Preamble: Good Leaders, Unite!

In a world where complexity reigns, where capitalism's grip on society threatens democracy, and where suffering pervades many organizations, we find ourselves at a crossroads. In order to reshape the future of work, leaders must heed the call of transformation, daring to challenge the status quo and driving change for good.

For far too long, executives across functions have grappled with an existential crisis, losing sight of their true purpose and their potential to become a force for positive change. We've professionalized, we've gathered brilliant minds, but the truth is, people and planet are no longer truly at the heart of what we do. We've wandered in the wilderness of indifference, too often lost in a labyrinth of bureaucracy and technology.

The path to real change is not lined with quick fixes or superficial solutions. We must stop to purchase indulgences in the form of sustainability reports or DEI programs, and cease to distract ourselves with the latest technological marvels to atone for our shortcomings.

Our first step is to gain clarity on where exactly we want to lead our organizations. If we're not cautious, the "Future of Work" narrative risks becoming itself hegemonic and instrumental. It promotes a seductive doctrine that urges individuals to conform to ostensibly inevitable external changes, without encouraging critical reflection on our destination and purpose. Rather than asking, "What is the future of work?"—which is descriptive—we should query, "What SHOULD the work of the future be?"

This calls not only for new ways to imagine our organisations, but for a profound, inward journey. Leadership itself has grown morally mute, and it takes bravery to confront our deepest fears, and stand up for what is good. Hence, the second step is a winding road of personal transformation demanding introspection, courage, and radical honesty.

Leaders must shed the chains of dependency on those in power. Good leaders, in and beyond HR, must take the reins of transformation and commit to subordinate effectiveness to #ethics, #humanism and #sustainability. They must once again nurture a dual loyalty, towards both the business and the ideals of their profession. The bedrock of any good organization are good people, and leaders must be willing to lead the way, so that others might follow.

Using HR as an example, we illustrate that leaders must confront their own role in creating and perpetuating the suffering they claim to alleviate. Herein might lie an opportunity for HR to show its metal and step into the void. A new HR has the potential to be the vanguard of a coalition of the willing, fostering systemic change within an unjust economic system. To achieve systemic transformation we must unify practitioners across organizations in a shared quest for what is right and good.

The clock is ticking and it's time to decide which road you are willing to travel. The solemn truth is that if we falter to transform, the #futureofwork will be an exact mirror of our troubled present. So, will you perpetuate the unhappiness of the past, with more of the same but new fancy clothes? Or will you take the courageous leap toward a better world, one where work exudes dignity, the economy serves humanity, and our organizations shine as beacons of a good life for all?

Peter Senge once spoke of leadership as a community's ability to shape its future. Within the HR community, let the spark of unwavering determination to craft a better world of work grow! Let our actions be the testament to our commitment to brighter, more humane organisations. That famous future, the future of work, is already upon us. Friends, let us not squander it! 

Introduction

Welcome, everyone! It's a genuine pleasure to share some further reflections on a topic that holds much relevance for us all: The Future of Work. In a world where the average person spends over 100,000 hours working, where more than 80% of adults deeply identify with their job roles, and where employment still far too often creates significant unhappiness, the imperative is clear—we must ensure that work becomes a positive force for as many people as possible.

And we firmly believe that this requires leadership. Leaders, across the board, need to not only deepen their understanding of what constitutes good work and actively contribute to its realization, but they must also scrutinize their own role within organisational systems, and assess their own capacity for transformative change, both personally and institutionally. Seizing the opportunity of the recent global HR Congress, we turned the spotlight on a pivotal group of leaders – those in HR. Why HR? Because, more than any other leaders, we believe HR leaders should be the custodians of good work. After all, HR is all about people, isn’t it? But, here’s the twist: when Antoinette and I delved into the data, to be perfectly honest, we didn’t really see it. Thus, we decided to kick off the Congress with a gentle provocation: we suggest the future of work is looking increasingly bleak, because leaders – particularly those in HR – find themselves increasingly stuck. 

But let us start from the beginning. Over recent years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of new roles proposed for HR. It’s remarkable – we're truly world class at inventing new positions. Can you spot some outlandish ones? Astoundingly, four out of the top five new "job roles on the rise in 2023" belong to HR! The lone outlier? A 'truck driver.' And yet, despite this feverish creativity, genuine transformation seems to be extremely rare. So, our hypothesis is that all this variety masks a deep and unexamined identity crisis. We suspect that as a function, HR has willingly surrendered to the bottom line, and today, we'll try to show you why.

  
Together, over the next 20 minutes, we aim to do two things. Firstly, we want to share with you a short retrospective of HR across its history. In an era where the noise of social media crowds out critical analysis, we want to dig a little deeper. In the second part, we want to explore how HR can free itself from what we will suggest is a deliberate stagnation. We firmly believe it is possible to change. But there are no simple fixes. Change demands substantial investment, determination and, above all, the willingness to face ourselves. It will need courageous people like I’m certain all of you who are watching are. So, are you ready to embark on this little journey together?

1. HR Retrospective

Why do people venture into HR?

Our research shows many reasons why individuals join HR. However, three motivations consistently stand out: a passion for working with people, a commitment to defending workers' rights, and a pragmatic drive to seek viable solutions when workplace conflicts arise. Maybe let’s have a quick show of hands: do any of these resonate with the discussions you just had?

Considering these goals, how successful do you think HR has been? 

Well, the answer here is complicated. A lot of it depends, as we will hear in a second, on circumstances. However, across all the surveys three points crucially stand out:

• HR, regrettably, has become the least trusted function in the organisation, except among executives. Yet even they aren’t convinced that HR contributes significantly to the bottom line.
• In many cases, HR is perceived as ineffective in addressing organizational tensions, let alone deliver reliable services. And many wouldn’t even recognise us at the watercooler.
• And when it comes to employee welfare, the reality is disheartening: most workers have been losing out. So to put it into scientific slang: "on average we did not fare very well"!

• PATERNALISM: At the beginning of the industrial revolution, HR emerged to support early industrialists and family patriarchs striving for better health and living conditions in their factories.
• POWER: Then, amid deteriorating work conditions and increasing unionisation, HR pivoted to manage industrial power relations, ensuring orderly production.
• PROCESS: Post-World War II, HR expanded rapidly to facilitate ever larger-scale of business with professional selection, training, and management. Shortly afterwards, when social democracies demanded greater worker protection the human relations movement emerged, seeking to balance performance and well-being.
• PROFIT: And, finally, as neoliberalism and global corporate expansion surged in the '80s, HR enthusiastically embraced high-performance cultures and a 'maximising profit' narrative.

2. The Anatomy of A Mid-Life Crisis

And that’s a paradox, isn’t it? We've all learned that culture change is rooted in underlying assumptions and values, below the surface. So if HR had strong values, how did it drift off course?

Unfortunately, it turns out the fashionable iceberg model is as popular as it is simplistic. So, it’s time to upgrade our toolkit: out with Schein, and in comes complexity!

Now, without diving too deep into the details – you find all the references on our web site, let me share a point from the operational coal face. As it happens, in complex business environments when we dive beneath the surface, we seldom find a neatly ordered set of shared values and assumptions that we can plug into some regression analysis or change programme to create the future. Conversely, the water is often pretty dark and murky and we face dangerous sharks and treacherous currents. In more technical speak, within social systems, we encounter three essential entities: people, culture, and social structures, each with its unique powers. Their combined interactions generate complex mechanisms that MIGHT, under certain conditions, translate into certain constellations, that we MIGHT detect above the water. But what does this mean for HR?

Simply put, it means that we can't just pick and choose our roles in complex social systems. Often roles predate us and our character and identity emerge dynamically from the interplay between narratives, our evolving agency, and relational dynamics. This also implies that the popular idea that we can change culture by simply changing mindsets is highly simplistic. It takes evolution of all elements in the system to generate transformation. Plus, a lot of courage to fend off the lurking 'sharks' of orthodoxy.

