Summary
Josh Bersin argues that organisations need to move beyond traditional job-based models and focus instead on designing work around people, skills and adaptability. He explains that many once-successful companies failed because they could not learn fast enough or adapt to technological and market change.
Bersin describes how employees are increasingly driving demand for flexibility, mobility and autonomy, while leaders are recognising that rigid job structures slow performance. He links adaptive organisations to inclusive cultures, skills-based work, and leadership models that treat people as capital rather than cost. The interview concludes that designing work for change enables organisations to innovate, grow and remain resilient in a rapidly evolving economy.
When you peer beneath the covers of every company that falls out of favour with the stock market or fails completely you often find the same things: lack of mobility, lack of agility, lack of adaptability and lack of learning, says Josh Bersin, CEO of the Josh Bersin Company and author of of Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World's Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations.
But before you start ripping up your organisational model this is not the answer, he says, Instead it is for individuals to work in a new way.
“I make the point a lot that people are the only appreciating asset in a company. Everything else depreciates except people. And so if you have this attitude that we can always pay people a little bit less, we can always get rid of people that we don't like, we can have turnover, we can outsource this, we can outsource that – you're going to always have these problems of not getting people engaged,” he says.
“Most employees are not doing only one thing. They have a job and they're doing some other things and they're working on a project and they're helping somebody else do their job. And they're lending their skills to another person because they might be more skilled in one area than another.
“And so a lot of those artifacts of how we select people, how we decide who to promote and how we put together job descriptions are being thrown away and being replaced by more intelligent, skills-based technologies. Managers who are managing in a more agile way, cross-functional teams, talent marketplaces, all sorts of things to create organisational performance that's not dependent on this kind of marching line, factory model of humans. Humans are not factory objects.”
In this video Josh discusses why organisations need to become more irresistible, the role diversity, equity and inclusion play in adaptive organisations and the three steps leaders need to take to start on thinking about work, not jobs.
Listen to Josh discussing why we need to ditch job descriptions and match people to roles in a more sophisticated way, how organisations are doing this and the role technology plays in helping companies in the Work's Not Working....Let's FIx it podcast.
Transcript
Why companies fail to adapt
You can look at GE. You can look at Nokia. You can look at Yahoo. You can look at all sorts of companies that were pioneers, leaders, high growth, high profitability companies, and something happened and they just fell off the wheels. They just fell apart. And that is for lack of adaptability. A lot of them saw the signals, but they couldn't move fast enough.
In my experience in business is you usually know when you're going to be disrupted with plenty of time but you don't know what to do about it. And so you talk about it, you ignore it, you think about it, your raise your prices. You do something else to try to protect yourself from the new entrance. But if you don't learn what they're doing and adapt to whatever's new – new technology, new industry change, whatever it may be – you get left behind.
I think every company that falls off the S&P500 or falls out of favour with the stock market or whatever, under the covers there's a lot of this going on. There's a lot of lack of mobility, lack of agility, lack of adaptability, lack of learning. I mean, Microsoft, when Satya Nadella came into Microsoft the one big thing he said was, we are not a learning company. We need to learn how to learn. Under Balmer and Gates Microsoft was a very arrogant company and it worked fine for a while until they missed a couple things. They missed the internet; they missed the search engine business. They missed mobile computing. They suffered a lot of misses and still did fine.
And then Satya Nadella comes in and goes, we're not going to do that again. We're going to listen and we're going to learn. And now they're the most successful tech company on the planet as best I can tell. There's stories everywhere on how companies don't do this.
Why work matters more than jobs
I think employees are voting with their decisions on where they want to work. And if the job is not flexible, if they don't have flexible on hours, they don't have flexibility on location, if they don't have flexibility on work style. Like if your boss tells you exactly how to do everything and won't let you do it your own way, most employees are not going to stay, not in this job market.
So the employees are pushing employers to do this, but I think 50% of the driver is the business side where the CEO and the CFO and the CEO is saying, 'we're not moving fast enough. We're going from here to here, and you guys are stuck over here. And how do I get you over here?' And the answer is not redesigning a whole big organization model. The answer is for individuals to move over there and work in a new way. And I see this all the time in our consulting constantly.
