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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Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in the UK, the last time I went out (apart from to the supermarket) was to see a venue for a Book Festival taking place in September that I’m a key interviewer for. I was actually excited at the prospect, but by the time I had got ready, got in the car, realised en route that I needed petrol, and eventually arrived… I felt quite stressed and needed five minutes to centre myself.
When I finally got out of my car and entered the venue, I found playing the ‘socially distanced game’ of not getting too close to anyone and making conversation (through a mask) really weird, to say the least.
Have the COVID-19 restrictions negatively impacted our ability be social, in-person?
While driving back, I reflected on how strange it will be for those of us returning to the office or work environment soon. Will we have lost the ability to function as per the old normal? And how will we all interact when Zoom and the virtual world has changed our communications so much? Has our ability to be social and to interact been damaged?
As human beings, wired by the primeval part of our brains (the Limbic Amygdala) for survival, we have a negativity bias that keeps us on high alert for what is wrong (or a threat) and to seek comfort in what is familiar. Over the last year we, as an adaptive species, have made the unfamiliar (lockdown and working from home for many) familiar. So now, the reverse is true, and what was once commonplace will feel strange and possibly a threat.
Of course, there may be real threats. For those frontline and essential workers who have been going to work there have been new checks and balances and rules that have been adjusted several times.
How to adapt back to life back in the office
For most of us however, the repeat warnings from our governments to stay at home seems at odds with any requirement to return to the office, so the prospect of doing so will naturally feel uncomfortable to us. Add in that familiar ‘return to the office’ dread or apprehension that we used to feel after a holiday, with the added fear over commuting, it is hardly surprising that you may be feeling anxious as you leave your bubble for what seems like the unknown.
Five ways to help you return to the office well
If you find yourself feeling stressed, then share how you are feeling with your line manager or colleagues, not least because they are probably also having such feelings themselves.
Practise getting into a good ‘return routine’ as soon as you can so that the time you have to get up, spend commuting or just being in the office are not at odds with your new body clock. This also includes getting good quality sleep and enough of it to be well rested.
Take frequent breaks during the day to walk in nature, do breathing exercises, listen to a meditative recording or just sit on a bench and enjoy your lunch. Physical exercise is a great antidote to stress so if you can, cycle or walk to work or do some physical activity that will also enrich your day.
To get yourself back into the right frame of mind for a return to work, remind yourself that you are familiar with what is expected of you in your office environment. Once there, practise being kind to yourself if it feels stressful or strange.
Do a ‘WFH Audit’ of the last few months. Ask yourself what has worked well while being away from the office. List the practices that have increased your productivity and physical and mental wellbeing. And explore how they can be transferred into the workplace.
How to strengthen your social interactions back in the office
We are tribal and connected beings and a way to punish people is to forcibly separate and isolate them such as via solitary confinement in prison. Loneliness affects your hormones, and chronic loneliness has as detrimental effect on a person as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In many ways, this sense of connection is something the pandemic has taken away from us, and we need to find it again.
You may be thinking, well I have connected in lockdown so what is the problem? Invariably you will have connected with the people closest to you and less regularly. So even the prospect of having to be in a room with several of your peers may feel very unfamiliar and daunting.
Whatever your circumstances during the pandemic, you have likely not had the mental stimulus or repeat usage of your social skills that you were used to – and, like anything that you don’t use much, these can weaken over time.
In the case of your brain, this can lead to memory being impaired (this has been proven to be the case for people who have endured long periods of social isolation). So, just trying to remember that fact or the right way to say something while speaking to your boss may then cause you stress. A combination of feeling stressed, unfamiliar (or unprotected in primeval terms), combined with feeling a bit tired and emotional can lead to undesirable responses, such as anger or irritation or even a complete shutdown. Therefore, it is crucial that you ease yourself back in gently.
Here are a few of my tips to help:
First and foremost, be kind to yourself. Remind yourself that you will get used to this again soon. Remember how clunky it was when you learned to drive, but how it soon became second nature with practice and an unwavering faith that it would be OK.
Do what you need to feel safe, such as washing your hands well and not rushing back into having big get-togethers – even socially distanced ones – unless necessary.
Being selective about who you hang out with, perhaps at lunchtime or after work, can give you psychological comfort and feelings of safety. What is key here is balance. You don’t want to be isolating yourself, and equally you don’t want to feel unsafe or overwhelmed by being around too many people at once. Keep the new bonds you have created away from the work environment as best you can. For example, if you have been at home with the kids for months, then check in with them at regular intervals during the day when you can. Put little notes into their backpacks in the morning that they will find during the day so that they know you are thinking about them too.
When interacting with colleagues, try to avoid unnecessary stress, like frustrating conversations or debates. So it might be a good idea to steer clear of in-depth discussions around the COVID situation and the vaccines, or other contentious issues. Know your boundaries and speak up if you start to feel stretched or overwhelmed.
Close your eyes and imagine how it will feel to have the sand under your feet, wind blowing in your hair and the freedom of a beach holiday again. Or if this is not for you, then imagine the desired place you will go when restrictions truly lift. Hold onto that feeling and remember how excited you were when you landed your job originally after an application and interview process. You wanted it. You chose it. On your first day I’m sure you were nervous, and it seemed very unfamiliar. It may seem unfamiliar again but remember the good aspects and that you choose it. Perhaps new eyes and a new perspective will make it a joy again.
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Since early 2020, we’ve all experienced or witnessed considerable change in the world of work, leading many careers to take unexpected twists and turns. In some instances, this has made it harder for professionals to feel as though they can effectively plan their careers in a way that they might have done pre-pandemic.
So, today, we’re joined by Eliza Kirkby, Regional Director at Hays Australia, who’s here to share how to effectively build a career plan for the year ahead and beyond.
1. To begin with, please could you introduce yourself to our listeners?
(01:27) Absolutely. So, as well as being a mum and sitting on the board of an engineering business as a non-executive director here in Sydney, I’m also a Regional Director in the Australian Hays business. I look after a diverse group of recruitment teams, that include our HR, marketing and digital, legal, defence and life sciences teams.
I started my career at Hays as a graduate and next week, I celebrate my fifteen-year anniversary. And one of the things that has kept me in this industry all these years is certainly the impact I can have on candidates and their careers. And I will share a story with you, Jon, if you don’t mind. Just before Christmas, I got a call from a candidate who I’d placed as an assistant accountant over a decade ago and she was calling to tell me that she had just achieved her career goal of becoming a CFO or a head of finance and she wanted to thank me for supporting her all those years ago. So, very relevant to our discussion today about career planning and absolutely one of the things I love most about this industry.
