Leading Change in the Shifting Workplace

In the past few years, the business landscape has changed at a rate more rapidly than at any other time in history. Unfortunately, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution upon us, organizations' internal workings, including how we lead people, haven’t broadly changed in response.

The Great Resignation

While the great resignation didn’t start with the coronavirus pandemic, it certainly increased the speed to get to where we find ourselves today (Gittleman, 2022). This, coupled with public outrage over racial injustice, is forcing organizations to change their business models and their approach to leading people. Those choosing not to are experiencing the decisive action of people who have been voiceless for far too long.

47 million people left their jobs in 2021. I was one of them. The pandemic awakened me. I watched people I love get sick and die. I spent long days at home, e-Learning with Madi, my 9-year-old, while juggling the constant pull of a position where I was overworked and undervalued. I balanced those difficult moments when I married my husband at sunrise on top of a mountain in June 2020. This culmination of experiences was the metaphorical shot in the arm I needed to make a change. It made me realize how much meaningful time I had lost over the course of my career shackled to my job. I decided to stop waiting and start living. My story is one of the millions like it.

While people left their jobs for different reasons, one thing is certain, the pandemic opened minds enough for people to assess their relationship with their jobs, their companies, and the people managing them. In their 2022 HR Trends Report, McLean and Company reported that in 2023, companies will not only need to recruit the right talent in a highly competitive employment market. Companies will need to give meaningful focus to retaining that talent. That means organizations have to fix what happens on the inside. That means “focusing on wellbeing, and the employee experience, in light of increased stress and work hours” and meaningful “DEI strategies that go beyond mere compliance.” That means that for leaders to put people at the center of organizational success, they will need to reflect on how their actions and behaviors impact the work.

The Growing Leadership Gap

The global pandemic provided heightened awareness of the state of the work, but we have been barreling toward a major shift for a while now. In 2015, The World Economic Forum published the results of its Survey on the Global Agenda. 86% of respondents proclaimed that we are amidst a leadership crisis. Baby boomers have held tightly to leadership roles across all sectors, probably longer than any of us expected they would. "Boomers still hold most of the CEO jobs at top public companies, most of the seats in Congress, and most of the votes in the academy that hands out Oscars” (Weisman, 2021), but this is changing. As many as five generations now work together at many organizations—Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, baby boomers, and the Traditionalists (Fry, 2021).

Millennials represent the largest living adult generation. A Deloitte (2014) study found that by 2025, they will represent 75% of the workforce and occupy many of the available leadership roles. While we already see this happening, more and more millennials will challenge traditional leadership and organizational culture paradigms. Millennials eagerly desire to make a difference. 63% of millennial team members said the purpose of a company was to improve society more than to generate profit. If their organizations won’t give them the chance to improve society and strive for a greater purpose, they will go somewhere that will.

When our team at Crescent Leadership works with organizations undergoing a leadership transition, smooth succession is rarely realistic. Last year, in a leadership team coaching session, a junior leader appropriately described her company’s succession challenge as, quite literally, a gap in leadership. With 50% of the company’s senior partners retiring within one to two years, the junior partners had not been cultivated to step into the spaces left by the departing senior partners. I looked around the room at the faces of these junior partners and saw palpable fear. They knew they weren’t ready, and it made them worry about the long-term future of their company.

Time and again, we discover that the next layer of leadership is woefully unprepared to ascend to the top of the organization. Unfortunately, poor leadership evolves as supervisors continue to take on more and more "people" responsibilities without truly understanding what it takes to lead people. Supervising people and leading people are exceptionally different. High-performing, individual contributors get thrust into supervisory roles, unequipped with the knowledge and skills to lead people well. As a result, leadership devolves, and organizational distress becomes exceedingly more complex and convoluted.

