What it means to be a Human leader

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by James Ashton

 

Talk to some CEOs, and it becomes clear that lockdowns imposed by COVID-19 tore down barriers between them and their workforce. One leader I know was taken aback by the response he got for a casual reference to “all 8,000 of us” in an all-hands Zoom call. Isolated staff clung to what they saw as a significant moment of togetherness, and emailed him their heartfelt thanks.

Other CEOs acknowledge the fresh divides that were erected and still need to be navigated. In an interview, Amanda Blanc, CEO of London-based insurance and savings group Aviva, highlighted the challenge of remote leadership, including presenting over “video walls.” “If you were an introvert, it would be a very difficult thing to do,” she told the Sunday Times of London.

The ambition to preserve the status quo, though, drove some CEOs to behave as normal, including Yves Perrier of French asset manager Amundi, who went to his Paris office every day of lockdown. I suspect it was just as comforting for him as it was intended to be for his staff. But others took this idea to extreme lengths, such as a CEO who filmed his Christmas message last year standing at a lectern in an empty lecture hall.

Going into the pandemic, I was focused on the leaders that I described in my recent book, The Nine Types of Leader. This taxonomy was distilled from encounters with CEOs during my 20 years in financial journalism. In that time, I had examined up close the all-powerful Alpha, growling into his mobile phone or summoning lieutenants to join him at the opera; the passionate Lover, throwing herself into an advertising pitch or leading a high-energy workout; the fearless Fixer, dispatching staff and pleading for clemency from creditors; and the others. But the one that stands out as lockdowns subside and economies start opening up in many markets is the Human. Continue reading →

Facilitate collaborative breakthrough with these moves

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by Adam Kahane

By alternating between top-down and bottom-up approaches to problem-solving, teams can make progress.

Early in my career as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder collaborations, my colleagues and I led a two-year strategy project for a Fortune 50 logistics company. The company’s established way of doing things was vertical: the CEO managed by giving forceful, detailed directives, which had produced coordination and cohesion that enabled outstanding business success. But the COO thought the company’s situation was dangerous. Globalization and digitization were changing the competitive landscape, and he wanted employees from across the organization to collaborate more horizontally to create innovative responses.

My team worked with the COO and his colleagues to agree on a project scope, timeline, and process, and to charter a cross-level, cross-departmental team. The process we designed for the team was more egalitarian and creative than what they were used to. They immersed themselves in the changes in their market by spending time on the front lines of the organization, going on learning journeys to successful organizations in other sectors, and constructing scenarios of possible futures. They participated in workshops that emphasized full engagement on the part of all team members and that included structured exercises designed to generate, develop, and test innovative options.

This transformative process enabled breakthrough by creating a space in which the company’s command-and-control culture—which assumed that the bosses knew best—was suspended. This in turn enabled greater contribution by participants from different departments and from different levels in the hierarchy. The project team cut across the siloed organization, where lines of communication ran up and down rather than from side to side, so the process enabled greater connection. And the company had a steep hierarchy of privilege, with senior people having much greater compensation and agency, so the process also enabled more equitable contribution and connection. By enabling contribution, connection, and equity, our transformative facilitation helped this team come up with and implement a set of initiatives to launch new service offerings and to streamline company operations. Continue reading →

The Essence of Agility and Resilience After Covid

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by Peter B. Zemsky, Deputy Dean of INSEAD and Dean of Innovation, and Sameer Hasija, INSEAD Dean of Executive Education

 

Navigating unprecedented levels of uncertainty takes a careful combination of technology and talent.

One burning question dominates our recent conversations with executives: What’s next? Their challenges differ. Some are working frantically to recover ground lost during the initial waves of the Covid pandemic. Others are trying to sustain growth while keeping an eye out for future disruptive events. But all seem to realise that the last 18 months were an organisational and individual turning point. The already-eroding stability that existed before Covid has been decisively overthrown.

In these conversations, two words stand out: agility and resilience. Leaders at every level know these two attributes will be key to survival, not to mention success, in the short- to medium-term (and possibly indefinitely). They are looking to us – and INSEAD – for help in becoming more agile and resilient. In other words, they are asking the right questions. But we also fear that these two words are at risk of becoming meaningless through repetition. (To clarify: How we use the word agile is not to be confused with Agile, a specific working style coming out of software development that is not for everyone.)

Stepping back for a moment, let’s examine what agility and resilience mean for companies in the here and now. This isn’t a semantic exercise. It is critical to understand the “what” and the “why” of these concepts, so that the “how” of building and promoting them can be executed effectively.

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5 Ways To Evolve Company Culture In A Hybrid World

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by Caroline Castrillon

The pandemic has had a major impact on company culture. According to a survey from global customer experience and digital solutions provider TELUS International, a majority (51%) cited feeling less connected to their company culture while working from home. And in another study conducted by Glassdoor, 56% of employees find a good workplace culture to be even more important than salary. Now more than ever, it’s important for employers to put company culture high on their priority list.

But with more flexible work arrangements on the horizon, what are the best ways to build and maintain an effective organizational culture? According to an article in Harvard Business Review, “it requires recognizing that culture is evolving despite being remote and that organizations need to invest a substantial amount of time and energy into keeping their cultures on track or steering them in new directions.” These five strategies will help any organization preparing to create, reinforce or reinvent its company culture to prepare for a hybrid workplace.

Document and communicate values

When you have a distributed workforce, it is even more critical to record and communicate company values. Develop a set of values that clearly articulate how employees are expected to make decisions. The documentation can take many forms. Some examples could include a handbook or posting a manifesto on the company website. It’s also a good idea to make this information public as a way to attract the right people to your team.

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Quick! Do you know your company’s values?

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by Adam Bryant

Some companies’ lists of principles are short enough to be easily remembered, while others have more than a dozen entries. Maybe some editing is in order.

At some point during their evolution, companies go through the values exercise. The founder may decide to write them down. Or the company’s values could be the subject of a whiteboard exercise by the leadership team at an off-site. Or employees may be surveyed for their input. There is no “right” way to do the values exercise, because every company’s culture is unique. Ideally, the list of values should capture and codify that culture.

But the leaders who drive this important exercise have to make some key decisions up front. They need to define the rules of the road, so that there is clarity throughout the organization about those behaviors that are encouraged and those that are discouraged. In going through this process, leaders must make choices. Will they use big-idea words, such as excellence and integrity? Or will they use more concrete and specific language? How will employees be reminded of the values?

I believe another question is too often glossed over: how long should the list be? Some organizations seem to embrace the simple rule that most people can’t remember more than three or four things from day to day. At Colgate-Palmolive, for example, the values are “caring,” “global teamwork,” and “continuous improvement.”

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