Links:

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

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

Winnie on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winnie-doeswijk-0a60b91/

Transcript:

Helen: Hi! This week, I'm talking to Winnie Doeswijk. Winnie is Head of Global Organization Development at Novartis, the pharmaceutical and medicines company, where she leads their team of OD experts in developing the way the organization works, its culture and its people. need to career has taken her around the world and she has lived in the Netherlands, London, Texas and now Basel. She previously held senior OD roles in the global oil company Shell and Pitney Bowes, the global shipping and mailing business. And she started her career in management consulting at Towers Perrin, now Willis Towers Watson. In fact Winnie and I started there at the same time in 1997, me in London and Winnie in the Netherlands. We met on our induction day and we've been friends ever since. So it's such a pleasure to have her as my guest in this first series of the podcast and to chat together about her impressive career. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Winnie!

Winnie: Thank you Helen, and it's lovely to see you. It makes me feel old. Those dates that you're rattling off .. we've known each other a long time haven't we!

Helen: Yes, we can probably debate off the podcast whether we're mid career or late career, but it does feel like we've done a lot together and separately since 1997. And obviously I know you very well, but our listeners may be hearing you for the first time. So to give them a sense of who you are, could you share three words that you would use to describe yourself?

Winnie: So it depends a bit on the three words that describe me and my relations to others, which is partly a mum of three children, a friend including of my husband, and, I'm hearing from my colleagues, a leader as well. So those are kind of the roles I play. In terms of more me as a person at work, I guess, at home as well is a fairly driven fairly committed to what I do, optimistic, I like to keep a glass half full otherwise what's the point of doing organization development work, right? And I like not to take myself too seriously. So I like to do things with a bit of a twinkle and a smile and a sense of humour. So more than three words,

Helen: That's great thank you. And have you always been driven or is that something that you think emerged as you got stuck into your career?

Winnie: I think I've always been driven. I've always had high standards for myself and as a result for other people as well. I think there's a hint of perfectionism in there and driven to make things better for other people and for myself as well. So it's not driven to drive a career per se or to keep getting promotions, but driven to improve stuff.

Helen: That's great that that's been behind you as you've worked and moved from role to role. So when you think back about those different stages in your career, when do you think you have flourished most in your career? Is there a particular time that springs to mind and if so, what was it that made that possible?

Winnie: That's a good question because it makes me think about all the various jobs that I've done and what was common them. And I think mostly flourishing was when there was something big and chunky to be done; something to really wrap your arms around; something that was just on the edge of my capabilities, where I thought, yeah, I can do this. But there was sufficient learning in there and a hint of nervousness that makes you stay open and listen to advice from other people, keep a curious mind but with enough confidence that I could put my arms around it. So doing something big and challenging and chunky usually supported by a manager that's given me the space to do it.  So I tend to do well without helicopter management. If I think back about the many projects and jobs that I've done what's also enabled me a lot is my husband where at home we've been pretty 50 50. So at the beginning of each week, we tend to figure out, well, who's got what on. And there's been times in big and chunky projects that he's been able to step up a b it more . It also gives the sort of the emotional support and the bandwidth to do, to do the job well. So yeah, I think flourishing , it's been enabled by other people. Someone had trusted me to pick up a big challenge.  Someone that's trusted me to crack on with it, a buddy to work with, usually in a, in a function that's complimentary to mine, like communications, for example, or someone in HR or someone in business strategy, somebody to spar with. Yeah. It's mostly those characteristics. Not, not a particular moment that I could point to.

Helen: That's so interesting to hear and you're right. It's so important to have the right kind of support around you at home and at work. So whether it's an encouraging manager who, as you say, really trusts that you can take a leap, be ready for the next bit of stretch in the role, giving you the space to do that. And then having all the great support at home as well. There's that fine balance between getting a bit out of your comfort zone and being stretched, but not being thrown in at the deep end without any life support.

Winnie: Yes. It's helpful to have some 'oh shit!' Moments, but the 'oh shit!' moments shouldn't be too long and too deep ... it cracks your confidence!

Helen: Yeah. That's a great way of putting it. Cause we all run into them, right? Some are worse than others. In some of them we have the tools and the support we need to deal with it and learn from it and grow. And other times we might not tick all those boxes and that's probably when it becomes a really painful experience.

Winnie: Yes.Yeah. for sure.

Helen: So has there ever been a time at work for you when things have felt really tough or hard going? And what did you take from that experience?

