Links:

Book into my autumn programme Time for the things that matter starting 4th October 2022.

'Reclaim Time to Read' 2022 reading challenge:  https://www.helenbeedham.com/2022-reading-challenge

Helen's recent short video of book recommendations to mark the halfway point in the reading challenge.

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

Overwhelmed: work, love and play when no-one has the time by Brigid Schulte

The Accidental by Ali Smith

The Lonely Century: a call to reconnect by Noreena Hertz

Transcript:

Helen: My guests on this podcast all share a passionate belief in people’s potential to grow and to do great work. For this final episode of series 2, I’m picking out some of our conversations about how we can help colleagues to be brilliant at work. As you’ll hear, this might be by developing their skills, giving them stretch opportunities, really listening to them, stepping back ourselves, holding them accountable and helping them focus on the important work.

My first guest, Ama Ocansey, UK Head of Diversity and Inclusion for BNP Paribas, talked about a development programme she has established for female colleagues and what is making that work so successfully. Here’s Ama:

Ama: But one of the things that I ran last year and I'm starting the process this year is a programme called Rise. And it's a career development programme for women who are mid to senior. And it's that sort of stage where women tend to leave the workforce because they've probably started having families and the children are at a stage now where they've got exams or they're preparing for entrance in schools. And so it's that tipping point where they tend to leave. And that is the difficulty for us, because then you have this bulge of women who are graduates and that whole 50/50 balance, because that's the stage where they are very engaged. And then you have the few women at the top. And because there's nobody in between, you tend not to be able to progress the women in the middle to be senior, and then you have that challenge with seniority. And so we're really focusing on this middle group and we've run this programme and it's very much focused on women and it's very much based on analyzing their strengths and their challenges. It's getting feedback from all their stakeholders. We provide them with group coaching and also we provide them with mentoring. And it's really a game changer because women are often in environments where they feel that they can't really discuss their challenges between their careers and their professions.

And by putting a group of women together, it's a psychological safe space. They're very infused; they're very encouraged and they just feel supported and not alone. Lots of commentary last year was 'I actually thought I was the only one who was struggling and not wanting to really put up my hand up for things because I had to pick up my daughter from school' and somebody else saying 'well, no, that's me too'. Or somebody saying 'well, actually I am thinking of leaving because I don't know how I really juggle this and I'm too scared to speak to my manager'. And I think that's been a real game changer. So I think those initiatives, and of course we've had men say 'well, how does that work? We need one too'. And we've sort of said, well, actually, if you look at the statistics, there's a very disproportionate amount of senior men to women. And I'm not saying that men don't need help, but at the moment, we need to focus on the underrepresented and unfortunately it's women. Last year, just giving you some broad stats, we had 32 women and of those we've already had six promotions and four of them have changed roles. And they have actually said the group coaching and the honesty, and the fact that it was a shared space and people thought and felt like me and also encouraged me and said 'look, do it, do this' has made a difference. So I do think those programmes, if they're delivered correctly and if they really address the issues, I think they can really help.

Helen: As Ama says, carving out time and space for people to talk honestly about their experiences at work, including their doubts about carrying on or going for a promotion, is essential.  We can’t help people flourish in their roles and in their careers if we don’t really understand what’s going on for them. My second guest was Janie van Hool, communication expert, leadership coach and author of The Listening Shift: transform your organization by listening to your people and helping your people listen to you. As Janie explained, by taking the time to be curious about our colleagues and their views, we gain a richness of understanding and insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have, and in return our colleagues get to contribute more, build stronger relationships and feel valued. Here’s Janie:

Janie: It's so easy to be busy in our heads thinking, 'oh, I've got all this to do and I've got that to do'. And, and actually just spend a moment doing that can bring us right into well, the moment. And certainly if you're focused on listening, that's very helpful. But something I would like to say about curiosity that I think is very much relevant to your work Helen on time, is that time pressure is a real killer to curiosity because we just haven't got the time to be curious. We're so busy doing. And actually, the more pressured we are, the more certain we become, the more assertive we can create ourselves to be. And actually curiosity is ... it's the absolute connection. I think it's the absolute key to building relationships, to finding out what your business could or should be doing. We're losing it. I think.

There are a lot of focus groups in businesses and they might be with customers or clients, and they might be with people in the business, but often the questions are framed in such a way that leads to the outcome they seek. It doesn't feel to me like they are a really open inquiry with an intention just to find out and you never know what you're going to find out. And of course, if we listen with a 'I'm going to solve this problem' hat on, the minute we think we've got the answer, we just totally switch off. Which is why you've really got to work at it.

The advice I often give about listening is I know sounds counter-intuitive and sounds a bit surprising, but actually one of the things I would say straight away is ask better questions. If you're a leader and you want to listen better, give yourself the best possible chance of doing that by asking something that is going to solicit richer information for you to respond to.

For example, I have a real beef with the question, 'how are you?' And I mentioned this in the book. When you say to someone, 'how are you?' what you will get is 'yeah, yeah, I'm good thanks, yeah, not too bad'. And that's not interesting to listen to, and it also doesn't give you anything from which to take further enquiry.

 If you must ask 'how are you?' make sure you ask, 'how are you really? or 'tell me what's going on for you at the moment'. And that is an intention. It means I really want to find out. It is much easier then to listen to the sort of stuff that you get back.

Helen: The reality of professional working lives is usually a combination of long hours and intense work effort, particularly earlier on in your career where you’re trying to build your profile, get recognised for doing good work and climb the next rung on the career ladder. There’s a very real risk of overstretching ourselves, making too many sacrifices around our wellbeing or our home lives and burning out. So how do we help colleagues to succeed in a way that going to feel sustainable over the long-term? My third guest, Leonard Ng, is partner and UK Executive Committee Member at the international law firm Sidley Austin, and he reflects back over his career to share this advice:

Leonard: As a young lawyer, I wasn't of the current world where you were tied to an iPhone or some other device 24 hours a day, and there were very fixed times that you were due at work and fixed times where you were not at work. So for example, when I was a junior associate at Sidley, I had some, well a few evenings free. We worked pretty hard, but the point is when you were outside of the office, you were actually your own person. And I was a musician outside of that, and I was doing other things. That doesn't exist today. And I think the way I manage it today is to think about those times when I did have that structure.

And if I were to give advice, if anyone would listen to me, it would be to try and replicate those structures, to try and have discipline and this is ironic because lawyers are generally a pretty disciplined bunch of people, right? But we need to set those disciplines to our personal lives as well, to actually say no, I'm going to put the phone down or I'm going to have dinner with my family, I'm going to do something which will help me take my mind off the incessant work that's always there because the nature of the beast, so to speak, is that it's always there. And if you don't draw some boundaries, you won't actually perform as well as you think you might. At some point you will burn out.

Helen: I think that's so true. I too remember a time when early in my career we could switch off when we left the office and when we went on holiday and genuinely not expect to have to do any significant amount of work or even to be contactable and that's changed so fast in the last 10, 15 years and it is worrying how normal it feels now for so many people to just be contactable and available to their employer in the evenings, at weekends and on holidays.

And I totally agree with you that part of managing that healthily is for us to think about how we want to spend our time, what really matters to us and be quite intentional about that and put some boundaries in place and structures. But I'm also interested in your comment that this is a kind of 'beast', our world of work is always churning away, it's always demanding things from us. What's your view on individuals managing that with their own boundaries, but also how we help within organizations create better habits and structures that work for everybody, rather than just leaving it to the individual, to push back against that tide?

Leonard: Yeah, I think that that's important. And look, you know, we're a big law firm, we serve our clients and you asked earlier about how I came to this point in my career. It's because I really serve my clients well, at least I try to, and I'm always available to them. I'm always on call so I'm a bit of a hypocrite, so to speak to say that. Well, I haven't set many boundaries myself, but I'm conscious of them.

I think having that consciousness and having a firm that says to people, listen, you need to understand that yes the work is really important, but actually, you have to go and exercise, you have to do this, you have to clear your head.

So I think that push from the environment around you is important.

Helen: Setting boundaries is not just about when you’re working and when you’re not working, it’s also about managing the boundaries of your role. How closely does your workload today match the job description for the role which you were originally hired to do or promoted into? I’ll happily put money on your workload having grown significantly since then, as new initiatives have popped up, team members have left and things rarely get taken off the agenda. My fourth guest Patricia Galloway, a global HR Director, Non-Executive Director and executive coach, explains how to deal with all that extra stuff that lands on your plate:

Patricia: I've always been very outcomes focused rather than looking at where are you going to work or when you're going to do it, to try and pivot my team, to look at what is it we're trying to achieve. And I think that's something that this new world of hybrid is pushing a lot of organizations to do and managers to do with their teams: to really focus on what's the output we need to achieve and then work backwards as to how they are going to do that in terms of time allocation.

But I've always tried to look at what's the end goal. And I think that really focuses our thinking and it keeps the way you spend your time, much more efficient because you're always quite tightly aligned to that objective. Whereas without that, it's very easy to get distracted and to just lose track of time.

Helen: Yeah, that's so true. I think just keep asking the question during the day, during the week, what am I focusing on? Why am I doing this? Is this what I want to be spending my time on? can make such a difference.

Patricia: It does but the other thing that I also found that's been useful, and I do this with my team, is to say no. To really look at what are all the activities that are building up and what can you say no to, and what's adding value, what's helping you with those end goals? And what are 'nice to haves' but are actually just going to chew up time in your day and not add value to the output.

 And also to just your career development, there are so many unseen side tasks that you can get sucked into. I often see this with my team, HR is one of the departments that are often asked to get involved in planning social activities, for example. And while that's all very nice, rightly or wrongly it's not going to enhance their career, but it's also not that highly valued when it comes to their perception by other senior managers in the organization. So that's one of the things that I always help them to take a look at to say, it's one thing to be on the social committee, but you don't need to be the one that's running these things.

Helen: That advice is making me want to sit down, write a list of everything I do at work and at home, and then highlight all the things I’ve let myself be absorbed into that are ‘nice to haves’ but aren’t really going to get me to where I want to go. As my own boss, I’ll then have to have a firm conversation with myself about taking some things off that list!   Helping others to be brilliant at work and in their careers means giving them the freedom to get on and deliver without constantly supervising or breathing down their necks. My fifth guest was Ben Higgins,Managing Director and UK Head of Human Resources at Societe Generale and Chair of the City HR Association. And Ben talked about how he empowers his team, starting with him switching off properly when he takes annual leave. Here’s Ben:

Ben: Now coming back to your question, how do I manage my time? I think it's about compartmentalizing sometimes these responsibilities and finding dedicated time for each of them within the day. But also I think it's about being super rigorous and disciplined particularly when at the end of the day, or for me where I'm particularly disciplined is on holiday. And for the past four or five years, whenever I'm on holiday, whenever I take a day off, I do not look at my emails. And I actually had the fortune of having a month off last year when there was a lot going on at work. I didn't look at my emails once and I'm pretty proud of that actually, because I think one bit is it shows to my family that, Daddy's now off work, but also it empowers your teams. And I have a fantastic team that I work with and for them to then be given the autonomy and the accountability to take decisions, to contact me if they need to, but to let them work on what needs to be worked on, I think it shows also good leadership to be able to do that.

Helen: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and that's just amazing to hear that you do it so definitively, and I'm really impressed by that. And I also love your point about actually how it can empower your team. So I'm just back as you know, from three weeks holiday in Australia and I was casually reading some of the local papers when I was out there. And I read an interview by, I think it was either the head of Google in Australia or the head of HR in Australia for Google, who was talking about returning from a year's maternity leave and she did the same. She totally disengaged from her role, I'm pretty sure it's the CEO, and she talked about what a phenomenal opportunity that was to develop members of her team and how we don't think of switching off enough in that way, in the benefits. We tend to just think about I'm a bit indispensable, I need to keep checking back in, or people will need me to be in touch. But actually we're missing the trick, which is with a good deal of conversation and preparation beforehand - and she talked quite a lot about how she approached it, she set two of her senior team members up to job share her responsibilities while she was away and she was very specific about what she delegated to whom and made sure they felt ready to take on that task for a secondment period effectively - and she said that the growth in the team and in the individuals as a result was just fantastic. And so she was really encouraging us to see that as an opportunity, and it sounds like you see the benefits as well, when you switch off as a leader.

Ben: Yeah, I think it's a win-win. I think you're right with your comment, by the way, preparation is everything. And I remember the run-up to that holiday - and yes, it's pretty unusual to take a month off - was very tough because you're trying to make sure that you've got the right handover and people feel that they've got the tools they need while you're away, but also they know that they've got the support if it's needed whilst I am out of the country.

But I do think if you have a good team you've got to be able to trust them to deliver. Plus there is something that I think has been said for a long time now which is when you're a leader. I think one of your first responsibilities, when you move into that sort of role, is to start thinking about your succession very early on, around who are the people who could potentially take over from you in the future and again, to give them the responsibility. Because personally I've been in my role for six years now and of course, one of the key ingredients to feeling good about the role that I'm doing is that I want to be challenged, which means that gradually I need to be able to delegate and give people the responsibility for tasks that I might've done two or three years ago to enable me to still grow and to feel that there's more that I can learn on.

So I genuinely believe it's a win-win I, I'm not sure whether my colleagues, when the going got tough and they had their own jobs to do plus a bit of what I normally had to do, would have thanked me all the time for that responsibility. But I think that it's far better to do that than be someone who is on holiday, but not on holiday; not in the office, but somewhere in the background, and I don't think that's a particularly healthy way of working.

Helen: That’s a great ethos and mindset to have, that we can only really grow in our own careers and take on exciting new opportunities by developing our colleagues who are following in our footsteps.  My sixth guest, Andy Wallace, also talked about how leaders can help individuals and teams perform well by holding them much more accountable for making decisions, taking action and figuring out the way forward. Andy is a founding partner and currently Managing Partner of Leathwaite, the executive search and leadership talent specialists. I’d asked him if he could recommend a book that has really influenced his leadership approach, here’s what he had to say:

Andy: Loads! If you want a book that I've read and I will caveat that I didn't read it I listened to the audio book of it, but it was ' Turn the ship around' by David Marquet. And it was about a very underperforming submarine when this captain took it over and basically turned it into the best performing team in the Navy. And I think there are an awful lot of things from that, but maybe the one core message is that It's really important to give accountability to all levels of an organization. Traditional organisations are very much a leader-follower structure where all of the key decisions are made by the leaders and the rest of the organization just do what they say. I think the organizations that are thriving today and will thrive in the future are leader-leader cultures, and that's very much about making sure that at all levels of an organization, there is a level of accountability for decisions to be made. I shared with my own company in the last update presentation that we gave that I get asked a lot of questions, and I sometimes say, am I being asked that question? I mean, am I being asked to make a decision because I'm the best person in the firm to make it, or am I being asked because I'm the managing partner? And I think that it's really important that leaders ask themselves are they the best people to make that decision? If they're not, why are they making it? Why aren't they asking other people in the organization to make it, they're much closer to it. I'm happy to make a decision, I've never found making decisions difficult to the extent of, if I make a decision I'm quite prepared in hindsight to find out that it's the wrong decision because at the time I had the information in front of me that I made it, but I move on very quickly. A lot of people torture themselves about why did I make that wrong decision? Absolutely learn from it. But understand that at that time you had the information, you did the right thing - you thought - for the organization. But it is important to make sure am I making the decision because I'm the right person versus somebody else? And I really took that away.

Helen: My eighth and final guest in this series was Jennifer Halliday, Finance Director at CF Fertilisers and chair of the Northwest Productivity Forum, part of the UK's Productivity Institute. We got talking about how to unblock productivity in the knowledge economy, and specifically how managers can help team members to work at their best and focus on the important stuff. Here’s Jennifer’s expert take on this complex question:

Jennifer: I think the other thing that we keep coming back to, and we've already touched on it several times already today, is this question of how managers manage people. There is quite a lot that's been written that says do managers really understand how people are spending their time? And are people spending a lot of time performing activities that they've always done because they've always done it? And do managers understand what their teams are doing and are managers spending enough time managing their people, allocating resources, making sure that they're working on the right things, and is the inability to do that, really a key driver in why we're not perhaps as productive as we could be? So I'd love to do something with managers in businesses to really think about how to manage their teams differently.

Helen: So, have you come across some interesting things that organizations are doing in the northwest area, or is there a success story or some experiment or trial that an organization's doing that you might be able to share here?

Jennifer: So let me get to that second, I'm just going to tell you a little story first, which is I remember my very first experience being a manager, which was quite some time ago, and I thought I was doing a reasonably good job and what I was trying to do was make sure that the team focused on the basic work of the day and anything that was too complicated, I stepped in to help out and I thought I was doing a really great job. And I got some feedback at the end of my first year and the feedback that I got was, ' she keeps all the very best work for herself'. And I thought, oh my goodness, that is not what I was trying to do at all! What I was trying to do is help and make sure that the team didn't feel too overloaded, but it was seen as lack of trust. You know, 'she doesn't trust us to do that work', and it was seen as 'we don't get opportunities for development'. And I've always remembered that and I've always thought that actually the role of the manager is not to do the complicated work, it's actually to figure out how to trust somebody beneath you to do it, so that they can then be developed. And then what that does, of course, is it creates a sense of empowerment and trust and your team is then going to be thinking about how to do things differently and they're going to feel as if they've got the right to do that.

So, I think today we still see managers exactly as you described, you've been very good at being individual contributors. And they think that being a manager is telling people what to do, those people will do it, and then they will measure the quality and then we get onto the next day, but that's actually not what being a manager is about really.

And it's also about setting the tone and the culture of the organization. So if the workforce doesn't feel empowered to manage their own time, to be responsible for their own deliverables, to come up with new ideas, if they feel as if they're going to get into trouble for doing that, and all they're supposed to do is log in at nine and leave at five, and complete simple tasks, then you're losing so much of the power of the workforce and potentially preventing productivity from happening.

Helen: I’m just going to leave it there. I’m very grateful to all my guests for sharing so many nuggets of wisdom, honed by years of experience and all the challenges and successes of their own careers. Series 3 will return in September with a cracking line up of guests including Randall Peterson, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and founding Director of LBS’ Leadership Institute; Susan Room, former corporate leader and now a voice and executive coach; and Rob Hatch, business coach, speaker and author of Attention! The power of simple decisions in a distracted world.

Enjoy your summer, take a good break and enjoy some brilliant downtime. See you on the other side.