A Tale of Two Parts: Morag's Story

Before we explore the five relationship areas of work, we want to set the scene and demonstrate how relationships at work have already evolved in both striking and subtle ways.

Relationship with Work

These two short vignettes are very real—and very different. They demonstrate how, in a few short years, the relationships we experience at work, and with work, have changed. We've moved from a local perspective to a global perspective. Our relationship with the workday, and work itself, has expanded from the 9 to 5 to the 24/7.

Let's be honest. Work is at the center of most of our lives. It's the necessary evil for many that allows us to pay the bills. And for those exceptional few, work is a place where we thrive and actually look forward to being. (Yes, those scenarios exist!)

In fact, we propose that the reason so many people dread work is because they've avoided the important step of cultivating good relationships in the workplace.

Work is where we form many of our most treasured relationships, whether it's friends and colleagues or potential spouses. It's also where we uncover and refine the relationship we develop with ourselves. When this all goes well, we thrive and creativity and innovation abound. We feel connected when we're adding value and contributing expertise to a positive result. We have purpose.

On the other side of the coin, when our relationship with work, or relationships at work, flounder, we can find ourselves stressed, withholding our knowledge, and taking those stressors home to our families and friends. When our professional relationships are damaged, this invariably impacts our personal relationships.

Work matters, and the world of work is probably the biggest team sport any of us get to participate in. As a team sport, business can't be just about the numbers.

We don't have to look far to understand why our relationship to work needs to change. A Google search for the definition of work resulted in this:

Work/werk/²

Noun: activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result. “He was tired after a day's work in the fields.”

Synonyms: labor, toil, slog, drudgery, exertion, effort, industry, service; informal grind, sweat, elbow grease

verb: be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a purpose or result, especially in one's job; do work. “An engineer had been working on a design for a more efficient wing.”

synonyms: toil, labor, exert oneself, slave (away); keep at it, put one's nose to the grindstone; informal slog (away), plug away, put one's back into it, knock oneself out, sweat blood

While the definitions of “work” were factually accurate, it was the synonyms that struck us—words like toil, drudgery, grind, and slog were used—none of which paint a pretty picture. Is it any wonder the “Monday morning blues” or “Thank goodness it's Friday!” slogans resonate for so many of us?

As we saw in the opening stories, work is no longer the aspirational 9-to-5 office-bound activity of yesteryear. In today's world, work can happen anytime, anyplace, and with anyone. The lines between work time and personal time are blurred. It's no longer a question of work-life balance and trying to fit everything else around a standard workday. Rather, the evolving expectation is that work and life are a braided system, blended, overlapping, and seamless.

Work in the Future-Past

What happened to our youthful, idealistic hopes for our future dream jobs? Did we imagine a world where we were slaves to our always-on devices or a lifestyle that allowed us to enjoy our careers?

We're at a crossroads. Will we use technology to create more freedom and success or a more oppressive relationship with work? We now have the power to choose.

The key to future-proofing both your own social time and the work that needs to be done is providing the resources that allow for both work and play. To ensure the temptation to always check e-mail is reduced, managers must face reality and allow fun, spontaneity, and other life experiences to occur.

Before you write us, please understand we're not suggesting that work can't be fun. What we are saying is we need to balance all the facets that make up a well-rounded life experience, including work, family, friends, and alone time. To have one facet at the cost of another means that ultimately we all suffer.

We have come full circle. If we travel back 200 years to a time before the industrial revolution that brought about the modern workplace, we would find a freelance economy where work was a 24/7 endeavor. Weekends are a relatively modern invention. In fact, the very word “freelance” is from medieval times when knights, who had not pledged loyalty to one family, were available to fight, whether in tournaments or in battle, for those willing to pay for their services—the ultimate freelancers.

In the years leading up to the industrial revolution, freelance was the basis for many jobs. During this time, people worked for themselves or in small family groups, usually out of their homes or in a nearby location. The blacksmith, the weaver, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker were the industries of their day. People's relationship with work was fluid and integrated into their lifestyle.

The Industrial Revolution brought about automation that centralized production, brought the individual worker out of the weaving loft into the factory, and brought the farm workers to the burgeoning towns to seek a new type of employment. The hired hands.

These times were not all idyllic and painless. There were riots, there was resistance, and there were even organized protests. Luddites were real people, textile workers who saw the newfangled factories and massive looms as a threat to their existence and way of life. But it's safe to say the stress-management industry we know today was not yet in existence.

Technology was transforming a previously skilled industry into one where a lesser skilled (and lesser paid) labor force could deliver the same results. The Luddites of today may not be smashing equipment with hammers or throwing clogs into the machinery, but their concerns are very real. Warnings of driverless cars and advances in artificial intelligence fuel a new fear, a fear of the unknown impact on how we interact as human beings.

