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According to Gallup’s most recent global engagement survey, only 13 percent of the world’s workers are engaged.1 With numbers like this, how do we get anything done? Well, we do it in a trance.
The truth is that most of us want to be enthused, awake, involved, interested, happy, grateful, and connected with our work. We also want to work in environments that inspire these characteristics. But unfortunately, until we understand how our workers fell into “the trance” and learn how to end it permanently, billions will be needlessly lost in productivity and profit every single day.
This 13-percent work engagement statistic isn’t a business problem; it is a national tragedy that extends far beyond the workplace. The malaise behind these figures impacts every aspect of our culture. The trance kills customer relationships, livelihoods, and personal satisfaction. The trance kills people. The trance shows up in the lab worker who lost the blood work or the receptionist who doesn’t remember your name. The trance shows up in a doctor who mindlessly issues orders to everyone around him as you lay right there in his presence, fighting for your life. He never talks directly to you. I call it the great disengagement.
We encounter the great disengagement every single day. We run into it at the grocery store where someone tersely answers, “If it isn’t on the shelf, we don’t have it” or having products break just days if not hours after bringing them home. We recognize disengagement when our boss tells us to shut up or he’ll make sure we regret it. We see it in the CEOs who blindly clip away at the bench strength of their organizations for lazy short-term financial gains. We feel it when flight attendants raise the temperature in the cabin of our plane, just so more passengers will sleep through their flights.
If 87 percent of the world is disengaged, the odds are high that we will only meet one person out of 10 who impacts us like an unexpected gift, a singular light that brightens our day. They may look us in the eye and tell us we are valued. We will remember them for sure. That is, unless we are also in a trance. And like an irritating and unwelcome friend, the trance follows us home to disengage our families. We pass the trance on to our children.
Attempts to break the trance have turned into a big business. Employee engagement is the single most popular talent initiative in organizations today. As Josh Bersin states, “CEOs are bending over backwards to make their company a ‘great place to work.’ Free food, unlimited vacation, yoga classes, and lavish educational benefits are becoming common. But as all this attention shifts toward the health and happiness of staff, employee engagement remains surprisingly low.” Bersin cites Gallup, Glassdoor, and Quantum Workplace research; Gallup states one-third of employees are engaged, Glassdoor averages engagement at a C+ (3.1 out of 5), and Quantum Workplace says engagement is at its lowest level in about a decade.2
It takes just a bit of common sense to define why typical engagement initiatives produce single digit improvements or fail altogether. You will probably recognize the pattern:
1. The CEO or business owner realizes that disengagement is impacting profits and customer satisfaction. He or she walks down the hall to human resources and tells them to fix the problem.
2. The human resources executive launches an employee engagement initiative, but the employees look past his or her shoulder to the CEO for cues and they see “business as usual” or no real commitment.
3. An employee survey is issued. Quite often, employees feel patronized by questions that seem to really be asking, “How can you do more for us?”
4. The feedback is summarized and shared, usually succeeding in making managers feel even more inadequate to solve the problem.
5. We send the managers to a retreat center to become better leaders. They return more “enlightened” to employees who respond, “So what?”
The Workplace Engagement Solution doesn’t mimic this old “top down” approach. What it does is offer a democratic process in which everyone is responsible, everyone participates, and everyone awakens. In my experiences creating engagement within organizations, it has become clear that when we build a great relationship with our work, not only does the organization improve, everyone’s life gets better. Everybody wins.
For most of us, work is the biggest relationship that we have. Why a relationship? When we launched Inspired Work, my work engagement company, the practice of using career assessments was quite popular. But an assessment only measures superficial aspects and truths about a person’s skills and probable best roles. A great relationship towards work, on the other hand, requires a wide variety of characteristics that include the person’s outlook, gifts, beliefs, life skills, and behaviors. Each characteristic influences the other. For example, someone can be on the right path but failing because they are missing the necessary life skills to be successful. Without knowing what those life skills are, the individual may define their career as a failure. But when we discover that those missing life skills are learnable, we immediately have access to the tools for building a highly successful relationship with work. And, we consistently find deep and meaningful value when a person explores each characteristic of their relationship with work versus relying on the limited views of assessments, surveys, and performance reviews.
