SKILL 1—ENVIRONMENTALLY ADAPTIVE

The ability to thrive in a changing environment is the most critical new skill for people. Change, technological and social, will be a hallmark of the transition to a global economy and global competition. How we react to change today is, in large part, a measure of how we will fare tomorrow. Management needs to know how to overcome people's re­sistance to change and rechannel natural anxiety into productive cre­ativity. People need to know how to use the new environment to their advantage. Members of the NGW need to know how to recognize their reaction to change and channel that reaction into contribution. This is not "change management," of which much has been written, but tools for individuals to thrive in a changing world.

Conventional wisdom says people fear change. It's because many of us fear the unknown. We are afraid that the proposed change may involve loss. We may lose power, prestige, or position. We may fear loss of our ability to perform our assigned tasks. We may fear losing our place in the group, as an accepted member of the community of our fellows. When we perceive this potential loss, maybe even loss of our job itself, we feel threatened. It is this threatening change that we fear. When we feel threatened, we resist change. We fight it as if our very life depended on stopping it. Change resisted is change delayed. Change delayed may be change denied.

So, how do we overcome people's resistance to change? Three steps: Understand the nature of that fear; identify the specific reaction to the fear; apply the tool that corresponds to that reaction.

We need to educate both management and workers that there is a continuum of reaction to change from resistance to positive acceptance of the change. By observing people's behavior in a changing situation, we can identify where they are on that continuum. There is a series of tools that can be used to help people through these stages. By identify­ing where a person is on the change-acceptance continuum, we can select and apply the corresponding tool and move them on to the next stage.

This skill is the cornerstone of any program designed to develop a Next-Generation Workforce. Development of Skill 1 supports the de­velopment of all the attributes defined above.

SKILL 2—CUSTOMER CONSCIOUSNESS

Customer consciousness is the ability to demonstrate customer respon-siveness. People need to know how to identify their customers, inter­nal or external, and how to identify their customer's needs. They need to know how to meet those needs and measure themselves in terms of the customer's perspective.

This skill set is too often taken for granted. "Of course we know who our customer is." But does everyone, at all levels of the organiza­tion know? In the new world we will have to be closer to our custom­ers than ever before. If your job is not direct interface with the cus­tomer, then maybe you support someone whose job is. We need to respond to those people like they are representatives of our customer. To that end, the idea of internal customers needs to be deepened. To drive customer consciousness through the entire enterprise, we must treat whoever receives the output of our process as our customer.

The NOW must be trained to continually ask the critical customer questions: "Who is MY customer?" "What are their needs or concerns?" "Am I meeting these needs?" "How do I know if I am meeting their needs?" The workforce needs to know how to keep in touch with their customer and to identify barriers to customer satisfaction and elimi­nate them.

To help our companies develop attribute number 1, customer re-sponsiveness, we need to teach people the four steps of delighting cus­tomers. In step 1, we should demonstrate tools and techniques for iden­tifying current and potential customers. These can be internal custom­ers, supply chain partners, end customers, and the customer's custom­ers. Step 2, we need to show people how to obtain input from their customers. They should learn to discover their customer's requirements and expectations, the relative importance of each requirement, and the customer's perception of current performance to those requirements. The next step in delighting customers, step 3, is to develop improve­ment plans to improve customer satisfaction. This involves the removal of barriers to meeting customers' requirements and the development of customer-friendly processes. Lastly, step 4, we can show people how to regularly obtain customer feedback for continuous improvement.

SKILL 3—STRATEGICALLY ALIGNED

This skill is the ability to deploy policy and build a winning culture. Those who wish to take advantage of the new business environment will have to have a culture of continuous improvement, a culture that em­braces change as a neverending necessity and that can respond quickly to shifts in the marketplace. The workforce of such an enterprise will have to respond quickly to new situations. They won't have time to get approval. They must know what is expected and acceptable.

Companies have vision and mission statements defining what they want to be and how they should act. Typically, those documents sit on a shelf or hang on a plaque on the wall and everyone acts like they always acted. Management must know how to turn those statements into coordinated action. The whole organization must be actively work­ing on achieving those results. The workforce makes tactical opera­tional decisions every minute of every day. These decisions must be aligned with the overall goals of the enterprise. The entire enterprise must be taught to pull in the same direction to achieve the goals.

Attribute 6, responsive practices and cultures, requires that the or­ganization be taught know how to turn broad policy statements into specific, concrete actions. Each work group and worker must be taught to be skilled in doing this. Management will define the mission. Work­ers will be taught how to define the methods. We need to teach people how to design and implement measurement systems to ensure plans are executed. Constant feedback tools must be explained so mid-course corrections can be made. Tools for driving change up the organization for inclusion in future plans will complete the cycle.

To Be Continued