Do we need a completely new approach to leadership at some level?
By Ted Bauer, Jhana staff writer
Global Human Capital Trends 2017, the newest in a series of annual reports from Deloitte, was recently released. While we have a dedicated in-house research team at Jhana and speak often to people managers about challenges and opportunities, the annual Deloitte report has become somewhat of a benchmark for the space overall — so it’s important to highlight some of the key findings here.
Will jobs disappear?
The report is spearheaded by Josh Bersin, and he summarized some of the key findings in a recent article for Forbes. One of the more interesting aspects is the role of automation, which has been discussed more and more recently (Presidential election, much business journalism, etc.) The Deloitte research found that:
- 38% of companies believe robotics/automation will be “fully implemented” in their organization within five years
- 48% of respondent companies said their current automation projects are going “excellent or very well”
Those two data points would point to automation coming faster than we all expect — although it’s probably not likely to replace managers anytime soon, admittedly. So what does that mean for jobs? This is where the data gets curiouser and curiouser:
- Only 20% of companies believe automation will directly lead to job loss
- By contrast, 77% of respondents said it would lead to better jobs
50% of the companies who responded said they are implementing processes to re-train humans to work side-by-side with robots.
The shifting landscape around automation is only one piece of the whole puzzle, though.
The problem of productivity
Despite increases in technology, business productivity (in North America) seems to be dropping, and employee engagement scores have been flat or declining for years now. And as Bersin notes, the average American worker in 2016 took one less week of vacation than an average worker in 1998.
All told, only 11 percent of companies surveyed were confident in their ability to build “an organization of the future;” in our own Jhana research, we’ve seen lower levels of confidence around future organization topics as well — such as managing increasingly remote teams.
Because of this shifting landscape, 88% of responding companies said their greatest need was new ways of organizing people and rewarding them; 59% of respondents said this was an “urgent” issue. But despite those scores, only 11% of companies claimed they knew how to implement processes geared towards that.
What we need is a new type of leadership
Bersin also notes that all these factors, taken together, indicate that organizations need a completely new type of leadership for 2020 and beyond. Citing “old, dated models of leadership,” he believes companies still practicing those — i.e. over-relying on hierarchy — will continue to fail.
We know from other research that bad leadership does have bottom-line implications — one bad manager in a crucial role can cost a company $144,000 per day. (That might be the equivalent of that manager’s annual salary.) Similarly, bad management practices have been shown to lose companies $15.5M/year — bigger numbers in bigger companies — and unclear, excess management loses the U.S. about $3 trillion (with a T, yes) per year.
The Deloitte research seems to indicate that more and more companies are understanding the crucial nature of these issues — but they are in various stages of actually doing something about it. One of our more recent research pieces, across 812 managers who use Jhana, actually showed a pretty large disconnect between how employees want to be developed (bite-size information, coaching, feedback) and how companies tend to develop employees (webinars, courses).
If you understand that work is changing and different managerial styles/approaches are needed, the next question is: what do you plan to do about it?