So, maybe we could say that HR was indeed a victim of circumstances.

Right from its inception, HR occupied what is called a marginal leadership position. That is a nice way for saying that despite our relentless proclamation that "people are at the heart of our business" HR had very little power. Its profession was loose, its authorisation uncertain, and its influence limited, sparking existential anxiety and a deep desire to carve out a role that was both recognised and effective.
Initially, that wasn’t a big issue until the context shifted towards massive instrumentalization. Because then, HR got trapped by the currents below the surface. In order to wield influence within the business, HR basically had to justify its existence by instrumentalising itself.
And that’s when the idea of the business partner discourse was born, which seemed a truly brilliant idea at the time.

All research shows HR's extraordinary effort to ascend to strategic significance over the past three decades. But truth be told, it always was, in essence, a dangerous game of swimming with the sharks. And, unfortunately, HR heroically failed. 

3. The Sinister Shadow of the Business Partner Discourse

All research shows HR's extraordinary effort to ascend to strategic significance over the past three decades. But truth be told, it always was, in essence, a dangerous game of swimming with the sharks. And, unfortunately, HR heroically failed. 

• Instead of getting closer to the people, HR found itself disconnected from the very individuals it aimed to serve. The imprudent separation between strategic advice and day-to-day people operations led to HR management by “remote control” and algorithm, booming HR outsourcing and increasing depersonalization. This is why HR often goes unrecognized in the organisational corridors. And, of course, vendors absolutely loved it! It's no coincidence that 90% of HR "research" today is sponsored by suppliers.
• Instead of championing labour rights, HR often operated as a subsidiary of the finance department. It’s original humanism faded away very quickly when the emphasis shifted towards numbers, KPIs, performance-based pay, and the relentless construction of "business cases" to support Human Capital-ism.
• And finally, HR inadvertently undermined its own capacity to tackle real-world issues, because the three-tier model (anyone?), excessive outsourcing and a single-minded focus on rolling out systems gradually chipped away at HR's core competencies and flexibility, eroding both its unique knowledge and its capacity to customize its services. And it also lost valuable allies. 

4. Reconstructing Leadership

Which brings us to the second (and hopefully brighter) part of our short journey. What can we do? Where do we lead from here? How can we get to a new horizon for work, to borrow from the conference theme of the recent HR Congress, “where – quote, unquote – “the well-being of individuals and the nurturing of humane workplaces have taken centre stage”. Is it even possible?

Yes, we think it is. But It’s not gonna be easy. Our first step is to gain clarity on where exactly we want to lead our organizations. Not: what is the future of work, which is descriptive, but what SHOULD the work of the future be? And there are so many ideas, proposals, and leadership models scattered all across cyberspace that it has become hard to know what to believe in. That’s why, two years ago, Antoinette and I embarked on an inquiry to figure out what exactly makes organizations good, and one thing became immediately evident.

Most of what’s being proposed as “new” today remains entrenched in an instrumentalist paradigm. Concepts like agility, net zero, net positive, sustainability, ESG, SDG, center around "doing less harm" while essentially maintaining the status quo. And if we are not careful, the “Future of Work” narrative itself becomes instrumental, by emphasising the necessity for people to submit themselves to inescapable external changes without questioning where we are going and why. But reducing bureaucracy, becoming agile or offsetting co2 emissions isn't the same as doing good. Doing good is about who we are and how to bring to life the best in ourselves at and through work.

Our simple idea is that we need to re-embed our organisations, as the vital link between a fulfilling life and a prosperous society. Organisations attain excellence by enabling people to develop -internally - while contributing collectively to a good economy and society - externally. And let’s be clear. We are not arguing against making organisations more efficient, customer-centric or adaptive, but we do suggest to do it for a different purpose. Profit is NOT an end in itself, but must serve to enable social flourishing and justice on a larger scale.

