Every year, over 800 tech and staffing leaders gather in Dallas for the SIA gig e-conference. We sat down with seven of them. Here are their stories. Today I'm honored to be here with workforce strategist Heather McGowan, who's an internationally recognized keynote speaker who helps leaders prepare their people and organizations for the fourth industrial revolution. She's been recognized across the industry, lots of accolades of course, from being the lead voice on LinkedIn and included in the Forbes class of 2022 for the future of work. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. My honor to finally meet you. As I say, as Jen Z says, IRL. IRL, yeah. In real life. So you just got off the stage. Yeah. And it was just moments ago. And you talked about one of the things that I think is important for people to understand is that our factory default settings have been changed. Removed. Removed. Yeah. And for a long time, we're all operating on autopilot. Tell me a little bit about what has changed. How have we changed? Well, as I open the talk, I say that it takes 66 days to form a habit. And so we had the habit of going to work. We had the habit of a boss being a certain way. We had the habit of work being designed for a certain person. We had a habit of we worked for originally survival and then status. And then we started to question that. So all of those things got removed. And we suddenly said, it was an existential crisis. 900 and something days for us saying, what am I doing with my life? Why am I working here? Why am I working at all? Why am I working so hard? Why am I not going to my kids soccer game so that I can go to one more meeting? But there was a lot of why that happened. And it removed all the factory default settings. And now we get to intentionally design them if we're brave enough to do it. Are you seeing more and more people take that leap? Yeah, look at the reaction to return to office. And I don't think it's remote. It's just a solution for everything. It's just an interesting way that bosses are not listening. They're demanding. And they're saying they have evidence, although I haven't seen the evidence. I think there are reasons humans run on connection. We like to be with each other. That's undeniable. We may collaborate better in person. That's yet to be proven. But I think the demands were not listening to the people and the people have been empowered. There was something I just got finished reading The Man Who Broke Capitalism. Have you read the Jack Welsh who gutted the heartland and crushed the soul of corporate America? No, I should though. That sounds good. It's an amazing book. But in your talk, you talked about Milton Friedman. And in 1985, it's all about shareholder value. And that was at a time when capital was buildings and other things and that shifted into people. And in 2021, the business roundtable came out in a bunch of years. 2019. Yeah, before the pandemic, which I think is interesting. That's right. And they signed a letter saying, okay, let's not shareholder capitalism. It's about people. Have you seen any proof of organizations starting to understand? I know saying it is a good PR thing. But actually doing it is another. Have you seen organizations start to really lean into that? Or is it still? Yeah, I can't remember who said it, but we're going to draw a parallel to the environmental industry. Somebody said, and I can't draw a blank on it, that greenwashing is the first step in being environmental. So when you're talking about it and pretending you're doing it is the first step in actually doing it. And I think that's where we are. We are, you know, whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is what we're doing right now. I think in the early days, one of the things that Business Roundtable did in the first couple of months we went into the pandemic, they set up another sort of declaration. And it was led in part by Rachel Carlson from Guilds Organization. She said, we need to step as organizations, we need to step up and protect the little person. So that means pay your people, pay your suppliers early, pay them before they've done the services, they're going to have cash flow problems. So how can we help in doing that? And it was a human moment, it was a humanization moment. And I would like to see that continue, but it's something that in part the Business Roundtable led early in the pandemic to help out as many people as possible. How do we in our minds bring together this idea of the corporation, which is separate from the independent contract? We're here at SIA, which deals a lot with contingent labor or independent workers and the gig economy. How do we bring together or how do you talk to leaders about that group of their workforce that in a lot of ways is silent, is handed off to procurement and other organizations? Well, I think it's interesting because I think what's changing is when place changed, people changed. So when work was a place you went to and all the employees went to the place and some of the contingent folks did, but they didn't have desks or they were in sort of or they work separately. Or they shared desks, sir. Yeah, when place changed, I think it changed, it became more porous for people and you have less of a distinction between where people work and how they work. You know what I mean? So it's an interesting shift. I think organizations were getting increasingly porous. We've seen the rises, you know, in your work in the contingent workforce as being part of the labor force. When we change where and it's no longer in a single place, that allows us to democratize it even further and start treating people as one. Let's talk about labor in general. There's every book I read, every article I see says there's a great labor shortage. Nobody can find workers. What's driving it? Why, you said on the stage, this is the greatest labor shortage since World War II. What's driving that? It's a number of factors driving it. One is we're starting to see the boomers retire. So we have a lower set of population from which to draw. We've had a... The silver, what did you call it? Silver tsunami. The silver tsunami. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have a lower labor force participation rate with men. We haven't moved men, you know, in the abstract, along enough. So we, you know, when it was the manufacturing society, we had 10% higher male labor force participation rate. Now we're in all of society, we lost 10% of those folks. We've lost a million people during the pandemic. And we also, under the prior presidential administration, shut down immigration. And we shut down immigration. And not just on the southern border, we shut down a lot of people who came here to go to universities, start companies. When you look at our Fortune 500 companies, more than half of them are started by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Or if you go look at the CEOs right now, the tech companies, you know, a lot of those leaders came from the same province and almost the same school in India. Yeah. If you look at Google, Microsoft, Twitter, you name it. Sure. So we need, we need, I've spoken to folks in Canada, we need a very smart immigration policy to address some of these things. We're not going to make 18 year olds overnight, right? You know, 21 year olds. So we're going to have to contend with that, but we're going to have to think about doing work differently. I also think we might need to break apart the job box, which this staffing industry is primed to do. Why does the job have to be 40 hours a week? Why does it have to be, could it be five, 10, 15 hours a week? Could we pull in some seniors who've left the workforce who'd like to work on a shoulder basis? So there's lots of opportunities we could address it if we were creative. So when you talk to leaders, are they leaning into that? Or they, you said greenwashing, are they leaning into this idea of, hey, it's time to get creative? Or are they saying, hey, it's a problem. I'm really struggling, but I'm not going to take the risk because it requires risk. Anything that is changed is risk. And what I've seen, at least in my experience, is that a lot of leaders get to a point and they want to, it's self-preservation at some point. You're making a lot of money, you're very successful, you're a vice, whatever you are, and taking that jump might just be too much risk. We also have to understand, and somebody asked me this question about quiet quitting, which is stupid, stupid work. You can talk about that later, but people are exhausted. This was a lot that we went through. And there was a theory once that we were going to have a student, not only a great resignation in the workforce, but we were going to have a great resignation in leadership, where leaders would be like, listen, I worked around the clock to get us through the pandemic. I'm done. We're seeing it in tennis. Serena Williams-Better is like, I'm out. Yeah, yeah, we're seeing it in tennis. So whether that happens or not, I don't know yet. I don't know how it's going to unfold. I think that we need to give, I think overall, I think we need to give everybody time to grieve. We've been through a lot, no matter where you work in the supply chain or where you live. The pandemic is a next essential crisis. We need people to give it a chance, but there are leaders who are just demanding us back to 2019. And I don't personally think that's going to work. Well, I'm watching a number of people that work. I come from big tech and I'm watching a lot of the leaders in big tech making their people work. They say, oh, you're not going to commute. We're going to start meetings at seven o'clock. And so it was not only the pandemic, the focus on trying to use in-place meeting styles in a remote work was even more intense for a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, there's presentism and now there's digital presentism. So presentism and this is, as you were valued, could you shut up in the office? That made you, you were more appreciated because you were actually there with no evidence of what you're actually getting done when you were there. And now there's digital presentism. And there was a study that came out in the last month or so that said people who are feeling the pressure of digital presentism are doing something like 67 minutes more of evidencing a day. Yeah. Now that could be sending an email, sending a Slack, sending it's doing something that has nothing to do with the work they're doing to evidence that they're working. Now you carry that out those 67 minutes of I'm sending you emails. Now you got to respond to that email. So we're just making a huge number of activities that actually don't yield any results at all. When I was early in my career, there was a gentleman who figured out that Outlook had a setting that allowed you to send emails at different times. Yeah. And so we'd work a full day. Apple just added it to the iPhone. And he would send the emails at night. So it looked like he was working and he was, he did it as sort of a farce and a joke. But he got promoted and recognized for the fact that he was always working. So I think we should create an app. We're sick. We're sick people. Let's talk about Gen Z. Everybody talks about Gen Z. They're going to be the largest part of the workforce. I'm in Gen X, proudly in Gen X. Me too. And I'm trying to understand when you want to create an environment, you want to create a working environment where somebody in Gen Z wants to work. What is the advice you give them? If Heather's creating a company and Gen Z says, Hey, I want to work for Heather. What does that environment need to be? Well, if I'm going to form a company, the company has to be formed around solving a real need. Right? I mean, that's how most companies should be formed anyway. And Gen Z wants to know how you're addressing that. What is your, why do you exist as an organization? How does the world look differently because you exist? What are your values? How can I express myself at work in these values? How can I feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself? That's what's driving them more than anything. And which is the why? Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to be, it can't be a return profits to shell heroes. It can't be, you know, to become the 1%. It can't be, you know, to penetrate this market. No, it's going to be solving a human need or societal or environmental need. Three years ago, I was on a panel here at SIA and I asked everybody who has a diversity program. Every hand went up. Everybody was proud to raise their hand. And I said, how many people have a remote program? Again, prepaid them. Every hand went down. And I'm like, nobody has a diversity program. You have a compliance program, but you don't have a diversity program. And what I was positing at that time is if you do not go outside of 50 miles, then you're not reaching out to diverse talent. Right. Being a studier of this space, what does the data say? Like what are the studies and people who look at this deeply? Because you said something that I truly believe that diversity is a business imperative. Oh, yeah. And that's for me, when I talk about the gig economy, I get excited every day because today I've worked with three people around the world this morning before I woke up. So what does the data say when you think of diversity and it not being a compliance program? I haven't seen the data in terms of geography. I've seen the data more on the standpoint of if we call everybody back to the office, it's going to hurt women, it's going to hurt minorities, it's going to hurt disabled individuals or differently abled individuals. And so when you think about your remote policy, it is your diversity policy, which is I think the point you were trying to make. I spoke at a conference like a supply chain automotive, something I can't remember it was conference, and I met this guy and he said, I figured out a long time ago that the talent I need does not live near me, doesn't live near my office. So I just let everybody work wherever they were. I found the talent in wherever it comes and I figured out how often we had to come together. And then instead of investing in office spaces, I invested in people's homes and then I invested in, for me it was quarterly, brought everybody to go to their quarterly for X number days. I think that is more the future of sort of figuring out like Salesforce announced their jobs not by geography but by time zone. There's some people in the East Coast who really live on West Coast times. They like to get up later, like to stay up later. That's fine. Well, there's the thing that I always thought like I worked very well super early in the morning. My brain works from 5am or 4am to about like noon. And so this idea that you would have to work like the meetings, scheduling a meeting or a high thinking meeting, and that was one of the things Bezos always says. It's like, hey, let's make sure that people can work when their brain is at its peak, not when the calendar says we can meet. You do a lot of work in frameworks. So one of your superpowers is being able to take something complex and turn it into a framework that makes it digestible. Today you talked about a framework of leadership around mindset, culture, approach, and behavior. So I just want to dig into each of those quickly. When you were talking about mindset, the thing that really struck me, you had a chart about gas and guidance. Talk to me a little bit about how you think of that. Okay. So when you think about your, how you think about your people, you have people who can provide their own gas or their own motivation or their own guidance, which is their own direction. And when we're in the mindset of I'm the boss and everybody works for me and I will tell them what to do and when to do it. Is that still going on? Yeah. They're calling everybody back to the office. It's absolutely going on. What is that? Oh, then I'm the boss and you're going to show up because I said so. That is, we're moving away from that to moving to trying to attract as many people as possible. We have their own gas, have their own guidance, who are self-propelled. So they're self-motivated and self-directed. And you course correct. You help the team of diverse talent that most likely has skills and knowledge you don't have. I loved when you asked that question on stage. Yeah. How many people have people working for them who have skills and knowledge they don't have? If your hand doesn't go up, nobody's working for you. Or you don't have the right people. Or you don't have the right people. Yeah. So you need to realize that this is a shift and it's a shift. It's a huge ego shift too. Because if you have been marching along, like I want to be the boss because I want to be the unquestioned expert and I need that. And I'm kind of leading with impression management. I'm a little bit insecure. I want people to be a little bit afraid of me. You ought to check out and tap out. You're not the leader we need right now. We need people who are comfortable being vulnerable, comfortable saying I don't know, can make decisions with imperfect information, but relying on the expertise of the people who work with you, who have more information than you have. It's a complete shift in the leadership profile, leadership pipeline, and how we think about relating to our leaders. You were talking one of the stats. I don't know if it was a true stats. I'll ask you. 10% of our CEOs are sociopaths. There was a study about it once. Yeah. That was the estimation, my sociopathologies. I bring it up because it was interesting when you're talking