Leaders Have Been Kicked Upstairs: How to Steward Today’s Empowered Workforce

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FORCY Radio, it's employees their affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W Forcy Radio, its employees, or affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FORCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, Doctor Release Cortez. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose program, now on air for eight and a half years. Thanks to tune it again this week I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortez. If we've not met yet, I'm a management consultant, organizational logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and I it Elise Cortez and Associates help companies enliven their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant workplace. There people are intrinsically motivated

1:30 to perform at their best, growner their vullid potential, and are committed to stay and help deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and now we can work together at Elise Cortez dot com. Now getting in today's program. With us today are the authors of the empathy advantage, leading the empowered workforce. We have Heather McGowan, a future of work strategist, thought leader, researcher and author and a leading voice on the future of work. She's transforming mindsets and entire organizations around the globe with her message about how the next phase of work will focus on tenuous learning and our leadership must shift to guide these expeditions. Also with us as Chris Shipley, who has documented, influenced, and predicted the impact of technology on business society for more than thirty years. Today to focuses our work on the human and organizational challenges in the face of technology and economically driven disruption. Father and Chris, welcome to Working on Purpose. It's amazing to have you on. I want to show and to show off this beautiful work. Look at this thing. It is just where I do find it remarkable. And Chris, you and I were talking about, you know, having children, what you did here is actually harder than bringing your child into the world, just so you know, because I have done both really really amazing work. So I want to You're welcome.

2:44 You're so welcome. As I said, I'm a huge fan of what you've done, and I aligned so much with your message, so I want to get into you. There's so much in your book that we could cover here, but I really want to talk and start by talking about just how radically the workforce has changed, and I aligned with that terrifically. And you really talk about how where, the why, where and how we work has changed forever in that work is almost unrecognizable, and I find that really interesting. You also talk about the different backgrounds, the different generations, five generations now in the workplace, and you talk about how increasingly they're leaders who resist this new way of being will be the ones that struggle. So it could you just start by giving us just a little bit of perspective on how what's happened here and just in the last few years has radically changed the workplace.

3:32 Sure. What happened is, you know, nobody seems to want to talk about the pandemic. When I go out and give talks, which is my primary method of earning a living, people said to me, yeah, but don't talk about the pandemic, and I think, no, actually, we need to talk about the pandemic. What happened is we had about a thousand days of a force social experiment, and it caused us to see the fragility of life, the finiteis of the time, and that's I'm at home and where our loved ones. We're in isolation, had us for folks who do not live alone, had us thinking is this really what I'm doing with my life? And so when people started asking me initially to give talks on remote work, I said, you know, sure, I can pull something together for that, no doubt, But I think we're missing the bigger picture.

4:17 It's not just where we work, but it's where work fits in our lives. And I think it's the bigger discussion. And it brought up five questions. Who works The workplace was designed for a single profile, and that's largely a white straight man who had a wife at home to manage all the careagam responsibilities. What we do for work, we still train people largely to do routine and predictable tasks, even at high cognitive loads. How we work, we train people mostly to work in isolation, and we hire people into singular jobs when increasingly we're going to work in collaboration. And then the why we work is what really bubbled to the surface. So it's the existential crisis. It's labor shortages that will continue unabated for decades, and it's it's the entrance of gen z into the workplace, who is not going to compromise in the way prior generations have in terms of what they'll put up with or what's worth it for them in the workforce. So collectively that gives you an empowered workforce that wants to work with a sense of purpose, and if you know how to engage them, there's never been a more exciting time. But if you're trying to use the methods and structures the past prepared, you know, there's just so much quotable material in your book, Ladies, just really so much.

5:27 And one of the things that I also really found really intriguing was when you talk about, of course, the pandemic. You talk you say that plagues reorder society, and you say they are they are in an existential crisis from which survivors emerge fundamentally changed. Then you go on, you talked about in the thirteen hundreds we had the bubotic bubotic plague, which gave way to the Renaissance. The nineteen eighteen influence of pandemic sparked the Roaring twenties. And then you say, the COVID nineteen has given us the Great Resignation, which is a reckoning that started in America, and it has catalyzed significant and rapid economic transformation of the workforce since the greatest since the rise of the Industrial Revolution. I think that is so critical, particularly that because I think that's what I tried to do in my book too, is to really help leaders recognized.

