Steven P. MacGregor's Blog, page 8

Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast episode 10: The Neo-Generalist with Kenneth Mikklesen

Here Steven talks to Kenneth Mikkelsen, author of The Neo-Generalist with Richard Martin, a 2016 book that challenges head-on society's fascination with hyper-specialism and labelling. Neo-Generalists, according to Kenneth "live in more than one world" with the conversation covering mental agility, life-wide learning, the education system, the discomfort of being a Neo-Generalist, and how they may play an ever more important role in the future of work.

Ebb and Flow

I spent some time with Oracle a few weeks ago, during the kick-off to their new financial year. 150 senior leaders from across EMEA came together under their branded ‘Sunrise’ event to hit the refresh button and ensure a good start to FY2019.

I’ve previously talked of the pressures during the 4th quarter in the company and the two day event was a reward for a good job done as well as a look ahead. I began to reflect that not all companies have such a dynamic, allowing a pause, however brief, before resuming the race. Not to say that the speed necessarily decreases in Oracle at any point in the year, and perhaps it should, but the mental framing of moving forward with a fresh pursuit of growth certainly does.

Many may experience the days, weeks, months, and years of their working lives to pass in a seldom changing drudgery of being ‘always on’ with ever tightening patterns of behaviour and unchanging habits. As in sport, I believe there should be a more clearly defined cycle or ebb and flow to work, helping on both the mental and physical levels. Chief among such a reflection has to be recovery.

Olympic athletes will work to a defined 4-year cycle of progress and other sports will have an annual downtime or off-season allowing the athletes to recover and perhaps work on their weaknesses. One of the mainstream sports not to adhere to this dynamic is Tennis, famously known for a grueling 12 month schedule which has resulted in serious injuries to the top 4 players of the past decade –Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray in recent years.

So what is your own principal cycle time? Perhaps the business quarter holds sway like the Oracle executives, or tourism and weather dictates an intense summer period. Others in a more technical environment may follow established shift patterns. Whatever it is, the requisite recovery mechanisms need to be considered. The pursuit of progress may also be aided by considering another key principle in athletic training, that of periodization – a three-phase approach where training load is built progressively over a period of time before maintaining that load and then allowing the body to recover. My own athletics experience over the years would typically involve periods of 6 weeks. In the age of lifelong learning considering periodization may also offer clues as to how we absorb and consolidate new things.

Daily cycles are also of interest here. We have worked for several years in the area of circadian rhythm science (discussed in more detail in chapter 8 of my new book) and some of our daily patterns are surprising:

1. We are taller in the morning than in the evening (up to 2cm). Over the course of a day our cartilage compresses, mostly within our spinal column, as a result of our physical actions. Sleep allows everything to relax and fully decompress.

2. We are physically stronger later in the day. Most athletics world records are broken in the afternoon or evening, when body temperature is highest, blood pressure is lowest, and lung function is more efficient.

3. Our core temperature varies during the day, dipping towards bedtime. Taking a hot shower or bath before bed can aid sleep, and researchers believe that the natural dip in temperature when we get out provides an additional signal to the brain that it is time to go to sleep. Our lowest temperature occurs around 5am – does pulling the covers over in those pre-dawn hours sound familiar?

The above examples may not be the most critical in a business context but energy, alertness and decision-making certainly are – and are also at the mercy of our circadian rhythm.

Many may be aware of the main energy fluctuations during a day; the siesta or nap zone in the mid-afternoon is now taken seriously at some leading companies who have installed nap-pods and rooms. The need to nap is not actually due to a large lunch (although it certainly can be compounded by one), but due to the fact that 3pm and 3am are the lowest energy points of our day.

Being aware of our higher energy states is just as important. How do you spend the pockets of time between 10am and midday, and 4pm and 6pm when we are at our most alert? Most business cultures and individual habits result in email and heavy administrative work taking up the first peak period and a home commute taking up the second. Try recording your own ‘energy audit’ over the course of a week. When do you feel most alert and when do you have your best ideas? Are you making the most of that time?

