In this final post in my series on sleepwalking employees, we’ll look at the ways active engagement benefits organizations and strenghtens our leadership practices. As we discovered earlier, there are ways we engage in unconscious behaviors that reinforce sleepwalking at work. While this might initially seem attractive to a manager who likes a high degree of control, in the long run it’s a recipe for burnout. No one person, no matter how competent, can unilaterally direct a team or organization in a dynamic environment.
Active thinking, awake employees deliver enormous amounts of adaptive capacity into the workplace. Since adaptive capacity relates directly to organizational resilience, it’s an important concept to understand. The following is a deeper dive into how fully conscious workers, or “active thinkers,” influence and strengthen the resilience of our organizations.
4 ways active thinking employees contribute to resilience
There is an essential connection between active thinking employees and the level of resilience in a team or organization. Resilience is the ability of an organization to absorb disruption and still maintain function and serve its purpose and mission. While sleepwalking employees weaken resilience, active thinking employees strengthen it in four primary ways.
1. Active thinking employees scan for disruption. They are always on the lookout for any changes or developments that may create a disturbance in their work or workplace.
Our old thinking assumes that the manager is the primary source of recognizing patterns that might cause disruption. However, the manager looks at things based on where they sit in the larger environment, and that constrains their point of view. Active thinking, engaged employees also notice disruptions based on where they are positioned. When active thinking employees are given the opportunity to share their observations, the organization has more information to help everyone proactively adapt to changing circumstances.
A dynamic, unpredictable, and disruptive external environment creates major ripple effects within our organizations.
2. They facilitate adaptation that minimizes disruption. When we hold tightly to old practices that don’t fit turbulent environments, eventually the organization has to undergo a major reset or reorganization to adapt to what has changed. This is now a common experience in our current, uncertain times. I’ve heard from colleagues who work in organizations facing their third reorganization in 18 months.
Active thinking employees self-organize their work. Consequently, they’re well-positioned to observe what’s changing and adapt their work in ways that increase the organization’s flexibility. If you have enough employees who can do this, the organization becomes organically more responsive. Leaders and teams can minimize (or even eliminate) the time, distraction, and energy waste that goes into a reorganization.
3. Active thinkers discourage sleepwalking. In a complex and unpredictable world, adaptive capacity is necessary for resilience. Employees who sleepwalk at work don’t change what they are doing unless they are directed to. This reduces the adaptive capacity of the organization when it needs it most. While this may seem like common sense, we need to constantly examine the patterns we see within our teams to ensure our environment isn’t unconsciously reinforcing people who “phone it in.”
4. They free up leadership capacity. Turbulent times require more leadership capacity. Outdated hierarchies assume that a few positional leaders can effectively lead an organization. When the environment is unstable, resilient systems respond by encouraging initiative and adaptive capability. This creates critical redundancy, which bolsters the leadership bandwidth within an organization
A note on AI
Disengaged employees who sleepwalk at work interface with AI processes or use them differently than active thinkers. A sleepwalking worker rubber stamps AI recommendations without questioning. We see this a lot in written materials, where teams simply use the outputs from ChatGPT or other tools without editing. This often creates unenforced errors, as we saw in a summer reading list that was published by several large newspapers that contained several entirely made-up books!
Active thinking employees interface with AI critically. They see it as a way to augment their work and thought processes, but they don’t assume that AI is infallible. AI is continuously evolving. An organization that forgets this fact will put itself at risk. To improve, AI needs to have a human mind behind it that resists easy acceptance. A sleepwalking employee won’t help AI evolve, and AI’s value for your organization will diminish over time.
Two final questions
As we close this series, I invite you to consider these questions:
- What challenges is your organization facing right now?
- How can active thinking employees increase adaptive capacity, strengthen leadership, and reinforce resilience?
