What's so good about working for your organisation?

The typical employer-employee relationship is adversarial in nature. It rarely comes to blows. It sometimes comes to lawyers. It always involves a contract.

Fair trade?

Work in many cases, particularly where Taylorism has left its mark, is an inhumane activity that requires the worker to unnaturally contort themselves into an industrial process, which they then repeat ad infinitum.

This might include quality control checks at a sex toy factory or staring into a spreadsheet trying to reconcile the chasmic divide that separates reality from the answer your boss is expecting. Each of these requires a suppression of our human nature in exchange for money.

Remote working

At the sadistic end of management, your boss adopts a sympathetic tone. She seems to care. Just keep in mind her job is to eliminate ‘conveyor belt friction’, not nurture future friendships. 

At the compassionate end of management, the boss is typically cold and abrupt. She recognises that your humanity, and her own, are compromised. She cannot allow a relationship to form with you because that would take her deeper down the sociopathic path than necessary.

The job of management in the modern factory is to maximise return on resources, including the human ones.

The jig is up

Unlike my generation, who saw this power imbalance as intrinsic to work, many young people are not buying it. They have seen what a lifetime of process work did to their parents and they are not impressed.

At the top end, this includes the acquisition of a big house, shiny cars and an inability to savour the moment.  Such people can be found at dinner parties trying to convince their fellow diners that their professional career meant something, and perhaps was even noble.

In essence it was a prolonged exercise in kowtowing to unreasonable bosses in order to keep their career on track. Perhaps the only ‘salve’ of this model was that they got to do the same to those that worked for them. This is what regeneration meant in the industrial era.

Careers are over

As I have covered elsewhere, whilst careers have been around for a very long time, they do not sit well with an increasingly disruptive world. Thanks to technological advances, my ambition to become a world-class database expert would have quickly led to a career cul-de-sac.

You could argue that in all professions there is and always will be an element of progression, eg. apprentice, journey man and master. Well let’s take a highly skilled job such as a heart surgeon. We are just a few years away from that role having the social status of a Kwikfit Tyre operative.

So what next?

Imagine a workplace where the management-employee relationship was not adversarial - where a win for either was a win for both and where the organisation capitalised on their employees’ humanity.

I have inferred such a model from studying many leading employers. They recognise that fundamentally they are in the cognition business. Cognition being the fuel that drives innovation (a well-established cure for chaos). Stressed people have less cognitive bandwidth and are thus less innovative. Being permitted to express your humanity at work is a surefire way to significantly calm the mind.

In such environments, the worker is perceived as a cognitive athlete rather than a process cog. The work environment is now a cognitive gymnasium where high performing athletes go to raise their game in the company of other high performers.

What was once a sociopathic boss is now a cognitive coach. Their skill lies in helping the athletes they coach improve their performance. To do that they need to create a psychologically safe space that enables the intimate conversations that reflect a healthy coach-athlete relationship.

Good at what?

But how does this play out in a post-career world? None of us know what lies ahead societally or professionally. The workplace will increasingly require the sort of person that has more in common with our scavenging ancestors than our white-collar parents.

Our mental, emotional and even physical capabilities will need to be more attuned. Such is the nature of innovating in an increasingly chaotic world.

So how will we then map meaning onto our professional lives? Well think of your career as less about becoming the master of something and more about mastering yourself.

Think intellectual elegance, emotional maturity and physical confidence. In many respects the best version of you is the most innovative version of you. Organisations will pay money for that.

Furry handcuffs?

This is not a reference to the quality control role I mentioned earlier. The smartest employers will look to ‘lock you in’ not through comfortable captivity (golden / furry handcuffs) embedded in a draconian contract, but by offering you the conditions where you get to develop and thrive alongside worldclass athletes.

Why would you ever leave such an environment?

This in my view is the future of talent management. And this will increasingly be the reason why people want to work for your organisation.

This article also appeared in the Intelligent Organisation newsletter on LinkedIn.