Sparking Success: Adam Kingl demonstrates how art and imagery can serve as the ultimate catalyst for creativity
FMCG CEO Magazine, May 2023, pp.20-22
Tag Archive for: Development
Why failure is creativity’s best friend
When researching the successful application of creativity in business, I was struck with how often the concept of growth mindset occurred in my interviews with leaders in innovative organisations.
Growth mindset assumes a tolerance for failure, which is too often anathema in corporate life. We know intuitively, however, that without failure, we’re unlikely ever to experience dramatic success. And if we don’t share failure, our colleagues are more likely to make the same mistakes. There are no knowledge economies here!
To shift a team’s attitude toward failure requires fostering an environment of vulnerability, where colleagues are comfortable, eager even, to share their learning from every experiment they attempt. One way to do this is for the leader to host a failure party. I hear you guffaw, but hear me out. One of the many reasons that Pixar’s mantra is always to ‘Display’ is to invite critique, sharing, building on ideas and socialising what isn’t working. A failure party is simply to celebrate that spirit of Display. Colleagues become more comfortable as psychological safety grows to push the boundaries of what they think is possible, knowing that their personal reputation does not depend on inauthentically trying to communicate an aura of omniscience.
In the failure party, each person in the team who has explored a new avenue, experimented with a hypothesis, tested a prototype or interviewed a stakeholder or customer, and it did not go to plan, would share their activity, the result and, most importantly, the learning. Colleagues may ask questions, can build on the ideas and even pursue avenues that the speaker had not. The one thing that no one must do is belittle or criticise the speaker. Each dialogue ends with the conversation ‘What we learned here.’ Some leaders of failure parties even toast every speaker when they finish with a ritual, be it ringing a bell or everyone shouting ‘Huzzah!!’ The speaker’s candour, vulnerability and creativity are acknowledged. The ‘party’ element, which can simply involve refreshment and an informal environment, is proposed in order to put people at ease as quickly as possible.
The failure party is also a tremendous opportunity for the leader to share directly and obliquely what the boundaries are of acceptable risk. Over time, the team understands explicitly and implicitly what they can try right away and what they need to share first before trying. This dynamic is not unlike how Sir Clive Gillinson, Managing and Creative Director of Carnegie Hall in New York City and former Managing Director of the London Symphony Orchestra, launched the National Youth Orchestra of the United States. Share the idea first, socialise it among donors to test the idea, and get a bit of investment to display the prototype, then that generates further investment, and ultimately produces a sustainable new programme for the world. The initial hurdle involved little risk, and once shared and improved, the idea proceeded to the next hurdle with the team having more confidence that their concept has passed muster each time. At each hurdle, if the idea cannot pass further, then the risk is controlled, lessons are shared, and the entire team has still acquired greater wisdom.
About the author
About the authorAdam Kingl is author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset, published by Kogan Page, priced £12.99.
Sparking Success: Why Creativity is the Skill for the Future
SPARKING SUCCESS, WHY CREATIVITY IS THE SKILL FOR THE FUTURE
This is a guest article from Adam King author of Sparking Success
Why Creativity is the Skill for the Future
In every conference at which I speak, with every corporate client with whom I consult, I hear that we need to achieve a greater balance between the art and the science of work, particularly when the conversation turns to innovation. But we feel stuck, unable to make the changes we know we must. A Boston Consulting Group study asked CEOs where innovation ranked as a strategic priority.
Seventy-nine percent said it was a top three priority, and you have to wonder why that number wasn’t one hundred percent since you could argue that innovation is the only protection for remaining relevant. So innovation is not an advantage; it is the advantage! However, a McKinsey study reported that ninety-four percent of employees say their organization is ineffective at innovation. I’m not sure that there is a bigger gap in our companies between how critical CEOs think something is and how bad we are at it, between what we know we need to do and what we actually do.
Sparking Success, Why Creativity is the Skill for the Future
A significant factor behind this knowing-doing gap is that we’ve been trained as leaders since the beginning of the Industrial Age to push out those very human qualities that would better enable our organizations to navigate these turbulent waters: inspiration, innovation, adaptability, empowerment, curiosity. While business has worked very hard to drive these qualities out with its incessant preference to value only those merits which can be acutely measured, the arts have always toiled to drive them in.
Yet the reason I am optimistic today is that we happen to live during one of those inflection points of history. Scientific management has had its day in the sun, making many executives and investors admittedly very wealthy. We now require a new Renaissance, a flowering of interchange between the arts and business whereby we recreate work around human fulfilment.
