Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work

Sue Bethanis  0:00 

Welcome to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa's monthly podcast, we provide perspectives on leadership. And we've been doing it for about 18 years, so we're excited to still be doing it. And we're excited today to have Emily Field. Welcome, Emily. Thank you. So glad to have you. Emily is the co author of Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. And she's also a partner at McKinsey Seattle office. Emily partners with leaders to shape data driven organizational strategies designed to achieve business objectives, established talent management as a distinctive advantage, and secure the human resources function as a driver of business value. Since joining McKinsey in 2017, Emily has worked with companies across industries and initiatives to transform the way organizations work. She puts particular emphasis on helping to establish a talent-first approach, installing a high performance culture and adopting effective people analytics approaches. Emily prepares leaders to manage the workforce of the future. She holds a BA in government from Georgetown. So glad to have you. So that was your bio. Yeah, that was your bio that I read, but really I always start with the same question. I've been doing this the whole time, every time we have a guest, because I want to hear from you: what was your journey to write the book? Like, why did you decide to write the book? Now? Tell us a little about you, by way of the book.

Emily Field  1:20 

Yeah, well, what's really interesting is, folks used to tell me, Hey, you're gonna write a book. And I was like, I don't think so. Right. You know, I like to do the work with organizations writing doesn't give me tons of energy. Well, wow, was I wrong? Because I did write a book, right. But what really came to life, and sort of what led to saying, hey, let's actually put pen to paper is, as me and my co authors, Bill and Bryan, were thinking about just sort of trading war stories, right? What makes organizations successful, what makes organizations fail at specific programs, initiatives, transformations, we just kept coming back to, we're becoming broken records, we're like, managers, managers, managers. And then once we sort of identified that, we couldn't unsee it. In any conversation we were having with business leaders, managers kept coming up. And so finally, we said, you know, I think there's something there. And also, you know, we often forget about middle managers, we talk about the top, we talk about harnessing the masses, but frankly, managers get a really bad rap. Their permafrost their the clay layer. And we said, we need to change that narrative. And so this book is really meant to be yes, for senior leaders to understand how to harness the middle manager, but also for middle managers themselves to say, how can they empower themselves to really drive the amazing impact that they can be at the center of.

Sue Bethanis  2:57 

So tell me about, so you got two other people together? And wrote it together? How did you write a book together? That's hard to do.

Emily Field  3:04 

We were warned at the beginning that it's challenging to have co authors and seeing as I've had written exactly one book, and I've only done it with these two co authors. It was actually a really fascinating process. So Bill, Bryan, and I have worked together for years, I've known them as long as I've been at McKinsey. And so you know, we've worked together for a long time. So we started from a place of trust rapport, and also understanding each other's strengths. And so this book was really sort of bringing to life our strengths. So quite literally, the way it worked was, we kind of had an assembly line, in a way, we'd come together at key moments, and this was in the pandemic. So we were meeting outside, but we'd come together, and we'd shape ideas, we'd have flip charts, we'd sort of kick ideas around. And then Bill Schaninger, was very devoted to building the structure of each chapter, how we really think about the governing thoughts and the examples and the research as an academic. And so Bill would build the structure, and then he'd ship it over to me. And I would really flush it out. And that flushing out literally took place mostly on cross country flights. We had this system, he knew I needed to get it by 2pm pacific time on a Monday. So then I could go heads down for five, six hours cross country. And then I would really put the chapter together. And then we had Bryan who's a tremendous storyteller. And Brian, then I'd ship it to Brian as soon as my flight landed, and he would weave in different stories, perspectives so then the assembly line would start again on Thursday evening when I'd be flying home. And we just really kept working like that for the better part of a year to really build it. And I think the other thing that was fascinating I was recently going through sort of the very rough manuscripts. And we also in the margins, right, I was on a plane by myself, I was talking to myself, I was writing in the margins, like, check for relevance in 2023. Right. You know, we talked about return to office, we talk about the wellbeing crisis, right? We talk about, you know, real estate and colocation choices. We talked about the great resignation, we talked about changing jobs, re bundling, automation. And so I'd just would make notes to myself, like check for relevance, right? We knew when that book was coming out. What was crazy to me when we went to actually submit, the final final version was it was all so relevant. Talking about right now, like still equity, talking about well being, talking about mental health, talking about the role of the manager in return to office and making it happen and thinking about why we come together, how we come together, thinking about how jobs are changing, right? The time that the book was published, chat GPT was just a concept right? Now it's a reality, and the speed of change is so rapid. And so it was really fascinating to say, hey, these topics feel like the time is now and managers have to take action and organizations have to help their employees take action.

