In the decade before the Covid-19 pandemic, change was coming so quickly and across so many vectors that most business leaders-so busy tackling one new challenge after another-missed the trendlines that would collide in the early months of 2020 and forever change their workforce.
In The Empathy Advantage, Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in this sequel to The Adaptation Advantage. Leaders today must acknowledge and respond to the fundamental shifts that lay the foundation for effective leadership: From managing people to enabling success, from viewing peers as competitors to seeing them as collaborators, from applying extrinsic pressure on workers to unlocking intrinsic motivation, and from driving productivity with unquestioned authority to inspiring value creation by leading with empathy.
In this book, you will learn about the five interlocking trends that brought us the empowered workforce: The Great Resignation, the Great Refusal, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Retirement, and the Great Relocation collectively delivered the Great Reset. These trends, building for a decade prior to the pandemic, saw employees leading jobs; restructuring where and how they work, accelerating retirement, and reordering the role of work in their lives.
We stand at an inflection point where technology can be leveraged to unleash human potential, or it can pit humans against machines. Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have dedicated the last five years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts have brought us to this place in order to construct this comprehensive and approachable guide to the future of work.
Blending insights from interviews with hundreds of executives with insights on professional and cultural identity, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes the world of work has undergone and posits the solution: create new systems that detach identity from work and connect it to purpose. This purpose, the authors suggest, will motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of identity throughout the workforce. Only then can we embrace a new approach to work that places learning and adaptability at its center.
With an insightful foreword by New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman, The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work is an important resource for all leaders looking to help people develop the resilient, adaptive identities necessary to flourish in the rapidly changing workplace.
