Pod was recently interviewed by Phil King and Cass Rix from The Search for the Soulful Leader – a podcast creating a safe space for curious leaders to evaluate their impact and trigger meaningful change for and beyond themselves.
In this conversation they discussed, amongst other things, the concept of Followership, and the value and importance of exploring your personal Leadership narrative.
Listen to the episode below:
Today I am joined by Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of the best selling book on coaching this century! His book, The Coaching Habit, has sold close to a million copies and has thousands of 5-star reviews online. His latest book, How to Begin, helps people find the clarity and courage to take on a Worthy Goal and start something thrilling, important and daunting.
He founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organisations move from advice-driven to curiosity-led. They’ve trained hundreds of thousands of managers to be more coach-like and their clients range from Microsoft to Gucci.
He says he left Australia about 30 years ago to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University …where his only significant achievement was falling in love with a Canadian …which is why he now lives in Toronto, having spent time in London and Boston.
We discuss:
and a whole lot more!
“It will take 65 years or until 2086 before women make up 40% of line roles in executive leadership teams, based on CEW Census trends from the last five years.”
CEW Census report 2021
The lack of female representation in executive leadership positions in Australia (or internationally) is not a new conversation. But it persists, signalling the complexity of the issue. This is not a straight-forward conversation with simplistic issues and even more simple solutions. Rather, this is a tapestry of occurrences and outcomes at social and business levels. A natural reaction is to be overwhelmed and frustrated with the sense of the inability to affect change. But in a recent Leadership Diet Podcast with Susan Metcalf from Chief Executive Women, the conversation forced me to consider what was something that can be actioned now, by the people who listen to this podcast? Here are five ideas.
Chief Executive Women (CEW) has 640 members who hold leading roles in Australia’s largest private and public organisations. Through advocacy, research, targeted programs and scholarships, they help to remove the barriers to women’s progression and ensure equal opportunity for prosperity. Through the conversation with Susan, one area that is vital to ensure this is to make sure there are enough women in the actual talent pool from which CEOs are drawn. It is possible but it will take effort.
Australian women are the most educated in the world, according to Nabila Ahmed from Bloomberg, and have more women graduating from university then men. Access to education and intellectual capacity is not in question. Yet, women make up a quarter (26%) of roles on Executive Leadership Teams and there are only 18 women CEOs in the top 300 ASX-listed companies (6.2%).
There is a gap here that can be addressed. What we also know is that most CEOs (78%) in 2021 were appointed from line roles with profit and loss accountability and women make up just 14% of those line management roles across the ASX300. The pool from which CEOs are sought does not contain enough women. There are women in business but they are more often employed in senior functional roles such as HR, Corporate Affairs, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Risk, Strategy or Technology which are not traditional CEO pathways.
So, something that is available to everyone who aspires to CEO and / or executive leadership is to pursue roles and experience in the line roles with carry profit and loss accountability or commercial and operational oversight. These are springboard roles, and the objective has to be to get more women exposed to these roles, if having a stronger or equal representation of women in CEO roles is the outcome being sought. This is also an obvious call out to every organisation, mentor, CEO, people leader, leadership and organisation development practitioner is to create, promote and enable (even mandate if necessary) the movement of female talent into these roles.
“You can’t be what you can’t see”
Marian Wright Edelman
If there is a shortage (which is often the feedback that we hear) learn from organisations that recognise supply challenges and war for talent. If your current processes are not working, then learn from someone else. In recent years, SEEK.com as example has recognised the supply of women in broader technology sector with product development or coding skills was not as readily available from the existing graduate pool. So, they have gone further down the supply chain to the high school students. They provide opportunities for high school girls to attend multi day learning workshop within SEEK before they complete HSC, to encourage enrolment into technology style degrees. Whilst this is a long-term strategy, it does address the pipeline of future female leaders at the very starting point. Interestingly SEEK are noted in the CEW report as having a 50:50 split at the executive leadership team. What can you be doing beyond asking the recruiters to provide you a shortlist to ensure that you are attracting quality candidates into your pipeline? Who is currently working in the line that could be encouraged and mentored to pursue leadership positions?
