Diversity and inclusion continues to be a top priority for business leaders around the world, and quite rightly so. After all, ecosystems thrive on diversity, and the world of business is no different. But, the journey to building a truly diverse and inclusive workplace can often be a long and daunting one.  So, in this podcast episode we’re sharing practical tips and advice to help you drive forward the diversity agenda within your organisation.

There is a clear distinction between changing a culture and shaping a culture, as Marino noted in his workshop. “Changing means you’ve got to be different. Shaping means there’s an element of what you’re doing that you want to keep, that you want to build on.” That is what Loblaw set out to do using both Human Synergistics’ assessments for measuring attributes of organizational culture and individual behavioral styles and Senn Delaney’s culture-shaping methodology to embed the desired culture.

With 161,000 employees in more than 150 countries, Unilever operates globally and at scale. The consumer-goods group’s brands range from Lipton tea and Magnum ice cream to Surf laundry detergent and Dove skin care. Under the leadership of Paul Polman, chief executive since 2009, the Anglo-Dutch group has sought to drive growth though innovation and by actively reshaping its portfolio while reducing operational complexity and focusing on sustainability as a key theme.

Leena Nair, chief human resources officer (CHRO), joined Unilever in 1992 as a management trainee. Prior to taking on her current role, she was the group’s global head of diversity and inclusion. She says, “If you look at a competitive advantage that a company truly has, it is really only the ideas, the ingenuity, the passion of its people. Because everything else can be matched.”

New CIPD survey suggests middle managers are particularly affected, while lower-paid staff lack training and development opportunities

This blog post is the second part in a series that shares our reflections on building an experimental culture in governments - see Exploring the unobvious: An overview for an introduction. In our previous post, we discussed how governments tend to explore only a small, fairly predictable subset of solutions. We argued that they need to get outside their comfort zone and explore the unobvious to develop better outcomes. So how do you go about exploring this space of the unobvious?

The good news is that there are multiple ways to explore and develop unobvious solutions to the problems that governments are facing. The methods mentioned below (read this post for a more in-depth look at this diagram) are all contributing, in different ways and at various phases of the development process, to building new understanding and creation of solutions.

Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long bedeviled organizations. In a digital world, solving these cultural problems is no longer optional.

Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age. That is a central finding from McKinsey’s recent survey of global executives (Exhibit 1), which highlighted three digital-culture deficiencies: functional and departmental silos, a fear of taking risks, and difficulty forming and acting on a single view of the customer.

In the near future, we should support students and young people in experiencing what it’s like to learn in online and in person spaces, managing projects and their own work, much like how they are living their lives.

Given this reality and given our goal of preparing young people for the world we think they may inherit, what learning experiences can and should we as educators design for? What does learning look like in the modern era?

The traditional framework for brainstorms involves identifying a problem, listing solutions within a set of parameters, and then choosing the best.

But research on creativity and innovation suggests that truly innovative solutions result not from searching for a “correct answer,” but from the collision of different ideas, perspectives and life experiences.

Rather than encouraging convergent thinking, as traditional brainstorm sessions do, the goal should be to encourage divergent thinking: the practice of finding new ways to look at a problem and generating multiple solutions. In divergent thinking, the emphasis isn’t to agree on the best idea—it’s to get as far away as possible from the most obvious answer.

You can't open a magazine these days without seeing something about "mindfulness." The concept has become so ubiquitous, a friend asked me the other day if its popularity was just a fad.
As a social psychologist who has studied mindfulness for nearly four decades, I am certain that it is not. Unlike, say, the hula hoop, mindfulness actually is enlivening, and it can improve our lives greatly in measurable ways.
But I do see a risk in its newfound currency: The idea of mindfulness could become so watered down or misrepresented that we fail to fully appreciate its ability to better our lives — that we become mindless about mindfulness.
Mindfulness is often described as the ability to be in the moment, to be in the present, to be aware. The problem with this is that everyone thinks they are already aware. Some people meditate to become more mindful. Meditation is really just a tool that leads to post-meditative mindfulness. Although it's a good tool, it's a tool nonetheless, not the end.

In this TED talk, Dweck describes “two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve.” Operating in this space — just outside of your comfort zone — is the key to improving your performance. It's also the critical element to deliberate practice. People approach these problems with the two mindsets …. “Are you not smart enough to solve it …. or have you just not solved it yet.”

We undertook a national survey to understand the reality of how mental health is experienced at work.  The survey results tell us that progress is being made but there is a need for greater organisational awareness of the support required for better mental health at work. Significant and potentially damaging disconnects exist that demand an urgent response from business.

