Blaire Palmer
We are on the cusp of a revolution as significant as the Industrial Revolution in how we utilise human talent. Two hundred and fifty years ago, machines disrupted ways of life that had been established for hundreds of years, and now they threaten to do the same. Our changing attitudes towards work, changing expectations from businesses of their employees, the long tail economic impact of Covid, a mental health time bomb, difficulties with the supply of goods, cost of living, geo-political unrest, the climate crisis, and the icing on the cake – Generative AI – mean we cannot operate our organisations as we have done for the last two hundred and fifty years.
And yet, with a few tweaks, that’s what we try to do. We look for efficiency savings, treat people like cogs in a machine, only value what we can measure, and talk about making it safe to take risks, but what we mean is only take risks that pay off. We talk about psychological safety, inclusion, and bringing your whole self to work, but ultimately, we want people to be predictable and productive and set aside their emotions to make logical, data-driven decisions like machines. We say we trust people but have myriad processes and systems to ensure people operate within tight controls. We say we trust people, but when we can’t reach them at 2 p.m. or see their car in the car park, we wonder where they’ve disappeared.
This is because two Victorian Age beliefs still sit at the heart of business:
- People are merely second-rate machines.
- People are trying to get away with something.
In fact, belief one is true – people are second-rate machines. Machines are reliable and predictable. They don’t need you to care how they feel. If they break, you fix or replace them. Today’s AI, let alone tomorrow’s, can analyse data, carry out research, make recommendations, produce reports, and do repetitive tasks without errors creeping in (and without complaining of boredom) far better than a human.
For activities that benefit from a lack of emotion, a machine is far better.
But humans bring qualities that a machine cannot replicate. We’ve not even scratched the surface of what humans could do for our organisations if they were liberated from doing what a machine should be doing.
“If the emotional intelligence of our people is what we value most about them, we must completely rethink the environments we create for them at work.”
Leveraging emotion in the new world of work
Humans are fundamentally emotional, even if they claim to be logical. They cannot help having feelings. By delegating non-emotional tasks to AI, we could leverage the value of emotion. We could begin to embrace our ability to connect, empathise, build relationships, respond to emotional cues, imagine, debate and wrangle with ethical topics, conflict over matters of principle, bring our lives into our work, and care.
What is currently marginalised to the two-day annual team-building offsite, or Friday afternoons when your company has decreed there will be no meetings and no emails, could become our day job.
So, yes, people are second-rate machines, but they are first-rate humans. What value could they bring to business which has never been possible before?
And what if most people aren’t trying to get away with something? What if they are not trying to take your company for a ride? What if they have a higher purpose than their own progression or ego?
We haven’t created environments where many people have genuine agency or can find a sense of purpose in their work. Our processes and systems have kept them operating like cogs in the machine, only rarely allowed to express their opinions, dissent, or individuality.
We do this because we are worried about the ‘bad apples’. What if someone lies repeatedly on their expense claim? What if someone is only interested in their own reputation rather than the good of the business? What if someone is lazy and willing to sacrifice quality for an easy life?
In my 25 years of experience working with business leaders and their teams, I have rarely, if ever, met anyone like this. The vast majority want to do a good job, be well-regarded, and not want to let anyone down. They are trying to do their best every day, up against barriers and challenges that they are attempting to overcome in whatever way they can, in alignment with their values.
But, when people do focus on lowest common denominator stuff – their salary, their bonus, a new job title, petty battles for turf, proximity to power, or any behaviour which appears to be primarily self-serving, what we are seeing is that, in lieu of any other way to express themselves, or a lack of influence over their lives at work or a lack of time to find a deeper sense of meaning, people will focus on hygiene factors to get their basic needs met.
If you don’t feel recognised and appreciated for your dedication, taking some pens from the stationary cupboard feels like a small way to get some power back. If you don’t feel the system recognises your contribution, focusing on a pay rise might be the only way to get feedback. If work is relentless and unrewarding, of course, you’ll take advantage of work-from-home days to do something that isn’t as relentless and unrewarding…something that makes you feel like you have a life.
