Heather McGowan

Heather McGowan is an American writer. She is the author of the novels Schooling and Duchess of Nothing Schooling was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Detroit Free Press and The Hartford Courant. McGowan has a master in fine arts from Brown University.

Heather E. Mcgowan

Quotes

• What I call myself is a Future of Work strategist and a keynote speaker and an author.  And Chris Shipley and I wrote The Adaptation Advantage, which came out in 2020.  The premise of it was, the future work is really learning and we can't have fixed occupational identities or fixed ideas, we have to essentially get adept at adapting, and that came out just prior to the pandemic.  And, oh boy, we did not know how much we were going to need to adapt then! 
• Not only has it played out, it's gone from push to pull.  So it used to be the employees pushing employees to learn.  Now the Pew's latest survey on why people leave organisations, of course number one is compensation; people jump for more dollars, but that doesn't sustain.  But with a net score that was the same, it was learning opportunities, because people realise, "If I'm not learning, I'm not going to be earning in the future".  And so they know that's what makes them valuable in the future, and so that's becoming a real pull with employees.
• Yeah, so the book is really divided into three sections.  We try to make it very easy for folks to both read and skip around, because I am a short-attention-span person as well, so you should be able to read it on a cross-country flight.  It's about 200 pages with about 35 graphics.  First part is, meet your new workforce because it's not the one you left in 2019.  Second part is, you have to rethink about how you actually organise work, because the maps and the models in the past are not only not helpful, they can actually be dangerous, like driving in the city of Boston, which I'm from, using maps before the big dig, it's just not going to get you anywhere, it's going to get you lost and frustrated.  And then the third part is about rethinking your leadership entirely, because here's what we think happened. 
• I say there are four shifts that a leader needs to embrace.  First is a shift in mindset.  You're not managing people and processes any more, you're enabling success.  And to be intentionally provocative about it, I say, "You used to think of the people as working for you.  Now, you work for them.  You enable their success, because you're not going to get anywhere without their success".  The second is a shift in culture.  We used to, when we had the same skills and knowledge of the leader and the team, and then usually across the team, you could pit people against each other.  Forced rankings, all those kind of bad ideas, Hunger Games kind of stuff, that doesn't work anymore.  So you've got to shift from peers as competitors to peers as collaborators. 
• Absolutely and we're seeing a shift in leadership too.  So, when I would go out and speak, and I usually speak to senior level group leaders, the room would be at least half boomer.  And now there's a handful of boomer, a lot of Gen X leaders, more millennial leaders and now we're seeing, at least in the US, about 12% to 13% of the workforce is Gen Z.  That's going to be 30% by 2030 and they're an entirely different animal.  They are going to change work in really fundamental ways that I think are ultimately positive.
• Well first, I think we need to dispel the notion that empathy means less, and I didn't really even understand it until I started doing these book tour interviews where people said to me, "Okay, so we've got to be empathetic, we've got to be nice, we've got to make concessions for people, let them do less and expect less".  And I thought, "Well, there may be days that's true".  Your dad dies, you have to put your dog to sleep, there are days that we have to be human and that's true.  But no, that's not what I'm talking about. 
  • Episode 156: Rethinking Leadership for the Future of Work (Interview with Heather McGowan) myHRfuture (June 27, 2023)
• I'm talking about empathy as a means of understanding your workforce so you can help them, not only motivate them, but help them become self-propelled.  Empathy ultimately drives performance.  It's not about lesser performances or about greater performances, it's also about greater balance.  Because what's really happened during the pandemic, and I think people get all caught up on where work takes place, you know, home, hybrid office, I really have no opinion on that.  What I think has happened is, and everything's pictures, it means I have to draw, is we had a smaller circle in 2019, that was called our personal life.  And we had agency over our personal life.  And we had a bigger circle that cast a shadow on that smaller circle, and that was our professional life.
• It's a huge shift and I gave a couple of talks one week to commercial real estate folks and they were all, it was mostly boomers, some Gen X, they were mostly kind of alpha dog folks, more males, one of them was almost all male.  It's not gendered though but that was the case in this instance and they were like, "Don't you think we're getting woke, and aren't we getting soft, and aren't we losing our edge?"  And I thought, "Oh, I'm not explaining this right, if that's what you're taking away from this".
• "I'm telling you to have empathy, but I'm not having empathy for you".  And I think that was a huge aha, is that if you were brought up, raised with this, give up your Saturdays, don't go to your kids' soccer game or cricket game, whatever it may be; work comes before everything, maybe get on to your second or third marriage because you've ground all your relationships to dust.  That's how you become a leader, and then in order to lead, you've got to have your people be afraid of you and not like you and that that's what you were brought up with.  This does seem like, "How could this possibly work?"
• You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things.  I know what you went through frankly sucked.  And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work.  So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics".
• Yeah, first of all, let me just empathise with you.  I know it's not comfortable.  I make all my audience say with me, "Let's all say the four scary words, 'I do not know'", and we say it together.  And I say, "And I know you were brought up as leaders not to say those words.  But what's happening now is, if you pretend you know and you don't, you could be leading your team down a very dangerous path.  You have to acknowledge what you don't know as an opportunity to learn, because the first step of learning is to say, 'I don't know', because if you know, you're not learning".
  • Episode 156: Rethinking Leadership for the Future of Work (Interview with Heather McGowan) myHRfuture (June 27, 2023)
• You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube now."
• "You'll meet many Gen Zs whose attitude is essentially, 'I'm going to work with a sense of purpose or not at all,'"
• leaders should understand that employees want to feel like their work has a purpose and act in that way. Yet, if we look at Gallup's research over the past 20 years, we can see the highest rates of disengagement, mental illness, burnout, and loneliness, which are not exactly traits that highlight being purpose-driven.
• It's not like the old way was working, and now we're suddenly loafing," she joked. "Instead, I think we're now putting work in the right place in our lives and getting the right social connections and support so we can do better work."
• "Let's say I'm scanning the horizon, and I might see the need to understand Chat GPT or generative design. And so, I bring that research back into the project as well as back into my functional home."
• As a society, we've put work first, and it hasn't helped work. We have not done better work when we put work first,
  • Practical Advice On How To Lead An Empowered Workforce Forbes (March4, 2023)
• 'It still seems a bit surreal and now that it's over, I can try to absorb all the little bits of the day. Getting a kiss on the cheek from him was absolutely brilliant'
• 'I was really worried that I would be a mess but I held it together. It was a day that I am honestly not going to forget. I'm quite lucky he was late. It let me get accustomed to the situation and compose myself a bit.'
• 'I asked about his wedding and he told me that he got to the point where he was just like, 'wedding planners, leave me alone'. He did say that he was really involved in his wedding, though.
• 'It's absolutely the best date that I've had. No one is going to live up to that. This wasn't on my bucket list but let's just end the list now. There's nothing that's going to beat this.'
  • We talked about politics and American football’: The woman who won a date with George Clooney describes meeting the star in Edinburgh Daily Mail (November12, 2015)