On average, people are worse at processing new information, planning, and resisting distractions as the day progresses. Decision fatigue theory points to the lower quality of our decisions as the day advances, with good decisions also dependent on mealtimes and eating the right food. Ethics are also at the mercy of our biology. When energy is low, people are more likely to behave unethically with others, having a greater tendency to lie in the afternoon than in the evening. Researchers call this ‘psychological depletion’, reflecting our experience of being cognitively weaker as the day wears on.

We have long held a machine-based view of work, a remnant of the first industrial revolution, but in the fourth industrial revolution, for humans to truly thrive we need to consider more closely our natural rhythms. Starting with the mental framing of ‘pause-appreciate-look ahead’ that was evident at the Oracle Sunrise event is a good start. The Lego CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, said: “Every year we throw out the trophies and start again.” How may you bring a more rhythmic approach to your working life?

Read the introduction to Chief Wellbeing Officer

While we're waiting on Amazon to manage stock effectively you can read the full introduction to the new book here.

The 1 Billion Click Man: An interview with the BBC's Neil McIntosh

In episode 9 of the Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast we talk to Neil McIntosh, a pioneering journalist and the managing editor of BBC online. Responsible for the BBC homepage which has 8 million visitors per week and 1 billion clicks per year we talk to Neil about news and journalism today including the dangers of fake news, our online habits, and where health and wellbeing fits in a 24-hour a day industry.

How did IESE get to number 1?

Episode 8 of the Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast is the Executive Education special.

In the introduction Rory and Steven reflect on how IESE Business School got to number 1 in the world, according to the Financial Times rankings. Rory helped set up the international executive education division 20 years ago as its first director and Steven has taught on 106 executive education programs since 2009.

We then talk to Nathalie Labourdette and Frederic Frantz of the Eurovision Broadcasting Union (EBU) Academy during their recent executive program at IESE. We discuss public service broadcasting in Europe, the need to equip journalists with a new set of tools to deal with disruption, and some of the results of the Sustaining Executive Performance element of the program.

Learning to Live

With the Chief Wellbeing Officer book released this week, we include an excerpt from Chapter 7 on how to achieve lifelong learning. Being surrounded by increasing rates of change together with our longer life journeys, learning is a hot topic of late, and one we consider of paramount importance for health and wellbeing.

They said he was an idiot. They said his sketches were infantile and that it looked like a child had done them. They were right! He did paint like a child as an adult, but more interestingly he had painted like a master when he was a mere child. Pablo Picasso was a genius. He was born in Malaga in the south of Spain in 1881 and his family moved to Barcelona when he was five, where he stayed for the next 20 years, before he left for France. He said of Barcelona “There is where it all began… where I understood how far I could go.”

This chapter is about learning to survive, and thrive, in a sea of change. By better understanding the great waves of change, we can learn to be masters of disruption, rather than victims. This is true on an individual and organizational level, and we will show how the Chief Wellbeing Officer can ask the right questions to help both the person and company navigate safely and successfully.

The very essence of wellbeing is finding, and acting according to, your authentic self. It is easy to lose sight of our authenticity due to a variety of factors, life experiences, bad habits, poor choices, and the environment in which we spend most of our time. We may even achieve a great deal of success acting inauthentically, though if that success does last, it is unlikely to be fulfilling. Exposing ourselves to outside points of view and influences is healthy, as is learning from others and getting new ideas, but we must always stay true to who we are. As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself, everybody else is already taken.” This quest for authenticity builds on our discussion in chapter three on defining purpose, values, and vision, and we will enrich that quest through different means in this chapter, including a call to adopt a more childlike mindset.

Disruption is the natural order of life – where change, death, and rebirth are ever-present. By better understanding the main rhythms and their transitions, we may take advantage on both a personal and business level. Our belief, akin to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma for companies is that all people, no matter how successful, must at some point leave behind the old way of doing things and make the switch to a new path.

