“Thank God it’s Friday!”
How many times have you heard that phrase? More importantly, how many times have you said it? And like so many of us, how many times have you bolted out the door and headed to a Friday happy hour to take the edge off another stressful week?
Why doesn’t anyone say, “Thank God it’s Monday?” No one says it because we live in a world where, for most people, work is drudgery, a meaningless ordeal to be endured day in and day out.
Here are some recent statistics from The Huffington Post, Gallup and The Muse:
- Only 30% of people enjoy their job and their leaders.
- 86% of HR and business leaders do not believe they have a good path for leadership development.
- 79% of leaders believe they have a significant engagement and retention problem.
- 89% of employers think their people are leaving for more money, but 12% of people do actually leave for that reason.
- 75% of people are leaving jobs because of their leaders.
It all comes back to something I talk about over and over – a crisis of leadership. We’re destroying people and killing our culture because we send people home after treating them as objects and functions, instead of caring about them as human beings. We want them more engaged because we want them more productive. We want more productivity out of them because that creates more profits and that creates a better future for the company, but we don’t care about them as people.
The good news is that we have the power to change this and begin healing tomorrow. We just need to engage our heads and our hearts in an approach to leadership that validates the worth of every individual, an approach in which everybody matters.
But the bad news is that the roots of this crisis run deep. Fortunately, we’re not alone in trying to address the matter. There are other leaders out there who are spreading the message that things can be different. Work doesn’t have to be work and business can be a powerful force for good.
Our friend Shawn Murphy of Switch and Shift – who recently released a new book, The Optimistic Workplace – compiled a list of 50 leadership innovators changing how we lead for Inc. Magazine. It contains many friends of Barry-Wehmiller who’ve been featured on this blog: Amy Cuddy, Jacob Morgan, Tony Schwartz, Simon Sinek and Rich Sheridan; but other friends like Daniel Pink and Jeffrey Pfeffer, with whom we’ve also connected.
I am honored to be featured in this list along with this group of Truly Human Leaders who can offer tremendous insight and inspiration on your leadership journey.
Take a minute to read Shawn’s article. Be part of the movement to make Monday the pick day of the work week.