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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
National Bestseller
Discover and embrace the future of human-powered leadership
In an era where the foundational elements of business are being disrupted, Essential: How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership emerges as a crucial guide for leaders navigating the profound changes reshaping industries and markets worldwide. This book, penned by a team of seasoned business and leadership strategists, offers a radical and necessary perspective on management transformation, emphasizing the importance of human-centered leadership in meeting the full potential of the technology age.
The authors explain how to:
- Unlock radical management transformation, demonstrating how to lead with humanity at the forefront, addressing changing attitudes about labor, management, and organizational goals in a way that fosters growth and innovation
- Adapt to the new business landscape, leveraging insights about managing distributed teams and incorporating emerging technologies like generative AI without losing the essence of your organization's talent and skills
- Achieve immediate, impactful change with realistic strategies and actionable techniques backed by thousands of hours of original research and practical experience
- Improve the way we live by revolutionizing the way we work
Essential is not just a book; it's a roadmap for 21st-century leaders facing existential challenges in a rapidly evolving global market. Perfect for managers, executives, directors, founders, entrepreneurs, and any business leader aiming to steer their organization towards success in a transformed landscape, this book provides the tools and insights needed to lead with conviction and humanity.
Whether you're looking to redefine your leadership approach, adapt to the transformed market, or leave a lasting legacy, this book offers a compelling case for why now is the time for a leadership reinvention. Dive into this essential resource and begin your journey towards leading with greater impact and humanity in the business world of today and tomorrow.
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Seitenzahl: 257
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Notes
PART I: The Business Imperative for Human-Powered Leadership
CHAPTER 1: The Economics of Human-Powered Leadership
A Brief History of Organizational Evolution: How We Got Here
Where We Are Now: A Skills-Based Economy Emerges
Notes
CHAPTER 2: Skills Scarcity in the Digital Age
Understanding the Skills Scarcity Equation
Technological Advances Decrease the Half-Life of Skills
Declining Workforce Participation Widens the Skills Gap
Reskilling to Balance Talent Supply and Demand
Redefining and Expanding the Talent Pool
Changing the Way We Think About Workforce Skills
A Call to Action for Future Leaders
Notes
CHAPTER 3: Investing in Human Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence: Made in Our Likeness
Why Technology Needs Humans
Centering Humans in the Digital Age
Notes
PART II: What Humans Require
CHAPTER 4: Purpose
Defining Purpose: For What and for Whom Is All of This Meant?
Purpose Washing, Virtue Signaling, and the Pitfalls of Disingenuous Leadership
Purpose and Values Take Center Stage
Building Purpose
Notes
CHAPTER 5: Agency
Individual Agency: Where, When, and How We Work
Collective Agency: The Rise of Unions Brings Us Back to the Future
Community Agency: Harnessing Purpose and Values to Effect Change
Modern Leaders Embrace Agency
Notes
CHAPTER 6: Well-being
The Measurable and Immeasurable Impact of Well-being
What Leaders Must Do: The Four Pillars of Worker Well-Being
Predictability and Flexibility
Mental Health Resources
Modeling Well-being
Relationship Building
Notes
CHAPTER 7: Connection
Safeguarding Connection in the Age of AI and Distributed Work
The Building Blocks of a Connected Organization
Investing in Leadership Skills that Build Connection
Notes
PART III: What Leaders Must Do
CHAPTER 8: Soft Skills Are Power Skills
When AI Masters Hard Skills Better Than Most Leaders
Soft Skills Are Now a Leader’s Power Skills
How to Softly Leverage Power
Notes
CHAPTER 9: The Essentials of Leadership
Suspend Self-Interest
Cultivate Insatiable Curiosity
Create Cultures of Excellence
A Call to Leaders
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
FIGURE I.1 Human-powered leadership practices pay off.
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1.1 Key shifting in management capabilities.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.1 The skills scarcity equation.
FIGURE 2.2 Overview of when skills gap is expected to occur in organizations...
FIGURE 2.3 Comparison of white-, gray-, and blue-collar workers.
FIGURE 2.4 The evolution of leadership focus.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 The unique and complementary skills of human and artificial intel...
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6.1 The C-suite significantly underestimates how much employees are s...
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9.1 The essential leadership flywheel model.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for Essential
“To transform an organization, you must first transform its leaders.Essential shows the way forward for revolutionizing the way we work, through Smith and Monahan’s innovative approach to human-powered leadership.”
—Angela Ahrendts DBE,former Apple SVP and Burberry CEO.
