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Category: vulnerability

Dear Family-Business Owner – your vulnerability is your superpower

Posted by on in Culture, Daring Leadership, Strategy, trust, vulnerability

Whilst I was drafting this post – a number of stories crossed my newsfeed of owners of family businesses expressing their desire to hold on to their independence and with it financial vulnerability as well as the intense vulnerability experienced whilst leading their organisation. And yes, I believe if we look closely exactly that may be their superpower.

Big corporates always like a best practice to copy. Often they look at the other major players. Maybe it is time to look at the family-owned businesses if we start to shift away from short-term financial profit as the single measure of success and have to build cultures with leadership that creates trust, binds employees, and at the same time enables innovation, disruption, creation.

“We posit that compared to their non-family peers, the likely elevated levels of vulnerability felt by many family firm owners and managers will engender richer and more rewarding social exchanges with those stakeholders”

Hayward M, et. al., Journal of Family Business, 2022 (full source below)

A couple of newly published journal articles in the Journal of Family Business have dug into these topics in family-owned businesses. Here’s what I take-away from them. Family-owned businesses build trust and an excellent attrition of their employees (even binding family members over generations) due to the following:

  • The vulnerability and acute sense of responsibility family-owned business owners feel on a daily basis.
  • Truly caring for their employees and hence offering a safe internal culture that develops along with needs.
  • Their independence from shareholders and the ability to look at the long-term returns versus quarterly balance sheets.

The two papers are different in style – one looking at one family-owned firm as a case study and another looking at a model based on social exchange theory. Yet, their findings support each other, and also support what was shared in the book published by family-business owner Antje von Dewitz, Vaude, which I wrote about here (in German).

“According to employee statements, whether long- established members of the executive team or new employees, they refer to the importance of the family firm’s long-term orientation enabling enduring employment and innovation for generations.”

Rondi E, et al. Journal of Family Business, 2022 (full source below)

This what I take from this research.

As a family-business owner, I can only imagine that intense sense of vulnerability of being in service to the idea, the employees, the customers, the local community. From this research and the work in daring leadership, which explains how vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage, I invite you to lean in to this discomfort of vulnerability to use it as your superpower – learn all the skills to have courage as well as boundaries, self-compassion as tools to look after yourself.

If I was a startup building my culture – I would be looking at these type of businesses rather than trying to be like the big corporates, the next unicorn. Some really interesting work into this field is being led by the New Mittelstand movement in Germany, which I can only recommend investigating.

And for the big corporates – this only adds another data point to support the need for a change in leadership, culture and strategy. We have to revisit the detachment of business leaders from the pulsing heart of the business. This can only be done if we change our definition of business success away from short-term financial profits, away from strategy based on competitive advantage and succeeding on business metrics to instead looking to provide products, services, solutions that contribute to people, planet and profit.

Source:

One for all, all for one: A mutual gains perspective on HRM and innovation management practices in family firms. Emanuela Rondi, Ruth Überbacher, Leopold von Schlenk-Barnsdorf, Alfredo De Massis and Marcel Hülsbeck. Journal of Family Business Strategy 13 (2022) 100394

How vulnerability enriches family firm relationships: A social exchange perspective. Mathew Hayward, Richard Hunt, Danny Miller. Journal of Family Business Strategy 13 (2022) 100450

Wholehearted courageous leaders – looking for reasons to invest in top leadership skills?

Posted by on in courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, Strategy, trust, values, vulnerability

Lucy Kueng calls it ‘High Thinking, Low Ego’ and the consulting firm Kienbaum calls it ‘Brave Leadership’ —> for me it is the ability as a leader to focus on strategic priorities AND be a whole-hearted courageous leader. 

Lucy Kueng presenting at the Swiss Board Day 2022, Kursaal Bern, picture by Anne-Marie Deans

A new Kienbaum report confirms once more this leadership style is associated with…

.. improved business performance

.. building courageous cultures

.. integrating paradox, ambiguous demands (eg people and business needs)

.. retaining and attracting talent

.. boosting transformation success

In addition, the work by Erika James and Lynne Perry Wooten shows ego is the quintessential problem getting in the way of crisis preparedness by top leadership in organisations.  

Where to start? With yourself to do your inner work and your leadership team. Build courage skills – that is handling vulnerability, operating by your values, understanding the elements of trust and examine the stories you make up. 

Here the sources of the referenced work:  

  • Lucy Kueng’s book she published as open access: Hearts and Minds: Harnessing Leadership, Culture, and Talent to Really Go Digital. (2020)
  • Kienbaum’s new report: BRAVE LEADERSHIP – Turning Potential To Progress (2022) (note: in German)
  • Erika James & Lynne Perry Wooten new book: The Prepared Leader. (2022)

Generosity, Care and Curiosity – can we start there?

