Edge Yule 2017

INSPIRING GREAT LEADERSHIP

YULE 2017

The end of the boss IS AUTONOMY THE WAY OF THE FUTURE? Plus Courageous leadership The eight pillars of innovation Bringing your emotions to work

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...WE GET LEADERS READY FOR WHAT’S NEXT

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Contents YULE 2017

Update 6

All the latest developments in leadership and management

Debate 11

Mailbox

12

Guest columnist Howard Behar, formerly of Starbucks, argues the case for putting people above profit

13

Our regular LBGT+ columnist, Christopher Hallas, explains why we still need the Pride festivals

28

Insider INSIGHT FROM THE INSTITUTE OF LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

15

Bye-bye boss Chief executive Phil James on the future role of leaders

16

News Meet your elected board; summer in the office; partnership with APS; Drucker Forum Special Report

19

22

Edge meets Femi Tanimola, managing director of Charis Industrial Services

Spotlight THE END OF THE BOSS?

28

Work, but not as we know it Traditional hierarchies are under threat from flatter structures

32

A framework for leadership Kate Cooper, head of policy and standards, puts the Institute’s five dimensions into context

Corporate liberation What happens when employees are left to make their own decisions?

20

Power to the people The link between autonomy and productivity

A day in the life of Iftikhar Khan; events update

21

In the Hot Seat Bryan Rodgers, superintendent of the Lothians and Scottish Borders Division of Police Scotland, talks about his biggest leadership and management challenges

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The Edge Interview

34

36

Case study Suma

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22 Making it Happen MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE

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49

Advice for keeping your brain young and agile

50

Bringing your whole self to work

54

Vision SETTING THE LEADERSHIP AGENDA

39

Exceptional leaders Where are they when you need them?

40

How to be a courageous leader

42

The power of self-reflection

44

Managing employees’ reactions to change

56

The role of contract leadership in procurement

Beyond Borders INTERNATIONAL INSIGHT AND BEST PRACTICE

Secrets of a successful launch

60

77 How to say no

France: Suivez le guide

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46

Future of Work

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75 Coaching column Jeff Matthews 76 Management Dilemma Is homophobic banter just a bit of harmless fun?

Motivating millennials in Sub-Saharan Africa

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MANAGING MENTAL, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL WELLBEING AND DEVELOPMENT

59

The biology of trust What saliva reveals about the effectiveness of a team The multi-dimensional leader discussed Coverage of the Institute of Leadership & Management’s summer conference

Live & Learn

STRATEGIES FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS

67

A virus of irrational thinking

68

The eight pillars of innovation

78 Personal branding 81 Inspiration Directory Your go-to development resource 82 Book Club 84 Leadership Legend Charles Hampden-Turner explores how pay for performance impacts on creativity

70

Filling the digital skills gap

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Contributors

HOWARD BEHAR

RENÉ CARAYOL

ELIZABETH FILIPPOULI

Howard Behar is a former president of Starbucks Coffee International. He helped the company to grow from 28 stores to over 15,000 stores spanning five continents. Today he is an author, speaker and mentor, and has written two books on leadership entitled It’s Not About the Coffee and The Magic Cup. He is a longtime advocate of the servant leadership model.

René Carayol is one of the world’s leading executive coaches, working with some of the Fortune 500’s top CEOs and their executive teams. He is also visiting professor at Cass Business School in London and lectures on its MSc in Management. In 2017, he published his latest book, SPIKE, which explores how people can mobilise their hidden energies and strengths.

Elizabeth Filippouli is the founder and CEO of the Global Thinkers Forum, a think tank that connects international thought leaders and promotes values-based leadership, women’s empowerment and youth development. Earlier in her career she worked as a journalist for Greek television, later moving to international media organisations Al Jazeera and CNN.

ISAAC GETZ

MARIA KATSAROU

CHRISTINE NASCHBERGER

Isaac Getz is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School. He has studied more than 300 companies in 30 countries, and published research on topics such as innovation, leadership, corporate transformation and employee engagement.

He is co-author of Freedom, Inc.: How Corporate Liberation Unleashes Employee Potential and Business Performance.

Dr Maria Katsarou is managing director of the Leadership Psychology Institute. Her doctorate is in leadership psychology, and she has 20 years’ experience in partnering with senior teams across many business sectors. She co-authored Under Pressure: Understanding and Managing the Pressure and Stress of Work and is now working on her next book about leadership.

Christine Naschberger is a professor in human resource management at Audencia Business School. Her research focus includes women and careers, disability and equality in the workplace, worklife balance, and social networks and their impact. She has written numerous academic articles and co-authored many chapters of books on those issues.

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Editor’s Letter

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Why we still need leaders Human nature prevails By

B

osses, who’d have one, eh? Not, apparently, the 4.8 million self-employed people in the UK, 15% of the country’s workforce. Having been both employed and self-employed, I would say the best thing about working for myself is not having a boss. There is something nice about not answering to anyone else, knowing that the fruits of your labour are all your own, and not having to argue your case at a performance appraisal. Whether clients come back to you is the most honest appraisal there is.

Yet, if you are employed, it is your relationship with the boss that will largely define your experience of work. A good boss will support you, develop you and help you to grow in confidence and learn new skills. They will appreciate the fact that you are a whole person who has interests and commitments outside of the workplace. A bad boss will simply see you as an economic unit who exists to serve them. By the time you are finally shot of this toxic individual, the chances are that you will be bearing deep psychological scars.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that there are still too many bad bosses around. In 2015, a Gallup poll found that half of the US adults surveyed had left their job specifically to get away from their manager.

So where does this leave leaders, who, by definition, are bosses themselves?

Will the rise of the flatter organisational structure and the growth of the gig economy make them redundant? Will they even be

Sally Percy superseded by robots? The truth, of course, is that humans, because of our psychological make-up, will always need leaders in some way. Both leadership and followership have been in our nature since the dawn of time; they underpinned our survival. Often, we want someone else to take on the responsibilities that we ourselves cannot, or do not want to, face: organising the country, for example, making the laws, co-ordinating defences in case we are attacked. It is very difficult to imagine how the armed forces might operate without leadership, for example.

THE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP IS EVOLVING ALL THE TIME What is clear, however, is that the nature of leadership is evolving all the time. In the developed world, at least, most of us today do not face the same challenges that we had in the Cenozoic Era – hunger, disease, the fear of being eaten by wild animals. Our challenges have become more sophisticated and, as a result, we expect our leaders to be more sophisticated, too. Leadership today is less about wielding brute force and more about the ability to solve complex problems. Nevertheless, the underlying principle remains the same – to bring order, purpose, stability and prosperity to all. That applies in just about any context you can think of. Leaders who fail in this respect, or who abuse their power, tend to be swiftly removed – and rightly so. sally.percy@lidpublishing.com

Edge is brought to you by: LID Publishing Editor Sally Percy sally.percy@lidpublishing.com Art Director Kate Harkus Assistant Editor Kirsten Levermore Chief Subeditor Luisa Cheshire Digital Reporter Matt Packer Account Director Niki Mullin Editorial Director Ben Walker Publisher Martin Liu Institute of Leadership & Management Pacific House, Relay Point, Tamworth, B77 5PA. Chief Executive Phil James Head of Research, Policy & Standards Kate Cooper Head of Membership Janet Payne For advertising sales, please contact Niki Mullin on niki.mullin@ lidpublishing.com Publishing Published in the United Kingdom by LID Publishing, 204 The Record Hall, Baldwins Gardens, London EC1N 7RJ Disclaimer Copyright 2017 The Institute of Leadership & Management and LID Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission of the publisher. While we take care to ensure that editorial is accurate, independent, objective and relevant for the readers, Edge accepts no liability for reader dissatisfaction rising from the content of this publication. The opinions expressed or advice given are the views of individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Edge, The Institute of Leadership & Management or LID Publishing Ltd. Edge takes every effort to credit photographers but we cannot guarantee every published use of an image will have the contributor’s name. If you believe we have omitted a credit for your image, please email the editor Printed by Asendia www.asendia.co.uk

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Update

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Minority ethnic leaders expose prejudice

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ver four out of five (82%) of ethnic diversity leaders believe there is institutional prejudice against minorities in the UK, a new study says.

Changing the Face of Tomorrow’s Leaders, was based on research conducted by executive search firm Green Park, together with its diversity recruitment social enterprise, DRIVE. It found that 60% of minority ethnic leaders had personally experienced or witnessed racial discrimination at work; and that 80% believe that ethnic minorities are subjected to prejudice in the UK workforce.

Ethic minority representation at leadership level has become a more prominent issue following the 2016 Parker Review, which called for all FTSE 100 companies to appoint at least one director from a minority background by 2021.

Nevertheless, 78% of those surveyed by Green Park said that their organisation had no ethnic minority leadership targets, while 95% believed

78% said their organisation had no ethnic minority leadership targets

95% believed that both internal and external recruiters should be making more effort with candidate diversity

that both internal and external recruiters should be making more effort with candidate diversity.

The report blamed the low level of minority representation on boards and within the senior talent pipeline on a lack of accountability around diversity recruitment initiatives and underdeveloped strategies to increase ethnic minority representation.

These findings come soon after separate research by the firm, The Green Park Leadership 10,000, based on information for the first quarter of 2017, highlighted that almost six out of ten FTSE 100 main boards have no ethnic minority presence.

Furthermore, just three chairs, four CEOs and two CFOs come from a non-white background.

On a more positive note, ethnic diversity within the FTSE 100 leadership pipeline has nearly doubled year-on-year, with 10.7% of the most senior leaders beneath board level being non-white in 2016, up from 5.7% in 2015.

Interestingly, the Leadership 10,000 also found that women have to be three times more educated than men to sit on a FTSE 100 board.

Britain’s best bosses work in financial services In what may come as a surprise to many Edge readers, Britain’s best bosses apparently work within the much-maligned financial services industry.

A study of over 1,000 employers by reward scheme operator One4All Rewards found that 62% of workers in the financial services sector described their boss as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.

The top behaviours demonstrated by financial services bosses, according to their line reports, are communication skills (71%), regularly thanking staff for their efforts (60%), and showing consideration for workers’ work/life balance (53%).

Commenting on the findings, Alan Smith, managing director at One4all Rewards, said: “Bosses play an essential role in driving our economy forward, but even the most informed and experienced boss would struggle to maintain a successful, growing company without their work being underpinned by happy and hardworking staff who feel motivated and incentivised to perform for the business.” He added: “Effective and expressive communication is the most crucial distinction

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workers measure their bosses by. Everyone wants their efforts to be recognised and valued, and to clearly understand what it is their manager expects of them.

“Communication is absolutely vital for maintaining positive morale in the workforce.”

Do bosses have a future? Find out in Spotlight, starting on page 27

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Millennials and generational disconnect Leaders who want to get the most out of their millennial workers – those born between 1980 and 2000 – should focus on coaching them, rather than managing them.

This is a key finding of Workforce 2020: Managing Millennials, a report published by the Institute of Leadership & Management in August.

The new research made interesting reading, resulting in the Institute’s head of research, policy and standards, Kate Cooper, giving comment to a range of business publications following the launch. These publications included Fresh Business Thinking, HR Director and The C-Suite.

According to Workforce 2020, managers should try to manage millennials’ career expectations and give them greater autonomy in the workplace.

This is because more than half (56%) of millennials want their manager to be a coach or mentor, compared with just 8% who want a manager who directs them.

Unfortunately, however, there is a generational disconnect in many

THE MILLENNIAL DISCONNECT* What managers think millennials want from management…

workplaces due to managers preferring to stick with traditional, inflexible, top-down leadership styles. Not only does this prevent millennials from achieving their true potential, it also contributes to attrition.

The research found that 57% of millennial workers are expecting to move job within two years, with a further 40% planning to leave within a year.

The study shows that a missed opportunity exists since engaged millennial employees can make a big difference to their organisations. Some 80% of millennial workers said that they were motivated to go the extra mile at work, with 60% revealing that challenging and interesting work is their top workplace priority.

Commenting on the findings, Cooper said: “By 2020 more than half of the UK workforce will be drawn from the millennial generation, a figure set to rise to 75% by 2025. While workplaces around the country are changing, our report suggests that a degree of disconnect still exists in several key areas.”

50%

49%

Regular advice /feedback

Clear objectives

…and what they actually want

43%

36%

To be respected and valued

Support in advancing their careers

35%

34%

To be trusted to do their jobs

Clear communication

*Source: The Institute of Leadership & Management

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The golden age for motivation is 51 The UK’s most motivated workers are more likely to be 50-somethings than 20-somethings, with 51 being the golden age for motivation and 20 being the peak age for demotivation.

According to The Motivation at Work report, by leadership development specialist Full Potential Group, 51-year-olds are enthusiastic workers, who are driven by flexible working options that stretch

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and challenge them, as well as opportunities to learn and develop their, or their team’s, expertise.

On the other hand, 20-year-olds are demotivated by a range of factors, including a lack of work/life balance, two much stress, workplace bureaucracy, and conflict and tension.

Researchers found that for all age groups the biggest motivators at work are flexible working options (67%),

work that stretches and challenges (46%), and the freedom to make your own decisions (44%). This last factor rose to 68% for working mums.

Carole Gaskell, managing director of the Full Potential Group, said: “Many bosses and leaders are getting it wrong by trying to motivate their young workforce in the same way that they motivate themselves. Times have changed and now the younger generation is less motivated by money or material awards, and more by autonomy and a work/life balance.”

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International Update

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Workers plan to upskill to stay employable Almost three quarters (74%) of people are ready to learn a new skill or completely retrain to keep themselves employable, according to new research by professional services firm PwC. Furthermore, they see it as their personal responsibility, not the responsibility of their employer.

Some 10,000 people across China, Germany, India, the UK and the US were surveyed for the report, Workforce of the future: the competing forces shaping 2030. The majority of respondents believe technology will improve their job prospects (65%), although workers in the US (73%) and India (88%) are more confident than those in the UK (40%) and Germany (48%). Overall, nearly three quarters believe technology will never replace the human mind (73%), and the majority (86%) say human skills will always be in demand.

While respondents to the survey were positive about the impact of

technology, with 37% excited about the future world of work and seeing a world full of possibilities, there is still concern that automation is putting some jobs at risk. Overall, 37% of respondents believe automation is putting their job at risk, up from 33% in 2014. And over half (56%) think governments should take necesary action to protect jobs from automation.

Commenting on the findings, Carol Stubbings, partner and joint global leader for People and Organisation at PwC, said: “The reality of life-long learning is biting among today’s workforce – no matter what age you are.

“The report found that 60% of respondents believe few people will have stable, long-term employment in the future. People are shifting from a qualification that would last a lifetime to thinking about new skills every few years.”

Institute launches international initiatives The Institute of Leadership & Management is working to extend its international presence through two new initiatives.

It is seeking out international partners that wish to collaborate in its research on ethical leadership. This work builds on an online corporate social responsibility survey, recently conducted by the Institute, which attracted nearly 1,000 responses from people across the UK, working in a diverse range of occupations.

This new research will examine how leaders ‘walk the talk’, empower their staff, model desirable behaviours, use constructive challenge in decision-making and improve standards of ethical behaviour.

The Institute is also actively recruiting speakers from overseas to join its highly popular webinar series. The webinars are an excellent source of information on best practice and expert opinion from around the world. Further details on the recruitment of partners for the research, and speakers for the webinar

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series, are available from Paul Coyle, the project consultant: paul.coyle@institutelm.com

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A leader decoded Angela Merkel Who is she? In a nutshell, she is the world’s most powerful woman. Merkel has been Germany’s chancellor since 2005 and is the figurehead of liberal European politics. She was born in West Germany, but moved to East Germany as a child.

After a career as a research scientist – she has a doctorate in chemistry – she moved into politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Leadership style: Given her starring role on the global stage, it is rather ironic that her former teacher described Merkel as “almost invisible” in an interview with Time magazine in 2015. Yet even today her personal brand is characterised by an almost complete absence of showiness. Blunt, pragmatic and steady, Merkel won’t curry favour if it means compromising her core liberal values.

Greatest triumph: Above all, Merkel will probably always be remembered for her humane response to the refugee crisis in 2015. In total, Germany took in more than one million refugees – to the dismay

of many. Merkel’s response to the criticism she faced was typically phlegmatic: “If we now have to start apologising for showing a friendly face in response to emergency situations, then that’s not my country,” she said. “We will cope.”

Leadership philosophy in a nutshell: “You could certainly say that I’ve never underestimated myself; there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious.”

WHICH SKILLS WILL BUSINESSES NEED TO ENHANCE THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?*

36%

Adaptability to change

In brief

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Managers fall short with mental illness Leaders and managers are failing to give sufficient support to direct reports who suffer from mental health issues, a new report by the Institute of Leadership & Management suggests. Mind Culture, published in September, found that more than half (51%) of survey respondents who had confided in their line manager about a mental health issue did not receive any extra support as a result. Even worse, 8% of respondents faced negative consequences, including

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22%

being forced out, demoted or subjected to disciplinary action The most common support offered by managers was time off work, yet respondents indicated that support with work would have been more helpful.

Discrimination is a problem for transsexuals Transsexuals can become isolated at work due to employers having a lack of awareness about the challenges they face, according to Acas. The arbitration service commissioned a study that found many employers are not up to speed with the law on gender reassignment discrimination, which protects some transsexual

Creative skills

18%

IT and technical skills

*Source: Alexander Mann Solutions, based on a survey of over 2,000 senior HR professionals

employees from unfair treatment at work. In fact, it is often left to the victims of transphobia themselves to inform their managers about the details of the Equalities Act 2010.

Acas head of equality Julie Dennis said: “Trans people are better supported in UK workplaces now compared with 20 years ago, but we still have a long way to go to create a positive environment for those who identify as the ‘T’ in LGBT.” Read Christopher Hallas, page 13 Parents are penalised over flexibility UK leaders could be penalising low-paid workers who are

struggling to manage work and childcare, a report by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) suggests.

More than two in five (42%) young parents said they felt penalised at work when they asked for flexibility. One in four (26%) told the TUC they had their shifts changed at short notice, making planning childcare very difficult.

Almost two-thirds of lowpaid workers (63%) were not aware of their right to unpaid parental leave. As a result, Nearly one in three (29%) had resorted to taking annual leave to cover their child being ill in the last year – and some were even prevented from leaving to look after their children in an emergency.

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Update

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Meaningful leadership development in Wales

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he Institute of Leadership & Management was a headline sponsor, partner and judge for an awards programme promoting outstanding leadership in Wales.

Phil James, the Institute’s chief executive, and Kate Cooper, its head of research, policy & standards, attended the Leading Wales Awards ceremony in Cardiff in September. At the ceremony, winners were recognised in a number of categories, including public sector, private sector, social enterprises and young leadership.

The awards were developed by a consortium of organisations that passionately believe that outstanding leadership, in all sectors, is the key driver for economic growth in Wales.

Barbara Chidgey, executive chair of the Leading Wales Awards, said that there had been a noticeable difference in Wales’ leadership since the awards started 13 years ago. “In the first one or two years, nearly all nominations were about CEOs or MDs,” she said. “There was a cultural and media fixation that leadership was only at that senior level. We believe that leadership is at all levels, irrespective of hierarchical responsibility.”

Commenting on the awards, James said: “‘It was a privilege to celebrate the achievements of people

The Leading Wales Awards winners with Institute chief executive Phil James and other sponsors of the awards

who have made a great contribution to advancing prosperity and social wellbeing in Wales.”

Emma Wools was named Next Generation Leader in 2016 when she was head of service integration at the National Probation Service Wales.

Now she is assistant police and crime commissioner in South Wales. She said she would have neither gone for the commissioner job, nor thought she could do it, had she not won that award.

For more on leadership in Wales, see p34-35

FROM THE BLOG

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Catch up with the latest Edge thinking online at: www.institutelm.com/researchnews/edge-articles.html. Here is an extract from a recent article: How should leaders approach the thorny topic of automation?

Perhaps leaders with their ‘realist’ hats on don’t necessarily strike the most helpful tone with their employees when it comes to discussing game-changing trends in the business world. This may well be the case with Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan, who noted in September that automation spelled the end for numerous jobs at his company.

“In our bank we have people doing work like robots,” he said. “Tomorrow

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we will have robots behaving like people.

It doesn’t matter if we, as a bank, will participate in these changes or not: it is going to happen.” As such, he stressed, a “big number” of Deutsche Bank staff – each of whom spends “a lot of time basically being an abacus” – stand to lose their jobs.

HIs gloomy message on what automation could mean for long-term career prospects is unlikely to go down well with the bank’s ground troops, however. So how can leaders talk about automation in an honest way, yet ensure that they safeguard employees’ morale and confidence in their roles? The Institute of Leadership & Management’s head of research, policy & standards Kate Cooper says: “John Lewis

chairman Charlie Mayfield has talked eloquently about how automation has changed the way warehouses operate at his firm. But he is keen to stress that the remaining jobs are much more interesting and skilled. From a leadership viewpoint, of course, there is a need to be honest when you talk about automation. But, at the same time, there’s optimism that it will create... more skilled jobs, and more jobs requiring knowledge workers.”

Cooper adds: “Each industry will have its own pluses and minuses amid the rise of automation. Leaders need to understand those changes and communicate them with a blend of honesty and empathy.” To read this article in full, see http://bit.ly/2wAiNGq

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Debate MAILBOX

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SHARING THOUGHTS AND IDEAS 11 Mailbox

12 Howard Behar

Nice work on BAME matters

T

13 Christopher Hallas

Feedback on the Leading Change in Corporate Governance seminar (11 September 2017) IT WAS A GREAT EVENT. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IS A VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT AND IT’S ONE I THINK IS GOING TO BECOME INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT FOR DIRECTORS. AS A RELATIVELY NEW COMPANY DIRECTOR MYSELF, I’M LEARNING THE RULES AND THIS WAS VERY INTERESTING AND EYE-OPENING.

his is to commend the new look of Edge. The cover and pages are of higher quality, which means that the magazine lasts longer than before. It also contains more material.

I miss the reviews section that reviews different books and useful equipment and apps for businesses.

