Heather McGowan Quotes

leaders should understand that employees want to feel like their work has a purpose and act in that way. Yet, if we look at Gallup's research over the past 20 years, we can see the highest rates of disengagement, mental illness, burnout, and loneliness, which are not exactly traits that highlight being purpose-driven.

Not only has it played out, it's gone from push to pull. So it used to be the employees pushing employees to learn. Now the Pew's latest survey on why people leave organisations, of course number one is compensation; people jump for more dollars, but that doesn't sustain. But with a net score that was the same, it was learning opportunities, because people realise, "If I'm not learning, I'm not going to be earning in the future". And so they know that's what makes them valuable in the future, and so that's becoming a real pull with employees.

Well first, I think we need to dispel the notion that empathy means less, and I didn't really even understand it until I started doing these book tour interviews where people said to me, "Okay, so we've got to be empathetic, we've got to be nice, we've got to make concessions for people, let them do less and expect less". And I thought, "Well, there may be days that's true". Your dad dies, you have to put your dog to sleep, there are days that we have to be human and that's true. But no, that's not what I'm talking about.

What I call myself is a Future of Work strategist and a keynote speaker and an author. And Chris Shipley and I wrote The Adaptation Advantage, which came out in 2020. The premise of it was, the future work is really learning and we can't have fixed occupational identities or fixed ideas, we have to essentially get adept at adapting, and that came out just prior to the pandemic. And, oh boy, we did not know how much we were going to need to adapt then!

I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you". And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust. That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with. This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?

I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled. Empathy ultimately drives performance. It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance. Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that. What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life. And we had agency over our personal life. And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life.

It's absolutely the best date that I've had. No one is going to live up to that. This wasn't on my bucket list but let's just end the list now. There's nothing that's going to beat this.

It's not like the old way was working, and now we're suddenly loafing," she joked. "Instead, I think we're now putting work in the right place in our lives and getting the right social connections and support so we can do better work."

I was really worried that I would be a mess but I held it together. It was a day that I am honestly not going to forget. I'm quite lucky he was late. It let me get accustomed to the situation and compose myself a bit.

As a society, we've put work first, and it hasn't helped work. We have not done better work when we put work first,

Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home.

'I asked about his wedding and he told me that he got to the point where he was just like, 'wedding planners, leave me alone'. He did say that he was really involved in his wedding, though.

I say there are four shifts that a leader needs to embrace. First is a shift in mindset. You're not managing people and processes any more, you're enabling success. And to be intentionally provocative about it, I say, "You used to think of the people as working for you. Now, you work for them. You enable their success, because you're not going to get anywhere without their success". The second is a shift in culture. We used to, when we had the same skills and knowledge of the leader and the team, and then usually across the team, you could pit people against each other. Forced rankings, all those kind of bad ideas, Hunger Games kind of stuff, that doesn't work anymore. So you've got to shift from peers as competitors to peers as collaborators.

Yeah, so the book is really divided into three sections. We try to make it very easy for folks to both read and skip around, because I am a short-attention-span person as well, so you should be able to read it on a cross-country flight. It's about 200 pages with about 35 graphics. First part is, meet your new workforce because it's not the one you left in 2019. Second part is, you have to rethink about how you actually organise work, because the maps and the models in the past are not only not helpful, they can actually be dangerous, like driving in the city of Boston, which I'm from, using maps before the big dig, it's just not going to get you anywhere, it's going to get you lost and frustrated. And then the third part is about rethinking your leadership entirely, because here's what we think happened.

You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things. I know what you went through frankly sucked. And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work. So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics".