# Smart Work by Jo Owen - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? An introduction to the new world of work.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we work.

For Jo Owen, those changes amount to the greatest shake-up of the way companies are managed and led in over 200 years.

The old industrial “command-and-control” model is finished, for starters.

The leaders of the future won’t be bossy office micromanagers – they’ll be experts in facilitating the work of highly skilled, autonomous professionals who’ve embraced remote work.

All of that adds up to a paradigm shift.

What’s needed now is a parallel shift in attitudes.

If leaders are to meet the challenges of the future, they have to rethink what it means to lead.

And that’s what we’ll be exploring in this Blink.

Along the way, you’ll learn:  Why offices will still play an important role in the future; How to delegate effectively; and Why you should hire for values, not skills.

The future of work is hybrid.

The world of work is changing.

It has been for a while now, too.

Since the internet became commonplace some 25 years ago, change has been a constant feature of the workplace.

New ideas, attitudes, and technologies have transformed everything from whom we do business with around the globe to how we sit – or stand – at our desks.

For lots of companies, keeping up with rapid change is the challenge of the twenty-first century.

And that’s when the pandemic hit.

Covid-19 showed us what fast really looks like.

Overnight, entire industries had to change their entire operational models as remote work became the new normal.

The suddenness of that sweeping change shouldn’t obscure an important point, though.

Remote work was already on its way – the pandemic turbo-charged existing trends.

At some point in the near future, companies would have had to make the transition anyway.

If there’s one silver lining to the pandemic, it’s the fact that it forced companies to start thinking seriously about the future of work.

That, in a nutshell, is the view of the author, Jo Owen.

And that’s why he wrote Smart Work – to help companies navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.

So what does that future look like?

As we emerge from the pandemic, there’s a temptation to turn the clock back and restore the pre-Covid status quo.

That, Owen thinks, would be a mistake.

We can’t just uninstall Zoom and get everyone back into the office.

Lots of professionals don’t want to do that, for one – they appreciate the autonomy working from home gives them.

Just as importantly, remote work has distinct advantages.

Some tasks, it turns out, can be better completed outside the office.

That’s especially true of “thinking” work, like reading and writing reports.

But offices also have their unique advantages.

They’re wonderful machines for building trust.

Teams are often forged in chance meetings by the water cooler, and problems are often best solved during informal chats over lunch or coffee.

It’s also in the office that new hires learn about a company’s values and leaders can best help team members grow and develop.

So there are good reasons to keep both the office and working from home.

This combination of models is called hybrid work.

That, Owen argues, is the future of work.

Adapting to this hybrid model is a challenge, though – especially for leaders.

Thing is, leadership is much easier in the office.

Everyone’s in the same place at the same time, so you can always see who’s struggling and who’s coasting.

If there’s an issue, it’ll jump out.

Usually, the solution can be worked out on the spot.

Remote work, by contrast, doesn’t give leaders the same oversight.

Zoom calls don't even tell you what people are wearing below the waist, let alone if someone is slacking, struggling, or striving.

You can’t “accidentally” bump into people in the hallway to discuss a problem, either.

And the people you need to influence aren’t sitting a few desks away – they’re on the other side of a city, country, or continent.

Leading remote teams, in short, is a challenge.

But it’s a worthy challenge.

Adapting to the hybrid workplace, Owens argues, has the potential to make you a better leader.

Effective leadership isn’t about control – it’s about trust.

So let’s talk about leadership.

We can start with a famous question.

It was posed in the sixteenth century by the Italian diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli.

Is it better, he asked, for a leader to be loved or feared?

He favored fear.

Love, after all, is fickle.

A leader who relies on affection will find that their authority has no basis if their followers’ love fades.

A leader who is feared, though, can afford to ignore popular opinion – self-interest will ensure that people do what they say anyway.

Machiavelli directed his question at political leaders, but bosses have always asked it too.

Does a company run on love or fear?

Like the Italian thinker, they usually favored the latter strategy.

It’s easy to see why.

Take a typical twentieth-century factory.

Usually, it was the only major employer in a town.

Like the inhabitants of Italian city states, workers had nowhere else to go.

It didn’t help that most of them were unskilled.

They were easy to replace, and so they followed orders and kept their mouths shut.

There’s that fear.

In this setting, leaders didn’t set out to inspire – they had all the power, after all.

And they didn’t see workers as collaborators in a collective undertaking; they were cogs in a machine that obeyed the laws of command and control.

As the century wore on, that picture changed.

Workers became more skilled and their leverage increased.

The most skilled workers – professionals – no longer had to accept the dictates of micromanagers.

If they didn’t like their boss, they moved on and found one they did.

That forced leaders to rethink Machiavelli's question.

Fear just didn’t cut it anymore.

Technological change has reinforced this trend.

Today’s professionals have more leverage than ever before, and they’re not afraid to use it.

What they want hasn’t changed, however – greater autonomy.

What skilled employees desire, in other words, is to have a say in how, when, and where they work.

That’s why remote work was on the rise even before the pandemic hit in 2020.

Leaders, in other words, can’t rely on the old command-and-control model – they have to inspire and enthuse and treat employees as collaborators, not cannon fodder.

Survey after survey shows that the number one reason professionals leave their jobs is to escape overly controlling bosses.

In the twenty-first century, management is about making things happen through people you don’t control and don’t want to be controlled.

The answer isn’t love or fear.

What leaders need is trust.

As we’ll see, trust can take different forms, but there’s one constant: acting on the belief that people will do their best, even if you can’t see what they’re doing.

