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Here’s an idea that’s likely to be the best investment you could ever make: Servant leadership, in which a company and employees join together in providing hands-on service to create a better community and world.
Servant leadership is not without its costs. In our own company, we dedicate a day of service to our community every year for a major project to help children, communities, and groups such as Native Americans, veterans, and single moms. Our project costs of having our employees out of the office is 150 to 200 thousand dollars, not to mention the planning and preparation months before this special day. But the passion this creates and the bond it instills in a company makes it one of the best ROI decisions you could possibly make. Make this your first and highest strategic endeavor.
Coined by Robert K. Greenleaf, founder of the Greenleaf Institute for Servant Leadership, the concept of servant leadership defines a leader who is, very literally, a servant first. “Servant leadership is a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations, and ultimately creates a more just and caring world,” states the Greenleaf Institute for Servant Leadership.
We do these projects without an expectation of monetary return, but the benefits we receive are profound. Based on our experience, here are three ways we—and by extension, your company, too—can experience the benefits of servant leadership.
- Be an example of what a servant leader should be.
Before you expect your employees to fully embrace servant leadership, you must demonstrate the concept within your own day-to-day office management. - Build a team of servant leaders.
By creating an office culture of service, you will begin building a strong team of servant leaders. Nothing screams camaraderie like uniting a diverse group of people to work toward a common goal. Encourage each employee to embrace a culture of service throughout their workday. - Seek opportunities to serve.
Once you have established yourself as a servant leader (and even striving to become one) and have encouraged your team to adopt the tenets of the movement, it’s time to get out of the office and serve your community. With so many opportunities to serve in every community throughout the nation, establishing an annual day of service can easily become a fun, company bonding tradition.
If my advice and our experience compelled even one more company to adopt a servant leadership culture, imagine the impact on hundreds or thousands of others each of these decisions would have. I challenge you to join us. And please let me know about your experience as you realize your own ROI.
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Senior executives need to understand the tactical as well as strategic opportunities, redesign their organizations, and commit to helping shape the debate about the future of work.
Senior executives have two critical priorities in this world. First is to gain an appreciation for what automation can do in the workplace. While cost reduction, mainly through the elimination of labor, attracts most of the headlines and generates considerable angst, our research shows that automation can deliver significant value that is unassociated with labor substitution.
As leaders consider this wide range of possibilities, they have a second priority, which is to develop an action plan. That plan should include a view of both tactical and strategic opportunities for their companies, a blueprint for building an organization in which people work much more closely with machines, and a commitment to helping shape the important, ongoing debate about automation and the future of work.
To gauge the business-performance benefits that automation could deliver beyond labor-cost savings, we asked experts to consider how it could transform working practices in a range of settings—a hospital emergency department, aircraft maintenance, an oil and gas operation, a grocery store, and a mortgage brokerage. The results, though hypothetical, are striking. Measured as a percentage of operating costs, the changes deliver benefits ranging from 15 percent in a hospital emergency department, to 25 percent for aircraft maintenance, and over 90 percent for mortgage origination.
Automation is enabling companies to make the following far-reaching set of moves:
- Get closer to customers. Affectiva, a Boston-based company, uses advanced facial analysis to monitor emotional responses to advertisements and other digital-media content, via a webcam. Citibank works with Persado, a start-up that uses AI to suggest the best language for triggering a response from email campaigns. The results are a purported 70 percent increase in open rates and a 114 percent increase in click-through rates. And Kraft used an AI-enabled big data platform to reinvent its Philadelphia Cream Cheese brand by better understanding the preferences of different consumer segments.
- Improve industrial operations. GE uses machine-learning predictive-maintenance tools to halve the cost of operations and maintenance in certain mining activities and so extend the life of its existing capital. Rio Tinto has deployed automated haul trucks and drilling machines at its mines in Pilbara, Australia, where it says it has seen a 10 to 20 percent increase in utilization in addition to lower energy consumption and better employee safety.
- Optimize knowledge work. It’s becoming more common for a software robot to receive a user ID, just like a person, and then to perform rules-based tasks such as accessing email, performing calculations, creating documents and reports, and checking files. Besides scalability and higher throughput and accuracy, the results include built-in documentation of transactions for audit, compliance, and root-cause analyses. Meanwhile, numerous financial institutions and other companies deploy robotic process automation to collect and process data.
- Harness the power of nature. Land O’Lakes’ WinField United compiles data on US crops to help farmers make key decisions throughout the year, including which seeds to purchase, soil and nutrient requirements, and yield potential. Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola Company’s Black Book model uses algorithms to predict weather patterns and expected crop yields to inform procurement plans for their Simply Orange juice brand, so that no matter what the quality and quantity of the crops, they can be blended to replicate the desired taste. The model also enables the company to overhaul its plans within minutes if weather conditions threaten to damage crops.