Well, congratulations on 15 years with Hays. We often find that at Hays there are people who’ve been here a long time. I’ve been here eight years myself as well, and that’s such a fantastic story to share as well. It’s so good to know that you’re obviously having such positive impacts on people’s lives.
(02:55) Absolutely, and I think for so many recruiters, colleagues, and peers at Hays, it’s the same story for them. It’s the people and the careers that they’re impacting that keeps us coming back into the office day after day and really being passionate about this job.
2. So, as explained in the introduction, this podcast is about career planning. Have you followed a career plan yourself to help you get to where you are today?
(03:21) Absolutely. So, from an early time in my career at Hays, and when I say early, I’m talking within the first six months or so, I knew I wanted to be a Regional Director. So, that’s been my end goal, and I followed a people management career path to get me here.
There have been stages where I’ve been able to fast track my career plan because of high performance but if I speak candidly, there have also been times where having that career plan has helped me push through challenging and tougher times and keep focused on that end goal. I’ll add that I’m lucky to work for an organisation with what we call a meritocratic culture. So, the more you put into this job and deliver results, the faster you’re progressed and promoted. And we’ve got clearly set up career paths, which has meant that throughout my time at Hays, I’ve very much felt in control of my career plan. So, I feel that I’ve been very lucky. I think that there are many candidates that I’ve interacted with over my career that have had to play a much more proactive role in really driving that themselves.
3. Could you explain exactly what a career plan is and what the benefits are of creating one?
(04:32) Sure, so a career plan is essentially a roadmap that lays out a pathway towards your ideal career goal. That could be a particular role in the industry you’re in or even a completely new occupation and it also includes the smaller tasks and achievements along the way that are going to help you get there.
What are the benefits? By having these priorities set out, you’re more likely to work towards and achieve your goals consistently. Creating a clear career plan is also a great way to consciously think about what you want out of your professional life and that’s a question that people often miss when they don’t think about putting a career plan in place. It also means that whenever you next job hunt, you’re more likely to look for a role that is going to move you one step closer to achieving your career goal.
And I have come across this throughout my career that for some people, it’s completely overwhelming to contemplate these bigger questions of what you want out of your career but I think just taking the first steps, thinking about it, breaking it down into that larger goal and then smaller objectives that makes it more manageable and gives everyone a greater chance of succeeding.
4. What time period should a career plan cover? Should you have one for one year, five years, ten years? Should you have multiple career plans that span a certain length of time?
(06:00) That’s a great question because I genuinely believe that allocating a timeline to your plan is a big key to success. So, having that timeline is going to help motivate you and keep you accountable to your larger goals over the long term.
In general, you can break your career plan down into two phases. So, you’ve got the short-term and then the long-term. And for the short-term phase, once you’ve identified your ideal career, you should develop short-term objectives that will cover say the next three or so years. These will start you down the path towards that goal and they might cover things like the new skills you need to learn, the qualifications that could help you get there or certain experiences you need to gain. And you can think of them as ideally tasks that will set you up to be ready for your next promotion.
Then when you’ve got the long-term phase, you’re obviously looking at longer-term goals and charting a course towards that bigger future goal that covers the next five to ten years plus. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that of course things can and will most likely change over this time and the last year has proven that to us in spades. So, it’s important to be flexible and adapt your plan if and when priorities do change, to remember to check in from time to time to ensure your goal remains achievable, measure your progress, celebrate your successes and don’t be afraid to reset your objectives, both those short-term and longer-term objectives if you need to.
5. What should your first steps be if you’re writing a career plan from scratch or if you’re revisiting one that you’ve already written?
(07:49) I would recommend starting with a wide lens, so, think big to start with. Consider your skill set, your interests, your values, where you want to live, your lifestyle, and then start researching the occupations that interest you and the roles that seem like they could be a good match. So, if you start big, it ensures that you’ve explored all the possible careers of interests before selecting the one that you feel either most passionate about or most comfortable with. And it also ensures that you’re considering really what the day-to-day realities of your career choice are going to be.
If you find yourself, which isn’t uncommon, unable to select between two or more different career paths, take some time to reflect, compare the occupations, consider the qualifications, skills, typical responsibilities, the work environment, salary and work-life balance for each, and don’t forget to consider what inspires you about each option.
You can have multiple career paths. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify your best fit through doing this reflection, and once you decide which career option is the best fit for you, you can then write down your resulting career goal. From there, you’re ready to then plot your course from where you are now to this ultimate goal and you’re going to cover both those short-term and those long-term objectives that we spoke about earlier.
6. How important is it to set realistic SMART goals and objectives?
(09:26) It’s very important that you write clearly defined objectives that you can work towards. And the SMART system is really useful for this. I’m sure most are aware that SMART is an acronym and SMART goals are those that are:
Specific – So, for example, when writing goals, they should be specific and that means being as clear as you can and avoiding ambiguous statements or targets.
Measurable – that’s about making sure you can actually quantify what you want to achieve.
Achievable – being achievable is so important and keeping your goals attainable. It doesn’t mean that some of your objectives can’t be stretch goals where you really need to push yourself but don’t set yourself up to fail because that’s just going to be demotivating.
Realistic – Goals should be realistic, so, you need to be reasonable. Make sure your goals are realistic given your skill set, experience, finances, and importantly, the market conditions you’re facing, now more than ever.
Timely – And then finally, timely. So, creating timeframes to help you feel motivated to stay the course is important.
7. I’d imagine conducting an analysis of which skills are in demand is crucial when career planning. Could you give us some examples of which skills will be crucial to succeed in the future of work?
(10:56) When creating a plan, it’s important to think critically about your skillset right now and what is likely to be needed in the future. So, constant advances in technology mean that we all need to be developing our skills over time. I would prioritise staying on top of technological advances and the influence these have in your industry and building a need for professional development into your plan that aligns with that. You can do that through things like formal education, on the job experience and working with a mentor.
The skills in demand, they absolutely change over time, there’s no question about that. They vary by industry and sector at any moment in time. So, that’s one of the reasons at Hays we compile the most in-demand skills in each industry. So, you could visit our website to stay on top of these desirable skill sets as they’re evolving.
And I’d also recommend making sure you’re following leading organisations, that you’re following experts in your field, that you’re keeping in touch with your local Hays recruiter, that you’re doing all these things to make sure you don’t miss new trends and technologies. In Australia, we’ve got a really great tool which is It’s a skills-match online tool that the government provides, where people can go in, they enter the jobs they’ve done previously and the tool actually matches up possible roles with transferable skills for that individual. So, I would recommend looking out for similar tools in your own local markets.
