When Humanize came out three years ago, I came to an epiphany of sorts. I realized that when it comes to management and leadership in organizations, we really have no idea what we’re doing. We are trying hard, but fundamentally for the last hundred years we have been making it up as we go along. We convince ourselves that we have developed “best practices,” but I still think that our organizations continue to thrive and be profitable IN SPITE of our management, more than because of it. And with Gallup’s annual employee engagement survey depressing us every year, it’s time we took a harder look at management.

All that being said, however, I remain very optimistic about the future. In writing our next book, Maddie and I have been studying organizations from very different industries, all of whom have very different cultures, but they all created amazing workplaces that their employees flat-out love. The largest one we’re looking at even has an employee engagement rate of 93% (the average from the Gallup poll is about 30%). And they all also knock it out of the park when it comes to their performance metrics and bottom line results.

Management is changing. What it means to both run and organization and work in an organization is changing. The changes are big, and from what we’ve been seeing in our research, they mean good things for the future.