Many businesses are very traditional although the world is changing at the fastest pace ever seen. Many individuals are waking up to the fact that personal development and self education is extremely key for a successful and happy life. How do we unify these two trends? Agility!
My personal development journey around the topics which you can see on my page has started since I’m 18 years old and this obsession has brought me so much joy, success and personal freedom. I always heard that there are so many traditional companies in the world when I was young but when I started working in different industries and did research around Artificial Intelligence, I realised how big the gap between business and personal development in terms of change is. Change in regard to business and behaviour, I’ll mix them both into my equation.
I’m aware that it’s impossible to change a business as fast as our personal lives, however, there are businesses that are unwilling to change although the world around us is changing faster than ever. Technologies such as AI and blockchain will change businesses but also the jobs we’ve studied for our whole lives, being a topic for another blog post or our personal coaching sessions on how to make you bulletproof for the changes that are coming).
Happily after doing my own meet-up, I got the chance to work for a startup and dive into the area of Agility, realising that my personal development journey can be correlated to a business development and way of organising of companies. In case you don’t know what Agility is, it refers to the capability of a business or its components to rapidly respond to a change by adapting to maintain stability/ company growth. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Tesla are known for their agile practices.
Teams working with agile frameworks understand the need for rapid change, hence, they also have allowance from management to change according to their perspective and knowledge (hopefully, but sadly not always) into the direction which is essential to remain competitive. Since living this experience, I enjoyed working with Agility as it’s the perfect foundation to mix our personal development with our job development.
Working agile implies the willingness to change and the constant improvement of work. If you’re into personal development, which I’m sure you are as you’re on my homepage, the best destination for your career is to work in an agile setting or an environment where change is possible. Turning this around, it would be beneficial for companies to apply the agile ways of working as individuals are more and more interested into personal development and elevating their standards of living, without actually being an entrepreneur.
Attracting employees with these “benefits” is something I haven’t heard so far but could be a big reason for finding employees in the sphere of self development. Companies such as Google already made the move of turning the back to employees definitely needing traditional education, meaning that the trend into self education is taken into corporations into account as well.
The rapid changes in the world and increased competition make it more important than ever for companies to have employees with competence and emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is not a common topic in schools or universities, hence, it becomes more evident why companies would want an employee that has learned it through their own personal development. Besides that, individuals who work on themselves have a vision for their lives while raising their consciousness. What impact these two aspects have on motivation and team work should be clear to all of us.
Lastly, there is another component of agile working which is interesting for you as an employee: the interdisciplinary team working. What does this mean? You’ll be able to work in a team across different disciplines, learning new things instead of only focusing on your known tasks. This has the positive outcome on you being more multidimensional and more bulletproof if AI comes to take over a component of your work.
It’s also beneficial for your personal need of uncertainty, which I will cover on videos and posts as well, as we want to feel comfortable and secure (certainty) but also like new experiences and surprises (uncertainty). Having a job which provides uncertainty or variety in other words, may be beneficial for individuals scoring high on this need.
I’m well aware that this blog post has been all over the place, however, I hope the main messages came across for both, employees and businesses. The big trend of Agility isn’t seeming to stop and if businesses can take their advantage of actually positioning it as a benefit for employees interested in personal development (while actually doing it correctly), businesses will be able to recruit the right employees. Moreover, employees can become more conscious about in what kind of an organization they want to work for as the future brings change that most of us can’t imagine. Covid has already shown us how fast the world changes, no matter how our personal opinion on change is.
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