T
TALKING HEADS
Leaders must model sacrifice to return to the so
I
Margaret
Heffernan
In these volatile
and uncertain
times, work must be
redesigned around
people and purpose.
42 // Future Talent
t used to be that leaders
just needed to know how
to sell things for more than
t h e y c o s t . T h a t wa s
often hard enough. But now the tables
have turned. Profit isn’t always a
requirement — but satisfying multiple
constituencies is.
Today, employees crave work
that has meaning beyond money.
They want to feel that the time and
effort they invest in work serves more
than their boss and their landlord.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to
expect some intrinsic satisfaction
from work — on top of the whole shiny
basket of extrinsic incentives that
many managers believe condition
productive behaviours. But if you’re
leading in a business with razor-
thin margins — which most are —
accommodating these demands
is difficult.
And that’s only the beginning. Just
as Bangladeshi garment workers
require safe working conditions, both
gig workers and corporate strivers
demand that the hours and conditions
under which they work don’t damage
their cognitive or human capacity.
Long hours, excessive time spent
with technology, working nights and
weekends: all of these, we now know,
erode our capacity to think — even
though thinking is what most of us
are paid for these days.
Although we’ve known, since the
first productivity experiments in
1888, that human capacity declines
precipitately after about 40 hours
a week, few employers bow to
the science.
Yet you don’t have to believe it
for it to be true — so flying in the
face of over 100 years’ evidence is
having entirely predictable results, in
the form of burnout, mental illness,
errors, accidents and disengagement.
I n c re a s e d p ro d u c t i v i t y wo n’ t
be achieved by sweating your
human resources.
The current volatility of the working
environment demands resilience
from everyone. This is both the
physical resilience of recovery from
crunch mode, and the intellectual and
imaginative resilience to embrace and
experiment with new ideas, casting
aside what won’t work and moving on
to find what does.
The best response to uncertainty
is a high level of experimentation,
but that means that much of what
is tried will fail. For all that writers
are rhapsodic, talking about the
long-term learning that failure
offers, they gloss over its immediate
emotional cost. Invent a new app or
“What actually
motivates
people most
is each other”
product or service that fails; sure, it’s
learning — but abandoning fantasies
of glory and triumph hurts. Anyone
who tells you otherwise hasn’t taken
any real risks. Recovery takes time
and stamina.
And if all of this wasn’t tough
enough, any leader who isn’t wilfully
blind must now confront the challenge
of legitimacy that global warming
presents. We’ve known about this for
30 years now but, taken as a whole,
business response has been little, late,
lazy and often evasive.
The time left to repair the planet is
short and this decade will segregate,
with pitiless clarity, those who listen
to their children from those who listen
to no one. The position of business and
government as sources of solutions
has never been regarded with greater
scepticism and the race is on to see
who earns a licence to operate.
This might sound scary and, to
unseasoned managers, it is. Those
with more experience need now
to dig deep to remember what
years of booming economic growth
have obscured: that actually what
motivates people most is each other.
What gives work meaning isn’t key