Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Leadership today suffers from a lack of diverse learning, focusing too much on technical skills over human understanding.
- STEM education is important, but it risks creating one-dimensional leaders lacking critical thinking and empathy.
- Alternative leadership programs emphasize personal growth, legacy, and human experience to develop well-rounded leaders.
In a previous article, I suggested that persistently poor HR data across industries underscores a leadership crisis.
That employee engagement has hovered around 40% for some sixty years is bad enough, but it seems that during the pandemic many simply threw up their hands and quit. The Great Recession, as it was called during the pandemic, has only partially abated over the past several years.
Numerous factors come together to create our current disengagement crisis, with tech displacement and AI being among the most talked about. But there is something deeper and more troubling underlying that.
Specifically, in this piece, I want to talk about the increasingly limited range of learning, reading, and understanding that corporate leaders bring with them into their jobs. To be clear, I am not blaming specific leaders for this. They are simply executing the scripts that are placed before them.
Analog Reflections
In a recent LinkedIn post, Airbnb’s Mick McConnell reflected on what it’s like to operate in today’s world as a member of “the last analog generation.” This would be Gen X. As a Gen Xer myself, this piece really struck a chord.
I was reminded of the fact that for many years, successful organizational leaders, in business, government, and the social sector, majored in liberal arts or social science disciplines as undergraduates.
Then the specific and technical skills and knowledge they needed to advance in their careers they learned on the job. Over time, one would develop sufficient technical knowledge to be successful in their chosen field.
Those days are long gone. Fewer people than ever before study the liberal arts. Or social sciences. Or really anything that does not lead directly to a solid starting salary. Particularly in light of the mind boggling escalation of college and university tuition, this is understandable.
Less Reading, More Information
Americans read less today than perhaps ever. Yes, we take in more information, but we’ve lost our capacity for critical reasoning, intellectualism, and general ability to parse (bogus) information and make truly informed decisions.
It is estimated that, on average, we are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day. It is a wonder any of us have any time to think.
Further, pressure on leaders, from investors and the business press, to make quarterly decisions for the primary benefit of shareholders only institutionalized our growing simple-mindedness and the moral and ethical dilemmas this creates. There is only so much time in the day.
When our education is largely concerned with solving for X — whether in finance or technology — the human dimensions and implications for decision making are easy to bracket off.
Economists refer to these as externalities. Pesky and unpredictable factors that muck up our models. Demands for efficiency, predictability, and scale require nothing less.
Being super competent with ones and zeros does not make for a fully educated person.
STEM education, as critically important as it is, creates its own dilemmas. Being super competent with ones and zeros does not make for a fully educated person.
It might make for a good job candidate, but realistically many of those ones-and-zeros types of roles will be performed by AI in the future anyway.
So where does that leave us?
Proteus
From here, much of what I have to say will be seen (by some) as hopelessly atavistic. I get that reverting to something ancient may seem odd. As Tom Papa says, no one wants to go back in time and wear burlap underwear.
However, nor do we want to capitulate to the increasing one-dimensionality of today’s crop of leaders.
The data begs for an alternative.
As a former business school professor, I have long admired some of the more humanistic and “radical” leadership development programs out there. Many of these, not surprisingly, are outside of the U.S.
One particular program, Proteus, (formerly offered at London Business School), I suggest, is the type of “leadership training” program we desperately need now.
Proteus was the Greek god of change and shape-shifting. The program was founded by legendary LBS professor Nigel Nicholson, who is one of the leading management thinkers of his generation.
It essentially has nothing to do with “business.” Rather, it is about life, legacy, and human experience. The program was a week-long journey of personal and cultural discovery, where each day participants embarked on a different field trip to engage the world.
- London Zoo
Field trip to the London Zoo to contemplate humans’ place in the animal kingdom and how we are different from and similar to other higher primates.
- London at large
Visiting different places around the city to develop a broader sense of the global nature of the city as a way to appreciate global development, growth, and commerce.
- Cambridge University
A visit to science labs at the university to understand how, for example, life changing pharmaceuticals are researched, developed, commercialized, and change people’s lives.
- Schools around London
Visiting both primary schools and high schools to understand how kids are learning and developing, and how they represent the future.
- Biography workshop
The final day of the program was a biography workshop, where participants reflect on their own lives and impact up to that point, their future legacy, and how they might change their lives (like Proteus) to better adapt to a fast-changing world.
These were followed by a “biography workshop” where senior leaders could reflect on their impact, legacy, and relevance in a fast-changing world.
Creating context and reminding leaders how their work is situated within society, and how the lives of employees are shaped, creates powerful change in how people lead teams.
On Shakespeare
Finally, what about literature? Years ago, I came across a few leadership programs that had participants read and talk about issues of ethics, morals, decision making, right/wrong, as they manifested in Shakespeare’s plays.
That might not fly today, for the reasons I suggest above. But the world would be better if programs like that were more common today.
For those who might find such a notion interesting, the American Shakespeare Center does offer leadership training and development programs that aim to do precisely this.
For all the many reasons that Shakespeare is difficult to read and comprehend, there is still hope yet for rescuing future leadership from the restrictive mindsets of ones-and-zeros.
And you don’t have to wear burlap underwear to get started.
