My friend Todd Lebo from Ascend2 sent me a copy of the Arbinger Institute’s 2024 Workplace Trends report. What caught my eye was “The Disconnect Effect,” which basically means that executives and senior management aren’t aligned with what managers and individual employees want and value.
While executives and senior leadership feel employees need to improve their breadth and depth of professional skills, managers and individual contributors say morale and engagement are bigger problems.
This reminds me of a project I did years ago. I was leading a product development committee, and I gave everyone a copy of Act Like an Owner.
It’s a good book. You should read it. But it suffers from one serious problem, which may be illustrated in the disconnect effect.
Not everybody wants to be an owner.
If you run a publishing company, you want the company to have a product development mindset and culture. You want employees coming up with new ideas. You want to grow — maybe to satisfy your ego, maybe to please your shareholders, or maybe to get a better valuation when you sell. In any event, you want a passion for growth.
Here’s the hard reality. Most editors and writers don’t really care. They’re not nearly as invested in this growth mentality as upper management.
“They should be? Their job security depends on the health of the company.”
Sure. They should also drink a lot of water, exercise, eat their vegetables, and spend some quiet time in prayer or meditation.
Every man isn’t an owner — or cut out to be one. Every man isn’t an entrepreneur. Every man isn’t obsessed with growth.
Employees do want the company they work for to do well because (1) who wants to work for a loser, and (2) they might hope to get a raise or a promotion. They don’t have the same thirst for success as the owner or the top executives.
Fully half of the professionals surveyed for this report believe employee retention is a serious issue at their company. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but how about this as one of the possible reasons: hard-driving executives expect the workers to be like them. The majority of them are not, and won’t ever be.
There are a lot of challenges in corporate America, and I’m not arguing this is the solution. I am saying that a healthy company should realize that while there are some hard-driving, ambitious people in the workforce, most employees simply want to do their jobs, be treated fairly, then go home and live their lives — without being obsessed about the company. A management philosophy that expects employees to get excited about growth might not be reasonable.
This is just one thing that popped out to me while reading the report. It’s full of other useful information, and if you’re curious about the modern workforce, you should give it a look. You can get the report here.
