Trust - The Next Leadership Crisis

This is a Jack Welch quote I reference frequently:

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

Organisations generally tend to struggle with keeping up with the pace of cultural change and recovery from a global pandemic is highlighting that disconnect more than ever. There are two areas which organisations need to redefine and reassess to avoid a corporate crisis: ambition and trust.

Ambition

Businesses are heavily reliant on employees being "ambitious" which is?synonymous?with commitment, long hours, drive, resilience, risk-taking and objective achieving individuals, who surround themselves with similarly minded people. ?Ambitious executives were traditionally male. In Kat Matfield's Gender Decoder ambitious is therefore noted as being masculine coded.

Ambition is defined as:

These corporate values have been historically dependent on the nuclear family with one revenue generator (usually male) and one household manager/child carer (usually female.) Ambitious executives had the support of a wife or partner who either stayed at home, or put her career on the back burner to allow hubby to forge ahead. Today, this binary narrative is out of step with the realities of our wider worlds.

Senior managers therefore, not only need to reassess how they define commitment and ambition, but also need to take a hard and fresh look at how they view leadership itself. Despite the shift in outside circumstance and our wider cultures, the career path to leadership roles and the view of what makes a good leader has remained reasonably constant.

How it works

Ambition has been considered a quality required to "get ahead." Individuals have either been directly criticised for lack of "ambition," or adapted their behaviour in anticipation of having their ambitions questioned, and then being professionally penalised as a consequence. Here are some typical stories.

• Tia didn’t share with her new boss that at age 25 she had a son of 11 months. She didn’t want that to put her career focus under the microscope and to be a factor in the allocation of training opportunities
• David, a Director in a major consulting company was "spoken to" by his Partner because he took his turn leaving on time to pick up his toddler every second day from nursery, because it might be seen in "some quarters" as showing a lack of ambition. His wife eventually gave up her job.
• Aniya a medical student in the top 5% of her class took off her engagement ring at her Board interview. She expected be judged as being less ambitious and serious about her career.
• Paolo, turned down a job because he didn't want a three hour daily commute and his wife wouldn't be able to get a job in a new town. He was described by in the headhunter notes as lacking ambition.

Women are as ambitious as men

The first myth to unpick is that women are not as ambitious as men. Research from Boston Consulting Group?indicates that women are just as ambitious as men at the start of their careers but this falters in organisations with poor gender balance initiatives and results.

The study of 200,000 employees, including 141,000 women from 189 countries, identified that women were just as ambitious as men at the outset and companies were at fault for blocking this, not family status or motherhood. The findings suggest employees aged under 30, there was little difference, but women’s "ambition" dropped off faster than men’s at companies lagging on gender diversity. The report suggests that there was almost no ambition gap between women and men aged 30 to 40 at firms where employees felt gender diversity was improving with 85%?of women seeking promotion compared with 87% of men.

Matt Krentz, a BCG senior partner and co-author of the report, says

“Both genders are equally ambitious and equally rational. Ambition is not a fixed trait; it is an attribute that can be nurtured or damaged over time through the daily interactions and opportunities employees experience at work.”

Ambition is therefore something that can be literally crushed by organisational culture and expectations.

Diversity in family life

Ironically, families are becoming more diverse but workplaces aren't. As organisations cling to outdated expectations around ambition, there has been a significant shift in the composition of our family structures. Research from Pew suggests that the share of children living in a two-parent household is at the lowest point in more than half a century: 69% are in this type of family arrangement today, compared with 73% in 2000 and 87% in 1960.?In the U.K. 75% of women in the workplace have dependent children.

Families live further apart and two-career families frequently out of financial necessity are the norm.?Divorce?is increasing and so is single parenthood. In the U.S. 16% of families are blended, bringing with it all sorts of co-parenting and custody arrangements some enforced by the courts. At the same time school hours and holidays have remained unchanged for centuries.

Something has to give.

Challenging male stereotypes

We also need to challenge male stereotypes which are deeply embedded in our organisational cultures. They set the norms around career progression and the behaviours we need to exhibit to achieve career success. Gender stereotyping is not just a women's issue and men are equally trapped.

