New Giants Rising

How Leaders Can Help People and Companies Grow During the Followership Crisis

Paul D. Fisher

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351855334
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

The greatest concern for all Americans today - leaders and followers alike – is how their prosperity seems to depend on a shrinking foundation of technology-only growth. And the onset of artificial intelligence only threatens to marginalize people even more with job loss and increasing isolation inside the few remaining jobs that it will leave behind.

This book helps us understand that business growth fueled by labor productivity does not rely on leadership as we've come to celebrate it, but on our ability to sustain loyalty and commitment to one another– a following if you will - inside and outside our workplaces. When we recognize and understand our historical Followership Cycles, we can begin to restore our workplaces to their lost role as a place to meet the demand of all Americans for a better future.

This illuminating book:

• Provides a new, sustainable growth model based in the socioeconomic realities of modern America and the world it wants to lead – a new Followership System.
• Tells the story of how one profession, on the brink of disappearing into irrelevance, will lead the new Decision Economy into the 21st century.
• Demonstrates the development of the "leaderless" specialists who will manage evidence together to pursue a Reason-to-Grow.
• Stresses the importance of charging all C-Suite executives with leading a continuous process of discovering, articulating and then defending those stakeholder agreements to share purpose.
• Reveals, not the technology infrastructure, but the social architecture that organizations will use to build new social capital – the Followership that will propel our New Giants to future greatness.

New Giants Rising takes us on a journey of the Followership Cycles of our recent past. And, more importantly, it puts forth a plan of action - voiced very simply by Henry Ford during the last cycle over a century ago when he faced the same moment then as we do now: "Coming Together is the Start. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success."

Chapter 1

New Giants Rising

The generational divide that has long existed in our economy is now growing alarmingly wider. We all feel it: young people trying to gain a foothold in their professional lives while previous generations quietly believe its new, younger colleagues are too self-involved and uncommitted to cultivate the relationships that they’re leaving behind at retirement. It’s a problem that sits at the intersection of historic and economic forces that stretch far beyond problems of workplace culture in professional service firms. And it’s also a problem that stretches to my dinner table.

My daughter Anne and I share a profession. She’s a young senior manager at a large accounting firm, a field I worked in for decades; because of this, work is always on the tip of our tongues. However, something interesting happens whenever the conversation turns toward our professional lives: our father–daughter familiarity disappears, and I suddenly become less her father and more just one more of the older white-male, upper-management types around which she might typically guard herself. Whatever social capital we’ve built between us as family members falls away.

But Anne has shared with me pieces of her workplace experience. I know she’s acutely aware of the political surroundings at her office, but would rather just work and let others do the gossiping about who’s carrying whose water. Or who calls the shots at the office. Or whether people are being promoted or treated fairly. Or if clients are happy, or if colleagues are supporting one another. She sees and feels all these things and surely has deeply held opinions, but she doesn’t share them, especially not with me. She is busy, and such discussions don’t contribute to the operational life she prefers, one in which she has control and is able to focus on the multitude of tasks at hand, free of idle speculation. She’s got a role, and she’s going to perform it; it’s as simple as that.

This compartmentalized approach to her work life probably sounds familiar to any young person in any line of work. But it stands in stark contrast to how most of us conduct our lives away from our jobs. In our personal lives, we easily share roles that are typical in an evolving family dynamic. For instance, I have the difficult and unenviable job of trying to find ways to make my grandson Simon like me as much as he likes Anne, his mother. Her job is much different: while I’m trying to curry favor with him by saying “yes” to him all the time, she has to say “no” to him pretty frequently. Despite this, he still seems to like her a lot more than he likes me. That’s because they are at the core of the family’s operational future and, as such, are the most relevant to one another. No amount of happy cheerleading by Simon’s Grampa will elevate him to the degree of relevance that they share as mother and son.

But despite all the potential for family conflict, we manage to stay on the same page because we share purpose, personified by our young Simon. Everything flows from that. All our efforts are focused in the same direction—the continued genetic, financial, and social success of our family. Our persistence in cooperating with one another in operational matters and family succession is fueled by that important goal despite our differing jobs—our specialties, if you will—and despite our age difference. This feels so natural and ingrained that we never give it any real thought at all. And yet, the moment work comes up between my daughter and me, all this shared purpose falls away. That same dynamic is almost wholly absent from our professional lives.

In our business lives, with me as a former equity partner and her as a current senior manager, we are unable to seamlessly talk about work in our shared profession. This is because we have no shared higher purpose—like Simon is to our family—to bind us in common cause. This disconnect at first appears generational, a divide between the old guard and young people. But if that were truly the case, we would feel that same discomfort in our personal lives where we interact with members of different generations all the time. But we don’t. We easily share personal family purpose while failing to share professional purpose.