Posted by on in courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, Strategy, values, vulnerability

I had the real pleasure to give a keynote on the topic of “Speak Up & Psychological Safety” at an internal company event.

Preparing for this really made me distill down what this topic meant to me in its essence. What it meant in terms of the stories I have experienced. What it meant in combination with the experience I have from working in corporate cultures and my learnings around building courage and courageous cultures.

This is what I got to – forget for a moment all the fancy language, statistics and KPIs. Stop pointing the finger in all directions in terms of who is responsible to start generating this safe environment. And simply do this – start your interactions with others from a place of generosity, care and curiosity. Be the courageous listener so those around you can be heard with their ideas, opinions and feelings.

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what takes to sit down and listen”

Winston Churchill

Because here’s the thing – I am confident we all are doing our best, carry our individual struggles and have a uniqueness that makes us shine. That includes ourselves. If we can keep that in mind and interact from a place of generosity, care and curiosity, this forms the starting point for us to be able to be Courageous.Enough.Together. And that is what we need in our businesses and our societies today.

Give it a try. See what happens and please do let me know if you feel inclined to share feedback.

Capturing my moment of vulnerability during the German version of the keynote (spot the numbering). Picture is used with permission and courtesy of the host Syngenta Stein R&D and the photographer Stephan Graf.

Trust – it has a business value, yet is volatile. Can a new ‘Trust Index’ be the answer for leaders to navigate the topic?

Posted by on in courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, Strategy, trust, Uncategorized, values, vulnerability
Charles Feltman, The Thin Book of Trust

BCG, the strategy consulting firm, is going deep into the topic of Trust at this year’s WEF in Davos and have published a new report, in which they present a newly developed trust index. You can find the full report here.

Five immediate reflections below to the report, as I find there are interesting details hidden in this big scale research and at the same time it raises questions:

1. Good news for those of us who believe trust is important. They find a strong correlation of their way to assess trust with above-average total shareholder return, better post-crisis performance and higher ESGC scores – so investors will also be paying attention. But oops – a “significant portion of the largest companies received consistently low-trust scores” – plenty to do then! 

2. The overall finding confirms how fickle trust is – slow to build, quick to destroy. It is very variable which firms were in the top 100 list over a time span of 4 years. But those who do stay show strength in looking after their people, good governance, strength in collaboration and innovation. And unsurprisingly they deliver on their products and promises. I’d love to see the list of these 20 companies and look closer at how their leadership team looked within that time span. 

3. A whole report on trust without talking about care, integrity, values. These topics are hidden to a certain degree within BCG’s indicator of ‘Fairness’. Yet is still surprising given how these are weighted in other trust frameworks to not see them get more coverage. I disagree with this being purely ‘systemic trust’. Personally, I believe there needs to be more courage to include these more ambiguous and hard to measure aspects of trust and leadership.

4. Measuring topics has pro’s and con’s. The BRAVING Trust framework from Dare to LeadTM also comes with an assessment. So yes a Trust Index will draw attention to strengths/weaknesses and allow a degree of comparison. Yet if it is handled as primarily a KPI on a dashboard to ‘perform’ against, rather than truly integrate it into leadership behaviour, it may turn into exactly that – a performance. And I would not be surprised if that could send your trust-index score shooting right down.. 

5. Finally – did I miss it? What about looking a little closer at governance and the leaders. Did those with high scores have a stable consistent leadership team, that built and maintained trust by operating with clear values and integrity? How does it match with BCGs diversity score or their innovation rankings?

My work on the topic of ‘Trust’ is based on the research findings by Dr. Brené Brown and the work by Charles Feltman, and I continually integrate additional research and findings. For sure I will be following this ongoing work by BCG closely.

Most importantly – this research confirms the significance and value of investing in trust. Trust is a skill that can be learnt. It has to be maintained with continuous attention to the elements that define trust and addressing what gets in the way of trust in a safe manner. Trust will only be meaningful if leadership from the top truly stands behind their purpose, lives their values with empathy and with humility holds a true stakeholder focus which goes beyond ego, profit and financial returns.

My conclusion? Before adding a new KPI to the dashboard, I would take the money to invest in leadership skills such as those for Daring Leadership, ensure values have clear behaviours to operate by, and have the courage to move from a narrow profit-/performance-based dashboard to a wider collaborative, stakeholder and long-term perspective of success.

