Author: simongterry
Zeitgeist warning: the future of work is human
Talk of the changing future of work and human potential is growing. There is discussion of the need to make the future of work more human in many different ways. The conversation runs from thought leaders to vendors to managers to employees.
Why now?
The cynics will attribute this to the last gasp of dreamers before a new networked information revolution of automation takes over. Hope you enjoyed your daydream: Welcome to Skynet and the singularity. The market pressures from global competitors, disruptive innovation and capital markets are as intense as ever. Management is doing a its job driving rising efficiency. Technology will continue to advance its potential under human ingenuity.
We choose the path for humanity
So why be an optimist?
We get to choose. Remember there is no external power determining the course of history. Humans collectively get to choose and to make it happen. The evil external force we fear is us. The peers, management teams, the markets & the competitors are other people too.
In the last thousand years collectively we have chosen paths that lead to great knowledge, productivity, wealth and freedom. We have embraced major social changes that have changed our institutions, markets and our organisations because they made our lives more human.
There are decisions that deprive people of their potential that others can no longer make without consequences. No CEO will stand and argue for the profitability of slavery, discrimination, violence or tyranny in our workplaces. We have used leadership to realise this potential and make the changes required. With enormous cost, turmoil and effort we have created change.
If you want to make a bet on the future of work, bet on humanity. Leadership is the technology of human potential and we would waste our lives of we did not work to realise that greater potential. Networks now give us the power to use leadership to connect and engage people in change. Use your leadership and creativity to help make work more human.
I know where I will put my efforts. I am comforted to know many others are working for the same goal.
Note: If you are interested in working to change the future of work, then check out Change Agents Worldwide, The Responsive Organisation, read anyone of a dozen other manifestos or get in touch with me. I would love to help
End Collaboration Silos
Help the Future of Work break out of its silo. The social collaboration & leadership required for the future of work is central to how we organise for human potential & productivity, not a bolt on. We can’t create great Responsive Organisations playing around the edges.
Why bother with the Social Collaboration? Isn’t that an HR issue?
Ask most CEOs and they will tell you they wish their people could better leverage what they collectively know. Look closely at the broken processes in your organisation and you will find consistent issues of poor engagement, knowledge management or collaboration. Senior managers want to be more ‘digital and more agile’ but they are frustrated they can’t generate more innovation and change in their organisations. The poor customer outcomes, broken processes and the purposeless work that results are at the heart of the issues impacting productivity, employee engagement and the customer experience.
Each of these issues are a sign that traditional management mindsets and approaches are failing to deliver what our organisations need. Importantly they are also failing to realise the potential of people at work. Yet most organisations respond to these issues with more of same structures and systems along with more technology and more management effort. We need an alternative that better leverages human potential, networks and social collaboration. The people who work in the organisation need to be a part of building that alternative. Building that alternative is the Future of Work and it will take leadership and collaboration.
Get Human Potential out of a Silo and into Work
Transformation requires a new conversation about how we work leveraging new organisational structures, new approaches and technologies. The fact that many organisations can’t decide who owns enterprise collaboration technology is a terrible start. We need to shift from questions of who owns collaboration. Traditional thinking leaves ideas like leadership, collaboration, organisational design and the future of work to soft functions and lets hard managers deal with organisational processes and performance.
The future of work offers an exponential opportunity to realise the potential of people. Realising this opportunity will take enterprise-wide leadership & change. You can’t realise people’s full potential without offering them the opportunity to change the core structures, systems and processes of the organisation. Until leaders use enterprise collaboration to create systemic change, it can’t generate the kinds of benefits management wants. If new ways of work stay on the periphery, at best they work only as an employee engagement bandaid. At worst, they are just technologies organisations have to be trendy.