In the privileged position of a consultant and educator to executives, I hear from leaders all around the world who are feeling an unprecedented pressure to reinvent how they lead, learn, operate, structure, incentivize, hire, promote and communicate. Business must reflect the needs of its employees, customers and society in better ways than those we have experienced. If the leadership of the corporate estate requires reimagining, then the new solutions will come less from the science of management and more from the art.
Human expression to human engineering
In humankind’s quest to perfect the process by which we create wealth, the previous ménage à trois among science, business and art became a cosier domestic arrangement between science and commerce, elbowing the arts into the periphery in terms of the habits, goals and philosophies of leadership and organizational life.
This paucity of artistic creativity and inspiration is a symptom of the Industrial Revolution, which perfected the philosophy of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management, whose hypothesis was that the way in which we organize business is to drive efficiency in and variance out, implying a human labourer is but a cog in an industrial machine.
Taylorism was specifically perfect for the manufacturing heyday of a century ago when Henry Ford once famously quipped, ‘Why is it every time I hire a pair of hands a brain comes attached?’ Over a short period of time, the skyscape of business lost its constellation of artistic exploration – a critical mindset laid to waste. We dehumanised our companies in perfecting Taylorism and combined that philosophy with the obeyance-driven, hierarchical architecture of the Roman legions. Yet today, we lament that we lack humanity in our work life. Why are we surprised?
The fault does not reside with our front-line employees but with our leaders and their philosophy of governance from an era and context that effectively ended half a century ago. Some predicted that the digital revolution or information age was to herald a nirvana of wealth and contentment. But while the technologies and industries changed, the manner in which we organized work did not, so work-life continues to be unliveable.
The German sociologist Max Weber remarked, ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world We still find ourselves in a cage of our own making, unprepared for a world in which the need for humanising is increasing by the hour.
Therefore, adaptability, creativity, and inspiration are the leadership qualities that our organizations require today. Both employer and employee need these capabilities now, and we don’t have centuries anymore to develop them. Making these qualities preeminent in our organizations is the next revolution. You can be at the forefront of this changing tide.
In rediscovering art and play, two virtuous habits that spark and nurture those characteristics of innovation including divergent thinking, collaboration, mindfulness, inspiration, exploring untraditional ideas and picturing the future, we uncover anew the state of mind and spirit that we have always naturally possessed. We begin to encourage an environment that allows our companies collectively to discover what we know individually that we have always craved.
Adam Kingl is on the faculty of the Irish Management Institute and is author of new book Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset published by Kogan Page, priced £12.99.
How Can Leaders Unlock The Creativity Of Their Teams?
By Sally Percy
Innovation is key to success in business, but it can be difficult to establish a consistently innovative culture within an organization, not least because the creative process itself can be both challenging and draining. Today, on World Creativity and Innovation Day, six experts share their secrets for encouraging people to come up with great ideas.
1. Create a psychologically safe learning culture
“When we talk about how leaders can drive innovation and creativity, it’s easy to focus on the individual characteristics of a leader,” says Gillian Pillans, research director of the Corporate Research Forum. “Are they visionary? Do they generate novel ideas?”
Yet research by the Corporate Research Forum finds that the organizational context created by a leader is far more important than their personal characteristics. In particular, leaders should create a psychologically safe learning culture that supports employees to try out new ideas.
Psychological safety – a term popularized by Professor Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School – refers to an organizational context where people feel safe to take risks and make mistakes. “A leadership approach that encourages people to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas is foundational to this,” says Pillans. “Simply put, leaders should create an environment where employees are comfortable that their ideas will be welcomed, rather than ridiculed.”
Pillans advises that leaders can establish psychological safety through creating a culture of trust and mutual respect. They can achieve this by practicing behaviors such as being fully present in conversations, being approachable, acknowledging that they don’t know all the answers, and using mistakes as an opportunity for learning. She concludes: “This will all help to create a culture where people feel like they can experiment and safely make and learn from mistakes – essential prerequisites to creativity and innovation.”
2. Be more human
“If we’re to inject innovation and adaptability back into our organizations, the practice of leadership is due for a revolution,” says Adam Kingl, author of Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset.“Organizations are only going to change to the extent that their leaders are personally willing to change, and this can be challenging because, as senior executives, we have spent a lifetime learning to succeed in a certain way – in many cases, emulating the leaders above us.”
Kingl argues that customers and colleagues alike increasingly expect leaders to be more human at work. “Becoming a creative leader must be about taking your people with you on this journey,” he says, “communicating emotion and creating clarity and the right environment for a human-forward company.”
