Embracing The Shift (WIP)
on Leadership
Explore how leading businesses are adapting to a growing freelance economy, managing blended workforces, and maintaining company culture in the face of changing worker preferences.
Highly Skilled Professionals Want Your Work But Not Your Job
Thesis
- A paradigm shift in leadership
- Background
- Post zirp business landscape less favorable to luxury beliefs about management and leadership. Many reputations, business models, and conventional wisdoms will struggle in the new monetary framework, by design. Tom Hagen wasn’t a wartime consigliere. Odysseus couldn’t get home until he humbly acknowledged the same skills in battle were an obstacle in peacetime. Two sides of the coin. But this could be industry specific or subject to politics picking winners and losers. Clearly some big winners from inflation pricing power but one crisis away from command and control becoming viable.
- Product life cycle framework suggests mass adoption of leadership theory based on knowledge worker signals opportunity for disruption. Jack Welch was a hero until he wasn’t. If everybody is a leader, nobody is a leader.
- Many highly skilled professionals are looking for autonomy and flexibility, but also to escape systems of patronage and propaganda masking as culture. They are fine with transactional relationships and will give their best as long as there are interesting problems to solve.
- The rise and popularity of content creators highlighting corporate cringe pushes back against the power of organized corparate narratives.
Scenario
- Marta is under intense pressure to help the company move faster to market by implementing more-sophisticated digital and conversational AI capabilities. But her in-house talent lacks the deep expertise and experience necessary to transform the company’s offerings, processes, and data and security infrastructures, and her recruitment team has been unable to pry away top professionals from tech firms, despite making generous offers.
Scale
- Upwork’s December 2023 study of 3,000 professionals put the number at 38%, or 64 million workers. Of these, one-third were earning more than $150,000 a year, and just over half were providing knowledge services—such as computer programming, marketing, IT, and business consulting.
- Significantly, 52% of Gen Z workers and 43% of Millennials were freelancers in 2023. And the shift is catching on globally: Gartner predicts that independent workers will make up 35% to 40% of the global workforce by 2025.
Challenge
- Integrating and managing what we call the “blended workforce” will be one of the main managerial challenges in the years ahead.
- Culture + values
- Authority
- Knowledge dependency
Risks
- Talent pool for in-house leadership pipeline becomes substantially more risk-averse as it self-selects for comfort and stability.
- Full-time model could be at risk as concentrated political power to alter benefits system becomes a possibility if in-house offers don’t improve.