Interviews with Superheroes - The Change Expert

Today’s video is a real treat - an interview with one of the most amazing Superheroes of the Human Work and a champion of change and resilience - the inimitable Karen Ferris. Her thirst for knowledge is second to none and the way she’s able to boil the key points down is utterly mesmerising.

Asking Karen when she first heard the term "Psychological Safety" was special because if anyone has read everything that would be Karen so she would have stumbled upon the concept far before many other people and indeed she had.

I then asked Karen if I were a leader of an organisation with a mountain of HumanDebt - what should I do first? And she answered unflinchingly:

“Start with leadership to pay off HumanDebt, we were in a crisis before the pandemic, we are in a bigger leadership crisis now, we need to give these people help, servant leadership and new skills aren’t easy - have they got the capacity to be empathetic and the competency to give clarity and structure and then how do we help them truly to get to apply this new definition of leadership”.

Karen then goes on to mention that leaders are far from being willing to let go of command and control and that their need for line of sight in the face of the new working from home reality translates into how global demand for employee surveillance software has gone up for 80% undoubtedly driven by fearful middle managers who can’t trust their people and how that has driven response behaviour from employees that continue the productivity theatre by making themselves appear busy.