Steven Howard

It is painfully obvious that the pre-pandemic models of operating and managing no longer work as well with today’s workforce. Simply stated: work is not working for many people, as witnessed by the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting trends.

Quite frankly, our leadership models are broken and filled with obsolete leadership practices – especially the concept that leaders need to be people managers. Managing people is a 1980s construct no longer valid or applicable.

People do not want to be managed. They want to be led. To be motivated. Trusted. Given opportunities to grow their skill sets and decision-making capabilities.

They want (and need) to be coached, mentored, empowered, unshackled from directives, and freed from being told how to accomplish their work. Leaders at every level of organizations now need to excel at the coaching and people development aspects of leadership.

As Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn’s first Chief Human Resources Officer, wrote in the Foreword to my book Humony Leadership: Mindsets, Skills, and Behaviors for Being a Successful People-Centric Leader, “Most legacy leadership models strive to achieve control, consistency, and reliable outcomes. As we all have come to realize in recent years, in a world where so much is unknown, and the pace of change is relentless, what we really need is a model to help us expect change and instability.”

Welcome to Your New Organization

The pre-pandemic model of the organization-employee relationship was that organizations bought an individual’s time (usually 9 to 5) and mandated that this daily time slot would be devoted solely to them five times a week. And the organization told employees where they would physically be placed to spend this time sold to their employer.

The new model for the employee-organization relationship (note that now the employee comes first) is that organizations buy people’s skill sets and purpose (short-term or long-term). The employees and their organizations must now decide together where individual and collective work is best performed. They must also agree on how each employee can best deliver upon their responsibilities to the rest of the organization and its customers. Best outcomes are produced when the employee has work/life harmony and integration rather than when managers employ tight oversight and micromanaging tactics.

Leaders and managers need to forget about the idea of control. That is an old-school leadership mentality. Control went out the window in 2020 with the lockdown-mandated work-from-home environment. This means leaders have to change how they trust and lead people.

It also requires a mindset and verbiage change from seeing employees as staff, assets, or resources to seeing and understanding them as human beings. It also means respecting that these humans have responsibilities and commitments (not just lives) outside work. Responsibilities and commitments that leaders and organizations should help them fulfill.

Doing so requires increasing respect and trust in the workplace. Leaders need to understand that they must start first by trusting and respecting their team members (and not expecting automatic trust or respect based on titles or a position on the organization chart).

Will this be easy? No.

But it need not be difficult or expensive either.

As John Keynes wrote, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.”