When their faces popped onto the screen as they joined our virtual classroom, you could see the eagerness and the anxiety. Thirty-seven students, mid-career professionals, had signed up for our winter 2023 Stanford Continuing Studies seminar on “Modern Leadership in the New World of Work.” These up-and-coming leaders would be logging on to Zoom one night a week for the next eight weeks. In this class, like previous classes, we have students from around the world: San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, and many places in between. This means they’ll be forced to stay up or wake up just to show up. And, they do.

Why?

Much like the hundreds of students we have taught through Stanford and the thousands of leaders we engage with through our global leadership labs and our daily work, employees at every level are struggling with the complexity of today’s new world of work. They, like all of us, are facing tectonic shifts in where, how, and even why we work. As one of our new students, Abel, a senior director for a well-established tech company based in the San Francisco Bay Area shared, “I’m taking this class because I’m trying to understand how to be a good leader in the midst of this chaos.” 

Abel is zooming in from Atlanta. He moved back home mid-pandemic to be near family. Like him, his team of over 100 designers and engineers is now spread across the United States. Abel's boss wants everyone back in the office. He believes it will boost productivity, but Abel’s teammates enjoy their newfound flexibility. He’s already lost two high-performing employees to remote-first companies and he worries he’ll lose more if his company leaders stick to their plans. On top of that, with a looming recession, the company just cut funds for a deeply valued initiative: a program that offers technical skills training to minority students who can’t afford a four-year college degree. His team is upset, morale is low. “I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Abel admitted, bringing a vulnerability that is not unusual amongst our students.

Another student, a chief people officer for a fast-growing start-up, sympathized with Abel, “I’m taking this class because our managers are unsure how to lead in this environment. I need tools to help them.”

At the beginning of each semester, we do our best to help our students put the challenges they are facing into context. We explain that to lead today, you need to understand the unprecedented forces that are putting pressure on companies and the people who run them. From employees who are challenging previous assumptions and expectations about the nature of work, to external stakeholders who are demanding companies step up to solve critical societal issues, to the underlying question of what is the essential purpose of a corporation, more is being asked of leaders than ever before. 

It starts by understanding that everything has changed.  

What Used to Work at Work, No Longer Does….