We are the most disengaged people in the history of work!
We are disengaged because of perceived poor leadership and bad management. The figures correlate quite well.
- 86% of employees believe there is a leadership crisis
- 85% of employees are disengaged
- 75% of employees say their boss is the worst part of their job
This costs the U.S. economy $860 billion annually. And that's a conservative figure. It might be as much as $1.06 trillion.
But what's $200 billion between friends?
Note, these figures only refer to the U.S.A. Globally, the figure is in the trillions.
You want evidence?
- Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. between $450 billion to $550 billion each year in lost productivity.
- Workplace bullying costs $360 billion in lost productivity each year - Forbes
- Project management failure rates represent a loss of $50 billion to $150 billion per year in the United States - Gallup
Things are slowly getting worse. We've become static. Locked into leadership, management and organisational theories and practices that have no place in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.
It's not really managers' and leaders' faults. They are generally decent people. But they've been trapped into following outdated ideas and theories. And we don't know how to get out of them. As Jeffrey Pfeffer writes,
The enormous resources invested in leadership development have produced few results. Estimates of the amount spent on it range from $14 billion to $50 billion a year in the United States alone.
So, what to do? It's a big task and some difficult truths need to be processed.