When leaders suddenly change without providing context, they can cause their teams to become confused or frustrated,” Kingl warns. He says that practicing a creative mindset is about laying the foundations for an organization that is as human as any individual within it. What’s more, there are five steps to ensure personal and collective success: develop an inspiring personal vision; don’t fear incorporating emotion into communication; attract the unusual and the different into your teams; manage initiatives lightly, allow for adaptation and iteration; and be kind.
3. Use sustainability to drive creativity
Mark Carney, the United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance, has described the transition to a lower-carbon economy as the “greatest commercial opportunity of our time”.
Climate change is also the ultimate test of today’s leaders, according to Solitaire Townsend, author of The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future. “Demand for solutions will only intensify in the coming business cycle,” she explains. “With the global transformation to net zero being worth $3.5 trillion per year, the opportunities for inventiveness are powerful.”
Sustainability also solves another great challenge for leaders: motivation. “Since the pandemic, employee motivation across industries has plummeted,” Townsend explains. “The Great Resignation is only the most obvious symptom of poor morale, with innovation-poverty, creativity gaps and productivity drops felt everywhere.”
She continues: “The only area where that trend is reversed is in social and environmental initiatives. Especially for Gen Z staff, who are overwhelmingly interested in sustainability, showing how creativity and innovation have social purpose can spark imaginations the way quartile returns never will.”
4. Look to the margins
“Business leaders need to move out of their traditional growth comfort zones and encourage their teams to look to the margins of society for creativity, innovation and growth,” suggests Dr Helen Edwards, author of From Marginal to Mainstream: why tomorrow’s brand growth will come from the fringes – and how to get there first.
Edwards argues that marginal behaviors – such as contrarian sleep patterns, naturism, eating insect protein, burying loved ones at home and extreme frugality – are practiced by a tiny percent of the population and are therefore generally ignored by business. “They are ignored because they seem unpromising, untested, weird or even repulsive,” she says. “They are ignored because they may remain marginal.”
Nevertheless, people on the margins may point the way to new innovation, new routes to market and exciting new category creation. “Veganism was marginal once,” Edwards points out. “Now it’s a growing, multi-category sector worth over $23 billion, fueling innovative solutions and new ideas in food, beverages, clothing, leisure and packaging.”
Like veganism, the behaviors and ways of life found at the fringes can break through and surge in popularity – and this surge is not random. “There are signs, clues and motifs that you can look for, to understand and see the swell before it really takes off,” says Edwards. “You can be one of the businesses involved right at the outset, serving this emerging and burgeoning need. What does it take? The willingness and courage to look, understand and creatively imagine the solutions to help it on its way. Today’s margins are tomorrow’s business growth – if you know where and how to look.”
5. Look outside your bubble
“Teams become stuck when certain behaviors dominate,” says Jeremy Campbell, CEO of performance improvement company Black Isle Group. He cites some key “creativity killers” as group thinking, fear of failure and “not invented here” syndrome.
“These traits mutate in well-established teams,” Campbell maintains and he advises that alarm bells should sound for leaders if they hear their long-serving colleagues declaring: “We tried that before, and it didn’t work.”
Campbell believes that leaders who want to kickstart creativity need to move their thinking from “Our world” to “Our world plus”. By that, he means bringing ideas, solutions and innovation into your world from outside your bubble. How have your problems been solved elsewhere? What have other companies done in the same situation? How are they innovating in other sectors? How can technology or data and artificial intelligence (AI) transform your approach?
“Create an ideas session where no one is allowed to kill an idea,” suggests Campbell. “Instead, anyone who speaks must suggest a better one.”
He adds: “Don’t let the dominant voices dominate. The best ideas can often come from the newest and most different perspectives on the team.”
6. Build a team of daydreamers
“Creativity is a process, not an event,” argues Chris Griffiths, co-author of The Creative Thinking Handbook, and founder of the AI-powered brainstorming app Ayoa. “We sometimes associate creativity with those big occasions: breakthroughs in a brainstorming session, or a fun, energetic workshop. Certainly, those are creative moments. But lest we forget, creativity begins inside the human brain. And the best way to engage it is by making time for the mind to wander.”
Griffiths says that the reason why this approach is sometimes met with skepticism is because it challenges the status quo. “It can be hard, as leaders, to encourage our teams to make time for daydreaming,” he explains. “It might sound like time-wasting – especially in the age of hybrid work when levels of trust can be low, but the truth is, this is the best way to promote creativity.”