And one final comment here would be that there is definitely a collection of skills that will always be sought by employers or we certainly believe this to be the case because they’re difficult to automate and they’re difficult to outsource and these are soft skills. So, you’ve probably heard this term. They include things like communication, teamwork, adaptability, creative thinking, influencing, and relationship building. So, adapting these soft skills into a career plan, I think, is an important one.
Great. thanks, Eliza. We’re recording this in early 2021. So, throughout the last year or so, one of the only certainties has been change.
8. Do you think that change has made career planning more difficult?
(13:21) Of course, I do. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you about this topic so passionately if I didn’t but what I will agree with you on is that you can’t account for everything that could possibly change in your career. That doesn’t mean setting aside some time to put a career plan together isn’t a valuable thing to do though, and I think rather than seeing a career plan as a strict set of rules, it’s important to see it as a roadmap to help you consciously navigate your career, so to check that you’re being proactive, to check that you’re being focused on the long-term. Doing this helps you put the smaller challenges we face day to day into perspective at times. It can help you stay focused and can also help you get greater enjoyment and satisfaction from what you’re doing.
And I guess I’d also say that planning is something we’re doing in so many areas of our lives. So, just some examples: planning our work week, our personal life events, our exercise schedules, managing our households, managing our kids’ activities. There are so many places that we do planning, and I think that our careers are important, and it stands that our careers can benefit as well from this planning too even during periods of change and perhaps more importantly during periods of change.
9. And with that in mind, would you say it’s important for listeners to be open-minded and flexible when it comes to following their career paths? Is it okay if we move away from them from time to time to focus on other things perhaps?
(14:55) Absolutely, of course. And it’s totally expected and understandable that at various times people will need to do this and deviate. After all, we’ve seen in the last year things can change, and they can change rapidly. Technology and industries, they’re shifting all the time with new jobs being created to support the continuing digital revolution. You might end up staying in the area of work you’re already in or, as we’re seeing more and more commonly, you might find yourself switching careers along the way, in which case, again, your career plan is going to need to shift too but it is also okay to put a pause on things and to revisit them.
One of the evergreen skills that I talked a little bit about earlier was that adaptability piece. As we’ve seen over the last year, it’s such an asset for overcoming the challenges that can arise during your career. So, developing these soft skills to cope with that is important too. And you might find that what you want in your career is going to change over time independent of what’s happening externally in the market. And I guess the most important thing in creating a career plan is to check back in, review and adapt it.
Equally, if you’re presented with an opportunity you didn’t plan for, which interests you and it’s not in your career plan, absolutely, go for it, seize it. You’ll always learn something even if it’s that you didn’t enjoy an aspect of that piece of work. When you have opportunities that are presented that are interesting, go for it.
10. For those of our listeners who had a career plan in place but have been impacted by redundancy or change in circumstances, how would you recommend they go about resetting and reviving their plans?
(16:41) Well, this is such an important question because being made redundant can be such a huge shock. And I know for most people it’s one of the scariest challenges that they will face in their professional lives. So, it’s important to be thinking about how, if you’ve experienced this, you can find a way to move forward. And I think that there are positives that can be taken from situations people are in, so it be a chance to re-evaluate your career goals, to put an effective plan in place and really look for a suitable next career step for an individual.
In this situation, I would recommend, honestly, checking in with yourself and with your circumstances, so asking yourself things like “Do my goals still align with my desires and the reality of my workplace, industry, market or the conditions I’m in at the moment? What’s changed between the last time I wrote my plan and now?” and really importantly, “What can I actually do to lift my value to a future organisation?” This is something that’s been more important ever, particularly in the last year. We’ve experienced a tidal wave of change in so many industries.
And I just immediately think of an example here in the Australia and New Zealand business, One of our insurance clients hired hundreds of customer service staff because they needed to set up an onshore contact centre and data centre due to the pandemic and the things that were going on. And many of the staff that they hired had recently been made redundant or been stood down from the travel industry, again, due to the pandemic. And these candidates were given the opportunity to transfer existing skills and develop new skills in a completely different and new industry to them.
So, I would say to anyone in this position, be open to new possibilities. If you’re in this position currently, I think it’s worth considering whether there are other growing industries that would suit your skills and experience and where you could transfer the knowledge and the offering that you would have.
11. And on the other hand, are career plans still helpful even if you’re satisfied with your current career?
(19:06) Well, I think they certainly can still add value. I think that some job research, some conscious consideration of where you are, your achievements, the trajectory that you’re following at the moment, I think, that can still surface interesting things about your work life that you might not have thought about before. I think that having a plan that’s down in black and white on paper or on your computer can also make you feel even greater satisfaction from the career achievements that you’re achieving along the way. So, I do think that’s really an opportunity to explore the possibilities that the world of work can offer. And I think that there are benefits both when you’re sailing along as you hope to be or when your struck with challenges, change or difficulties that you are having to face.
12. And for those of our listeners who may have been working towards a promotion which has been put on hold due to the pandemic, how can a career plan help to get them back on track?
(20:05) Well, I’d firstly say don’t be discouraged and certainly people in this boat are not alone. Events of the pandemic have and are going to continue to require extraordinary ongoing action both from candidates and organisations looking to survive and to navigate their way through but I would say it doesn’t mean you won’t be able to reach your goals eventually.
So, if you’re in this situation, use this time as an opportunity to review and adjust your plan. We see a growing trend for workers to leave their organisations to achieve a promotion. And so, perhaps, you’re looking to develop in a new role externally. And if so, this is the time to assess if there are things you can do now to add to your skillset and make you more attractive to prospective employers for that promotion you’re looking for. And for this, you can find advice on how to approach your job search on our website, absolutely.
If the promotion you’re seeking is internal, I’d recommend speaking with your manager, bringing your relevant accomplishments from your career plan, other supporting evidence. If you haven’t already shared your aspirations and your goal, I think, if you can discuss a promotional timeframe that is realistic, if it’s appropriate, and obviously industries and organisations are being affected differently at the moment, but also talk about other tasks that you could take on now to help you progress and then add those into your career plan. Even if your promotion or all promotions across the organisation you work for are currently on hold, I think it’s really good advice to keep looking for opportunities to develop your skill set to move forward so that when promotions do end up back on the table, you’re at the top of the list.
13. If you’re hoping to progress in the current company that you’re in, should career planning be done on your own or should it be done in conjunction with your manager?
(22:07) This is going to depend on particular circumstances but I’d say, generally speaking, if your manager is in a position to guide you and help you progress against your goals, then it’s definitely worth asking for their input. I’d recommend maybe expressing your long-term goal and asking your manager to help you with short-term goals or even asking their opinion on how you can best work towards achieving what you’re trying to achieve.