Reinvention is becoming a child again, curious to learn and adopt a beginner’s mindset that is characterized by curiosity, exploration, and discovery. We all know how to make friends without starting with assumptions and judgments. We did that in the school playground. We all know how to openly express ourselves without fear of humiliation. Young children do that all the time. Yet over time our innate, authentic, and unique characteristics are eroded and moulded into a standardisation of what society or our family or company wants us to look like. During this process we lose the invaluable and naive ability to create, innovate, and be our authentic selves. Picasso said: “Every child is an artist… and then they grow up.”

The childlike characteristics so often stolen from us as we grow, mature, and learn to socialize are exactly what so many companies are now asking for in their people: the ability to think out of the box, to think for themselves and innovate. Children are predisposed to authenticity and optimism. These are probably the two most important leadership characteristics that companies are crying out for, yet we humiliate our employees for displaying them.

It was said recently that “companies are abattoirs of the human soul”. Companies step into our lives, just after we have been through years of training and conditioning by schools, and they keep on transforming us into the best version for them, again eroding our personal characteristics. At the same time they increasingly ask for creativity and passion. Yet wellbeing and the creativity, passion, and performance that comes from it, thrives when we reconnect with our authentic selves. This is what Chief Wellbeing Officer is here for, and there are signs that organizations are beginning to change. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked in 2017 of his admiration for the book MindSet by Stanford professor Carol Dweck:

“I was reading it not in the context of business or work culture, but in the context of my children’s education. The author describes the simple metaphor of kids at school. One of them is a ‘know-it-all’ and other is a ‘learn-it-all’, and the learn-it-all always will do better than the other one, even if the know-it-all kid starts with much more innate capability. Going back to business: if that applies to boys and girls at school, I think it also applies to CEOs, like me, and entire organizations, like Microsoft. We want to be not a know-it-all but learn-it-all organization.”

Such a learn-it-all approach is often held up as good practice in parenting, where the focus should not be on giving the answer to questions that children may have, but taking an approach of “let’s find out together”, in order to awaken interest in the process of discovery. The process and thirst for the answer is actually more important than the answer itself. Such a skill will be even more important for the complex problems of the future where there may not be a single answer. The way of thinking is more important, which can be deployed today to question why things exist in the organization, not simply because that’s “the way it has always been done”.

Learning to live has two distinct meanings. First, in a longer life and career we must better navigate the waves of change and so we better learn how life unfolds. Second, on the role of learning in order to live. Learning is a never-ending process. Picasso also said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” It seems he was a learn-it-all, too.

Inner agility for health and wellbeing

Does this count as a separate blog post? The 20th straight month of MacGregor on Executive Health with The European Business Review, so we think it does ;)

We look at agile ways of working this month, including an excerpt from episode 7 of the Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast with global expert in agile methodology Jeff Gothelf.

Organizational agility is a hot topic. Many leading corporations around the world are looking at how to improve their customer responsiveness and transform for the digital age. Meanwhile, smaller companies with grand ambitions are looking at how they can scale effectively so that being bigger doesn’t automatically mean being slower. Yet the melting pot of tools, processes and methods from the fields of design thinking, lean and agile, also have massive potential at the individual level, and health and wellbeing specifically can benefit.

There is a recognition that simply copying the tools, methods and processes of Agile is insufficient and that culture and mindset need to be considered closely. Leadership is key, with a different approach to leading others, driven by humility and curiosity, necessary in the future of work. Thought leaders including McKinsey and IMD Business School have published work in the areas of inner agility and agile leadership behaviours which shows this new approach.

I think that much of the drudgery of work today can be linked to an anti-agile mindset: layers of administration and bureaucracy, slow decision making, lack of empowerment and autonomy, to name but a few. So in addition to doing or making better work through Agile we can also make work itself better.

All of these concepts came to the fore on a new pilot program last week for Telefónica, at the end of which I interviewed Jeff. A key part of the discussion on the experience of work is included below while you can listen to the full interview in the link that follows.

