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Tag: courage

Active engagement in our local communities – an unachieved priority

Posted by on in Busyness, collaborative narrative, courage, Culture, trust

What if.. people want to be actively engaged in their community.. and yet are not achieving that?


A study in the US that looked at what people privately share as their top personal priorities* and also to what degree do they subjectively feel they achieve against these. Below you see the top 10 results – source Populace, Success Index:
Misunderstanding the American Dream:

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Of the individuals reported top 10 priorities – active engagement in their community scores lowest in terms of their feeling if they are achieving it in their lives.

From my other research I know active engagement in our local communities is important for our wellbeing, for building peaceful connections across divides, and for engagement into looking after our local environment. It matters.

My personal experience with community engagement? My observation is for me getting involved in my local community requires space such as small regular chunks of time, free attention to look around myself, and consistency in being present. It’s about familiarity and micro-steps in building trust. It’s quiet, not loud. Sometimes it feels pointless and annoying. The rewards are not what mainstream culture rewards, they are connection, the satisfaction of living into your integrity and fulfilling that priority number 1 of having a positive impact on others in small, hardly noticeable ways.

And maybe it is simply knowing you matter because you feel part of a place. Your community. Where people know you and treat you as part of the community, irrespective of differences you may have.

A shoutout here. This makes me proud to be affiliated with the new initiative PIONIERQUARTIER – which is an amazing team of experts and initiative looking at how to create community spaces with a lower threshold for how to become and stay engaged. 💫

If anything these data are an invitation to question any judgement if people are not engaged because they do not care about their local community, and wonder what if rather there is something in the way of making it happen? What if..?

(*note: these top personal priorities are often not expressed publicly as we self-silence and follow what we believe are societal norms, there is more to this in this study – for example actively engaging in our community is ranked at nr26 for how important supposedly ‘others’ think it is)

Source: If you like reports and data and original sources as much as I do. This is all from the Populace research report on ‘Success index’ (2023) and the conversation by Todd Rose: Populace

Source: I also can highly recommend a listen to Todd Rose talk about his data and the findings in this episode of the Mel Robbins podcast. So much also on belonging, values, trust, and our personal agency.

Learnings on humanisation

Posted by on in collaborative narrative, courage, Enough

“Start small. Start local. Circulate with unusual friends. Propagate better conversations.” John Paul Lederach


Did you know internationally renowned peace practitioner John Paul Lederach shared his reflections freely in a Pocket Guide on his experience across over four decades mediating and transforming conflicts around the globe?

I believe it is so relevant for current times that you go read the full ca 100 pages, I’ll add the link to his website where you can find the pocket guide as a source below.

I believe it is so relevant for current times that I am also sharing my own selection of key extracts in the attached document because I know many won’t feel there is time to read the full document. The extracts require some thinking – as tempted as I was to add the ‘key take-aways’ for you, I have not condensed it further. His wise words are clear.


Nothing he observed regarding how to shift away from violence and dehumanization is rocket science. His stories are about ordinary people. An improbable few – the critical yeast. With a whole load of curiosity, courage, and the willingness to persevere. It’s worth giving it a try right? To be the critical yeast.

There is a discussion guide provided to dig into the concepts and what they may mean for you, your life, your local area.

I will keep sharing different views on ways to stay in our integrity with hope, with curiosity, with courage. If you want to know more, please do get in touch for a chat.

Extracts from John Paul Lederach’s Pocket Guide – AMDeansDownload

Source: https://www.johnpaullederach.com/2024/07/pocket-guide/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Getting curious about entitlement – what’s convenience got to do with it?

Posted by on in Daring Leadership, Strategy, trust

Entitlement.

A word that’s popped up so frequently in the conversations I’ve had with leaders over the last two years. These are typically conversations about wholehearted daring leadership, courage building, enhancing trust, and all with the goal to achieve the strategic business results with energised, motivated and engaged employees.

Often when entitlement is mentioned there is frustration, uncertainty and armored leadership that comes up with it, hanging in the air like a big question mark. I am sure there is resentment mingling amongst the reactions. 

Here’s the thing I can’t help but get curious about this. What’s the root cause? How do stealth expectations play a role? What is to be done?

First off, as this word entitlement has come up, in German sometimes as ‘Konsumverhalten’, I keep coming back to one thing. Something that surrounds us to such a degree it may easily be overlooked. That is how over the last decades we‘ve been working so hard on making everything as convenient as possible for the individual. 

