Warburtons is a traditional family-owned business. Run by the Warburton family since it was set up as a bakery in the English town of Bolton in 1876, it is now the largest bakery in the U.K., with 12 bakeries, 14 depots, and 4,500 employees. Although its core product is still bread — accounting for about 70 percent of sales in a country that is the world’s largest per capita consumer of sandwiches — the company has expanded its offerings to bagels, crumpets, potato cakes, and gluten-free products. In the decade up to 2015, Warburtons spent £400 million (US$555 million) on new technology and upgrading factories — and the company continues investing.

Management is now in the hands of fifth-generation family member Jonathan Warburton and his cousins Ross and Brett. That is a remarkable feat, because as U.S. research has shown, only about 30 percent of family companies make it to the second generation. The transition from the previous generation to the current team of Warburton family managers offers useful lessons for other family-owned businesses at a time when business models face the twin challenges of disruption and rapidly evolving shifts in consumer behavior. Warburton recently sat down with strategy+business to talk about succession planning, leveling the playing field to attract talent, and investing for the future.

How do you figure out the right thing to do? More importantly, how do you develop the habit of making better decisions, time and time again, even in difficult and uncertain circumstances?

Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to learn what happens at moments of choice inside the human mind (the locus of mental activity) and the brain (the physical organ associated with that activity). If you understand these dynamics and how they affect you and those around you, you can set a course toward more effective patterns of thinking and action. You can replicate those beneficial patterns, at a larger scale, in your organization. Over time, this practice can help you take on a quality of strategic leadership: inspiring others, helping organizations transcend their limits, and navigating enterprises toward lofty, beneficial goals.

When asked what men can do to improve women’s lives at work, Mary Barra gets straight to the point: “Stop making assumptions,” she tells Quartz.

As chief executive at General Motors, Barra practices what she preaches. Her management philosophy is epitomized by GM’s workplace dress code—which is equally brief, and also an antidote to the restrictive, wallet-draining policies at many large corporations. It reads, in full: “Dress appropriately.”

Having worked for GM since she was a teenager—first as a factory-floor inspector, then scaling through leadership roles in engineering and communications—Barra was well-acquainted with the automaker’s bureaucracy by the time she became vice president of global human resources in 2009, months after the company filed for bankruptcy.

Instead of immediately focusing on high-level restructuring strategy, Barra surprised her colleagues by tackling the small, seemingly inconsequential policies she knew were foundational to company culture. Her first battle: The dress code.

The problem isn’t the problem; our relationship to the problem is the problem. In other words, we have many of the skills needed to handle what’s being thrown at us. But when faced with continual complexity at unprecedented pace, our survival instincts kick in. In a mental panic to regain control, we fight, flee, or freeze: we act before thinking (“we’ve got to make some kind of decision, now!”), we analyze an issue to the point of paralysis, or we abdicate responsibility by ignoring the problem or shunting it off to a committee or task force. We need inner agility, but our brain instinctively seeks stasis. At the very time that visionary, empathetic, and creative leadership is needed, we fall into conservative, rigid old habits.

You can’t steer your company through constant change if you are relying on the safety of your own cruise control. To spot opportunities—and threats—in this environment, we must teach ourselves how to have a more comfortable and creative relationship with uncertainty. That means learning how to relax at the edge of uncertainty, paying attention to subtle clues both in our environment and in how we experience the moment that may inform unconventional action.

We don’t need better leaders. We need organizations and structures that let all people cooperate and collaborate to get work done. Positional leadership is a master-servant, parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee relationship. It puts too much power in the hands of individuals and blocks human networks from realizing their potential. Even punishing the person in charge will change little. Changing leaders will not change the system from which they emerged.

Depending on one person to always be the leader will only dumb-down the entire network. In the network era, leadership is helping the network make better decisions. This starts by creating more human organizational structures, ones that enable self-governance. Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance.

In tumultuous times, a company’s talent is its most valuable and reliable asset. What does it take to lead an organization that truly unleashes its human capital?

All too often, leaders see cultural initiatives as a last resort, except for top-down exhortations to change. By the time they get around to culture, they’re convinced that a comprehensive overhaul of the culture is the only way to overcome the company’s resistance to major change. Culture thus becomes an excuse and a diversion, rather than an accelerator and an energizer.

But cultural intervention can and should be an early priority—a way to clarify what your company is capable of, even as you refine your strategy. Targeted and integrated cultural interventions, designed around changing a few critical behaviors at a time, can also energize and engage your most talented people and enable them to collaborate more effectively and efficiently.