[SM] Let’s look at the why of Agile working in a broader sense. I’m thinking here of ways of working, and work being such a big part of life. Actually one of the ideas I presented in the course this week was ways of living – so can you adopt the mindset of agile in the way you lead your life. Regarding notions of health and wellbeing, perhaps happiness, takes us to consider the experience of work. I’m starting to explore how some of this methodology or philosophy of Agile can contribute to making the experience of work a lot better. So looking beyond a high level of performance and competitiveness of our teams or being more responsive to customers through agile, what else does it give us? Is work going to be better because I’m doing things, I’m finishing things, learning at a much faster rate, talking to and working with people from different disciplines. To me that just seems more attractive. So in terms of health and well-being and in the many years that you’ve been spreading the message of Agile transformation what do you see? Do you see potential for ways of working and ways of living into the future?

[JG] Yes absolutely. I spent the first ten years of my career following orders. Doing the thing that I was told to do. Creating the deliverable I was told to create. On a good day half of what I did made it into a product. On a bad day around two-thirds to three-quarters of what I did never made it into a product that a customer used or saw. Now you could argue that I was bad at my job right! But joking aside that was par for the course for the people that I worked with. And ten years into my career I really took a hard look at that and thought if this is the next 10 years of my career I’m done. I’m moving out of tech. I’m going to do something else. And really that’s when the conversation for me started to shift towards different ways of working. And so since then having been heavily involved in figuring out how to implement agility, customer centricity, design thinking, and a lean mindset into the way that I did my job, initially as a designer and then as a team leader and then as an entrepreneur I can confidently say that it changed my perception of work and my well-being and happiness at work.

From the first half of my career and those first 10 years I don’t think there’s anything I would proudly put my name on. I remember the projects as slogs, just about getting the work done. Looking back now over the second 10 years I’m really proud of what we’ve done –regardless of the success or failure of the work itself. There are stories after stories after stories that I’m proud to tell about the work that we did. It ends up being about the ways of working, the passion that the teams have, their motivation and energy. The excitement that becomes contagious in the workplace. This stems from fundamentally changing what we were asked to do. It’s a really simple concept. Like a lot of these things are but the implications are massive. And they’re not easy to implement. Fundamentally the shift for me as I started at that 10-year pivot point was instead of being told what to make or what to build or what to design, I was told which problems to solve. And that fundamentally shifts the kind of work that you do and the way that you work.

All of a sudden I’m not working on the idea that you told me to build, for which I’ll do a fine job and I’ll implement it to the best of my ability. Rather I am figuring out based on my ideas and my collaboration with my colleagues what the best answer to this problem might be. And then we are building our idea, which is far more motivational, far more inspiring, and far more interesting work to do. You’re simply happier. I first saw this several years ago. We were piloting for this way of working and other teams would look to us and say: Why are you guys smiling at work? Why is there all this activity and engagement? Why are your engineers coming in early to pull analytics reports and posting them to the walls around the office? We can’t get our teams to show up at the office before 10:00! That to me is indication that this fundamentally changes your happiness at work because it gives us more purpose. You’re not a drone. You are solving real problems and that’s the nature of knowledge work in the 21st century.

[SM] Absolutely. And it means that we keep learning. The old model that we go to school, University and then the world of work where we don’t really leverage learning is loosening. Lifelong and continuous learning is key. We also need to move beyond the dynamic you mentioned of just slogging or grinding through work. I think we now have more of that human experience, at least potentially, at work. You mentioned purpose and even just connecting with other people makes such a difference. It’s interesting also to reflect on the outputs of our work. Are we proud of what we do? and sometimes even if it’s not the task work or output, we can be proud of the experience we’ve had with others and the teamwork. Collaboration and sharing with our colleagues is part of the agile journey which really can help health and wellbeing.

Talking agile ways of working with Jeff Gothelf

Reflecting on the pilot of a new Agile Ways of Working program for Telefónica we speak to Jeff Gothelf, a global expert in the areas of lean and agile, about why agile is so important for the world of work today, covering benefits for health and wellbeing as well as his own de-risking strategy in moving his family from New Jersey to Barcelona.

Produced by Alejandro Yllarramendy.

