In the 1960s, it was non-hygienic factors. In the 1990s, it was High Performance Indicators, or HPIs, as they became known. And now, 20 years later, it’s called agile leadership.
It’s true that whatever goes around, comes around.
But no matter what you call it, it all amounts to the same thing: People matter; a lot. And organizations that truly recognize that they contribute a lot of value, are not only more productive, but are also more profitable than those which don’t.
It then begs the question: If we’ve known how important people were to the success of organizations for all these years, why the sudden interest? Why are leaders caring more about it now than they have in in the past couple of decades?
Here are three reasons.
1. Generation Y has come of age
It is generally agreed that the Generation Y cohort was born between 1980 and 2000. And that means that many of them have recently moved into leadership roles.
It is they who are assuming the corporate reins as increasingly large numbers of Baby-Boomers retire. And it is also this generation, in particular, that will remember how employers treated their parents.
In the mid-1980s, the long-held practice of giving employees jobs for life vanished. Beginning with the Nashua Corporation and accelerated by Xerox, people unexpectedly found out that their loyalty to the firm was misplaced. Xerox alone laid off more than 20,000 workers worldwide. The world of work would never be the same.
Generation Y is now driving the agenda and will do for the next 20 or 30 years. And while the views they have about how their organizations should be led are quite different from the regime under which their parents worked, many of them, nevertheless, will be ignorant of the value that people bring to the success of the business.
That’s because they will remember only the adverse impact their parents experienced. This time, however, they’ll be viewing employees from the executive side of the house.
2. Organizations are feeling new pressures.
The ground rules of entire industries have been turned on their heads in recent years by the Internet, which has simply made traditional models obsolete.
For example, customers, who in the past, had to rely on local gossip to discover where gasoline could be bought for less, now have access to web sites where they can discover on their smart phones where the cheapest prices are according to their post code.
3. Interdependency has become indispensable
Fifty years ago, Barbara Streisand reminded us that “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
This expression could not have been more true than if it had been written for leaders today.
Personal relationships aside, it’s becoming measurably obvious that inter-organizational competition is counterproductive. Each part of any company is almost entirely dependent on the success of the others; and anything less than their full cooperation can threaten its very survival.
Will leaders finally “get it” this time? Will they once and for all put people ahead of efficiencies, and other strategies that look great on paper? Or will they, as the world economies improve, drift back to doing what they did before they were confronted with pressures that were too great to bear in a turbulent economy?
If history has taught us anything, then it has taught us to look for a reprise of the concept of agile leadership in the not too distant future.
It will have a new name and generate a lot of excitement, until someone reminds them that we’ve heard it all before.
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