Like the 3 witches in “Macbeth” business journalism today is filled with dire premonitions and dark warnings for the future of organizations.

95% of workers surveyed by Monster are considering changing jobs.1

The US economy added more jobs in June than expected yet US unemployment still rose.2

Retail and Service workers are leaving in such unprecedented numbers that pundits are calling this “The Great Resignation”3

Amidst all this sturm und drang how are organizations choosing to respond and react?

Three paths are emerging:

Reset – the ways we’ve formerly done things will not work for our future success. The talent we have or are trying to attract will not join us if we continue in this way. We need to reset our systems, processes and take a deep look at our culture.

Recalibrate – we’re not perfect but we’re satisfied that, broadly, we can adjust, tweak, refine and become the organization we need to, to ensure our continued success.

Refuse – nope we’re not going to make any substantive changes. This past 18 months was a hiccup and a rollercoaster but we’re going to go back or “get back” to business as before just as soon as we’re able.

The continuation, or cessation, of the “Work from Home” or “Remote Work” phenomenon is the most visible example of organizations choosing one of the paths above.

Deloitte, Twitter, Capital One, Facebook, Atlassian have loudly and publicly stated that employees can WFH indefinitely, even to the point of never having to come back into an office ever again.

Tom Siebel of C3.ai and James Gorman of Morgan Stanley have taken a different approach. Get your butt back into the office or find your happiness (and job) somewhere else.

As Gorman shared with CNN Business;

"By Labor Day, I'll be very disappointed if people haven't found their way into the office and then we'll have a different kind of conversation. If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York," Gorman said. "None of this 'I'm in Colorado...and getting paid like I'm sitting in New York City.' Sorry. That doesn't work."

While the conversation around remote working remains the loudest and most public, I’d humbly suggest that’s a red herring.

Your quintessential leadership challenge in this new world is not where the work is done. It remains how the work is done.

Whether you’re “resetting, recalibrating or refusing” your organization and your culture, making decisions about the which office and how many days people can/must come into that space is just one component.

The more urgent and more strategic adjustments needed for organizations arise from dimensions that, conveniently for someone who likes alliteration, centre around 3 “A’s.

Agency – an employee’s desire, need and ability to act independently, to make choices of free will that enables them to do work that’s meaningful, purpose-driven and outcome-focused. Environments that stifle or prevent agency will increasingly become less appealing to a workforce seeking this.

Autonomy – both individually and collectively the ability (necessity?) to not exist in unnecessary hierarchies, centralized control but to move to flatter, more distributed, less bureaucratic/autocratic operating models and systems. Environments that continue exercise a centralized, autocratic, hierarchial design and attitude will find themselves falling behind as talent magnets. Subsequently impacting their ability to sustain growth in this new era.

Agility – A desire (and an outcome) to move with more speed – as individuals, teams and organizations. To have more capacity and capability to be nimble, to pivot, to adjust and adapt quickly (to a pandemic for example). Environments that aren’t ruthlessly and relentlessly delivering on agility will be seen as increasingly bloated, cumbersome, inefficient, non-innovative. Not a set of attributes likely to attract fresh thinking, fresh thinkers or fresh customers.

Dan Pink raised these themes over a decade ago but, like much in the harsh glare of the pandemic, these topics are arising with increased urgency from thinkers as broad as Lynda Gratton in HBR, Gary Hamel in Humanocracy, Tsedal Neeley in Remote Work Revolution and Stan Slap in Back to Better

Not surprisingly tackling the 3 A’s requires leadership.

More importantly, a new type of leadership and a new definition of leader.

For organizations who also view leadership in some traditional sense of tenure, gender or organizational construct will you be willing to consider new definitions and new manifestations of leadership? Will you seize the opportunity to strip needless bureaucracy from every facet of your firm? Here’s a fun and helpful place to start. Will you see the advantage in illuminating the rich informal network structures already operating inside your organizations? The informal structures that your colleagues already use and trust to drive change and momentum in your company.

For every organization are you willing to recalibrate or reset or will you refuse to make those adjustments in your leadership style?

For Executives who view leadership in the traditional sense of where you sit in an org chart, the combination of “C”, “S” or “V” in your title you’re going to be relentlessly tested on whether you can give your people agency versus micro-managing them. That you can make them feel empowered by heightening the autonomy of your teams, rather than making them feel emasculated that you are the only source of wisdom and direction.

For every Executive are you willing to recalibrate or reset or will you refuse to make those adjustments in your personal leadership style?

For individuals who also view leadership in the traditional sense of where you sit in an org chart what are you prepared to do to advance your own agency, autonomy and agility? Will you join the Great Resignation and take your skills, passion and capability to organizations who embody these principles? Will you show that individual leadership? Will you act as an internal agent provocateur and use your own sphere of influence to change your organization from within? Will you take this opportunity, or will you wait for the opportunity to be given to you?

For every Employee are you willing to recalibrate or reset, or will you refuse to make those adjustments in your own style?

At this moment of tremendous change – and opportunity – in business and society, we all seem to have reached a moment that poet Robert Frost4 so eloquently described as roads diverged in a yellow wood. And, as the protagonist in that famous poem realizes, which path you take will make all the difference.

Reset

Recalibrate

Refuse

Which path are you gonna choose?