♥ Share this episode with someone you think will benefit from it. ♥

♥ Leave a review at Lovethepodcast.com/BusinessConfidential ♥

Modern Employee Expectations

Modern employee expectations of work have lots of executives, managers and entrepreneurs scratching their heads and if you’re one of them you need to hear what today’s guest, Jim Bishop, has to say about it.

What You’ll Discover About Modern Employee Expectations:

* Why the old “normal” will never return

* How the social isolation of the COVID pandemic changed modern employee expectations of work

* Things organizations do that create a false sense of community

* The importance of human connection in modern employee expectations

* The three things leaders need to build into their culture to meet modern employee expectations

* AND much more.

Guest: Jim Bishop

With over two decades of immersive experience in executive development, corporate leadership and human performance, Jim Bishop stands as a beacon of transformative leadership through his business, Conjunction Leadership.

Jim’s journey has taken him across the globe, coaching executives, diverse teams and orchestrating the modernization of leadership systems for transforming business units. Having collaborated with industry giants like Eli Lilly, Roche, and Elanco, Jim recognized the pivotal role of a visionary leader willing to first work on themselves while revitalizing their culture. This catalyzed the birth of Conjunction Leadership in 2020, where Jim provides executive coaching and team development solutions.

As a certified coach by the International CoachingFederation and a Certified Leadership Facilitator with Blanchard, Jim’s methods are a blend of science and art. He empowers executives through executive coaching, corporate culture consulting, and team effectiveness programs, focusing on holistic development within volatile contexts. At Conjunction Leadership, transformation starts within. The exclusive DISRUPT, BRIDGE, and GROW process guides leaders on a journey of self-discovery, mindset shifts, and measurable growth.

Related Resources:

If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership and Management episodes.

Contact Jim and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Also visit his business website, Conjunction Leadership.

_____

The Leadership Art of Navigating Modern Employee Expectations

Hanna: Modern employee expectations of work have lots of executives, managers, and entrepreneurs scratching their heads. And if you’re one of them, you need to hear what today’s guest, Jim Bishop, has to say about it. Stay tuned.

Announcer: This is Business Confidential Now, with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

Hanna: Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I have a very interesting guest for you today. He’s Jim Bishop.

Jim provides executive coaching and team development solutions at Conjunction Leadership. His methods are a blend of science and art. It’s an exclusive disrupt, bridge and grow process that guides leaders on a journey of self-discovery, mindset shifts, and measurable growth. And it’s given him a unique perspective on today’s workplace. I’m particularly interested in his thoughts about modern employee expectations, so let’s have him join us now.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Jim.

Jim: Thank you. Hanna. Thanks for having me.

Hanna: It’s great to have you. The Covid pandemic appears to have changed modern employee expectations at work, and it has more than a few of us wondering why things just can’t go back to the way they were. Would you please help us understand what these modern employee expectations are?

Jim: Oh, yeah. Certainly. I think there are more than just a few of us thinking when will things go back to normal. And it was probably about June of 2020 when I realized normal wasn’t coming back. Right? If you think of it, we all go back in time and kind of relive some of that experience. We realized like there was more than just the pandemic going on. There was this whole social isolation that was happening. There was more fear and anxiety and everybody and understanding what was going on and what do I need to do about it.

Then came the summer of 2020 with all the social unrest situations, and then the political division that was happening in an election year, right? So, if we take ourselves into that swirling moment and we think about what was happening in most people’s mind, there was a need for connection and a need for grabbing on to something that was bigger than themselves. Some people did that into safety, some people did that in their organizations.

But what was happening in most people’s mind was there has to be a meaning and a purpose behind all of this. Now, at the same time, I think most modern employees were looking to say, “How is my employer helping with this? How can I find fit and connection with the people that I work with when we are also more distanced from one another than we ever were?”

So, the absence of the watercooler conversations and the absence of just being in the lunchroom or the cafeteria together that we would have normally known, or even our commute time where we were taking advantage of making phone calls or talking with family members. That stuff wasn’t happening as often.

Jim: So, by default, what I saw happening was a lot of those employees were bringing them those personal challenges or personal situations into the work environment. Yet work was occurring mostly on Zoom, and so most leaders were hosting meetings just the way that they would have hosted meetings had we walked into a boardroom or an office setting where they were starting with the purpose and ending with our action items and very little time to socialize or engage with one another.

And this whole need for meaningful connection, where work is more personal and social, was being neglected. At the same times, I think a lot of people were also like disconnecting from some of the places where they naturally found that connection, whether it was their churches or their PTO groups or their synagogues or their mosques and things like that. So, we weren’t able to find that natural source of connection and purpose. Misattributing that to what – how can I find that in the workplace?

