In his speech in the 1935th year, Joseph Stalin put forward the slogan, which later became the catch phrase: "Cadres decide everything." The historical assessment of the author of the phrase is ambiguous, but the principle voiced by him has been adopted. Sixty-six years later, seventeen people, among whom were Beck, Kokburn and Fowler, signed the Agile Manifesto of software development, the first value of which was: "People and interaction are more important than processes and tools."

Now a lot has been written about how important people are for any business, what is needed to select the best and how to do it. These books are written by HR specialists for other HR specialists or executives who select employees for themselves. But what does this mean in practice for “ordinary people” - professionals looking for work, wanting to build a career and develop professionally?

What is being bought and sold?

First you need to understand the basics. What exactly does an employee sell to his employer for a salary? It is widely believed that an employee sells his knowledge and skills to an employer. This is a fairly logical and obvious answer, which, it seems, is confirmed by the facts. For example, in job descriptions and employee resumes, you can find lists of languages ​​and technologies that are compiled very carefully so that you do not miss anything. Moreover, in our sphere, the descriptions of skills are simply formalized: a set of two-, three-, four-letter abbreviations make it easy and compact to describe everything that is needed. Accordingly, it is widely believed that the more a person knows and is able to do, the more expensive are his services.
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Skills are important. If the work involves programming in C ++, then it is unlikely that a person who does not know this language may be useful. But is the opposite true? Do knowledge and skills guarantee that a person will benefit in his place? No, it does not guarantee. It happens that a formally competent person does not bring special benefit or even is a ballast, that is, it creates additional problems.

Once there was a new manager Vasya. He himself was recently a technical specialist. And he picked up his staff in the hope of creating a super-team that will tear all. But an excessive focus on technical skills played a cruel joke with him.

Possessing the techie mentality, he paid a lot of attention to technology knowledge and picked up very strong specialists in this regard. Gathering the team, he sighed with relief: "Well, now everything will be fine!"

However, after some time, it became clear to him that although people are all good, for some reason, skis do not ride. What does this mean? The deadlines are broken, the result does not suit the client, the work done has to be redone, and fruitless disputes eat up the time.

Our hero is trying to deal with this, strengthening the control and introducing the process, but it does not give the expected result: micromanagement takes all the time, and attempts to write regulations for all occasions lead to an overwhelming bureaucracy. Gradually, he realizes that if a person lacks something inside, you cannot make him work effectively with any external methods of influence.

The reasons why a technically literate person is useless may be many: he didn’t find a common language with his colleagues, wasn’t interested in the project, didn’t fit into the management style of the company, was inattentive to trifles, was afraid to make decisions. The list can be continued, probably, to infinity. It turns out a funny situation. Although the vacancies write about skills, the possession of skills in itself is useless. No one wants to pay for this knowledge because the person inside himself knows something, no one is cold or hot. They want to pay for the value created using this knowledge and skills, as it is understood in this particular place. In this case, the coincidence of the regalia described in the resume with the requirements of the vacancy does not guarantee anything.

What is the result? Although everyone in the labor market speaks in terms of knowledge and skills, they really want to receive value and benefits from employees. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no direct unambiguous connection between these things.

How can this be explained?

In the theory of systems there is the concept of "emergence", it is also the "system effect". This is a phenomenon in which the system exhibits some properties that are not the sum of the properties of the elements. An example from the contrary: the mass of a person is not an emergent property. The mass of a person simply consists of the masses of all its parts. If a kilogram grows from the wrong diet somewhere, then the mass of a person in an absolutely transparent manner will increase by the same kilogram. Behavior, on the contrary, is an emergent property. Individual parts of a person are not capable of doing the same thing as a whole person just in smaller quantities. The manifestation of such a property cannot be unambiguously predicted from the properties of system elements.

The ability to create value is an emergent property of a system that consists of the employees, managers, their environment of the business in which they operate. Special skills and knowledge of employees here is only one of the success factors, important, but not determining. It is no less important whether all these parts of the system will be able to adapt and interact with each other so that the same systemic value-creating effect will arise. The ability of people to adapt to each other and to circumstances is determined by their personal characteristics, cultural background, level of development of general competencies (soft skills), and motivation. If these factors work as it should, then an interaction system is built up, which works as a “means of delivering” special skills to the problems requiring their application.

What practical implications does this model have for a person building his career?

Sell ​​not skills, but value

Above, the contradiction between the common belief "selling skills" and the real need of employers has been shown. What it can lead to in practice, consider the following example.

There was a programmer. He worked in the company for three years, studied during this time new languages ​​and technologies. Sensing the growth of his knowledge and skills, he decided that he was worth the upgrade to a senior developer or team leader. Gathering his courage, he went to his supervisor and put forward his demands, backing them up with his main argument — an increased level of training. To his disappointment, the manager was clearly not in awe of what he heard and got off with general phrases that he would do everything possible, but he cannot promise anything concrete now.

What is the programmer's mistake in this example? He came to sell his skills, and not the value that he could create with the help of these skills. In essence, the employee says: “I demand that you find a worthy use of my skills” - and shifts this concern onto the shoulders of the manager. Why does this approach work badly? Because it loads the head of the problem, in the solution of which, in the first place, the employee himself must be interested.

In order to increase the chance of success, one should go to the manager not with a demand, but with an interesting proposal. It could look like this: “We have such a problem, I would be interested in doing this, and I have ideas on how to solve it. Let's discuss?"

What is the fundamental difference between these approaches? Selling your skills does not imply customer knowledge. The value lies in the man himself, which means he will be equally useful everywhere. Selling a value involves knowing the customer, since value creation occurs only in conjunction with him and his unique situation. Naturally, in order to go in this way, you must first prepare yourself: collect information about what is happening in the company, talk about it with colleagues and managers, analyze current problems, form your suggestions on them. A good side effect of this activity will be business connections.

Not all people and places of work fit together.

If you move away from the concept of “my skills is my value” and evaluate the benefits of the concept of “my successful interaction with a client is my value”, it becomes obvious that the value can change dramatically from situation to situation without changing skills. It is impossible to please all people, it is impossible to be equally helpful employee for all employers. If a person does not work well, then this does not mean that he is incompetent in principle. Maybe he just needs to find another job.

Plan your professional development

But what place should it be? To understand what kind of employer you need, you must first understand yourself. Understand your goals, career plan, strengths and weaknesses. Determine exactly what value and under what conditions you are ready to create now and in the future. In essence, this means a systematic approach to planning your career. With such a plan in mind, employers can be assessed according to the degree of compliance with it, discarding those that do not fit into it.

Conclusion

This article outlines an approach to understanding employee-employer relationships. This approach is designed to help professionals who want to develop and build their careers, to find new opportunities and ways to achieve their goals. The basis of this approach is to increase a person’s awareness of his place and role in his employer's business and, as a result, a systematic approach to planning his professional growth.