I think you showing interest and ambition may also engage them in taking a more active approach in your development but the one thing I would say, Jon, is that if you’re thinking of changing your career, it could be the case that your manager won’t know how to help you get started or they may not want to help you get started in many instances. So, if that’s the case, I would talk to a recruiter or a trusted friend, family member, mentor, someone that’s objective and outside of your organisation, about your plans and how you’re going to go about actioning them.
14. What advice would you give to those that feel as though they’re not getting the support they need from their manager?
(23:21) That can be a tricky relationship or circumstance to find yourself and to navigate a positive outcome from. What I would start off by saying is that managers can be such a wealth of business and industry knowledge and they can really help you fast track your development. If you feel that you aren’t getting the support you need from your manager, I think it’s worthwhile having a think about the areas in which you’d like more assistance, think about how they could be helping you develop. Perhaps there’s a short-term goal you could suggest they help you work towards.
Your development isn’t in the hands of your manager. You need to be proactive and really work with them in a two-way relationship to achieve that progression and development. I think, be proactive and request a meeting with your manager where you ask them for their advice and support. There needs to be a little bit of strategic thinking done here because what you don’t want is to accuse them of mismanaging or neglecting you.
You want to make sure that you’re posing your request for more support as a win for the organisation as much as it would be a win for you. So, it’s in the organisation’s interest that you develop your skills, that you offer and give back more to your organisation, that you stay engaged, remain passionate, etc. And adding that you appreciate, value and respect their input and their opinions won’t hurt either.
We all lead busy lives or when we’re not in lockdown, we usually lead busy lives. We’re dealing with many conflicting priorities, which means we can lose focus on our career plan which we have established already.
15. What would you recommend listeners do to ensure that they feel motivated to remain on track?
(25:17) I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think this is really where that timeline that you attached to your goals can be really helpful and useful. And this is also where it’s key to set realistic goals and to check in and make sure you’re adjusting them based on what is going on. If your career plan includes several smaller, easier to achieve goals that lead you down the pathway to that overarching goal, it provides you with extra motivation to remain on track. So, that’s a good way to remain motivated is checking in with that career plan and acknowledging and celebrating those smaller achievements along the way.
I’d say, stay as positive as you can. I know everyone faces a tricky balancing acts between the competing priorities of their lives and their careers. And I think just keep checking in, adapting your plan and flexing it if you need to are really sensible things to do in this market and particularly when it can be difficult to stay motivated or remain on track.
16. How can listeners track their progress to maintain motivation? Being able to see that there are differences happening, that there is progress, obviously can give you a real boost.
(26:36) I highly recommend finding yourself someone you can work together with on your career plan, so finding yourself a mentor or a sponsor to work with you and to guide you. It could be your manager or a trusted advisor, a family friend. Set up regular meetings, perhaps monthly or quarterly, so that there’s an opportunity that you can be held accountable and hold yourself accountable to your plan and also to discuss and re-evaluate career objectives with your mentor as well.
So, I think it’s important that you’ve got those meetings or checkpoints to maintain some accountability. Also, as we’ve talked about several times, reviewing your plan. So, if you find yourself struggling to meet your goals or if you find yourself losing drive, ask yourself whether you still want the same things, are those goals that you had set reasonable considering the other commitments and priorities in your life or the market conditions you’re facing. And if not, then don’t be afraid to reset them and realign them.
Thank you so much, Eliza. I think, the past year, there’s been so many changes and it’s given people a lot of time to reflect on what they’re doing in their lives, what they want to do to make them happy, changes that they can make. So, I think this is a really, relevant topic to be discussing at the moment. And I think that’s some fantastic advice that you’ve shared with our listeners that will help ensure that they’re making progress in their careers and that they’re motivated to constantly develop them as well. So, thank you so much for sharing your insights and advice today.
17. I’ve just got one final question though before you go. If you had one piece of advice to help our listeners navigate their careers for out of the pandemic and beyond, what would that be?
(28:30) I’m going to steal a piece a quote from someone else here. A quote from Arthur Ashe, which I find incredibly motivating and so relevant in this market.
The quote that he said is “Start where you are, use what you have and do what you can.”
I’m not sure if you’ve heard that one before but I think it’s appropriate. So, in terms of starting where you are, what does that mean right now? Well, we’re experiencing an unprecedented global pandemic. So, be realistic, be fair to yourself about whatever professional circumstances you find yourself in. The careers of people in different countries, industries, professions, and organisations are being impacted in such completely different ways now that, I think, starting where you are is really important.
The next step is, use what you have. So, what are your strengths? What are your capabilities and experiences and qualifications? And what tools and resources are at your disposal to help you move forward?
And then, finally, probably most powerfully, do what you can. So, this is about taking action. Don’t make excuses, take action. And once you start taking action, it’s a game-changer because your action is either going to bring progress or it’s going to highlight areas that you still need to develop and work on. This, in turn, helps propel you forward and continue navigating your career through that career plan and that career journey.
So, I think that this advice from Arthur Ashe couldn’t be more relevant in the market that we’re experiencing right now.
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As the expectations placed on marketing departments continue to expand and evolve, marketing leaders are under tremendous scrutiny to prove the value of their organisations products and services to their customers.
1. To begin with, please could you introduce yourself to our listeners. Simon let’s begin with you.
(01:10) I’m Dr. Simon Kelly, I call myself a pracademic now, which reflects the fact I had a long commercial career mainly running marketing and in big telecom organisations. I help organisations with Stacey at Shake Marketing to develop more powerful value propositions and growth. And I’m also a lecturer at the University of York, and I’ve lectured to several universities in the UK and in the US. I’m the co-author of this book that we’re going to talk about today, Stand Out Marketing and Value-ology.
2. And Stacey, how about you? Could you tell our listeners a little bit about your background and your current role?
(01:54) Yes, absolutely. Well, firstly, thanks Megan, for having us here today. Simon and I always love the opportunity to talk about marketing leadership. I’m Stacey Danheiser, based in the United States. I’m the founder of Shake Marketing Group, which, as Simon mentioned, is a B2B marketing consultancy where we help organisations with customer research, value propositions and marketing strategy. I’m also the co-author of two marketing books along with Simon, and before starting Shake, I have a long history of working in Fortune 500 companies across various corporate marketing leadership roles.
3. Now, you both recently released your new book, Stand Out Marketing. Could you tell us a little bit more about this and the research you conducted around it?
(02:37) Yes, well, Stand Out Marketing was born from some initial research that we started to conduct across three different industries. We looked at the telecom data centre in UK university industries to understand how they’re communicating to their potential customers and clients.
And what we found was that really, everybody is saying the same thing. And so, we started to dig into why that was happening and part of the research that we conducted to learn about that was dozens of one-on-one interviews with marketing sales and business leaders across the UK and the US. We led a global survey with over fifty respondents, the case studies, as I mentioned, and then we also have our own first-hand corporate experience in working with over two dozen clients.
