Ideas For Navigating a New World of Work
More Ideas For Helping Employees Navigate and Succeed in Today's World of Work
After over a decade working at the intersection of digital transformation, leadership and organizational change initiatives, I’ve come to learn that for many transformations the willingness and ability to change is less about the technology and mostly about the people.
After looking at it for almost a decade, time and time again I saw that when we fail to adopt a change or struggle to evolve or adapt to new innovation, it is often less to do with the technology, but more, with the ability to give people the mindset and toolset to change.
At the time, this made me reflect upon the fact that many companies really need change, or the ability to change as a competency or capability in their organization. Sure, getting through a transformation is hard, but what happens when you have to do it again?
A few years ago, I began observing a growing need for this ability to change, both for companies as well as individual people. This time, it had less to do with a specific technology, but rather, what seemed like a consistent and continuous release of new technologies, cultural shifts, and employer experience shifts and worker desires that didn’t seem to end. Case in point, in the 2010’s alone, we saw movements like
All of this eventually became themes under the bigger umbrella of “the future of work” or “4th industrial revolution.” To me, it showed that it was time to start to re-think and re-evaluate the tried and true ways we were building organizations, leading teams, structuring the employee experience and teaching professionals about navigating their careers. And then a global pandemic hit, and put many of these trends on overdrive. But the existing themes as well as the cycle of challenges many of us have faced over the past three years,
For the past two years, I’ve been exploring new ideas that can help us collectively think differently about how we help leaders lead and build companies and help employees grow, lead, and thrive in a world of work that is ever-changing and constantly evolving
This has led me on a journey of conversations, dinners, coffees, zoom calls, and brainstorming sessions with over 500 people, and fortunately, a handful of them have made it into the hundreds of podcasts I’ve produced, newsletters I’ve written and articles I’ve published.
Through all these conversations, I’m more convinced than ever that we still need new, better and more ideas for how we can collectively help employees navigate and thrive in today’s world of work.
For this week’s newsletter, I wanted to put together a “curated playlist” of some of the ideas that I keep coming back to as I continue to explore a deeper question of “What can we teach employees so they can continue to succeed, and thrive in a new world of work?”
My Playlist
Podcast: Creating Language for a New World of Work (Feat. Steve Cadigan) - As the former CHRO of LinkedIn during a time of hypergrowth, Steve saw first hand how the world of work was evolving as well as the lack of preparedness we had in keeping up with the change. In our interview, Steve details some of the common legacy mindsets about the workplace that exist, and how we might create new ideas and language for a modern world of work
Podcast: What’s a Good Enough Job? (Feat Simone Stolzoff) - Simone writes about the workplace and careers, and in his book, asks and wonders what the workplace would look like (in the Western world) if instead of all of us placing work at the center of our lives, what if we just tried to find a “good enough job?”
Podcast: Expanding Our Views on Career Growth (Feat Shana Lebowitz) Gaynor)
Shana is former reporter at Insider, and her book, wrote about a more modern way of thinking about career growth. Instead of feeling like people can only grow through taking new roles or opportunities, what if we could find more ways to find meaning and fulfillment in our current ones.
Christina is many things, including an entrepreneur, professor and musician. As a self-prescribed human venn diagram, Christina has been on a mission to find a type of career that enables her to live a life that aligns to her own values and interests. To do this, she’s applied concepts of financial portfolio theory and come up with a new career model to help people think about their careers as a “portfolio” and enable us to think more expansively about how to construct a career that fits within the context of our life.
Podcast: The Pathless Path (Feat. Paul Millerd)
After leaving the corporate world to freelance and travel the world, Paul Millerd began writing about his journey and broader reflections and research on the state of the workplace. Along the way, Paul has found a way of working that fits within the context of his life that eschews traditional norms about work and careers. Paul’s book and work urges us to think more expansively and creatively about some longly held norms about work, the workplace and modern american culture, and then pushes us to consider how we can pursue an alternative path for success, and finding work that really makes us feel alive.
Podcast: Recalculating Our Mindset For a New World of Work (Feat. Lindsey Pollak)
Lindsey is a longtime workplace and career expert and has written many books about career development. In her latest book, Reculating, Lindsey makes the case that instead of focusing on a career path, we should develop a navigation system that helps us navigate the twists and turns that life and careers bring us, and to embrace the journey.
Article: How Employees Can Navigate a Changing World of Work (Me) While many of the content at large in the broader future of work landscape (ex: analyst reports, consulting research, think tanky stuff) focuses on the importance of companies and leaders that need to navigate change and think differently, or the importance of “upskilling at scale” we also need to consider the people that will play a critical role in this future of work - everyday employees. This is my own thinking around the playbook that employees can use to create opportunities for themselves to stand out and thrive in a new world of work.
Article: 6 Principles For Managing Your Career (Me) - These are the practical principles I teach in my workshops and courses around how to manage your career in the workplace today.
As readers of this newsletter may know, one of my favorite sayings is Albert Einstein’s quote “You cannot use an old map to explore a new world.” To me, these conversations represent ideas for helping us develop a new map for helping employees thrive and navigate a constantly changing world of work.
If you get a chance to listen or read these I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how to educate the next generation of leaders about what we need to equip employees with in order to thrive in a new world of work.
Have a great week!
Al