This may require a fundamental mindset shift for the organisation, but it sends a very clear message about the seriousness with which CEO/ C suite succession and development planning is taken in the organisation. Sometimes this might take encouragement to move people from their comfort zones. My experience in assisting C-suite development suggests rotation of roles or expansion of responsibilities amongst the expanded leadership team, fosters greater understanding of the whole of business view among the leaders and brings a stronger decision capability to strategic conversations, rather than what is often considered to be a functional only approach.
This comes back to two core principles. One is if organisations truly want to have their client base represented by the make of their leadership teams, then having a larger number of women represented in key commercial roles makes sense. Secondly, if there are obvious springboard roles that lead to CEO succession pipelines, then get more women into those roles as often as possible. Exposure to commercial and operational oversight comes with specific roles. But exposure can also come from cross functional organisational wide projects.
One healthcare company we have worked with created a role that encompassed pre-product launch activites, sales force efficiency activities, data insights gathering and GTM analysis with a heavy lens towards their R&D expertise. The female leader of the R&D department took this role as an expansion of her functional leadership role. Five years later she became the Managing Director, which would have been unheard of had she only stayed in her functional role.
Too many times we have seen examples of a role that is a perfect next step or a building block to a wider scope of leadership been created, only to find it has inherent designs in it that limit many candidates, especially working mothers. Next time a new role is created, or an opportunity emerges that allows for a vacant role to be redesigned, as part of the design process, also ask, what is in the design and nature of the line role that would make someone say “no thanks” to doing it? Maybe it takes more design work to enable flexible work arrangements and normalise uptake across levels and genders. Let us not forget the extraordinary pivoting that has taken place all over the world in 2020-2021 from perspectives that were once held as sacred cows. Once held views sounded like, ‘they must have x and y to do this senior leadership role, or they must be based in X location to do this role’. Many of those pre held convictions have been proven to no longer be true.
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Susan Metcalf is the CEO of CEW, Chief Executive Women, a member organisation representing more than 800 of Australia’s most senior women leaders. CEW works to remove barriers to women’s progression and create equal opportunity for everyone.
In this episode we discuss:
and a whole lot more.
Inspired by a conversation with Susan Metcalf, CEO of Chief Executive Women
and a whole lot more,
Leaders, particular executive-level leaders, rise and fall on their ability to have good judgement, whatever that is! Yet, most leaders never learn how to develop this situational level skill.
I am joined by Meahan Callaghan, CHRO for RedBubble. She is one of the most experienced CHRO/ HRD’s (Chief People Officer) in the technology sector globally having led the people function in three different technology unicorns.
We discuss:
and a whole lot more…!
What I learned from talking with Meahan Callaghan
“Good judgement is a bit like personal values, you don’t know what is missing until it is not there. The quality of any of our leader’s judgement is only recognised when the consequences manifest. And if the decision is deemed to have been a poor one, the leader’s judgement capability Is absolutely questioned!”
So said one CEO to me recently when we were discussing how can leaders develop their ability to make good decisions. I dare say we have all committed, observed, or been affected by poor judgement. Depending on the scenario this can land on the spectrum from relatively inconsequential to disastrous for the individual and their career, their team, and the organisation. Often the energy, effort, and cost (for all parties) needed to deal with the consequences (intended or otherwise) from poor judgement is significant.
Judgment is about making good decisions.
Real decision-making is rapid, biased, and subconscious. And we rationalize our decisions after the fact. Having good judgment mostly concerns fixing (or not repeating) bad decisions. Judgement emerges as a property of a leader’s information processing style, decision-making approach, decision-making style, personal reaction and openness to feedback and coaching.
R. Hogan, Leadership assessment author
and psychologist
While it is easy to be wise in hindsight, much can be done to increase the capability for good judgement. I explored this topic in a recent Leadership Diet podcast (link), with Meahan Callaghan, one of the most experienced tech sector CHROs in the Asia Pacific region.
Meahan believes that as executives progress in their careers, the development need is less about general skills and more about judgment especially where there are decisions to be made under pressure and where there are competing interests. Specifically in relation to employees she advocates that faster quality decisions are made by leaders on their own, the more credit that will gained from followers.
