The Future Of Work Podcast With Jacob Morgan | Futurist | Workplace | Careers | Employee Experience & Engagement |

David Marquet is the bestselling author of the 2013 book, Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders and the new book, Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don’t, which comes out on February 4th.  David was in the Navy for 28 years and he was ultimately selected to be captain of a nuclear submarine. And it was during his time as a captain of the USS Santa Fe that he changed his leadership style and that change led to him writing his first book.  What does David mean by “leadership is language’? He explains that while there are a lot of professions that require a person to work mainly with their hands, in leadership, because it is always about other people, leaders interact through words--face to face, emails, company statements, annual reports, etc...As he says, “the magic of leadership is that by changing your words you will change the world around you because if you ask a question a different way, you'll get a different answer.”  In his book David

Motivation is key to your success at work. Your boss can try to motivate you, but in most cases, you can’t rely on anyone else and have to find your own internal motivation. No matter if you work in an office or remotely for yourself, everyone needs help from time to time finding motivation to push through and be productive.  Here are three effective ways to motivate yourself at work: Set Goals Start every day with an idea of what you want to get done that day. Setting goals gives your purpose and direction instead of just wandering around trying to find something to do. Goals can be big or small. I like to set large goals, smaller daily goals, and mini goals. For example, my large goal could be to write a book, so I set a daily goal to write for an hour. As I’m working on that goal, I can set a mini goal to write 500 more words. Setting goals pushes you in new directions. Find Meaning You’re more likely to be motivated and productive if you feel the work you’re doing is useful. It can sometimes be a stru

Bruce Daisley is a former Twitter VP and bestselling author of the forthcoming book, Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job, which comes out February 25th. Bruce also has experience working for Google and YouTube.    There are some statistics that show that only 13% of employees are engaged in their jobs. Why is that? Bruce says it is because, “If you have a look at status, higher power is dis-inhibiting. What I mean by that is if you watch people who are bosses, people who are presidents, people who are high status individuals, they generally are unencumbered by this sort of self-consciousness that the rest of us fail. And the correlate of that, the flip side of that is that lack of status is inhibiting, meaning that when we have no position in the hierarchy, when we are junior, when our opinions are told that they don't matter, it means that we repress how we feel. And you observe this more and more, countries that have strong hierarchy generally find that their workers are less engag

For decades, most people believed there was just one path to career success: climbing the corporate ladder. Everyone was expected to start in an entry-level role, pay their dues, and get promoted as they worked their way up the organization. That was the only way it was done, and no one questioned it. Thankfully, today we have many more options and fewer people spend their entire careers working their way up the corporate ladder. With new technology and opportunities, each person can build their own career ladder to chart their own path to success. For some people, that could be staying with the same organization, but for other people, the career ladder they create could involve becoming an entrepreneur or working for multiple companies. Building your own career ladder comes with countless possibilities, but it also requires work and vision. Here are five way to build your own career ladder: Keep learning Knowledge has never been more plentiful than it is today. We have access to tools and resources to learn

Marissa Andrada is the Chief People Officer at Chipotle, a very popular restaurant chain with 2,500 restaurants and 80,000 employees. Prior to Chipotle Marissa had led HR for companies such as Starbucks, Kate Spade, GameStop, Red Bull, and Universal Studios.  Marissa has seen quite a few changes in HR over the past 10-20 years. One of the biggest changes she mentioned is a shift in leadership. Purpose, vision, and values have been around in theory for awhile, but it wasn’t until recently that companies took these words from something on a poster in the hallway to something that companies actually live out through leadership. And employees can tell when leaders are actually living out what they talk about in company meetings or if it is all just talk.   When it comes to tenure in restaurants, a lot of times employees are coming and going frequently. Although Marissa shares that tenure at Chipotle has increased, she also says they understand that not everyone will stay at the company long term, and that’s OK. 

If you’re like most people, you often get caught up in your work and personal life. You’re busy every day with new activities, goals, and the mundane tasks of work and life. It can be hard to find time to be curious when you’re busy with all your other activities.    But curiosity is vital to our creativity and success. Curiosity allows us to solve problems, uncover opportunities, and have fun. It’s the curious people who shape the future.    So how can we balance our daily lives with the need to be curious? It comes down to making time to be curious. For most people, it takes real effort to set aside our daily tasks and allow our minds to wander and think of new possibilities. Here are five ways to make time to be curious.   Schedule it in. The most basic tactic is to simply schedule time to be curious. If it’s on your calendar, you’re more likely to actually do it. Scheduling in curiosity time can come in many forms, from giving yourself a few minutes to step away from your responsibilities to finding a ne

