A couple of years ago, I designed a training course for a client which was called, ‘The Human Skills of Leadership’ (without any irony). It covered topics like compassion, emotional intelligence and leadership skills – key aspects of leadership that I firmly believe we need more of at the moment.
And, with the upheaval that a pandemic has wrought on our society, I’m seeing so many more discussions, papers and books now exploring this human aspect of business, revisiting the ‘next step’ in our evolution. This book is one of those - focusing on the leadership approaches needed for organisations to survive in the overwhelming complexity of the 21st century. These approaches are all about those human skills.
The underlying message throughout this book is about the rehumanizing of leadership, around “transforming our organisations to operate from the axes of purpose and empathy with a view to creating a meaningful impact on the external environment of nature, market and society, and in our workplaces.”
It’s is split into three parts: Part I explores how we’ve got to where are now: Part 2, examines ‘Why Change is possible’ and in Part 3, the authors unpack and share some great ideas on how to get purpose back into business.
With the focus on ‘The Future is Human’, they help the reader with approaches to ‘excavating and aligning’ organisation and team purpose and introduce a Purpose Framework. This tool, comprising four axes, looks at organisation purpose from two different perspectives – the outside in and inside out — which offer some interesting approaches to helping teams work on this themselves.
Finally, there’s a very brief but very insightful Final Note, underlining the continual task that creating purpose is for leaders at all levels in organisations. For me, every one of the tips in this section is about communication and empathy.
First and foremost, this book is all about showing organisations that purpose and empathy can make a real difference. But throughout, there is an underlying message that from the perspective of survival, purpose, empathy, values and meaning cannot be ignored if organisations are to survive.
With a workforce demographic shifting to millennials and from baby boomers and Gen Xers over the next ten years, it’s a message that any leader ignores at their peril.
“A recent study by PwC called Workforce of the future: The Yellow World in 2030, found that 88% of millennials want to work for a company whose values reflect their own. More tellingly, it is predicted that millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce in about seven to eight years”