So how can people learn good judgment and have good cognitive ability in this space?
Before we jump into what can leaders do to develop the capability of good judgement, it is useful to cover off some common pitfalls that leaders fall into, leading to poor decision making or excising poor judgement.
The starting question always is, “What does good judgment look like here?”
Meahan Callaghan
“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils.
The thing is to supply light and not heat.”
Woodrow Wilson
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Akimbo, the infamous online education school set up by Seth Godin, teaches many courses, including one on podcasting. Every year hundreds of aspiring podcasters from around the globe partake in a variety of ideas designed to offer the best podcasts for their ideal listeners. One of the outputs of the program is, of course, a podcast, called…The Pod Buffet!
Guests are chosen from the graduates of the program and are by invite only. The Pod Buffet is an eclectic mix of new podcasts from fresh new podcasters around the world.
Our own Pod was invited to partake in October 2021 (Yes we appreciate all the various puns here…!)
Listen to the 8-minute interview below
Design is the key to leadership team effectiveness, speed and agility. What I learned from talking with Ruth Wageman.
“Can you come and chat? I’ve got some great people on my team, but it feels like I am alone in pushing a boulder up a hill. They don’t seem as committed as me or are only focused on their function – not the whole business. And this is the most senior leadership team! Can you help to sort us out”?
This was the content of a recent call with the Managing Director of a subsidiary of a large global organisation. She is charged with overseeing $3bn of revenue in the 5th largest market in the world for their global organisation. This is not small fry.
Yet her frustration is not unique. In fact, it is quite common for leadership team leaders and indeed members to be frustrated at how their team works together (or as may be the case, does not)
One helpful assumption to hold when thinking about leadership teams and leaders within those teams is that most leaders want to do a good job. Yet when we dig into what lies behind the classic call from a Managing Director as outlined earlier, many leaders are confused as to what is really being asked of them in their individual roles and functional responsibilities when coupled with their role as a leadership team member.
The functional leadership roles (Director of Marketing, or Director of Supply Chain etc.) are typically challenging roles with all kinds of performance metrics attached. Feedback from many leaders is that what happens in the leadership team meeting is not leadership work. Mostly what they’re doing when the collective leadership team comes together is reporting and exchanging information about what’s going on in the different parts of the business.
I was discussed this in a recent Leadership Diet podcast episode with Ruth Wageman. Ruth is a renowned expert in all things team, team formation and setting up leadership teams for success. She has been a Professor at Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard universities in the USA. She co-wrote the widely acclaimed book, “Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make them Great” and is the co-creator of the “6 Conditions” team assessment.
Ruth noted when leadership team meetings become a mere information exchange, “the leaders are distracted and thinking about the problems that they could be solving back in their day (functional leadership) jobs. The invitation to be enterprise level leaders has never been clearly called out, which leads to an assumption that as a leader I’m here because I’m supposed to fight for my part of the enterprise”.
Ultimately the time spent in meetings for many leadership team members become boring at best and completely ineffective at worst. If that is the case how does a leader think about structuring the leadership team, so it becomes effective and leadership team meetings become a valuable use of time?
In the episode we discussed what she calls 3 essentials that are part of the fundamental building blocks for launching teams towards effectiveness.
The 3 essentials are:
According to Ruth, the first mistake leader of leadership teams make is not thinking through the make-up of the team itself. Her experience and international research suggest that many leadership teams are made up of all the direct reports of the most senior leader, be it the Managing Director or CEO. Hence many teams end up with large numbers of 12-18 members. This is not a leadership team! This is merely a reflection of the organisational structure.
First and foremost, if a leader is intent on leading a collaborative, enterprise wide thinking and effective leadership team, they need to start with building a real team with clarity on who is and who isn’t a member. This is what Ruth refers to as a bounded team.
A real team is:
The second problem is that many leadership teams have not paused to clarify the team’s actual purpose.
Ruth suggests the core questions the team leader needs to be able to answer with their team, include:
She adds, “a really compelling purpose is clear about what our contribution is. It’s challenging. So, it’s going to be a real stretch of our capabilities, just like our individual leadership roles. There is a consequence for us doing or not doing this”.