Winnie: Of course, yes. And mostly it's when I get in my own way. I remember atime when I got promoted to a big job and I worked with a very senior leader in one of my past companies and I was a little bit in awe of this person and I felt a little bit like what kind of value could I possibly add to this person? And as a result, I didn't really step up. I kind of got in my own way. And it wasn't until the person actually invited me along. Actually, it was a Christmas dinner with the leadership team that he invited me to as well, which is like, oh my God, he sees me as one of the team, this is quite impressive! I'd never really realized this. And then somebody else in the leadership team also made a comment about why it wasn't I picking up the phone to him because they would be so interested in talking to me. And I was like 'Talk to ME? Really? Clearly they think I have something to say! So this phase of me getting into my own way, of not feeling so confident, having some doubts about what value did I have to add I kind of learned that it was pretty self-imposed , unfortunately. And I got in my own way because I limited my own impact t hrough that, so I kind of learned through those colleagues, those clients, a little bit of swagger without taking yourself too seriously. Like I said, at the beginning, a bit of swagger and a bit of confidence is important. A little bit of claiming the space, if you're working in an expert role, like I have done over the years, you need to think through, well, what is the expertise that you bring in? Where does it come from? And it needs to come from within.

Helen: That's great advice, that's really good. Because I think so many people suffer from that inner critic. I know I do where you have that little voice in your head saying, who are you to rock up and sit around this table and, or to, as you say, even just pick up the phone to someone that you're slightly in or over, maybe don't see yourself on the same level in terms of peers, but they may be seeing you so differently. It's good that you had that little nudge from those conversations with others to look at the situation from their point of view, and instead of just your own point of view.

Winnie: Yeah, exactly. And it links to a piece of advice that someone gave me years ago. And I remember exactly the moment that they told me on and what they said and where it was. But I, I joined one of those large companies that consists of thousands of people.

And I felt very much like a small radar in the machine, a very insignificant one, actually, because people in that company had all been there for years. Like they started out there as a graduate, they grew up together and I joined a little bit later in my career, so I felt like I couldn't really catch up with them because they'd had so many years together building relationships, getting to know each other and the whole company and the culture so much longer than me. And then the person told me, well, the reason that you were brought into this company is because you offer something different, so you don't need to compete with other people to be, more similar to them. It's actually better to stay a little different, to have something unique. And it's clearly at the heart of D&I, obviously. But it's also very personal, a nd it taught me that I didn't need to be the same as all those other people. Because I, well, first of all, I couldn't catch up for them anyway. But secondly, the reason I was there was to bring something different that they didn't already have. Yeah, so that's given me some confidence I suppose.

Helen: That's great advice. It's such a good reminder that we need to believe in ourselves and in the unique perspectives and experience that we've got, that's different to the people around us.

Winnie: Well, and what's hard about this is that it's easy to say. Easy to tell someone, oh, you need to appreciate your own uniqueness, but in my case, it hit home after I experienced it. After this leadership team that were working in finance and I was like, I can't possibly add any value to them until I realized, well, actually my job is not to do finance because that's their job. My job is to help them organize their own function better and to engage their people better, and that's something that I'm uniquely qualified for. So sometimes those lessons are a bit painfully gained, at least in my case they were. It's, like I said, easier said than done. And I sometimes tell my kids as well that you don't need to compete with other kids in your classroom and your unique self. But it's hard to go beyond just words until you've experienced it.

Helen: It takes many years to really take that in. I'm still practicing that one now. So yeah, it's hard to expect children to get it straight away the confidence. And so you juggle a full-time role, your husband also works and you have three children.

Winnie: Yeah.

Helen: And you've moved around the world quite a lot. So I'm dying to ask this question. How do you organize your time? Because I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot. What are the habits. that work for you and I'm talking mainly here about how you organize your time at work, when you're in a senior leadership role, there's no doubt more stuff going on than you can ever really, get a handle on or accomplish and lots of demands , as a leader and a manager. So what works for you? Where do you find things fall over?.

Winnie: Well, still looking for the magic formula, but there's a few things that I've, that I've found work better than others. First of all, I've established a few rules. I try to stick to the no work in the weekend rule. I don't have a problem to work some evenings in the week. I get a bit irritated if it's every evening in the week, but a few I don't mind. So I try to limit the time like there's work and there's life, you know, they can blend a bit, that's fine. But I need enough recuperation time and time for me and for the family t hat's not work, which is the weekend. Then I also block as much as possible early in the day and end of the day and lunchtime, so that I have some time to just read messages and there's, there's a few more operational things about how to block time in the day.