Rita McGrath is a professor at Columbia Business School and author of the new book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. She was also recently ranked #5 on the Thinkers50 list for her work in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship and for being a champion of harnessing disruptive influences for competitive advantage.    What does it actually mean to see around corners? Rita says it’s not about predicting the future, because predictions are hard, but it is about paying attention to signals. She says, “it's more about expanding your range of possibilities that you're considering, and then really being prepared to challenge your own assumptions. And I think that's really where the seeing around corners part is so valuable, because if you think about it, any business grows up with a set of assumptions about what's possible and what's not. And what an inflection point does is it really changes the nature of those assumptions.”    Companies have to be able to pay

As AI and automation grow, employees are concerned for their job security. Adding to that fact is uncertainty about the unknown future of work and what it will take to succeed over the next decade and beyond.   There are lots of ideas of what it will take to future-proof your career, but the simplest and best thing you can do is this: be a coach and mentor.    All leaders should be coaches and mentors, but it’s not just limited to leaders. Employees at all levels can find people to coach and mentor, either at work or outside of work. A coach is different from a traditional boss. A coach gives honest feedback to their mentee, pushes them, unlocks their potential, and removes obstacles from their path. In fact, the ultimate goal of a coach or mentor is to make the person they’re mentoring more successful than them.    This isn’t how it’s always been. It used to be that leaders and managers sat at the top of organizations and pushed down anyone with talent who threatened their success. Today, we’re seeing more l

Tom Rath is a bestselling author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and well-being. He has written several books, his newest one comes out in February and it is titled, Life’s Great Question: Discover How You Contribute to the World. Tom set out to write this book as a result of his personal reflections over the last several years. He says, “I've really been personally reflecting on, given my own health challenges and threats and my mortality, what are the most important things for people to get focused on? In particular, most of my writing and research is focused on that nexus of people and organizations, and how can we help people to lead better lives through the organizations that they're a part of? And one thing I've observed after 20 years of, kind of following this area is that we're often so quick to look inward and think about self-development and our own brand and how we can improve personally, and the more I have studied these topics, my big

Like most people, I’m constantly bombarded with requests from other people in both my personal and professional lives. I’m asked to meet friends for coffee, attend a conference, conduct an interview, answer questions for someone — the list goes on and on. I used to say yes to everything because I didn’t want to miss out on making a new connection. But over time, I felt myself becoming exhausted and depleted. I could never meet my own goals because I was spending all of my time helping other people. So I started saying no. It was difficult at first, but I learned that in order to see my own professional and personal success, I had to invest time in myself. When you say no, you’re really saying yes to something you want to do. Something for yourself that gives you purpose and meaning. As we become more connected with new technology, we’ll be even more inundated with requests. Learning how to say no is one of the most valuable things we can learn. You don’t need to be rude, but you also need to stand up for your

Dan Helfrich is the Chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting, where he has worked for over 20 years. Although he had always wanted to be a sportscaster, once he graduated from Georgetown University, he had a choice between broadcasting and consulting and he ended up choosing consulting. And that choice has led him to where he is now, which is leading a team of 56,000 people.    Dan is very passionate about diversity and inclusion, which seems to be at the center of a lot of conversations today inside of organizations. Dan says, “I actually think some are talking about it as a theme, and I think that's wrong. Diversity and inclusion is an imperative, not a management fad, and not something to pay lip service to. And what we're doing is, we are putting diversity and inclusion, and I view those as related concepts, but that have distinct elements to them. We're putting that at the center of everything we do, we're striving for increasing the representation of our teams on a ton of dimensions, in terms of gender,

What does a typical day look like for you?  It’s a question I’ve asked of hundreds of CEOs and top business leaders around the world. They almost always tell me the same thing: they don’t have a typical day. Every day is full of different activities and meetings. If you want to follow in the footsteps of some of the most successful business leaders, avoid having a typical day. These people still have habits and commonalities throughout their days, but they avoid falling into the routine of doing the same mundane things every day. Avoiding a typical day can make you more creative and energized, which is good for your sanity and the success of your business.   So how do you avoid having a typical day? Here are five tips: Get out of the office. It’s easy to fall into the same routine when you’re in the same place all day, every day. Get out of the office and take your work on the road. Work from home or a coffee shop or even a communal workspace in your building. Visit customers and distributors. Take your team

Barri Rafferty is the President and CEO of Ketchum, a leading global public relations firm serving clients in over 70 countries. Ketchum has been named PR Agency of the Year and the winner of an unprecedented three consecutive Campaign of the Year Awards.    She became the first female CEO of a top-five global public relations firm at the beginning of 2018. In total, she has worked for Ketchum for 24 years. When asked what her leadership style is, Barri says, “My goal is to bring out the best in the people that work for me. So I feel like as a leader, I'm very much of a coach. I go... I move really fast, so I have to trust the people around me. And I really encourage us to all collaborate and work together. We have a lot of debate on... Any leadership team I ever have, I always think if people aren't debating and pushing back on me and there's not a few raised voices, or curse words every now and then, that it's probably not a good thing, right? We've gotta get in it, but we lock arms when we get out. And I a

