Pride Day, celebrated on different dates internationally, is the annual occasion to show support to the LGBTQ+ community through large parades and celebrations. If the circumstances were different, the streets would already be full of rainbow flags and marches in favour of gender and sexual diversity. Although the pandemic is not as bad as it was in 2020, this year the healthcare situation is still fragile in most countries and the ways to show our support for Pride still need to be readapted.
This year has been devasting for social affairs, especially for people who identify as part of LGBTQ+ community. During 2020’s strict lockdown and the social distancing rules, which in different measure still apply to this day, many groups that were already vulnerable before the pandemic are even more so today. According to a report by Spain’s National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals (FELGTB), LGTBI people over 55 suffer three times more depression and anxiety. And, if these numbers were concerning in the world pre-covid, they should be more alarming in the new normal.
Such data represents a reality in our society that we must face so that people with different sexual and gender identities are not discriminated against. We have to understand that generally we are not aware of the difficulties faced by the members of the LGBTQ+ community. We need to be open and listen and let them show us the way to become truly inclusive.
As time passes, we’re moving towards an increasingly equal and inclusive labour market, where different identities are accepted and only merits and qualities matter. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no goals still left to achieve nor that we must stop advocating for the inclusion of this community. As a global recruitment group, from Hays we want to offer a short guide of six principles that can help any business become more open, plural and respectful.
1. Coming out of the closet is a continuous experience, not a unique situation
This first principle is fairly common, especially in the workplace. The ‘closet’ is often referred to as a metaphoric place where once you’re out you never go back. When, in fact, the opposite happens. According to a McKinsey Report, ‘coming out of the closet’ is a situation that the members of the LGBTQ+ community experience on a monthly basis, even weekly and daily depending on each case. Workers find themselves having to correct their colleagues regarding their personal situation or having to reaffirm the assumptions others make about them. This is why replacing expressions such as ‘fathers and mothers’ for ‘families’ or ‘boyfriends or girlfriends’ for ‘couples’ is quite useful and inclusive. It allows anyone to feel included and doesn’t assume anyone’s gender nor identity.
2. Someone’s sexuality or gender identity cannot be a taboo
As mentioned in the LGBT+ ADIM Guide, developed by Spain’s Government, not assuming someone’s sexuality or identity should not be confused with turning the subject into a secret or a taboo. It is very easy to say “I don’t care what anyone does at home.” But following this mindset is very dangerous nowadays, as it makes all non-straight people invisible. There is a middle ground between not assuming and being able to freely share matters about one’s sentimental life. Saying ‘I don’t care’ can impose the Law of Silence, where things are not normalized. We spend a large part of our daily life working, and encouraging people to feel fulfilled and be themselves in the workplace is essential to achieve an inclusive company. You do not have to force or assume, it is simply about creating the right kind of environment.
3. Not all people in the LGBTQ+ community are Gay men
When we speak, for example, about standing up for the ‘Gay community’ or attending ‘Gay Pride’, we are referring only to defending the rights of homosexual men. Lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, transsexuals, etc. should not be invisible. Companies and organizations have to advocate for all the people in the LGBTQ+ community. Each group has different experiences, but they all are related to gender and identity. Including the acronym LGBTQ+ and encouraging others to speak about the issues in each letter is essential; such as the difficulty of recognizing their own gender faced by trans people, or the social invisibility suffered by bisexual people. All letters in LGBTQ+ matter.
4. Discrimination is not always easy to detect
When we think of discrimination in the workplace, the first thing that usually comes to mind are insults, mobbing or even an unfair dismissal. These are very serious and concerning topics, but the discrimination in these cases is obvious, almost undeniable. Then, there’s a large etcetera of scenarios, much more frequent and difficult to solve: jokes, comments, rumors, light mockery… It all starts with setting a good example from above. Make sure leaders and managers are the first to show zero tolerance for jokes that can make someone feel uncomfortable or unfulfilled at work.
5. Language and visibility matter a lot
At this point and after more than 50 years since the Stonewall riots in 1969, it might seem like showing support for the LGBTQ+ community is redundant and unnecessary. But this perception could not be further from the truth. Showing support for the movement both internally and externally and manifesting that a an organization is in full support of anyone’s sexuality and gender often creates a comfort effect among current employees and favours the inclusion of future employees.
Signs of support can’t only be based on changing a company’s logo on social media and putting on a rainbow costume once a year. At Hays we like to reiterate that Pride should be celebrated all year round. Participating in demonstrations and joining campaigns can be part of the plan, but companies need to ensure that managers and directors are just as consistent with diversity values. Including protocols in HR departments or organizing talks and trainings on D&I are some of the first steps to guarantee an equal treatment of all employees.
5. It is no longer enough to be neutral, it is time to take action
In the work environment of 2021, it is no longer just a matter of acknowledging that all workers are equally valid. It is time to show that companies support the LGBTQ+ community and all that this entails. A very useful initiative is to promote the creation of internal committees that are in charge of promoting the acceptance of the different sexual and gender identities, which can be made up of both people from within the community and allies.
At Hays a couple of years ago we created the Hays Pride Network initiative, which brings together the different Pride committees from around the globe. This year, the committee has been materialized in Spain, with real plans and objectives for the upcoming years. Involving employees is essential and we hope to contribute to a greater acceptance, inclusion and diversity in our immediate environment. Understanding that our social system is exclusive by default is the first step on the road to equality. Doors must be opened for those who have been discriminated; this is the only way to achieve real change. We look forward to talking about more social progress in 2022, celebrating Pride as we used to. Until then, we promise to keep moving in the right direction.
When operating in a position of leadership, higher demands, pressures, and responsibilities can sometimes make it difficult to cope and effectively manage your work and teams. As a result, resilience is proving more important than ever before to adapt to this ever-changing climate. So today, we’re joined by Dr. Susan Kahn, Business Psychologist and Coach, and author of the new book Bounce Back.
Susan is here to share her expert advice to help business leaders build resilience in themselves and role model this trait to support their teams too.
1. To begin with, please can I ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit more about your background and your career journey to date?
(01:16) Yes, of course. Well, I began my career as an anthropology graduate who joined telecoms and later, as you know, moved on to become a Business Psychologist. Telecoms was an extremely exciting time of transformation when I joined and I became fascinated there, both by the way organisations change, the way products and services change, but also about the way people led and directed that change.
And then through various twists and turns, I trained as a consultant using psychoanalytic methods and began to investigate below the surface dynamics in organisations. So, distinguishing between what’s presented and what’s really going on. And this work feeds into everything I do, really. In my writing, my teaching, and my coaching work.
2. And what sparked your interest in resilience led you to write your book Bounce Back?
(02:18) Well, during the financial recession of 2007, I was doing some research in a failed bank, and I had a very privileged position witnessing the very slow shutdown of this organisation, and exploring the experience of loss and endings and really catastrophic change. And it was fascinating to note who within that organisation seemed to work through those challenges with relative ease and those who got stuck and really struggled. And this fascination led to another book on loss and mourning, but ultimately to Kogan Page approaching me about writing Bounce Back.
3. In your book, you devote a chapter to the specific resilience challenges that leaders face. Can you tell us more about this area of developing resilience in a bit more detail?
(03:14) Yes, I think leaders face a challenge when their organisation, or team, or as we’re experiencing now, world events are stressful or demanding. Because they not only have to manage their own fear, their own panic, their own anxiety, and perhaps even dread, but at the same time, be a containing and supportive force for those around them, reassuring those that they’ve kind of got this, that they’re leading those who are turning to them for guidance and support with authority and with capability. And it’s a tough position to be in. So, you’re almost sandwiched between two demanding forces. And perhaps also, this is particularly challenging for newly appointed managers or people who are in new organisations establishing themselves.
4. And why do you think it’s so important for business leaders to build resilience right now? What are the common challenges that resilience will help them overcome?
(04:16) Well, I think it’s very important to acknowledge that we are all in the situation of stress and anxiety, that we’ve been in for a very long time. We have been working and living and experiencing a period of enormous flux, and that has created an opportunity to develop our resilience, but also really to be challenged.
We’ve moved from the resilience that’s required for dealing with an emergency, that fight-flight response, to something immediately challenging, to this very long drip-feed experience where we don’t know the end. So, we’re in a very heightened state and that demands a sense of long resilience. We have the psychological impact of social distancing, the loneliness and fatigue that goes along with that.
And business leaders must communicate constantly to make sure that their people are feeling connected, understood, and supported. And that is much more demanding now, there are so many unexpected things that are happening and so many ways in which people respond to the crisis, that we have a lot of challenges as leaders. And to overcome them, I think that we need to really focus on attending to ourselves as leaders, to our own wellbeing, our own self-awareness.
5. Sticking with this, what are the key benefits of resilience, and are these becoming even more important for leaders to own in this world of work?
(06:02) I mean, you’re so right, Megan, things are changing so fast. It’s hard to anticipate even what’s going to be coming in the next month, never mind in the coming years. So I think that, in terms of the benefits of resilience, it might sound a little bit counter-intuitive for me to report that I think a kinder and more benevolent approach to decisions is a really positive impact of becoming more resilient.
Being able to take a helicopter view— In my work as a mediator, we often use the term ‘turning to the balcony’, taking another perspective on things and developing resilience. We have this capacity to stand back, to leave the current crisis and look at what’s going on and attached to that as a sense of opportunity to learn.
Lots of work has been done on post-traumatic stress and the aftereffects of going through real crisis but there’s less attention given to what’s known as post-traumatic growth, the idea that through real adversity, we can learn and grow so much. And I suspect many people are sitting in that position now, that despite the difficulties, they’ve really grown through this period of challenge.
But just to add, particularly for leaders, this idea of being a model mentor to others can be both a wonderful opportunity for you to share your learning and expertise, but again, another demand. I think generally with resilience, one can turn to the master of resilience, the master of working through adversity, Viktor Frankl, who says that when we’re no longer able to change a situation, we’re challenged to change ourselves. And this is really at the heart of resilience.
6. What traits do leaders need to possess the kind of resilience that we’ve just discussed?
(08:11) Well, resilience is universal. It’s not something that leaders have, or they don’t have. So, if a leader is feeling a little fragile or frail, they can know that it’s something that can be developed. We all have the capacity to become more resilient, but to develop that resilience, you must have a willingness to rethink, to have self-compassion and to consider alternatives.
And I think that Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst’s gift to us all ‘good enough’ is a wonderful trope to adopt here. This idea that we don’t have to be perfect, that we can do our best to deliver what we need to deliver, and that’s good enough. And so, abandon this notion of perfection or getting everything right, because it’s simply impossible.
7. Do you have any strategies that leaders can follow to build resilience in themselves?
(09:19) I mean, absolutely. This is at the heart of my work, the idea that we do have tools and techniques and ways in which we can build our resilience, and they don’t have to be hugely time-consuming. Just to give you some ideas, let’s think about in terms of mind, body, heart, and soul.
In terms of the way we think, cognitive reframing, choosing to be optimistic, having what Carol Dweck calls ‘a growth mindset’. So, rather than limiting our beliefs and thinking, “I’m not good at that.” Or, “I’m not good in a crisis.” Or, “I’m always the person who makes a mistake.” To begin to readdress your thinking around yourself, that’s one strategy.
If mind and body are inextricably linked, we’re learning more and more about this, but we must take care of ourselves. It’s not a selfish thing to make sure that we have a walk every day, that perhaps we do some breathing exercises or meditation, that we’re making sure that we’re hydrated, that we’ve got a reasonable diet. These are things that people are like, “Oh no, more and more of the same and same.” But it makes so much sense to take care of our physical selves and that helps our resilience enormously.
And in terms of our relationship with others, we really are social creatures, and we need each other. So, connecting to others, even revealing what you’re struggling with, or what you’ve been pleased with. Bonding with authenticity is a very vital way to build resilience. And at the heart of all this, perhaps the soul of the matter is, being connected to some sense of purpose, believing that the sacrifices you’re making, that the work you’re doing is worthwhile because you’re working towards something that matters to you. So, I think there are some headlines strategies that could really help to build resilience.
8. Is there anything else that our listeners can be doing in addition to what we’ve just discussed?
(11:33) I mean, lots. I’ve got about fifty exercises in Bounce Back but let me just perhaps refer to a few other things.
There’s real value in finding a bit of space to talk and express yourself. And if you don’t have a trusted colleague, a coach, a thinking partner, you might want to do some journaling to make sure you’re expressing your progress or worries yourself. That can be extremely cathartic. And in terms of our brain and our neuroplasticity, to know that we do have the capacity to literally rewire our brains, that our brains can change themselves. This is a wonderful development in understanding brain function that teaches us in very practical ways, but simple ways we can rewire the way we think.
So an exercise, at the end of each day, just thinking about three good things that have happened, that we’ve achieved from the smallest thing, to remembering to make that call or to chairing a meeting well, or remembering to go for a walk can actually allow you to build this optimistic and growth mindset. Generally, I think, forgive yourself for your mistakes. Give up on perfection. I, myself, I’m a retired perfectionist, and I can assure you it’s much nicer on the other side. And learning to say no, I think these are all things that can be of additional help.
9. How important is it for leaders to role model these behaviours to support and build resilience in their teams? And do you have any advice that you can share to help our listeners do this more effectively?
(13:33) Yes, I mean, I think it might sound a little counterintuitive for me to stress that leaders showing vulnerability is one of the most powerful things that they can do. Allowing teams to see that everyone finds things that are difficult, even those with knowledge, power and authority, is a very strong message of, “We’re in this together” and that you’re not expected to get everything right.
And gives a strong message that you’re open to listen and learn. You’re not presenting yourself as a perfect example of a leader or somebody in the workplace. So, I think that vulnerability and recognising that, however hard we try, we’re going to make some mistakes at some point is an enormously powerful and valuable thing that a leader can do. And I think that that message is beginning to change, the idea of strong, unbending leadership is really shifting.
10. On this theme of breaking ideas or notions that there is such a thing as a perfect leader and how leaders should be more vulnerable, do you think it can be beneficial for leaders to let their teams experience failure, to make them more resilient? And if so, how can our listeners support their teams in embracing failure and learning from their mistakes?
(15:00) Absolutely Megan, being able to experience failure is our journey to wisdom. It’s only by trying, failing and learning and trying and failing again, that we do get to any sense of conquering our skills and our knowledge and our understanding. And the wise, I think, that are recognising as soon as they’ve learnt something that they know very little, that other people who are on course to become knowledgeable.
So, I think failure can’t be avoided. It’s universal as is adversity. We’re all going to face some difficulty at some time. We’re all going to have challenges, be that loss, health, or relationship rupture. So, failure is something that hits us all, so hiding it can be really damaging. As a leader, pretending that you never have had a failure can be something that is both inauthentic and also leads to people hiding mistakes, to not doing what we refer to as failing fast, recognising that something has gone wrong, learning from it and fixing it, but kind of brushing it under the carpet.
And, as a society, we’ve seen the damage that can be done in terms of the financial crash, and even with the early responses to COVID-19, of not actually acknowledging when things have gone wrong. And I think this very much connects to the point that we discussed around vulnerability. That it’s okay to fail because, frankly, we all do.
11. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader? And crucially, do you think that these qualities have changed because of the pandemic?
(17:12) I love that question because it encourages you to really think and crystallise your ideas around leadership. And so, I would say that, at first, communication is vital in any time of leading and guiding a team. But now, I think it’s communication, communication, communication both as a way of containing i.e. allowing people to understand the parameters of what they’re working in and helping people to have clarity about what’s expected of them, what’s going on.
And most importantly, to be able to listen to what people have to say, both in terms of learning and being able to understand and take the temperature of the room, but also to be able to have a sense of the way you’re managing the crisis, seeing how that’s impacting. And I think in terms of how that element of communication impacts now, I think everything is amplified. Every moment of feeling isolated and disconnected is created in a much more amplified way because we are working with home. We don’t have our colleagues around us, we don’t have the prompts that help us to get through the day. So, communication is one.
I think, secondly, self-awareness, and alongside that, self-compassion. So, to not only know who we are as leaders, perhaps recognising that we might be a bit intimidating to some people, or that we have a certain style, or even that we enjoy recruiting people who agree with us, that have the same kind of sense of values and understanding. And being able to recognise that and to be understanding of that can help us to then make changes and understand our patterns of behaviour.
And then finally, and this is something that I think applies to everybody, is that we must be willing to change and adjust. The necessity of change has never been so dramatic as it has in the last year. But I think that that ability to think again, to question our judgments, to be able to have the confidence to say, “I got that wrong, let’s try something else,” is an amazing quality in a leader.
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As the world of work continues to evolve, many professionals are reflecting on what they truly want from their careers, striving to find a sense of meaning and purpose in their everyday working lives.
So today, we’re joined by Shannon Houde, Founder and Managing Director of Walk of Life Coaching, Certified Executive Coach and Author of the book Good Work, which explores how to build a career that makes a difference to the world. Shannon is here today to share her expert advice to help all of us find meaning in our every-day working lives.
1. Please could you introduce yourself to our listeners and give an overview of your career to date?
(01:08) Absolutely. Well, I must admit, it probably took me about 39 years to find my calling myself, and I’ve spent most of my career reinventing myself again and again. I’ve been everything from a corporate recruiter to a management consultant, an accountant, an entrepreneur three times, and a conservationist. And I’ve changed jobs every 18 months until I created my own ideal job with Walk of Life Coaching.
So, I really fit now at the intersection of all the hats I’ve worn across my career, both from a psychology perspective, from a consulting and coaching perspective, and then also from the recruitment and talent agenda.
2. So, you’ve had quite a varied career. Did that lead into your interest in career purpose and to write your book Good Work as well?
(02:00) Yes, absolutely, in creating my own ideal career of running my own business. So, I think I’m an entrepreneur at heart and I’ve always loved writing resumes, helping others, mentoring them, and coaching them through their professional journeys, whether it was being their manager or just as a colleague. And so, I took my experience and my coaching and management background, and merged that up with the issue areas that I had been consulting in for big businesses over the past 20 years, which is around the impact space or sustainability, the environment, charity sector, all of those kind of themes that are in business where we’re making more than just profits but we’re also considering people and planet as well.
3. How have you personally found meaning in your own career?
(02:56) Yes, meaning it’s a great word, I love that word. I think it links a lot to purpose as well and I really can honestly say, I don’t feel like I go to work every day because I love what I do so much. And I think the meaning really, for me, is the motivation is helping others to achieve their own sense of purpose, their own potential, and being able to unlock barriers that we all get to our own personal progress.
So, it’s that kind of an enabler or facilitator role that I get to play so that others can go out into the world then and make a difference for our environment, the planet, and our communities.
4. And in your book, you begin by exploring the concept of impact careers. Could you just explain to our listeners what you mean by this in a little more detail?
(03:51) Yes, it’s kind of an umbrella term now that I’ve started using, because we’ve got lots of different semantics and language that have evolved around this space over the last twenty years. It used to be called corporate social responsibility, then it was called corporate responsibility, it was called sustainable business, sustainability, environmental, now we’re talking resilience. There’s lots of different words that we’re using to mean the same thing in essence, which is really what I talked about more is the triple bottom line, which is a concept that was coined about twenty years ago around businesses focusing and leaders focusing on more than just the profit number, but the economics, the planet, environment, people, and so that being the stakeholders of the communities, so that could also mean employees.
So, we’re looking more holistically at how we lead businesses forward around this triple bottom line approach rather than just the economic, we include the environmental and the social elements to it as well.
5. Why is it so important that we find purpose and meaning in our jobs? And do you think, this need to find meaning has grown because of the pandemic?
(05:07) Absolutely. I mean, the last year through COVID-19, I have seen more than a 200% increase in my business because people have had time to reflect on what’s important to them. We’ve been able to stop, we’ve been able to just slow down and have the time to think and decide what’s important to us without a lot of the external pressures and pace that we were used to having.
And so, there’s been a lot of self-reflection and in that, I think people have woken up to the fact that maybe they’re not so happy in their current roles, that they want to do more than just make a salary, they want to make a difference. So, most of my clients come to me and say, ‘I still need to earn a living. I want a job that I love, but I really want to make a difference’. And that can mean a lot of different things to different people, but ultimately, what I think that means is, having a sense of doing something and giving something back beyond just getting that pay cheque.
And again, I think this links quite nicely to a lot of the neuroscience and a lot of the psychology research around what makes us happy as humans, right? We have our Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and once those are met, what else is there that allows us to really live a balanced, happy and fulfilled life. And I think that is about being able to identify and then live into, achieve and find that purpose and meaning.
Yes, we’re hearing a lot about people using the time during the pandemic to reflect on what they really want, as you said. So, it’s great that there’s places where they can go and get advice and get a bit of guidance on what they can do.
6. Is there anything that you can tell our listeners now on how they can find a sense of purpose in their day-to-day roles?
(07:02) Yes, I usually would start them off with a very simple mapping exercise and it could just be a brainstorm, it could be a mind map, however your mind works to gain insights about yourself. And it’s about being able to map out or list what gets you excited? What issues are you passionate about? What gets you angry? For me, it’s all the plastic that I see at the grocery stores, you know.
So, it depends on what are those issues that you want to make a difference in? What are you willing to invest time, money, and energy into shaping change around? And I think that alignment with those passion areas are basically founded on what are your values.
So, I do a values mapping exercise, and then do an impact issue mapping exercise where we’re identifying those key issues you want to solve. But also, that values alignment must be there in terms of the type of people you’re working with and the type of organisation and the mission of that organisation.
