On February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler published a blog post on her personal website. The software engineer, by her own account a “really introverted and really shy”¹ person, had previously blogged on various subjects, including computer science, myrmecology (the study of ants), philosophy, physics, and software engineering. However, on this day in February, she decided to tell a “strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.”²

Fowler's post, titled “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” detailed her personal account of the rampant sexism and systematic culture of sexual harassment at Uber, the multibillion-dollar ride-hailing company and her former employer. Clocking in at 2,910 words, her essay quickly went viral.

Fowler's post was the catalyst that sparked a chain of events that led to the termination of more than 20 Uber employees, including cofounder and CEO Travis Kalanick. Further investigation into the company's business practices revealed even more wrongdoings. These revelations hurt Uber's business. It lost significant market share to Lyft, a smaller player in the ride-sharing industry.³

The influence that Susan Fowler and her story carries represents a giant swing in the power dynamics of the workplace. Fowler, a single employee in a large organization, had the information and the platform to broadcast her insider experience to the world. She affected public sentiment in a way that wasn't possible in the early days of the industrial revolution.

Clearly, this was not the work of a person who “resembled in his [or in this case, her] mental make-up the ox more than any other type.” The world that Frederick Winslow Taylor knew has vanished. In its place, we have a workplace that moves lightning fast and is perpetually in flux. The skills needed—by both leaders and employees—to navigate this sea of uncertainty is profoundly different. To succeed, today's leader needs to know how to create an optimal work climate suited to our era.

In a recent study, the consulting firms Towers Watson and Oxford Economics asked employers what skills managers and employees will need most in the next 5 to 10 years. The top skills noted were as follows:

• Relationship building
• Teaming
• Co-creativity
• Brainstorming
• Cultural sensitivity
• Ability to manage diverse employees⁴

In another study (conducted by IBM), 1,700 CEOs from 64 countries in 18 industries were asked, “Which are the most important leadership qualities to possess?”

The top four responses:

1. Collaborative
2. Communicative
3. Creative
4. Flexible⁵

These two studies share a common denominator. The leadership skills now most in demand are what are commonly known as the “soft” (or people) skills. Positive attitude, working well with a team, and being adaptable are all examples of these soft skills.

It wasn't always this way. The fact that these soft skills are now the top priority is a drastic change from the days when the skills considered most valuable were the “hard” (or technical) skills. Examples of hard skills include business acumen, data analysis, and quantitative decision-making.

You need go back no further than the late 1970s to find the difference. Back then, if a child was a good student and wanted to advance to the top rung of the professional ladder, then the student was expected to become either a doctor or lawyer. Back in the day, medicine and law sat on the top of the academic and professional hierarchy. Follow the linear track and do well, and you'd be rewarded with a highly compensated, successful career. To be a doctor or a lawyer was the epitome of what the management author Peter Drucker called knowledge work.

According to Drucker, knowledge workers differentiated themselves through their “ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge.”⁶ In the industrial age, workers were prized for their brawn. It was the managers and leaders who were prized for their brains, more specifically, their analytical brains. In particular, the analytical types—the engineers, the lawyers, the doctors—ruled the roost at work.

But then things changed. In the information age (1980s to the present) knowledge work isn't the province of a rare few occupations. Now, it's the de facto way of working in every industry. The ability to think critically and creatively has been pushed down through the organizational pyramid right out into the front lines. Responding to customer needs quickly and competently is no longer exceptional; it's the ticket to entry to play in the game of business.

In this new world, leaders can no longer be narrow, linear directors. When Old-School leadership rubs up against New-School knowledge work, the results can be disastrous. Susan Fowler's blog about her experience at Uber is a case in point.

The nature of what leaders need to do has transformed. Leaders now need to coordinate and facilitate complex interactions with a variety of different people. As such, their need to connect, communicate, and collaborate is more important than ever. This change of focus is captured perfectly by the title of Daniel H. Pink's seminal book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future.

This change didn't just happen out of the blue. Building on Pink's argument, the end of the 20th century brought with it three megatrends—massive societal shifts—that altered the world in which we live and work. For anyone who wants to be able to understand and influence others, knowing how these megatrends have shaped our beliefs and behaviors is essential.

