Susan Carroll

When I was growing up in Ireland, I’d sometimes be told not to be bold. In fact, I’d hear it quite often. Being told not to be bold in my Irish childhood was a reprimand for kicking my brother’s shins or wolfing biscuits without asking. Chided for being bold is a semi playful, gentle term that all Irish children, and adults, recognise as a term for misbehaving. It wasn’t the term used for courage, resilience, or persistence.

 

But many years of working with leaders have taught me that boldness is the very quality needed to make your mark in business, to be an effective leader. To become better connected to yourself, your team, and your organisation, you need to be bold. To overcome the unconscious, natural biases and shortcuts that help you cope with information overload – but at the same time lead us to make predictable mistakes – you need to be bold. And to foster a culture of innovation by looking to the edges for their inspiration, you need to be bold.

 

This is particularly true for women looking to become leaders. Because although women make up more than half of the workforce in developed and developing economies alike, research from around the world shows that women are seriously under-represented in leadership positions. Data from the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership show that:

·      Women make up just 15% of corporate board members

·      Only a quarter of all national parliamentarians(23%), media leaders (26%), judges (27%), and senior managers (25%) are women

·      And fewer than one in ten of senior IT leaders are women

Why women still have away to go

There are many theories put forward to explain why women lag men in the leadership stakes. For me, there are three principal causes.

 

First, the organisational culture and structure of business remains more or less unchanged since the industrial revolution, a time when women’s legal, property-owning, and voting rights were a long way short of parity. Although there are organisations making great strides in diversity and inclusion, they remain in the minority.

 

Second, our innate cognitive biases – shortcuts that enable us to make decisions under threat and uncertainty – lead us to make predictable but unfortunate mistakes, as shown here.  In the case of female under-representation in leadership roles, these include both selective attention and confirmation bias. Because men are the de facto leaders in many industries and organisations, when recruitment panels and boards are looking to appoint the next generation of leaders, too often they appoint the type of leaders they’ve had before and see in other leadership roles, and they’re usually men. This is changing, but glacially slowly. Even on something as simple as pay equality, in 2017 the World Economic Forum revised its estimate of when parity would be achieved in pay upwards by 101 years, to the year 2234.

 

And third, women resist stretch challenges while – by contrast – men push themselves forward to take on new and tough opportunities. Even when they’re not qualified or sufficiently experienced to undertake a project or a role, men are much more likely than women to say “I’ll give it a go” and work at the edge of comfort. A report in the Harvard Business Review[1] showed that while men are prepared to apply for jobs if they’re 60% qualified, women – typically – don’t apply unless they can meet every one of the specifications required for a role. A more recent study in the same journal reported that another factor holding women back from leadership roles is their unwillingness to volunteer for tasks that lead to promotions[2]. Too often, women prefer comfort-zone activities where they feel safe and in control.

 

How to change the status quo

The simple remedy to this situation is for business to address these challenges head on – to change the organisational structure of business, to do more than run tick-box training sessions to tackle unconscious biases, and for women to push themselves forward and take opportunities at the edge of comfort. And these are all good strategies for enabling and empowering women to be bold in their leadership behaviours.

 

But beyond that, I’ve developed a three-part framework that I know many women find helpful, a framework that enables them to be and become bold in the workplace, to achieve and sustain their leadership ambitions. I call this framework “Dream – Dare – Do”.

 

1.     Dream

Creating and expressing a vision is one of the most powerful and fundamental leadership tools available. It’s a superpower that enables you to teleport yourself into the future, to envision what you want for yourself, your team, your organisation. You can imagine what kind of leader you will be, how the structure may need to change, what you’ll be like to work with, and who your typical and ideal customers will be. You can then step back from the future to the present, assess what needs to happen between then and now, and put in place the steps you need to close the gap.

 

There are lots of different ways of mapping out your personal vision, and one of the most effective and creative ways I’ve found is to storyboard the process in order to fully bypass the critical thoughts we can leap to when something is out of our range of comfortable cognitive processes. Hand out incredibly simple tools like magazines, scissors, and glue, along with a set of challenging vision questions and it’s remarkable how tomorrow’s leaders can face up to, imagine, and then create their future.

 

2.     Dare

If you don’t dare to take the steps necessary to deliver your vision, it doesn’t get done. There are two parts to dare. The first the involves saying yes, the second saying no; edge of comfort yeses and strategic noes.

 

Edge of comfort yeses demand that you volunteer for stretch targets and things you feel uncomfortable with. As we’ve already seen, many women feel very uncomfortable taking on anything that they don’t feel 100% qualified to do, while men are typically happy to take on jobs for which they’re only 60% qualified. Saying yes to edge of comfort yeses is less about the process of achievement, and more about being outside of your comfort zone. Let’s rename the term comfort zone and start calling it the learning zone.

 

The second part of dare is saying no – not obstinately or randomly, but strategically. The second HBR article I mentioned above reveals that, too often in business, women volunteer for supportive tasks that help others out but aren’t the kind of tasks that lead to promotion – busy work. Rather than offer to help others out to complete tasks which are theirs, women should choose to say no strategically to tasks that dilute their impact, and should rightfully be done by others. You don’t have to do them, someone else can. Daring means daring to say yes as well as no, in the right circumstances.

 

3.     Do

The third step on the path to being bold is do. Do is everything. Be sure you do what you’re say you’re going to do and follow-up relentlessly. If you don’t put into practice what you’ve said you’ll do, you’ll have little to show for it. I often encourage women to “lean in” a bit less. Despite its good intentions, Sheryl Sandberg’s well-meaning encouragement has done many women in business a great disservice. Leaning in can often be the classic embodiment of female passivity. Rather than leaning in, I recommend that women do, ask, create, and lead.

 

Where do I start?

In encouraging women to be bold –by dreaming, daring, and doing – I’m keen to ensure that more of us start to raise our hands for edge of comfort challenges and opportunities. This is the route to greater knowledge, experience, and expertise. Ultimately, it’s the route to leadership impact.