Collaboration silos and layers lose momentum and fail eventually because collaboration is human and purposeful people need to be empowered to create real change in their day-to-day work. Customers & employees want whole systems of work to improve, not just parts or peripheral tasks. Without the pressure of demonstrating impact for people to improve their day-to-day work, competing collaboration solutions flourish to the frustration of employees, generating new silos that undermine the benefits for all. Positive impact on the value of work for an employee is a critical test of the value of any collaboration solution.
Moving Collaboration out of the Silo and to Value
Here are a few first steps to help your organisation leverage the potential of its employees and embrace the Future of Work:
- Embrace the development of human potential: Make the measure of leadership in the organisation the delivery of results through the development of people’s potential. Anything less is just management and wastes the potential of your people to help.
- Explore transparency: Ask leaders to role model working out loud. Help them understand the new mindsets. Encourage employees across the organisation to work out loud too. Shift the default disclosure model to open sharing of information in a culture of trust.
- Empower people to improve their work: Start a leadership conversation at all levels in your organisation about how work can be improved. Define value as value to a customer or other external stakeholder. Give your people the power to make changes as a result of the conversation. Leaders will need to support, participate and facilitate. A critical role for leaders is to ensure participation of others. The conversation will fail if processes or silos are off limits to change.
- Experiment and learn: Give your people permission and the capability to experiment with creating value in new ways of working. Embrace learning and ensure that the successful experiments are adopted as wide scale change
With the right leadership conversation, your organisation will begin to explore new models of trust, new ways to create value and start to discover its purpose on this journey. You will know your employees are embracing this new model when they begin to question the other structures & systems in your organisation, like organisational structures, performance management processes or technology systems, that get in the way of their productivity and potential. Your next challenge will be to work with your people to change these bigger systems to realise further value from work.
That work leads directly into the future of work and to a much more responsive organisation.
Image source: Grain Silo by Hakan Dahlstrom
End Collaboration Silos
Help the Future of Work break out of its silo. The social collaboration & leadership required for the future of work is central to how we organise for human potential & productivity, not a bolt on. We can’t create great Responsive Organisations playing around the edges.
Why bother with the Social Collaboration? Isn’t that an HR issue?
Ask most CEOs and they will tell you they wish their people could better leverage what they collectively know. Look closely at the broken processes in your organisation and you will find consistent issues of poor engagement, knowledge management or collaboration. Senior managers want to be more ‘digital and more agile’ but they are frustrated they can’t generate more innovation and change in their organisations. The poor customer outcomes, broken processes and the purposeless work that results are at the heart of the issues impacting productivity, employee engagement and the customer experience.
Each of these issues are a sign that traditional management mindsets and approaches are failing to deliver what our organisations need. Importantly they are also failing to realise the potential of people at work. Yet most organisations respond to these issues with more of same structures and systems along with more technology and more management effort. We need an alternative that better leverages human potential, networks and social collaboration. The people who work in the organisation need to be a part of building that alternative. Building that alternative is the Future of Work and it will take leadership and collaboration.
Get Human Potential out of a Silo and into Work
Transformation requires a new conversation about how we work leveraging new organisational structures, new approaches and technologies. The fact that many organisations can’t decide who owns enterprise collaboration technology is a terrible start. We need to shift from questions of who owns collaboration. Traditional thinking leaves ideas like leadership, collaboration, organisational design and the future of work to soft functions and lets hard managers deal with organisational processes and performance.
The future of work offers an exponential opportunity to realise the potential of people. Realising this opportunity will take enterprise-wide leadership & change. You can’t realise people’s full potential without offering them the opportunity to change the core structures, systems and processes of the organisation. Until leaders use enterprise collaboration to create systemic change, it can’t generate the kinds of benefits management wants. If new ways of work stay on the periphery, at best they work only as an employee engagement bandaid. At worst, they are just technologies organisations have to be trendy.
