Purposeful Work Archives - The Future of Work Exchange

The Power of Purposeful, Selfless Leadership

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 08/11/2025

A thought that popped into my head while watching the Little League World Series last week. A commercial from 2022, officially sanctioned by League Little International, features several seconds of a harried parent berating his son for inadequate swings during a strikeout. What follows is a montage of kids providing powerful messaging about how youth baseball is about them…not the parents or the coaches. The kids encourage the viewer to change their perception of youth sports and focus more on them.

“We need you to build us up…not break us down.”

This line, amongst several others, really stuck with me. I haven’t been shy about discussing the oft-overlooked links between sports and business, especially given the numerous leagues I coach around the year here in New England (and as a diehard Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics fan!). When I built the FutureOfWorkExchange back in 2021, I wanted an equal focus on business leadership and talent technology and strategy.

The evolution of leadership needs to follow a selfless path…and we can’t ever forget that this should be a key foundation of the greater Future of Work movement. We’ve talked about “purposeful work” and linking what we do in our careers with the aura of humanity each of us holds. For business executives with teams that depend on them, “purposeful leadership” is an amazing extension of this idea.

It can be incredibly difficult in sports, especially youth sports and especially as a coach or a parent, to “let go of winning” and focus solely on the development and satisfaction of the kids playing. Gosh, it can also be trying to forget about the “Let’s just have fun!”, too. But there’s an undeniable attribute of coaching that we need to extract and bring into the world of business: being selfless and being a champion for those that look up to us.

Sure, business and sports aren’t perfectly analogous. In the corporate world, self-interest is baked into the enterprise system: salaries, bonuses, promotions, career goals. That won’t change. Nor should it. But what can change is how we show up for others and how we lead.

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The Future of Work Is Human

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 01/22/2025

Last summer, I stood in front of a packed room of talent acquisition, procurement, HR, and recruitment professionals (as well as many, many friends running contingent workforce programs!) and stated a phrase that I’d repeat ad-nauseum through 2024 and into 2025.

The Future of Work is human.

While it’s hard to believe that we are nearly five years (five years!) removed from the beginnings of the biggest health crisis of our collective lifetimes, the fact remains that the ramifications, both personally and professionally, of the COVID-19 pandemic affected all of us as humans in a deeply profound way…a way that sticks with us even in these early weeks of 2025.

When life (and business) returned to “normal” in late 2021/early 2022 (depending on when you would define “normalcy,” right?), many business leaders and their teams kept that sheen of humanity in how they managed and how they worked, choosing to embrace broad-based hiring, fair treatment, emotional intelligence, and other human-led factors that wore woven into the very fabric and dynamics of “work.”

Somewhere between now and then, though, these amazing attributes began to fade for too many enterprises. Remote and hybrid work, perhaps the most famous of all non-technological Future of Work ideals and probably the centerpiece of the movement’s rapid acceleration during the pandemic, started a rift between workers and executives, who, respectively, yearned for continued flexibility and its rigid counterpart of return-to-office (RTO) mandates (which dismiss the proven benefits of remote and hybrid arrangements that supported and continue to support work-life integration).

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How Are Businesses Enhancing the Employee Experience?

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 04/19/2023

It’s all about the “experience” today. All aspects of the modern-day workforce, including both FTEs and contingent workers, revolve around the day-to-day (and long-term) experience within a workplace setting. Business leaders cannot rely on archaic modalities of management any longer if they want their workers to be happy, satisfied, and, most importantly, productive. In the latest edition of the Future of Work Exchange‘s exclusive infographic series, How Are Businesses Enhancing the Employee Experience?, we unveil some new research findings on how business leaders plan to improve their employee engagement and employee experience initiatives.

Five Ways Business Leadership Is Evolving

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 03/21/2023

The Future of Work is built on transformation. When enterprise rethink and reimagine the ways they get work done, innovation becomes the nexus of business operations. The Future of Work Exchange has long defined the Future of Work movement to include three major pillars: 1) the evolution of talent acquisition and talent engagement, 2) the impact and utilization of new technology and innovation, and, 3) the transformation of business leadership.

That third pillar has been critically important over the past several years, especially as many organizations have “rebooted” their operations in the wake of a global health crisis, a newfound focus on “humanity,” and the need to be more talent-oriented to thrive during uncertain times. With this in mind, Ardent Partners and the Future of Work Exchange has developed the below infographic, Five Ways Business Leadership Is Evolving.

The “Why” We Work is Just as Important as the “How”

Business Leadership by Christopher J. Dwyer on 01/23/2023

Over the past several years, and especially since early 2020, there has been an incredible focus on the many, many facets of how enterprises address how work is done from various perspectives: workplace, workforce, operations, finance, etc. After all, it made (and still makes) sense: in the midst of the frightening early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the very aspects that supported how work was done needed to be reimagined in the wake of lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing. And while the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, these transformations are still required to truly optimize the many ways work can be done.

As time passed, however, something incredibly interesting brewed below this layer of pandemic-specific responses: the so-called “Great Resignation” quickly became an outlet for workers and professionals to prove that the workforce needed the power, control, and better conditions to perform productively and effectively.

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