The first few chapters suggest a tantalizing new world beyond employment, and one that many leaders have glimpsed. Leaders and managers have heard about outsourcing, free agent nation, Upwork, alliances, CEO of Me, the end of job security, crowdsourcing, and so on. Some leaders may even have experience with a few of these emerging work arrangements.

Yet, these examples and trends often appear isolated and unique: the stories may be intriguing, but they don't give you a way to make logical, evidence-based, and optimal decisions. What you need is a decision framework that isolates the most important dimensions and choices, and offers you a way to optimize them. That means defining your choices not simply as “regular full-time employment versus some shiny new alternative,” but as “creatively combining key elements to achieve my goals in the most optimal way.”

A decision framework defines the dimensions of the fundamental changes in organizations, work and workers signaled by these examples. It helps you as a leader make better decisions. This chapter describes just such a framework. A leader's job is to lead through the work. In our framework, we show how that means making optimal choices about how to design the assignment, the organization, and the rewards.

The previous chapters showed that as a leader you face some important decisions such as

• Should you break formerly intact jobs into smaller pieces that can easily be handled by skilled and inexpensive free agents?
• Should you see if your clients are taking work they formerly gave to you, and getting it done through a talent platform (exactly what is happening to ad agencies, thanks to Tongal)?
• Should you reinvent your “employment” brand so that it attracts not merely the best employees but the best free agents—and you might want to stop calling it an employment brand.
• Should you borrow talent from one of your organizational partners, when it is too hard to hire?
• Should you loan out your own talent to give them the experiences they need or desire, while staying loyal to your organization?
• Should you create internal rewards that mimic talent platforms and crowdsourcers, such as using contests to give your workers imaginative rewards, measure their capabilities, and let them compare themselves to the population of free agents?

The array of choices is expanding constantly. Even when your work is mostly or completely accomplished with regular full-time employees, their expectations and your options will be influenced by developments in the world beyond employment. When combining employment with things like contests, talent loans, and moonlighting on talent platforms, it's apparent that even useful ideas like free agent, CEO of Me, and others don't effectively capture all the possibilities, nor do they offer enough guidance on how to decide.

The possibilities are never binary. For example, today many firms outsource compensation design but manage compensation administration internally for confidentiality reasons. It is about constructing a solution from the many possible configurations. Perhaps a useful analogy is that of a purchasing agent. A purchasing agent scours the world for the best sources of goods; leaders will have to scour the world for the best ways to get work done.

The right choices depend on the particular leader and organization, and they require more than just a list of tantalizing examples and stories. Leaders need a framework to pull the pieces together and make more informed, logical, and optimal decisions. Today, they have lots of “shiny objects” to draw their attention, but it's difficult to see the underlying pattern behind them. It's like trying to understand astronomy when you see only a few bright shiny stars.

This chapter describes our framework. Think of it as a map and a set of dials that let you navigate to your optimum place on the map. We will use this framework as a language to make sense of the examples we described in earlier chapters, and as to guide a deeper analysis in later chapters. We hope you will use this framework as you map your own journey toward a more systematic approach to leading in a world beyond employment. This book will show you how to use this framework to create combinations of new work arrangements to optimize your objectives and achieve your mission. You're not limited to the work arrangements that exist today, nor are you limited to stark choices between things like regular full-time employment versus free agents. The work evolution we've described offers you exponentially increasing options, as you can dial up or dial down any of the individual elements.

You need a way to map these alternatives so that you can see their relationships, using dimensions like the lines of longitude and latitude that let you map locations on the globe. That map also helps you make navigation decisions just as longitude and latitude help you decide on the direction and speed to a location. When it comes to leading through the work, seeing the various dimensions and how they interact allows you to better navigate the fundamental building blocks of work and put them together in new ways that better fit your strategies, goals, and needs.