How many of us get our best ideas while commuting to work, or taking a shower? “There’s a wealth of research proving the connection between daydreaming and creativity, productivity and overall enhanced cognition,” says Griffiths. “So as leaders, it is time to encourage teams to daydream more – whether that is getting out for walks or allowing them to spend time doodling. The creative results will speak for themselves.”
Just In Time Hiring, ‘Covering’ and the Engagement Crisis
I’ve talked at length in previous blogs and articles about employee engagement, but now I’m going to address a political hot potato – that thing that many people in organisations all know, all whisper about around the water cooler, but won’t say out loud, and that is the staffing model. How many of us have been in situations where our colleagues have gone off on long holidays or unfortunately have gone off sick for a long period of time, or fortunately have had children? What happens with the rest of us? Almost always, our organisation asks us to pick up the slack. So for a long period of time we’re not just trying to fulfil our roles, but we’re trying to fulfil someone else’s role as well. But do we receive both titles? No. Do we receive two salaries? No. Are we rewarded in any way by our organisations? Typically not. In fact, in many ways we’re often punished. What do I mean by that? Well, think about what happens during one’s annual review. Your boss or HR might say, ‘Well look, you didn’t achieve these objectives,’ and you’re thinking, ‘Yeah, I didn’t fully achieve those objectives because I was trying to achieve those objectives and someone else’s objectives while trying not to keel over from exhaustion!’
So our organisations might philosophically say we have just the right number of people to fulfil all the roles required. In reality, architecturally our organisations are chronically understaffed, and that creates an enormous engagement problem.
Think about what happens when organisations downsize and they tell teams, ‘Okay, yes, we know you had to do x amount of work with six people but now you have to do x amount of work with two people, but don’t worry’, the organisation says, ‘After six months we’ll revisit. This is just temporary.’ And we all know what happens: Two years later you look back and you think, ‘Huh! We’re still in exactly the same position. We’re all working umpteen hours a day, and this was all supposed to be temporary!’ Organisations sometimes claim: ‘We have just in time hiring. As soon as we see a gap we will hire.’ I say that’s almost always nonsense. Organisations typically do not do that. They tacitly expect their people to pick up the slack. And if they are going to do that, then at least be honest with employees. When you do put them under that stress of having to work two or three jobs for the same title for the same salary for long stretches, then, even better than simply being honest about it, reward them for it and watch what will happen to your employee engagement when you combine transparency with recognition.
Adam Kingl, www.adamkingl.com, is the author of Next Generation Leadership and Sparking Success. He is also an educator, adviser and keynote speaker.
The failures of work give us hope for the future
Workplace engagement is approaching an all-time low, and typical employer reaction has been characteristically resigned. Actually, that last statement was inaccurately soft. Let me rephrase: most employees either don’t care about or actually hate their jobs, and employers couldn’t care less.
Gallup recently issued their biennial global engagement survey – the widest and most accurate in the world if the sheer numbers of participants are anything to go by. While overall average engagement decreased slightly to 20 percent, that figure plummets to just 11 percent in Europe. The situation is even worse than it initially sounds. If 11 percent of our local workforce are engaged, then that implies that 89 percent are either disengaged (don’t care about their jobs) or actively disengaged (actually despise their work and/or employers). When I share these results to rooms full of senior executives, the reaction I usually receive is an odd mix of troubled and resigned. In other words, ‘It’s not great but I don’t see what we can do about it.’
Popular press has recently attempted another tactic to bring this engagement crisis to the forefront of corporate consciousness by calling it ‘quiet quitting’. But is that really a new thing? Or are we just sticking a new label on an old problem: colleagues doing the bare minimum, just trying to hang on and draw their pay cheque and keep their noses down? Isn’t that what a lot of people have been doing for decades? The difference now is that employers are experiencing the pain of high rates of ‘real quitting’ with some figures indicating that at least half of all employees in the West are considering resigning in the next year.
Employers are experiencing the pain of high rates of ‘real quitting’
If we accept that the cost of replacing an employee is 50-200 percent of their annual salary, then a company of one hundred colleagues with an average salary of £50,000 may face a semi-hidden cost from over a million to as much as five million pounds in the next year in resource gaps, recruiting, possible headhunter fees, training, and knowledge and learning economy losses. For the youngest generation at work, the problem is even worse. In researching my book Next Generation Leadership, I discovered that 90 percent of Generation Y (or Millennials, who compose 65 percent of the global workforce) typically don’t expect to stay with any employer for more than five years, and 37 percent would say not more than two years.