about the from to the type of leaders that existed or the type of things that we admired to the types of things we need to admire now. You're about me. Do you remember Al Dunlop, Chainsaw Al? He went into Sunbeam, which was an, they had just kept acquiring companies. Yeah. And he was, his nickname was Chainsaw Al. And he was studied in the, it was a book I had read about sociopaths. He was a documented sociopath. He loved firing people. He loves humiliating people. He would go in and his self-proclaimed nickname was Chainsaw Al. I'm in here to just cut the people. I've worked in a lot of those environments. That was the 80s leader. Well, yeah, you definitely need to read the Jack Welch book. I think you'll, you'll get an appreciation for how Milton Friedman created a leader who then became like that whole mindset that became ingrained. Let's talk about culture. The thing that resonated with me is when you said death to a force rankings. So my entire career in technology, I was subject to and then participated in it as a senior leader in the force ranking system. And it always felt unnatural. Tell me about the wee culture. Yeah. I mean, the force rankings is to, to, to put a cap on it is was basically you encourage mediocrity. Don't, don't be the high poppy as they say in Australia, because the high poppy always gets lopped off when they're landscaping. Don't raise your head up. You're going to get extra work. Don't be so terrible that you're going to be cut. Just kind of float along in the middle. It was a, it was a terrible idea. But now when we're like, for a number of reasons, we have to do our work in teams. Because we're doing work that's never been done before, because we're requiring skill sets that don't reside in a single individual, because we have constant turn in organizations, we need to work in teams. You have to create the psychological safety for people to work in teams. You have to create the environment where people are comfortable doing things they've never done before when they work in teams. So it's a commitment to we as an organization, where are we going? Because when we pit each other against each other in this kind of environment, it's just like, you know, shooting fish in a barrel while you're standing in the barrel, shooting your own feet. And it's a continuity point of view. I think one of the things you said that resonated was if it's about the individual and not about the teams, the individual leaves, because the, you know, the duration of an employee at a company, you know, there's a thought leader that I talked to Pat, who's like, everybody's in the gig economy, you just don't know it. Because people are staying at companies for two to three years. And so if you build your organization around an individual and not that team, the person leaves, you're kind of in trouble. Let's talk about the approach. The thing that resonated in that part was job sculpting. Explain job sculpting and how we should, you know, if there's a person listening right now that says, hey, I've been thinking about my career. Yeah. And I'm thinking about my why and what I want to do. I thought job sculpting was a, was a good framework and way to think. Yeah. So I'm going to just ask you to Google it because I'm drawing a blank on the guy's name who came up with, there was a Harvard professor, it was a Harvard Business Review article, there were several of them on job sculpting. He identified eight delis was what he called them, deeply embedded life interests, and that we all have them around, whether it's, you know, storytelling or synthesizing information or enterprise control. Like enterprise control is somebody who wants to run the show. Well, synthesizing information and storytelling, those are mine. I like to take a lot of information, boil it down, figure out how to put it in a framework to help people understand, not necessarily the future, let's be honest, and what they're going through in the present, and then use stories to help them understand it. So that's how you take deeply embedded life interests and you sculpt a job around it. I made up this job. I mean, I didn't even know what speaking was. I've never taken a speaking class in my life. I never thought I'd be doing this. And I'm making up my job. I mean, ever since I left, I'm making it up every day because I knew that I wanted to chase something and I'm not sure what I'm chasing, but I wanted to learn. And I knew that learning would keep me safe. Yeah, you followed your curiosity. You knew it was about learning. You were like, where is the pocket of value that I can capitalize on and basically get people to pay me to learn, right? I mean, that's what we do. Which is the greatest job in the world. In organizations, we have this bizarre idea that we're going to create a job box, which is usually defined by the last document, full of biases and unnecessarily requirements. And a bizarre job description. And a barge is unscripted. And then we're going to do some search process and some filters going to kick off half the relevant people who could have fit in that job because of the irrelevant information in there and then force them to fit into it. Now, why don't we instead look at the work that needs to be done, look at people who are attracted to our mission, who have some of the skills that we need, knowing that they're not going to have all those skills because it's going to continue to change. But people who want to learn and be part of bigger something bigger than themselves, and they want to learn with you because they know they can do it more quickly in a collaborative environment. Well, and they bring energy. If they bring an entrepreneurial spirit or energy yourself, starter those things might be more important than a specific skill. And sometimes they bring other people. I think we're going to increasingly see that. Well, I talk often about it. I right now have 15 