There was something similar in ‘The five Os of leadership apps’ by Perry Timms (summer 2017 issue, page 69), which I found quite useful. I also like the fact that there are sections that focus on the BAME community. I miss the cartoons and the sections that contrast leaders of the past with current successful leaders. But well done for the great work. Dr Kingsley Oturu

Richard Bowdidge, director of Lucas Fettes & Partners IF WE LOOKED FORWARD AT LEADERSHIP AND GOVERNANCE, MAYBE THERE’S ANOTHER MODEL WE CAN LOOK AT INSTEAD OF JUST TRYING TO MASSAGE THE EXISTING ONE AND COME UP WITH MORE RULES, AND MORE STRUCTURES. IT’S TIME TO THINK ABOUT BASIC CHANGE. Dr Peter D Hahn (panellist) dean, Henry Grunfeld Professor in Banking, The London Institute of Banking & Finance

Edge’s diverse coverage ignites the Twittersphere Donna Hewitson @PubDonna Aug 11 This started me thinking.

Pre-Twitter, my world was kind of same-same.

My social circle is now very diverse & I am a better human for it.

northern fella @iancsbloke Aug 13 Oh the irony of how @InstituteLM depicts an award-winning and diverse employer on a cover of Edge whilst questioning diversity.

Andy Johnson @The_AndyJohnson Aug 8 Interesting cover on the @InstituteLM magazine this month.

Long-overdue article considering transfer of military leaders to civilian world.

inji duducu @injiduducu Aug 11 Oh, agree, the perspectives I get from women of colour and women with disabilities have been enlightening esp @Classyvoo & @AfroMatriach

Equitable Education @EquitableEd Aug 18 I was pleasantly surprised to see the magazine promoting diversity. More should follow their lead.

C.M.Raymont-Hall @CMRaymontHall Aug 18 Absolutely!! I completely agree. Some great articles in this issue of Edge.

GET IN TOUCH If you would like to share your views on leadership or management, or content that you would like to see in Edge, please email the editor at sally.percy@lidpublishing.com. Letters may be edited for publication.

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28/09/2017 16:58

Debate HOWARD BEHAR

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Care, compassion and coffee shops Starbucks’ success is based on putting people first

A

t Starbucks, we always said: “It’s not about the coffee, it’s about the people.” No matter what type of work you do, putting people first – your team, your customers, your partners, your family – will do more for your long-term personal happiness and professional success than any short-term ‘wins’. I understand if you’re sceptical. All around us we see people trying to one-up others, get the better deal, find favour with the boss, or play politics with peers. That’s a mindset focused on winners and losers.

Even if you believe with your whole heart that it’s best to put people first, you might struggle to believe this approach works in the real world.

But it does.

When we stand for the value of putting people first, we find inspiration in the good times and a lifeline of support and talent when times are hard.

Here are four principles to put the philosophy of putting people first into action: First, allow and encourage independent thinking. People are not ‘assets’, (as in the phrase, “People are our biggest asset”). We are all human beings who have the capacity to achieve results beyond what is thought possible. We need to get rid of rules – real and imagined – and encourage the independent thinking of others and ourselves. You can follow this principle by remembering the phrase: “The person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom.” Don’t micromanage. Don’t assume you know what’s best.

Don’t project your own way onto others.

Second, listen. Listen to others and listen for the truth. I like to say: “The walls talk.” If you quiet your mind, you’ll realise how much you can know

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By

Howard Behar

and understand by simply absorbing the messages around you. One of my favourite concepts is the idea of ‘compassionate emptiness’. Compassionate emptiness involves listening with compassion but without preconceived notions. It asks us to be caring, but empty of opinions and advice. As the Western Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein explains it: “Compassion is not a stance, but is the simple responsiveness to circumstances from a place of selflessness. The emptier we are of self, the more responsive we are.” When you put time into listening, you’ll know what people are thinking and wanting, you’ll see where the passion lies, and you’ll learn solutions to problems that have been sitting there, waiting to be picked.

Third, build trust by caring. Caring is not a sign of weakness but rather

THE EMPTIER WE ARE OF SELF, THE MORE RESPONSIVE WE ARE a sign of strength, and it can’t be faked – within an organisation, with the people we serve, or in our local or global communities. Without trust and caring, we’ll never know what could have been possible. Without freedom from fear, people can’t dream and they can’t reach their potential.

Fourth, be accountable to yourself and others.

Only the truth sounds like the truth. No secrets, no lies of omission, no hedging and dodging. Take responsibility and say what needs to be said – with care and respect.

Whenever you have doubts about how to act in a situation, you are always on safe ground if you ask yourself: “What would I do if I put people first?”

Howard Behar is retired president of Starbucks Coffee Company and author of ‘The Magic Cup’ and ‘It’s Not About the Coffee’

28/09/2017 16:58

Debate DIVERSITY

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Seasons of Pride The LGBT+ community and its allies have achieved much.

But equality is not complete

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utumn has now replaced summer and the season of Pride has passed. This year, cities across the UK, and most of Europe, hosted LGBT+ celebrations. As the parades took place, many people questioned whether, given all the social, political and legal advances that have been made to achieve greater LGBT+ equality, these celebrations are still needed. Many people think that with legal recognition and, most recently, same-sex marriage, equality has been achieved. But it hasn’t – for several reasons.

First of all, while equalities have been achieved, they are not complete. As readers of my earlier columns will know, the LGBT+ community is very diverse and, whereas much has been achieved for lesbians and gay men, awareness and understanding of the issues that impact bisexual and transgender people are not so readily

PRIDE CELEBRATIONS SERVE AS A REMINDER AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF HOW FAR WE HAVE COME appreciated, even within the LGBT+ community itself. Inequalities and constraints on rights still exist, especially in relation to transgender people – this is evident since LGBT+ people still have to take cases to the UK Supreme Court: a recent example being for equal pension rights.

Secondly, equalities are not evenly spread.

Across the UK, LGBT+ people have different experiences of rights, with members of the LGBT+ community in Northern Ireland still not having the same rights as those in England, Scotland and Wales, or those in Eire. Culturally, LGBT+ people of different generations experience their rights and

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By

Christopher Hallas

access them differently. Although I have been with my partner for 36 years, I still find it difficult, for historical and cultural reasons, to refer to him as my husband, although technically I can. Meanwhile younger people in same-sex marriages readily refer to their wife or husband. Across Europe, LGBT+ rights vary widely. While Malta leads the way, Russia seems to spearhead a movement of persecution, with shocking incidents in Chechnya. The rainbow map of Europe shows extremes, with advances for some and steps backward for others.

Thirdly, the LGBT+ community and its allies have real concerns that there could be a backlash and repeal of hard-won rights. In the US, the 2016 Republican Presidential campaign included commitment to such repeals. In the UK, we have witnessed inflamed tensions following the EU referendum in 2016 and an increase in racist and homophobic hate crime incidents, with demonstrating crowds chanting: “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, first we’ll get the Poles out, then the gays.”

Incidences of bullying in UK schools due to LGBT+ identity are reported to be rising, rather than falling – possibly because there is greater awareness and greater readiness to report such behaviour. This trend suggests that not all is well for our younger generations of LGBT+ people.

Pride celebrations serve as a reminder and acknowledgement of how far we have come, and how important it is to keep going. While Pride was launched as a rights movement in the 1970s, it has evolved to become a symbolic celebration for the LGBT+ community and its allies, not just through the high-profile parades, but with awareness-raising exhibitions, lectures, events and parties. We still need to achieve equal rights for all, and we still need to celebrate those rights.

Yes, we still need Pride, especially in the colder winter months.

Christopher Hallas is a higher education and diversity consultant and executive director at Trans*formation

28/09/2017 16:57

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28/09/2017 14:45

Insider

15

NEWS AND VIEWS 16 News New trustees share their views; summer in the workplace; strategic partnerships

19 Setting the Standard & Webinars

20 A Day in the Life 21 In the Hot Seat

Bye-bye, boss

I

n this issue of Edge we’re posing the tantalising question: is it the end of the boss? What a stimulating opportunity to reflect on my own existence, since I am, I suppose, a ‘boss’ myself.

Developments in technology are raising all sorts of questions about the future of work. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence and innovations such as blockchain are challenging the future purpose of humans and their role in business life: so why should the job of the boss – certainly in traditional terms – escape?

If we leap for a moment to an automotive analogy, technology commentator Nikolaus Lang of the Boston Consulting Group says of advancements in driverless car technology: “By 2030, you’ll be a ‘controlling passenger’ in your private self-driving car and you’ll be a ‘complete passenger’ in a robo-taxi.” I’m not sure how well either of these borderline dystopian scenarios translate as a metaphor for the role of the boss. I might respond with: “We’ll still need a destination,” or, “We will still have to help other passengers get on board,” but perhaps I’m being too defensive.

In any case, we ignore such challenges and opportunities – and the increasing pace of change itself – at our peril.

Futurist Jacob Morgan, in his Future of Work podcast, argues that such technological advances are changing the very nature of leadership, as organisations come under the influence of the different experiences

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Will managers survive the work revolution?

By

Phil James

and expectations of new generations. This is a theme we explore further in our Workforce 2020: Managing Millennials report, launched in August. In this research we suggest that the core competencies of leaders and managers will shift further towards interpersonal areas and, at the same time, become harder to attain and execute.

Personally, I’m excited by what the changing nature of leadership and role of the boss mean for my own responsibilities, capabilities and sense of fulfilment. I

CORE COMPETENCIES OF LEADERS AND MANAGERS WILL SHIFT know that I’m in good company since, as a member of the Institute, you’re not simply a passenger along for the ride, but also a leader committed to learning. As Lauren Keating, Peter Heslin and Susan Ashford wrote in the Harvard Business Review (10 August 2017): “The bottom line is that by supporting leaders in learning mode, organisations can develop the capabilities leaders need to anticipate, respond to, and continually learn from the stream of emerging challenges…”

The Institute of Leadership & Management is here to invigorate, inform and inspire you to embrace the future of leadership. Enjoy Edge.

Phil James is chief executive of the Institute of Leadership & Management

28/09/2017 16:57

Insider

16

T

Meet your elected board he Institute’s new board of trustees is settling in well after being elected in late June by you, our members. Board discussions are already under way, with great ambition for the future. Here are some thoughts from the new trustees.

Annabel Graham, director and executive coach, Successful Training “I’m very much looking forward to working with new colleagues on the board and within the Institute. I hope we can collaborate and deliver high performance with passion, energy and commitment.”

Stella Chandler, director, Focal Point Training and Consultancy “I am passionate about helping leaders, at every level in organisations, to understand the impact they make in so many ways – including to the ‘bottom line’.”

Andrew Sharman, professor of leadership & safety culture, CEDEP “The Institute is in a process of change as it repositions itself to better support its members. As a consultant specialising in leadership and culture, I can offer perspectives that may be valuable in helping the board to take strategic and tactical decisions.”

John Gavin, executive chairman, G4h “The Institute is helping leaders and managers be ready for the increasingly volatile world we face today. We, as a board, are here to ensure we chart that course with the values of authenticity, vision, achievement, collaboration and ownership.”

Joy Maitland, managing director, Inemmo Leadership Development Solutions “As board members, I am sure that we will all bring the following to our roles: fresh perspective, constructive challenge and rigorous debate.”

Shutterstock

Institute partners with APS In July, the Institute announced that it had entered into a strategic partnership with the Association of Professional Sales. This professional collaboration will enhance the membership experience of both organisations by providing new, original content and the latest digital technology. Not only will this partnership transform the experiences

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that the organisations provide, but it will also help both professional groups to build, engage and inspire their growing global memberships.

Karen Waite, director, Leap Like a Salmon “It is an exciting and challenging time to be part of the Institute team, and to have the opportunity to influence leadership and management that is inspiring people for the future.”

SHARE YOUR RESEARCH If you have undertaken any research into leadership and management, written a paper or participated in a best practice case study, we want to hear about it. We may even be able to feature it in Edge.

Email us at: research@ institutelm.com

28/09/2017 16:57

News

17

How to manage summer in the workplace

Drucker Forum Special Report is published

Summer was a busy time for the Institute’s head of research, policy & standards, Kate Cooper, and the communications team. The Institute spoke to you, the members, and our wider audiences to garner your thoughts on how you manage your team in the summer, when motivation slows down as big sporting and music events distract from the job in hand. Also, how do you approach taking holidays and the surrounding stress?

Your engagement in our survey was high, and there was media coverage of the results in Workplace Insight, Business Leader and HRZone.

We have collated solutions to summer dilemmas based on comment from our flexible working research. Three-quarters (75%) of managers interviewed for that research said they would allow staff to watch, or listen to, sporting events in the office.

Our research survey results also showed how important it is that managers get a complete break while they are on holiday. Over half (56%) said that taking a holiday in a remote location, without a wi-fi connection, was the only way to get relief from the ‘always on’ connectivity culture.

Looking ahead to next summer, the Institute advises that managers lead by example and ensure staff members don’t come back from holiday to an unmanageable workload. They should delegate responsibility for decision-making in their absence and build in a day to catch up on emails. That way, they can maximise the holiday benefit, making for a happier and more refreshed team all round.

The Institute of Leadership & Management has partnered with the Global Peter Drucker Forum on the Drucker Forum Special Report.

It was prepared for the forum’s European congress, which takes place in Vienna in November. The forum is an international management conference dedicated to the management philosophy of Peter Drucker, also known as the Father of Management Theory. Drucker put great currency in asking questions, listening and letting natural patterns emerge from answers. The report contains key management and leadership lessons, plus insight from top thinkers. Download the report from: www.institutelm.com/drucker-special-report MEMBERS LOVE...

Top five document downloads from the Learning Resources section 1 A n Introduction to Leadership Styles 2 H ow to Adapt your Leadership Style 3 M entoring vs Coaching: Do You Know the Difference?

4 Understanding Yourself 5 Top Tips for Coaching

4,380

members engaged in our events and webinars* *June-July 2017

The following five articles were the most-read items on the Institute’s weekly newsletter, News & Views 1 H ow Elon Musk email provides leaders with a lesson in empathy 2 W hen, why and by how much should leaders reward their staff?

3 W hich leadership skills went missing during BA’s IT crisis?

4 H ow can leaders more effectively harness their workers’ creativity?

To access the resources, which are exclusive to members, log in to your web account

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5 H ow can a leader maintain a clear vision amid unpredictable events?

28/09/2017 16:57

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28/09/2017 17:14

Insider SETTING THE STANDARD

D

efinitions of what constitutes leadership and what constitutes management change over time. They also provide interesting conversation and debate.

Of the two, leadership is invariably considered to be the more interesting and valued. Yet the two activities are not mutually exclusive.

Frequently, both are needed at the same time and enacted by the same people. As progress changes what is required of leaders and managers, definitions will continue to evolve. Our Leadership Framework presents leadership and management as interrelated, recognising that there is always an organisational context for leadership, as well as an understanding of one’s own role within it, alongside the complexity of organisational life and the need to keep on learning. Publication of Version 1 of the framework provoked a lot of interest, and we are delighted that our members, and others, are already adapting it for their own use. There were, as we hoped, some questions and challenges, which we have used to inform the slightly amended Version 2 that is now on our website.

We have incorporated what people in organisations have been telling us about the experience of leading, being led, studying and witnessing leadership in a wide range of contexts. We identified five separate dimensions of great leadership, namely: collaboration, ownership, achievement and vision, with authenticity at the heart and centre of the framework. We endorse our own Authenticity Ambassador Charles Hampden-Turner’s definition of authenticity as being “what lies between people” – a recognition of the importance of relationships to everyone who leads or aspires to lead.

We also recognise that leadership always takes place in a context. Every leader has knowledge and experience that relates to

The sixth dimension Great leadership happens in context By

Kate Cooper

19

their own situation. This ‘sixth’ dimension is outside the framework, since the context in which leadership takes place is fundamental to how leaders understand and enact the five dimensions.

There are, of course, overlaps between the dimensions. Some leadership responsibilities and behaviours, depending on interpretation, might sit quite comfortably in two dimensions, but the dimension that seems most controversial is that of authenticity. No one has yet disputed that authenticity is important for leadership, but its component parts have provoked debate.

THE LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK

Ownership

Achievement

Authenticity

Collaboration

Vision

Great leaders will be self-aware, able to both challenge and empower the people they work with, know their values, work in organisations where those values are able to flourish, and behave with integrity, so engendering trust. It is this trust that our research repeatedly reveals as extremely significant.

Please help us to keep this important conversation going. You can contact us at: research@institutelm.com Kate Cooper is head of research, policy & standards at the Institute of Leadership & Management

WEBINARS The Institute runs free ‘Learn at Lunch’ 30-minute webinars most Wednesdays from 1-1.30pm. To find out more, visit www.institutelm.com/events/ webinars.html

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Check out these coaching webinars, which you may have missed: Coaching for a virtual reality 31 May 2017 bit.ly/2sATxlL

Coaching at a distance 24 May 2017 bit.ly/2rzfTE6

Coaching in 3D virtual worlds 17 May 2017 bit.ly/2tvwjtK

28/09/2017 16:57

Insider

20

Events

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF

Iftikhar Khan

M

y day begins at 4.30am, the same time as it has begun for the past 28 years of my military life. I don’t need an alarm clock because my biological clock wakes me up. I served in the Pakistan Navy for 22 years, retiring in 2011 after reaching the rank of commander. Since then, I have worked for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Naval Forces Institute, in Abu Dhabi.

My day starts with a good breakfast. Then I leave my home at around 6.15am and I’m in my office by 7am.

At the Naval Institute, my primary role is to act as an adviser to the command. This includes development of objectives, strategy and action plans to achieve the vision and mission of the institute, using a balanced scorecard approach. In addition, I advise on the overall management of learning and development; support the institute with obtaining accreditations; and conduct seminars and collaborate with other institutes in the UAE. On a day-to-day basis, I juggle lots of different projects, but I always start work by checking the management dashboard to see whether we are on track with meeting our objectives. When that is done, I can get on with other things. Besides

Naval leadership

scheduled meetings, I am also required to attend short-notice meetings to address immediate tasks.

We leave at 1.30pm and I get home at around 2.15pm. After lunch, I go upstairs and nap for up to an hour. On waking, I catch up with my wife and children before turning my attention to my PhD studies. I’m studying for a PhD in management with Lincoln University College, Malaysia. I write articles on leadership and management and have presented my research papers at conferences. In 2012, I published a book called The Leadership

MY PRIMARY ROLE IS TO ACT AS AN ADVISER TO THE COMMAND Star, which is based on my own experiences, lectures and workshops.

Dinner is between 8 and 9pm and I get to bed by 10.30pm. I’m quite good at falling asleep within 10 or 15 minutes. Six hours' sleep is enough for me. That’s been my life for the past 28 years, so I’m used to it now.

Iftikhar Khan is learning and development adviser with the UAE Naval Forces Institute and a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & Management If you would like to feature in A Day in the Life, email sally.percy@lidpublishing.com

EVENTS A dynamic new partnership between the Institute of Leadership & Management and venues across the UK aims to inspire great leadership at a local level – and we want you to get involved. We’re giving Members and Fellows the opportunity to customise their own regional networking events, bringing together like-minded people to connect, collaborate, share ideas, solve problems and consider their own particular local leadership challenges.

The venues involved so far include Airspace, a smart co-working space located in London’s glamorous West End, and Accelerate

Places in Manchester and Nottingham. Stacey Jasiewicz, Airspace general manager, says: “Airspace provides affordable, design-led, no-nonsense desks in central London. We are very excited to be collaborating with the Institute on this events programme, which will cover a broad spectrum of topics.”

If you would like to organise or speak at one of these events, or if you are a venue interested in hosting an event, please contact jane.nicholson-biss@institutelm.com. By doing so, you will help us to fulfil our mission of inspiring great leadership everywhere.

For more on events, see www.institutelm.com/events.html. To view recordings of past webinars, visit www.institutelm.com/events/webinars.html

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28/09/2017 16:56

Insider

Member Q&A

21

IN THE HOT SEAT

This month, Edge meets Bryan Rodgers, superintendent in the Lothians and Scottish Borders Division of Police Scotland

What does leadership mean to you?

effectively and efficiently, but also reduce our overall budget. One of the big challenges with becoming one organisation is that individual communities can feel as though they have lost their identities, and our teams in those areas can feel that they have become a smaller, less important cog in a huge organisation.

The biggest asset we have as a service is our people and how our people work with communities. We’ve got to continue to fight for that.

For me, the only way to achieve positive leadership is to know yourself, understand yourself, be clear on your vision and values, and lead by example. I worry about the strong focus on learning from the leadership of others. Of course, we should study good, strong leaders, but it’s very dangerous to impersonate any other leader. Find your own approach.

What are you focusing on personally from a leadership development perspective?

What are your biggest leadership challenges?

There are 13 local policing divisions in Scotland and I work within one of those. The big challenge for me is around engaging communities. We need to be part of the communities we police and carry out policing alongside those communities. We also need to do it increasingly with partner agencies, such as health services, local authorities and voluntary groups. Getting that message across externally, and internally to our own people, is very important.

I’m retiring from Police Scotland shortly, so I’m developing myself in a different way. I’m in the second year of a doctorate at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, looking at continuous improvement in quality of service in the public sector. I’ve been doing a lot of lecturing on leadership programmes within the university and I find that a really effective way of sharpening my own thinking and continuing my own learning.

How does the general context of policing feed in to those challenges?

How are you developing your people?

We are four years into the largest merger of any public-sector body in the UK. Pre-2013, there were eight individual police services in Scotland and two national agencies – the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA). These services and agencies employed over 30,000 staff, with 24,000 of those being police officers, and had a combined budget of £1.1 billion. On 1 April 2013, all of the police forces were merged into one single agency, Police Scotland. We needed to not only merge

I like to sit with a team of people, talk through ideas and challenge them. I make sure that all my team understand that if they come up with an idea, it’s their idea, but if things don’t work out, I will take responsibility. After all, that’s my role. I believe in moving away from the theoretical, towards tools and opportunities that allow people to test ideas and approaches in a safe environment.

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UNDERSTAND YOURSELF, BE CLEAR ON YOUR VISION AND VALUES

Would you like to feature in In the Hot Seat? Email sally.percy@lidpublishing.com

28/09/2017 17:02

The Edge Interview

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So much for the slump The oil price collapse led Femi Tanimola to broaden his career horizons – and he’s not looking back Writing Sally Percy

Photography Tom Campbell

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nyone who works in the oil and gas industry for more than 20 years is bound to learn some important lessons about leadership. For Femi Tanimola, the most powerful lesson came after he was made redundant from Schlumberger, the oilfield services giant that provides drilling and processing technology to the oil and gas industry.