If current employer efforts clearly have not worked, how should we reconsider and refresh engagement? My research identified that true employee engagement is composed of three areas:
One is development, but not necessarily development in the way in which we usually define it, such as courses. We usually give our people development all the time, but managers are often poor at explaining why those are development opportunities explicitly. So those opportunities are ignored or taken for granted. For example, if we give people projects, do we actually tell them that this is a development opportunity and for specific reasons? When they are shadowing, attending international secondments or placements, or receiving mentoring, are we explicit about how and why those are development opportunities? And of course, many of the initiatives I’ve just mentioned are free or inexpensive.
Culture matters
The second engagement lever is culture. What is it like to work around here? What’s the experience? We have to think about culture less as a communications exercise (composing the purpose and values with communications consultants or the investor relations department), and more of a sociological initiative. In other words, what behaviours do we want to observe more of and less of?
The two questions that Generation Y told me that they wish they could ask or would have been asked in a recruitment interview are: Can I meet the team I would be working with, and would you show me where my desk will be? They are interested in the individuals surrounding them and the behaviours they would see from those people. They are interested, therefore, in culture not as an employer value proposition but as a day-to-day experience.
What we’ve learned since Covid is that we should in fact have flexibility in terms of workplace location
The third engagement principle is work-life balance. When employees request work-life balance, they might truly be asking to work fewer hours, but there might be something else behind that request, which is flexibility in terms of where they work. It’s important to diagnose what each colleague wants because there is semantic discord among the generations about their definitions of the term ‘work-life balance’.
For most Gen Xs and Baby Boomers, work-life balance is a ‘when’ question. In other words, when they hear ‘work-life balance’ they would interpret that the speaker wants to work fewer hours, which can lead them to conclude, ‘They don’t want to pay the dues that I paid, and so they’re lazy.’ So it goes, and that contributes to this incorrect prejudice that Gen Ys are somehow indolent.
When I ask Gen Ys what they mean when they say or hear ‘work-life balance’, they generally say that this is a ‘where’ statement. Therefore, what they’re looking for is flexibility in terms of location of work. What they’re rejecting is face-time culture, being chained to your desk, not being able to leave the office until the boss leaves.
Of course, what we’ve learned since Covid is that we should in fact have flexibility in terms of workplace location. And yes, I know that it does vary based on function or industry whether it is possible to work from home or elsewhere, but I would nevertheless suggest that we ask each another before we get into a work-life balance conversation: ‘What do you mean when you say work-life balance in your context,’ in order to make sure that we aren’t speaking at cross-purposes.
The good news about the world of work is that it actually has an awfully good record of reinvention. Over history, how work is organised and incentivised has evolved dramatically from feudalism to mercantilism to industrial capitalism to post-industrial capitalism. With will and focus, we can and must evolve our world of work again to make it fit for the human beings within, to make our work life a life worth living.
Adam Kingl is an educator, keynote speaker and the author of Next Generation Leadership and Sparking Success, due to be released in April 2023
Quiet Quitting: New Name for an Old Problem?
Let’s consider that most troublesome of conditions that’s much in the press – quiet quitting. Is that a thing? Really? Or actually, are we just talking about people doing the bare minimum, just trying to hang on and draw their pay cheque and keep their noses down? Well, isn’t that what a lot of people have been doing for decades, if not centuries? I wonder if we just put a new label on a condition that we have been too easily ignoring for far too long, and that’s the chronic engagement problem. So how do we as leaders better engage our people?
I was particularly looking at the largest demographic (over 65%) in the workforce in my own research, and that’s Generation Y or Millennials, and what might keep them engaged at work and actually allow them to give more discretionary effort than they ever have before, and I found that engagement has to do with mainly three things.
One is giving them development opportunities and naming those development opportunities explicitly. In other words, if we give people projects, do we actually tell them that this is a development opportunity for these reasons? When they are shadowing, or attending international secondments or placements, are we explicit about how and why those are development opportunities? Do we give our people mentoring? Most of the things I’ve mentioned are free or inexpensive.
The second thing that we need to think about is culture. What is it like to work around here? What’s the experience? The two questions that Gen Y told me they wish they could ask or would have been asked in a recruitment interview are: Can I meet the team I would be working with, and can you show me where my desk will be? In other words, what they are interested in is: What are the behaviours I observe from the people around me? What they are interested in, therefore, is culture.
