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Leaders Need To Make Organizations The Places Of Workers' Dreams

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As longtime business school researchers and teachers in the areas of organizational culture and leadership, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones are as aware of anybody of all the current enthusiasm for “authentic leaders.” Indeed, a few years back they wrote a book with the title Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? that argued that authenticity was “a necessary condition for the exercise of effective leadership”. The message that current and aspiring leaders should “be themselves – more – with skill” has, they say, attracted broad interest and support. Nevertheless, they have grown aware that many feel that their ability to be authentic is dependent on their organizations being authentic. It follows, then, that the authentic organization should allow and encourage those working there to be their best selves and so create a sort of self-reinforcing power. The new book, Why Should Anyone Work Here? (Harvard Business Review Press), is an attempt by Goffee and Jones to set out how this might come about.

They have many examples of organizations – not all of them the usual suspects – that are making valiant efforts to create the great workplaces that are at the center of this quest. But they are also experienced enough to know that many well-meaning efforts are doomed to failure for reasons as varied as being too limited or simply missing the point of what people are looking for. Mission statements, they point out, are often so all-encompassing or vague as to be the very opposite of inspiring, while those that are clear and direct are often undermined by the actual behaviour of those who commission them. On the other hand, many organizations sign up for diversity initiatives and yet fail to see the gains that are supposed to follow because – while they have recruited people of different gender or race to their previous norm – they have not really embraced difference. Often the new hires share similar educational and work backgrounds as those they have replaced.

The important thing is not to allow such setbacks to put organizations off trying to improve how they operate. Inevitably, Goffee and Jones begin with a little scene-setting that explores how the world is changing to such an extent that the old idea of the organization is becoming less and less relevant. In particular, they describe how younger workers are both looking for something they can believe in and less inclined to stick with a single employer for any length of time. All of which, they argue, makes the drive to create better employers all the more urgent.

While noting that many organizations are plagued by disengagement – four in ten workers around the world are reckoned to be disengaged – and dysfunction, Goffee and Jones have looked to the positive and – over four years – canvassed opinions on what people’s ideal workplaces looked like. Their views generally fell into six categories that have been fashioned into the mnemonic DREAMS.

Difference – “I want to work in a place where I can be myself, where I can express the ways in which I’m different and how I see things differently.”

Radical honesty – “I want to know what’s really going on.”

Extra value – “I want to work in an organization that magnifies my strengths and adds extra value for me and my personal development.”

Authenticity – “I want to work in an organization I’m proud of, one that truly stands for something.”

Meaning – “I want my day-to-day work to be meaningful.”

Simple rules – “I do not want to be hindered by stupid rules or rules that apply to some people but not others.”

Goffee and Jones accept that the themes are on the one hand broadly obvious while also being counter to traditional practices and habits in companies and on another almost impossible to adhere to completely. “Almost all require leaders to carefully balance competing interests and to rethink how they allocate their time and attention,” they write. But Goffee and Jones do not stop by just stating the goals as some lofty aspiration. They provide plenty of help for achieving them and point out the potential pitfalls as well as the advantages of succeeding. Moreover, the book includes a chapter devoted to the trade-offs and challenges facing leaders. In the end, though, there is no escaping the task. “Organizations must forge forward in the direction of this ideal or risk being left behind, competitively and by their own people in terms of engagement and commitment,” they write.

Since engagement and commitment are key factors in performance, it follows that a serious attempt to make the dreams a reality (as it were) should more than pay off in financial terms. The authors originally trained as sociologists, though, and there is an over-riding sense that they believe that – central as organizations are to our lives – if enough of them can get this right society might just be better off in more general terms, too. They quote Studs Terkel, the late Chicago broadcaster who wrote in Working, one of his many oral histories: “Work is about daily meaning as well as daily bread; for recognition as well as cash, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying ... We have a right to ask of work that it include meaning, recognition, astonishment and life!”

Indeed, they describe early on in the book how they believe that “the new task of leadership” is less about exciting others and more about orchestrating or creating environments where others can follow their own authentic obsession. As Goffee said at an event at London Business School launching the book earlier this week, “You’d be surprised by where people find meaning.” The examples he offered were gutting a fish or pouring a beer. But the reality is that many people’s work is more mundane than these tasks, which at least can inspire an attempt to perform them with a certain panache. Then it is a case of making the overall operation feel worthwhile or at least part of something bigger. All of this suggests a need for much more of a rethink about the nature of leadership than is generally felt necessary. Goffee and Jones put the challenge like this: “Modern leadership may be as much about an authenticity of task or place as it is about the person leading and what that individual thinks or does.”

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