“Essential provides a leadership roadmap that details how to harness the power of human intelligence in combination with AI to unleash true innovation and reach our fullest potential. This book provides a much-needed roadmap for unlocking and inspiring our workforces during this dynamic era.”
—Hayden Brown,CEO, Upwork
“Essential offers a visionary roadmap for modern leadership, blending the latest in AI technology with a deeply human approach. Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan expertly guide leaders on how to create thriving, adaptable teams in an era of constant change.”
—Dorie Clark,Wall Street Journal bestselling author
ESSENTIAL
How Distributed Teams, Generative AI, and Global Shifts Are Creating a New Human-Powered Leadership
Christie Smith, PhDKelly Monahan, PhD
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ISBN: 9781394276585 (cloth)ISBN: 9781394276592 (ePub)ISBN: 9781394276608 (ePDF)
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To all leaders – especially those with the courage to embrace our shared humanity.
Introduction
As we write this book, we live in a world we’d describe as tense, uncertain, and increasingly polarized. It’s at moments like these that we usually turn to leadership to guide us through the unknown and allay our fears. And yet today, trust in the institutions that have historically safeguarded our well-being and provided opportunity is at an all-time low. In place of hope, connection, and civility, what we see around us are overwhelming levels of disillusionment, disengagement, and division. Leadership is failing.
Our decades-long careers have been spent researching and consulting Fortune 500 companies and their C-suites on how to build thriving teams with a philosophy that when people do well, so does business. This approach to our work is in no small measure derived from our educational backgrounds in industrial psychology, organizational leadership, and clinical social work. Above all, we feel a responsibility and a drive to serve humanity – to improve the way we live by revolutionizing the way we work.
As a Baby Boomer and Millennial team, we have experienced the workforce differently, and yet share a strong conviction that the way we work, and thus lead, must change. As mentors and trusted colleagues, we bear witness to the level of confusion, burnout, anxiety, and frustration people experience in their jobs and this environment every day, even in our youngest generation. We too are disappointed and angry – with leaders unwilling to relinquish power to invest in their only sure path to progress: people. It is from this position that we set forth to write this book, to inspire a new kind of leadership to meet the requirements and challenges of our evolving world.
Of course, the need for a new leadership paradigm born out of external crises is a historical pattern. When the Black Death wiped out as much as 60% of the world’s population in the fourteenth century, medieval thinking about the human condition as one of necessary suffering transformed. The bleak, faceless feudal system gave way to capitalism, and politically the dominance of the Church was ultimately challenged by increasingly powerful states. A new philosophy, known as humanism, evolved to form the cornerstone of the Renaissance, perhaps the most revolutionary advance in Western civilization. Humanism introduced the idea that people were individuals, championed self-determination, and created an environment that supported rather than suppressed individual expression.
The Renaissance is just one example of how catastrophic disruptions can generate far-reaching social and economic change, often in surprising and even positive ways – at least in the long term. Most recently, of course, the daily reminders from natural and man-made disasters of our own mortality, along with inflation, political instability, environmental change, and widening disparities in the quality of life for minority communities, have similarly combined to awaken a new humanism enabled by new technologies that together seek another reinvention of society.
For businesses, a decade of disruption is transforming the nature of work. Leaders have been buffeted by relentless technological innovation, shifting demographics, and waves of economic shocks, including health crises, recession, inflation, global political instability, and supply chain interruptions. Social and cultural values increasingly play a major role in the brand image of all organizations, in the eyes of both customers and employees. And new technologies, like generative AI, are creating a wealth of new opportunities, but also overwhelming employees and leaders alike.
The impacts of these far-reaching changes have forced a global reimagination of what great leadership looks like in an uncertain world. Many leaders today still yearn for the top-down “good old days,” when senior management was in control of their organizations and decision-making was relatively easy. But the solutions to today’s challenges aren’t found in the past. Regardless of now-constant economic shocks and waves of disruption, the long-term trajectory of uninterrupted business transformation requires a total reinvention of the very concept of leadership.
We’ve dedicated our careers to empowering and enabling companies to thrive through a human-powered approach to leadership. Our experience and research show that for businesses to thrive, so must their people. Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed:
The growth rate of our labor force slow down
A digital-everything world introduce new business and operating models
The supply and demand of essential skills thrown off-balance, and in some cases, employees gaining the upper hand in where, when, and how much they work
COVID-19 and its aftermath accelerated these developments, but they did not begin with it, nor will they end with its resolution. Underlying the sudden shift to hybrid working models, the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and other artifacts of COVID-19 were already potent and demonstrable shifts in population dynamics, skilling, and attitudes about labor and business. Even before the economic shocks of the last few years, the transformation of labor markets, flattening organizational models, and worker portability were leading us to a new understanding of employment. The pandemic only served to speed up the inevitable. These forces will continue to generate unanticipated disruptions for businesses and the global economy long after our current crises abate.