Sue Bethanis  6:27 

Well, you just said, you stole all my thunder, all those topics we're going to talk about, so. Let's get to them. Okay, so let's start with the one that's clearly up, and that is AI. So, you know, as my son tells me every day, you know, chat GPT was around for a long time before, you know, the latest echo. I know, but it wasn't open source. Okay, so dude, like, we have these conversations about chat GPT a lot. But how do you think it's gonna affect companies that are, let's say tech companies? And how have you seen it affect them and affect managers now in terms of their facility with it, and their ability to apply it? And then how do you see it like, two years from now?

Emily Field  7:12 

Yeah, well, you know, I think we're learning as we go, right? There's a piece of this that is if we think about managers, as re bundlers of tasks.

Sue Bethanis  7:23 

Yes great, great. Love that.

Emily Field  7:25 

If we think about, the specific numbers may vary, depending on the report you look at. But let me throw a few stats at you. So we predict by 2030, that 85% of jobs will be significantly disrupted. And also 97 million jobs are going to be created that don't exist today. And so if we think about that, some of that's driven by chat GPT. Some of it's driven by the aging population, other things, E commerce and sustainability and energy, right? There's different things driving growth. But the reality is that jobs are changing. So that's one. The second is, specifically on generative AI, approximately 10% of any knowledge job can dramatically change as a result of generative AI. And so if we think about that we need to think about then what is the role of the manager? Who's actually understanding what's the mission of my team? What's our direction? How does the work get done? How does my work change? What is the net new work that needs to happen? Right? What's part of that 97 million perhaps? What needs to go away? What's part of that 85 million?

85 percent?

And I'm sorry, I was actually wrong. It's 85 million is not 85%. I'm sorry. But um, so 85 million jobs will be disrupted or go away.

Sue Bethanis  8:54 

And 97 million will be new jobs. And this is just because of GAI?

Emily Field  9:02 

It's because of automation and technology broadly.

Sue Bethanis  9:06 

Okay, I got it. But it's good for all the statistics.

Emily Field  9:11 

So 10% of jobs of any given job will be dramatically changed as a result of generative AI. So if we think about that, then the role of the manager is really critical. And also, if we think about generative AI,  the whole point is to find the next best answer. So what this means is that over time, generative AI becomes smarter. But also you still need the human being the sense maker, who's actually saying, is that the next best answer? And so I think if the past few months are any indication, the rate of change is only going to change. I'm sure we'll talk more about sort of the well being crisis, resiliencey, adaptability. But I think the headline is one of the things that generative AI means in technology more broadly, is managers have to become increasingly resilient. They should have to build adaptable managers who can sense what's on the horizon rapidly respond and translate it into what's the work? How are we getting the work done? What are the results? Because change is the only constant.

Sue Bethanis  10:20 

Right, right. I mean, we keep saying, your business, my business, but it's like, people really need to get that, like, just assume it.

Emily Field  10:28 

Well, and I think the challenge is people are saying, My gosh, give me a break. Right, like, the pandemic, mental health, the great resignation, social, social injustice, all the things like, give me a break. And the reality is that unfortunately, I wish I could give you a break if I had imagined I would, but there won't be a break. And we have to think about how do you change the way work gets done to build in, i'm not gonna call them breaks, but sort of recovery periods? How do you build adaptable managers who can respond in the right way? And then how do you make sure that you're responding to the right things too, versus everything, but that has to do with changing the way the work gets done.