“Oil and gas is a very intense industrial sector,” he says. “It’s a bubble. In oil and gas, we tend to see A-type people as leaders, people who push for the best at all cost. But pushing for the best at all cost can be costly. I’ve realised that we need to step back once in a while and look beyond our immediate environment. We’re not very good at taking on external ideas so we need to collaborate with the larger world.”

Indeed, it is only through the adoption of new ideas and collaboration that the oil and gas industry will withstand the sustained slump in the price of crude oil, which kicked in at the end of

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2014 and is not expected to recover any time soon.

“The biggest challenge is adjusting to the new reality of the low price of oil,” Tanimola explains.

“We’ve gone close to pre-1998 prices. Leaders will have to start re-thinking about how we recover crude oil out of the ground.”

To date, the industry has reacted by making redundancies, moving staff to cheaper locations, undertaking mergers and acquisitions, and shelving projects – although Tanimola is not convinced that this is the right response. “The industry is normally very technologically driven,” he says. “But we’ve not been looking at different ways of delivering the technologies that we use to get oil out of the ground. We need to look at how things are done in other industry sectors.”

Transferrable skills Tanimola himself is gaining insight into other sectors through his consultancy firm, Charis Industrial, which he set up in March 2016 in the wake of his departure from Schlumberger.

Self-employment was a big step for a man

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Femi Tanimola

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The Edge Interview

who had worked for a succession of big companies since leaving university in Nigeria.

“It was a personal challenge,” he admits. “I’ve had to adjust to not being in the mainstream oil and gas sector, and it was difficult to get any help or support. I have worked around the world and been involved in every aspect of the industry – exploration, drilling, completion and production. So when I was starting out it was difficult to pinpoint one specialist area to concentrate on. Also, there are no oil wells where I live in Bedfordshire!”

The breakthrough for Tanimola was realising that he could transfer the skills that he had developed in the oil and gas industry to other sectors.

Today, Charis Industrial serves clients both within the oil industry and outside it. He also has a modern, flexible operational business model and draws on the expertise of ‘associates’ – his former oil and gas colleagues from around the world – as and when he needs it.

“It was pretty difficult getting away from what I had always done, which was running around the world, putting technological solutions in place,” he says. “So I decided to focus on bringing in new technology to the oil and gas sector to cut the cost of production and transferring both technology and other skills from the oil and gas sector into other industry sectors. I’ve done that successfully.”

An important project outside the oil and gas sector that Tanimola has worked on is a business improvement and transformation programme for Luton Borough Council. “It’s looking at how their housing and social care departments deliver telecare services. That’s led to me creating a new team, redefining processes and establishing a traded service for them. So a service that previously relied on annual grants from Adult Social Care is now being transformed into a surplus-generating entity that will deliver substantial earnings over the next three years. The skills involved are what we take for granted in the oil and gas industry, such as getting the most out of every dollar spent. It was straightforward for me to see where improvements could be made.”

Tanimola hopes his story will serve as inspiration to other people in the oil and gas industry who fear leaving the sector in case they can’t reinvent themselves. “They will realise that they’re not alone, and when they start out things will come together.”

Ignorant encounters During his career, Nigeria-born Tanimola has worked in numerous countries, but he decided to formally immigrate to the UK in 2003 as part of the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme. He and his wife had a holiday home here and believed that it would be a nice place to bring up a family.

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LEADERSHIP LESSONS Who has been your real-life leadership inspiration?

“Monday Okoro, vice president at Schlumberger Production Management. He’s of Nigerian origin like me. He never looks back or sees limitations. He’s influenced a lot of people’s careers – black, white and everything in-between.”

What does a good leader look like?

“Someone who is not afraid to change the status quo, someone who’s not afraid to say, ‘It’s always been done this way, but I’m going to stick my neck out.’”

What’s the greatest challenge you’ve faced as a leader and how did you overcome it?

“Being confident enough to make changes and do new things, but in that I’m still a work-in-progress.”

What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve ever learned?

“Never succumb to the fear of inexperience. Every new challenge is in itself an opportunity to learn something new about myself and gain experience.”

What’s the secret to your own success?

“I follow the example of the entrepreneur Richard Branson. If anyone asks him to do something, he’ll say ‘yes’ and find out later how to do it. That level of can-do is my secret.”

How do you like to relax at the end of a long day?

“These days, it’s all about that glass of wine while playing cards with my two kids, or just listening to them and my wife tell me about what sort of day they’ve had.”

I’M STILL THAT ENGINEER WHO ISN’T AFRAID TO GO DOWN TO THE RIG FLOOR

He acknowledges the shortage of minority ethnic leaders in British business, but says: “Before we complain, we need to do our bit. We tend to stick together, but unless we show our faces, we’re not going to be heard.” He doesn’t believe that his own career has suffered as a result of discrimination, but he can cite instances of what he describes as “ignorance”.

“Even though I was often the lead engineer on the site, people would say: ‘Can I speak to your boss?’” he recalls. Once, he was the first black person that some workers on a Japanese oil rig had ever seen. “We ate lunch in the galley and I thought I’d try the sushi with them, but they would not sit near me.”

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CAREER TIMELINE 1992 – 1993 Geologist, Sol Fond / Utility Borings, Nigeria 1993 – 1997 Geotechnical engineer, N-Core, Nigeria 1998 – 2001 Data engineer, Geoteam International, Switzerland 2001 – 2004 Field superviser, Geoservices, Republic of Congo 2004 – 2006 Base (project) engineer, Geoservices, UK 2006 – 2009 Business development manager, Sensornet, UK 2009 - 2011 Business development manager, Onstream Group, Netherlands 2011 – 2013 Regional business unit manager, Sub-Saharan Africa, Weatherford, South Africa

After years of living out of a suitcase – like so many others in the oil and gas industry – Tanimola is now enjoying spending more time in the UK and contributing to the local community. He believes it is very important to give back, which is why he is a member of the board of directors of the Kings Arms Facilities, the commercial part of the Bedford-based Kings Arms Project, which provides meals, hostel accommodation and employment opportunities to homeless people. He and his wife also support charities in Bulgaria and South Africa.

As a recent member of the Institute of Leadership & Management – he joined in 2016 – Tanimola is pleased with the way that the other members have embraced him. He also believes

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that the institute is going through a period of exciting transformation, and believes that it will be increasingly influential in the world of leadership going forward.

Looking back on his career, Tanimola says that one of the most important lessons he’s learned is to “give people opportunities to expand beyond their current remit”. He himself has benefitted from such opportunities in the past, and having such a wide breadth of practical experiences will certainly give him a solid foundation for his new career as an entrepreneur. As he says: “At heart, I’m still that engineer who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and go down to the rig floor.”

2015 – 2016 Global account manager, Schlumberger, UK 2016 – present Managing director, Charis Industrial Services, UK Not-for-profit roles 2015 – present Member of the board of directors, Kings Arms Facilities, The Kings Arms Project

Sally Percy is editor of ‘Edge’

28/09/2017 17:01

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28/09/2017 17:15 04.11.2015 15:42:50

Spotlight

27

THE END OF THE BOSS? 32 Corporate liberation: there is life after management

34 Why good leadership is a boost to productivity

36 Wholefood business Suma is a model of co-operative working

Shutterstock

28 The jury is out on traditional hierarchical structures

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Spotlight

The end of the boss?

Traditional hierarchies are under threat from flatter organisational structures, greater autonomy, distributed workforces and the rise of the gig economy Writing Matt Packer Illustration Stephen Collins

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28/09/2017 17:00

End of the Boss

I

n 2001, German beverage maker Mineralbrunnen AG dialled down the caffeine content in its star product Afri-Cola, drastically softening the flavour. Amid a public backlash, Afri-Cola’s most militant fans formed a tight-knit, online network dedicated to reversing the decision. When it became clear that Mineralbrunnen wouldn’t budge, the protesters, led by the resourceful Uwe Lübbermann, simply researched Afri-Cola’s original recipe – and began to make it themselves, averting legal action by subtly tweaking the formula in a way that wouldn’t affect the flavour.

The resulting product, Premium-Cola, steadily eroded consumer interest in Afri-Cola altogether.

Now, it has six different brands under its belt, 220 cities on its books and 1,650 commercial partners.

But Premium-Cola is significantly more remarkable for what it doesn’t have: offices, formal employment contracts, salaries, a permanent factory floor… or a boss. In the spirit of the brand’s rebellious origins, Lübbermann sees himself as an ‘organiser’ or ‘coordinator’ of the operation; a linchpin sitting in between dozens of trusted, and largely autonomous, experts and stakeholders, who crunch the brand’s logistics over conference calls and an array of digital platforms. Ethics ride high within the Premium-Cola network. Its environmental mindfulness is matched by a culture of egalitarian treatment, which extends to profit participation. In that sense, Lübbermann is no more or less important than any of his peers. If it works for Premium-Cola, why couldn’t it work for every company? Do we really need the traditional ‘boss’ at all?

Incinerate the rulebook There are numerous, compelling reasons why the end of the traditional boss is a realistic prospect.

For a start, Premium-Cola is not the only brand that rejects the stale corporate framework of top-down control. And some of its soulmates have marched to the beat of their own drums for decades. Since the 1970s, Swedish bank Handelsbanken has worked under what it calls its ‘church-spire’ ethos. The governing principle: each branch is an autonomous unit that adapts to fit the needs of its community, rather than channelling a monolithic corporate identity and applying cookie-cutter service models.

Handelsbanken provides its branch managers with the freedom to build their own businesses under the brand, with maximum support and minimum interference.

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FREEDOM AND AGILITY HEIGHTEN PERFORMANCE

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Then there’s the ‘industrial democracy’ credo of Brazilian manufacturer and corporate-services firm Semco Partners. Actually, it’s far more than a credo: it is Semco’s core – the primary driver of its success. When CEO Ricardo Semler took over from his authoritarian father Antonio in 1982, he almost immediately incinerated the command-and-control rulebook, handing out swathes of autonomy to his staff. He even allowed them to set their own salaries, on the proviso that everybody would know everybody else’s earnings. Far from spawning a bitter remuneration arms race, Semler Jr’s evenhanded approach encouraged workers to keep their pay within reasonable limits – and to perform with gusto to prove they were worth it.

By 1993, amid a decade-long stretch of economic misery throughout Brazil, Semco’s profits were up by 500%, revenues by 600% and productivity by 700%. All without formal company policies or mandatory working hours – central tenets of the command-and-control cliché. It was no flash in the pan. Semco is respected and profitable to this day, and its culture has a lasting beacon in the shape of the Semco Style Institute (SSI): a think tank-cum-training body that decants Ricardo Semler’s ideas into rising business talents who would prefer to facilitate their workers’ skills – and then get out of their way.

In a recent SSI blog, trainer Arko van Brakel outlined five strategic reasons why democratic leadership is the future of work: 1 You will cope better with disruption – and be more likely to create it.

2 Talented and innovative millennials will want to work for you.

3 Staff who have been encouraged to be creative will seize the jobs of the future.

4 Autonomy breeds good health, and vice versa.

5 Freedom and agility heighten performance.

“If you build pyramids,” quips van Brakel, “you get mummies.”

Critical mass It isn’t just two or three firms that are flying this flag – it is a bona-fide movement, surging across a variety of sectors. Netflix (TV streaming), Zappos (shoes and apparel retail), AirBnB (accommodation), Crankset Group (business consultancy), Valve Corporation (video games), Menlo Innovations (software design) and Coolblue (e-commerce) have all put their own, individual spin on the unconventional business

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FLAT FRIENDS AND FOES Some corners of the globe are more receptive than others to the concept of the flat structure.

Expectations vary greatly as to how leaders should operate, how they should be addressed and the height of the podium they must occupy in workers’ minds. In this year’s July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review, author and INSEAD professor Erin Meyer wrote: “In Nigeria, a child learns to kneel or even lie down as a sign of respect when an elder enters the room. In Sweden, a student calls her teachers by their first names and, without implying any disrespect, feels free to contradict them in front of her classmates. Unsurprisingly, the management approach that works in Lagos will not get the best results in Stockholm.”

Grasping those contrasts, Meyer stressed, is key to successful market entry. “In general,” she noted, “the greatest business opportunities lie in the big emerging economies, which include Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Turkey … cultures where hierarchy and deference to authority are deeply woven into the national psyche.”

One of the most popular pieces of research into corporate models around the world is linguist Richard D Lewis’s book When Cultures Collide, in which he provides a sort of spotters’ guide to different nations’ structural preferences. Here are some of his observations: FRANCE Autocratic. To outsiders, the CEO may, on first glance, appear to have a roving, consultative role.

But when the facts are in and decisions made, the orders are top-down.

SWEDEN Primus inter pares. A generally democratic structure, with the bare minimum of layers. The CEO is a central pivot between different functions, and is highly accessible.

UNITED STATES Structured individualism. Upper and middle managers are tasked with significant responsibilities, and often prize their own welfare above that of the wider firm.

GERMANY Hierarchy and consensus. A clear and rigorous chain of command is complemented with a genuine desire to convince and win round staff in different departments.

JAPAN Ring-sei consensus. Senior executives have an aura of power, but little hands-on involvement. Ideas for new initiatives are often collected from various layers of a firm’s personnel, and then filtered up to the top for ratification.

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THE GIG ECONOMY GIVES BOSSES MORE POWER TO HIRE AND FIRE AT WILL

structure, with worker autonomy and boss-free motivation present in their DNA to varying degrees.

In parallel with that movement, demands have grown for styles of work that can be tailored around the intricacies of people’s lives. For many workers, the requirement to report into a permanent office space has become anathema, leading firms to yank down the shutters on physical premises and shift towards full distribution of workers.

Two years ago, social media firm Buffer pulled out of its head office in the trendy SoMa area of San Francisco, concluding that the “critical mass” of its workforce now lay with distributed staff in London and New York. Similarly, Automattic – the parent company of WordPress – closed its own San Francisco space earlier this year following a period of meagre attendance. CEO Matt Mullenweg put the 15,000sq ft facility on the market once he realised that the number of employees who were using it had the run of 3,000sq ft each.

The Institute of Leadership & Management foresaw this trend in its 2013 report Flexible Working: Goodbye nine to five. At the time, the report noted, 94% of UK firms were offering their employees some form of flexible-work option, with technology the key enabler. “Virtual meeting software, high-speed broadband and mobile networks help us to engage with work wherever and whenever we like,” it pointed out. “Work used to be the place you turned up to – now, it is increasingly something you can do anywhere, at any time.”

Increasingly, the image of work is morphing from open-plan office into individuals, and their portable technologies, setting up wherever they see fit. The bricks-and-mortar HQ is slowly receding – and with it, the imperious boss.

Broken structure Alex Hirst is founder of The Hoxby Collective: an office-free, employee-free and – as far as he’s concerned – boss-free corporate-services provider that puts together bespoke solutions from a network of freelancers. In Hirst’s view, the least-progressive firms are still in thrall to social reformer Robert Owen’s “Eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest” dogma, which is now 200 years old. While Owen’s ethos stemmed from a noble effort to tackle exploitation, it later calcified into the nine-to-five, spawning presenteeism: a telltale sign of the controlling workplace. “I consider the gig economy to be a huge liberation of the workforce,” says Hirst. “Our freelancers unite into small teams to deliver outputs. And they’re judged upon those outputs. And that’s really important.

A major flaw with the traditional structure is the basis upon which people are judged. It’s pointless to evaluate someone for the time they spend in the office, or their ability to schmooze. Those sorts of

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End of the Boss

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SILICON VALLEY SPOTLIGHT: THE BOSS IN FLUX Our image of the tech industry – and boss culture in general – is defined by the moguls of Silicon Valley: Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates; their respective successors Tim Cook and Satya Nadella – and the younger likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, plus Elon Musk (Tesla), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Marissa Mayer (ex-Yahoo).

All are high-profile figureheads – yet encompass a wide spectrum of leadership approaches. Jobs was famously confrontational and authoritarian. Nadella has led his firm out of rigid silos and top-down control into the ‘One Microsoft’ era. Mayer, on the other hand, notoriously banned Yahoo staff from working at home.

But, of late, the Valley has played host to unprecedented controversy, triggered by its more rebellious enfants terribles. While Uber’s founder Travis Kalanick espoused a flat structure at his firm, he was forced to resign in June this year following months of woeful PR around sexism scandals that left the company’s senior leadership team in shreds.

That same month, in the Valley’s investment

things are becoming less and less relevant. What matters is that people deliver outputs. Don’t worry about how they do it, where they do it, or when they do it – as long as they do it.”

For Hirst, the classic, top-down structure is “broken”, because traditional bosses tend to favour those who are skilled at selling themselves.

He argues that more introverted, but eminently capable, creatives have “just as much right to opportunities as the others”, and that freelancing provides them with a more workable vent for

SILICON VALLEY HAS NEVER STOOD AS AN INNOVATOR IN THE REALMS OF LEADERSHIP

scene, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure and Binary Capital co-founder Justin Caldbeck both stepped down from their roles in the wake of sexualmisconduct allegations.

So, is Silicon Valley in the grip of ‘toxic leadership’? In the view of international entrepreneur and management expert Margaret Heffernan, the Valley’s boss culture is actually in a wild state of flux. “Flat organisations are getting even flatter,” she says, “and the technocratic, command-and-control structures are more heavily engineered.”

She adds: “Concern for the social impact of organisations – whether on employees, stakeholders and society at large – is similarly splintered, with some companies proudly disdaining all concepts of responsibility, some adopting unconvincing stances and others serious about the roles they play in the world. What is striking to me is that, for all of the Valley’s claims to be a leader in technology – and whether or not this is still true remains unclear – it has never stood as an innovator or model in the realms of management or leadership.”

their talents. Asked whether he considers himself a boss, Hirst says: “The word ‘boss’ conjures up all sorts of images that Hoxby rebels against: fat cats in suits, calling the shots. I’d describe myself as a leader. When people hear the word ‘boss’, they tend to think of management, not leadership. We have 300 people – and none of them are bosses.”

But despite all these exciting developments, it may be rather too early to write off the boss altogether, according to entrepreneur, broadcaster and serial CEO Margaret Heffernan. “I don’t think that the end of the boss is nigh,” she tells Edge, “and I have rather mixed feelings about that. The gig economy may give workers more freedom. But it also gives bosses more power to hire and fire at will, to pay low wages and to pick and choose, on a casual basis, who gets to work and who doesn’t. In that sense, bosses have more power than ever.

“In public companies,” she adds, “CEO salaries certainly don’t indicate that bosses are underrated, because most are overpaid. That hardly suggests that boards consider bosses irrelevant. Instead, I’d say we are seeing a bifurcation: between companies that absolutely believe in concentrating huge amounts of power in a few individuals, and those that believe in emphasising teamwork and collaboration. The latter, it seems to me, are more responsive, knowledgeable and adaptable. But the mythologies around solo, heroic leadership are still, alas, going strong.”

Matt Packer is a freelance writer and editor. Follow him on Twitter at @mjpwriter

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Life after management Organisations thrive when workers are empowered to make their own decisions Writing Professor Isaac Getz

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raditional companies are getting a bad rap.

The media is full of stories of top graduates who quit, or simply don’t join, managerial careers. Instead, they become hipster chefs, cheesemakers or bakers. With an avalanche of academic texts and conferences on the end of management, the impression is that soon managers will be the rarest – or even an

extinct – species.

My own work on corporate liberation, namely the book Freedom, Inc. co-authored with Brian Carney, is often mentioned in this context. Indeed, most of the liberated companies – organisations in which the majority of employees enjoy complete freedom and responsibility to take actions they decide are best for the company – have no managers. The reader is probably asking what happened to them. Before answering it, I will give more details on corporate liberation.

Shutterstock / Kate Harkus

What liberation looks like I have observed over 100 liberated companies of all sizes, geographies and sectors, including public. Although there is no liberated company model (more about that later), they share some elements. Most don’t have reserved parking or corner offices for executives. Some have no assigned executive offices: everyone, including the CEO, simply selects an available desk.

Many have no fixed seating arrangement and don’t cluster desks by department. Most have no clocks and allow employees to set their own work times. Most have no organisational charts, and some have no titles or ranks. Many allow employees to choose their own job descriptions and, in essence, invent their own jobs. Some have no human resources department. Some have no budgets or even a finance department. Finally, many allow employees to pick their leaders and have no managers.

So here is the first of the liberated companies’ paradoxes: most managers are still around, but they are not managing people anymore. Instead, some lead and others transition into roles requiring their expertise, but not the people skills. The reader may wonder if ‘leader’ in these companies is not a new buzzword for the ‘manager’. Yes and no. Yes, because the leader is doing what the manager – theoretically – has been asked to do but rarely did: to be in the service of her team so that the team can do its best. No, because the leader doesn’t have hierarchical power and is most often picked by his or her team. In other words, the leader is not resorting to traditional managerial behaviours of telling people what to do and controlling them.

Because being a leader requires different behavioural skills from being a manager, not all managers succeed in becoming team leaders within a liberated company, despite being offered training, and even executive coaching. Some managers’ strong ego or need for control may require a psychoanalyst rather than a coach. Companies may forgo such an expenditure, offering them instead a ‘bridge’, a possibility to take a couple of months off and invent a value-generating role where they can use their technical expertise. Some, a tiny minority, may choose to leave.

But in liberated companies, no manager is fired and most stay.

A legitimate question is: how do you know when a manager is a successful leader? That brings us to the second paradox: a manager only succeeds as a leader when she is not needed for

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running the business. Sir Alex Ferguson famously sat on an Old Trafford seat – not on the bench, as most football managers do. He prepped his team and saw no reason to interfere in the game. Most corporate managers, however, run their teams not even from the bench but right from the field. The measure of the leader’s success is his redundancy. Once the team is fully self-directing they don’t need the leader to be in their way, meaning that he or she can focus on the future needs of the team members – to help prepare for future games.

Role of the CEO Which bring us to the ultimate boss – the CEO – and the ultimate paradox. Over the past five years, there has been a dramatic rise in corporate liberation, which has been adopted by multinationals such as Airbus, Decathlon, Michelin, a major French insurer, the French social security system, two Belgian ministries, several municipalities and hundreds of small and medium companies. Organisations as different as banks, fire brigades, hospitals, the military, start-ups and store chains have held seminars on corporate liberation and are considering entering the movement. Despite all the interest in how liberated companies are run – be it without clocks or without managers – this is not the key issue.

