CHAPTER 6

Humanizing the Workplace

Part 1 of this book defined what a Hyper-Learner is, explained why you should become one, and provided the knowledge and skills for how to do it. The answer to how to become a Hyper-Learner for most of us is a New Way of Being—a journey to our Best Selves that includes cultivating Inner Peace, developing a Hyper-Learning Mindset, and actively engaging in Hyper-Learning Behaviors. So far, you’ve created your Daily Intentions, identified the principles of a Hyper-Learning Mindset for yourself, and begun the process of identifying and assessing the Hyper-Learning Behaviors you need to adopt.

Part 2 now focuses on the environment where you do your work. Using the same why, what, and how approach, this chapter describes the New Way of Working that enables organizations and their people to be Hyper-Learners. Chapters 7 and 8 take a deeper dive into three key concepts fundamental to that New Way of Working: Caring, Trusting Teams; High-Quality, Making-Meaning Conversations; and collective flow. Chapter 9 provides an in-depth overview of the journey of EnPro Industries to a New Way of Working.

Understanding the type of work environment that will enable the highest levels of human cognitive, emotional, and behavioral performance as the digital age progresses is important because, if you work on a team or are a team leader, you can influence the culture and environment of how that team operates or functions. You can have a team culture that differs from the corporate culture. And if you have the opportunity to influence the corporate culture, even better. Remember, it is all about how people behave with each other.

It all comes down to what you can control or influence. You can control you. If you lead a team, you can influence the team by creating rules of engagement (of how you want to behave and work together). If you lead a functional area or a business unit or a geographical unit, you can likewise step up and use the key concepts in this book.

THE WHY

Why do we need a New Way of Working?

We need it because the dominant way of working in most organizations today will not enable Hyper-Learning. In fact, it will inhibit Hyper-Learning. That dominant way is based in large part on achieving compliance through fear, with the leadership model being command and control (i.e., directing others).

As the digital age advances, human beings must perform at their highest cognitive, emotional, and behavioral levels. Individuals must come to work with a state of mind and body reflecting Inner Peace, ready to fully engage in the higher-order cognitive, social, and emotional tasks that smart technology won’t be able to do well.

Hyper-Learning requires a work environment that embraces the science of adult learning (that we are suboptimal learners) and a work environment that mitigates the two big individual inhibitors of learning: ego and fear.

Hyper-Learning requires a work environment that is team-oriented and highly collaborative, not an individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest, competitive environment.

You can’t effectively coerce or command individuals to do the tasks that smart technology won’t be able to do well.

To fully enable humans to Hyper-Learn requires a New Way of Working that fundamentally challenges the cultures, policies, and procedures of traditional workplaces.

THE HOW

Humanizing the Workplace will require organizations to operate as idea meritocracies and embrace the psychological principles of positivity, self-determination, and psychological safety.

The digital age will continue to place higher and higher expectations on leaders, requiring them to excel at the desired Hyper-Learning Mindsets and Behaviors and to serve as role models of the types of thinking, emotional engagement, and collaboration—the team play—that is needed. I believe that leadership must become enable-ship, and that the chief executive officer of the future must become the chief enabling officer with primary responsibility for facilitating the levels of human performance needed for continual Hyper-Learning, innovation, and multi-stakeholder value creation.

It is time for the old ways of working to die.

The old ways of working involve internal competition, power plays, internal political gamesmanship, hierarchies, silos, ego, fiefdoms, a short-term focus primarily on quarterly earnings, cultures that promote survival-of-the-fittest mentalities, and attitudes exemplified by phrases like go along to get along, the boss knows best, keep your head down, don’t make waves, just do as you’re told, don’t challenge the status quo or a higher-up, and keep the boss happy.

These old ways generate anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, and worry. They are not conducive to human creativity, innovation, agility, adaptability, value creation, or strategic differentiation.

The old ways are not conducive to human growth and development.

The old ways are not conducive to Hyper-Learning.

The old ways of working will not work in the advancing digital age.

The old ways inhibit the highest levels of human performance. By emphasizing survival-of the-fittest mentalities and hyper-internal competition, they reinforce crass individualism and zero-sum thinking, which inhibits the development of diverse, cross-functional, Caring, Trusting Teams, which are needed for Hyper-Learning and innovation.

The old ways must be replaced by a humanistic, enabling system that liberates people to think and emotionally engage at their highest levels and to have the courage to innovate, create, and thrive in an idea meritocracy.