The factory approach has informed many of the approaches to work, management, and education that we see today. The rapid acceleration of new technologies has a direct impact on how and where work is done, and it is having a transformational impact on work that far surpasses the impact of the Industrial Revolution. We are now in the midst of the digital revolution.

In hindsight, while transformative, the Industrial Revolution was more of a gradual evolution. The rate of change was steady, and it sometimes took years to move from a concept to a design. Change happened at a local level and from there moved outward to neighboring communities, industries, and other countries.

Contrast that with the launch of Pokémon Go, from zero to 1 million-plus subscribers in less than 24 hours.

Career Lattice

It's not just technology that's imposing this change on how and where work happens. It's also a shift in expectations. The Millennial generation, born after 1980, and the upcoming Generation Z, born in the late '90s, know nothing but the technological age. They demand a more flexible work environment and are less willing to work a standard 9-to-5 schedule. Instead, they are drawn to opportunities where they can work when inspiration strikes them—as long as expectations are met and results are delivered. In the past it was about the hired hands and mind. Now it's the hired mind and heart!

They are the generation for whom the option to telecommute is not a perk or a luxury. For this upcoming generation it's the norm and the expectation. They will be the ultimate flexible workforce. Millennials have been raised on next-day or same-day delivery, and everything on demand. Work is no different for them. Sitting in rush hour traffic for two hours or catching a train to the office is anathema to this generation—a complete waste of time—instead they want to work on demand, anytime, anyplace, anywhere, and they expect bigger challenges and new career opportunities on demand, too.

The traditional career ladder is no more. The idea that if you pay your dues and stay with a company long enough, you will move up the career ladder is a fable. With the flattening of organizations the career ladder is more of a career lattice—where success isn't only about vertical movement. Success is about the horizontal opportunities that provide new experiences and expand skills.

Morag's career is a case in point: currently in her fifth career, she began as an aspiring engineer, became a corporate banker, moved into leadership development, and became a solopreneur, then an entrepreneur with a growing team, and now an author and professional speaker.

Linda's career was very much the same, moving from administrator; to union representative to the public sector; management development; then on to finance; leadership development; and now consultant, coach, speaker, and radio show host.

Careers today don't follow nice tidy paths. They zig and they zag in response to the doors that open and opportunities that are seized.

Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte recently told us, “I think there's basically a redefinition of what business is, that it isn't a hierarchical company anymore. It's a network and that is having profound implications on how we manage people, people's careers, how we develop people, and how we do performance management. All of that traditional HR stuff is getting questioned because it doesn't serve you as well in this new world. I hear this all of the time now from companies of all sizes.”

He went on to describe business as “networks of people coming together for specific purposes or to solve specific, particular problems. They may work together for a couple of years. They may disband, and they may reconnect in other kinds of configurations.”

The career lattice is also indicative of how the corporate hierarchy is shifting from defined hard-line reporting and top-down structure to one that is matrixed. A team member could be hard lined to one manager while dotted lined to another manager or team. We now work in a series of interconnected and interdependent networks, even if they are difficult to chart.

When we pause to consider who our bosses are, most of us will identify an ever-extending and convoluted group that includes customers, colleagues, our immediate boss, our boss' boss, the area manager, the regional leader, and the functional leader.

Learning to manage what may become competing perspectives and opinions will differentiate the high performer of the future. To future-proof your career you need to be connected at multiple levels, to multiple people, and actively cultivate those connections.

Relationship with Employer

The twentieth-century expectation of work was that we provide our skills, mental and physical, to one employer in return for getting paid at a regular and predictable cadence. This forms the basis for what was described as the “psychological contract,” the implicit expectations that employers had of their employees—and vice versa.

During our leadership studies in the late 1980s, we were taught that the psychological contract went something like this: Employees committed to working at a company, providing loyalty and a consistent work effort. In return, the company took care of the employee, providing pay and benefits that would last a lifetime.

For our grandfathers, a job for life was the expectation, and, in many cases, the norm. When they retired, they received pensions. For our fathers, the presumption was to join an industry and possibly move to different organizations within that industry once or twice during a career. The pension was no longer a guarantee based on their final salary; it was now determined by the value of the pension fund and the contributions made.

The idea of an employer taking care of their employees from day one through retirement seemed too good to be true then, and it's certainly too good to be true now. The rules of the employer-employee contract, whether implicit or explicit, are being rewritten for the twenty-first century.

There has been a shift from the paternalistic employer to the self-sufficient employee and from employee for life to the more flexible workforce. In the modern world, working for several employers as part-time and contract workers will continue to increase. Company pension plans are becoming less common with individual retirement accounts and stakeholder pensions becoming the responsibility of each individual.

