by Milton Pedraza & Doug Kirkpatrick
As the 21st century roars on, rapidly advancing technology such as the Internet, mobile devices and artificial intelligence, have generated intense global interconnectivity that drives massive interdependence within and between organizations and individuals. Focused on implementing technology, a ubiquitous commodity that is easier to grasp, leaders are missing the big picture of self-management and emotional self-mastery, and how these two powerful new skills will make or break organizations in the next decade and beyond.
Industrial Age organizations, and their corresponding scientific management style, are being dismantled at a torrid rate. Scientific management that views organizations as machines, instead of complex adaptive systems, and human resources processes that treat people like robots, instead of human beings, are making themselves irrelevant. Millennials, who have grown up digital and collaborative, are eagerly waiting for their current leadership to step up to the challenge. Traditional organizations are learning that the essence of new leadership is not a position in a hierarchy, or a static job description. Leadership now requires the humanistic expertise to design purposeful and meaningful work for human beings that inspires them to join an organization. It requires designing and building an organizational context: the connective tissue, or scaffolding, required to create a highly adaptive, open system that enables human beings to grow, and express their creativity. This mastery of new skills will generate massive value through collaborative human relationships across internal and external networks. The future of work requires the symbiotic new skills of self-management and emotional self-mastery from every worker.
Self-Management: The Why and What of Work
Organizational self-management is the philosophy of individuals freely and autonomously performing the traditional functions of management (planning, organizing, coordinating, staffing, directing, controlling) guided by principles and without mechanistic hierarchy or arbitrary, unilateral command authority over others.
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