This new kind of system must support team environments that enable people to behave with each other in ways that lead to the highest levels of collective human performance that result in High-Quality, Making-Meaning Conversations and collective flow.

That is how businesses will create value as the digital age progresses.

That is how people will find more meaning in their work. That is how high employee engagement will happen.

Humanizing the Workplace is a pathway to your being, belonging, and becoming!

Work becomes a way that you can express your human uniqueness to the world.

Humanizing the Workplace is much more than being people-centric. People-centricity is necessary but not sufficient.

Humanizing the Workplace requires people to connect, relate, and engage with each other in ways that enable the uniqueness of each individual to contribute to the common purpose and meaningful mission.

Humanizing the Workplace means that you can bring your Best Self to work because you are cared about and respected as a unique human being and that is evidenced by how people behave.

Humanizing the Workplace means that the desired values and behaviors are woven into the daily way of working—the daily fabric of the organization—through practices that are used by all people every day.

In chapter 9 you will see an example of how this can be done.

Assume the person to whom you report came by and asked to talk with you. He or she said, “I want you to bring your Best Self to work, the same Best Self that you are with your friends and loved ones.”

What would that mean to you?

What new behaviors would you bring to your work? What current behaviors at work would you drop?

Gary Hamel says, “To put it bluntly, the most important task for any manager today is to create a work environment that inspires exceptional contribution and that merits an outpouring of passion, imagination and initiative.”⁹²

Does your employer care about your uniqueness as an individual human being?

Is your work designed to play to your strengths?

Do you have a personal development plan that your manager has committed to make happen?

Can you speak freely and honestly with your boss or higher-ups without the fear of negative consequences?

Can you be yourself at work? Is your Best Self at home different from the self you bring to work?

How many work friends can you be totally transparent and authentic with?

Can you be the “real” you at work?

Is your work meaningful and purposeful?

Leaders are starting to understand how the highest levels of human performance occur. Such performance originates with small teams of people who care about each other, feel psychologically safe with each other, trust each other, and believe in the purpose of their work.

The unique cognitive and emotional capabilities of human beings are what will differentiate organizations as the digital age advances.

Those qualities are evident in work environments that enable Hyper-Learning and are not coercive or stifling.

FOUR KEY CONCEPTS

The New Way of Working that will enable Hyper-Learning will require organizational leaders to cultivate an idea meritocracy and embrace three key psychological principles: positivity, psychological safety, and self-determination.⁹³

Idea Meritocracy

This is the model that both Google and Bridgewater Associates use.

In an idea meritocracy, the best data-driven idea or judgment wins irrespective of rank, compensation, or power. What determines any course of action is the best idea or judgment, not whose idea or judgment it is.

Is your place of work an idea meritocracy? Or does positional rank or power win most of the time?

Positivity

Leading research by cognitive, social, and positive psychologists, including Barbara Fredrickson and Alice Isen, has produced strong evidence that positive emotions enable and enhance cognitive processing, innovative thinking, and creativity and lead to better judgments and decision making. On the flip side, research has shown that negative emotions—especially fear and anxiety—have the opposite effect. Fear and anxiety in the workplace can take many forms, including fear of looking bad, speaking up, making mistakes, losing your job, or not being liked.

The work environment must be designed to reduce fears, insecurities, and other negative emotions. This concurs with eight major research studies that found that consistently high-performing businesses have high employee engagement and that such engagement occurs in people-centric cultures.⁹⁴

You already learned in part 1 how positive emotions enable Hyper-Learning and how negative emotions inhibit Hyper-Learning.

Is your place of work a positive emotional environment? Or is fear fairly widespread?

Self-Determination

Initially developed by psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan, self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the most well-known theories of human motivation. The theory is that intrinsic motivation—the tendency to seek out new and challenging situations and expand cognitive and behavioral capacities for their own sake as opposed to fulfilling social obligations or gaining some extrinsic reward—is supported when three innate human needs are met:

   Autonomy. The experience of volition and initiative. An example of this would be having input into how you do your job and feeling valued as a unique human being, not just a means to a corporate end.

   Relatedness. A sense of mutual respect and reliance with others. One example might be having a best friend at work.

   Competence. Succeeding at optimally challenging tasks and being able to attain desired outcomes, such as having the opportunity to grow and develop.