 

But there’s also a role for men here, too. Too often I’ve heard men talking about the types of statistics I shared above, and they say they’re appalled about the status quo because they have wives and daughters in this very situation. For me, that’s not much more than paying lip service to the issue. Apathy and doing nothing are unacceptable. Awareness and action are steps in the right direction. But what men really need to do is advocate for women to lead and take on challenges at the edge of comfort. They should put women in their team forward for stretch targets and not accept them doing busy work to prop up others’ achievements, without recognition in their own right.

 

What’s more, there’s an economic imperative we should all bear in mind, beyond the legal, ethical, and moral imperatives. Boards, teams, and indeed entire organisations that are gender-balanced make better decisions, perform better, and are more commercially successful. What better reasons could there be for men to become advocates of women leaders?

[1] Tara Sophia Mohr (2014), Why Women Don’t Apply forJobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified, HBR,https://bit.ly/1zZzB3B

[2] Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, & Lise Vesterlund(2018). Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotions, HBR, https://bit.ly/2NlnDjL

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Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Eight challenges leaders will need to address in the coming decade

 

The pace of change in modern business is dizzying, and leaders who aren’t prepared for the challenges on the horizon may find themselves leading their organisations into the history books. In 1958, the average lifespan of a company listed on the S&P 500 stock exchange in the U.S. was 61 years. Today that lifespan is just 18 years – and falling.[1] At the current rate of attrition, three quarters of companies currently listed on the index will have changed in the next decade. The story’s the same in stock markets around the world.

 

Just think of the household names that have been outmanoeuvred, outinnovated, and outplayed since the digital revolution really hit around the turn of the millennium. No more Blockbuster, plenty of Netflix. Move over Kodak and Polaroid, and hello digital cameras then smartphones and Instagram. As the chill winds of ecommerce blow – and familiar names disappear from the high streets and shopping malls of the UK, the US, and Europe – meantime, everyone has Amazon. Where most towns once had an independent or chain record and CD shop, most households have a Spotify, Deezer, or Apple Music subscription. And remember, Google is just 20 whileFacebook is only 15.

 

The key to surviving, thriving, and growing in the modern, turbulent corporate environment is leaders’ ability to adapt and innovate in the face of the headwinds of disruption. Success is a result of how agile and nimble leaders are at encouraging and empowering their organisations to embrace novelty and influences from the edges, experiment with them, and adapt them for their employees’ and customers’ present and future needs.

 

In this post, I’m highlighting eight challenges and trends that today’s leaders must face and rise to if they are to survive and thrive in the 2020s. For each one, I’m highlighting the significance of that trend for the workplace. And for each one, I’m  suggesting one implication – one simple top tip – that they can start doing today.

 

ISSUE: Artificial Intelligence and automation. While the aspiration of genuinely human-like intelligence may be an impossible dream, in many fields the advances made in AI and automation are making people less efficient than computers and machines. As robots took over production lines in the previous generations, algorithms are moving into more cognitive tasks today.

IMPLICATION: Work out how you could remove some of the more menial, repetitive tasks from your workflow to enhance and improve productivity – and then develop more meaningful and motivating work for people instead. For instance, is manual, double-entry book-keeping really necessary today?

 

ISSUE: Millennials and the ageing population. Those reaching young adulthood in the early 21st century don’t have many of the opportunities that their parents’ generation did – no jobs for life, no job security, and a much greater challenge to get onto the housing ladder. They also often have different priorities and values and a different perspective on how companies should behave and why. Meanwhile, those retiring now and in the next decade are predicted to live longer than ever. The balance is shifting from the number of people in work to the number of people retired. Those in work will increasingly be expected to contribute to help care for those no longer working.

IMPLICATION: Ask yourself if you’re embracing all the generations in your team, if they know how best to work with each other, and how you can help both to learn from the other’s perspective.

 

ISSUE: The real distribution of wealth. Celebrity and social media culture, not to mention cultural myths like the American Dream, suggest that anyone can become wealthy and fast. The lightning-quick success of tech businesses – often bought, sold, or floated for billions in just a couple of years – also convince many of those just entering the workforce that they’re just one smart idea away from Bezos status. The reality is that in most developed countries, wealth is accumulated and held by a very small number of individuals, and the concentration of wealth is getting narrower – more owned by fewer people.

IMPLICATION: Consider whether your corporate structure is fit for the long-term future. Experiment with incentivising all employees by giving them a real and meaningful stake in your business.

 

ISSUE: The gig economy. The new gig economy promises great flexibility – work when you want, where you want, on your terms. Build your life around your work, not the other way around. The reality for many Deliveroo and Uber drivers and others can be very different. Zero hours contracts are no guarantee of any work, and many gig economy employers are very reluctant to acknowledge or accept union representation. Sick pay and holiday pay are not offered as standard and usually introduced under pressure.

IMPLICATION: Are you sure you’re putting equal weight on all different types and categories of employee? Are you being fair? Can you build social capital into how your company does business?

 

ISSUE: The techlash. Big tech and Big Data appeared to be a great democratising force, giving many more people a voice and connecting anyone and everyone around the world; the price of admission was just a smartphone and a 4G or WiFi connection. But the truth that “if it’s free, you are the product” has been made crystal clear thanks to a series of recent scandals. These include: YouTube and extremist ads, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and the Fyre Festival and influencers on Instagram. Some have deserted the platforms forever, and many have tightened their profile settings.The tech revolution has accelerated ahead without bothering to ask what morality thinks, generating social divisions along the way.

IMPLICATION: How do you use technology to connect with your team? Is the always-on, on-demand approach good their mental health and well-being and for productivity?

 

ISSUE: Big is not necessarily beautiful. The techlash against the FAANG five – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google – is symptomatic of a natural human tendency to work most productively in communities of up to 150. When agriculture first brought us together in villages, archaeology shows us that another would split off when the population reached 100-150. Roman legions were subdivided into units of 100 men –centuries, run by centurions. And the multinational manufacturing company Gore splits its divisions once they pass the hundred mark. The reason is simple. The human brain can only map successful social relationships with communities of about 100 people. The anti-globalisation movement, the techlash, and the gig economy are all manifestations of this innate human belief that big is not necessarily beautiful.