7. What would you say to those that are struggling to find meaning in their current roles?
(08:18) I would say, do some self-reflection. There’s lots of different ways to get at the root of what’s missing. It could be reading some books, it could be, self-help books. It could be mindfulness meditation, taking a walk in the fields or in the mountains, and to try to get some sort of distance from that day-to-day struggle, so that you can get some perspective. It might be a therapist or a coach or reaching out to friends and family, but it’s about doing the groundwork on the reflection around what is important to you. What is meaning? What does it look like if you had it? And then what are some of the steps you can take to try to correct the space that you’re in right now that’s challenging you.
So, that’s what we really do as coaches, it’s very forward-looking to say, where do you want to be? What would that look like? Draw us a picture of that and then let’s address the issues that are the blocks to getting there and start to build out an action plan, for how you can incrementally shift towards getting closer to that meaning.
8. Are there any strategies you can share with our listeners that they can follow to find an organisation that matches their personal values and traits? And how important would you say it is for them to do that?
(09:43) I think it’s crucial. I mean that’s really part of my 13-step programme that I run with job seekers and job changers is a mapping of those personal values and traits very early on, it’s in step three in fact, so we need to be able to understand our own traits because those are basically our approach or our style of working.
So, we need to know that about ourselves first. Where do we thrive and what kind of environment, so that we as an individual and as a contributor, we’re going to feel valued in those roles or in that context of that organisation.
And then the values side of it, I flip it on its head. I say, what are your top five values that are so important to you, you have to be aligned with the organisation, their culture, or the team or the boss that you’re going to be working with? So, the values are almost like a tick list of what you want from the culture and context that you’re going to be working in.
So, if you start to map those out with that lens, it really helps you to have that checklist of things that you need from that organisation. That it’s not always only the candidate trying to prove what they’re offering but the organisation also in their fight for talent, needs to be aligned and proving that they have those solid values and that they’re walking the talk from a leadership perspective.
So, I always say, look at the top down, how are those senior leaders walking the talk of those cultural values that they’re claiming to have in that organisation. And in order to do your due diligence on that, before you accept on the dotted line for a new role, I always say talk to old employees, talk to ex-employees because they’re the ones that are probably going to tell you the real truth about how that organisation or that culture, that team, are really working and how they’re really adhering to those values.
Thank you, that’s helpful. And yes, of course, as a candidate, as a person going for a role, it is important to remember that you’re not the only one that’s being assessed, you are assessing the company as well to see how they fit what you’re after.
9. So, if a person has decided to search for meaning elsewhere, in a new job, for instance, how can they effectively demonstrate their commitment to the employer’s purpose on their CV or during the interview stage perhaps?
(12:11) Yes, I mean identifying what the employer’s purpose is, is the first step, right? Because it’s not always completely obvious. I think often especially in the corporate sector, we see the purpose is usually the bottom line, it’s usually just that profit number isn’t it? Or the shareholder returns. If you’re going for an NGO (non-governmental organisation), it’s probably going to be linked to whatever their mission is, whether that’s a health issue or a medical or conservation.
So, I think just being able to identify the drivers for that organisation, and that will help you to decide and see if there’s alignment around the business model. So again, an NGO is going to be run very differently than a for-profit. So, being able to identify that first, it’s going to be important and then thinking about, well, okay, so which one am I going to actually target for finding a new role because I’m going to be better aligned to that non-profit, for instance, mission or business model versus the more profit driven corporate sector.
Once you’ve made that decision, you can then start to map and to research what it is, in terms of the semantics, that you need to match. How can you really be relevant and resonate for that employer based on the language that they’re using to talk about their brand and their mission. So, when I think about purpose, I almost would translate that word to mean ‘mission’, so that’s what we talked about often in mission-driven organisations, meaning that they’re not just about profit. They’re about more in terms of the triple bottom line. So, you’d want to be able to articulate that both on paper, on the CV, but also during an interview, as to what you’ve done in your past that proves you are aligned to that similar mission.
So, it’s about doing the homework, the groundwork, the research on the people and the brand messaging that the organisation has put out to the market, and then aligning that for your own personal story, and your personal branding that you’re putting out on LinkedIn, CV and the interview, so that your language and semantics are going to resonate and align as well.
10. If you had one piece of advice to help our listeners navigate their careers throughout the pandemic and beyond, what would that be?
(14:38) It would be to believe in yourself, because each one of you listening can make a difference while making a pay cheque, and to make the change that you really want to make. So, if you can roll up your sleeves and commit to the somewhat rigorous process that it will take to make a career change or to make a job change, you can absolutely do it.
I’ve worked with more than a thousand career changers over the past decade who have successfully made big leaps and shifts in their careers and reinvented themselves. So, I know first-hand that it’s possible and I think the first thing is just keeping that positivity, tapping into your own personal resilience in terms of the process because it can take time, and it does require that resilience and bounce back from rejection here and there, but also a creativity that you need in order to reach out to people in your networks, to think about how you’re going to be perceived on paper and verbally, and getting creative about how you’re going to improve that personal brand messaging with a deep-rooted self-confidence.
And I think that self-confidence grows in the process, if you get support in doing it, I think this is a very difficult process to go through on your own behind a computer screen, trying to write a CV or do job applications, or pick up the phone and leverage your personal networks. It’s a lonely and difficult process. So, find a group of colleagues, friends or family or a coach that can really support you through what can be a somewhat long process, keeping in mind, that it is possible.
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Generation Z is largely defined as those born between 1996 and 2012. Given that the people born towards the start of this generation are now in their twenties, many are beginning their entry into the workplace.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has monumentally impacted the start of their careers. Many have missed out on their first job opportunity, or had their final years of education interrupted.
In this new era of work, employers need to ensure they properly understand Gen Zers – including what motivates them – in order to create the perfect workplace to attract and retain them.
So, how does Gen Z differ from the generations currently dominating our workforces – Millennials, Generation X and Baby Boomers?
The four defining characteristics of Gen Z – and what they mean for organisations
1. Gen Z is the most diverse generation yet, with the most inclusive views and expectations
According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center, 48 per cent of Gen Zers in the US are racial or ethnic minorities, compared to 39 per cent of Millennials, 30 per cent of Generation Xers, and 18 per cent of Boomers. Not only that, but Gen Zers also hold more inclusive views and expectations than previous generations.
A survey by the BBC in the UK found evidence that Gen Zers were far more concerned about prejudice towards LGBTQ+ people, gender equality and racism than older generations. In addition, The New York Times has described Gen Zers as possessing “untraditional views on gender and identity.” They have a real open-mindedness and awareness when it comes to gender and sexuality – ultimately defined as identity. Many Gen Zers, for example, will include their pronoun preferences in their email signature and social media bios. Research in Brazil further evidences this generational characteristic; it was found that 60 per cent of Gen Zers were of the opinion that same-sex couples should be able to adopt children – 10 percentage points more than members of other generations.
What does this mean for organisations? As reported by The Washington Post, Gen Zers are seeking proof of employers’ dedication to diversity and inclusion. Indeed, in the US, 77 per cent of Gen Z have indicated that a company’s level of diversity affects their decision to work there. So, an organisation’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion – and how clearly they communicate it – is evidently a key factor for Gen Z when considering job opportunities.
2. COVID-19 has negatively impacted Gen Z’s education and entry into the workforce
Although all generations have suffered from the economic consequences of the pandemic, evidence suggests that Gen Z have been hit with job loss and unemployment the worst. As early as March 2020, Pew Research Center reported that 50 per cent of Gen Zers in the US said they or someone in their household had lost work or pay due to the outbreak of the virus. The equivalent figures for Millennials, Generation X and Boomers were much lower; 40 per cent, 36 per cent and 25 per cent respectively.
Gen Zers currently in education have also faced huge turmoil; exams have been cancelled, much of the traditional university experience has moved online, and proms and graduation plans have evaporated. Students have seen entire years – those often considered to be ‘the best years of your life’ – written off. In the words of Lauren Stiller Rikleen for Harvard Business Review, “collectively, they are experiencing the greatest national trauma since the Great Depression and World War II.”
So, what does this mean for employers looking to attract and retain Gen Z candidates? As our CEO, Alistair Cox, previously reflected, “As business leaders, we cannot just idly sit back, avert our eyes and let this generation experience this monumental upheaval without doing all we can to support them. It is our duty to act.” You need to build a supportive working environment to enable them to thrive when they join your team:
Provide suitable mental health and wellbeing support. The American Psychological Association (APA) reported that Gen Zers are “significantly more likely to seek professional help for mental health issues” than past generations. Even before the pandemic, Gen Zers had expressed higher levels of anxiety and depression than older generations. They will therefore expect and want employers to have support available for them, should they need it.
Be aware of the likely increase in skills gaps among Gen Zers than previous generations, due to their interrupted education. As Rikleen has noted for Harvard Business Review: “Now that their structured learning has been upended, employers and employees may need to develop greater patience with Gen Z’s adjustment to the professional world and a greater focus on intergenerational mentoring and support.”
3. Gen Zers are true digital natives
Gen Z haven’t known a world without the Internet. They are therefore accustomed to having information at their fingertips via search engines and social media. They’re also used to instant, virtual connection, which they routinely use to form and build relationships. Your organisation therefore needs to provide the platforms and opportunities that enable them to quickly access information and establish virtual connections while at work – especially as remote and hybrid working arrangements become our new ‘normal’.
However, if your new Gen Z starters are onboarding remotely, it’s important to appreciate that while they will almost certainly be confident with the technology, they may need additional onboarding support. As Alistair Cox, has explained previously: “Yes, they are a digitally savvy generation, but research shows that 45 per cent of Gen Z and employed Millennials said they had never worked remotely before the pandemic, so give them the support they need to get up and running quickly.”
And don’t forget about the practicalities of your new Gen Z employees onboarding and working remotely; do they have the space to work at home productively? Do they have access to Wi-Fi? This is an essential consideration if you are wanting to build an inclusive workplace. After all, those from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have these luxuries.
4. Gen Zers are passionate about solving the world’s wrongs
In the words of McKinsey & Company, Gen Z “mobilise themselves for a variety of causes. They believe profoundly in the efficacy of dialogue to solve conflicts and improve the world.” Just one example of Gen Z’s notable commitment to transforming the world is the decision – as reported by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – of more than 30,000 French students from over 300 universities to sign a pledge to only work for environmentally conscious companies.
What does this mean for organisations? It underlines the importance of employers having a strong sense of meaning in what they do, enabling employees to feel as though they are benefiting society. As the WEF has put it, purpose is “the most powerful tool companies have at their disposal to meet the intrinsic needs of new talent.” But simply creating a new purpose doesn’t cut it; they added that, “For this new generation, it is not enough for their employers to simply have a compelling purpose. They want to see purpose lived out authentically through bold actions.”