Collaboration silos and layers lose momentum and fail eventually because collaboration is human and purposeful people need to be empowered to create real change in their day-to-day work. Customers & employees want whole systems of work to improve, not just parts or peripheral tasks. Without the pressure of demonstrating impact for people to improve their day-to-day work, competing collaboration solutions flourish to the frustration of employees, generating new silos that undermine the benefits for all. Positive impact on the value of work for an employee is a critical test of the value of any collaboration solution.
Moving Collaboration out of the Silo and to Value
Here are a few first steps to help your organisation leverage the potential of its employees and embrace the Future of Work:
- Embrace the development of human potential: Make the measure of leadership in the organisation the delivery of results through the development of people’s potential. Anything less is just management and wastes the potential of your people to help.
- Explore transparency: Ask leaders to role model working out loud. Help them understand the new mindsets. Encourage employees across the organisation to work out loud too. Shift the default disclosure model to open sharing of information in a culture of trust.
- Empower people to improve their work: Start a leadership conversation at all levels in your organisation about how work can be improved. Define value as value to a customer or other external stakeholder. Give your people the power to make changes as a result of the conversation. Leaders will need to support, participate and facilitate. A critical role for leaders is to ensure participation of others. The conversation will fail if processes or silos are off limits to change.
- Experiment and learn: Give your people permission and the capability to experiment with creating value in new ways of working. Embrace learning and ensure that the successful experiments are adopted as wide scale change
With the right leadership conversation, your organisation will begin to explore new models of trust, new ways to create value and start to discover its purpose on this journey. You will know your employees are embracing this new model when they begin to question the other structures & systems in your organisation, like organisational structures, performance management processes or technology systems, that get in the way of their productivity and potential. Your next challenge will be to work with your people to change these bigger systems to realise further value from work.
That work leads directly into the future of work and to a much more responsive organisation.
Image source: Grain Silo by Hakan Dahlstrom
Leaders help realise potential
An insightful quote by David Foster Wallace on leadership in which he describes leadership in terms of the development of human potential
A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.
In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own
Authority is earned. Authority comes when others judge you ready. Development of the potential of others in your networks is the work.
How are you working to earn the authority of others? How do you help them realise a potential that they couldn’t reach on their own? Show that potential and people will follow.
That is the future of leadership
Swapping Hard and Soft
Management likes to talk about the hard skills and the soft skills of managers. These terms are usually applied backwards.
Hard skills are the decision-making, analytical, performance oriented skills of traditional management. Hard skills are a matter of education, experience and practice. The hard skills are mostly transactional, process-driven and mechanistic. Done right there is little variation in the outcome of the hard skills. If you are a manager for long enough, you can do the hard skills. They are just a ticket to the game.
Soft skills are the people & stakeholder skills, like building trust, fostering motivation, developing people, managing conflict and team building. In most cases, it is a challenge to know whether you have done these skills well and the results of actions in any scenario can vary widely. These are the skills essential to realising the potential of people in any context but particularly in a world of networked knowledge work. This is the work of leadership and it must be learned the hard way.
Time to Swap
The terms hard and soft are backwards. In a culture of hierarchy, command and control andengineering mindsets, it suits management to think of the manager as engineer tackling the hard work of decisions, managing the machine and delivering results. Hard skills start to sound like they are most important in a culture where power really matters.
Except it is easy to make a decision. It is far harder to have that decision stick and be embraced by other people. Try to coach another person and you soon realise that developing their potential and helping them is not easy.
The soft stuff is what unravels the hard stuff. You need both people and power in management. The soft stuff is far harder than setting the levers on a machine.
Leadership is work. Hard work. Importantly, it is the hard work that matters most to realise the potential of your people and to benefit from the future of work in a networked knowledge economy.
Swap your view of what is hard and what is soft. Better yet leave them both behind as terms that belong to the last age of management.
Image source: Swan feather – http://pixabay.com/en/swan-feather-spring-swan-slightly-16313/
Swapping Hard and Soft
Management likes to talk about the hard skills and the soft skills of managers. These terms are usually applied backwards.
