Part 5
Welcome to Human Work. A series about the changing nature of work today.

Many leaders are seized of the need to transform to survive and thrive. They also know that leadership isn’t just about telling people what they want to hear. It sounds obvious, but it wasn’t so long ago that hymns to the mercurial, ambidextrous leader were being sung. Now, in this era of DEI rollbacks, ESG fudging (or outright rejection), accountability and cost-driven decision making, leadership looks more like stating what the leader (and the organisation) stands for right now.

More CFOs are edging towards the CEO role, which affects the overall tone. There is genuine soul-searching about how to invest for the future, and an anxiety about hiring the right people for the right roles – as opposed to hiring based on age-old cultural biases that pervade even the most forward-facing companies.

On the last point, I have been speaking to a team leader in a UK organisation who is pulling what’s left of his hair out over the following problem. The senior management are talking big – about competing at the highest levels. Only, those levels have risen fast in recent times and are rising daily due to a new strain of tech-native, operationally lean competitors. The organisation he works for must change the way it operates, fast.

A common statistic cited by McKinsey and others is that around 70% of transformation projects fail, and a key factor in this is a lack of focus on the people aspects of change. When it comes to taking concrete actions, the team leader I mentioned says the root of the pain is that his team is full of people, many of them quite senior, who want to do one or more of only three things:

• What they enjoy,
• What they are good at,
• What they have always done.

Fair enough, you might say. But technology and the competitive landscape have moved at such a pace that NONE of these three things may be needed by the organisation right now. On top of this, some of the people in the team negotiated compressed hours and remote work during COVID. They sold and bought houses, moved out of town, changed their lives. Not only are they not present to collaborate in person, they’re doing four days a week and being paid for five.

In an ideal world (from the corporate point of view), he says that the organisation would replace half of these people with more curious, more dynamic (and probably cheaper) generalists: people who would welcome the experience but might stay only for two years, or a year, or even just six months. This would aid the overall transformation. The transformation the leaders are talking about is not possible with the existing people working in the way they’re working.

Making them offers they can refuse

Could an enhanced voluntary redundancy programme be the answer? You offer redundancy packages and sweeteners on top to tempt people to leave. Having been through a number of these exercises, our team leaders says that it’s problematic. The good people take redundancy because they know they can get another job, while the ones who are happy cruising opt to stay. It can make matters worse.

So, what’s next? Horse’s head?

Caught between worlds

How can leaders help? There are still too many leaders trying to read the room, tell people what they want to hear and get out of the room as smoothly as possible. You must be able to do this at the highest levels, but some are caught between worlds in the contemporary context.

Real leadership in this time of difficult but essential transformation increasingly involves stating what is acceptable, and what is not. It’s hard because people will get upset if you tell them the terms of their work need to change.

But change they must. There is no point a CEO saying they want to compete globally, digitally, culturally (add your own adverb) if they’re not in the same breath going to stand behind the terms, actions, behaviours and decisions that are essential if the organisation is even going to try. And if they don’t, the organisation certainly won’t be able to compete with nimbler, deep-pocketed rivals. Not only that, this leader may be putting on a good show of “leading”, but they are not really leading at all.