We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply.
The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster.

Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.
Compare today to the way things were a decade or a century ago. The world is healthier and safer than ever. The number of children who die every year has been cut in half since 1990 and keeps going down. The number of mothers who die has also dropped dramatically. So has extreme poverty—declining by nearly half in just 20 years. More children are attending school. The list goes on and on.
But being an optimist isn’t about knowing that life used to be worse. It’s about knowing how life can get better. And that’s what really fuels our optimism. Although we see a lot of disease and poverty in our work—and many other big problems that need to be solved—we also see the best of humanity. We spend our time learning from scientists who are inventing cutting-edge tools to cure disease. We talk to dedicated government leaders who are being creative about prioritizing the health and well-being of people around the world. And we meet brave and brilliant individuals all over the world who are imagining new ways to transform their communities.

We identified 13 levers, or “characteristics,” that appear to accelerate the adoption of technologies and practices that have been implemented by innovation leaders but are new to less advanced firms.1 Six of those 13 levers can be influenced directly by the actions of businesses themselves, largely independent of broader factors such as competition, education, regulation, and infrastructure quality.

The application of these six levers varies widely among firms within countries and across different geographies (exhibit). For example, professional management practices that drive diffusion have been more widely adopted, on average, in German and US firms than in firms in other countries. On the other hand, Japanese firms tend to benefit more than others from access to plentiful science and technology talent. UK firms, in turn, stand out for their external collaborations with the strong local-science base and for their embrace of value chains that are advanced, global, or both.

Can we please agree that there is no such thing as a corporate entrepreneur?

The term corporate entrepreneur devalues what real entrepreneurs do, and it creates a haze of hokum around people trying to innovate in large companies that sets them up to fail.

There is an ocean of difference between people innovating or designing new offerings inside a large company, and actual entrepreneurs. On one shore of the ocean is certainty — the steady paycheck, the options vesting, status, the cushiness of a corporate campus — and on the other is the possibility of incredible wealth. Fly-your-own-plane-to-your-own-private-island-level wealth. And in between the two shores are a million ways to fail, to sink without a trace.

I have now interviewed hundreds of actual entrepreneurs — including founders of Amazon, Apple, Biogen, Boston Scientific, iRobot, Netflix, PayPal, and YouTube — as well as new venture and innovation leaders in large companies like Disney, Target, Toyota, and Coca-Cola.

Five things differentiate the former from the latter:

Hard-core individualists who doubt leaders’ need for supportive teams should consider the famous study by Harvard Business School professors Boris Groysberg, Ashish Nanda, and Nitin Nohira. They studied more than 1,000 “rock star” analysts — securities analysts named by Institutional Investor magazine as among the best in their industry over a period of eight years, from 1988 to 1996. They found that when stars switched firms, their job performance fell and they rarely reached the heights of their previous success. The causes of this performance plunge are multifaceted. But the authors concluded that losing the teamwork and relationships at the places where the analysts became stars were important contributing factors.

What makes coaching effective, and what’s the role of emotional intelligence (EQ)?
New research published in the Journal of Experiential Psychotherapy (Stillman, Freedman, Jorgensen, & Stillman, 2017) reiterates the powerful link between EQ and effective coaching. . . both for coaches and clients.

Our people need their own multicultural competency if they are to understand the diverse needs of our customers. I call it “cultural dancing.” You don’t have to be Filipino to have that competence. You don’t have to be Indian or Turkish. But you do have to be open-minded to people’s needs and willing to step away from the perspective with which you see the world.

You also have to be willing to look beneath the surface, to look beyond the apparent first meaning of the words someone is using. Because the person speaking may not be using their primary language, it’s up to the listener to actively participate in finding out what the person actually means by what they say. If you’re only used to your home culture, you don’t have to do that. You can take things more at face value. But if you grew up in a multicultural environment, you think to yourself, “Maybe they didn’t mean it exactly like it sounds. Maybe there’s a second thought, a second meaning behind the first one.” That openness is important if you are on my leadership team.

Some thoughts for people who are contemplating a radical career change.
John told me that he had experienced an identity shift. He now thinks of himself as a novelist, not as a leader or consultant. And as a novelist, he is already contemplating his next work.
I was struck by how much we are shaped by our self-images, and how much our self-images shape our choices. There may be more choices available than you are currently considering, if you are willing to set your identity aside, put the effort into learning new skills, and have the tenacity to see it through. It also helps, as was the case with John, if it is something you are excited and passionate about.