And one more thing that's sort of driving it, the pace of industry transformation has accelerated. There was an article, rather a survey by the PWC folks that came out last week or the week before, 2000 CEOs. And of those 2000 CEOs, I think it was 40% of them said that they believe that their company, as it exists today, will not exist in 10 years.
Things are changing that fast. And if you think you're going to make that change by just writing a bunch of new job descriptions and figuring out who to hire. That's not going to work. So this is just the realities of the economy and how quickly companies have to adapt.
How employees are driving change
And as I talk about in the book, and it's very true today coming out of the pandemic, most employees are not doing only one thing. They have a job and they're doing some other things, and they're working on a project and they're helping somebody else do their job. And they're lending their skills to another person because they might be more skilled in one area than another. And so a lot of those artifacts of how we select people, how we decide who to promote, how we put together job descriptions are being thrown away and being replaced by more intelligent, skills-based technologies. Managers who are managing in a more agile way, cross-functional teams, talent marketplaces, all sorts of things to create organizational performance that's not dependent on this kind of marching line, factory model of humans. Humans are not factory objects.
Adaptive organisations and inclusion
So we're doing a project to study what we call adaptive organizations. We're going to define what one of these adaptive organizations look like and what, you know, the differences are. And so we are just having this big debate: is diversity part of being adaptive? Or is diversity a prerequisite to being adaptive?
And the conclusion I've come to so far is you can be diverse and not adaptive. But you can't be adaptive and not be diverse. So if you haven't built a diverse and inclusive culture and set of management practices and pay practices, it is going to be hard for you to really be an adaptive organization because all sorts of politics are going to get in the way, every time you want to do this.
So I think diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, all of those things that we worry about as HR compliance-oriented things are business enablers for growth and innovation. And I think there's been a lot of research to prove that.
When I was at Deloitte, there was a study that one of the senior partners did down in Australia that basically proved that more diverse teams define themselves as much more creative and innovative problem solvers than teams that are not diverse. And there's been all sorts of research on that. So I think they go hand in hand.
How leaders build adaptive organisations
I think something that goes without saying, but I think it has to be reminded, is the CEO and the top leaders have to define the mission and purpose in the company as something other than making a profit and growing the revenue. Because that is in some sense the underpinnings of a lot of these decisions about people. So that's number one.
Number two is reflect on the fact that the people, the skills, the management, the leadership, the culture are basically capital. They're not expenses. You can't just say we're spending too much on people, so we're going to cut them. We're going to let a bunch of people go and then we'll make more money.
Those are capital decisions, and I make the point a lot that people are the only appreciating asset in a company. Everything else depreciates except people. And so if you have this attitude that we can always pay people a little bit less, we can always get rid of people that we don't like, we can have turnover, we can outsource this, we can outsource that – you're going to always have these problems of not getting people engaged.
The third is, probably if you read the seven things in the book, the fundamental part of them has to do with management and how are you rewarding managers? What are the behaviours you expect out of leaders? How are you deciding what a good manager looks like? Is it somebody who hits the numbers? Is it somebody who develops people? Is it somebody who works across the organization in a collaborative way? Is it someone who's creative and innovative or not?
I think maybe that's the third big one is for the CEO and the CFO and the people at the very top to have a good conversation about what does great leadership behaviour look like here based on our business strategy and our mission? And therefore you guys in HR make sure we're doing this and then we're building leadership in this way. And you guys can worry about the mobility and the hiring and stuff underneath that. So those are three things that I would say are kind of essential to this at the c-level.
If you operate that way, then the company can adapt almost by itself. And you don't have to keep forcing change into a structure that is not designed to change. So in some sense this is designing the company for change, designing the organization for change.
And the individuals, most people love that. I mean, they want to do work that interests them. They want to have multi variated careers. Also, people are living longer. They don't expect their career to end in 25 years. They're willing to try new things. There's a whole bunch of drivers for work to go in this direction.
The irresistible organization
If I think about the book and all the things in there, the biggest lesson in that book to me is what I call the unquenchable spirit of the human being.
Every person who listens to this podcast can do more, can adapt, can change, can learn if they're willing to try and if they're in an environment that supports it. So our job as managers and leaders is to create an environment where people can do that. And then individuals have to take it upon themselves to take a little bit of a risk and do something new and try it and learn about it and accept the fact you're not going to be perfect, but over time you will get better at it.
That's the only way for this irresistible organization model to work.
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