Examples? Banking, messaging, picture taking and sharing, self-promotion, information accessing, holiday booking, traveling, recruitment etc etc. A latest example that popped up with my software update with an app that will more or less do your journaling for you at the end of your day*. 

So we have basically communicated to people it is important everything is maximally convenient for you. We will trade you convenience for your money and that convenience will validate you are living life well. Yet now we are surprised when we feel our employees display entitlement. Is entitlement not asking for that convenience? For what I deserve?

Second, let’s talk about stealth expectations. These are “A desire or expectation that exists outside our awareness and typically includes a dangerous combination of fear and magical thinking. Stealth expectations almost always lead to disappointment, resentment, and (more) fear.” from Dare to LeadTM.

Both parties – on the ‘non-entitled’ and ‘entitled’ side – are likely harboring stealth expectations. We all do so often throughout our days. On the one side a leader doing their best to build a great work place and on the other side an employee with unexamined messages about being clear on what they deserve. Does reading these two sides already shift something in your thinking? The thing is as Dr. Brené Brown says – stealth expectations if not voiced can lead to disappointment, resentment and fear – that is walls that build up and disconnection from each other.

Finally, what can be done? To not let the uncertainty and resentment build walls, the best first step is to tap into curiosity when the feeling arises. Notice it and get curious about what’s happening. You can always begin with yourself and check about your stealth expectations, were you hoping for a certain reaction? Why? And also include asking questions with your colleagues and within your team to normalise reality-checking of expectations, and their underlying explanations. OK, everyone. Do we think there are any stealth expectations we need to put on the table? What does this mean to you? What is this really about?

I say this as I believe we have to not let the uncertainty lead to walls and instead let curiosity from all sides show where behaviors and reactions are coming from. Not easy but worth striving for. 

Sources: Dare to LeadTM, Dr. Brené Brown and Atlas of the Heart, Dr. Brené Brown

*Side note: This refers to the new Journaling app that has appearred on my iPhone. Not having to reflect whilst journaling may defeat its valuable point, it will surely be a good activity and people tracker if that’s what one seeks. And it’s worth checking the fine print and privacy settings on this new feature, in case you don’t like other people’s phones collecting you having been around them for their journal prompt that eve..

 

“Denken ist handeln” – it’s time to examine our thinking

Posted by on in Abundance Mindset, Busyness, courage, Culture, Daring Leadership, Enough, Strategy

Image: Artist Olaf Hajek 2003. Personal material from the Move On Weekend, Munich 2005, by The Boston Consulting Group.

“Denken ist handeln” takes me back to my first interaction with the large management consultancy I joined after my malaria PhD. That line, “Thinking is for action,” spoke to me. I love ruminating, researching, putting complex bits of information into a digestible big picture, spotting the inconsistencies, the patterns, the messages. I tend to hang out a little longer on the side of thinking than on the side of action.

Yet – today I ask.

What if our thought itself was incorrect?

What if our thought adapted to a world around us and is driven by external messages of “you are not enough until _____” and you fill that blank with an external validation: your school grades, your university, your job titles, your products, your material wealth, your nose shape, your wittiness, your number of likes and followers. A world that we have created and our brains told us this is the only way of doing things.

If there’s one thing that such thought does it keeps us pretty distracted, busy and insecure as our basic desire for worthiness depends on external factors. It turns our opinions into self-identities, as David Bohm writes. It makes conversations into dangerous battle-grounds, as differing opinions are seen as attacks on our inherent internal worthiness and right to belong.

It makes us distracted and complacent.

As I write this, the world is watching atrocities unfold in the Middle East. It feels a little like the final straw on the camels back. I observe we are in pain. Yet, I also sense a discomfort in a sense of how could this happen (again). And a sense of grief for what we realise we are losing. There is also an unsettling silence to not say a wrong thing.

For me this article in the Guardian by Patrick Wintour sums up what I believe is a relevant viewpoint and speaks in a broader sense on other topics such as the loneliness, the anxiety, the questions on how to care for each other and our planet better. His title captures it: “The danger of leaving things be”.

Can we break the cycle of complacency?

Can we channel the regret of what got us here today, into where we put our energy into action tomorrow?