IMPLICATION: Has your organisation become too bloated to function effectively? How and when should you reorganise to re-energise?

 

ISSUE: Diversity and inclusion. Despite resistance from the old order, it’s clear that the diversity and inclusion drum is getting louder. Many younger workers have grown up in more diverse societies than previous generations and are ready to evaluate and accept colleagues’ contributions on the merit of the strength of their ideas rather than their gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. Bosses are coming around the D&I agenda because the evidence is growing that the more, different influences you’re exposed to, the more agile and innovative you are.[2]

IMPLICATION: Embrace diversity, include everyone, make your team as diverse as you can for the benefit of your team and your organisation. Move beyond your comfortable, established matrix.

 

ISSUE: Intelligent working. The world-renowned Wellcome Trust has moved to a four-day week without cutting salaries. The London office of ad agency Wieden & Kennedy actively incentivises its employees to ignore email when they’re not in the office and has banned meetings before 10am or after 4pm. The Xerox company has a 30-minute limit for meetings, and they’re often held standing up to prevent them going on too long. All of these organisations have seen increases in productivity.

IMPLICATION: Experiment with new and more human ways of working that establish a genuine life /work balance – and in that order.

 

Disruption is real, and the pace of change makes many – particularly leaders – feel uncomfortable. Jobs that exist today won’t exist tomorrow. And the seismic shifts in the workplace in the last 20 years are nothing compared with what’s expected to come in just the next ten. Leaders need to be alive to the challenges that threaten to undermine their best intentions and well-conceived plans. Otherwise, they might find themselves sleepwalking into a future they don’t know how to control. Those that lead their businesses into a successful future are those who can adapt with agility.

[1]Source: Richard Foster & Susan Kaplan (2003). Creative Destruction, https://amzn.to/2Uzzoqs

[2]Leonard Mlodinow (2018). Elastic:Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World, Penguin.

The human brain is a wonderful thing. The most powerful supercomputer on earth, and every one of us has the latest model sitting right between our ears. It’s what enables us to do uniquely human things. Things like planning for the future, inventing and innovating, and imagining the world from other people’s points of view. All critical skills for aspiring leaders, and all delivered thanks to generations of refinement to the structure and psychology of the human brain.

 

In terms of evolutionary history, modern life is but a blink of an eye. Our cognitive architecture evolved to cope with a world very different from our own. A world driven by survival and the need to pass on our genes. A world in which the most powerful supercomputer is faced by a barrage of information from all sorts of stimuli competing for limited attention. And in order to cope with this overstimulation – this information overload – the supercomputer has developed shortcuts.

 

These shortcuts or rules of thumb –what psychologists call heuristics – are what enable us to deal with all the information that assails our senses. They allow us make decisions under pressure that will lead us to approach or avoid situations and objects. Inhuman terms, we can think about these behaviours as pleasure-seeking or pain-avoiding. To survive, we need to know whether we should attack prey that we might want to eat, run away from predators that might have the same designs on us, or mate with one of our species to attempt to pass on our genes directly.

 

In the savannah, our ancestors were faced with many, literally life-or-death decisions every day, and evolutionary psychologists believe we developed these shortcuts to avoid endlessly processing the same complex situations in detail. That would be expensive,time-consuming, and potentially fatal. The shortcuts are low intensity, low energy, and run by the automatic, so-called System 1,  part of the brain. The trouble is, these shortcuts – which it can help to think of as natural biases – can also lead us to make reliable and predictable mistakes. Mistakes that today are played out at work.

 

Cognitive biases in the workplace

Leaders and aspiring leaders need to be aware that the two main functions or modes of thinking are

pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance. Leadership is an inside job, and to succeed, leaders need an awareness of their own fundamental drives and modes of thinking. Of the shortcuts we use to judge whether to approach or avoid someone or something. And of how – by the application of a little pause, reflection, and self-awareness – we can overcome these shortcuts and make better decisions.

 

Neuroscience has proved beyond doubt that the adult brain is not rigid, but rather plastic. We can unlearn unhelpful and unproductive behaviours and rewire ourselves for success. Age and experience don’t make us fixed and stuck in our ways. We just need the self-awareness and resolve to change, and our brains will follow.

 

So, let’s consider three of the brain’s most common shortcuts in the context of leadership and what we can do to overcome the bad decisions they can lead us to make.

 

1. Fight, flight, or freeze. With birds, lizards, fish, and mammals, we share an ancient self-preservation mechanism called the limbic system. This part of the brain is what helps us – quick as a flash, and without conscious reflection – assess a situation or other creatures and direct our energies in one of three ways. We can stand our ground and fight (we might beat off a rival and win food or a mate). We can run away and hope we don’t get caught, avoiding conflict or injury. Or we can stand stock still in the hope that we somehow become invisible. Remember David Attenborough’s baby iguanas and their snaky enemies on Planet EarthII? Classic flight vs fight behaviour.

 

We may have moved off the savannah and into the office and boardroom, but these behaviours are driven by the very same brain system in the office. I often see fight, flight, or freeze behaviour in organisations under pressure and stress, particularly at periods of organisational change or transition. Leaders closing their doors, not showing up to meetings, failing to reply to emails: these are all flight or avoidance behaviours. Managers raising their voices or colleagues losing their tempers with peers: these are fight behaviours. The inability to make decisions or paralysis by over-analysis: freeze.

 

Suggested action: at times of change, leaders should make themselves visible, not runaway, hide, or confront their teams. Communicate even when all you’re saying is, “There’s no news, but I promised to keep you updated.” Make yourself available and answer as honestly and candidly as you can, making colleagues feel valued and respected, even if and when the news is not good.

 

2. Selective attention. We pay attention to what we know. When we have children, everywhere there are babies. When we’ve bought a car, we notice only that make of car on the roads. If we’re suffering from hay fever,everyone is sneezing. Like makes like appear to be more common and a better representation of reality. This cognitive bias is also called the “availability heuristic”. If something is mentally available to you, you think it’s much more common than it is.

