Category: TV Series

Sean begins by answering the question “What do you feel is a business mindset for the coming decade and what facets do you predict will have the biggest influence across businesses?” He believes that one of key skills will be mining data to gain actionable insights with the help of AI and machine learning. In his time at GSK they looked for data in everything and he found this extremely helpful.

Another question is: “How do you think your people will interact with and leverage this revolutionary change?” Sean explains how hard it is to get people to step into the unknown and “break the rules” in service to growth. At GSK he established a Capabilities document that was used to help employees develop the right attitudes and mindset to be positive change agents. Leaders at GSK were asked to spend time coaching staff to develop these capabilities in themselves and this enabled huge leaps forward in the organization. 

The key for Sean is “leaning into the art of the possible” and having an open, growth oriented mindset. Experimentation and challenging ‘sacred cows’ is vital to creating  a new future for the business. Small test projects were established using ‘calculated risks’ and then scaled up if there was success. Experimentation and failures were subjected to learning reviews. And in this way internal red tape and bureaucracy could be avoided.

In the second part of this series around ‘Leading into the Future in partnership with The Business Transformation Network, Bruce Owen (Vice President – Employee & Community Impact at Equinix) looks at how Equinix measures diversity and inclusion efforts.

Equinix’s key belief is transparency. They break up the elements of diversity, inclusion and belonging so that they are not merged. 

Diversity is measured through key metrics. Internal placemats are published every quarter that then goes out to all senior leaders that represent all aspects of diversity that they can measure. Some include gender, race, ethnicity and more. 

Inclusion is heavily relieved on survey data. Poll surveys are used every quarter to get a sense of where their employers are. Bruce then explains how they look at what is the experience of people from under representative communities at Equinix’s and how do they take action to create a more inclusive environment. They identify which pockets of the organisation have higher levels of inclusion and which ones have lower levels. Bruce states…

“You cannot make progress until you’re willing to be vulnerable and transparent”

The conversation then moves on to the different ways we can develop future leaders and create a comfortable place to work. According to Bruce, there are 4 main ways that this can be done: 

1. Creating an environment where others look like you at all levels of the organisation. 
2. Creating an environment where you are believed. 
3. Being valued for your perspective, such as having a different opinion. 
4. Fun. Create an environment where people want to grow, develop and lead. 

We welcome another insightful leader to this fascinating series around ‘Leading into the Future, Bruce Owen (Vice President – Employee & Community Impact at Equinix) in partnership with The Business Transformation Netwoork (The BTN)

Within this session, Bruce looks at what leadership behaviours employees need to truly believe in an inclusive culture. Bruce believes it’s all about…

“remembering the type of leaders that made us feel included whether that be teachers, sports coach, or manager that you worked for.”

5 factors you need to truly have an inclusive culture:

1. Accountability – where you are holding people accountable for inclusive behaviour. 
2. Vulnerability – watching leaders discuss real topics such as admitting their weaknesses, being able to demonstrate that they do not have it all together.
3. Empathy – taking the time to truly listen and understand what someone is trying to say despite their wording being different.
4. Helping conflict – diversity of thought and diversity of experience is about injecting difference into an equation. This results in conflict. Conflict is seen as necessary and healthy to have greater innovation and outcomes. This is only that is done on a foundation of trust, it is an important behaviour to be able to model as a leader. 
5. Collaboration – diversity is a core ingredient to innovation and business progress. Leaders need to ensure that they lead collaboratively. Leaders do not always need to always have an answer, but to simply be able to work together as part of a collaboration team and help one another.  

4 ways organisations should start their Diversity & Inclusion Journey:

1. Being Clear on the why… If an organisation is looking at every data point that leads to greater innovation, agility, higher performance and financial targets, you have to be precise on why you’re doing this. 
2. The positioning of acknowledging you are unaware of what you don’t know. It is vital to listen to your employees and require help. 
3. Ensuring that the majority of groups take active roles in leading and co-leading. 
4. Establish a set of guiding principles right at the start about how you want to embark on a diversity and inclusion journey.

Within part 2 of this series with Ian Hardie (Founder at Hardie & Company), in partnership with The Business Transformation Network, Ian identifies what leadership behaviours facilitate a learning community and how each of us is motivated by different role models or motivators that we look up to.

4 behaviours we can adopt as individuals to make learning more effective:

1. Encouraging people to ask just one question of why – This question needs to be asked so that you can learn from it.

2. Openness and curiosity – That you are genuinely interested to understand and learn. What is it that you can take from it going forward?

3. Tenacity – The ability to stick to it, learn and engage with the topic and subject.

4. Celebrate – Being able to celebrate when someone has learnt, made progress, advanced so that you can make the connection between what has happened and discuss the progress that has been made.

Ian then goes on to discuss what leaders can impact your organisation the most. Organisations need to ensure they have a leader who is seen at the very top, valuing people who are learning and progressing. Instead of following the norm and getting the CEO to inform everyone that they need to learn, look for individuals who influence others.

For example, the people in lead learning need to pay attention to understand who is influential in their network. Ian explains that. “If you can advance their level of commitment to learning, that will have a much better impact than classically getting a CEO to do his learning is an important speech.”

To finish the discussion, Ian demonstrates his views on whether the rise of more remote working will widen or narrow the talent pool. As the internet has given many of us the accessibility that we need, it all comes down to what you do with it as an individual.

Many individuals want to learn at the moment, however, the question is… are they prepared to access learning long-term for their long-term development? Or is it, according to Ian, going to be “Just in time and transactional” which acts as a large barrier.

