How To Lead An Empowered Workforce

The new book, The Empathy Advantage, speaks to anyone with responsibility for recruiting, engaging, leading and retaining the next generation of workers – a workforce shaped by the pandemic that fundamentally transformed the relationship between individuals and organizations. 

Not surprising, managers at every level are struggling to adapt to this new dynamic, balancing both employee satisfaction and corporate productivity. Quiet Quitting, Great Resignation, and Great Reset have all become code words to describe the trendlines that have been building for years. Accelerated change driven by exponentially advancing technologies have made steep learning curves part of every day work.

 

Fortunately, book authors Heather C. McGowan and Chris Shipley, unpack the five interlocking trends that placed agency in the hands of workers:

 

The Great Resignation

The Great Refusal

The Great Reshuffle

The Great Retirement

The Great Relocation

 

…collectively delivering the Great Reset. Looking at these trends, they discuss strategies on how to best lead the new workforce including: 

Understand the New Habits of Your Workers and Share Vulnerability: due to accelerated changes, there is a gap where leaders no longer have all of the skills needed but must still run their team. 

Workplace leaders must acknowledge they don’t have all the answers and demonstrate a willingness to discover together with their teams. The honest and fearless embrace of your own vulnerability builds the psychological safety that enables your team to be active, adaptive learners. 

Allow Flexibility on Where and How To Work: in the Great Reshuffle, workers have more freedom to let their own physical and emotional needs dictate where they settle. The new “office” is not just about work logistics; it’s about providing a worker-first environment that enables your people to flourish. 

90% of the value in most organizations is generated from intangible capital: your people. Companies must care for workers as complete “assets”, caring for workers’ health, wellness, mental health, and longevity as they would care for any tangible asset in the corporate balance sheet. 

Leading Without Maps with Four Leadership Shifts: At the threshold of a new frontier in leadership and workforce development, business leaders can no longer rely on the guidebooks of the past. Not only do those mental models not apply, but they also become a liability in a changed world. 

Instead, leaders must be open to four fundamental shifts: mindsets (move from managing processes to enabling success), culture: (encourage workers to collaborate rather than compete), approach (use intrinsic motivation rather than external pressure), and behavior (inspire effectiveness rather than myopically drive productivity).

 

Heather E. McGowan

 

 

Chris Shipley

 

Today, the authors share these additional insights with us:

 

Question: The pandemic brought dramatic changes to the workplace; what, exactly, has changed?

 

McGowan/Shipley: Two major transformations that were decades in the making came to head in the pandemic. First, we now have a changed relationship between individuals and organizations because of a now empowered workforce. The pandemic was an existential crisis that put into sharp focus the fragility of life and saw a merger of our personal and professional lives; we finally have agency over both, solidified by the trust and autonomy bestowed upon workers during long months of work from home mandates. As a result, we have an imperative to humanize work.

 

Second, decades of digital disruption have brought us to an increasingly complex and interdependent global economy where the simple models of the past have less and less relevance every day. Those models, now, are a liability rather than a guide. Most leaders don’t have all the skills and knowledge anymore and must rely on their teams who do have unique contributions and capabilities.

 

These two transformations require four shifts to leadership:

1. Mindset. From managing people and processes to enabling success. The team doesn't work for you anymore, you work for the team—their success is your success.
2. Culture. From peers as competitors to peers as collaborators. That unique knowledge across the organization requires effective collaboration rather than fierce competition.
3. Approach. From extrinsic pressure to intrinsic motivation. You are not going to get your people to learn and adapt at the speed, scale and scope you need through punishments, threats, and rewards—it simply will not work. You need to help them tap into their own internal motivational fuel source so that they become self-propelled.
4. Behavior. From myopically driving productivity with domination or fear to creating effectiveness through inspiration, caring, empathy, and love. 

Question: You assert that our new workplace requires a more empathetic approach to leadership. What are the costs of ignoring this shift in expectations?

 

McGowan/Shipley: The pandemic laid bare gaping holes in our social contract and gave us all a new perspective on the frailty of life. These realities have always been there, but now workers bring these vulnerabilities to work and expect the workplace to support them as whole people.

 

Addressing workers’ challenges with anything other than empathy will cause them to leave your organization at their earliest opportunity, leaving businesses in a high-cost spiral of hiring and training without seeing the benefit of that investment.

 

Case in point, Gallup released data in late January 2023 showing a 4% decline in engagement since 2020. With only 32% of the workforce engaged and 18% reporting they are disengaged. This is the highest rate of disengagement in a decade. Why? Poor communication, inconsistent and changing mandates around remote work, and layoffs or threats of layoffs. How can leaders address these concerns? With empathy.

 

Question: Leaders are used to being positions of authority with all the answers. How is this approach actually counterproductive in the new workplace?

 

McGowan/Shipley: Business today is too dynamic and too fast-changing for any one person to have all the answers. Unquestioned experts are a liability. Authority comes from confident, yet humble, leadership, the ability to assess the current moment, synthesize information, and make clear calls, not from having all the answers, because frankly, that’s an impossible bar. Instead, the ability to say “I don’t know. Let’s find out” is a leader’s most powerful business tool.

 

Question: How can leaders support both the needs of the organization – which can be at times very taxing – with the physical and emotional needs of their employees?

 

McGowan/Shipley: Every job comes with tradeoffs and those events where organizational needs take priority over employees’ needs. By ensuring that these occasions are rare and only exist to deliver a clear and greater purpose, strong leaders make the shared sacrifice and shared reward an opportunity for authentic employee engagement.

 

Think about it like an ER doctor - you cannot repeatedly shock a patient without causing serious and permanent damage. Our obsession with always on, hustle culture had taken too many “shocks,” leaving workers burned out, disengaged and struggling with unprecedented levels of mental health challenges.

 

Question: How does Generation Z demonstrate different needs compared to previous generations?

 

McGowan/Shipley: At every stage of their lives, Gen Z has met with trauma and uncertainty. They learned to walk in the shadow of 9/11, headed to middle school amid a global financial meltdown, came of age as the United Nations declared a climate crisis, and graduated to virtual Pomp and Circumstance as the Covid-19 pandemic cast a cloud over their early careers. Active shooter drills were as much a part of their curriculum as reading, writing, and arithmetic, and they have never known a world that was not, somewhere, at war. Because of these experiences, Gen Z also exhibits higher instances of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, than any prior generation.

 

Nevertheless, they are perhaps the most resilient, racially diverse, and well-educated generation we have known. Living in an eddy of change, Generation Z survives – and even thrives – with an agency not often seen in young workers. They are unwilling to compromise their values for a paycheck, and they have a burning desire to improve the world that was handed to them.

 

Given these life experiences, Gen Z isn’t one to coddle, or even harness. Rather, channel your empathy, provide direction and mentorship, channel their passion, and get out of the way.

 

Question: What is a tip leaders could implement tomorrow from your book to start leading with empathy?

 

McGowan/Shipley: Remember, toxic work cultures lead to resignations. Healthy cultures lead to employee engagement.

 

Creating a healthy culture is really quite simple: Listen. Seek every day to find out something new about the people who work for you. Ask open ended questions. Request feedback. Gather input, even about things seemingly unrelated to someone’s direct responsibilities. Act with empathy and vulnerability and in return you will establish psychological safety and trust.

 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.