 

In part, this bias is a mechanism to protect ourselves from becoming overwhelmed. But it also has important implications for leaders, especially those dealing with people or driving innovation and new product development within an organisation. Selective attention keeps us in our comfort zone. It stops us looking to the edges for radically new inspiration. It means we only notice what’s relevant to our narrow world. But our world is not THE world. If we reflect and understand those flashes of inspiration when we’re suddenly become aware of things – of unexpected solutions to thorny problems – we realise how we can use novelty to our advantage. And avoid the trap of falling into the same old, same old.

 

Suggested action: metaphorically put yourself into someone else’s shoes – your boss’,your competitor’s, your customer’s, your manager’s. Notice what seems to be important now. How does the altered perspective change and unblock your thinking? Can you get closer to a compromise or resolution? When you’re leading an innovation project, take an excursion. Get out of the office. Stop trying to solve the problem. Take timeout. Concentrate on something else entirely. Breakout of the confines of the meeting room. Getting out and noticing things from new perspectives is a fantastic exercise that makes creativity flow.

 

3. Confirmation bias. When we’re looking to address an issue,too often we confirm to ourselves that the things we see or experience are exactly what we expected. In fact, what the brain does is seek out those elements to match up with our opinion of how to resolve a challenge – what are known as my-side arguments. They come to mind more easily, they make us feel comfortable, and they convince us that the path we’d imagined was the right one all along. The problem is, confirmation bias doesn’t admit others’ perspectives or points of view, and it makes us behave in altogether too predictable ways. For those we lead, this can be demotivating and even demoralising.

 

Suggested action: surprise yourself by seeking out the polar opposite of what you expect to look for. Where you expect to experience conflict, seek harmony.Where you expect to see incompetence, seek genius or – at the very least –competence. Whenever you can, be genuinely curious and open-minded, even (or perhaps particularly) when you’re already certain you know the right things todo.

 

Our brave new world

Cognitive biases and shortcuts can be incredibly helpful. We don’t live on the savannah as we did for the vast majority of our evolutionary development, and our brains find it challenging to adapt to the new realities of today’s corporate environment. In this new realm,cognitive shortcuts allow and enable us to get on with our jobs, with managing and leading and developing our organisations in new and innovative ways. They can certainly help us filter out the wall of noise from digital and social media.

 

By the way, if you think these biases sound familiar – you’ve seen them in others, but not yourself – you could well be suffering from another, lesser-known bias yourself: bias blind spot bias. Bias blind spot bias  – try saying that 3 times quickly in a row – is the bias that enables you to recognise the impact for biases in others’ judgment, but failure to recognise it in yourself.

If you can put bias blind spot bias aside, you’ll recognise that cognitive biases can lead us to make entirely predictable and not particularly helpful mistakes. Be sure as you’re leading your organisation, your team, and yourself that you make the time to reflect on why you’ve made the decisions you’ve made. And if you find – as so often – that you’ve been led astray by an otherwise helpful rule of thumb, stop. Think again and cast aside the power of the shortcut. You might just surprise yourself and your team and make a better decision.

In many years of working with leaders, I’ve often observed that even the most senior people see their working world in fragments and not as an interconnected whole. They compartmentalise the different constituent elements of their roles – their team members, their peers, their bosses, and the imperative to deliver results – but they don’t bring all of these elements together. By failing to see the forest from the trees, they make it less likely they will succeed to their potential. So, what I often help them do is to break free of this siloed way of thinking and working, to help them become truly Connected Leaders.

 

Successful, connected leadership requires leaders to take off the blinkers and join the dots. It demands that leaders are properly connected to their organisation’s purpose, vision, and values. Connected to their people – in their team, their department, their whole organisation.But also connected to external stakeholders, too, from customers and clients to shareholders and regulators. Connected to innovation and results. And connected to external trends and dynamics.

 

When I work with leaders to help them become better connected, there are four principal domains in which we work. Each one of these is – quite naturally – connected to the others. Four domains that may, at first glance, appear to be independent, but in fact influence one another profoundly. Push here and something happens over there. They are the component parts of a unified whole.

 

The first relates to the leader’s internal world, and their connectedness to their organisation’s vision, purpose, values, culture, and behaviours. Gaining mastery and getting connected to the internal world enables leaders to understand the shared assumptions that guide their organisation; to explore the links between the component part of its “why”, and how to appreciate how they connect for the benefit of the organisation.

 

Then comes self-drive, addressing how leaders are connected to what motivates them, considerations as diverse as authenticity, ethics, awareness,and beliefs. Connecting here enables leaders to understand their place as leaders, how to align leadership style with values, and explore the links between leading themselves and the impact they have on others. Successfully connecting to what makes up self-drive is all about using tools to grow capability.

Next up is the external world, an environment which has never been more complex and often apparently contradictory, where unattended or unanticipated global forces and trends can knock a leader off their feet. Being connected to regulation and compliance and all the myriad forces at play in the external world enables leaders to bring balance to the quadruple bottom line of purpose, people, planet, and profit.  It is the foundation of strategic thinking and strategic leadership, learning from others’ perspective and experience and identifying ways to anticipate and address risk.

 

And finally we have the domain of organisational drive, covering the dynamics inside the organisations leaders lead. This includes connectedness to performance, relationships, building teams, and innovation. By understanding what drives an organisation, leaders can identify both areas of strength and gaps for development. In so doing, they can pinpoint what needs to change to build the most connected organisation in terms of people, performance, and process.

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The interconnectedness of these domains can be further understood by analogy. In the 1960s, our understanding of physical structures was advanced by the development of the concept of tensegrity.Tensegrity is a principle which shows that the strength of a structure is built up from a set of interconnected components. Although not necessarily strong in and of themselves, when connected in the right way – through bars and struts,cables and tendons – they create a rigid and stable structure. Structures with tensegrity – a contraction of “tensional integrity” – will flex and move when pressed in any one place, but will nonetheless retain their integrity because of their interconnectedness.