MEGATREND 1: GLOBAL AFFLUENCE AND CHOICE

Since the start of the industrial revolution, the world has gotten wealthier and wealthier. In the United States alone, in the period between 1820 and 1998, real GDP (gross domestic product) per capita increased 21.7-fold, or an average of 1.73% per year. Measured in constant 1990 dollars, the GDP per capita in 1820 was $1,257. In 1998, it was $27,331.⁷

Increasing affluence isn't just a U.S. phenomenon. According to the World Bank, global GDP has increased from $3,692 in 1960 to $10,284.⁸ And this boom in affluence hasn't been limited to wealth; people have gotten healthier as well. Just since 1960, average world life expectancy has soared from 52.58 years to 71.89 years in 2015.⁹ As Richard Easterlin puts it,

Most people today are better fed, clothed, and housed than their predecessors two centuries ago. They are healthier, live longer, and are better educated… Although the picture is not one of universal progress, it is the greatest advance in the condition of the world's population ever achieved in such a brief span of time.¹⁰

This higher standard of living has created an ever-increasing global marketplace. More people have more money to buy more things. Combine more money with decreased transportation costs and improved manufacturing technology, and you've got the ideal environment to create a mass proliferation of stuff. We are truly living in a material world.

Plenty has become a fact of life for most Americans. In the United States, there are more automobiles than there are licensed drivers to drive them. The average U.S. home has only 2.5 people but 2.86 TV sets.¹¹ All this stuff has led to the boom of a whole industry: self-storage. The self-storage industry is now a $32.7 billion industry in the United States¹²: three times larger than the motion picture business's revenue.

As a society, we've been living with so much stuff for so long that we now take it for granted. This affluence has not only invaded our closets and garages but also it's taken up residence in our psyches. It's changed our entire relationship to the idea of choice.

Consider that a century ago, if you wanted to eat cereal for breakfast, you'd go to the market and buy some type of uncooked grain: wheat, rye, oats. You'd bring it home and cook it yourself.

Today, if you wanted to buy hot cereal, you could go to the store and buy bulk oats. But would you choose organic or conventional? Slow-cook or quick or instant? Steel-cut or rolled? Or would you prefer to buy pre-packaged oats? Single-serve pouches? Plain? Maple and brown sugar? Apples and cinnamon? Peaches and cream? Raisin, date, and walnut? Apple and cranberries? (I'll stop…you get the idea.)

Choice after choice after choice. And we're only talking oatmeal. If you wanted cold cereal, you have an entire aisle filled with shelves of boxes of different shapes, grains, colors, and flavors.

The mind-set of “have it your way” goes way beyond the cereal aisle. It's permeated most of our day-to-day lives. We expect choice in our cereal, our sneakers, our handbags, in practically everything. With so much more supply than demand, the abundance of choices has shifted the balance of power from producers to consumers.

As consumers, our very beliefs about what it means to consume have also changed. With one-click ordering and drone delivery, our expectations have risen dramatically. We relate to the very concepts of “needing,” “wanting,” and “having” in a very different way than people did 100 years ago. What's now perceived as a “necessity” is very different. Someone might casually say, “I need to get the latest model of iPhone,” and not even realize that they don't actually need it: they want it.

Why should leaders care about these dynamics of choice and affluence? In this age of abundance, it's obvious that we have higher expectations as consumers. Less obvious, but equally important, is that our expectations as employees have also increased.

For many people, work is far more than just a job. It's where we go for inspiration and motivation. It's the place we forge our identities. It's what we answer with when someone says, “What do you do?”

In their book The Human Capital Edge, Ira Kay and Bruce Pfau share research on what employees want from work. It turns out that regardless of race, gender, or age, there are four key questions that employees ask when they consider joining, engaging, or staying with a company:

• Is this a winning organization that I can be proud of?
• Can I maximize my performance on the job?
• Are people treated well economically and interpersonally?
• Is the work itself fulfilling and enjoyable?¹³

It's clear from these questions that today's employees aren't going to work only to take home a paycheck. They also want to take home meaning and purpose.

This is what Susan Fowler was looking for at Uber. Similar to every employee, Fowler asked herself these four key questions. To discover the answers, she looked first to the same place that all employees look: to the behavior of the company leaders. Through their actions, they set the foundation for the company culture. Their actions say, “This is how things get done around here.” Fowler was horrified by the response from upper management after she shared her incident of sexual harassment. She quickly hit a personal tipping point at which she could no longer reconcile the disconnect between the Uber culture and her personal values.

A hundred years ago, if a factory worker didn't feel aligned with the values of the organization, that person, like Fowler, had the option to resign. But Susan Fowler could do much more than just quit her job.

MEGATREND 2: COMPUTERIZATION

Fowler's blog post wouldn't have wielded such force if hundreds of thousands of people hadn't read it. Given the ubiquity of our digital devices today, it's easy to take for granted the technology that enabled so many people to read her post in the first place.

Older readers will recognize that just a generation ago, what a big deal (and cost) it was to make a “long-distance” call. Today, with Skype and other web-based services, you can video chat for hours for free. We are all the sons and daughters of the fiber-optic revolution, which enables data, ideas, and even 3-D objects to be shared as easily with someone on another continent as with someone in another room down the hall. Moreover, sharing and applying information is the primary driver in most modern workplaces.