I remember once telling Anne about a group of managing partners that I’d organized in Minneapolis. We spent meetings discussing leadership challenges, and I was enthused about the conclusion we came to: that we would all need each other someday. Anne, however, was unimpressed. “That’s nice, Dad,” was about all the response I got. She would later refer to this group as my “managing partners club.” Even between a loving dad and daughter, the suspicion that fuels the appearance of a generational divide was clear: to her, my meetings with others in my position were a sign of exclusion, a banding together of the old guard. The shared higher purpose so easily felt in our family was simply absent from her thinking about us as professional colleagues.

The reason behind this strange inconsistency between our personal and business lives lies in something called social capital. It accumulates over time and, if successfully invested, can produce more and more benefit as it grows. A social capital system is successful when people demonstrate persistence in their pursuit of common goals. Those mutually beneficial goals are what keep people engaged and what hold the system in place. But when stress reduces people’s willingness and ability to pursue those common goals, social capital stops growing and begins to deplete. If this goes on for long enough, the system itself enters a state of peril, as we see today in our slowly growing economy and profession.

The most useful definition of social capital in the twentieth century was created by French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, he referred to social capital as being comprised of “durable networks of people,” the growth of which created rising economic activity. Interpersonal relationships in the workplace lasted a long time, as did the trusted brands that our economy produced. Today however, the appearance of a generational divide suggests that these networks of people aren’t durable at all. People simply aren’t showing relationship persistence the same way they did in the past to pursue common goals and their benefits. The symptoms are obvious: leaders across many industries are experiencing what they perceive as declining loyalty of customers, and the declining commitment of employees.

Why, though? Why are the same durable networks of people that served individuals and the economy well throughout the past century proving inadequate to meet the needs of our new generations? The answer to that comes from looking at the history of how the formation of social capital changes during each new major industrial regeneration. We’ll call it the Followership Cycle; it forces us to adapt to one another’s needs inside newer and more isolating technology environments.

Common sense tells us that, in our new world of specialization and global labor and material sourcing, the durability of specific groups of people couldn’t have led growth any longer. We may be more connected to the world than ever before, but we’re also more isolated as individuals; far less frequently are our colleagues just one workstation over on the assembly line. A more modern and realistic understanding of social-capital formation today must remove the notion of these outdated networks. There must be a more useful and richly rewarding way to pursue purpose together in a world where many of us can’t even see one another any longer.

So, while durable networks of people helped generations of the prior century achieve a rising middle class, they are woefully inadequate to the task of creating persistence of purpose in a new century. Common cause must be formed around something other than permanent interpersonal relationships. And it will fall to new leaders to foster that binding common cause—except the nature of who’s doing the leading is changing too.

Certainly, the leaders of our future exist in the ranks of young professionals and even current students. But by that, I don’t mean the future leaders of our profession are buried somewhere in that population of young people and that a select few of them will emerge someday to lead their colleagues. Instead, they will all lead. Every single one of them. All the time.

But how can that be? People my age, who grew up in the 1960s and spent a career enjoying the fruits of a successful leadership past, are almost certainly saying: if everyone is a leader, doesn’t that mean no one is? It doesn’t sound like a leadership strategy at all; it sounds leaderless. While that person is, in one sense, correct, it’s this intergenerational handwringing that lies at the heart of the divide between young and old members of society, between a depleting social capital system and the emerging new one starting to grow. And this handwringing has led to stereotypes of young people, rather than understanding, adaptation, and human progress.

Popular business culture frequently invents stereotypes to tidy up the messy business of being human. So, rather than dig in to the underlying sociology to find the real reasons that a reimagined foundation for the tools of leadership is quite necessary and a natural progression of our current century’s Followership Cycle, business culture has invented the “Millennial.” We all know the profile; it exists to help explain why young people appear to be failing to produce what we traditionally think of as leaders capable of rallying the growth of durable networks of people. Using “Millennial” lets people classify a whole generation by their perceived behavior to explain negative changes in workplace productivity. Unfortunately, using profiling to understand, modify, or adapt behavior is sort of like trying to explain and cope with the common cold by analyzing sneezing and sniffling. It is useless as a tool to help people adapt to their surroundings and to one another.

But this creation of categories does tell us what the people who created them think, and so it’s an important starting point as we explore what a “leaderless” culture might mean. The Millennial profile is described as entitled and narcissistic, their attitudes in the workplace thought of as disrespectful of authority and dismissive of the chain of command. They want their input and ideas to be heard immediately, instead of wading through political channels for years before making significant contributions. They are not, this thinking goes, interested in waiting their turn.

And with all these apparently widespread personality defects come the need to find someone to blame. So, the deficiencies of a new generation are attributed to soft and overinvolved parenting. Popular urban mythology relays horrifying stories of moms attending job interviews with their basement-dwelling adult children. These stories are obviously exaggerated; but worse, they’re completely unhelpful in telling us how people can be led to persistently follow one another in pursuit of common goals today. That’s the only adaptive reason human behavior changes at all in an economy. People want to follow other people but they’re struggling to do that today.