It just caught a lot of leaders completely off guard. And the new normal never returned. Those employees now expect more from what work should offer them. Not only a sense of pay, which is the one thing that we, most people would have said in the past, and a sense of growth and a sense of opportunity in my career. But I also want to make a meaningful difference and know that I’m connected to a larger purpose. And I think a lot of leaders are still grasping with how do I help provide that?

Hanna: That is a lot of change. As I’m hearing you rattle it off going back in time, it seems so distant. But in a lot of ways the consequences seem to be echoing and reverberating in how we’re responding now. I appreciate that some business leaders interpret some of the approach or attitude of younger employees as them just not wanting to work. What would you say to those decision makers?

Jim: I think every coin has two sides, right? And we’re most able to see it from the side that we look at it. And so that’s where if we want to put it into the generational context, leaders who have grown up in a certain environment will look at it and say, this is the way that I see the coin, and I see the coin as I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps and I – no one took care of me when I came into the workplace. And work was not this social and emotional connection that I need today.

Work was a place where you came and got your stuff done. You did it by yourself. And there was more of a meritocracy of sorts, where he or she, who knew the most tend to rise to the highest levels of power or position. And today’s – the newer generations entering the workforce have had just a different perspective through their developmental years like 9-11 occurred. Safety was a bigger issue.

They saw a lot of corporate downsizing and parents being laid off, so they recognize that work has a different context than it used to. And they’re coming to work with a need for purpose and meaning that isn’t just met through the paycheck. And so their side of the coin says, “I do want to work. I want to work very hard, but I want to know that what I’m working is going to going to be more of an existential existence than just getting the gold watch at the end of 25 years,” which probably isn’t going to exist anymore or “making sure that I get a bigger bonus at the end of the year.”

They’re looking more for a long term meaning and purpose rather than just a short term gains. And I think between there we have a lot of tensions in the generations just helping each other. See that neither perspective is 100% correct, but both perspectives are necessary, valid to make sure our cultures work.

Hanna: That’s a great point, Jim. I’m just wondering, though, for a manager, a leader, an executive that’s listening, a business owner, how do they go about providing that meaning? I mean, what are they supposed to do, let them play guitar in the break room? I mean, I’m being facetious here, you know that. But it just seems like a fuzzy concept. And are they even equipped to provide that? Help us out here?

Jim: Yeah, I do think that it is a fuzzy concept, but it comes back to personal behaviors. It doesn’t come to – we can add creature comforts to our workplaces. And I mean, my opinion is some of those things are helpful like on site daycares. That definitely helps me to need on site dry cleaning or whatever. But some companies have gone to the point of – a break room music or putting pool tables in or coffee bars and things like that that are building this false sense of community in the workplace.

And really, when we’re human to human connection, what I want to know is, does the other person on the other side of the table or the other side of the Zoom call, understand who I am as an individual and respect my opinions? It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to agree on one another’s opinions, but when it comes – when a leader, what can they provide?

It comes down to how much do they embrace their own humanity, and how much are they comfortable sharing that humanity with others? And what that means is a lot of leaders, in a typical generational sense, the baby boomers or even the early Gen Xers have kind of grown up in an environment where either we were latchkey kids or we were just told to go do things, and we did. But that meant there wasn’t a lot of direction or shared humanity, right? There was just a lot of you go figure it out.

The younger generations entering the workplace have never really had that. They’ve always had a coach or an advisor or someone beside them.

Jim: And it’s – in large response to the way that the older generations raised their children. We put them in tap, ballet and jazz. We didn’t just tell them we wanted them to be good dancers. We put them in band and music and vocal lessons all at the same time because we wanted them to learn more about the arts. We asked them to play soccer, basketball and volleyball and be a three sport athlete, right?

And when they did that, what that is, is having a coach or a mentor and advisor beside them at all times, helping them set the standard of excellence. When we put them into a work environment and say, just go figure it out all by yourself, just go do this. We’re almost like we’re sending someone into a blackened room, and we all balk just a little bit because we don’t know – our eyes haven’t adjusted yet and we’re not sure what to do, and it doesn’t feel safe.

When I say a leader needs to go first and share their humanity, it just comes to embracing the fact that there are some human to human needs that we have. And what I often do with leaders who are in that kind of generational space of not understanding, is we just start with their origin story.