The liberated company is not a model. It’s a philosophy. It is a set of fundamental beliefs about human nature: that people can be trusted, everyone has a gift, and that human beings prefer to self-direct rather than be directed. Luckily, leading social psychologists have demonstrated empirically that these beliefs have a real underpinning in three universal needs all humans share and seek in order to be self-motivated. In traditional companies, based on command and control, these needs are not satisfied. Consequently, a manager’s key role is to motivate his or her team – extrinsically. That’s why most of the ‘command and control’ practices, which are unnatural to humans, disappear in the liberated companies to satisfy people’s fundamental needs. Instead, a natural, nourishing organisational environment is co-constructed, and the only person who can take the decision for such transformation is the CEO. So here is the ultimate paradox: because the goal of corporate liberation is to give people the power to make all the decisions, by launching this transformation, the liberating CEO is taking potentially his last top-down decision. That said, the liberating CEO does not become jobless once the company is liberated. The freedom and responsibility-based culture is fragile, and the CEO is its guardian. He is also in charge of the vision. Not a pompous statement coming of a residential executive seminar, but one that makes people dream. People don’t put arguments in their heart, rather dreams. Only then will they be able to make decisions that are best for the company, because they share in the dream.

In such companies, former managers don’t need to look for an escape into a more meaningful place of work – a bakery or anywhere else. Quite the opposite. Not only can they participate in fulfilling a dream they share, but they can also help people to realise their gifts and live meaningful lives. There is life after management.

Isaac Getz is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School and co-author of ‘Freedom, Inc.: How Corporate Liberation Unleashes Employee Potential and Business Performance’

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Power to the people The most successful leaders understand that autonomy is the way to create inspired staff Writing Peter Crush

W

hat do Apple, Netflix, Google and Dell all have in common?

Aside from being multi-billion-dollar mega-firms, they share a rather surprising fact that differentiates them from others. According to research by management consultancy Bain & Company, these firms aren’t just a bit more productive, they are a staggering 40% more so than the average firm. But the surprise doesn’t stop here. The reason’s got nothing to do with them having the best talent, the best wages, or the best benefits. Instead, Bain & Co claims, it’s down to one thing – leadership.

Anecdotally, the link between leadership and productivity is not in doubt. It’s well understood that leaders impact on engagement and discretionary effort. But can good leadership be so clearly linked to productivity, and be responsible for such a huge difference? If so, it seems a strikingly simple solution to the UK’s infamous productivity problem – it is 18% lower than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, and 35% lower than Germany’s.

“When you compare high-performing businesses with average-performing ones, the proportion of star-players is typically the same – around 15%,” argues Eric Garton, partner of Bain & Company, and co-author of Time, Talent, and Energy. “What’s more important is how leaders place this talent in the 5% of business-critical roles.”

According to Garton, talent placement is important because it makes the greatest difference to tackling the biggest drain on productivity: so-called ‘organisational drag’.

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“The average company loses 25% of its productive capacity just by bringing people together,” he says, referring to his study of all S&P 500 share index firms and 34,000 other US firms. “For every 10% increase in staff headcount, firms lose 2% in productivity, too. Emails, meetings, team catch-ups; they are the biggest threat to productivity now. In the drive to create inclusiveness, leaders have confused collaboration with productivity. But the two are not so linked.” By

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Business Performance

placing star players better, Garton says they can cut through organisational drag by stripping out processes that don’t work. “Falling productivity is inevitable; it’s just how much leaders want to reduce it,” he says. “Around 60% of staff have to interact with ten people everyday just to get their jobs done; 30% interact with 20-plus,” he says.

“Firms have to deactivate nodes that no longer create value. When Dell reduced the number of reports engineers had to deal with from eleven to five, its productivity shot up.”

One leader acutely aware of this is Justin Basini, CEO and founder of credit-check firm ClearScore. It hired its first employee in 2015, but is now starting to stabilise at 150 people. He says he’s reached a point where efficiency needs to give way to productivity: “The two can be confused – efficiency is about doing more with less,” he says.

“In our growth phase, this was probably what we were doing. Productivity is about getting more out of the same people – it’s a different challenge.”

One way he has addressed this is by recently restructuring the business away from distinct teams such as customer service, IT, marketing and sales. Instead, employees have been organised into three teams – acquire, engage, monetise; ones that more closely mirror the customer journey through ClearScore. “Staff previously siloed by job function will work across all three,” he says. “Crucially, we’re setting up autonomous decision-making within this, so I don’t need to be so involved.”

For some, this is a classic move to collective leadership, where more distributed decision-making rules. “I know I can get in the way of things,” he admits. “I can be a control freak.

That’s not always the best way to get things done.

This move is very much about me trying to set up a system where I hand decisions over.”

Garton says this helps boost ‘decision velocity’, where speed of decision-making also correlates to productivity. Meanwhile, Alessio Tanganelli, UK regional director of the Top Employers Institute, says: “Shared leadership is now the way advanced companies understand what leadership means.

It redistributes the decision-making process.”

She adds: “While the link between leadership and productivity isn’t always clear, there is a very strong connection. Financial results are the best indicator of leadership efficiency.”

Of course, collective leadership isn’t a luxury that all businesses can deliver all the time. Joerg Nuernberg, CEO of global media agency Newbase (formerly Publicitas), was parachuted into the organisation in 2014 specifically to rescue a business that desperately needed transitioning to digital. “We were in a battle for survival, and from a productivity point of view, we needed to take out the chainsaw,” he admits. “I looked at exactly who was doing what job and why.”

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WALES – THE UK’S LEAST PRODUCTIVE PLACE It’s an infamous claim to fame, but Wales has the lowest productivity of any part of the UK, with data from the Office for National Statistics revealing the output of Welsh workers is 83.3% of the already low UK average.

According to Professor Brian Morgan of Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU), reasons range from high (20.8%) levels of Welsh employment being in the public sector (in London, it is less than 15%), to poor transport infrastructure and historically low investment in training. “Structural issues, including the difficulty Welsh firms have getting investment to scale up, are also creating lower than optimal productivity.” He adds that a low skills base has been exacerbated by the abolition of school league tables in Wales, since standards have fallen.

Investment in training is also limited.

Indeed, data from the bi-annual UK Employer Skills Survey (2015) shows that 63% of Welsh firms offer some form of training (the UK average was 66%). CMU runs 20Twenty leadership programmes to improve the skills of leaders, yet only one Welsh firm – Admiral (Wales’s only FTSE-100 listed company) regularly sends its leaders there. Admiral is well known for having engaging leadership – it

AN INSPIRED EMPLOYEE IS 125% MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN A SATISFIED ONE

has its own ‘Ministry of Fun’, issues staff with £3,000 worth of shares each year, and gives them £110 annually to try something new (examples include circus skills and sheep herding). In 2017, it was named the second-best large company to work for by The Sunday Times. CEO David Stevens scooped Best Leader award, too.

The Institute of Leadership & Management has been helping to champion leadership development in Wales by acting as a headline sponsor, partner and judge for the Leading Wales Awards (see page 10).

David Stevens CBE, chief executive of Admiral, was named Best Leader in the leadership category for big companies in the 2017 Sunday Times Best Big Companies to Work For awards

In this situation, he says, strong, more old-fashioned command and control leadership was necessary. But even he admits that now this do-or-die period has passed, shared autonomy is his preferred strategy. “Leadership is about adapting. Empowerment – where teams make their own decisions – is how we now see we can boost our productivity and profitability.” He adds: “The fact that 50% of our turnover is digital, up from 14%, shows it’s working.”

Garton will, no doubt, be a fan. Leaders who create autonomy will, he argues, create inspired staff; and inspiration is his word for organisational ‘energy’ – the opposite of organisational drag. “An engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied one; but one who is inspired is 125% more productive than a satisfied one,” he says. “Strong leadership creates engagement, and then some.”

Peter Crush is an award-winning freelance business journalist and editor

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A fresh approach Wholefood business Suma has a model of co-operative working that has stood the test of time Writing

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Ethical values

Rebecca Kinnard

ack in the mid-1970s, a man called Reg Taylor, who was passionate about natural foods, began thinking there should be a natural food wholesaling business in the north of England. Speaking to friends at various wholefood shops in Leeds and Manchester, he realised others were keen to be part of a wholesaling operation.

In the summer of 1975, people from wholefood shops across northern England met to discuss the options. Taylor offered to start a distribution

business, and with this spirit of co-operation, Suma was born. Things began in his terraced house in Leeds, where Taylor and his friends sold cereal flakes, dried fruits and brown rice. The business took off, and in 1977 Taylor decided to sell it to the then seven employees. Suma, the co-operative, was born.

During the 1980s, there was a strong alternative community in Leeds, with Suma at its heart. New worker co-ops were set up. Suma was a worker co-operative wholesaler, buying from co-operative suppliers and supplying worker co-op wholefood shops across the North. It was building a new world outside corporate capitalism.

WE PRIDE OURSELVES ON OUR GREEN CREDENTIALS

From the beginning, Suma was dedicated to supplying vegetarian wholefoods. And 40 years on, we still are. We pride ourselves on our green credentials and co-operative business model.

We are also Europe’s largest single-pay [where everyone is paid the same hourly rate pro rata] vegetarian wholesale co-operative.

We aim to promote a healthy and ethical vegetarian lifestyle by offering wholefoods, health foods and body care at affordable prices. We support independent shops and businesses; you won’t find any Suma products in the supermarkets.

We specialise in organic and Fairtrade products, and all of our body care products are cruelty free.

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Case Study Suma

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in different areas of the business. They are encouraged to take ‘tours’ of all the departments, to learn how each works and how they all fit together. The idea is that members will develop a strong overview of the whole process within the co-op, and that this knowledge helps all workers engage in decision-making.

During the trial membership process, regular reviews take place, in which the whole co-op is invited to participate, giving 360° feedback. At the end of the trial, the reviews are collated and scored against our member standard. If the review panel agrees that this standard has been achieved, they recommend that the co-op vote the trial member into membership. A trial member needs a vote of 75% in favour to become a member.

Performance of workers is measured with regular reviews. Member reviews look at how an individual is working to member standards within the co-op, and departmental reviews focus on how people are performing in their different roles.

Action points are set for the next review.

Co-operative management

Suma

Boss-free working Suma is a worker co-operative, meaning that unlike most businesses, we operate a thoroughly democratic system of management that isn’t bound by a conventional management hierarchy, which can often stand in the way of fairness and hinder progress.

As a worker co-operative, the business is jointly owned and managed by all of us. We collectively do all the jobs that need doing, whether it’s delivering orders in the Suma trucks, cooking lunch in the canteen or developing exciting new Suma products.

Being 100% owned and managed by our workers means we are all on board in terms of achieving our greener lifestyle aims, and not working to line the pockets of external shareholders.

In fact, there are no directors and no managers. Instead, we multi-skill and job share to ensure a level of engagement and integration that would simply not be found in a conventional business.

Our co-operative is mainly made up of members, and some short-term contract workers.

To become a Suma member, there is a trial member process that lasts nine months.

Trial members spend the first three months in our warehouse, learning the key skills to pick orders. They then move on to a variety of ‘home departments’, with the aim of gaining experience

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Above Suma is Europe’s largest single-pay vegetarian wholesale co-operative

THE SUMA MISSION The FAC team and MC meet regularly to set yearly business plans and discuss longer-term strategy. The co-op members and workers are invited to contribute to these conversations.

Our current mission statement, which is at the heart of our plans, is: “To provide a high-quality service to customers and a rewarding working environment for the members, within a sustainable, ethical, co-operative business structure. To strive to promote a healthier lifestyle by supplying ethical, eco-friendly, vegetarian products.”

Over time we have developed a successful management structure for the co-op. In the early years, decisions were taken at a weekly meeting of all members, and all decisions required 100% agreement. Yet this approach had to develop as we grew in size. Today the co-op is managed by the Quarterly General Meeting (QGM), which all members should attend. The QGMs are also open to Suma workers. Decisions such as changes to policy and new proposals are discussed and voted on at the QGMs. Changes to policy or new proposals require a 50% majority, and changes to our constitution require a 75% majority.

Outside the QGM, an elected management committee (MC) of six members meets weekly to make decisions on behalf of the co-op. Any member can stand for election to the MC, which must always have at least two women on board.

The co-op is divided into six function areas – brand, buying, distribution, service, tactical sales and warehouse – which are managed by appointed function area coordinators (FACs). Within most of the function areas are also various team coordinators and roles of responsibility.

In addition, we have a number of officers who are appointed to specific roles, for example, finance officer, health and safety officer and personnel officer. The holders of these posts can make specific decisions on behalf of the co-op when necessary.

Ultimately, the QGM is the ‘boss’ of the co-op, and members are expected to self-manage in the co-op’s best interest.

Rebecca Kinnard is a member of Suma co-op

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28/09/2017 17:16

Vision

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SETTING THE LEADERSHIP AGENDA 40 Act with courage Risking unpopularity to do the right thing

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42 Self-reflection An essential component of a continuous learning journey

xceptional leaders – where are they when you need them?

Following the sudden and tragic death of Princess Diana in 1997, the Queen struggled to find the appropriate response.

She was seen to be stiff and incredibly out of touch with a nation that was plunged into convulsive shock by the gruesome car crash that stole Diana’s life.

In contrast, this was probably the moment that made the then prime minister, Tony Blair. He totally caught the mood of the nation and hardly anyone who heard him speak will forget his near perfect intervention on the day Diana died, when he described her as the “People’s Princess”. He represented, both emotionally and authentically, how most people felt.

It took a few years for the Queen to recover her place in our hearts, because her scripted and emotion-free addresses temporarily damaged her reputation.

In a crisis, what’s needed most urgently is the ability to emotionally connect with those who have suffered – the people who will otherwise feel aggrieved and neglected.

Empathy and emotional intelligence (EQ) will always win over strategy and intelligence quotient (IQ).

Our current prime minister Theresa May re-emphasised this point with her bumbling and baffling performance in front of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, which is estimated to have killed at least 80 people. Due to her desire to be in complete control, she came across as completely out of touch. What’s more, her guarded and cautious approach was misconstrued as “uncaring and robotic”.

Today, crises abound that demand and deserve authentic leadership. So where

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44 The biology of trust What saliva reveals about high-performing teams

Exceptional leaders for exceptional times Empathy and EQ will always win over strategy and IQ By

René Carayol

46 Why vision isn’t enough Exploring the traits of the multi-dimensional leader

are our true leaders? We are not talking managers or ‘experts’ who rely on data, evidence and intellectual prowess. Instead, we are talking about individuals who have the ability to take other people with them at a difficult time. This is less about intellect and much more about EQ and being seen to be able to connect, empathise and most of all, ‘walk in the shoes’ of those who have suffered.

In these times of growing global uncertainty, we need more inspired leaders than the ones we’ve got. Unfortunately, however, we have fallen into the bad habit of looking for the ‘cleverest person in the room’, or for someone who is ‘strong and stable’.

Leadership should no longer be about rank or hierarchy.

IN THESE TIMES OF GROWING GLOBAL UNCERTAINTLY, WE NEED MORE INSPIRED LEADERS So, are leaders born or are leaders made? Well, neither actually – leaders are found. To prove the point, I believe that the ideal leadership role models for today are mothers. Good mothers have exceptional emotional intelligence and a natural empathy with those they lead, nurture and support.

When we start looking for those who can influence and persuade without resorting to exercising their authority, we will soon find that we are onto something – exceptional leaders, probably.

René Carayol is an international leadership guru, visiting professor at Cass Business School and author of ‘SPIKE’. See www.carayol.com.

Follow him on Twitter @ReneCarayol

28/09/2017 16:59

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Vision

How to be a courageous leader To lead your team through a period of seismic change, you must be willing to have difficult conversations, take unpopular decisions and go where others fear to tread Writing Adrienne Gibson

C

ourage is a term that instantly evokes powerful images, images that mean different things to each of us. Perhaps it might mean climbing a mountain, leaping from a cliff or taming a lion. Or perhaps it conjures up individuals who have shaped history. Regardless of the images that arise, it is something we have all witnessed, experienced or learned about. But how do we apply it as leaders and in business?

Courage doesn’t have to be something as bold as shaping history or battling a lion. It is more commonly displayed simply by living and leading with authenticity, staying true to your values and being willing to make unpopular decisions to do

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what is right. It is also avoiding the temptation of conforming to what others think or expect of us, following group-think, or simply doing what has always been done. It is not about being different for difference’s sake. Rather, it is willingness to lead by example in paving new ways for our teams and organisations, even in difficult circumstances.

When was the last time you saw real courage displayed? What was your impression of the person displaying it? How did it make you feel? Do you create that same impression for the teams and organisations that you lead?

The Oxford Dictionary defines courage as “the ability to do something that frightens one; bravery”. Let’s face it – leading people and organisations can sometimes be frightening, especially in times of adversity or change. With experience,

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Courageous Leadership

we become more comfortable with the role, but no matter how long we’ve been leading others, there can still be situations that push us beyond our comfort zone.

Into the unknown That is especially true in today’s business environment, where leaders are facing change at a pace that seems much faster than that experienced by our predecessors. Companies of all sizes feel the pressure from global markets, financial crises, and even political surprises. Keeping up with constantly changing business environments requires leaders to demonstrate courage in making the tough decisions, taking the road less travelled and challenge the status quo. But that is not enough.

We cannot lead teams or organisations in a new direction without their alignment and support. We have to inspire others to join us on the journey and help them feel secure in the path we are leading.

That’s much easier said than done. People often avoid, resist or even fear change, so they look to their leaders for guidance. ‘Walking the talk’, leading with authenticity, showing bravery in the face of the unknown, and helping our teams feel secure on the journey, is all part of demonstrating courage. This is something we know as leaders, but, if we are honest with ourselves, I wonder how many would agree this is something we consistently demonstrate.

So how do we develop and demonstrate courage as leaders?

1

Identify what stops you from taking courageous actions. For many, it is a fear of failure or negative consequences. It may be concern about the opinions or reactions of others. Perhaps it is a lack of confidence in your own knowledge or ability. Whatever the blocks for you personally, it is important that you recognise them so that you can address and overcome them.

2

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Take risks and accept failure as a part of learning and growth. This doesn’t mean being reckless. There is a big difference between taking leaps of faith versus throwing caution to the wind and doing something just for the sake of being bold.

Taking healthy risks requires understanding the consequences of failure and being able to accept that outcome, yet creating the circumstances for success. Also, when failure occurs (and it will, if you take enough risks), take the learning from the situation and move forward. Don’t let failure stop you from taking more risks.

3

Recognise courageous steps taken in the past. When have you taken courageous steps previously? What barriers did you face and

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SHOWING REAL COURAGE IS OFTEN AS SIMPLE AS JUST BEING AUTHENTIC

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overcome? What was the outcome? How did it feel?

What did you learn? By reflecting on past experiences, identifying what made them successful (or what you learned) and recognising your courage, you can boost your confidence for taking courageous steps in the future.

4

Practise small courageous acts to build confidence. Like any skill we want to develop or behaviour we want to change, we have to practise. Just as a muscle gets stronger as we exercise it, the more we practise a behaviour, the easier it gets. Start with small actions or decisions that may be uncomfortable, at first. As the courage muscle gets stronger, it becomes more comfortable to exercise in demanding situations.

5

Be authentic and aligned to your values.

Showing real courage is often as simple as just being authentic, honest and sticking to our values.

Day-to-day, we face decisions that challenge our values, or even present ethical dilemmas. Staying true to ourselves, our values and maintaining our integrity in the face of adversity are ways we demonstrate courage every day.

Face your fears The late American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou once said: “Having courage does not mean that we are unafraid. Having courage and showing courage means we face our fears.”

Being courageous will not always be comfortable. It means having difficult conversations, making unpopular decisions, revealing our lack of knowledge or imperfections, or staying the course even when it may seem impossible. Leadership and courage are not about popularity contests.

They are about doing the right thing, rather than what’s easy, standing up for others, taking healthy risks in spite of difficulty, and taking teams to places others may not have thought possible.

The good news is that courage can be developed. It is a state of mind or quality that we can choose to demonstrate in any given situation.

It’s not being fearless. On the contrary, it is about recognising our fear and taking that next step anyway. Courage doesn’t have to be slaying dragons either (despite it feeling like that some days). It’s more typically seen in the day-to-day decisions and actions we take. And it is certainly something we want to develop within our teams if we want to enhance our businesses.

So what is that courageous decision or action you’re going to take today?

Adrienne Gibson runs Genesis Global Consulting, a coaching and consulting company focused on change, leadership and working globally. Follow her on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter @AdrienneCGibson

28/09/2017 16:59

Vision

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Eyes down, look in Self-reflection might be challenging, but it is a critical part of your on-going development process Writing Mark Bisson

I

t is part of the human condition to be introspective and to have a desire to gain a better understanding of ourselves. This is a key characteristic that sets us apart from other species. As early as 5 BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates advocated for all humans to “know thyself”. During the time of the Enlightenment, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proclaimed a revitalised conviction that, “Man is distinguished above all animals by his self-consciousness, by which he is a ‘rational animal’.”

Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud argued that human behaviour is to a large extent controlled by the unconscious mind. Developing awareness of our unconscious is often the starting point for self-reflection. As a professional coach, I view self-reflection as an essential component of my continuous learning journey. It has provided me with new insights about myself and has enhanced my understanding of others, both in my professional life and in my personal relationships. Here are my three key learnings.

1 Open up Effective self-reflection has at its core a willingness to be open internally. This openness creates a space for messages to come forward. Those messages could be words, an image or an emotion.

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British psychotherapist Alison Rickard states that we all have an internal supervisor, which is “the combined voice of the best teacher and superviser we ever had”. Twentieth-century Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire cautioned, however, that “reflection without action is sheer verbalism, or armchair revolution, and action without reflection is pure activism, or action for action’s sake”. Self-reflection therefore needs to include a call to action.