The explosion of cheap computing power pushed us out of the industrial age and into the information age. Computerization has transformed the nature of work. Repetitive, algorithmic parts of jobs have been automated, outsourced, and offshored.

What remains for the worker is knowledge work. This type of work is heuristic, meaning that it's not predictable, and there's no clear-cut predefined answer. It relies on having ideas, creating strategies and hypotheses, testing, and observing what works or doesn't work.

Knowledge work is filled with challenge and variety. Not only do knowledge workers need to “come with a brain attached” but also they need to continuously use it. They're asked to creatively problem-solve, which involves these skills:

• Correctly framing the problem/challenge
• Generating multiple ideas to solve the problem
• Choosing the best idea(s) to implement
• Implementing a solution
• Noticing the outcome and adjusting solutions as necessary

Knowledge work is on the rise, and non-knowledge work is on the wane. Today, it's commonplace to buy groceries in a supermarket and never deal with a live person. It's the norm to bank via computer. Driverless cars are on the horizon. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that from 2001 to 2009, the number of routine transaction jobs such as bank tellers and checkout clerks decreased by 700,000 in the United States. Manufacturing jobs over that same period decreased by 2.7 million.¹⁴

Although routine transaction and manufacturing jobs have decreased, jobs dependent on human interaction—doctors and teachers, for example—have increased by 4.8 million. Interaction jobs have become “the fastest growing category of employment in advanced economies.”¹⁵

Leading knowledge workers requires a more complete approach than leading in past generations. No longer are employees seen as mindless worker bees. Now, leaders need to be more involved and nurture and develop the whole person that comes attached to the pair of hands.

Some organizations have progressed with the times, and their leadership philosophies reflect this new world of work. Sadly, others haven't. They remain trapped in their inherited history and the archaic thinking of Frederick Winslow Taylor. The command-and-control paradigm of leadership is still alive and well. It's why the data say there are such low levels of leadership effectiveness and trust. Leading through fear and threats suffocates good decision-making and keeps teams mired in mediocrity.

Esther, a relatively new CEO of a regional bank, shared an example of her top-down culture this way:

One of the first things I noticed around here is that our people don't feel empowered to speak up. When I first came on board, I sat down with the executive team (my direct reports) and asked them to show me the project plans for their top priorities. As they reviewed their plans, they shared the plan deadlines with me. I asked them, “How did you choose these dates for these projects?”

They said, “We tell the teams when things are due.”

“Did you get any input from the teams on the deadlines?” I asked. “Did you think to ask the people doing the work when they could get things done?”

There was a long silence. “No. That's how we've always set deadlines. We tell them what to do. No one ever pushes back on the deadlines.”

The kicker of the whole thing? The deadlines are consistently missed.

At Esther's company, this top-down style neglects a key ingredient to lead knowledge workers: trust. When knowledge workers are trusted, they feel empowered to be creative, solve problems, and perform better. For sustainable success in the long term, trust is a must.

MEGATREND 3: TRANSPARENCY

In To Sell Is Human, Daniel H. Pink shares a huge idea that has radically altered our information economy: the switch from information asymmetry to information symmetry.¹⁶ For example, as Pink illustrates, until quite recently, if you wanted to buy a car, you were at a distinct disadvantage. The car dealer had access to more information than you did. This information asymmetry meant that sellers had the power to withhold information about product quality. Were you buying a decent car or a lemon?

You'd see the sticker price, but it'd be difficult to learn the average price of that make and model. Were you paying a fair price or being gouged? You could try to haggle the price down, and then, if you still weren't sure, you could walk off the lot and travel from dealer to dealer to create a hypothesis of a best educated guess. This approach would take a lot of time. It'd also create a lot of stress by having to negotiate with every single dealer.

Information asymmetry meant that the buyer had to be cautious. Not having adequate information meant that customers had low trust in merchants. Thus, transactions would move rather slowly.

That all changed with the internet. Suddenly, there were web-based companies whose sole purpose was creating information symmetry. They wanted to make sure that customers had access to as much accurate information as possible. Information symmetry facilitates trust between buyers and sellers and levels the playing field.

Avis Steinlauf, the CEO of the automotive information company Edmunds, explains, “It's remarkable how simply providing a fair, upfront price can get deals off on the right foot. Our focus moving forward is to continue identifying these pain points and figure out how Edmunds.com can play a role in building a bridge of trust between car shoppers and dealers.”¹⁷

The auto industry isn't the only sector in which the rules of the information asymmetry game have changed. In real estate, websites such as Redfin, Trulia, and Zillow share important information with eager house hunters.

