A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential--if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a "good job" looks like. Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities--and help our organizations do the same. Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety--despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.

Empower and Inspire Human Potential 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 and how they lead it for generations to come. In The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce, Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley team up again to deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in a sequel to their successful book 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. The Empathy Advantage offers advice on how to lead a complex, diverse, and multi-generational workforce to out-perform your competition. This book will inspire you to: Rethink Your Workforce You'll gain new insights into today's empowered workforce and how best to tap their intrinsic motivations. Rethink Your Organization You'll learn how to reorganize work to become resilient in continuous change. Rethink Your Leadership You'll discover superpowers and unleash your Empath Advantage. Whether you are a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce speaks to those who are ready to embrace a more influential and engaging form of leadership, and will earn a place in the libraries of anyone with responsibility for recruiting, engaging, leading and retaining the next generation of workers.