【职业成长】核心员工的特征

作者：大卫·G．詹森

核心员工究竟是什么样子的？几乎每次进行调查时，我都会从雇主那里听到核心员工这个名词。我请一位客户---一位正在参与研究的人事部经理，给我解释一下。“每家公司都有少数几个这样的员工，在某个专业领域，你可以指望他们把活干好。在我的小组中，有七名化工流程工程师和生物学家，其中有那么两三个人是我赖以生存的，”他说，“他们对于我公司而言不可或缺。当请你们公司替我们招募新人的时候，我们期待你们会去其他公司找这样的人：其他公司经理不想失去的员工。我们只招募核心员工。”

这是一段充满鼓动性的谈话，目的是把猎头们派往竞争对手的公司去游说经验丰富的员工们做一次职业变更。他们想从另一家公司招募核心员工。然而，每家公司也从新人中招人。他们需要寻找的是完全一样的东西。“我们把他们和公司顶级员工所表现出来的特质进行对照。假如他们看起来有同样特征的话，我们就在他们身上赌一把。”只是这样有点儿冒险。

“这是一种有根据的猜测，”我的人事经理客户说。作为未来的一员职工，你的工作是帮助人事部经理降低这种风险，你需要帮助他们认定你有潜力成为一名核心员工。

特征1：无私的合作者

职业顾问和化学家约翰。费策尔最早提出了这个特征。关于这个特征，人们已经写了大量的文章。它之所以值得被反复谈及，是因为这一特征是学术界和企业间最明显的差别。“这里需要合作，”费策尔说，“企业的环境并不需要单打独斗，争强好胜，所以表现出合作和无私精神的员工就脱颖而出了。在企业环境中，没这样的思维方式就不可能成功。”

许多博士后和研究生在进行这种过渡的过程中表现的相当费力。因为生命中有那么长一段时间他们都在扮演一个独立研究者的角色，并且要表现得比其他年轻的优秀人才更出色。你可以借此提高在公司的吸引力：为追求一个共同目标和来自其他实验室和学科的科学家们合作---并且为你的个人履历上的内容提供事迹证明。这个方法，加上你在描述业绩时开明的使用代词“我们”而不是“我”，能使公司对你的看法从“单干户”转变为“合作者”。更为有利的是，要在你的实验室内部，以及在和你们实验室合作的人们之间，培养一个良好的声誉：一个鼓励并发动合作的人---还要保证让那些会接听调查电话的人们谈及你的这个品质。

特征2 紧迫感

唐.豪特是一位给aaas.siencecareer.org网站论坛频繁写稿的撰稿人。他之前是一名科学家。许多年前他转向了企业，并一直做到了高级管理的职位。他在3M公司的一个部门负责策略和商业开发工作，这个部门每年上缴的税收高达24亿多美元。他就是一个重视紧迫感的人。

“一年365天，一周7天，一天24小时，生意始终在进行，那意味着一年365天，一周7天，一天24小时，竞争也同样在进行，”豪特说，“公司取胜的方法之一就是要更快的到达“目的地”！这就是说，你不仅要把所有能支持公司快速运转的功能都调动起来，而且还要知道如何决定“目的地”在哪里。这样，不仅对那些行动快速的人们，也对那些思维敏捷，并有勇气按自己的想法行事的人们提出了要求。这需要全公司各部门的运作，而不仅仅是管理部门的工作。“

特征3 风险容忍度

企业要求员工能够承担风险。“一个求职者需要表现出仅凭不准确，不完全的信息就做出决策的能力。他或她必须能接纳不确定因素并冒风险作出结论，”一个客户在职业描述中写道。

豪特赞同这一种说法，商业的成功通常都有这样一种特质：那就是能接受不确定因素和风险---个人的，组织上的和财务上的。这就让许多的科学家感到不适应，因为学术上的成功是依靠认真而严谨的研究。更进一步说，伟大的科学常常是由找寻答案的过程和答案本身两者同时来定义的。因此科学家往往沉迷于过程。在企业里，你需要了解过程，但最终你会迷上答案，然后根据你认为该答案对你的企业所具有的意义来冒风险。像这样敢冒风险是一套技能组合，是所有雇主在他们最好的员工身上所寻找的东西。”

风险忍受度的另外一个要点是求职者对于失败的承受度。失败很重要，因为这表示你不怕冒险。所以各家公司总会寻找有可能犯错误并敢于承认错误的求职者。大家都知道如何谈论成功---或者当他们在寻找工作的时候应该知道。但很少有人乐意谈论失败，更少有人知道如何从失败的边缘吸取教训和获得经验，“对我的企业来说，求职者需要坦然地谈论他或她的失败，而且他或她需要有真正的失败经历，而不是特意为面试而杜撰的东西。如果做不到的话，那么这个人冒的风险还不够，”豪特说。

特征4 善于处理人际关系

瑞克。李奇在迪科德遗传工程公司从事业务拓展。李奇最近才转行到企业，做业务方面的工作。我向他咨询这个重要特征，是因为在他新业务角色中，人际沟通能力在失败和成功之间发挥着很大的作用。“科学家毕生都在积累知识，培养技术上的敏锐感，”他说，“但为企业工作需要完全不同的东西---人际交往能力。想转行到企业界的科学家们必须要先考虑他们的社会关系资源而不是技术资源。对一个以前一直根据专业知识水平被评价的人来说，突然之间要根据他的人际交往能力来评价他，真是十分令人恐惧。”

