Leadership in the Age of Personalization
We are seeing this every day in the increasingly straightforward racism spoken not just by our president but by many people who feel free to express their frustration at losing the power they have come to expect as their right.
People who have made the rules and benefited from those rules are not happy when those rules change – even if that change is good and necessary and just.
I see the same dynamics at play within our corporations, and it stretches even broader than race and ethnicity to encompass every person’s individual identity.
That dynamic is this:
A system operates in a certain way: follow this path, get this experience, demonstrate these skills, move up the ladder rung by rung.
- “This path” has been one that is only truly accessible to certain people.
- “This experience” can only be acquired by following “this path.”
- “These skills” can only be mastered while practicing “this experience.”
- Each rung of the ladder is only reachable by someone who has mastered “these skills” – which we’ve already established is only achievable by the people who, from the beginning, had access to “this path.”
- “Rung by rung” is the only acceptable pace – those who followed that pace resent anyone who dares to want to move up faster or even skip some rungs.
A subset of people have benefited from this system, but they don’t see the system at work because they’ve never bumped up against it.
When that system changes, they lash out.
For 12 years I’ve had a front-row seat at several of the most powerful organizations in the world. I’ve assessed thousands of mid and top leaders and personally worked with hundreds. Leaders everywhere tell me they have felt restricted their entire professional lives, and they want to be free to be who they are and empower others to contribute.
But they are trapped in and by this system.
This system isn’t just about who gets hired and who doesn’t. It’s also about how employees are allowed to grow or not, within their organization. How people are allowed to collaborate or not, across the boundaries of department and function in an organization. How people are allowed to experiment or not, within their own jobs.
It’s about how people are allowed to contribute at the highest levels of their individual capacity.
Or not.
Mostly not.
I write about this now, not just because I care about these people who are so frustrated and exhausted. I write about this now because if our corporations don’t get this right, they are doomed. How can leaders confront marketplace challenges when they feel crushed and in turn stifle those they lead? Right now, they cling to standards that are no longer relevant because they desperately want to keep everyone the same. They want to keep in place the standards that they know, the standards that served them well in the past, the standards that keep things predictable and familiar.
I have been part of and worked with some of the largest organizations in the world across almost every industry from health care to automotive from big-box retail to banking. I have heard what people are thinking but not saying to their leaders: We have been conditioned to operate in environments that standardized our identities and now we want those identities back.
But corporate values and mission statements never account for the mass variations of this need for individuality and inclusion and the coming of the Cultural Demographic Shift—even when they say they do. That’s why they are unprepared for the standardization of me.
Saying—and even believing—we respect individuals or we value and strive for diversity and inclusion is not execution of those beliefs. Substituting even more inclusive words every few years but never challenging anyone to do the evolved thinking needed to live those values and mission statements does not lead to employee influence either; it only reinforces the mission of the company over inclusion and individuality.
This causes people to either quit or disengage.
It’s not just the vast majority of Millennials who are disengaged either; nearly half of the generations before them report being disengaged at work.
That’s right: The very leaders who reinforce the rules from the age of standardization feel alienated by it.
Yet senior leadership still fights the evolution to leadership in the age of personalization out of fear—the fear of being vulnerable and exposing their insecurities about how little they understand what needs to be done, and their inability to lead through change.
That’s why so many leaders today are unprepared to lead this transformation even if the mission of the company says they should. Because corporate missions are about standardization; they are about attitude.
Shared beliefs are about personalization and align around individual and organizational goals; they are about mindset. Shared beliefs allow for alignment between the goals of the company and the goals of individuals.
I get it. Reinvention is exhausting—perhaps more exhausting than the chaotic work leaders are doing now, which is just doing what they’re told. Better to fight and resist rather than to recognize that we have to think differently about the way we approach our work and how work works . . . and who we are!
One senior leader told me after slogging through the chaos during two decades at her company that she didn’t have the will to change anymore. She also admitted that it annoyed her that changing now would mean the next generation wouldn’t have the same slog she did.
But then she thought from a more human side and said:
“I should want them to go through that simply because I did, and be as tired as I am? I should want them to lose a sense of who they are just because I had that stripped away from me? I should wait for the company to value what they bring to the table and it’s too late for me to contribute?”
Those revelations from that leader who had seen her identity stripped away over the course of two decades are exactly why none of this works in your head unless you know in your heart what I am telling you: operationalize this or fail to lead in the future. You are running out of time. If you don’t reinvent yourself and your organization, you will become extinct – or at least your role will.
Experience has less and less value these days. Most skills can be automated, some might say commoditized. That’s the problem with standardization in the age of personalization: everything begins to lose value, importance, and relevance faster. Standardization and the efficiencies that go with it should give us the time to invest in leadership in the age of personalization to make organizations and their leaders relatable and relevant now and in the future.
It’s time to do more than think about what this means, not only to the health of our economy but to ourselves. It’s time to be the best me and us we can be.
