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In last week’s edition, I revealed my first 2 predictions in the March 2022 interview with Authority Magazine about The Future of Work:

· Automation & Artificial Intelligence will replace 70% of a manager’s duties.

· Work will be done by Autonomous and Self-Managed Teams.

Here are my other three predictions, and my assessment of the accuracy of those predictions:

3. Managers will be replaced by Subject Matter Experts: coaches, mentors, mediators and facilitators. The pandemic revealed the terrible state of management in most companies. According to Gallup, leadership fails to select a manager who can lead a high-performance team 82% of the time! Even worse, even those these unqualified managers are responsible for culture, retention, and employee performance, they don’t receive the training to have the skill sets necessary to interact successfully with their Information Age employees. This bizarre process of choosing the wrong people to be managers, then refusing to train them to do their jobs, creates managers as disengaged as the employees they manage. A Gallup survey found only 35% of managers are engaged, 51% are not engaged (caring little about their job and company) and 14% are actively disengaged.

This situation will only get worse as distributed and hybrid work requires managers to have the “soft tasks” — empathy, judgment, curiosity, humor — necessary to meet the needs of their Information Age employees

But rather than expect managers to be really good at five or more really difficult skill sets, a much better approach is to replace managers with subject matter experts who will fill a specific role (i.e. coach or mentor or mediator or facilitator or trainer) and provide the Teams and individual Team Members with the assistance, information, support and training they need to do their jobs and be more engaged employees. As a need for a subject matter expert arises (i.e. facilitating a dispute between Team Members or between Teams), the subject matter expert with the expertise in that area (i.e. facilitator) will assist the Team in resolving the issue.

An example of how this will work is The Goodway Group, a fully remote company has created a dedicated role, the Team Success Partner. Managers work with Team Success Partners to respond to the unique challenges distributed employees are facing, such as fostering trust and psychological safety, supporting team health and supporting new team member assimilation.

My current assessment of the accuracy of this prediction: Complete miss!  With a major push to return to the office (75% of CEOs believe, within 3 years, nearly all employees will be required to work in an office 5 days a week), there will be a complete reversion to pre – pandemic command and control management by managers who are as disengaged as the employees they manage.

What’s your assessment of the accuracy of my prediction that Managers will be replaced by Subject Matter Experts: coaches, mentors, mediators and facilitators?

4. Managers’ & leaders’ compensation will be connected to increased & sustainable employee engagement.

More than ever, because employee engagement directly reflects how employees view the company’s culture, their work environment, meaningful work, empathetic management and opportunities for growth, it has become a business imperative for leaders at all levels, to the extent Companies, realizing there is a direct link between employee engagement — an emotional commitment to the success of the organization — and the organization’s success, spend in excess of $100 billion a year to increase employee engagement,

However, this huge investment to improve employee engagement has little return on this investment. Gallup’s engagement surveys show, over the last 20 years there has been little improvement in employee engagement. In 2021, only 39% of employees were “engaged”, 14% were “actively disengaged” (spreading toxicity to co-workers), and 53% were not engaged (doing just enough work to avoid getting terminated).

Gallup engagement surveys also show that 70% of employee engagement is determined by the relationship between the employee and their direct manager. Since managers have this much impact on employee engagement, they must be held accountable for the level of engagement of the employees they manage and lead.

Since employee engagement has a direct impact on employee performance and retention managers must view increasing the engagement of their teams as one of their top priorities. Tying a portion of team leaders’ compensation to, or providing a bonus based their team members’ engagement, are the most direct way to send a powerful signal of the importance of employee engagement and the obligation of the manager to do everything feasible to increase the level of employee engagement.

An example of a company exploring how to link compensation — salaries and bonuses — paid to managers and leaders for something other than productivity is Heineken, the world’s second-largest brewer, which wants to increase the commitment of managers and leaders by connecting compensation to meeting its 2040 net-zero emissions goal.

My current assessment of the accuracy of this prediction: Crap! Another complete miss!

What’s your assessment of the accuracy of my prediction that Managers will be replaced by Subject Matter Experts: coaches, mentors, mediators and facilitators?

5. Companies will treat employees as stakeholders.

In 2019, recognizing the relationship between those who own and manage the company and those who create and deliver the company’s service and products is frayed and outdated, 181 members of the Business Roundtable, CEOs of America’s largest corporations, redefined the purpose of a corporation from maximizing shareholder return to mean, not only serving the interests of their shareholders, but also delivering value to their other stakeholders, including their employees. These CEOs explained that they were going to Invest in their employees by compensating them fairly, providing important benefits, supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world, fostering diversity and inclusion, and treating all employees with dignity and respect.

My current assessment of the accuracy of this prediction: Not even close.

What’s your assessment of the accuracy of my prediction that Companies will treat employees as stakeholders?

“If nothing changes, nothing changes.” When I made my predictions in 2022, I didn’t expect that they would become reality in a few years.  But I did hope, because of the impact of the pandemic (the Great Resignation and the realization by employees that work should not dominate their lives), that there would be an ongoing dialogue between companies and their workforce about how their relationship could be structured to accommodate both sets of needs.

That dialogue is not happening.  Instead, there is an attempted reversion, by major corporations, to the pre-pandemic industrial age command-and-control style of management.

This is best evidenced by the rejection of hybrid work by 73% of corporate, who, within the next 3 years, will force their employees to be back in the office 5 days a week.  This is occurring even though there is little evidence it will achieve what employers say they want: more employee engagement and productivity.

This adversarial position, indicative of the lack of empathy corporate executives have for their workforce, is nothing but a display of power, allowed because of a changing economy that does not favor employees.

Even though I’m obviously terrible at making predictions, I’ll make one more: What goes around comes around.

As corporations continue to reveal that they only see their employees as replaceable resources, and not partners or stakeholders, they will ensure that, with the next turning of the economy wheel, which is occurring faster and faster,  their employees will be as ruthless in their exercise of power as their employers are now.

I could be wrong, …but I’m not.