4. Now, in your book, you mentioned the phrase ‘copycat marketing’, and the fact that we are ‘swimming in a sea of sameness’. Please can you explain to our listeners what this is and what it means for marketing leaders?
(03:41) Yes, so, as I mentioned, this is based on the research that we did into the three industries. And we did a scrape of websites and Twitter feeds of the top thirty companies in each of those industries.
We found that most companies were using the exact same words, the same “why us” story, the same benefits statements. We saw an overuse of generic business terms, like the word “services,” “solutions,” “business,” and a lot of phrases that start with “we” and “our” instead of being about the customer.
We also found that B2B companies rarely use proof points that are meaningful to the customer. So, for example, there’s a lot of promises to help businesses grow or transform their business but when you ask how, the answer is always something like, “buy my product or service.” So, these are lofty and empty claims as what they’re saying and the bridge from here, how you get a customer from here and where they currently are to where they really want to be, is very weak. So, when every company sounds the same, customers end up really confused about what makes each one different. And so, we call this ‘swimming in the sea of sameness’.
5. How do you think leaders can identify if their organisation is one of those that’s ‘stuck in the sea of sameness’?
(04:57) Yes, so we have various exercises and assessments in our book, but there’s a few things that I would encourage people to look at. And that would be:
Do you really understand your customer’s business problems and the problems that your organisation solves?
Are you presenting value in a way that resonates with the customer?
Does your “why us” story involve the customer or is it all about you, your number of years of experience, your products, and your superior customer service?
And then one that I found a lot of marketers are doing is constantly looking at their competitors and copying, frankly, the websites, social media content and feeds of their top competitors. So, one thing to look at here would be, is your website structured the same? Is the content you’re producing the same? Are the benefits that you’re promising the same? And even looking at colour palettes, logos, and the way that information is presented can be all incredibly confusing if it looks the same as your competitors.
6. Turning to you Simon, the skills and competencies of marketing teams will help businesses emerge from ‘the sea of sameness’ and become more customer centric. So, what are the key competencies that organisations need to begin developing in their employees?
(06:18) Yes, it’s a great question. Before I dive into that, I think it’s probably important to say what we see as a competency.
A competency, we think, is the combination of the knowledge, skills and the behaviours added together to be successful in your role. Now, for example, if you look at chapter four in the book, which is about what are the key roles for marketing and sales. When we interviewed leaders across the world about this, lots of people said, maybe not surprisingly, that the most important role for marketing is brand management. So that’s a key job to be done by marketing: differentiating the brand in a meaningful way to customers. As Stacey said, what do you need to know to be able to do that effectively? What do you need to be good at? And how do you need to behave to develop and mobilise a brand within your company and crucially, in the market?
So, if you were a brand manager, adding that together gives you an equation for what the competencies are that you need. Now, at the top level for marketing and salespeople, five competencies came out of our research and taken together, the initials spell the word VALUE:
V is for visionary, which is about foreseeing potential changes in a broader business environment.
A is for activator. That’s about getting buy-in to initiatives to help drive growth in the business.
L is for learner, which is to learn from changes in the environment, changes in what your customers value, changes in what sets you apart from competitors.
U is for usefulness, which is differentiated in a way that’s relevant, practical, and resonates with customers.
E is for evaluator. This is about evaluating, not just the ongoing success of marketing and sales campaigns, but at the front-end evaluating potential opportunities to decide whether your organisation should pursue these opportunities or not.
7. I’d like to look firstly at the visionary element, which as you mentioned, is about looking ahead at the broader environment to develop new ways of doing business. How important is it for marketing leaders to develop a vision for change to continually adapt to external influences?
(08:38) Well, it’s extremely important. At any one time, there are lots of things going on: happening now, coming up on the near horizon or that you could foresee in the far distance. Let’s just look at what’s happened recently.
In the US, there’s a new president who on his first day, brought America back into the Paris Global Climate Agreement. Reflecting on that, that could be a move towards a much more unified global trading environment rather than the one that existed before.
In Europe, there’s Brexit with the UK withdrawing from the European Union. And of course, this year we’ve seen the dramatic effects of COVID-19 sweeping the world, which has affected us all in many ways from changing shopping habits, meaning that we’re always in Zoom meetings, putting a focus on mental awareness because of the effects it has on people and dramatically affecting organisational performance in different ways.
Now, you think if you were the CEO of Pfizer now versus being the CEO of British Airways, you’re in an entirely different position. So, when we think of what’s happening on the technology front, it’s just eyewatering. It’s difficult to believe that the first iPhone was only launched in 2007, and the last time I looked, there were 3.5 billion globally.
And what’s happening or coming up on the horizon. We’ve seen 3-D printing, we’ve got robotics, AI and all these things have impacted customer behaviour and competitive behaviour. So, for example, we’ve seen the rise of Airbnb and Uber and Lyft, which are organisations that don’t own any assets but have developed offerings by effective uses of these new technologies. So, taken together, you’ve got to understand how this will impact your customer, how your own company will be affected by these things and how it will affect your industry.
In the words of Wayne Gretzky, who was a famous Canadian ice hockey player, you need to be able to do this in order to skate to where the puck is going and not where it’s been, to try to predict what’s going to happen into the future and then to portray that to your customer. Now, people disregard the use of that analogy that Wayne Gretzky’s saying and say, “Oh, well, you’ve got to have a certain amount of talent because Wayne Gretzky was the greatest ice hockey player ever to walk the planet”. But I think that’s why it’s relevant in what we’re talking about in this book. You must have a level of competence that you need to be able to develop to be an effective visionary.
I think that’s a great analogy, thank you and probably the first time that Wayne Gretzky has been referenced on our podcast.
8. Now, how would you recommend marketing leaders encourage idea sharing from their teams to build a collaborative vision of the future?
(11:42) I think ideas are great but informed ideas are even better. And so, I think there’s a point that needs to be made before idea sharing takes place. The first one will be read and take reference points wisely. So, don’t just start with an inside out viewpoint, which is what really shackles lots of companies. They’re always having meetings, which start by their own perspective. Now, look from outside in, think about the customer world, take reference points from industry experts and commentators, look at other disciplines, other industries; get people going on to Ted Talks or listening to Hays podcasts.
Don’t be myopic. I mean, at the very heart of marketing is that famous article by Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia, which bemoans the decline of the rail industry of the US because they didn’t foresee the rise of short-haul flights because they’re focused on their own industry.