What is Trust?
As important as trust is, one of the problems is we are not always talking about the same thing when we talk about trust. Trust is a general, all-encompassing word that means many different things.
Huge misunderstandings can occur when we talk about “trust.” If you say you don’t trust someone, do you mean you don’t believe they are honest or do you mean you don’t believe you can depend on them to get the job done on time? If someone says they don’t trust you, what exactly don’t they trust?
There are different levels and intensity of trust. Honesty is a more basic level and has a stronger intensity than dependability.
Understanding the levels of trust and their intensity can help you build a strong foundation of trust and communicate more clearly when others violate your trust.

Rather than succumb to the hyperbole and false promises found in so much management writing, business strategists would do far better to improve their powers of critical thinking. Wise executives should be able to think clearly about the quality of research claims and to detect some of the egregious errors that pervade the business world. Indeed, the capacity for critical thinking is an important asset for any business strategist—one that allows the executive to cut through the clutter and to discard the delusions, embracing instead a more realistic understanding of business success and failure.

In recent years, I’ve noticed that enquiries for team development and coaching, invariably start with the statement: “we (or they) need to be a high performing team.” On face value, this strikes me as a reasonable request. However, I’ve learnt that this statement covers a whole range of ills, dysfunctionalities and possibilities. It gets used as a proxy for ‘help us sort out our problems…without risking exploring what these might be’.

In truth, there are no off-the-shelf answers to what constitutes high performance for a leadership team. Every team needs to work it out for themselves. However, we believe that there are important questions that a leadership team needs to ask itself which can act as a starting point of a conversation or development process.

Below are ten questions we think it is important for every leadership team to ask itself:

Chaotic, largely unexplored, and fraught with risk, yet immensely promising” is a description of the coaching industry from “The Wild West of Executive Coaching,” a 2004 ground-breaking article in Harvard Business Review by the president and CEO of the Executive Coaching Network, Alyssa Freas, and U.S. top 50 coach Stratford Sherman.
Flash forward more than a decade later. Are we still in the midst of a coaching rodeo? Has the field continued to gallop ahead but in many directions?
The answer is complicated. It is true that the executive coaching industry still comes with its share of fuzzy evaluation metrics, a lack of standard qualifications and uneven execution, but in many ways, the field has also evolved — and in unexpected ways.
Here I examine the areas in which the executive coaching industry has properly evolved — as well as the areas where there is still room for improvement.

Already, a growing number of firms are betting that more and better use of data can give them a tangible competitive boost in the here and now: more detailed knowledge, and better analysis - of customers, employees and the business environment - have the potential to reduce risk and uncertainty and radically improve decision-making. In an information age, competitive edge will surely accrue to those firms which use information best. Won’t it?

We shouldn’t assume so. Managers are wrong to put their faith in any such certainty, argue Jonas Ridderstrale and Julian Birkinshaw in their new book, Fast/Forward. The title sums up a deceptively simple theme: in a fast-changing world, mountains of data and super-detailed analytics can get us only so far. Indeed, they carry risks of their own. Ridderstrale and Birkinshaw observe that many companies are more comfortable analysing and debating than acting decisively and intuitively. The default assumption that more and better information is always better actually cramps companies’ ability to move fast. To navigate the future, the ability to act with decision and purpose will trump big data. Priorities need to be reversed.

Mauricio knew that he must carve out time for strategic conversations with his leadership team, but during a one-on-one coaching session he told me he was puzzled. When he had suggested to his leadership team that they have these conversations, people had nodded their heads and said they’d raise strategic agenda items. Yet their meetings continued to focus on the day-to-day numbers, operational processes, and immediate crises.

Unfortunately, this scenario is common for many leadership teams — when facing immediate concerns, it’s difficult to remain strategic. Senior executives need to balance the long- and short-term demands of their businesses, and meetings need to mirror this balance. But they rarely do when executives don’t realize the pitfalls of meetings that conflate strategy and operations.

How do we promote our leaders? How do we decide that a person is ready to take on a role with a brand new remit and unfamiliar responsibilities? We do it trusting that a person will succeed, based on often nothing more than a hunch. “But wait!” I hear you cry. “People are promoted based on their success in their current role. It’s how it works everywhere.” This is true. People are promoted to the next level based on their previous performance. But does this make sense?