The Human Impact of Change Leadership

We are living in an age of constant change. Organizational change is predicated on everything from human needs to competition, changing customer needs, and external threats. To achieve the results needed to stay relevant in today’s marketplace, change is inevitable. The Survey on the Global Agenda was published a full five years before the coronavirus pandemic knocked us on our collective asses. It tested and continues to test leaders’ resolve to sustain their organizations and evolve to meet the demand of a world that is forever changed.

To lead through change, leaders must adeptly navigate constantly changing environments. But leaders have another nemesis in the change process—basic human biology. While both challenges make adaptive leadership a vital skill, the human side of change typically gets pushed to the back burner. 

It is well documented that 50 to 70% of all change initiatives fail yearly, but it is not because of poor tactical planning. The primary reason that change efforts fail is that leaders don’t fully consider and plan for the “human” impact of change. Britt Andreatta (2017) tells us that we are literally “wired to resist.” She gave us an excellent resource to better understand all that’s happening in our brains when we face change. For the sake of better understanding the need for adaptive leadership, I’m going to focus on one key idea. Human brains experience events emotionally before experiencing those same events rationally. Although humans are the most intelligent and sophisticated species on the planet, a part of our biology is still primal. This part of our brain causes us to react without thinking. Without planning for the human impact of change, change efforts die on the vine.

Evolving Strategy

Excellent adaptive leaders also understand that changing for the sake of change is not helpful. Adaptive leadership is purposeful evolution. Many organizations mistake staying relevant and competitive for constant change and innovation. These are not the same things at all. In fact, the most successful organizations stay true to their DNA but make mindful shifts in anticipation of and in response to the changing environment. In 2021, Crescent Leadership introduced Evolving Strategy Development to our clients for this exact purpose. An evolving strategy is a fluid guide versus a traditional, stagnant resolution.

Traditional approaches to strategy development and execution can be unyielding to shifting operational environments with constantly changing external influences. Our evolving strategy approach is a nimble and powerful alternative to traditional strategic planning. The process does employ proven, interactive, and collaborative techniques. But we initiate our work by preparing leaders to build adaptable strategies and to identify, understand, and act on challenges and opportunities as they arise. Leaders with high situational awareness can seamlessly shift themselves and their teams without sacrificing personal authenticity or organizational integrity.

I facilitate a course at Cornell called Leading Organizational Change. I started teaching this course in 2019. Over the past three years, hundreds of my students have shared with me how they and other leaders in their organizations led through the transformational shifts that occurred because of the pandemic. Those organizations that chose to ignore the fact that they must evolve or die a slow and painful death got slapped in the face when the pandemic first hit. They are gone now, or their rate of decline has increased significantly. Those that did evolve pivoted quickly to ensure the organization’s survival. Unfortunately, many haven’t since returned to those innovative shifts to implement the right systems and hone the right competencies to sustain those changes. Leaders have a choice. They can use what they already know about the shifting landscape to lead through change. On the other hand, they can let change lead them and allow their organizations to become victims of it.

References:

Andreatta, B. (2017). Wired to resist: The brain science of why change fails and a new model for driving success. 7th Mind Publishing.

Deloitte. (2014, January). Big demands and high expectations The Deloitte Millennial Survey. www.deloitte.com. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-dttl-2014-millennial-survey-report.pdf

Fry, R. (2021, May 28). Millennials overtake baby boomers as America's largest generation. Pew Research Center. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/

Gittleman, M. (2022, July). The “Great Resignation” in perspective, Monthly Labor Review. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2022.20

Kim, M. L. & C. (2022). 2022 HR Trends Report. McLean & Company. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://hr.mcleanco.com/research/ss/2022-hr-trends-report

Weisman, R. (2021, November 29). At the top, a generational shakeup unfolds as boomers begin to step aside. BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/27/metro/top-generational-shakeup-unfolds-boomers-begin-step-aside/

World Economic Forum. (2015). Outlook on the global agenda 2015. World Economic Forum. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.weforum.org/reports/outlook-global-agenda-2015/