But that clearly takes more than new narratives or polished purpose statements. Firstly, as we have seen, we must cultivate all those elements below the Organisational surface, from the underlying cultural foundations—like language, symbols, metrics, and policies—to the structural frameworks, routines, and systems, and the holistic development of individuals and communities.

This calls for a new model to look at Organisations. In our work, we emphasize the intentional development of virtuous social practices, which we call 'micro-organizations,' alongside the refinement of corporate institutions and governance, which we frame as 'corporation', and of course people. Here our focus lies not just on competencies, but character, virtues and wisdom.

But its not just about each component, but also about the connection between them. Truly human-centric organizations need to nurture a moral environment that combines care, integrity and compassion with a genuine commitment toward mutual elevation for the greater good. To do so, we must continue to evolve organizational design, striking a more progressive balance between local affordances within those micro-organizations, individual growth, and the need to foster shared learning and a coherent external value proposition.

And that’s difficult. In our research, we can clearly see that with growing scale most corporations turn instrumentalist. To counter this, we believe that we must overlay the existing dominant financial governance with disciplines for collective reflection and participation, essentially creating a living organizational constitution. For instance, at ING, HR sponsored a so-called leadership council that collectively steered the ongoing transformation. The ultimate goal is to first connect people, structures and culture, thus nurturing organisational wisdom, identity and character, and then to enable a reflective equilibrium that continually actualises the potential of the organisation, within its specific contingent ecosystem, to create social flourishing.

4. Reconstructing HR Leadership

Which brings us to the second part of our short journey. What can we do? Where do we lead from here? How can we get to this new hr horizon, to borrow the conference theme: “where the well-being of individuals and the nurturing of humane workplaces have taken centre stage”. Is it even possible?

Yes, we think it is. But it won’t be easy. Our first step is to gain clarity on where exactly we want to lead our organizations. There are so many ideas, proposals, and leadership models scattered across cyberspace that it has become hard to know what to believe in. Hence, two years ago, Antoinette and I embarked on an inquiry to figure out what makes organizations good, and one thing became immediately evident.

Most of what’s being proposed today remains entrenched in an instrumentalist paradigm. Concepts like net zero, net positive, sustainability, ESG center around "doing less harm" while essentially maintaining the status quo. But reducing bureaucracy or offsetting co2 isn't the same as doing good. Doing good is about who we are and how to bring to life the best in ourselves through and at work.

The simple idea here is that we need to re-embed our organisations, as the vital link between a fulfilling life and a prosperous society. Organisations can attain excellence by enabling people to develop internally, while contributing collectively to a good economy and society externally. And let’s be clear. We are not arguing against making organisations more efficient and adaptive, but we suggest to do it for a different reason. Profit isn't an end in itself but serves to enable flourishing and social justice on a larger scale.

But that takes more than new narratives or polished purpose statements. Firstly, as we have seen, we must cultivate all those elements below the Organisational surface, from the underlying cultural foundations—language, symbols, metrics, and policies—to the structural frameworks, routines, systems, and the holistic development of individuals and communities.

This calls for a new model to look at the Organisation. In our work, we emphasize the intentional development of virtuous social practices, which we term 'micro-organizations,' alongside the refinement of corporate institutions and governance, framed as the 'corporation', and individuals. Here our focus is not just on competencies, but character, virtues and wisdom.

But its not just about each component, but about the connection between them. Truly human-centric organizations need to nurture a moral environment that combines care, integrity and compassion with a genuine commitment toward mutual elevation for the greater good. To do so, we must continue to evolve the organizational design, striking a progressive balance between local affordances within micro-organizations, individual growth, and the need to foster shared learning and a coherent external value proposition. And that’s difficult. In our research, we can clearly see that with growing scale corporations turn instrumentalist. To counter this, we must overlay the existing financial governance with disciplines for collective reflection, essentially creating a living organizational constitution. For instance, at ING, HR sponsored a global leadership council that collectively steered our ongoing transformation. The ultimate goal is to connect people, structures and culture, nurturing organisational wisdom, identity and character, and to enable a reflective equilibrium that actualises the potential of the organisation to create social flourishing. 