According to SDT, if employees feel that they have autonomy, relatedness, and effectiveness at work, they’re more likely to be highly engaged and thus more likely to perform at high levels.

WORKSHOP: SDT ASSESSMENT

SDT is so important. Here is a diagnostic I use with my client companies. I designed it for managers to assess whether they’re meeting the self-determination needs of the people who report to them. If you are a manager, I invite you to answer the questions separately for each person you manage and to create a plan to better meet each individual’s self-determination needs.

If you do not have direct reports, I invite you to assess how your manager or managers might fare under the diagnostic.

This is what I mean when I use the term humanizing business: knowing the people you work with well—their strengths, weaknesses, and goals and who they really are; knowing about their lives outside of work and their hopes and dreams; and knowing what they believe to be their human uniqueness—what they bring to work and can use to contribute to the purpose of the organization.

Psychological Safety

Feeling psychologically safe is feeling safe from retribution, which could be social ostracism, being passed over for good assignments, having bonuses or raises reduced, or even being transferred out of the team or fired on trumped-up charges. Studies show that without psychological safety, people will not fully embrace the hard parts of thinking and innovating: giving and receiving constructive feedback; challenging the status quo; asking and being asked the hard questions; being non-defensive, open-minded, and intellectually courageous; and having the courage to try new things and fail. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has conducted some of the best research on psychological safety, has found that it’s an essential element of organizational learning.

Psychologically safe environments have cultures of candor and are characterized by the permission to speak freely and make learning mistakes (within financial risk parameters). They are cultures that offer all employees a voice by devaluing elitism, hierarchy, and rank (other than with respect to compensation). Google’s research shows that psychological safety is the strongest determinant of high-performance teams.⁹⁵

It’s not enough to give permission to speak freely. Speaking freely should be acknowledged and emotionally rewarded publicly. Leaders and managers must publicly seek challenges to their views and beliefs. In this type of environment, leaders have to be human too. Overbearing, all-knowing, elitist leaders will be severely challenged under the New Way of Working.

The importance of psychological safety for Hyper-Learning is echoed in the words of renowned humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who stated that a person “reaches out to the environment in wonder and interest, and expresses whatever skills he has, to the extent that he is not crippled by fear, to the extent that he feels safe enough to dare.”⁹⁶

These four concepts—idea meritocracy, positivity, self-determination, and psychological safety—help an organization become more humanistic, people-centric, and human-development-centric.

Do you remember Marvin Riley’s goal of creating the perfect workplace? I believe that workplace must be humanistic and based on people-centricity, human development, and the four principles above.

LEADING OR ENABLING?

The New Way of Working requires a humanistic, people-centric, human-development-focused leadership model.

The dominant leadership model in many organizations today is a relic of the Industrial Revolution. It’s based on hierarchy and favors all-knowing leaders who command, control, and direct others. That type of leadership will become obsolete as the digital age advances because one cannot effectively command, control, or direct others to cognitively and emotionally perform at their highest levels. You can’t command or control someone to think critically, innovate, or emotionally engage with others. You cannot effectively command, control, or direct someone to be a Hyper-Learner.

Leaders must become enablers of organizational and human excellence. Enablers create the right environment for Hyper-Learning, model the desired mindsets and behaviors, and take responsibility for the culture. Leaders must themselves become passionate Hyper-Learners and create Caring, Trusting Teams (the subject of the next chapter). No one gets a pass under the New Way of Working. Managers must become enablers too, by becoming coaches tasked with the development of people and the removal of institutional obstacles to Hyper-Learning.

The Four Es

Leaders become enablers by modeling the Four Es: Engage, Embrace, Excel, and Enable.⁹⁷

ENGAGE with the world as a lifelong learner with a Quiet Ego.
Lifelong learning requires that you constantly stress-test your mental models and be wary of insularity, complacency, and overconfidence. Lifelong learning requires Hyper-Learning.

EMBRACE uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity like a courageous scientist.
The pace of technological change will likely accelerate, and the magnitude of the change will at various points become exponential. Traditional approaches to making strategy and managing organizations in such an environment increasingly will become obsolete. The comfort of “knowing” will be fleeting. Yearning for stability and predictability will in many cases be futile. Being self-focused will in many cases be a reason to “short your stock.”