During the last 25 years, I have helped more than 42,000 professionals transform their relationship with their work. Thousands of them have launched new careers. Thousands have become business owners for the first time. Even more have become far more effective and happier in their existing careers. For many years, we used the program for individual applications and eventually created separate leadership and learning programs for whole organizations. There was some concern that if we got employees to define what they wanted out of life and how to get it, they would leave, but that changed when we began giving the program to intact teams. Instead of leaving, employees experienced an opening up of their minds and hearts to elevate their entire experience of work together. They committed to each other. Employee engagement figures soared, and by introducing a few simple internal rituals, the breakthroughs were not only sustained, they expanded over time.
The bottom line is that we all spend most of our waking hours driving to, being at, coming home from, and recovering from work. When individuals consciously navigate their way into a great relationship with their work, not only does life improve, they become highly engaged and satisfied.
From all of these watershed experiences, I am going to share how to “crack the code” of employee engagement and build cultures that are energized, enthused, fluid, and capable of not only absorbing enormous change, but actually exploiting change to everyone’s benefit. The investment is worthwhile because not only will profit and performance improve, but you will also serve to build tomorrow’s workforce. The Workplace Engagement Solution isn’t an advertisement for another big consulting contract. In fact, all that is required is an internal orientation, a dose of courage, a “book club,” and an organizational change of heart.
It has become clear that full employee engagement is elusive due to two critical missing pieces:
• Engagement only works as a democratic process. It is futile to expect an awakening when we use the old hierarchical model of pushing leaders to become skilled at drawing engagement out of talent. They will not respond to more manipulation. They need and crave personal involvement and individual transformation.
An awakened organization requires that everyone is involved. In a democracy, everyone is responsible for the end result. It is a mistake to assume that the leaders are more engaged than the rest of the population. Indeed, I have met line workers who are more engaged than some of the leaders in charge of engagement programs. We all have much to learn from anyone, no matter the level, who shines in the area of self-driven change and engagement with their work.
In a true democracy, everyone is responsible in the process of learning how to change and engage. The leaders and managers can provide the right conditions, but they are not ultimately responsible.
• We need to provide people with the skills to break out of the trance. For years, academics, management consultants, and human resource professionals have discussed the “broken employment contract.” But, as we lost the promises and assurances of the Industrial Revolution, organizations have typically failed in defining what it is that we need to do in order to thrive within the rapid, disruptive, and transformative change we find ourselves in. By extension, much of today’s talent has obsolete work skills and no new life skills. Consequently, they become overwhelmed in simply trying to keep up with change. We need to help them close these gaps.
In 1970, the great futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that technology would accelerate the rate of change to such dizzying levels that by the turn of the century, most people would be in a perpetual state of shock trying to absorb too much change in too short a period of time. This “future shock” directly ties into the going-through-the-motions behavior that typifies today’s trancelike, disengaged worker.3
We are emerging from a 300-year cycle called the Industrial Revolution. During this cycle, we were conditioned to view change as threatening, dangerous, and unsettling. Yet, thriving today requires more than just coping with change. The wisest of us are not only developing the skills for self-change, they are establishing an enthusiasm for growth, because growth is the new game and it offers far greater payoffs than the era of survival and predictability.
How many of us are conscious enough to be excited about trading in a sense of security for perpetual growth? Most of us need to be educated to even realize what the opportunity means on a personal level. For the vast majority, real change is a frightening prospect. For example, when we began our programs in 1990, most of our participants were pursuing one big professional change. After making that transition, many would tell me, “I’m glad that is over.” But it wasn’t over. The world just became faster and faster until now, when many people are too confused to even define what it is that they want. Now, imagine how much the national workplace will improve if we develop a thirst for learning and growth within ourselves and throughout our organizations.