Sue Bethanis  11:13 

Well, let's talk about this move, because we can go into the mental health part of it now. Because, yeah, I think that you're very astute by saying that GAI is just another thing. And I think people are super stressed, I mean, everybody I talked to is stressed out in some way, because their kids are still not adapting. I'm sure if you have kids then we have the same thing. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why we're not adapting. Let's talk about this recovery. And I'm going to say this, because I just spent six weeks recovering. And I would say that my recovery had to do with not just the winter we went through San Francisco, because it was ridiculous. We haven't had a summer or anything, nothing. But you know, it's because of the pandemic, it's because I had surgery, it's because work changed completely. So there's a lot of things that I'm recovering from, and I know how to do this, you know, like, I'm conscious of it. So sorry, the birds are really loud outside. Man, it's morning here. So how do we encourage people to take time to realize that you can't do this full time all the time, you have to have little time to recover every day. And so the short term, and you have to have long term, like go on vacation for two weeks minimum, because your brain changes in that time. And I'm just really concerned because we're at a complete stress level, that as you said, we're not changing the stress level in terms of there's always something is not going to change. And it's been like this in tech for a long time. But this is, in the 28 years I've been in it, this is the most intense heightened stress I've seen. So let's give you a bunch of stuff to think about.

Emily Field  13:03 

Yeah, well I may start somewhere that you're not going to expect, which is actually about the job of middle managers. It actually starts with the job design. If you think about it, you can't, you know, telling someone to calm down or chill out or recover when they're running on empty, their task list is full both personal and professional. And the system is not rewarding recovery. Like Good Luck. Actually, I think I just felt my cortisol level spike, right?

Sue Bethanis  13:37 

Making it worse.

Emily Field  13:38 

Yeah, exactly. You actually have to change the work. And this is where you think about it, in an organization, is the organization set up for success? If we look at the organization, like the org design, do we have managers reporting to managers reporting to managers. In the case of tech, is it that we've just had such hyper growth for so long, that we've kind of become this like mushrooming organization, where we ask, Hey, why does this work with like this? Why does this work happen here? How do these two groups work together? And it's like that's a good question. I don't know. Right? And so it actually starts with is our structure making it hard to get work done? Is it making it that it's actually hard to understand who's accountable for what? 43% of middle managers that we surveyed said that organizational bureaucracy makes it hard for them to get work done. 44% said that they have experienced burnout recently, which is higher than any other population. So managers are the most burnt out and they're citing organizational bureaucracy as a reason they can't get stuff done. So then you need to say, hey, we need to fundamentally rethink the role, right? And I like to think about this as the manager operating system, this idea of, okay, think about just the number of tasks, just like the organization has mushroomed, the manager role, the manager workload has mushroomed. They've got all of these tasks just constantly layering on top of and no one task is so onerous in itself, right? It's the accumulation of all the tasks, like the 100th one, that's the straw that broke the camel's back. And when we survey middle managers, we found that on average, middle managers spent a day a week on administrative tasks, they spend two days a week on individual contributor tasks and the rest of their time is spent on strategy and people, which you might argue should be the vast majority of their time. And we're not saying managers shouldn't have individual contributor responsibilities. It's actually important, there's certain work on an individual contributor basis, that middle managers are uniquely suited to drive, weaving the entire picture together, forecasting out, etc. But you should ask the question, if we just take that individual contributor work, are our managers spending the majority their time on the highest value individual contributor work? Or if we're being honest are they filling a role that someone else on their team was previously doing and when that person moved on, they just absorbed it?So how do you get to the individual contributor work that's high impact? And then on the administrative work, actually, we need to say, we need to take a hard look at all the tasks that are on a manager's plate and we need to say, what can we eliminate? What can we just kill completely? Because maybe we needed it at one time, but we no longer need it. Then what can we automate or streamline? And then what can we push down? What can we delegate so that it's not falling on the managers plate. And I think that's just so important, you actually have to in order to help a manager recover restore, you actually have to create space where they have a chance to do that. And that means something has to fall off their plate. And unfortunately, what we're seeing is that oftentimes the individual contributor work does not fall off their plate, because they're measured on it. It's highly visible, it's tied to their name, they're held accountable for it. What falls off their plate, what's the first thing to go is actually the team leadership, the people in the coaching, oftentimes, because many organizations, you can't be a jerk, right? But you're not rewarded for being an exemplary leader, you're not really rewarded for managing your team. And we think that's a critical shift that needs to happen because that's the most critical role that that a middle manager plays. And so you actually have to change the way that a manager spends their time to then be able to say, are we sufficient? Then you need to think about their role. Are you sufficiently empowering them? Do they have resources? Are you scoping it? And then how do we develop them? How do we build resiliency practices and muscles? And that becomes part of that operating system where you actually say, for example, can you have an entire team shut down for a week so that you actually get full recovery? Because it's not just someone taking off, but they're checking their email constantly. But you actually do a full team shutdown one of my teams and I just this, and it was incredible. Everyone got to have the vacation and we coordinated it with everyone to say we're all gonna take off. And that's not easy to do in client service, right? But so how do you actually then build in those pauses,, that recovery, and then the micro recovery too but again, you can't do that when you're running on empty, you actually have to change the system. You have to actually change the structure how managers are set up for success. And then you have to reward them for it. And I'm a big believer that managers should be held accountable for their team's well being, are they burned out? Are they thriving? Because that's the way you actually drive change.

