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Recently, we completed a project with a well-known multinational beverage company with the aim of aiding all function-leads and teams to adopt an agile mindset by using Agile to increase efficiency and business results.

The project involved consultation with the client, interviews and follow up discussions with stakeholders to support the implementation. This ensured alignments between all stakeholders, managed expectations and helped set clear objectives and the offsite programs created the right learning climate, enabling the client to move forward with successful transformation. The project involved a 2- day workshop to gain a better understanding of what Agile is, defined a joint vision toward Agile transformation, and steered towards concrete next steps. As an outcome of the main session run with TPCL, a pitch and plan were shown to stakeholders which resulted in the green light to the initiative.

The project finished with follow up meetings with key participants, where we were able to share observations with the client which assisted them in a successful rollout of their Agile transformation program. The program was so well received that it generated a full effort from their international country operations to be implemented and adopted locally. A year later the rollout was considered a success having led to increased efficiencies, better alignment between departments, faster adaptation to client needs which resulted in quantifiable benefits.

To learn more about Agile and TPC Leadership don’t hesitate to get in touch.

In our 3rd blog in the series, ‘Diversity is given, Inclusion is a choice’, Annelieke Jense and Frouke Horstmann provide practical ways based on their experience working with clients on how organisations can create a true inclusive culture by installing processes that mitigate unconscious biases.

A hundred years ago, women fought for the right to vote, needing to justify why their voice also counted. Today the USA has a black Asian woman as vice president.  We have indeed come a long way! But now is the time to drive home hard that we still have a long way to go to having a fully inclusively diverse culture as the norm, not the exception.

Inside office jokes, not understanding your colleagues when they chat in a language you do not understand, team meetings held on days when you do not work or not in your time zone, starting meetings without all colleagues present, consistently recruiting similar types, made to feel silly for not knowing the cultural norms, not being able to enter a building or attend an event due to disabilities not been taking into account, not starting from an assumption of competence due to race, gender or culture – if you have observed or experienced any of the above, you have encountered unconscious bias in the workplace.   And more than likely none of these scenarios were not done with any ill intent, just like the last time you discussed your weekend with a colleague and didn’t involve the foreigner in the canteen.

So how can an organisation ensure true diversity and inclusivity?

When working with clients on how to mitigate unconscious bias, we like to use the word ‘nudge’ – moving people in the direction of inclusive behaviour without convincing them. We help them set their mechanism default in such a way that they choose the right inclusive behaviour because mechanisms, by default, usually invite in-group favouritism.

Throughout your career, the decisions to attract, develop and retain people are underpinned by HR processes and mental decisions often, without bad intent, built on unconscious biases and therefore excluding many people from the beginning.

An example is the Organ Donor drive in The Netherlands.  At first people were asked to opt-in, stating they would be donors.  But the system was based on the hardwiring of exclusion, discussion in our first blog, and did not generate participation no matter how hard the marketing efforts.  But last year the government changed the law and by default you are a donor, unless you opt-out.

This shift can also be made on an organisational level when developing people, for example assessing promotions. The default question asked of managers is usually, Who is promotable? By changing the default to everyone is promotable, the argument is then who is not promotable and by doing this, more women are promoted.

Another example of how changes in the HR process can nudge others to inclusivity is instead of convincing leadership that you must have a D&I policy, ask the managers to argue why not!

‘Blind’ recruiting, i.e. removing personal information such as age, sex, nationality and even the applicant’s name from candidate applications during the assessment process is also a  positive nudge in removing bias from the hiring process. This would also include the question “are you internationally mobile”, which often excludes people with young children.  By changing this question to “would you consider an international assignment sometime in the future?”, you are automatically more inclusive.

If organisations are in favor of quotas, rather work with, for example, a maximum 70% homogeneity target.

We invite you to follow us on LinkedIn, check out our blog page for original content and actionable insights or contact the authors (Annelieke Jense & Frouke Horstmann) to continue the discussion.

Copyright TPCL 

 

In the 2nd of our Technology and Humanity blog series, we talk to Hilary Harvey about the leadership required as tech advances.

Technology has been rapidly advancing in every sphere of life for decades. The conversation has long shifted from the capabilities of hardware to the innovations of software and onto the power of the algorithm and AI. As these developments change the way we work, they also cause us to question the way we lead.

In this time of global crisis, the most obvious manifestation of technological progress is that our interactions have shifted online. It is the fulfilment of Scorsese’s Zuckerberg who predicted, “We lived on farms and then we lived in cities and now we are going to live on the internet.”

But this has had a fallout effect. Both in general life and at work. “It’s not just that people have to work differently but that they’re doing so in the context of a general feeling of fear and anxiety,” says Hilary Harvey, an associate partner at TPC UK.

Without the advances in technology that have taken place in the last ten years, organisations would have struggled to function during this time. But the danger is that we will mistake the functionality our tech affords us for an all-encompassing solution.

Adaptive leadership

“Leaders have needed to adapt this year,” says Hilary. “To think of themselves as managing change programs.” The work has been to put new structures in place, to give vision in a time of uncertainty, and to coordinate teams through what might be an entirely new way of working for an organisation.

“It’s hard because people step into a role because they want to lead this team, to do this job, in this way,” says Hilary. “But now they have been forced into a remote situation. How do you build morale when it wasn’t their decision to work remotely? How do you support motivation and performance on an individual and team level?”

Leaders cannot just rely on software and internet provision and automation to hold everything together. They need to have a critical eye of the situation and take real measures of how people are doing.

