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.

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?

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,

It still seems a bit surreal and now that it's over, I can try to absorb all the little bits of the day. Getting a kiss on the cheek from him was absolutely brilliant