Leadership in a digital world
Leaders need to make 3 things happen to be successful in their role:
- Get decisions made
- Develop cultures
- Help people grow
Whilst much has changed in our world, a lot hasn’t. This is how leaders can achieve these responsibilities in the organisations of today and the future:
Digital = communication
Digital is communication. The vast majority of advances in our society over the last 30 or so years, have been down to our ability to communicate faster and at a higher resolution than before.
The way we communicate is extremely important to us as a species. As Harari argues in his excellent book Sapiens, it is what sets us apart from other animals. It is probably what has allowed us to evolve into the most dominant species on the planet. However it is a very particular type of communication which has been so valuable.
Communication = evolution
Monkeys are able to communicate. They can objectively explain things to each other. An example of this would be ‘there is a snake over by that bush’ or ‘there is a bend in that river’ over there. Using this form of communication they can create social structures of up to 100 or so animals. However after this number, the social bonds start to break down. It is impossible for them to keep any more individuals co-ordinated using this type of communication.
What we are able to do is communicate abstract concepts, that are then just as real to us as snakes or bends in a river.
We are able to tell and believe stories.
Examples of the types of stories we tell ourselves are money, countries and laws.
These concepts govern almost our entire waking lives, yet they do not actually exist in the physical world. It is this ability that allows us to co-ordinate billions of people with shared understandings.
As this communication is so important to us, tools and technologies that allow us to do it better have always been highly prized. From music to burning beacons to telegrams to telephones and most recently the internet. These advances have often heralded significant changes in our society. We are in the process of living through the latest one of these.
Progress is predictable
If we look at the way these technologies have been adopted in the past, then we can see how new ones will be in the future.
It was with living memory, that telephones was brought into organisations. They started as a specialist tool which were outsourced and eventually made their way into being fully integrated onto everyone’s desks and now their pockets.
This is the same journey that digital tools are taking in many of our organisations. Hub and spoke models happened for telephones too, they were called secretaries.
The process is so familiar, that many have studied it and created models for predicting how tools will add value at different points in their life. Simon Wardley’s Maps are particularly interesting to see how businesses are made up of a combination of commoditised services and specialist expertise — http://medium.com/wardleymaps.
The history of the internet is ahead of us
What’s worth remembering, is that in the course of human history, the internet has only just been invented. We are still working out how to make best use of it — and are no doubt making mistakes as a result.
Our role as leaders is to work out the best way to use these new tools to derive value for the organisations in which we operate.
What people want is the same
Despite much change, the underlying needs of people have not changed. I am broadly worried about the same things that my dad and his father were at the same stage in my life. Consumer behaviours are similarly predictable.
The need for AirBnB and hotels is the same — I am in a place where I can’t afford, or it doesn’t make sense for me to buy property, but I don’t want to sleep outside.
Likewise Deliveroo and a 1930s neighbourhood cafe — I can’t or don’t want to cook food, but I don’t want to go hungry.
When designing products or services that meet these needs, we have to focus on the underlying value we are adding — rather than get distracted by the technology which might be involved.
Change = people
If we’re talking about creating value in a changing landscape, then we again need to focus on the people which make this happen.
It’s tempting to think of organisations as real things. As with the other imagined realities which rule our lives, this is not the case. The charities and companies that we work for, are collections of people working towards a specific goal.
As such, if we want to lead any kind of change, we need to think about people first.
People aren’t dicks
No matter what many think, no one comes to work trying to be difficult. That ‘stakeholder’ you think is being a blocker, probably just sees things differently to you.
They might be scared or they might have a different life experience to you — but more often than not we’re approaching the same problem from two different perspectives:
Next time you’re seeing somebody act like a dick, ask yourself what you’re doing which might make that happen. Think about how the change you’re looking to lead could come across to them. How could it affect their hopes, dreams and fears?
So what do leaders need to do for their teams to be successful?
1. Bring diverse groups of people together to solve problems
Collaboration is often talked about but rarely understood.
Lots of teams talk about involving other people rather than collaborating. They will say things like, “Come to our retrospectives and demos” whilst driving towards the solution they had in their heads at the start.
Others will say “here’s a list of requirements, any questions?” and be surprised when another team doesn’t feel like they’re being heard.
Genuine collaboration means getting to somewhere no one was aiming for at the start. It makes use of diverse perspectives and creates something new from them.
Mary Parker Follett, a management consultant in the 1930s described these situations as having three outcomes.
Domination — where one side gets what they want
Compromise — where no one gets want they want
Integration / Collaboration / the third way — a new way of doing things
“Integration involves invention, the finding of a the third way. Never let yourself be bullied by an either-or. Find a third way.”
Mary Parker-Follett, 1933
In order to find these novel solutions, we must use imagination. This is entirely dependent on a culture of trust. If we believe the people in our team will harm us, we’ll never suggest the innovative ideas or communicate our true point of view.