My experience in facilitating many such conversations is that when done well, functionally orientated leaders realise there is a significant contribution they are being asked to and can make as leadership team members. It’s a very powerful intervention. Once there is real leadership work on the table, it calls upon all of them to remove their functional leadership hat and come to conversation as an enterprise leader. But for many leadership teams, the invitation has never been clearly given.
I often get misquoted as saying that trust and relationships aren’t important. But I do think trust and relationships matter. I just think that they’re an outcome of good team design. Building trust is not the point of intervention.
Dr. Ruth Wageman
When a CEO or Managing Director has an organisational chart with 12-18 direct reports either because of historical reasons, matrix structures or indeed, the motivation to review the leadership team structure has never been loud enough, leaders struggle to articulate a compelling purpose for a team that large. Large teams (of up to 18 members) find it difficult to work interdependently on core business needs.
Ruth suggests better questions to ask of such a team, are:
With these questions what emerges is a realization that one size does not fit all and having more than one leadership team addresses many core complaints. An example is demonstrated below.
Leadership team | Core focus | Interdependency |
|---|---|---|
Wider Alignment leadership team, often called the Management Team | Has all members, which may be a large number.
Convene for the purpose of companywide alignment on key strategies including organisation culture, information sharing, corporate messaging and/or broad consultation.
| Information is shared at Functional level and at other leadership team levels |
Operational leadership team(s) | Members are those with direct oversight of key commercial or operational parts of the organisation.
There may be a manufacturing or commercial orientated leadership team(s), as example.
Convene to steward BAU leadership, oversee key pre agreed metrics and raise red flags as appropriate.
| Feeds urgent issues into the Strategic or Executive Leadership team and updates the Wider Alignment team in BAU updates |
Strategic or ‘Core/ Executive’ leadership team | Usually led by the CEO/ Managing Director, is a small team made up of the roles with key strategic impact, including CFO and commercial leaders.
Convene for oversight of multiple business horizons, rapidly address urgent issues and redeploy resources as needed.
| Usually led by the CEO/ Managing Director, is a small team made up of the roles with key strategic impact, including CFO and commercial leaders.
Convene for oversight of multiple business horizons, rapidly address urgent issues and redeploy resources as needed.
|
Each team needs to address the 3 essentials as outlined earlier i.e., the structure to make it a real team, purpose of the team, membership. When this is done well, Ruth says each team will have a clear purpose statement and direction, purposefully designed meetings agendas and clarity on the interdependency between that team and the other subsets of the leadership team.
My experience in sharing ideas like this with many leadership teams over the years is the notion of leadership team subsets makes logical sense to everyone. However, the realization that my role does not need me to be in the core or Executive leadership team, is often confronting for many leaders. This takes a mindset shift. Indeed, restricting a large leadership team into a series of smaller teams, takes a few different mindsets.
The first mindset set shift is for the CEO or Managing Director. According to Ruth, for the most senior leader to say, “Oh wait a minute, all my direct reports are not my team. In fact, I might have more than one team and I really need to ask some key strategic questions!” can be very freeing as a mindset shift. This mindset shift gives them permission to think about different configurations of people for different purposes.
A useful approach for the leader is to share with the team that they want to get more efficient in how the team works together, in how they share information and, most importantly, do real work together. In doing so the leader intends to launch several smaller teams to address specific areas.
“Everybody wants to be on the leadership team, but no one wants to go to all the meetings, because so much information that’s being shared is not relevant to anybody who, you know, to 50%, at least of the people sitting around the table at any given moment!”
Dr Ruth Wageman
The second mindset shift is for new members of leadership teams, particularly if this is their first time on a leadership team. Their expectation is they will be involved in all decisions at the leadership team level. They quickly realise this is not the case and often are relieved when this is shown to be untrue. The allure of going to many leadership team meetings, many of them deemed to be a waste of time, diminishes fast.
At a point when the team has got some success under its belt, it’s much easier to authorize subsets of the team members when they’ve come to recognize why those talented and smart people are best suited to tackle a specific area of leadership team responsibility and report back.
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