6:10 Look, I mean, the world is profoundly, fundamentally and irrevocably changed, and I think the way that you did that for us is just really dynamic. Chris, you on the way in on that one. Yeah, No, I think that that's right. I think it's important to recognize so that the pandemic amplifies so many of these things that we're already trend lines. We were already experiencing a lot of these behaviors, a lot of these concerns and trends that just put a magnifying glass on it all. And I think that it's the point that they're just made. What got us to that point in twenty twenty and the sort of rethinking that went on for the next thousand days. Really the conclusion really is that you can't go back. You got it. What got you here isn't going to get you where you're going in the future. And it is a great opportunity to really rethink everything about your work environment. Yes, and I really appreciate that. And then and then you go on to talk about how this and there's this massive study of thirty thousand people in thirty one countries. Microsoft's latest work trends index found that many of the things workers were accepting in twenty nineteen, they just simply won't anymore.

7:24 Things like the commute, the cost of childcare, We're no longer worth it. Then you'll also go want to talk about just how the push for productivity is driving work is too exhaustion. So this burnout stuff is real gen zs or especially at risk for brunout. So I really thought that too, the way that you really depict just how the force of what has happened here over the last whatever it's been fifty some years has come to come to a culmination that again requires some some change. And I think that's worth speaking about too, if you would weigh in on that. Yeah, and when when folks ask me to, you know, can we speak about can you give a talk on resilient And I've put together talks on resilience and say, you know, you folks seem to want to go back to twenty nineteen. Let's look at how we were doing back then. We were burnt out, then we had mental distress, then we were disengaged. Then we actually had a spike in trust, engagement and productivity at the height of the pandemic. You know, when we were washing our packages on the front porch, we had higher levels of trust and higher levels of productivity. Now we have lower levels of trust, especially trust in leadership, and lower levels of productivity. So let's look at that. What you had there in the height of the pandemic because you didn't have a choice, so you trusted your people, they had agency, you gave them autonomy, and they performed. Why don't we tap back into that because it's such a high correlation with employees that have autonomy.

8:46 Seventy nine percent of employees we have autonomy are actually engaged higher levels of trust. You have a multiple cut, multiple times, higher levels of performance, high performing teams, high performing organizations are rooted in trust. So those are the kinds of things we got to get back to. And that's what I think the opportunity is with the empowered workforce is figure out how to activate them. You're not going to control them with the command and control stuff in the past. You've got to engage them with intrinsic motivation. I completely agree, which is why I'm all about the meeting and purpose stuff. So I completely align with that. And that's one thing head that you mentioned this, but I wanted to go a little bit deeper on it because it really does speak to something important and critical, and this notion of this this shift from work from home and get that autonomy and trust that you were talking about. It allowed workers, as you say, to find their agency in other words, to be activated, to be to be awakened to what they could actually do.

9:39 And in my view, that's so much of what's missing inside of organizations is that is the capacity creating an environment where people can be activated on that level. Yeah, so I mean, I'm going to draw some pictures because those pictures in the book. That's how before the pandemic we had a smaller circle that was called our personal and our personal life is frankly fodder for our eulogy, and we had agency over it. And we had a bigger circle for which the smaller circle was subordinated, which is our professional life, which is our quarter for our resume CV LinkedIn what have you and what happened during the pandemic. As these two overlapped, the personal grew a little bit, the professional shrank a little bit, and we had agency and autonomy over both.

10:22 And I think that was a moment in where people felt a sense of I want to work with a sense of purpose. I have higher levels of engagement, I have higher levels of performance when I'm activated with a sense of self expression and performance. And one of the things we saw between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, fifty three percent of people who left their jobs, according to Pew Research, went into a different industry or function or area. And I think that's really good news because that's people saying, you know what, I always hated the financial sector, I love the travel agency, or I've always wanted to be a teacher, whatever it may be. They switched to find something that more lines with their sense of purpose and is a sense of self expression for them. So that's I think where we need to get to more often is focusing on trust, focusing on purpose, focusing on self expression, and focusing less on fixed jobs, and having people attracted to your organization because they know they can learn faster with you than on their own.

11:18 They know that they can express themselves fully at work with psychological safety, and they know they have trust. And when you give people that, it's better than any dollar you could ever give them. But let's also be really clear that the agency bringing people back to the office. There's not a way to quell their agencies. Say you're back now, I can watch you work, I can make you at ten meetings and all of the things that you know we've come to understand are the trappings of being in a workplace versus in a hybrid or even work from home environment. That agency still exists. People might be going into an office, but there's still in their minds thinking is this what I want to be doing? Is this who I want to be doing it for? Is this the work that does give me purpose and meaning?

12:07 And they may not be walking out or striking, but if you don't understand that that agency is there and it will be used, you are going to lose people. You're going to lose them to underperformance. You're going to lose them to quiet quitting, and you're going to lose them to other organizations or other opportunities, other industries where they feel that they are allowed to be a full person at work and where their agency, where they're their full self is to tapped. Their intrinjet motivation is tapped in their work, and that, I think is where you get this much higher level of performance because people are now doing that which gives them a sense of purpose. Yeah, and let me just jump in and say clearly, we don't have a dog in the fight about where work takes place. I don't think we know. I think we've had a for social experiments taught us a bunch of things, but I don't think we know where we're Where we optimize human performance, it may be some in, some out, maybe all out for some, may all be all in for others. It really depends on the job of the task, the team fairness. I speak virtually, you know, like this is this would be a setup for a virtual talk, but I speak in person.

13:18 I just got back from Vancouver. I'm going to Denver next week, so there's and I can see it from that perspective. There's a different experience from and in person talk to a virtual talk. There are advantages to virtual ones because there are environments I can't get to physically, can't get there in time, or people don't have the budget to do it. So when we look at work, it's really we got to figure out how we activate human performance. And we have to also have empathy for the leaders who are in place right now, because the leaders in most organizations do not become leaders during the pandemic. They were leaders prior to the pandemic, and they were successful in the arena of the office, right, And what makes them comfortable? If they don't see people, they get nervous. Right, So we have to have empathy for them because they don't know how to manage a remote team or a hybrid team because we haven't tapped them in and we haven't figured that out yet. So we have to have empathy when we can call it the empathy advantage all around, including for the leaders right now that are struggling, and we have to give them the tools they need to unleash that human performance.

14:16 Completely agree with that, Heather, and I love that you call your book the empathy advantage because we do need to get invited for that. And that's again why I do a lot of the work that I do, and I certainly like you ladies, am out to try to help create find that way forward for how do we actually well lead and manage the workforce of today and tomorrow, because it is rather from from yesterday. If we look at what you say in your book here that you know this is a pretty bleak picture currently that Gallup says that from twenty twenty two, the Global Engagement Story. We found that just twenty one percent of employees say that they're engaged at work, and only a third say that they are worth thriving in their overall well being. In other words, we have a lot of work to do here, you do. And when you take that even further and you look at our issues around burnout, mental health, mental distress, it's even more troubling and isolation. So in the interesting thing is a couple of surveys, three of them actually came out emphasizing the role that both a job and the manager has on people's well being. So sixty nine percent of people asked said that their boss was their greatest influence over their mental health home, on par with their spouster partner and more than their doctor or therapists. Sixty percent of folks and another survey said the job is the greatest factor affecting their mental health.

15:35 And then a longitudinal study that looked at how managers affect caregiving. So if you are a manager, if you have a manager who gives you autonomy and gives you agency at work and trusts you, you go home and your or warmer and more engaged parent and as a results, because this was a longitudinal study, your children have greater financial, academic, and social success. So we really need to arm these leaders because the impact is not just the workplace in society, but it's the next generation in the next workforce. Yes, completely aligned without Heather, I've been staying this ripple effect for quite some time. Completely aligned. I want to come with you on your road trip. By the way, ladies, this is fantastic. Let's grab our first break. I'm your host, doctor Elias Quartez. We were on the air with Heavy McGowan and Chris Shipley. They are the authors of the in the Advantage Leading the Empowered Workforce. See with us. We'll be right back.

16:41 Doctor Elise Quartez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to fight a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on Purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a lease, send an email to a lease a l I se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for sting with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez, as I'm dedicated to helping create a world where people realize the potential at work, are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness and would your business that better is the world? I keep writing my own books. One of my latest came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business and it helps leaders understand what today's workforce really wants and then offers twenty one best practices to equip them to provide it through their leadership and culture. You learn more about my books at at least cortez dot com and buy them on Amazon or wherever you find your favorite booksellers. If you're just now joining the program. My guests are Heather McGowan, a future of

18:11 Work strategist, thought leader, researcher and author in leading voice on the future of work, and Chris Shipley, who focuses her work on the human and organizational challenges in a face of technology and accountanly driven disruption. So let's pick up where we were again. There's so many things we could talk about in your book that are so worth talking about. But one thing that I want to go to next, which I was really really shaken by in your book. I did not know this at all, is you talk about You say, by twenty nineteen, the US federal hourly minimum wage had been stuck at seven dollars and twenty five cents for a decade. You say, had them minimum wage kept pace with inflation, hourly workers would be making twenty four dollars an hour. Had wages kept pace with productivity, the hourly rate would be twenty six dollars. But wages didn't keep pace. And so I think about, gosh, you know this, this is incredible, No wonder we're having such an issue here. We saw so many people leaving those jobs during the pandemic. But if you could comment a bit on this, how in the world could this possibly have happened, well, we would we had enough workers to fill those jobs so that we could continue to keep those those wages compressed.