Source: What AI Reveals About Trust in the World’s Largest Companies, May 2022, BCG

Longing for divinity – what Bittersweet has to do with our workplaces and daring leadership

Posted by on in courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, Enough, trust, Uncategorized, values, vulnerability

During this great resignation employees are leaving workplaces and listing ‘Uncaring leaders’ as their number one reason (source: McKinsey – Gone for now, or gone for good? ). People are desperate for meaning, values, purpose, kindness and leaders who care.

What if we have to go a step further, and consider that employees are desperately seeking both guidance as well as safe story stewardship for their longing for divinity and wholeness. And with no where else to go they are now searching for this in the workplace.

Let’s go a little back in time. Since I read the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” many years ago, I have had an ongoing quest in the back of my mind regarding ‘Faith’ – what is it to me, where do I find it, how do I cultivate it? This came as a result of one of Dr. Brené Brown’s findings in the book that the most wholehearted people cultivate faith in their lives, making her include guidepost #6: Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith. This has nothing to do with a religion and Brené Brown offers following definition for faith.

Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.

The Gifts of imperfection, Dr. Brené Brown.

More recently Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talked in her book Whole Brain Living about how our ‘character 4’ on our right brain side already knows about the deep connection we all share. Also the work by Dr. Martha Beck explores how to let go of culturally-derived values, and follow the longing for warmth and yearnings to stay in our own integrity.

Now with Susan Cain just publishing her newest book “Bittersweet” (published April 2022), I have been provided a further addition to the thinking on our inherent longing for that more beautiful place.

I am an avid fan of the work by Glennon Doyle and how she has cut loose from culturally imposed rules of how things “should” be and writes about it so beautifully in her books (Carry on Warrior, Love Warrior, Untamed). So I was very excited to see that Susan Cain went into a conversation about the findings in her book Bittersweet with Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle on their podcast We can do hard Things.

It is a beautiful and stirring conversation – do listen to it yourselves – and it resulted in this post. They talk about how that longing or yearning that we feel in those moments of beauty and sadness remind us of the better world that could be, that it ideally makes us stretch together to build such a world even if we never fully reach it. It reminds us that this feeling of longing and bittersweet is a moment that connects us with each other. This really brought for me the point of faith or a longing for divinity together.

Ok – so that’s all great, but what about the workplace?

In the podcast, they also speak about relationships and refer to a finding from Esther Perel to which I went and found this reference in a another article: “In our modern world, we have the unrealistic expectation that our relationships will fill in for the divine, offering wholeness, transcendence and unconditional love”.

So let’s come back to the workplace – I wonder, did the time at home in the pandemic make us realise that we will not find divinity within our relationships? And so now we are off searching for it in our workplace? And that is why if we are not cared for, looked after, if we are made to feel morally compromised, constantly put in competitive situations to go against each other then employees are leaving or burnt-out or certainly not going to be in a best position for healthy striving.

Why is this important? Because we have to have conversations about it – and as it is even more ambiguous and wishy-washy and touchy-feely than even talking about emotions, I fear many organisations will avoid going there. And at the moment business schools are hardly building strong skills and competencies in this area.

For leaders ready to look at this a bit closer, we do have starting points.

The work by Dr. Brené Brown, published in her book Dare to Lead, showed that courageous, wholehearted leaders have in common that they truly care for and connect with their employees. In daring leadership I work to build courageous, wholehearted leaders and work cultures. And I continue to see this as an important first step for leaders – as it teaches what courage is, how to rumble with vulnerability, why values with behaviours are important, what the elements of trust are and how distancing from the stories our minds make up we can gain resilience. So it means skills to sit with uncertainty are built, there is space for the conversations and for being a learner, not a knower.

The Dare to LeadTM program includes how grief gets in the way of LivingBIG, that is the belief every person is doing the best they can, yet it handles the topic of grief with a lot of caution. And I see grief as part of sorrow and bittersweet, about something that is lost and what it may make us yearn for and stretch for with action.

This is where I believe we have to dig deeper and not shy away from conversations around the bittersweet, grief, nostalgia, beauty. These play a critical part of connecting us with our humanity, our longing, our faith and those emotions awe and wonder. It can put us in communion with each other. Taking from Brené Brown’s newest book Atlas of the Heart – we have to become more confident as story stewards to one another.

If you are looking for something concrete to do:

  • Develop your own thoughts, skills and awareness (you can start with books mentioned in this post)
  • Get leaders trained to enable safe workspaces, where vulnerability and uncertainty is allowed (eg. the Dare to LeadTM program)
  • Business schools – do include new programs so leaders come away with empathy and humility
  • Start incorporating and become aware of beauty in your life and workplaces

Although my thoughts here are around the workplace, I believe it is imperative that our education systems and our local governments step up in their responsibilities to engage and enable dialogue on our societies’ values, our moral compass, our desire for communion and connection with each other. As really I am not convinced we want these beautiful, soft issues of humanity to be cared for by large corporate conglomerates.

