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 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’, are committed to the organization and the management-speak of mission and values.
Not only to do that, but then you have to keep them happy and retain them.
How, especially in the age of 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 Quakers, 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.
In the Second Age, that debate about how to treat employees came to the fore, partly because unionisation changed the power balance, and partly because of the rise of work psychology. You could subscribe to Theory X (that workers are economically rational actors, so carrots and sticks will work), Theory Y (humans are intrinsically motivated and so we should seek congruence between the organizations’ and individuals’ goals), or even Theory Z (a well-meaning mixture of the two).
That was the theory. But on the ground in the Second Age you saw the rise of Corporate BS. 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 someone. 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, and fast.
Copyright Andy Bass 2022
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