19:18 And then we're seeing the way labor shortage now and what is effectively a collective strike. And we've seen I think a lot of places it's nowhere near where it should be. But we're seeing wages in the sixteen seventeen eighteen dollars an hour, and there are some parts of the country where they're fighting for fifteen as the federal minimum wage we ought to be given. How along it takes us to win these fights. We ought to be fighting for thirty now, and because it's gonna take a decade to get there, you know, So I think some of the inflation we're experiencing will persist a bit because I don't think the wages are going to go back down, nor should they Listen. The argument as always, well, we can't raise the minimum wage because it's going to affect small businesses, and small businesses won't be able to survive if they have to their employees a living wage, and so their employees work in a state of misery, often at multiple jobs, in order to just patch together a living meaning they don't have the income to actually buy the goods and services of those small businesses. So there's this sort of specious argument that says if we pay people more, we'll go out of business, and a lot of that I think is just run around this this you know, idea that capitalism accrues value to the to the owners and people are treated like cogs and a wheel, and I think that fun there's a fundamental awareness that labor is not valued as as a human capacity, but is a resource, as an asset, as a something to be used up. And I think this

20:49 is what you know, we go back to the discussion on agency. This is what people are understanding. Now, Wait a minute, I'm worth more than twenty five or even fifteen dollars an hour. I'm not going to work in this role that doesn't honor the value I contribute. And I think we're at an approaching a tipping point where workers are going to just say, listen, it's not you go fight all you want in DC that's going to take ten years. How there's absolutely right, or you can just recognize for the good of your business and our economy generally, we need to reshift the balance and in our economy in capitalism, and treat human beings like human beings, not as chattel labor that can simply be replaced because we're just not in that place anymore. Yeah, And I think that's only possible because of the labor shortages. If you have a labor surplus, you'd never win that argument.

21:47 One of the other things that came up, and this was somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, one of Edelman trust barometers found that customers were looking more and more at the brands they bought and how they treated their employees. So if you were treating you were right by your employees and keeping them safe during the pandemic and paying them fairly or paying them not to work in the industries that were shut down, people were more likely to trust that support those brands. So I saw that as a as a bright spine, because we either have to have the consumer push or we have to have a labor shortage, and then we had for a little bit we had both. I'd see a little bit less on the consumer stiff, but the labor shortages continue so much there to be able to delve into. I talked a little bit about that in my book as well, But as a social scientists too, I really really fascinate with all ends that you that you circuits here. And we've already talked about the wear of work here, but when I want to get to next that I thought was really compelling about what your rote, ladies, is you talk about how, of course we're so long we've centered on lives, on our jobs. That's so true, where we work determined, you know, where we lived, where our kids went to school, with whom we socialize, all those kind of things. What I find fascinating though, is what you then say is what's happened now is we want to build our lives around belong in community. So we were settling our homes in our places to fulfill our physical and emotional needs, and then layering in our jobs.

23:07 You know, working remotely, you're finding work that is more purpose aligned in the place we want to be. I find that incredibly compelling that the way that you have written about that you know, this idea of what you mentioned that the circles before, Heather, but if you would speak a bit about this, this more this calling for belonging and community here, sure, so the circles that you took about and all going to draw them in the air again. So, first you had your job, whatever your job was located, that meant the geography in which you lived, and you've built the layers around that from your spouse's job most likely, because we're most mostly too family incomes two income families. Where you bought your home, which was usually a school system and real estate decision, and then out of that you sort of accidentally got community and belonging and now putting community and belonging at the center, and then the job on the outer edge. I say to companies all the time because that's what I do all day long. I will do we will make better value when work fits the right place in our lives. So when you get people who are not burnt out and not lonely and not exhausted and enriched by their community and thriving because of the environments that they're in, they'll bring that into the work that they do, especially when it's purpose aligned in its self expression. Agreed, you know. So one of the things I wrote about in my book is I live here close in East Dallas, and I have this big, huge bay window in front living area, and I during the pandemic I literally saw moving caravans and reconnection. What I saw was the adults walking along, sipping on some kind of a beverage. The kids

24:37 were happily rolling along on a bicycle or a skateboard or whatever, and that the pets were happily coming along. And it was something I had never seen before and it was magical. Yeah, we got we had a collective pause button moment. My only concern right now is we seem to be losing many of the things we learned in that moment, you know, if we looked at it and delve into politics. Really but we became more di I hated during this rather than united. But we did depressing to me. But we had moments of community and smaller scale, like in bigger scale in terms of how we've up and we see each other as other. I see more so on the community level, on the street level and the neighborhood level. We saw a bit more cohesion, and I was hoping that it would be sort of a contagion that would grow from there. And that trust that we saw employees have with their people, I was expecting and hoping that to be a contagion as well. So one of our messages is why In one of my messages when I'm out there is why are we not going back? Why are we missing the learning in this crisis? Yeah, and so one of the pleasures we had in writing this book was talking to David Allison, who's written a book called Value Graphics, and he argues that marketers look at things like gender and age and income and zip code to figure out how to segment markets.