“The biggest risk is that people will burn out,” says Hilary. “Under the psychological burden of constant stress, unless they are supported how can we expect people to have the same level of motivation and performance as before?”

Human-centric leadership

Leaders seek to move an organisation forward. Because technology appears to be always advancing, it is easy to look for it to be the answer to progression. But unless our tech is pulling our teams closer together, it might only be dragging us sideways.

“The need to be, not tech-centric, but human-centric is fundamental,” says Hilary. “And that has to be a decision from the top of the organisation that affects all levels.”

Usually it’s middle managers who are closer to the real issues. They have the potential to have a better grasp of what’s going on than those in senior positions. But they can’t notice these issues or communicate them if they are distracted by other priorities.

“Modelling human-centric leadership at the top is not enough to ensure it permeates the organisation,” says Hilary. “If, when it filters down to middle management, those managers are still pressured into delivering results, they can slip into not paying attention to the human relationships. Unless they are challenged to have a human-centric view of the situation, it’s so easy for middle management not to.”

How do we treat people? What do we really care about? It is easy for leaders, especially while  face-to-face to face interaction is limited, for false priorities like efficiency to take prominence over people. And if we’re not careful, technology can be a gloss of progressive paint that hides the slowly deteriorating material underneath.

Leadership that facilitates team

For most organisations right now there is a struggle to maintain a sense of team. And we should be careful not to interpret technological provision as authentic connection.

“Just because you have the tech in place – like Slack or Trello – and a lot of traffic doesn’t mean there is a quality of relationship,” says Hilary. “The risk is that leaders mistake quantity for quality of interaction.”

The same principle applies to video calls, Hilary says. “Being present in a team meeting doesn’t necessarily mean there is a sense of team. That’s the same logic that inspires businesses to believe ‘you’re on video at your desk’ equals ‘you’re doing a good job.’

Presenteeism is not a measure of engagement. “It’s the responsibility of leaders to be holding the view of how we are doing as a team. And to invest in it.”

Hilary explains how a professional service company has done just that – and has doubled down on it since the pandemic. “We train their consultants as team coaches so that when there’s a project team working for a client, each team will have access to a team coach.”

“Each team coach is tasked with supporting them with how they’re doing as a team, what their learning is, what’s working and what needs to happen to make it even better.”

We may be responsible for systems change, but unless relational leadership and team leadership permeate our mindset, we’ll soon find technology isn’t enough. As technology advances, we need to be careful not to lay to one side these more fundamental aspects. We are not leaders of technology after all but leaders of people.

For insight on how to build trust, engagement and collaboration in a virtual environment, check our virtual teams training.

Leading a business has never been easy but the events of the last few months have been more challenging than anyone could have predicted. For those sitting at board level, striving to steer their organisations through the changes that have resulted from the COVID-19 crisis, it has been a time of rapid and unprecedented learning.

As leadership coaches and consultants working with a range of organisations around the world, the team at TPC Leadership have seen first hand the impact the crisis has had. Over the last few weeks, our managing partners have been getting together virtually to discuss the key issues in a series of panel discussions.

In this week’s blog post, we join TPCL founder Charles Brook and managing partners Paula Abramovicz Erlich (Brazil), Frouke Horstmann (Netherlands), and Laurent Jacquet (Belgium) as they look at the role culture plays within a business, how it has become even more strategically significant thanks to the pandemic, and what leaders at board level can do to ensure they set and communicate an effective culture within their organisations.

Most people don’t like change, especially when it might impact their security. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people were naturally very frightened. From how to adapt to home working to the worries or whether or not they’d have a job by the end of the year, employees had a lot of questions. In many cases these questions remain unanswered. And for business leaders this can have a negative impact on morale, productivity and ultimately retention.

Frouke Horstmann and Laurent Jacquet, managing partners for the Netherlands and Belgium respectively, have recently worked with a client on a culture project. Concerned about the number of people leaving the business, they asked TPCL to help them understand why people might be leaving.

The answer was simple: lack of communication. Despite having all the right intentions to communicate their plans, the leadership team had been holding back until they had all the answers. Ultimately they had decided not to let anyone go – but in the meantime, people had been scared of losing their jobs and so had decided to move on.

“The younger population – the whole world – is 24/7 these days, communication is 24/7,” says Frouke. “So even if you don’t know the answers, you have to be communicating with people, you have to let them know as far as you can what you already know, what you don’t know, what your ideas are.”

And it’s not enough to communicate practical plans either. In times of crisis the temptation is to focus on operations and ignore strategy, but setting and communicating an organisational vision is especially important when everything else is so uncertain.

“There has to be a reason for people to want to stay,” says Charles Brook. “And organisations that don’t help people connect with what they’re doing, to the reason why the organisation is there and why they as individuals are there – that meaning and purpose – are really going to struggle.”

This is particularly important in a work-from-home context, where staying connected to an organisation, its vision and its culture is that much harder. People need to know that the effort they’re making has an impact and that they have a place within a wider context.

Charles adds: “Many organisations are understandably trying to leverage performance and productivity when it comes to home working, but they sometimes don’t realise that another cost is people disconnecting. To attract and retain talent it’s important that they feel connected.”

There are benefits to remote working when it comes to talent. Without the need for people to be physically present in an office, employers can widen the net, hiring from further afield – even abroad. The accelerated new ways of working have also opened people up to different hiring approaches. 