I leave you with some words from Susan Cain in her conversation with The House of Beautiful Business:

I think it’s possible to admit – not just admit, but embrace – all the bounty of what spiritual longing actually is. That’s completely consistent with deep agnosticism. But we’ve lost sight of that.

House of Beautiful Business. LONGING IS THE SOURCE OF ALL OUR MOONSHOTS, AND ALL OUR LOVE

And if you wonder where I am with my personal quest for faith. I continue to rumble with it, explore, learn and give myself grace whilst doing so. Currently it rests for me around my gratitude practice, the mantra Martha Beck offers “I deserve to live in peace”, my reading of the Tao Te Ching and it’s call to Non-Action, and the Buddhist high virtues of: loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.

(Clear is kind: I provide links so you can find my sources and find publications. I have no affiliation with any of these external sites or any return from doing so.)

Daring Leadership, heisst unserer Verletzlichkeit bewusst zu sein und warum das für Unternehmen wichtig ist

Posted by on in courage, Daring Leadership, trust, Uncategorized, values, vulnerability

Was Verletzlichkeit mit Mut, Inklusion und Innovation zu tun hat, und warum das gerade in Unternehmen so wichtig ist.

Dazu durfte ich meine Erfahrung in einem Gespräch mit Alkistis Petropaki teilen und dabei von ihr erfahren was Verletzlichkeit für sie und in ihrem Alltag mit Advance – Gender Equality in Business bedeutet. 

Diese Gelegenheit bedeutet mir sehr viel, denn Alkistis mit ihrer Organisation setzt sich mutig für neue Regeln in der Arbeitswelt ein, und ich bin der Meinung wir müssen in Unternehmenskulturen die Fähigkeiten zum Umgang mit Verletzlichkeit fördern, denn wir brauchen Mut. Ein grosses Dankeschön an Alexandra Rhiner für die Leitung des Gesprächs. 

Dazu kommt das ich den Eindruck habe, gerade im deutschen Sprachraum wird noch weniger über Verletzlichkeit (Vulnerability) gesprochen. Ist es der Begriff? Wäre Verwundbarkeit, oder ‘sich angreifbar machen’ oder ‘sich zeigen’ einfacher um das Gespräch aufzugreifen? Wir verstecken oft diese Verletzlichkeit, weil wir uns schämen nicht würdig /gut genug / geliebt zu sein. Ich finde schön wie in Deutschland der erste Artikel im Grundgesetz lautet “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” und in der Schweiz im Grundrecht “Die Würde des Menschen ist zu achten und zu schützen.”. Daran kann man sich orientieren und wir dürfen nicht Angst vor Fehlern haben, wir lernen alle – jedoch kann man Kompetenzen lernen, um im Alltag mit dieser Verletzlichkeit umzugehen und auf seine eigene Würde sowie die Anderer Acht zu geben.

Veröffentlicht ist unser Gespräch in der aktuellen Ausgabe der Business Zeitschrift Ladies Drive (Frühling 2022). Insgesamt hat die Herausgeberin Sandra-Stella Triebl spannende Beiträge von beeindruckenden Personen zum Thema Emotionale Intelligenz & Verletzlichkeit zusammengebracht. Und aktuell ist das Thema Verletzlichkeit ja sehr präsent um uns herum und betrifft uns alle. Eine Leseempfehlung.

Wer interessiert ist mehr zu erfahren darf gern mit mir unverbindlich Kontakt aufnehmen. Das Dare to LeadTM Programm von Dr. Brené Brown ist auf Deutsch verfügbar, ihr Buch dazu noch in der Übersetzung und nicht am deutschen Titel stören lassen.

#Verletzlichkeit #Mut #Startatthetop #ladiesdrive #businessisterhood

Daring Leadership – it is not about reckless daredevils, but about leaders who courageously show up open to vulnerability and empathy

Posted by on in courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, trust, Uncategorized, values, vulnerability

There are three important elements required to reimagine our systems and business models:

  1. Daring Leadership
  2. Abundance Mindset
  3. Collaborative Narrative

In this post I dig in to the term ‘Daring Leadership’ and why I believe it is important at the individual leader level, and also at a cultural level for our societies and organisations.

