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.
Nobody told
you this, but the day you were hired you actually accepted two jobs.
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 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.
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Hidden-Curriculum-of-Work?gko=2121d&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160809B&utm_campaign=respB
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