From all the research into the topics of wholehearted, courageous leadership, moving from discussion to dialogue and ways of rethinking strategy and business, I land at these three areas of focus for myself:

  1. Thought: Start with “you are enough”. Full stop. Then get really curious about a lot of other aspects of what we think of as normal and ‘has to be that way’. Ask yourself is it true?
  2. Feeling: Seek out & soak in awe. You can find this witnessing moral beauty in others, music, dance, nature, art. Read words from those that inspire you, watch concert videos, go to an exhibition, dance in the kitchen. Awe connects when the world polarises.
  3. Action: Shift from exploitation to exploration. I hold a deep desire to work with leaders and organisations (exploitation). That rarely allows real disruption and is slow, the logical consequence – it’s time to work with those leaders and organisations at the fringes (exploration).

Now here’s the thing – if we are feeling regret mixed in with all those feelings, according to Dan Pink we have three choices: Delusion, Despair or Action. Let’s choose action.

Sources:

  • David Bohm: On Dialogue.
  • Dan Pink: The power of regret
  • Dacher Keltner: Awe, The transformative power of everyday wonders

Investing in our aliveness matters

Posted by on in Abundance Mindset, Busyness, collaborative narrative, courage, Enough, Strategy, values

“The wheel is turning, the hamster is dead”

I have chosen a quote from 📚 Michael Bungay Stanier‘s fantastic and funny session on ‘how to work with (almost) everyone’, to sum up what I wish to share from my The_Dream business festival attendance: a quick win, a pay attention, a choice and a permission.

1) Less talking, more doing regarding our inner & outer ecology. It’s time to get the hamsters out of those wheels (alternatively we can use Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s reference to not be a Kafkan bug). Ie. how we want to work with each other, how we look after ourselves, how we build skills for wholehearted, courageous leadership. This can be a ‘quick win’ – it is known what can be done. Do it.

2) Speaking the truth – our planetary safety needs degrowth, our geopolitical safety needs growth. That means we have to really drill down into this paradox and align on a global scale to work on solutions. This is taken from Olivia Lazard‘s talk – the speaker who to me stood out most with her bravery, courage to look closely and her ability to grasp and look for solutions around energy transition and global situations. This is about paying attention – don’t look away from hard topics, chose where you want to invest your skill sets, your own behaviour.

3) Every time we invest in technology, we have to also invest in being human – our morality, our ethics, our communities. The messages were clear on how fast technology is moving, I took from it once more confirmation that we cannot expect to ‘teach’ technology ethics, morality if we are not investing similarly into these skills for ourselves and ensuring well grounded, alive human beings, relations and communities. To me this is a choice – let us link tech investment to human investments.

4) Do not mistake dreamers for not also being doers. I met the most amazing people – dreamers AND who have created businesses and institutes and art and graduate schools and new ideas. And who bring new ways of being to their leadership, teaching and interactions. Full of hope, curiosity, passion and desires to develop life-centered businesses. To me this is a permission – please dream, be full of aliveness, that is what our communities and work places need.

Back to that quote and stepping out from the busyness of a turning wheel – only with our aliveness can we tackle all these paradox questions around planetary wellbeing, shaping technological developments and doing so out of a deep care for ourselves and others.

Again, a thanks to the organisers and curators at House of Beautiful Business and all dreamers contributing.

Source: This post is reflecting my experience at The_Dream Business Festival, 2-5 June 2023, Sintra Portugal. Full details of the program is here: https://houseofbeautifulbusiness.com/thedream. I am happy to share more – get in touch.

Today’s strategic leaders require space more urgently than a neatly orchestrated strategy process

Posted by on in collaborative narrative, courage, Strategy

“There are leaders that always have time.
And then there are leaders that never have time.”

Does that ring true to you and your experience? This is what a senior leader recently observed to me and a group of their peers during a recent workshop. Since then, this comment has stuck in my mind. Because all around me I hear of the current busyness in organisations, and not in a ‘this is great there is so much happening’ way but rather in a ‘it’s too much we are all close to burnout’ way.

So what distinguishes those two groups of leaders mentioned above, if of course we all have the same hours in a day and a to-do list, which is never ending?

My hypothesis – we’re back to courage. Courage to make space, take time, be strategic and deliberate in our activities and interactions. Imagine the two groups:

  • A hustle and busyness culture: You stick with a command and control style of leadership, reactively fighting fires and resisting any change.
  • A strategic, deliberate culture: You make the space to invest in delegating power, allow for strategic thought and getting collaborative and curious in the face of change.

Does this mean if you lead with daring leadership everything will get real slow? I doubt it, even if I also believe it may not be the worst thing if there was more focus rather than worrying about speed. Anyway, if you look at it closely, removing the busyness may not be a contradiction to enabling speed. In the last years, McKinsey published work showing that speed can be a business advantage (McKinsey, The need for speed in the post-COVID-19 era—and how to achieve it), yet they also published that leaders report a lot of busyness with little effectiveness (McKinsey, If we’re all so busy why isn’t anything getting done? ).

I don’t have their underlying data, yet when McKinsey talks about an advantage for speed, if you dig into their report, you will find that the barriers reported as getting in the way of speed are silos, slow decision-making and lack of strategic clarity. So, this supports my hypothesis about being intentionally focused and calm with a clear strategy, and with a culture that enables employees to take bold business decisions at the right moment and right level, with the right amount of information and with an appropriate amount of risk. This enables the speed we are looking for – as the right activities and decisions get focused on and delivered upon – or as McKinsey says it themselves in an older 2018 article “Slowing down to speed up”.

What also backs this hypothesis up for me regarding busyness actually getting in the way of strategic work is the work by Business Professor Dorie Clark, who has written and spoken about the fact that busyness is often a mask to avoid facing uncertainty. You can go watch her TED Talk on the topic here.

So this busyness is asking us to have the courage to lean heavily into the discomfort of slowing down. That is making space. Space..

  • … for strategic, deliberate thinking, ideas and reflection, versus rushed firefighting and action bias.
  • … to take the time to align accountability and responsibilities for activities, versus blame and shaming over unclear responsibilities and deliverables.
  • … to allow for providing guidance on work that has been delegated with power to and power with models, versus a quicker ‘power over’ decision or solution,
  • … to respond with empathy to a situation going on with a colleague, versus brushing over it with a sympathetic gesture,
  • … to breath when you notice an emotional hook and get curious, versus letting our eager minds make up a false story.

And for many more examples of showing up with daring leadership behaviours.

As all of you reading this know, leaning into daring leadership is a tough choice, requiring persistence and practice. And yet we can build our courage skills to handle the vulnerability of making that space.

And this is where my activities tie to this work and you are welcome to get in touch with me about:

  1. Providing consulting and facilitation services to build those courage skills within your organisation that enable your leadership team to make and hold space
  2. As an open mindset facilitator certified by OMind support organisations in developing the mindset regarding collaboration
  3. Bringing the dialogue method to you and/or your organisation to create a wide space for strategic thinking and curiosity outside of structured processes and frameworks

I’d love to hear what you do to create and hold space as a leader so we can share and learn from each other around this.  

Image credit: Picture by Adam Thomas on Unsplash

Rethinking strategy or sometimes you have to look backward to move forward

Posted by on in collaborative narrative, Strategy

Wrapping up the year 2022, I want to end with a piece of work that is unfinished and at the same time only just beginning. The question whether it is time to rethink the principles underlying business strategy. Does strategy even need a new name?

There are three pillars at the center of my thought-leadership work: leadership, culture and strategy. For me these represent the symbol of integration, that 3-legged stool often used within different concepts – think (strategy), feel (culture), do (leadership). I see the future of these being grounded in daring leadership, an abundance mindset and collaborative narratives.

There is significant awareness how organisational culture is the engine driving success, there is awareness that the main lever shaping the culture is leadership behavior and also which behaviors foster a courageous culture enabling innovation, change and creativity. Yet, strategy – well I see yet little work digging back to the roots of strategy and questioning the engrained concept of strategy being grounded in competition, beating others and winning.

If you go back to the roots of the well-known strategy consultancy, where I had a great experience starting my path into corporate strategy work – the Boston Consulting Group – you will find the classic text by Bruce Henderson on “The origin of strategy”. He was fascinated by the work of Darwin regarding evolution, competitive advantage and survival of the fittest. Bruce Henderson developed a theory to compare natural selection with business, which was grounded in assumptions around having to compete for limited resources. And he saw businesses having the human advantage of adding strategy to the moves they make, “primates possess imagination and the ability to reason logically“. For him using strategy could be revolutionary and faster, versus the slower natural selection of evolution. So far quite interesting..

Yet, this is what I see as complications. Bruce Henderson grounded a lot of his theory into the similarities regarding limited resources. When looking at this for business he talks around the following resources: “The characteristic fundamental resource segments for business are sources of: money, either in capital or in ongoing revenue; suitable skills, abilities and individuals on an ongoing basis; materials, supplies, energy, components not contained within the organization; and knowledge and communication capability with respect to all external resources and factors affecting their availability.“

There is no consideration here for planetary limits that all businesses (and species) are bound to. Although he touches upon boundaries at other points in his writing, it is not further considered regarding the competition situation. Is that what may have led us to the situation we are in today?