Santander Partners with The Leadership Academy of Barcelona [LAB] to Promote Health and Wellbeing to More Than 200,000 employees

Barcelona, Monday, April 16, 2018. Santander Bank has chosen The Leadership Academy of Barcelona [LAB], to support “BeHealthy”, an employee health and well-being initiative which will be accessible to Santander’s entire workforce of more than 200,000 employees based in Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

Targeting employees in offices in major cities in Brazil, Poland, the U.S., the U.K, Spain and elsewhere, Santander’s “BeHealthy” will make use of all the resources included in the LAB’s Sustaining Executive Performance (SEP) programme. Santander’s “BeHealthy” initiative was presented with the LAB’s new materials last week during the bank’s annual “BeHealthy Week”, which raises awareness of the importance of health and wellbeing among its employees.  

SEP will help form the basis of Santander’s bid to become one of the world’s healthiest companies.

Developed by the LAB in 2010, SEP is a comprehensive programme geared to promoting healthier habits in the workplace and beyond, which in turn drives sustainable performance and value, both professionally and personally. Drawing on a confluence of ancient wisdom, including Greek and Chinese philosophy, innovative business cases and emerging research, SEP demonstrates how the often forgotten premise of mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body) can be an actionable business strategy for the 21st century professional. Originally conceived for executives, it has since been applied to everyone in the workplace, irrespective of job title, and recognising the great pressures we all have these todays to manage work and life.

The deal will see Santander deploy and customize all of the SEP content across its offices. This content includes an online course of more than 30 videos, practical exercises for employees and readings. In addition, there is a customised eBook published by Pearson and nudge posters will be deployed around offices to help sustain behavioural change in the workplace.

Santander committed to becoming the healthiest company in the world

The bank’s “BeHealthy” programme to drive a healthy, balanced and structured approach in the workplace is backed by Global HR Director, Roberto di Bernardini. This month sees the Santander annual “BeHealthy Week” aimed at raising awareness among employees. The Sustainable Executive Performance Programme will, he says, have a key role to play in igniting this initiative and bringing it to life across the bank’s workforce in all of its geographies.

"We're passionate about making Santander one of the healthiest companies in the world, with BeHealthy a key part of our company mission to help people and business prosper. We needed high quality material that had a track record of impact and we are delighted to work with the Leadership Academy of Barcelona on customising their transformative Sustaining Executive Performance program, which all 202,000 employees will have access to off and online."

Dr. Steven MacGregor, CEO of the Leadership Academy Barcelona said: “This agreement marks a highly significant commitment from Santander to driving the well-being of its workforce. The scale of the initiative is a first for us also. The online nature of the programme delivery means that we are able to extend reach and impact exponentially.”

"We've been lucky enough to deliver Sustaining Executive Performance to over 20,000 people face-to-face the past seven years, which has allowed us to develop a rich material base and understand what works in changing peoples’ behaviour and improving their health and happiness at work. Customising the existing material with a client who are committed to health at work has been a true privilege, and the exposure to such a very large number of people is very exciting," he adds.

About The LAB
The Leadership Academy of Barcelona [LAB] was founded in 2007 with the mission of Designing Sustainable Leadership. We help to bring a more human approach to work that improves health, happiness and lifelong learning to create positive cultures and drive business success. Recent clients include McKinsey, Salesforce and Uber. Sustaining Executive Performance was published as a book by Financial Times Press in 2015 and Dr. MacGregor’s follow-up, Chief Wellbeing Officer, is out this month with LID publishing, and is endorsed by Arianna Huffington and other leading figures from business and academia.

Leading by example

I’ve been lucky to have had some great conversations this past week without travelling too far from home. Two days spent with Salesforce in Rome was followed by a day in London with O2. As ever I learned a lot from engaging with a highly diverse set of good people.

What really got me thinking was some opening comments from Chris Ciauri, Executive Vice President of Salesforce EMEA at the Rome event. He said that if you are the most senior person in the room, people look at you six times more. We’re not always aware of that I think, so what is the example you may be setting to your team through your behaviour and actions?