 

As with structures, so with organisations. Leaders who are connected to the inner world and the outer world, to the strategic and the implementational are leaders with tensegrity.This sets them apart as leaders who know what impact applying pressure here will have over there. Or, as I call them, Connected Leaders. And not only do they have tensegrity, they also have integrity. Integrity and authenticity,permission to be themselves and bring their true selves to work. The more you are you – the more you are the real you – the more others will follow.

 

The benefits of being a Connected Leader clearly apply in business and in commerce, but they go much wider than that. They’re relevant for leaders in whichever area of society they operate – public or private sector, business, education, government, healthcare, charity, and the voluntary sector. Every kind of organisation needs leaders and leadership; every kind of organisation benefits from having a truly Connected Leader to shape and direct strategy. And far, far more than that, Connected Leaders can change the world.

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What do you need to become a more Connected Leader?

Businesses and organisations in every sector are under constant – indeed increasing – pressure to innovate. Innovation is the key to securing competitive advantage. To staying ahead of the pack. And in some cases simply to surviving.

 

The responsibility for innovation and for fostering a culture of innovation falls on leaders. Leaders of teams.Leaders of divisions. Leaders of multi-national corporations. The way leaders build innovation into their day-to-day ways of working and leading can inspire everyone in an organisation to adopt leaner, more innovative working practices.And it can lead those organisations to become disruptors.

 

We live in the age of disruption, where apparently left-field, unexpected solutions to problems we thought we had licked can creep up on big, established market leaders, to become noisy, irritating challengers. Then they become established. And before you know it, that pesky challenger has eaten the market leader’s lunch, risen to dominance, and oftentimes forced the old guard out of business. In our increasingly digital world, innovation is often driven by early or progressive use of technology. Investment in tech ahead of the curve can set innovative businesses up for success when infrastructure or the democratisation of technology catches up.

 

Once there was Kodak and everyone took photos on film. Now there are smartphones with smarter cameras and superior optics than most people ever owned, coupled with Instagram andFacebook.

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Once there was a Blockbuster in every shopping mall, on every high street, renting a limited number of clunky video cassettes. Now there’s Netflix and Amazon Prime, streaming whatever we want, on demand.

 

Once there were travel agents –several in every small town. Now there’s AirBnB and Booking.com.

 

To the outmanoeuvred, to the sluggish establishment, the struggle is knowing how to be different and how to change. It’s as if the innovators rewrote the rules of their sector and didn’t tell anyone. It’s like their upstart competitors really did uncover the secrets of alchemy or worked out how to speed up evolution.

 

There’s a common misconception that innovation, as a branch of creativity, is only for creative types. Innovation can be stifled by this misconception, by individuals – particularly leaders –fearing they’re going to fail to be innovative because they don’t conform to the stereotype. The truth is, everyone can contribute to the process of innovation within any kind of organisation. They just need to know where to look and how to access and channel their creative instincts.

 

Some organisations allocate special times – and even dedicated creative spaces – for innovation. They get together for creative sessions – rigidly scheduled once a month – and have no-idea-too-silly, blue sky, ideation sessions where dozens of ideas bubble to the surface. They’re captured on flip-charts and PostIts today, typed up on PowerPoint next week, by which time even the idea’s originator can’t quite remember why they were so excited about it. Too often, leaders throw out radical new ideas and stick within their comfort zone – with innovations they know how to make real and how to get approved. But innovations that fundamentally fail to challenge the status quo.

 

“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.” – Vilfredo Pareto – the originator of the 80/20 rule

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to this process per se – or at least the intent to innovate that lies behind it. But too often none of the ideas developed in this kind of environment are ever made real. They’re not anchored, they’re not followed through, and once the monthly creative session is over, everyone goes back to their day jobs. It’s as if the team and organisational leaders encouraging them are paying lip service to innovation.

 

What’s more, the blue-sky approach actively excludes introverts. Developing ideas in public, by group-think, isn’t how they function best. It’s not how their minds work. They often feel uncomfortable in ideation meetings because they need the time and space to reflect. So that’s approaching half your team unwilling and unable to contribute. What’s more, social psychology shows that this approach is a much less effective way of generating new ideas – the key to unlocking innovations – than smaller, more focused, less chaotic groups of three or four.

 

As often, having a framework – some structure – gives teams the freedom to innovate. It’s a paradox, but an incredibly powerful one, that constraints don’t constrain, they liberate. And the framework I’ve found to be most impactful for leaders looking to help their teams become more innovative is what I call look to the edges. By looking for inspiration outside the mainstream – to the fringes of a market or society – you can very often find inspiration and stimulus to help you unlock the imperative to innovate in the mainstream.

 

“Curiosity is essential for progress. Only when we look to worlds beyond our own can we really know if there’s room for improvement.” –Simon Sinek, author, Start With Why

 

Truly effective leaders know that leadership isn’t just about dealing with what’s in front of you. It’s about scanning the horizon for what’s to come. Like being a good driver or to win at chess, you need to look ahead and consider what might be. Those who are really good are often said to be able to see around corners. Looking straight ahead uses focused, foveal vision; looking to the edges brings peripheral vision into play.

 

Trends that are today considered weird or wacky or out there have a funny – and actually quite predictable – habit of going mainstream:

 

·      Health food shops in the 1970s were seen as the preserve of sandal-wearing hippies. Last year in England, Brighton’s own Infinity Foods won an Observer Food Monthly award as one of the country’s best independent retailers. Veganism was the province of the social outcast 20 years ago. Now it’s worth billions. Recently, the British frozen foods supermarket Iceland has introduced a dozen new vegan ranges. In Brooklyn, NY, sales of oat milk are now higher than sales of cow’s milk, and recently the district ran out of oat milk.

·      For generations since the 1950s, disposable nappies were the only way to care for infants. The return to washable nappies in the 1990s was treated with some contempt. Why go back to all the hard work & inconvenience?  And yet millennial parents are now embracing them almost as closely as their offspring. As is often the case with an idea that comes back into use a few generations down the line, the washable nappies experience of today bears little resemblance to the cloth nappies experience of yesteryear.

·      Three years ago, every juice box had a single-use plastic straw strapped to it, usually in a single-use plastic wrapper. Today, you’d be hard pushed to find plastic straws in many supermarkets and cafés. They’re more likely to be made of paper or even pasta.