Our CEO has also previously discussed the power organisations hold in providing employees with personal meaning, “By joining a purpose-driven organisation – one that is aligned to our own value system – we are able to find solace in the fact that, collectively, as part of a team, we are better able to have the positive impact on the world that we feel we need to make.”
So, we now know the four key characteristics of Gen Z – and why it’s so important for employers to understand them. Essentially, they have a very different attitude than older generations towards diversity and inclusion, the role of digital in the workplace, and organisations taking accountability for improving the world. But what do employers need to change in order to attract and retain Gen Z employees in the new era of work? Read my next blog to find out.
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Careers are full of satisfying, challenging, and rewarding moments but there can also be times when we feel out of our depth, inadequate or depleted. In these instances, resilience is important, it can help us to understand failure and respond to it quickly and bounce back.
So today, we’re joined by Dr Susan Kahn, Business Psychologist and coach, and author of the book Bounce Back. Susan is here to share her expert advice to help those looking to build their resilience in the workplace.
1. Please could you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit more about your background and your career to date?
(01:09) Yes of course, as you introduced, I am a psychologist, but I began my career in the telecoms industry. And early on, I became really interested in management and leadership, what motivated individuals, and what made people successful in leadership. So, development was always an interest and I trained as a consultant using psychoanalytic methods. So, this was a transformative time in understanding below the surface dynamics, not just what is presented on the surface.
And I’m now part academic working within the Department of Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck, and also an executive coach and a mediator, trying to bring all the threads of my career together in both a way of teaching and also practising what I preach.
2. What sparked your interest in resilience, and led you to write the book Bounce Back?
(02:10) Well, I’ve always been fascinated by what makes one individual appear vulnerable and another appear very strong, but during the financial recession, I was lucky enough to be doing some research in a failed bank. And I had a ringside seat into exploring the experience of loss and endings and trying to understand why it was that some coped with the challenges of redundancy and failure, and others seemed able to work through this. So, it became something of a fascination which led to another book, but also led to my work with Kogan Page on Bounce Back.
3. You mentioned a concept in your book of ‘failing fast’, which is a framework that allows employees the space to make mistakes. Could you explain this concept in a little more detail?
(03:08) Yes, of course. The term ‘fail fast’ comes from system design and is process by which as soon as a mistake or a flaw is noted, it’s very quickly changed and updated. This is something that the scientific community is very familiar with the constants of hypotheses testing and revising. And, entrepreneurs who almost embrace failure as a chance to learn, you’re not really considered as a serious entrepreneur unless you’ve got a couple of failures behind you.
But at work, we have this misplaced notion that somehow, we should be able to do challenging things first time. And by shifting, changing, pivoting, and learning from our mistakes, we become much more successful at work rather than digging in our heels and doing what we’ve always done despite that failure. So certainly, embracing failure and dealing with it quickly is a route to success, not a route to failure.
4. Why else do you think it’s so important that employees embrace failure?
(04:19) Well, I think the essence of it is that failure is at the heart of growth and development. If we’re striving to gain wisdom or expertise or understanding, we must go through a constant cycle of making mistakes, of learning from our mistakes and then recognising that that cycle is a perpetual one. That we’ll always need to carry on learning and trying and even when we’ve reached a level of expertise, that that cycle continues. Essentially, in order to develop and grow, we must acknowledge that we’ll fail along the way.
5. And how can our listeners embrace failure and learn from their mistakes? And what effect could this have on their careers potentially?
(05:06) I think firstly, it’s important to note that the failure isn’t necessarily enjoyable for most people. We are all vulnerable and fallible, and it’s not a pleasant experience to know that something we put our heart and soul into has not been successful. And of course, we might be fearful of how that’s judged and viewed. But whilst it is humbling and at times uncomfortable, it’s important to know that inevitably we’re going to fail. Nobody runs through their career or their life, indeed, without stumbles along the way.
And it’s a good starting point to just register that, and crucially to know that these mistakes can have a profound difference to our future actions and future career choices. So, it’s something that the greatest leaders have learned, that it’s okay to be vulnerable and flawed. It demonstrates humanity and confidence and a learning mindset. We’re not talking here about making the same mistake repeatedly, of course, that’s not to be recommended, but just taking time to pause and learn so that the same error doesn’t happen again.
6. Going back to the concept of failing fast- that is seen as being key to developing resilience. Please could you share with our listeners how you define the term resilience?
(06:27) Yes, it’s something which is come into common parlance, and I think that going to the etymology of resilience is a good way to understand it. It comes from the Latin word ‘resilient’, which is literally translated as “bounce back”, the ability to return to our path once we’ve been knocked off course. And it’s very important to stress that when we do bounce back from whatever adversity or failure or difficulty we’ve encountered, we’re not the same. We can continue the path to try again, but we’re not the same individuals as we were before the experience we had.
So, bouncing back is in many ways also a bouncing forward as a newly developed individual with additional understanding and insight. So, we’ve heard so much about bounce back over the past year and I think really, it’s just at the heart of resilience, the ability to get back on track despite the difficulties that you’ve encountered.
7. And what are the key benefits of resilience? And do you think this is becoming even more important as we find ourselves in this ever-changing world of work?
(07:52) I mean, as you rightly point out, work is changing so rapidly, it’s unrecognisable from even a decade ago. And those times when we had a predictable career path are long gone. The fourth industrial revolution has bought with it so many changes that make work unrecognisable; technology, language, leadership and change management.
So, we must be able to adapt and grow and to learn and to be resilient to the fact that change will be constant. We must forgive ourselves some failures along the way because we will be forever immersed in a constantly changing environment. Working with home is a good example of what we’ve all had to adjust to, and I purposefully say working with home rather than working at home, because alongside home comes so many other interruptions and demands, particularly calling out to anybody who’s been home-schooling during the last year.
8. What do you think the typical traits of a resilient person are?
(09:09) I’m passionate in believing that we all have capacity for resilience. This isn’t a binary concept, it’s not like you have it and I don’t. It’s something that can be developed in all of us. It’s not static, we’re not always at our most resilient all the time, but in terms of the most important elements for me, I think it’s around mindset. Looking at events through a growth mindset, and the work of Carol Dweck is very relevant here. Rather than fixed thinking, looking at something with an eye to potential, to opportunity. Not allowing disaster or disappointment to define this, but to look at that as something with a path to something else. So, mindset.
And then I think this recognition that adversity doesn’t discriminate. We are all going to be having tremendously challenging times, even when we come out of this pandemic and accept that things will go wrong, that there will be suffering, but that we are perhaps stronger than we think and we will be able to work through these things. And maybe finally, self-compassion, forgiving yourself, allowing yourself to learn from those mistakes.
9. What can our listeners do to develop their own resilience? And do you have any strategies that they can follow that would help them achieve this?
(10:48) Yes, I mean, Bounce Back has got about fifty exercises in it to help you to access your inner resilience and to tap into what you need to do. But just to mention a few here today,
I think the important thing that we often do for others but forget to do for ourselves is acknowledge our strengths. To take time to note when you have been resilient. We’re very quick to dismiss positive activities that relate to ourselves, narcissistic personalities excluded from this and negative things stick like Velcro to us. And yet, being able to acknowledge those times that we have done things which are very positive, very strong, that indicate resilience is an important thing to do to almost make a practice of noting the good things that have happened during the day. And there’s lots of research to back up that even doing something simple, like noting three good things that have happened during the day, will change the neural pathways in your brain after just a few months to allow you to think differently about yourself. So, I think that’s a very important thing to acknowledge your strength.
Secondly, that you are allowed a bad day. Resilience ebbs and flows, and we’re not always going to be in our sterling best condition. We are at times going to feel a little less than we could be, and that’s okay. You can have a bad day, but each of us, and this will be very different for you, for me, for anyone, is what helps you when you’re feeling vulnerable and what gets in the way. For example, I’m someone who particularly relishes peace and quiet but I have other colleagues and friends who, when they’re feeling in need, desperately want to talk to another person or to be in a social environment. So, knowing what’s right for you, and that comes to the idea of self-awareness, understanding what’s important for you.
And I suppose finally, the thing that I would love everybody to do right now is just to abandon any notion of “perfect”. I, myself am a retired perfectionist, and it’s a very wonderful place to be. It’s unrealistic and unhelpful to imagine that we’re going to get everything right all the time, that we’re going to please everyone, that we’re going to be successful in every endeavour. And by allowing that notion of perfection to go, we can begin to build our resilience by looking at what we are capable of and forgiving ourselves those small imperfections along the way.
10. It seems that self-awareness is important to developing resilience, would you agree?
(13:45) Yes, absolutely. I think self-awareness is a very important first step. but alongside that self-awareness needs to also be self-compassion. So, we might, for example, recognise that we’re a people pleaser who is very keen to say yes to any requests however inconvenient or demanding or inappropriate that might be. And we might find it hard to say no, but we should, in addition to that self-awareness, develop a bit of self-compassion to say, “It’s okay to say no. I can’t do that at the moment.” And to find strategies to practice those quick no’s that allow you to connect your self-awareness with self-compassion and then ultimately action as well. So, we protect ourselves from burnout and getting unnecessarily frazzled.
11. Is there anything else that our listeners can do in addition to what you’ve already discussed, to build their resilience?
(14:53) I mean, it’s a huge topic, but I think it’s important to emphasise that the mind and body are connected, and we need to take care of our physical selves to be mentally resilient. So simple things that we’ve heard a hundred times, but maybe don’t always eventually do is just to keep moving, to stay hydrated, to get some regular sleep. And above all, as I’ve mentioned, self-compassion and knowing you have the potential to grow from adversity, even if it is painful and difficult.
12. If you had one piece of advice to help our listeners navigate their careers throughout the pandemic and beyond, what would that be?
(15:42) I think that what we’ve learnt so profoundly this year but is a lesson we should have with us all the time, is that we must stay open to different possibilities. That our careers might not have taken the path we expected over the last year, and they certainly might not next year, but other doors may open. To stay curious, to keep learning. And of course, to know that if things aren’t as you hoped, you do have an opportunity to bounce back.
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As leaders continue to navigate the changes of the COVID-19 pandemic, factors such as extended periods of remote working and a lack of face-to-face collaboration can have a damaging impact on employee productivity.
To purchase Tim Ringo’s book ‘Solving the Productivity Puzzle’, please click here
1. To start, could I ask you to please introduce yourself to our listeners?
(01:00) Sure, I’m Tim Ringo. I’m a former management consultant and software executive. I recently retired, or as I like to call it, pro-tired, because I’m still doing things like podcasts and writing books and those sorts of things. But I started out my career in Andersen Consulting back in 1990; Andersen Consulting is now known as Accenture. So, I was a management consultant for 25 years.
I was there for 16 years; I was a senior partner and was then recruited to IBM to be Vice-President and lead up their human capital consulting practise in 2006. I did that globally, so I spent a lot of time on an aeroplane. I also wrote a book at that time, called Calculating Success, with my co-authors. And that book was about workforce analytics which was about ten to twelve years ago, so it was a little bit ahead of its time.