Sue Bethanis  19:11 

I love it. Okay, you gave us a lot. And thank god, this is recorded. So I'm gonna stop real quick if Deborah wants to jump in and ask a question.

Deborah  19:17 

I just want to say I'm really excited by what Emily is saying about the need to change the jobs themselves. Most of the clients I work with, from middle to upper middle management, I would say and, I mean, the reason I'm here is you're describing the stresses that most of these people are operating with. Yeah, it's really helpful to be able to normalize what they're experiencing. And so your research for me to be able to say, you know, you're not alone. This is a systemic problem. And here's some things you can do about it. So I'm going to be quiet now but just say thank you for doing this. And Sue, thank you for inviting Emily and I want to hear more.

Emily Field  19:59 

Thank you Deborah.

Sue Bethanis  20:00 

So let's talk about in your your mind what the the pandemic and the great resignation, and I don't know if you want to put those together or separate them, it's up to you, but what did that do to sort of the role of the manager, the importance of the manager, middle manager? And you're basically saying they should play a more important role. But what did you see like, was there deterioration? Because there's just no there there anymore. There's nowhere to go in most cases, so just talk to me a little about that.

Emily Field  20:34 

Yeah. And maybe I'll address them separately, but then connect them because I think there's some common threads. If we think about I mean, no one wants to go back to March 2020. But if we just go back there for a brief moment. The reality is that who made it happen, right? Who sent everybody home, who figured out how to make people work from home on their teams? Get it done? It was really the managers.

Sue Bethanis  21:07 

Oh, yeah.

Emily Field  21:08 

And what was fascinating is that when we actually asked managers the reality, they were holding everything together, they were checking on their teams, oftentimes, they were just given the situation in life of middle managers, right? They often had significant caregiving obligations, both parents and children, and they were doing it all and they were taking care of their teams. And no one was asking how they were. Right, an alarming number of managers said, nobody asked who I was, they kind of became this forgotten layer, then on top of that, with the great resignation, they were having to fill jobs rapidly and mass. They were having to also plug the jobs of the folks that had left. And also what we know is that one of the big reasons why people were leaving, was actually because of the transactional nature of work, the lack of relationships, what we found was in our great resignation research people will stay at their job really because of the relationships they have and the managers. The most important relationship, the relationship with your manager is the single biggest determinant on your well being, your health, your performance, bigger than personal relationships bigger than a spouse or partner. And so this manager role had a tremendous role. And it'd be interesting to think about so much was falling on the manager, no one was taking care of the manager and managers were trying, but they weren't made, in all cases, equipped with the right skills to actually be able to support, develop their people who were at the same time saying, I'm going to rethink my relationship with work in many cases. And so then people are leaving the workforce in mass, and whose job was it to solve it? Like it was the managers. And so it's like this great dumping of things on managers.

Sue Bethanis  23:08 

Emily, real quick. Do you have stats on the actual how many managers left, like the percentage of managers who left in a great resignation? Obviously, the workers left more, but I'm curious if there was an out outbound managers do you know?

Emily Field  23:25 

You know, I haven't looked. I don't have specific numbers on that. But certainly, plenty of managers left as well. And disproportionately women were leaving the workforce because they were downshifting their careers. They were taking on the kids care. And so that was another big piece of it in terms of the who was leaving.

Sue Bethanis  23:47 

Right, right. Definitely. Okay. So where are we in terms of recovery of that? There's some companies and again, we're focused on tech, mostly here, but there's some companies that are requiring, I was talking to somebody yesterday that said, oh, yeah, they're requiring somebody go back to the office. And I said, What, are they really doing that? Because the requirement doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna make them do it. And they go yeah, they are. I said, Okay. And it's the manager that's requiring it. For this guy is a manager of like, 300 people, but his manager is saying, Hey, you gotta get back in the office, because he's not really he's kind of like doing it one day a week instead of three. So, what are you seeing in terms of people actually, if they've been told to come back if they actually are.