Up until now we have focused on women as a way of achieving gender balance in the workplace. But many of these assumptions don't challenge underlying expectations around caring responsibilities which are vital to bring them in line with other shifts that are going on in the family. In providing better perks for women we may even have embedded these expectations even further. Whether this is enhanced maternity leave rather than shared parenting leave, or assuming men don't want to participate in child care, and then making it difficult for them when they chose to do so.

Trust the underlying issue to ambition

Underscoring our ideas around ambition is the issue of trust. It's the "if you can't see it, it's not happening" theory. Leaders don't seem to trust what they can't see. A new report from Microsoft suggests that leaders think employees are being less efficient than their self-assessment of their own performance

• 87% of surveyed workers say they are productive at work.
• 12% of leaders say they’re fully confident their employees are productive.

This disconnect, which Microsoft calls “productivity paranoia,” is one of the key findings from the survey of 20,000 people at companies in 11 countries, conducted for Microsoft by a third-party firm in July and August.

If we don't physically see someone working hard, ergo they are probably not.

Redefining ambition

There are two main roadblocks in the current thinking process:

1. A Presence culture

We have to get over the idea that because someone is not on 24/7/365 they are not ambitious and can't be a high contributing employee. The days when senior executives are expected to sit for 12 hours or more per day in an office should be long gone. Technology offers sophisticated opportunities for remote and flex working and the pandemic showed it was possible. The measurement of success should not be about where and how the hours logged and performed, but by the results achieved.?It's about the skills needed to meet assigned objectives and then the results.

The parent who wants to do bath and bed between 6 and 7.00 pm will probably be the same executive who reaches targets. All research shows that working long hours becomes counterproductive and results in reduced employee engagement as well as well-being and health issues both physical and emotional.

Presenteeism is contributing to a significant?decline?in productivity as well as physical and mental health issues. Being present does not equate with being productive. Burnout levels and employee disengagement are at all-time highs. Biologically we are not built to be in high-stress?mode all the time.

2. New ideas on career paths

Companies traditionally assign?stretch assignments,?sometimes internationally, when an executive is in his/her (but usually his) early 30s to test the potential of their leadership talent. This tends to be the time when biological clocks tick loudly and for those with increasingly complex family circumstances, the traditional routes are no longer attractive or even possible. Extensive travel has been impacted by the global pandemic and businesses no longer want executives to fly across the world at the drop of a hat. Higher numbers of single parents adds further complications and the fact that both parents need or heaven forbid want to play a part in family life have to be factored in.

But this doesn’t mean to say that by opting out of historic corporate expectations, they should be written off as unambitious or unsuitable for leadership roles. Employees should still be given the necessary exposure to new experiences and opportunities to add to their skill set and career progression paths will need to be redefined.

New times, new expectations

Companies must move with the times and create new and progressive talent management strategies to attract and retain future leaders. New generations have different commitments and will be less inclined make the sacrifices that characterised previous generations which is at the root of the quiet quitter explosion. But it is also about economic necessity as most families today are dependent on two incomes with both parents being key revenue generators. They will also want to give family life a higher priority and seek greater balance as a new generation of Dads emerges. Currently kids are a corporate inconvenience.

In a new era, the old way of leading and the definition of ambition and what we look for in future leaders is becoming increasingly out of step with the real world. Organisations looking for long-term sustainability rather than short-term ROI will need to reassess their priorities. Employees shouldn’t have to choose between a relationship and family and a career, and are no longer prepared to do so.

Leaders have to trust employees to deliver results which means create new benchmarks for assessing ambition, which underpins corporate career paths to leadership roles.

So how near are we to the end?

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My goal is to increase the number of gender balanced, diverse and inclusive workplaces where everyone feels secure and reaches their potential.

? Please share this newsletter with your HR contacts.

??Unconscious biases affect all our decisions, but it is possible to manage them. Make your company?hiring processes?more inclusive so you attract, train and retain the best talent.