Like it or not, transparency is the new normal for leaders in every industry. On the internal side, websites such as Glassdoor allow employees to post confidential career information. It gives job candidates insight on how the company is managed, what it's like to work there, and average salaries. Pre-internet, it was nearly impossible to gain this kind of insider knowledge.

In addition, social media gives every employee a platform to broadcast his or her views. Fowler's post went viral because it was shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The #metoo movement (which gained momentum in the wake of Fowler's post) calling out sexual harassment and assault has toppled leaders in multiple industries, including Hollywood, politics, journalism, music, science, and academia.

Leaders need to be aware that not only can every employee broadcast his or her views but also so can every customer. With a cellphone camera in everyone's pocket, anyone can become a frontline journalist.

Consider the fiasco that United Airlines went through in April 2017 when one passenger filmed another passenger being forcibly dragged from an airplane. The shocking video was posted on YouTube and received over four million views. United Airlines was caught in a public relations nightmare, and their company stock dropped $1.4 billion due to the incident.¹⁸

In the age of transparency, command-and-control leadership loses its iron grip. People have options. If they're dissatisfied, knowledge workers can take their valuable skills and easily go work somewhere else. They know that with a few clicks on LinkedIn, they can search out greener pastures. They don't have to put up with lousy leadership that was the norm a couple of generations ago.

Smart leaders understand the accountability that comes with increased transparency. They know that organizational missteps can bring huge consequences. Every unhappy customer or employee can blog, share, or tweet his or her frustration to the world.

On the flipside, smart leaders also recognize the huge opportunity that increased transparency brings. Employees and customers can become raving fans and brand ambassadors if you exceed their expectations. Some leaders have built their entire business on building trusting relationships.

For example, the retailer Nordstrom has made its name synonymous with exceptional customer service. Stories of Nordstrom's employees going above and beyond are legendary. In one such story, a woman in North Carolina lost the diamond from her wedding ring while trying on clothes at a Nordstrom store. The Seattle Times explains:

A store security worker saw her crawling on the sales floor under the racks. He asked what was going on, then joined the search. After they came up empty, the employee asked two building-services workers to join the search. They opened up the bags of the store's vacuum cleaners, where they found the shiny diamond.¹⁹

Nordstrom's leadership doesn't create a culture of such dedicated employees by accident. They see their employees as vital partners in the success of the company. Whereas other retailers may have long and elaborate employee handbooks, Nordstrom's handbook has only one rule. It reads: “Use good judgment in all situations.”²⁰

Using good judgment. It's a fundamentally human skill that can't be replaced by an algorithm or a robot. It's the essence of heuristic work. It's also the essence of ethical leadership.

THE LEADER OF THE FUTURE

The world has changed, and it's not going back. Leadership needs to keep up with the times. The megatrends of affluence, computerization, and transparency have made our world flatter and faster. Understanding the implications of these trends (for better and worse) is essential. When you know the macrocosm, you can better lead in your organizational microcosm.

Organizations need to continually evolve or risk becoming obsolete. Business models that used to last for decades or centuries are being disrupted. What do hulu, Fitbit, Spotify, Dropbox, Airbnb, Kickstarter, and Quora all have in common? They're all billion-dollar businesses that didn't exist 15 years ago. And that's just a few.

Consider this statement from a COO of a Fortune 25 company that I heard at his company's annual leadership conference:

The way we do business has fundamentally transformed. With the advent of new technology and the ever-increasing rate of change and innovation, we can no longer afford to find ourselves on a burning platform. The companies that wind up on a burning platform are done. The challenge in this competitive landscape is to predict where the potential burning platform will be six months or a year from now, and course-correct now, so we never wind up on the platform in the first place.

In this flatter, faster world, there's no way one person can corner the market on knowledge. You're dependent on the eyes and ears of your people—and their willingness to share what they see and hear. Thus, being connected becomes more important than ever.

To compete, smart companies have reorganized to share knowledge and decision-making with the front lines and the customer. This structure is much more complex than the linear, hierarchical systems of the past. The only way such a restructuring works is if there's effective communication in every direction.

In addition, many companies are abandoning top-down planning models. To meet the increased demands of customers, they're implementing agile methods to drive rapid innovation and a better customer experience. Collaboration is key to making this nimbler approach to doing business flourish.

The successful organizations of tomorrow will be led by “New-School” leaders. They're the ones who will know how to catalyze a new generation of talent. They'll be equipped to solve complex problems and create innovative solutions for pressing problems. Their leadership will create value for their employees, organizations, and customers. They'll do this by harnessing the power of these basic skills—connection, communication, and collaboration—so that in this brave new world of work, their teams and companies don't just survive but thrive.