New cultures for a new era
If we want and need people’s best, their most enlightened, most engaged, and most complete contribution to our organisations, we must treat them differently.
The new world of work is starting to look very different from the old world of work. The only differentiator between human and non-human (AI) employees will be emotion. Activities which benefit from emotion cannot be delegated to AI.
Therefore, if the emotional intelligence of our people is what we value most about them, we must completely rethink the environments we create for them at work. Rather than treating people like second-rate machines, we must treat them like humanity is their most precious quality.
This means rethinking almost everything about the way we work:
- Working hours versus value added
- Measuring how busy or active people are versus the quality of their thinking
- How we hold meetings and how we gather
- Office spaces
- How we supervise and manage people (and whether we need to)
- How we use technology and how people and technology inter-relate
- How we manage change
- Attitudes toward dissent, conflict and risk
- Attitudes towards displays of emotion (including ‘difficult’ emotions like anger and fear)
- Our obsession with process and predictability
- Reporting lines, decision-making and hierarchy
- How we share information and what information we are willing to share, even with our most junior people
- How we recruit and the qualities we look for in people
- How we delegate, empower and engage with our people
- What people spend most of their day doing versus what they do today
- The role of leaders in the organisation (and who makes a good leader)
A humane working environment is one that doesn’t limit the humanity people bring to their work but encourages it in all its messy unpredictability.
“We’ve not even scratched the surface of what humans could do for our organisations if they were liberated from doing what a machine should be doing.”
Rethinking leadership
Leadership in such an organisation has a very different role. The charismatic leader-follower model has no place in these organisations. We don’t want blind followership or compliance. Instead, we need leaders to do three jobs:
- Keep the destination in mind. What is the purpose of the business? What is the shared work product to which we are all contributing? I picture this as standing on the horizon waving a beacon to remind people, “This is where we are heading”. A leader is someone who keeps that destination in mind and helps others do the same. And destinations can change. In an agile business that is responsive to shifting sands, goalposts can move, too. The leader needs to be able to help others work in such a dynamic environment, recalibrating the destination continually.
- Make space. Leaders need to move obstacles out of the way. They look for tensions in the system and then seek to address them or empower others to do so. When you change one thing over here, you create another problem over there. Even with great planning, as soon as you embark on the journey, you realise what isn’t going to work as you hoped. Leaders don’t ignore these tensions or develop workarounds. They go towards tensions as they arise in real-time. Getting obstacles out of the way also means getting themselves out of the way. Someone senior is often the barrier to people doing a great job. Let’s end that now.
- They coach and mentor. In most organisations today, the leader is the ultimate decision-maker. They ask others to fill in the gaps in their knowledge so they can see the full picture, combine that with their years of experience and their superior decision-making skill, and then they make a call. In the new organisation, the reverse occurs. The leader distributes their knowledge and expertise to whoever would benefit from it, enhancing their insight and understanding of all the moving parts. They give access to authority, opening doors to those who are hard to reach. And they ask questions – not so that they can gather data with which to make a decision but so they can enhance the other person’s quality of thinking. They push the decision down as low as they dare and then a bit lower, ideally to the person who will have to implement it. After all, that’s where the information about how it will work on the ground lies.
Leaders like this don’t need their egos to be stroked. There’s not much room for ego in this kind of leadership. Instead, they are people who believe in the untapped potential of human beings and who believe that if we can liberate that potential, we can make work more meaningful, we can make a far more positive impact on the customer, we can really innovate, and we can even turn business into a force for good in the world.
Biography
Blaire Palmer is a former BBC journalist turned organisational culture and leadership specialist and keynote speaker who has worked on flagship Radio 4 programmes like Today and Woman’s Hour. For the past 24 years, Blaire has worked with organisations helping to drive real change in their businesses and create places where people can come and do their best work. Currently, Blaire speaks internationally at conferences and events, calling on audiences of senior leaders to rethink what leadership means in the modern era.
Her new book Punks in Suits is a call to arms for leaders to embrace change and a practical guide offering clarity on the most pertinent workplace challenges of the modern era.
