Fred Keller, the founder of Cascade Engineering, wanted to show that a for-profit business could also help address society’s social ills. So he accepted an employee’s suggestion that they hire unemployed locals. They rented a van, went to a low-income area of Grand Rapids, Michigan and — with the eight men they identified — started Cascade’s welfare-to-career program.

Their first attempt failed completely. Not one of the people hired remained after a few weeks: the men they hired weren’t prepared or equipped for the requirements of regular work, and Cascade wasn’t prepared to help them succeed. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” recalls one of the managers involved, so they resorted to “tough love” that just didn’t work.

For most leaders, this inauspicious beginning would likely have also been the end. It seemed to confirm the common sentiment that helping people get out of intergenerational poverty isn’t a role business can or should try to play. But not to Keller. For him, the initial outcome was simply data — the first attempt hadn’t worked, so clearly there were things to learn before taking another step.

The second attempt — which involved a partnership wherein potential Cascade employees first learned basic job skills and accountability at a local Burger King — failed, too. Cascade’s managers still didn’t really understand what it took to help this type of employee, and were frustrated with the additional effort “Fred’s program” took. Leaders of other businesses thought it proved Keller was naive to think companies could address this type of social problem.

Amidst this internal and external criticism, Keller persevered. He, and then everyone in a managerial position at Cascade, underwent focused training on intergenerational poverty. He continued to be a cheerleader, encouraging managers to embrace the broader purpose they were serving. And he stepped further outside the box and convinced the state of Michigan to — for the first time — place a public social worker onsite at a for-profit business.

With those supports in place and a never-give-up, continuous learning culture infused from the top, the program slowly found solid footing. Managers pushed through the hard times — iterating toward new processes that facilitated employee-social worker interaction without being too cumbersome, overcoming perceptions that there were two sets of standards, refusing to bow to employee threats to leave, and eventually letting go some employees whose attitude got in the way of their performance — because they believed in what they were trying to do and in Fred Keller.

If Keller had been hung up on old-fashioned notions of how to lead, none of this would have happened. He would have blamed others, given up, and tried to focus others on the company’s success on traditional business metrics. He certainly wouldn’t have been willing to be vulnerable by acknowledging that initial attempts hadn’t worked or that he didn’t know how to solve a problem. He wouldn’t have gone first in asking for help, or repeatedly publicly apologized for mistakes along the way.

Most of us know that our “tough guy” views (and yes, sadly, they are highly masculine) of “leadership,” “bravery,” and “courage”—the very ones Fred Keller repeatedly refused to embody — are outdated, sub-optimal, and sometimes downright dangerous for the organizations where most types of work get done today. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we aren’t still driven by more intuitive, comic-book-hero notions.

This is an example of what evolutionary scholars call mismatch theory — the idea that something that was once useful for survival has not evolved quickly enough to match the current environment. While it may once have been useful to think of courageous leaders as those who were physically strongest and most aggressive (when daily survival did depend on not being killed by wild animals and being able to kill them instead), those traits are no longer the critical ones in most current settings.

In that case, it’s time to consciously reconsider – and then choose to act more frequently on – a new view of courageous leadership, which I also cover in my book Choosing Courage. Below are some starting points for a view that would be much better matched to today’s environment.

Courageous leaders display openness and humility

Pretending to be fearless no matter how good the reasons to be afraid, or acting like a know-it-all no matter how obvious it is that neither you nor anyone else has all the answers, isn’t impressive. It’s dangerous — for yourself and for those who depend on you.

As Aristotle noted over 2,000 years ago there’s clearly a difference between courage and foolhardiness. It’s foolish, not courageous, to lead a hiking group toward a bear that will obviously kill you all for no good reason. Likewise, leading people in your organization into all kinds of trouble because you couldn’t acknowledge you were afraid or needed others’ expertise isn’t courageous. It’s dangerous.