Frouke says: “The discussions CHROs are now having is, ‘Okay, maybe we don’t need to always have people on the payroll. We can think in project terms and we can take that talent for six weeks, for two days and we can bring in someone from Singapore and someone from China and someone from Amsterdam, because they have the talents that we need now.’”

But attraction and retention remain a factor. With teams not coming together physically, how can employers ensure there is a consistent and effective culture? How do we get people to buy into an organisation and gain a sense of belonging if they work every day in their own home?

“With everyone working from home we’re just having meetings, we don’t talk around the water cooler,” says Paula Abramovicz Erlich. “There’s no spontaneity. Nothing comes around of meeting in the halls and having a spontaneous idea. There’s no chit-chat in the beginning of meetings, we always go straight to the point. So what happens to culture?”

Further reading: Employees working partially from home and in the office: how do you connect your team? By Frouke Horstmann

For the leaders in charge of newly remote organisations, the issue of culture leads to two foundational questions – is it something that can be created and, if so, who is actually in control of that process?

Laurent Jacquet believes there are only two options – either you do nothing and a culture develops organically, or you decide on the culture you want and you communicate that down through the business.

“What are our values? How do we want to communicate? How do we want to take decisions? How do we want to work from home? Setting culture is about all of these things,” he says.

“For me, culture should be top-down – but you should of course be inclusive and listen to what everyone is saying in terms of their interpretation of the culture. My belief is that culture stems from the founder.”

In large organisations putting that into practice takes effort – especially where teams are split across different locations. If a board is setting a culture behind closed doors but failing to communicate that then it simply won’t be effective.

“It’s always down to the leadership,” says Paula. “The leadership needs to role model what the culture is, what they want everyone else in the company to do. So if the board doesn’t get the leadership on board, there is no culture change, in my view.” 

 

Role modelling is a vital part of leading when it comes to culture. Frouke, who has written extensively on workplace culture, has worked with a number of board level clients who want to set a feedback culture, for example, but don’t include themselves within the project.

“They want to have a program starting with what I call N-1 – so starting with a level below the board,” she says.

“I find that it is fascinating. If you want to have a feedback culture, is it not the most important thing that you look into the mirror yourself? And that you role model it to the rest of the organisation?”

Whether a board allows a culture to emerge organically or whether they are constructionist about it and create it from the top, it is vital that it is clear what behaviours are acceptable in order to reinforce that culture.

“In some ways that’s the most important bit,” says Charles. “People need to know what is the right thing and the wrong thing to do in this culture. Otherwise, it’s very hard to get a unifying culture because people will act in different ways.

“We had a partner years ago who was probably one of the best at selling projects, so a very valuable person to have in the business. He wanted to become a senior partner but we have an annual values check where we assess whether our partners live their values and he didn’t pass that so we didn’t promote him. Eventually they had to leave.

“At one level you think, ‘We’re letting go of our best salesperson!’ but on another level if their behaviors are not going to generate the culture you want, then they have to go. And I think making some of those tough decisions is difficult for organisations but ultimately understanding what’s acceptable and not and then acting on it is really important.”

Culture has always been an important part of business success, bringing employees together, encouraging collaboration, improving morale, reducing turnover and having many other positive effects besides.

But in today’s business environment, with so much change and uncertainty, it is more important than ever. For board members and seniors leaders at the helm of their organisations, it is essential that steering the ship does not take priority over setting a course and communicating it to the crew. 

Have you enjoyed this article? Be sure to catch up on the rest of the series:

Contact us for a discussion.

@copyright TPCL (2020)

Has COVID-19 changed the make up and functioning of the boardroom? Or has it merely held up a lens and made us focus on what has been evolving gradually for some time? Perhaps the pandemic has shown us where more change is still needed if businesses are to survive and thrive in a post-pandemic world. Whatever the case, the world has changed and that means staying still isn’t an option. 

With experience working across a range of organisations in numerous countries across the globe, TPCL’s partners and associates have seen up close the challenges and the opportunities facing leaders over the last few months, the things that have changed and those that still need to.

Last month we kicked off a series of articles on leadership based on panel discussions with TPCL’s managing partners from around the world. In today’s post we’re focusing on the boardroom and how it has or hasn’t changed over the last few months. 

Contributing to the discussion are TPCL founder Charles Brook, and managing partners Paula Abramovicz Erlich from Brazil, Frouke Horstmann from the Netherlands, and Laurent Jacquet from Belgium.

Working together to solve problems

The role of a board of directors is, when you boil it down to a single definition, fairly straightforward – to look after the interests of the business or organisation, its shareholders and its stakeholders. 

What this actually looks like in practice, however, is likely to change over time. And in the case of a global crisis like the current pandemic, it may shift more rapidly than at other times. So has that been the case this year?

Laurent Jacquet, managing partner with TPCL Belgium, believes that one way the pandemic has impacted boardrooms is by increasing the focus on leadership diversity – even if the theory has been slow to translate into practical action.

“The vast majority of people in boardrooms are there because it serves the business,” he says. “But there is an increased awareness that greater diversity in these boardrooms is required and can be overall beneficial.”

“As an example, the Belgian government’s COVID-19 working group was initially only made up of health experts and political people. Then they thought, ‘Is this sufficient? Shouldn’t we ask other people to join this expert group?’ Because it’s not only about health; they understood that it would be wise to have different perspectives.”

Resistance to change at top level?

While specific problem-solving task groups may have demonstrated an accelerated move towards diversity of expertise, in the boardroom progress hasn’t always been as fast, especially in relation to gender diversity and ethnicity.

