Andrew White: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Listen to different types of people — I know of one leader who spent 4 hours a week being taught by someone 20 years younger than them about digital technology.

As part of our series about the “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew White.

Dr Andrew White directs the Advanced Management and Leadership Programme at Oxford University’s Said Business School, is an accredited business coach and leads academic research on leadership and transformation.

In his position as Senior Fellow in Management Practice, his academic research focusses on transformational leadership. More specifically, what it means to lead successfully in today’s world, given the risks and opportunities that leaders face. This research is demonstrated in articles that he has written in publications such as Harvard Business Review, and via his podcast series and LinkedIn Newsletter, entitled Leadership2050.

As a business coach, he works with 80 global leaders every year, guiding them on how they can transcend the modern challenges of delivering sustainable high performance. His top accreditations include the qualification of Professional Executive Coach from the Association of Coaching. His private coaching company Transcend.Space has worked with senior executives at Unilever and Gulf International Bank.

He is also a certified meditation teacher and has developed a toolkit of meditations tailored to the different situations leaders face. Andrew lives in Oxfordshire with his wife, a palliative care doctor, and two adult daughters.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I never thought I would end up in academia at one of the top universities in the world. At school, I battled dyslexia and because there wasn’t the same awareness as there is now, it affected my grades. Luckily I had academic parents who tutored me through. It wasn’t until I got a laptop in my second year of university, which freed me from my own handwriting that I had a breakthrough and my grades went from Cs to As.

I had always been interested in leadership, innovation and change, so when I saw an advert for a scholarship to study a doctorate in this, I quickly applied. I had intended to go into management consultancy or venture capital when i graduated but there was a recession at the time, so I continued in academia. I moved onto Said Business School at the University of Oxford in 2006, where I focussed on the subject that fascinated me — the development of leaders and the intersection of research and practice.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

I was once hosting a group of senior leaders from the Middle East for a leadership development programme. We needed them to walk from one venue to another and despite checking the weather, there was a lot of unforecasted rain! I was very anxious about the whole event being a success and worried about them getting very wet. As I began to apologise — they started to laugh at me. ‘We love the rain’ they said, and it was at this point I realised they saw weather very differently from me. That is a lesson that when working with people, especially those from different cultures, make no assumptions and be aware of bias!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Many people have a particular person or mentor in their lives who instantly springs to mind when they’re asked that question. Often it’s a parent or a particularly good teacher or friend.

But it’s different for me and that’s because of the nature of my work, which is about successful leaders themselves. So rather than just having one shining example, I have many, some of whom are business titans. They include Unilever CEO Alan Jope, CEO and Founder of the Plastic Bank, David Katz and Founder and CEO of the Clean Air Fund Jane Burston. These are all speakers on my Leadership2050 podcast series.

Each and every successful business leader I talk to, I also learn from. It’s their success, their approach to life and the satisfaction they derive from what they do that educates me and drives me to find out even more about what I can do to make my own business grow.

I am grateful to each and every one of them for their knowledge and insight that drives me to find out more about what it means to be a 21st century leader.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

It’s true that the most successful businesses are created by — and grow fastest — by those who have a clear goal of not only what they wish to achieve but who provide a benefit to wider society.

Of course financial profit is a strong motivation. But when this is allied with the knowledge that what you’re doing also benefits society and the environment, your interest and motivation is enhanced further. As such, those who are motivated the most put in the greatest effort, which in turns leads to greater success. This is what I see the participants of the Oxford Advanced Management and Leadership Programme that I direct at the Said Business School, University of Oxford focus on.

It’s a virtuous circle and also forms the backbone of what I try to achieve for my clients and therefore, as a matter of course, for my own business.

My focus has always been to help business leaders operate more effectively and for a wider environmental and social purpose than solely financial reasons. That vision and goal hasn’t changed but what I have learned is that only those businesses who adapt to these new requirements placed upon them will survive, let alone thrive.

Knowing that what started out as a vision for my business has solidified into an absolute requirement for its survival, provides all the purpose my clients and I need!

In conclusion, the purpose for my company www.transcend.space is ‘to work with leaders to facilitate them to understand and transcend their individual and strategic edges’.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion. Can you share with our readers a story from your own experience about how you lead your team during uncertain or difficult times?

In every difficult or uncertain time I have experienced, or witnessed other leaders experience, relating with self and others has been at the core of getting through it.

This was particularly true when addressing the challenge of digital transformation. In my experience, this was moving into digital learning interventions that sit alongside face-to-face ones. I learnt a few things from this experience including; don’t make too many assumptions about what life will be like in the new world, recognise that the boundary of the organisation may need to shift (what you do internally as opposed to being outsourced), the need to give time for people to come to terms with any change that is being implemented, adjust policies and processes that may no longer be fit for the job and above all listen, listen and listen again to your own assumptions and the views of others.

Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the motivation to continue through your challenges? What sustains your drive?