Third is work-life balance. Now, this doesn’t mean necessarily working fewer hours, so when we say people are quiet quitting, what they’re telling us is that they’re working the bare minimum of hours, but there might be something behind that, which is that they may truly want flexibility in terms of where they work, and if they have that flexibility then they might actually give us more of their time in terms of doing the work required. I am not suggesting that we kill people and work them to death, but if we think that people are giving us the bare minimum, how do we create the conditions of that work, so that they’re more willing to do what is required to the extent that is healthy and well? That is a two-way conversation of course between employer and employee. But work-life balance is a tricky question because we always have to ask ourselves whether we are dealing with hours worked or with flexibility in terms of where and how the work happens.
For more of my media and speaking, please visit www.adamkingl.com
How is the Four-Day Week Shaping Workplaces?
While the four-day work week is a global trend that more and more companies are adhering to, there are conditions that enable its success. Planning, purging bureaucracy and open communication are essential tools that organisations must be equipped with to make a smooth and successful transition.
The decrease in working hours is a global trend that started in Europe a few years before Covid-19 but intensified during the pandemic.
According to Perry Timms, author of Transformational HR and The Energized Workplace, and founder of People and Transformational HR Ltd, it was mostly the exhaustion felt after trying to recover from lost work during the pandemic – and a long-standing belief that five-day weeks were a barrier to career progression for working caregivers – that made them decide to implement a four-day work week.
“We wanted more focus from being rested to save our enterprise and bring more balance to our mainly part-time team. In short, modelling a new way to slice and dice the working week,” he explains.
Adam Kingl, educator and author of Next Generation Leadership, explains that the reason why companies are adopting a four-day work week is because they need to respond to employees’ increasing requests for greater work-life balance. “A demand for work-life balance isn’t a cry for fewer work hours – it’s a cry to be able to work from outside the office beyond a rigid 9-5 schedule,” he says.
Jordan Lorence, Marketing Manager at MRL Consulting Group, clarifies that in the case of his company the four-day week started out as a strategy to improve recruitment and retention internally. They had many other incentives in place before the four-day week but they wanted something to bring it all together.
“Our best people would want to continue to stay, and recruiters would want to work for us. There was also the wellbeing side of things; our team would be refreshed, happier, healthier, and we’d all enjoy our time in the office more as a result. Many of our team have children, so giving them back time would be really important,” he states.
Claire Daniels, Chief Executive Officer of Trio Media, explains why her company is taking part in the 4-Day Week Pilot Programme in the UK. For her the motive was around productivity. As a growing business, she wanted to see profits increase and so was open to anything that could allow her organisation to get the best output from their people.
“I think companies generally are implementing it, as they are intrigued about how to build a workplace for the future that has a balance between performance and employee wellbeing,” Claire states.
Providing a better work-life balance
Jordan Lorence suggests that the work-life balance was one of the main reasons for bringing in the four-day work week. Every employee has every Friday off. No hours are added on to make up time, no loss of pay or commission, just one day less in the office. That extra day is for the team to do whatever they want with. “We felt like that was the best balance to offer – we already have flexible working in place, so to give back one whole day was the next best thing to add,” Jordan explains.
Claire Daniels clarifies that an additional free day per week gives people the opportunity to get a lot of life-admin done, along with spending more time with their family or friends. She noticed that some employees have even started volunteering or learning a new skill.
Perry Timms explains that the four-day work week is an awesome way to do what he refers to as ‘2×2 day working sprints to their work’, with flexibility all around it. “If we have to flex for client work, we trade the time/day. And with families, life-admin, hobbies and other pursuits, we no longer feel these have to be crammed into a weekend,” he states. Accordingly, they don’t have a work-life balance, they live a balanced life which includes their work. Noticeably, their culture, positivity, support, creativity and work volumes have all increased since they took this decision. They’ve cut out bureaucratic clutter and they’re now being asked to help others create new capacity in the way they did.
Impacting productivity and performance
Claire says that the impact on productivity has definitely been positive, in that their workload has increased and they have been able to keep up with demand even in fewer hours. The performance speaks for itself: in the five months they’ve carried out the trial, they performed 49% better financially than in the same time last year, and 30% better financially than the previous period. They’ve also had two record sales months since they’ve been operating their four-day week.
Perry confirms that this work schedule has had a huge impact on employee productivity and performance. They’ve had two years of sustained growth with 20% fewer hours “on the clock”. When they tracked this over the last two years, they were able to pin it down to efficiencies, clarity and attention to what makes things swifter without being breathlessly fast.