Paradoxically, effective leaders are going to have to relinquish control just as new technology comes online that’s seemingly tailor-made for control freaks.

Keyboard loggers, location trackers, and always-on video are a micromanager’s dream, but they’re a short-term fix with disastrous long-term consequences.

Leaders who rely on intrusive surveillance software will find that their distrust of employees is paid back with interest.

The best and brightest will leave; new talent won’t even bother applying.

That’s an outcome no company or organization can afford.

Hiring for values, not skills, will help you build a robust team.

Teamwork is about dependency.

If no one depends on anyone else, it’s not a team – it’s a bunch of individuals who happen to share the same boss.

But you can’t depend on people you don’t trust.

Trust, then, makes the difference.

Like glue, it holds everything together.

Remote work highlights just how vital trust is.

In the office, you know what people are doing – you can see what they’re doing with your own eyes.

It’s different in remote teams.

You can only rely on colleagues if you can trust that they’re doing the right thing even though you can’t see them.

It’s easy to see where this trust comes from when you observe high-performing teams: shared values.

Or, more technically, values alignment.

Simply put, we trust people more when they’re like us.

When they share our goals and approaches to achieving those goals.

When we have the same values as other people, we have a good idea of what they’ll do when no one’s watching.

But lots of companies don’t look for values when they recruit – they look for skills.

On one level, that makes sense.

Competency matters, so leaders jump at the chance to place someone with the right skills and experience in a hard-to-fill role.

But skilled new hires are useless to a team if they’re disruptive, devious, or manipulative.

Having been hired for skills, they end up being fired for values.

In an ideal world, you’d find plenty of people who are skilled and have the right values.

But say you can’t find anyone who fits that bill – how do you build your team?

Well, you reverse the usual order of priorities.

Instead of looking for skills, you hire for values from the very beginning.

That’s especially effective for remote teams.

New members can’t absorb or adapt to the values of an office or workplace they can’t observe.

It’s also just a lot easier to train new skills than it is to convert someone to your team’s way of looking at the world.

So what are your values?

If you want to hire for values, you have to be able to answer that question.

A good rule of thumb, here, is to identify a couple of core values that stand out when things go wrong.

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about your team’s values.

The first is positive regard, or the belief that colleagues are professionals who act in the best interests of the team.

When people  take this view of one another, they assume that problems are the result of misunderstandings.

That makes it easier to solve them without getting into political blame games.

Positive regard also fosters a culture in which ideas can be discussed openly and robustly – it’s clear, after all, that people are attacking an idea, not the person who proposed it.

Then there’s kindness.

Working remotely can leave people feeling isolated socially.

It can also make work more stressful since there’s no one around to tell you when you’re done.

Teams that hire for kindness will place greater emphasis on social and professional support structures that help colleagues master those challenges.

Delegating real work builds trust and motivation.

Delegating can be tricky, and it often makes leaders anxious.

Do it too well, the worry goes, and you’ll delegate yourself out of a job.

That’s not quite right, but we’ll come back to that.

First, though, let’s ask a simple question: why is it so important to delegate work in the first place?

We can start answering that question by looking at it from the perspective of a team.

Say this team’s boss can’t, or won’t, delegate.

If something major comes up, he takes care of it.

For him, that feels like leading from the front.

For the team, though, it signals distrust – why else wouldn’t he pass on important or difficult tasks?

That’s the start of a negative doom loop.

A team that’s only allowed to work on the simple stuff is a team that’s going to struggle with motivation.

Low motivation doesn’t just lead to slacking, though – it also erodes the desire to learn and grow.

Add all that together and underperformance is baked in.

Of course, if the team is underperforming, the leader isn’t going to delegate work.

So the cycle repeats itself.

And that’s why delegating matters – without it, it’s extremely difficult to establish the bonds of trust that sustain high-performing teams.

Which brings us to what the author terms a virtuous cycle.

Delegating lots of important tasks signals high trust.

That boosts motivation high and keeps teams learning and growing.

Question is, how do you kickstart that cycle?

Well, one way of doing it is to reframe the issue.

Rather than asking yourself what you can delegate, focus on the things you can’t delegate.

In other words, assume you start with none of the work, rather than all of it.

How many tasks are there that you really, really can’t entrust to your team?

Of course, there are things only you, as a team leader, can do – your team can’t review its own performance, for example.

Chances are, though, that there aren’t nearly as many things you absolutely have to do as you might have thought.

It’s also important to delegate the right portfolio of work.

Sometimes, you’ll be handing off boring tasks no one wants to do, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re delegating.

You also need to give team members a chance to work on challenging, interesting stuff that gets them engaged and helps them grow.

Clear communication goes a long way, here.

Who needs it and when?

Are there no-go areas?

Who else is involved in the project?

How does it fit in with other priorities?

You're a facilitator, which means it’s your job to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Okay – delegation is essential to your team’s motivation and morale.

Where does that leave you, though?

Well, to circle back to where we started, yes, you are delegating yourself out of a job.

But it’s a role you shouldn’t be playing anyway.

Professionals don’t need overpaid supervisors – they need leaders.

And that’s the job you’re freeing yourself to do when you delegate effectively.

Final summary

Covid-19 kickstarted a paradigm shift.

Overnight, we had to adapt to remote work.

But the end of the pandemic doesn’t mean we’ll go back to the old way of doing things.

Skilled workers were already demanding more autonomy, including the right to work from home, before Covid.

That’s not going to change, which means managers and leaders will have to adapt to a new hybrid workplace – a workplace that incorporates the best of both remote and office work.