Our society is now more polarized than for many years. Such is the overarching finding in the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer (find it here), reporting for the 23rd consecutive year on the state of trust across the world. Interestingly, Australians are less trusting of business, government, NGOs, and the media than they have ever been.
Overall trust has declined across the world and the report identifies the four main forces that are leading to an increased global polarization:
Reflecting on the data collected, the authors propose four actions that can alleviate this polarization:
To this end, it comes down to each of us as individuals and leaders to trust, be trustworthy, and promote optimism.
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have different priorities to those of the organisation - as discovered by McKinsey and Co and reported in their December 2022 online article (read it here). Overall though, there are a number of areas where CFOs are sharpening their focus for 2023. The top five risks they identified as key for the next twelve months are:
While these somewhat align with the priorities of the organisational leaderships, CFOs have indicated they will be spending less time on long-term goals like setting corporate strategy and large-scale transformation. Instead, their priorities ware more about “improving the management of financial risk, liquidity, and resource allocation.” These are areas that CFOs can affect directly and feel warrant their particular attention.
It is important for CFOs and the organisational leadership team to have the conversation about priorities to ensure everyone understands what the major priorities are and why, and to clear up an unwarranted misalignment.
The buck stops with you as leader, right? Well, yes. So, what do you do when things start going awry? Our tendancy is usually to jump in, take control and get things sorted. But an article in Kellogg Insight contends this approach “can lead to more problems than it fixes.”
How so? The article notes when leaders are getting their hands dirty fixing operational problems, “they’re not focused on strategy, and doing someone else’s job.” They’re also signalling to their team “their input is not desired—and may not be considered.” Rather, “leaders should show restraint and consider how their actions and decisions impact the broader company.”
The author gives three pieces of advice. The article expands on these in detail with examples but in summary:
The best thing a leader can do is prepare their teams for potential issues and problems through reviews of previous experiences and working through potential scenarios. Then when something does occur, step back, trust your team and find out from them what they might need from you.
Photograph: Kues on Freepik.
Quitting is a required skill for leaders, one that we should develop and use much more frequently than we currently do. This is the theme of Annie Duke’s most recent book Quit: The power of knowing when to walk away (2022. Ebury Edge). Society typically implores us to “soldier one”, “Never give up”, and to remember that “Energy and persistence conquer all things”, and even actively shames quitting through expressions like “Quitting is never an option”, “You cannot fail unless you quit”, and “Nobody likes a quitter.”
But Duke challenges this approach and illustrates her position with numerous examples that include summitting Everest, bankrupt corporate empires, software development, and professional poker. Taking a common-sense narrative, Duke advocates a data-based approach that considers options and expectations, noting that failing to achieve key strategic goals and targets are wanting signs that it might be better to ‘cut and run’, rather than keep on ‘throwing good money after bad.’
Also drawing on the work of psychologists that include Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, Duke presents a science-based rationale for knowing when it is time to quit, instead of persisting at all cost. Littered with case-studies to illustrate, and written in an easy-to-read style, this book is a very timely and must read for all current and inspiring leaders. Very highly recommended.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and Commonwealth Bank have just released their latest Not-For-Profit Governance and Performance Study 2022-23 (read it here). It contains some interesting snapshots of what NFP Boards are grappling with. Although the survey was conducted within Australia only, I imagine the findings would resonate with other jurisdictions as well.
There were five key findings, each with some detail worth reflecting on. Following is a very brief summary of these findings, and I highly recommend you also download the report and reflect on these in the context of your own organisations.
It is a worthy report to read, reflect on, and consider how your NFP might respond to these challenges and opportunities.
When talking about presenting information and concepts in a positive light, is it an irony that that supports of the idea refer to is a “framing” and detractors call it “spin doctoring”? Either way, how a message is presented can significantly affect its successful (or otherwise) adoption.
Recent research reported by the Warwick School of Business (University of Warwick) in the UK (read it here) shows how framing in a business setting impacts on the business. From data collected over a 22-year period, the simple inclusion of a negatively framed sentence in a case study was shown to significantly impact the choice of strategic options. Such an impact demonstrates how important framing is in relation to all manner of business decisions, including “…how conclusions and decisions themselves are made.”
The article presents five lessons from the research for leaders ands managers to consider in “…how to frame a strategy to ensure staff and other stakeholders back it.” These five points are listed below, but the article does a great job of exploring them in more details.
So when you next need to communicate with your key stakeholders, take a few moments to consider how to best frame your message.
Much has been written and discussed about workspaces in a post-COVID world, but one pre-COVID discussion still unsettled is the perceived value of unconventional workspaces (think the head offices of Facebook or Google). The belief is these stimulate creativity but there’s little research to confirm this.
