You might remember the days, or heard the urban legends, when someone worked at the same company for fifty years, received their gold watch, and walked into the sunset. Hold on tight, be patient, and keep climbing—we've all been told this will pay off some day.

If you pay your dues and stay with our company long enough, you will move up the ladder. - Ancient inscription on an employee orientation letter

Today, with the flattening of organizations, the career ladder has been replaced by a career lattice—where advancement isn’t only about vertical movement. Success is also about horizontal opportunities that provide new experiences and expand skills.

My career is a case in point: currently in my fifth career, aspiring engineer, became a corporate banker, moved into leadership development, and became a solopreneur, then an entrepreneur with a growing team, and now an author and professional speaker.

Josh Bersin founder of Bersin by Deloitte recently told me, “I think there’s basically a redefinition of what business is, and it isn’t just a hierarchical company. It’s a network. This is having profound implications on how we manage people, people’s careers, and how we develop people, or manage performance. Traditional management stuff is getting questioned because it doesn’t serve you as well in this new world.“

Think about it. A hamster wheel is simply a ladder made into a circle. It’s designed for running in place.

The career lattice is indicative of how the corporate hierarchy is shifting. From defined “hard-line reporting” and top-down structure to one that is matrixed. You can be “hard lined” to one manager while “dotted lined” to another manager or team. We now work in a series of interconnected and interdependent networks.

When we pause to consider who our “bosses” are, most of us will identify an ever-extending and convoluted group that includes customers, colleagues, our immediate boss, our bosses’ boss , the regional leader, and the functional leader.

Learning to manage what may become competing perspectives and opinions will differentiate the high performer of the future. To future-proof your career you need to be connected at multiple levels, to multiple people, and actively cultivate those connections.

The twentieth-century expectation of work was this: we provide our skills, mental and physical, to one employer in return for getting paid at a regular and predictable cadence. This forms the basis for what was described as the “psychological contract,” the implicit expectations which employers had of their employees—and vice versa. Work hard and the company would provide pay and benefits for a lifetime.

The idea of an employer taking care of its employees from Day One through retirement might seem too good to be true, and it’s certainly too good to be true now. The rules of the employer-employee contract, whether implicit or explicit, are being rewritten.

The rules of the employer-employee contract, whether implicit or explicit, are being rewritten.

The question is, are you managing your career accordingly? Are you stuck on the ladder, or enjoying the lattice?

As a manager, are you dealing with the new reality of employees who expect to climb a lattice—and jump when opportunity knocks?

In the modern world, working for several employers in part-time and contract work will continue to increase. Company pension schemes are becoming less common, with individual retirement account or stakeholder pensions becoming the responsibility of each individual.

Loyalties are shifting from the company or the team, and to the manager one works with. The quality of the working relationship with boss and colleagues, or the lack of it, is a key driver for staying with, or leaving, an employer. The Kelly Global Workforce Index 2013 surveyed 120,000 respondents from thirty-one countries across the globe. Of these, sixty-three percent of the participants stated that the quality of the relationship with their direct manager impacted their level of satisfaction with their job.

The psychological contract is no more. Welcome to the social contract.

Relationships matter, and the quality of our working relationships matter even more. Our willingness to tolerate toxic behaviors —the team member who takes credit for our work, the boss who yells, or being excluded from team meetings—is diminishing. Our options to seek opportunities elsewhere are endless. When people move to a new job, it’s not just about the money being offered, it’s also about the quality of the team experience.

Globalization is changing the nature of work. No longer are individual employees competing in a local market for the next opportunity, instead we are all part of the Global Talent Pool. When it comes to finding new sources of talent it seems that 21st Century companies are destined to play a never-ending game of global whack-a-mole. As fast as a new talent hotspot pops up, whether it’s a city or a country, other companies quickly follow—the market is saturated – and the game moves to the next talent hotspot.

The internet means we are now competing with an unseen colleague who may be thousands of miles, and many time zones, away. When you’re sleeping, they’re working.

Dan Pink, bestselling author of books on the changing world of work, observes “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.”

The future of work is less of a chore or a place we have to go to. Instead, work becomes something we choose to do, because we want to.

As a manager, are you ready to move your company into the lattice?