We're Not Getting Enough Opportunity to Grow at Work: Whitney Johnson

03/03/23 • 40 min

The pandemic gave many of us a time to reflect on what we wanted from life and where our values lay. So it’s perhaps no surprise organizations were suddenly faced with what became known as The Great Resignation in 2021. This was the trend in which employees voluntarily resigned from their jobs in what appeared to be a mass exodus as they rethought their work conditions, careers and long-term career goals.

One of the reasons cited for the Great Resignation has been the lack of career advancement opportunities. We’re not getting enough opportunity to grow in work. But is this the fault of organisations or ourselves?
Top #10 Business Thinker Whitney Johnson reveals the forces that are stopping us from growing, the six stages of growth – including Explorer and Collector - and how we can use this to chart our growth.

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors, a tech-enabled talent development company. She was named a 2021 Top #10 Business Thinker by Thinkers50, and is a globally recognized thought-leader, keynote speaker, executive coach, and consultant. A LinkedIn Top Voice since 2019 with 1.8 million followers, Whitney has a passion for personal disruption, helping individuals transform their lives, careers, teams, and companies. Her LinkedIn Learning course Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times.

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Previous Episode

Leadership is Broken. Creativity is the Answer: Rama Gheerawo

Everything we are taught about leadership today is wrong, says Rama Gheerawo. Traditional models of leadership are broken and outdated. We need more creative leadership – leadership that speaks the language of business but also the language of humanity. That is more empathetic, expansive and communal rather than outdated frameworks driven by the tired rhetoric of management and business run on the whole by men. In this episode we discuss how we can fix leadership.
Rama is an international and inspirational figure within design and was named a 2018 Creative Leader by Creative Review alongside Paul Smith and Björk. Now Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, he uses design to address issues around age, ability, gender and race. He sits on a number of advisory boards and committees for awards, universities and organisations such as the UK Design Council, The International Association for Universal Design, the Design Management Institute, The Bhavan Institute for Indian Culture and the RSA Decolonising Design Initiative.

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Next Episode

Stop Focusing on Job Credentials. Start Fitting Work to People: Josh Bersin

Companies today are failing at a record pace. In 1958 the average age of a company on the S&P500 stock index was 61. Today it is 18. It is predicted that within the next five years three-quarters of S&P500 companies will have disappeared.

Artificial intelligence and automation is everywhere. But, rather than automating us out of work, these technologies are taking the more repetitive bits away from our jobs. The result is that more and more jobs are becoming hybrid – they combine skillsets that never used to be included in the same job. To keep up with the pace of automation we need to keep upskilling.

Meanwhile, while we may be hearing about large scale layoffs in some companies, many organisations are struggling to fill roles.

Global future-of-work thought leader Josh Bersin discusses:
• Why we should be talking about work, not jobs
• Why humans are the only appreciating assets in a business so just cutting staff is a false economy
• How companies are tearing up the traditional job descriptions and entry paths to work, such as degrees, and what they are doing instead
• What do we as workers need to do to keep our skills up to date?
• Where human resources fits into this debate

Josh Bersin founded corporate learning, talent management and HR research and advisory company Bersin & Associates in 2001, selling it to Deloitte in 2012. On retiring from Deloitte in 2018 he went on to launch the Josh Bersin Academy for HR and learning and professionals. In 2020 he brought together a team of analysts and advisors to form The Josh Bersin Company, which undertakes research and advises companies in areas such as HR technology, employee experience and diversity equity and inclusion.

Josh is a prolific blogger with more than 860,000 followers on LinkedIn and frequently appears in top business publications. He recently published a book Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring Employee-Focused Organizations which is based on thousands of interviews with innovative leaders at the world’s best-run organizations, revealing the secrets of success of more than 5,000 companies he and his team have been researching.