Emily Field  24:30 

You know, what I'm hearing and seeing anecdotally is people are coming back in part because they're being told I'm gonna check your badge swipes well, like in this economy, especially if your organization has had layoffs, right. I think people are feeling a bit of like the survivor's sort of guilt, or gratefulness, depending on you think about it that like well then I've got to go in. I think what's important though, is what are people doing in the office? And that's really where I think managers have been untapped. underleveraged and are really critical. Which is this idea of managers are if you think about managers, bringing people together, thinking about when we come together, what do we come together for? Do we come to the office, we put our headphones in, and we sit on Zoom meetings for 8 to 10 hours a day. That's horrible use of commute time, terrible for the environment, well being, etc, versus actually saying, how do we think about when do we come together for collaboration, for coaching, for community, for connectivity, and really thinking about what's the purpose of the office and when we come together. I also think what's interesting, too, is people are kind of being victims about this. And I'm obviously being a bit dramatic and using that word of victims, but this is happening to me right, but what if we could have managers really playing this critical role of helping shift people to agents about that? So, okay, if we're coming in, how do we make the best use of our time? And so I love the idea of managers just asking their teams, how effective was our time in office today? Rate it one to five? If it was a five highly effective, I want to know what made it really effective. Let's learn from each other and let's share it far and wide. What if it was a one? Good to know, right? Name it and what wasn't effective and then what can we change about it? Instead of I think saying, coming back to the office, putting our headphones on, and there's the reality right of, hey, my teams globally dispersed, hey, I work in a highly cross functional environment where my teams are, I'm in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, but they're in the office Thursday, Friday, and so we were ships passing in the night. But I think there's a bit to say, hey, what can we control? How can we change it? And how can we evolve our response to say, if we're in the office, let's get best time out of it?

Sue Bethanis  27:02 

Yeah, we use the word intentionality or intention. We've been talking about it since the beginning. Like, if you're gonna go back to the office, which I would say that still with the people we work with,  I would say only the biggies are going back. And most of the people we work with they're still remote. However, if they are remote, they will be intentional about, hey, we want people to come together every quarter for a couple of days, something like that. They'll have an off site. Okay, so that's the least we're doing. And typically, people are intentional about that, because that's what they've been doing forever. But I'm talking about peeps that are coming in twice a week, and they're coming in and doing zoom rather than doing the collaboration doing the coaching doing the community.  I mean, we've of course, tried to brainstorm with people on this. And we are asking the managers to do it. Now they can delegate it. Like they could have a social person who does the social, whatever you want to call it, the community part. What are some of your ideas?

Emily Field  28:04 

I like to call it the chief fun officer.

Sue Bethanis  28:06 

Yeah great. So tell us some of the ideas you guys have come up with in terms of, or you've seeing work really well? Because I'm all about the intentionality.

Emily Field  28:14 

I mean, so I think part of it is actually setting out together, why are we coming into the office, for what purposes? To collaborate, to also apprentice junior colleagues. That's in all of our interest, right? And, to problem solve, we're going to work on some highly collaborative problems that touch multiple of our universes, and we need to come together to really be able to hash it out together, to align on the problem we're solving, then we can disband, go deliver, and then come back, right. And so there's this piece that is actually saying, Why are we coming together? But so important, and then holding ourselves to it. I also think there's a piece and I think a manager can have a helpful role here. There's something about coming in a couple of days a week, which requires a level of task switching and a cognitive load that's really daunting right? Figuring out who's doing kid drop off, who's taking the dog for a walk? Do I have food for lunch, because my office has no food? Like, how can you reduce the cognitive load? Right?

Sue Bethanis  29:24 

It's been a lot of it's a project.

Emily Field  29:27 

It's completely a project, right? It's like, Who's going where, right? It's chaos. And so also, how do we even just think about the organizational tools we're helping people make those plans with their teams, right? How are they going to get the most use out of the time in office? How are they going to also course correct and learn along the way? And then also, how do you give some autonomy, right? If you think about this, we have a story in our book about an organization, the same business unit, two managers, and I like to think of them as they call one manager, a faucet or the tap for UK listeners, and one the sieve. So this the faucet, this manager heard the tech leader say everyone has to come into the office five days a week. And the faucet leader said everyone come into the office five days a week. And so some of the questions that the faucet leaders teams was giving him were like, well, I'm going to be with customers these three days or I'm going to be actually like in the field at a tech site. Does that count? And this faucet was kind of baffled. He's like, I don't honestly I don't know I have to ask. The sieve was, if you think of a sieve right as you're straining, maybe you're straining let's do gold. Like you're sifting for gold.