I have never considered giving up but I have known some business titans thinking of giving up — something that not only surprised me, but that would shock most people.

This happens when a business has grown purely as a profit-making machine. The bosses have been focused solely on their balance sheet and keeping their investors on board. Then, having achieved that goal, they discover they don’t know how to adapt to the new reality of doing business — where society, the environment and policymakers are making new demands either by increasing regulation of media pressure to do something worthwhile.

All of a sudden these captains of industry find they’re out of their depth and the “business as usual” model that has sustained them to date, is not fit for the future. There is also an increasingly common phenomenon of leaders and whole populations of employees desiring purposeful work, which is greater than profit, shareholders and focus on something greater than themselves.

My job is to point them in the direction they want to go in and give them the tools to adapt to this new reality. My LinkedIn Newsletter Leadership2050 focuses on this

What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during challenging times?

We are only a little way into a new industrial revolution — where businesses have to benefit society and protect the environment as well as satisfy investors.

So the most critical role of a business leader is to both recognise this fact and know how to deal with it successfully.

Those who embrace these new challenges and inspire their colleagues and shareholders to do likewise — rather than merely cope with them — are destined to be the business champions of tomorrow.

At the heart of this process is asking difficult questions, not being afraid of uncomfortable answers and making radical decisions (before the decisions are forced on you). Some questions that I have found very helpful are: ‘what do you see always being discussed, but never resolved,’ and, ‘what are you not discussing that you need to talk about?’

This is why I set up Transcend.space my coaching business.

When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?

The aim is to get their team to embrace change rather than fear it.

This should, with the right attitude, be an inspiring and enjoyable process. After all, doing the same thing day in, day out, is anything but enjoyable or motivating.

Perhaps the most effective way of bringing colleagues on this journey is by giving them the knowledge and training they need to be ready for it and the knowledge to cope with regulatory change affecting their particular business sector. Employees will recognise the value of working for a business that does this and staff retention and satisfaction will be the tangible results.

How can a leader make plans when the future is so unpredictable?

It’s true that as pressure to protect the environment and society mounts, so too will the amount of legislation and regulation heaped upon businesses to make them comply.

The most effective method to deal with this is to be proactive rather than merely reactive to change. What every business leader knows is that demands upon them to reduce waste, carbon emissions and unacceptable business practises are in the pipeline. So why wait to tackle them until the last moment?

My role is to impress this reality upon them, help them be mentally prepared and recognise the huge advantages and profitability of being a leader rather than a follower in the years ahead.

Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make during difficult times? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?

The most common mistake, and one which happens depressingly often, is for the CEO to keep blinkers on and hope that whatever is producing the difficulty will simply go away. At the very least, this will be a learning opportunity wasted.

Allied to this, is when the rest of the senior management team fail to take the appropriate action — either because they lack the motivation or, more commonly, fear bringing the situation to the CEO’s attention.

Similarly, the board’s failure to either be aware or to raise the need for action with the executive team is another common theme.

There is a unifying thread to all of these: poor communication and the lack of timely action result in poor staff confidence and motivation.

Keeping senior managers informed, breaking down any silo mentality and reducing the negative aspects of hierarchy are all fundamental to overcoming difficult times and eventually profiting from the lessons they can provide.

Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?

No business can control the wider economic environment — either in good times or bad. But what it can and must do is to make itself as aware as possible to what the future might hold and what opportunities and dangers might emerge if those predictions materialise.

The best strategy is to develop a keen awareness of the direction of travel of the wider economy and to identify how consumer pressures and regulatory change might most affect your sector.

This will provide the window of opportunity to prepare for both opportunities and challenges. Those most prepared will be those that maintain the best performance in lean times as well as outperform their peers in better times.

Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to lead effectively during uncertain and turbulent times? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Listen to different types of people — I know of one leader who spent 4 hours a week being taught by someone 20 years younger than them about digital technology.
2. Find ‘points of leverage’ — bringing transformation to life can change the energy from anxiety to excitement. Planning the ‘emotion critical path’ can be a critical enabler of success. A ‘big bang’ approach to transformation can be very risky.
3. Transformation begins with the self not others — several leaders I know have invested considerable time in preparing themselves to lead a transformation before it takes place. At its core, this means going from knowing to not knowing.
4. Make bold ‘trajectory decisions’ — divesting and acquiring business is part of this. Also, deciding not to sell certain products because they don’t align with your purpose, as CVS Pharmacy, the US healthcare retailer, did with tobacco in 2014, can also be part of the solution.
5. Learn to live with uncertainty — the vision you have at the beginning of a transformational project may change — review the vision as you undertake the journey.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

‘When you lose touch with inner stillness you lose touch yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world’ — Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks. This is one of the most profound books I have ever read. The quote brings into focus the importance of meditation. Meditation is a practice that helps me stay calm, focused, make better decisions and generally live a more purposeful and happy life!

How can our readers further follow your work?

You can find out more about my work at https://transcend.space/ or follow me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-white-0928b2/

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!