What I find interesting is that flexible work/ work from home is a key criteria to attract talent and an inclusive culture where people feel like they belong is important to make them stay.
I do not say these two are mutually exclusive – my team never meet all together in person since I joined VMware and still in the way people interact you can see that they trust each other.
But it’s very hard to do both. Trust and connection are often forged by the small thing, the gestures, the personal anecdotes you share over lunch, the extra mile you go for your colleague when you see from across the room that they are stressed.
👉 I believe it’s a two way street – as a leader you have to create opportunities to connect and build a culture of trust. And as an employee you have to invest some of your time to come to the office a bit more than what’s strictly necessary in order to build those connections. Do you agree/ disagree?
In an experiment, people were told that they were not allowed to use the word “breakfast” or “therefore”. When they then had to solve a series of tasks, their cognitive performance plummeted.
Focusing on not spilling the beans occupies your brain – and it isolates you. “Secret keepers” actually felt bad. Unresolved issues create shame, guilt and anxiety which your brain can chew on over and over.
While of course not all secrets should be told, opening up helps us and makes our relationships happier and healthier. In leadership, empowerment hinges on sharing information to allow people to make their own informed decisions. But that requires trust and an new concept of leadership. It’s no longer about hording information (and deriving power from this) but about sharing and enabling.
👉 What keeps you from sharing information with your teams?
Source: Michael Slepian – The Secret Life of Secrets
My favorite perk at #vmware are the EPIC days – 4 days per year (plus the time between Christmas and New Year’s) when the company shuts down.
EPIC days are so valuable because as everyone is off, you get to really unwind. No emails piling up in your inbox, no meetings that you missed.
Often, especially also as #leaders and in this new #hybrid world of flex working, the boundaries between work and leisure time become fuzzy. You send just another quick reply before going to bed or as you are about to head out for dinner. While it’s super convient to fit work around your life, it can also create a lot of stress – both for yourself and your teams. And if you are working with people at the other side of the world your inbox fills up while you are sleep anyways.
I decided to use the EPIC day on Friday for some dedicated me time: I went rowing in the morning without the time pressure of having to be back at my desk at 9am, then I visited a friend and her new baby in Basel, called my grandma from the car and spent the afternoon in a day spa. And last but not least, we packed up the car in the evening to be able to have a leisure start, waking up on Saturday in the mountains.
Not every day can be an EPIC day, but you can make every day epic. Both my taking small moments for yourself and also sparing a thought how others might perceive a 10pm email 😉
Apprently some investors even have a mental cut off of 32 – if you are older, they are not interested. And all the big names that come into your mind when thinking about start ups (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos) all got their break young. Or did they?
Researchers actually looked into this question and found that “the probability of extreme startup success rises with age, at least until the late 50s”. And even Bill, Steve and Jeff might have started young(er) but the market cap of their businesses reached their peak when they were middle aged. Come on, take a guess how old Steve was when the IPhone was introduced (I will tell you at the end of the post)
So where does this leave us? Probably at the unsurprising insight that nobody is immune to biases (or VCs just exploit the fact that younger funders are likely more cash strapped and willing to put up with worse financing conditions) and that there are many paths to success.
Youthful “can do” spirit, being unburdened by legacy and maybe a higher risk tolerance when you do not have a family that depends on you, help you get started but experience (whether built over the years in your own business or as an employee) will increase your odds for success.
➡️ In the end, this research just shows yet again why diversity (not just in terms of gender but also e.g. in terms of age) is so important 😊
Source: https://buff.ly/3Vjdd87 (And by the way, Steve Jobs was 52 when the first IPhone was launched.)
I go rowing a lot – in some weeks I am on the water five times or more, usually in the morning before work. I get up at 5.55am, meet my rowing partner at the club at 6.30am and get to work just before 9am.
Sometimes people ask me how much I row and when I tell them, the reaction usually is “oh, I wouldn’t have the discipline”.
Can I tell you a secret? It’s not about (self-)discipline.
Discipline is “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour, using punishment to correct disobedience.” Sounds hard – and it is hard. If I had to rely on discipline, I would have a negotiation with myself every morning whether to get out of bed and the reason I might eventually get up is because I didn’t want to feel bad about myself (my punishment) all day. Really hard and exhausting – and not sustainable.
It’s the same in a business context – yes, as a boss you can roll out a new initiative everybody is supposed to adopt. And if you can have a report which you review every week and – crucial step – have and enforce punishment for those who do not comply, you will probably succeed in driving adoption (and probably a fair bit of attrition as well). But boy, I am already exhausted by just writing about it.
So what’s a better way? A better way is to design circumstances in a way that make the desired behaviour the easy option and the undesired behaviour hard.
In rowing, my desired behaviour (at least the night before) is to go rowing in the morning. So I make sure to confirm with my rowing partner that we’ll meet at 6.30am the next morning. Now when my alarm goes off, getting out of bed is unpleasant but it’s the easy option compared to picking up my phone and making a lame excuse to my rowing partner (I hate letting people down!). She is probably already up and brewing her coffee, so I better get going.
Back to business – think about how can you make adopting your initiative the easy option and resisting hard(er). This includes designing the initiative itself, if you want a initiative to succeed make it easy – lean & mean processes, the minimum amount of red tape you can get away with, clear & simple rules.
You can also tap into behavioral science and the currently red-hot topic of micro or atomic habits: make it easy to get started, and break the new behavior down into mini chunks. So think about how can you get people to have a success moment/ feeling of accomplishment with 1 or 2 minutes and then build on this.
⚡️ What you might have gotten wrong about “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
🤔 I am afraid that this quote from Peter Drucker invites the misunderstanding that culture is more important than strategy. But that’s not it.
💪 You need a strong strategy and then also a strong culture – but a strong culture cannot make up for a lousy strategy (and neither will a strong strategy succeed, if not backed up by culture).
⚖️ Success needs strategy AND culture. So it’s not that one is “better”/ “more important” than the other, both need to be in synch
🎧 I thought that James Gorman nails the point in this interview (https://buff.ly/3v7vVEb): “Having a clear strategy earns you the right to talk about culture. Culture is what guarantees continuing strategic shifts and alignment to the world around you.”
🗓️ It usually pays to question assumptions – and one of the assumptions is that the work work starts on Monday. I am currently visiting my colleagues in Israel, where the weekend is actually Friday and Saturday and so the first day of the work week is Sunday.
📌 Why does this matter (unless you travel to Israel and find yourself in the office on Sunday)? Well, it matters because as I know that there are people whose weekend starts on Friday, I try to avoid scheduling cross-regional calls on Fridays.
🔭 But there is also a broader point here: many things that you do not question about your own working practices might be very different for others. That can be which days are the “weekend”, it can be the concept of respect, it could be open feedback culture vs. saving face, it can be your ability to work late (or early) hours …
👉 So how to solve this? I guess, the usual answer here: be curious, question things – and talk about it!
🎓 I like the concept of different types of failures – preventable, complexity-related and intelligent which relate to different kinds of work (routine, complex, frontier). Particularly interesting as usually one type of work shapes the culture.
👉 Example: “Fail often in order to succeed sooner” is great in R&D (-> frontier) but works less well in a manufacturing plant (-> routine).
❓ How are you/ your organization doing in learning from failure? What would you wish you could do differently?
Dr. Eva-Maria Hempe 