Bruce Henderson himself adds the following about the observations of natural competition: “Except for the most elementary forms of life, the required resources are other forms of life or activity. This establishes a form of vertical equilibrium. The higher levels prey on the lower levels but cannot live without them. Excessive success is self-defeating.“

Excessive success is self-defeating. Yes – so potentially the excessive success of the business principles of the last 30 years have been exactly that: self-defeating, to the point that we are at risk of destroying the basic resources required for all species, including us humans.

Is there an alternative? Can we again look to nature? As clearly despite the ongoing natural competition our planet has been able to be regenerative over a long period of time before humans came along with their ability for strategy.

Yes, I believe we can. If you consider natural selection I can see two differences to think about:

  1. The species are geared towards survival, they are not geared towards ‘winning’ or ‘beating’ other species. That is about mindset, if you like.
  2. Nature often moves to a state of cooperation, which allows the most benefit outcome for the different species and organisations in an ecosystem. Elisabet Sahtouris has written extensively about this and I will be coming back to her work.

So when you are next looking for input on your strategy, looking at the websites of leading business schools on their strategy principles and executive education – pay attention to the language used. Ask yourself is the goal truly to win and beat other companies, organisations and markets? Or is it time to shift up a maturity level also with our strategy principles and re-consider what real success on a people, planetary and profit basis can look like.

Taking one more quote from Bruce Henderson – maybe it is time to go back to his starting point on what makes strategy possible and pay attention the effects of alternative actions.

“For strategy to be possible, it is necessary to be able to imagine and evaluate the possible consequences of alternate courses of action. But imagination and reasoning power are not sufficient. There also must be knowledge of competition and the characteristic higher order effects of alternative actions.“

Let us be courageous, start changing our mindset, allow for different language in our strategy workshops and consider new definitions of successful outcomes.

Look out for more on this topic in the new year. Share your thoughts with me. And look after yourself – also on an individual level it may be time to let go of having to be more extra-ordinary than the next person. Be you. You are enough. And thanks for your time to read this.

Sources for all quotes in italics are taken from Bruce Henderson and the following two publications:

Bruce Henderson, The Origin of Strategy, Harvard Business Review, 1981

Bruce Henderson, The Concept of Strategy, BCG Publications, 1981

Well-being is enhanced by diverse social interactions. Time to put that benefit into the business case calculation?

Posted by on in Daring Leadership, Strategy
Zürich Train Station. Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

Zürich SBB train station. Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

The results from a new study recently caught my eye “Assessing the social interactions and happiness of over 50,000 people reveals that interacting with a more diverse set of relationship types predicts higher well-being.” (1)

And this is what I concluded from that additional piece of research findings:

  • For Individuals: Treat others with generosity, care and curiosity. It’s good for your well-being, their well-being and it’s good for our societies.
  • For business – your investments: Be bold and include well-being (people) impact within your cost/benefit analysis for investment decisions, particularly if you offer a ‘Service public’ and receive public funding. Get creative and work out how to do this. If we want to change how we do business, we have to upgrade our ROI and NPV calculations.
  • For business – your processes: Check if your internal processes reward or penalise behaviours that link with the this value-add if you do see it as part of your business case and values (eg. is the time required to interact with the customer factored in or penalised as ‘inefficient’. Do you actively maintain a level of interaction or ask your employees to ‘nudge’ customers to do the interaction online by themselves?)
  • For business – your employees: Confirm if you are providing your employees with the skills for grounded confidence to show up with kindness and curiosity. It is not something that comes naturally as we have been taught to worry more about ‘what people might think’, yet there are skill sets that can be learned.

In case you ask, why be interested in well-being? Well, it is in all our interest to be a society with individuals who are well and can look after ourselves, our families, our communities and contribute to our institutions (incl. business) with energy, ideas and focus.

I have provided my conclusion up front, now let’s look at this research and findings a little closer. Clearly by now we know that having social interactions benefits our well-being, and on the contrary loneliness is a key indicator for health problems and earlier mortality (3). Yet, the research so far has not been clear on what type of social interactions to aim for. This new study (1) from which I quote above indicates there is a benefit if you have not only close relationships to interact with (think partner, family, friends) but if you have a diverse set of social interactions.

