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Sure, we have formal and informal flexible work arrangements. But they are tied to jobs, not to people. You can’t build a career on the mommy or daddy track. You can only shift from job to job and company to company in hopes of better pay and a new set of challenges to deal with. Is it any wonder most executives are changing companies every three years (or less)?

And if I can personalize the M&M’s for my company’s trade show booth, why can’t I personalize my career and life plan rather than simply changing companies every time I need to adjust?

Leave it to someone who hired 12,000 people last year to issue the wake-up call companies have needed. “It’s time the workplace catches up with the workforce,” says Cathy Benko, Deloitte vice chairman and head of the talent management practice. But rather than add to the rhetoric, Benko and her colleagues have studied and tested a new approach. They call it Mass Career Customization. In effect, it’s a business plan for replacing the 10 or 50 or 79 flexible work programs at your company with a framework where every employee and every manager accepts in advance that the balances will shift with age and life circumstance and that it is possible to plan for dialing up and dialing back in stead of leaving it to chance.

Cathy Benko will be discussing how to adapt your company’s process and how to look at your own career in a special GrowingBusinessLink.com webinar. Seating at the live presentation is limited. You can receive an invitation by registering at the Oracle Featured Resource Center by noon ET Friday January 18 for the presentation January 22nd.

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It takes a whole menu of talents to reach leadership levels, and colleagues will respect and perhaps admire that expertise, but converting them to believers — followers — takes more than fancy strategic footwork. It takes the ability to communicate credibility, trust and motivation — often referred to as “the soft skills.”

“Although people tend to describe these types of skills as ‘soft,’ the most successful leaders understand that to motivate, persuade and advance the business’s interests, such skills are essential, indispensable and equally important to the ‘hard’ skills,” says Ruth Sherman, communications consultant and author of Get Them to See It Your Way, Right Away. “To implement a new strategy or make major changes of any kind, there must be a plan. Then, they must commit to it and follow through.”

The key, says Sherman, is to communicate messages with the “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me?) factor. “Unless a direct connection can be made between what employees are being asked to do — getting behind a turn-around plan or supporting a new initiative — and how it will benefit them, they won’t do it. This is human nature. The message has to have some type of emotional content and connection, and it doesn’t have to be about money or other perks. It makes for good feelings which are motivational by nature.”

Avoid dry, technical, jargon-heavy language, Sherman warns, as everyday talk is more humanizing. “Interestingly, it’s when we use big words or overly formal language that we lose credibility. People feel talked down to. They are reluctant to ask questions, because they don’t want to come across as unknowledgeable. If there is one thing we know, it’s that people resent being made to feel ignorant and they will turn off, stop listening.”

As the leader, you have to model the behavior you expect. “Show — not tell. If support for a strategic plan is being sought, for example, and it’s a tough sell, the leadership could hold small meetings with business groups or departments and allow employees to voice concerns or worries and share their own. This type of openness engenders trust.”

If the leader’s behavior is inconsistent, Sherman says, “Executives are just spinning their wheels, which I’ve seen happen repeatedly.”

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Technology services, telecommunications, insurance, manufacturing, engineering, banking and finance, oil, travel, utilities and communications all reported higher rates for offshoring.

At the HSM World Innovation Forum in New York City in early April, author Daniel Pink said if just 15 percent of India’s population of one billion has the talent, education and skills, it will surpass America’s workforce. “Last month, 146 million Americans worked to power the world’s biggest economy,” Pink noted, and India will be even more powerful by 2010 when English becomes the most spoken language.

Offshoring is not an immediate threat to U.S. jobs, according to Pink, but it is an example of how we overestimate the impact in the short run and underestimate in the long run. “Workers making $65,000 per year in the U.S. make $18,000 in Asia with the same skills,” said Pink, adding that any kind of routine work that is just a series of steps will disappear in the U.S. and race toward the cheapest mass provider. However, he also notes that as those lower-cost workers begin to see the abundance at hand, the cost to keep them rises, and thus they become more expensive workforces.

“Even certain kinds of white-collar work that our parents said we ‘could fall back on’ like accounting is becoming routine,” and Pink said that his “fall-back” profession — law — is also becoming automated. “Uncontested divorce is routine paperwork, reduced to lines of code; you can now go to a lawyer, or go to CompleteCase.com or 123DivorceMe.com for affordable solutions.”