Our framework consists of two closely related tools. The first is a map that can be used to locate the work on three fundamental dimensions: Assignment, Organization, and Rewards. The second is a decision framework that describes the choices leaders can make on each of these dimensions. Dialing some dimensions up and others down not only maps and deciphers the bewildering array of work alternatives we see today but offers insights about new hybrid work designs that may better fit your strategic needs.

The three major elements of the framework are the Assignment, the Organization, and the Rewards.

1. Assignment refers to the deliverables that the worker produces and the client receives, such as coding software, driving a car, creating a logo, evaluating an X-ray, or figuring out the optimal folding pattern of a protein needed to treat the AIDS virus.
2. Organization refers to the relationship between the work, the workers, and the clients. Is there more than one legal entity such as an alliance partner, a talent platform or outsourcer? If there is more than one entity how much do they share information, risk, decision authority, and accountability?
3. Rewards refer to the outcomes that the workers receive, such as money, learning, experience, sense of pride, bragging rights, or membership in a desirable group.

The “Lead the Work” Map

The diagram below shows three scales, Assignment, Organization, and Rewards, with the traditional regular full-time “employment” version of each dimension on the left, and the most extreme “beyond employment” version on the right (see Figure 5.1).

On the left, we see traditional employment. The Assignment is constructed into jobs, collected in fixed times and places, and engaged through a regular full-time employment relationship. The Organization is self-contained, unlinked, exclusive, and has a stable shape. The Rewards are based on a long-term connection, are collectively consistent, and use traditional elements (money, hours, working conditions, etc.).

On the right, we see the most nontraditional elements beyond employment. The Assignment is deconstructed into tasks, dispersed in time and place, and engaged through transactions that are detached from regular full-time employment. The Organization is permeable, interlinked, collaborative, and flexible. The Rewards are short-term, individualized, and differentiated, and use imaginative nontraditional elements (game points, reputation, mission, etc.).

Unlocking the “Lead the Work” Code

Each of the three dimensions implies fundamental choices. It's very much like using the dimensions of the map to dial up or down each dimension to find your optimum combination or code. That code unlocks your strategic success. Figure 5.2 below poses the questions that define the choices for each element.

The Assignment has three major choice categories:

1. Deconstruct? When this is dialed far to the left, work is contained in traditional jobs. When it is dialed far to the right, work is parceled into smaller units such as projects, tasks, and microtasks.
2. Disperse? When this is dialed far to the left, the work exists in fixed locations at predefined times (such as major surgery). When it is dialed far to the right, the work can be done in any location and at any time (such as web-based microtasks that can be completed wherever and whenever the worker has access to a cell phone).
3. Detach? When this is dialed far to the left, the work conditions, rewards, and rules are attached to and contained in a traditional employment relationship. When dialed far to the right, the work is detached from regular employment using alternative relationships, virtual markets, alliances, talent platforms, or volunteer crowdsourcing.

The Organization has four major choice categories:

1. Permeable? When this is dialed far to the left, the work resides only inside an organization boundary. When this is dialed far to the right, the work resides inside and outside and flows freely across the permeable organizational boundary.
2. Interlinked? When this is dialed far to the left, the organization is unlinked to the outside, relying on internal relationships and processes. When this is dialed far to the right, the organization is interlinked with the outside at many levels and with many connections.
3. Collaborative? When this is dialed far to the left, the organization is exclusive, operating only through formal and protective arms-length relationships with outsiders. When this is dialed far to the right, the organization is collaborative, with outside relationships based on mutual trust and shared norms and values.
4. Flexible? When this is dialed far to the left, the organization is stable, never changing its shape or what is included and excluded. When this is dialed far to the right, the organization is flexible, constantly reshaping, stretching and contracting in ways such as acquiring and divesting other organizations, outsourcing or insourcing processes, and forming alliances.

