The
Hidden Curriculum of Work
What do you
do for work? Not, what is your job title, or what’s written in your official
job description? But what do you actually do?
It’s potentially the most important question
you can ask yourself if you care about standing out, staying ahead of the
change curve, and continuously elevating your performance to gain access to
choice assignments and opportunities to advance.
This is because the value you deliver, the
results you produce, and the impact you have on others come more often from the
execution of unspoken intangibles that are not reflected in your title, job
description, or the daily tasks and activities you’re responsible for. This
severe mismatch is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the true demands
of work.
Nobody
told you this, but the day you were hired you actually accepted two jobs. The
first was the position you interviewed for, including all of the tasks outlined
in that job description. The second “job-within-the-job” included the unspoken,
unwritten work that, among other challenges, requires you to manage constant
change, collaborate well with others, navigate workplace politics, and get your
best work done in an environment of shrinking
resources and increasing demands.
Nobody trained you to succeed in this hidden work, and you have to learn how to
confront its everyday pitfalls. And although you can reach out to trusted
colleagues for input, the pace of work and pressure to perform often limit our
willingness to reflect, formulate questions, and take the time to seek
guidance.
As if this isn’t difficult enough, staying
relevant at work requires you to get ahead of the change curve by steadily
increasing your skills and abilities and finding innovative ways to go beyond
your job description to add new value to your organization. These two elements
combined — the challenges of your job-within-the-job plus the need to add value
to your organization through continuous learning and performance — represent
what I call the hidden curriculum of work.
The
term hidden curriculum was coined by the educator Philip
Jackson in 1968, and then elaborated upon by MIT’s Benson Snyder in 1970. Both
explored the concept within the realm of education and youth development. I
applied a new, expanded definition of the term to the workplace in my
post-graduate research beginning in 2006.
A hidden curriculum exists whenever there are
two simultaneous challenges where one is visible, clear, and understood and the
other is concealed, ambiguous, and undefined. Take, for example, the lives of
professional athletes. They must master the fundamentals of their sport and
excel at the highest level on the court or field, but they also have to learn
how to navigate murkier waters like wealth, fame, and other distractions that
can arise. Similarly, when children enter school, they have to master their
academic curriculum but, reading, math, and science do not prepare them for
peer pressure, social dynamics, and developmental challenges of youth.
In the same way, we all encounter a hidden
curriculum of work, regardless of tenure, level, or role. Whether you
acknowledge it or not, you’re navigating your own hidden curriculum.
Consider this example: An emerging leader,
recently promoted to manager, is challenged by her boss to “step it up” and is
given a clear mandate: “Work closely with key stakeholders outside of your
department to improve collaboration and achieve the company’s objectives of
increased innovation.”
The expectation is now visible and, on the
surface, easily understood. But a closer look reveals a range of complexities,
judgment calls, and potential pitfalls that can derail her. To fulfill the
mandate, she must:
• Know her own department’s goals, as
well as the company’s objectives, well enough to interpret what is most
important among many competing demands
• Understand the varied communication habits among the different stakeholders, including the various “triggers” to avoid
• Stay mentally flexible and willing to adapt her own leadership style to build rapport and establish trust with others who may define success differently
• Avoid over-collaborating, but have the wisdom to know what requires closer oversight, discussion, and shared decision making
• Understand the varied communication habits among the different stakeholders, including the various “triggers” to avoid
• Stay mentally flexible and willing to adapt her own leadership style to build rapport and establish trust with others who may define success differently
• Avoid over-collaborating, but have the wisdom to know what requires closer oversight, discussion, and shared decision making
If leaders are responsible for equipping
others to succeed on the job, trial and error just isn’t good enough. For
example, when a leader tells his team, “We’re getting complacent and need more
innovative ideas, so I want to encourage more debate at our weekly meetings,”
he needs to recognize the hidden curriculum in this request. Encouraging debate
can trigger defensiveness, which inadvertently shifts people into “advocacy
mode”: an unconscious effort to prove a point, which inhibits listening, mental
flexibility, and learning. When this happens, the capacity to stay curious, ask
questions, and make connections among previously unconnected things is lost,
and the intended result of the debate collapses.
Despite the complexities of such situations,
the hidden curriculum of work can be identified and understood. What’s more, I
believe that one of the most significant competitive advantages for
organizations is a leadership group — and ultimately a workforce — that has the
capacity to recognize the hidden curriculum of work and take deliberate steps
to manage it. Considering this, the urgent questions for any employee are: Do
you know your own hidden curriculum of work, and are you navigating it with
focused attention? If you are a manager, do you know the pitfalls and demands
of those who report to you, and are you taking proactive steps to equip them to
address them?
Unfortunately,
as “do more with less” has become the corporate world’s mantra, the rush to
oversimplify distracts from these questions and the nuanced answers they bring.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that one
of the most common barriers (pdf) in advancing to
and succeeding in a senior leadership role is an inability to switch from task
execution (focusing on the tactical side of delivering work) to big-picture,
strategic thinking (the ability to know what’s important, why it matters, and how
to navigate the uncertainties in between).
Said another way, a valuable strength is the
ability to shift from just getting the job done to actively observing and
navigating the hidden side of work. Although there are no shortcuts to going
beyond the job description, the next installment in this series will outline
practical strategies to achieve this ability.
Jesse
Sostrin is a director at PwC’s U.S. Leadership Coaching Center of Excellence.
He is the author ofThe Manager’s Dilemma(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Hidden-Curriculum-of-Work?gko=2121d
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