MANAGEMENT SPECIAL................ DOV SEIDMAN

MANAGEMENT SPECIAL DOV SEIDMAN

PURPOSE & PASSION

FOUNDER & CEO, LRN AUTHOR OF H O W: W H Y H O W W E D O A N Y T H I N G M E A N S E V E R Y T H I N G
THE BIG IDEA: THE FUTURE WILL BE ABOUT POWER THROUGH PEOPLE, AND NOT OVER THEM

The word job is not an old word. When
people felt that their work could be broken down into bite-sized pieces, they started calling it a job. What we have in the world right now is a jobs crisis. Too many people have been unemployed in the last few years, and many of those who are, are not engaged in what they do. They are leaning out; collecting a paycheck but not really contributing in terms of innovation or job creativity. There’s a real rupture between the activities that companies are focused on and where people’s hearts and minds are, and I think the future of work will have to solve that problem.
    When people do not have a career they are invested in, it’s a careers crisis. People not being inspired to give it their all at work will be one of the major pressure points in the future of work. In the industrial age, we wanted people to do repetitive tasks over and over again. In a knowledge economy, we want human qualities like collaboration, innovation and creativity and we can’t get it using the same approach. We need a fresh approach to leadership in order to bring about this change and that’s a challenge. The carrot-and-stick approach can extract conventional performance but to inspire human qualities the company needs to be something worthy of their dedication. It needs to have a mission that inspires people and a valuesbased environment. Capitalism is fine, but money has to be a by-product and not the fundamental reason why you are doing it. If money is the fundamental reason, people disengage. If money was the only reason for people to come to work, then loyalties would constantly keep changing. The world is now so hyper connected that whatever connects people to a company is being revealed. Earlier there were artificial barriers that enabled you to hold on to people, but that’s no longer the case. Leadership is trying to find better adhesion and the best human glue ever created — values. When people share values and a purpose and mission, they stay together no matter how tough things are. The future of work is work becoming more human and this is a structural shift.
    Companies need to get ready for the future of work. They have to learn how to have two-way conversations. Earlier, all conversations were one-way and topdown. Leadership was all about authority and power. Leadership still has a responsibility to get people to do things, but not through formal, designation based authority—that’s decaying today. The future will be about power through people, and not over them. Leaders need to go on a journey to manifest a new type of power and authority because the typical worker won’t respond to formal authority. And it’s not just the millenials. We are now seeing a new generation of leaders coming in and as they move up the ranks, they will be connectors and collaborators. It’s a relational world, moving from connected to interconnected to interdependent and the only way to respond strategically is to form healthy interdependencies. And this is where behaviour comes in – how you treat somebody animates your values. According to me, we are in the era of behaviour. What organisations are facing today is a systems problem. Business is great at systemisation and it's time to get equally systematic about the forces that bear on behaviour. The innovation agenda is going to flip around. Instead of human innovation, we’ll have innovation in humanity and a new way of doing business. Work used to be an affair of execution and implementation. The world was stable so we could use management science to reduce everything down to excel sheets and hold people responsible for it. In an up and down world, everything is a journey. Businesses that get it are led by CEOs who are on a journey. Leaders that get it are deliberately and explicitly on a journey. When Unilever’s Paul Polman said that the company would not be giving quarterly guidance, the stock took a hit initially, but it’s up now. What he did by saying that was create a context for people internally to allow them to think long term, thus changing the culture and dynamics within the organisation.^CD
As told to Priyanka Sangani

CDET140103