5. Leading the Transformation of Work

Or to put it more simply, we must learn to care and be intentional about our Organisation's moral climate exactly like we have learned to care for the environmental climate.

But how does all of this translate into action? Firstly, we must focus MORE on our people. This involves character-based selection and promotion, personalized development plans, and strict adherence to that famous 'no asshole' rule. Secondly, we need to much more DELIBERATELY evolve management structures and practices to craft that reflective holding space for mutual growth and creativity. Thirdly, we must revise corporate governance structures and institutions - like success measures, reward and recognition policies, or team affordances, to embed virtuous principles and actively develop and foster positive impact.

Key here is to evolve people and organizational practices holistically and at the same time, across various levels, avoiding fragmentation between specializations or vendors.

But, there is always a “but”: from our experience, the maturity of an organisation can never transcend the wisdom of its leaders. Therefore, we must also deliberately develop leadership. And there's a lot to do: a recent study by the CMI (Chartered Management Institute) found that 52% of leaders lack professional qualifications and 50% of new leaders fail within the first year.

There can be no doubt that HR is in a great position to foster positive transformation. It holds many critical levers to influence the context, both within HR and across the policies, structures, and success metrics of the broader organization. We've gathered some initial ideas, and you will find some of them on our website, but we’d love to hear from you: if you're willing to share your thoughts and best practices, just get in touch. We will make all the outputs accessible at leadershipsociety.world.

But talking about the need for better leadership, this of course brings us back to our initial question. HR possesses some power, but it might be unwilling or unable to wield it effectively. So, which of the many, many roles should HR assume to catalyse positive change? 

In essence, we believe it all boils down to only three viable options:

• A) Stick to the conventional 'business partner' narrative. This, frankly, encompasses all those fashionable trends from AI to DEI.
• B) Cultivate HR’s role as what we have called an excellence brokers. This could mean empowering and uniting selected good leaders within an organization, to systematically create ripple effects throughout the business. It demands more focus on L&D and change management, and a radical empowerment of virtuous teams. Think of it as an undercover mission aimed at eliminating barriers to excellence, from the bottom up, one team at a time, until the whole system shifts.
• C) Lastly, where feasible, HR could step up its position in the boardroom to actively steer the organization towards a new, more humanistic narrative. This would require a human-centric overhaul of all HR policies and processes, the intentional development of governance and organisational design, and a meticulous vetting process for all leaders.

6. The Future of Work is Now

But as we said at the beginning, the challenge extends far beyond HR. If we’re serious about achieving good work, we need all senior leaders to step up. That is why we have inaugurated a new initiative aimed at professionalising leadership, called the Global Society for Good Leadership. It is meant to be an active collaboration between academia and praxis to combine the best of research with the best of our collective experience. Our objective is to stimulate a humanistic ethos of good leadership and to systematically support marginal leaders across all functions with continual development, a strong community and our collective best practices.

Such a project cannot succeed without the partnership and courage of executives at all levels. We must insist together on the advancement of better leadership within and across Organisations. Because let’s face it—the challenges that society encounters today cannot be resolved by any single company alone. But perhaps by forging a broader coalition of leaders committed to the highest potential of both people and organizations, we stand a tiny chance to foster the necessary shift in the character of business to defy an increasingly dehumanized financial capitalism that encroaches upon our enterprises.

The simple truth is: Excellence in business is not just about what we produce, and certainly not simply about how much money we make, but ultimately, about who we become. Our work is always also a mirror image of who we are, capable of creating boundless joy or bottomless sorrow. Therefore, colleagues and friends, what you do, and how you develop your own leadership in your own organisation and beyond, matters.

With that, we come to the end. The presentation, references and resources are available on our website at leadershipsociety.world. And if you want to take away one closing thought from our session: remember, we are not good leaders, because we rule; we are good leaders because we truly care. The future of work? It’s already here. Let’s not waste it! Thank you very much!