“We’ve crafted intelligence and information creation, storage and retrieval that is very optimal. Our communication, learning and social time have increased, not decreased. Overall, our culture of performance is far more optimal because we’ve sharpened in every area possible,” Perry explains.
At MRL Consulting Group, and according to Jordan, they’ve had their best financial year in 25 years of business, with 60% of the headcount they had when they established the previous record. This was set before the financial crash in 2008, so to say the business environment was also different back then is an understatement.
“We’re now doing more work in less time, so using the four-day week formula, productivity has certainly improved. We stopped looking at inputs (time spent in the office etc.) and started looking at outputs (calls made, interviews scheduled, placements made etc.) and it helped us to focus on the things that really matter. People are happier, more energised and focused for four days, so they tend to get more out of those four than they would have out of five days,” Jordan clarifies.
Increasing employee engagement
Adam Kingl explains that when he was surveying hundreds of high potential Generation Ys (who represent over 60% of the global workforce) for his book Next Generation Leadership, he found that work-life balance is the number one condition that such HiPos seek from their employers. So, a four-day work week could be a major initiative to improve employee engagement and reduce attrition among the largest generation in the workplace.
For Jordan, engagement has really improved for everyone. He suggests that when employees know they have less time to do something, they tend to focus more on their work. There’s then the other side of it where, when they feel appreciated as a person and they’re given a proper work-life balance, they’re happier at work – and happier people tend to be more engaged.
Claire believes employee engagement has increased at her company, although this isn’t a metric they currently measure. Due to the reduced working hours, they’ve also made an effort to organise more social activity outside work to help work relationships continue to flourish even in reduced working hours.
The conditions of success of the four-day work week
Claire explains that in order for the four-day work week to succeed they had to do a lot of planning. For her, open communication and transparency are key to safeguarding the business against any of the challenges. Equally, bringing in several new systems and processes to ensure the success of everyone on the trial helped in their case.
For Perry it is important to socialise the idea first to test belief in the option. The socialisation of work doesn’t mean a slower process and the need for consensus; it means respect for the process and clear lines of accountability.
He believes equally that a company must purge bureaucracy – especially the time spent in meetings – and instead create open, transparent processes, communications and decision-making that are focused on impact and positive outcomes. “Then measure, sense-check and narrate culture into prominence, creating a psychologically safe place to pursue prosperity – not meaningless KPIs and targets. Less time, better work,” he concludes.
According to Adam, organisations should still seek clarity about what their employees mean or want when they request ‘work-life balance’. In some cases, they seek to work fewer hours, in which case working, for example, 10 hours a day for four days a week may not yield fewer hours. But in other cases, employees might seek greater flexibility in where or how they work, and having three days when they are not obliged to work may provide this.
“It all would depend on the individual’s circumstances as well as the employer’s truly giving the employee the freedom and flexibility, including not intruding on their ‘fifth’ day off,” he concludes.
The four-day work week, if implemented well, seems to be a promising model that companies are heading towards. So far it has shown very positive results: improvement in the wellbeing and performance of employees, increase in productivity and engagement.
Is this not what every company aspires to? Is it not in line with what employees are requesting when they speak of a better work-life balance? Perhaps it is time for more organisations to consider it so that it becomes a new norm in modern workplaces.
Responding to the Resignation Crisis
One of the topics I discuss in my book, Next Generation Leadership, is how to respond to the resignation crisis. I discovered that, among many tactics, one which appears to be highly effective is cultivating an alumni network. If it is true that Generation Y, or Millennials, are leaving their organisations with frightening rapidity, my research show that this is in fact their expectation. They are often anticipating leaving every two to five years from one organisation to the next.
Then, it’s best that we consider how we might allow them to come back at some point in the future. So, they may not stay for more than two to five years at a time, but perhaps we can convince them to come back two, three times over the course of their careers, and in so doing, the develop new, senior leadership skills, customer relations skills, sales skills, whatever it might be, which you didn’t have to pay for, and then you get them back, and you get the benefit of all that new development. So how do we cultivate an alumni network? Well, professional services organisations like McKinsey or Accenture are world class at maintaining their alumni networks, so we can learn a thing or two from them. They even hold reunions in many cases, just as a university would, of their former employees because these people are currently clients, they’re customers, they’re net promoters. You certainly don’t want them to be net detractors!