Employers need to recognise the scale of poor mental health in the workplace and take significant steps to reduce the risk of their workplace being a contributor.  Employers have a duty of care to their employees to respond to mental ill health just as they
would to a physical illness.  Organisations should equip their managers with the tools, support and organisational culture they need to do their job well, which must include managing employees with mental health issues. It makes good business sense to foster a culture of openness that supports employees with a mental health issue to work and stay in work.

When it comes to Strategic Management for decades the focus has been on Scientific Management - which was never scientific in the first place - and the idea business could be run and controlled like a machine. Such ideas ignored the fact businesses are social systems – the clue being in the term “company” - and operate within even larger social systems. And for decades management theories have been obsessed with performance, efficiency and competition. I am not suggesting they are unimportant factors, but as Colin Price, a co-author of Beyond Performance[v] said in an interview with me, “When it comes to achieving sustained excellence in performance, what separates winners from losers, paradoxically, is the very focus on performance. Performance focused leaders invest heavily in those things that enable targets to be met quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year but they tend to neglect investment in company health; investments in the organization that need to be made today in order to survive and thrive tomorrow”. Good strategic management cares about performance and health in the short, medium and long-term.

The field of positive psychology was born when researchers noticed that psychology was awfully negative—focusing on illness and suffering but mute on the topic of how to thrive and flourish.

Two decades later, you could say that positive psychology is moving past this dichotomy of positive and negative, toward a more nuanced perspective on the good life. At least, that was one of the themes at the International Positive Psychology Association’s 5th World Congress, a four-day conference held earlier this month that brought together more than 1,300 researchers, practitioners, students, and journalists in Montreal, Canada.

Researchers shared the complexities and complications they were uncovering about the elements of well-being, from gratitude and mindfulness to passion and grit. Here are some of their insights.

There is an upside and downside for each type of organizational culture. Some people think one type of culture is better than others. But overemphasis brings out the downside of any culture, as Nose Dive demonstrated.
The upside of a collaborative culture is the ability to achieve greater heights – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But too much collaboration and you end up with group think.  The upside of a competitive culture is individual excellence and delivering results that meet customer needs, but the downside is burnout and stress.
A bureaucratic culture’s upside is operational excellence. But if it’s overdone, you get bogged down in red tape. The upside of an entrepreneurial culture is flexibility and creativity. The downside is chaos.

As the power of the individual grows, modern employees want more flexibility and autonomy in how they work and learn. We are now in the Age of the Individual.

Whilst many L&D professionals do recognise this, they just don’t know how to enable and support continuous independent learning, and more often than not try to force-fit it it into the traditional training model – by trying to capture and manage everything in some sort of central enterprise learning management system or “learning platform”. Whereas an enterprise platform might be relevant to keep track of (mandatory) corporate training, it is just not appropriate to use it to try to manage an individual’s professional learning.

In other words, the traditional, top down, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control approach to workplace learning – which organizations have been using for more than 100 years – is just not up to the new world of work. What it requires is a new workplace learning model.

The Employee-Centred Learning & Development (ECLD) Model – turns everything on its head. Here an employee’s professional learning and development lies at the very centre of the model. It is something they organise in a privately owned learning space and evidence in a privately owned digital portfolio. It is the role of their manager to enable the growth and development of all the members of his/her whole team, and the role of L&D to work with both managers and individuals to support all this – as summarised on the diagram below.

True or false: the principles of leadership development work regardless of location. 

Answer: false. 

This surprised me, but this is what I have learned from researching leadership development in Silicon Valley.  

Here, the speed of change is more rapid than in other places. Talent is in short supply, so there is immense competition for the same people. Tech leaders are younger in age than other industries, so development needs to happen faster. This calls for learning that is more accelerated and continuous than previous models of development.  

Key to developing leaders in this high impact environment are the following seven practices: 

Companies need to approach gender inequality as they would any business problem: with hard data. Most programs created to combat gender inequality are based on anecdotal evidence or cursory surveys. But to tailor a solution to a company’s specific problems, you need to seek data to answer fundamental questions such as “When are women dropping out?” and “Are women acting differently than men in the office?” and “What about our company culture has limited women’s growth?” When organizations implement a solution, they need to measure the outcomes of both behavior and advancement in the office. Only then can they transition from the debate about the causes of gender inequality (bias versus behavior) and advance to the needed stage of a solution.

