Upgrading Employees’ Human Operating System

Rob Hays, former CEO of Ashford Hospitality Trust, reflecting on 15 years of conversations with over 400 senior executives in an ongoing Dallas-based gathering he has hosted, concludes that “while there are exceptions, many of our employees and colleagues are struggling. They are living with anxiety, depression, and isolation. Many of them do not have flourishing relationships, resilient marriages, or supportive friendships. Distraction is rampant. They are confused on issues of identity and self-worth. They have no idea what it takes to be genuinely happy. While these struggles have always existed in various degrees, they seem particularly acute right now.”

How do you lead in the face of these cognitive, behavioral, and emotional challenges? A disparate set of consultants, educators, and researchers are converging on a promising concept that could be called the “human operating system.”

Universal Human Capabilities

A report from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, titled “Skills change, but capabilities endure,” identifies a core set of “universal human capabilities,” including resilience, creativity, critical thinking and social intelligence, that “underpin an individual’s ability to gain specific skills.” McKinsey & Company consultants subsequently developed a larger list that also includes humility, self-control, courage, grit, and the ability to learn, among still others, and found that they are “associated with a higher likelihood of employment, higher incomes, and job satisfaction.”

America Succeeds, a not-for-profit organization focused on preparing students to be competitive in the global economy, in collaboration with the online recruiting site Glassdoor, published “The High Demand for Durable Skills.” Based on an analysis of 82 million job postings, this report identified seven of the ten most employer-requested skills as “durable skills” — which are nearly identical to the capabilities identified in the Deloitte and McKinsey reports. All three teams appear to be honing in on a foundational set of capabilities.

Scholars working in the field of positive psychology have been studying such capabilities for the past three decades. They call them “character strengths,” and have found in each case that they lead to greater effectiveness as well as improved happiness and mental and physical health, according to a meta analysis of 347 research studies.

Ancient Pedigree

The origins of these discoveries lie in the ancient world. The character strengths identified are based on the virtues, a set of “super habits” that were at the center of the writings of Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and other ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, and which have recently been popularized in the work of bestselling author Ryan Holiday. They identified the foremost of these, the “cardinal virtues,” as practical wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline.

The medieval Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas assembled these into what is arguably a human operating system. He showed how collectively these habits address cognitive, behavioral, and affective excellence. Practical wisdom, the habit of making wise decisions, develops cognitive excellence; justice, that habit of treating others fairly, fosters behavioral excellence; and courage and self-discipline address excellence in dealing with the two main dimensions of our affective, or emotional, experience: desires and fears. Courage is the habit of proceeding despite fear, and self-discipline is the habit of following one’s desires only when it makes sense to do so.

Aquinas also noted that each of these four cardinal virtues had several smaller virtues associated with them. So, for example, critical thinking and creativity are subsidiaries of practical wisdom, while resilience and grit are related to courage.

Upgrading The Human Operating System

These habits for cognitive, behavioral, and emotional excellence seem to address the challenges identified by Hays — by updating the human operating system. Hays says that a “really good starting point is helping employees grow in these virtues or superhabits. It can be a powerful antidote to the challenges they face. It makes them more effective and just generally happier and more satisfied human beings, both at work and in the rest of their lives.”

Neglecting to update a phone or laptop’s operating system results in apps slowing down or ceasing to work at all. Overlooking the human operating system likewise seems to cause a wide range of problems. Viral growth coach Cory Warfield says “An upgrade fixes bugs, and there are clearly bugs in our current human operating system. Habits of excellence are created over a period of time, refined over a next period of time, and maintained in perpetuity.”