2 Push the boundaries

SELFREFLECTION HAS AT ITS CORE A WILLINGNESS TO OPEN INTERNALLY

We are unique in terms of the approaches to self-reflection that suit us best. I suggest that you push your boundaries and experiment with techniques that may feel uncomfortable. Having a healthy level of scepticism will ensure you take a balanced perspective – in my own career, some of the approaches I have been most uncomfortable with have also provided my most transformational learning. The following approaches are examples of the many options you can evaluate: Reflective writing

Reflective writing provides the opportunity to review experiences objectively at a time when you are not impacted by conditioned or instinctive emotional responses. In their 2006 paper, US medics Johanna Shapiro, Deborah Kasman and Audrey Shafer consider that reflective writing nurtures characteristics including narrative

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Self-reflection

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consciousness and made little attempt to perfect the words or form of the poem. This flow created new insights about myself and my practice, which was confrontational but non-judgemental at the same time. Writing poetry engages the right side of our brain and frees us up to a deeper creative level of interpretation. Reflective practitioner Christopher Johns frames this as “like taking a short cut to the unconscious bypassing the cognitive realm”.

Reflective drawing

competence, emotional equilibrium, self-healing capacity and well-being. The practice of writing reflectively is analytical in nature and requires us to describe an event and our thoughts and feelings, together with the new insights gained and what we would do differently as a result.

Storytelling

There is evidence that storytelling and the metaphors created within stories can support the stimulation of change in individuals. Self-disclosure through storytelling can also encourage openness in cultures that close down emotions.

Metaphors can enable us to draw out unconscious judgements, bias and assumptions that we hold about ourselves, others and the organisations in which we work. American sociolinguist William Labov, in 1972, evidenced that stories are often told for the purpose of communicating important dilemmas and problem situations. In telling the story, Labov argued the storyteller’s perspective on the dilemma or problem, and how the storyteller viewed the resolution, becomes clearer. Indeed, in telling the story the teller communicates what it was like to be within the story. These stories can then be reanalysed to gain new understanding.

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Reflective poetry

I have found that writing reflective poetry enabled me to connect with my unconscious mind in a way that I had been unable to achieve using other writing approaches. I wrote with a stream of

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IF YOU CHOOSE TO SELF-REFLECT, BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Within the visual arts world, a journal is used to capture visual language and drawn images, which are related to reflecting on issues and challenges.

These images can be invented or collected from the environment surrounding you. Reflective drawing can also be used to consider a hypothetical challenge or dilemma. Doodling and abstract drawings are alternative ways to express thoughts and feelings. All of these techniques can be used to look back, reflect on current reality and to vision ahead. I have used drawing to provide a symbolistic image of something that has blocked me and to articulate how I want something to be in the future. You don’t need to be a talented artist to benefit from this approach. The power of using drawing to self-reflect is that your images tell a story that has meaning for you. For some people, a seemingly ritualistic destroying of an image reinforces a learning. For others, images they create are given prominence in their study or office as reminder of the journey they have been on and the learning they have achieved.

3 Be kind to yourself My third learning is that if you choose to self-reflect, be kind to yourself. Recognise that this is brave, courageous work that can be used as a self-regulatory process. Swansea University emeritus professor of nursing Gary Rolfe states that critical reflection is “a difficult and challenging undertaking, but that is no reason for not attempting it”. I believe that we all have the capacity to develop our ability to self-reflect, and I would go a step further and state that it is a vital element of our on-going development as leaders, managers and coaches.

It is important to view enhancing our ability to self-reflect as a humbling journey that has no destination. It is driven by an intrinsic motivation to know ourselves so that we can be the best that we can be. I will leave you with a question: as a leader or a coach, what have you learned about your relationship with self-reflection as a result of reading this article?

Mark Bisson is author of ‘Coach Yourself First: A Coach’s Guide to Self-reflection’. For a review, see Book Club, page 82

28/09/2017 17:06

Vision

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The biology of trust Saliva reveals much about the effectiveness of a leadership team Writing Dr Maria Katsarou

F

ollowing the global financial crisis, the effectiveness of leadership teams has come under more scrutiny than ever before. Scrutiny has largely centred on corporate governance, fraud, inappropriate business strategies, or other team dysfunctions such as inattention to results or the avoidance of accountability.

Of course, corporate governance is critical, with boards and executive leadership teams the prime gatekeepers. Yet the dynamics of those teams is almost never explored – mainly because it is not easy to gain access and their proceedings are highly confidential.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a research project, driven by my interest in understanding the reasons behind business failures. I wanted to explore the unconscious processes that come into play when members of leadership teams decide who they are going to trust and why. During my research, I came across an abundance of evidence

that shows how trust occurs between team members, and the role of the hormone oxytocin in building trust. Those studies, however, focused on administering and measuring the effects of intranasal synthetic oxytocin on individuals or groups.

Structural Dynamics

FIGURE 1 RESEARCH DESIGN Organisational development intervention/ Structural dynamics

Treatment group – leadership team

Selection

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Pre-test

Post-test

1 Trust-scale 2 Oxytocin (OT) in saliva

1 Trust-scale 2 Oxytocin (OT) in saliva

My own research objective was to measure the existing oxytocin levels of a real-life leadership team, treat that team with an organisational development intervention using Structural Dynamics, and then measure their oxytocin levels again.

The patterns of human attachment are formed and influenced during the recurrent relationship that a child experiences with their primary caregiver. Oxytocin is the hormone that has been associated with this specific bonding. Its name comes from Greek words oxús, meaning swift, and tókos, meaning birth. There is a correlation between trust and oxytocin, and there are several studies that have shown evidence to this effect.

The release of oxytocin in the brain during trusting interactions makes humans treat each other as though they are part of the same tribe or family.

Structural Dynamics, devised by US systems psychologist Dr David Kantor, is a model that shows how face-to-face communication may be facilitated or hindered among team members, including the leader. By making the invisible structure of discourse visible, it uncovers problems in face-to-face communication and helps to bring about change once all unspoken issues are dealt with. It includes a self-reported psychometric instrument, the results of which provide an individual report, as well as an aggregate team report. In addition to having their oxytocin levels measured, the research participants completed

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Unconscious Processes

FIGURE 2 OXYTOCIN BEFORE AND AFTER INTERVENTION Oxytocin Con pg/ml

100 80 60 40 20 0

0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 Oxytocin Con pg/ml

BEFORE

a paper-and-pencil questionnaire on trust before and after the intervention. I then compared these results with the oxytocin results. A key purpose of the study was to apply an interdisciplinary approach – in other words, to merge knowledge from leadership literature and practice with knowledge from psychology and neuroscience.

Research methodology A leadership team from a retail organisation participated in my research. This leadership team consisted of seven members, including the managing director. The research was a quasi-experiment (see Figure 1, opposite), which took place in a hotel over two days. A microbiologist measured the oxytocin levels of participants using a saliva swab twice – once at the beginning of day one and again at the end of day two. The participants also completed the paper-and-pencil questionnaire on trust twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of the two days.

Over the course of the two-day experiment, I used Structural Dynamics to explore what trust meant to the participants. There were quite a few misunderstandings regarding the leader’s behaviour towards certain team members, and issues among pairs within the team. So it was very important to understand where those issues stemmed from, as well as to distinguish between the impact and intention of a specific behaviour, and to talk openly about participants’ assumptions and expectations with respect to one another.

Results At the end of the experiment, all participants showed an improvement in the trust scale scores

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AFTER

TRUST IS CRUCIAL TO GIVING AND RECEIVING FEEDBACK

45

(paper-and-pencil psychometric) once the Structural Dynamics had taken place. The exception was the leader, whose scores remained the same. Interestingly, women’s scores improved more than men’s. In terms of oxytocin, the oxytocin levels of all participants – including the leader – rose dramatically (see Figure 2).

So why did the leader’s score stay the same with the paper-and-pencil questionnaire, but improve dramatically in the oxytocin test? The answer to that question is this: in the paper-and-pencil questionnaire, the leader replied consciously because he believed that having chosen his team, he already had a high level of trust in them. But his oxytocin levels revealed that his trust in his team actively increased as a result of the Structural Dynamics, despite what he may have wanted to believe.

Over the two days, the team members had an opportunity to raise concerns around behaviours and trust. The discussion was not easy, and the heat and stakes rose, which was a necessary aspect of the intervention. Yet it also led into a ‘disequilibrium’ of the system, which allowed the team members to move forward, resolve misconceptions and arrive at a space where they were able to have these difficult, yet necessary and productive, conversations. Higher oxytocin levels were therefore evidence of their improved trust.

At the end of the two days, the participants came up with an action plan on how to continue to work on team effectiveness, as well as how to cascade the value of trust down their organisation.

Conclusion From a leadership or management perspective, the implications of being able to build trust are great. Trust creates conscious opportunities for constructive social interaction among team members, or between a leader and team members.

It is crucial to communication, giving and receiving feedback, and establishing a safe environment during a team-building activity.

Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, we can see the impact of our behaviour on someone’s brain. If providing unsolicited feedback to your direct report has the same impact on them as hearing footsteps following them in the dark, imagine what effect you are having on them! That’s why we need to get to know our biology better and understand that trust is not some near-magical elixir. It is something we can feasibly work towards – and even measure.

Dr Maria Katsarou is managing director of the Leadership Psychology Institute. Contact her via maria@ leadersipsy.com and https://drmariakatsarou.blog

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Vision

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eadership is about “providing hope and passion”, and by “questioning it, you learn it”. Plus, to “transform leadership we all must act as a collective, and ensure the culture of an organisation is right”. Finally: “How emotionally intelligent you are, or the mind-set you have, will determine the impression you leave. The ideal situation is to leave a positive fingerprint!”

These were just some of the take-away messages from a conference organised by The Institute of Leadership & Management in the summer, entitled Why Vision Isn’t Enough: The Multi-Dimensional Leader. Its theme was “leadership is never a finished product”, so it cannot and should not be done alone.

Opening the conference, Institute CEO Phil James highlighted that vision has long been an attribute of great leadership. But in an increasingly unpredictable environment, both politically and commercially, vision alone does not always lead to organisational success. So what else makes a difference?

The Institute has a framework that identifies five separate dimensions of great leadership, namely: ownership, achievement, collaboration and vision, with authenticity at the heart and centre of the framework. At the conference, these dimensions were explored in the context of everyday working life.

Five dimensions of leadership

Why vision isn’t enough Leaders must be multi-dimensional and leave a positive fingerprint if they are to succeed in today’s fast-moving and capricious world Writing Neena Dhaun

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A wide range of motivational speakers addressed the event – ironman and coach Jim Rees; leadership and enterprise development professor Kiran Trehan; educationalist Dame Kathy August; and leadership development expert James McCulloch.

Their subjects were derived from the Institute’s leadership framework, which is based on extensive research into the knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviours and values that enable organisational leaders to achieve successful outcomes in the workplace. Kate Cooper, the Institute’s head of research, policy & standards, chaired all the talks.

Executive coach Jim Rees began by discussing achievement. He asked the conference delegates to analyse what the attributes of great performers are, and how much of those are attitudinal or skills based. It transpired that attitude has a key impact on behaviour, which then translates into what you do and what you say. Hence it is essential to performance. He ended by saying that the pursuit of high performance was characterised by constantly questioning yourself and asking “who you become in pursuit of your goals?”

Next up was Professor Kiran Trehan, who

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Multi-dimensional Leadership

explored ways to enact inspirational leadership. She said: “It is often by taking the more challenging routes, as opposed to the one of least resistance. Learning about leadership is questioning it.”

Turning to authenticity, Trehan reiterated that true success in organisations comes from great leaders having integrity and the ability to inspire trust. As professor of leadership and enterprise development at Birmingham Business School, her definition of authentic leadership is about self-awareness – knowing yourself, as opposed to rewarding and pleasing others.

Trehan used a video of Guy Garvey, frontman of rock band Elbow, with his full orchestra as an analogy of how the sum of all parts is what makes something a success. Guy was not able to have the same impactful performance without the choir, musicians, and indeed the audience itself. She ended by saying: “It’s the power of the collective, working with the differences in your teams, so you can change the music of leadership.”

THE VISION CONFERENCE

Clockwise from top left: Phil James; Kate Cooper with educationalist Dame Kathy August; delegates enjoy an inspiring talk

through curriculum-based and extra-curricular activities. She emphasised that soft skills, such as demonstrating responsibility and accepting accountability, can be learned at an early age and then developed in adulthood.

Organisational culture

A shortage of greatness

There was a huge amount of audience interaction during the conference, with delegates taking part in the real-time polls and question-and-answer sessions, or using the Institute’s designated hashtags for tweeting.

One question polled was: Women are underrepresented in senior posts in multi-academy trusts – who should ‘own’ this problem?

James McCulloch, the final speaker, addressed why industry does such a poor job of developing great leaders. To capture the audience’s imagination, he asked what the most important thing in life was. Silence ensued, but gradually words such as ‘happiness’, ‘contentment’ and ‘wellness’ cropped up. His own answer was: “feeling good”.

He continued by highlighting the lack of positive stories around good leadership development.

Nods from the crowd resulted, with remarks of: “Tell us some”.

McCulloch went on to re-tell some career anecdotes, which were met with smiles, before explaining that his role is to make people break their bad habits and look at new ways of learning.

Leadership is about providing hope, and being in place to provide safety and compassion, he concluded.

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1 School governors 2 It’s not a problem 3 Teacher training organisations 4 Female teachers should assume responsibility for their own advancement 5 Department of Education Surprisingly, answer four polled highest, and was a good segway into the Institute’s Ownership Ambassador, Dame Kathy August. An educationalist, she was the first principal of the Manchester Academy in Moss Side.

Getting the culture right is crucial to leadership success in organisations, she said. That means employing the right people with the right mind-set, values and moral purpose. “You cannot outsource the organisational culture,” she explained.

In August’s experience, the strongest leadership came from senior people with high visibility and high communication skills. “Always explain to your team why you’re doing something, but also why you’re not. Both are equally important.”

The process of developing leadership skills can start when children are at school, both

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Leading by example

THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP SKILLS CAN START AT SCHOOL

As Kate Cooper put it, the conference focused on the multi-dimensional nature of leadership and, by highlighting its complexity, assisted with its practice.

She endorsed management philosopher Charles Hampden Turner’s definition of authenticity as being “what lies between people” – a recognition of the importance of relationships to everyone who leads or aspires to lead.

Neena Dhaun is PR and external communications manager for the Institute of Leadership & Management

28/09/2017 17:04

The Drucker Forum Special Report The Institute of Leadership & Management is proud to partner with the Global Peter Drucker Forum

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DIGITAL VERSION OUT 4 SEPTEMBER Download your special preview report featuring top speakers from the upcoming 2017 Forum at institutelm.com/ drucker-special-report

28/09/2017 05/07/2017 17:16 09:43

Making it Happen

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MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE 50 Emotional evolution Tapping into humanity at work

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our brain has been on a learning journey since the day you were born.

When you were born, your brain cells were largely unconnected.

Over the first two years of your life, they started to connect rapidly as you adapted to novel information. Over this time, you formed as many as two million new synapses (connections) every second until you had about 1,000 trillion of them.

By your second birthday, your brain had tripled in size and actually had more synapses than you do now. Then you began a process of synaptic ‘pruning’: some connections were removed in order to strengthen others. In your teens, your brain underwent a second period of rapid growth and neutral reorganisation, and it wasn’t until your mid-twenties that your brain was fully developed.

After your twenties, your brain reverts to a pruning approach – it now operates on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young,” asserted Henry Ford, the US industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company.

There is a neurological truth in this. The degree to which your brain continues to develop, or wither away, is largely based on how much you train it like a muscle. If you continue to learn and challenge your brain, it strengthens, grows, and remains younger for longer.

Here are three ways to keep your brain young: 1 Learn new things Learn new skills and continue to learn new things, especially languages and musical instruments.

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54 Show of solidarity Employees can react to change in unexpected ways

Nurture your neurons How to keep your brain young and agile By

Phil Dobson

56 High-performance procurement The role of leadership in contract management

This will help keep your brain young and flexible. Research suggests that bilinguals are better at solving puzzles, better at directing their attention, and less likely to suffer from symptoms of dementia.

Researchers from the Harvard Medical School found more grey matter volume in musicians compared with non-musicians.

2 Embrace novelty Take a class in something you’re interested in for its own sake.

Learn new academic subjects. Read broadly, try new authors and explore new genres.

Explore and travel more. Challenge your routines and make unconscious behaviours conscious. Take a different route home, use your non-dominant hand more and try doing things with your eyes closed.

Do things the hard way, deliberately live outside of your comfort zone and remain socially active.

3 Take care of your brain Don’t forget to take care of your overall brain fitness with sleep, physical exercise and a healthy diet.

Sleep is important because while you sleep, your brain undergoes a toxic wash, washing away plaques and keeping it healthy.

Physical exercise helps produce BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which helps your brain to produce grey and white matter and consequently keep it younger for longer. Finally, don’t forget nutrition – a Mediterranean diet is associated with improved brain health over the long term.

LEARNING NEW SKILLS KEEPS YOUR BRAIN YOUNG

Ultimately, your brain fitness, now and in the future, is very much up to you. Invest in it accordingly.

Phil Dobson is a coach, founder of BrainWorkshops, and author of ‘The Brain Book - How to Think and Work Smarter’.

This article is an edited extract from his book

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Making it Happen

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Emotional Evolution

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Behind the mask How can managers help their teams to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work?

Writing Georgina Fuller

P

icture this: it’s Monday morning and you have had a difficult and draining weekend at home. You have been up half the night worrying and only got a few hours’ sleep. Maybe you had a big row with your other half, or perhaps you were worrying about your finances or a family member.

You get up, make yourself presentable, hit the caffeine and drag yourself into work. When you get there, you put on a smile, wish your colleagues a good morning and sit down at your desk as though everything were fine.

You don’t mention anything to your colleagues about your worries because you want to remain professional. But adopting a professional persona is actually detrimental to our health and wellbeing, according to philosopher and School of Life co-founder Alain de Botton.

“When we go into work we put a mask on and become a caricature of ourselves,” he said, at a conference earlier this year. “We are, in fact, cutting ourselves off from humanity by trying to appear professional, rational and intelligent.”

Instead, employers need to create an open culture where we can embrace and admit our frailties, and develop our softer skills, such as empathy and honesty, Botton said.

Tell your story So how can today’s managers help their teams bring their ‘true selves’ to work, and connect emotionally as well as professionally with their colleagues?

Storytelling can be one way to get people to ‘open up’, says Dr Penny Moore, a social psychologist and research fellow at Henley Business School.

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WHEN WE GO INTO WORK WE PUT A MASK ON AND BECOME A CARICATURE OF OURSELVES

“When a leader shares their story and meaningful life experiences, it helps to put people at ease and create an environment where they can open up and share their story too,” she notes.

The context and environment in which people communicate is, however, crucial. “People should have a designated time and space to share their stories and be their true selves,” Moore notes.

“It’s about giving them a window to talk about the important stuff, the things that have shaped them or made a difference.”

Sarah Stein Lubrano, head of content, and designer of learning and development workshops at the School of Life, says it is also about bringing the ‘right’ part of yourself to work. “One of the ways you can do this is to listen more deeply in conversations and to try to more closely address what the other person is saying, including the emotional subtext,” she notes. Slowing a conversation down and paying attention to any pauses can help you read the emotional subtext. “We can also ask smarter questions to draw out what the other person is really getting at,” explains Stein Lubrano.

One of the best ways managers can demonstrate their authenticity is by owning up to their mistakes. “The leader or manager who can admit where they messed up and demonstrate awareness of their own blind spots doesn’t just earn trust, but makes other people comfortable admitting their own mistakes – which in turn allows the manager much greater visibility over how things are going,” says Stein Lubrano.

Moore is also noticing a link between sharing stories and employee performance. “It’s still early days in my research, but it seems that the workplaces where leaders share their stories are definitely more productive,” she notes.

Matt Russell, managing director, talent practice at Lee Hecht Harrison Penna business

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Making it Happen

psychologists, says that is not surprising. “People are more likely to stay at their job if they have a human connection with their manager and feel comfortable coming into work each day,” he notes.

Russell believes that managers who share certain aspects of their home or family life with their team come across as more personable, and that this could have a significant impact on productivity and retention. “The team will start performing better if they develop emotional relationships with each other and feel as though they can be more honest in giving and receiving feedback,” he notes.

Emotional Evolution

SELFREFLECTION IS IMPORTANT BUT OVERSHARING IS A BIG ‘NO-NO’

As the mood dictates…

A recent study by the Institute of Leadership & Management, however, painted a somewhat bleak picture of today’s managers in terms of their emotional evolution. Half of the 1,200 managers surveyed by the Institute and YouGov in summer 2016 admitted to allowing their personal mood and state of mind to dictate the climate of their workplace, and a quarter (26%) also said they did not seek to build trust with their colleagues.

HOW DOES YOUR COMPANY ENCOURAGE YOU TO BE?

Holly Barry, a digital PR executive at Distinctly PR, says one of the best things about where she works is the fact that the MD brings in his dog, Dolly, every day. “She’s a Hungarian Vizsla and she is absolutely adorable.

There are a couple of people in the office who are more cat people, but everyone loves her,” she says. “Having the opportunity to walk her at lunchtime means we can get out of the office for a breath of fresh air and do a bit of exercise.”

050-052_EdgeYule2017_Evolution.indd 52

Luke Hughes, founder of Origym, a provider of personal training courses, runs a daily quiz on a subject of an employee’s choosing.

“Each staff member will suggest five areas where they are knowledgeable and we then draw a random topic out of a hat,” he explains.

“Today, for example, the questions were about previous Wimbledon winners. It’s a fun way for everyone to get involved and tell us what their interests are.”

Mary Hughes, a senior sign-writer at HN Signs in Birmingham, says her company encourages staff to personalise the office space. “We pitch ideas about the images we’d like to go on the wall until a final decision has been made,” she explains. “We’re all big music lovers, so much of it is music related. We’ve got pictures of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Blondie. If it were just a blank space, it wouldn’t be an inviting environment to work in.”

Overall, the Institute’s Five Dimensions of Leadership: Authenticity report, based on the research, found that good leadership was a work in progress, with self-knowledge being the starting point.

Lydia Amoah, a business coach, says it’s up to managers to understand and contribute to the objectives of the business they represent. “It falls upon their shoulders to then communicate the company’s vision and goals to their teams,” she says. “It’s important for them to set the tone and act as a positive role model in a firm, but fair, way.”