But what too many organisations do, instead of cultivating those relationships, instead of holding alumni reunions, instead of keeping a social network alive, is when someone resigns they say, ‘Oh, you’re leaving? Ok, leave your swipe card on the desk and don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’ That’s certainly not the way forward. We want to keep a workforce, whether it’s in one go at a time or two or three goes at a time because we’re living in a world where young employees want mobility from job to job. Sometimes those future collaborations might be contractor positions instead of full-time employee engagements, and that’s fine. Certainly we need to make working with us as attractive as possible, so that over the course of their careers, we can collaborate with the high potentials for as long as possible. The only thing is – it may not be all in one go.
The Evolution of Capitalism: Profit or Purpose?
HR Magazine, 26 January 2022
The Evolution of Capitalism
Profit or Purpose?
Adam Kingl
Is profit the fundamental criterion for a business? As capitalism is evolving under our feet, and that evolution is accelerating since Covid, we’re seeing a shift of emphasis from the pre-eminence of shareholders to stakeholders: customers, employees and communities. Now, I want to make a very important distinction. This does not mean that shareholders are getting the short end of the stick in terms of reward. If companies refocus or even redefine how they add value to stakeholders, then shareholders are rewarded too.
At a macrolevel, this shift that we are just starting to observe is essentially a rebalance in corporate focus from outcomes to outputs. If we think of outcomes as share price and profit, we cannot deny that these are good things to have. But I can’t storm into the office and say that my focus today will be to maximise my share price. What am I supposed to DO?? A blinkered focus on share price creates drift away from the reasons a company was founded in the first place: to identify a market need and to serve customers brilliantly. Creating value for customers and serving them better are outputs that companies can rally behind, can guide whether to spend more time on activity A or activity B. My outputs will lead to the outcome of enhancing my bottom line. But the outcome is not my daily focus – this is a subtle but hugely important point.
Does this mean that the CEO would not want to earn a profit? Absolutely not. Business has to survive and thrive. Here’s the rub. Most businesses were founded on an idea of introducing an exciting product to the world, serving a previously undiscovered market need, bettering a community or creating employment opportunities. But then financial analysts’ opinions grew in importance to investors, with their use of various ratios that are useful shortcuts in assessing company health. However, we must remember that these shortcuts are only performance indicators for today; they do not assess if the business is closer to or farther from achieving its purpose, closer to or farther from achieving long-term or ‘moon shot’ objectives.
Chasing ratio optimization is a short-term game. Before one knows it, the purpose of the business is about tacitly, implicitly pleasing analysts. Making decisions toward long-term objectives takes a back seat, and sustained success can become much harder to achieve over time. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened on a massive scale. At an inflection point in the second half of the twentieth century, as analysts’ and shareholders’ voices became louder, the CFOs’ and Investor Relations’ departments began to dominate the c-suite conversations. CEOs’ compensations grew increasingly related to share price and less on customer value indicators. The focus on outputs dropped down the totem pole in terms of time and attention in favour of outcomes. One could argue that the Great Recession of 2007-09 was caused, or at least made much worse, by this shift in focus.
Companies that remain focused on their purpose are rewarded by investors and customers. Aggregate research has proven that such purpose-focused firms significantly outperform their rivals. The authors of the book, Firms of Endearment, explored those organisations who are in the top ten percent in relation to focusing on their purpose, community, customers and employees. Their research revealed that, over the decade ending in June 2006, these firms returned 1,025% to their shareholders, compared to 122% return on investment by the S&P 500 overall. Just to be clear, this study therefore quantified that purpose-driven organisations reward their investors better than the market average by a multiple of ten!
Separate research published in Organization Science reached a similar conclusion. Faculty from Harvard, Pennsylvania and Columbia Universities surveyed half a million employees across 429 firms. While these academics did not find correlation between purpose alone and financial performance, they proved that companies with strong purpose and high clarity from management exhibit stronger financial and stock market performance. The implication is that one condition of commercial success is that an organisation’s employees understand and believe in their collective purpose and have a clear path as to how that purpose will be achieved.
Perhaps our ultimate question is: Are purpose and profit a zero-sum game? Recent research indicates this is not necessarily so, and the two forces may even serve each other. A huge amount of dialogue has attempted to answer this question both in media and in conferences. The opinions are typically more definitive than one may guess and often resemble the sentiment: ‘The most successful companies, both in profitability and longevity, are the ones who recognise the absolute necessity of profits as well as the equally high necessity of having a purpose beyond shareholders’ wealth.’
Adam Kingl (adamkingl.com) is the author of Next Generation Leadership and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the UCL School of Management, where this theme of the evolution of capitalism is explored in the School’s executive education practice and notably in its Building Competitive Advantage through Sustainability course: https://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/executive-education.
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