And then I joined SAP SuccessFactors as a Vice-President. So, the last five years working alongside the SuccessFactors sales teams, helping SAP customers understand how to get the best out of their SuccessFactors system. And then as you mentioned, I wrote my latest book which is called Solving the Productivity Puzzle. It came out late last year in 2020 and it turns out it’s really timely because everybody’s talking about productivity now, so it’s been good. It was just shortlisted for Business Book of the Year by the Business Book Awards, so I’m really pleased with how it’s been received so far.
2. What sparked your interest in productivity and led you to write your book?
(02:30) Well, it was in 2016. I was looking at a paper by the OECD. I guess I’m one of those sad people who read OECD white papers, but as you know, OECD is the world’s economic body. They do their big part in calculating gross domestic product both globally and then by country. But they put out a paper that was really pessimistic about the future, which essentially said that the average annual rate of GDP growth is going to be stagnant or decline over the next 50 years, which essentially means that 50 years from now we would be likely to have less prosperity and lower living standards than we have today. That’s the outcome of GDP going down.
And most of the reason for it was people-productivity, and they gave three reasons why there was an issue. Firstly, organisations weren’t spending enough on aligning people to new technology, so investing in learning and change-management and those sorts of things, and simply just explaining to people what new technology was being implemented. The second was they weren’t adjusting their processes for digitisation, so a digital organisation that were still using 20th-century processes. And then the third one was their prediction was that organisations were not going to change their organisational structures to take advantage of new tech.
So pretty grim, and I certainly agreed with those three things, but I didn’t see those as long-term issues. In fact, I saw the opposite, which is that companies are working hard on those three things to fix them, to align people to technology, to re-engineer processes, to flatten out organisational structures. So, I thought it was overly pessimistic, and I took an optimistic view and wrote a book about what I saw where the trends that were emerging were both challenges, but also opportunities and then I wrote about solutions.
Really the main part of the book is focusing on, how do we fix this? And I’ve been lucky enough in a thirty-year career to working with some of the world’s biggest and most successful companies and I’ve got to see what they do to create higher performing and productive workforces. So, I focused in the book on the solutions, but that’s what inspired me, when I thought, “Wow, that’s a really pessimistic view and we really do need to fix this.” And so that’s why I wrote the book.
3. What do you mean by the term “productivity” in real terms?
(04:52) Well, this is the immediate problem I ran into when I sat down to write the book, which I looked up: what’s the definition of productivity? Because it had been thirty years since I was in business school. I thought that I should probably go have a look at it again. I found the following, and I’ll read the definition just to show you how boring it is, but it’s:
“Various measures of the efficiency of production. Productivity measures expressed as the ratio of output to inputs used in the production process, i.e. output for a unit of input.”
So that’s very 18th-19th century, that is people as machines picking fruit on a farm or producing widgets. That’s just not what work is like today as 70-80% of us work in offices. And so, I thought, right, I’m going to have to redefine this to unpick the issue. And so, I came up with the following, which is:
“Getting stuff done that measurably improves the economic and human interest of organisations and society at large.”
So, I took that one-dimensional view about people producing things and said, “Look, it’s a broader thing.” It’s absolutely about production, but it’s the outcomes of those productions, so the impact on the economic, the human interest, and then organisations, the society at large, it’s all these things. And you essentially had to come up with that new definition, have something to aim at that helped solve the problem. And so that’s what I hang the whole book on, which is, okay, what’s underneath that?
And for me, there’s three things. There’s the fiscal side, absolutely. You always must measure the dollars and cents and the outputs. But there’s the second piece, which is creating workplaces where people can flourish, so what we call engagement and engaged workforce. And then the third is, well, guess what? Engaged workforces are innovative, they figure out new ways of doing things they come up with new products, new services, and you get this virtuous cycle of, well, engaged workforce creates innovation, which creates more money and prosperity. So that’s how I’ve defined it. It’s a broader, more three-dimensional definition.
4. What impact has the COVID-19 pandemic had on the world’s productivity?
(07:00) Well, initially, a year ago if we think about it— Gosh, it seems crazy that we’re still here a year from now, we’re still in lockdown (in the UK). But that immediate first three months, March, April, May, there was a massive impact on the world’s productivity. It’s been centuries since we’ve seen, particularly in this country, in the UK, that level of productivity drop.
But what we’ve seen is quite quickly in the following nine months as we’ve dug ourselves out of that hole, and in fact, because we were already in a situation where productivity was going down, we’ve actually started to see productivity get back to where it was and start to go beyond. So, the initial numbers are starting to come through. So that January, February this year, that starts to show really interestingly in that people working from home, people working flexibly and people being innovative in how they work is actually starting to solve the productivity problem, it’s starting to impact and create greater productivity. Initially, it was a huge shock and a huge drag on, but we’re starting to see some numbers that indicate we’re actually starting to come out of this better than we were when we went into it, which is fascinating.
5. So, you’ve just mentioned that we’re starting to see productivity figures rise again, how exactly can leaders measure productivity?
(08:19) So, that new definition that I described starts to measure several things. The old one just measured the outputs that people were creating. In the new definition, you can and should measure things like your workforce’s satisfaction, your workforce’s engagement levels. These are things you can measure scientifically and put dollars and pounds to, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is that when you’ve got that engaged workforce and they’re impacting positively on the organisation, well guess what? You’re getting outputs, but more importantly, you’re starting to get outcomes. And outcomes are the things that drive what a business produces for its customers or for the taxpayers. And so, you can make this direct link between engagement and people doing more and doing it better and take it one step further and say those outputs together create an outcome.
So, let’s take for example, that a high-tech company comes up with a new version of a phone that nobody’s ever thought of—this is like the iPhone was 15 years ago—and comes up with this new thing. I don’t know what it would be but it’s almost ahead of the market. But essentially, that came because people saw a new way of doing things, a new product, something that people would want, and took that to market. And there were outputs in producing that, but ultimately you get that phone to the market, people start buying, it becomes the next big thing. That’s an outcome; that’s a huge outcome, that’s a multi-billion-dollar outcome.
And so those are the things that you want to measure. You want to measure the engagement, through to the innovation that it creates, through to the outputs, and then ultimately the outcome that it creates. And that’s what we’re missing today, we’re missing all those pieces in between, but we’re also missing that these products and services that we’re producing these days are sometimes ones and zeros. It’s software, it’s these sorts of things which I think we have a real problem in measuring the outcome of those things. And that’s what economists are starting to get better at, so we’ll be able to measure those ones and zeros, and real dollars and pounds and cents. But that’s how I see things improving in terms of us being able to measure productivity properly and measure the uplift that we’re going to see in productivity.
6. Why do you think the productivity puzzle is such an important one to solve for leaders and organisations, and is it becoming an even more important puzzle to solve as we start to emerge from the pandemic?
(10:52) So as Professor Krugman is famous for saying not too long ago, I think in the past ten years or so, that, “In the short term productivity is neither here nor there, but in the long-term productivity is everything.” And that’s true because the only way that economies and societies grow and prosper is by creating ever more productivity in terms of what people produce and the innovation that they create. It’s the only way that we can see stock markets go up, it’s the only way we can see profits go up, it’s the only way we can see wages and those sorts of things come up.
So, for leaders of organisations, whether you’re a public sector or private— If you’re public sector, your customers are taxpayers and it’s about how you effectively use those tax dollars. If you’re a private sector, it’s about the shareholders. But increasingly it’s becoming more about what you’re doing for society in terms of raising all boats in terms of prosperity, not just the shareholders. And so, leaders need to recognise that the linkage between that engaged workforce in the innovation, then the productivity they create, and then guess what? What that does to the outside world in terms of everybody’s prosperity and everybody’s standards of living. And this is really part of the thing that I think, frankly, business schools sometimes miss. They miss making these connections and it becomes down to dollars and cents and people as headcount and that sort of thing when it’s a much more complex picture and real leaders understand that equation.
7. How important is it for leaders to really understand the individual motivations of their people in driving productivity? And how can they go about improving this understanding?
(12:34) Well, I learned this the hard way, and in my career— Maybe not the hard way, but it took some time, which is that as a leader, as a manager, one of the things that I learned is I need to understand everybody who works with me and works for me. I need to understand my colleagues and my team, what motivates each one of them individually, both personally and at work, and then help everybody to understand each other in that way, because understanding individual motivation and then team motivations allows you to do everything you need to drive productivity.
Because people have a desire to do particular work, and unfortunately, a lot of people end up in work that doesn’t fulfil that desire. And really, a leader’s job is to help people get to that job, to that thing that they’re good at and help them flourish in that situation once they find it. So, your job is to move people around the deck chairs and get them in the right place at the right time with the right skills and help them then develop from there. And you can only do that if you understand their motivations. If you don’t understand what motivates them, it’s impossible to get them in the right place to do the right things.
So, it was trial and error for me, I figured out. And so, what I did going forward is I would always sit down with a new direct report or a new team and get to know each one of them personally and ask them directly, “What motivates you? What can I do?” A manager cannot make it a hundred percent that somebody is doing the exact thing that they’ve always wanted to do. And it just doesn’t work that way. But if you’re trying and you’re getting at 50% or 70%, people totally appreciate that and you’re going to get the most from them. So, it’s about learning to understand their motivations, listening, and understanding what they’re saying, and then really use that to help them flourish.
8. Of course, today we can’t have this conversation without me asking if you think that people’s motivations have changed because of the pandemic?
(14:37) It’s anecdotal, but talking to people in my street and colleagues and ex-colleagues and that sort of thing, I’m getting the sense that a lot of people are stepping back and saying, “This is somewhat of a near-death experience,” in terms of this crisis. It must’ve been how people felt maybe after World War II was over. It’s like, “Wow, I got through that somehow, and I want to think about how I live my life and the way I live my life,” and I think a lot of people are going to do that.
And I think you’re going to see a lot of people look at the manager they work for, look at the organisation they work for and say, “Is this really where I want to be and what I want to do?” Because one, the economy is really going to take off I think, later this year, and people are going to have choices. So, I think people are going to vote to go places where managers have a high EQ, high empathy, who took care of people during the crisis. They’re going to go to places that, it matches more of their personal values, which is what I was talking about a moment ago, and they’re going to do that.
And I’m hearing a lot of people saying, “I think I’m going to change job,” or, “I’m going to do things differently going forward.” And this has been such a long crisis that I think it’s given people a very long time to think about these rather deep things, and so I think it’s going to have a big impact. And the other side of it, I think there’s going to be a lot of people who go back to work who are traumatised and don’t know it. And it’s going to be up to those managers to recognise— we’re not psychologists, but you should be able to tell if somebody’s not well; it’s going to be up to us to help them get where they need to be well. And guess what? If you do that, they’re going to probably want to stay and work with you. So, I think that’s the other side of it, that people have had life-changing situations. But I think a lot of people don’t recognise that they’re probably somewhat traumatised coming out of the past year.