25:55 But at the end of the day, no matter how you're segment them about, you'll reach about ten percent with your message. But if you look at what people value, and he's interviewed three quarters of a million people around the world, you can very clearly understand what motivates people. And there are you know, it changes from region to region what's top and bottom, but there are about fifty six fifty eight values that people share around the world, regardless of culture, in any of the demographic data. Interestingly, belonging is always in near the top of those lists, regardless of where you are in the world. I think what's happened is that if you recognize it, belonging also taps into our very primal sense of tribalism, right, and so if I can belong to a community of people in Dallas who are willing to take the kids for a walk and have their nightly cocktails out on the street and wave and belonged to this neighborhood going through this crisis together. That's a very sweet thing. I can also use belonging is a way to separate people by grievances. I can use belonging to separate people by all sorts of things.

27:07 And I think that belonging is a tool for leaders to say, what what do I want my people to belong to? Not to be a family? I think that's just that language is not outstated organization. Right. We're not a family. We are people that come to work. But if we can belong to our work in a way that we have ownership of it, that we feel a sense of shared purpose, that we have a shared commitment to one another because we're all working toward a shared goal, that's a magic for opening this sort of intrinsic motivation to come to work and be part of something that's that's special. And I think those are the kinds of things that leaders need to be looking for, not this sort of how do I drive more productivity and get more widgets out of my folks. It's uh, you know, how do I create an environment where people feel like this is where they want to be? And that's where you really where I saw you speak to this notion of moving away from designing workplaces and designing people places, and I really appreciated that. And then you go on to say, these people places a space and structure where employees come together to learn, collaborate, and get the needed resources to do the work that they do either at home or some other place, which is a paradigm shift. And again, all three of us are working together to try to help equip leaders of the future to do this. But I think even just saying that this is not a workplace, it's a people place, it's a great thing. And Chris, no surprise, what you just elucidated there, of course takes what is happening in the

28:37 diversity, equity, inclusion, and now belonging space to a whole other level. You just created something much bigger there than I've ever heard anybody actually articulate around the space of belonging. So thank you again for that brilliance. Yeah, and you know, since we wrote the book, Seth Godin's come up with a book called The Song of Celimfication. Yes, I'm reading it now. Yeah, And if you're in through the introduction party goes through the survey he did with ten thousand people in ninety countries on the best job they've ever had, and he gave them a predescribed list of things, so it was you know, it could it could have some cohesion to it. Which I think it's interesting is is it the bottom of the list or the ten things we tend to put at the top of the list, and we're designing a job which were I got paid a lot, I got to travel, I got to tell people what to do, it wasn't difficult, and I got fired. Those are the bottom reasons. The top reasons are I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. I could work independently, the team built something important, people treated me with respect. And really what we're talking about is people are looking for four things and working. They're looking for growth, they're looking for autonomy, they're looking for achievement, and they're looking for respect.

29:42 And imagine the world that we could live in if we design jobs that way right right well, and then to go on further, I thought This was a really interesting too. You talk about Roger Martin's work as well, and this idea of organizing people not around jobs but around projects really interesting and that to me spoke to something that I had on some people on talking about the idea of holocricy leading through holocricy. That was really interesting. Could you speak a bit more to this idea of organizing work around projects but not jobs. Yeah, I mean, we tend to work around jobs, and a job is a box that's generally defined by the last occupant, so it's filled with bias and irrelevant information, but we fill it. And by the time we fill a job, if you look at the speed of change in the time it can take to do that, most of what you're looking for is probably no longer relevant. So we end up with these people who are sort of misfit for the job we used to be searching for. So if we could attract people around a sense of agency, a sense of purpose, appensis of shared values, a desire to learn, a desire to grow, and then some fundamental skills and literacy so that they can enter the first few tasks you have them to do at first few projects, then they can go on what rid Hoffmann called tours of duty. It was just another way of talk with some of the things that Roger talked about. And if you looked at you know, things like management consulting firms or innovation strategy groups. People who learn them have a functional role, you know, marketing and design and engineering and what have you, but they swarm to a project and they're on a project