Sue Bethanis  30:52 

Yeah panning for gold.

Emily Field  30:53 

Getting rid of those pebbles and the impurities. And you're saying, what's the essence? What's the whole point and so the sieve leader said, Look, let's come together. Let's think of this as sort of the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law, let's come together for the highest value of moments where like, let me tell you, when you're with customers, that counts as an office time, I don't care what office you're in. And let's be really reasonable about this, right? If you need to work remotely for a week, because you've made a personal commitment, let's figure out a way to support you. Not surprisingly, right, I'm still in touch with this organization. People want to work with the sieve leader, multiple people have shifted teams to work with that leader who's panning for gold, not the faucet who's just saying, here's the edict on high, and that's where managers really have to be that translation layer. And I'm not saying that you can, you know, I hate to use the term like insubordination, right? But like, actually organizations have to trust their managers to actually say, let's hold you accountable for delivering on the outcomes, and not just financial outcomes, but also the how you deliver it right. Are you apprenticing your people? Are you building an inclusive, equitable and diverse environment where in which people belong? are you attracting and retaining the best talent that are delivering outsized results? Are you collaborating across silos to deliver more faster, better? And I would posit that that does require oftentimes some in person time, but actually figuring out the when, the how, to what end? I think is really important.

Sue Bethanis  30:57 

Well and I think there has to be, again, more intentionality. And I actually think that most leaders, if you were to take, what we're seeing, and we don't have wizards anecdotally, is that the faucet leaders on the top and the sieved leaders are in the middle. And they're, they're trying to adjust, they're trying to like, and they're basically saying to they're up until this foster leader has said, You must come in, like now there's, you must come in, and we're badging and all that. But before that, it was all civil leaders saying, Okay, you guys, you know, do what you want to do as long as you get your work done. But now they're having to shift. And so then the question becomes, okay, so now if it's real, really, okay, really have to come in. Okay, so there hasn't been as much incentive up until now, to be more intentional about when they come to the office. And frankly, there wasn't intentionality before this. So why would there be intentionality? Now? You know, there wasn't any intentionality about collaboration and communicate, communicate community except having, you know, Tuesday, taco night, or, or, I mean, taco lunch, or mean, people basically got together because of food. So providing food is sort of like, okay, check that off. So, before we leave, I want I want to know, from you like some of these mechanics, because I think that people are really stuck on the mechanics of this, they know they should do it, and they want to do it, but they don't know how to do it terms of getting people together, mentoring, collaborating, coaching, you don't know how to actually spend the time to do it?

Emily Field  33:55 

Well, and that's the thing Sue, they don't have the time, right? And so even more than they don't know how they don't have a moment in their day that's free of firefighting to actually say, let me pause and let me plan. And so this really goes back to the first premise, which is get your structure, get the role of the manager right. So that you can actually say, how do I actually create some space, and also create accountability that a manager is expected to do this? And then I also think being very clear on what are the pieces that are causing organizational operational burden? What are the things that are just exhausting? And then saying, can we eliminate them? Can we make it easier? Are there tools? Are there just even norms and ways of working as I think of again, I go back to this concept of the manager operating system? Can we just say, Hey, this is how we do things around here. There's tools, there's templates, they're not onerous, they make sense, a common language a common set of this is just what we do. Every time we kick off a project, these are the three things we do, every time we onboard a new hire, so that we're reducing the operational burden, reducing the cognitive load, and we're freeing up managers from innovating on how you're going to onboard a new employee, how you're going to get them their laptop, like we don't want to innovate on that we want to innovate on how are we going to solve this huge, hairy problem? How are we going to address this thorny customer need? How are we going to look ahead to something our customer doesn't even know they want, but actually we know they need it? Those are the things we want people innovating on and so we've got a free people up and rethink their operating system, so that they actually can do that.

