Commitment, and The Three Ages of Management, Part 1
Commitment, and The Three Ages of Management, Part 1 (The Age of Coercion, The Age of Compliance – aka. The Age of Corporate BS – and The Age of Committed Action).
As a leader, you are being asked to do the seemingly impossible: trying to get people to give a third of their lives to the business, foregoing other opportunities for work, outside interests, or time with their families.
Your organization (and if you’re CEO, your board) wants you to fill it with employees who are not just good, but are brilliant, meet superhuman ‘person specifications’
Not only to do that, but then you have to keep them happy and retain them
How, especially given the Great Resignation are you supposed to meet this expectation? (And if you do, it’s a thankless task – just part of your job).
The way I see it, we’re now in the third of three Ages of Management.
In the First Age, management was much simpler. If you ran the town’s mill, factory or shops, then people didn’t have much choice about where to work. They were easier to manage because they had to put up with what was on offer. You could watch them, and the clock, like a hawk, limit their toilet breaks and sack them summarily.
You could argue back and forth about how well to treat employees (and like the Quaker chocolate firms, you could choose to treat them very well because you saw a bigger picture), but at the end of the day, if they needed the job, they had to knuckle under.
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In the Second Age, that debate about how to treat employees came to the fore, partly because unionisation changed the power balance
That was the theory. But on the ground in the Second Age you saw the rise of Corporate Bullshit. Managers learned to speak the language of humanistic psychology (“People are our greatest resource” etc). Some believed it and some didn’t. This was the age where one top-flight US business school sold a long-running programme called “How To Be Human At Work” (no irony appears to have been intended). Whether managers believed it or not, they knew they had to talk the talk, even if they then laid workers off by text when it was expedient.
The rise of the Millennials heralded the Third Age, and the so-called Great Resignation marks its full establishment. I have recently heard from two senior leaders in financial services – one a regional chairman for a Big Four accountancy firm, the other an MD at a global investment bank, saying that they can’t persuade high-paid and talented people who want to quit to accept one-year paid sabbaticals. These people want OUT. They’ve had it.
These days, people have infinitely more options. They can sit in their kitchen and skip from employer to employer. Everyone uses the same software, so screen-based work looks pretty much the same anyway. And they can freelance, consult, and launch all kinds of businesses using cheap and powerful online platforms.?
Talented people are more conscious of the opportunity cost of working for you. They don’t have to be drones and clones who at least pretend to conform to business theories of organizational behaviour any more.
The first big challenge for leaders in the Third Age of Management is to unlearn their old assumptions
What old assumptions do you think leaders need to unlearn?
Making work "work" for you
2 年Gosh there's loads in this - and lots for people to unlearn...Not just leaders. But a few things that spring to mind: 1. "Talent" doesn't look like they do or get formed in the way their talent got formed. 2. Screen based work may look the same from company to company so relationships are even more crucial - you might easily leave "a company" but you might stay for team-mates/ colleagues/ people you know and trust. So trust is massive - and with that the ability to have two-way emotionally honest conversations. (Not one way voice-mails, WhatsApps and passive aggressive emails.) 3. There's a lot of talk of EDI at the minute. If it were adopted as an approach to uncover an abundance of talent (and not another corporate BS hoop to jump through) then that could herald a new industrial revolution. That takes generosity, openness and - weirdly perhaps - joy.
Training ★ Coaching ★ Psychotherapy (...and a Laughter Yoga Teacher - yes seriously!)
2 年Certainly does raise a number of questions, particularly around how employers can differentiate themselves here and now in 2022, when jobs are aplenty and the required skills are in short supply. Is this an opportunity to shine by offering training/learning? Is the knowledge economy about creating both branding differentiation and pay-back?
Director at Hays
2 年Nice article Andy. I`m not sure its an old assumption, but leaders need to spend more time in todays world getting fully under the skin of why employees are looking to leave (or not join) an organisation. Burying your head in the sand or throwing money at the problem is not going to solve anything
International supply chain expert in logistics and supply chain. Global conference speaker, author, blogger & broadcaster.
2 年It's true Andy! Among my own clients in the manufacturing and distribution sectors, I am seeing more and more that the limiting factor on the delivery of many strategic projects is not the lack of capital, material resources or intent, but rather the lack of the people with the right skills, experience and temperament to implement them. Consequently, I think one assumption that leaders will need to unlearn is the assumption that they need to "own" the talent in-house. What they will need is to be able to do is access the talent when they need it, not own it. When it becomes a question of access, then all sorts of possibilities can open up.