Paula Abramovicz Erlich, TPCL’s managing partner in Brazil, says that change has been slow – and the pandemic hasn’t done much to accelerate that.

“There has been a movement to try to include more women in boards over the last few years, but it hasn’t been extremely successful yet,” she says.

“There’s resistance around getting quotas. I think quotas are a temporary mechanism that help you ‘fix’ an inequality in the short term but don’t solve the problem. There’s still a lot of prejudice around getting women on boards.”

Charles Brook, TPCL’s founder, agrees that it’s a challenge but believes that quotas can be helpful in changing cultural norms.

“It’s a hard nut to crack because people like people that are like themselves,” he says. “It’s very easy, as the CEO, to recruit in your own image. And yet we all know diversity is important.”

“I know some people will see this as controversial but in countries where they have enforced more gender equality on a board, I personally think it is a good thing. Because we have to break the norms.”

The world is demanding diversity

One important business reason for increasing diversity at board level is increased pressure from wider stakeholders. 

Charles says: “For some of my clients in the consulting world there’s been a very strong push from their clients to have wider, more diverse representation. So it’s becoming more client led, where clients are really having to be heard.”

Frouke Horstmann, TPCL’s managing partner for the Netherlands, agrees – but acknowledges that balancing stakeholder interests is a real challenge for board members.

“There’s a lot of pressure from society for boards to be more focused on not only profit creation but real value creation. The pool of stakeholders has broadened so it’s not only about focusing on the shareholders who put in money in your company, but all people.”

“There’s more focus on purpose and planet, more B Corp organisations – not just the smaller businesses but bigger ones like Danone in the US. The problem is that some boards really get on board with this but then the more old-fashioned shareholders do not always buy into that. So there’s this real tension for them.”

TPCL virtual event, 17 November 2020: Diversity is a given, inclusion is a choice

Opening up the conversation with tech

Of course, representation – having the ‘correct’ number of women, ethnic minorities and so on at board level – is just a first step towards true diversity.

“It’s one thing having a diverse group of people in a boardroom and then there’s how much space they get to share their views and how much their views are valued and acted on,” says Charles.

“One way I believe COVID has positively impacted on diversity is that many board meetings, if not all, are happening virtually now and I’ve noticed that people are having more of a say because of that. Technology is more or less forcing more people to have a voice. It’s harder to sit in a room and just talk over other people.”

In fact, restrictions on travel and the resultant increase in remote meetings thanks to the pandemic may well mark a long term step change that allows a wider pool of people to input into what might once have been more local conversations.

“People are starting to say, ‘I’m not traveling for a four-hour meeting. This is working fine over Zoom.’” says Paula. “Board members don’t all necessarily live in the same city, so we may see more representation of different countries or cities coming together more easily.”

Operations vs strategic focus

Another change that TPCL’s leaders have noticed since the pandemic started is the shift from strategic discussion to more operational conversations. This, our experts warn, is natural but could be dangerous in the long term.

“The current situation is forcing more tactical conversations to be happening in the boardroom, because things are changing on a day-to-day basis,” says Charles.

“There’s less and less time spent stepping back and looking at the big picture and wider system. Less and less time spent on the why. Why are we here? How can we engage with the ‘why’? I think that’s an issue, albeit a downstream issue.”

The problem with prioritising operations over strategy is that it can be all too easy to lose sight of the organisation’s vision. This can filter down into every level of the business, ultimately resulting in a disconnect for the very people who keep the business operating on a day to day basis.

“Due to the crisis a lot of boards are in survival mode, either just holding on in there, trying to survive or at best trying to see how to create opportunities,” says Laurent. “That means that wider systems and purpose have been put a little bit on the side. But people need to put that back on the table.”

“I’m talking to a lot of people who are saying, ‘I’m actually starting to disconnect from my organisation, because if I work for A or for B, there’s no difference. I’m working from home in front of my computer and that sense of belonging is starting to fade away.’”

“It is that risk of lower engagement and difficulty in holding onto their people that puts the purpose and the why back in front of the boardroom table. They may be in survival mode but they still need to keep that in mind.”

In part two of this discussion featuring Charles, Frouke, Laurent and Paula, we’ll pick up on the theme of employee engagement and explore the important subject of culture. Keep an eye out on our social channels or sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with the latest insights from TPCL’s Leadership experts.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help or check our leadership consultancy services.

@copyright TPCL (2020)

In this blog, TPC Leadership Associate Partner Catherine Bardwell talks about how a very difficult personal situation led her to change her mindset around sharing her vulnerability.

Vulnerability and leadership

Vulnerability is defined as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. Which, at first glance are oddly similar to key qualities of leadership. On closer inspection, however, the link is far more natural and perhaps even intrinsic.

I’ve long held a belief that displaying my own vulnerability could only happen in extremely rare circumstances. I feared that showing my vulnerability would undermine my strength. And with that, I would always try my best in all my endeavors to hide any sign of vulnerability, either through clenching my teeth whilst running the last kilometer of my cross-country runs, or ‘fake-smiling’ as I was making a spectacle of myself whilst doing a guitar piece at a concert in front of hundreds of people (oh yes, I was terrified!!)….

Our greatest measure of courage

Back in 2015, I watched a Dr Brene Brown’s talk on vulnerability. She said vulnerability is “not a weakness but rather our greatest measure of courage”. Until I decided to show my vulnerability as a leader, I would never have understood the full extent of what she meant.

Last May, something happened that radically changed my attitude towards vulnerability. I was leading a workshop on leadership development for some wonderful participants in Denmark. Everything was going smoothly and as planned.

Then, I received a text from a dear friend of mine. She was explaining to her close friends that she only had a few more days before she would leave this world. Louisa was dying from cancer. I was expecting the message, but not so soon. She was informing us of her palliative care under the Princess Alice Hospice. I was overwhelmed with sadness and spent the whole of my lunchtime crying. But, I decided to carry on with my workshop.

Reframe a different perspective

I gathered all my inner-strength and chose to reframe a different perspective for myself that day by sharing my story to the participants. What I didn’t know was the knock-on effect this would create. An immense sense of trust emerged across the room. A sense of belonging and caring that I have never seen before. We collectively somehow allowed ourselves to share our vulnerability for the rest of the workshop, and as a consequence, dug deeper into each others’ meaning of leadership.

The feedback was monumental. I am still in touch with some of the participants, and regularly checking up on their progress

Sadly my friend passed away soon after.

Despite this deeply upsetting tragedy, I feel incredibly grateful. I’m thankful that my friend gave me this gift of vulnerability. Thankful that I shared it, showed it, and used it.

So please believe me when I say to let go of your preconceived ideas of vulnerability and use it as a strength to shine even more. If you shine, others will shine also!

We believe in leadership that harnesses the good intent and best beliefs of an organisation’s people, unifying them around a reason for being. Our unique leadership development, coaching and consulting solutions inspire your leaders and people to deliver extraordinary results in your businesses. 

Leaders tend to be affectionate toward the living analogy of the caterpillar – that it needs to become a lava before it can become a butterfly. It’s a parable that could be applied to the personal journey of almost every experienced leader. But after a leader has been through that fire once, transformational change becomes a much harder feat. The trouble is we like using the analogy to describe our past, or to inspire emerging leaders, but it’s unpleasant to apply it to our own present. It’s humbling to recognise ourselves as caterpillars who need to change. Because that particular invertebrate needs to destroy itself before it can transform again.

It’s difficult to die 

“I am able to control only that of which I am aware. That of which I am unaware controls me. Awareness empowers me.” – John Whitmore, Coaching for Performance

Success can make us comfortable after a time. We can even forget what real success is. We can find ourselves resisting innovations and movements we would once have been at the forefront of, because they demand our business models to change. They might even challenge and question the success we feel we have accumulated. 

But success is not something we can continue to passively accumulate. If one part of our body started trying to thrive at the expense of the rest of the body, it would be self-terminating. When we see ourselves in perspective – in regard to the world that we are a part of and inevitably impact – then we know that success is not something we should be holding onto. We let our laurels die so that we can enter the chrysalis and become something more like our real selves.

Our need for emergence

“We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change.” – Margaret Wheatley, Organisational Behaviourist

Real change requires us to be in connection with others: to be listening, to be attentive to their perspective and vision. But it also means we need to create an environment that enables us to hear from others – and for others to speak without filtering, regardless of how senior or junior they are. 

Most leaders are familiar with synergy, that the total is greater than the sum of its parts. But the scientific principle of emergence is just as important. It’s not just that the total is greater, but that the total contains properties that cannot be found in any of the parts. A human consciousness cannot be found in any of the cells or neurons of our body, yet the whole contains power the parts do not have. As Daniel Schmachtenberger describes, it is scientific law that when diverse parts, are brought together into an elegant order, the whole gains qualities that are not just more, they are new.

For experienced leaders, this emergence of something new is not an alien experience. But it might have been a while since we last felt that newness emerge. It’s likely that emergence propelled us to where we are now, but once here, it’s easy for us to rely on the ‘newness’ that emerged five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. If we are going to walk away with more than a good retirement, we need to keep seeking connection with others who think differently from us. We need to keep evolving. 

Creating transformational change

“What if making the change was fun, and beautiful, and cheeky?” – Dr Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion

When asked what business leaders should do in response to the climate crisis, Dr Gail Bradbrook said, “distort reality.” 

There are pressing issues facing the business world right now: the climate crisis among them. And in this age of connection, all local business issues have become global issues. If we want to be able to say, hand-on-heart, that our leadership shaped the earth for the better – we need to mess with what is expected of us. 

We cannot just do what we did. That got us here. But to go where we are meant to go, if we want to self-actualise, we need to move on – from these habits, these methods, maybe even this worldview. To destroy ourselves to become ourselves. 

If you want to keep bringing transformational change, if you want to tackle the crises facing the business world, contact us. Self-actualisation might be a step or five further than you previously thought!

The issue of leadership is often only narrowly understood. Many see leadership as a position, others as a set of skills, a capacity to influence, but all of these perceptions miss the nuances of being a leader. And the complications.

Leadership is a dynamic relationship. It is fluid, impacted by organisational culture (see more in our previous blog post ), by the needs of others and by world events. So much affects the leadership in our organisation that it can feel impossible to untangle. But we need to untangle it. And when we do, we are able to deeply connect individual talents and values with organisational purpose and strategy, developing a system that enables all leaders to thrive, while adding real value to clients and key stakeholders.

Adapting to world events

The impact of the financial crisis of 2008/2009 can still be felt today. Many organisations we work with say the issues never ended. They’re still driven to double and triple check everything they do. To proceed with caution in all things so that from the top down, the organisation can feel assured about the success of every endeavour, no matter how small or large.