·      The explosion of the coffee shops across the world, from a late 20th century buzz in Washington State, is extraordinary. Perhaps even more extraordinary is the move by consumers to bring their own, reusable cups – nicely incentivised by money off per coffee – to their neighbourhood coffee shop.

·      Music (particularly record, then CD, and also DVD) collections used to confer status on their owners. For Generation Z (aka Centennials or the iGeneration), owning physical copies of media is anathema. Why would you ever own a CD, when you can stream it from Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music? Why would you own a DVD of your favourite film when you can stream it from Netflix? Vinyl may be making a strong, sound-quality-driven comeback, but even that is an innovation from the edge, from DJ culture.

 

Looking to the edge means having the curiosity to look to the margins of society. Of not being afraid of offbeat ideas, and embracing them as part of your business or organisational scenario planning. Fundamentally, looking to the edge is about being curious and encouraging a culture of curiosity. Of broadening your worldview to take in apparently irrelevant, not immediately obvious sources of stimulus, joining them together with what you already know, and creating something new.

 

So, as you look around you, on your way in or out of work or travelling between meetings, be sure you’re alert to all the creativity and innovation you could capture and harness that’s happening at the edges. Be sure to look there and learn to take inspiration from the most unexpected of places.

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Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

Half of all university graduates are women, who go on to take up to 60% of junior management positions. But this promising start in education and early-career jobs doesn’t last long. Women are still seriously under-represented in senior positions, despite the numerous studies showing that gender-balanced boards produce better financial results than male-dominated boards.

The facts on gender imbalance in leadership at work make for stark reading:

·      Globally, women hold less than a quarter of all senior roles. This has crept up by 1% in the past year, and just 6% since 2004

·      In small and medium enterprises, 21% are led by women[1]

·      Just seven FTSE 100 companies have a female CEO, and there’s just one in the top 50 – Emma Walmsley of GlaxoSmithKline

·      In fact, there are more men called David (9) who are FTSE 100 CEOs than women

·      In Ireland, just 14% of CEOs and COOs are women

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The picture is better than it was, but it’s not changing fast – or fast enough. In some sectors of the economy there’s stagnation, and in others the trend is going backwards. The World Economic Forum recently predicted[2] that it will take until the year 2234 for women to achieve genuine equality of opportunity and pay parity in the workplace. Just 216 years to go, then.

So what’s going on here? Gender equality is everybody’s business – not just women’s, but men’s too. It needs addressing properly for the benefit of the workplace, of culture, and of broader society. And the current and projected future gender equality gap in the boardroom has serious consequences for the pipeline of future women leaders.

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There are a number of really strong, complex, and interconnected reasons why women don’t get to or succeed in senior positions. Let’s consider three.

1. Unconscious bias. Those assessing and selecting candidates for senior and leadership positions unconsciously favour men over women. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra was shocked to find, in 1970, that just 5% of its musicians were women. When they introduced blind auditions – when those selecting performers choose on ability alone, without seeing the performer – the percentage of women doubled to 10% in the 1980 and 25% by the turn of the millennium[3]. With blind auditions unconscious bias was eliminated. By no means parity, but a five-fold increase in women.

Unconscious bias is hard to root out, and I can’t see too many organisations introducing blind interviews. But as we all suffer from it – women as well as men – it’s encouraging to see more and more organisations introducing unconscious bias training. But a tick-box training programme is not enough. Just understanding unconscious bias is not enough. Organisations need a multi-dimensional approach, which includes specific actions for recruitment shortlists and culture change. Today’s leadership needs help understanding that addressing unconscious bias is not political correctness but a highly-desirable, commercially-driven decision.

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2. Many women’s confidence can be all-too-easily undermined when they return to work after having children. Despite the fact that children are the next generation of employees and leaders – and it was ever thus – society doesn’t value raising children sufficiently. It doesn’t believe that it’s possible to combine leading a board with leading a family, even though the latter can be much more challenging. Business behaves as if women can’t do what they did BC; Before Children. Companies and governments pay lip-service to equality of parental responsibility, but the workplace culture means that only a tiny proportion of new fathers take even the minimum time off required by legislation, let alone full, shared parental leave.

Too many women are still affected – afflicted – by “return to work syndrome”. Many experience a drop in confidence having been away from work for a period of time. Their bosses – their institutions – assume that they lack ambition, are inflexible, and low in self-confidence. This is an all-too frequent narrative in senior circles. It’s no surprise that data from PwC and the 30% Club shows two-thirds of women professionals end up working beneath their potential, when they return to work.

And yet, all the evidence shows that those organisations that invest in supporting women after their return to work reap dividends in multiple ways. Commercially, in terms of productivity, of course. But also in terms of loyalty in return for recognition of their continued value to their organisations. It’s hard commercial metrics such as these that have convinced Goldman Sachs, for instance, to create its programme of Returnships as a bridge to help its women leaders back to work.

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3. The culture of organisations and the workplace is – and has been from the Industrial Revolution on – inherently male. Male-dominated. Structured around men and men’s priorities. This is never more acutely obvious than when mothers look to return to work. Intelligent working, compressed hours, flexible working – all these strategies pay dividends for companies that introduce them. But most don’t or won’t because they mistakenly believe that to do so is a sign of weakness and “the thin end of the wedge”. It’s as if they feel they’re doing women a favour or giving them special treatment. This is institutionalised thinking, whether from men or women.

The subtext of women looking for flexible working to balance work and family life is that they’re being difficult. The reality is, those who do choose to blend both worlds bring benefits to both, and there really doesn’t need to be a competition or hierarchy of importance of one over the other.