To grow this trust, you must start with understanding. This is where conversations that have no agenda are so important. By chatting with someone as they get to their desk or over a coffee on Skype, you get to know about them as a human being. You can appreciate their hopes, their dreams and what they got delivered from ASOS that day.
From here, you can empathise with their perspectives. This empathy, means imagining how someone else is feeling or what they’re thinking. This is different to sympathy, which is feeling that same emotion as them. I think empathy is a professional skill that is crucial to learn and practice if you want to collaborate effectively.
Once you can see a situation from someone else’s perspective, you can respect their point of view. From here, you can build a relationship based on trust — where even if you don’t agree with someone, you are confident they’re not going to harm you unfairly.
This feeling of trust is increasingly called a culture of psychological safety. This term was coined by Google — when looking at what made their most effective teams successful. Rather than the skills in the team, they discovered that it was far more important how the team worked together. In particular, those that were comfortable being vulnerable in front of each other, were more likely to:
- Admit mistakes
- Take on new roles and challenges
- Harness new, diverse ideas
- Challenge the status quo
Edgar Schein described culture as ‘What it’s ok to assume’. Leaders have to show people that this way of working is what’s expected by demonstrating it themselves, and rewarding it in others.
2. Make remote working work
If we want to increase the number of perspectives we can bring to bear on any problem, then we need to open up the pool of people that we work with. One of the ways we can do this, is to bring together who live in different places.
There are also real economic benefits for charities. Those that have made it work (such as the fabulous Emily Casson), have seen 10 fold increases in the number of people applying for roles. Whether junior or senior positions, this allows you to get more talent without having to increase the salaries you pay.
There are challenges with this way of working. One of the biggest is how to do real collaborative work when you’re not in the same place. It is possible, though — here are a few of the top tips I’ve heard for making it happen:
Remote for one, remote for all
- Running sessions where some people are remote and some aren’t amplifies a whole host of problems. Some have suggested that even if you’re in the office, and someone else is dialing in, then you should set up a Google Meet and all connect.
Use two Chairs for mixed meetings
- If you aren’t going to be able to get everyone remote, or everyone in a room, then get a chair for each group of people. Their responsibility is to flag what each group needs and make sure their voices are heard. [Thanks to Mandy Johnson for this suggestion from her time at change.org]
Make time for unstructured relationship building
- Going for a coffee with each other in the office in the most natural thing in the world. However we struggle to do it when working remotely. There are those that will have a coffee either side of a Skype call or even teams that dial in for Friday 4 o’ clock desk beers. At the very least, call your team members for a chat regularly. This type of personal, unstructured conversation is crucial to building strong bonds on which you can base a trusting relationship.
3. Avoid icebergs by talking to people
It’s a popular theory that Executives only see 4% of the problems in their organisation. Conversely this means that they must only see 4% of the opportunities available to them.
The idea is that staff ‘on the ground’ see all of these problems and solutions.
I would suggest that this is the case in poorly run organisations. Those effective leaders that I have worked with, spend time ensuring that it is not the case.
Good leaders work hard to build relationships with people across the whole organisation. It is their job to create empathy, respect and trust amongst all of their colleagues.
This means that people feel safe in bringing problems to their attention and telling them of opportunities they spot.
It is incumbent on the leader to set up this culture — they have to make the first move. But once they do, this way of working will flow through every level of their teams.
4. Get rid of HIPPOS
Too many people in the digital industry use the term HIPPOs — meaning Highest Paid Person’s Opinions. It is supposed to describe a situation when a more senior colleague comes into a session and directs decisions. This is usually to the detriment of the opinions of those in the room who are not as senior.
There are very real situations where this can be damaging and cause poor decisions to be made. However there are plenty when it’s just people complaining about not getting their own way.
If it were up to me it’d be banned — i’ve written more words about that here — https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/06/remember-hippos-humans/
However, in the meantime it’s down to leaders to make sure that they can’t be accused of it. As in the previous point, they need to help people understand their perspective. From here, no matter what level or salary bracket people can come to respect it.
This can’t be done in a single meeting or interaction — it must be a sustained campaign to build trust.
Many of the best leaders are seeing the opportunity of social media to help them with this. Clare Moriarty, the Permanent Secretary of the DExEU spoke about when running DEFRA she would use twitter as an internal communication device. For her, this gave her the opportunity to engage in conversations with her 20,000 staff members — most of whom she would never meet.
This type of approach raises everyone’s understanding of why a leader might come in and express an opinion, where it has come from and what to do with it.
5. Run people centred kick off sessions
At the start of almost every project, leaders will get the team together and discuss what’s going to happen next. They almost never spend any time facilitating a conversation about how the team is going to work together. They spend even less time helping them explore their own personalities so that can relate to one another.
As we’ve already seen from Google, the way that teams work is more important than the skills they have. These kick-off sessions should be the start of creating that psychologically safe environment for the duration of the project. The work will then take care of itself.