It will require us to reinvent, learn, unlearn, and relearn in shorter periods of time. When we ask or order our employees to “snap out of it” or “get used to it,” how can most of them comprehend how to do that? Yet many leaders continue to display the “do it or else” tactic in a world in which talent pools are filled with experts in going through the motions. Similarly, this idea that people should somehow be skilled at continuous personal change is equally far-fetched. This is why organizations, realistically, must develop their workers to not only understand change, but to learn how to change themselves continuously.
But let’s get real. There isn’t a corporate budget in the world to pay for the consulting fees it would take to do this. Yet, when we move the entire process in-house where it belongs, the financial investments are minimal, especially when we factor in the increases in performance and engagement that will ensue. This is much more an investment in time and energy. It is also, simply, what it will take to get beyond these real challenges we are facing.
As we proceed, we will examine why so many workers are still ensnared by the cataclysmic breakdown of the old industrial-based work paradigm and why it is good business to invest in their future. Developing a change program for these individuals is far more valuable than showing them the door and trying to recruit from the small slice of available talent out there that has already mastered the game of engagement.
There is also good news. Personal change is learnable. In The Workplace Engagement Solution, it is equally important to develop the skills of unlearning and identifying beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve us, no matter how we might desire to cling to the past. Consequently, skilled self-inquiry represents a vital beginning to this process.
In a world in which many media and political messages pine for the past, we need to be posting a new message: Change is everyone’s responsibility. In front of us is a world filled with more opportunity to craft successful lives than ever before. But in order to fulfill that opportunity, we have to learn how to change on very personal and fundamental levels. We need to embrace continuous education and self-inquiry. Why? Because without a compelling and personalized sense of mission, vision, and purpose to fuel internal motivation, employees will lack the initiative, the “juice,” to go through the challenges inherent in actualizing the personal change that is required.
Welcome to the reality of future shock. During the last 30 years, we progressively removed predictability and survival from the work-place. Then, technology introduced change with such growing ferocity that today’s average college graduate will change careers, not just jobs, an average of four to six times. If we dare to expect the majority of our workers to engage, we need to help them become change experts in ways that are not only valuable for our organization, but personally meaningful as well. Like every other set of skills, when and if our capacity to personally change becomes as natural as other relevant skills—navigating software platforms, mastering social media advertising, and the like—we will become more effective in responding to other organizational, market, and technical changes that are continuously coming at us.
Is this outcome attainable? Absolutely.
I have both inspired and witnessed the human capacity to change and transform more than 40,000 times. These experiences have made me both an optimist and a realist—perhaps not a bad combination as we move forward. So let’s get on with it.
We begin with the state of the CEO or business owner. If 87 percent of the world’s talent is disengaged, the probability of CEOs also being actively disengaged is pretty high. With a purely democratic solution, the global disengagement problem can only be solved if everyone from the entry-level worker to the CEO/owner is dealing directly with his or her own engagement.
Engaged CEOs lead their cultures. The very word “engagement” implies connectedness and transparency. As I have already pointed out, the failure of most engagement programs begins when the CEO turns the initiative over to someone else. Make no mistake about it, engagement includes an emotional component, and many CEOs are uncomfortable with the feelings generated by the human side of business. Others are so absorbed in dealing with market and shareholder expectations that they believe they cannot add culture concerns to their crowded plates. Nothing could be more wrongheaded.
It might still seem counterintuitive for CEOs to feel they should be saddled with culture development, but developing awakened cultures is what makes the job of the CEO much easier. In fact, as I coach and consult with many chief human resources officers while they navigate themselves into new careers, I always ask the question, “Is the CEO leading the culture?” If the answer is no, I tell the client to “keep their bags packed.” I also tell them that it will not be worthwhile to do an engagement program because regardless of the circumstances, the results will be the same: mediocrity or outright failure. Bottom line? Wasted time, effort, and dollars.
This challenge becomes even clearer when we accept that engagement and personal change are challenging for all of us. The journey from disengagement to engagement requires deep personal change and some new life skills. Unfortunately, too many of us still fear the predictable discomfort of personal change and avoid it at all costs. We do not even understand that we are working against our own best interests. We lack the insight. We don’t know what we don’t know.