Hard skills are the decision-making, analytical, performance oriented skills of traditional management. Hard skills are a matter of education, experience and practice. The hard skills are mostly transactional, process-driven and mechanistic. Done right there is little variation in the outcome of the hard skills. If you are a manager for long enough, you can do the hard skills. They are just a ticket to the game.
Soft skills are the people & stakeholder skills, like building trust, fostering motivation, developing people, managing conflict and team building. In most cases, it is a challenge to know whether you have done these skills well and the results of actions in any scenario can vary widely. These are the skills essential to realising the potential of people in any context but particularly in a world of networked knowledge work. This is the work of leadership and it must be learned the hard way.
Time to Swap
The terms hard and soft are backwards. In a culture of hierarchy, command and control and engineering mindsets, it suits management to think of the manager as engineer tackling the hard work of decisions, managing the machine and delivering results. Hard skills start to sound like they are most important in a culture where power really matters.
Except it is easy to make a decision. It is far harder to have that decision stick and be embraced by other people. Try to coach another person and you soon realise that developing their potential and helping them is not easy.
The soft stuff is what unravels the hard stuff. You need both people and power in management. The soft stuff is far harder than setting the levers on a machine.
Leadership is work. Hard work. Importantly, it is the hard work that matters most to realise the potential of your people and to benefit from the future of work in a networked knowledge economy.
Swap your view of what is hard and what is soft. Better yet leave them both behind as terms that belong to the last age of management.
Image source: Swan feather – http://pixabay.com/en/swan-feather-spring-swan-slightly-16313/
Human Potential is Exponential
Managing the productivity of people is increasingly important as our economy adjusts to increasing an increasing share of knowledge work. For many organisations labour is already the most significant cost of production.
Many organisations adopt a traditional efficiency management mindset when it comes to managing people. The view that their people have a fixed potential contribution means that the organisation will miss the opportunity that flows from increasing human potential.
Leverage the Growing Potential of People
People are the most unique input to your production process. Their contributions offer the potential for exponential increases in value. The potential of people is not fixed. You will struggle to make steel exponentially more useful in your process but you can quickly help your people to create exponential increases in value in their work.
We know people’s skill can increase over time as the learn and gain experience in their roles. Most organisations work to foster the learning of its people to better leverage their growing productivity from new skills. Growth in skills delivers significant improvements in the potential of your people.
As benefit of the leadership conversations to develop people you also discover that your people have capabilities to contribute to your organisation in ways far beyond their current role & performance. Leveraging this potential through new assignments, new challenges and new roles is essential to development of talent and better performance.
Networks Accelerate Potential
However, people have one other critical capability over most factors of production. People can also network to accelerate their learning and productivity. Metcalfe’s law tells us that in a network the value increases exponentially with the number of people connected. People working, learning and sharing in a network experience this exponential impact on their potential.
How can networking with others, through working out loud deliver exponential increases in value to people working in your organisation?
Networks enables your people to realise greater potential through:
- greater access to knowledge, a faster pace of knowledge flow and most importantly accelerated opportunities for people to share and to learn from each other
- access to consult perspectives, skills and experience that they have not yet acquired through conversations with peers and others.
- the ability to accelerate the growth of their own personal connections by leveraging networks to find additional friends, colleagues, stakeholders, experts or others who can help add value to their work
- building purpose, trust & engagement within and outside your organisation. Lack of trust is a major barrier to productivity in organisations. A sense of purpose and engagement have major influences on people’s contributions at work, particularly discretionary efforts.
Most importantly of all, people aren’t just an input to your work. People organised and empowered by networks can work together on improving your system & processes of work. All of a sudden you have the potential for major leaps in the value of your work as collaboration drives innovation.
If you are wondering how to get started to leverage the exponential potential of your people in networks, then Harold Jarche just described the way to get going with working out loud, personal knowledge management, distributing authority and building a common vision.