We start breaking their life up into unique quadrants and mapping out the highs and the lows, and see how much they embrace their entire story, the moments in time that have really solidified some of their core values, the moments in time where they’ve had to, like, deal with adversity and grit. And then we pull those stories out so that they really have a complete library of things that they can share from their own experience when they relate to other people.

Jim: When we share from our own experience, what we’re doing is building human to human connection. Now the space – this is part of the disrupting phase, right? Because a lot of leaders have this mentality, if you never let them see you sweat like vulnerability is weakness, is what I often hear. And if that’s the belief, then the behavior is going to be, “I will hide behind my humanity, and I will believe that I have to have all of the answers.”

I will come across as the strong and formidable leader, even in the times of turbulence. Now, I’m not saying that vulnerability you need to go to the opposite extreme and say, “The ship is sinking and I have no idea how to get out of it.” That would be extreme vulnerability. But what you should be saying with certain people is I’m under the – I’m getting advice myself. This isn’t an unprecedented situation. I’m not sure where we’re going, but I know that we’re going to together, get through it.

That is a story of vulnerability that will allow people to embrace your humanity while you fill in the gaps around some of the lessons that you’ve learned over time, or some of the experiences that you’ve had. When we’re able to do that with one another, we break down some of the need for structures and process and systems that we’ve tended to default to in our organizations, which breed away some of the human to human elements.

Hanna: But don’t you still need certain processes and systems? I mean, we can’t just be in a total freefall and say, “Okay, let’s all hold hands because there’s a safety net somewhere. We just have to find out where it is. But we’re going to have a soft landing. Just hang on.”

Jim: Yes, I do believe that. I do believe there is a need for certain structures and certain systems, like we’re not going to the opposite extreme of anarchy here, right? But at the same time, I do think that sometimes – let’s just take the example of finance. If we have someone that is less than ethical on an expense report or that does something that is violating of somebody else’s personal expectations, what we tend to do is we put a policy in place, and then we have to hire someone to manage that policy.

And then we ask everybody to comply with that policy, which adds a lot of bureaucracy and red tape into the system. Right? When really what the default competency is that we’re not really building in our leadership is how to deal with conflict. That productive conflict can help us get better.

But you don’t always have to slap a policy on top of it and police it. What we can do is just approach the offender and say – figure out how to not make this happen again in that one offense and demonstrate that we have courage to step into those situations rather than manage through policy and make sure that we have no exceptions to the policy.

That’s the kind of excess structure that I try to get away from because that red tape and that bureaucracy just gets in the way of how do we actually relate to one another in the workplace so that we can have greater humanity and connection.

Hanna: Oh, I hear what you’re saying about red tape. Nobody enjoys that. But by the same token, let me ask you this. When it comes to managing modern employee expectations, how are they supposed to know if we don’t have some kind of fundamental, simple policies?

Jim: I’m not sure I understand. How are they supposed to know…?

Hanna: What to do. I mean – and the thing is to – when you’ve got a larger workforce, you can’t – you don’t have the time to hold everybody’s hand to tell them the 25 things they need to know, being able to have some kind of a reference tool just makes it easier, whether that’s online, whether that’s a printed manual. I mean, the mechanics of it is another story, but it’s like, “Here are the processes that have helped make the business successful.”

We’ve polished this over time, and there are certain things that that need to be done in a certain way. Like you said, expense reports. Do they need to be in triplicate and quadruplicate? Probably not. There are probably ways to streamline it, but there’s a business purpose behind having expense reports and being able to track them and making sure that they’re reasonable. You have to have some way to explain what the rules are because a mentor can’t be a helicopter parent, correct?

Jim: Correct. Yeah. I think what I – the way that I would resolve that is there’s a difference between policy and agreements. Right? And I’m a firm believer that everything rises or falls upon clear agreements. And oftentimes, go figure it out, is the direction that is given to someone. That’s not really a clear agreement. So, setting the context of how high and how wide and how tall and how fast you need to run, all of those things are clear agreements.

And as long as we can have clear agreements – like a lot of a lot of companies will have what they call their ethics policies. Right? Don’t cheat on your expense report might be one of those ethics policies. What’s the consequence? What’s the agreement that we’re making if that happens? Right? And then do that, but don’t necessarily employ a policy that says everybody is going to have to – your spending limit is $50 per person or whatever that happens to be.

Set an arbitrary limit that allows everybody to go back in and everybody has to go – someone to police that because then what happens is your employees don’t feel empowered to step into the space where they can exert leadership.

Jim: What they always do is default to the policy or the hierarchy to make the decision. And at the same time, then I hear the most senior leaders saying, “I don’t have employees that really want to be entrepreneurial or that want to take risks” because you’ve kind of managed risk out of the system for them, and you’ve given them so many boundaries that there isn’t a reason to take risk.