Loyalties are shifting from the company to the team and sometimes the manager one works with. The quality of the working relationships with boss and colleagues is a key driver for staying with or leaving an employer. The Kelly Global Workforce Index 2013³ surveyed 120,000 respondents from 31 countries across the Americas; Europe, Middle East, and Africa; and Asia Pacific. Sixty-three percent of the participants stated that the quality of the relationship with their direct manager impacted their level of satisfaction with their job.

The psychological contract is no more. Welcome to the social contract.

Relationships matter, and the quality of our working relationships matters even more in the modern world. Our willingness to tolerate toxic behaviors—the team member who takes credit for our work, the boss who yells, or being excluded from team meetings—is diminishing. Our options to seek opportunities elsewhere are endless. When people move to a new job, it's not just about the money being offered, it's also about the quality of the team experience.

The impact of globalization is changing the nature of work. No longer are individual employees competing in a local market for the next opportunity; instead we are all part of the global talent pool. The rush to outsource in the 1990s demonstrated how quickly change can occur and how new sources of talent can be tapped.

When it comes to finding new sources of talent, it seems that twenty-first-century companies are destined to play a never-ending game of global whack-a-mole. As fast as a new talent hotspot pops up, whether it's a city or a country, other companies quickly follow—draining the market for talent and extending the game as companies rush off to anticipate and capture the next talent hotspot.

Fiverr.com, Upwork.com, and TaskRabbit.com are platforms connecting a global army of freelancers with opportunities that match their skills. Tapping into the flexible economy will allow companies to scale up and down rapidly in response to market and project needs.

Transparency and opportunity on the Internet means we are now competing with an unseen colleague who may be thousands of miles and many time zones away. When you're sleeping, they're working.

Dan Pink, best-selling author of books on the changing world of work, observes “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.” The future of work is less of a chore or a place we have to go to. Instead, work becomes something we choose to do because we want to.

Relationship with Colleagues

In today's hyperconnected world it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between friends and colleagues.

We spend more than 40 percent of our time with work colleagues who were strangers initially. In twentieth-century models coworkers bonded together in the same place. They built tribal relationships and often did not play well with the other tribes in the workplace. Sales competed with operations, finance competed with HR. It was politics, silos, and turf wars, with infighting tribe by tribe.

From studying the brain we know that our instinct is to put up defenses with people we don't know—unless, of course, they seem like us and then a quick bond develops. But in today's entrepreneurial global workplace this tribal attitude cannot survive. Building relationships and connections quickly, and paying attention to how we bond so that everyone is included, is paramount.

Increasingly, the workplace consists of the traditional employee, as well as contractors and independent consultants. What's uncommon is the focus on how the individual contractors and consultants are integrated into the traditional team and how they are treated.

In many organizations independent workers are still kept at arm's length. Training, social events, and access to information are usually unavailable to the flexible worker. The result is a segment of have-nots and therefore potential will-nots.

In many cases this differentiation is understandable. A legal line has be drawn to prevent the independent worker from gaining access to benefits and perks offered to full-time employees such as stock options, overtime pay, 401k accounts, and health care—in addition to matters of trade secrets, training, and confidentiality.

Deloitte's “2016 Global Human Capital Trends” report stated that contingent, contract, and part-time workers make up almost one-third of the workforce, yet many companies lack the HR practices, culture, or leadership support to manage this new workforce.

With more than 40 percent of the workforce likely to be composed of independent workers by 2020,⁴ it's apparent that legislation will need to move quickly in order to keep up. In the book, The Alliance, Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn), shares his vision for the future of work. The days of the career for life are gone, replaced by the concept of “tours of duty” where the nature of work is becoming more fluid and where individuals with specific skills are hired to complete a specific project.

Building alliances is essential from Reid's perspective. Employees may only work with you for a certain project cycle and then move on to another tour. They may or may not stay with your company if the mutual alliance no longer makes sense. But keeping the relationship regardless of where the person goes is essential.

Who you know and what you know is much more important than the formal role you play.

Relationship with Cultures

We are all global workers, whether we recognize that today or not.

Linda and Morag have worked with leaders on five continents and in more than 30 countries; we've seen the future.

And as globalization accelerates, the need to collaborate with colleagues from across the world increases. With globalization comes the importance of respecting cultural differences and being curious about the expectations of others. In doing so, we create respect for different approaches to how work gets done in different countries.

Working globally is no longer an opportunity afforded to just a few expatriate assignments. We are all global citizens and need to build global relationships in order to succeed.

Connecting with our colleagues is vital, whether we're sitting in an office, a cubicle, a coffee shop, or on our sofa. Our assumptions of working relationships need to change from an individualistic approach, which fueled unhealthy internal competition, to an ally mind-set, which Morag wrote about extensively in her book, Cultivate: The Power of Working Relationships.

As humans, we are naturally social creatures, which means the opportunity to chat with a colleague at the water cooler or stick our head in someone's office and say “hi” actually matters to a company's success.