As the World Economic Forum reported in January 2023, millions of workers continue to leave their jobs every month, with some industries losing nearly 10% of their employees in the last 12 months alone. In the US, the independent workforce, or “freelancer” economy, grew from 40 million to 50 million workers between 2020 and 2021. Women in particular are voting with their feet, resigning from leadership positions in tech and other key industries in disproportionate numbers, taking with them, according to data from the Federal Reserve, over $1 trillion in economic value – more than half of what they have added since 1970.
Employees aren’t simply leaving for better pay or the chance to work from home. According to the Pew Research Center, “lack of opportunities for advancement” and “feeling disrespected at work” were among the top reasons Americans quit their jobs in 2021. The survey also finds that those who quit and who are now employed elsewhere are more likely than not to say their current job has better pay, more opportunities for advancement, and more work–life balance and flexibility. Put simply, workers now expect considerable autonomy when it comes to the conditions of their employment.
Beyond rapid turnover and a shift to self-employment, stakeholder discontent is also manifesting itself more in the form of legal change. Even companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and Google, long considered worker paradises, are facing growing unionization efforts. In Europe and in some US states, legislation requiring board representation that more closely reflects gender and racial demographics is forcing dramatic realignments. Salary transparency and disparity reporting is being mandated in much of the world.
Meanwhile, antitrust authorities worldwide have declared war on business consolidation, blocking mergers in every industry in hopes of reducing concentration and reigniting competition in the interests of consumers, employees, investors, and suppliers – embracing the core idea of “stakeholder value.” What we are experiencing is nothing short of a stakeholder uprising. Business leaders must adapt, and adapt quickly, to new ways of thinking, collaborating, and working in general. Adapt, or become irrelevant.
Demands on CEOs – and others in the C-suite, boards of directors, and rising business leaders – to face these challenges have increased dramatically. A new way of managing is desperately required, one that rejects much of the conventional and outdated wisdom of the last 50 years. Every leader, every business, and every industry must transform – and quickly – to reinvent themselves as flexible, human-driven enterprises if they are to flourish into the future.
We’re facing the most significant management crisis we’ve seen in decades of working one-on-one with senior executives. So far, business leaders have largely followed, rather than taken the lead, in operationalizing the new reality of work. Most are dangerously lagging, threatening the long-term sustainability of their organizations. And while our research shows that most executives understand the necessity of transformative change, few have taken even the first baby steps toward leading in an increasingly stakeholder-driven economy – one in which employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and regulators compete to set the terms of business for organizations of all sizes.
In large part, that’s because today’s leaders simply don’t know where to begin. A 2023 “Work Innovators” survey from the Upwork Research Institute finds that the majority of leaders (55%) are doubling down on their existing operating and talent strategies or seeking greater efficiencies within them. Yet only 23% are even considering trying something different by taking risks, innovating, and changing how they lead inside their organizations.1 When directly asked what is stopping these leaders from operating differently, the majority responded with concerns resulting from managing distributed teams, uncertainty regarding the right talent and skills mix given the unexpected entrance of generative AI, and general anxiety surrounding the macroeconomic conditions we face today. Simply stated, many don’t know where to start.
Their predicament is as understandable as it is perilous. We know from our daily engagement with CEOs across the Global 500 that many business leaders are themselves overwhelmed and exhausted, unable to pivot fast enough to stay ahead of the chaotic and shifting disruptions of the pandemic, emerging technologies, supply chain issues, inflation, and growing political tensions at home and abroad. CEOs, like their employees, have discovered the limits of their resilience. Many simply have given up.
This is more than just a serious morale problem. It is an economic time bomb, accounting for $8.8 trillion in lost productivity.2 Yet CEOs tend to be more concerned with their company being continually productive than with setting policies and practices to help workers avoid burnout and exhaustion, apparently unaware of the cause-and-effect between the two.
As these and other data reveal, seeing workers as human beings first and factors of production second isn’t simply an enlightened approach to management. It is an economic imperative. Stakeholders are no longer willing or required to put up with the refusal of leaders to share power, collaborate openly, or embrace the values of those who do the heavy lifting.