9. What role does reward and recognition play in improving the productivity of a workforce?
(16:39) Well, I’ll tell you one role that plays at the moment, is it absolutely—and this is proven, and I’ll point you towards the data that shows it—it is proven that the way we do recognition and performance management today and how we pay people actually de-motivates them, it reduces productivity.
So, if you think about it, and this is what we’ve seen for over a hundred years, but essentially the way Western capitalism is set up and the way organisations are set up is it’s the carrot stick. So I will give you a fantastic bonus if you produce more widgets and you do it faster and with higher quality and you can get a promotion as well, or if you don’t do what I’ve asked then you’re going to be punished. And that is essentially how work has been since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Well, guess what? Certainly, that works. If somebody is on a farm or in a factory and you pay them a big bonus, they are going to pick faster or they’re going to produce faster and they’re going to pay attention to the quality of that. But the fact is, is that if you’re in an office environment, where 70-80% of us are, and you say, “I’m going to give you a cash bonus for your knowledge, expertise and from working with other people in a team to produce something.” Guess what? That person gets very focused on their money and they’re not focused on the team, they’re focused on their bonus.
And Daniel Pink’s book Drive, so D-R-I-V-E, so, like drive, driving a car – Daniel Pink, he’s an MIT economist, wrote a book ten years ago that still has got repercussions today. It’s really caused people to sit back and think about the whole idea of rewards and recognition. Essentially what he found in his data, and he looked at this at great levels of detail, he found that for office, knowledge workers, intrinsic motivation, which is why they come to work for you, why they come to do what they do. The motivation of that is as important as the money, and if you then put their focus completely on the extrinsic, which is the money and the bonus, you are cutting off half of the motivation and you’re distracting them.
So, you’re seeing a lot of organisations, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, particularly in the financial service industry said, “We’ve got to get rid of these big bonuses.” Because it created a situation where people focused on the money, took huge risks, and almost brought the whole system down. And so, they moved more towards, instead of giving investment bankers big cash bonuses, give them shares of the company. And guess what? It changes your thinking. Suddenly you’re an owner and you’re focused on the organisation growing and becoming more prosperous than you are on just focused on your personal cash bonus.
So, you’re seeing a lot of organisations starting to mix non-cash rewards into their rewards to people because it takes the money off the table. And who doesn’t want shares of a growing enterprise? If you’re in the public sector, a lot of public sectors say, “Well, we’ll pay for your PhD” or other non-cash sorts of things. And this is really starting to fix the problem. It’s taking people out from focusing on their cash bonus to starting to focus on working as a team because there’s something at stake for everybody. And that’s really come from his book, and a lot of people said, “We have to rethink this” because that intrinsic motivation is being left on the table and people were not tapping into it.
10. What impact does high turnover have on productivity? Is it a good or a bad thing?
(20:05) So if we go back to the GE capital days of Jack Welch in the eighties, his view was, “Turnover is a great thing.” You want people to leave your organisation, particularly if they’re on the lower end of the performance scale, and that held way until well into the 21st century. But it’s really proven to be a false economy, that this whole idea is that you want turnover and you want to push people out, the thinking on that’s changed quite dramatically in that what we’re finding is that turnover is extremely costly on so many levels. First, that you must replace that person, and the cost to recruit them is very expensive these days, plus to get them up to speed. And then we don’t think about the disruption to teams that that person was in, that you took out, and now you put a new person in, and then the productivity of that team.
And so, Jack Welch missed something which said, “Certainly you can probably save some money by moving somebody out who seems to be low performing.” There’s probably some question around whether that was really the case in the first place anyway, but you’re not thinking about the broader impact and you should pull out all the stops that you can. The leaders need to understand the motivation of the person and help them get to the right place at the right time and the right job.
And from there, it’s saying, well, when you turn that thinking around, it says, no, turnover is already a bad thing. So, my personal experience as an executive and then what I’ve seen working with organisations, turnover is bad for organisations. And you want to keep it as low as sustainably possible. If you need to, maybe move people into different positions, but you want to try to hold on to that workforce because of the costs, the disruptions, and the ultimate impact on productivity.
11. What about wellbeing and its role in productivity? What should leaders keep in mind about this?
(22:02) Well, it’s really interesting because when I sat down to write the book and I was looking at various trends and things that I thought were going to be important based on my research to impact and improve productivity, one of the ones that I looked at and tossed aside was wellbeing.
So, I’m a Baby Boomer/Gen X, so I’m literally on the cusp of both of those generations. So, to a certain extent, I think my baby boomer part of me was saying, “Just work harder” and “What’s all this wellbeing stuff?” But my wife kept putting articles and papers in my hand and saying, “You really have to look at this. This is really important.” Then I started doing a lot more research and I got the opportunity to spend some time with Arianna Huffington while I was at SAP and her Thrive initiative, and really came out thinking, “Alright, wellbeing is in the top three things of the top 10 things that you want to do to fix productivity.”
And so, it went from not even going to be part of the book to one of the most important things when I did proper research on it. And the reason is because there are three aspects to it, it isn’t just about having a gym on the first floor. There are three elements that are important. It’s the physical, you should always do everything you can to help your workforce be as physically well as they can. Maybe it’s as simple as handing out water bottles, drinking enough water during the day can improve your cognitive function by up to 20%. So little things like that, or having a gym or those types of things, health insurance, all that sort of stuff. But that’s one part of it.
And a lot of people stop there when there’s two more pieces, the second one is mental health. Mental health is just as big as physical health. In fact, in some cases, and I think after the pandemic we’re going to have more mental health problems than we do physical problems, which of course mental health tends to lead to physical problems. But this is a huge thing and it needs to be made okay in an organisation to say, “I am not well both physically and mentally,” and for that organisation then to step in and say, “We’ve got some things we can do to help you.” People never forget that, and that’s important, that physical and mental wellbeing is important.
But there’s a third element, which I also think is going to be important coming out of the pandemic, is the financial. Financial stress has a huge impact on people’s mental health and then their physical health and whatever organisations can do to reduce that stress around finances. So, a lot of people may be worried about losing their jobs. Well, come out and tell them they’re not going to if you really believe that’s the case because people are worried. Second, a lot of people are financially strapped now. So, several organisations are setting up the ability for you to borrow money against your salary without ever asking your boss. You can just go online, do it, and nobody knows about it, it’s kept anonymous. And that really reduced the stress, because you don’t have to go to your boss and say, “Look, can I borrow? I need £500.” That has a huge impact on people, to know they’ve got that safety net that they could get some money if they need it and not have to go begging.
So, these things are important altogether, and you don’t really have wellbeing in an organisation until you’ve got those three things and then all the subsequent parts that make that up.
12. Are there any other elements of the overall employee experience that leaders need to keep in mind when tackling dips in productivity?
(25:30) It’s really interesting, but it’s been in the past three or four years where I’ve started to hear very senior executives, CEOs at the top leadership of companies starting to talk about ‘digital at home, digital at work’. Meaning that senior leaders are seeing that at home, we have fantastic devices that make us highly productive. We have our Alexa’s, and I’m going to set mine off, it’s sitting here on my desk. We have our smart refrigerators, ours here orders milk and those sorts of things when the camera sees that we’ve run out of these things.
We’ve got various things that make us super productive at home, but then you get to work and it’s like 1990 all over again. It’s a PC with a screen and a mouse and a keyboard. You don’t talk to anything; you don’t have anything that’s automated. And so, a lot of senior executives have really come around to, “Hang on a minute, productivity is going up at home but why don’t we start to make work look like home in terms of productivity? Why don’t we have digital assistants for our people? Why don’t we have smart technology that does things without you even having to ask it to do it?”.
And so, you’re seeing a big focus on human experience at work, and that’s not just the human resources side of it, it’s everything. It’s how your boss interacts with you, it’s how the technology at work interacts with you, it’s how the entire organisation is set up to help you flourish. And that isn’t a charity thing, if you flourish, the organisation flourishes. Senior-level people realising that this human experience is so important, that everything should be designed in the organisation around the employee and the customer. Right now, most things are around the taxpayer or the customer. Now they’re saying, “Right, no, it’s employee and customer or taxpayer, and we should design everything around those things.” And that’s a huge shift, and for me, that’s a big part of solving the productivity puzzle, the employee experience. You’re going to hear more and more about that in the coming years. And I think the pandemic’s accelerated it. People have been working at home, they’re going to come back to work and say, “Well, hang on a minute. I feel like I’ve stepped back ten years, twenty years.” So that’ll be interesting.
13. Can strategic workforce planning boost the productivity of a workforce? And how can leaders go about doing this effectively?
(27:46) Not only can it, it will, it absolutely does. And it’s interesting, you’re seeing several universities, business schools setting up whole degrees around strategic workforce planning. And that is because organisations are asking for that capability. They are going to be the rock stars of the next decade. People who do strategic workforce planning and getting right people, right skills, right place, right time, right motivation. It’s the core of my book that quote-unquote, “Equation.”
Adding all those things up, that’s what gives you people-engagement, innovation, and performance. When people are actively managed in a way such that they’re in the right skills, right place, right time, right motivation. That’s good for everybody, and for me, when I looked at what did top organisations do, the ones that have solved the productivity puzzle. Well, guess what? They do that well. And they don’t just do workforce planning for the moment, like this week or next week, they can look ahead eighteen months and say, “Based on economic conditions and supply and demand, we can see it’s going to look like this.” So, they are always looking out into the future to make their decisions today.
And for the companies that get this right, they’re going to have a huge strategic advantage because there’s already several companies that do this well. Companies like IBM, companies like SAP, they’re good at getting their workforce in the right place. And this is going to be important, but we must understand that first, it’s a mindset to say as a leader, that’s my job. And then secondly, it’s putting in place processes, digitally enabled processes that will allow this to happen. And third, then it’s plugging in technology to do it intelligently using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Notice I put technology third on that list, and that’s intentional because it’s a mindset first. Leaders must have this in their mind, it’s how they lead. And then everything flows, so it’s critical. And It sounds boring, strategic workforce planning does not sound sexy or exciting, but it’s going to be, and it’s going to be important for organisations whether you’re a manufacturer or you’re a very large recruitment company.
14. What do you think the most productive organisations and leaders do differently?
(30:11) Well, I think to summarise, I think they are very good at understanding the details of their workforce, starting with motivation. They are very good at listening and then they’re very good at taking those two things and deploying that workforce in the most effective way and constantly changing the mix to fit both what the worker’s looking for in terms of their aspirations, but also for what the customer needs. They’re constantly moving people around like on the chessboard, get them in the right place to get the most advantage for the employee, but also for the end customer.
And for me, that’s what the most productive organisations do, but they invest in this. They have the mindset, and then they invest heavily in it and they don’t make it a one-off, it’s a constant investment. It’s just part of doing business, and that’s the organisations that are going to really do the best in this next decade.
