The contractual bonds that bind us into Organisations are held within the evolved context of the Social Age. Whilst we have spent decades optimising our Organisations, ensuring profitability and agility, using aspects of scientific management, process optimisation, notions of humans as redeploy-able resources, outsourcing for cost and resilience, performance management (too often experienced as aspirational constraint) and cultures of busyness have given us some success, but at quite a cost - the cost being the fracturing of the Social Contract itself.
The Social Contract is wrapped around the written one: it governs not the utilitarian aspects of our job - what we do, who oversees it, and how we are rewarded - but rather the social context of it. This includes our discretionary engagement, invested trust, belief, pride, sense of belonging, loyalty, and energy. Quite important things… and indeed the very things that many of our Organisations are currently pinning their hopes and dreams upon.
We want 'more' from the people we employ - their invested engagement, energy, co-creation, collaboration, trust, ideas, belief and motivation - but at the very time when the Social Contract is at it's most fragile, or entirely gone. When we need elasticity, we stand brittle.
We are right to have focussed on the efficiency and effectiveness of our Organisations: to drive profit is part of their purpose. But not at any cost. And the cost, where it has been borne, has often been borne by people who have weathered and survived multiple re-orgs, where they had to apply and reapply for their job - alongside what has been increasingly strident attempts to control every aspect of the 'self', when the broader context mitigates for greater agency.
And in any event, 'work' now exists within a broader space of engagement. The old paradigm, where you graduated, got a training position, spent your working life progressing through an Organisation, retired, and tended to the garden is so far gone that we can barely see it in the rearview mirror.
Instead, you may do an apprenticeship, or build your own startup, you will find a job through your community, carry your reputation in an external community, be coached, mentored, tutored, and challenged, through your most valued connections. You will learn more from YouTube, TikTok and podcasts than any wise old owl sitting in a corner office, and in any event you will have more 'jobs' than there are days in any month, across a wide range of Organisations, many of whom are consolidating, restructuring, being acquired, resisting change, or simply becoming irrelevant in the waves of change bought about by new technologies and, most importantly, evolved social expectation and desire.
Organisations are still important to us - our jobs still matter - but they are not the only thing. And if you want me to 'bring my best effort', the chances are that you will need to earn that right, not believe that you have bought it. There is a difference between utilitarian engagement and invested engagement. And it's the latter that really matters.
This is not about being nice.
There is a structural imperative for Organisations to discover effective ways to contract the best talent, and to do so in ways that are sustainable for all concerned. And to learn how to do this when the nature of engagement (and contract) are shifting.
If we looked forwards, we would probably look towards models of Collective Capability, Interconnected Organisational Design, and the concept of the Socially Dynamic Organisation - or at least that is where my work takes me - the view that we know how to build structural Organisations at scale, but we have to learn how to build social ones at such scale.
To do so will give us the mechanisms of social engagement that fulfil the needs of both parties, in a deeply fair way.
The Pandemic - and particularly the road to recovery - have not helped this process. Much of the conversation about going 'back to the office' (or indeed 'back to work') has infantilised the relationship, and made stark the lack of trust in the very people we employed. It's clear what people want - agency, belonging, trust, opportunity - and success. Often this aligns with what Organisations want. It's just that the two sides, like waring couples, are finding more friction than trust.
Social Leadership provides a part of this solution: enhancing the Social Context of our Organisations, interconnecting beyond the structure, alongside an evolution of Organisational Design, and a reassessment of our mechanisms of effect. The foundational understanding of how our Organisations work.
To find this understanding requires a specific capability: an ability to look at the world through different lenses, and sometimes to make, or borrow, those lenses. A more trans-disciplinary perspective, and a willingness to recognise that much of what we consider to be 'true' is actually just familiar.
Formal contracts are moderated by HR and the law. The Social Contract is moderated by the communities that surround us. Meaning they are inconsistent, belief based, contextual, and often implicit, rather than transparent and clear. But they act strongly upon us nonetheless. To navigate this complexity is part of the role of a Social Leader. To ensure not only that we are 'safe' in the formal system, but also in the Social one, which may require us to consider how people hold their voice, and how it may be silenced. How they find agency, and when our mechanisms of control, and established power, may fracture that agency.
It is possible to be too safe.
In essence, to build a Socially Dynamic Organisation will require not simply a formidable approach to structural strength, but also to distributed social strength. To view the Social Context with as much clarity as our visible mechanisms of systems, process, hierarchy, formal reward, and formal control.
To weave a new type of Organisation, within a new context, and under both formal and Social contracts.
#WorkingOutLoud on Social Leadership
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