Here’s the thing: Once people know you’re competent, it makes you look stronger (not weak) when you admit “I don’t know” or say “Please help with this.” Think about the myriad difficulties faced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Did you admire and feel more drawn to your leader if she came online and acted as if nothing at all was troubling her? Or, instead, when she also admitted she was facing a series of work and life challenges unlike any in the past, but was committed to getting it through it together and becoming stronger as a group as a result?

The same is true with apologies. When a leader genuinely says, “I’m sorry, I screwed that up,” we see that person as more likeable and more trustworthy. We want to help make the situation better. In contrast, we don’t think someone is a good leader or a hero because they cover up mistakes with lies or omissions. We think they’re weak or a jerk, and we try to distance ourselves as quickly as possible.

Courageous leaders put principles first

Real leadership isn’t about winning a popularity contest. It’s about doing important work on behalf of others. And because there are always going to be differences of opinion and limited resources, you’re probably not going to make much progress on that important work if you can’t stand the thought of upsetting some people some of the time.

Michael Bloomberg clearly understood this during his tenure as Mayor of New York City. “If I finish my term in office… and have high approval ratings, then I wasted my last years in office,” he said. “You always want to press, and you want to tackle the issues that are unpopular, that nobody else will go after.” If things are going pretty well, said Bloomberg, you’re skiing on what for you is a bunny hill and it’s time to move to a steeper slope.”

Leadership as a popularity contest is, in short, a high-school or Hollywood view of leadership. Good leadership is about being trusted and respected for the defensibility of the decisions you make. It’s about courageous action to defend core principles, even when it costs something significant — potentially even one’s own popularity or standing in the short run.

Courageous leaders focus on making environments safer for others

In the vast majority of organizations, entreating people to routinely stick their necks out despite legitimate fear isn’t exactly a sign of strong leadership. Yet that’s what leaders who “encourage courage” are essentially doing. They’re implicitly saying that because they aren’t courageous enough to change the conditions in their organization to make it safer for people to be honest, try new things, or take other prudent risks, everyone else should be courageous enough to do them anyway.

Sadly, that’s not going to create an environment where people routinely do more of the things that are needed for individuals or organizations to learn, change, and thrive. Even superheroes know this doesn’t work. They don’t spend their time trying to make everyone else a superhero; they spend their time trying to create safer conditions where courageous action isn’t routinely called for.

The leaders we need today surround themselves with, and promote, people who help them learn by challenging rather than flattering them. They reward rather than punish those who try new things, even when they don’t go well. They change outdated systems that exclude diverse perspectives.

The leaders we need today demonstrate, rather than demand, courageous action. They choose, like Fred Keller did, to be vulnerable — even if their position, gender, race, or other status markers mean they don’t have to.

This content was originally published here.

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The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic starkly revealed fundamental deficiencies in health care delivery around the world, including endemic racial disparities, the fragility of supply chains, the vulnerability of staff, and the depth of uncertainty about both a novel disease and our own systems. It also sparked innovations in the delivery of care and a transient change in how our organizations are managed. Many credited their successful Covid-19 response to flatter hierarchies, easier access to senior leaders, a sharper focus on what really matters, quicker decision-making, rapid experimentation and tolerance of experimental failure, and less-experienced staff spontaneously stepping up to lead. As one academic observed, “In a small crisis power moves to the center,” but in a big one, “it moves to the periphery.”

However, once the first wave of crisis abated, staff returned to their usual routines and traditional management and governance models were reintroduced. Productivity targets replaced the compelling and unambiguous goals of saving lives and protecting staff. The status quo ante reasserted itself. New plans once again had to make their way through the byzantine bureaucracy of multi-layered approval processes. Yet, although the pandemic has evolved into a more chronic phase, both the uncertainty and the need for innovation persist. At the same time, we are now confronted with new problems, such as caring for patients with persisting post-Covid-19 symptoms (so-called “long Covid”) and addressing the backlog of untreated patients while maintaining a Covid-free environment.

Instead of returning to the old leadership and management style, we should continue to encourage the kind of innovation leadership that characterized the acute response. How can we preserve the recent energy and enthusiasm of distributed, team-based, rapid problem-solving — when many staff felt they were their best selves — and put it to work on the new problems that health systems are now facing? Most importantly, how can senior leaders free up staff creativity and support rapid learning while at the same ensuring the quality and safety we expect?

Insight Center

We served as senior leaders at two emergency field hospitals, both of which were established in convention centers at the beginning of the first surge: the NHS Nightingale London, which exclusively treated patients on a ventilator, and Boston Hope Hospital, a facility that treated post-acute patients not ready for discharge but no longer needing the services of a major hospital. During that period, we observed the following 10 senior leader behaviors that served to empower, encourage, and support leaders across professions as they stepped up to address the uncertainties they were facing. We believe these have ongoing applicability across care settings and should not be abandoned for historical and more conventional approaches.

1. Publicly acknowledge the uncertainty. In both field hospital settings, senior leaders openly acknowledged both the general uncertainty and their own. As Boston Hope was being set up, when nurses asked the hospital’s co-medical director such fundamental questions as which supplies to stock or how to induct new staff, she simply admitted that she didn’t know since she had never done this before.

Paradoxically, a leader does not diminish his or her status by asking for help; rather, subordinates respect her all the more. Such transparency takes the pressure off staff who might believe that they should know what to do, legitimizes investing valuable time and resources — often in short supply in a crisis — in the search for answers, and enables others to fill the ignorance space confidently.

2. Focus the search. Of course, simply admitting uncertainty without committing to learning serves no purpose. When resources are finite, problem-solving needs to be efficient and senior leaders need to focus the search on the most pressing uncertainties. By indicating priorities, senior leaders define what is critical and what can wait, assign a lower status to minor distractions, and tailor energy and resources to the urgent problems.

At the NHS Nightingale, the large multidisciplinary management meeting that took place late each day began by discussing the questions “What did we learn today?” and “What do we still not know?” and then went on to set the learning objectives for the next 24 hours. In contrast, smaller issues at many hospitals in the past have distracted attention and resources from a few major ones as clinicians’, educators’, researchers’, managers’, and regulators’ imperatives jockeyed for position so much so that the ultimate goal of better patient care sometimes became obfuscated.

3. Delegate authority. In both field hospitals, the crisis revealed the capability of junior staff who relished the opportunity and license to tackle difficult problems that the urgency created. Senior leaders deferred to expertise, not seniority, and authority for specific problem areas was delegated to whichever staff member had the best expertise, irrespective of his or her organizational status. Frontline staff were responsible for establishing new patient care routines.

There is more capability deep in their organizations than senior leaders often know or acknowledge. However, in delegating, it is important to simultaneously give a clear sense of accountability by clarifying expectations through setting goals and defining acceptable process. Newly empowered junior staff in the field hospitals were not given carte blanche. There were both clear boundaries limiting their discretion and a schedule for reporting progress: trust but verify.

4. Don’t delay making the difficult (and unpopular) decisions. Empowered independent teams that tackle important issues with energy and excitement is a popular management trope. But the reality is that occasional autocracy is necessary. Leaders certainly have to create an inclusive and empowered work environment where dissent, challenge, wild ideas, and lively debate are encouraged. But they must also shut down unproductive lines of inquiry quickly so as to preserve resources for more promising ones.

5. Shorten the feedback cycle. In many hospitals, multilayered decision processes and ambiguity about who has ultimate decision authority are common. Even when the answer is “no,” it can take an excruciatingly long time for it to be rendered. All too often the outcome of a meeting is another meeting and the outcome of an audit is another round of counting.

In contrast, both field hospitals emphasized frequent progress assessment through both data review and multi-disciplinary team meetings. A regular rhythm of staff huddles, service chief report-outs, and decision-making meetings examined the barriers to and efficacy of proposed solutions. These were complemented by a daily news cycle that focused on key data and meaningful issues and kept everyone alert to the priorities. Both field hospitals also insisted on data parsimony (measuring only what matters) and clear decision-making processes, and explicitly identified which authorities needed to ratify which decisions.