The Rewards has three major choice categories:

1. Shortened? When this is dialed far to the left, work rewards are provided over a long time, such as single-organization careers, retirement pensions, or equity that vests many years hence. When this is dialed far to the right, work rewards are provided in a very short time, such as immediate electronic payment after a task is finished, or an immediate ranking on a virtual scoreboard.
2. Individualized? When this is dialed far to the left, work rewards are consistently applied to all workers, such as a negotiated contract for all production workers in a factory. When this is dialed far to the right, work rewards are different for different individuals or subgroups.
3. Imaginative? When this is dialed far to the left, work rewards are drawn from traditional elements such as pay, benefits, conditions, and security. When this is dialed far to the right, work rewards are drawn from less traditional elements such as prestige, purpose, spirituality, fun, and reputation.

How the Framework Deciphers the Work beyond Employment: The Case of Upwork

This framework can help explain what has happened across the landscape of work and workers, and can help you as a leader to describe how to turn the dials to achieve your goals. Recall our examples in the earlier chapters.

Upwork dials the first two of the Assignment elements far to the right, creating work that is dispersed in time and place, and deconstructed into specific tasks. The third Assignment element is not dialed fully to the right because the workers of Upwork are attached, but not to an employment agreement. They are nonemployees attached to a platform. Indeed, the insight that the work should be attached not to employment but to a platform is what has allowed Upwork to build that platform to become much more than a meeting place for detached free agents doing microtasks, but instead to become a place to organize larger projects, and that allows Upwork to command additional revenue. Upwork dials the first three of the Organization elements far to the right, with work and workers flowing into and out of the permeable platform, and with increasingly strong interlinkages and even collaborations with its clients. The fourth Organization element is in the middle, because Upwork does not acquire and divest smaller organizations at will, but it does extend its platform to include outside organizations when it runs contests inside them. Finally, Upwork dials all three Rewards elements pretty far to the right. Its rewards are almost instantaneous as payments are made virtually, but there are also rewards such as reputation that occur only if workers have been on the platform for some time. Rewards are extremely individualized, with top performers getting far greater rewards than middle or low performers, but the system through which the rewards are calculated is the same for everyone. Upwork gets some attention for its imaginative rewards such as reputation, but that dial is not all the way to the right, because they also rely heavily on a traditional reward element—money.

The framework allows you to see developments like Upwork, Uber, Tongal, and Khazanah as more than bright shiny objects that pundits use to demonstrate how much the world is changing. It allows you to look inside, map their location, and see more clearly how the decisions they made fit their particular strategic challenges.

More important, the framework allows you to use these examples to decide how you will lead through the work. Understanding them through these dimensions allows you to better perceive and then to choose the elements that are right for you. You may decide to disperse your work while regaining it within jobs that are filled with regular full-time employees. You may decide to retain the work inside your organization among employees, but to implement elements of talent platforms like Topcoder, which more transparently and publicly track performance and accountability, and add a sense of fun and recognition to the work. You might look at an intact job such as controller, and decide to keep it intact and a relatively permanent part of your organization, but to outsource it to a consultant employed by a contractor or consulting firm. You may decide that the job of software manager can be deconstructed so that the coding part of it is sent outside your organization boundary and managed through a platform like Topcoder, but that the rest of this job (managing projects and teams) should remain within a traditional employment relationship.

The framework is also useful for workers, navigating a world beyond employment. An individual worker can decide where in this new world he or she wants to play. A whole range of options exist. Some will want relatively permanent jobs in protective organizations and be willing to accept the risks and rewards that come with that “Company Man” approach. Others will opt instead to work as independent individuals doing microtasks with no employment relationship, perhaps operating completely independently through their own websites and apps, or perhaps joining a global talent platform that preserves much of their freedom, but organizes work and workers. Thus, workers can use this framework to map their preferences and to understand how the marketplace for work and workers in their field is changing.

Our position is that leaders, workers, and of course governments need to understand this framework and use it to actively manage their decisions. Some configurations of the work, the organization, and the reward will be much more effective than others. People who are conscious of the options are in a better position to find the best configurations.