It is also extremely important to understand the difference between barriers and triggers. The trigger is in terms of accessibility, connection and gaining access to different resources. The barrier is the attitudes of those people making decisions. Ian emphasises that a lot of work is done on unconscious bias, are people prepared to yes they learned online? To summarise, Ian explains that some societal organisational structural barriers need to be addressed. Organisations also need to celebrate the idea of accessibility and breadth of resources that are available to us. There are many societal organisations.

As we continue this fascinating series in partnership with The Business Transformation Network, around Leading into the future, we welcome Ian Hardie (Founder at Hardie & Company). 

This conversation brings to life Ian’s view on how we can create more ‘pull learning’ situations through technology rather than the historic classroom push learning. Learning needs to be happening in the workplace, in which case for a lot of organisations, video is now a large part of the workplace. 

 

Technology has always however been a large barrier to virtual learning. Individuals have to be taught technology first before getting them to do the learning you need them to do. Despite this, the advantage of everyone now using technology is that everyone now knows how to work, operate and connect virtually, and therefore those barriers of technology can be voided. 

As the technology barrier is down, organisations need to think about what the triggers are. How can they encourage and motivate people to want to learn and identify what the impact of learning is? On the other hand, face to face learning will not completely die out and therefore, there will be some occasions where you have to meet in person to be successful 

Ian then goes on to discuss whether the move to more virtual environments has created a new challenge for learning, in which he explains that having a learning mindset is key.

“Everyone does their best when they are motivated to do their best.”

This is one of the responsibilities of people who deliver training, learning is to ensure that the brand and desirability is built into the provision they create. Organisations need to ensure that their people are drawn into it. 

A phrase identified by Ian is ‘Learning works’ – If people see what impact learning has, then they are motivated and drawn to it even more. The key is that individuals need to understand what will happen once they are engaged in learning and what will happen if they don’t. They need to identify what the missed opportunity is which enables them to want to learn and do things themselves. 

Ian acknowledges that we are seeing a variety of trends. Some include: 

1. The modularisation of learning – Learning is being broken down into smaller and smaller chunks. However, with this in place, there is also the risk of taking away that interest and fascination of long term learning.
2. We will see this facilitation and connection with a coach, mentor or expert which will mean there is more facilitated learning going forward. 

 

In this interview with Jerry Pico, Co-Lead, Global Culture Initiative at Daiichi Sankyo Co., he talks about his company’s purpose – “To contribute to the enrichment of the quality of life around the world” and how his pharmaceutical firm has a social mission to ‘give back’ through the three core values of “integrity, accountability and innovation”.

Next Jerry explains that, as part of the company-wide culture change they are in the middle of, they administered a diagnostic that led to the ability to link each person’s individual purpose to the company’s purpose, values and strategy.

Another value emerged. Instead of the leadership being more HQ centric, thanks to the pandemic global leadership can be exercised virtually and is more fluid. By embracing diversity and inclusion a leader can contribute whoever they are and wherever they are based. 

Jerry ends by describing how pleased he was when a senior leadership group chose to vote for self-awareness as the number one most important leadership competency. A leader cannot be authentic without this. And what does being authentic mean in practice? It means asking questions, listening well, ‘exuding empathy and compassion’ and being true to oneself.

As we continue our ‘Leading Into The Future’ TV Series, in partnership with The Business Transformation Network, we are eager to welcome and hear from Jerry Pico, (Co-Lead, Global Culture Initiative at Daiichi Sankyo Co), who will be discussing the ‘Power of Purpose’.

With great clarity, and based upon his years of experience in the corporate world, Jerry Pico shares his view that of course it’s OK for a leader to have his or her one values that are not included in the company’s set of core values.

But it IS vital that the leader supports the purpose and strategy and, above all the CORE values of their company.

The leader cannot lead authentically if they do NOT believe in those core values. They must ‘walk the talk’ and the culture must encourage people to call out and give feedback to those who don’t do this.

Jerry Pico says there should be consequences for not doing so and if they do not truly believe in the company’s core values they should leave the organisation.

When asked if there was any potential downside to a purpose driven organisation Jerry says that people could lose sight of their own purpose and blindly follow a leader who does not have the right values, a leader who only wants to control, manipulate and degrade people and the organisational culture.

In this Part 2 of Martin Barner’s interview about ‘Building a Learning Community’ he poses some key questions including “What do you want to learn?” “What’s the purpose you’re striving towards?”. Martin feels it’s important for people to take ownership of their own learning and answer the question “Where and how do I want to learn?” 

A benefit of virtual learning is that it has become more accessible and even ‘democratised’ through being more scalable and not limited by travel. Martin mentions the Novartis ‘Unbossed Leadership Experience’ (a self-awareness program) that is now being rolled out to five thousand leaders a year at the company thanks to the virtual nature of the program. 

Another question Martin answers is: “Will the rise of remote working widen or narrow the talent pool?” He says that it does widen that pool and explains with concrete stories how it can broaden it. Integral to this expansion is remote and flexible working conditions.

Join us in this episode, in partnership with The Business Transformation Network (The BTN) to know more about building a learning community and some of the initiatives that Novartis rolled out internally to develop their employees.

For the next episode in our ‘Leading into the Future’ series, a partnership with The Business Transformation Network (The BTN), we are eager to invite Martin Barner (Head People & Organisation Global Product Development, Sandoz at Novartis) to share his thoughts about building a learning community. 

Martin starts by talking about the way the virtual environment will align with a lifestyle of learning culture & the role of self-service culture and the enablement of technology. 

Join us in this episode to know more about building a learning community and some of the initiatives that Novartis rolled out internally to develop their employees.

In the 3rd and final part of this series with Sabine Weishaupt, we explore the role of trust within virtual environments. 

Sabine shares her knowledge about building trust across teams within virtual environments and how empathy and the right skill set can operate in physical and virtual contexts. Sabine also highlights the emotional capacity and the sense of self-awareness that a leader should have.