Sue Bethanis  35:40 

Yeah, I'm with you. As a person who looks at organization design, I get it and I'm with you. And I agree with you. The reason why I didn't go into organization design as a profession, full time, is because it's slow and your ideas are all great and it's going to take a lot longer to rethink job design, then it's going to take for somebody individually to make a decision to say, You know what, I'm going to spend an hour today, even though it's firefighting, I'm putting on my calendar, I'm going to make sure that I talk on the phone twice today with somebody instead of being on Zoom. So their actual habits that people can do, and can pass those and model those with their folks that they work with. So I'm at that level. And I mean, and I know that you're seeing some of that as well, because I think it's an actual decision, because I clearly agree with you that they don't have the space. So my job is okay, so this sucks in terms of all these things that have happened, pandemic, people leaving, social justice or injustice, the economy, all over the place, we keep saying there's gonna be a recession. Where is it? So what can they do? What can they control? The manager can actually job design within his team, his or her team, right? And give them the space and encourage them for the space. But then I also think that they don't want to people have the space, they don't necessarily know what to do with the space. Right? Tell me, tell me what you think about that if I'm wrong, or if I'm off base?

Emily Field  37:16 

No, I think you're spot on. I mean, frankly it sounds a bit blase, but a manager can control their response. That's the reality. And I think, to be able to say, so what am I going to do with that information? I also think, to your point, I love this idea of a manager saying, How can I free up my team's capacity? There's actually something really nice there. Because then you can also say, What can I delegate down? What can I push down from my plate? And also, oftentimes it actually becomes this incredible step up opportunity, right? To say, you know, what, and you can do this even at the micro level, even at the calendar, at the weekly planning level. Carve out time, actually put in your calendar planning time. And you can actually say, hey, let me look at the calendar, the things I have coming up, my key deliverables, how I'm getting them done, are there specific pieces of it that actually tie to the development goals of one of my colleagues, right? I had a team member where I said, Hey, you take that meeting tomorrow where we're prepping for a big workshop, because it's one of their development goals to really work on facilitation and orchestration, I'm not going to join, right. That's fantastic. That frees up my calendar for another need. And so really thinking about too the other piece about managers, managers need to make sure that they're connecting the work that needs to be done to their team's strengths, but also to their purpose, particularly for Gen Z ers. And also, not just the individuals purpose, but the organization's purpose, what's the why behind it? And they've got to make the thinking visible. Why are you asking someone to do things? That's how you make work relational and not transactional. So the manager then can actually say, how do I connect the work to the person who then is like, super excited for the thing that you were dreading? That's incredible, right? That's sort of how you get teams who are in the flow, who are feeling great building on their strengths. And I think that's where you have to spend the time actually planning. Because if you're just always reacting, if you're always firefighting, it's actually hard to do that.

Sue Bethanis  39:26 

Right. Right. Now, you're totally right on. Any last thoughts before we talk about this, you know, information stuff that I want to share with people. What people can be doing to help their teams?

Emily Field  39:38 

I think the one thing I would say is start small, experiment. This isn't about like, I'm not saying, hey, go recast your entire calendar tomorrow. I'm saying, pick a couple things. Can you change it? Can you pick one day that you're all going to be in the office and really think intentionally about the agenda and get feedback on it. Start small, test and learn, because those little things can add up. And you can experiment, you can involve others, you can crowdsource new ideas, and those little things can add up to something bigger over time.

Sue Bethanis  40:17 

That's great. I love it. I really enjoyed our conversation. You've got lots of ideas, and I can't wait to dig into the book some more. And I can't wait for people to hear this. I'm gonna send this to my clients because they're hurting, they're hurting because of the space. And it feels like every time I'm on the phone with them, it's like, did you sleep? Did you you know, it's like, taking care of them. Right? And there's a lot of energy it takes to carve space. And that's kind of the irony of this. And I feel like that's a lot what they do this a lot of what I do, it's like how do I do this really quick so that I can go over here and have some time to play pickleball or whatever I'm doing. Right? So it's like this challenge to say define the space kind of thing. So I really appreciate everything you've said let me just give the folks on the call some websites so you're like you're on LinkedIn as Emily K Field. The book again is Power of the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. Of course, you get that on Amazon. Website, you can go to mckinsey.com/our-people/Emily-Field. Okay. Again, really appreciate it. Thanks again. Mahalo, everyone, and aloha.

Emily Field  41:38 

Thank you, Sue. Thank you, everyone.

Sue Bethanis  41:40 

Bye.

Emily Field  41:41 

Take care.