Seven key characteristics in the new world of work will define career success for workplace leaders and knowledge professionals in 2010 and beyond.

1. Career lifecycle - managing change in front of your inflection curve.

Successfully managing your personal inflection points requires that you first understand your own patterns and rhythm associated with your preferred cycle of change. Everyone has a pattern associated with the peaks and valleys of their life changes. The rhythm of these changes creates what I call an Optimum Change Cycle (OCC), a timeframe that generally falls between nine months and five years.

What does this mean for a professional who wants to know when it's time to reinvent their career? You begin by reviewing your life over a ten or fifteen year period, which provides you with enough of a timeline to connect the dots between the peaks and valleys of your life / career. What triggered changes in your life? When you were proactive in managing change in front of your personal inflection curve and when were you behind the curve.

Obviously, your goal is to proactively manage in front of your personal and organizational inflection points--being caught unaware is risky in the new world of work.

2. Communities for high visibility, high impact decisions.

The second way to thrive in the new world of work is by developing or refining your skills associated with research and due diligence in making faster, high-profile decisions defined as those with higher risk but also bigger payouts.

In order to do this, however, it's important that you have a safety net of advisors and decision communities that provide you with the trusted information you'll need in making these types of highly visible decisions. This safety net can be leveraged as an extension of your network during economic ups and downs or when you experience a career setback-something that happens to us all.

3. Technology toolbox - right tools for the situation.

It's critical that you add to your toolbox and upgrade its contents at least once a quarter. With emerging technologies entering the marketplace at a faster clip, you want to ensure that, at the least, you're knowledgeable about the primary tools you'll need for managing your business, your teams, and your career.

I'm still surprised when I meet high-tech professionals (even in Silicon Valley) who don't use or leverage social media! Your social capital both inside and outside the workplace is more crucial for your career than ever before. Professionals cannot afford to be perceived as slow adopters of high-impact technologies that can make or break their careers.

4. Learning for life - formal and informal education.

Knowledge seekers are curious animals by nature. Remember that informal learning is available every day to us, whether it's on-the-job learning or even "water cooler" learning, a term for when people actually used to congregate around a water dispenser and share informal information.

Today, this might be the company break room, but it's more likely to be your company's social media sites that you'll want to monitor. Your education needs to include a mix of formal, informal, and social learning just to stay in the game and to enjoy playing it as well.

Burying yourself in the tactical details of your job without connecting the dots of your formal and informal learning in order to see the big picture about what's happening around you is not how you effectively manage your career lifecycle in the new world of work.

5. Tribal innovation - entrepreneurial mindset for leadership and collaboration.

It's important that leaders and managers develop an entrepreneurial mindset in order to differentiate themselves at work and in their career. If the "Great Recession" has taught us anything, it is that value creation will come through innovation. But the rules of innovation have changed and will translate differently to the workplace than in years past.

Increasingly, your innovation value will be based on your ability to generate creative ideas and to collaborate with others who do; leveraging your communication and negotiation skills to vet these ideas and to navigate the organizational process of implementing internal process improvements or introducing innovative new products and services to the marketplace. For those of you who possess strong connector skills--influencing and persuading others to adopt your ideas--will want to ensure that you're measuring your value in both direct and indirect ways.

6. MobiFlex environments - mobile, global mindset.

Mobile, flexible workplace environments will increasingly define the new world of work. How much experience do you have working with multicultural, remotely distributed teams within the last 3 years? How many teams have you led? How many teams have invited you to serve as a Subject Matter Expert? You are way off the mark if your answer is less than five teams in three years. It is becoming a critical skill set to be able to differentiate yourself at work by collaborating face-to-face and within a remote setting, as you can expect to experience both with your career lifecycle.

Leaders and managers must set the stage by designing new ways of working, effectively using the right tools for workplace situations, and modeling best practices for their workers. Knowledge workers must continue to level the innovation playing field by using the latest collaboration tools for running efficient meetings, inclusive of more people across a wider playing field.

7. Responsible Risktaking - managing the upstream, downstream impact of risks.

The age of greed with its primary focus on profits at the expense of people and the planet continues to shift towards one of transparency and accountability. The current global economic meltdown has raised our awareness how we, as connected societies, got here in the first place. How company products are produced and used throughout the supply chain is now visible and increasingly seen as the responsibility of both large-scale enterprises and entrepreneurial startups.

Responsible Risktaking will increasingly become a key indicator of innovative solutions with its focus on responsibly managing the upstream and downstream impact--positive and negative--of risks when developing products and services. It provides thought leaders and socially-connected workers with an opportunity to step up and do the right thing for the right reasons at the right time.

© Dolores McCrorey Risktaking for Success LLC. All Rights Reserved.