They default to the policy or the hierarchy to make a decision. And so one of the most basic needs of human motivation, right, is autonomy and mastery and purpose. And if we can take those three things and build them into our cultures and find a way to give people more autonomy while helping them become more masterful at things, while also helping them find connection and relevance and purpose to what they’re doing.

Those three things alone are going to get your people to be more entrepreneurial and risk taking and more adventurous. So, I’m kind of a warrior when it comes to that stuff. And I’m working with corporate cultures to say, “How do we build more of that and reduce some of the things that get in the way of that?”

Hanna: Yeah, it sounds like there’s some trust issues that need to be bridged when it comes to modern employee expectations and being able to build more trust. What advice do you have on that front?

Jim: Yeah, trust is built and trust is earned, right? So, I think first it’s a – I do a lot of work with trust audits and leaders. And they know that trust is kind of the – what I call the lubricant that reduces the drama tax in the organization that very, very easily will see that, that the higher the trust level, the greater the less the friction is in the organization. What they don’t often realize is how often are they, as an executive leader, breaking trust. And they no one sees that, right?

Because we generally judge ourselves by our intentions, not by our actions, but when they’re really honest about it – like I asked them to look at some of the relationships that they might have some friction with, where in that relationship can they take responsibility for not completely being trustworthy? What might be there? Right? So, I hear, like a lot of times, executive leaders saying things like, “I can’t tell you that. I mean, we haven’t yet – we haven’t released that decision yet.”

Well, that isn’t necessarily breaking trust, but it’s certainly not earning trust, small things like that over time. I just ask them to repurpose their language and say, “What can you share?” Right? Instead of saying, “I can’t share that with you.” Just being able to answer the question of, “Well, here’s what I can share with you,” right? That enables them to open up the conversation and have things that are more – that allows them to be more trustworthy.

Secondly, I also asked them to look at some of their reactive patterns, and I use an instrument that allows them to see, like how did they go about learning what leadership was in the first place? And generally, it’s really informed by all the things in our past. We’ve learned that there are certain behaviors that help us and get us to a certain point.

Jim: When we overuse those patterns of reactivity, though, they can hurt us, right? So, if one of my patterns of reactivity is to be a – generally a people pleaser, right? I want to get along with others, and I want other people to have harmony with one another. There isn’t a danger of overusing that pattern of reactivity, and that is, I can lose myself in that conversation that I’m constantly subordinating to everyone else, and then I no longer make my opinions known.

Likewise, on the other extreme of that is more of a task oriented individual who probably has learned to multitask, to outwit, outlast, outplay, out control, out plan a lot of other people, and that means they’ve generally been rewarded for getting a lot of work done. I see a lot of our executive leaders falling into that bucket of reactivity, and what happens as a consequence of overuse of that kind of pattern in every activity is they burn out or burn others out around them because their standards of expectations and their standards of perfection are so high, they only measure their worth or their value on the amount of things that they can get accomplished.

Now, when we map that out, what we’re able to also do is help leaders understand “I can be more trustworthy” by honoring the gift, but being more creative about how I use it. And we map out what does creative leadership look like for them versus reactive leadership. And we help them step into a greater place of authenticity and using those gifts in a better way. So, I think that also helps breed trust. They don’t often realize that their patterns of reactivity are causing them to be untrustworthy.

Hanna: That’s interesting. You’re talking about it in a very theoretical way, which I appreciate. I was wondering if you could give me a concrete example that would make it a little easier to relate to.

Jim: Sure. So, I’ll give you a client example. So, busy CEO many a multinational organization, newly promoted to CEO after having been in many different parts of the organization for many years, actually having grown up there. And so this individual knows more about the organization than most people who work there, and all the different intricacies of how the different parts and the pieces relate to one another. Right? So, that’s the background.

They have literally grown up in this environment from being an intern all the way now to CEO. They have shown – demonstrated competence just by being able to learn things faster than others. And a huge part of this individual’s identity has been shaped around their intellect, their ability to be smarter than most people or their ability to learn things faster than others. And they’ve generally been rewarded all the way to the CEO seat. Okay? So, that helps us understand the context.

When we map out these reactive strategies, we see that intellect is one of the ways that this person has gone around showing up in the world. And is a major source of identity. Now, here’s the situation. When he became CEO, his challenge to me was, “I don’t have time anymore like I used to,” like “everybody wants on my calendar. I’m always in many different things.”