This impulse to classify generations is a problem worth addressing. It’s an instinct that leads older generations to explain any behavior that doesn’t support durable networks of people, the outdated foundation of social-capital formation, as something that needs to be fixed. And it suggests to us too that traditional concepts of trust, teamwork, and relationship building, as we knew them in the twentieth century, are automatically good because they promote the creation and maintenance of those durable networks.

But the reality is that durable networks of people are in the final death throes of their usefulness in the creation and accumulation of social capital; as such, judging Millennials by their unwillingness to cultivate them is less than useful. It also ignores the reality that such words as “trust,” “teamwork,” and “relationship” will need to be completely redefined in any new social-capital environment that can be expected to produce persistence of effort in ways other than relationship permanence. As we will soon see, the only thing this stereotyping really shows us is how and why durable networks of people were so effective at producing rising labor productivity along with a rising middle class in the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century, and by extension, why they’ll be so ineffective at producing similar personal and organizational growth now.

In truth, current and future generations’ ability to grow personally, professionally, and organizationally together has nothing to do with generational behavioral deficits. It has solely to do with a lack of persistence in pursuing the same goals. Both sides of what we think of as the generational divide are trying to grow social capital by pursuing purpose. On one hand, older generations are trying to sustain durable networks of people as the binding force for persistence of joint effort. On the other hand, newer generations are leaving those networks in search of higher forms of social capital that will help them meet their needs as human beings in a far more dehumanizing work environment. The social-capital environment a young person navigates looks far different than the one a baby boomer entered; it’s a dehumanizing technological landscape the likes of which the prior generation could never have imagined. Refusing to mold themselves according to the workplace social capital standards of their parents isn’t failure to thrive—it’s future survival.

Rather than being behavioral flaws, the current generation’s adaptations to the stresses of today’s productivity environment are completely in line with Maslow’s higher order human need for recognizing and valuing one’s unique self. What is typically characterized as Millennial narcissism is a reach for that next-higher order of needs: self-esteem, achievement, recognition, independence, and prestige. As we’ll see, looking to rise a level in Maslow’s hierarchy is a historically normal adaptive response to each new industrial regeneration. In truth, these new Followership phenomena are more appropriately described as socio-industrial regeneration cycles.

So, what appears to be a lack of persistence in pursuing group goals is, in truth, extraordinary persistence in pursuing the formation of modern social capital required for the foundation of Followership Agreements capable of producing global growth. When examined this way, we see that Millennials are actively pursuing the same goal every generation has chased since the beginning of recorded time—a better, more rewarding future for themselves and their children.

This technology-induced need for the formation of more effective social capital is reshaping the concept of leadership. But consider this persistent new idea of everyone being a leader. What does that mean, and why is it happening?

Almost no project today involves the exact same network of people inside an organization. This is because almost no modern individual or organizational problem can be solved without a newly formed specialist team ready to face a unique set of complex conditions. Durable networks of people don’t work anymore, simply because a single network of people is not able to complete the wide variety of specialized tasks facing modern organizations looking to meet increasingly complex needs. This is a normal output of highly specialized people collaborating in a global environment.

Within a workplace, this trend toward specialization has multiple consequences. First, it’s far more frequent now for employees of the same company, perhaps even members of the same team, to have entirely separate sets of expertise. Specialists are brought in to deal with a specific task, rarely collaborating on a problem as much as eventually handing it off once their specific action item has been addressed. This drastically cuts down on the need for coworkers to be familiar with one another, in either a personal or professional sense; it’s easy to see how feelings of isolation could set in.

But it also means that it becomes far tougher for a single person to be “in charge” of all these disparate specialists. It’s nearly impossible for any one person to hand down purpose and meaning from on high. So, specialists are forced to “lead” themselves, to create their own purpose and meaning in an emerging, and confusing to some of us, “leaderless” reality that will redefine how shared purpose is cultivated, how quality is negotiated, and how accountability is expressed among people in global companies.

That truth is uncomfortable for everyone involved in leadership. But rather than look to the source of the problem, negative social-capital growth, we continue to promote the tools we used to grow durable networks of people and hope that some future generation will produce leaders again as we knew them during the twentieth century. This inability to help serve the very real leadership needs of people in our increasingly dehumanizing world of technology is one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. And it won’t be solved by continuing to patch together our declining twentieth-century social capital.

It’s clear that we sit at a moment of profound socioeconomic change. As we see in our own political processes here in the United States, there is now severe pressure to make progress on job creation and economic growth. This pressure has reached politically explosive proportions globally as well, as the most developed of our nation-states find ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 New Giants Rising
• 2 Leaderless
• 3 The Followership Story
• 4 Social Mobility
• 5 Unique and Meaningful
• 6 Equality
• 7 Sustainable Impermanence
• 8 Coming Together
• 9 Keeping Together
• 10 Working Together
• 11 A Reason to Grow
• Index