31:14 for a period of time. And I think most of our work is going to move more that way, especially when we hand off more and more to technology. We're going to have people in these collaborative explorations where you're going to go on tours and you're going to swarm to the project, and then you're going to go back. You might be on the bench and do some learning, and you'll swarm to the next project. I love the way you describe that, how they're it's it's so compelling. Let's let our listeners and viewers think on that for a second as we grab our last break. I'm your host Doctor at Least. Cortez were on the air with Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley, who are the authors of the Empathy Advantage leading to Empowered Workforce stick with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a Lease, send an email

32:44 to elease a l I se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying well us and welcome back to working on purpose on your doctor at least Quartez. I mentioned in the last break. My latest book is called The Great Vitalization, How activating meeting a purpose can radically enliven your business. I wrote that actually for leaders to be able to understand what's happening in the workforce, like Heather and Chris have been talking about as well. I also added an assessment on my website that you can actually go through and look and see to what extent our easier leadership and culture meeting today's workforce. You can find it at at least cortez dot com. All right, Heather and Chris, let's come back. We have just our last segment here, and I want to continue what you were saying there before the break. Heather. This idea of you know about the job descriptions and you actually have a segment and there to fire the job description, which I think is great. And what I like about what you're putting forth instead of a job description is to the practice you want to actually hire fill work around outstanding people instead. That is really really compelling and definitely something on its side as well on its ear as well. How in the world could organizations actually start creating work and jobs around outstanding people. I have to start by saying it's not easy organizations who've done it to some extent. It works better in smaller organizations or smaller divisions. It's hardest scale because it's so much easier in a

34:15 large scaling organization to say this job does these tasks and fits under this person. And that's how you run it. But when you look at increasingly how we're going to be facing much more uncertainty, imperfect information, and rapid pivots, then it's really hard. Because you've got these people who know how to do certain tasks, what do you do when they're relevant? And I think we've proven that the spill and film model doesn't really work. When you lay out large swaths to the workforce who hire new and shinier skills, you've got a compression of enthusiasm and motivation and performance for some period of time, not just with the people who left, with the people who stay. Who kind of wonder one of my next and two is this how they treat people? And you know, I'm not really motivated anymore. So we have to come up with a different way of retaining and repurposing people because the organizations that repurpose people have higher levels of engagement and higher levels. Yeah, and just to reinforce what how they're saying a moment ago about job descriptions. Most job descriptions are written for the past, what we needed back then. They're very traditional, right, we don't think about how do we hire people for what we don't even know we need yet? And so there you're not hiring for specific skills necessarily. You might be hiring for a capacity to understand the world marketing, or be an engineer, or you certain skill sets at large, but you're really wanting to investigate what is someone's capacity to learn, to collaborate, to be part of a team, to be okay with not knowing something and

35:49 figuring it out. Those are not typical interview questions, But we have to reframe what did this person? What has this person done in the past? Great, that might be good for us in the future because we don't know to think about what is this person's capacity to adapt and learn and to engage with our team to discover new opportunities. Yeah, and if I can just grab onto that. I also think we need to do a far, far better job at internal mobility. We tend to think somebody externally is more valuable than somebody internally, and we don't look beyond the things that show up often on CVS and LinkedIn. I remember I was working at a university and there was somebody in the office in which I was working well, I wanted to put on my team and elevate who had not finished her degree yet. And universities have a lot of places to have it biased about the Certainly universities do because that's the business they're in. But I also had discovered that she raised triplets and that her husband was gone off and for work, so she often raised triplets by herself. Wow, And I said, there's nothing that's going to come up that she can't handle better than any of us, regardless of our seriously. So I didn't end up eventually getting me on her, getting her on my team, and now she's at you know, in a senior leadership position at the university. But those are the kinds of things that we need to look for, particularly when it comes to women who often leave the workforce to raise their children and then they come back at a lower rung on the bladder, where I think they should come back at a much higher level, because if you've raised a human, and if you've raised more than human

37:20 human at once, you are more than equipped to handle much of the stuff and the s up at work. I love that Heather so really focusing on the full human right and all of his or her element. It's just so so important. That also goes for a military experience as well. I mean there's a lot of a lot of things that we're not looking closely enough for because in this BUCA or bratt rupt world, there's all the new acronyms for volatile and certain complex and ambiguous. We need to look and tap into those skill sets that people develop in real time out of out of necessity. Yeah, and I like how you're talking about really a new model and UNIVERSI on work and jobs, etc. And I like how you're really focused on an outcome focused collaboration among people of different and complementary skills who come together focused on a defined objective. And I think what I love also about that is that again we're moving away from that whole I focused on presenteeism to productivity, and I know we need a better vehicle to deliver that for our leaders, and of course, like you, I'm out to support them too because it's this is what we know presenteeism. But I really appreciate that whole notion of outcome focused collaboration. Can you speak a bit more to that, Yeah, I mean, even if you look at this way outside the traditional bound. I remember reading a study and it was back in like the nineties that looked at the efficiency of drug based gangs and how they organized and operated in a way that was very efficient, more so than what you learn at Harbor business.