15. Now I’d like to finish with a question that we ask all our guests. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader and crucially, do you think these qualities have changed because of the pandemic?
(31:26) So for me, I think the three things are this in the following order:
I think a good leader and a great leader has a clear vision and purpose. So, they know exactly where the organisation is going, what’s the purpose of that, and can articulate it in a way that’s compelling.
Which gets to number two: being a good communicator. And these are two things that you can learn to do. You can learn to have a discipline around knowing exactly what your vision and your purpose is and developing that. And then you can learn how to then communicate that very effectively and compelling.
But the third one is not as easy to be learned, and it’s something I call EQ, so it’s empathy. So, the leaders of the future of the coming ten years, the rock stars of the coming ten years, are going to be people who have a high EQ, they’re great listeners, they’re genuinely empathetic about human beings and people in society at large. And that’s who people are going to gravitate towards to work. A lot of that is going to be because of the pandemic. It was already heading in that direction, but the pandemic has accelerated this idea of leaders with high EQ. And that is something that is not always learned. Many people, they’re born with it, but you can develop it over time. You can discipline yourself to be a good listener and show interest in other people and that sort of thing, but it’s going to be important going forward. And I think that’s who you’ll see emerge in the future. And that’ll be a big part of solving the productivity puzzle, I think.
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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, technology has been key to pivoting businesses and enabling them to thrive. So today, as the Official Recruitment Partner of Manchester City Football Club, we’re joined by Greg Swimer, Chief Technology Officer at City Football Group. Greg is here to share his expert insights on how the role of a CTO has evolved because of the pandemic and the key qualities required to succeed as a tech leader.
1. Before we begin, it would be great if you could please introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit more about your career journey to CTO.
(01:00) Yes, of course. So, I studied engineering and management quite a long time ago now. I graduated in 1994, which I suppose in IT terms is a very long time ago. I entered IT as a profession in 1997, so that was three years after graduating. And I entered IT straight into general IT management, what you might call general tech leadership. I was very fortunate to get a really great opportunity. I was the Country IT Manager for Unilever, the consumer goods company. That was me aged 27, back in 1997.
I would say technology then wasn’t really considered a very glamorous job; I daresay perhaps not even a very important job. We were dealing with technologies that some of the listeners might remember, Windows 3.11 and some of the early enterprise technology implementations, but it was absolutely incredible training ground, really, for me and I think for anyone that was around in tech in those days, the early days of the web and trying to bring technology to drive growth for companies.
I actually ended up spending 15 years with Unilever doing a variety of IT jobs, and the last job I had there before leaving was CTO, Chief Technology Officer, which was something that I had really only dreamt of when I joined Unilever back in 1997. But I decided that I’d spent a long time in one industry, it was time for a change, and from Unilever, I went to do something completely different which was in advertising, and I took a role as CTO again but this time for a company called Hogarth Worldwide, which was and is the world’s largest advertising production company and a big part of WPPs global operation.
I did that for three years, and then from there I came to City Football Group in 2017, again, as Chief Technology Officer. So, stepping back from that, I feel very fortunate that I took that decision way back when in ‘97 to go into IT. I’ve seen, been part of just incredible change and growth in the technology landscape over that time, and I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to work in three different industries: consumer goods, advertising, and now sports.
Thanks, Greg. Sounds like you’ve had an interesting career journey, working with some great organisations and big brands.
2. Now, to really kick off our conversation today, I wanted to begin by asking, have your key strategic priorities shifted due to COVID-19?
(03:45) Yes, that’s an interesting question. I think strategically, if we take a long-term lens, I think the same things are important now as we sit here in March 2021 as they were prior to all this kicking off twelve months ago. It’s the same things that will form the core of our business, that will make us successful and that we need to achieve in technological terms.
But saying that, in the short term, what you might call tactically, my priorities—everyone’s priorities I think—have just changed enormously, and actually, there’s never really been a twelve month period or even any period really quite like it in my career. I think looking at our business, as I say in Manchester City and City Football Group, there’s barely a single aspect of it that hasn’t been quite profoundly affected by the lockdowns and the change in awareness and regulations around public health and individual health.
The scale at which we operate both in Manchester, in the Premier League, and globally, technology’s woven into pretty much every single business process that we operate and because we’ve changed nearly every business process one way or another, that’s meant changes to the technology, to our service, to our offerings. It’s meant huge changes to the projects that we’re running, it’s meant changes to be aware of the way we run football matches, running them behind closed doors, dealing with our fans, trying to maintain connections, the way we run our offices—everything has changed. So, that has been the priority, really, for twelve months or more now.
I suppose, like everyone, there’s also been a big shift in personal priorities or at the very least the places that I’m spending time, obviously at home much more like everyone. That’s where I’m talking to you now. But the requirements of us, or myself as parents of three school-aged children, as children of my parents, and so an awful lot has changed in that regard as well but that must be balanced in. So yes, it has been an unusual twelve months, I think one that we’ll all remember for a very long time.
3. Now, in what ways do you think the pandemic has spurred on technological change and innovation and what impact is this having on teams and organisations?
(06:19) I clearly think the standout change, the one that just jumps out a mile, has been this replacement of physical presence with virtual and the almost complete elimination of travel beyond the various local journeys. You sit here now, and you step back from that, I think the remarkable thing about it, and again I think everyone can observe this from their own personal lives as well as their professional lives, is just how well it’s worked, basically. As a society, we’ve found virtual solutions to all sorts of things: schools, birthdays, family events, all that.
And a a business, we, like other businesses, have found solutions to all sorts of things that we hadn’t really had to do before but have found ways through. So, it would be fan walls to bring fans that can’t be at the game into the stadium, we’ve done player appearances, press conferences, we’ve launched our We’re Not Really Here show, which is an event around the get behind closed doors games streamed over the internet. We’ve even during the first lockdown ran some first team training sessions virtually, we’ve run thousands upon thousands of meetings, we’ve actually built and opened a brand new City Football Academy overseas in Montevideo, Uruguay without being able to go over there and actually participate in the commissioning process. So, there’s been this explosion of possibilities to do things virtually that previously one would only have thought was possible physically.
You ask about the effect on teams, or teams and organisations, I think that’s a little bit early to judge. You can make some observations about the way the teams are working through this. Again, we’ve all been part of teams that are working through it. So, I think one observation that I would make is that contrary to some people’s expectations, collaboration hasn’t stopped and by some measures, I think it hasn’t slowed down. In fact, it may even have speeded up. I think in some ways being virtual for things can be quite a big democratiser. I think physical meetings can sometimes end up quite imbalanced just because of where people are sitting or how people dominate space and time, and I think virtually can sometimes provide a more thoughtful and structured form of collaboration. I’ve personally been in lots and lots of probably smaller group meetings over virtual technologies and in some ways it’s quite easy to get hold of people because everyone’s at home and not charging around all the time.
So, we’ll have to see how it goes, because I think that in saying that’s all one thing, it must be balanced against other factors. I think it’s clearly difficult for people to be isolated as we have been for such a long period of time. People need a release from that. I think people are very tired, I think working this way is quite tiring. So, I would say I don’t think it’s for quite a while yet that we can see what the long-term impacts really look like and what that new normal is, people talk about that.
4. Looking back to the beginning of the pandemic, how did you ensure you were operating in an agile and flexible way when initially responding to the crisis?
(09:42) Yes, that’s a good question. I thought you might ask me that. I’ve had to try and cast my mind back twelve months or so to that period. I would say is that we had quite a good starting point, which is fortunate. It wasn’t an accident in a way because we worked hard to make sure that we had good conditions for technical stability and agility, but things like we have a large proportion of our services are software as a service, public cloud provisions, so we don’t have an extensive reliance on infrastructure that might be stuck behind an aging firewall or that. So, we are quite well-positioned from that point of view.
The other thing, perhaps we might talk about this a bit later, but we have a highly technical IT team and I’ve deliberately built it that way. So, I think those two and other things as well, it gave us a bit of agility and speed built in. But looking back over that time, almost the first thing we did was moving the entire of the IT organisation into a daily planning cycle. Which is familiar I suppose for all that development, agile framework thing, but that’d be less familiar for a more rigid, service-based, organisational, the service-based part of our organisation. So, we quickly got into that daily planning cycle.
One of the things we did was develop a set of assumptions that were quite cautious. I’d been following the news quite carefully. We have a football club in China (Sichuan Jiuniu), so professionally we have an interest in what’s going on out there as many people do, but also following the news quite carefully of what happened over the December, January timeframe. I was developing a set of assumptions that were deliberately cautious, like if we close the office, we will be closed for three months rather than say, “Well, we’ll close on a Wednesday, we’ll open again on Friday.” And that enabled everyone to start planning with some certainty ahead of those announcements, so in our planning we were probably two or three weeks ahead of where the country was.
We did move very quickly, but we tried to be quite organised and systematic about it. We’ve tried to hold this the whole way through the pandemic period, really. For example, in the very first days we were working out how to move hardware from the office to people’s homes; very quickly after that, we were trying to work out how to issue medical questionnaires, manage site access. But in all of those, we tried to do it systematically, as in develop systems, even if they were quite rough initially, but just to say, “Let’s capture all the information, let’s put things through proper approvals, let’s keep good records, let’s develop new IT systems if we need to.”
So, we appointed the development teams that were put a couple of weeks away from their tasks towards developing systems to manage COVID. I think that’s really stood us in quite good stead, and I think, at least I hope I’m right in saying that I think technology as a team within the company has strengthened our reputation through the pandemic. And I think we’ve had good support from our colleagues, and we’ve supported them well in helping manage things in a professional way.
5. And were there any other ways in which you have continued to adapt and continued to be adaptable to the changing demands throughout the last year or so?
(13:23) Yes, I think we’ve had to do that. Probably every few weeks, or maybe at least every three months or so, we’ve had to reset the methodology of how we’re working and how we’re approaching things, because I think there have been periods of rapid change. If we think back to March and April last year, things were changing every day.
Similarly, when we started to open back up again and started for the first-time doing things like staging matches behind closed doors, that was a tremendous learning experience. Then again with the second lockdown, there’ve been these periods of time where things have changed very rapidly. There’ve also been periods of times which have been a bit more stable. So, what I’ve tried to do is try and look every few weeks, heads up, where are we, how are we working?
There’s also been a very company-wide effort which has been very successful to really be very conscious always about what our key risks are, work through those, re-evaluate them. Those risks, obviously a lot of those are enterprise-level, club-level, but they’re also technology-level. So continually looking at, where are our risks now, which ones are likely to manifest themselves, have we got the right mitigations in place? That forces, I think, a continuous re-evaluation of what we’re doing and perhaps it sounds, I suppose, rather simplistic to say that’s what we’ve done but that is how we’ve worked, and so far, I think it’s stood us in quite good stead.