Financial pressure created a preference for safety over innovation. Our organisational structures shifted towards survival. And quite apart from the skills leaders may or may not have been taught, their capacity to lead became constrained.

If the tolerance and celebration of risk-taking took a hit from the financial crisis, it will be important to evaluate what impact that the coronavirus has both now and in the future. Whether we are affected by decreased demand, quarantine or halted production, we will unconsciously adapt to the new rules of play. It will be essential for us to keep asking questions, to consider the impact of the changes we make and to hold onto the core values and purpose that makes our organisations what they are.

Considering every need and impact

Traditional leadership focused on the need to increase sales and efficiency. But this focus is too narrow for our changing world. Now the wider world affects leadership and leadership affects the wider world.

Too often we have focused on the means of creating profit, without considering its impact. Leaders have been driven by shareholders’ ends, without questioning those ends. And this has left its mark on the environment, the market and society.

If leadership is a dynamic system, it is more than a function. It is not about making things happen but asking what should happen in the first place – and why. We cannot consider ethics as an afterthought. Ethics aren’t something to temper the impact of profit-making. They can be the entire reason we are doing business in the first place.

We need to take our values and purpose seriously, to focus on what matters most. There are environmental and social ends we care about that we have compromised – consciously or unconsciously – because we have perceived leadership too narrowly. We have focused on the immediate and missed out on our reason for being.

This is where leadership consultancy is essential. It connects us back to the people we are serving, to the values that define our personal and organisational vision. No organisation aspires only to meet the bottom line. We know that we have a more important part to play. Leadership consultancy realigns us with the purpose we may have forgotten.

Crossing the unknown

The etymology of the word leader is rooted in the role of a guide. The kind of person who would help you cross an unknown land – perhaps a forest or mountain range – from one point to another. What kind of person would you want for a guide?

Today we are still crossing the unknown. There are world events and changes that threaten to be unnavigable. There are systems and cultures we work in that permeate our thinking so that it’s hard to separate our own priorities from the demands of the day. It can be hard to remember why we’re even travelling at all. On an organisational level, leaders can stay lost in the woods, perhaps forgetting that they ever meant to journey to another destination. It’s easily done. After all, this isn’t a reflection on our ability, but a reflection of the dynamic and ever-shifting system of leadership.

That’s why we do leadership consultancy. It’s about helping entire organisations to cross the desert safely. To remember what’s important. To hold fast to their vision despite the manys obstacles and get to their destination: a place that has a real and good impact on the world they are a part of. They’ll end up making a profit as well. But they do it without compromising.

We want to ask you the hard questions, to help you understand the importance of reflection. We won’t forget the needs of day-to-day business, but we’ll integrate them with an understanding of human behaviour and mindsets – connecting the day-to-day to the bigger picture, to your reason being, to the people you serve. We won’t just stop at self-discovery, or structures and process, we’ll help you follow through to support behavioural changes in your people.

Let’s walk together on this journey through the unknown. Check out our leadership consultancy services or contact your local TPC Leadership team to begin the conversation.

Navigating change is now more important than ever. This article is part of a six-part TPC Leadership original series on leadership consultancy – and its role in helping organisations engage with the bigger picture while staying adaptable to the present moment. Next in the series: The importance of setting the right goals and measuring the right results.

Co-written by Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy and Christian Scholtes, Managing Partner TPCL Romania.

Copyright@ TPC Leadership (2020)

What is leadership consultancy? Let’s ask another question: Does leadership matter? For every instance where leadership plays a part, leadership consultancy has a place and potential for impact.

Organisations are shaped by leaders who in turn are shaped by the structures and culture of the organisation they are part of. It’s a circular system of influence. One that is difficult to accurately assess when you’re caught up in it. That’s where leadership consultancy comes in.

Leadership consultancy leverages your unique strengths

Andrea Cardillo, a TPC Managing Partner in Italy, defines leadership consultancy as ‘a consultative and facilitative process to support organisations to understand what leadership models and structures would best serve the business strategy, leveraging on the unique traits and strengths of a particular culture.’

Leadership consultancy is a holistic way of looking at your leadership capacity and turning it to your ultimate advantage. It is not a training program, nor is it executive coaching, It is a way of tackling the entire system of leadership and aligning it with what the organisation is and aspires to be.

You can’t transfer or replicate solutions from one organisation to another. For this reason, consulting is about having good conversations – an in-depth dialogue between the external consultant and internal leaders. We always need to find a uniquely nuanced strategy that is optimised for the situation. And this comes from digging deep into the organisation’s own leadership solutions, history and potential.

Leadership consultancy discovers potential

Often organisations harbour a huge capacity for leadership, but only a fraction of it ever sets sail. It’s only through asking difficult questions that we can understand this untapped potential.

The right questions reveal where assumptions are holding an organisation back. For instance, people may assume that leadership is centralised. That leadership is only for senior managers, while the role of everyone else is compliance.

We have found that many managers assume leadership is not a primary part of their role. When we asked managers in one organisation to rank the priorities of their role, most listed managing and the completion of tasks in their top two. Very few managers ranked leadership high. Because they didn’t prioritise it, they did not invest in it, and they were less likely to display initiative or make courageous decisions.

Often people associate leadership with a set of skills they may or may not be developing. But they don’t realise the importance of taking ownership of their role as a leader. If you don’t perceive yourself as a leader, you inevitably will not act like one. And if an organisation is largely made up of people who do not act like leaders, their leadership capacity is stunted.

If we’re going to find, harness and maximise the leadership capacity already in our businesses, we need leadership consultancy to bring our potential to light.

Leadership consultancy brings awareness

Leadership consultancy helps you intentionally realign your leadership model with your aspirations, so that your structure doesn’t unconsciously distort your vision.

Even if you don’t believe you have a leadership model, you do. Even if you don’t intentionally think about it, its impact will unintentionally affect everything in your business, particularly in HR.

Everything from your talent management strategies to compensation and benefit streams can be linked back to your leadership model. Any recruitment strategy you create will also be inescapably influenced by it. Engagement, operations, financial performance – everything is affected. Leadership consultancy helps to uncover this correlation

Leadership consultancy makes organisations robust

No single human can navigate through life while remaining unchanged. How much more the case for organisations, which are formed hundreds or thousands of people, all experiencing different personal changes. Once you factor in the effects of internal growth, departures and shifts in the market, it is clear that no organisation is ever in stasis.

Leadership consultancy helps guide businesses through change, preserving their best qualities while enabling them to stay effective. Businesses cannot just do as they always did because a strategy formed two years ago is unlikely to have the exact same effect this year. This would have been relevant for any organisation that experienced a significant shift, such as a small business doubling in size. But given the current pandemic, every business faces huge change. Our strategies and leadership models must be adapted, so we can navigate through this difficult time.

The irony is that by refusing to adapt, you can actually lose the unique qualities that make your organisation special. But at the same time, you cannot move forward authentically without reference to the past. This is why leadership consultancy is essential. It helps untangle what is important to an organisation’s identity from attitudes that prevent the organisation thriving through change. It keeps the core of the organisation robust.

If you want to unlock leadership potential in your organisation, or keep the core of your organisation robust through change, contact us to begin the conversation.

 

Leadership can be defined as the ability to achieve extraordinary things, from common people

We would have met and interacted with many Leaders in our day to day affairs. They keep us inspired by their style of Leadership. Leadership style is the way the leaders use their power to lead others.

One thing we would have noticed is that the Leadership style they display could vary amongst them. It’s always important to develop different leadership styles to suit the needs and the situation. Great Leaders choose their style based on their needs and goals.

Though there is no strict classification of Leadership styles, below are a few common Leadership styles:

    1. Autocratic Leadership: A leader with all Powers, Authority and Responsibility. “The Boss” is a synonym for this style. They make the decisions, communicate them to the team members and expect a prompt implementation of the same. Leaders with this style are very clear with their requirements and vision and expect the team to follow them. Communication is always from top to bottom. Steve Jobs was one classic example of this style.
    2. Democratic Leadership: This leader involves all his team members in making a decision. Though the final decision will be taken by the Leader, all the team members’ voices will be heard and their views will be evaluated. Medical and many Hi-Tech companies look forward to such leaders as they need a high amount of collaboration.
    3. Strategic Leadership: They are the set of leaders who are the head of the Organization. They help in planning the vision and mission of the organization and plan to meet their organizational goals. They know all the rules of the game and plan the strategy to achieve the goal. Board Directors are a good example of this style
    4. Team Leadership: They are the leaders who take the Team together to achieve a common set of goals. They are very clear with the Objectives and the endpoints. They take all the necessary steps proactively to ensure the team never misses to deliver. They always try to take calculated risks. The sports team captain or the Project Manager are a few examples showing this style.
    5. Coaching Leaders: Coaching leaders enable their people organizations through powerful questioning and listening. They facilitate learning and development to unleash the potential yielding high performance.
    6. Pacesetter Leadership: This style is one of the most effective styles for driving fast results. They are very focused on the improvement of performance. Many organizations possess really skilled employees. But to keep them motivated they need regular mentorship and feedback. With the fast-paced world, it’s always a need to keep the employees on their toes and match the pace. Pacesetter leaders are the best fit for high tech organizations.

We should always understand that there is nothing like “the best” leadership style. As mentioned earlier, leadership styles should match the needs and goals of the tasks being performed.

By understanding various leadership styles, the leaders can select the right leadership style for the current situation.

Where ever there are people, just two or two million or more, 2 traits automatically come into play; Leadership and Management.  Until a few decades ago, leadership was a term used only in the context of military at all levels from junior most to the chiefs of forces of a country and mega level political echelons; examples being Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln etc.  Elsewhere, in non-military professions, they generally spoke more about management.  The difference between the two is vast.  Leaders have people who follow them, but  managers have people who simply work for them. Management aims at achieving a given objective using the team and resources.  Leadership is a much larger field of which management is only a small part.  Leadership is about leading people.

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Loyalty to the people one leads and their well being becomes as important as the objective, if not more.  In leadership, a leader cares for his people and their welfare, like parents care for their children and at times even more.  In the recent times, the non-military professions; especially the corporate world  have also been attracted to the concept and practice of leadership in a much bigger way.  Much has been written about leadership and in the recent years also about the corporate leadership.  Training in leadership has become an all together a new field and a recognized profession.  All the leadership qualities like integrity, accountability, empathy, resilience, vision, positivity, selflessness, passion, personal example, professional excellence, trust, transparency, rewarding the merit, moral courage and many more are often talked and written about.  However, in the following paragraphs, I like to share just  3 most important leadership qualities based on my personal experiences from my years in the military and my second innings as a corporate thinker and trainer.