freelancers. So if I showed up to work at the Heather McGowan Corporation, I would show up with my own team. Yeah, I would say, well, who can you bring in to help me out with this? Right. Yeah. Now, let's talk about the last one in the framework. So we talked about mindset, culture, approach, and then behavior. This idea that in a skills-based economy, in a human capital-based economy, the human potential is the thing. Tell me a little more about the behavior that needs to change or adapt when you think about leadership. Okay. When we treated humans as a cost to contain, where humans were the means by which value was created. We had to chainsaw and cut costs. We were just caught. We were caught. And so the boss was a person who just drove as much productivity out of those depersonalized units of productivity as they could. And now we're looking at much of our work as exploratory. Most of our work is learning. So we need leaders who can drive in productivity with fear. Doesn't work. It's a liability in this environment. So we need people who can say, I don't know. Let's find out. People who can pull the inspiration out of people. They can pull the potential out of people. They can help people reach levels they didn't think they would reach on their own. It's really a lot about coaching. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about quiet quitting. Okay. So I know it's not a good term, but it brings up to your point. I think it brings up a conversation. I think around the word quiet quitting, people are struggling. And I saw a good article that said people are just acting their wage. Right? What is quiet quitting? How do you, what's going on? Quiet quitting is the stupidest term I've ever heard of, first and foremost, because I don't think it describes what people are really talking about. They're not showing up for work and not working. What they're doing is saying, I am going to do what's required of my job and no more. They're putting guardrails up. They're putting guardrails up. Yeah, we've got a 38% increase in burnout since 2019. We've got a 38% increase in mental distress. Our engagement numbers in Gallup really haven't moved much in 15 years. It's crazy. When I look at that number in Gallup, where 50% of the people are in gate, like if you, how much do you spend? 21% of people globally are engaged and we're 21. But just think how much is spent on that, that human capital. Right. Name a product, anything, where it could be 21% efficient and that expensive. Even batting averages are better than that in baseball, right? Yeah. So we haven't done a good job of tapping the potential in humans. So if quiet quitting is me saying, I'm going to do my job and no more and I'm going to prioritize my family and my mental health forever or for now, for some people it might be forever. They might, we might have a band of people who just say, I am doing the job and no more. And then we have to operationalize around that. There are other people who are saying, you know, I just went through hell. And with your hell over the last, you know, 925 days, you need a break. I think the insight that you shared from the stage that's going to stay with me is it goes back to the original thing or reset our defaults have changed or we've gotten rid of it. Because we have created something new. We have new habits. And those habits, by the way, unless we do something else, we'll stay with us. Right. And we'll have different expectations. One last question. As you go around and talk to people post pandemic, how do people feel like, I know they're burnt out. But when people come to after you get off stage, what are they saying? If it's good, they said that was the best keynote I ever heard. That's always fun. No, my favorites are, I didn't see it that way before. I see an opportunity now. I was depressed before. I get it now. I see it in a different way. My hope is to spread some optimism because I think there's a lot of stuff going on right now. We've got environmental problems. We've got geolocalitical problems. We've got looming economic. We're talking ourselves into a recession, in my opinion. We've got a lot of stuff going on. So what we can do is say, we're the humans. We're in charge here. What is the world we want to create? And that's the message I'm trying to spread. We have a tremendous opportunity right now to redesign the workforce. So it works for more of us, whether it's diversity, equity, inclusion, or how we want to live our lives, so that more of us show up at work engaged and happy and mentally well. And when we do that, we'll create far better value. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. It's great to meet you, IRL. The work you do is powerful because it is optimistic. There's a lot of people that talk about the future. And to your earlier point, try to fear and say, well, I'm going to scare you so you're going to listen to me. I think your perspective is always optimistic and it comes from a great place of curiosity. I'm inspired by your work. And so thank you for taking the time and the energy to do what you do. Because I know it's not easy. It takes a lot of time and you put yourself out there in front of a bunch of people to be judged. And I think it's well received. Thank you very much. It's really great to meet you finally in person. I want to plug your book, The Adaptation Advantage, which is a great book. I have it. I'm halfway through it. I wanted to read the whole thing before we got here, but I really wanted to talk about the keynote today. I'll put a link to that in some of your other work in the show notes. And I just want to mention, because I have to go write another chapter, I'm writing The Empathy Advantage now, leading the empowered workforce, which should be out in February or March if I hit my deadline. I wish you the best on that. And I look forward to reading it. Thank you, Heather. Thanks a lot.
