Companies today are facing a big talent-management challenge. They simply do not have the capabilities they need in-house to transform their offerings, processes, and infrastructures-and they're increasingly unable to persuade highly skilled professionals to come on board full-time, despite making attractive offers. In many fields-particularly technology, data sciences, and machine learning-the people with the most sought-after skills are freelancers. Integrating and managing a new "blended workforce" will be one of the main managerial challenges in the years ahead. Force-fitting the model used for temporary staff onto highly skilled freelancers won't work, however. Firms must fully integrate these professionals into a highly cohesive internal team. This article looks at successful efforts to manage the blended workforce at companies such as Microsoft, M&C Saatchi, and Mars and lays out some of the most helpful lessons they have learned.

In recent decades sweeping reengineering, digitization, and agile initiatives--and lately the move to remote work--have dramatically transformed the job of managers. Change has come along three dimensions: power, skills, and structure. Managers now have to think about making their teams successful, rather than being served by them; coach performance, not oversee tasks; and lead in rapidly changing, more-fluid environments. These shifts have piled more responsibilities onto managers and required them to demonstrate new capabilities. Research shows that most managers are struggling to keep up. A crisis is looming, say Gherson, a former corporate chief human resources officer, and Gratton, a London Business School professor. Some organizations, however, are heading it off by reimagining the role of managers. This article looks at three--Standard Chartered, IBM, and Telstra--that have helped managers develop new skills, rewired systems and processes to support their work better, and even radically redefined managerial responsibilities to meet the new priorities of the era.