然而，如果认为只有像李奇那样的生意人才需要熟练的人际沟通技巧，那就错了。事实上，我所遇见的在企业工作的核心员工们之所以取得成功，很大程度上是因为他们能够与公司上下各种各样的人与事。

附：原文，顺便学一下英文

1、 What exactly is a key player? A "Key Player" is a phrase that I've heard about from employers during just about every search I've conducted. I asked a client - a hiring manager involved in a recent search - to define it for me. "Every company has a handful of staff in a given area of expertise that you can count on to get the job done. On my team of seven process engineer and biologists, I've got two or three whom I just couldn't live without," he said. "Key players are essential to my organization. And when we hire your company to recruit for us, we expect that you'll be going into other companies and finding just that: the staff that another manager will not want to see leave. We recruit only key players."

2、This is part of a pep talk intended to send headhunters into competitor's companies to talk to the most experienced staff about making a change. They want to hire a "key player" from another company. Every company also hires from the ranks of newbies, and what they're

looking for is exactly the same. "We hold them up to the standards we see in our top people. If it looks like they have these same traits, we'll place a bet on them." It's just a bit riskier.

3、"It's an educated guess," says my hiring manager client. Your job as a future employee is to help the hiring manager mitigate that risk. You need to help them identify you as a prospective "key player".

4 、Trait 1: The selfless collaborator John Fetzer, career consultant and chemist, first suggested this trait, which has already been written about a great deal. It deserves repeating because it is the single most public difference between academia and industry. "It's teamwork," says Fetzer" The business environment is less lone-wolf and competitive, so signs of being collaborative and selfless stand out. You just can't succeed in an industry environment without this mindset"

5、Many peptides and grad students have a tough time showing that they can make this transition because so much of their life has involved playing the independent- researcher role and outshining other young stars. You can make yourself more attractive to companies by working together with scientists from other laboratories and disciplines in pursuit of a common goal—and documenting the results on your resume. This approach, combined with a liberal use of the pronoun "we" and not just "I" when describing your accomplishments, can change the company's perception of you from a lone wolf to a selfless collaborator. Better still, develop a reputation inside your lab and with people your lab collaborates with as a person who fosters and initiates collaborations—and make sure this quality gets mentioned by those who will take those reference phone calls.

6、Trait 2: A sense of urgency

Don Haut is a frequent contributor to the aas.sciencecareers. org discussion forum. He is a former scientist who transitioned to industry many years ago and then on to a senior

management position. Haut heads strategy and business development for a division of 3M with more than $2.4 billion in annual revenues. He is among those who value a sense of urgency

7、"Business happens 24/7/365 which means that competition happens 24/7/365, as well," says Haut. "One way that companies win is by getting 'there' faster, which means that you not only have to mobilize all of the functions that support a business to move quickly, but you have to know how to decide where 'there' is! This creates a requirement not only for people who can act quickly, but for those who can think fast and have the courage to act on their convictions. This requirement needs to run throughout an organization and is not exclusive to management."

8、Trait 3: Risk tolerance

Being OK with risk is something that industry demands. "A candidate needs to have

deonstrated the ability to make decisions with imperfect or incomplete information. He or she must be able to embrace ambiguity and stick his or her neck out to drive to a conclusion," wrote one of my clients in a job description.

9、Haut agrees. "Business success is often defined by comfort with ambiguity and risk- personal, organizational, and financial. This creates a disconnect for many scientists because success in academia is really more about careful, studied research. Further, great science is often defined by how one gets to the answer as much as by the answer itself, so scientists often fall in love with the process. In a business, you need to understand the process, but you end up falling in love with the answer and then take a risk based on what you think that answer means to your business. Putting your neck on the line like this is a skill set that all employers look for in their best people."

10、Another important piece of risk tolerance is a candidate's degree of comfort with failure. Failure is important because it shows that you were not afraid to take chances. So companies consistently look for candidates who can be wrong and admit it. Everyone knows how to talk about successes—or they should if they're in a job search—but far fewer people are comfortable talking about failures, and fewer still know how to bring lessons and advantages back from the brink. "For my organization, a candidate needs to have comfort discussing his or her failures, and he or she needs to have real failures, not something made up for interview day. If not, that person has not taken enough risk." says Haut.

11、Trait 4: Strength in interpersonal relationships Rick Leach is in business development for deCODE Genetics. Leach made the transition to industry recently, on the business side of things'". I asked him about this key trait because in his new business role, interpersonal abilities make the difference between success and failure.

"Scientists spend their lives accumulating knowledge and developing technical acumen," he says, "but working for a business requires something else entirely—people skills. The scientist who is transitioning into the business world must prioritize his or her relationship assets above their technical assets. To suddenly be valued and measured by your mastery of human relationships can be a very scary proposition for a person who has been valued and measured only by his mastery of things," says Rick.

12、It would be a mistake, however, to assume that strong people skills are required only for business people like Leach. Indeed, the key players I've met who work at the bench in industry have succeeded in great measure because they've been able to work with a broad variety of personalities, up and down the organization.