Some confuse a human-powered approach with being more humane – being nicer – a dangerous oversimplification of the real crisis they face. Worse, many willfully reject the idea that they need to do anything at all, clutching at the false hope that somehow the seismic shifts of the last few decades will simply go away.
And while the costs of implementing a human-powered approach to management may appear significant, especially at the beginning, they are far outweighed by the potential benefits. The Upwork Research Institute ran a study in 2023 to determine the impact having a human-centric workplace made on a company’s bottom line (see Figure I.1). The implications for leaders today are astounding.
FIGURE I.1 Human-powered leadership practices pay off.
We wrote this book for the next generation of leaders and those now in power who recognize that something must change – and soon – if we are to make progress of any kind. Our intention is to understand and use history alongside the latest research to inform what’s needed from organizations now to drive business forward into the future. Together with our shared experience working with leaders and executives across industries, countries, and enterprises of all sizes and ages, we’re redefining what it means to be a leader in the twenty-first century, making the case that the only way forward, for the good of people and for business, is to radically transform the way we manage. Our hope is that you’ll walk away from Essential with a new understanding of the needs, motivations, and potential of your own workforce, inspired to change what you can for them to thrive.
Notes
1
. “Work Innovators Drive the Success of AI-Enabled Organizations,” November 2, 2023,
https://www.upwork.com/research/work-innovator-report/2023
2
. Pendell, Ryan. “Employee Engagement Strategies: Fixing the World’s $8.8 Trillion Problem,”
Gallup.Com
, September 11, 2023,
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/393497/world-trillion-workplace-problem.aspx
PART IThe Business Imperative for Human-Powered Leadership
CHAPTER 1The Economics of Human-Powered Leadership
“People follow leaders by choice. Without trust, at best you get compliance.”
— Jesse Lyn Stoner1
As researchers we have a great appreciation for the lessons of our past and how they shape our present and future. We rely on historical perspectives to understand how organizations and the economy have evolved in response to advances in technology, automation, and machines over time, which have in turn informed employee capability and skills requirements. In this chapter, we examine how technological advances have shifted the power dynamics between employers and employees, widened the skills gap, and presented new socioeconomic challenges that require us to reexamine our leadership. So please bear with the history lessons because they are critical to the foundational argument of the book – that humans must be at the center of our organizations for our societies and the global economy to flourish into the future.
A Brief History of Organizational Evolution: How We Got Here
Where is here exactly? The pandemic, a growing consumer demand for more sustainable products and business models, and the rapid embrace of stakeholder capitalism more generally have all accelerated three long-term macroeconomic trends: flattened organizations, the democratization of data, and skills scarcity. (Stakeholder capitalism assumes the purpose of business is for more than maximizing shareholder profits and seeks to add value to stakeholders such as society, employees, and vendors.) These forces translate into specific organizational shifts that leaders are now navigating, largely without a playbook. Taken together, they create the business imperative to reexamine our organizations and leaders with new criteria that put humans at the center of the way we work, prioritize, and make decisions.
Decades of top-down management theory have been upended in recent years in favor of the flattened organization – it’s simply too costly to design today’s workplace around hierarchical structures. As a result, decision-making is very often conducted from the bottom up, with workers driving innovation and collaboration and using it to take collective action. This trend is spurred on by the fact that workers today often know more than their leaders about how work actually gets done. Most leaders lack a basic knowledge of the technology used to drive their business forward, and as data and knowledge are increasingly democratized, those working closest to it hold the most power and influence. In today’s digital environment, it is the insights gleaned, not the data itself, that is most valuable.
With these factors at play, and no longer being limited to seek employment locally, highly skilled workers are empowered in ways never seen before to capitalize on career opportunities. But these circumstances, while favorable for some, create a growing concern for those workers unable to keep up with market demands. An imbalance in the supply and demand of talent has created a skills gap that is costing both businesses and society trillions of dollars. It is arguably the most urgent problem facing our organizations today.
The impact of these trends on the global economy illuminates a need for organizational change that shifts focus from asset management to talent management. Put another way, the power dynamic has changed polarities, giving leverage to stakeholders at the expense of enterprises.
In 2023 alone, we’ve seen how this shift has changed the game for leaders. Take, for example, the leverage UPS drivers had in negotiating higher rates and better working conditions. Due to the low unemployment rates and lack of available workers, leadership at UPS did not have much leverage in negotiating and gave the workforce most of what they demanded, including higher wage rates and better workplace conditions.2 Or consider the example of Open AI, whose CEO was ousted, only to be reinstated days later when nearly the entire employee population threatened to quit. Finally, in the hotly debated return-to-office movement, we see that workers still have the upper hand as many refuse to adhere to their leaders’ call for a return to office.