So, don’t be myopic. Look more widely than your usual reference points and then at that point, draw people into what the Americans call brown bag sessions, which were effectively bringing your own lunch, sitting around a table and encouraging people to bring new things in. But don’t let those things be about, “let’s have a meeting about how to do effective copywriting” – you can do that in a different way. Have them about these new perspectives and then you could work with people like us to do things like scenario planning, to think about what potential combination of things can happen.
And then having considered all that, if you’ve then got to sort of Zoom in and predict, okay, after we’ve taken this eagle eye 2000-foot-view, what could happen? What would we place bets on what is likely to happen? Because that is, if you like the end of the vision building, you’ve got to develop and take to your customer for insights.
9. Following on from that, I’d like to talk about the second element, activator, which to remind our listeners of what you said earlier is all about being the force that successfully drives the team to growth. How can marketing leaders effectively get buy-in to initiatives and activate these visions that we just discussed?
(14:06) If you’re a marketing leader, I think firstly, you’ve got to create the environment and that’s by focusing and prioritising. So, coming out of this visionary phase and thinking what are the things that you believe to be important to drive as change initiatives and ongoing programs in your organisation and set clear priorities.
And then to lead, train, coach and appraise people on your team along the main sort of facets to this advocacy, activate your competency that we talk about. The first one is this thing called a balanced advocate, which is if you’re a leader, you should know, not only what is good for the customer, but what is good for your own company. In the book, we have a simple Venn diagram, which shows an overlap between what’s good for the company, what’s good for the customer, and in between that is your sweet spot where you can do things that are good for both you and the customer.
So, when you’re then trying to mobilise things inside your organisation when you’re trying to get a good feel for what is important to customers, you need to be able to listen emphatically, not just listen in order to reply; to really listen to what concerns people. And above all, if you’re leading a marketing organisation, you must make sure that your team understand that they must be able to negotiate.
And don’t get sensitive about if you take an idea forward and some senior leader or the salespeople need to change it, because they’ve got some view about how it could be more effective. You must negotiate, and you must be tenacious because to get an idea over the line, you’ve got to keep going and going. And if then it’s approved, all the time there’s another new initiative coming in that field, which might be from HR or from IT that you’re competing with, you’ve got to keep driving people to remember that you’re running this important initiative. They are some of the main things I would recommend.
10. Now we just discussed what marketing leaders need, but what can marketing leaders do to drive their teams to push for change themselves? And what do you think are the benefits of doing that?
(16:29) I think leaders themselves must be more self-aware and reflect on what they’ve got in their team and what type of capabilities they must have to effectively activate and mobilise. So, get the team to consider:
Are you a balanced advocate?
Do you know how this company makes money?
Can you therefore develop business cases, which are compelling because it can move us forward in the marketplace that they can be profitable for this company?
Do you go into situations with what we call “fully baked answers,” where you think this is what the thing needs to look like? Or are you prepared to negotiate, and do you have the skill to negotiate?
Do you understand what motivates the sales force?
Do you understand what motivates one of your senior executives so that you can get buy-in and they can develop programs that everybody’s prepared to take forward together?
They’re really the sort of things that need to be done and to courage, coach, advise your team and be there by the side of them to help drive change if need be. And if they need you to call on a senior leader in a business from another function to get something moving, then you should do that.
11. Thank you, Simon. And now, Stacey, looking at the third competency mentioned, which was learner, so learning new skills or ways of doing business. Why is it so important for marketing leaders to encourage their team members to upskill particularly in this increasingly hybrid and remote working world of work?
(18:06) Yes, well 2020 perfectly sums up the reason why being a learner is so important. Marketers started off last year with one set of plans and strategies, and then six weeks into the year, everything changed from switching to online events from in-person events. And suddenly there was this massive need to immediately learn new technologies.
Companies that had strong learners were able to quickly understand that business and customer expectations had changed, and they were able to adapt. We say that being a learner is about having a mindset of curiosity. So, it’s somebody that’s open to new ideas, can be a critical thinker and somebody that’s deliberate and self-directed rather than waiting for someone to tell them what to learn.
12. How can marketing leaders support their teams in upskilling and what are the benefits of that?
(18:56) Yes, well, I think the first thing is encouraging the team to take ownership of their own learning. So, one thing that we were surprised when we talked to marketing leaders is that most of the organisations said that they did have a budget for learning and development. That would be to send the team members to seminars or workshops or trade industry events, but that people are rarely taking advantage of these.
And so first and foremost, it would be to get the team to come up with their own plan for learning and that understanding this is completely within their own skillset to do. Secondly, we outlined five key areas in our book that we think all marketers really should understand. There are specific questions that we outlined so I’ll just briefly go through these:
The first is the market. How well does your team understand what’s happening in the market? As Simon mentioned, all the things that is required to be a visionary, somebody that can look at trends and really understand what’s happening.
The second is customers. So really, what does your team understand about who the ideal customer is, what the customer’s top needs and pain points are, what they’re trying to gain or achieve in their business and why specifically do they work with your company.
The third is competitors. So, we mentioned that a lot of marketers are looking at other people’s websites and copying and pasting what’s being said there, but there’s a little bit more to it than on the competitive landscape. You have your direct competitors and then you have the indirect competitors that are how people spending their time and resources. So, getting a full broad picture for how your company fits into that competitive landscape.
The fourth area is your company and the product and services that you offer. So, we found, and this is a common complaint amongst the C-level team that marketing does not really understand the business. They don’t really understand how their activity fits into overarching business goals. There are profitability questions: Which products and services are the most profitable? What’s the mission of the company? Why are they even in business?
So, all of these are broad level questions that really need to be understood at that company level. And then, finally, is their specific role. So, what skills are needed to be done within their specific job? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Where do they need to improve within their current job and how can they grow and elevate their career from there? So, that’s the five key areas we would say that those are good reflection questions to implement within the team.
And then there’s a culture piece to this as well, which is a culture of learning. And that has to do with, firstly making sure that people understand why things are being done. We find that a lot of marketers are executing programs not fully understanding the big picture and maybe just taking things at a surface level. So, for example, one of the famous sayings is, “why are we losing business?” Oh, it’s all about our price because our price is too high. And so, then everybody goes to immediately start fixing the pricing, but there could be more to it about the value understanding what customers are trying to achieve and digging deeper. Maybe the answer is not just the prices are too high but that we need to explain it better to customers what they’re getting for their money.
And then one of the key pitfalls to learning that we frequently hear from marketers is that they just don’t have time. So, they’re too busy executing and they’re not making the time to learn. So, the best organisations encourage learning and aren’t worried when people are taking time to sit and think and reflect on what they’ve learned. They use that as very productive time versus just the standard sort of definition of productivity in the amount of volume and output that that person is doing.
