Who's in Control of Work?
A Brief History of Leadership. Are leaders ready for the Future of Work?
In January 2020, I began research for a book on changing work dynamics. The premise of the book was pretty simple - I believed that that work was transforming in ways that few people were acknowledging directly, and this was resulting in an environment where many employees were barely able to get beyond showing up. The book was to be called “Unsustainable.”
As I researched Unsustainable, I read a lot of course, but I was also determined to talk to employees, managers and leaders directly. So my team and I conducted over 300 interviews, and have done many more since.
But then COVID happened, and upended everything, including my book plans. My co-founder and I ended up launching our company BillionMinds - with a goal of solving the problem rather than pontificating about it, and I put the book on the back burner.
Recently though, I’ve started work again on “Unsustainable”. And so I’ve been trawling through my old notes, comparing them to the interviews we do every day to help keep our company on track. As you might expect - the employee view of the world is very different today than pre-COVID. But what has really surprised me is the sudden, rapid shift in how leaders and owners of companies view their organizations, and their roles in them.
I’ll get into more detail, but to avoid burying the lead - Pre-COVID, many leaders came across in general as confident, composed and in control, even with detailed questioning. Today, many of those same leaders are no such thing. Beneath the surface, many are anxious, uncertain and in some cases even scared.
I believe that COVID is part of the reason for this, but there are other factors too. And the story is not just about the leaders themselves, but about all of us.
Let’s dive in.
Leaders in Transition
Picture a CEO. If you are like most people - you will think of a white, middle aged man - perhaps a tech CEO like Steve Jobs, or a more old school CEO like Jack Welch.
Now think of their characteristics. Again if you are like most people, you will think of them as decisive, potentially aggressive, and most certainly “in control”. After all, their job is to “run a company”. If you are not the CEO, you cede control to them, and they make the big bucks to determine the direction of the company.
Our interviews pre-2020 showed that many senior leaders viewed themselves in a similar fashion. When we asked them to describe their own role, they would use phrases like “decision maker”, “direction setter”, “decider”, and even sometimes directly “controller”. The company was their show, and they ran it. After all, companies are not messy democracies.
But today, many of these same leaders are using dramatically different language, and struggle to even find the right words to use. New terms have emerged like “risk reducer”, “steward of the business” or “custodian of the culture”.
It’s clear that a new model is emerging - less “controller in chief” and more “influencer in chief”. Of course, some of this is cultural. Servant leadership is growing in popularity, and leaders with the ability to truly listen are increasingly lauded. But there is, I believe, something deeper at work. In most cases, leaders are not voluntarily ceding control, they are losing it - and it’s leading to some challenges for all of us.
The History: The Employer in Control
Control is largely a zero-sum game. The more control others have, the less you have.
And for decades business leaders, particularly in the United States, have had a lot of control, at least on paper. No other western-style democracy provides fewer guaranteed benefits to employees in terms of healthcare, vacation days or parental leave. As a society we can argue the merits of this, but the result is that the company (and thus the leadership) gets to decide an awful lot about the employee experience, including when that experience ends by terminating employment. All of this against a backdrop where union membership has dropped from about 35% of the population in the 1950s to around 10% today.
These statistics are well known. But what is less discussed are the more subtle ways which companies have maintained control over their employees. Over the last decade or so, new technology has allowed the what, when, where and how of work to change in a whole host of different ways. And change it has. Companies across the world have traded in a model of tight control between 9 and 5, to one of loose control 24/7. Tools like Slack, e-mail and WhatsApp mean that we are always loosely tethered to our work and never really able to let go.
The Pressure: Employees Under Stress
Between 2015 and 2020:
The number of Americans having to care for a family member increased by 9.5 million, with 67% of them having to balance this with employment.
The number of children enrolled in after-school programs in the US decreased by 3.8 million, driven largely by lack of affordability.
Even pre-pandemic, employees across the country were faced with significant underlying challenges before they even showed up for work. The shift to a loose control model helped on the surface, as it gave employees more flexibility in when and where they did their work. But this same model also often increased uncertainty, ambiguity and anxiety in employees. In our interviews conducted before the pandemic, employees repeatedly told us they felt that they could never really leave work, because their phones always kept them tethered to it. And a majority of them told us they no longer knew what success looked like at work.
Breaking Point: COVID
One view of the pandemic is that, if it was going to happen, it came at a great time - at least from a technology perspective. Always available systems - a sprawling infrastructure of line of business applications, combined with productivity tools always available over the Internet, had been built to support the loose control 24/7 model. But now these same systems meant that much of business could continue even if the office was closed. Some businesses even thrived. Had a major lockdown happened even 15 years earlier, the economy would have completely stalled, and almost all of our work lives would have taken a pause for a period of months.
But, for many of us that didn’t happen - we carried on working from our kitchens and living rooms, while simultaneously trying to keep our kids occupied. All this happened when millions of us were already on edge, stressed to almost breaking point by the changes in our work and non-work lives. At work, we’d been enduring year after year of shifting priorities, change initiatives, and pleas to “do more with less”. And outside work, tighter household budgets, less time, and more demands on that time.
It can be difficult to comprehend the full impact of major traumatic events in the midst and immediate aftermath of them. But to restate some uncomfortable truths - 7 million died from COVID-19 worldwide, over 1 million in the US alone (more than double the number that died in World War II). Our children’s education was massively disrupted and many of us lost our jobs. And today - suicide is up, divorce is up, college dropout rates are up. Unsurprisingly many of us struggled and continue to struggle.