38:54 So we sometimes have to who are we going to go, yeah, finds and I wouldn't encourage that because they think, you know, I'm not encouraging illegal activity or some of the things that happen in those environments. But there's sort of an efficiency to things that we learn in extreme environments, whether it's the military, parent raising or being in a gang, yeah, or even just being in the pressure of an organization that's continuously changing, which is what it's doing. And I think we talk about things like presenteees and productivity because these are things that we can measure, or how hard time really embracing the idea of what is really performance? What does it mean for our team to come together, I perform well, to achieve some goal together, to recognize an opportunity to go forward together when these new opportunities arise. So we need to find better metrics so that we can measure the things that matter. Agreed, Absolutely, agreed, and I appreciate that where all of us and back to your point, how they're early on is being empathetic toward our leaders who are trying to try their best to steward this This workforce in helping them find their way is important. And even moving away from you also mentioned in your book, is moving away from that the long tenured roles, the concept of lifetime employment to shorter engagements. Right, the idea that a project might require two to three years of concentrated effort, And this to me sounded an awful lot like what you see in you know, consulting companies. So I thought

40:24 that was kind of interesting to think about too, which you speak to what that might look like in an organization to focus more on that sort of a concept. Yeah, And I think this sort of brings back the best language I have for is is the Reid Hoffmann's concept of towards the duty. So it's not stay with an organization because a lot of people can stay with one organization for a very long time but move around to different projects in different divisions. And so I think the real focus there is what are you learning? What are you contributing? Should you still be in this role, is a time for you to move to another role? Are we continuing to develop your skill? Where we continue even to engage you because the models we had in the past were basically like, you know, we took somebody, say they were an engineer or a salesperson, and if they were good at it, we elevated them out of the position they were good at into a position of management they may or may not have wanted to have. And we selected people.

41:17 I often let people self select based upon sometimes ego and insecurity. They felt better being the boss. And so we picked people who could you know, drive productivity bitmiopically, sometimes with domination, fear or even humiliation. They could make you know, they could be unquestioned experts who could make decisions in certainty. And if you just look at those two sets of factors right now, they're liabilities because most people are managing teams of people who have skills and knowledge that they do not, so they can't be an unquestioned expert making a decision in certainty. And a leader who is a little bit insecure and leads with the domination, fear or even humiliation. That's going to backfire on this workforce because it's this work is looking for people who are authentic and vulnerable who trust them. So the leadership profile, which has been wrong for a long time, really did a one eight out of necessity over the last couple of years. Oh so I again that goes back to having empathy for those that are trying to actually stuarse organizations. And we would be remiss if we didn't say a little bit more about this notion of hybrid work. I know that if a lot of organizations and leaders are really struggling with that. And one of the things again that I appreciated about what you talk about in your book, and you mentioned Roger Merrin again as well, but also you talked about this notion of Mark what Mark Crowley said in May of twenty twenty two a podcast interview looking to actually create curated experiences for people, but I found incredibly compelling. One I will say that one thing I've gotten from being in the

42:51 pandemic is the importance that it seems to have immersed of a focus on experience as something really central for people. So providing the you know, what's the experience of actually being in the office, and so could you say a little something about this notion of curated experiences when it comes to hybrid and our leaders can support that or steward that fascinating concept Yeah, too much of too much of the hybrid work has been again counting things that we think we can count. How many times does somebody swipe into the building, how many hours are they there? You need to be their X number of days a week or a month. And you know if your days are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Monday Friday or Monday Tuesday Friday, whatever it may be, if you're on one of those three day rotations, if you go on the days that work for you, the day you can get trial care, or the way you can get elder care, or the way your remmunity or spouse or partner can manage things. A lot of times I hear from folks so while I'm going in on my required days, but I get there, I sit in the cubicle and I zum to people who are home. Right, it's not motivating, that's very demotivating. So curate experiences are I went in and there was a reason for so A lot of the work that I do, I find myself more than confidence speaking, I already do. Some of that is going into organizations like this past Monday night, I know, sorry, Tuesday morning, I was in Vancouver. I spoke to nine people nine not nine. I've read the sheet and I was like, is that a typo ninete who wants you to lead a conversation and have you know, an in

44:21 depth conversation where people can ask you anything? Or bringing people into a central location for them to have this experience. And I think, and it's not just about speakers, but you have to have something that's the gravity to get people there. What is the thing that you want them to do that they can't do from zoom that they're going to have some sort of experience, whether it's a learning experience, a collaborative experience, it's a brainstorming session, it's something that works better in person. I don't think culture is limited to in person experiences. It helps, but I don't think it's limited to in person experiences. Certainly you can develop culture and belonging remotely as well, but those in person and experiences have to have a moment of gravity that gives us a reason to be there. So people walk away from it and say that was worth fighting traffic, That was worth paying for daycare, that was worth you know, it was worth it? Yeah? Yes, And if we think about this in terms of the when we come together what's happening, How does the how does leadership curate create an experience of that reason to be together?