So here’s a structure that we’ve used to help with this:
9:30–9:45 Check-in
9:45–10:45 Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder etc analysis
11:00 –12:00 Retrospective
12:15–13:00 Network mapping & Decision making styles
LUNCH User Insights speed dating
You can see more about each of these steps and their benefits here:
https://medium.com/william-joseph/an-agenda-for-a-people-centred-kick-off-meeting-67955219fc6b
6. Help people slow down
According to some psychologists there are two types of thinking — abundant and pressurised.
You experience the first when you have things to do, but are less focussed on delivering against a specific deadline. This space allows you to explore routes you wouldn’t normally investigate and come to new conclusions.
When you’re operating under pressure you’re moving from task to task, without spending a lot of time thinking about each.
A leader’s role is to provide the context, environment and culture for people to be able to use both types of approaches. There are some situations where stuff just needs to get delivered. However if there isn’t a balance of both types of thinking, then work will suffer.
All leaders provide a variety of supports to those around them. Two of the roles that they perform are as a mentor and a coach. When mentoring, they are more likely to give direct advice or challenge to someone. In a coaching role, they are there to help someone come to their own conclusions.
Good leaders can play both roles — but are always super clear to people if they’re switching between the two. There’s nothing worse than someone pretending to coach you towards a particular solution they’ve already decided on.
Walking 1–2–1s are a great way to engage with your team. By getting out of the office, you’re much more likely to open them up to abundant thinking. It also reduces the amount of direct eye contact you’re having with each other which many find intimidating. It also gives you something to look at and discuss other than your work — again building understanding and eventually trust.
More about how to create effective feedback partnerships with your team — https://medium.com/william-joseph/feedback-partnerships-a-new-model-for-leaders-f35a199959d3
7. Build strategies that make things happen
Strategy is about making decisions. To be a genuine strategy, you have to decide on a route you’re going to take, which has viable alternatives. Being bigger and better isn’t a strategy in most cases — as what’s the alternative? Be smaller and worse? It’s not a route you could realistically take.
Strategies should help people focus their activities. It should answer questions they have, so they don’t have to every day.
Building narratives around your strategies allow you to communicate this to your teams. They should start with where you are now and then where you want to get to. From here you explain to people the risk of not taking this path and then the ideas which are going to allow you to make it happen.
This brilliant post from Martin Weigel goes into more detail — https://www.martinweigel.org/blog/2019/03/20/strategy-needs-good-words
However, you know it must be a strong model as it fits around most Disney movies:
As well as showing people where you want to get to, you also need to make it seem realistic to achieve your goal. Helen Butterfield, from Starlight simplifies it as “If it’s daunting, then people won’t do it”.
Your job as a leader is to bring people with you. With strategy, you have to break things down into small enough pieces for people to have agency around. This doesn’t mean telling people how to do their jobs. You need to give people the outcome they’re trying to achieve — and how it contributes to the bigger picture.
Breaking strategies into smaller pieces and then asking people to work together to achieve them should be the bedrock of any leadership role.
8. Help people learn
If you don’t develop people in your team, you’re in trouble. Their skills won’t improve causing you problems right away. Longer term they will get frustrated and leave — causing you bigger problems down the road.
As you would imagine, the medical profession has spent a lot of time studying how people learn skills. They see that most people start in a stage of “Unconscious Incompetence” — ie they don’t know what they don’t know. At this point people either react by saying “How hard can it be?” or ignoring the skill all together.
Doctors spend time developing Mastery of a skill — where they don’t have to think as they perform it. It is second nature:
Most training is designing to engage those at stage 1 or 2 of this journey. Materials are delivered to people and then they are left on their own. Practice is rarely encouraged and even less often reflected upon.
In order to help people progress to Mastery you need to:
- Reflect with peers — by sharing experiences with those in a similar position to you practical lessons are learned. You hear about the nuances of different attempts and the outcomes they created. For any skill programme, action learning groups must be set up if the change is going to stick and develop past stage 2.
- Learn by doing — the only way to develop most skills is to practice them. When it comes to professional skills this is often overlooked. Take the example of email broadcasts. Many teams deliver this training and then expect staff to be able to remember it when they come to send a campaign in 3 months time. Without the ability to practice in the meantime there is now way this knowledge can embed itself. You must be looking for opportunities to give people so they can practice any development areas.
- Train others — there is nothing better at consolidating your own understanding that explaining it to others. This situation forces you to rationalise all the competing ideas in your head and lay them out in a logical manner. It is also another opportunity to hear from others in similar situations to yourself and find out how they handle them.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this or your experience of leadership. Drop me a line on james@williamjoseph.co.uk if you’d like to discuss.
[I originally created this content for the IOF Yorkshire conference — it roughly follows these slides: https://speakerdeck.com/williamjoseph1/leadership-in-a-digital-world]
