Identity Economy meet Human Capital Era

TWO fabulous articles were just published by two of my favorite, dynamite, boat rocking idols: Esther Perel and Heather McGowan.

They championed two things: the power of identity in the present and future of work, and how organizations must invest in human capital. (Obviously, we learned with COVID that people are the bedrock of companies. When a pandemic causes offices to close, how does work continue? The PEOPLE matter!)

If you haven't heard of these terms before, get ready. The identity economy and human capital era are new frames for understanding and describing major shifts in how businesses need to operate.

The identity economy is about treating people as whole humans.

The human capital era is about valuing talent and investing more in them because humans are critical to economic growth, they're not just cogs in economic machinery.

For nearly two decades the company Workhuman has been trying to make work more human. They've seen this wave coming.

Now, it's upon us.

We can't treat people as just sets of skills who are potentially replaceable by robots.

We can't ask people to compartmentalize who they are to fit the boxes companies create for them.

Being a human is complex and messy. Oh, and ever evolving too.

Leaders need to accept this.

Embrace this even.

And, they need to promote wholeness at work so that people can actually work and feel like they belong.

What does feeling whole at work mean? Well, I think that's one great place where my work about hybrid professional identity comes in, and I'm working on a separate post about that.

Regarding the identity economy, Esther says that in addition to funding basic needs, people work with a vision of self-fulfillment, purpose, and growth. They expect their jobs to foster identity, meaning, and belonging, which is why so many people who lost a job last year due to the pandemic felt a loss of income and security, and also a loss of self.

A snapshot of Esther's article on the Identity Economy

You should read the full article by Esther Perel in Fast Company. The statement that caught my eye the most was when Esther wrote:

...how else will employees know that their work matters or that they are meant to be exactly where they are? The future of work is about coming up with new, actionable ways to answer that question—and that question is fundamentally about the role of identity and relationships in the workplace.

YESSSS! Are you tracking with me?

…and then there’s the Human Capital Era

In terms of the human capital era, Heather discusses how future jobs will require specific skill sets (hard and soft skills including empathy, social and emotional intelligence). Investing in these assets, or human capital potential, is what she believes we need more of for a healthy, equitable, and vibrant future of work. If you follow Heather on LinkedIn, she often posts about companies who are already successfully doing this and why it's working.

Since the onset of COVID, Heather has written a series of articles about her observations on human capital and work. Last week was her latest article, and her argument is getting clearer and stronger.

Why these terms matter for hybrid professionals

I'm obviously a fan of these two experts and the terminology they're using. They're signaling key ideas that go beyond the buzziness of "hybrid work." If you're a future of work nerd, like me, then pay attention and think hard about what Esther and Heather are saying.

We’ve been stuck in a binary state in the workforce, defining workers as either experts or generalists, when in reality workers are a spectrum of identities being accumulated over the duration of their career. What does this make them?

Back to my mantra, people are MORE than their job titles.

We’re entering a new period where titles are more and more meaningless. On one side, employers and managers are spending more time focused on peoples’ skills than their job titles. There’s a camp of folks focused on the skill economy and how to analyze skills to enable organizational mobility and talent mobility more seamlessly.

The focus on skills is paramount, but it’s incomplete because it’s not a complete depiction of who someone really is.

The WHO speaks to identity, which is where Esther’s identity economy argument comes in.

Identity is how we see ourselves, the stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences, and it’s about belonging and making sense of where we fit in the world.

As hybrid professionals change jobs and dabble in additional disciplines, they’re naturally combining and meshing different skills into altogether new professional identities. If we only look at people based on their list of skills, we’re not understanding how these skills fit together or how that person sees their identity.

It all maps together. Deconstructing people into “what they can do” and ignoring “who they are” doesn’t work. Businesses need to take both into account. Heather talks about self-actualized identities that are internally validated, and I think she’s right that our occupational identities are not defined or validated by our employers or clients.

Today, work is about fluidity, flux, and adaptation. People are constantly evolving as human beings as well on their career paths. Static twenty+ year careers in one company are gone. In order to stay competitive and know our value in this shifting work landscape, we must be able to hybridize our talents and convey the value of our hybrid professional identity. That’s how hybridity connects with the identity economy and human capital era.