The Rebellion: Employees Take Back (Some) Control
The terms “Quiet Quitting” and “Great Resignation” were rife during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, many sages regarded these with a shrug. After all, lots of employees have always “dialed it in”, and every day people quit their jobs.
But our interviews as the time revealed something significant and different WAS going on. In particular, huge numbers of us were having serious “what does it all mean?” moments. The change in our work environments, and continued confusion about what success looked like at work, meant that we needed some deeper meaning in our work - a reason to put in the hours when we could more easily be on TikTok.
Employees were also looking at this 24/7 loose control model and figuring out how to make it work for them. After all, if the promise is flexibility and autonomy, the logical conclusion to that is working where I want and when I want. If that means moving across country to be with family, enjoy a better climate or access cheaper housing, so be it. In some cases employees took this step with the blessing of their employers - in other cases they did it just because it made sense for them at the time. Overall, the numbers moving have been so dramatic that it will likely be considered the 6th major migration wave in American History.
And then, starting on November 30th 2022, employees started gaining control in a dramatically different way. Chat GPT 3.5 was publicly released, with the promise that it could do a bunch of our work for us. Did employees wait for companies to tell them whether or how they could use this? Absolutely not. Within 9 months, over half of office workers in the US were using it, fundamentally changing how they worked, forever.
The Aftermath: Leadership in Crisis
Historically, leaders have had a measure of control over three things in their company.
What the company does (via business strategy)
How, when and where it does it (via the infrastructure and policies of the company)
Who does it (via hiring and firing)
But to do any of those things, leaders need the tacit and ideally active support of existing and potential employees. And in the current loose control 24/7 model - many employees are demonstrating that they are not in on the deal. You want me in office every day? Fine, I’ll find an employer that doesn’t. There are tens of thousands of them, all over the world. You don’t want me using AI? I’ll find an employer that does. Union memberships may be lower, but in it’s place is a generation of employees that are understanding their value. They are using that understanding not just to demand more pay, but to gain more agency over how their companies are run.
How are leaders responding to this?
For some - it’s not pretty. It often starts with ham-fisted efforts to reassert control, for example by pulling people back into the office against their will. And then, often comes blame - blaming employees for lack of work ethic, blaming schools for not teaching work ethic, blaming societal norms. Blaming anyone rather than looking in the mirror.
Eventually, leaders have to accept that the world is now different. And this is the heart of why leaders are using different words to describe their job today. In the past leaders could often make things happen just by saying they should. That’s gone, most likely forever, and to work in the new world, leaders need to step up and lead differently.
Back to Leadership Fundamentals: What’s Old is New Again
In our interviews, we often ask senior leaders what job outside of business leadership they considered to be most similar to their own role. We get lots of answers, but I think one of the most revealing is “Captain of a Ship”.
In the 18th century, captaining a ship was seriously challenging work. You had to recruit the right crew, and do your job well enough to retain the crew’s faith in trying circumstances, at risk of mutiny. You had to navigate threats of piracy, war and perhaps most difficult of all, the vagaries of mother nature. Now, of course, ships were run with great discipline, but one thing was absolutely true. The captain of the ship was never fully in control. Storm clouds could gather at any time, and the best you could do was depend on the crew to batten down the hatches, attempt to steer, and try and ride things out. Recognizing this reality was not just part of the job, your life, and the lives of your crew depended on it.
Part of the problem of the current generation of leadership is they have rarely had to lead in this degree of uncertainty. Understanding what needs to happen and telling others what that is is only a tiny part of the job. The real challenge is to create an environment where employees actively choose to go on the journey with you, not because you pay them to do it (others can do that) but because they want to.
None of this is new, many of us just forgot how to do it.
The Next Generation of Leaders - Wired for Change
This essay is not a plea for servant leadership, even though personally I’m a fan of it. Not every leader is cut out to be a servant leader, and not everyone needs to be. But the next generation of leaders need to understand three fundamental truths about the future of work, and adapt their leadership style to accommodate it.
Truth 1: Change is inevitable
COVID changed where and when people are willing to work. Generative AI changed how people are working (and that change has only just begun). But this change is not new. In the past 15 years, the what, when, where, how and why of work have ALL changed, and they will change again. You won’t control whether the change happens, or the speed of that change - the best you can do is attempt to steer through it, with the help of your employees.
Truth 2: You don’t have control (and you never did)
If you believe you are in full control of your organization - I’m afraid you are flat wrong. Not only are you at the mercy of external factors (like competition, pandemics and technology revolutions), but you don’t even have full control of your employees.
The myth of control in the US has stemmed largely from hands-off government policies, a decline in union membership, and hero-worship of high-profile CEOs. But employees have agency, and they talk. You don’t have control over employees, you only have the ability to influence. And you only have that while employees are still willing to listen.
Truth 3: Your job is to help employees thrive
In a very real sense, this is ALL your job is. In a fast moving world, employees need to be able to do two things beyond anything else - adjust to changing circumstances (adaptability) and cope intellectually and emotionally with that change (resilience).
When employees are struggling, they deal daily with change anxiety and change fatigue. When they are thriving, they see change as an opportunity to learn, grow and develop. And when they do that, they are engaged and motivated - to their benefit and yours.
Leadership Matters More Than Ever
The book “Unsustainable” is a different book than the one I started writing before the pandemic. That’s hardly surprising given the massive changes we’ve been through as a society in the last few years.
But the change in workplace dynamics has led some leaders we’ve spoken with to wonder aloud whether leadership still matters.
I believe the answer to that is simple. Leadership is harder, leadership is different, but in these uncertain times:
Leadership has NEVER been more important.