What does it take to succeed in the workplace today?  What skills will you need in the future?  The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has issued a thought-provoking report on the 10 most critical workforce skills needed for the future, based on six drivers that are disrupting business as we have known it. The article, which appears in The Atlantic, is a must-read if you are hiring, or if you have children to educate. 

Here is just a brief summary, the full article explains it in more depth:

Six Drivers of Change: IFTF says the confluence of these six drivers will affect future work skills:

• Extreme longevity: It is estimated that by 2025, the number of Americans over 60 will increase by 70%.
• The rise of smart machines and systems. Workplace automation will nudge workers out of rote, repetitive tasks.
• Computational world. Massive increases in sensors and processing power make the world a programmable system.
• New media ecology. New communication tools require new media literacies.
• Superstructed organizations. To "superstruct" means to create structures that go beyond the basic forms and processes with which we are familiar.
• Globally connected world. This driver puts diversity and adaptability at the center of operations.

Future Work Skills, 2020

What do these six disruptive forces mean for workers of the next decade? IFTF has identified 10 skills that will be critical for workplace success by 2020:

• Sense-making: The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed. Higher-level thinking skills cannot be provided by a computer.
• Social Intelligence: The ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions. The machines being built are very smart, but they don't have Emotional Intelligence.
• Novel and adaptive thinking: Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
• Cross-cultural competency: The ability to operate in different cultural settings.
• Computational thinking: The ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning.
• New media literacy: the ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media forms for effective communication.
• Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines. The ideal worker of the next decade is "T-shaped." He/she brings deep understanding of at least one field, but has the capacity to converse in the languages of a broader base of disciplines.
• Design mindset: Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
• Cognitive load management: The ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a broad range of tools and techniques.
• Virtual Collaboration: Ability to work productively, drive engagement and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.

Now I don't know what you are seeing when you interview, but I am not finding these skills in abundance right now.

To read the full article  ... 

The new movie Horrible Bosses has thrown a spotlight on an unpleasant fact: A lot of bosses are awful. According to a blog post by Carol Tice on Entrepreneur.com, a new survey of more than 400 workers found nearly half had worked for an "unreasonable" manager, according to OfficeTeam, a staffing firm that commissioned the survey.

The study identified five common types of bad bosses:

• Micromanager. Just can't delegate, and when you do, you're double-checking the work to make sure it's being done the way you would have done it.
• Poor communicator. With little or no direction offered, workers waste time as they fumble about trying to guess what you want.
• Bully. Easily frustrated? Lose your cool with employees and start yelling? Is it your way or the highway?
• Saboteur. You're taking credit for workers' ideas and successful projects. On the other hand, if things go wrong, a worker is getting the blame.
• Mixed nuts. Happy and laid back one minute, snapping orders the next. 

"If I had to pick the one thing to get right about any collaborative effort, I would choose trust." So writes Larry Prusak, blogging for the Harvard Business Review. Trust is more important than incentives, technology, roles, missions, or structures. There can be collaboration without it, he says, but it won't be very productive or sustainable in the long run.

Here's what a leader needs to do to generate trust in an organization:

1. Promote trustworthy people
2. Work with your own employees - at all levels.
3. Publicize the costs of distrust
4. Give people a reason beyond their pay to come to work
5. Reduce pay inequality.

The first is the most important: it's the strongest signal by far you can send employees about the values you actually live by, says Prusak.

Trust tends to be asymmetric and once broken is hard to repair. Trust (like distrust) is contagious. It is carried socially and can flourish when enough people in a given organization display their trustworthiness.

Do you think you know what makes a great saleseperson? Think again.

Following a decade of research, Steve W. Martin, blogging for the Harvard Business Review, has come up with the key personality attributes of top salespeople. He conducted thousands of interviews, administered 1,000 personality tests, and distilled all that information into this summary of traits, some of which are counter-intuitive:

• Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility.

• Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, Martin says. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results.

• Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers, Martin writes: "Overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance."

As it turns out, the stereotypical salesperson is not the top performer.