The room was silent. Then I went on to say, “In the past it is true that a leader did not need to know the technicalities of the work that the team members did, but in today's reality the leaders must know as much as they possibly can about the technology in order to have relevance with the team.” The CEO had been accepting the approach of the VP of sales because he was not willing to engage in a dialogue with her about how she needed to step up and be more proactive in her role and to learn as much as she could about the technology. This company had a need for breakthrough transformation in order to achieve the objective of being a technology firm rather than a telephone firm. The attitudes and the behaviors of the executives needed to fundamentally change in order to transform and drive business forward. I am happy to say that as a result of that two-day retreat, the company went on with the rebrand and a new commitment to training and upgrading of leadership skills to ensure the focus remained on transformation and making positive change.
The Generation Y impact is a profound change that I identified and that I have helped clients with over the past five years. When I wrote my book, 101 Ways to Make Generations X, Y and Zoomers Happy at Work in 2010 it was as a result of clients telling me that they were being majorly challenged by this new younger demographic who was in the workforce.
By 2020, Generation Ys are expected to make up around 50 percent of the workforce; by 2025 this number is projected to be 75 percent. Yes Generation Ys bring new approaches, innovations, unique values, and ways of working, and they are going to be the dominant demographic in the workplace, which means what they want will rule. This is a generation that has technological intelligence and innateness and that is focused on working smarter with the use of technology rather than harder (aka longer hours).
Many Generation Ys will live at home until the average age of 35; they are willing to live at home longer until they find a company that they truly want to work for. Gen Y are either staying home longer until they find work they love or they are working at what they want but it doesn't quite pay enough for them to move out. The implication for organizations is that they must shift from creating an environment in which they assume people need to work to one in which people want to work.
We need to transform the workplace and the culture to include the viewpoints and ideas of Generation Y and to be engaging for all of the generations. Generation Ys are not the reason companies need to transform; the reason for the transformation imperative is technology, and Generation Y happens to be the generation infiltrating the workplace that has been born with technology as a part of their life since birth. Generation X or Baby Boomer parents taught Generation Ys to do what they love, to ask for what they want, and that life is too short to be in one job for life. Because of this, Generation Ys show up at work and want the workplace to segue to their lives; they want it to be fun, to be collegial, to be creative, and to have the ability to enjoy life while having a career. The art of change leadership includes the ability to adapt to the Generation Y influence and to incorporate their ideas as well as their creative solutions for driving transformation forward.
The other trend that is impacting the need for transformation is cloud computing. Big data, the cloud, robots, real time, video, collaboration tools, and open-source platforms are changing everything. The cloud puts the power of technology in the hands of employees. Robotics is forcing us to rethink the jobs that humans can and should do. Recently, I was a keynote speaker for the American Manufacturing Excellence conference on finding and keeping good people, and robotics was a big item of focus because many mundane and repetitive tasks in the manufacturing industry are being replaced with robotics. Interestingly a 2015 statistic by Fortune 500 magazine says that 82 % of CEOs of the biggest companies plan to employ more people two years from now than they do today even with robotics entering the workplace. The change of bringing on robotics is in response to one of the biggest challenges for many traditional industries, namely finding talented new people, and many Generation Ys are happy to do jobs that involve technology such as operating robots and not so happy doing jobs of repetitive labor (the jobs that robots do).
Big data is also giving us insights into the metrics of how we work and how customers interact with us. Collaboration tools give us the ability to connect people and information together anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Data collection as a focus has shifted into data action–leveraging information from data mining to improve customer deliverables and business results.
Business agility has become the primary advantage being delivered by the cloud, says a new survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services of 527 Harvard Business Review (HBR) readers in large and midsize organizations. Business agility is the main objective for adopting cloud computing, with nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) saying it was their primary reason for pursuing the cloud. This was followed by increased innovation (14 percent), lower costs (14 percent), and the ability to scale up and down in response to variations in business demand (13 percent). So you can see the need for breakthrough transformation in this fast-paced and changing world. The human requirement is for all of us to master the art of change leadership. This requires the ability to be responsive and quickly adaptive to change and to have the mental agility and the emotional agility to lead people to the exciting future of business that lies ahead.
The Increasing Need for Innovation and Speed
In addition to the need for breakthrough and transformation, there is the ongoing reality of the speed of change and the need for rapid innovation. In the example of the AT&T Foundry a structure was created to focus on innovation as a main driver for the business. There is an opportunity for an organization of any size to create its own innovation hub. There are innovation hubs available for start-up companies, but what if existing companies created their own innovation hubs similar to AT&T's. An example of an innovation incubator is Innovation HUB – Florida Innovation HUB at the University of Florida. The mission of the Innovation HUB is as follows:
The Florida Innovation Hub was created to serve as catalyst for start-up companies whose technologies emanated from laboratories at the University of Florida and throughout the state. Our mission is to provide them with the infrastructure, logistics, and resources needed to get up and running effectively and efficiently. In doing so, the Innovation Hub hopes to help those companies and others bring research discoveries to the marketplace, creating additional jobs for Floridians.
The Florida Innovation HUB is modeled after successful entrepreneurial-focused commercialization centers. According to the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA), companies that graduate from a business incubator create jobs, revitalize neighborhoods and commercialize new technologies, thus strengthening local, regional, and national economies. Historically, NBIA member incubators have reported that 87 percent of all firms that have graduated from their incubators are still in business.
What is great about innovation centers such as the Florida HUB is that it provides a format for continual research and innovation. Many organizations say they want to be innovative and speedy and yet they have not created a format or environment for both of these things to be focused on. We need future focused change leaders who will not only question whether they have processes aligned with what the company and executives say they want to create but who will actually lead the change to create the solutions and the infrastructures to ensure that innovation is a consistent focus. The manufacturing industry has recognized the need for innovation hubs; in 2014, three Manufacturing Innovation Institutes were announced, each geared toward a particular field of manufacturing development and funded in a similar fashion. At North Carolina State University at Raleigh, an innovation hub known as the Next Generation Power Electronics National Manufacturing Innovation Institute was launched in January 2014 and tasked with improving energy efficiency. N.C. State and its partners will tackle the broad challenge by advancing the technology and production of special power-oriented semiconductors to improve efficiency in applications ranging from electronic devices to electric vehicles.
Innovation today is not innovation of the past. In the past, innovation was led by the senior leaders who would then report back to the employees about the innovations that were going to take place. Today, innovation requires open-source. Think Tesla and this excerpt from a June 12, 2014 blog post from Elon Musk on the philosophy of sharing for the sake of innovation: