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Writers
Alfred Abolarin
Ashish omas
Charlotte Finlay
Claire Smyth
Christine Gilland Robinson
David Nicholl
Glenn Williams
Karise Hutchinson
Kerry Anthony
Mike Hardy
Rachel Portilla Dillon
Sabina Nawaz
Founder Karise Hutchinson
Managing Editor of Illuminaire
Christine Gilland Robinson
Creative Designer & Director
Hannah Woolley
Associate Editors
Zachary Hutchinson
Charlotte Finlay
Featured Artist
Claire Smyth
Photographers
Hannah Woolley
Oliver Owens
Zachary Hutchinson
Research digest: Leadership and the power of in uence
Leadership and the centrality of trust
In conversation with Professor Mike Hardy
e light and shadow of leadership
In conversation with Sabina Nawaz
e power of humility
Re ection by Alfred Abolarin
HEALTHY LEADERSHIP
Research digest: Healthy leadership through integrating the mind, body, and heart
Leaders: Breathe but don’t inhale
In conversation with Kerry Anthony
Sustaining leadership
In conversation with David Nicholl
Finding and keeping margin
Reflection by Karise Hutchinson
Research digest: Leading transition
Getting lost in transition
In conversation with Dr Glenn Williams
Leading community change
The Fidela story
Taking the long way round
Reflection by Christine Gilland Robinson
CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
Research digest: Leadership and creative innovation
Leadership and creativity
In conversation with Ashish omas
Highs and lows: Life’s delight
Re ection by Claire Smyth
Welcome
Whetheryou believe leadership is the cause or solution to the world’s problems, one thing remains true: leadership matters. But not any old leadership will do. In a world where leaders chart unknown waters, face unprecedented challenges, and attempt to embrace the latest technological advancements, what really matters? This question was the starting point of the Illuminaire journey.
There have never been more resources telling leaders what matters today. Millions of books, articles, blogs, videos, courses, and organisations are available and accessible in an instant. But it is an overwhelming and confusing landscape, making it difficult for leaders to distinguish opinion from fact and the conceptual from reality when it comes to effective leadership practice. Leaders, there is no single source of insight. No quick fix. No blueprint.
I created Illuminaire Press to provide a platform that harnesses the collective wisdom from research and practice, bringing the science and strategy of leadership together through story and art. In my experience, it is the triangulation that comes from knowing the research data, applying the wisdom from tried and tested leaders, and listening to personal stories that provides a sound foundation for the leadership journey of becoming. And art? Well, because art is not only a source of beauty; it can inspire and speak without words.
I believe strong and healthy leadership should matter today.
First, the work of leadership — regardless of context or industry, paid or not — is physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding. The work requires a strength of character, an ability to make tough decisions, and a determination to remain true to core values against the tide of popularism. Second, leading is a perpetual process
of becoming: A process marked by varying seasons of growth, joy, challenge, and loss. The process can yield negative or positive results depending on how the leader takes responsibility for sustaining the journey of becoming and the healthy practices adopted along the way.
Third, at the intersection of these two words is the small but mighty and. In the face of unhelpful, extreme stereotypes of leaders, many have come to associate strong leadership with inflexible, controlling, and dispassionate behaviours. And yet, we know because of the uncertainty and complexity of the world’s challenges, it is not a time for weak, soft, and indecisive leadership. The word and provides the balance. It points to strong leaders defined not by their superhero powers, but by the fruit in their life and those around them.
To explore what matters when it comes to practicing strong and healthy leadership, Volume One will first unpack some of the misconceptions of strong leadership, focusing on ego-centered, toxic behaviours and subsequently reorientating the discussion around how leaders can harness the power of influence with integrity. The second theme explores what it really means to develop healthy leadership practices that go beyond diet and exercise to consider a more integrated approach that spans physical, emotional, and mental dimensions. Today’s ferocious nature of change is a challenge for all leaders, hence the third theme spotlights leading in transition: the critical but often underappreciated internal dimension of change. The final theme of creative leadership underpins the need for fresh perspectives and innovative solutions, seeking to help leaders make room for the inevitability of the new.
There is no doubt as I have researched, listened, and reflected on this writing journey, I have learned, relearned, and been challenged to unlearn what really matters when it comes to strong and healthy leadership. It is my hope you experience the same.
Karise
VOLUME GUIDE
The mission of Illuminaire Press is to provide a dedicated space for dialogue about effective leadership practice at the interface of science, strategy, and story.
SCIENCE
Knowing the latest leadership research data.
STRATEGY
Applying the wisdom of experienced leaders.
STORY
Listening to the personal stories of leaders.
‘Light
by Claire Smyth
and shadow’
THE POWER OF INFLUENCE
THE OF INFLUENCE
and misused power for unethical and immoral does fit fast-changing manage who
Power is often considered a dirty word. It is all too easy to think of leaders who have used and misused power for unethical and immoral purposes. Research provides strong evidence that the old way of leading by command, control, and charisma through superior knowledge and personality — although still present in many organisations — does not fit a fast-changing society. This section explores scientific data that identifies the important impact of influence but considers how the process of influence should work and why, as well as pointing out some of the ways leaders can carefully manage the dark side. The message contained in conversations with those who serve leaders across the world is simple: Real power is empowering others, building trust, and carrying it with humility.
The problem with power
Leadership and the power of influence
WORDS: KARISE HUTCHINSON
How can leaders manage the power of influence in a strong and healthy way that brings others with them on the journey to achieve real and positive change?
Leadership power has often been described as the ability to impose your will or make others act in the way you want based on your authority. The problem with power comes with how it is used. Therefore, research and best practice efforts have focused on better understanding how power is acquired, how and when to use it, and anticipating its probable effects. The earlier work of French and Raven in the 1950s provided insight into the sources of power within organisations. This well-established categorisation of power includes formal and informal sources identified as legitimate (formal authority), reward (incentives), coercive (threat of punishment), expert (recognised knowledge, skills, or abilities),
and referent (admiration) power. Other studies have extended this understanding to include other bases of leadership power found in relationships, charisma, information, and in sharing power, or empowerment.
When it comes to power, it is too easy to think of individual leaders who have used their position of authority for unethical or immoral purposes. This misuse, or abuse, of power is referred to as the dark side of leadership. Destructive or toxic leaders use power to control and manipulate others and are renowned for their emotional unintelligence: a lack of empathy, inability to take criticism, impatience, and intolerance. Recent
research published by the Harvard Business Review in 2023 argues the uncertainty of current global challenges provides a ripe opportunity for narcissists to emerge as leaders: People who have a superior conception of themselves, are selfobsessed, and who crave authority and control. This study by Dritjon Gruda and Paul Hanges in 2023 found narcissists are great at accumulating power and influence, with their confidence and charisma creating the illusion of them being the best leader at a time when complexity is high and predictability is low in the external environment. While there is no doubt throughout history narcissists have emerged to shape the world for better or worse, there is overwhelming evidence that their emotional isolation and distrustful personality also destroys productivity, morale, and organisational culture.
People follow people, not positions
The problem with power is causing society to rethink our conception of leadership. Society has moved on from the great man theory of an allpowerful omniscient infallible leader, and models are now reflecting the power found in influence instead of authority. Influence as a competency is defined as the ability to impact, persuade, and/ or convince others in order to gain support. As a result, influence can be both positive and negative. Research evidence confirms leaders who positively influence employees are likely to produce positive outcomes, and similarly, those who negatively influence others are likely to generate negative impacts (Kovach, 2020). Nonetheless, the ability to influence others to achieve positive and impactful change requires values-based leadership marked by a highly relational focus exhibited in transparent behaviours. The internationally known psychologist and author Daniel Goleman stated in 2017 that the ability to sway, not dictate, others can make or break a leader.
Even thirty years ago, the highly regarded research by Lyle Spencer and Signe Spencer
in 1993 pointed to the importance of the relationship between leaders and followers as the source of influence. In fact, this study as well as others have found influence to be the strongest competency distinguishing outstanding leaders. This approach is especially critical given the growing recognition of leadership as a collective process and the mutually dependent relationship encompassing leaders and followers, both within and out with the boundaries of an organisation. When it comes to leading teams which a leader has no direct authority over, influence becomes critical. In this case, leaders can’t order others to do what they want. Instead, they must persuade or inspire them to achieve collective change efforts.
Empowerment:
A new source of superpower
In times of distress people turn to authority, placing their hopes and frustrations upon leaders whom they assume have the knowledge, wisdom, and skill to solve the big problems of society. As Heifetz in 1994 explained, “authorities serve as repositories for our worries and aspirations, holding them, if they can, in exchange for the powers we give them.” People want leaders who are powerful and capable of results. Yet on the other hand, they hate the dependence and giving of power to others. This shared perception of the solitary superhero whose brilliance and strength can save the day brings with it rising expectations, which also brings the potential for rising disappointment. Leaders are only human after all, so why do we continue to put our hopes in leaders we assume have superhero powers?
This perception of a leader as hero rests on the illusion someone can be solely in control. But, simple answers rarely exist, nor can one individual possibly hold all the answers. It was in the 1990s when research identified the concept of sharing of power: empowerment. Defined as real power that flows from the bottom up, rather than top down in organisations,
empowerment has become a major strategy for leaders delivering improved outcomes. Margaret Wheatley and Debbie Frieze (2010) refer to this leadership approach as hosting: Leaders are skilled conveners who facilitate and steward environments where problems get solved, high functioning teams are at work, and there is a culture of creativity, commitment, and generosity. These hosting leaders are not seeking heroic recognition. Rather, they seek to hear the voice of others and value their participation in the pursuit of change. These leaders fully understand the value of full engagement and trust from whom they lead.
Influence and the value of trust
Research evidence and leadership practice is unequivocal: Influence cannot be obtained without trust. Leaders have a hugely influential role to play in building, demonstrating, and earning trust in the organisations, institutions, and teams they lead. Research identifies four pillars of trust: ability (the knowledge, skills, and professionalism of a leader), benevolence (leaders who are approachable, genuinely show interest, and recognise individual needs), integrity (leaders who are ethical in their decisions, and believe,
as well as live out, their values across their whole life), and predictability (the consistency of a leader’s behaviours or walking the walk). The benefits of a trusting workplace are thoroughly researched. It is clear trust has a considerable impact on the performance and financial health of the organisation or institution. This includes better cooperation, more effective problem solving, a positive work climate, higher employee engagement, higher job satisfaction, and lower staff turnover. Research also points out the direct correlation between levels of internal trust within an organisation and the levels of trust with external stakeholders.
Leadership behaviours that destroy trust include:
• Disrespect: blaming, disregarding, and ignoring others.
• Poor communication: lack of clarity, consistency, and poor listening skills.
• Unmet expectations: assumptions and broken promises.
• Ineffective decision-making: bias, no feedback, and punishing those who challenge.
• Incongruence: lack of self-awareness, integrity, and inauthenticity.
Leaders need to be seen, they need to listen, and they must be open to being guided
The more significant question for leaders today is, what repairs trust? It is often said trust is the easiest thing in the world to lose, but the hardest thing in the world to get back. Best practice underscores the importance of leadership responsibility as the first critical step in rebuilding trust. Regardless of whether it was a direct result of their actions, explanations and apologies from leaders play a vital role in the journey of reparation. As a research report by the University of Westminster in 2015 identified, leaders must be open, forthright, and honest in their communication. For leaders to demonstrate respect and benevolence in communicating the sincerity of the respective message, it is important they treat their audience as adults. Namely, leaders must not hide the truth nor sugar-coat it.
Listening: Creating a space for trust to grow
The phenomenology of leadership means it is not static, but rather a series of social moments. Research evidence has found it is important for leaders to connect with the mind, heart, and felt sense of others. In doing so, the benefits are not only to well-being, but also increased levels of trust, honesty, and openness of communication. Trust, however, is personal. Therefore, face to face communication by leaders is key. Leaders need to be seen, they need to listen, and they must be open to being guided. Building trust requires deep personal and collective listening at all levels of an organisation. Why? Because leaders are humans, and humans naturally suffer from all sorts of biases and blind spots. As explained by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of cognitive biases, “we are blind to our blindness – we have very little idea of how little we know” (2011). In order to recognise these patterns, research by the University of Westminster argues leaders must slow down, suspend judgement, listen with our whole being, be comfortable with silence, and wait patiently for the feelings and thoughts to emerge.
Crucial to active listening is receiving feedback. There is a misconception that seeking feedback makes a leader seem unconfident or needy. But the reality could not be further from the truth. It takes great courage to request feedback and then listen to it. Indeed, research has found there is questions of others. When it comes to asking questions, it has been said friends tell, wise friends ask telling questions. This type of feedback not only empowers employees to feel their opinions matter, but it also empowers leaders to know where they need to improve. That is the power on offer for those who listen. The question for leaders is, how open are you to hearing what you don’t want to hear? Research by Zenger and Folkman in 2019 found when leaders ask for feedback, they are more likely to change their attitude, resulting in a greater overall effectiveness of the leaders in question.
Holding power accountable
Accountability is perhaps the most important skill in effectively leveraging influence. And yet, those with the most power often overlook it. The realisation that leaders are fully human — not superhuman — is paramount to understanding the need for accountability. A common downfall for leaders is misunderstanding how power really works and their own personality tendencies and drivers. This type of responsibility starts with self-awareness. Why? Research by Tasha Eurich in 2018 reveals experience and power can hinder self-awareness: The more power a leader holds, the more likely they are to overestimate their skills and abilities. Whereas, when leaders endeavour to see themselves clearly and in real terms, studies have found they make better decisions, build stronger relationships, communicate more effectively, and remarkably, these leaders are less likely to lie, cheat, and steal.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it has been suggested that power left unchecked drives leaders to divest scarce organisational and institutional resources away from collective purposes and toward self-
serving endeavours. A research study by Rus et al. (2012) found accountability structures can moderate the effects of power on a leader’s selfserving behaviour. Why? Because accountability heightens the pressure on leaders to justify one’s decisions and to consider potential consequences of one’s actions. Leaders, therefore, must uphold their responsibility to serve others and to respect the structures in place for safeguarding the organisation or institution. Anyone can use power to drive change. Nevertheless, often the disconnect for aspiring leaders is not found in their intentions but in their tactics. When leaders take responsibility for their actions and behaviours, they demonstrate trustworthiness and commitment to the organisation’s future success.
Plotting a way forward
Whomever we blame, the global property of trust has been fundamentally broken and this pervades working environments at a more local level. The likely gap between senior level leadership conversations and wider discussions across the organisation means transparency in decisionmaking has never been more critical. Whatever the sector — whether government, business, or NGO — leaders must advocate for, and put in place, structures and strategies that promote an awareness of self and others while exercising the power of influence. The current cultural moment, therefore, does not require the power of the individual hero. Rather, it calls on leaders (plural) who model transparency and accountability, paying high attention to human relationships; for leaders who want to influence positive change and deliver extraordinary performance in a healthy and sustainable way. This must be the way forward.
Leadership and the centrality of trust
In conversation with Professor Mike Hardy
Trust. We hear a lot about trust. Or, more often, we hear about the lack of it. Whoever we blame, there is no doubt the global property of trust has been broken. Despite the proliferation of the concept, the practice remains elusive for leaders seeking to either build it or rebuild it. Professor Mike Hardy is the chair of Intercultural Relations and founding director of the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University. Mike’s work on trust in the area of peace leadership is wellrecognised across the world and his experience in various contexts means he brings an incredible depth and breadth of insight to one of the greatest challenges facing the world today.
His experience includes senior director with the British Council, leading their global cultural relations programmes and soft power global strategic partnerships, as well as diplomatic postings in Egypt, East Jerusalem, and Indonesia. He is also currently the board chair of the International Leadership Association,
a global network of leaders who study, teach and practice; namely, a community of leaders and leadership researchers, educators, and development specialists.
I had the privilege of teaching with Mike at the University of Oxford in 2023 as part of the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building’s Fellowship Programme. Mike is often travelling so it was a unique and wonderful opportunity to take time with him to talk about his experience and research for Illuminaire. This conversation with Mike in the beautiful gardens of Harris Manchester College brings to life what it means for leaders to build trust with purpose.
Karise: Mike, it is so great to chat to you today! I want to start off by asking you to tell me about your journey of leadership and what you have learned about power and influence along the way?
Mike: Let’s start by talking about power. I think leaders can either use power, or they try to be effective without it. I’ve always tried to use the leadership position I am in to mobilise change
for good. By circumstance in my first academic leadership position, I was the youngest member of the staff in a very hierarchical organisation. Naively, I wanted to change the world through the work of the department. So, I became quite a driven leader. I would set out the destination and wouldn’t take any prisoners along the way. But what I learned quite early in my career is that positional power dilutes very quickly. As you build your team around you, influence becomes all about relationships. Since this discovery, most of my work has focused on leadership influence through the strength of relationships and purpose.
The importance of purpose came as a revelatory experience. I had been asked to speak at a conference about my work with the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University. Just before I went on stage, the host took me to one side and asked me to focus not on what I did, or even how I did it, but they wanted to know why I did it. That question came as a shock! I was already on stage and only a few minutes to process an answer. At that moment, and for whatever reason, I reached deeper into the why of my life and from sharing that I have never looked back. I came to realise what others have called the power of purpose. If you have a clarity of purpose, you have far more power than a position and it is not a power that dilutes.
Karise: There are no shortages of challenges for leaders to navigate today, so what do you think it takes to lead effectively?
Mike: Context is really one of the most important ingredients to practicing effective leadership. And yet, it is also the least predictable. I believe context defines and shapes how leadership is practiced. Let’s take what leaders do: Leaders have to take information and ideas and translate them into action and practice. Leadership is multifaceted. Leaders don’t lead by themselves; they need others to achieve goals and make an impact. Therefore, leaders contribute valuably through sense-making by investing in understanding the context and making sense of it for people. It becomes all about collective action. The whole experience and
impact of leadership is greater than the sum of its parts. Leaders must ask others, can you help me understand what’s going on? And in exchange, I will help you deal with it better.
In a sense, that’s the deal of leadership: It is defined by relationships, where leadership almost becomes a transaction with parties asking what is in it for me and what is in it for you. Then together we can work out the best way to navigate the challenge of the context. So, we shouldn’t put all the heroism onto one person. Leaders have to be many things: a thought leader, a doer, an expert, an entrepreneur and a champion of competence and integrity. No one individual can be all these things, so from my experience, effective leadership requires a group of heroes. If you look in the political domain, what you often see is a powerful communicator who stands out from the other heroes around them.
Karise: You have travelled the world helping support senior leaders in different countries and sectors. In your experience, how does leadership play out in different contexts?
Mike: Relationships aren’t generic. Rather, they are context specific. It is the same for leadership. I’ve had experience of working and living in several different countries. My experience of leading was very different in each place. To be effective in a multicultural, multinational, globalised world, leaders must be agile and realise that their first job is to find out what’s going on in their own context and make sense of it! When I moved to Indonesia, at first, I lived in a diplomatic bubble: I was expected to be correct, knowledgeable, affluent, and confident. I was always defined and treated as an ex-patriot. People didn’t expect me to be culturally aware at all as there had been a long tradition of foreigners moving in and remaining unaware of their local context.
My staff team was more than a hundred strong in Indonesia and when I arrived in the office on my first day, I couldn’t speak a word of Bahasa Indonesia, the language that the nation-building project there had introduced for all to share.
Leaders don’t lead by themselves; they need others to achieve goals and make an impact
I couldn’t even say hello! But, I was determined to be an effective leader by being resonant with the context. I understood enough about Indonesian culture to know communicating in their language was a sign of respect. Hence, doing so would be a vital ingredient for building relationships and influence. I decided to go and live with a local family for two months to really learn how to communicate, as well as going to language classes. Through this experience I also learned about other behaviours that could help leaders build influence. Humour was one such example and being a funny guy helped me a lot! Today I work with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) supporting their new ambassadorial appointments (very clever people I might add) to become even more impactful diplomatic leaders. Through my experience in Indonesia and other places around the world, I teach that it all goes back to relationships. For my work at the FCDO, ambassadorial prospects must understand that they are built in a specific context and the building process will vary across cultures.
Karise: You have talked about the power of influence that for leaders is found in relationships and purpose. Can you share your insight into the role of trust in leadership?
Mike: A lot of my early research focused on trust and trust building as the glue that holds relationships together. Social capital theory refers to the bonding and bridging resources found in relationships that creates strong horizontal trust between people in teams and groups. For leaders, however, it is also about vertical trust: When people not only trust one another but trust in the organisation in which they serve, and importantly, its purpose. In my experience, you can’t replace one or the other, that’s a big mistake that some leaderships make. Take, for example, a football team. You might trust the other players, but you might hate the coach, management, or owners of the club. You will not be effective as a player just by getting on with the other players on the pitch. That is not enough. You need to have strong relationships with the manager and coaches too. In doing so, you trust the vision of the team. You trust the purpose of the organisation.
If we translate that principle into societies, it is likewise important for leaders to have both respect, trust, and strong engagement vertically as well as horizontally. This is where trust permeates a whole system, reinforcing the shared purpose that the organisation, institution, or say, a nation state, has agreed. Where leadership disappoints tends to be where leaders focus on only part of the overall system often on themselves — their survival —
blind to any overarching purpose or uncaring about the contribution of others. So, I saw trust as a two-way street, a reciprocity between peers as between leaders and organisational members. The transaction to which I referred earlier. Interestingly where we do not trust trust, we begin to see toxic leadership and scenarios where the toxicity is never addressed. Toxicity here defines where leaders have not invested in trust in their teams. It is toxic because only part of the leadership system is in play. Trust cannot co-exist under toxic leadership. Such leaders tend not to be interested in a flourishing society, and it seems often that they act with impunity.
How do you disqualify a toxic leader? We must build alliances and collaborations. Such leaders, if they are receptive, must be helped to see the bigger picture and align with people they wouldn’t ordinarily align with. I’m still a believer in democracy even though, as a contemporary system, there appear many problems. But, it is
important to displace such negative and destructive leadership through the democratic process.
Karise: Understanding the centrality of trust in building relationships is vital and you have made that clear. But Mike, knowing it can also be quite an elusive concept to grasp, could you bring it to life by finishing this sentence “trust happens when …”
Mike: [trust happens when] I’m willing and able to present my human vulnerabilities to others. It really is about how comfortable a leader or leadership team is with being vulnerable and showing vulnerability; these are different! Some associate trust with the trust fall: The image of people falling backwards relying on another person to catch them. But, for me, it is the way we connect with others, sharing and exposing our vulnerabilities, not our strengths. The other side of the coin is that when trust breaks down,
it leaves a mess. This happens when mutuality leaves the room because trust is all about reciprocity or exchange. It also happens when there is little predictability in the relationship and a lack of consistency in behaviours and actions. If leaders act inconsistently then it can look like they are making it up and are not really engaged or serious about the relationship. In turn, this causes others to question motive and responsibility. And the result? The breakdown of trust.
Karise: Finally, two questions in one for you. Can you tell me more about the book you are writing and the learning it contains for leaders today?
Mike: It’s been a really interesting journey for me. I come from an economics educational background, then into cultural diplomacy. When I was first curious about leadership, I didn’t see it as a new mission for me to explore, research, and write about. But, I was so disappointed with the outputs of scholarship, specifically the lack of explanation and help with change processes for leaders. For my current book project, my initial focus was to look intensely and with intent at the practice of global leadership in our turbulent world of uncertainty and constant change. I’m fortunate given my experience and role with the International Leadership Association to have access to senior leadership teams in a whole variety of settings, sectors, and contexts. While I started to look at the leadership challenge through the lens of turbulence in the twenty-first century, I began to also speak with, and listen to, many with far more experience than mine. The conversations unearthed some fascinating insights into the nature of leadership itself, which in turn has helped to recalibrate the concept for me. What has emerged as more important was not the turbulence in the world nor the growing complexity. Yes, these are both influences, but it was the reality that leaders were getting less and less capable; becoming less and less focused on data that could make a difference. Even with artificial intelligence and the abundance of data, leaders were struggling to come to terms with how to lead in the unknown waters. I have often been signposted by leadership teams towards
crisis and the particular challenges of leadership in times of crisis. Interestingly my response has been to look more carefully at both leadership of crisis and leadership in crisis.
My conversations with global leadership teams have encouraged me, then, to explore the softer side of leadership and how and where leadership works most effectively, and as a result, the book has morphed into an examination about why leadership seems to be struggling to perform in the twenty-first century. My concluding bottom line suggests that leadership is most effective when it cares about consequences. I think we are in a caring age, even though it feels like lots of people don’t care. Caring about the climate, sustainability, customers, even shareholders! We are also in an era of leadership consequences. The one characteristic of uncertainty and of the unknown is things happen that you don’t expect. There are intended and unintended consequences of every leadership decision taken. I’m really intrigued whether leaders care enough about consequences to improve their approach to navigating the unknown. In the book, therefore, I look for more evidence within leadership teams of what I might suggest are the results of caring. So apparent within strong, purposeful leaderships should be evidence of more love, more loyalty, and a greater concern for loss, as not all benefit from leadership actions.
Love matters in successful leadership relationships. Pure and powerful human to human connection should be important within the leadership influencing process. Above all, love can describe an unquestioning commitment within a team or a relationship. Loyalty matters to effective leaders. An acknowledgment of the challenge for leaders around loyalty in relationships has emerged. We live in an age where vertical trust (between society and government or national institutions) is causing a dilution of loyalty. Based on my research, effective leaders understand the power of loyalty and the importance of dealing with it when it is weakening and utilising it when it is strong. And also loss. Effective leaders care about loss. It was remarkable in some of my conversations
Trust cannot co-exist under toxic leadership
how little attention some leaders placed on the negative consequences of their actions. For leaders, every decision made has winners and losers. The best examples of leadership I have found are marked by love and care, leaders who work at loyalty and earn it, and who care about loss. With hindsight, in the recent pandemic as an example, when leadership encouraged social behaviours to keep people safe through isolation and social distancing, they should have also worked just as hard to understand and accommodate the negative and unintended consequences of loneliness, depression, mental health, and the collapse of education for young children. Leadership that learns takes the wonders of hindsight to create insights, and in turn, foresights, including tools for the future.
I do not conclude, however, that effective leadership in this particularly complex and fastmoving time is just about caring behaviours and relational trust. Care and trust are ways through which leaders can work towards greater and more purposeful results. But in this context, what we know also matters. A leadership that is clear about what it needs to know is more likely to be effective in pursuit of its purpose. My conversations with leadership teams on what they need to know was mixed and varied, inconclusive, contradictory and contentious. But, I was able to distil it down to what I have called four learning terrains. These describe the know-how which the research suggests is critical. Firstly, leaderships must understand the challenge it faces now and in the future; it must become challenge-led. Secondly, leaderships must be clear about what is possible; the reality of the possible. Thirdly, leaderships must know with whom it needs to connect and collaborate, stakeholders and beneficiaries alike. Finally, leaderships must know what competence they have or do not have and be clear about the key relationships between those who have the knowledge and those who must put the knowledge to use. These are the learnings: knowledge domains where trust and context are so important. Much more about this will be unpacked in my book, which will be published at the end of 2024.
The light and shadow of leadership
In conversation with Sabina Nawaz
Leadership power or leadership influence?
It’s a conundrum that often dominates conversations at tables in boardrooms, cafés, and kitchens. The story of the shadow side of power is widely disseminated. We make films, write books, and develop case studies all about the demise of narcissistic or toxic leaders. Yet, when it comes to influence, a different story is told. Many are fascinated by the lives of celebrities who, at a great distance, influence what we eat, the clothes we buy, and where we go on holidays. To help gain insight into what it really means for leaders to influence others in a strong and healthy way, I met with Sabina Nawaz, a global CEO coach currently based in North America.
business and serves leaders across twenty-two countries. Her insight is regularly published by the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine. She supported me at a time when I was a leader of an academic department seeking to influence positive change with my team so I knew from my own experience Sabina would be best placed to provide insight into the light and shadow aspects of leadership.
Karise: Sabina, it is great to reconnect again! I want to start with change in leadership. In your view, what are the top three leadership competencies necessary for delivering significant change and what type of influencing skills do they require?
Sabina Nawaz spent fourteen years at one of the world’s most successful companies, Microsoft. After nine years as a software engineer, she moved to human resources and became one of the principal architects of the company’s leadership and succession planning strategy. In 2005, she established a global executive coaching
Sabina: The first thing about leading change concerns the person responsible for it and how open they are to change. Many of my clients will come to me and tell me about their latest big change project and ask how they influence their team and get others on board. What they really want to know is, how do I convince everyone my answer is the right answer? A lot of the time it is about being open to being changed because
if we are on the precipice of a change, then no one knows the exact path. The person leading the change must have as many sensing systems around them to enrich the view and find the right path. This leads me to the second point around co-creating change. I really gained a lot of insight from the book by Daryl Conner, Managing at the Speed of Change. It focuses on managers giving their teams a voice and real choice. Too often they want to save time, so they come to their teams with a first draft to speed up the process. But when a manager comes in with the first draft, especially if you’re in a position of power, very few will argue with it. If the person responsible really wants their team to buy-in to the change they wish to see, then they must show up and ask their team for ideas. This doesn’t mean I can’t have a vision, or a point of view, or even my point of view doesn’t count. Instead, it means I must listen first! It’s about leaving your ego at the door.
The third point concerns the awareness that all change incurs loss. People in positions of influence need to be aware that any change they wish to enact will bring loss. Harvard professors Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, who created the
Adaptive Leadership Framework, found that people don’t resist change, they resist loss. Hence, if managers are running against resistance, it’s likely because their team doesn’t want to lose something. We need to remember we are all up for change if it’s going to give us our dreams on a platter. But, if it means my head count gets cut, or I have to give up my favourite project, or I have to spend extra time on something that’s not as exciting, then I will naturally resist it. If people want to affect real change, they must consider what will be lost and by whom if the change is successful.
Karise: So, how can leaders develop a sense of understanding the loss of change for others in the organisation and in their teams?
Sabina: I help people in a position of responsibility to create a problem statement about what will happen if the change is successful so they can understand future loss and be strategic about how to navigate this with their team. I ask them to understand the losses from the perspective of the different factions involved and their values. Creating a loss map helps people to simply
acknowledge the losses by putting them on the table and allowing others to co-create a way to minimise them. Even if some of the losses are inevitable, putting them on the table helps people realise you’re leading with empathy and they will be much more willing to say okay and start the journey of change. An exercise I do in one of my workshops is ask participants to explain the purpose of the change initiative. For the rest of the people in the room, I hand out sticky notes with a role they are to play. For example, an employee, a customer, a peer, their boss, and so on. I then get them to ask questions about the change based on that role. It is interesting to watch how participants, as soon as they have the sticky note, ask questions totally coming from the perspective of the role they are playing.
Karise: This all takes considerable effort and significant time. We cannot be ambivalent about the fact leaders in all spheres are expected to prioritise efficiency. In your experience, how can leaders navigate the tension?
Sabina: In reality, it is very difficult. Many organisations run quarter to quarter, hence their structures and processes are wired for short term results. Therefore, if a new leader doesn’t produce results straight away, they are asked to leave and the cycle continues. This type of culture creates real pressure on individuals to deliver results as quickly as possible. My advice is to look for the low hanging fruit and make progress there. At the same time, managers can push into deeper change by collecting data and listening in a new way as well as working with others to find the evidence to support a bigger case for longer-term change. I say all of this knowing from experience it can be, and will be, very difficult.
Karise: How do leaders influence sustainable change across diverse teams?
Sabina: Most of us actually don’t like to experience difference but the reality is we cannot survive without it. I think about myself, for instance. Do I really want to slow down my presentation and get someone’s opinion that’s
completely different from mine? No! I’m smart and I have figured it out so I just want to get going. Even though I want to get on with it, I find that asking for input and seeking different perspectives always makes the end result far richer. Why is the initial reaction to reject a different perspective or resist it? Because people fear what might be lost, whether it is time or their own rightness. I remember I led a project where I thought I had the answers figured out. So, I told my boss to give me one off-site meeting with colleagues and it will be sorted. “I will persuade them” I thought. But guess what? Six months and ten off-sites later, we shifted from having a programme that needed redesigning every year to developing a new programme that lasted for twenty years. This happened because I let go of my own sense of superiority, ego, rightness. I bit my tongue and sat on my hands (literally) to get answers from the team and harvest their wisdom. It took time but it was worth the investment.
One of the best books I’ve read for managing different cultural perspectives is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It provides readers with insight into the differences across cultures when it comes to context, power dynamics, confrontation, and time management. I believe the onus is on people to educate themselves, not ask the people who are from different cultures to educate them. One of the excuses I hear from managers working across diverse cultures when things don’t go well is that they say “my intentions were good.” I don’t care about good intentions. Corporate history is littered with stories of brilliant jerks! The impact matters. So if a person creates damage, then it’s not their intention that matters. If we keep going back to intentions, we’re centring the story on the person who is causing the harm, forgetting about those who have been harmed.
Karise: I want to shift focus to how leaders influence change beyond their team and organisation. What are the most effective ways leaders can influence others outside their organisation to achieve positive change?
If people hoard power, it will be taken away from them
Sabina: I think the first thing is to convene a space with different voices around the table, and then subsequently make sure all voices get heard. One of the challenges with multi-stakeholder engagement is the time it takes. Hence, it is important to make it practical. I teach teams the Play, Plus One, Pass strategy. The play means each person gets an opportunity to speak and share their perspective. A person can also say plus one: This means they agree with another person. There is also the option to say pass if someone doesn’t want to say anything. Now, if the same people keep saying pass over and over again, then the person leading the discussion needs to pay attention to that. This strategic approach helps democratise all the voices in the room in such a way that it is not just the loudest voice, the voice from the most dominant culture, the voice with the biggest title, or the largest endowment that gets to speak.
I think it is important to remember when it comes to influencing change with others outside your context, it is not about the solution; it’s about the problem because based on where you sit, the problem is going to look very different. We see the word problem and we say solution but that is the fastest way to disenfranchisement. The solution-first approach is the fastest way to build a great bridge in the wrong location. It is important for managers to allow time for the framing and reframing of the problem with others. It is vital for them to realise the importance of diverging before converging because in it lies wisdom. This means people must be comfortable with the mess involved in letting all voices be heard if they truly want everyone to contribute and move forward. In the corporate world, too many people in positions of influence try to be neat and tidy in discussions. They try to get to a common view way too quickly. Once managers have worked through the mess, then they can get to the purpose. Only then do they get to the solution.
Karise: We are hearing more about the characteristics and effects of toxic leadership: The shadow side exhibited in domineering, unreasonable leaders who
will not listen to feedback and mistreat their employees to achieve the goals of the organisation. How can leaders navigate the power dynamics of a senior leadership position wisely and effectively?
Sabina: In my new book I am writing about the ten power truths that shift when people get into positions of power. We like to create binary views about power. The reality is there is no such thing as a good human being and a bad human being. In the same way, there is no such thing as a good person and a bad person. It’s all on a continuum. Find me on a day where I’ve had little sleep, maybe an argument with my husband, or the dog is sick. I’m in a rush, getting out the door and somebody cuts me off in traffic. I am not nice. Is anyone nice? Answer truthfully! People are only one click away from being exposed now. As a result, society is now creating these impossible standards by which no human can live by 100% of the time, not least people in positions of authority!
I would say the toxicity is also bred through the heroism and the narcissism society promotes. When it comes to defining a narcissistic leader, if we mean someone who is really not interested in others, then I don’t think that leadership has any place anywhere. In my experience, people must be self-aware and other-aware if they are to steer clear of the shadow side of leadership such as narcissism. So, when it comes to self-awareness, people in influential positions must be aware of their own hungers and how this can affect others. There is great insight by Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey from Harvard University about the Immunity to Change approach, which is about how to identify these hungers, and how to put in place practices to manage them.
I also believe managers need to have a strong sense of self because they will encounter pressures and challenges from all directions. Take, for example, making an unpopular decision because it had to be done for the survival of the organisation. Without a strong sense of self, a person will wither and fail to survive the pressures of the job due to the multiple interpretations of their decision. But, ultimately,
that sense of self is not mutually exclusive from care and curiosity for others. To me, narcissism is the lack of curiosity about others impacted by your actions. When it comes to leading, it is about supporting the change for the benefit of others and serving the overall purpose of the change. This way people take them self out of the equation.
Karise: Finally, can you talk about your experience of helping leaders become better at empowering others to achieve significant and positive change?
Sabina: If people hoard power, it will be taken away from them. Especially in today’s world where I can see a shift in the dynamics of power: It is less about position and more about people. Think about the organisations and institutions that have mandated a 100% return to the office and the results. It has not gone so well. In my experience, too many managers complain about being overwhelmed, overburdened, or on the verge of burnout. My question to these people is, instead of trying to fix other people, what part are you playing in this experience? The answer points people in the direction towards empowering others. I worked with a very smart, very senior, highly strategic and relational manager. He shared a story with me about one of his team members who came to him and said, “I have to meet with another senior executive and I am really worried about it.” This person’s immediate instinct was to set up a meeting and take care of it. But, he stopped. Instead, he started to ask some coaching questions of the employee like, what is the exact issue? What have you tried? What do you think would work? He then shared some insights with the employee about the person he was worried about and helped him prepare for the meeting.
As I said before, if people hoard power, it will be taken away from them. I have no doubt that in my experience and in my outlook on the future, empowering others is vital. It is the most influential way to achieve real transformational change in organisations and institutions.
The power of humility
Reflection by Alfred Abolarin
You are one of us, he said as he conducted our wedding ceremony over two decades ago. The late Reverend Professor Ishaya Audu was humility personified. A Nigerian diplomat and foreign minister to the United Kingdom, he also served as Nigeria’s ambassador to the United Nations. The unique privilege of serving, listening, and learning for close to a decade under the astute medical doctor, Professor Audu and his wife Rev Mrs Victoria Audu contributed to the man I am today. Daddy Audu, as some of us called him, exuded wisdom and a wealth of knowledge that was nothing short of admirable and inspirational.
People who exhibit humility are powerful, not weak. During my time under Daddy Audu, I learned that a humble attitude could instigate a genuine desire to serve others without seeking personal recognition or gain.
In my early years, two verses from the New Testament greatly influenced my development and outlook on life, “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” [Luke 12:15] and “I wish above all things that you prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers” [3 John 1:2]. As I grew older, the prospering of the soul and service to humanity became hallmarks, which on one hand brought contentment and joy, but on the other hand, instigated a clash of different codes and conventions. I had to know what, when, and how to apply different approaches in terms of being humble and confident as opposed to the more enduring sense of pride: A deep-seated character flaw and an exaggeration of one’s importance.
A line from one of my favourite songs, down at your feet oh Lord is the most high place, resonates with the power of humility. I believe there is
a thin line between humility and pride, with the latter so easily camouflaging itself as false humility. A spurious representation of authenticity. It can be challenging for leaders to understand the concept of going lower to be higher, yet it remains core to what it means to be a servant leader. The key for me is having a sense of my own value and self-worth to make the improvements where needed in my leadership journey.
Humility is powerful because it allows you to treat others well and with respect. Humility is real, not perfect. It inspires trust and helps to build bridges as you try to connect the dots between who you were, who you are, and who you are becoming. It creates a space for you to step back, reassess situations, and have better clarity. It helps you to leave the table when love is no longer being served. It is better to humble yourself and to remain authentic rather than be humbled by life.
I have learned on the pathway of leadership that a person’s character has a huge impact on their interpersonal skills and on how they treat other people. I have always wanted to lead a life of continuous improvement, one that reflects the values that challenge people to be better. I have aspired to provide a leadership that supports and lifts the spirit of those around me; one that creates a safe and inclusive space where growth and potential can be nurtured; where vulnerabilities are embraced and not exploited. I have learned that humility is not weakness, stupidity, or over zealousness. It is critical to creating that inclusive space. I remember working for an organisation where my zeal and enthusiasm caused me to make decisions where I learned the folly of maintaining shallow connections. As it has often been said, your inner circle should be a garden of positivity, where each friendship speaks the language of encouragement and contributes to the blossoming of character; a source of inspiration and not a pool of negativity.
Over the years, and in various leadership positions, I have tried to align my actions with my values without compromising my integrity. In a world of evolving notions of flawlessness, filters, illusions, self-aggrandisement, façades, and
pretence, we constantly have a choice to make. A choice to be authentic even amid negative critique and a cacophony of judgement. To continuously reflect on our attitudes and behaviours in a way that is fair and just. A way that does not put others down, crippling their potential and confidence to be better. I would encourage leaders to let your authenticity be a lighthouse, guiding others back to their true self.
Humility is vital to the influencing process. It is not loud, but it is sincere. Humility does not focus on titles or the limelight, but it reflects the very essence and outcomes of our actions. The fragrance that lingers leaves a positive impression on those we encounter. There is a sacred dance between vulnerability, morality, confidence, and boldness when we walk with humility. After all, humility is a unique art and paints a portrait of authentic leadership. Brushstroke after brushstroke.
Reflection question: Take some time to think about the last time you witnessed genuine humility in a leader. How did it make you feel? Ask yourself, how willing are you to admit weaknesses or faults?
About Alfred Abolarin
Alfred moved from West Africa to Northern Ireland three decades ago and over the past twenty years he has worked in the area of equity, diversity, and inclusion, pioneering initiatives and projects on national and international platforms. I met Alfred in 2022 when he joined the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building’s Fellowship Programme. What struck me about working with Alfred during this time was not speci cally his track record of success (as impressive as that is), but what he carried into the places and spaces we journeyed that year. We read a lot about the importance of humility in leadership, but I have found the demonstration and consistency of such an approach much less common. Alfred’s living leadership example made me realise real power is truly carried in humility. I asked him to re ect on his perspective to bring to life and light to what it means to lead and live with humility today.
NOTES
‘Tending the garden’ by Claire Smyth
HEALTHY LEADERSHIP
There is a lot of talk about health today, but perhaps a lot less action. Less is known about the health warning that comes with leadership and, more importantly, how leaders can put in place strategies to help them sustain and enjoy the journey. In this section, you will read about what science is telling leaders and gain some practical insight from strategic leaders in the arena wrestling with the everyday living leadership challenge.
Healthy leadership through integrating the mind, body, and heart
WORDS: KARISE HUTCHINSON
Why does current research advocate a healthy leadership model, and how does it impact the bottom in organisations today? What are the pragmatic implications for leaders who want to develop and sustain healthy leadership behaviours?
For many, the adjective healthy is synonymous with diet, the state of our physical bodies, or psychological well-being. More and more data confirm healthy food, movement, rest, emotional regulation, and social connection as the fuel to sustain the pace of living today. In recent years, organisations have dedicated more attention and resource towards systems that support employee health and well-being, as a key component of their duty of care. This data is now helping inform the development of healthy leadership models from the perspective of self-care and care for others, not just the absence of disease.
Considering the attention given to healthy workplaces, employee well-being policies, and practices, this digest asks a few vital questions: What about the leader? Who looks out for them? What does the research tell us about how they should take responsibility for healthy leadership? The purpose is to first explain why an integrated approach to healthy leadership is vital; second, to shine a light on the working of a leader’s internal decision-making system; and finally, to discuss some of the latest evidence about how to best develop and sustain healthy leadership practices.
An integrated approach to healthy leadership: Why is it so vital?
The message from medical research is unmistakable: The key to healthy living requires interdependence and interconnection of the mind, heart, and body. Wellness is more than simply the absence of disease; it is an active process directed toward a healthier, happier, and more fulfilling life and includes not only physical, but also psychological and emotional dimensions. Take for instance, the recent scientific statement published in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation in 2001, which confirms psychological health contributes negatively and positively to heart disease (Levine, 2019). Emerging sources of evidence from the fields of neurocardiology and neurogastroenterology are now validating colloquial phrases such as gut feeling or heart intuition pointing to a three-factor model of head, heart, and gut aspects of embodied cognition in decision-making.
When it comes to understanding the meaning and practice of healthy leadership, research is only now starting to grasp the interconnection and interdependence of mind, heart, and body. As Culman (2013) explains, “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” The global body for professional accountants, Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, wrote about the heart of leadership in 2019. From their experience of working with thousands of global leaders, they found those who can tap into the innate intelligence of the heart were able to draw on a richer wisdom. It is this head-heart connection that helps leaders focus on what is important and right in the face of moral and ethical choices. The surge of interest from the work of Daniel Goleman and others in the 1990s has been
helping leaders understand the key role that emotions play in leadership processes and outcomes for both leaders and followers. Research findings identify emotional intelligence (EQ) as twice as important as a leader’s technical skills and IQ. Hence, it underscores the argument that intellect alone is not sufficient for high impact leadership. Specifically, the emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy have been identified as fundamental concepts for leading with integrity and moral purpose (Lucas, 2015). Emotional regulation is also connected to the mental health agenda, which in the main is confined to the workplace environment and its employees. It can be argued there is still some stigma around the conversation about the mental health challenges of senior leaders. Hence, more attention needs to be given to better understanding mental health and leadership practices.
A leader’s internal decision-making system: How does it work?
The leader of an organisation is the interface to the external environment, often experiencing parallel distress. Our simplistic view of what makes up a leader — personality, experience, qualifications — negates the deeply interconnected dimensions of mind, heart, and body when it comes to making decisions. There is now a robust body of research into the human decision-making process, specifically into the roles of cognition, emotion, and intuition. The traditional view focused on two different, but complimentary, evolved types of thinking: system one (fast and intuitive, using emotion-related associations and gut instincts) and system two (slower and more deliberate, involving logic and reason). Leadership researchers are now realizing we as humans have over-emphasised the parts of the brain focused on conscious verbal thinking; now it is clear relational leadership
Complex times require leaders capable of using their head, their heart and their guts as situations demand
processes require emotional and social functions activated in other regions of the brain and the body. Therefore, there is now a need for leaders to embrace an integrated emotional and cognitive approach to developing skills and behaviours not only as in leading self, but leading others too.
According to the work of Richard Strozzi-Heckler of the Strozzi Institute, for many of us who spend most of our time in our heads, access to the vast intelligence in our entire nervous system has been atrophied. His research argues by utilising the power of all three of our brains — the head brain, the intrinsic cardiac network (the heart brain), and the enteric neural plexus (the gut brain) — we create quicker and more sustained shifts in our leadership behaviours. We are hearing more research discovery on how the human body, heart, and mind interact in work settings. For example, the University of Sydney’s research centre on body-heart-mind in business involves work by academics from the fields of management, psychology, biology, and medical sciences, adopting methods and approaches to understand the effects that physiological and somatic factors have on how individuals and groups think, feel, and behave at work. More research evidence underpins the wisdom of this integrated leadership approach, not least for today: “Complex times require complete leaders – leaders capable of using their head, their heart and their guts as situations demand” (Dotlich, Cario, and Rhinesmith, 2006).
Developing and sustaining healthy
leadership practices
A walk back through leadership text books and theory reveals a deep fascination with the personality traits of successful leaders, more often perceived as superheroes. Twenty years ago (or less), words such as mental health, emotional health, or even resilience were not commonplace in the leadership vernacular. We wouldn’t have even imagined leaders approving the addition of
sleeping pods and pool tables into the workplace environment. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated change in different aspects of organisational leadership priorities and agendas across the globe; one of the key discussions brought front and centre is the importance of health and well-being for leaders and their teams. Yet, for many leaders within organisations and institutions, overworking is glorified with full immersion into the job and compulsive moving from one responsibility to another can be viewed as a badge of honour. But leaders must accept this kind of relationship with work is unsustainable.
Research evidence (see, for example, the study by Rudolph, Murphy and Zacher, 2018) points to follower well-being as a function of the attitudes, values, and behaviours of the leader. Expressed as an equation, it looks like
FOLLOWER WELL-BEING = F(HEALTHY LEADERSHIP)
What is common in research to date is the one-way street approach of concern, focused primarily on how the leader enhances the performance and/or well-being of others. What about the leader? Who looks out for them? Work by Iszatt-White and Ralph (2016) underscores the importance of leadership interventions in ensuring that leaders, as well as employees, also have a well-being support structure in place. There is no doubt leaders often find themselves in complex situations that require drawing from multiple competencies to perform well, and on top of wider societal trends and challenges, it is becoming more important than ever for leaders to find effective ways to manage burnout and associated distressing emotions from across their whole life. Many leaders are what Gallos (2008) describes as toxin handlers: Exemplary leaders distinguished by their empathy and emotional intelligence. These leaders are highly productive, ministering to others in need without regard for the personal and professional toll on their health. Evidence from leadership practice across a variety of sectors and cultures has found that
the more senior a leader is, the less favourable the conditions and support for healthy leadership practice exist.
In 2020, research from The Center for Creative Leadership brought more significant evidence of the need for leaders to adopt a whole-self approach to resilience that correlates in greater leadership effectiveness. Four interconnected and mutually reinforcing areas of physical, mental, emotional, and social resilience are identified alongside eight everyday resilience practices: moving (physical activity), sleep, mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal, savouring, gratitude, social connection, and social contact. Here are three practices that offer a great place to start on the journey:
1. MOVING: The work of leadership is more sedentary than ever. Whilst most leaders know intellectually that exercise is good for them, it can be viewed as another task to fit into an already busy day. Hence, it quickly becomes classified as non-urgent on the daily to-do-list. The research evidence underpinning the health benefits of movement is unequivocal: It fuels our energy, enhances our organ health, aids our circulation, balances our sugar levels, as well as increasing our resilience to stress, improving and enhancing our sleep and our mood. So, it is unsurprising that the evidence is also undeniable when it comes to leadership performance and exercise. Take for example, The Center for Creative Leadership’s survey. Out of more than 1,500 senior leaders, it found 88% said “exercise clearly impacts their performance” and noted the benefits of improved problem solving, creativity and focus; better mental health, mood, confidence and well-being; and lower stress levels. The research does not advocate extreme levels of exercise, such as running a marathon (you will be glad to know). Rather, it recommends walking, swimming, cycling, and even dancing. Just twenty minutes per day will reap benefits.
2. SLEEPING: A common ailment of many leaders is sleep deprivation. Working tirelessly to get results whatever the hour. It is a problem not just confined to leaders, but the World Health Organization points to a global epidemic of sleeplessness with roughly two thirds of adults sleeping less than eight hours a night. The dependency on technology to communicate and complete work means the art of shutting down has become more challenging than ever for leaders. The medical research over the last thirty years proves the direct correlation between quality of sleep and performance at work. Leaders, like all human beings, need sleep because it biologically restores the occurring toxins that accumulate during the day in the brain; much like a biological cleaner, it sweeps away the dirt so we can start afresh tomorrow. Sleep also resets our brain by helping us disconnect from the external environment. If we don’t, this will lead to systemic overload and serious overheating of the human machine. Research has found poor sleep quality can be caused by: too much caffeine, alcohol, stress, hormonal changes, and LED light from devices (phones, laptops, TV screens etc.).
3. THINKING: Science proves thoughts are real, tangible, measurable things called electrical impulses that influence reality. In other words, our thoughts can greatly impact our feelings, behaviours, physical sensations, and vice versa. The problem is we believe we are objective thinkers. But as Stephen Covey explains, “we see the world as we are, or how we are conditioned to see it” (2020). It is well understood that great thinkers make great leaders. Yet, the effective management of thought patterns is one of the most challenging dimensions of leadership. Brain research now tells us, that thanks to neuroplasticity, we have the power to change our thinking. Research into leadership thinking has identified cognitive appraisal as an effective way to reinterpret an emotionally evocative situation in a different light (ideally, more balanced) after considering the missing information, assumptions, and new perspectives. In turn, the impact for leaders who practice this strategy is higher job satisfaction and lower emotional burnout.
In the same way clinicians, academics, and researchers are refocusing on the patient and the person to promote and prescribe wellness, leaders must also refocus attention on the practices of the whole leader from the inside out. Research by Cavagnaro and van der Zande (2021) offers some important insight through their Care Model of leadership development aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Leadership responsibility must start with the leader and how they care for themselves, before caring for the well-being of others and the wider community and environment. The mandate, however, comes with forewarning: It is not instant or effortless. It requires courage to bring all of who we are into the active process of leading — the brilliant parts, the messy parts, the parts we hide, and the traits we feel most proud of — if we are to experience a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life. One that includes not only physical, but also psychological and emotional dimensions.
Leaders: Breathe but don’t inhale
In conversation with Kerry Anthony
OnceI started to explore healthy leadership, I quickly realised how few research-informed resources were available specifically for leaders. It was at an Institute of Directors event about mental health in leadership where I met one of the speakers Kerry Anthony, the group chief executive of Inspire. It was the combined impact of her leadership experience and authenticity in shedding light on one of the most misunderstood leadership subjects to a jam-packed room of leaders in Belfast that struck me. The insight and wisdom imparted into the room that day was something I wanted to make sure was shared with the world. Kerry kindly took time out of her busy schedule leading Inspire to join me for a conversation about strong and healthy leadership today. What is it? Why is it so hard to see? And, how do leaders exercise it?
Karise: Kerry thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today. First off, what do you believe are the top three challenges today that impact the health and well-being of leaders?
Kerry: One of the big challenges leaders talk about — certainly consistently for the last twentyfive years during my time in the sector — is finance. Even through the good times, there are always financial pressures for organisations. In the current environment, it is an even bigger challenge because of the pressure on public funding and the impact this has on health and social care systems. Hence, the danger for leaders is that so much of their energy gets invested into thinking about finances that other strategic and important matters get forgotten.
Under financial stress like this, leaders can neglect culture. As a result, important leadership issues,
Ego can get in the way of healthy leadership
like values, don’t get as much attention as they should. Cultivating a positive, cohesive culture post pandemic is a big challenge for leaders to understand their purpose and why their organisations exist as well as then communicating this to their staff and clients. It is so critical for sustaining organisations.
This relates to another challenge for leaders: recruiting and retaining staff. During the pandemic, the health and social sector played a pivotal role in supporting people and continuing to provide services. I had hoped that this would lead to a greater investment in these services post pandemic, with the ability to offer better rates of pay, but sadly this has not materialised. Leaders are asking people to work in incredibly challenging environments and for a salary often just above the living wage. So, it is a real challenge for leaders in the third sector. We have to think of other ways we can recognise, thank, and celebrate staff.
Karise: Based on your experience, what does a strong and healthy leader look like, talk like, and feel like to work for?
Kerry: For me, an effective leader has a very clear purpose, a really clear mission and vision, and is able to articulate it to others in such a way as to bring other people with them on the journey. They bring energy and light into the room but they don’t detract from others. Such leaders are really good at their job and at the same time they are allies. They provide an environment for other people to grow and flourish. They shine a light of recognition on others. These leaders see themselves as facilitators, bringing out the best in others. I have experienced that and for me it was this type of leader who helped prepare me for my current role, enabling me to have faith and belief in myself, equipping me for growth when the opportunity came. However, this is rare. I still hear and see too many examples of people leading poorly and the results can be devastating for their people and their organisations.
Karise: So, why do you think healthy leaders are in short supply today?
Kerry: I think exceptional leadership is about the facilitation of others and how a leader role models that every day is critical. Poor leadership is when people believe leadership is mainly about them. Sometimes ego can get in the way of healthy leadership. Leadership must be balanced with humility. Too many people lose sight of that. I remember a leader, who I respected immensely, speaking to me when I received an award for my leadership impact in the sector. He gave me a great piece of advice to keep my ego in check: Kerry, you can breathe, but don’t inhale. In other words, take time to enjoy the moment and recognise your achievement. However, don’t get carried away by it as you have to keep going and stay focused on your purpose, not the praise. I use their maxim regularly when I am talking to others, especially when someone asks me about what they need to know when they become a CEO. I believe it is important not to get carried away with the title: Leadership is working for others every day. So, do your very best! Shine a light on other people and make sure you thank them.
I think a healthy leader can also be ambitious. My ambition is for Inspire to grow and do more, and for the people in Inspire — those working in Inspire or using the services of Inspire — to grow as a result. I want Inspire to have a successful and sustainable social enterprise that thrives — including for it to be profitable — so our work can reach and transform the lives of more and more people.
Karise: Focusing on leadership practice, what do you think makes a leader healthy in today’s world?
Kerry: When it comes to physical health, leaders must move! With so much remote working and continuous meetings, it is too easy to sit for long periods of time without a break and that is not healthy for anyone. So, taking a pause and short break to walk around the block is important. When a leader does it, it sets permission for their team to do the same. I have two dogs and I love being outside with nature. I think it’s about finding the thing you enjoy doing. For me finding headspace is important. I spend a lot of time
outdoors, especially in the garden. Sometimes I can be in the greenhouse for two hours and have completely lost myself and switched off! Other times I will have been out there with a problem in my head and in that time I will have worked to find a solution to something I have been stuck on previously. Nature offers great physical and mental health benefits.
As an organisation, Inspire talks about the five steps to well-being. Hence, I would say staying connected as a leader is also incredibly important. Leaders must find their people that they can trust and talk to. I often hear other CEOs talk about being in a lonely or isolated role; that only happens if you allow it. For example, I was experiencing a challenge recently that some chief executives probably wouldn’t talk to their executive leadership team about. But I thought, if I talk to them about it, they will be aware of it and be able to support me with it. I don’t believe sharing that challenge made me look weak as a leader. Rather, it says to my team: I’m making you aware of this because I want you to be conscious about something that’s really troubling me, and if you see it happening, please step in and support me. It takes humility to say to your executive team I need your help on this, and it is only possible when a leader knows their team has their back and the leader has theirs.
Karise: In your experience leading a large cross-country charity, what do you put in place to protect your health and wellbeing as well as for your senior leadership team and board?
I meet with my executive team twice a week, so there’s an awful lot of collective leadership and decision making. Effective leadership is built on relationships. It is about good communication, respect, openness, and transparency. It is also about having fun, being honest about who you are, and what’s going on in your life. After all, everyone has a life bigger than work (or at least you should!). When there’s enough understanding of each other personally as well as professionally we get to understand both how we each lead and collectively how we want to lead Inspire.
A collective approach to leadership also means at a very practical level when someone is on leave, they can really switch off knowing the rest of the team will be able to handle challenges that arise. Is there anything worse than getting a work phone call when you’re on holidays?
Part of the success of a collective leadership approach is down to how we give and receive feedback. Recently all members of the executive team completed a 360 degree appraisal. I have been impressed by the level of honesty and kindness (incidentally two of Inspire’s values) in the feedback to one another. I can also see how the team have bought into the process and been open to learning about themselves and refining some of their own practices and behaviours. Most of all, I can see how an already very strong and high performing team is benefiting by being even more supportive of one another, whilst offering challenge and debate. A strong and healthy leader also has good self-awareness and I think a 360 degree appraisal helps to strengthen this and allows us to develop techniques to manage the inevitable stresses and challenges that can come our way.
I want people to be happy in work and to thrive and grow. Working at a senior level I recognise that the directors in the team are advisors each chosen because of their experience and expertise. Respecting and valuing this ensures people are able to bring their best selves to work and know their contribution is truly valued.
Karise: We hear a lot about the importance of creating healthy workspaces for employees and teams, but what about leaders? How can and how should busy leaders be supported? Where does the responsibility lie?
Kerry: I am clear that well-being is both an organisational and personal responsibility. It is the organisational responsibility of leaders to ensure they are creating mentally healthy workplaces and a culture that is psychologically safe and open. Regardless of organisational size, type, and available resources, leaders can always
do something to support employee well-being, for example through policies, systems, or access to EAP support through organisations like Inspire. Leaders must remember that they can, and must, help to set the tone and provide an environment for staff at all levels to speak up and say to their manager I am struggling and I know I need some support.
There is also a fundamental personal responsibility for leaders to think about their work life balance and to prioritise how they want to live and work. That can be a real challenge for leaders in our sector because of the emphasis on caring for others. There is such a danger of taking on so much and we have seen in recent years quite a bit of burnout at a senior level. This is where personal choice and personal responsibility really matters. It is about being self-aware enough to know when you are not coping, understanding what you need to put in place to support yourself, asking for support if it is needed, and then being courageous enough to make the change.
Karise: Finally, what advice would you give readers in their journey of pursuing the practice of healthy leadership in organisations?
Kerry: The key word is practice. It requires deliberate and intentional role modelling on an ongoing basis. Every interaction at every table counts. Leadership takes serious energy and commitment. Be kind to yourself and find places of support and encouragement. Find a time to exhale and pause. I am not naturally good at exhaling; stopping and reflecting on the journey. But in the last few years, as an executive team, we take a day in December to stop the activity and pause, reflecting on the challenges and successes of the year, telling each other what we are grateful for about one another. It is powerful because we get to breathe out, and in doing so, together we can make sense of the journey, the highs and the lows. By the time we come back in January, we are mentally ready for the next year ahead.
Inspire is an all-island charity and social enterprise with over nine hundred employees whose aim is the well-being of all. Inspire works with people living with mental ill-health, intellectual disability, autism and addictions to ensure they live with dignity and realise their full potential. They campaign to create a society free from stigma and discrimination, creating a culture of compassion that focuses on people and their abilities.
Visit their website to find out more: www.inspirewellbeing.org
Sustaining leadership
In conversation with David Nicholl
Energy industry leaders know they operate in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. Regulatory challenges, geopolitical pressures, and environmental issues mean the stresses and stakes are high for leaders of energy companies. So, when it comes to understanding how to lead in a healthy and sustainable way, there is much to learn from leaders in the sector. My knowledge of David Nicholl as a leader and advocate of healthy practices meant I had the privilege of inviting him into this conversation for Illuminaire. He has a strong track record of success across a variety of roles and global companies: executive vice president, global marketing and sales, smart power and smart buildings, and also head of northern and southern Europe for ABB’s Electrification business division, president and CEO for Philips Lighting (UK and Ireland),
Rockwell Automation (UK and Ireland), and Schneider Electric Country president (Sweden and Romania). He is currently a director at eEnergy. There is a striking humility, however, about how he leads his teams across countries and cultures that I believe will bring wisdom and insight to readers about the healthy leadership Challenge.
Karise: The first volume of Illuminaire Press focuses on strong and healthy leadership. In light of your vast experience, how would you describe this type of leadership?
David: When it comes to strong leadership, I think about strength of character, body, and mind. Strong leaders also have a clear vision, direction, and purpose. Purpose is huge: Why you work matters, not just to you, but to others in the organisation or institution. It is really important for leaders to understand how to recruit talent. It is not just about money! There is a young generation of talent coming through
that will select a company to work for based on its purpose; the why they do things. Clarity of vision and purpose is critical to leading people in a world of complexity and ambiguity. Everything is moving very, very fast, so leaders and their people need to know where they are heading. Leaders need to know their direction of travel.
When it comes to healthy leadership, for me it is about the whole leader: the spirit, mind, and body. Physical health is very important to me as exercise and sport have always been a big part of my life, from playing rugby at school to mountain biking, cycling, and going to the gym today. It is important not just for my body, but also for my mind as well. I spend a lot of time at my desk where my brain is switched on all the time. I am constantly present as there’s lots of information coming to me from everywhere, whether it’s the phone or the computer, or just people wanting to talk. Then when I go to the gym, my body is switched on, and my mind switched off. I literally just focus on the weights or the road in front of me while riding my bike. I don’t read emails or text when I am exercising. It is my space protected from interruptions. Leading, especially in the area of sales and marketing, means I am constantly switched on, and while I am an extrovert and get energy from people, there are times when I need to go into my cave to recharge. Hence, exercise has double the benefits!
Karise: It clearly isn’t easy, or everyone would be doing it. So, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges to developing healthy leadership practices?
David: The pandemic forced some great things to accelerate in regard to technological advancement and remote working. In other ways, however, the pandemic accelerated some of the more significant and concerning conversations about how we look after ourselves, especially when it comes to mental and physical health. It has created problems of isolation for leaders and workers alike. Remote working has created the challenge of confinement. I think it’s really important to get away from the desk and get outside and get away from the stress. There are
ways to combine and do both. Take exercising with friends, for example. Social connection is vital for leaders in our day and age. But there is also the importance of quiet time or relaxation. I like to practice meditation and breathing. So, I don’t feel guilty about taking one hour to go to the gym at midday and then take lunch after if I started work at 6am and need to be on a call later that night. It is not about feeling guilty but being flexible! I came from the era of the traditional nine to five working week so I have had to change my mindset away from this and toward delivering projects and tasks. I have had such a mix of leaders in my teams over the last twenty years from different cultures, backgrounds, countries, male and female. By taking a time flexible approach I have found my biggest challenge is often to tell my team to stop working too hard for too long!
Leaders probably aren’t as healthy as they once were in the past. There’s a couple of reasons for that. Number one: there’s too much technology. It is always at our fingertips, hard to walk away, and there’s no off switch. Leaders are now on call 24/7. Second thing is food: It is now so easily accessible and mostly the unhealthy kind, namely process foods, sugary snacks, then there is soft drinks and alcohol. For so many leaders, the calories consumed at their desk or around meeting tables far exceeds the energy being burned. Overeating, overdrinking, and overconsuming, leads to weight gain, and that’s not good for the heart and body. It’s not even good fuel for the brain! Yes, exercise helps, but again that means creating space for movement and action. Whether that is going to the gym, going for a walk every day, choosing to eat well, it takes discipline. Take David Brailsford’s theory of marginal gains: Leaders can make small healthy changes over time; even progress by one percent will add up and bring impact to your life. The bigger challenge for leaders is how can they teach and encourage others to do the same?
I try to adopt the approach of leader as coach in managing my team. This includes setting aside time for quarterly one-to-one sessions with each member of my team. Some of the discussion is performance coaching and some is more life
I am not impressed by leaders who work 12 hours every day; that just tells me they are being inef cient
I’m self-aware enough to know
I am a human with limits
coaching. Too many leaders work all day and try to do everything, but are never finished, and some fail to deliver on the necessary tasks. The message I consistently try to convey to my team comes from Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. By taking his time management principles, I help them develop practical ways to prioritise urgent and non-urgent tasks according to Covey’s four-quadrant system. For example, I like to encourage my team to make sure they are not always working on quadrant one tasks that are concerned with managing crisis and project deadlines. While this level of task will inevitably arise, time must be prioritised for quadrant two activities, which concern relationship building, planning, and recreation. I am not impressed by leaders who work twelve hours every day; that just tells me they are being inefficient. This means I will always ask about planned holidays and periods of leave.
Karise: When it comes to coaching your team, I am sure you have encountered the impact of emotions in the workplace. How important is the ability to manage emotions in leading others?
David: When I was a younger leader, I probably did lack empathy. However, due to the feedback I received, I had to teach myself about how to listen. When I started to read a leadership book about putting you first, I thought it meant me, when it was actually about the other you: the other person in the conversation. I also have had to work at my leadership style. My natural state is very directive, focused on getting the task completed. I am married to someone who is exactly the opposite and wants to learn all about people. She complements my personality very well and I have learned so much from her about how she listens well to people, and brought this into how I lead my team. I have found there’s a lot of smart people in the world who have never made it because while they are highly intelligent, they lack emotional intelligence. Leaders need to be balanced. They must be smart and emotionally aware. I did neurolinguistic programming to learn about the importance of anchoring and listening to words, as well as understanding body
language. That was really important learning for me as a leader about how to relate better to others, especially when it comes to receiving feedback from my team.
Emotions are really important to understand when recruiting for new positions. I used to ask people about their CV in interviews, but now I know it is more important to find out how they will cope in certain situations; what derails them. This means I need to understand how they manage their emotions and how they drive behaviour. I have never fired anybody because of performance; it’s usually because of their behaviour. I’ve tried to change my hiring practices and recruit the right people with the right internal working, even if they don’t have the experience or knowledge. You can develop people as long as they are open to feedback, ambitious, driven, and enthusiastic. Whereas, if you hire someone with all the knowledge with big internal issues, then it can be really difficult to change their internal programming.
Karise: You are so right. Emotional intelligence is massively underappreciated today. Now David, can you tell the readers about some of the everyday practices you have developed over time that help you lead effectively?
David: I’m self-aware enough to know I am a human with limits. Burnout is always a real possibility. Micromanagement, therefore, should be avoided at all costs! It is not the remit of leaders, and if it creeps in, so does the risk of burnout. I’ve tried to teach myself that leading in the workplace — wherever that is — is just a job. Whilst I want to perform, I can only perform as well as I can. I can make the best plans, but there’s a lot of external factors that come into play, which I can’t control. You can’t beat yourself up about it because it’s not always just about me; it takes a team. For me, it is all about planning. Leadership requires significant amount of energy, so just like a leader must prepare in advance for strategic meetings by having their papers read, documents written, and key conversations had, it is important to pre-plan some of the more basic
daily decisions in advance. I plan, for example, what I will wear and what I will eat the next day (because choosing to eat healthily requires effort and planning). I also plan my exercise schedule a week in advance so it is in my diary, prioritised alongside my work commitments. What I find when I get stressed or overwhelmed is that it is not because I am overscheduled. Rather, it is because someone is putting stress on me. Hence, it takes a conversation to solve that type of stress. We need to role model leadership another way.
I have adopted this response strategy: I either do it, delegate it, delete it, or diary it. It is back to Stephen Covey’s time management principles. The reason why many leaders don’t get important stuff done is due to the simple fact they don’t put it in the diary. When it comes to strategy and working on strategic documents, I carve time in the diary so it is protected, otherwise I would spend all day in meetings and doing emails, and the strategic work would get pushed to evenings and weekends, invading my personal time. On that note, email management is a big one for leaders. There’s no such thing as an important email! If someone really needs me to do something, they will phone. I don’t check emails all the time. When I do, I filter my emails by whom they come from: first my boss, then I check for customers, then my peers, then my team.
Karise: Now moving on to a vital topic: resilience. I would love to hear about a time in your life where you were tested as a leader, whether it was failure, disappointment, or difficulty. How did you develop resilience?
David: I have so many experiences of difficulty and challenges! One of the greatest learnings for me was a few years ago, when I started a new business with a friend in the construction industry. Unfortunately, things went badly and I was left with serious outstanding debt due to fraudulent actions by my business partner. At first, I didn’t know what to do and faced losing my house and everything else I had. But then I asked myself, what can I do? So, I went to work. I made a series of important and difficult
decisions: I hired lawyers, I took control of the business, I changed bank terms, I raised cash, and I prayed. It took time and serious work, but thankfully I came out the other end, and with cash too, which I reinvested into a small energy company. The learning curve was steep, and it was serious: Going from almost bankrupt to getting all my money back, and setting up a new business, growing it to £32million turnover and £5million profit with my business partner, and then floating it on the European AIM Stock Exchange Market.
For leaders in this sector, business is high return but also high risk. Cash flow is always the challenge. Experiencing nearly losing it all and having faith in myself that I could find a way when I put my mind to it made me stronger as a leader because similar challenges always arise. A coach once reminded me about how babies learn to walk. When they start, they fall, time and time again. But, they learn to walk by getting back up and trying again, and again, and again. As leaders, we are just big kids! It is not about asking why has this happened, but asking yourself, what action can I take?
Karise: Finally, zooming out to consider the wider leadership narrative, what do you believe needs to change about how we lead today?
David: I do think change needs to occur in how we view the responsibility of leaders, especially in the c-suite. While ultimately the CEO has the final say, they must be a coach and have the best team. It must be collective leadership in action. In my experience of leading a large global business in Sweden, I found a strong collective decisionmaking culture. It meant there was a lot of talking, communicating, sharing, and openness when it came to making decisions. While decisions took longer, implementation was very fast. Whereas across the Atlantic in the United States, decisions are made fast, but implementation takes much longer and so there are lot of mistakes made along the way. Initially, I found it so frustrating in Sweden. As a more task orientated leader used to fast decision-making, I got frustrated by
the time spent on collaboration, alignment, and listening to people’s opinions. But I soon came to appreciate the calmer leadership approach of the Swedes because when it came to the final meeting — where the decision was made — everyone was aligned. There is no doubt the pace of change remains a constant challenge for leaders, so the reality of decision-making can sometimes require a quick response. But, regardless of the decision to be made by leaders, pace should not trump the consideration of people.
Finding and keeping margin
Reflection by Karise Hutchinson
Some say you don’t know what you have lost until you find it. It’s true. It happened to me a few years ago when I found margin: a remedy for overloaded living. The discovery came at a time when I was in a senior leadership role and the experience of overworking, overcommitting, and overachieving culminated in a significant moment that grabbed my attention. The experience gave me a clue to something fundamental I needed to know about and find it: margin. Until this point, I understood margin as typography, the space between text and the outside of a page. I want to tell you about my experience of a different type of margin and how it has transformed how I live and lead.
Progress. A double-edged sword. In the Western world we live at a time when we have ten times the material abundance of two generations ago. Global progress has brought affluence, education, technology, entertainment, the comforts and conveniences our grandparents could only have dreamed of. Yet, do we find ourselves ten times more content or fulfilled? Or at a societal level, has inequality become the inevitable accompaniment of progress? For leaders, progress involves measurement, associated with words like performance, growth, and development. Stakeholders — employees, customers, suppliers — look for it and shareholders expect it. Hence, there is no doubt progress is well embedded into the role and responsibility of leaders.
I was leading a university campus with five thousand students and five hundred staff, responsible for delivering strategic projects and building relationships in the region. I was also a professor of leadership involved in leading major
research projects, supervising PhD students, and teaching. Not to mention, a wife and mother with four children; the eldest about to go to university and the youngest only a baby (he was my surprise fortieth birthday present). Life was full and work was fulfilling. Two years into the role, making significant progress as an academic and senior leader, I woke up one day and couldn’t get out of bed. Not in the usual I am so tired way, but in the my muscles won’t work way. My body was telling me something my brain didn’t know. I was suffering from overloaded living and my body was sending me an SOS.
The problem about progress is threefold. Progress is deceptive. The achievement and applause of delivering positive change and making a difference, while good and important, fuels overworking and overloading our lists of to-do’s. The other problem about progress? Addiction. I became dependent on the mission believing I could do more and without any effort
the to-do-list just grew and grew. And there is a third problem about progress: hindering perspective. Many leaders take health for granted until it leaves. Caught up in the never-ending need for progress, it is easy to lose perspective. As the saying goes, health is the crown on the head of the well man that only the sick man sees. Too many leaders prioritise the health of others at the detriment of caring for oneself. This can be an especially major challenge for all types of carers, who often have a deep-seated desire to push on and dig deep when they are sick. They feel they have no choice because after all, what would happen to progress if we didn’t?
I had a decision to make: To look beyond progress and examine the conditions of living across my whole life, or blindly move on. To help me on this journey, a kind and thoughtful friend bought me a book called Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard Swenson. In this book, I read about overloaded living: A worldwide stress epidemic fuelled by progress. In his book, Swenson gives guidance to help deal with overload and it was here where I found margin. I discovered margin is a space between my load and my limits. Its significance lies in its purpose: a space for relationships. Margin helps build reserves and resilience for living leadership not only in work, but as a wife, mother, aunt, and friend.
Fortunately for me, my experience was the early stage of burnout. It was a significant — but not detrimental— warning sign for which I am eternally grateful for. Now that I had found margin, I didn’t want to lose it. Putting theory into practice is never easy. It is possible, however, thanks to Swenson’s simple formula:
MARGIN = POWER - LOAD
Power is the resources in our lives, such as skills, time, training, emotional and physical energy, faith, finances, and social supports. Load refers to work, problems, obligations and commitments, expectations, debt, deadlines, and interpersonal
conflict. So, if our load is greater than the power in our life, we will overdraw. If we do this consistently over time, our bank of health will take a hit. The burnout guarantee. The challenge is that while load just happens, margin requires serious effort. Leaders, we must draw a line on the excessive overload in our lives if we are to stay healthy. We must reschedule our life to 80% so we have margin when the unexpected comes into our life. Whether it is a sick child or parent, the departure of a key employee, or the other countless curve balls life throws at us.
In a society marked by overloaded living, it is time to tell a different story of how to lead so we can demonstrate to others the importance of relationships and balance that will help us progress in a sustained and healthy way. If you are in a position where you want margin back, then you must do something about progress. There are multiple paths to overload but vigilance alongside faithful friends — those who will call out the early symptoms— will help you on the journey. Remember: The only way to increase margin is to reduce load or increase power. The responsibility of the decision rests with you. I can’t promise it will be easy, but it is truly worth it.
Reflection point: Take a moment and consider the margin formula. List the things contributing to power and load, then weigh them. Ask yourself, do you have margin? If so, how much?
We must preschedule our life to 80% so we have margin when the unexpectant comes into our life
About Professor Karise Hutchinson
Karise Hutchinson is founder of Illuminaire Leadership, a global institute providing high quality, research-led insight to leaders in private, public, and third sector organisations. Karise is an award-winning researcher, author, educator, speaker, and strategic advisor who specialises in uncovering and distilling the very latest leadership thinking, helping leaders take a deeper look at how they think and practice leadership today, for the sake of tomorrow. Karise lives on the north coast of Northern Ireland with her husband and four children exploring the adventure and love of life.
NOTES
‘Seasons Change’ by Claire Smyth
LEADING TRANSITION
Change may not be anything new to leaders and organisations, but the human dimension of transition has never been more important. This section examines the less understood dimensions of the inner workings of transition and provides research insight into why it should matter to leaders today. Learnings from conversations and stories will help shine a light on how leaders can navigate the challenges and find beauty in every season of living leadership.
Leading transition
WORDS: KARISE HUTCHINSON
How is leading transition different to leading change? What does the research tell leaders about how to lead themselves and others through transition?
Change is nothing new to leaders. Over the past forty years, organisational change research has brought a deep appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities of leading change. Indeed, as geopolitical and economic conditions continue to flux, leaders have come to realise yesterday’s assumptions and practices will no longer suffice. Change is no longer optional for leaders; it is essential. How leaders navigate change determines success or failure. Change for leaders comes in many guises: a new market, a new product, a new technology, a new team, a new boss, a career move, or a new leadership role. While there is a surplus of books, articles, videos, and models available to help leaders manage change efforts, it remains one of the toughest leadership challenges. Why? Because it involves more than change.
Society talks a lot about change, but seldom deals with transition and it’s the same for leadership research. Transition is not another
word for change. While change can be described as external, imposed on an individual or organisation, transition is the state that change puts people into the internal psychological process of adapting to a new situation. As Bridges puts it, “change is situational, whereas transition is psychological” (2009). Externally imposed change, whether positive or negative, requires leaders to change behaviours, competencies, attitudes, and thinking. The problem is that the uncertainty of change triggers all kinds of behavioural and emotional reactions from leaders and people. Hence, to only examine a change process without understanding the more complex human dimension is problematic. Indeed, research purports the most recognised reason for the failure of a new change initiative is not the implementation, but in the human transition process. The challenge for leaders, therefore, is effectively handling both the structural side of leading change and the slower-moving human dynamics of transition.
Steps of transition
There is a misperception by leaders that transition is automatic: That it happens just because the change is happening. But the reality is very different. In 2009, William Bridges, a leader in the field of change management, developed a threestage model that can help leaders understand the complex dynamics of the transition process. Bridges’ model draws upon a theory of personal development that views transition as the natural process of disorientation and reorientation marking the turning points in the path of growth. He presents three different processes that people undergo in change, which helps explain why transition takes longer and why it is so unsettling.
STEP ONE
The first critical step in transition is about saying goodbye: The need to let go of the way things have been and the comfort of the familiar. However, even if people want to let go of their old ways, it can be very difficult to start anew, and this is where the next step comes into play.
STEP TWO
The second step is described as the neutral zone: The in-between state of exploration where the greatest risk to change exists. Some will try to rush ahead into something or any new situation, while others will want to retreat into the past. Leaders, however, must resist the urge to rush through the neutral zone because it is the seedbed for new beginnings.
STEP THREE
Time in the neutral zone can take longer than expected, but it is never wasted. It is where the real internal transformation takes place that enables people to get to the third stage: Moving forward and reaching the new beginning. Therefore, leaders need to understand it is transition, not necessarily the change, that will hold people back from accepting the new beginning.
Most people experience change as loss, so it is natural to experience resistance in transition
How can leaders lead well in transition?
Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020 shows learning to successfully navigate invisible transitions is both a crucial and a formidable challenge. It is critical for leaders to understand and support the internal transition process in relation to the external change process. Studies have found men and women often deal with informal transitions in different ways and that their success in navigating the ups and downs depends on having the right support in place. Not only do leaders need to understand the gender differences in transition, but they must also be aware of the pace and timing
of change. The structural position of leaders means they will be closer to the need for change: They will have seen and accepted it before the rest of the organisation. While the leader will have likely moved through the transition process quicker, it is critical they give the rest of the organisation time to process and give feedback during the three stages of transition.
Research by Professor Victoria Grady applied the concept of transitional objects from the field of developmental psychology to help leaders provide pivotal support between an organisation (or institution) and its employees during a time of significant change. Her research, over fifteen years involving more than one hundred organisations in seven different countries, found three ways transitional objects help leaders steady their teams during a transition. She draws upon a neuroscience concept called neuroplasticity that confirms the human brain can be reconfigured; in other words, biologically people can let go of old ways and embrace new ones. The research first points out the importance of agency in transition: Giving people an active part in making decisions and shaping the process. Hence, leaders should ask, where can I give my employees choice in this transition? Her research also points to the importance of connection to something shared: A mission or purpose, much like a physical security blanket, that helps people focus on something bigger than the current pain and uncertainty of transition. Leaders should consider, how can I instil purpose into everyday activities for everyone involved? The third way focuses on using something new as a bridge toward the new destination, based on the premise that even on dark days, there is probably at least one bright spot to focus on. To consider this, leaders should also explore what new objects, innovations, or technologies can serve as a bridge for people to help them on the journey of where they are headed.
Leading transition requires a greater level of soft skills; most of all, a high level of emotional intelligence. It requires empathy: Deep listening to why others struggle to embrace change. In the neutral zone, the emotional connection between
a leader and followers is most critical. The reality is most people experience change as loss, so it is natural to experience resistance in transition. It is also a process that can take its toll physically as well as mentally and socially. Research points to the benefits of a coaching approach to leading organisational change, but it starts with selfawareness. Leaders must first understand their own predisposition to change. Some will enjoy the challenge that comes with change, but many find it difficult. This recognition will help leaders not only manage their own emotions but that of others during the transition process.
How can leaders navigate transition from one leadership role to another?
Leadership changes are more common and important than ever, but according to research by McKinsey & Company in 2018, most companies don’t get it right. Examples of formal leadership transitions include vertical transitions (promotions to a higher rank), lateral transitions (moving to a different part of the business), and geographic transitions (moving to a different country or market). This study by McKinsey & Company looked at the success of senior leadership transitions and found that despite the high stakes, leaders are typically under-prepared for —and under-supported— during the transition to a new role. Studies show that two years after executive transitions, anywhere between 27-46% are regarded as failures or disappointments by the organisations who appoint. This is partly due to organisations who often give little support to new senior leaders, expecting the demonstration of success, intelligence, initiative, and results in previous roles will automatically transfer to the new role taken.
It is widely known that transition into new significant roles can be one of the most challenging times in the professional lives of
leaders. Research has found no blueprint for leading personal and professional transitions; it is certainly not a one size fits all approach. A study by Michael Watkins in 2009 discusses the different types of transition contexts and whether it is in the context of a new start-up, strategic realignment, or growth, it is a mistake for leaders to think the experience and success of the past will work in a new role and context. Leaders must recognise that with each transition, they must adapt their skills to face the new set of challenges in a new role. The failure to embrace the personal modification of behaviours, attitudes, and skills points leaders to Marshall Goldsmith’s wise advice, “what got you here won’t get you there” (2010). Therefore, what made a leader successful in a previous role is typically not sufficient for a new role.
Making this level of change is not an easy task. It relies upon a different mindset with room for feedback and being personally accountable for change. The degree to which a leader in transition can adapt their personal approach to leadership depends upon their ability to embrace the pillars of self-management, which includes enhancing self-awareness, exercising personal discipline, and building complementary teams. Research describes this position as learning agile, which leaders must reflect and ask themselves: How and what do I need to change to keep up with the future and be of value to this organisation? As the research by McKinsey & Company recommends, leaders need time to take stock and act across five dimensions encompassing the organisation/ function, corporate culture, team, self-leadership, and management of other stakeholders.
For some leaders, change is not always confined to a new formally defined role. Transition has become increasingly informal and invisible. This has been especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, with organisations and institutions under immense pressure to launch new business models and leaders taking on new tasks and obligations. Job transitions have skyrocketed, and for many, substantial role changes have taken place without changes in their job’s title, description, or authority. A research study by MIT in 2020 found invisible transitions
as significantly harder for leaders to navigate than formal ones. Companies seem to simply assume that competent leaders have the capacity to adapt. Hence, they expect leaders to handle expansions of their jobs and shifts in their roles on their own. This type of change brings more work on top of the main job, so there is a real danger of overworking and overwhelm. There are key lessons to help leaders successfully navigate informal and invisible transitions. For example, authorising: Stepping up and renegotiating the new mandate with your supervisor to discuss how the role has changed, what the implications are of the change, and who needs to be on board to make this transition a success. It is also important leaders build trust with the new team, which requires soft skills, such as being a good listener and exercising diplomacy. Lastly, a positive attitude toward personal professional development: A growth mindset is critical to leading informal and invisible leadership transitions successfully.
Moving forward in transition
External change can happen quickly, but transition takes much longer. The research points to the need for leaders to understand and support the human dimension of transition, both for themselves and others in the organisation or institution. For leaders in transition, it is important to fully understand the nature of the process — the time it takes and the internal challenges it presents — which will help leaders stay ahead. Once the transition process is truly appreciated, leaders will see it everywhere and realise many of the issues commonly addressed in leadership learning and organisational development are an inevitable part of transition.
Getting lost in transition
In conversation with Dr Glenn Williams
In a world that talks a lot about change, it is more difficult to hear the real stories of transition from leaders who openly and honestly share about the necessary inner reorientation and self-redefinition involved when incorporating change into our life. When I was invited to read an advance copy of Dr Glenn Williams’ new book When Leaders are Lost, it came at a time when I was moving from the in-between space of the neutral zone in transition and starting to make new beginnings. For me, the book was a powerful encounter with reality and hope about how to lead transition better. I only wished I had read it before setting off on my journey!
Glenn Williams is the founder of LCP Global. With more than twenty-five years working as a psychologist, c-suite leader, and executive coach helping leaders across the world, Glenn brings wisdom and insight into the connection between personal and corporate well-being and how together they unlock resilience and breakthrough performance. He also brings his own story and learning on how to leverage the value of leadership transitions. Providentially, I had the opportunity to have coffee with Glenn while he was on his world book tour when he visited Northern Ireland. Knowing all Australians
love a cup of good coffee, it didn’t take much to persuade Glenn to come to Fidela — our pioneering leadership feature in this volume — for a conversation over coffee about his book and experience of transition.
Karise: Glenn, let’s begin with the macro. In your opinion, what are some of the global trends causing significant transitional issues for leaders?
Glenn: Okay, let’s take a big one: artificial intelligence (AI). I remember the initial concerns over the Internet and the worry about how it would take away jobs. While there are still aspects about the use of the Internet that are really challenging for society, it has also created amazing opportunities: more businesses, more jobs, and the transformation of the way we can work on a global scale. I think AI has the potential to really hurt people and there is already evidence of how the technology is being abused. It’s hard to prepare leaders and organisations for something like AI when we don’t know the parameters and we don’t know the endgame. However, I believe it’s a matter of trying to work out how to work with it, rather than see it as something that’s going to override everything.
Leaders must understand the response to a change of this scale is internal. It is a mindset, and it is about values. So, rather than running away full of fear from AI, I encourage leaders to run towards it. But, such a brave response requires leaders to create a framework to help view the change in a different way. This brings me to values. More specifically, to embrace a set of intrinsic values that will help leaders focus on what values are important and non-negotiable. If leaders don’t care about their values, it becomes all about what they can get out of it even if others are hurt. So, I think leaders can still prepare for transition from the point of view of embracing both the unknown and the potential from a place of strong values that will guide decision-making.
Karise: In your experience, then, why do some leaders manage transition better than others?
Glenn: A couple of different reasons really. First, leaders who handle transition well understand their wiring. I love using Gallup’s Clifton Strengths: An assessment tool created by Don Clifton to help leaders find their talent DNA. From my work over the last thirty years, it’s surprising how many leaders don’t fully understand themselves. Leaders find themselves in roles where they are good at something, and as a result they tend to keep focused on that. While it is rewarding, leaders simultaneously miss out on exploring and exercising other strengths they are often not aware of. It is also easy to focus on strengths when everything’s going well, but under pressure? They take on a different tone and expression. Leaders need to understand how and when their strengths can become a weakness under stress as it will impact their relationships and how they make decisions. I also found leaders who transition better are those with a greater level of support outside of the workplace. Depending on how quickly a leader goes through the transition process, if it takes longer than expected, they can quickly lose confidence and start to question what they bring to the table. During this time, it is easy to worry about what other people think and wondering if others are questioning what has gone wrong and why. There are so many
emotions at play and lots of thinking, which can be very confusing and disorientating. Hence, having the support of a close group of friends and family is important for leaders during this time. At the same time, it is also important to minimise the noise! There will always be lots of people with great ideas about what you should do or not do during transition. I always recommend leaders to slow the process down and allow time for reflection to make sure the next role or decision is the right one.
There’s a great book called the 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton. It talks about how the traditional three phased approach to life — education, job, and retirement — is no longer relevant. The book encourages people to think of life as longer and beyond the big transitions such as from one job to another job, from singleness to marriage, from no children to family life; whatever the case might be. They exhort their readers to view life as being a series of continuous micro transitions. Many think it is just intuitive, but the reality is it is more complicated and more frequent. Leaders need to learn how to transition well and help others to do the same. I believe the work of Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton provides a helpful framework in doing so.
The final thing is to remember no transition process is perfect. The learning curve of transition requires leaders to come to terms with imperfection. Understanding that the transition process is often not linear will help leaders be kinder to themselves, more willing to listen to people, and process the perspectives of others. It is challenging on a personal level because it is about understanding who you are: your identity. In transition, when everything is stripped away, it can be very difficult for leaders to come to terms with the change because so much of their identity is centered around what they do, their achievements, and successes. Your identity also includes your values and strengths, disappointments and hurts, and how you manage that part of your identity can make the process of transition easier or harder.
Karise: In your doctoral thesis you studied the relationship between values and performance, how does this research influence how you help leaders in transition?
Glenn: Values are critical. The problem, however, is about the word value is its overuse — where its significance has lost its meaning — to the extent that today many people in organisations question the value of committing to a set of corporate values. As I began to research this, I realised there is a difference between the values we describe as important, and virtues. The word virtue comes from Aristotle and the Greek Classics. I believe virtues are part of your identity: They drive what you do and how you behave. Essentially, they are intrinsic values that have been so consistently practiced in your life they are part of your DNA. In transition, it is our virtues, or intrinsic values, that become important when making decisions. You can’t just readily discard a virtue when it’s inconvenient or when you think the outcome is not what you like. It is about matching the internal wiring of who we are with the decision in front of us so we can ask ourselves honestly if an emerging opportunity lines up with our virtues. Virtues keep us anchored throughout the change process.
Karise: How can leaders navigate the difficulty of the in-between space in the transition process?
Glenn: I describe this as the hallway of transition They say when one door closes another door opens. What many don’t tell you about is the long walk between the doors. For me, some transitions have been easier than others. The most challenging was the transition out of a global executive role when it didn’t quite finish the way that I would have liked. It really floored me to be honest. Up until that point I had gone from one success to another, one promotion to the next. I had never seen myself as a failure until this point. While it wasn’t technically a failure, I was physically, emotionally, and mentally burned out. I felt like I had let down my family. My transition coincided with the global financial crisis so when
I thought we had done the smart thing by buying a house and paying it off quickly, suddenly we lost so much money. So, we decided to move back to Australia from the US, to the safety and comfort of family with my tail between my legs, not sure what to do next. At the age of forty-seven I never thought I would have to go back home and rebuild financially.
I knew I didn’t want to race into anything new and decided to do some consulting work for a business. What I didn’t expect were the ethical issues I encountered with the owner. Upon returning from a short overseas trip, I came back to thanks very much Glenn, we think you are done here. Whoa, hang on a minute! I had gone from never experiencing these types of things before in nearly twenty-five years of leadership to seeing my role come to an end twice in a relatively short period of time. That was very hard for me to process. But, I kept consulting and to be honest, it was very much trial and error with different projects. Then I met John, who had started the work of Halftime Australia, based on the book by Bob Buford called Half-Time: Moving from Success to Significance. The book talks about the many seasons and inflections in a person’s life — especially when things don’t go according to plan — and to see these as pivotal moments where we can either race ahead into something or we can take stock, reflect, and really process what we’re going through and what we are learning.
Through a Halftime Roundtable, I was given time to process my own change and it really helped me walk through the hallway of transition into a new beginning. I soon realised I wasn’t the only person going through a messy transition: There were many other leaders who had all experienced tremendous success but found themselves in a place they weren’t familiar with. It gave me a fresh lens for looking at these significant transitions, teaching me we all need a good coach or group of friends cheering us on and supporting us, while challenging us at the same time. These people will help us to ask good questions of ourselves, that in turn will slow us down from making a quick, illinformed decision.
The learning curve of transition requires leaders to
come to terms with imperfection
Karise: So, what questions should leaders ask themselves and others in transition?
Glenn: Good questions are all part of the coaching process. I have come to really believe in the value of asking the right questions at the right time. The default question from a friend to someone in transition is usually, how are you feeling? This can be patronising and is not helpful for many reasons. Sometimes people are uncomfortable telling you how they feel, or they don’t know quite how to articulate the moment if it is really messy and confusing. For a leader, it is important to be present and ask good questions of others experiencing transition. So, a more practical question is, how can I help you right now? Or, is there someone I can introduce to you to help you on this part of your journey? Or even, do you need a sounding board to bounce off some ideas with? These sound very simple. Too many people, however, want to rescue others in transition or solve the problem for them. Yet, that might be the worst thing to do sometimes! I remember John saying to me, I could rescue you Glenn, but that would be the wrong thing to do. I felt like saying, no, I’m very happy for you to rescue me! But I now know it’s okay to wrestle and to be uncomfortable. That is the place when you start to look at things differently.
Karise: As you have implied with your own story, leadership can be lonely. So, how did you deal with it and how can leaders today manage isolation in the transition process?
Glenn: When I came back to Australia from the US, not sure what to do next, somebody gave me this book titled Isolation. Nine months later, I picked the book up and read it. Now, it’s a challenging book, but the principle was powerful. It talked about how a voluntary or involuntary transition can cause leaders to become isolated. I realised I struggled with my transition mainly because I didn’t know what to tell people without them thinking what was wrong with me. So, I avoided them. That led to me becoming more and more isolated, which can be an incredibly unhealthy thing to do. Over time, however,
I came to the point of realising it can also be liberating. You get a chance to really define your values and what is important to you which is vital for creating a new identity. It’s not a great metaphor, but the process of transition is a bit like stripping paint. You know it is hard work and not a pleasant experience. The principle for leaders: The identity that served you well previously, may not be the identity that will serve you well in their next role. So, if all you do is try to cover it up, rather than strip it away to build a new identity, then it probably won’t be sustainable. As difficult as it might be, the process will set you on a new trajectory if you give it time. It will help you to write a new story, which doesn’t mean you ignore the old story. Rather, you get to write that story into the new one!
Karise: Excellent advice Glenn. Just to finish, do you have any final words of encouragement for leaders in transition?
Glenn: Don’t avoid transitions. Embrace them. They are necessary for our growth and development. I lost my son several years ago. He was only nineteen years old. Amid overwhelming loss, I found a striking clarity about what matters most, and crucially, about the relationships that matter most. I recommend leaders take time to think about what success really means and focus on that. I would also urge leaders not to avoid isolation that often comes in transition but to embrace it. Slowing down and taking time is important for how we enter new beginnings. Finally, leaders need inspiration. For many, what inspires us is not the current success of leaders, but how success came. Overcoming great odds and disappointment in very difficult periods of transition gives other leaders hope. This is a big part of why I wrote my book: To encourage leaders not to be afraid of sharing their whole story, resisting the urge to only share the airbrushed and social media version. It is my hope that by me telling the whole of my story, other leaders will be able to shift perspective and see a bigger picture of the necessity of change.
Leading community change
The Fidela story
WORDS: KARISE HUTCHINSON
Itall started in Madrid. Frank Portilla and Rachel Portilla Dillon, founders of Fidela Coffee Roasters in the Northern Irish town of Coleraine, began their coffee journey in 2016 in Colombian village of Nariño. But the story really starts ten years earlier. Rachel, a business graduate from the north coast of Northern Ireland, met Frank, an engineer from South America, when working on a social community project in Ecuador. It was in Madrid where they fell in love, got married, and had their first child. In 2014, they decided to move to Frank’s home place in Ecuador to explore how they could bring their experience and knowledge to the local community. They set up a frozen yogurt
business and grew the business to ten shops. But everything would change again for the couple after a visit to Frank’s family coffee farm in the well-known coffee region of Nariño, an eight hour drive north in the country of Colombia. In Nariño they saw amazing opportunities to work alongside Frank’s family and start a new coffee adventure. Ready for a new challenge, they embarked on a significant journey of leading community change, combining the expertise of Frank’s technical engineering and coffee harvesting with Rachel’s retail business experience, finished off with a large dose of courage and an entrepreneurial risk-taking mindset to make the dream a reality.
a leadership approach of empowerment and education paved the way for a sustainable future
The beginning of a coffee dream
Coffee is a challenging business in South America. It is closely connected to cocaine farming, dominated by cooperatives, and at the mercy of government driven supply chain processes. Notwithstanding the significant structural and societal challenges in Columbia, in 2016 Frank and Rachel started working with four family members, educating and helping them to improve their farming systems. While it is nearly impossible to export coffee in Columbia without the right contacts, the breakthrough came when Frank and Rachel met a local group involved in a Columbian peace programme. One of the girls in the local community was being sponsored by the programme working on a Cacao (commonly used as the raw base for chocolate manufacturing) farm project because her family had been killed by the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). This serendipitous connection to the
Cacao farming industry gave Frank and Rachel the miracle they needed to expand the business across the Atlantic to mainland Europe, exporting coffee to businesses in Holland and Spain.
What began as a small family project of four farms started to grow into a wider coffee farming community alongside the installation of a coffee laboratory in Nariño, Colombia, which enabled them to invite more farmers into the community. For Frank and Rachel, their leadership approach of empowerment and education paved the way for the farmers to build a sustainable future in the local community and for the local community. It has required a hands-on approach, however, training local farmers and their families about how to manage coffee processes beyond farming to include cupping and brewing techniques. Frank and Rachel have witnessed over the past seven years how education in harvest planning and budgeting has given farmers a sustainable income. Yet, more importantly, it has instilled a greater confidence in doing business.
Growing the dream and moving to Northern Ireland
The dream became bigger than coffee in Columbia. Alongside the development of their coffee venture, Frank and Rachel’s family was also growing and together they decided to move to the north coast of Northern Ireland where Rachel was born and raised. Still strongly connected to the coffee business in Columbia, they decided in 2019 to set up Fidela Coffee Roasters in the town of Coleraine. Even with the experience of Columbia, there was still vast uncharted waters to make the dream a reality; not to mention the unexpectant challenge of the COVID pandemic during the first of year of setting up a new business. In the first two years, they led the business with a
spirit of experimentation, testing the market by trying different ways to reach customers. It was a pleasant surprise when Frank and Rachel realised the high demand for a coffee shop experience. With no barista or coffee shop experience between them, however, they had to quickly learn all about how to lead in the hospitality sector.
The roastery remains the heart of the business. By importing the harvested coffee beans directly from Nariño, Frank and Rachel can keep the family farming links in Colombia. Nevertheless, the coffee shop and their staff has become the Fidela brand experience. They describe the coffee shop as the brain of the business, taking staff from Coleraine to Columbia to meet the farmers and work on the coffee farms to gain a bigger perspective of the global industry. Then bringing the farmers from Columbia to Coleraine to gain immersive experience of managing a small
business. Education remains a key part of the Fidela leadership ethos; not only by educating farmers and staff, but also, they enjoy educating local coffee drinkers too. Fidela has built a strong reputation in its infancy, leading the community in Northern Ireland by inviting baristas, coffee enthusiasts, and visitors of the north coast to their roastery to experience the full story behind the coffee, from plant to cup. Frank and Rachel’s journey so far means Fidela now supplies coffee for both the home barista and the hospitality industry, including independent coffee shops, restaurants, and bars across Northern Ireland.
Relationships and trust at the heart of transition
It is Frank and Rachel’s learning orientated leadership approach that has kept them open to the possibility of change. Furthermore, it has been their strong investment in relationships that has not only enabled their transition from one country to another, but it has helped others in the community to thrive in the journey of change. In the coffee industry change is constant and fast paced, but it is underpinned wholly by the dependence upon trusting relationships. In the coffee supply chain there is no traceability, so the success of the harvest for specialty coffee roasting is all about cultivating and maintaining the trust of local farmers in Colombia. In a similar way, when it comes to the coffee shop experience back in Coleraine, it is all about building trust in their relationships with staff: The brand ambassadors who live out the purpose of the business in the local community.
To know more about the Fidela journey, visit: www.fidelacoffee.com
Taking the long way round
Reflection by Christine Gilland Robinson
In
life there are moments when the call to adventure is a very clear summons. It shows up at your doorstep, unmissable, eager, expectant of an answer. It can be as major a life event as a marriage proposal, an international job offer, or it can be as seemingly banal and minor as an unexpected phone-call. It can be an event tinged with tragedy or a moment brimming with promise and opportunity.
One thing is certain: The second you see a double line on a pregnancy test is generally one such moment. For me, it was as if I was standing at the doorstep of my old life with a new path forming before my eyes, winding out in front of me to some distant, unknown horizon.
Humans, in contrast to most of earth’s creatures, have a famously long gestation period. Many women feel the passing of these months as a slowcreeping wait. I certainly had those moments. But I also needed every single second of those nine months to come to terms with the reality of my motherhood.
Days before the birth I was still desperately cramming for my first-born’s arrival like a recalcitrant teenager before a test. My Google searches in this time were woefully telling: Types of prams, types of pain relief, types of sleeping arrangements. What do babies actually wear??? was a favourite topic of my anxiety-riddled brain in the early hours of those watchful mornings.
I couldn’t decide what kind of mother I should (or could) be. As the months rolled on and the books I read advocated one parenting style after another, I puzzled over which tribe I was set to join. Was I a Montessori mum? A Pikler parent? I went down the rabbit-hole of RIE, although I still can’t remember what the acronym stands for. During the day I talked of water births, mindful breathing and how mums had been doing this for millennia. At night I prayed for the sweet mercies of Big Pharma and twenty-first century medical interventions. I was, quite frankly, all over the place.
Transition will do that to you. Whatever the changes we are facing, after that initial moment
Most of the time in true transition we are invited into a season of intense waiting
of invitation there will often come a time where things seem at a standstill, with only the racing of our mind to keep us entertained. Because transition is rarely quick. In fact, most of the time in true transition we are invited into a season of intense waiting.
In transition, the circumstances often do not immediately change. As I was experiencing during my pregnancy, many of the shifts that signalled that my body was in transition were inward. At times it felt like the entire pregnancy was all in my head. At other times, especially in the dead of night, it felt like life had become an endless loop; a restless, watchful waiting.
And yet, I was finding that it was this waiting itself, and not simply the visible signs of change, that was proving to be transformative. It was during this time, fully immersed in the throes of another transition loop, that I began to experience something unusual (and frankly, unwelcome) to my Type A self: the surrender of control. I was so used to setting my plans, charting my course, and ticking off my to-do-list that it came as a humbling realisation that in this moment in time that I wasn’t actually as firmly in the driver’s seat as I imagined. The indignation I felt at this fact was indescribable.
There was so much that I couldn’t control: From my baby’s growth in the womb to how much sleep I was getting each night. As someone privileged enough to have never experienced significant health issues, I was astonished at how vulnerable it felt to be so utterly and viscerally aware of the impact of pregnancy upon my energy, my mood, and even my capacity to make plans. In the days leading up to the birth, as I was expecting the baby to dutifully adhere to his due date, I was horrified to have the midwife tell me that the baby would come when he wants to. There wasn’t much we could do about that.
Eventually I came to the realisation I could either engage in a futile fight against this lack of control or allow myself to embrace it. As it happens, a few months before I’d fallen pregnant, I had been introduced to the philosophy of wu wei through
the writings of Sue Monk Kidd. Wu wei — the Chinese concept of non-doing — does not signal total inaction. Rather, the idea is of being totally in flow with your circumstances; not striving against the tides of life but moving with them. It focuses on letting your life evolve rather than making life happen.
Many times during my pregnancy, when I felt tossed around by the chaos and vulnerability of being pregnant during a pandemic, I remembered wu wei. I remembered that the tide of my life could carry me kicking and screaming or it could bear me up in a more graceful flow. Or at least, a peppy dog paddle.
I was beginning to realise the most important learning in this time was the knowledge that the tide is going to take you anyway. You might as well swim with it as best you can.
This isn’t a complete rejection of the importance of making plans and five-year goals. I love a life planning session as much as the next person. It is, however, a reminder that despite our desire to be master of my fate … [and] captain of my soul we are considerably more vulnerable to the vagaries of life than we like to admit. The life and death of William Ernest Henley, who penned the lines of Invictus above, serves as its own cautionary tale against the hubris of pure self-sufficiency.
Three years on, I’m still very much on a journey with this (I was extremely tempted to title this article ‘Wu Wei or Wu Who?’ but self-respect and editorial oversight did not allow). Life with two toddlers and a pandemic will do that to you. My emotional state, despite the best efforts of Janet Lansbury (if you know, you know), can often best be described as considerably ruffled.
I have also emerged from this stage of my life — and I truly believe I have emerged, after several false starts — with a renewed capacity to be present to my life in the waiting moments. To sometimes, just sometimes, let life happen.
I’m trying to live, as Parker Palmer would have it, not “scrambling toward some prize just beyond
my reach but accepting the treasure … I already possess.” I am trying to let life unfold. Albeit with a little striving here and there, because Lord knows I can’t help myself.
As I’ve been writing this piece and contemplating the last few years, I remembered a conversation I had with a good and wise friend before my pregnancy. I was thinking about retraining in another career direction and worried about where the arrival of a baby would place me in the grand scheme of my ten-year plans. I asked her straight out if having a baby would put me behind; if it would be a mistake to take my eyes off my goals at this moment in time to have a baby?
I could hear her smile through the phone. “Christine,” she said, “You are about go through one of the biggest transitions of your life. Who you become, who you will be on the other side of this, is its own type of formation, its own education. This transition will be exactly the preparation you need for your next stage of life, whatever that will be. There’s no such thing as behind. So relax. You’re where you’re meant to be.”
Does the phrase let your life speak resonate? If so, what do you think your life is saying to you? What can you observe in its highs and lows? Where have people and circumstances in your life served as guides and teachers?
We went on to heaven the long way round
Henry David Thoreau
About Christine Gilland Robinson
Christine Gilland Robinson was born in Australia, worked in London, and is now living out her twofold calling of entrepreneurship and motherhood in Northern Ireland. I first met Christine in 2017 when she was PR and marketing director for HOLOS kombucha, a unique fermented drinks company with a social purpose that provides support for survivors of slavery, trauma, and human-trafficking. It was the challenge of transition that connected our lives. Christine is a woman with both skill and passion for communication, and whether it is written or media form, she brings a warmth and intuition to every room she walks into and every project she pioneers. Christine is also a woman who has profoundly shaped my entrepreneurial journey. Her recent experience of transition brings practical insight into the turbulence that often accompanies a season of changing direction.
NOTES
‘Making space for the new’ by Claire Smyth
Creativity and innovation are heralded as critical forces for the sustainability and growth of organisations across the world. Pushing beyond the stereotypes and misconceptions about what creative leadership looks like, this section investigates what it really means to practice it with real positive impact. Specifically, we explore the role of creativity and innovation in leadership and how it can be nurtured and developed to make a difference in organisations and societies today. Strategic insights from a CEO in India, an artist-entrepreneur,as well as others bring the creative context of leadership to life and shines a light on what leadership becoming really signifies.
Leadership and creative innovation
WORDS: KARISE HUTCHINSON
What role do creativity and innovation play in leadership and how can it be nurtured and developed to make a difference in organisations and societies today?
Research evidence now demonstrates that creativity is not just reserved for artists, writers, and designers, nor is innovation confined to the play book of scientists and technologists. While the creative and innovative dividend may have been the focus of research attention in the corporate world, it is also evident its impact goes beyond business competitive advantage. As Dan Palotta identified in his Harvard Business Review article in 2013,
The best creativity comes from a desire to contribute to the lives of others, either by introducing something new that improves the quality of their lives or by showing people that something thought to be impossible is in fact possible. When you change people’s perceptions about what can be accomplished or achieved, you contribute to their humanity in the richest possible way – you give them hope.
Creativity and innovation are a critical concern today. The world is changing. Organisations are changing. People are changing. Change, whether it is the speed, the complexity, or the ignorance, no organisation or individual has access to a blueprint with the answers. The uncertainty of change brings with it more ill-defined and ambiguous problems. Unlike well-defined problems that are characterised by a known goal and route to a correct answer, ill-defined problems (also defined as wicked problems) are characterised by multiple potential goals, numerous ways of solving the problem, and several possible and acceptable solutions. At a time where wicked problems abound, creativity and innovation remain key sources of value creation and differentiation both for organisations and individuals. Not only is this essential for the world’s most innovative companies, but it is critical today for public institutions, not-for-profit
organisations, small businesses, and start-ups. Creativity and innovation are the keys to the renewal of our entire society.
Creativity and innovation are distinct but related constructs. Simply explained, creativity concerns idea generation and innovation concerns idea implementation. As explained by Allen Lee and colleagues in their large-scale meta-analysis study in 2020, creativity is largely an intra-personal activity concerned with individual thoughts, feelings, abilities, knowledge, and intention that generate truly novel ideas. Whereas innovation is largely about interpersonal activity concerned with how thoughts, feelings, and knowledge merge into conversations with others and cause interactions that ultimately implement new ideas. The difference is a crucial point demonstrating that creative ideas will rarely lead to innovation unless shared with relevant or influential people inside and outside organisations.
Why does creative leadership matter?
The research areas of creativity and leadership are drawn together by the force of change and the complex problems brought about by change. At this intersection, a new type of leadership, creative leadership, is foregrounded. The common view of creative leadership points to a confluence of skills and dispositions that lead people through a process of identifying problems, generating creative solutions, evaluating ideas, and then implementing the plan. Leadership is identified as a crucial precursor to creativity and innovation in organisations because leaders allocate resources, determine the nature of work tasks, influence employee behaviour, and control the environment. In other words, not only do leaders set culture and climate for creativity and innovation, but they also influence the cognitive processes involved in creative production.
Creative leadership matters today because it is fundamentally about advancing change in or about something. As research by Tayloe Harding
in 2010 explained, however, there is a difference between leaders who think creatively and act creatively; imagining change requires creative thought and leading change requires creative behaviour. In turn, Harding argues many leaders who are great creative thinkers struggle with behaving creatively. For some leaders, it may be the case that it is easier to nurture creativity within their own imagination, as opposed to the more challenging dimension of creative thinking with others. Regardless, the evidence is strong. The most innovative outcomes emerge from a diverse collection of individuals thinking and acting creatively together.
Developing creative leadership ability
One of the challenges about creative and innovative leadership involves stereotypes. In fact, some traditional leaders can be intimidated by creativity, perceiving it as a gift awarded to some and not to others. Stereotypes of creatives, namely artistic, colourful, extrovert personalities who can imagine and conjure ideas from a blank sheet of paper, create mental barriers for leaders who like certainty, order, and data. Nothing is further from the truth. The research evidence is clear: The potential for creativity exists within everyone. It is a mindset that can be cultivated and a skill that can be developed over time.
In 1965 George Kneller remarked, “creativity consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know, therefore to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.”
Research, such as Guo and his colleagues in 2016, specifically points out the development of divergent thinking skills, evaluative thinking skills, knowledge, disposition, and emotional intelligence as important. The creative process for a leader is about trial and error: Refining ideas from testing different solutions and expanding the progressive ideas over again and reiterating until a satisfying outcome is reached.
Solutions to significant challenges reside not in the senior executive suite, but in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels
By combining logic and intuition, leaders can leverage diverse resources for input and available data. The leadership result? A leader’s ability to trust their gut for complex decision-making.
The growth conditions for creativity also involve brain matter. David Rock and his colleagues in 2012 published research on the neurocognitive activities that nurture the mind, which has informed healthy practices in workplaces across the world. They found five of the seven factors of downtime, play time, connecting time, time in, and focus time are associated with creativity. In the Healthy Mind Platter, they explain how different pieces of the brain puzzle can come together in different ways when we defocus visually and mentally; for example, through meditation or doing something fun, which enables an idea to bubble to the surface. Other studies offer practical ways of switching the brain off and letting your mind wander away such as walking, meditation, and exercising. These activities cause relaxation, helping reset the brain to gain more clarity and create opportunities for new insights.
Collective creative leadership: Thermostat not thermometer
There is more research evidence regarding the individual conditions for growing creativity, but much less on how leaders develop positive relationships that facilitate both individual level and team-level creativity in organisations. One thing is clear from recent studies: A heroic approach to leadership has little chance of bringing innovation and renewal because leaders do not single-handedly lead organisations to greatness. Authoritarian leadership decreases the expression of personal ideas or participation in problem-solving, thereby inhibiting employee creativity and innovation. In order to enhance individual-level creativity, therefore, leaders
should inspire, empower, and exert broad influence in the organisation or institution by building a close leader–follower relationship, characterised by a high degree of trust.
The evidence about how leaders can create an atmosphere in which creativity and innovation are fostered is widely discussed. For an organisation to become innovative and successful, it must benefit from the creativity of all its members. This can be determined by tasks at hand, motivation, policies, goals, resources, technology, and leadership support. Leaders can do this by building friendly and inclusive working conditions for all members of the organisation. As research by Agbor in 2008 explained, leaders can help their organisations achieve creativity by stimulating it. By asking questions, leaders help bring freedom and focus collective intelligence and creativity on addressing organisational issues and goals in new ways.
Agbor’s work links to the research study by Lee and colleagues in 2020. It highlighted empowering and entrepreneurial leadership styles as strong predictors of innovative behaviour. On the one hand, empowering leadership involves highlighting the significance of followers’ work and communicating confidence in their ability by delegating authority, encouraging selfdirected and autonomous decision-making, coaching, sharing information, and asking for input. On the other hand, entrepreneurial leaders foster their employees’ creativity and innovation roles by modelling entrepreneurial behaviours, encouraging and directing followers to engage in entrepreneurial activity, and providing opportunities for followers to mastery experiences.
A good leader can do much to challenge and inspire creative work in progress. But arguably, the managerial reactions that speak the loudest to creative workers are reactions to failure. Leaders must decrease fear of failure. The goal should be to experiment constantly, fail early and often, and learn as much as possible in the process. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues leaders must create an environment of psychological safety, convincing
people that they will not be humiliated, much less punished, if they make mistakes, or speak up with ideas, questions, or concerns. Edmondson explained how failures in organisations fall into three quite different types: unsuccessful trials; system breakdowns; and process deviations. All must be analysed and dealt with. The first and most crucial category, which offers the richest potential for creative learning, involves courageous leadership that seeks to overcome deeply ingrained norms that stigmatise failure and thereby inhibit experimentation.
Creative leadership and adaptive challenges
Changes in societies, markets, customers, competition, and technology across the world are bringing some of the toughest challenges to organisations and institutions. These unprecedented challenges are forcing leaders to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating. The challenge for many business leaders is the predisposition of
linear thinking, such as the experience of devising strategies to grow business through increased efficiency or acquisitions. Thinking like this, leaders find it difficult to come up with radical ideas that reshape their industries; ideas that might cannibalise and overhaul their own products. Mobilising people to do adaptive work was the subject of Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie’s Harvard Business Review article in 2001. From their experience working with several leaders of global organisations, they present a number of key ingredients that help leaders to enable the creative work that solves adaptive problems.
First of all, creative leaders must be able to maintain a productive level of tension, regulating the distress of the change by carefully balancing the need for employees to feel the need but not be overwhelmed. Second, these leaders appreciate the value of diversity and embrace contrasting views knowing innovation and learning are the products of difference. This requires opensource experimentation, which in turn enhances diversity by looking outside the organisation for sources of creativity. It also means leaders need to get conflict out in the open and use it as a source for creativity to flourish. In a similar way, the third ingredient forms the foundation of an
organisation willing to experiment and learn: The harnessing of feedback from all voices. What often happens in organisations and institutions is that whistle blowers, creative deviants, and other original voices generate disequilibrium. The easiest way to restore balance is to neutralise those voices, sometimes in the name of teamwork and alignment. Creative leaders understand the importance of internal contradictions and the need to enable others to raise questions; even if it is not what they want to hear.
Finally, the work of Heifetz and Laurie underscores empowerment as a key ingredient of a creative leadership strategy. They explain leaders must learn to support rather than control as workers need to learn to take and feel the weight of responsibility. Why? Adaptive challenges are not amenable to solutions provided by leaders. Rather, solutions to adaptive challenges reside not in the senior executive suite, but in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels who need to rely on one another as resources to learn their way to those solutions.
Though past breakthroughs sometimes have come from a single genius, the reality today is that most innovative solutions draw on many contributors. This is echoed in the more recent research study by Lee et al. 2020, which found employees are better able to innovate — promote and implement novel ideas — when their leaders become less leader-like in the traditional sense. That is to say, when leaders act as facilitators, supporting and empowering employees.
Effective creativity
While measuring creativity remains an inexact science, the research study by McKinsey in 2017 provides evidence to support the notion that creativity matters for the bottom line and identifies the practices that differentiate the most creative companies from the rest. The study shows creative company leaders outperform their peers on several key financial metrics, demonstrating above average performance for organic revenue growth, total return to shareholders, and net
enterprise value. The findings describe effective creativity as working the problem and having in place disciplined management practices that help leaders foster sparks of insight and shepherd them into tangible business outcomes.
Based on their findings, it can be argued creativity and innovation is effective if:
1. IT IS A BUSINESS PRIORITY.
While there is pressure on leaders to hit quarterly financial targets, leaders must also ensure the organisation is executing creative and innovative priorities in its daily practices.
2. THERE IS A DEEP DEVOTION TO UNDERSTANDING
CUSTOMERS.
It requires the leader to go beyond standard research methods and rely on multiple sources of data such as advanced analytics, ethnographic research, and behavioural analysis for intimate knowledge.
3. IT IS DEFINED BY SPEED OF RESPONSE.
Leaders of organisations must translate insights into action — new product launches or new marketing campaigns — more quickly than comparable firms.
4. IT CONCERNS ADAPTATION AT ALL COSTS.
Leaders recognise that the action is just the beginning of a process of obtaining marketplace feedback, which serves as the basis for ongoing evolution and improvement.
Managing the creative process: Possible or impossible?
The need and impact for creativity and innovation is clear. The dynamics, however, necessitate strong and healthy leadership: Leaders who put the creative process in motion and sustain it over time. And yet, not any old leadership style will do. Leadership must take place every day. It cannot be the responsibility of a few, a rare event, or a once in a lifetime opportunity.
After all, a leader doesn’t manage creativity, they manage for creativity. Leaders must empower, enable, and cultivate the collective intelligence of others if they want to see creative ideas translate into innovative solutions. Not only to navigate the adaptive challenges of this world, but to find the opportunity.
Leadership and creativity
In conversation with Ashish Thomas
The complex and unknown features of the world today present great wicked challenges to leaders across industries and cultures. Creative leadership is recognised as a core leadership skill and mindset which sets apart the great leaders from the good. The wrestle for leaders today is not how to solve the world’s wicked problems (most are unsolvable), but rather, how can they harness the benefit and/ or opportunity from these global challenges? To help explore this profound question, I met with Ashish Thomas, an Indian born American citizen who resides with his family in India and together cherish the experiences and bonds they have fostered across the nations.
With more than fifteen years of experience in executive leadership and consulting, Ashish has worked alongside respected global names such as Deloitte, PWC, EY, and Cognizant, as well as establishing and growing a US company’s subsidiary in India. He has a PhD in crosscultural innovation and is writing a new book called InnoWAYtion, presenting the unique and culturally profound concept of Dhairya, refuting the notion that innovation can be merely duplicated and customised as a strategic template. His research provides a practical framework to guide leaders in developing an innovationempowered culture within their organisations. My conversation with him provides some new insights concerning some of the bigger questions about what it means to be a creative leader.
Karise: First Ashish, let’s set the scene. Could you tell us about your journey of leadership thus far, how creativity has been shaped in your life, and how it affects the way you lead today?
Ashish: I was born in India and at the age of eleven I went from an Indian school to a new American international school. At this young age my whole world completely shifted overnight. I remember day one vividly, meeting for the first time my room-mates from South Korea and Tibet, then walking across the hallway to meet fellow students from Russia and Ethiopia. Growing up around different cultures meant I was introduced to the concept of a third culture and cultural intelligence early on. I learned from a young age that bringing together different perspectives causes chaos and discomfort but that it is all part of the mix. I learned to see divergence and convergence as a good thing. So, today when I am deconstructing an idea with a team, and everything goes in many different directions, that’s okay! I know it is important to allow the idea to spread before bringing it into focus.
As an American citizen living in India, travelling around the world and interacting with different clients, I find myself cherishing opportunities for conversations with people from different cultures, cherishing opportunities for the divergence of ideas and appreciating opportunities to even seek out new perspectives. But, I have to keep reminding myself that this experience is unique. One of the biggest challenges I find is that I take this life experience for granted. It is easy to become frustrated with others who so quickly run away from the discomfort of difference and divergence, so I am learning to find the right language and tools to support these people in thinking broader and outside their cultural experience box.
Karise: There is a plethora of definitions of creative leadership generating different perspectives about whether it is a natural disposition for some and not for others. How would you approach defining it?
Ashish: Like many others, I’m still trying to come to terms with questions such as, is creativity a skill? Can creativity be learned? What behaviours demonstrate creativity? What are the attitudes of creative people? I find the Creativity Model by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist and creativity researcher, really helpful. He proposes that the interaction of three systems generate the opportunities for creativity. First of all, the culture that includes symbolic rules; secondly, the individual who brings something new into a symbolic domain; and thirdly, the field of experts who acknowledge and confirm this innovation. This model highlights how each culture consists of different domains and fields of experts. The most fascinating part, however, is the focus on the person, which has become the focus of my work for the last five years.
For me, the big questions about the creative person concern the following: How is the creative person formed? What are the constituents? And, what antecedents are required for this person to be creative? Some of the most critical notions about how creativity works in expanding
individual and cultural meaning was introduced by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. His work, framing creativity as a higher mental function deeply rooted in social systems and social processes, has helped me better understand how culture impacts our creativity. I have found from my experience that until an individual is part of a culture or a social system that values creativity, the incentive to be creative is undervalued. Therefore, when creativity is undervalued, people are not generally going to pursue a new creative idea. From my own personal faith, it is my worldview that all human beings have been created by a Creator who gives us the ability to be creative. Hence, once humans are put in an environment, social setting, or context where creativity is valued and permitted, then I think anyone can learn to be creative!
As you can tell by now Karise, I don’t have a definition. But here is a thought-provoking fact for you: Do you know what IBM, Google, YouTube, Adobe, and Starbucks all have in common? Well, first of all, they are all globally recognised for innovation; for driving the
conversation about what’s new forward in their respective industries. And yet there is a second common thread between all these companies. They are all run by Indian origin CEOs! Now that is very interesting to me, because India is not globally renowned for its creativity in the workplace. It may be known for creativity and cultural expression in our food, dance, music, and movies. But, in the workplace? We are not famous for creativity there. In fact, as a country we are often used as the back office of the world. While our Western colleagues are doing creative work, we are doing the monotonous back end work. So, what is my point? Well, if we take these successful companies with Indian origin CEOs into account, there must be something about what happens when a person is put in a creative environment! I hold this to be true because I believe that’s what happened to me.
Karise: You have just completed a PhD in cross-cultural innovation. Tell me about the interplay of leading different organisational cultures and national identities in fostering creativity? Why is this so important?
Ashish: It is often easier to discuss the barriers of culture toward innovation so I wanted to better understand how leaders can leverage the strengths that exist in culture and how these unique dimensions can spark creativity. The cultural dimension research by Gert Jan Hofstede is often used to understand differences in culture across countries. His framework argues some cultures are individualistic, whereas others are more community oriented. So, in a community orientated country like India, innovation might look like a circle of leaders sitting around talking and drinking tea in a community space where there’s great relationships and high trust, where leaders are naturally exploring the best way to solve a human centred problem through conversation. The collective dimension of Indian culture is really important to fostering creativity. As a result, I have focused on trying to understand more about how I can support leaders to better leverage this in their local context whilst looking to drive innovation forward in similar cultures.
It is also important to better understand the cultural context of creativity in countries like India in light of recent geopolitical shifts. In September 2023 India hosted the G20 Summit in New Delhi. It demonstrated in some way the growing power of India. It is a country — with a population of 1.4 billion people — for the first time finding itself at the forefront of the world stage when it comes to addressing some of the biggest and most pressing global challenges. There is something to be learned from the Global South and the massive populations of India, China, and other parts of Asia. Creativity is really crucial for the change we need to see in the world. It can no longer be confined to the hands of a few Western minds.
Karise: Where does the responsibility for creativity lie when it comes to leaders in organisations? And what does it mean to take responsibility for the development of creative leadership?
Ashish: Creativity starts with the individual person. How you lead yourself impacts how you lead others. I believe if you give yourself space to be reflective and creative, you will give your team and organisation the space to do the same. In my experience, leaders who don’t give themselves time and space to think creatively are likely not to give their teams in the organisation the time to do so. We named our youngest daughter Selah, an ancient Hebrew word meaning an invitation to pause and reflect. And ever since we first thought about naming her, and then as we have got to know her, the word Selah has come to mean so much to me as a leader! But I have found it be a really challenging concept to put into practice; to find the time and the space to reflect about life and what is happening and why is not easy. I have, however, grown to value the time for my own internal dialogue. In turn, I have placed greater value on the dialogue with others around me. Now, you might wonder what I talk to myself about. Well, I ask myself, what can I learn from my errors? Am I willing to try different things? Why? Because innovation comes with error and experimentation. I must be willing to first do this as a leader before I ask others to do the same. One
Innovation comes with error and experimentation.
I must be willing to rst do this as a leader before I ask others to do the same
of the practices I started when I turned thirty and have done since is every year I try to learn a new skill. A skill where I start from zero. So one year, for example, I learned to play the piano for the first time. I spent all year trying to learn the piano. I was not trying to get to perfection. In fact, it was not even about learning the piano. My aim was, and still is, to learn the counter-intuitive skill of starting from zero and doing the work of growth in that area. Currently, I am learning to sing. But it is not always about music. Last year it was the stock market, where I started from a point of zero knowledge or experience! What has happened is that I have learned a lot about myself: Whether I’m someone who is willing to take risks and step out into a space where I’m starting from zero. Some of these things might be simple, but to me they are counter-intuitive. It’s counterintuitive to step into a space where you’re starting from zero. It’s counter-intuitive to build time intentionally to learn new skills. It is counterintuitive to reflect and to pause. It is especially challenging in a world where leaders are driven to always go, go, go.
Karise: It is fascinating to hear about your own practice of developing creativity, but can you tell us about your experience of helping other leaders establish the most effective spaces for creativity to exist and grow in their teams and organisations?
Ashish: I don’t believe it is new wisdom that leaders need, but it’s about how they apply old truths to new realities. The world is changing every day and I think it is important leaders are adaptable and able to put the right and relevant tools in the hands of their teams so they are equipped to be adaptable to the constant change occurring around them. Amy Edmondson has pioneered some of the most interesting insights into the concept of psychological safety, as well as others like Brené Brown who talk about creating spaces of courage in the workplace. I thought a lot about this and there is this beautiful Hindi word called dhairya. It is a word that carries three different English words: patience, courageous, and fortitude. While I thought about this word, I went through the results of my PhD study
and I found that it is one thing to teach design thinking as a skill. It is another thing, however, to create the space for people where there is time and permission to disagree. Namely, a space for courage and fortitude that enables teams to experiment and explore new ways.
Taking the Hindi word dhairya, I am encouraging leaders to create these safe spaces for creativity within their organisations. Later this year I am delivering a programme in four different locations: San Jose in the US, Tel Aviv in Israel, Shanghai in China, and then Chennai in India. While I will be teaching the same principles, the space we will create in each city will be different based on the strengths of the culture we are in. Hence, what it means to facilitate creative thinking in San Jose will be different from what it means in Chennai and Shanghai. In helping leaders understand the strengths of the culture that can be leveraged, I believe I can really help leaders then overlay the tools of innovation, things like design thinking, to become more relevant and more powerful in their decision-making.
Karise: Finally, I know you are currently writing a new book. What is the core message you are excited to share with the world?
Ashish: The title of the book comes from the English language and the Indian mispronunciation of innovation; how we say our v’s and our w’s uniquely highlights the word way. There is a Silicon Valley way for innovation and there is no doubt the world has needed and depended on this. But, there is also an Indian way for innovation. As the world searches for new ways to create space for innovation to happen within the relevant context, I believe there is something special about the Indian way of innovation that can help the world. Hence, my book brings together my experience as an Indian CEO with the insight from Indian global leaders to identify how to celebrate cultural innovation through understanding the barriers and the leverage of culture that generates a space for creativity to flourish. The book is set to be released in late 2024.
Highs and lows: Life’s delight
Reflection
by Claire Smyth
Highs and lows. A common phrase to describe the journey of life. But for me, it is beyond description. It defines the road of creativity, and in the process, profoundly shapes who I am and who I am becoming. As a soon to be thirty-yearold female artist and entrepreneur on the brink of motherhood, while thankful for the highs, I am more grateful for the humbling moments, navigating the valley of lows where the sparks of fresh vision and creativity have emerged from the shadows.
Being a creative thinker and doer has always been part of my DNA. For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by a desire and passion to create. As a teenager, whether it was designing wedding stationery or photographing engagement
shoots, every square inch of my bedroom was filled with different art projects. As I started to think about my future and career at the grand old age of seventeen, I fell captive to the ageold battle of choosing between a safe job versus pursuing my passion. To cut a long story short, I surrendered to safety. I spent seven years teaching young children, managing a classroom, building strong relationships with fellow educators, and developing a range of leadership skills.
Although these years were formative both personally and professionally, four years ago I started to sense change was coming and I experienced a renewed creative passion. This time, however, I knew it was going to be more than a hobby or pastime. Weaning myself back
into the world of acrylic paints and messy palettes was a shock to the system. And yet, I felt a sense of freedom and excitement for the first time in a long time. The marker moment was the painting Highs and Lows: a piece I painted for my now husband in 2019. The longing to paint and bring the gift of art to others returned. Embracing risk, I decided to enter into the world of entrepreneurial creativity and Palette Design Art was born. In the last few years this small but life-giving business continues to challenge me as I learn to navigate the wide characteristics and demands of the creative industry. In turn, these challenges continue to weave a pattern of highs and lows in my life.
When asked the common question what do you do for a living?, I still find myself hesitating as I reply that I run an art business. I would love to say that answer with full confidence, but the creative pursuit of passion is vulnerable and exposing. Often the boldness I wish I had disappears. It has been a short journey so far, but along the way I am learning it is a lot less about what I do as a business and more about how and why I do it. Even more so, I have recently discovered it is in fact more about who I am in the process. Who I am becoming. For me, the discovery has been formative in my understanding of what it means to lead today, in all aspects of my life: as teacher, wife, artist, and small business owner.
Art is a beautiful means of connecting with people far beyond words. Art has a unique ability to instil peace even from a simple glance. As a teacher I know the benefits of art all too well, but I found myself starting to dream about how I could share my creativity with others. Art is a gift. I wanted to share this gift to make a difference in the lives of strangers. Initially, I wasn’t sure how this desire would align to my business. Then I discovered art therapy, which uses art as a vehicle for self-expression and communication. It is a powerful way of helping people of all ages and from all backgrounds discover an outlet for often complex and confusing feelings. So, as an artist and business owner, I find myself back in the classroom. This time, however, I return
as a student. How the tables have turned! It is a humbling experience and I’ve already felt the strains and struggles of learning again, juggling the roles of teacher, wife, artist, small business owner, and now, student.
As my creative journey continues to unfold, the perennial creative thread weaves together not only the highs and lows, but the twists and turns; the intersection where life’s delight is found. And, if I am listening, it always asks of me: who are you becoming? The question brings with it tension riding on its wings. Wearing different hats in different spaces, I inevitably face the turbulence of figuring out what to hold on to.
I hold on to hope. Laying bare my reflection on life’s highs and lows, I am on the brink of another beautiful birth of creativity. I am just weeks away from meeting my first child. A blank canvas. A beauty yet to come and struggles yet to be had. Vulnerable. Exposing. Joy filled. Life giving.
Held together in one same bag, I am reminded that beauty is most often found in the most unexpected places.
Reflection Point: Take some time to reflect on the last twelve months of your life. When did you step out of your comfort zone? If so, what did you discover about yourself in the process? If the answer is no, then ask why are you choosing the safety and comfort of the known?
About Claire Smyth
Claire Smyth is the founder of Palette Design Art. I was introduced to Claire at a conference where her art was the central feature. Her art provoked me to step into a new chapter on my journey of leadership. One of her pieces was presented to me as a gift that I will forever treasure. Knowing how much her art inspired me, it was an obvious decision to invite Claire to help inspire leaders across the world in volume one of Illuminaire.
To learn more about Palette Design Art, visit palettedesignart.com to explore Claire’s stunning abstract art inspired by the colours and textures of the north coast of Northern Ireland.
Leadership becoming: An epilogue
WORDS: CHARLOTTE FINLAY
Bridging and building, Beyond barriers and backgrounds, Living leadership is a process for all of us. For those like us and not like us at all, A unique chorus in progress, Everyone together embracing the becoming.
Different for each of us, no equation can fully grasp or solve it. Shaped and refined in ways we often forget and neglect: In first beginnings and trying again; In change, transition, confusion, and challenge; In the unfamiliar and our day-to-day mundane. But a new understanding is emerging.
Not formed in the limelight, or on the platforms we create, For growth happens most often when no audience is watching. Not limited to a title, a position, or a role we behold, Influence is found well beyond these spaces. Not confined to one person, set of traits, or a place, Leadership is best practiced in a constellation forming.
Living leadership is in our becoming, together, Like seeds, buried deep down in the soil. They are not lost nor lacking in purpose. They know true living is more than their budding and flowering, But in their working and in their waiting, In their changing and in their growing.
Expressed like an artist’s first strokes of paint on a canvas, Part of something much bigger still to be, But not yet . . . finished. As much in the process as in the display. Here we become and are still becoming. And possibility brims and beckons, In the unfolding journey of living leadership.
About Charlotte Finlay
Charlotte Finlay is a PhD researcher based at Ulster University in Northern Ireland studying the phenomena of collective leadership. Before embarking on a doctoral study of leadership, Charlotte was a leader in a not-for-profit organisation. She is passionate about mentoring young women as they fulfil their leadership potential. Charlotte has been a core voice in the Illuminaire becoming journey, helping the team navigate how best to help people across the world live leadership better.
NOTES
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LEADING TRANSITION
Center for Creative Leadership (2022) ‘The Role of Power in Leadership’. The Center for Creative Leadership
Folman, J. (2015) ‘Top Ranked Leaders Know This Secret: Ask for Feedback’. Forbes
Frazer, W. (2020) Trust and Repair: An Exploration of How Work Groups Repair a Violation of Trust’. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis.
Goldman, A. (2008) ‘Company on the Coach: Unveiling Toxic Behaviour in Dysfunctional Organizations’. Journal of Management Inquiry. Vol. 17, No. 3
Goleman, D. (2017) Influence: A Primer. Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence Book 8
Gruda, D. and Hanges, P. J. (2023) ‘Why We Follow Narcissistic Leaders’. Harvard Business Review
Illes, K. and Matthews, M. (2015) ‘Leadership, Trust and Communication: Building Trust in Companies Through Effective Leadership Communication’. University of Westminster Publication Report in Collaboration with Top Banana
Kovach, M. (2020) ‘Leader Influence: A Research Review of French and Raven’s 1959 Power Dynamics’. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership. Vol. 13, No. 2
Lunenburg, F. (2012) ‘Power and Influence: An Influence Process’. International Journal of Management, Business, and Administration. Vol. 15, No. 1
Mackey, J. D., Ellen, B. P., McAllister, C. P., and Alexander, K. C. (2021) ‘The Dark Side of Leadership: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of Destructive Leadership Research’. Journal of Business Research. Vol. 132
Rus, D., van Knippenberg, D., and Wisse, B. (2012) ‘Leader Power and Self-Serving Behavior: The Moderating Role of Accountability’. The Leadership Quarterly. Vol. 23
Spencer, L. and Spencer, S. (1993) Competence at Work: Models for Superior Performance. John Wiley
Stoke, J. and Dopson, S. (2020) From Ego to Eco: Leadership for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Tasha, E. (2018) ‘What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)’. Harvard Business Review
Wheatley, M. and Frieze, D. (2010) ‘Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host’. Resurgence Magazine
CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
Agbor, E. (2008) ‘Creativity and Innovation: The Leadership Dynamics’. Journal of Strategic Leadership. Vol.1, No. 1
Amabile, T. and Khaire, M. (2008) ‘Creativity and the Role of the Leader’. Harvard Business Review
Brodherson, M., Heller, J., Perrey, J., and Remley, D. (2017) ‘Creativity’s Bottom line: How Winning Companies Turn Creativity into Business Value and Growth’. McKinsey and Company Report
Guo, J., Gonzales, R., and Dilley, A. (2016) ‘Creativity and Leadership in Organisations: A Literature Review’. Creativity. Vol. 3, Issue 1
Harding, T. (2010) ‘Fostering Creativity for Leadership and Leading Change’. Arts Education Policy Review. Vol. 111, No.2
Heifetz, R. and Laurie, D. (2001) ‘The Work of Leadership’. Harvard Business Review
Lee, A., Legood, A., Hughes, D., Wei Tian, A., Newman, A., and Knight, C. (2020) ‘Leadership, Creativity and Innovation: A Meta-Analytic Review’. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. Vol. 29, No. 1
Pallotta, D. (2013) ‘What’s the Point of Creativity?’ Harvard Business Review
Rock, D., Siegel, D., Poelmans, S., and Payne, J. (2012) ‘The Healthy Mind Platter’. Neuro Leadership Journal. Issue 4
Illuminaire Press
Volume One
A printed annual publication bringing the science and strategy of leadership together through story and art.
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Strong and healthy leadership
Whether you believe leadership is the cause or solution to the world’s problems, one thing remains true: leadership matters. But not any old leadership will do. In a world where leaders chart unknown waters, face unprecedented challenges, and are forced to embrace the latest technological advancements, what really matters?
In this first annual publication of Illuminaire, we are drawing on science, strategy, and story to bring to light what really matters when it comes to practicing strong and healthy leadership. Whether it is navigating the power of influence, seeking to find a healthy balance, managing the internal dynamics of change, or trying to harness creativity and innovation, these pages explore answers to the challenges of living leadership today.