And then lastly, I would say it’s around encouraging the team to experiment. One of the leaders we spoke to called this Fearless Experimentation, and this is encouraging people to try new things and not just have to follow the herd, where we end up copying and pasting old business playbooks that aren’t really aligned with the changing customer needs.
13. Now, it’s becoming more important than ever for organisations to be able to articulate the usefulness that they can provide to customers, which is the fourth competency you picked out. What role do marketing leaders have in this process? Does it start with the product or service offering?
(23:29) Yes, so first we define usefulness as the ability to connect the dots from what your company does to how it solves a customer problem. So, this really includes everything from products and services to the sales approach, even marketing content, programs, and customer service. So, really everything that a company is offering should be useful to their end customers.
We have a little usefulness triangle in our book that we described and there are really three elements to being useful.
The first is about knowledge and skills. So B2B buyers want to work with sellers that really understand their business. So it starts with spending the time, again, going back to the learning component, really understanding what customers need, what they want, what’s going to fit into their business and how you can help them achieve their goals?
The second is what we call preparation. So, this is being proactive, ready, and willing to help. This is putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and realising that there really is no one size fits all. This is the element of how much time you are spending here to develop new things versus being reactive and waiting for somebody to come to you and ask you for something.
And then the third is timing. So, 90% of buyers are open to engaging with salespeople earlier in the process. So, it’s a matter of getting in there early. And there’s a stat that says 35-50% of sales goes to the vendor that responds first. So, these are having systems and processes in place that help accelerate the timing, especially if a customer needs something, they don’t want to sit around for four months waiting for you guys to come up with it. So, the timing aspect is important here. The question becomes well, who owns this, who owns becoming whether something is useful to the business. And marketing absolutely has a key role in understanding and presenting data back to the business that reflects what the customer sentiment is.
So, every department is impacted here from the product team coming up with product roadmaps, to the sales team and how they’re presenting this information. So, marketing really has a hand in driving that and making sure that there is discipline around implementing things that are going to be useful.
14. Now, keeping on this theme of usefulness, how can marketing leaders make sure that their teams have their finger on the pulse of the customer to appeal to their requirements?
(26:03) Yes, so, the first I would say is having a budget for some customer research. One of the things that continues to be shocking when we work with clients is that many of the marketing teams especially, do not have a budget to talk to customers and cannot remember the last time they did any customer research.
What does that mean? That means they rely on their sales team or their customer service team or data that they’re collecting about website visitors, or email open rates and making decisions on that versus talking one to one with customers to really understand at a deeper level what their business problems are, what’s changed and how that might fit into their world.
And then it goes back to the theme that we were talking about earlier, around making time to learn and it’s the same thing here. There must be time spent on reading and digesting all this information and making sense of it so that the business can use the information to make decisions. I mean, we are all overwhelmed with big data. The challenge becomes how are people acting on it? We have no shortage of information. It’s a matter of getting the teams together and talking through what this really means for our business.
15. Can you share any examples of organisations that have, or are currently proving their unique value well, particularly during this uncertain time?
(27:23) Yes, well 2020 was an exciting year for this competency to see how businesses emerged. There are a ton of B2C examples that we saw, especially during the early days of COVID. So, think of the distilleries that started making hand sanitizer or the large clothing retailers that started making face masks.
On the B2B side, we’ve seen a lot of technologies and even specific marketing and sales content aimed at helping people be more productive working from home. And I think what we’re seeing now, now that people have been stuck at home, one of the trends is how do you get people to unplug since we’re all connected what seems like 24 hours a day. So, you’re starting to see more research and reports and tools that help you block certain things. I mean, there are apps where you can close down and put limits on social media, as well as just mental health in general, making sure that you’re taking breaks, going for a walk and getting unplugged so that you can avoid the burnout, which is happening to so many people right now.
16. Thank you, Stacey. Turning back to you, Simon. The final key competency that organisations need to be developing in their employees is evaluator. Could you tell us a little bit more about what this means and why it’s so important to organisations?
(28:52) Well, first of all, before I get into what we believe is the competency for this, let me just talk about the difference between this skill to be able to do this in the competency.
So, firstly, you need to have people who can measure. Stacey mentioned some digital type measurements like click-through rates or likes, which can move you down a line of chasing vanity metrics. So, you must have people who have the skill to be able to do the measurement and connect the dots to the end about how it’s affecting revenue overall, or sales growth. But over and above that, you have to be able to have people who can evaluate new opportunities to decide which to take forward or not; whether to stop initiatives, change initiatives or just keep going with something that you’re moving forward with.
And if you go and do that well, you either burn a lot of cash and calories focusing on the wrong things, or you can miss out on big opportunities. And so, in our book, the overall competency we think is much more in keeping with what is not just a numeric thing, but a human and very political thing because most of our senior leaders that we spoke to around the world in sales and marketing were bringing the idea to the table, which we’ve all experienced.
It’s okay, say now you have to measure a new mover after evaluate, but people don’t like having their ideas thrown under the bus in front of other people and people don’t like to see their pet projects killed even if the numbers suggest that they do need to be. And so, to be a good evaluator, you must be able to in the end, say, this has worked, we should keep doing it. I’ve looked at the business case for this and it is going to be worth us doing as an organisation because it brings value to us and the customer.
Then there are some key things that you must be as a human being. And the first one is that you have to be somebody the organisation believes has integrity, that you are prepared to measure things and be objective and you can go to the evaluator as a person who you could trust will not follow somebody’s unpolitical agenda, that will measure correctly and accurately whether the thing’s been successful or not in the face of some political pressure. And they must be able to be this balanced advocate, which we talked about before on one of the other competencies. You have to be able to know how it’s affected customer value, not whether the thing turned up on time and whether the service was all right but if you promise that customer that the thing you sold them would help them be more productive, could you actually measure that and has it actually moved the needle in your own organisation?
And so, therefore, this person has to have a lot of political-ness and persuasion skills because there’s one thing measuring as I said, and then the other thing is turning around and saying to a senior executive, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to carry on with your pet project because the numbers don’t stack up.” So, if you’re a marketing leader, I think you have to understand there’s evaluation and the need to be able to do the evaluation numerically and objectively but that you’re taking the outcome of those decisions into a political environment. So, you need people who can handle that.
17. And what can marketing leaders do to help their teams effectively balance what’s good for the plus customer with return on investment for the business?
(32:32) Well, I think this is a key thing had we mentioned this balanced advocacy more than a couple of times now. And one senior leader in particular, I won’t reveal because the research that we did was anonymous and that’s how it should be, but got really catatonic with anger about how they believe that marketers don’t often understand in the round what’s actually good for the business, how the business actually makes money. And so, they’ll talk about marketing campaigns in isolation without really joining the dots.