- Increase scale and speed. The potential for AI-enabled automation to create scale, boost throughput, and eliminate errors creates a range of opportunities for discovery in R&D. For example, GlaxoSmithKline’s machine-learning-enabled model-selection process helps the company analyze many times more models in a matter of weeks as it could in several months using traditional processes. In the automotive industry, Nissan has cut in half the time it takes to move from final product design to production, thanks to digital and automation. And BMW has reduced machine downtime significantly in some of its plants through AI-enabled condition-based maintenance, effectively generating fresh economies of scale with minimal investment.
This dizzying array of possibilities makes it critical for today’s CEO to develop an automation action plan. A good one will include the three following components.
- A tactical and strategic view of the opportunities
- A plan for integrating automation into the workplace
- A commitment to participating in a broader dialog on the future of work
For all the positive effects, many questions about the impact of automation on society remain unanswered, particularly regarding employment and incomes. We do know that business leaders will be at the forefront of what is afoot as they move to embrace automation. They will be drafting the blueprints of the automated workplace, the first to understand which new skill sets will be needed, which old workplace orthodoxies will be obsolete, and how machines and humans will work together. It falls to them, therefore, to take what they have learned beyond their corporate walls and engage in a broader dialogue to help shape the future. Executives’ vantage point gives them an important voice in the future-of-work debate that needs to be heard if the value of automation is to be captured at the same time as its challenges are addressed.
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The jobs market is well into the 21st century. So why isn’t our education system? Today’s jobs are vastly different than they were a generation ago. All of us, from Gen Zers to Boomers, are facing a working world that is more changeable and unpredictable than ever. The days of working for 40 years at one job and retiring with a good pension are gone. Now the average time in a single job is 4.2 years, according to the US. Bureau of Labor Statistics. What’s more, 35% of the skills that workers need — regardless of industry — will have changed by 2020.
That rapid pace of change in jobs and skills means there’s a growing demand to update skills as well. According to a new report on workforce re-skilling by the World Economic Forum, one in four adults reported a mismatch between the skills they have and the skills they need for their current job.
In the 20th century, work was dominated by factory jobs. The education system that was built in the previous century was, with some modifications, still suited to training good factory workers and their managers. Management focused on a series of tools to optimize this kind of work: operational efficiency, something called Taylorism, and eventually some management philosophies called Six Sigma. Management was mostly done face to face, while health insurance, a social safety net, and other benefits were bundled into inflexible labour contracts. Today, in the 21st century, we’re seeing the rise of new work models such as freelancing and remote work. In the most advanced companies, teams are learning to be more agile, to work with distributed and remote teams, and to scale up and down to adapt to ever-changing conditions. This is the future of work.
Yet education hasn’t kept pace. We still send our children through a fixed set of primary and secondary education steps, only now a college degree has been added on as a virtual prerequisite for the best jobs. The model doesn’t actually prepare anyone well for a flexible world, in which skills are typically outdated by the time you finish a four-year degree.
Given this situation, people in the workforce should proactively steer their own ongoing skills development. In other words, recognize that you need ongoing training, and realize that you hold the responsibility for your own education.
The first step is to ask yourself: Are my skills still in demand? What’s the outlook for these skills? And what skills could I work on today that would increase my income potential in the coming years?
Don’t feel like you have to retrain yourself completely, all at once. First of all, as pointed out by the New York Times this week, many of the skills needed to do fading jobs are applicable to growing jobs. For skills you do need to acquire, consider step changes. In computer science, we are trained to break down large problems into smaller chunks that can be more easily solved, one at a time. You’re not going to turn yourself from a coal miner into a data miner overnight. But you can acquire basic skills leading in the direction you want to go.
As your career progresses, make decisions about which work to take based on how much you will learn. Prioritize jobs where you will learn valuable new skills.
As your career progresses, make decisions about which work to take based on how much you will learn. Prioritize jobs where you will learn valuable new skills.
Companies also need to look beyond the “not my problem” mentality when it comes to skills acquisition. If nobody takes responsibility for training, simply assuming that some other party (another company, universities, the government) will take care of it, then we have a classic tragedy of the commons. Instead, we all need to contribute to investing in workers’ skills.
To facilitate this kind of cooperation, there is a big role for public-private partnerships, such as internship and apprenticeship programmes, and vocational training that prepares young people for jobs that don’t necessarily require a college degree, but for which industries have specific skills needs.
Meanwhile, for individuals, don’t wait. Take charge of your own future now, and start working on acquiring the skills you will need to have five years from now.
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