6. Legitimize reversal. A necessary complement of making decisions quickly is making it easy to change them. During the crisis, staff often expressed a legitimate concern that important decisions were being made very quickly. (Clinicians have a natural caution when considering new therapies, and consequently a preference for more data, more debate, and more consideration. This also tends to be applied to new organizational arrangements for delivering those therapies.) To address this caution, leaders at both Boston Hope and NHS Nightingale emphasized that a decision was only for now: It will be reviewed tomorrow, possibly even later today. The daily review at the NHS Nightingale of what worked and what did not, coupled with an occasional reversal, reinforced the idea that well-designed experiments that fail are a key source of learning.

7. Set expectations. Liberty to problem-solve by “trying it and seeing what happens” comes at a price. Freedom to experiment is constrained in a framework created by goal clarity, scientific process, and expectations of individual performance. As Gary Pisano notes in this HBR article, tolerance for failure is not the same as tolerance for incompetence or bad science. In fact, tolerating failure presumes individual competence and rigorous methodology. Senior leaders must therefore set expectations by distinguishing productive failures that lead to learning from unproductive ones in which no learning can be abstracted because of poor scientific practice. Those who are not up to the task must be either coached early and often or removed from that task (but not from the organization).

8. Include patients and their families. In the heat of a crisis response, it is easy to be singularly focused on solving the many technical problems. In health care, however, our raison d’ être is to solve problems with and for patients, and in most health care delivery systems, patients and their families are critical contributors to uncertainty reduction and problem-solving. Their perspectives and insights lead to solutions that would otherwise be missed.

In the best hospitals, engagement with patients and their families is much more than fashion or correctness: They are members of the team. Even at the NHS Nightingale, where patients were unconscious on arrival and for much of their stay (in contrast to Boston Hope), the Compassionate Care team worked with relatives to change patterns of care substantially. This team, made up of clinicians and chaplains, was charged with ensuring that ventilated patients were treated with dignity at all times and that care was responsive to families’ needs and preferences. It found ways to bring relatives, in full personal protective equipment (PPE), onto the ward toward the end of life, and when this wasn’t possible, a video-call via a tablet provided connection to a loved one.

9. Look after your people. Frontline staff have borne the brunt of the pandemic; they have been taking greater personal risk to care for their patients than in more normal times and have been suffering the consequences. For too long we have taken staff professionalism and commitment for granted, and even before the acute crisis evidence pointed to increasing burnout. Reducing the burden of work at the bedside and protecting the physical, mental, and spiritual safety of staff has become a pressing senior leader priority. All staff at NHS Nightingale were debriefed as they came out of the hot zone at the end of their shift and offered immediate counseling and access to subsequent psychological support. The Compassionate Care team, representing multiple faiths, also offered spiritual support to staff.

10. Be there. Finally, all the leadership behaviors we observed and associate with managing a coherent response to the uncertainty of the pandemic are predicated on one key leader behavior: being there. Senior leader visibility and availability is an essential precursor to all of the above.

The layout of the Nightingale and the Hope in the relatively contained physical spaces of convention centers made it easy for leaders to be visible and present. In other surroundings, this requires deliberate effort: It is not enough to say, “My door is always open.” Senior leaders must work to maximize their visibility and accessibility in work areas and be available to coach the staff to whom they have given authority. The Nightingale’s senior leaders abandoned their offices and worked in the main team room where they were easily interrupted: Neither personal assistant nor physical distance limited access.

The Covid-19 pandemic is far from over and the longstanding weaknesses in health systems that it has exposed remain. It is already clear that there will be no returning to business as usual. The world has moved on and new structures and approaches are unlikely to be dismantled, even in a future with Covid under control. More importantly, uncertainty, instability, and system fragility persist, and new and unexpected problems continue to arise. The leadership approach we describe above, honed during the most difficult and uncertain days in two field hospitals, remains applicable.