45:22 And that's absolutely true, I think, And this is where we really do need to have great empathy for people leading today. Is we're moving from I think, an idea of leading meaning you know often, you know this kind of command and control, here's the hill, let's go take it to even kind of being coaching. We talk a lot about leaders now as coaches and mentors. I think they're moving into a role of being curators, curators of the work, curators of the project, curators of the culture. And it doesn't matter whether that means people are in an office coming together for a purpose like sitting down having a great experience with Heather or being at home, but given the tools and resources they need, the access they need to do something different special there. Curation now is leadership or leadership is now curation. And that's a major mind shift, mindset shift that's going to be really challenging for a lot of leaders. But those who can do it, I think, are going to find that their people are engaged, they feel trusted, They leverage their agency to work in a way that's far more beneficial creates much more value for the organization. Yeah, and if I could just jump on that.

46:35 In addition to that, when you start looking at the technology tools that are moving merging, like everyone's talking about chat GDP and playing with it, when you start looking at what the human does in that role, it's prompt, curate, refine, make meaning, and then deploy at scale. Now, if you look at that, you're really looking at people who are getting better at collaboration and curation and refine and prompting, whether it be in leadership or in the actual creation of the work that we do every day. Well, and this is why I couldn't resist calling this episode. You know that leaders have been kicked upstairs, and I understand and empathize so deeply with what how terrifying that must be if you're running an organization, You're like, wow, you know, I'm I have Now there's an expectation that I need to be performing on this level and with a whole other set of skills in this you know, it's like we're playing on Mars or whatever it is. And I really really appreciate, admire, and I'm grateful and feel privileged that I get to alongside you get to help steward this place for our leaders in the workplace of the future. It's incredibly compelling and gratifying work to get to do.

47:43 So. On that note, here we are at the close. Already this show is listening to my people around the world that are trying to help create those workplaces where people can realize their potential. They're led by those inspirational now curated leaders, and we do business at betters in the world. What would you like to leave our listeners with. I'd like to leave with the idea that we have not put forth now. We call the book the Empathy Advantage of People are like, well, how do I get started? I say, listen, listen, listen, listen. If you look at your head, you have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears. There's only one output device. The other is our input devices, and that some be looking at communication. If you really want to help and understand your people, really try to listen, understand where they're coming from, and help them become the next best version of themselves. Yeah, I would just add to that. I think we often see empathy as something leaders should have for their people. I would like leaders to start with self empathy.

48:40 Understand that this is a really challenging place that you're in. You're not going to be brilliant at this from the get go. You're you're finding new ways to be and lead and curate your purporce. And that's hard, and so give yourself a break, give yourself the opportunity to make some mistakes and learn from that. Work closely with your people to understand what is working, what's not working, how you can change and adapt. But start with a level of self empathy. It allows you to give yourself the latitude to figure this stuff out. A great way to finish both of you, Heather, Chris. I'm delighted to know you both. As you know, I read your book cover to cover, which is what I do with each of the books, and you really have created something profoundly important. IM very happy to share with my listeners across the world. Thank you for being on working on purpose.

49:29 Thanks so much for having us. You're welcome, listeners and viewers. I highly encourage you to get in touch with either of these ladies or both of them. If you want to learn more about Heather McGowan, you can go to her website, which is Heather McGowan dot com. Let me spell that for you Heather h e A t h e R. And then McGowan mcgowa n Heather McGowan dot com. And for Chris Shipley you can go to c Shipley dot com. Last week, Give You Much the live show, you can always catch it via recorded podcast. We were on the air with Robert Lindell talking about his new book A Place for Tea, Giving Voice to the Tortoise on our hair Brained World, which addresses the business that stresses relationships, kill spirit and trust in the workplace, and silences the voices of dissent that would otherwise break down communication. Next week, we'll be on the air with Atiq Rafique talking about his book Decision Sprint, the new way to innovate into the unknown and move from strategy to action. See you there, and remember that work is an integral and important part of our lives. It can be one of the best adventures and means of realizing potential in making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez. Each week on W four C. Why together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there.

50:52 Let's work on purpose.