A fresh take – really – on what it takes to be a leader with Joanne Smollan

Leadership has always been a hot topic for corporate CEOs and entrepreneurs. After the past few years, though, with all their upheavals and tribulations, I think it’s safe to say we need better leaders more than ever. In an episode of my podcast, Willing & Abel, I talk to someone who has spent more time thinking about it than most of us, Joanne Smollan .

If you don’t know the name, it’s because Joanne works behind the scenes with top business leaders and coaches them to develop new insights, new skills, and new systems to work well together. The important word here is “new”. Working with Joanne has taught me that one’s perspective makes all the difference.

Joanne is the founder of the Walnut Office, a boutique consultancy, where she focuses on catalysing positive change in organisations within and between people. In her work, Joanne uses the Enneagram. It’s a personality profiling tool that divides people into nine primary types. Those nine personality types represent nine ways of viewing the world, nine worldviews, nine primary ego strategies.

I turned out to be a Type A personality (surprise!). But it’s one thing to know yourself – you also have to know the people you work with, and why they do what they do if you want effective teamwork.

It’s a hard lesson to learn that knowing yourself and being your authentic self as a leader means allowing yourself to be vulnerable. This is particularly difficult when you’re meant to be the strong, fearless head of a business with people depending on you for their livelihoods. You don’t want to be seen as weak. As Joanne says, “You spend an entire lifetime trying to protect yourself and those defences serve a very, very important purpose. Vulnerability means being able to drop those defences and lean into the world defenceless.”

This requires you to look at yourself and your role, and how you present yourself, very differently. Sometimes changing your perceptions takes a mind shift and sometimes it’s as simple as changing your environment. What Joanne showed me has helped me tremendously in my life. We go into it in more depth in our podcast conversation, where we also talk about different levels of diversity and the dangers of Chappies wrapper wisdom.

One insight of hers I’m keen to share is about getting out of your comfort zone – literally. Successful businesspeople are usually comfortable talking to someone from behind their desks. This signals a position of power. “The way that people engage when you're sitting around a boardroom table is very different from the way that people engage when they are shoeless on the floor,” explains Joanne. “A desk says, ‘I have positional power. You are separate from me.’ This is an “us versus them” conversation. And it's such an easy fix. There are so many ways to fix that kind of dynamic that don't actually cost much time, energy or money.”

I wasn’t surprised when Joanne said that generational tension comes up in one in three coaching conversations she has with business leaders. As a Gen X-er, I work with mostly Gen Y while trying to raise Gen Z at home, so I get it. I also agree with her when she says that generational tension is not only normal, it’s healthy. Change can only happen when there’s friction. In fact, change is the only constant, as Gidon Novick said in our conversation on the highs and lows of building four new businesses.?

Listen to my full conversation with Joanne to learn about the shifts that could help you become an even more effective leader. Also, click the follow or subscribe button on our podcast profile to make sure you don't miss more episodes!

Season 1 of the Willing & Abel Podcast is brought to you by M&C Saatchi Abel , a proudly South African award-winning creative company founded on the principle of Brutal Simplicity of Thought.