Although leaders are under constant pressure to manage health care as a routine production process in a stable environment, uncertainty and a need to learn are ever present. Arguably, the conventional leadership and management approaches the field hospital leaders replaced were never really up to the tasks of reliably adopting and implementing best practice innovations and learning and adjusting dynamically.

Leadership under uncertainty as practiced at both Boston Hope and NHS Nightingale London was not so much having a plan and giving orders as focusing on the target and clearing the way for others by creating conditions that enabled them to push back the frontier of our ignorance. Rather than allow ourselves to slip back into more traditional leadership styles, these behaviors should become a permanent part of each senior leader’s armamentarium across settings in more usual times.

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To borrow a flight analogy, they’ve steered the plane through an extended wave of turbulence—but there is every indication that many more dips and dives lie ahead. There is no apparent return to business or finance as usual. Market conditions are changing, and so must companies’ traditional day-to-day planning and budgeting activities—and quickly.

The CFO must regain control of and reimagine financial plans and processes that, many would argue, have been on autopilot in the lead-up to the COVID-19 crisis. A hands-on approach is needed not just to steady business operations in the near term but also to create conditions for the company’s value-creation efforts in the next normal—and to act on key scenarios and strategies generated by the plan-ahead team.

Drawing lessons from these unsettled months, the CFO must permanently build speed and flexibility into forecasting, planning, and resource-allocation processes and incorporate new tools and rapid decision-making protocols into the finance team’s day-to-day work. Taken together, these actions will comprise the CFO’s new operating manual for the finance function, with detailed instruction in six critical areas:

The CFO cannot steer this plane alone, of course. The finance leader will continue to need support from other C-suite executives and the board of directors, as well as an agile financial-planning and -analysis team (FP&A). The members of this crew must come together in new ways to steer analytical and strategic resources and capabilities to the priorities that matter.

Finance’s new flight plan

For most CFOs, the established flight plan is out the window; their standard routines for generating forecasts and scenarios, reviewing performance reports, and making critical resource-allocation decisions no longer make sense in a world where the global health and economic situation has changed so profoundly. These routines have largely been driven by inertia—simply doing things the way they’ve always been done. By contrast, the new flight plan must address the rapidly changing context, focusing on several best practices.

Set multiple flight paths

CFOs and finance teams are finding that annual scenario-based planning cycles are no longer responsive enough to the pace of change in business.

Most companies already use some form of scenario planning, but in the next normal, finance teams must embed them into existing core planning processes. The CFO and the finance team should continue to rely on the three or four independent scenarios built during the acute phase of the crisis that reflect short-term and long-term revenue and cost outlooks. Each scenario should have a perspective on the length of potential economic decline, the depth of the decline, and the ramp up to the next normal. Among them should be a momentum case—or a do-nothing scenario—that accounts for country-specific macroeconomic outcomes and sector-specific implications but excludes the execution of any strategic initiatives or the allocation of resources toward those initiatives. Having a varied range of scenarios can allow for more agility and flexibility in both the planning process itself and the company’s eventual responses as pandemic-related events unfold—if a U-shaped recovery turns into an L-shaped or “swoosh”-shaped recovery instead, for instance.

The CFO and finance team at a consumer-goods company, for instance, might identify two likely scenarios (alongside the momentum case): one in which a rapid rate of recovery allows it to gain greater market share given the strength of its e-commerce channel; and the other in which a more muted rate of recovery prevents the company from growing at a rate much more than that of the economy, with much less opportunity to gain market share and differentiate itself from competitors.

The finance team can then use one or two of senior leadership’s chosen scenarios as the anchor for an operating plan that will be used to “run” the business. The operating plan should have clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and triggers that reveal when the shift from one scenario to another is required. For instance, in an initial scenario, a retailer had initially planned for only a modest shift in sales to its online channel. Based on the increased click-throughs it was seeing, however, the company boosted its sales targets under what the company had deemed a higher-demand scenario.

