New Mindset New Results
Earlier this week, I was a guest speaker at the Howden Tiger annual Professional Liability Networking Forum held in Nashville, Tennessee. The session had over 150 CEOs, and C-suite leaders from across the USA and included both insurers and reinsurers and it is was wonderful orchestrated dialogue on leadership, AI, and mind reading, with good old fashioned Nashville country music.
The first speaker was a McKinsey partner, Richard Steele, who shared highlights of McKinsey’s research on the Future of Work, as well as his own perspectives on the new mindset and the impacts it has on results.
Although it has been validated for some time that higher performing organizations have a balanced focus on performance results and human performance. Richard shared McKinsey research underscoring the importance of the significance of these balancing attributes and confirmed that optimal balance separates the good performers from the truly great performers as much as 5x. He also identified leadership attributes that distinguished the average performers to the higher performing organizations, and encouraged the forum executives to embrace these new dimensions.
The first leadership behavior to cultivate was purpose. Purpose, has of late been a major topic across organization design experts as a must have behavior to unlock your company’s true potential. Corporate purpose is defined by Colin Mayer as “producing profitable solutions for the problems of the people and planet, and not profiting from creating problems”. This definition is adopted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Enacting Purpose Initiative and the British Academy, among other prominent organizations.For example, Google’s original purpose was to “organize the world’s information.” Netflix defined its purpose as “entertaining the world.”
Richard Steele reinforced that employees want to show up for work seeing an organization’s purpose is to authentically care about the broader community’s social context, the environment, the health and wellbeing of the people are all top of mind in attracting talent who are looking for more balance in choosing a company to work for.
The second leadership behavior was collaboration. Merriam-Webster defines collaboration as “To work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.” The action of working with someone to produce or create something is about appreciating diverse stakeholder views and working together across organizational/functional boundaries and recognizing that the organizational vessel has many moving parts and appreciating each function’s purpose and value contributes to the whole. Richard reinforced that work across an enterprise and enabling employees to understand their contributions against the larger organizational operating system is increasingly important and to develop performance goals that are broader in purpose vs narrow to remove organizational barriers in acting as a unified culture vs a siloed culture.
The third leadership behavior was human. This from my perspective was the most important leadership behavior as humans are attracted to storytelling, authenticity, and transparent leadership behaviours. This creates a culture of being approachable, valuing diverse views, being more inclusive, and being willing to share one’s vulnerabilities. Being perfect is not what employees want rather they want to thrive and work in a sense of community and have a strong sense of belonging. Being human is a social leadership behavior that inspires a stronger people performance orientation and its paramount to build sustaining growth.
The Future of Work requires more authenticity, corporate purpose, collaboration and more humanity. With our increasingly digital convergence, our foundations of what it means to be human is undergoing change. In my first degree at University in the Arts, I studied a lot of Shakespeare and he wrote three types kinds of plays: the tragedies where things got worse, the comedies where things got better, and the histories, with a combination of winners and losers.
In today’s technology centric world which is the foundation of my Forbes musings, we need to ensure we advance humanity where happiness is prevalent, with increased social robustness and support meaningful and memorable relationships with and among people.
Richard Steeles research at McKinsey is underscoring how important it is to make our world better and balancing financial performance with the betterment of our people’s needs have a broader purpose was a refreshing perspective to hear.
I also had the opportunity to speak after Richard’s presentation to the lead conference organizer, Paul Herriott, North American Sales Director at Howden Tiger and ask him what he thought leadership meant, and this is what he had to share: “What is key in effective leadership is articulating a compelling and clear vision and building the capacity to motivate and inspire those around you. It is not about being ‘in charge’ but about empowering others to achieve individual or collective goals. I firmly believe leadership needs to also be flexible, as not every style and approach is applicable to every situation.”
Thank-you to Howden Tiger for recognizing how important leadership is to transform business models and bring the best thought leaders to its professional networking forum.