It seems our American cousins have thought of some increasingly weird and wonderful ways to ‘set the tone’ and introduce humour in the workplace in a bid to help workers bond with their colleagues.

A recent study by Management Learning journal road-tested some of the methods suggested in Gung Ho!, a book on motivating employees written by management gurus Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. These included managers dressing up as animals, such as beavers, geese and squirrels, in training sessions to reflect and mimic the qualities of the animals. Researchers from Anglia Ruskin and Lancaster University found, however, that some of the employees who took part in the animal culture-change programme found it “patronising” and “hard to take seriously”.

As with most things in life, there is an app to help you measure your emotional well-being at work. The Remente digital coaching app allows users to chart their satisfaction with various aspects of their lives over time, including their career. “The app asks users on a daily basis how they are feeling, and how happy they are, and lets them set goals towards the directions in life and at work that are important to them,” explains entrepreneur and Remente founder David Brudö.

Remente, which was launched in 2016, aims to prevent users from ‘bottling up’ their feelings.

“This technique will likely lead to a more serious issue later down the line, such as stress, conflicts, lower productivity or sick-leave,” Brudö notes.

“Being aware of one’s feelings, and charting them with regularity, allows employees to be more selfaware and better communicators.”

Yet there is such a thing as ‘too much information’ and it is important to know where to draw the line when it comes to disclosing personal details about your life to your colleagues, warns Aisha Oakley, head of HR consultancy and outsourcing at Bradfield HR consultancy. “The tipping point that pushes others away from trusting us as managers or leaders, is when we overshare or allow our emotional self to dominate or affect our business decisions,” she notes. “Self-reflection and managing our own emotions is important, but oversharing is a big ‘no no’.”

Georgina Fuller is a freelance journalist, editor and digital content provider

28/09/2017 17:04

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28/09/2017 17:16

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Employees can react to change in unexpected ways, which presents challenges for managers Writing Professor Gabriele Jacobs

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one of us really like change, whether we’re managers or those who are adapting to new ways of working, new processes, new offices or joining a different team of people.

Mergers, acquisitions, reorganisations, continuous improvement initiatives: each of these inflicts change on us at some

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IT TURNS OUT IT’S NOT THOSE SUFFERING FROM CHANGE WHO WORRY MOST ABOUT IT

Studies on self-interest Current change studies exclusively focus on the self-interest of employees confronted by change.

Shutterstock

Show of solidarity

point. In today’s business world, everybody has to be change-ready and change-resilient if they want to be part of the contemporary workforce. There simply isn’t room for those who have to be pushed out of the office on their chair when change occurs.

Since change is increasingly coming thicker and faster, with the ability to change business operations and processes becoming critical to survival, how can managers within organisations handle change better?

Much research has focused on the management of organisational change. A recent study by the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, analysed the reactions of 23 employees to change projects in a large police organisation. The purpose? To determine how to improve organisational change management.

Remarkably, it revealed unexpected results.

It turns out it’s not those suffering from change who worry most about it. It is their colleagues who are more concerned about how their workmates might suffer in the change process – and indeed worry most about the impact on the entire organisation.

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Making it Happen

Our study places a new and fresh challenge for managers, since it alters their perspective when it comes to handling a change programme. In particular, it seems that managers need to consider the impact of change on those not directly affected, just as much as the effect on the casualties of change themselves.

Rethink reactions Significant reorganisations can be fear-inducing events for employees who see their roles and career opportunities being affected by new structures and ideas. That’s why managers often assume that employee behaviour – and backlash – against change is mainly driven by self-preservation.

Employees’ reactions to change are influenced by a number of factors, however. It is reasonable to expect the workforce to react since the process of change involves going from the known to the unknown. Yet when employees react, it is important to distinguish between the symptoms of their reactions and the causes behind them.

In the Rotterdam School of Management study, we found that, in general, employees tend to form more elaborate opinions about the effects of change than managers often anticipate. They tend to see various gains and losses in every change, both for themselves, for others, and for the organisation.

New career options can open up, and some people welcome new and improved ways of working. Simultaneously, however, these people can also feel bad for others who have lost career options, or else be deeply concerned as to whether the change really benefits their organisation.

This reaction from participants in our police service study was unexpected, since we were anticipating that employees would mainly want to minimise the damage to their own positions and careers. Yet only a minority of people expressed such an opinion.

More voiced concern over what would happen to their colleagues, and the organisation itself, as a result of organisational change. They were also worried about how the general public might react to the changes, or how the quality of the police service might suffer.

While the research related to a police force, the insights we gained are potentially relevant to other sectors where change projects are common and affect a large workforce.

The cost of change Among the in-depth interviews that formed the basis of our study, we questioned a select cohort, namely change recipients, who had been recruited into a high-potential group at the police

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Change Management

IT IS ENTICING TO FRAME EMPLOYEES AS ‘WITH US’ OR ‘AGAINST US’

55

leadership academy. These change recipients might have a biased positive attitude towards their work and greater capacity for understanding a managerial perspective, when compared with the average change recipient.

Our respondents were generally in agreement that the beneficial effects of organisational change are always accompanied by costs and negative outcomes. The change they perceived to be unsuccessful was when it delivered benefits at different levels for different parties.

When an interviewer asked what might have been different had the project been perfect, one respondent replied: “I don’t know, I have never seen an ideal change project in my life.”

Our data provides some clues that the social cost of change is potentially very high if we consider that each and every colleague negatively affected by a change process has, in turn, many colleagues observing her or his pain.

From this perspective, the effects of social losses are easily multiplied and extend far beyond a single change recipient to others who may not directly lose out because of the change, and may even personally benefit from it.

Management challenge If they witness the suffering of colleagues, or feel concern that external stakeholders – such as the public – might get poor outcomes, change recipients might be inclined to resist the change out of solidarity with the change victims.

This complexity suggests that we need to develop greater awareness and understanding of ‘net reactions to change’ if we want to predict how people will react to and behave in response to change, or how they will be impacted by change.

Senior management often has its hands full when reorganisations are designed and implemented. Under pressure, it is enticing to frame employees as ‘with us’ or ‘against us’, but the reality is more layered and less clear-cut.

Managers who want their reorganisations to succeed could improve their chances of doing so by listening to what employees see as gains and losses. This way, resistance to organisational change becomes a valuable source of managerial information.

Clearly, what stands out is that change has much greater implications than the obvious victims of a restructure process. It hurts work colleagues more than any of us think, and sets further challenges for managers to overcome.

Gabriele Jacobs is professor of organisational behaviour and culture at the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

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Making it Happen

56

A basis for better buying Leadership is the answer to the challenges posed by complex contracts Writing Colin Linton

N

umerous media stories have highlighted the problems with significant contracts in both the public and private sectors. High-profile incidents in recent years include significant problems with the delivery of some prison service contracts and the maintenance of Ministry of Defence-owned accommodation for armed forces personnel. There have also been supply chain issues where high-profile brands have been potentially compromised due to poor practice.

These examples are ‘media-worthy’ due to the sums of money involved. Yet they also draw attention to the fact that if issues can arise on these sorts of contracts, where one might assume that more experienced contract managers focus, what might be the position on other contracts that fall under the executive radar? Poor contract management practice is known

to create numerous issues including sub-standard supplier performance, poor quality products, unnecessarily inflated costs and reputational risks.

What is the scale of the issue? There is no definitive valuation of the scale of global procurement, so the potential importance of contract management is not readily apparent. The scale can only be estimated, although the value is significant. In the UK, for example, the government has annual procurement spend in the region of £250 billion. In the US, government procurement is estimated at US$7 trillion. Meanwhile, it is generally agreed that for most private-sector organisations, the annual value of bought-in goods and services is equivalent to at least half of the organisation’s turnover.

Given the number of high-profile contract issues that exist, perhaps current practices are no longer sufficient to cope with the complexities and rigours of the modern world, particularly

TOP 10 SKILLS PRIVATE v PUBLIC SECTOR Private Sector

1

Public Sector

Skills

%

Understand contract terms and conditions

83

1

Skills

%

Understand contract terms and conditions

93

2

Negotiation tactics and planning

80

2

Negotiation tactics and planning

78

3

Soft skills (influencing, persuasion, etc)

74

3

76

4

Risk management

72

Understand the fundamental principles of contract law

5

Handling conflict situations and dispute resolution

69

6

Relationship management

69

7

Managing internal stakeholders

65

8

Understand the fundamental principles of contract law

62

9

Creating a performance framework for suppliers

10

Strategic thinking

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4

Relationship management

71

5

Risk management

71

6

Creating a performance framework for suppliers

69

7

Handling conflict situations and dispute resolution

69

8

Soft skills (influencing, persuasion, etc)

64

58

9

Understand the regulations

63

57

10

Managing internal stakeholders

61

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Procurement

57

tive engagement, i.e. contract leadership (see matrix, centre, bottom). Not all contracts require leadership. Indeed, not all contracts require management. To figure out what is needed, ensure that all contracts are properly recorded (administration). For some, this is all that is required. Others will change The research over the contract term and need ongoing maintenance, but little The research was driven by a hypothesis – in light of media effort in terms of proactivity. For those that require proactive coverage around poorly delivered contracts – that management engagement, while remaining relatively static over their term, of procurement-related expenditure could be better dealt with. conventional contract management techniques will be sufficient. For more complex contracts, where change is a regular In particular, the research had two key objectives: occurrence and formality vital, and where continual engagement (with internal and external stakeholders) is needed, a contract to identify competencies for highly effective contract leadership approach should be adopted. People involved in managers; and these contracts should be skilled across the competencies iden to ascertain the necessary level of preparedness for contract tified in the tables on page 56. managers to do their role effectively.

CONTRACT LEADERSHIP So what’s the difference between contract leadership and contract manageI surveyed 130 experienced contract Implementing contract leadership ment? Contract leadership requires high managers, evenly divided across the public levels of proactivity with all relevant and private sectors. The overwhelming High stakeholders. The contract leader takes majority (96%) did not have a relevant ownership of the contract, collaborating qualification when they commenced their closely with the supplier. Potential issues first contract management role. Only 2% of Contract Contract management leadership are identified as soon as they arise and are respondents had a qualification in procuredealt with promptly, before they become ment and supply, while the other 2% had a too serious. The contract leader has a law qualification. high level of interpersonal skills and uses When I asked them about their first emotional intelligence to manage relationyear as a contract manager, 82% of responAdministration Maintenance ships and drive value. Contract leaders dents stated that they had received no have thorough market knowledge and can formal training at all, yet all were involved quickly recognise the potential impact on in managing contracts of substantial value Low High Level of contract delivery of any changes that arise (most were responsible for contracts with formulisation within the market. Contract leaders are a value of £1 million or more). A further 8% comfortable dealing with conflict situastated that they only received unstructured High tions and have a wide range of skills to help ‘on-the-job training’. In other words, 90% them do so. received no formal training at all within Contract leadership their first 12 months in post.

Contract management In addition to ascertaining the levels Conclusion Maintenance of preparedness of those new to contract management roles and their experience of Ultimately, the findings of my research initial training programmes, the research suggest that insufficient attention is paid Administration attempted to identify the key skills considto the support provided to staff who ered necessary to deliver enhanced value manage contracts and suppliers within through a more proactive approach to organisations. Not only are they generally managing contracts. While one might have inadequately prepared when they begin Low High Level of expected some significant variations in their role, but they are given little help to formulisation views from public- and private-sector staff, develop relevant skills during their first 12 the results show limited differences. months in the post. While it is feasible for © Colin Linton/Gidea Solutions Limited (2017) The tables opposite show the top 10 people with no or very limited experience skills (as selected and ranked by the survey respondents). Nine of to succeed from the outset in dealing with significant contracts, these applied to both the public and private sectors. Unsurpris- the potential risks for the organisation can be high. So properly ingly, ‘Understanding the regulations’ (ie the Public Contracts tailored formal training and development programmes should Regulations 2015 or the Utilities Contracts Regulations 2016) be established for staff who deal with supplier relationships was important to public-sector staff. These regulations do not where a contract leadership approach is considered necessary. apply to those managing contracts in the private sector.

Conventional ‘contract management’ is sufficient for certain The start point is to determine the profile of the contract. expenditure, but the most important contracts need more than The matrix (centre, top) shows a broad approach to profiling. just ‘management’ – it’s time for contract leadership.

In reality, however, the approach is often not so clear-cut. For Colin Linton is an academic and trainer in procurement, marketing example, some contracts that have a low level of formalisation and leadership, as well as a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & may still be very important and require high levels of proac- Management. Contact him at: colin.linton@gideasolutions.com Proactive engagement

Proactive engagement

when organisations are increasingly using third parties? This was the question I sought to answer through a study that was part of a master’s in research at the University of Leicester.

056-057_EdgeYule2017_ProcMan.indd 57

28/09/2017 17:03

THE VOICES BEHIND THE

THINKING

Visit us @ www.LIDRadio.com Podcasts available on ITunes, SoundCloud and audioBoom To access the podcast scan the QR code

058_EdgeYule2017_ADVERT_CFO.indd 58

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Beyond Borders

59

INTERNATIONAL INSIGHT AND BEST PRACTICE 59 Ready for lift-off The secrets of a successful launch

O

ne of the most common obstacles to any launch is fighting the inertia of the status quo. You can be excited about a new idea, business, or career, but unless you make a conscious decision to start exploring that new idea, business or career, it will remain a figment of your imagination.

Change is part of every launch. We are moving from the path we are on to a newly imagined one. That may require a change in how we see the world, and in how others see us. It may also require us to change our habits. For example, when I was writing The Launch Book, I had to change my routine to carve out time to write. I also needed to embrace a new identity as an author.

The fear of failure is quite real when we are launching something new – especially for leaders who already have a strong track record. What if we don’t achieve the outcomes we first imagined when the idea for the launch first surfaced? That thought alone can keep us from taking the first step.

So how can you get over these psychological obstacles to launch something new?

For every launch, there is a customer.

If you are launching a new career, your customer will be the industry you want to move to and the potential hiring companies with it. If you are launching a new project within your organisation, the customers may be colleagues in other departments. If you are launching a start-up, the customers will be the people whose problems your product or service can address.

Deepen Parikh is a partner with US-based Courtside Ventures. The firm invests in early-stage start-ups in the sports, technology and media sectors. Deepen also has his own experience of launching a start-up. I have worked

059_EdgeYule2017_Sanjin.indd 59

60 Bon travail Leadership lessons from France

Ready for lift-off Don’t let fear get in the way of your new launch By

Sanyin Siang

64 Sub-Saharan Africa Connecting millennials with tech start-ups

with him to develop a thought-leadership technology and media summit for owners.

He finds that it’s easy for entrepreneurs to start with an idea that directly impacts their own life, but then they tend to stop at that level, which is a mistake.

“You have to think bigger,” he says. “A lot of the time people do not do enough due diligence when going into an idea, but it’s good to be a little naive. If you know too much, then you would be jaded. There would be certain things you wouldn’t do that could prevent you from innovating.”

Another point that Deepen makes about launches is this: “It’s important to solve your own problems, but once you have identified a problem, you need to validate it with interest. If it’s a consumer product, figure

UNDERSTAND YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS’ PAIN POINTS out if it’s something people would use on an on-going basis. If it’s an enterprise product, would people actually pay for it?”

So whatever you’re launching, whether it’s a new product or a new you, make sure that you understand your potential customers’ pain points. From there, figure out how your launch idea can be shaped in a way that is relevant to them.

By including your customers early on in the process, you will overcome the inertia of the status quo, ensure that your launch solves a key problem, and diminish the potential for failure. You will also start to build the momentum that will keep you going for the rest of the launch.

Sanyin Siang is a US-based leadership coach whose focus is to help champions keep winning.

She is also author of ‘The Launch Book’

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Beyond Borders

Suivez le guide France doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let its top-down leadership style hinder its productivity Writing Professor Christine Naschberger

Illustration Janne Livonen

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France

060-063_EdgeYule2017_France.indd 61

61

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Beyond Borders

62

A

ccording to studies, French corporate leaders tend to adopt a top-down leadership style. The same goes for French public organisations.

Some experts also believe that many French employees, especially civil servants, go on strike in part as a result of this authoritarian leadership style – the feeling being that protests and strikes are the only way to be heard in France.

It is not so different in politics. Political leaders such as Emmanuel Macron have an agenda for which they have been elected, and the new executive government is implementing the electoral programme. From the outside, it looks like the French president is very prescriptive around objectives and outcomes, since he is aware that his success will be measured by France’s economic recovery. Former president François Hollande, who left a big hole in state revenues, said that he would only run again if he managed to curb French unemployment. Since the number of jobseekers grew during his presidency, he didn’t stand for a second term.

Macron’s leadership style is most likely shaped by his previous professional experience in the banking sector. But as yet it is too early to tell. At just 39 years old, he defied the odds to become the French president in May. He is the youngest incumbent ever, and has only been managing the country for a matter of months. Macron’s popularity began to steadily decline following his election, however.

In June, it stood at an impressive 64%, but by the beginning of August just 36% of the population had a favourable opinion of him. This is not seen as overly serious, since numerous former French presidents have been in a similar situation several months after their election. Macron’s fall in popularity is mainly linked to austerity policies, including budget cuts.

Winds of change In reality, top-down leadership is not practised in all French organisations. The winds of change are blowing, leading more and more leaders to reflect on ways to engage, lead and motivate employees.

Different leadership styles are practised in multinational organisations compared with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), start-ups and family enterprises. Of course, it very much depends on the level of education and values of the company’s top management team. A democratic, or ‘bottom-up’, leadership style has been gaining momentum over the past couple of years. Many professional CEO networks also provide platforms for reflection and exchanges. ‘Old-fashioned’ leadership styles are questioned, and the outcome

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DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP IS THE MOST EFFICIENT, WITH OPTIMAL RESULTS

is a renewal of management practices. Some sectors are further ahead in this area than others, yet overall there is more reflection across all industry segments.

Productivity paradox Does the French traditional leadership style have an impact on the country’s productivity? It certainly does. Early studies by German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin explored the impact on behaviour and productivity of three different leadership styles: autocratic, laissez-faire and democratic. Lewin showed that democratic leadership is the most efficient variant, with optimal collaborative behaviour and results. Nevertheless French employees are relatively high in productivity, with France coming fourth in Europe in terms of hourly labour output.

So how can we explain this paradox? French managers and senior managers are generally highly educated and technically competent, but not always well equipped to manage the human dimension in the workplace. French employees are very critical of their managers and top managers’ managerial competences. Yet, statistically speaking, French employees work fewer hours than employees in Germany or the UK. But it can be hard to compare figures and the way productivity is measured.

THE CURSE OF TECHNOLOGY French employees have traditionally tended to separate their professional and private lives. Yet the invasion of technology has changed behaviours so that this conventional separation and idea of a work-life balance are at risk of being lost. A new shift from worklife ‘balance’ to work-life ‘blending’ is happening. This may be a particular concern to white-collar workers, since they often take work back home.

A January 2017 study by organisational effectiveness consultancy Cabinet Eléas found that 37% of the French workforce was using office digital devices such as a smartphone, computer or laptop outside of working hours on a daily basis. Back in 2015, research by l’institut Think for Great Place to Work revealed that 12% of the French working population felt at risk of burn-out.

There is no perfect secret formula for

combining work and life – stakeholders need to work out the right ingredients and the correct blend. They should reflect on what is important for each employee, and how he or she can reach their professional and personal objectives. The 2016, El Khomri Law stated that an individual has the right to be disconnected from technology out of office hours (le droit à la déconnexion). This is an attempt to ensure that rest and leave periods are respected, and that there is a balance between work and private lives.

Since 1 January 2017, companies with more than 50 employees have had to guarantee their employees’ right to ‘disconnect from technology’ out of office hours. So leaders have had to find tailor-made solutions in order to implement the law and modernise their management style.

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France

63

A TALE OF TWO TELEPHONES What do Macron’s two smartphones say about him?

Emmanuel Macron is making great use of social media and modern technologies.

He often uses Facebook Live to broadcast official visits or events. In an official portrait, published on Twitter, a smiling Macron posed in his office in the Elysée Palace with two smartphones on the desk behind him – a first for a head of state. Many interpreted it as a sign that the new president wants to be seen as a thoroughly modern leader, determined to turn his country into what he calls a “start-up nation”. But are two smartphones perhaps a subtle reference to the balance between the president’s public and private life?

Alamy

Work-life balance One of the reasons why French employees are probably highly productive is that the French workplace offers generous benefits. For example, French working parents get a lot more support than those in other European countries, such as the UK, starting with generous paid maternity leave for working mothers. Paternity leave is not as generous, however; fathers are only guaranteed 11 days off.

Work-life balance is important for French employees, so more and more companies help them to achieve equilibrium. An increasing number of companies have adopted flexible working schedules to give more freedom to their employees. Life is less stressful if you know that you can start your work any time between 8am and 10am.

Compared with other cultures, French employees tend to further separate their professional and private life. Unlike in the UK, there is no tradition of workers going to the pub and having a drink with colleagues after office hours. Instead of socialising with co-workers, young French professionals tend to pick up their children from school.

France has the highest birth rate in Europe and provides well-organised, affordable day-care facilities for children. Even though there are not

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IMPROVING EMPLOYEES’ EXPERIENCE HAS BECOME IMPORTANT IN FRANCE

enough places in crèches, French working parents also receive help from inexpensive childcare assistants. This facilitates the possibility, especially for women, to combine career and family.

Nevertheless, presenteeism, or présentéisme in French – i.e. the collective pressure for long working hours – is an increasingly strong feature of the French organisational work culture, just as it is in the UK. Studies show that white-collar workers suffer from an obligation to stay at work until 8pm, 9pm or even 10pm. Some call it “networking time”, but this can have harmful consequences on physical and mental health.

Obviously it takes some courage to swim against the stream. Fortunately, leaders in many organisations are aware of this phenomenon and are helping to formulate employees’ objectives so that they focus on results, instead of the amount of time spent in the office.

Home offices have become an increasingly prominent feature of French organisations, as a means to facilitate a work-life balance. In the past, leaders in French companies were very reluctant to allow remote home-working, because managers traditionally liked to control their subordinates, and there was a perception that only present employees were productive – the view being “out of sight, out of control”.

But French leaders are modernising their organisations and human resource management practices. Hence more and more organisations are now providing home offices as an employee benefit.

