Transforming Work with Sophie Wade 125: Kelly Monahan - Up-leveling Leaders for the Blended Distributed Workforce
Kelly Monahan, Ph.D., is Managing Director of Upwork’s Research Institute, with research published in applied and academic journals. Kelly is the author of “How Behavioral Economics Influences Management Decision-making: A New Paradigm.” She shares insights from studies of strategic leadership and organizational behavior. Kelly urges executives and managers to rethink their approach to work and leading a distributed, blended, and AI-augmented workforce. She emphasizes accessing versus acquiring skilled talent enabling businesses to be agile and compete.
TAKEAWAYS
[02:21] Kelly misses a human element in her business degree so gets into strategic leadership.
[03:10] Kelly aligns with Edward Deming’s thinking that systems are the issue, not the people.
[03:57] Leadership feels broken. As part of her Ph.D., Kelly researches how people learn.
[04:55] Kelly discovers business philosophy is founded on the assumption that people are lazy.
[05:50] Kelly focuses on how leaders can appeal to people’s intrinsic motivations.
[06:31] Early in her career, Kelly works as a media planner during the financial crisis.
[08:55] In 2015, CEOs 3 big worries: more distributed work, blended workforces, AI taking jobs.
[12:05] Leaders struggle to manage distributed and cross-functional teams.
[12:35] Leading through influence, not hierarchy, requires the new power skill, empathy.
[13:13] Most leadership theories derive from the military and don’t translate well for business.
[14:37] Kelly finds more emphasis on empathy in the military than business leadership.
[00:15:19] At Accenture, the pandemic lockdown stops Kelly from announcing a new people-first approach.
[00:17:27] During the crisis, Kelly stress-tests the framework and sees employees’ needs evolve.
[00:19:40] Kelly joins Meta, excited about the possibilities of VR/AR in shaping the future of work.
[00:20:28] Tech companies have location-centric cultures so what is distributed work going to look like?
[21:20] Hands-on, Kelly tries to understand how leadership norms and careers will evolve.
[22:00] Relying on local talent will not be sufficient as engineer must be hired further afield.
[22:50] How Ready Player One expresses some of Kelly’s technology-related fears.
[23:28] Meta focuses on bringing social presence and connections into digital environments.
[24:53] Kelly is bullish about personal connections and realistic human presence in virtual space.
[26:05] Virtual environments could democratize access to learning, but there are trade-offs.
[26:45] Kelly goes to Upwork seeing the urgent need for companies to access skilled external talent.
[28:58] Over 2-3 years, Kelly predicts companies have a more blended talent mix to be more agile.
[31:16] Freelancers tend to stay competitively upskilled compared to full-time employees.
[32:14] GenAI is disrupting tasks, causing leaders to rethink how work is done and by whom.
[35:05] HR strategies do not align with Gen Zers’ desire for diversified work to have financial stability.
[37:05] Kelly advocates more dynamic “talent access” rather than “talent acquisition.”
[39:00] Using an abundant mindset rather than a scarcity ‘war for talent’-type mindset.
[41:00] Kelly highlights NASA which successfully uses external talent to solve big problems.
[42:56] Kelly believes connecting business performance with new ways of working is key for businesses survival.
[45:15] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Rather than thinking of a job when analyzing work, consider ‘what’s the problem I’m trying to solve for?’ Then what are the skills you need to achieve the project and how can AI and skilled freelancers be incorporated as part of the solution?
RESOURCES
QUOTES (edited)
“The true power skill today of how people lead—it's not through formal structure, it is through their ability to empathize and move people to move in a direction they otherwise wouldn't.”
“Whether it's transformational leadership or servant leadership or authentic leadership, all these different theories, they really didn't translate well into the business world because so much of it was actually still from a transactional, top down driven approach.”
“Today's need, urgent need, is to help leaders begin to realize that there's really skilled outside talented, that they need to learn how to capture and create the processes and leadership styles and environment to actually bring in this talent in order to continue to navigate the turbulent times we were in.”
“I think the next wave of innovation is going to come from a much more disciplined approach of how companies are organizing their talent, in particular, and beginning to really right size the mix that they need. Skills change too quickly to continue to keep really large, full-time core up to date. It's nearly an impossible task.”
“Freelancers tend to be at the bleeding edge of their skilling. When your livelihood depends on it, you make the time to upskill and learn. We're seeing that with generative AI as being the most recent use case—freelancers are much more ahead of this technology curve.”
“How much is this [Generative AI] actually disrupting work at the task level itself, which is going to cause leaders to rethink ‘How do I actually really need to get this work done? Is it a full time employee or is it a combination of a freelancer and AI working together to get this work delivered?’”
“Leadership and talent in HR strategies have not kept pace with the way that the social contract has changed. When you ask the majority of Gen Z'ers today in particular, ‘Where do you find the more stability? Is it that one to one relationship or is it the one to many?’ The majority of Gen Z are telling us it's the one to many is where they actually feel more stable and they feel more in control of their career.”
“The majority of executives have been taught 'I'm in a war for talent'. When you have that mindset, it's very much a scarcity mindset. Because we're dealing with people and human beings, I encourage much more of a collaborative ecosystem, an abundant mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset.”