Companies that are determining how to address changes in the market as a result of the novel coronavirus obviously cannot rely on financial plans that were generated at the beginning of the calendar year; the circumstances have changed dramatically since then. Even beyond the effects of the current pandemic, CFOs and finance teams are finding that annual scenario-based planning cycles are no longer responsive enough to the pace of change in business today.

Planning and review cycles at the peak of the crisis were sped up out of necessity; that pace must now become habit within the finance function. The CFO and finance team must continue the shift toward quarterly (or more often, if needed) planning and review cycles. The financial plan should continue to include detailed breakdowns of the ten or 15 highest-value business units, geographies, or strategic initiatives—for instance, those that account for 80 percent of the value of the business. It should also continue to incorporate multiple scenarios focused on the five or six potential pain points for the company in the wake of the pandemic—those geographies, products, and business units, for instance, where the company expects to see significant value leakage.

If the company isn’t already using dynamic forecasting, now is the time to start. Dynamic forecasts, common in retail and software settings where churn is rapid and data are plentiful, are updated in real-time, and the FP&A team adjusts inputs in a predictable way as conditions change. Most companies use them to manage the top line or to limit discretionary spending if forecasts are falling behind annual targets. In a world in which pandemic scenarios will drive business decisions for the foreseeable future, the CFO and finance team should take a similar approach—with the understanding that the rolling COVID-19 forecast must be modified at least twice each quarter, as various business scenarios unfold, and the company is managed to the forecast instead of the budget.

Some finance teams are even using advanced analytics to stress-test their forecasts and scenarios. For instance, one consumer-packaged-goods company is using a combination of precrisis data, postcrisis assumptions about business drivers, and consumer-behavior research to model demand for its product categories under various recession scenarios. One early finding showed that the one-year compound annual growth rate in the canned-goods category changed from –2.7 percent in a business-as-usual setting to 4.2 percent under a deep-recession scenario.

Adopt contingent resourcing

To avoid any sudden, steep dives in performance, the CFO and finance team should build more agility and flexibility into their resource-reallocation processes. They should consider implementing contingent resourcing, in which funding and resources kick in as certain scenario-based triggers do. For instance, during this crisis period, a business unit may receive a base minimum to spend that covers only fixed costs. Any additional funding would be contingent on increases in, say, demand, delivery rates, or customer-retention rates—the business unit would have to meet predetermined thresholds, set jointly by the finance team and the business. This stage-gate approach gives the CFO and senior management options: they can quickly put a hold on initiatives or cancel them altogether if the financial plan is off track or if indicators of success are not there.

Similarly, the CFO may want to take a more dynamic approach to resource reallocation—perhaps creating a separate pool of funds that is allocated throughout the year based on risk–return expectations across businesses and geographies. The CFO at one dental-services organization, for instance, has set aside funding for office renovations and renewed marketing to consumers; these discretionary dollars are held centrally and allocated based on which regions open up first and the levels of customer demand for dental hygiene after quarantine. The organization intends to make this a permanent approach to allocating discretionary funds.

The finance leader will need to ensure that performance-management dialogues reflect this change in budgeting strategy. Any reviews should be based on real-world data, and conversations should be focused on costs and tradeoffs rather than on budgets and variances. Make no mistake, building flexibility into resource allocation can introduce challenges: some investments may get delayed; some companies may end up paying more for indirect spending contracts with fewer up-front commitments and uncertain future allocations. On balance, however, having more flexibility is better than not: it allows companies to manage to the actual outcomes of various business scenarios rather than being forced to adhere to a target that no longer makes sense.

Finance’s new navigation system

The CFO will need to refine various elements of the finance function’s navigation system—that is, the tools, KPIs, and protocols that will support changes in forecasting, planning, and budgeting. By institutionalizing the best practices adopted during the crisis, the CFO and finance team can help ensure the company’s success in the next normal.