Talent attraction and retention are also important factors in this strategy. Although France has high unemployment figures, many corporations are struggling to recruit talent. Competition is tight in many industries, including IT and manufacturing. There are also a lot of vacancies to fill in the service sector. As a result, creating an employer’s ‘brand’ and improving employees’ experience and benefits have therefore become very important in France over the past few years.

Christine Naschberger is professor in human resource management at Audencia Business School, France

28/09/2017 17:02

Beyond Borders

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A millennial mission The Baobab Network engages young leaders by connecting them with start-ups in Sub-Saharan Africa Writing Tom Fairburn

O

ne of my most striking memories at business school is of a corporate finance lecture. It was otherwise unremarkable, until the professor said something that has stayed with me ever since, and went on to shape my view of the business world: “The sole purpose of a business, above anything else, is to create shareholder value.”

This idea struck me as out-dated and, more importantly, totally unsustainable in a world where environmental and social issues dominate the headlines every week. What I began to imagine, sitting in that lecture hall with hundreds of my peers, was that everyone else listening to the professor was thinking the same thing. So, if business leaders genuinely believed that idea, they would be in for a shock when millennials entered the workplace.

A lot has been written about millennials. Yet the majority of articles have focused on the disengaged and troublesome junior employee who needs constant attention and immediate

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gratification, and is prone to getting bored. As a disengaged millennial myself, disgruntled by this blinkered view of my generation, I decided to set up a new company – The Baobab Network – with my friend Toby Hanington. It is dedicated to helping companies re-energise their millennial workforce.

The Baobab Network The Baobab Network runs talent development and innovation programmes for big corporates around the world. The core offering involves a five or ten-day immersion programme working on the ground with a tech start-up in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as workshops that cover lean thinking, disruption, building minimum viable products and social business.

From a start-up perspective, the network focuses on giving support to early-stage tech businesses that are building products to solve key market problems across five key sectors. Toby and I describe these as ‘big impact’ industries – agribusiness, clean tech, education, finance and healthcare.

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Sub-Saharan Africa

The organisation has been running since August 2015, when Toby and I left our corporate jobs in London with two core missions. These were to change the way big corporations think about talent development; and to drive innovation across Sub-Saharan Africa. Over the last 18 months, top talent from some of world’s leading businesses – including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, IBM and PwC – has come through Baobab programmes.

From a corporate talent development perspective, the projects are set up to offer a unique insight into the life of an entrepreneur. Teams are fully immersed in an early-stage tech start-up in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa or Zambia, working directly with the company founders on the ground.

Participants are set a live strategy project to deliver (carefully scoped in advance to ensure it is of genuine value to the start-up) that is aligned to their individual skill-set. Given the early-stage nature of the start-ups, the work is usually focused on commercial growth, investor readiness, market entry and user acquisition. For example, it might entail creating a revenue model, helping a start-up prepare for a fundraising round, or undertaking in-depth market analysis.

Working in a new environment in an emerging market, in a new team with a flat hierarchy, challenges participants to become better leaders, since they have to deliver highquality work within a tight deadline, across cultural and industry boundaries.

Alongside the project work, which involves days in the office, trips to the field, and also interviews with key stakeholders, The Baobab Network team also runs three key workshops. The first is focused on innovation and the ability to build ‘minimal viable products’, taking ideas to market quickly and cheaply. The second is focused on disruption and finding markets that truly need innovation. Great lessons can be learnt from the entrepreneurs on the ground, since they are working in sectors that desperately need reform. Finally, the team runs a workshop on social ventures, focused on the importance of considering the social aspects of a business from the very beginning.

In return, the start-up founders get access to global talent that they would otherwise never be able to afford. There is a gap when it comes to accessing top talent across Africa’s tech ecosystem, and entrepreneurs are often software developers by training, meaning that commercial and business skills do not come naturally to them. Baobab projects are carefully tailored to fit their needs, and are always focused on scale and growth from a business perspective. Start-ups that are part of The Baobab Network also get access to continued support, international exposure and help with investor access.

The Baobab Network

Social impact and the development journey A recent Deloitte study suggested that 88% of millennials feel their job is more fulfilling when they have the opportunity to make a positive impact. The same survey suggested that the ability to be innovative was also a huge driving force behind job satisfaction. Both of these factors have big knock-on effects for HR teams looking to keep their best young talent engaged.

The era of corporate social responsibility consisting of two days’ volunteering in a nearby school is behind us. Many young leaders today want to feel that ‘impact’ is at the heart of their

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ABOUT THE BAOBAB NETWORK Founded in 2015 Based in London, with a permanent team of four Projects run in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Zambia 40 participants have come through the programme in the last 18 months The programme has supported 15 start-ups in Africa, across the agribusiness, clean tech, education, finance and healthcare sectors

development journey within an organisation. Likewise, innovation can no longer be left to the R&D department. In order for organisations to stay ahead of the curve, innovation needs to be a pillar in every leadership programme and talent development initiative it runs.

Businesses should encourage employees to run a side project – be it a charity, a social enterprise or a start-up. They should also embrace entrepreneurial thinkers and invest in internal innovation labs. Developing internal entrepreneurship (‘intrapreneurship’) should be as important as line-management skills for high-potential employees. There should be particular focus on how this creative freedom can generate social and environmental returns for the company. All these initiatives will increase levels of engagement among young leaders, reducing the sentiment of ‘us versus them’.

Tom Fairburn (pictured top, on the right) grew up in Kenya before attending business school at Bath University in the UK. He spent three years working in the corporate world in London, before leaving to co-found The Baobab Network in 2015 with Toby Hanington (pictured top, on the left). Find out more at: www.thebaobabnetwork.com

28/09/2017 17:10

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Vis 28/09/2017 17:16

Future of Work

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STRATEGIES FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS 68 The eight pillars of innovation A useful blueprint for organisations looking to generate new ideas

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n 2007, I moved to London to work as a journalist for Al Jazeera English. At the time, Al Jazeera was a very controversial, even hated, media outlet. Just a few years after the 9/11 attacks, it was seen by the West as the ‘devil’s mouthpiece’, Osama Bin Laden’s propaganda tool.

Before Al Jazeera English, my career was with CNN and Greek media. I had a long and impeccable track record of integrity and transparent, objective news coverage.

When I arrived in London, I looked for a flat. I soon realised that agencies and landlords were rejecting my application on the

WE NEED TO WORK TOGETHER, UNDER A COMMON VISION, FOR A BETTER WORLD basis that they wouldn’t trust a tenant who works for such a controversial employer. It was the first – and so far, only – time in my life that my professional and personal integrity had been doubted.

Eventually, Al Jazeera English won its position among the world’s most respected and credible media outlets. But as far as I am concerned, I will always remember my unpleasant experience of being judged and categorised as ‘untrustworthy’ by a misguided belief and an aphoristic generalisation.

In this day and age, innovation and new technologies are abolishing barriers and borders, while simultaneously creating challenges and a push for a major mind-shift.

Social media platforms, together with the continuous information (and misinformation) flow, intensify the impact of events,

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70 Redefining talent Advice on filling the digital skills gap

A virus of irrational thinking We must work together to rebuild trust By

Elizabeth Filippouli

72 Who controls learning?

The link between power and knowledge

news and challenges, often creating a falsified impression of the world around us.

This uncertainty generates mistrust, and consequently instability, which affects the relationship among various social stakeholders. According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, the general population’s trust in four key institutions – business, government, non-governmental organisations, and media – has declined broadly, a phenomenon not reported since Edelman began tracking trust in 2012.

Can we exist without trust? No. In reality, all of us need relationships based on trust and integrity. It would jeopardise our mental and physical survival if we felt that we could not trust people anymore. For that reason, we need to be deeply concerned about the thriving reality of fabricated news and misinformation, and how it affects our ability to filter the truth from falsehood.

Culture, ethics, religion and social inequality are used as excuses for those who choose to participate in this ‘game of lies’ in an effort to claim or secure power.

Accurate information is taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by ‘fake experts’ or ‘fake facts’ that do not seem fake at all.

Mistrust is like a virus. It spreads easily; it attacks badly. It can ruin relationships, partnerships and good will within seconds. We no longer trust authorities. We no longer trust the media. So how do we restore trust? We need to work together, under a common vision, for a better, more transparent and more inclusive world.

Accountability, ethics, leadership and universal values must be present in the same equation. All of us, together, will have to fight for this. Let’s begin today under this shared vision.

Elizabeth Filippouli is founder and CEO of the Global Thinkers Forum

28/09/2017 17:10

Future of Work

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The eight pillars of innovation Follow this useful blueprint for coming up with new ideas Writing Owen Hunnam

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n recent years, the increasing pace of the digital world has brought innovation into the spotlight. Now considered the key to an organisation’s future success, innovation belongs at the heart of business growth and development.

In order to succeed and, in many cases, even to stay relevant in such a fastmoving marketplace, businesses need to anticipate both industry and technological changes.

Having a comprehensive innovation strategy in place is key to generating effective innovation activity. The innovation process can seem like a minefield, however, and it can be difficult to know where to begin when there is so much to consider.

So we have established eight pillars of innovation, which will help businesses build their own effective and actionable innovation blueprint.

Shutterstock

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Describe your main challenges and opportunities A way to boost business innovation internally is by crowdsourcing ideas from within your organisation. Publishing a challenge encourages employees to generate solutions towards a specific problem. It also empowers your staff when they see their ideas are being taken forward and executed. Moreover, consider sharing a challenge with a group of people you may not usually have approached, since this will generate different perspectives and will encourage original solutions to the problem.

3

Define your business vision, mission and goals

Capture ideas

This might sound like a given, but it’s very important for a business not to underestimate the importance of its vision, mission and goals. Often overlooked or brushed aside, these are essential for supporting the overall culture and identity of a business. Defining clear objectives will ensure that everyone in your organisation is aligned to the same goals so that they can work together more effectively and efficiently to achieve them.

Ideas are everywhere in your company. It’s just a matter of finding, gathering and implementing the best ones. Innovation is an ongoing process and shouldn’t be approached only when it suits you. In order to be really successful, innovation needs to be an integral part of your everyday processes and reside at the very core of your organisation.

Every employee should be aware of the internal processes that exist to capture ideas and be incentivised to contribute.

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Innovation

4 Collaborate and interact The next stage is for employee interaction with a suggestion. All ideas will not necessarily be perfect immediately, so sparking conversations around them is an effective way to reveal any potential problems, as well to create space for the renegotiation of goals. Sometimes an idea needs just a little push in the right direction until you can make a decision on whether to pursue it further.

5

Curate An idea is just a starting point, and not all ideas will be appropriate for implementing. They might simply be unrealistic, too costly or simply not very good. This is all part of the innovation process – a process in which trying and failing is necessary to succeed in the long run. But how do you choose the best ideas, especially when there are so many to choose from? The curation should be a natural extension of the previous collaboration phase. Collect as many opinions and perspectives as possible, since it helps to mitigate the risks involved with a change.

It is important that an idea generates excitement, conversations and buzz around it. Furthermore, if an idea has the support of multiple employees, it is more likely to be a success once implemented.

6 Implement and execute Implementation does not just have to sit with the most senior members of an organisation. It is often a nice touch to ensure that the person who came up with an idea is able to get involved so they can see it come to fruition. Involve as many people as possible and ensure there is awareness throughout the company so that any changes won’t come as a surprise and everyone is prepared to help make the execution process as smooth as possible.

Everyone should be up-to-date with the progress of the project.

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YOU NEED TO BE RECEPTIVE TO NEW BUSINESS APPROACHES AND WILLING TO TAKE RISKS

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Measure, fail fast and adapt It is very important to constantly monitor, analyse and review the progress of the implementation process. Avoid waiting until the end of the process to do this, otherwise you won’t be able to adapt as you go along. Establish how you will measure success and work in an agile way to constantly review progress and adjust as necessary. How you track success is up to you, but it’s worth framing your results in terms of goals and objectives. It is crucial to understand that failure is okay and is an inevitable part of the innovation process. Businesses will always learn from their mistakes and can use them to gain a better understanding of their consumers, business values, and even staff.

8

Reward and recognise Offering recognition for the best ideas is crucial to maintaining a strong innovation strategy in the long run. Give credit where credit is due in order to incentivise employees to continue contributing ideas. Rewards should not just be reserved for your internal staff.

They should also be considered in terms of your open innovation strategy. By offering a prize, you are more likely to generate better quality ideas from various contributors.

Generating new ideas and putting them forward can become an overwhelming process.

With innovation comes change, and with change comes uncertainty. Yet, if you want to stay relevant in this fast-paced, digital market, changes are inevitable. That’s why you need to be receptive to new business approaches and willing to take calculated risks.

By remaining open to new ideas, and following the eight pillars of innovation outlined above, you will be well-placed to execute a highly successful innovation strategy.

Owen Hunnam is CEO and co-founder of Idea Drop, a London-based technology company that helps organisations everywhere to capture, curate and implement the best ideas from their people. www.ideadrop.co

28/09/2017 17:10

Future of Work

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Redefining talent Previous performance is often an unreliable predictor of future potential

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enior leaders and HR professionals regularly voice concerns over their future talent pipelines.

A combination of demographic change, new technology, shifting skill demands, and the evolving preferences and expectations of employees and customers are creating new challenges for talent professionals.

The emerging nature of the roles we need to fill, and the way we will have to select for them, is driving change in the way businesses approach the attraction, hiring and retention of talent.

In particular, demand for digital skills is a landmark of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s talent landscape. Nearly 90% of all new jobs require digital skills, according to a 2016 report by the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee, yet this year alone the

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Writing Mervyn Dinnen & Matt Alder

Illustration Adam Howling

UK has a potential shortfall of 745,000 workers with digital skills. Meanwhile, human resources consulting firm Mercer highlighted in 2017 that the UK is facing a general workforce and skills crisis.

Digital skills are important. Technology is involved in nearly everything our employees do.

In 2016, research by Ultimate Software found that 92% of US employees said that their satisfaction at work depends on having the technology necessary to do their job efficiently.

The ways that we communicate, collaborate, create, innovate and learn are all governed by our use of digital tools and platforms. From email, messaging and content creation, to project management and the data we collect and analyse to help support better decision making, we are constantly using digital skills in the workplace.

Employees need to be comfortable moving

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Digital Skills

between devices and platforms when completing tasks. Digital is therefore about much more than coding. For most businesses, it defines the way their employees are hired and developed, and how they operate. Digital technology shapes the way customers, clients and colleagues communicate and interact. It also informs their expectations of how we respond and transact business. All organisations have a business strategy that is now underpinned by a digital strategy, and they need to start planning for the growing digital skills divide.

the people right for the business and the role, irrespective of background and work trajectory, that organisations need to focus on.

Hiring managers must be discouraged from starting a vacancy search by creating a role specification based around a previous incumbent’s profile, or by drawing up a wish-list of ready-made capabilities and achievements that they want to bring in. The vacancy needs to be broken down into tasks and rebuilt around what actually needs to be done. People already in the organisation can cover some of these actions, either by having their own roles reimagined, or through secondments or stretch assignments. Internal mobility – often the last resort for recruiters and HR practitioners – should be the first strategy before trying to fill externally. The opportunity for development and skill enhancement is an important differentiator for talent looking to join, or remain, with a business.

Workforce planning So where should businesses start? With the world of work evolving quickly, all strategies and potential future operating models are likely to be defined, or limited, by workforce capability and skills availability, so preparation begins with a proper look at business strategy to help more accurate workforce planning. Knowing the people we will need, and the skills they should have, are two crucial components of this planning. When looking at digital skills, there is an added problem, however. This is predicting the roles that have not yet been created, which might require skills yet to be identified.

Many HR leaders and senior managers will readily admit that their approaches to workforce planning can be haphazard, too often impaired by the uncertainty of future trading conditions.

More recent global political and economic uncertainties, and the introduction of emerging new technologies such as artificial intelligence, seem to guarantee a future that will see even more short-, medium- and long-term change. Meeting the challenges of identifying and filling the digital skills gap will require a different approach to the way we identify, hire and retain talent.

Firstly we need to start redefining exactly what we mean by the word ‘talent’. It is probably one of the most overused and misleading words in the modern labour market, often used by HR and recruitment professionals to imply a highskilled, high-potential candidate who is in some way special. This narrow definition leads to poor recruitment practice, with recruiters chasing mythical candidates who tick all their boxes and seem ready-made for their vacancy. These people rarely exist, nor are they likely to be successful.

Specifically in a commercial world where new jobs will often require skills that have not been hired before, that narrow definition also fails to take into account the many ways that employees can develop and use their initiative and capabilities to help companies meet business challenges.

Most successful specialist hires step in to a role that will stretch them and help them to grow and realise potential. Everyone has talent. It is finding

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Drive for diversity

INTERNAL MOBILITY SHOULD BE THE FIRST STRATEGY BEFORE TRYING TO FILL EXTERNALLY

Redefining what we mean by ‘talent’ also means we can start selecting people for what they can achieve in the future rather than what they have done in the past. Previous performance is often an unreliable predictor of future potential and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the area of digital skills, which evolve and change at a rapid pace. While retaining and retraining existing employees is valuable in helping to diversify the talent pool available, it is a focus on diversity itself when recruiting new people to the organisation that will help businesses to succeed.

Increasing the number of women in the workplace, attracting and supporting people with disabilities, and giving opportunities to graduates and apprentices, as well as ex-offenders, can all help to diversify and enrich the talent pool. Some initiatives in this area have already started. In May 2013, software provider SAP launched its Autism at Work programme, which is aimed at hiring adults on the autism spectrum. The programme has been a success and expanded. In the summer of 2016, recruiter Monster unveiled a TechTalent Charter, which is intended to improve diversity and inclusion across the UK technology sector. A particular focus of the charter is to increase the ratio of women working in tech.

Ultimately, the way that roles are developing, and the range of personal qualities and skills that many recruiters find lacking in candidates – such as collaborative working, communication, emotional intelligence and project management – calls for a more diverse approach to hiring. It also calls for a redefinition of what talent should be.

Mervyn Dinnen and Matt Alder are the authors of ‘Exceptional Talent: How to Attract, Acquire and Retain the Very Best Employees’

28/09/2017 17:09

Future of Work

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Online Learning

The knowledge monopoly An elite group of billionaires effectively controls the world’s learning. What does that mean for everyone else?

Writing Kirsten Levermore

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teve Fiehl, chief innovation officer and founder of digital learning provider CrossKnowledge, recounted a story as part of his 2014 TEDxAix talk. He had argued with his 15-year-old son over the importance of school in a world where his son could “just learn from his smartphone”.

The argument, Fiehl recalled, ended with the opposition’s final blow: “Why should I learn something just in case, when I can learn it just in time?”

For Fiehl’s son, and many others, it seems that the instantaneous, content-driven, broad nature of attaining knowledge in the moment has replaced the desire for a traditional education.

One unforeseen aspect of the online learning phenomenon, however, is the beginnings of a two-tiered educated population: the auto-didactic, information-hungry and enthralled searchers, and the passive, lazy, “I’ll just Google it if I need to” fact-finders.

Furthermore, according to a recent study from the UK National Citizen Service, the latter are already outnumbering the former – in terrifying proportions. The study found that 97% of young people do not believe problem solving or creativity are important skills for the future.

Could it be that the people controlling this new type of learning are to blame?

For education researcher, writer and education technology (or ‘edtech’) commentator Audrey Watters, the most powerful man in US education is no education secretary or government minister, but Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

“Technologists in and around Silicon Valley have influence over every aspect of society under the sun,” Watters explains.

She points out that the so-called ‘PayPal Mafia’ and a few other Silicon Valley stalwarts, such as Mark Zuckerberg and The Emerson Foundation (linked to the late Steve Jobs), control

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more than 400 companies in the valley alone. The PayPal Mafia is the group of entrepreneurs who founded, or were early executives at, PayPal. It includes tech bigwigs such as Elon Musk, Steve Chen, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel.

Having forward-thinkers and some of the most talented people of our time in control of learning may not seem like a bad idea, but, as Watters notes, these technologists remain victims of their own biases and goals – no matter how well-intentioned or philanthropic they may be.

Problem #1 Technologists are not educators Although technology plays an important role in furthering education, there is also conflict between them. This is well illustrated by the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $100,000 “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in the classroom”.

“Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates both dropped out of Harvard University,” Watters highlights. “Silicon Valley has a very particular rhetoric with regards to learning and education – I think many of them are autodidacts, so they don’t necessarily see school as something being instrumental to their own ability to become millionaires or to learn things.”

But with more than 15 million people pursuing online degrees, and a further 35 million accessing massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 2016, a notable percentage of the population clearly responds to the Silicon Valley model of learning.

“Obviously it works for some people,” says Watters, “but when you look closely at who signs up and does well in MOOCs, for example, they tend to be people who are affluent, who have an understanding of how school works, who have usually achieved at least a second-level education, and who aren’t the first person

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in their family to go to college. Edtech, as it is, is overwhelmingly controlled by a white, male, affluent engineering body, which is solving problems they had or have in ways that work for them, but don’t work for everybody in the long run.”

Problem #2 Venture philanthropy If you’re a creationist and you search ‘evolution’ on an internet search engine, the first 10,000 results are going to be about how evolution is not real, and how your views are correct.

This is the way that internet search is designed. It filters out information it thinks you will find irrelevant or don’t want.

Not only does the model offer a way to navigate a path through the world’s collective knowledge, it also increases advertising revenues since you are more likely to stay longer on a ‘personalised’ site returned by the engine and to use that engine more frequently.

Personalisation of search has not gone unnoticed by the edtech community. “Yes,” Watters offers, “these technologists are trying to ‘give back’ through their philanthropy. But, ultimately, they are entrepreneurs who are about securing profits for their investors. There is even a name for such people: venture philanthropists.”

So in a landscape more open and accessible than ever, learners fight an uphill battle to avoid personalised, ‘agreeable’ content and seek out new, exciting and diverse material to learn from – against the very people who bring them to this space. And for the non-self-taught, or for those students who need structure and a helping hand to find new material, that battle could be a significant barrier to learning.

Technologists themselves can see the effect that they are having on the learning landscape. A search engine expert at one

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of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley told Edge: “The greatest sadness is that, ultimately, each individual is in control of their own learning, but unless they are aware of the choices they make, they can quickly lead themselves into a very narrow path of views and information. Although technology is the enabler of these filter bubbles, it’s not actually technology’s fault – people limit their own learning. It’s a bit like Plato’s cave.