EXCEL at managing self and otherness.
Leaders of the future must be leaders with high emotional intelligence who embrace and enable otherness: a focus on connecting and relating to and emotionally engaging with other stakeholders in the pursuit of a purposeful organizational mission.

To excel at otherness requires managing yourself, which means managing your thinking, emotions, and behaviors and intentionally taming your ego and fears on a daily basis. Excelling at managing yourself has two parts: (1) increasing the quantity and the quality of the behaviors necessary to optimize thinking, collaborating, and learning and (2) minimizing the behaviors that limit or impede that result.

ENABLE the highest levels of human development and performance.
As the digital age advances, integrating the highest levels of human performance with the best technology will be a strategic imperative. In fact, the strategic differentiator in many industries will be the human component because, for example, artificial intelligence will be readily available to all businesses at a low cost via cloud services. In those cases, the organizations with the best human thinkers, listeners, collaborators, and learners—in other words, Hyper-Learners—will have a competitive advantage. Developing teams of Hyper-Learners requires a leadership and talent model that is based on human development, and that means that the human resource function must be transformed into a human development function.

Chapter 9 offers an organizational story from EnPro Industries about enabling human development.

THE YEARNING FOR MEANING

One morning in October 2019, while I was working on this chapter, I received a message from a former executive education student whom I taught in a servant leadership course. He is a very successful, high-level executive and researcher with an MD and a PhD. He is also a caring person, and we have stayed in touch over the years. That morning he was seeking advice because he was considering leaving his company. The work environment there was not humanistic, and senior leaders did not value or enable meaningful work relationships.

He came to realize that no one at his company really knew each other, that everyone was consumed with getting tasks done, and that there were few true work friendships. People were nice to each other, he said, but they didn’t really care about each other and didn’t help each other be successful. He said he had no emotional connections with others, that his boss was not open to using work time to build those connections, and that there was little interpersonal joy—just a get-it-done mentality.

Everyone was very well paid, so that was not the issue. The issue was the lack of emotional connections and meaningful work relationships. While he loved his work, he said that many days he felt like walking out and never coming back.

That is sad.

But it is not uncommon. It speaks to the importance of emotional connections with others and the human need to find meaning to answer the existential question: Why do I exist?

My friend Ray Dalio says the best things in life include meaningful work and meaningful relationships.⁹⁸

I am moving toward believing it is all about having meaningful relationships—at work and away from work. The most meaningful work generally requires meaningful relationships. If I am correct, the workplace has to move in the direction of becoming a much more humanistic environment that enables human emotional connection. Having best real friends at work will be key and that means being your Best Self at work.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, felt strongly that Microsoft needed to rediscover its soul by embracing empathy and aligning human purpose and organizational purpose. In his book Hit Refresh, Nadella says that one of the first things he did with his leadership team was to have a consultant facilitate a conversation in which the senior leaders could be completely open and transparent with each other in sharing their personal passions and philosophies with complete candor. Very similar to my friend’s story above, Nadella said he felt like people did not really know each other, and he explains in the book how hard it was for his group to be that vulnerable.⁹⁹ That is the type of openness, vulnerability, and sharing of one’s humanity required to begin humanizing work.

I am a big fan of John O’Donohue’s work. In his book Anam Cara, O’Donohue wrote extensively about the need for work to be an arena where human potential is allowed to emerge and flourish. Work can be how people find their meaning and express their unique contribution to humankind.

That type of work environment produces joy, not dread or just going through the motions or just wishing the end of the workday would come faster.

Joy cannot occur in an environment dominated by compliance and power over others because such an environment leads to fear and submission.

Joy can only happen in an environment that values you as a unique human being and in which you are encouraged to play to your strengths and further develop yourself.

Human uniqueness gives birth to creativity, innovation, and emergent thinking, none of which smart machines can do well and all of which are areas where humans will be able to create value as the digital age advances.

That is the game going forward for all of us—to bring our Best Selves (our hearts or souls) to work every day in the pursuit of meaningful work that creates value for others.

My guess is that right now you might be thinking, Hess is getting really touchy feely.

Maybe I am. But it comes from what I am experiencing in my world of working with people in corporations, government agencies, schools, and universities. People are yearning for more from their work. They want more meaning and richness and to experience more joy. They want higher-quality emotional connections with others. And it’s not just coming from younger generations.

Most workplaces must be humanized: it is only then that we human beings can fully bring forth without fear our creativity and imagination, the power of our subconscious minds, and our hearts and souls.