Jim: “There’s more responsibility than I’ve ever had,” right? Which is not uncommon in that space. Well, he was also then orchestrating his future and outlining some plans in a coaching conversation. And one of the things that he wanted to do was catalyze this global meeting to get new ideas out there and new products generated because they felt – he felt the pipeline and their marketing was just a little bit weak.

And so, he was outlining his goals about how to go about this. He was organizing the meeting. He was putting the agenda together. He was inviting the participants. He was setting the context. He was going to host the meeting. He was going to facilitate the meeting. He – and at the end of the session, I asked him, “So, if all of that happens, who owns the follow up? Who owns the accountability to make this happen?” Okay?

Well, naturally, he owns all of that. He was the one that was controlling and organizing and planning all of it. Right? Well, why was he the one organizing, controlling and planning and all of it? Well, it comes back to because he’s the one that knows more of the information than most people. And he prides himself off of his intellect. Right? So, it was a particular a-ha for him to be able to say, “How do I identify?”

“I identify so heavily with my intellect that I’m over controlling and over planning and over strategizing, and therefore I own all of the accountabilities, and then I have to direct and control and plan everything out for everybody because they don’t take responsibility,” when in reality, now I do different behavior is to use creative leadership is to go find the person that he wants to be responsible for helping build a new global product enterprise, and coach and mentor them so that they can organize and control and direct this new meeting.

Jim: And he can build competence in his leadership team without him actually having to do all the leadership role for his leadership team. He is now a completely changed leader. He has more time in his calendar to do the creative stuff, to do the future planning and to do the mentoring and to do the coaching and to do the developing of his people because he no longer takes accountability for making sure all the small details are there. And it all comes back to how did that reactive pattern of intellect show up in his life, and how can he use it in a different way today as an executive leader versus a front line leader?

Hanna: Very interesting, very interesting. Thank you for sharing that example. In the time that we have left, I was wondering if you could let us know, what do you think the most important thing is for executives, managers or entrepreneurs to know about modern employee expectations?

Jim: I think the most important thing is that your opinion is your opinion. But what modern employee expectations are, are the individual. It’s as necessary and relevant to the individual, not necessarily to my opinion of what they should be. Right? And so I find a lot of my leaders are really wrestling with that, like they don’t want it to be the way that it is. They want it to be the way that it used to be. They want it to be – people came to work, earned a paycheck, got some career development along the way, and felt good about what was happening.

They don’t necessarily know – they don’t feel comfortable when we have a middle East conflict, and we’ve got both sides of the equation in our employee base, and they’re trying to resolve the differences. They feel like they have to provide a solution to that. What they really need to do is just realize that the modern employee wants to be heard and valued in their workplace, and they need to provide a place for that discussion to occur without necessarily providing the resolution that there is a right or a wrong answer to it. And I think that’s a big wrestling point for people.

I mean, it popped up here in this modern example, but it started well before Covid. But I think Covid brought a lot of it to the surface. And if a leader can just step out of their paradigm and step into somebody else’s paradigm for a little bit and see that there – if the workplace is going to become what the workplace needs to become for our businesses to evolve and the products that we provide to be there, then we also have to allow the human to human element to evolve along with it.

We can no longer control, organize and plan our way through these things. We also have to adapt more like an ecosystem in balance to make sure that all things stay regulated.

Hanna: Very good. Sounds like we could all use a good dose of empathy.

Jim: Absolutely. It goes a long way.

Hanna: Yes, yes. Well thank you Jim. This has been an eye opener and I appreciate your time and the insights you’ve shared with us today about modern employee expectations. It’s really such an important topic, especially going forward with – as you pointed out, I think it was really very important point you made early in our conversation about how our experiences shape our expectations as adults. The younger cohort having experienced 9-11. And then their parents being downsized and you know the loyalty not being rewarded as it might have been expected.

So, if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Jim Bishop and his work at Conjunction Leadership, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.

Appreciate your listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next week with another information packed episode of Business Confidential Now.

So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.

Join, Rate and Review:

Rating and reviewing the show helps us grow our audience and allows us to bring you more of the rich information you need to succeed from our high powered guests. Leave a review at Lovethepodcast.com/BusinessConfidential.

Joining the Business Confidential Now family is easy and lets you have instant access to the latest tactics, strategies and tips to make your business more successful.

Follow on your favorite podcast app here as well as on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Download ♥ Follow ♥ Listen ♥ Learn ♥ Share ♥ Review ♥ Comment ♥ Enjoy

Disclosure:

This post may contain links to products to products on Amazon.com with which I have an affiliate relationship. I may receive commissions or bonuses from your actions on such links, AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU.