Links:

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

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's book 'Dear Ijeawele'

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

Connson on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connsonlocke/

Connson's website: www.connsonlocke.com

Connson's book 'Making your voice heard: how to own your space, access your inner power and become influential'

Stephen Covey's book 'The 7 habits of highly effective people' 

Mo Gawdat's book 'Solve for Happy'

Transcript:

Helen: Hello this week, I'm talking to Connson Locke. Connson is Professorial Lecturer in Management at the London School of Economics, where she teaches leadership, organizational behaviour and negotiation and decision-making. She is a psychologist, speaker and the author of 'Making your voice heard: how to own your space, access your inner power and become influential'. In the book, she looks at how we influence others, why we're prone to miscommunication and biases and how to overcome these barriers. Connson holds a PhD and MSC in Organisational Behaviour from the University of California in Berkeley and a BA in Sociology from Harvard University. And before her current role at LSE, she headed up Learning & Development for Boston Consulting Group in Asia Pacific, and also worked for the consulting firm Monitor, and she has lived and worked in several regions of the world. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant Connson!

Connson: Thank you, Helen. It's lovely to be here.

Helen: Thanks so much for joining us, and when you and I spoke in July last year, your book had been published three to four months earlier and I'd just finished my first draft. And so we had a lovely conversation comparing notes on the writing experience and what happens when a book enters the world. So that was really helpful to me and it's great to have this opportunity to talk more about both books and hear a little bit more about your career and work. So I gave a brief flavour of your career to date in the introduction just now, but could you tell us a little bit more about your work at LSE? What you're focusing on at the moment?

Connson: Well, I guess I've been at LSE about 13 years now and it's been a real journey. The whole idea of job crafting has really been relevant for my career. I've never stayed at the same organization more than five years when I was at the Boston Consulting Group, you know, that was five years and most of the other companies I worked at before then was about five years because I would get bored. But at LSE there was a lot of opportunity and it felt like it was the right place for me so that my role has transitioned. I started out on the regular tenure track where I was teaching and doing research; after a few years, I thought, well, I don't really want to spend time doing my own original research; I just never really got into it. I was much more interested in the teaching and the administration. So I ended up in a role where I was focusing on teaching and overseeing degree programmes, but what I've developed into now is in addition to the teaching and overseeing degree programmes, I see myself as a bridge between academia and the professional world where I'm bringing other people's research to the attention of, giving people access to it. Because one of the things I found when I went into academia was there's so much interesting stuff that nobody knows. Like when I worked at BCG, we never knew about motivation theory. And yet there's a hundred years of research on motivation theory that we could really use to design rewards and incentives. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book is that it's focused very much on influence, but it's taking all of the research and saying, this is what we can learn from the research that's been done.

Helen: So you're helping people to both understand the research, but also understand how they can make use of it and how they can apply it in the organizations they lead and in their own work lives as well.

Connson: Exactly.

Helen: And talking about your book, I love your title and subtitle. Ever since I've had to think about my own title and subtitle, I find other people's absolutely fascinating and I pay so much more attention to them than I might have otherwise done.

And I often think about, ooh, why did they choose that? And how hard was It for them to come up with that? Because I probably have a small book worth of alternative versions that never made the final cut. Did you find it easy to come up with the title and subtitle?

Connson: So I came up with the title. It was my editor who came up with the subtitle and I didn't even intend it as the title. That was the title of the introductory chapter. And my editor was suggesting a title, like 'The Art of Influence' or something like that and I looked it up and I was like, no, no, there's already a book with that title. And then she said, well, I actually liked the title of your introductory chapter. Why don't we just use that for now? And so it was temporary, but then it stuck and everyone really likes the title. It basically does what it says on the tin, right? It's exactly an accurate title of what's in the book.

Helen: Yeah, absolutely. You know straightaway what you're going to get from this book and how it's going to help you. Funnily enough, I had a really similar experience with my title. The lead contender was something quite different, like 'The Diversity Timebomb'. So it was all about the idea of a ticking time bomb.  'The Future of Time' was actually the heading for part two or part three. But my publisher had such a great reaction when I mentioned those few words I thought, oh no, I've got it completely wrong. That needs to be the book title. So it's funny how much it comes from other people's reactions and how, the way you express things is received by other people.

Connson: That's right.

Helen: And so with your book, what prompted you to write it? And what do you hope people will get from it?

Connson: To be honest, what prompted me was the publisher. I get contacted by publishers every once in a while as academics do you know, saying, are you interested in doing a textbook or something, but this publisher contacted me and said, are you interested in doing a popular book based on academic research. And I was like, oh now, that's different, that's interesting. And we had a conversation and as we talked, I was like, you know what? I, there is a topic that I'd really like to write on. I had been thinking about writing a book for a while, but I had no idea what to write about. And of course your everyday work is so busy that I never actually made progress on it until this publisher contacted me. And then I thought, oh, maybe I should do this. And, and it just unfolded very quickly. Once we had decided what the topic was, it was almost like it was waiting to be written and it took just over a year to write it.

Helen: So it was a kind of bringing together of a lot of your work and thinking in recent years so that must have been quite satisfying to see it all pulled together in this new way.

Connson: It was great.

Helen: And for people that are interested to hear more about the book and to go look it up online or in a bookshop, is it aimed at somebody in particular who's struggling with something in particular or can lots of different people get stuff out of it?

Connson: Everyone can get something out of it, but I wrote it for my students and my students are very diverse. They range from people in their twenties to people in their fifties, at all different levels of the organization. A lot of my students have said, oh, it feels like I'm in back in one of your lectures. I've written it with a lot of practical tips. So it's really for people at work who want to make their voice heard to people above them in the hierarchy or at the same level. It's how do you create change at work? But you can also use it outside of work but it's really in a professional setting. How do you create change? How do you influence others? How do you change their minds about something or how do you promote one of your ideas?

Helen: So I imagine it might be also particularly helpful to someone who finds themself in the minority in some way in the work setting or in the team, that finds it hard to get people to understand their perspective and experience.

Connson: Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's also a chapter on gender, so there's a lot of stuff to try to help women who maybe get interrupted a bit more often. I talk about stuff like that. What do you do? And so, I tried to make it accessible for a lot of people.

And I have people who have told me that they actually bought copies for their team because they felt that their team would benefit from this as well.

Helen: Fantastic idea. So if you're a manager and you have a team and you want to look after people a little bit more and let them know that you care about their careers and how they're finding their work lives, particularly if you're not getting the chance to see each other much, then have a think about sharing this wonderful repository of wisdom with them.

So we're getting a sense of what your specialisms are and all the fantastic expertise you bring to your role at LSE and through your book. What about Connson the person, if you had to pick three words that describe you, or if you asked other people to describe you in three words, what would those three words be?

Connson: Oh, I don't know if I can boil it down; one of them is eager to learn. I guess it's like a curiosity, that's what I always want to do is I want to learn about everything, you know, there certain things I've tried to learn about cricket and I just couldn't.

I just gave up. I was like, no, it's not worth my time. So there are certain things I'm not that interested in other things like, like over the Christmas break, I started learning new languages and I love that sort of thing and psychology, anything to do with people, so eager to learn. I guess creative could be part of it. I don't think of myself as an artist, but I like to try to think in creative ways. I love it when people come to me with a problem that they haven't been able to solve, because it really challenges me. And I think, okay, maybe we're not looking at it in the right way. Maybe we need to look at it in a different way. So I love that sort of stuff. And the third one, I think of myself as intellectually restless, but physically I do stuff like yoga. I don't like, I don't go running or anything like that. It's almost like physically, I'm very calm and quiet, but my mind is going all the time.

Helen: It's not about getting hot and sweaty.

Connson: Yeah, exactly.

Helen: It's a lovely contrast. And I love what you say about being creative. So easy to think. Oh, well that just means artistic, but actually being a creative thinker is absolutely a way of channeling creativity and getting pleasure out of thinking differently. And it's such a great asset in our work lives. Sometimes I think one that's quite under appreciated because as we'll come on to talk about, I think often our work cultures favour certain things over other things and prioritize time for activity and busy-ness rather than reflection time, for example.

 So Connson, when you think back about your consulting career and your academic career, is there a time that stands out for you as to when you really felt you were flourishing? And if so, what was it about that time that helped you feel like you were really flying in your career?

Connson: It's a difficult question to answer because flourishing can mean many different things. There were times when I felt like I was really getting the recognition that I wanted, but at the same time I was feeling burnt out. But there were other times when I felt like I've hit my stride and I'm managing my time really well and I've actually got time for a social life and things outside of work, but then my job started to become a little bit boring.

Helen: It sounds like it's very hard to have all the boxes ticked, right?.Sometimes it's a different set of boxes that are being ticked and we're feeling like we're good or we're motoring, but not everything's perfect all the time, even when we're on a good path.

Connson: Exactly.

Helen: Was there a particular piece of advice that has helped you in your career or something that needs to be in place for you in order to be able to deliver your best work and feel like you're making a positive

Connson: I think one thing for me is I like to feel that I have the power to make changes that I feel are necessary. So if I'm going to be involved in a project, I want to either be the person who's overseeing the project or at least be the deputy or have the ear of the person who's running the project, because I want to be able to say "this doesn't make sense, or this is not efficient, or we need to change this" and know that it's going to be taken seriously otherwise I get very frustrated.

Helen: Yeah. And I know that something you write about in your book is about how we can best deal with negative emotions. And all of us have had times undoubtedly in our work lives when things have felt tough or just hard going or we're wrestling with quite a few big or difficult negative emotions. How have you dealt with that in the past? Is there any advice you'd give to others who might be in that situation now?

Connson: Negative emotions in general: I've learned that a good strategy is really to ... what my therapist used to say was get bigger than it. And what that means is when you're feeling an emotion, you don't let it overtake you. So if you think of emotion as essentially it's a shot of energy and I think of it as almost like a wave coming at me. So if I let the wave wash over me and drown me, then I'm filled with that negative energy and I can't do anything else. If instead I get bigger than it so the wave is just like, you're on the beach and it comes up to your feet, maybe it comes up to your ankles, but you then let it wash away.

Helen: That's a great metaphor.

Connson: Yeah, it's taken me a long, long time to get to that point where I can just go, yep. I'm really frustrated right now or I'm really upset about this right now and then just let it wash away. Because if you try to push it away or if you try to ignore it, then it sneaks in later on and sometimes if I'm really overwhelmed by it, like if I can't think of anything else, I need to do a little bit of journaling or I need to talk to somebody or just deal with it in order to let it wash away, and so that's one strategy is dealing with the emotion in the moment. But the other strategy is this idea of thinking about what you can do about something. It's the circle of influence and circle of concern that Stephen Covey talked about, where we have a lot of things that we're very upset or worried or frustrated about. It's useful to think: what can I actually do about it? So I can't do anything about the horrible stories I'm reading in the news except to not read the news. And so I don't read the Metro on the tube anymore. Obviously I keep in touch with the headlines, but I don't dig deeper into the news because it upsets me and there's nothing I can do about it.

Helen: I totally get that. I definitely got to a point in the first year of the pandemic of just feeling too overwhelmed with the numbers and the daily updates and made the decision to actually switch off from it completely. And my husband is a data geek. He absolutely loves getting into data to understand what it's saying and what it's not saying. And I would have to say to him as you're sitting there each day, checking the map and how it's changed since yesterday, I'm really glad you're doing it so one of us knows what's going on, but I don't need to hear about it. And I'll let you know when I'm ready to hear about it. And it actually felt quite a positive thing to say and do. I just needed to be in my little bubble and not always have COVID popping my bubble.

Connson: Yes. Yes,

Helen: Those are great ideas. And it reminds me also of some parenting advice I heard from a great parenting expert about helping very little children deal with their emotions and how reminding us as adults that for little children, when they feel a big emotion, it's huge. It is their world. And they haven't learned to distinguish between their emotion and themselves. It just takes them over. And so that's a really helpful thing I've been told and try to remember that actually the emotion isn't us. It is an emotion. And you talk about emotions being a signal that point to something. So we can get curious about what it's pointing to. Instead of getting hung up on the emotion itself. What is it telling us? What might I learn from this?

Connson: That's right. Because if you're getting upset about something, then there's something behind that. Why am I getting upset? Is it just because this person triggers me all the time, maybe I need to avoid this person, or is it because there's something happening on this project that I need to pay attention to.

Helen: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of your own career and your work life day in, day out, how do you organize your time at work? Are there certain time habits that work for you? And where do you find your working time just falls over and isn't quite how you want it to be?

Connson: So I have to say I was much better at it before the pandemic. So when I was writing the book, which was in 2019, I was writing the book while working full time. But as an academic, you're allowed to have one day a week to focus on your research and so I took that one day a week to focus on my writing. So Monday was my writing day. And I set up a really nice home office which turned out to be very useful later on. But in 2019, I set up a very nice home office, and every Sunday I would start thinking about the book and then Monday I would spend the whole day in the home office just writing, and then Tuesday and the rest of the week, I was fully back at work.

And I found that that rhythm helped me a lot. Just knowing that I'm not thinking about the book right now, because it's not Monday. And then on the Sunday I start thinking about it, Monday I've got the whole day. It allowed me to get the book done in just over year.

I'm not always so disciplined with other things. So the one thing I need to get better at is not letting email distract me all the time. On the days when I'm actually able to turn off email for a few hours and focus on something else I find I'm way more productive than when I keep my email open, and every time something pops up, I'm like, oh, what's that? And then I find, if I'm dealing with email, I could spend the whole day on email and then I feel like I've done nothing. I have my to-do list and nothing got done.

Helen: Yeah, it's so easy isn't it for us all to slip into this reactive mode at work when there's a constant pinging of messages or requests or demands. And that's something I write quite a lot about in my book The Future of Time, where I'm describing what's wrong with our culture around time in the world of work and why it's broken for individuals, but also why it's broken for businesses and how it's damaging our productivity and our wellbeing, and it's also having an impact on diversity and inclusion as well. So I talk about our time culture in terms of our how we spend it. And I write about our cult of busyness, how being busy and having very full diaries is often interpreted as a symbol that we're achieving things and we're doing good work. And by contrast downtime for reflection, some of that creative thinking we were talking about earlier, just letting our minds process, all the stuff that's been coming in to it during the day, but also time for just social chats and relationship building that isn't necessarily driven by a particular purpose, but that helps build the social glue in organizations, helps us feel individually like we have good connections, we belong, we're helping each other out . If you're sitting at your desk just looking like you're daydreaming or staring off into space, people think, oh, they're having a bit of a break or obviously not busy on something and it's somehow not viewed as, as valuable. Is that something that you recognize and see from the research you study and your teachings?

Connson: Yeah; if your book can convince organizations that it's bad for people to be available all the time, that would be a huge, huge accomplishment because I just think it is really detrimental. I'm lucky to work in academia where until the pandemic, there were very few things that were so urgent they had to be replied to within a few hours. Most things can at least wait a day. So I could take the Monday to write my book and even though I checked email just to make sure nothing was urgent, I could basically say I'll reply to that tomorrow. But I have students who work in organizations where they insist on using Slack, or you have to have your Teams on all the time and so people are pinging you, and sometimes it's WhatsApp, even. So you're being pinged all the time and no matter what you're working on, you're constantly being interrupted and you're expected to respond right away. That would just drive me insane.

Helen: Yeah, it does drive people insane. I've heard people talk about those digital interruptions as being like a child constantly running into your room, saying 'Mummy, Mummy, I need you!' when you're trying to concentrate. And there are, and I do share them in the book, lots of research-based great pieces of advice about how we can combat this and try and thrive in this environment, from batch processing emails and just checking them three times a day to what we were just talking about off air before we started recording about knowing when your peak hours for energy are and when you do your best work and and organizing your important work around that and doing the less cognitively demanding work. For me, that's what I do in the afternoons when I don't have to rely on my brain firing at its best. So there are some things, but they all require willpower. And really importantly, they require other people to be as intentional and thoughtful about it. And that's one of the challenges I write about and what I guess my hope is for my book is that we stop thinking about time management as being something just what I do in my own role and in my own time, but we think about it much more collectively and we organize ourselves much more collectively.

Connson: Yes so the first week of January was an amazing time for me because I was back at work, but very many people were not yet back at work. And nothing was happening in my email box. I was like, wow, I've never been so productive. This blog that I had promised someone I would write and put it off for almost a full year, I finally got it written. I was like, why did it take me a year to write that? But it's because my email box was quiet. I've also found when I'm writing, especially when I was doing research, you need a four-hour block at least. A four hour block of quiet time to really get back into the topic, to really understand the topic again and produce something new. If you don't get the four hours, if you get interrupted within those four hours, then you've got to restart, you've got to rethink, revisit it. And so, I don't think people realize that you need these big blocks of quiet time.

Helen: I agree, and I think it's only now that some organizations are starting to recognize that they need to talk and encourage more conversations across groups and teams about how people are spending their time during the working day, because you're right. So much time gets wasted and that's part of our productivity puzzle that we work these really long hours and yet we have fairly low productivity rates as a nation compared to other nations. So I think organizations are starting to think about how they manage time more intentionally. So it may be as simple as at a team level, as facilitating a team conversation and saying, are there certain things we can introduce that help us all be more productive and still stay in touch? I know some teams are thinking about having meeting free weeks at the start of the year to help people kick off really productively or have an hour at lunchtime when nobody contacts each other, and everybody can just take a breather or do some thinking. But also I think people can take it further than that. They can say, okay, well, if we need to be together, this is the day we'll do it on and we'll use that time for brainstorming and planning, but we might keep, afternoons free for individual productive work. And I think that's more the direction we need to go in. Would you agree?

Connson: I completely agree with that. I think coordinating across teams makes a lot of sense. I also think we should also pay attention to the physical environment and the effects that has on our productivity, because all of this talking about hot desking ... My home office used to be in our house, it used to be one of the bedrooms in the house, but then we had to change that because my daughters got big enough that they each needed their own bedroom. So then we built a garden office. That was when I was able to start writing my book. If I had been working in the office in the house, I got interrupted all the time and there was so much noise. Because I was there in the house, people would just knock on the door but now I'm at the end of the garden. comes out here!

Helen: It's great. Sheds have real value ...

Connson: Yeah.

Helen: Because of the distance.

Connson: Yeah. And it's not even that far, but nobody comes out here. Nobody interrupts me. So it's the physical environment. There's no way I could have written a book in my old home office, but now I was able to, so we have to pay attention to

Helen: I think that's so true. And I think any organization, that's just assuming, oh, well, when everybody's back in the office, we'll go back into our normal open plan, rows and rows of desks with a few meeting rooms. I really hope that they're seeing and thinking differently about the kind of physical and virtual spaces that people need to really do good work and to have spaces where people can work undisturbed and interruptions aren't allowed and spaces where people can collaborate and they're separate. I think you make some really good points there.

So obviously you delight in accessing fantastic research and sharing that with others in your teaching and through your book and your own talks. Is there a particular resource, maybe one that you've come across recently or one that is an old favorite, that you would recommend to people listening to our conversation that might help them flourish in their career?

Connson: Oh, there's so many! For me, books are things that you draw on when you need them. I've got this book called 'The Artist's Way', which helped me through times when I'm feeling particularly stressed or frustrated, because it's all about noticing the world and getting back in touch with the joy in life. Stephen Covey's 'Seven Habits'. I read it when it first came out and I was like, ah, this is kind of interesting. I read it again about eight years later, I was like, wow, this is really useful. So I really think books have to be the right knowledge at the right time. There's another book called 'Solve For Happy', which I thought was a great one by this Google employee. He's an engineer talking about how he was able to rediscover happiness after the unexpected death of his son. So books come at the right time when you need them.

Helen: That's such a great reminder that we might have books on our bookshelf that we've read and we think we've gained the value from them, but maybe we read them a long time ago or maybe our outlook's changed or ambition's changed and actually now we might get something quite different from it. I think that's a wonderful reminder.

Thank you so much Connson for taking the time to chat with us. If listeners want to find out more about your work or connect with you professionally, what's the best way for them to do that?

Connson: They can always connect with me on LinkedIn and I have a website, connsonlocke.com, that has all my podcasts and writings and things like that so they can find out a lot more about me there.

Helen: Wonderful. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure to connect again and talk about your book, my book, the world of work and careers as well. I really appreciate it. Best wishes for everything for the coming year.

Connson: Thank you, Helen.