Keep eyes on the control panel—always

Companies today are likely in one of three categories: still in a severe liquidity crunch, experiencing some decline in performance but still airborne, or experiencing some tailwinds from increased consumption and demand. The CFO must be ever cognizant of where the company is on its journey and, with help from the FP&A team, closely monitor and manage resource deployment and consumption accordingly.

Most organizations, at this point in the life cycle of the pandemic, have likely set up spending control towers, cash war rooms, dashboards, and nerve centers—all of which should be maintained to help fuel the recovery. The CFO and FP&A team can use these tools to keep constant watch on capital investments and may even want to revisit assumptions about various business cases as conditions evolve. The finance team in one industrial company has established new stage gates for capital investments across all businesses. The new hurdle rate is linked to the percentage of top-line- revenue attainment over the next two years. The team has created a user-friendly finance dashboard where everyone can see (in the form of dynamic graphs and charts) the progress of the top three initiatives they are managing. Business leaders’ performance evaluations are explicitly linked to the completion of these initiatives versus top-line goals alone.

Even after the company’s recovery strategy has been established, the CFO will need to ensure that it remains constant or, if it needs to change, that all are in agreement on a new direction. That is why the finance function’s new navigation system should include a robust global positioning mechanism—namely, frequent (weekly or monthly), detailed check-ins with senior management about strategic direction and the outcomes from the company’s biggest moves and initiatives.

These performance-related dialogues, powered by the FP&A team, should focus on the top five to ten initiatives and the real-time data being generated about them—for instance, the status and utilization of crucial production plants or the order-intake and -delivery rates from an e-commerce platform. A laser focus on the top initiatives and triggers associated with them can give senior-management teams visibility into how resources are being deployed currently, how conditions are changing (in terms of, say, an increase in customer demand for certain types of products), and how budgets may need to be altered over the longer term. Traditional reviews of aggregated financials and analyses of budgets versus variances can provide some indication of the extent of the financial impact from the pandemic. But they probably will not accurately reflect the impact of the actions the company has taken in response to the crisis.

Digital tools like robotic process automation (RPA), advanced analytics, and machine learning can further enable these dialogues. One forward-thinking electronics company has consolidated its analytics resources within the FP&A team and created a digital-boardroom capability that allows for deeper, more engaged performance dialogues and quicker decision making.

Even after a company’s recovery strategy has been established, the CFO will need to ensure that it remains constant.

Even without all the digital bells and whistles, some FP&A teams are enabling deeper discussions and quicker decision making simply by organizing themselves differently. For instance, a consumer-goods company has created dedicated subteams (with no more than seven members) within the FP&A team that support analyses and decision making on critical topics, such as customer response, vendor management, and product pricing. Some FP&A teams are scheduling daily, weekly, or monthly stand-up meetings to identify urgent and immediate tasks and match them to team members’ schedules (who is free?) and expertise (who can lead, who can support, and who can teach?).

Be prepared

Most companies have likely already undertaken some version of a financial stress test that indicates their ability to survive this or any other crisis. That’s only the first step, however. The companies that are fortunate enough (liquid enough) to begin thinking about recovery and that are considering which bold bets to place will need a reliable financial fact base to draw from. It is incumbent upon the CFO and the finance team to continually refine their perspective on liquidity and cash flows, taking into account industry-specific factors and any changes in senior management’s and the board’s appetite for risk. The CFO will need to continually monitor the fuel gauge—that is, the driver-based models they have built, from revenue to cash. Armed with this information, the CFO can evaluate liquidity and solvency risks, determine how much fuel is left in the tank to allocate to new initiatives or prop up existing ones, and evaluate how many more miles are left to cover before the company begins to emerge from dark clouds.

