Heather McGowan | Championing Humans in the Learning-Centric Future of Work

Heather McGowan

Championing Humans in the Learning-Centric Future of Work

Fee Range
Please contact us for pricing

Heather McGowan
Featured Books

The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforceby Heather McGowan

The Empathy Advantage: Leading the Empowered Workforce

by Heather McGowan
The Adaptation Advantageby Heather McGowan

The Adaptation Advantage

by Heather McGowan

A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and ambiguous Future of Work

Foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman

Technology is changing work as we know it. Cultural norms are undergoing tectonic shifts. A global pandemic proves that we are inextricably connected whether we choose to be or not. So much change, so quickly, is disorienting. It's undermining our sense of identity and challenging our ability to adapt. But where so many see these changes as threatening, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley see the opportunity to open the flood gates of human potential--if we can change the way we think about work and leadership. They have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts affecting the workplace have brought us to this crossroads, The result is a powerful and practical guide to the future of work for leaders and employees. The future can be better, but only if we let go of our attachment to our traditional (and disappearing) ideas about careers, and what a good job looks like.

Blending wisdom from interviews with hundreds of executives, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes happening in the world of work and posits the solution: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title, and connect it to our sense of purpose. Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Only when we let go of our rigid career identities can we embrace and appreciate the joys of learning and adapting to new realities--and help our organizations do the same.

Of course, making this transition is hard. It requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety--despite fierce competition and external pressures. Adapting to the future of work has always called for strong leadership. Now, as a pandemic disrupts so many aspects of work, adapting is a leadership imperative. The Adaptation Advantage is an essential guide to help leaders meet that challenge.

Disrupt Together: How Teams Consistently Innovateby Heather McGowan

Disrupt Together: How Teams Consistently Innovate

by Heather McGowan

The Empathy Advantage
Leading The Empowered Workforce

The global pandemic didn’t only change where work takes place, it’s altering where work fits in our lives. The combination of a shift in leadership from Boomer and GenX to GenX and Millennial and the entrance of Generation Z into the workforce is altering the fundamental values around work.

Based upon her upcoming book, The Empathy Advantage, this talk examines labor shortages that are shifting the power from employers to employees, creating an empowered workforce. In this RUPT (Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, and Tangled) world, leaders must make four shifts (mindset, approach, culture, and behavior) to effectively navigate a world that has transformed overnight from linear to complex.

The factory default settings have all been removed, from who works (diversity as a norm), where work takes place (home, office, anywhere, hybrid), what we do for work (exploration over routine tasks), how we lead (inspiration over fear), and why we work in the first place (purpose, values, impact).

In this talk, buckle up for a fast-paced and inspirational overview of the post-pandemic world comprising an empowered and engaged workforce.

The Human Value Era

For much of the history of work, talent was defined by the things you could make. In this new era, talent will be defined by what you can make out of your people.

Research shows that human capital comprises 90% of all enterprise value in the S&P 500. As we hand off more and more mentally routine and predictable tasks to technology, human talent and ingenuity will be the true competitive advantage.

We have entered the human value era, where humans are seen as assets to develop rather than costs to contain. In this talk, discover how to navigate and master this challenging yet thrilling new world.

The Adaptation Advantage
Leading In A Post-Pandemic World

When Heather E McGowan and Chris Shipley wrote The Adaptation Advantage (April 2020, Wiley) even they didn’t realize just how quickly their predictions would come to pass. Then the coronavirus global pandemic required an immediate and dramatic shift in work, learning, and leading. The predictions they made for the next three to five years occurred over the following three to five weeks. Overnight, companies remapped supply chains, pivoted product lines, and transformed to distributed work-from-home organizations. Entire university and school systems adopted virtual delivery exclusively, something many said they would never do.

This new normal requires a laser focus on culture, purpose, trust, and psychological safety as we embark on the largest social experiment in human history. The virus has accelerated our future of work, expedited our human transformation to digital creation, and placed an even greater burden on leaders to inspire and motivate human potential.

Even as the pandemic subsides, our new ways of working will remain. With Heather’s strategies in place, those transformations can be for the better.

Learning
The Real Future of Work

We live in times of accelerated change driven by exponentially growing technologies paired with a hyperconnected global market economy. As a result, work tasks as we knew them in the past have become atomized (fragmented), automated, and augmented by technology. This reshaping of tasks requires that we rethink our systems of education and workforce development, our organization of work and workers, our process of talent attraction and retention (including learning and development), and even ourselves. In the past, we learned to work. Tomorrow, we’ll work to learn. Discover how with Heather in this stunning and actionable keynote message.

Heather McGowan
Featured Reviews

Get more details and availability

Heather McGowan

Give us some basic details about you and your upcoming event, and one of our experts will be in touch with you quickly regarding pricing and availability.
Event Details
Your Details
Cancel
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.