Humans are problem solvers - we are good at fixing things and we are compelled to do so as a means of survival. My favourite discovery in Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow was that humans have an in-built desire for shortcuts - a drive to solve problems using the least possible amount of effort. We prefer to use the information we have in front of us and don’t naturally seek additional information.

I wondered whether this desire for shortcuts could help to explain the ubiquitous ‘fix-it’ culture that we see in our public services. Does our innate drive to reach solutions quickly (amongst other obvious influences such as social and organisational pressures) play a role?

Add empathy into the mix and our desire to ‘fix’ things may be perpetuated further. As a practising clinical psychologist, I find it hardest to resist offering solutions when people appear to be struggling the most – as if empathy intensifies the urge to ‘fix’. We don’t want people to suffer – so it makes sense to find an answer and fast!

But is this the most helpful response? In some situations a fast solution is appropriate, such as with urgent medical care. But if a person has a more complex problem to solve, then a question is likely to be more useful than an answer.

Developing leadership to improve relationships and accelerate change is a key goal in many organizations, so what’s the secret that helped 73% of leaders in this global tech company measurably improve?
Excelitas is a global technology company with R&D and 19 manufacturing facilities around the world.  To improve performance, the company set out to strengthen the leadership skills that would improve workplace climate to strengthen employee engagement. Recognizing that emotional intelligence would be a valuable ingredient in this initiative, company partnered with Six Seconds to develop a program measurably improve leadership. This case study reviews outcomes of the program and key ingredients that the company used to create this success.

The mismatch between leadership development as it exists and what leaders actually need is enormous and widening. What would work better?

Over the last 16 years I have carried out research into how leaders create change, and I’ve worked in the change leadership field for 25 years in multinational corporations. Over that time, I’ve come to appreciate four factors that lie at the heart of good, practical leadership development: making it experiential; influencing participants’ “being,” not just their “doing”; placing it into its wider, systemic context; and enrolling faculty who act less as experts and more as Sherpas.

Former Surgeon General Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled, "Work and the Loneliness Epidemic." In it, he explains that loneliness -- the "subjective feeling of having inadequate social connections" -- can impact an employee's well-being and their work performance. He calls on organizations to make social connections a strategic priority. Employees should have genuine opportunities to foster friendships. Removing "coldness" from a workplace culture is the right thing to do, and it's a smart business decision.

Actions necessary to support longer-term corporate-performance objectives, on the one hand, and a rapid performance transformation, on the other, might seem at odds. But our research paints a different picture. When coupled with organizational health, long- and short-term performance can become interdependent and complementary—just as yin and yang in Chinese philosophy are inseparable, unable to exist without each other, despite their apparent opposition.

Simply put, healthy organizations are more likely to orient themselves toward the long term. And companies in the midst of a rapid performance transformation boost the odds of sustaining those efforts when they improve their health. The evidence for these propositions is substantial, and it underscores the fundamental link between organizational health and performance.

I wasn’t receiving complaints from the people on the team. I could just see it in the their eyes. There was exhaustion and not the good kind of exhaustion from doing complicated and hard work. It was the exhaustion you see when individuals on a team have to do too much interpersonal yak shaving. Writing software, the core job of a software engineer, had become too taxing and it was taking a toll.

It was incredibly hard for a simple feature to get out the door because we found ourselves in an all too common collaboration overload situation. Our wish to create continuity meant that the managers in the tech organization had to maintain expertise over 5-6 different priorities across 5-6 different tracks and at any given time would have to switch contexts to help one of their engineers out or discuss an ongoing project or upcoming release. For individual contributors and product managers, it manifested differently with questions of who was responsible for what. It didn’t lead to finger pointing, but ownership was sufficiently muddy that it became hard to move as quickly as we’d like. Even worse, personal and team success became elusive because a matrix, by its very nature, diffuses responsibility across the collective.

I joined Pinterest as the company’s first Head of Diversity in January of 2016. By the end of that year, we had hit or exceeded most of our goals, improving hiring rates of underrepresented engineers from 1 to 9% and increasing underrepresented talent from 7% to 12% in other roles. But we saw limited movement for women engineers, only increasing our hiring rate from 21% to 22%, which fell short of our goal. While higher than industry norms, this flatness was in large part due to our focus on putting more women in senior roles versus in entry-level roles (more on that later). Over the course of my first year at Pinterest, I’ve learned four key lessons about how to improve diversity from within a company:

Are people in your organization energized and happy or anxious and stressed? Does it matter? New research offers important insights into people and what drives performance. Here are three key findings, and a link to download the full report.