Therefore, it is critically important for the CEO or business owner to “wise up” to this cause-and-effect relationship within a culture. She or he needs to become the first to put their feet to the fire and embrace the life-altering possibility of becoming a deep personal-change role model. Now this is something to get excited about.
Indeed, we consistently find CEOs of category leaders such as Tesla, Apple, HBO, and Google who live and breathe this commitment. But before we start discussing category leadership, we must understand why fully awakened employees are so hard to find. Perhaps the greatest psychic leap that is in front of us is to move beyond the fixation on equating security with the routine. If we do this, and if we help others to do the same, the great opportunity is to develop lives and cultures filled with an enthusiasm for growth. But getting started requires that we get beneath the surface to understand why there is so much cynicism, contempt, aimlessness, and resignation around the topic of work. In other words, “How the bleep did we get here?”
For a full answer we need to go back in time. The Industrial Revolution has had an iron grip on our culture for the past three centuries. Clearly this era was over by the end of the 20th century. Even Y2K now seems like distant and quaint memory. The changes in front of us collide with the beliefs about work that our parents, grandparents, and many employers offered up as absolute truths. And though most of us understand this, few of us know how to move beyond these beliefs to become more effective participants in a modern landscape filled with whole new ways of living and working.
Prior to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, change took place at a far more glacial pace. People spent most of their time and money growing or buying food. Making even one garment by hand took days. Industry resided in cottages. Child mortality was so high that many people had large numbers of children hoping that one or two would survive. Education was reserved for landowners, nobility, and the religious elite. The rich and powerful did not pay taxes while poor people paid rent and taxes.
The first great turning point in the world of work took place almost three hundred years ago. At that time, the British called the shots for how the rest of our world functioned. It was the most studied country on the face of the earth. In 1733, an English watchmaker named John Kay invented a simple machine called the Flying Shuttle. Its purpose was to improve the productivity of weaving. One person was now able to do the work of three. Fueled by riches, this innovation tipping point quickly turned into a tidal wave. Water and steam power moved the textile industry into high gear. The first inexpensive process for the mass production of steel was invented. We moved from scarcity of food to storehouses of abundant supply. Now producing more goods than any other country, England needed to find ways to get these products to other countries. Roads were built and boats got steam engines. Rails were laid. Landowners became industrialists. The banking industry was invented to grease the skids and the UK developed a world of consumers.
The Industrial Revolution represented an intoxicating leap forward in the evolution of civilization. The architecture behind this revolution introduced goods and services that were previously available to only the wealthy. In a parallel to today’s work landscape, the Industrial Revolution resulted in the handing out of pink slips to virtually every worker from the previous era, but work didn’t go away, it simply changed. This phenomenon is also taking place today. As old structures and dynamics go away, we need to become more fluent in seeing where new structures and dynamics emerge, because emerge, they always do. The difference? Three hundred years ago, it often took decades to change. Today, it can happen in a matter of days.
The old revolution also developed an unquenchable thirst for workers. Industrialists developed a recruitment pitch filled with standards and beliefs that haunt us today:
“If you come to work for us, we will give you survival and predictability.”
To most of those working on farms, hunting for food, or dealing with the day-to-day uncertainty of keeping that cobbler shop in business, the pitch sounded really good. Human capital nourished the machine, which took center stage in our work. Parents, schools, organized religion, and governments prepared a new labor force that fit into the assembly lines, plugging bolts into holes. A new economy grew based on making large quantities of stuff. This worked for several hundred years. And, as with all personal or cultural advancements, there was also a price.
Predictability and survival didn’t just become two in a series of standards. They became the standard. Although these standards made perfect sense at the time, consider how outdated they are now within our modern times. The fixation on predictability and survival dismisses joy, creativity, passion, engagement, full living, and connectedness to others. It often keeps us from new learning. Most profoundly, the old standards obscure the birthright of every man, woman, and child, which is to find and pursue what we were born to do. The growing awareness of this is also one of the seeds fueling today’s discord with work. But, there was another great price we paid.
In Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller quantified predictions he had been making since the mid-1930s.4 He warned the world that if we did not find ways to either eliminate or remove the poisons generated from fossil fuels and chemicals, the world would become uninhabitable by the turn of the century. Mr. Fuller must have died with a great deal of frustration because very few people listened to him. Most did not think about these issues because repetition produces a trancelike state. Fitting in, tending to our workstations, going through the routine became the mass trance of the Industrial Revolution. Most were happy for progress. Wages were small. Long hours were filled with back-breaking and repetitive work. Safety standards were appalling. In many factories, children were sent in to tend machines because the spaces were so small. If someone was injured or killed, others were waiting in line to step in and replace them. In fact, some of the laws passed during the early days of the Industrial Revolution indicate just how barbaric many employers were during that era. For example, the Factory Act of 1819 limited the work of children to 12 hours a day. And in 1833, children under the age of 9 were banned from working in the textile industry and 10- to 13-year-olds were limited to a 48-hour workweek.
Ironically, England’s innovation also led to it losing its grip on the world. In the early days of the revolution, British leadership did its best to protect the country’s manufacturing technology. But that progress opened up channels to the rest of the world. As mass production spread throughout the globe, other countries not only became more powerful, they turned into competitors. It wasn’t long before every developed nation was playing the same game. And for the next 250 years, the Industrial Revolution dictated how we lived, consumed, worked, competed, and got educated. As the promise of predictability and survival evolved, we added various employee benefits: vacation plans, a retirement plan for when we grew old, medical coverage if we got sick, and so on. The most talented embraced it all and worked their way up the proverbial “career ladder.”
On the shadow side, our ability to build stuff also fueled the bloodiest wars in the history of humankind. We leveraged wars with new technology and powerful capability to snuff life out in dramatic fashion. This led to the most awesome victories, but at a terrible price. But as we returned from world wars, manufacturing supremacy led to jobs for life, a comfortable middle-class living, and what was, for many, a comfortable routine. We worked, we saved, and we retired. The Industrial Revolution had successfully disrupted and transformed a culture that had stayed relatively the same for thousands of prior years.
In 1943, England dropped its next disruptive bomb on the world of work. A British engineer named Tommy Flowers demonstrated the first programmable computer to a stunned, skeptical room of military leaders. He developed this machine to decrypt German military code. It worked amazingly well. Ten of these “Colossi” were completed and used to gather intelligence. On June 5, 1944, a courier handed Eisenhower a note summarizing a Colossus decrypt. It confirmed that Hitler wanted no additional troops moved to Normandy. Moments later, he announced, “We go in tomorrow.” The rest is history. The first computer may have actually played a bigger role in ending World War II than the first atomic bomb.5
Surprisingly, British leaders had the Colossi dismantled after the war. But, word of its power had gotten out. By 1946, the Eniac was invented and completed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania. The world’s first digital computer occupied 1,800 square feet, used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed almost 50 tons, and had less than half the power of a smart phone.
Whereas our first work revolution took hundreds of years, a new one was quietly birthed that day. This innovation would take just 50 years to completely change the way we live, work, think, learn, grow, and transform. The original wave from this technology would grow in ferocity and depth, disrupting virtually every work model we had developed over 300 years. In the mid-1990s, the wave made landfall and started to wipe out all of the promises and ideals of the industrial workplace.
Wouldn’t it be great if the average human could change their behavior just as quickly? But, let us not get ahead of ourselves quite yet. The 1980s and early 1990s introduced two more revolutions that torpedoed once and for all the promise of predictability and survival. Financial deregulation quickly put the money people in charge of organizations. As companies lost the balance provided by marketing, human resources, and operations, jobs for life were replaced with dispassionate work-force planning sessions. People were moved and dismissed like, well, numbers. Insecurity replaced predictability and survival as our workers developed unprecedented levels of cynicism and contempt.
