Humans master the dynamics of responsive change. We can leverage human agency to easily drive change in your tired goals, roles and processes. Before we embrace Agentic-AI should we try giving our employees the agency to surprise us and to truly enjoy their work? Instead of going to war with talented employees who want to make change how can we better leverage their talents?
Storytelling Purpose
I lived my passions like a fire, and afterwards saw them and even though I had escaped from danger, I wept for this ending that exists in everything. I gave myself up to the greatest ideals, then denied them afterwards,
and gave myself to them again even more impetuously.Tasos Livadhitis, Craft
In a discussion on the Mel Robbins podcast, Jay Shetty shares a new version of the oft-cited NASA janitor story about purpose. In Jay’s version, it is a hospital cleaner and he refers to the capacity to change our feelings about a role without changing what or how we do that role. Jay describes this as job crafting, crediting Amy Wrzesniewski’s research on the topic.
I haven’t read all of Amy Wrzesniewski’s research to validate the story. I don’t need to as the story in any form is powerful, whether true or fable. Anyone who takes care of cleaning to allow others to excel is a special contributor. Stay back and talk to those who clean in your workplace and you will meet remarkable people working for lives, family and more. I agree wholeheartedly that purpose comes from our desire to contribute to others. Mindsets matter and we can change ours at will. The story however intrigued me in a different way.
Stuck in the Work
he’s like a rock
a general sense of fatal
paralysis
stuck in the mind
a whale of a guyZbigniew Herbert, Stuck in the Mind
What struck me most in the telling of that story was what the cleaners thought they couldn’t change – what they did and how they did it. When I did research Amy Wrzesniewski’s job crafting, the research describes the ability to change all three things about work, with or without organisational permission. Job crafting is ultimately an employee’s ultimate act of agency. It may even be one of rebellion to the extent that change is not authorised by the organisation.
Agency of employees seems to be a topic fading from discussion in this particular phase of late-stage capitalism. Many of the scaremongering tactics around work from home relate to the flexibility enabled in job crafting beyond the real or imagined panopticon of the office. Digital transformation and efficiency for legacy organisations is often couched in the ability to codify practices and experiences – ‘one system, one process, one way, the same way’ – which constrains an employees capacity to adapt their work to customers, situations or their own needs. Surveillance, security, efficiency and compliance are consistent themes that crush agency.
Whither Agency?
When I started focusing on management theory in the late nineties and early aughts, much of the leading management theory revolved around leveraging employee agency, particularly for productivity, customer experience, change, and innovation. Our focus on employee engagement was to win discretionary efforts. The talk of teams involved delegating work choices and control to teams of employees who then worked with increased autonomy. The Toyota Management System’s focus on improvement was led by empowerment at the frontline, even to stop the entire production line. Even the theory of Net Promoter Scores from Bain & Company was paired with a now long forgotten internal empowerment of teams. I could go on because there are so many examples from the leading management thinkers of the day.
We have become stuck in our view of the employee’s role as a widget in the process of work. Now Agentic-AI threatens to take even our now compliance-oriented pre-ordained process-centric work from us. The generative potential of human agency needs new advocates. From job-crafting to agile teams to employee-led change, we need to embrace a new model of how employees shape their work.
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.Amy Lowell, A Fixed Idea
The War with Talent
A decade ago, I did some work for clients on the future of HR. The thesis, tied to the Hero’s Journey, that resulted was around how the standard Ulrich HR model would need to evolve in a world of change agents, communities, and rapid transformation. Many elements have come true but like most forecasting I was mostly wrong or at least too early.
This week I saw shoots of that discussion again in a Linkedin post on the role of agentic AI in HR services and business partnering. Even then, the role of AI was to support a top-down business-led view of HR, not one driven by employee needs and experiences. For all the talk of a ‘war for talent’, our organisations often focus instead on the ‘war with talent’, the fight to force employees who desire agency into small unforgiving boxes and processes.
In an age of agentic-AI, rapid change, and volatility, the untapped potential is to manage the agency of employees before it is lost forever to the Borg. Creative employees aligned to strategy can produce exponentially better outcomes when allowed the agency to make changes. How are you leveraging the discretionary efforts your engagement score gives you before it is wasted? How are you working with your employees desire to be alive and make change before they leave?
Something will change every day.
It may be hard to process but I won’t lose my way.
Cecelia Taunton, Changes