And then I think ahead of time, a year ahead. Who are the sorts of people that I need to talk with regularly? And is it weekly, bi-weekly monthly? What does the schedule look like? And then I schedule it slightly on the edge of light, that I just feel a little uncomfortable, like, oh, I could really talk to them more often. So rather than every two weeks I do every three weeks or every month I do every six weeks. And then if something important comes up, I want to have enough flexibility in my schedule to be able to pick up the phone and just have ad hoc conversations. So schedule the regular cadence a little light, all to make sure that I have enough working time in the day and in the week to just create blocks of time to do stuff. Cause sometimes you have to do something that just takes thinking time, like organize a workshop or write a report. So I try to keep enough blocks of time to do chunks of work.

So I think those are my more operational tips and then more mindset like is around: a m I really needed? Is this really important right now? Who is this meeting or a piece of work for, is it for me or is it to benefit someone else? And what is therefore the role that I can play with on my own time commitment such that I still meet the needs of someone else without it costing an arm and a leg.

Helen: That's so interesting to hear. It sounds like not only have you put in place a few habits that you find work well for you, but also that you're very intentional every day about your use of time, which is fantastic.

 And you know, obviously about the book, The Future of Time, that's coming out at the beginning of March and how in it, I talk about how our time culture at work is broken, and by time culture, I mean our collective attitudes and beliefs and norms and behaviors around how we think about time, how we manage our time at work, how we talk about it and how we spend it.

And my argument is that we have these 'time norms', these cultural norms around time. It's all based around speed and urgency, 24/ 7 availability and operating, but also often highly fragmented work time and very blurry boundaries. Our working time is stretched and become quite amorphous. Does that sound familiar to you or have you experienced different time norms?

Winnie: Unfortunately it is familiar. I've worked in the types of companies where I've been surrounded by pretty competent people and I tend to be not the only one that's fairly driven. And that collective effect creates this, this I wouldn't say a pressure to perform, but people take responsibility to get the work done.

It's not about how much time am I spending here about attendance or being visibly at work. It's more about, I want to be seen to be doing important things that matter. And I want to make a difference in most of the companies that I've been part of.

 That's looking like quite long working hours. Of course there's always the next emergency, and like you say the speed and the urgency of stuff. It's fairly relentless so that's hard. And the problem is that It impacts almost performance in the wrong way, because if you're working longer hours and fairly fragmented, from one meeting to another topic, to another workshop about something else, again, it's harder to focus and to just get something done.

 And there's this fragmentation about, bitty, bitty focus I would call it. It's very inefficient.

Helen: We end up with lots of little bits of wasted time when we're transitioning between pieces of work or, we get to end of the day and we realize we've been so busy responding to stuff that's been incoming that we haven't done the really important bit of work we wanted to do.

Winnie: Ends up being in the evening in my case.

Helen: Which then really impacts our sense of wellbeing and, and having a life outside of work. What do you hear other people say, do you feel in the organizations you've worked in that that's been a fairly common experience or is there something else that is stopping people from really flourishing in their careers?

Winnie: Well with COVID particularly, and in large global companies, there's a couple of things that you hear all the time, which is around too many hours on the screen, not enough social lubricant, if you never meet each other and if you can't spend time in person it becomes much harder to work well together. So that social lubricant is missing. In terms of global companies I hear lots about the time zones, clearly somebody in my team in China or in the U S and in Europe, if we want to meet together as a team, some people always going to have to start at the crack of dawn and some people are always on the phone late into the evening. And I suppose in large global companies that gets taken as a fact of life and it's not always fair. There's ways around it, but it takes a bit of extra effort that people need to be willing to make.

 And then the final thing more particular to my role, is that the company I work in now is fairly initiative rich. People get out of bed in the morning to make a difference. And they're very driven by the diseases that they want to cure ,the patients that they want to support in this medicine company and it drives people to work pretty hard and pretty committed, but not enough taking the time to look left and right to see what colleagues are working on, and what they could glean from each other and where they could be a bit more efficient if they did something together, or if they were willing to copy something from another country or another function, for instance.