You have the whole world out there to explore, but people are chaining themselves to look at the shadows.”

The balanced classroom of the future Jamie Smith is executive director of South Staffordshire College, and works with tech giants such as IBM and Google to affect change in learning and education across the internet.

“Tech is absolutely great, and a tremendously powerful tool,” he enthuses. “It allows people to learn anything they want to, and in a way that suits them. When done properly, platform-agnostic, cloud-based learning provides access to almost anyone on Earth, is simple to interact with, and removes barriers across the board.”

Nevertheless, he believes there is an important balance between technology and education. “Where online learning goes horribly wrong is in the dumping of content and simply labelling it ‘learning materials’. It’s a soulless experience and, frankly, it’s a bit arrogant on the part of the contributor.”

He continues: “What is needed is the combination of thorough content with the social aspect of a classroom, and the freedom and flexibility of online learning. If educators and governments and technologists work together, everyone can access information and learn in the digital age.”

Kirsten Levermore is assistant editor of ‘Edge’

28/09/2017 17:09

ENHANCING THE RELOCATION EXPERIENCE

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28/09/2017 28/09/2017 16:19 15:38

Live & Learn

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MANAGING MENTAL, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL WELLBEING AND DEVELOPMENT 76 Management Dilemma When sexuality is a sport 77 How to say no Ways to refuse when you are up to your eyeballs

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colleague of mine offers this nugget. If, in your coaching, you feel like you are about to give your client some advice, go and lie down in a dark room for 20 minutes until it passes.

It is one of the early lessons that those aspiring to adopt a coaching style need to learn, particularly if they have been senior managers used to being recognised for their personal judgement and decisive problem solving. Preferring questions (and the more open the better), and then holding the silence can be a challenge. We understand the theory, but practising it in the moment can be rather different, since well-established habits take over.

My own experience is that giving advice has its place as a legitimate intervention, and it won’t attract a fine from the coaching police. But what if it keeps happening? My question, then, would be: “How come?”

Why did you think it was the best intervention at that moment?

There’s a famous acronym that I rediscovered recently, and I have found myself reflecting on it. It is WAIT, or ‘Why Am I Talking?’ If we were to get philosophical, that phrase sums up the skill of coaching in just four words. It’s a question that can be answered at increasing levels of sophistication. There’s a GCSE answer and a PhD answer, and all levels in between.

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78 Personal brand Success comes to those who sell themselves

WAIT before you wade in How to stop giving advice By

Jeff Matthews

81 Inspiration Directory Your go-to development resource 82 Book Club Edge reviews top leadership titles

At its simplest, if my mouth is open, I’m either asking a question or proffering a view. If it’s closed, I’m listening carefully, even creatively, and I am certainly present and in the moment. So, how come I thought giving a piece of advice was the most skilled intervention I could make? Would a question have been better, or prolonging a silence?

If you have a clear contract to offer advice, if it is overtly what the client is looking for, then it’s a legitimate intervention. But if it keeps happening, you need to ask whether it is you, the client or the system?

Is it the system? Managers in an organisation typically give solutions. You’re a manager (even though you’re also a coach), therefore when asked for a solution, you oblige. Is it the client? Is the client discounting his ability to solve this for himself? Is it you? Offered the opportunity to ‘rescue’, you take it. You feel valued because you’ve solved the client’s problem. He thanks you profusely. It justifies your fee or some deeper need you have.

You reinforce the client’s self-perception that he is not capable of finding his own answers. Hey presto, we have ‘co-dependent coaching’.

Try these questions instead: what do you think my advice would be?

What would your ‘wise self ’ advise?

What if you were the expert? There, that’s my advice.

Jeff Matthews has been a coach for over 25 years. He is working with the Institute of Leadership & Management on ways to help coaching members

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Live & Learn MANAGEMENT DILEMMA

When sexuality is a sport A problem shared is a problem halved, so what did the Institute of Leadership & Management Fellows LinkedIn group have to say about a management dilemma?

The dilemma My team regularly engages in homophobic banter in the office. I feel a bit uncomfortable about it but I don’t know how to manage it and I don’t want to be a spoilsport. And should I really be worried when I don’t think anyone in my team is gay? Isn’t it just a bit of harmless fun?

How our Fellows responded There is nothing harmless or fun about bigotry and discrimination, whether on grounds of sexuality or gender, race or other characteristics.

Rather than feeling “a bit uncomfortable”, alarm bells should be ringing.

There may be a cultural problem in your workplace if this kind of inappropriate behaviour is considered acceptable.

Dave Chetwyn

The last thing I would consider this to be is “harmless”. The team need to have their behaviour addressed.

Illustration by Janne Iivonen

Tim Malone FInstLM. Cert ED

Banter used to be a fairly neutral word, but it has been hijacked to mean laddish behaviour, where idiots take a pop at anyone they can. It’s playground bullying and shouldn’t be accepted.

Hilary Mitchell

The employee handbook should contain a section that indicates that this form of behaviour is unacceptable, with details on how to report it. Of course

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this does raise the issue of the line manager being involved in the incident, but there should always be a reporting procedure in place.

Mike Joy FinstLM

I’m going to be controversial. I come from a military background where this sort of language is routine. Even the people whom society might think would take offence give as good as they get, recognising that no harm is intended. If someone genuinely takes offence, which in my experience is extremely rare, then all it takes is a quiet word from that person to their manager and then for the manager to take action. In my experience, where this has happened, the individuals concerned are horrified that their language has been taken as offensive and they go out of their way to make amends. Of course, this is not to condone behaviour intended to cause harm. That needs to be stopped, but that is not banter.

Ralph Dodds, MSc, FInstLM, MCMI

Banter is only okay if everybody is comfortable with it. The risk is that what one person sees as banter, another person might view as offensive. I like a joke, but never at the expense of hurting somebody’s feelings. I speak from experience since I come from a Jewish family and I have had my fair share of banter to deal with over the years. Banter from people I know and trust isn’t an issue for me, as I know it really is banter. In some ways, it keeps an important message alive: “Never forget”.

Debbie Gardiner

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Live & Learn HOW TO...

N

How to… say no

obody likes saying no. No is a negative. It declines, it refuses, it denies. So, lots of us find it hard to say no. And many also find it a hard word to accept.

So, instead, why not be positive? Instead of saying no, make a noble objection (NO). You make a noble objection when you say NO for a positive, noble reason.

Noble means well-intentioned Saying no to be capricious, or because you don’t want to, is far from noble. But, you can say NO because your other priorities outweigh this one. Then, you are doing the right thing.

Noble means respectful How you say NO is important. Show respect if you want to keep respect. Be courteous, because that’s what noble people do. Your NO may be the right thing for you, but it may inconvenience me, so don’t make me feel worse than you need to.

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Noble does not need to apologise Making the right choices and doing so respectfully is a reasonable thing to do.

You do not need to say sorry for doing the right thing.

When you’re up to your neck in work, you need to know how to refuse more Writing Mike Clayton

want to help me understand why you said it. In the science of influence, we learn that the word ‘because’ has great power. … and noble may suggest alternatives You may not have time to say YES, but it only takes a moment to be helpful and suggest alternatives. Who else could I ask? Where can I find useful information, resources or tools? What could I try?

Noble is brief, but not curt Don’t make a big deal of your NO; it will sound like you have doubts. So it will open you up to attempts at manipulation or emotional blackmail. But that doesn’t mean you have to be curt and dismissive. Look me in the eye, stop what you’re doing, listen to my request, and make your noble objection.

Noble is courteous, but firm While staying courteous, resist attempts to persuade you otherwise. Patiently repeat your NO. Noble is open to persuasion When you make a noble objection, stay open to new facts that could change your assessment. If my attempt to persuade you gives you a new perspective, you must assess it. NO is only noble when your reasoning is sound. New information demands new reasoning. Otherwise, you risk creating a didactic no that sounds like arrogance.

… but noble may empathise with others But you know your NO may inconvenience me. So, it will help me to accept it if you show you understand that, and you care. Sometimes, you may value our relationship above the time commitment. So, choose to say YES. If you do, say YES with all your heart – nothing is worse than a grudging yes.

Noble is honest … about the real reason for your NO. Don’t pretend there are bigger reasons than there are, nor blame it on other people.

Taking responsibility for your NO is the only respectful route.

… and noble may give reasons You don’t need to apologise for your NO. But you may

Mike Clayton is author of ‘The Yes/No Book: How to do less and achieve more’.

Visit his website at www.MikeClayton.co.uk

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Live & Learn PERSONAL BRAND

Sell yourself In the digital world, personal branding is a critical component of leadership Writing Sandra Long

P

2

Share your expertise One of the best ways to highlight your personal brand is to share your niche expertise. Today’s most exceptional leaders are often considered influencers or thought leaders because they are sharing relevant insights. Identify all the ways and means that you possess to demonstrate and share your expertise. This may include speaking, blogging, writing a book or e-book, podcasting, or sharing social media content with advice. Make sure your message and values are consistent across these sharing platforms.

ersonal branding has become a popular term. But what does it mean? Personal branding is about actively managing your image and defining your unique value.

Think of it as the way to shape opinion and influence a reputation. Today, in our ‘always on’ digital world, it’s a critical component of leadership.

Having a strong online brand is a component of good business. According to research by software provider Salesforce.com, 92% of business-to-business buyers start their search for a solution to their problem online.

Job candidates are also searching online for their next career opportunity. So the way in which you present yourself online is crucial to attracting and influencing prospects, clients and candidates.

Here are five tips for leaders who want to enhance their personal brands:

3

Make first impressions count Since impressions are made so fast, our brands are increasingly visual. Your brand is demonstrated every day, starting with your physical and online appearance. Attire, body language, handshake and smile are the traditional ways in which we create positive first impressions. Now, online impressions are increasingly important as well. The headshot and profile that you use on social media create an immediate impression, so make sure they present you in a positive way.

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1

Take time to self-reflect The starting point for building a personal brand is to make sure that you truly understand yourself. Dedicate some self-reflection time to working out your perceived value and how you can communicate it.

Some leaders conduct 360° analysis to help them understand their wider reputation.

Begin by asking yourself several key questions.

What are your natural strengths? What makes you unique professionally and personally? What’s different about the way you work? What values are intrinsic to your brand? What is your niche and how do you differentiate yourself from others doing a similar thing? Where is your specific expertise and how do you demonstrate it?

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4 PERSONAL BRANDING IS ABOUT ACTIVELY MANAGING YOUR IMAGE

Devote time to social media Build your social media profiles to accurately reflect your brand. One of the biggest mistakes people make is failing to allocate sufficient time to working on this critical online expression. Your clients, prospects and potential candidates will typically start by viewing your LinkedIn profile if they want to learn about you ahead of a meeting or interview.

Encourage and support your employees to enhance their personal brands and social media profiles. Savvy employers know that employees with strong personal brands can strengthen the

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CASE STUDY COMPARISON The power of personal brands

brand of the business as well. Consider how you can support your employees to build their profile and brand, and give them the opportunity to use company brand messaging and visuals. Your employees will effectively become your company’s brand ambassadors.

5

Don’t boast, demonstrate Display your personal brand across all digital and physical channels. Instead of boasting of your expertise, it is far better to demonstrate it with your blog posts, articles, awards, certifications, commentary and speeches. Use your LinkedIn profile to demonstrate your brand attributes, rather than just declare your capabilities.

Take control With personal branding, we each have an opportunity to shape opinion and influence the impressions that others have of us as individuals, and of the businesses we own or represent. Social media is a great way to showcase a personal brand,

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DISPLAY YOUR PERSONAL BRAND ACROSS ALL DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL CHANNELS

Let’s examine the profiles of two individuals on LinkedIn. Both people could be considered environmental impact leaders. In fact, they both use that term to describe themselves on LinkedIn. “Environmental impact leader” Alex uses his LinkedIn summary to say that he is a global expert, and mentions that he is “highly accomplished”. He goes on to list three relevant job roles that he’s held in the Experience section of his profile.

“Environmental impact leader” Kim uses her LinkedIn summary to describe why she entered the field and her niche areas of focus. Her profile includes five industry publications that she wrote, two industry awards, and three recommendations from colleagues. She includes a short video of herself talking about an important environmental issue. In addition, she lists three job roles in the Experience section.

Kim took the time to demonstrate her personal brand using LinkedIn. People who meet Kim, or hear about her, will look on LinkedIn and craft an immediate impression of who she is and what specific value she brings. Her online brand as displayed on her LinkedIn profile conveys deeper experience (and more humility) than Alex’s profile.

demonstrate our unique qualities, and share our company’s capabilities to impress prospects and candidates.

Sandra Long is the author of ‘LinkedIn for Personal Branding: The Ultimate Guide’ and the owner of Post Road Consulting in Westport, Connecticut, US

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Join a community of like-minded book lovers, and discuss a new title every fortnight with its authors. Plus great book offers to be won.

Find us on Facebook at The Business Book Club by LID

Have you read our latest reports?

Workforce 2020 and Mind Culture are available to download now www.InstituteLM.com

Find out what millennials want from work #Workforce2020

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81

Live & Learn INSPIRATION DIRECTORY

Inspiration Directory FOR YOUR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDS To feature your business in the Inspiration Directory, contact niki.mullin@lidpublishing.com National & Distance Learning The Academy of Leadership & Management 0845 890 2549 info@academylm.co.uk www.academylm.co.uk Leadership and management/coaching and mentoring courses. ILM Levels 3, 5 and 7, Leadership and Management; ILM Level 3, Coaching; ILM Level 5, Coaching and Mentoring; ILM Level 7, Executive Coaching and Mentoring; ILM Level 7, Coaching Supervision.

London & The South East 3gHR 10 Diddenham Court, Grazeley, Reading, RG7 1JQ 0344 543 2121 enquiries@3ghr.com www.3ghr.com The Circle Management Development Programme from 3gHR is a practical, high-impact series of modules aimed at first line managers and managers of managers. Circle has been delivered throughout the UK and Europe and is designed to

be flexible. Our delivery methods range from short two-hour sessions through to one-day modules.

Quality Education & Development Ltd (QED) 25 Manor Gardens, Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, BN6 9UG 0800 0938 419 or 01273 301521 mail@qedcoaching.co.uk www.qedcoaching.co.uk ILM Levels 2–5 Leadership and Management; ILM Levels 3–7 Coaching and Mentoring/ Coaching Supervision.

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Live & Learn BOOK CLUB

WHICH BOOKS SHOULD BE KEEPING LEADERS AND MANAGERS AWAKE AT NIGHT? EDGE REVIEWS SOME OF THE MOST INTRIGUING TITLES AROUND

The Change Catalyst Author Campbell Macpherson Price £23.99 Wiley

Your change initiative is likely to fail According to Campbell MacPherson, around 88% of all change projects fail.

It doesn't matter whether it’s a plan to enhance your corporate culture, a new organisational strategy, an IT project, or a merger or acquisition – only one in every eight succeeds. With democracy in crisis, globalisation causing business disruption around the globe, and nanotechnology and artificial intelligence increasingly threatening the way we work, it’s easy to see the need for this book.

The Change Catalyst explains why – even with the greatest of strategies – most change programmes fail by placing key causes under the microscope to examine just how to avoid the pitfalls. Not surprisingly, it’s all about people. Macpherson asserts that “your people are the only ones who can deliver your strategy”, and true to his faith, he articulates why we resist change (fear of failure, fear

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of the unknown, and fear of being blamed) before setting out a solid framework for banishing the blues and introducing his top ten ingredients for successful change.

This is not your typical business book, crammed with verbose philosophising and ancient wisdom. Sure, MacPherson enjoys a powerful quotation here and there (don’t we all?), but generally this book is written in a conversational, easy-to-read style and it’s eminently practical.

The reader is firmly positioned as the ‘change catalyst’ (regardless of our position in the hierarchy).

Through the book, we are systematically equipped with the knowledge, understanding and skills to succeed, our emotional intelligence is boosted and we learn just how to engage people in the change. Several insightful case studies – successful and otherwise – illustrate key points and promote further discussion.

Macpherson also adds to our professional toolkit with his Culture Change Checklist and Strategic Framework, as well as other useful ideas to aid organisational design and performance management.

Many of these can be downloaded for free from the accompanying website.

Change is the only constant in the world today – and the pace of change isn’t slowing down. Neither does this book. If you’re looking for some pacey pages packed with the insight, tools and know-how needed to make sure your next change is the one in eight that succeeds, you’ll do well to pick up this book.

Reviewer Andrew Sharman is chief executive of RMS, and Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & Management

Leadersmithing Author Eve Poole Price £14.99 Bloomsbury Business

Take leadership development out of the classroom and put it into the hands of the individual To master a trade or profession can take a lifetime, but none of us has a lifetime in which to do it. This book recognises that we have limited time to invest in leadership development,

Coach yourself first Author Mark Bisson Price £12.99 Matador

Robust self-reflection brings value to coaches and should not be ignored As the title of this book suggests, it’s aimed squarely at those active in coaching roles and keen to take a closer look at their own approach.

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Edge is looking for readers to review management and leadership books for Book Club. If you are interested, email sally.percy@lidpublishing.com

and describes how we can accelerate the achievement of the necessary skills through craft-based practice.

Trade secrets tumble out of this book, and there is an abundance of good practice ideas, stories, experiences and relevant theories – as well as 52 exercises for individuals to practise.

These exercises are organised into four suits, like a pack of cards, and focus on different leadership skills and competencies. It is a generous book, which is deeply informed and has impeccable research and academic foundations. At times, it is brutal about what it takes to learn to be an effective leader. I like the ruthless concentration on the individual

It also provides a useful insight into the world of coaching, making it equally useful to those who would like to pursue a career in it, and even forward-facing leaders looking to take a more critical view of their own performance.

Part one of the book walks us through the benefits of self-reflection as a practice, before setting off on a comprehensive review of the research. Part two offers a range of creative approaches to self-reflection, including concepts of journaling, storytelling, metaphor and mindfulness. In part three, the role of supervision in supporting self-reflection is discussed as author Mark Bisson persuasively argues the value of supervision for those engaged

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taking control of their development time. Leadersmithing sweeps you along – informing, inspiring, overwhelming, provoking, reframing, and solving. It challenges you to use your time wisely to practise, practise and practise.

Although the book is focused on preparing individuals to be job-ready, it has much to offer existing leaders. Time emerged as a theme for me, and the timing of this book is interesting.

New management apprenticeships are preoccupying many organisations. Anyone involved in them would be well served to read Leadersmithing.

Reviewer Julie Steel is a learning and development consultant

in coaching. The final chapter pulls together the golden threads over a handful of pages, prompting thought about future practice and encouraging us on our way.

The writing style is clear, relaxed and thoughtful, with plenty of personal anecdotes. This creates a sense of Bisson actually being in the room with the reader. The author’s deep experience shines through as he explains not just practical tools and techniques of self-reflection, but also potential trips and traps. The book makes a terrific toolbox for anyone involved in coaching practice.

Reviewer Andrew Sharman is chief executive of RMS and Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & Management

Leading with Vision Authors Bonnie Hagemann, Simon Vetter & John Maketa Price £20 Hodder & Stoughton

Vision is vital The subtitle of this book promises a “blueprint for creating a compelling vision and engaging the workforce”.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite deliver. The authors start well, and chapter three effectively describes an organisation that has got it right. But having followed their own advice (telling stories and engaging emotions), the authors then switch to their research data.

This reveals what we already know: vision matters. Without justification, they announce that the best way to get others to buy in to the vision is through “courage, clarity, connectedness and culture”. Why? A chapter on each describes examples, but doesn’t explain. Visionary leadership is not something we do to the workforce using 'techniques' as presented here. It is something we inspire and empower the workforce to do with us.

Reviewer Finn Jackson is a leadership and change coach, consultant and author

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Leadership Legend

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Reward or punishment?

Pay for performance can kill creativity and innovation

O

ne of the fallacies that nearly everyone takes for granted is that we are all motivated by monetary gain and obey the dictates of those who finance us. Bankers tell us that their institutions will go into a ‘death spiral’ unless those institutions are bailed out and they themselves are lavishly compensated. CEOs insist they are worth 500 times more than their average employee. Desperate for tax revenue, the government seems to believe them. But is it credible? How come the Chinese, with a tenth or less of our incentives, have been growing on average four times faster over the last 36 years?

There is a famous experiment involving a candle that must be pinned to the wall by a team. The teams offered money for doing this successfully take many seconds longer than the teams offered nothing. Money narrows our perception, impedes problem solving, and leads us to concentrate on what the source of money wants, not what needs doing. Differing experiments reach the same result.

Alfie Kohn, the Boston-based writer and psychologist, who has surveyed 50 years of failure around pay for performance, asks why we never learn. Perhaps economists fear that the foundation stone of their discipline might be kicked away.

Kohn draws attention to the following problems: payment often trivialises the significance of work. What should we pay a hospital nurse who holds the hand of a young joyrider while he dies? Children paid to fasten seatbelts stop doing that when payment ceases. Is that what we want?

Do those in authority know with accuracy what every job is worth? Suppose you did something innovative and unexpected.

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By

Charles Hampden-Turner

Would this be rewarded at all? How would its value be assessed? What if employees discover which jobs are best paid for the effort needed and avoid other jobs? Suppose they ‘game the system’? Who will do the hard things? Who will confront problems? Who will use their own judgement, not that of their pay-master?

Who will help another person if that person, not the helper, gets all the money?

Suppose several people contribute to a solution; how are rewards shared? Will not the person who works best and gets most show up his or her companions? Might they

REWARDS PUNISH IF THEY ARE HOPED FOR AND ARE NOT REALISED. THEY CAN SOW DEEP RESENTMENT punish that person as a ‘rate-buster’? No one is going to pay people more than they can afford. Does pay for performance not allow the supervisor to claw back the money after the fact?

When you supervise someone, you need to be subtle. You support the performer so that he or she goes on trying, but critique the performance so the person improves.

But giving or withholding several hundred pounds is going to obliterate that fine distinction. It is crude and clumsy.

Rewards punish if they are hoped for and are not realised. They can sow deep resentment. Do you want 50% of your people to realise they are ‘below average’? They’ll work it out! Why put different talents on a single monetary yardstick?

Charles Hampden-Turner is a British management philosopher, and was a senior research associate at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge

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