A human-first approach to business is not simply the popular or politically expedient thing to do. Neither is it merely a change in rhetoric for management to sound more empathetic and appeal to the zeitgeist. Genuine change is required – and hard to achieve – for the continued growth of our organizations and the health of the global economy.
Zeroing in on Profit and Productivity
Our brief history lesson starts with the First Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, during which organizations primarily focused on efficiency, productivity, and mass production. As you may well know, the introduction of factories and machinery led to the emergence of large-scale manufacturing, with organizations structured around hierarchical and centralized systems of control for the first time. This way of working required specific roles from people to manage the mass production of products in a brand-new way. During this period, we saw the rise of manufacturing companies, such as DuPont, Ford, and Boston Manufacturing.3
The leading economist and management thinker of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, believed a division of labor was necessary to reduce the costs of goods that resulted from newfound global demand. As a result, there was a steep decline in training people for a “trade” or “craft” – instead, these newly formed organizations sought workers to fulfill a narrow and specific task within a large production line. The birth of management transpired as companies realized they needed a new role within their organization to coordinate the array of people now working on specialized and interdependent tasks along the production line.
The advantages of this new way of working were clear from a traditional economics perspective. Goods and services could now be made at scale, servicing new global customers as well as ensuring a level of standardization otherwise unachievable. The disadvantages to the human worker were also profound. Without a direct connection to the customer or product, it quickly became unclear what should motivate people tasked with the same repetitive workday. Workers during this time often lamented their boss’s capricious management style, the result of inadequate training to understand and meet core human needs – ones we all share, regardless of which century we live in.4
A leading railroad analyst at this time, Henry Varnum Poor, cautioned of the dangers that this change in work was having on people. He warned, “Regarding man as a mere machine, out of which all the qualities necessary to be a good servant can be enforced by the mere payment of wages, may not work, as duties cannot always be prescribed, and the most valuable are often voluntary ones.”5
How We Became “Cogs in a Wheel”
This First Industrial Revolution gave way to Frederick Taylor’s and others’ examination of scientific management in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The principles of this approach are characterized by a focus on engineering, optimizing, and standardizing work processes and tasks to achieve greater efficiency and productivity, from which we saw the rise of specialized job roles and detailed job descriptions.
During this period, the phrase “cog in a wheel” became a well-known way to describe how most workers felt under Taylor’s relentless focus to break down jobs further into small discrete tasks that would be aggressively measured for productivity. (While the concept of the cog in a wheel originated in the fifteenth century, its use as applied to workers became mainstream in the 1930s.) What ensued is described by the twentieth- century management thinker Whiting Williams as “the worst time in history” for labor relations.6 In 1919, more than four million American workers, or 20% of the nation’s workforce, went on strike.7 Turnover at leading companies, such as the Ford Motor Company, reached 380% with 10% daily absentee rates of their workforce.8 The lack of human-centric management was costing the already fragile US economy. As a result, the government formed an Industrial Relations committee to better understand the state of labor and how this new scientific management was influencing talent.
Their conclusion? That the system operated with a complete disregard for employee welfare for the sake of profit, and in the process denied employees a say in the standards of their own working conditions. Under these circumstances, the report concluded, there would be no reason for workers to endorse or support a system that “[reduces] them to mere soulless machinery, mechanical in action, denuded of thought, and which would rob them of their humanhood.”9
What Motivates Us?
Ultimately, the report deemed scientific management ill-equipped to move the economy forward, and with more attention paid to job roles and competencies, an examination of what having a workforce of employees really means began. The Human Relations Movement in the early to mid-twentieth century thus shifted the focus of organizations toward understanding the social and psychological aspects of work and its influence on optimizing work processes in the management of humans. It’s during this period that we see organizations start to recognize the importance of employee satisfaction, motivation, and morale in improving productivity and performance.
The most famous thinker to emerge during this time was Elton Mayo, who like Frederick Taylor believed scientific experiments were needed in the workplace to better understand and improve human performance; with the field of management still in its infancy, managers needed training and data to effectively lead their workforces. However, unlike Taylor, Mayo placed an emphasis on deeply understanding what motivates humans rather than what drives profits. His work profoundly shifted management thinking at this time, with research that demonstrated productivity increases when individuals feel connected to others within their work group, are asked for their input through employee listening activities, and are given a purpose for their work. The summary of his research, produced in the late 1930s, stated the role of a manager was not to drive efficiencies, but to manage relationships.10