6. What do you think are the top tech challenges that will impact the future world of work and how can tech leaders and their teams work to overcome these?
(15:14) That is a great question. Knowing that I was coming on here, I asked my team that question. So, I internally sent out a little message to everyone in my team and said, “What do they think?” and I got a load of good answers back. There were three big themes that dominated in terms of these future challenges for technology. There was information security, InfoSec, cybersecurity, nd that whole area, the second one was integration and integrated world of work and integration within the company and beyond and then the third one was talent, which is probably a subject that is quite close to your heart at Hays.
So, just looking at each one of those things briefly, on InfoSec, every IT professional is basically now an information security professional to some extent or other. There isn’t anyone in my team or I’d argue in any IT organisation anywhere that doesn’t have a role to play in thinking about InfoSec. We see these new attack vectors all the time. There’s been a lot of news recently just in the last days before recording this about attacks on SolarWinds and other key infrastructure.
The pandemic, as we’ve discussed, it’s seen as temporary at least and stopped office space working, so the absolute end of the idea of a network point and a firewall that everyone’s working behind. So, securing accounts, securing devices, securing data, securing identities, operating security operations at large scale, I think that is a theme and a challenge that will culminate for a generation for sure, if not beyond.
I think the second one I mentioned was integration, so as departments and teams and organisations are working in this much more dispersed way, the demand for integration and integrated solutions is just increasing all the time. Then for tech leaders, getting the balance right between speed and agility and allowing things to move in perhaps a less integrated way, but also maintaining all those key integration points so that data can always flow in the right way that go back to security, things are secured properly, that business processes work properly. I think that’s a key balancing act for tech teams and for tech leaders. It also drives the need for really, top collaboration tools, top discipline around collaboration, good discipline around IT resource management, project management and all those things speak to the need to deliver integration for our colleagues.
Then the third one was talent. I probably ought to ask you about that as much as you could ask me, but there is a shortage of IT talent and there will continue to be. I think there are some priority pockets within that, particularly around cybersecurity, information security. So yes, there is obviously competition, or a ‘war for talent’ people call it. That’s one thing, but I think there is a wider need for the technology industry to promote talent, to promote technology education in schools and universities. My children have just been through A Levels and GCSEs. Getting more people studying computer science at that level, painting exciting pictures of this industry, expanding talent pools, working on diversity and inclusion across the industry because it’s still nowhere near where it needs to be, making these roles accessible. Yes, I think this is going to be, again, a generational challenge for the industry in the UK and beyond.
7. What have you learned about yourself both personally and professionally over the course of the crisis so far?
(19:20) That is a good question. I turned fifty a few weeks ago in lockdown, which was a very nice day although a bit different from what I probably had in mind for my 50th birthday. I suppose it’s a bit hard to detach how you feel about yourself growing older from how you feel about having been living through these last 12 months, and in particular, I suppose parenting through these last 12 months. I think more than anything, it’s drawn out how connected we all are to each other and I think as a leader or as a colleague or as a parent or as a brother or child, it’s driven that greater connection with people’s personal situations.
I spend a lot of time talking to people about how they’re coping and what they’re going through. There’s been this just horrendous sense of personal loss and tragedy for many people, both friends and colleagues. I think that is all good in a way. We need to understand each other, we need to talk to each other. I think it’s good that we connect with each other. I have always enjoyed doing that. As a colleague, it probably took me a little bit of time in my career as I grew older to realise that people— Obviously everyone has different views on that, but generally it’s welcomed from colleagues to pay an interest. I try and pay an interest in how my team are doing and how everyone’s doing. I try to be open and honest about how I’m doing and some of the difficulties that we’ve had with home schooling and some of the practical difficulties with that.
8. For those who have perhaps just started out in their first tech leadership role, how would you recommend they make a strong initial impact?
(21:50) The first part of my answer is a bit glib, but I think it is nonetheless true, which is, find problems to solve. There are almost always in technology a bunch of problems that people want help solving. There may be new problems, there may be old ones, but I think it is easy— And I do see this from time to time in technology. It’s easy to sometimes get a little bit lost in the abstraction of what we’re trying to achieve. I think first and foremost, we deploy technology in business to help the business and it’s our colleagues that know what they want to achieve, be those marketing challenges, finance challenges. In our context, challenges with how we want to entertain fans in our stadium, or keep people safe, or win football games.
The job of technologists first and foremost is to go and find those problems and help solve them and help deliver success. That’s the first part. I think the flip side of that is that if that’s all one does, then I think that’s not a very good long-term route to success, because it’s also important to take time to try and root out what the underlying causes are that prevented success in the first place if you like. So, what’s holding things back? What are the root causes of that? I think it’s important for tech leaders, whether they’re in their first role or a later role, to be able to stand back and articulate what the challenges are and gain support for changing those.
There’s one example of that. I came into a previous role where there were a very large number of developers working on a product, but very slow progress in product development. We were months behind where we wanted to be. The person I’d taken over from, the previous incumbent, had left saying, “We’re not there because we need to add another twenty or thirty developers.” Wanted to increase and that had been rejected as an idea, or at least was very sceptical about that. And once we took a position a bit more detached from the problem, looked at what the problems actually were, you could see that the root causes were not going to be addressed by adding more developers and the root causes lay in the way the product was being managed, the way that the release process was being run and many other more deeper technical factors. Once we addressed those, and we did take some time to address those, we got an awful lot more done with fewer developers.
So, I think tech leaders need to be courageous enough not to accept received wisdom on what the problem is because often it’s not what people think it necessarily is. That can be quite uncomfortable, but if you’ve got an opportunity to lead in technology, yes, go find problems and solve them and be known as that person that does that, but also be the person that looks for, how do we do things better and where do we need to challenge things that are perhaps long-held views, and actually change those in order to be more successful in the future?
9. What advice would you give to any tech professional who one day aspires to work at the CTO level?
(25:18) I’d give anyone the same advice. Just keep on doing it. I suppose, as you get more senior in any function, let’s say— Doesn’t necessarily have to be technology, it could be finance, it could be HR, it could be marketing, it could be general management, it doesn’t really matter. I think as you get more senior, I think there are a whole raft of things that grow in importance. You’re managing bigger teams, you’re managing bigger budgets, you’re a part of the leadership of the company. So, all sorts of things become important.
But in terms of the success in managing and running technology, I’d go back to the same things I talked about. Make sure you’re focused on success through technology, solving problems, not overly focused on rigidity of process but focused on, what does it take to be successful? But at the same time, just continually searching for, ferreting out and solving the blockers and the bottlenecks wherever they come. They’re sometimes technical but they’re sometimes attitudinal, and I think there’s no more important role for me as a tech leader than to try and make sure that the whole organisation can be successful with technology.
There’s no one path to doing that and I find my way of articulating those things, but I’m in contact with and learn from other CTOs right across this industry and others who do that brilliantly. So, make sure you’re solving problems but make sure you keep on looking at what it takes to be successful with tech.
10. Which soft and technical skills do you think IT teams will really need to thrive in the future?
(27:13) Well, again, IT has become such an enormous and diverse profession in any number of ways of thriving within it. There’s any number of niches, one can go one’s whole career being a specialist in a particular type of technology or a particular type of program language and never doing anything other than that, or one can perhaps plough up further a bit more like I have done, which is being a bit more of a generalist across all sorts of technology. I was more in the applications world at the beginning of my career, then moved more into the data and analytics, and latterly perhaps being more focused on infrastructure and information security.
I suppose a couple of general comments to make, I think organisations or IT organisations must be technical. I know that sounds slightly like a statement of the obvious, but I think there was a period of time maybe going back a decade or so and I still think I hear this talked about from time-to-time, that in-house IT can just run on service management, vendor selection, project management, and it’s all about finding the right vendors, managing them well and managing them to SLAs, and that’s how to deliver IT. I don’t believe that to be the case. I don’t think that delivers successful IT outcomes. I think in-house technical teams or IT teams at companies must be technical, must understand the technology that they’re dealing with, understand how to learn it, manage it, implement it, develop it. I think that’s important.
Then I think the second thing are that all the old received wisdoms about what’s important in management generally are just as important in IT, whether that’s ability to communicate, ability to lead, ability to be adaptable; IT teams need those skills. I think you’ve talked about them as soft skills, but they’re completely critical. It is possible for highly technical functions to get a bit detached from more nuanced side of business conversations sometimes because with the world that we’re dealing in technology, it can be quite binary. We have an application with a million lines of code, they all must be right because if one line in the million is wrong, the application may not work. That requires a certain mindset, but not everyone that we work with must come at it from the same mindset, it can come from the more creative side of things. We all must find ways of talking to each other and working with each other, and IT teams need those skills just as much if not more than other teams in the business.
I would say, just to finish up, I think some of the great deal in fact of the talent that’s coming through now at graduate level and beyond first job changes is just phenomenal. The range and breadth of the talent, people that have been dealing with high-end computing tasks since they were seven, eight, nine years old and learned through a series of facilities and opportunities that my generation never had is just amazing. So, I have no doubt that that generation is going to be just supremely successful in technology exportation and leadership.
11. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader and crucially, do you think these qualities have changed because of the pandemic?
(31:02) Well, I think the second question in some ways is easier than the first. I don’t think they’ve changed because of the pandemic. So, I’ll pick my three. I’m sure there were another thirty qualities that other people could have picked that would be just as good as the ones that I’ll pick, but I think leadership is quite timeless in a way. The three that I’ve picked are authenticity, communication, and tolerance.
So, authenticity, because I think there are many ways to be a leader, but there’s only one way of being you. Quite some time ago now, back at Unilever, I did a fair bit of management development around the concept of authentic leadership and True North, and I found that to be a very good way of thinking about leadership.
The second one, communication. So, leadership always involves explaining ideas and often explaining them again and again and taking on board feedback and nuances and then recycling those ideas into other conversations. I think the ability to listen and understand and then explain ideas is just an absolutely critical part of being a leader because it’s just the ideas and the currency of what we deal in, and being able to explain that and carry people with you and listen to what you’re being told is absolutely critical.
Then tolerance, maybe that does in a way link a little bit into the pandemic. I think teams are necessarily, particularly when you get to enterprise level, large and complex things made up of human beings and we are all as human beings’ complex people. Organisations are made up of large numbers of teams, so they are exponentially complex. So, these are places that to survive and thrive in larger organisations, you have to have a degree of tolerance for different outcomes, different ways of doing things, you have to be able to learn from all of that. I think if you’re too rigid about the way in which you think things must happen, it inhibits success in larger organisations. So, I think people look for tolerance in their leaders and they look for people that can flex when they need to. I think good leaders do that whilst sticking true to values, and that goes back to the authenticity point. Value-based leadership is phenomenally important, but nonetheless, you have to be able to listen and adapt and go with quite a different range of circumstances in order to achieve success and to be seen as a good leader, I would say.
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