You are working on a project, your colleague has a great idea for an improvement that is mentioned over a coffee break. However, in the critical meeting no one speaks up. When they do speak up – you notice no genuine interest by those in the room to spend time to dig in to what this change would require. Most of the time in your organisation you seem to be reactively fixing issues, adding a new task force on top of another – rather than taking courageous decisions of stopping projects or blocking a chunk of time to really engage in meaningful dialogue with the experts and take hard decisions.

Time and time again in different organisations I witnessed and participated in similar situations and behaviour – yet I couldn’t quite put words to what was going on. I valued my colleagues individually, yet in our work interactions we seemed to stay in safe places that mid-term felt very dissatisfying regarding the business decisions taken.

Brené Brown opened my eyes and gave me language to explain what is going on in our societies and organisations. By interviewing CEOs and c-level executives Brené Brown collected all the answers to what is required in leaders. The answer she received most often was courage – “We need braver leaders and more courageous cultures”. Did they know how to act with courage and what skills this required? No – was the answer. But then the list, like mine above, started pouring out – behaviours that get in the way of a courageous work culture. This led to a large piece of research by Brené Brown and her group to look closely at the topic of courage and vulnerability in our work cultures.

‘Daring Leadership’ is based on this research by Dr. Brené Brown, Research Professor at the University of Houston, Texas. Other terms that for me relate to Daring Leadership and which are used elsewhere are ‘Servant Leadership’, ‘Courageous Leadership’, ‘The Purposeful Leader’.

If you are a leader living by Daring Leadership principles then you are leaning into vulnerability and staying open to learning, you are caring for and connecting with your stakeholders, you are demonstrating curiosity and empathy and you have the courage to develop the potential in people and processes.

Brené Brown is not alone in her findings of the importance of courage and vulnerability. The best business schools and management consulting firms have started to put major highlight on the importance of trust, vulnerability, empathy and innovation in our workplaces. The recent publication by Hubert Joly “The Heart of Business” is receiving much positive attention for it’s focus on ‘unleashing the human magic’.

Yet, what is significantly harder to find are concrete methodologies that provide you with a way to strengthen your own skill set, provide you with tools and help you recognise when you are on the right path to being a leader and building an organisation with a culture of vulnerability, trust and empathy. Too often it is assumed we are naturally brave or trust is something you just have, or it is easy to come forward with these attributes.

Dare to Lead™ is an empirically based courage building program designed to be facilitated by organisational development professionals. It originated in the publication of Dr. Brené Brown’s research findings in the book Dare to Lead™.

Daring Leadership is unrelated to a companies organisational design. How you draw your organisational chart, whether you like the old-fashioned boxes with dotted and direct lines and classic project management, or you focus on agile methods and new ways of operating, whether you are set up in business and function units or are a process-driven organisation – it really does not matter (and I actually believe overall it does not really matter). Daring Leadership is the cultural and behavioural glue you require for HOW you, your leaders and employees operate within the organisational setting and interact with one another.

So why is Daring Leadership important? In a world that is transforming from shareholder-driven capitalism to a new form of stakeholder capitalism, from individual profit focus to sustainable solutions and with new technological advancements we have to be able to stay curious, foster an environment with diverse thinking, the ability to have tough conversations and dig into uncomfortable decisions. And with all of this we have to care better for each other and our planet.

On an individual level there are steps you can take on your path to Daring Leadership:

First, you become aware of what is happening around you – you observe carefully your own behaviour and that of others around you at the workplace. For example do people come up with and give voice to questions or suggestions, are there ‘meetings-after-the-meetings’ taking place where, what was agreed is altered again and do you feel you are constantly just fire-fighting issues rather than proactively taking the time for hard conversations early when issues start to appear?

Second, learn the skill sets for courage – by understanding vulnerability, identifying and discovering how to practice your values, understanding the elements required to foster trust and find out how to own and change the stories you develop. To build these skill sets you have amongst others the options depending on your learning preferences to read the book, work with a coach or take part in a Dare to LeadTM facilitated program. The facilitated program is also available to organisations.

Finally, you can develop your practice by integrating tools such as rumble starters into your daily way of working and keep developing the ability to lead with grounded confidence – that is by staying curious, using your rumble skills and practice, practice, practice.

On a societal and business model level we have to focus on building these skill sets in individuals, but also by generating interactions, time and space for meaningful dialogue around our values and also start operating from a notion of an abundance mindset and with new collaborative narratives that define how we measure success.

Summary of the Dare to LeadTM program to develop Daring Leadership, ie leading with Grounded Confidence. Dare to LeadTM is an empirically based courage building program developed by Dr. Brené Brown.
Image by AMDeans Consulting 2021.

Source: You can find more information on the work by Dr. Brené Brown and Dare to LeadTM here.