Employee experience is the next big battleground for organizations. It’s crucial for building a place where people want to come to work because they are engaged and satisfied, not just because they have to be there. Many people think that employee experience is determined by executives, but in reality, it is something employees at all levels can control and shape.   A few decades ago, employees didn’t have any power. If they were frustrated with something at work, their only choice was to go home and complain to family and friends because they could make any real changes. But today’s world is different, and employees now have the power to shape their own work experiences. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entry level employee, mid-level manager, or executive. Here are five things you can do to shape your employee experience:   Talk to your manager. Have open and honest conversations with your manager about what you like about your experience and what you want to change. Don’t just complain; come with a solution

Martin Boehm is the Dean of IE Business School, one of the world’s leading higher education institutions. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but most of their programs consist of 80-90% international students.    The business school was ranked the 3rd European Business School by Financial Times, 1st Worldwide Distance Online MBA by QS, 1st Business School in Europe and 3rd in the world by The Aspen Institute, and 3rd Non-US MBA Business School by Forbes, just to name a few of their awards.    Education hasn’t changed much over the past 100+ years and it is becoming more apparent that we are in desperate need of change in this area. With all of the technological advances, the evolving workforce, and an incredibly face pace of change in the world today we have to update our way of educating to allow students to prepare for the future of work. And that is just what Martin and his team at IE Business School are doing.    One thing that has to change is we have to move from simply imparting knowledge and facts to stude

Believe it or not, there’s more to life than work. When we’re stuck in the repetitive day-to-day where the majority of our time is spent at work, that can be hard to believe. Many people struggle with separating themselves from work and focusing on other things. But the truth is that we don’t live to work; we work so we can live.   Everyone is unique, but everyone has more in their lives than just work. How do you discover your life outside of work? Try these five tips:   Set boundaries. Work tends to expand to fit whatever time we have to get it done. Without limits, you may let yourself work all the time and feel like you have enough work that it needs to take all that time. If you set boundaries and decide you’ll leave the office or be done with work at a certain time every day, you’ll have more time for other activities and will likely find you can still get your work done in less time. Build relationships. For many people, one of the biggest parts of their life outside of work is relationships with othe

Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2014) and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2019). He started and sold two tech companies and he has taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design. He has been studying and writing about behavior design and habit formation for many years and he became fascinated with how technology persuades people to do things they normally wouldn’t do. This is ultimately what led him to write his bestselling booked Hooked.    Nir’s newest book came about as a result of his search for a solution to a problem he had with staying focused and getting things done. Nir says, “Hooked is about building good habits, Indistractable is about how do we break bad habits.”   Being distracted is not a new problem. These days we tend to place the blame on technology, social media, smartphones, etc… But as Nir points out, “People have always been finding ways to escape boredom. So it's not a new [being distracte

When was the last time you were noticed at work? Did you get recognized at a meeting or even just receive a compliment from a boss or colleague for a job well done? It can be difficult to get noticed at work, especially in large organizations. With lots of moving parts and ongoing projects, it takes effort to stand out and be recognized. It also comes with risks. There’s always the possibility that a big step to get recognized could backfire or a project could end up not being as successful as anticipated. But those risks are worth taking because being noticed is crucial for your career.   People who get noticed will grow and thrive in the future of work. They’re the people managers turn to when a new opportunity arises and they have a chance to grow and develop. Of course, it’s important to do good work simply to be a good employee, but it also helps to get extra recognition.   How do you get noticed at work? Make yourself visible and stand out. Here are three tips to getting noticed for the right reasons:

Diane Hoskins is the co-CEO at Gensler, the largest global design and architecture firm with over 6,000 professionals across 50 offices. You may have seen some of the structures they have worked on, including the Shanghai Tower, the Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, the Microsoft headquarters in Ireland, the Ford Foundation Center in New York, and countless others all over the world. When speaking about the work that Gensler does, Diane says, “We bring insight-driven and research-driven design solutions to some of the most challenging and most amazing opportunities out there, all around the world. Working with leading companies in the tech industry and governments, and law firms, and organizations all over the world and also projects like airports, and sports stadiums and hospitality and even health and wellness. And really bringing a full 360 understanding of really the transformation of live, work, and play. And our deep research is helping us to bring insight into the design solutions that we offer with

Humans have changed naturally over time. There’s a reason we don’t live in caves and work over fires any more—we’ve found a better and more efficient way. Human evolution didn’t stop with technology or modern times. We’re still changing and evolving as we find better ways to do things and as our values and concerns change.   Many people think of employee experience as something that just happens at work. Organizations want to create a great environment where employees are happy to come each day, but they only think about what happens during normal business hours and only for things that are work-related. That’s the old way of thinking.    Employee experience relates to every aspect of a person’s life, not just their time at work. When they feel engaged and empowered at work, they likely feel calmer and more confident outside of work. They know they are welcome to bring their true selves to work without judgement, and they don’t feel the pressure of dividing their lives into strict boxes between their personal