We’ve talked previously in the column that the vast majority of our habits and behaviours are subconscious, which adds to the challenge. Indeed, we may first identify a certain behaviour in another person who is simply reflecting what they have seen from you: think about your home environment and where your spouse or children may pick up certain traits.

We’ve also commented on the aggregate of these habits and behaviours giving us culture, what PwC have termed “the critical few.” And culture has been a big area of focus at Salesforce since the very beginning, viewing it as a key element of their growth strategy. Ohana is the term used, which is a Hawaiian word meaning family. This reflects how their culture and values extend to their employees, customers, partners and communities, how they are bound together and have a mutual goal and responsibility.  For Salesforce, who are a company experiencing rapid growth, it is a reminder that sustainable success can only be achieved through collaboration and thinking of others, features that are perhaps more at risk in a sales environment. The following proverb may be appropriate here: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

None of this is easy. There is no quick fix. The acceleration to work-life integration (in a nutshell, employees have more flexibility in their workday, being able to leave at 4pm to watch their children’s school play, but can expect work demands to come out of the normal work hours also) needs to be managed with care.  For example, we may take advantage of the weekend to catch up on some e-mails because that fits our own personal context. You may have the best of intentions and be taking advantage of a pocket of space in your busy professional and family life, yet that innocent email arriving on a Saturday morning may ruin the weekend for a junior member of the team, or create a cascade of emails over the course of the weekend which prevents people from being fully present at home as well as compromising their recovery before going again on Monday morning.

Taking advantage of those pockets of space is one of the great benefits of modern-day technology, so it could simply be the case of clearly communicating to the team that unless marked ‘urgent’ no response is needed until Monday at the earliest, as noted by Chris Ciauri. And yes, I know what you’re thinking now, but if everything is urgent, nothing is!

The concept of work-life integration has been deservedly criticised after the usual rush to heralding the latest panacea for our complex times. Ruth Whippman on The Pool blog offered a refreshing, cynical view last year:

“Somehow, all the ‘integrating’ only ever seems to flow in one direction… taking time off in the middle of the workday for a kid’s concert or a haircut never quite materializes. Instead, we answer emails crouching behind a bush, playing hide and seek with a four-year-old.”

So care is needed so that work-life integration don’t simply mean more work and less balance. With this care it can offer significant potential value. For example, exercising in the middle of the working day will offer a significant boost to productivity and energy. Re-connecting with loved ones during a stressful period or midday slump will help address anxiety and fatigue. As long as the principal working objectives are being advanced and met, there should be more flexibility in the typical 9-5 block traditionally reserved for work and little else.

Leadership styles need to adjust, with empathy being a prime requirement. At the end of the day, work is still work. Employees must maintain professionalism and understand their responsibilities, yet the employer has to take their duty of care seriously. And this duty of care must encompass the whole picture, including home and family life, as well as notions of health and wellbeing. Such liberal paternalism allows diagnosis and preventative action before full-blown crises occur, including the best talent walking out the door.

Taking a more holistic view of management to pay attention to the small signals coming from the teams we lead can include more notions of personal care. As a leader, are you paying attention to the signals from your team and able to hold an empathetic conversation? Important signals could include excessive weekend email communication, skipping lunch at one’s desk, or a continual disregard of the importance of sleep.

Listening skills are an important part of an empathetic conversation. Start with a commitment to talk less! More talking and less listening tends to happen with more seniority. If the balance isn’t maintained there is little value in that conversation other than instructing or lecturing. Adopting a coaching mindset can therefore be of value, which includes active listening without judging or offering solutions.

An egotistical form of leadership has taken hold in recent years with many forgetting the simple fact that leadership is about others. “Be the change you wish to see” may be an overused phrase but if you want to drive change in your organisation, be it in the health and wellbeing domain or any other area, start with looking at the example you are setting through your own behaviour. It’s all well and good investing in sleep awareness training or re-designed offices with flexible spaces and better eating choices, but if all the senior people in the organization are skipping lunch at their desks and looking as if they haven’t slept in weeks, will the culture really change? We look to our leaders six times more, perhaps because we aspire to be them or simply need guidance, so what is the view you’re presenting to the world?