A article from INSEAD reports on research about what the impact might be. Noting there are no “typical” unconventional workspaces, the researchers defined them as a workspace perceived by its occupants as being unconventional. The hypotheses: that a non-typical work environment is expected to “stimulate higher divergent thinking performance.”
The results of the research found the opposite, that individuals in the conventional workspace had higher divergent thinking performance than those in the non-typical space. In explaining this, the researchers found individuals in the unconventional space scanned their environment for ideas to stimulate their thinking and then became fixated on these ideas, limiting their ability to come up with unique solutions. These experiments were replicated in a virtual setting with similar results.
So, what of this?
First, “atypical workspace designs are not silver bullets for fostering creativity.” They’re good for when we can’t draw ideas from the immediate environment.
Second, “companies should not blindly copy the alternative workspaces of other organisations.” It’s horses for courses.
Third, when designing an alternative workplace, ensure the employees who use it perceive it as an unconventional workspace, and that its design doesn’t directly relate to the tasks the employees carry out.
Fourth, note “it is possible that the unconventionality of the space can wear off over time as individuals adjust to their environments.”
Last, as reported earlier, “it is possible to replicate unconventional spaces in virtual settings.”
Does this settle the discussion? No, but it does provide some ideas to ensure unconventional workspaces are most effective.
Photograph: Austin Distel on Unsplash.
Pia Lauritzen, in this Strategy+Business article, makes the bold statement that “effective leadership isn’t about giving or taking responsibility—it’s about sharing it.”
Lauritzen focusses on the leader’s use of questions as a major factor in effectively sharing responsibility. She notes from her research that leaders typically respond to more questions than they ask. Usually, leaders feel they need to have all the answers and “pride themselves on responding quickly and accurately—and they feel ashamed if they are too busy or otherwise unable to provide satisfactory answers to their employees and superiors.”
Using the following figure, Lauritzen shows the type of questions typically associated with these approaches and the ability to effectively distribute responsibility.
To appropriately expect employees to be accountable, leaders need to ensure the conversation and answers do not end with them as leader. It may mean leaders putting their own solutions on hold and “not taking sole responsibility by setting themselves up as the ultimate authority.” The ideal is to “create a culture where no one is ashamed of not having all the answers.”
Photograph: [email protected] on Unsplash.
I have long been a fan of Bob Tricker’s books on corporate governance. He is considered by many to be the modern guru on the topic, and his writings are the basis of many MBA courses around the world. His latest book is ‘the Practice of Corporate Governance’ (2013, CRC Press), a short but punchy ‘how to’ guide for anyone involved with a board or committee.
Being less than 100 pages, it is easy to read and easy to remember. Each chapter ends with a worksheet that can be used o put the principles just covered into practice. And that is the real beauty of this book – it is incredibly practical. While Trickers seminal book on the principles, policies and practices of corporate governance provides the underpinning theory and foundations, this new book just gives the essence as a practical guide in simple language.
The experience Tricker brings to this book is obvious in the content. He comes from a strong corporate background before moving into academia and has worked in many countries including Australia. I was encouraged to find that this book fits nicely into Australia’s corporate governance context.
This is a book every board or committee member would benefit from owning, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Staff turnover is a major cost for organisations. So, why aren’t more organisations paying more attention to decrease turnover rates?
It’s established now: employees are much more willing to change employers if they’re unsatisfied with working conditions, including flexible hours, working from home options and work–life balance. A recent study by Polly Kang, David Daniels and Maurice Schweitzer—the findings of which are published in this article in the Knowledge at Wharton business journal—introduces one strategy managers can use to reduce staff turnover.
The study found “managers who want to keep employees from quitting should consider reordering their tasks. . . . People are far more likely to quit when given too many difficult assignments in a row, compared with a workflow that is balanced out with easier tasks.” This includes interspersing streaks of challenging assignments with easier assignments to give employees a chance to regroup, refresh and remember the joy to be found in their work. Doing this, the authors found, significantly boosted employee retention.
Importantly, one of the authors (Maurice Schweitzer) is quoted as saying, “When organisations think about efficiency, they think about the workflow and using the physical space as efficiently as possible when, in fact, it’s the experience of the people that’s so important.” Employees are not machines that mindlessly perform tasks continually without rest. Rather, they are humans who need rest, joy and variety to stay motivated and inspired.
Summarising the work of the authors, Schweitzer says we “should recognise that people do need these breaks” and that accommodating this “will sustain us and give us an overall better experience and have more favourable impression of our work.”
The key to higher retention and efficiency is not more work but a more balanced workload.
Photograph: Anna Shvets, Pexels.