For a few years, I was involved in designing and conducting workshops for the Tata Management Development Centre in Jamshedpur.  During my very first visit, I was keen to visit their Centre for Excellence.  As I entered the hall, the most prominent quote on the wall was of JRD Tata, “To be a great leader, you must love your people.” He believed that one has to lead people with affection.  Later, at a crossing, I saw a bust of JRD. And it was amazing to see many people passing by on motor cycles stopping there, bowing their head and saluting his bust.  He was worshipped while he lived and even now.  And his achievements as a business man were phenomenal.  So, love is the core of great leadership irrespective of the field or profession.  Most of the leadership traits automatically flow out of love for one’s people.

I feel ‘Personal Example’ comes next. Do not demand from people you lead more than what you will do or have done in given circumstances.  You set a personal example and people will follow you unquestioningly. They will even overlook some of your shortcomings.  Such is the power of personal example.  So, don’t be easy upon yourself as a leader.  And remember, you cannot fool people. If you try, sooner or later you will be found out for sure and then people will despise you.  Field Marshal Rommel, the famous German leader of World War II said, “Even the smartest General cannot fool the most  dumb soldier.” It applies in all professions.

Next is “Professional Excellence”.  In military parlance we say, “ Nobody likes to follow a bum”.  You must be good in your chosen profession.  People will respect you and follow you .  And when your  people look up to you in crisis or challenging times, you should not be found wanting.  And willingly take responsibility if things go wrong.

I like to close with a quote of Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.) , “Of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say, ‘We did it ourselves’.  A leader is best when people barely know that he exists.  Not so good when people obey and acclaim him.  Worst when they despise him.”

Please contact us for more details.

​– ​Commodore SPS Dalal

What is true leadership? Delegating, collaborating or directing?

What leadership and management styles should you be adopting and which should you be unlearning? Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey are the minds behind the Situational Leadership model, which argues that a leader should adapt their style of leadership according to the people they are trying to influence. In this post, we examine three types of leadership – directing, collaborating and delegating – and evaluate which styles are useful.

The misapplied leadership style: Direction

 “Yet too many of us are in a constant state of overextension, which fuels an instinctive reaction to ‘protect’ work. This survival instinct ultimately dilutes our impact through an ongoing, limited effect on others.” – Jesse Sostrin, HBR, To Be A Great Leader You Have To Delegate

The most basic leadership style defined by the Situational Leadership model – directing – is as plain and simple as telling people what to do. In this mode, the leader is taking control of the process and ensuring everything is done by the book, or at least how the leader prefers it to be done.

For the most part, directing has been used as a patronising form of people management that stifles creative thinking. However, before we overcorrect the excess of directing as a leadership style, it is worth noting that it still has a place. If a team member is in a low-stage of development, or is starting in a role that requires a different approach to how they have worked in the past, a certain amount of directing can be helpful to acclimatise them to their responsibilities. Alternatively, directing can be useful if a leader is offering specific expertise to deal with a technical problem.

The error of some leaders is they maintain that same level of direction beyond the point of helpfulness, and end up damaging the confidence and stunting growth. Generally, directing should be a temporary style, adopted along with a recognition that the leader’s way of doing things is imperfect, and that the one being directed should be on the lookout for better ways of working.

The smarter leadership style: Collaborative leadership

 

“Leading from good to great… means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.” – Jim Collins, Good to Great

If a leader is ever going to have access to ideas that are better than their own, they need to adopt collaborative leadership. It involves sharing control of a project, a process or even a vision. It means paying attention to whoever has the most relevant knowledge, rather than the highest position – and often that knowledge resides with those closest to the groundwork of the organisation.

Leaders can be reluctant to adopt collaborative leadership because they fear weakening their power base. But innovation, breakthrough and even success cannot reliably occur when a leader is the one holding the cards. They simply don’t have enough perspective. When leaders truly realise that, it is a relief, not a diminishment. A leader is only as good as they allow their team to be.

Collaborative leadership is even more essential now that workforces span three, four, sometimes five generations (read our thoughts on whether reverse mentoring can bridge the divide). Each generation desperately needs the strengths and perspectives of the others. The youngest are not ill-equipped and the oldest are not losing touch. Everyone has their finger on the pulse of something and if we don’t pay attention to that something, we will be blind to it.

Leadership actualisation = delegation

 

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu

The final stage of the Situational Leadership model is delegating, which is arguably the hardest leadership style of all, requiring a significant level of emotional intelligence to truly pull off.

In the Harvard Business Review article,To Be A Great Leader, You Have To Be Able To Delegate Well, Jesse Sostrin says, “elevating your impact requires you to embrace an unavoidable leadership paradox: You need to be more essential and less involved. When you justify your hold on work, you’re confusing being involved with being essential.”

In their purest forms, leadership and delegation are inseparable. Until you are challenging the way people think rather than dictating their movements, you are only a check and balance, not a true influencer. True delegation requires detaching yourself from the survival instinct that suffocates your ability to trust. It is not abstaining responsibility and removing yourself entirely from the equation, but does mean redefining what your responsibility looks like so you can see your vision – and more than your vision – come to life around you.

As Jessie Sostrin challenges us, “To know if you’re guilty of holding on to too much, answer this simple question: If you had to take an unexpected week off work, would your initiatives and priorities advance in your absence?” If your answer is no (and to varying degrees, it is a no for most leaders), then you have work to do.

TPC Leadership has been growing leaders since 2000, working with clients across over 110 countries, from 14 country offices. We are rightly considered to be pioneers in the field of human potential and have taken our expertise to craft tailored made programmes. Please contact us to find out how to switch gears in your people strategy.