MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Leaders Face the Future of Work

We are living through a grand transition in the way people work. Constant and extraordinary innovation in machine learning and robotics has and will continue to reshape work. Some tasks will be replaced. Others will be augmented. No one — whether highly skilled or less skilled — will be untouched.

As people live longer and their working lives expand to many more years, they will move inextricably from the traditions of the three-stage life — full-time education leading to full-time work leading to full-time retirement — to something a great deal more fluid, flexible, and multi-staged. These technological and demographic forces will continue to influence family structure, as more women work and more partnerships are built on “career plus career” rather than the tradition of “career plus carer,” further changing the shape of the relationship between a family and the workplace.

My interest here is what this means for leaders.

In many ways, a leader’s day-to-day life is more protected from these major shifts than those of many employees. The complexity of a leader’s work makes positive augmentation rather than replacement the most likely outcome of technological innovation. With their capacity for wealth creation, leaders have a great deal more opportunity to “go plural” and work with multiple organizations at the same time, and to develop encore careers whenever they wish. Perhaps as a result of their own protection within the workplace, some leaders have failed to realize that the daily lives of those who work in their organizations will inevitably be transformed over the coming decades.

But leaders need to be deeply aware — right now, not down the line — of the transition taking place. And they need to have clarity about the roles they can play in preparing their employees for the future of work.