Profoundly, most workers craved a return to predictability and survival—to no avail, as this quest worked directly against the growing need to change, reinvent, and transform. Workers that thrived during this upheaval demonstrated high degrees of creativity and adaptability, qualities in short supply 20 to 30 years ago, if not still today. The rest hung on for dear life, hoping the human resources “death angel” wasn’t coming around the corner. Unfortunately, these changes in our economic structure dictated that the angel would be making regular and more dramatic visits.
In 1976, two famed economists, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published the now-legendary paper, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure.”6 In it, they argue that corporations needed to align the interests of management and shareholders. This new model changed how the corporate world conducts its business. For corporate executives, stock-based compensation became the alignment mechanism of choice. Consequently, their incomes skyrocketed. In the 1970s, CEOs of large, publicly traded companies earned less than $1 million in today’s dollars. Today, that average has grown to $11.4 million. The new model motivates CEOs to focus incessantly on stock value over enhancing the real, longer-term performance of the company.
Also during the past 30 years, the entire investment market shifted from long-term investment in building organizations and markets to getting as much out of stock value in as short a period of time as possible. Investment banking turned into a multi-trillion-dollar industry. CEOs and hedge fund leaders became the foundation for how we dealt with workers in large organizations. With stock value becoming the number-one pursuit, American businesses and CEOs traded the long view for volatility, thus shifting the dynamic interests between capital and labor. As providers of capital push CEOs for greater and greater returns, cutting back on labor is the easiest way to signal they are addressing corporate financial performance.
Many workers are quite supportive of the American dream. But during the last 30 years, the average income has stagnated while hourly compensation has dropped. Workers witness venture capitalists taking advantage of financial deregulation to buy companies, take out loans on the assets, and pay huge dividends to themselves. Many of these acquisitions went bankrupt as employees lost their jobs, health insurance, and pensions. These financial barons are often celebrated and admired, but it has also resulted in mass income inequality at an alarming trend.
America’s workers have watched their job and financial security go up in smoke. Anger, contempt, and cynicism turned into a raging fire as they read stories of greedy CEOs backdating stock options and pushing the envelope to unethical, and sometimes illegal, degrees. But perhaps it was amorality that angered them the most. In many organizations, the underlying message was that when needed, workers mattered. However, the cycles of hiring and laying people off reached such dizzying heights that we now have a labor force that basically understands that work has become more of a temporary assignment.
In 1990, I found a stronger path to self-realization. At the time, I was a successful executive in the staffing industry. I represented many of the largest film studios, six of the top-10 ad agencies, the Getty Trust, and many others. In economically good times, I was a headhunter with a team. During recessions, I moved over to supporting temporary labor solutions. Early that year, I remember a young woman coming into my office and saying, “You are so successful. How do you do it?” I responded, “In a coma.”
At the time, it wasn’t a particularly shocking admission. It was funny. I said it for laughs. At the heart of that terrible statement, however, existed the belief that most people didn’t find joy, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and success from work. For most of us, work was just a job.
Besides, the staffing industry wasn’t what I really wanted to do with my life. As a respected jazz pianist and composer, what I wanted was a recording contract. In 1990, I received a call from a well-known jazz producer. He had inherited a truckload of money and was launching a new label within Warner Brothers Records. Six weeks into our project, he dropped dead of a heart attack.
For many of us, any brush with mortality is immediately followed by the timeless question “What is the meaning of life?”
After that terrible experience, it dawned on me that the only meaning I would ever find would be the meaning I, alone, could bring to my life. My producer’s sudden passing brought home the fact that I was always putting happiness off to somewhere down the road and into the future. I knew little of value in how to be happy in the present, on a day-to-day basis. As I explored how to improve my life, it became clear that my entire relationship towards work would have to change. The enormity of that relationship became vividly important because work, for most of us, occupies most of our waking hours.
September 15 and 16, 1990 represented the dawn of my professional life as CEO of Inspired Work. I walked into a hotel ballroom and delivered the Inspired Work Program for the first time to 36 participants. The program has the magic of getting people to break with their past and design an ideal relationship with their work. For two days, I watched these remarkable souls dive into the process and emerge with dramatic shifts and new visions. I watched some of them walk in the door with a deep justification for their pain, only to loosen the grip of that pain because a new and personalized vision pulled them forward. I related personally to everything happening with the participants because it was also happening to me. In that first program, all of us found at least the beginnings of the lives we were meant to have. It also became clear to me that once we truly experience the truth, there is no going back.
A number of brilliant behavioral scientists and academics contributed to the model for that program, which forms a foundation for all the services we deliver today. We have now led thousands of individuals to use their own values to design a great relationship with their work. And for every participant, the definition of that relationship is unique.
About a year after we launched Inspired Work, one of the nation’s largest banks became a client. After decades of success and stability, the CEO was looking for ways to generate more value for the shareholders. The plan backfired. During the next five years, waves of employees were laid off as the bank struggled to survive. They offered outplacement for those who wanted in finding another job, and they offered Inspired Work to those who wanted a new life. It was an amazing experience because they were individuals who came from the old world of “jobs for life” with the courage to elevate this event into a turning point. Many of them came in wearing blue suits and stickpins with the bank’s logo. In 1996, the bank merged with another financial institution and disappeared. Our graduates moved forward with unexpectedly diverse choices from art leadership, farm ownership, education, and new jobs in emerging industries, and yes, some returned to banking.
One of them was a young man who had become a senior finance executive. He was the first member of his family to go to college. In fact, he had earned an MBA from an Ivy League school. He told us of growing up in a family of migrant workers, doing well in school, and getting a scholarship. But his passion had never been to climb a corporate ladder and make a great deal of money. At one point he whispered to me, “All I ever wanted to do was to grow things.” That weekend he designed a whole new life. Today, he is a wealthy farmer growing premium lettuce for gourmet restaurants across the western seaboard.
Another gentleman had come into the program with his wife. He had been with the bank for almost 30 years. Now in his 50s, he panicked about finding another job as a middle-aged man. However, on the second day of the program, his demeanor had changed so completely that I asked what was going on with him. He responded, “I would like to make an announcement to the room.” He continued by telling everyone he had always been in love with the world of art and that now he had decided he would “devote the rest of his life to the art community.” Years later, I would open up a copy of the Los Angeles Times and find his obituary. It read, “John Morgan, Leader in the Los Angeles Art Community.” He had gone on to open a charity, bringing art education to inner city schools. He raised millions for art museums and he opened up a successful gallery. Later, his wife would share that, for 18 years, “he always left for work with a smile on his face.”
I have always been passionate about helping people find new lives and renewed purpose. Some readers might assume that my agenda is to get people to leave their jobs, but that is not the case at all. The vast majority of people want to be inspired and happy in their work. The majority of them find what they are looking for right where they are by simply relating to their circumstances differently. They develop a profound sense of internal drive. It is those who cannot find pleasure and passion in their work who need to leave. Our employers almost always find that those who are most unhappy and disruptive are often those who will never be satisfied. They are in the wrong environment or the wrong role, or both, and they need to go!
In 1990, we were also witnessing a landmark change in the attitudes of America’s workers. With the promise of stability shattered, disloyalty was rampant and the press railed on about the inequity of millions of workers being displaced as the coffers of the investment bankers grew exponentially. Human resources professionals complained about the “broken employment contract” and many of us continued to fixate on the losses while a larger wave grew on the horizon. The technology wave would hit our shores and advance so quickly that it would wipe out work as we knew it, and our culture wasn’t to blame this time. Still, after almost 300 years, a grieving period seemed in order.
As our early program participants defined and pursued new lives, many of them made a disquieting remark about the great and convulsive change they had just weathered. “I’m glad that’s over,” they would say. But little did we know that the wave of technology coming towards had only just begun. A few examples:
• Today, a smart phone can monitor a patient’s health, predict heart attacks, and directly notify her physician. This technology alone blasts thousands of jobs into the past.