So where do these diverse interactions occur? The following comes to my mind: There’s the obvious – your neighbours, colleagues and people you meet in sports, music or arts clubs. And then there’s the slightly less obvious such as other parents at a playground, the people working in supermarkets, post offices, retail or the conductors on trains checking your tickets. And then there are also the people you speak to to organise your life at doctors offices, government offices, banks, etc.

This is what strikes me. I have spent many years in the corporate world calculating NPV of investments and assessing business cases. I look around today and see a major drive to close ‘costly’ structures, which are often those where real human interaction occurs and the goal is to digitalize it in some shape or form. That is the group of people (and hence interactions) mentioned up there as those we interact with at shops, post offices, on public transport. And I just have to wonder if these are decisions, we (we being as a society) will regret when we have to artificially rebuild ways for diverse human interactions to happen with the intent to ensure well-being (that is once we truly recognise that it is not only financial performance we are after with our businesses). I have to ask myself if we are doing enough in redesigning our business case assessments to capture the value we seek to add and to get more serious about the triple bottom line to include people well-being?

In our current economic system, I do understand that a standard business may not see the reason to include well-being factors, which have no cashflow benefit for the immediate business, yet surely there must be ways to address this hurdle whilst rethinking our systems – particularly if we also want business to get more comprehensive regarding actual costs of which many will also not be direct but indirect. This change involves those setting strategic goals and direction recognising and wanting to generate this value – so investors, government, the board.

Yet, what comes to mind for me, is that particularly in Switzerland there is a unique opportunity to start and build experience and evidence. Why? Because in Switzerland the concept of ‘Service public’ exists for organisations close to government. This is a Swiss concept of services provided to the nation for the overall well-being and quality of life – it is at times given as exact KPIs (for example to the postal service) and at times left quite open to how it actually looks in practice (for example to the train service). My thought is when we look at a business case for the cost/benefit of let’s say running post offices, the cost for people checking our tickets on trains, those selling us a train ticket or bringing our post package to the door – as to what a friendly smile, a welcoming ‘how can I help you?’ or a sincere ‘how are you today’ may influence both individuals wellbeing and hence a value put towards it when looking at the financial case of keeping these services.

Clearly, it cannot be impossible to factor in this indirect benefit. In the health sector we have been practicing using calculations around ‘QALY’ indicators to establish a pharmaceutical price for many years. And I am of the opinion we have to get brave and try factoring something similar in to other business cases as long as we prioritise financials for decision making, before we might close services based on a cost/benefit analysis leaving out some of the benefits to your people and societies.

The research around social interactions and well-being is backed up by studies into kindness, for example research by Gillian Sandstrom shows talking with a stranger “in the majority of cases both parties report enhanced wellbeing and a boost to their mood.“(2). An interesting add from this research on kindness and the article authored by Claudia Hammond is regarding what most often gets in the way of this kindness and interaction. Two main factors have been identified 1) a fear of the act of kindness being misinterpreted and 2) not having enough time. I believe the first part is due to our conditioning of ‘what do people think’ and fear of not belonging, so building daring leadership skills builds our grounded confidence around this, and on the second point, well, clearly we all have to slow down a little and show up for each other.

At the organisational level there is an additional aspect. It means that if we factor in the added-value of our employees interacting with their customers in our business cases, we also have to ensure we do not penalise them for the time that it requires and support them with building skills for their own confidence and curiosity to be the person taking the first step in an interaction and so they can also handle when in rare situations the response will be a rude reply rather than a grateful kind interaction.

With that I invite you back to my conclusions at the beginning and I’d love to know if you have great case studies where these types of benefits are getting factored into investment decisions.

Sources:

  1. Relational diversity in social portfolios predicts well-being. Hanne K. Collinsa, Serena F. Hagerty, Jordi Quoidbach, Michael I. Norton, and Alison Wood Brooks. PNAS. Edited by Jonathan Gershuny, University College London, London, United Kingdom; received November 12, 2021; accepted September 6, 2022.
  2. Why we all need to be a lot less hesitant about being kind, The Guardian 13.11.2022, Claudia Hammond
  3. Rico-Uribe LA, Caballero FF, Martín-María N, Cabello M, Ayuso-Mateos JL, Miret M. Association of loneliness with all-cause mortality: A meta-analysis. PLoS One. 2018 Jan 4;13(1):e0190033. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0190033. PMID: 29300743; PMCID: PMC5754055.

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)