What the Future of Humans at Work Needs

Loads of foolishness happens in many industries these days when it comes to the future of work. Everyone can tell in their heart of hearts that the wind of change is blowing strong as carrying on like it’s 1996 is simply not sustainable when it comes to creating what is expected as outcomes by consumers if not stakeholders.

That doesn’t mean everyone is ready or willing to embrace the change. For evident reasons I write and speak about a lot, accepting change is necessary and executing is rarely joyous and straightforward and it puts people on defensive so deep it’s paralysing. This is of course not something that can be fixed overnight and the process of acceptance and then true alignment will take as long as it takes for those on the back foot to be convinced they can lower their heel and step on safe, solid ground.

In other words, businesses everywhere will have to make their dedication to the new ways of work crystal clear and demonstrate over and again that they sincerely mean it before employees will be willing to really change ways which they have been familiar with for tens of years.

Starting with managers and leaders who have to leave all they learned in business school at the door and manage without the clarity of “command and control”, to project managers and knowledge workers who now have to think and feel Agile and lean and to generally anyone who now has to leave their knowledge, their skills and even their sitting comfort zone for the pop-up/cross functional/swat teams, everyone has to accept that from hereon the game is new.

Here are some of the things we were all rewarded for traditionally:

Knowledge and expertise – hard skills over having empathy, purpose and a growth mindset – the skills which machines are starting to become infinitely better than humans at;

Being a “decisive” leader – controlling and commanding in lieu of being a servant leader and collaborating;

Sequential thinking – slow analysis versus speed and MVPing;

Getting approval – obtaining internal sign-off as a final act in a project versus depending on customer feedback;

Obeying – execution over curiosity, dialogue, creativity, learning and failing;

Individualism – “Keeping one’s job” and “looking good” over building things as a real team;