An analysis by PwC identified six key factors blocking the pipeline of women in leadership roles, six factors that mean businesses don’t promote skilled senior women leaders, don’t retain high-performing mid-level women, and don’t identify and address occupation-related gender segregation. The PwC report – Mending the Gender Gap – is focused on the financial services sector, but its findings are broadly applicable to other sectors. The six factors are:

·      Unintentional discrimination

·      Lack of clarity about the factors used to select future leaders

·      Fewer opportunities for advancement for women

·      Millennials’ high turnover rate

·      Women are less likely than men to stretch out of their comfort zones

·      Women’s networks lack broad support from men

None of this helps. In fact, the culture of the workplace – the fundamental culture of work – actually creates the very opposite of intelligent working. It makes it dumber and sub-optimal. Someone should show the impact of culture on the bottom line to the chief financial officer.

As a leadership development coach, I find myself working with women facing these challenges every day. I haven’t set out to specialise in helping women return to work or to navigate their careers into senior leadership roles. It’s just that this is an ever-present issue, with all its complex causes. Women – and men – need help in addressing it. And help introducing and institutionalising intelligent working.

If you’re interested in finding out more, take a look at our women in leadership programme called Step Back, Stand Out. Our aim is to work with senior women leaders to address the low percentage of women in leadership positions and to change the leadership pipeline. We’ll look at the specific challenges women face in the workplace and get our delegates to understand their leadership impact. We’ll show them how to get to and thrive in the C-suite – if they want to; how to be ambitious for both ourselves and our organisations. How to make the world of work one that embraces the spirit and potential of intelligent working.

[1] https://bit.ly/2lzLuAh

[2] https://bit.ly/2h5aX5W

[3] https://bit.ly/2aTrfGM

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Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash

When a goal is achieved in your team or organisation, what happens next?

 

It’s natural to want to recognise and celebrate achievements. Acknowledging a job well done is a vital part of the process of development.

 

But there’s a risk: complacency.

 

If we focus too much on what’s done, we often forget about what’s still to do. We look back, rather than forward to the next job, and the next goal.

 

 

From celebration to complacency

 

Picture the scene. You’re watching a football match, and, after several failed runs and a couple of saved shots, one team scores a goal. They’ve been plugging away, working for that goal for most of the game. They’re thrilled to see their work has paid off, and they celebrate with gusto.

 

The opposing team is back in position straight away, ready for the whistle and the restart, poised. The scoring team are still composing themselves when the whistle blows. They’re in position, but they’re not ready to play. The game kicks off, but their goal has robbed them of their hunger. They don’t feel they need to work hard. Inevitably, their opponents pounce on the opportunity and soon draw level.

 

If you’ve ever watched any team sport, from children’s to professional level, you’ll have seen this happen. When we work hard for something, we want to take time to celebrate it. But failing to refocus after that celebration quickly leads to complacency.

 

This isn’t something that happens only on the sports field. It happens in organisations. A team works hard to achieve a goal, only to falter soon after.

 

Complacency creeps in not because we’re lazy, but because we fail to notice the pace of change. It starts when we’re in a place comfort and pleasure. In that place, it’s easy to feel safe, and when we feel safe, we lose our ability to deal with change. We stop adapting and growing.

 

Complacency and mindset

 

Carol Dweck identified two mindsets: the fixed and growth mindsets. People with a growth mindset are successful, but they don’t just stop after one success. They know how to keep going and adapt what they do to continue being successful.

 

Speaking of the impact of praise on children, she says:

 

“If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”

 

In a business context, the equivalent might be a team working towards and achieving a goal, and then seeing that goal as the end point. Rather than thinking ‘what’s the next challenge?’, they sit back.

 

Remember Blackberry? An innovative, market-leading product that quickly became a must-have. But they failed to see the challenge coming up behind them from Apple and Android. Rather than continuing to innovate, they fell behind, blindsided.

 

 

How can we enjoy success and then keep on growing?

 

It’s not complacent to want to enjoy success. But success should never be seen as the end point or final goal. Success should be a springboard to more success.

 

Let’s take three possible scenarios.

 

Scenario 1:  You have a market leading product, just like Blackberry. You’re so caught up in your success with that product that you forget that others will inevitably be biting your heels. By the time you realise the strength of their challenge, they’ve overtaken you.

 

What could you do differently? Kept researching, developing and innovating, mindful of the fact that technology and markets can and will change.

 

 

Scenario 2: You’ve been delivering a successful, valuable service for some time. It’s difficult for you and your team to imagine being anything other than good at what you do. So far, so great. But now you’re coasting. You’re still doing what you do well, but you’ve stopped looking for opportunities to improve, because you don’t think you need to. You stagnate, and your service becomes poorer without you realising what’s happened.

 

What could you do differently? Kept challenging your business model, and made an active choice not to make assumptions about the quality of your service.

 

 

Scenario 3: You’ve achieved an important goal as an individual, and you’ve received considerable praise for it. Buoyed by this praise, you start to ignore useful feedback. As a result, you start to make mistakes that you never would have made before.

 

What could you do differently? Remember that a single achievement is just that. It doesn’t mean that you’re immune to making mistakes, or that you have nothing left to learn.

 

 

There are numerous other possible similar scenarios. For all of them, your ability to deal with them depends on whether you can keep on innovating, growing and challenging yourself and others.

 

Have you experienced the complacency trap? We’d love to hear about what you did and saw.

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Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash

If I were to ask you how you are, what would you say?

 

I suspect there is a strong possibility your answer would include the word ‘busy’. Most of us feel busy and we see being busy as a positive thing. If you’re busy, that must mean you’re productive, useful and high-achieving. If you’re not busy, what are you doing with your time?

 

It’s not surprising that we feel busy, because our world feels busy. If your day involves commuting on a packed train, to spend a day in an office full of people, with emails constantly arriving and meetings filling your diary, it’s difficult to feel anything other than busy.

 

But is being busy desirable, or do we just perceive it as such? We often assume that a busy person is a capable person, someone who is able to focus on tasks easily and get things done. People say: if you want something done, ask a busy person.

 

Busy people should, we think, be focussed people. But could it actually be the opposite: that people who feel constantly busy are actually distracted and unable to focus?

 

The value of a strategic no

 

Some people genuinely are busy. They are constantly rushing between tasks, always with something inescapable to do.

 

Others feel that they are always busy, and say they are, but their busyness is a choice. They are too busy for some things, but not for others. Most people have some choice or control over how busy they are. Unless you have no down time at all, you are able to make a choice about what you want to be busy with.