Killing the Golden Goose: From Waste to Potential
The origins of management have embedded a fixed mindset of human potential in management practice. The resulting efficiency narrative leaves us fearing volatility and battling the threat of waste. We need to embrace the opportunity of a growth mindset and lead the development of human potential.
Golden Goose Co Limited
Imagine you were entrusted management of 12 golden geese. Because the eggs they produce are all golden they won’t breed. As the manager of the golden geese all you can manage is their efficiency of production. Achieving the daily maximum of eggs is all that is possible.
The manager of Golden Goose Co Limited lives in fear of any volatility in performance, any change in circumstances or any threat to the geese. The most likely outcome from that change is a drop in production. The golden goose manager’s job in life is fight the geese’s inevitable extinction and deliver maximum efficiency of production in the meantime.
Which Management Narrative: Waste or Potential?
Human potential is not a golden goose. We are intelligent & creative, we can improve, learn, innovate, collaborate and grow. However, early management thinkers like Frederick Winslow Taylor viewed the challenge of management of maximising the efficiency of the labour resource, treating employees as a golden goose with a maximum limit of contribution. Time and motion, performance management and other tools were developed to maximise the fixed contribution from a resource that wasn’t expected to develop beyond a limited skill set of contributions.
The idea that management faces a threat of lost employee productivity and must do battle to maximise efficiency of production is a major narrative of management. As John Hagel has outlined, threat based narratives can build a strong unity of culture, but at the cost of conservatism and a focus on preservation.
Tim Kastelle recently highlighted that management is often deeply concerned at any sign of volatility of performance. As the manager of Golden Goose Co Limited, volatility would get you fired. We go to enormous lengths to embed our desire to eradicate volatility from management, even to the extent where often the implicit purpose of our organisational structures and practices is to embed execution of only the current business model.
The management mindset of efficiency with an implicit fixed mindset of human productivity is akin to Carol Dweck’s Fixed mindset of intelligence. The consequences for management behaviour are similar avoiding challenges, ignoring valuable feedback and feeling threatened by competitive success.
United in their battle against waste, managers with this traditional mindset are battling the extinction of the golden goose under the forces of disruption. Nothing more.
Growing Potential is the Work of Leaders
The rapidly changing and disruptive environment in which we work means we need to start managing the ability of human potential to grow. We need a new growth mindset and to develop a new opportunity narrative for management that embraces human potential.
Any work that can be automated will be automated, including more and more sophisticated knowledge work. The role of leaders is increasingly less about the focus on managing waste as the golden goose approach is being disrupted by the innovation of others. Increasingly Harold Jarche argues leaders should manage talent. Leadership is the technology of human potential.
Managers need to start embracing this leadership and focusing on the opportunity narrative that is embedded in human history. We have shown consistently that human creativity is the best source of productivity improvement. Focusing on improving effectiveness, defined as success in producing an outcome, allows a far greater contribution from the people involved in the work and keeps our attention focused on best ways to realise the goals, not the processes.
The productivity improvement from creativity and potential far exceeds that of human management. Ongoing experiments like scientific learning, our global networks and our start-up culture prove the human potential to improve outcomes through learning, creativity and innovation. The Toyota Management System shows that human potential can and will grow in the exact industrial manufacturing context that Ford and Taylor helped invent, when given the opportunity by the management system.
When managers focus on growing human potential to improve effectiveness, this growth mindset redefines the game and pushes changes in the other systems that define our modern organisations. Purpose and goals come first. Engagement is no longer an after thought. Experimentation is a core practice. Collaboration and cooperation are seen as human opportunities to work and not sources of waste & distraction. Volatility is embraced as a source of potential learning. Most importantly of all the new narrative respects and embraces the potential of all in organisations to lead and to contribute.
That is a future of work worth seeing. So let’s kill the golden goose mindset of management and focus instead on leading the potential of people.
Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/geese-birds-birds-flying-waterfoul-258749/