• iPhone cameras are now so sophisticated and produce such superior photographs that an entire class of professional photographers have become obsolete.
• Five years of technological advancement have ended virtually every cashier working on toll roads.
• The last time I used a travel agent was 1998.
• The rate-of-change produced such a need for mentors that an entire coaching industry sprung up overnight. These coaches tell potential clients something like, “If you’re nuts, see a therapist. But, if you’re healthy, I will help you become more successful without the stigma of working with a psychologist.” Many psychologists are only now realizing what these upstarts did to their profession.
As a consumer, picture this: You’ve wanted that new BMW convertible for quite some time. You get a promotion and a bonus. Your first thought is to order your brand new car. You visit BMW’s web-site and key in all of the options, the color, and the interior; you get to customize this car to fit all your unique design preferences. You click send and the dealership down the block prints out your beautiful new convertible. There is no big factory. There is no shipping. The dealership has no inventory. Does this sound like a pipe dream? In fact, 3D printing has reached such an advanced degree of sophistication that defense contractors are now tooling up to build entire fighter jets without assembly lines.
How will change like this impact our world?
If you are working in a traditional manufacturing setting, it is time to reeducate and reinvent—right now. In the next decade, China will lose the factors that have made it the world’s chief manufacturing center and 3D printing is at a tipping point. Most of our leaders don’t know it, but the technology has moved well beyond a novelty phase and it is about to go mainstream. GE is ramping up its production of jet engines, medical devices, and home appliance parts using 3D printing, and thousands of other organizations are following suit. Though the direct costs of using 3D technology are often higher, when we add flexibility and remove the need for inventory storage, shipping, and labor, the costs are substantially lower.
I offer up this scenario to portray how much all of us need to learn how to change ourselves. For years, our programs at Inspired Work have given people an active opportunity to change their lives with the endgame being a fulfilled and remarkably effective relationship with their work. So many walk into our programs and tell us, “I can’t change. I will be the one person that won’t get it.” And yet, they walk out the door with new lives. Many of them walk away from crumbling and obsolete platforms.
It’s time for us to retire our fixation on what we have lost and instead replace our fear of change with an enthusiasm for growth. The new engagement is about learning how to change our focus and behavior rapidly, to let go more quickly, and to anticipate the many roles coming from our future. So when we ask “How the bleep did we get here?” that’s how the bleep we got here.
Sadly, huge swaths of the current workforce continue to pine for a return to the past, and this fixation distracts them from the frightening truth that they need to reinvent and transform themselves. But, what if they don’t know how? As greater portions of the old workplace disappear, much of America’s workforce is standing like frightened deer in the glow of their smartphones. Without meaningful solutions, their pursuit of distraction and numbness only grows. This cultural craving to pursue the safe route, to find predictability somewhere, to get through life with a secure paycheck is obscuring the greatest opportunities for all that we have ever seen before—opportunities to grow with enthusiasm, to celebrate the remarkable change and advancement we are witnessing. We now have the opportunity to jump in and see where the next wave takes us.
This pursuit, my friends, leads to all of us becoming greater, more multi-dimensional human beings. We must stop reacting to the bigger waves by swimming faster, and instead learn how to ride them skillfully. Of course we will continue to experience a sense of awkwardness and some fumbling. That’s okay. But as we become skilled in riding the waves, we will find ourselves looking directly into a transformed world. In this new paradigm, mediocre employers will lose their footing. The wise will harness the energy of their brightest workers. The most visionary employers will not only recognize the profit benefits from teaching people how to change, they will help the world make a critical detour from having workers cast to the sidelines as we go. The mentors we develop will not only help our organizations become category leaders, they will become beacons to our community.
For those who learn how to use change as an asset and a resource, the years ahead will be an era where we get to live not just one work life, but rather a variety of lives. We will grow in such unexpected ways that we will become far more interested—and interesting. We will find ourselves creating solutions to all the challenges of this new world around us.
How do I know this is true? Simple. This is how my tribe lives.
So how about we snap out of this trance?