 

To exercise choice over your own busyness, you need to be able to say a strategic no.

 

This means that when you are asked if you can do something, you feel able to say no, even if you could make the time to do it. You can say no because you want to keep time free for other things, rather than because you really cannot find the time.

 

You don’t have to be at full capacity before it’s OK to say no. Indeed, it’s desirable to say a strategic no before you reach capacity, because spare capacity is the space where creativity and growth happen.

 

But saying no is difficult, because we are constantly distracted. Our world is constantly distracting. There is so much for us to potentially do that prioritising is hard. It can even seem impossible. So how do you do it?

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It’s impossible to prioritise or focus, if you don’t know what to focus on. If you don’t know what your destination is, you cannot choose a route.

 

That’s why having a clear vision is so important. A vision is a statement of your ideas, hopes and dreams. If you can write down and determine these, you can work out how to achieve them. You’ll be prioritising.

 

Create daily sanctuary

 

If you’re constantly busy, if you never stop, you cannot look beyond today. You have no room to plan for the future. You’ll certainly struggle to have or define your vision, or to find your path towards it. Busyness then becomes a cycle, a treadmill that it’s very difficult to leave. Having no time to spend on contemplation means you never contemplate just how busy you are.

 

Take time. Give mind the refuge from busyness it needs. When you do this, great things happen, because they have the space to happen. In your refuge, your sanctuary, you’ll have the chance to recharge. Your mind, freed of busyness, will wander towards creativity, ideas and solutions.

 

Many choose to find sanctuary in contemplation, meditation or exercise. Your sanctuary may be one of these things, or something else entirely. Find the space that you want occupy.

                                                                                     

Give yourself boundaries

 

Perhaps you feel that while you’d like to say no to things, to prioritise and take time out, you know you’ll find it difficult to do. But it is your responsibility to decide how you would like to be treated. We teach people how to treat us, by being clear about where our boundaries are and modelling the behaviour we’d like others to show in their interactions with us. If you want to be listened to, listen to others. If they fail to listen, tell them what you need.

 

The next time someone asks you how you are, what will you say? Spend some time working on your vision and on giving yourself the sanctuary and boundaries you need to do it. Let us know what happens to your life, your work, and your ability to focus.

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Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

After the sparkle and busyness of the Christmas holidays, early January is a time of awkward transition for many of us. Commuters travel to work past brightly-lit Christmas trees. Indulgences are still being felt, and with them come resolutions. Promises of change and something better. The celebrations are ending, replaced with determination.

 

Dwelling in possibility

 

In the words of Mary Chapin Carpenter, “I dwell in possibility on New Year’s Day”. At the beginning of the year, we feel everything is open to us. The year stretches ahead of us, full of hope and opportunity.

 

There is of course no reason we can’t create just as much opportunity in June as we can in January. We tend not to because we naturally live our lives by rhythms and patterns. The closing of one year and the beginning of another gives us pause for thought, as does the change in routine we tend to have for a week or two.

 

If we’re unhappy with something – and most years will bring pain as well as pleasure – then the change in the year seems the perfect opportunity to move on.

 

What do we do with possibility?

 

The traditional way to meet this endless possibility with resolutions. But as anyone who’s ever made them knows, the chances are, they’ll be broken by February, if not before. Our resolutions are all about how to make ourselves, our lives and our businesses, better.

 

We all want to be happier, healthier and more productive. We want to do less ‘bad’ stuff and more ‘good’ stuff. We begin the year full of resolve to be ‘better’. Walk into a gym in the first week of January and you’ll see people who won’t be there in the first week of February. Many people keep paying for the gym, but quickly stop going.

 

This happens because it’s hard for us to accept that we don’t really want to keep our resolution. It’s not enough on its own to make us change our behaviour. For the gym-goers, this means losing out twice: paying for a service that’s never used, and not being open to finding another form of exercise that will be enjoyed and stuck to.

 

When we promise ourselves that we’ll be better, do more and achieve more, we’re telling ourselves that we should not falter at all. There’s a feeling that if we can’t make it in January, we can’t make it at all. Then, on reaching February having broken our resolutions, the temptation is simply to wait another 11 months before making resolutions again.

 

In this way, resolutions narrow the possibilities we have on New Year’s Day. They are goals with shallow foundations. We make them because we feel we need to do something to iron out our perceived faults and improve ourselves. Instead of doing this, we could work on a vision for our lives that allows us to accept ourselves.

 

Make your goals part of your vision

 

Rather than setting goals for your year ahead in isolation, think about what your vision should be. Setting the vision provides clarity and allows you to prioritise your goals.

 

What changes will you make that will provide you and your family, friends and colleagues with genuine, heartfelt, positive change?

 

Don’t ask what your resolutions should be. Ask yourself what you can do to generate ideas, be more creative and innovate. Ask yourself how you can encourage others to do the same.

 

Resolutions don’t work because they take no account of the reality that things change constantly and we need to respond to change. This is something we know, but somehow, we choose to forget in January. The pressure that creates can be destructive, forcing us into rigidity. Resolutions say, you’re either a new you, or you’re a failure.

 

The ability to create a successful vision is a vital leadership tool. It gives you a clear view of your team or organisation at a point in the future, and with that view, a direction. It gives you the knowledge you need to get to where you want to be.

 

The role of goals

 

There will always be goals we want to achieve. Indeed, they’re usually a vital part of measuring achievement and performance. But for those goals to mean anything, they need to be tied to a vision of success. Use the opportunity January presents to set goals thoughtfully within the context of a vision. Allow yourself to do your best, even if your best isn’t always what you thought it would be.

 

At work, embrace the possibilities that exist for your organisation. Involve everyone in developing a vision for your team and beyond. Enjoy meaningful thinking, beyond the limits set by narrow goals. And don’t stop just because it’s February.

 

 

What is your experience of setting goals in January? How do your goals contribute to the development of your vision? Let’s have a conversation.

 

Photo credit: Photo by Simon Matzinger on Unsplash