We have carried the Conform play from the Industrial Age because it was the best way for leaders to get their teams to comply with their coerced wishes. In order to create leaders, we have to make it psychologically safe to share ideas and make decisions at work. What we need now is the Connect play. Connect is about caring what people think, how they feel, and about their personal goals.
We now come to the sixth, the final, and arguably the most important new play for leaders.
Now remember in the Industrial Age, we separated the deciders – salaried leaders – from the doers –hourly payed workers – and that resulted and cascaded into a whole series of plays that we’ve now gone through: Obey the clock, when what we want to do now is Control the Clock. Coerce, which results in people complying, but what we want is to Collaborate which results in Commitment. Continue the job when we want is to Complete – do the work in chunks – with a mindset of proving, now we want a mindset of Improving, growth, and learning.
And the final Industrial Age play is Conform. The best way for leaders to get their teams to comply with their coerced wishes is for everyone to conform to their role in the hierarchy, which means that what we really want now is connect. Because we’re making the doers also be the deciders, the workers also be the thinkers and the leaders, in order to make healthy decisions we have to have a healthy emotional state, we need to feel psychologically safe. In order to do that, we have to feel like humans at work. In order to do that we have to feel connected. This is why the final play, which underpins all of these is to Connect.
To learn more, read this IBL Blog post – It’s Time We Connect