So, I think the marketing leader has to make sure that they know and their team know how the business makes money and what the mechanics are there, and how the thing that you’re proposing is going to influence that.
18. To change direction slightly, Simon, I want to ask you how marketing leaders can role model the five competencies that we’ve discussed in this podcast?
Now many people said, “One of the things that’s constraining me doing visionary or being a better learner is having time”. So if you’re a marketing leader, you’ve got to set the agenda, set the environment to allow people time and, as I said earlier, to clearly encourage prioritisation and focus on not the volume of factory output mentality.
Once you’ve created that environment, I think if you’re a leader, you need to always look at yourself first and think, well, where am I in these competencies in the context of my own organisation and customers? Is it important for me to have as an individual and where is it okay to hire in? And then to put these competencies on the agenda with your team and to, as Stacey said earlier, understand how the competencies are spread around the team and to hire and develop to fill those gaps.
So, for a leader, I think reflect it on yourself: do I take all the other perspectives? Do I do that as a leader? Do I bring new perspectives into the discussion? For example, all these other industries or competitors are doing this or this other organisation has taken a completely different stance in the marketplace, or an external observer is saying that we’re not doing very well in this particular area, despite what we may think ourselves from an activation standpoint. I think as I said earlier, you’ve got to discuss and develop people around their ability to mobilise ideas in the organisation and to take part in that mobilisation when it helps.
And on the learner side, do you bring things to the team that helps with their learning? Do you create that environment? And do you, is all about something we’ve talked about a couple of times, do you encourage and reward targeted quality versus quantity? I mean, I can’t let this be finished without reminding myself that I worked in one organisation where the marketing organisation wasn’t very well perceived by the salespeople. And adjoined to the conference thing, the marketing leader says, “Oh, we need to bring in every sort of piece of brochureware that we’ve done for sales and customers”. And it’s an enormous table, it must’ve been ten foot by twenty foot. It was absolutely creaking with all this sort of brochureware that had been produced and yet the marketing team in question was poorly perceived because it was just responding to volume.
So, all of which weren’t useful to the salespeople really, and weren’t useful to the customer. So, encouraging and rewarding targeted quality versus quantitative for the sake of it is important role modelling of the usefulness. And then the E, try to demonstrate objectivity and balanced advocacy in front of the team, help them understand what that is. And to be honest, to kill your own pet projects. If you’ve got an idea or you wanted something to move forward and you can see that that’s not working, be brave enough in front of your own team and the rest of the leadership in the organisation to demonstrate that you’re killing that because it’s not worked.
19. Excellent. And I think there’s a lot of room there for our listeners to think about and to digest. Stacey, you’ve touched on this briefly, but do you think that the need for these competencies and marketing teams have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began and will this importance continue to increase in the new era of work?
(37:42) Yes, well, absolutely. I think, everything that we’ve talked about here really has been amplified because of COVID. Now we talked about how everything just changed so suddenly, and we’ve seen a need for everything that we talked about.
So, continuing to have your eye on the horizon, or what we say was a visionary; activating new ideas and programs and the ability to get buy into those; constantly learning about the customer and the changing landscape; and then creating useful products, content programs, and evaluating what’s working, especially considering all this online shift versus in-person tactics. I think what to do about that is really evaluating job descriptions. So, we often joke about some of the marketing job descriptions that we see, which are looking for unicorns. There are pages of responsibilities that this person is responsible for, and we think this framework of the five competencies that we outlined will not go out of style. It’s what marketing leaders should be looking for as none of us can predict what new technologies, businesses, or even approaches that are going to emerge from this, the events over the past 12 months.
And if you bring employees in with these specific competencies, it shouldn’t really matter about their industry experience, which we see as sort of a constant requirement on job descriptions, but in fact can be a benefit in an asset because they can bring a new perspective to what your team is missing because they came from a different industry.
All in all, yes, I think these are going to continue to be extremely important because we’ve heard an alarming stat recently that said 83% of marketers are burnt out right now. And that went up 10% after the pandemic, so it’s really important not to just keep piling on more volume of activity, as Simon mentioned, but about developing smarter strategies with your marketing approach and clearing out the things that aren’t working, even if everyone else in your industry is jumping on the bandwagon. So, we see a lot of companies that are constantly chasing the shiny object, Clubhouse being the new social media platform to be the latest that everybody feels like they need to go rush into. So, it’s just being mindful and careful that you don’t get caught up in that cycle.
20. Thank you very much, Stacey. Now, I’d like to end this podcast with a question that we ask all our guests. Stacey, 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?
(40:15) I’m not going to use all our competencies that we laid out here, but one of the first qualities I think that makes a strong leader is somebody that has vision. Somebody that can set a strategy and direction and provide clarity for where they want the business to go. Because it’s about getting people to buy-in to that vision and getting your team to see the broader picture.
The second, I would say, is somebody with courage. It’s having the quality to be bold, to be creative and the willingness to try new things.
And then lastly, just my overall ongoing quality that I think is important just in humans, in general, is communication and the ability to keep everybody informed, to maintain that alignment and to be constantly aware. As I mentioned, of the stat eight out of 10 marketers are burnt out right now, what conversations are you having with your team to help make sure that that isn’t everybody on your team? So, my personal philosophy is I think these are, these have always been important qualities. I don’t think the pandemic has necessarily changed these. I think it’s just, as I mentioned, amplified the need for people to develop these even stronger.
21. And finally, the same question to you, Simon. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader, and do you think these qualities have changed since the beginning of the pandemic?
(41:40) It’s a great question and as ever because you’ve asked me second, Stacey’s nicked all the good ones! So, building on what she said, I have vision on my list of three, and that’s really important, but I think that preceding the vision as a marketing leader, you have to demonstrate that you have the ability to bring an outside-in focus to always be concerned about the customer’s world, how the things that are happening around the customer’s world and then around your own environment could change things.
And then use that to help develop the vision and then to lead the change coming out of that vision. So that, two, leading the change from the vision and developing it from an outside-in perspective.
And then I think you’ve got to be able to finally, because you can tell, I like sporting analogies, bring in stuff from outside elsewhere we’ve talked about a lot is crucial. So, cricket in the UK, in England, the fielding got a lot better because people who coach cricket teams realise that people who play baseball field a lot more athletically than in cricket. So, it took a lot of learning from baseball. And I’ve just read that today, the coach of Leicester City Football team extended an invite to the new coach of Leicester Tigers Rugby Team so that they can share ideas on leadership. And I think, that’s both of those examples, the baseball meets cricket and the football meets rugby. In this country is good examples of what leaders should do, bringing thinking in from elsewhere.
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