Harnessing Your Right Brain to Protect Your Job!

With relentless outsourcing, off shoring, right sizing, and workforce rationalization, jobs are getting cut and shipped outside an organization. Part of the reason for the continued high unemployment rates, even among white-collar workers, is exactly this and most of those unemployed feel helpless to avoid this juggernaut.

If you look at this trend a little more closely you will uncover that the jobs that are “algorithmic” are getting sent out. These jobs are repetitive, logical, and can be done by anyone with a well defined skill-set anywhere in the world. So, using the labor-arbitrage model companies have been exploiting this trend to stay competitive.

So, how does a professional stay competitive in this labor market? Once again, a closer look at the partition between the jobs that are leaving companies and that are staying inside seems to be the very same partitioning within your own brain! Most outsourced jobs are the product of your left-brain activity. Our left-brain is good at logical, repetitive, and sometimes rote work. If anyone can do it cheaper than what you can, then your job is threatened, if not today, may be tomorrow.

So, what is the antidote?

Our right brain is the creative brain. Artistic and creative people engage their right brains in their endeavors to create unique outputs. They are hard to replace and cannot be easily parceled out without excessive work-definition, management, and overhead. So, they are more likely to stay inside an organization for a long time. If you compound that factor with the customer knowledge (because the customer is here) the skill set to deal with the challenges that require right brain disciplines are going to be more and more in demand as rote activities get outsourced.

So, what are these activities?

There are five Cs that form a formidable group of skills that are likely to stay in demand and any jobs that embody those skills are going to be in continued demand for a long time to come. They are:

1.     Customer

2.     Complexity

3.     Creativity

4.     Conceptualization, and

5.     Communication

Each of these activities uses our right brain more than it does our left. Let us examine each one and see what we must do to build the skill.

1.            Customer

As long as the customer is local, managing the relationship with that customer is critical. In the past (pre-Internet), companies took great pains to create their marketing message to drive their brand and to capture the customers’ hearts and minds. They often spoke a language that only they understood, often confusing the customer. The Internet changed that. A book titled the Cluetrain Manifesto lay bare the new paradigm of marketing by showing organizations that unless the customers themselves speak the language you want to speak to spread your message to others, no amount of unilateral marketing is going to get your customers on board. This environment is now going to require a new approach to building customer relationships, understanding the message they want to hear, and more importantly, how to get them to socially transmit their unique experience with you and that message you want them to transmit. This is at the heart of today’s marketing paradigm!

2.            Complexity

As things are getting more and more interconnected and the devices that connect then can be made exponentially more complex (remember the Moore’s law?), overall complexity of things is going to overwhelm people, especially the users. So, those who can understand this complexity, know how to deal with it, and find avenues to make it simple to understand are going to rule the world. All these are right brain activities.

3.            Creativity

As customers demand greater value from their vendors, providers of goods and services must engage in creative ways to deliver that value. This race for being more creative from the next competitor is going to drive the markets. Once again your right brain is going to provide you that resource to make this possible.

4.            Conceptualization

Once again, as complexity gets geometric, providing simple conceptual models and understanding of what is going on are going to be critical for people to deal with it. Conceptual skills stem from your right brain. So, anyone with strong conceptual skills is going to be in high demand, as the world around us gets more complex.

5.            Communication

As the world is getting more and more interconnected and the workflow is happening seamlessly across geographies, communication has become a critical factor because of cultural, linguistic, and learning barriers. Precisely communicating the right actionable message unambiguously has become increasingly more critical as companies grapple with the problem of dealing with the global workforce. Those who communicate well, not just linguistically, but also by other means are going to be in high demand. Those who understand cultural biases, local customs, and how people prefer to communicate will have edge over their counterparts. This, again, is a right-brain activity.

In our daily work we default to left-brain because we do not want to expend unnecessary energy thinking through with our right brain. We must learn and know how to change that and engage our right brain more actively in all our endeavors. Otherwise, most of us will have to deal with long unemployment lines for a long time, a pure left brain activity!