 So that drive creates a bit of silo focus in my view with not enough time taken to learn from what colleagues are already working on. So it's almost a self-imposed inefficiency in how time is spent, a mistaken belief that me spending my time on my deliverables is more efficient than me taking the time to ask a colleague for a bit of input first.

Helen: That's so true. And it is a particular challenge of a big global organization that might have many business units and have quite a complex or matrix structure. How do you get people clearly focused on what they need to be delivering, but also aware of what people are working on outside of their own team and there's always that tension. Something I write about in the book is about the need to be not just smart and thoughtful and intentional about our own time habits, but also about understanding the impact of our choices on other people and whether that's when we choose to go online and be in contact with people or when we choose to do deep work, deadlines we request of others. I think that talks to your second point about understanding the bigger picture and joining up the dots because what we each do is interconnected and the more we can encourage enough conversation about how we're spending our time and what we're spending it on and what the collective priorities are, then that would help just pull our heads out of the sand a little bit more often to, to make adjustments and to join up those conversations.

Winnie: Exactly. And that takes the same fluffy word of mindsett o some extent, usually shaped by a positive experience. What we're doing in my company at the moment is a new performance management system has been implemented, it's called Evolve and it looks much more at the impact that we're trying to have on patients, on each other, on the business as opposed to making effort or just being active. And it comes with a regular cadence of setting some big, bold objectives and sharing them with each other, but also a quarterly check-in, not just on what's the work that we're doing, but also how we're doing. And I find that pretty helpful, it's better than the mid-year review and the year end review, which you do on a one-to-one basis. It's more team-based. and I try and make sure that we do this across teams as well. So I find this quite a helpful improvement in our business.

Helen: That sounds a great example of just finding ways with the rhythm of the work to keep connecting, keep talking and fascinating to hear how you're thinking differently about performance management. That something else I was writing about in the book about how in the past and in many organizations still, performance management is more about the activity and the time you've been putting in and what you've been spending time on. And it's quite input focused as opposed to outcome focused.

Winnie: The big switch that we've made is the word 'impact' and an impact not just on yourself and your own job, but impact on the people around you, the ones close by in your team, but also clearly your customers or people in the broader community. So the traditional, did you do a good job and did you fulfill your objectives? Yes. And did you behave, did you role model the behaviors that we want to encourage in the company? Yes. And what was the result? What was the impact of this on people around you?

Helen: That's great that you take it that third step and really look at the outcome and the results out of that. Well, good luck with embedding that into the organization. It sounds quite a shift that you're helping people to get used to.

So, is there a particular resource, a book, or a talk or a podcast that you have found really helpful in your line of work and in your career that you would recommend to others?

Winnie: Probably too many to mention over time. I particularly like TED talks because they are insightful and long enough to get something really interesting and meaningful out of them, but they don't take hours. But so I think my main top tip that I've taught myself would be to drop FOMO, to drop the fear of missing out and to really switch off sometimes. I have a folder of stuff that I should read, watch, or listen to, and it's overflowing . There's always much more to learn and read, than I'm able to do. So I've had to teach myself to just relax about it. I don't need to feel FOMO about all the things I should be reading and watching. And it's sometimes really helpful to just really switch off properly.

Helen: That's a great tip, but it sounds like something you have learned to do really well, which is actually say right, that's it, I'm just downing tools and whatever it was that I should read - and it's interesting that we tell ourselves a lot of 'should's - but maybe you'd like to read, it's just going to have to wait another day and maybe one day I might get around to it and there will be some things we won't get round to it.

Winnie: And if another person reminds me of this great article, then I'll make an extra effort to look at it for sure.

Helen: Yeah, it nudges it up, doesn't it up your list, your radar. Great. Oh, they're such good suggestions. And if people have enjoyed listening to you and hearing about the work that you do, how can they connect with you after the podcast?

Winnie: The easiest is on LinkedIn I would say.

Helen: Brilliant. Well, Thank you so much, Winnie. It's been such a pleasure talking to you, both personally for me to have this time together, to hear about your career, it's been fantastic to catch up in that way, but also for our listeners.

Thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing your experiences and tips. There's so much food for thought that I think will help other people flourish in their careers as well. So thank you for being brilliant and joining us.

Winnie: Same to you. Helen, and I just really enjoyed looking through what you've been writing about and all the interesting concepts that you're talking about. So really best of luck when it comes to March and launching it all.

Helen: Thank you. I'll be letting the world know. Thanks Winnie.