SKIN IN THE GAME
I was flying high. By age thirty, I was the head of new channels marketing at Nokia, with business school education that the company paid for and more frequent-flyer miles—Executive Platinum on American, Premier 1K on United—than I could ever use. I was paid good money (more than enough to pay for my own master's degree) to sell the latest Nokia mobile device into retail and was a regular business traveler at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore, sometimes in the same week. I was crushing the whole upwardly mobile thing.
Until I came crashing down.
It was a typically insane business trip in October 2007. I arrived in Los Angeles from New York on a Monday night with just enough time to sleep, dazzle at my Tuesday 8 a.m. client meeting, and then, with peak efficiency, catch my early afternoon flight to New York and then Helsinki, Finland.
Driving through L.A. that morning, I remember thinking, I hope they don't have a lot of questions for me because I need to make that flight. I saw the sign for my turn too late. I didn't see the oncoming car at all. I injured my neck and back and dislocated my shoulder. My body was one big bruise. The pain was excruciating. Throughout six months of intensive physical therapy so that I could use my left arm again, I thought about all the other signs I hadn't seen as I barreled toward so-called success. The empty apartment I was never in. The family I never saw. I couldn't remember the last time something real—something other than an expensive new designer bag or the latest New York restaurant—brought me real joy. What's the point of all this? Am I here just to make more money for the company and, for myself, just to buy more things? There must be a better way to work, a better way to live. I had a lot of time to think.
"Pivot" is a word we hear more and more in the global discussion of work.
Well, I pivoted. Hard. I went back to school for a doctorate in education leadership, focusing my research on organization and system change, and then went out into the world to see how different workplaces worked in real life. Interviewing hundreds of workers, I made it my job to understand what they need from their employers and what barriers they face to getting what they need. Then I sought out employers who were already on the road to creating that mythical better way to work so many of us crave.
The questions swirling around my search—about the human part of human resources; about how to attract, hold on to and build talent; about how to invest in employees as people so that they, in turn, feel invested in their work—were first stirred in childhood, in the shadow of the shuttered Chrysler factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. From the time I was four, when my mother died, I was raised by my grandparents, neither of whom had more than a sixth-grade education. My grandfather was proud to be a Chrysler man and union member, making $7.25 an hour on the Kenosha plant's assembly line, installing doors on Chrysler Reliant and Plymouth Sundance cars. His pay was well over minimum wage at the time, and it afforded him good healthcare, job security, a pension, and a sense of community. Until it didn't.
I was thirteen when that factory closed, laying off 5,500 workers, including my grandfather, who was then sixty-four years old. Our neighbor across the street lost his job, so did my uncle. It felt like the whole town was suddenly out of work. Generations of workers kept the Kenosha plant humming for more than a century, and Chrysler, one of our community's last remaining employers paying blue-collar workers a family-sustaining wage, was now gone.
Chrysler had trained my grandfather to do just one thing—and to do it expertly. When that job disappeared, Chrysler had nothing more to offer him. He, like hundreds of others in my community, was left with no ability to pivot, no skills for transitioning to other work. The plant and its managers were transactional—you give us labor; we give you wages—and made no lasting investments in their people or community. That's a broken system, and one that lives on, even though rapidly advancing technology and worker discontent makes this system ultimately unsustainable.
FROM BREAKING TO WINNING
I have lived experience with the devastation—to my working-class grandparents and our community, to my totaled rental car and battered body—of the broken system of work. But it's much more than personal. And it's more than an American phenomenon. My postdoctoral exploration of workforce investments and the future of work was a deep dive into more than 1,200 companies and organizations around the world, from Walmart, the largest employer in the world, to Jergens Inc., a small manufacturing company, and TÜV SÜD, a global company that provides safety testing and certification for products we touch in our daily lives, including children's toys, car parts, and medical devices. This research involved extensive interviews and data collection over more than six years, a period that included perhaps the most disruptive force ever to hit the global workplace, the 20202021 COVID-19 pandemic. The findings confirmed my suspicions: the status quo of workplaces was choking the life out of both people and profits. But amid the wreckage, I also found glimmers of hope: organizations defying the old unworkable status quo model by creating for their people—leaders, managers, and workers alike—oases of collaboration, trust, and shared success. That's what I call a Win-Win workplace.