It's no surprise that one of the key questions in Gallup's engagement research is “Do I have a best friend at work?” Effective professional relationships are not just a nice to have, they are a need to have. There is a clear correlation between a positive answer to this question and higher employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Relationship with the Community

The importance of the relationship between companies and the local communities in which they operate has often been overlooked, with a few notable exceptions like the garden cities in the United Kingdom and the original Industrial Revolution Quaker factories Cadbury and Clarks, to name but two. In these cases, the companies provided not just a positive working environment but also sought to have a positive impact on the family and social lives of their employees.⁵

How times have changed. Now the impact of organizations on the communities and environment around them is scrutinized. Corporate philanthropy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs are a business priority and integrated into corporate strategy for many organizations. It's been said that bad news travels faster than good news. Technology has only increased the transparency of these relationships, with negative stories being published around the world in minutes.

Fair trade, clean water, environmental sustainability, local sourcing, and zero waste are initiatives on the mind of every future-thinking leader—and employee. While some CEOs might have disparaged these ideas years ago, today no one doubts the importance of community-mindedness to a brand. Additionally, these considerations are key to the relationship a company has with its community, its employees, and vendor partners.

There is a move in the European Union⁶ to make a requirement for publicly traded companies to report their CSR programs and social impact. More and more we are hearing that customers are choosing to do business with organizations that can demonstrate a positive relationship with the communities in which they operate.

CSR is one opportunity that provides employees the opportunity to feel connected to something bigger than themselves and see their company supporting the social good.

Social networking happens between companies and communities and goes way beyond Facebook likes. The key is to be proactive and own the message.

Relationship with Our Network

Collecting “likes” and random connections is not networking. While worn as a badge of honor, simply having a large number of connections is not the same as having an effective network.

It's the quality of the connections that matters, not the quantity.

Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, says this brilliantly: In the future we will all need to “stand out from the crowd while at the same time being part of the crowd or, at least, the wise crowd.”⁷

She goes on to describe a future where we will all need to be able to stand out with mastery and skills while simultaneously becoming part of a collection of other masters who, together, create value. A failure to do so will likely result in us being on our own, isolated and competing with thousands of others with no possibility of leveraging what a crowd brings.

In the past, success was achieved through personal drive, ambition, and competition. In the future, success will be achieved through the subtle but high-value combination of mastery and connectivity. The defining factors will be what you know, who you know, and how well you can work with others.

There are now seven billion mobile devices on earth,⁸ almost one for each person. Online connectivity has been jokingly referred to as the new minimum level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

At the time of this writing, we the authors had a combined LinkedIn network of over 6,000 people. These are first-degree connections and include people we have worked with, met at events, and partnered with—people who would take our calls. Our second-degree connections, or friends of friends, expands our network exponentially. This number doesn't include our LinkedIn followers, our Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or ScoopIt followers.

Having a network is not the same as networking. Having a network is passive, reactive, and refers to the people we are connected to through our professional work, associations, and family. Networking is proactive; it is how we use our network and web of connections to leverage our reputation, impact, and achieve our personal goals. Networking focuses on connecting with the people who can help you succeed today and help make your future goals a reality.

Forget the six degrees of separation. In the twenty-first century it's more like two degrees of connection.

However, these virtual connections are only of use if we are proactive in nurturing the relationships. As we move to a more fluid definition of work, career connections with allies become even more important—especially the “loose” connections to friends of friends.

You must intentionally connect or risk becoming disconnected. Within this second tier of connections there are opportunities that may be crucial to your future work.

In the new work order recruiting is both digital and social, personal and impersonal. It's not only who we know that's important, it's who knows us and who can find us that will be a key determinant of our success.

Balancing Is No Act

In the future, and more important, today, we need to be even more diligent in balancing the needs of the relationships we have with work and the relationships we have with others.

Increased connectivity means we can share work and simplify our approaches. The relationships we build with others are how we avoid becoming isolated, fragmented, and—at worst—obsolete.

Most of all, we must recognize that we have no excuse for not enjoying the kind of working relationships we aspire to.

Future-Proof Your Company

• Have you relied on technology and gimmickry instead of nurturing personal relationships? How can you help employees shift from the traditional work mind-set, to embrace a digital mind-set that will impact how they manage, organize, and lead change?
• What are the digital platforms, applications, and software needed to support clearer communication across the organization?
• Have you taken a critical look at your people policies and practices to see which are helping to build relationships and which are continuing to maintain the tribal “them and us” attitudes of the past?

Future-Proof Your Career

• As you consider the tasks you're working on right now, how can you take a more relationship-oriented approach to your work?
• What workplace relationships are stressing you? What proactive steps can you take to improve those relationships?
• Take an honest look at your connections and collaborative skills. What can you do to improve those relationships?