Understanding the business’s safety profile also means understanding what to do if the worst-case scenarios unfold and a “controlled crash” is in order: What moves make the most sense, and when do we make them? These will be critical questions for the CFO to consider in the next normal and points on which the finance leader will need to gain clear commitment from the management team. Most organizations have run simulations and constructed what-if options. Others have built decision frameworks with contingencies that note when, say, the divestment (or acquisition) of assets would most be in order. Taking it a step further, the CFO, often viewed across the C-suite as an objective arbiter, should be working with the plan-ahead team to establish a set of plan-B and even plan-C actions so the business can act as various business scenarios take hold.

Once all is stable, the CFO and senior management should conduct a thorough and honest review of how finance teams, systems, and processes carried the business through the storm—not just to prepare for the next rocky flight but also to ensure that the company has the new operating manual it needs to thrive in the next normal.

The post No longer on autopilot: Lessons for CFOs from COVID-19 appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

A company has only one peerless role: chief executive officer. It’s the most powerful and sought-after title in business, more exciting, rewarding, and influential than any other. What the CEO controls—the company’s biggest moves—accounts for 45 percent of a company’s performance. ¹ 1. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Despite the luster of the role, serving as a CEO can be all-consuming, lonely, and stressful. Just three in five newly appointed CEOs live up to performance expectations in their first 18 months on the job. ² 2. Eben Harrell, “Succession planning: What the research says,” Harvard Business Review, December 2016, pp. 70–74, hbr.org. The high standards and broad expectations of directors, shareholders, customers, and employees create an environment of relentless scrutiny in which one move can dramatically make or derail an accomplished career.

For all the scrutiny of the CEO’s role, though, little is solidly understood about what CEOs really do to excel. McKinsey’s longtime leader, Marvin Bower, considered the CEO’s job so specialized that he felt executives could prepare for the post only by holding it. Many of the CEOs we’ve worked with have expressed similar views. In their experience, even asking other CEOs how to approach the job doesn’t help, because suggestions vary greatly once they go beyond high-level advice such as “set the strategy,” “shape the culture,” and “get the right team.” Perhaps that’s not surprising—industry contexts differ, as do leadership preferences—but it illustrates that fellow CEOs don’t necessarily make reliable guides.

To show which mindsets and practices are proven to make CEOs most effective, we studied performance data on thousands of CEOs and revisited our firsthand experience helping CEOs enhance their leadership approaches.

Nor has academic and other research on the CEO’s role done much to illuminate how CEOs think and what they do to excel. For example, recent studies that detail how CEOs spend their time don’t show the difference between a good use of time and a bad one. Academic research also demonstrates that traits such as drive, resilience, and risk tolerance make CEOs more successful. This insight is helpful during a search for a new CEO, but it’s hardly one that sitting CEOs can use to improve their performance. Other research has tended to produce such findings as the observation that leaders are effective in some situations and ineffective in others—interesting, but less than instructive.

With this article, we set out to show which mindsets and practices are proven to make CEOs most effective. It is the fruit of a long-running effort to study performance data on thousands of CEOs, revisit our firsthand experience helping CEOs enhance their leadership approaches, and extract a set of empirical, broadly applicable insights on how excellent CEOs think and act. We also offer a self-assessment guide to help CEOs (and CEO watchers, such as boards of directors) determine how closely they adhere to the mindsets and practices that are closely associated with superior CEO performance. Our hope is that all CEOs, new or long-tenured, can use these tools to better apply their scarce time and energy.

A model for CEO excellence

To answer the question, “What are the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs?,” we started with the six main elements of the CEO’s job—elements touched on in virtually all literature about the role: setting the strategy, aligning the organization, leading the top team, working with the board, being the face of the company to external stakeholders, and managing one’s own time and energy. We then broke those down into 18 specific responsibilities that fall exclusively to the CEO. For example, setting a corporate strategy requires that the CEO make the final call on an overall vision, a set of strategic moves, and the allocation of capital.

Focusing on those 18 responsibilities, we conducted extensive research to determine what mindsets and practices distinguish excellent CEOs. We mined our proprietary database on CEO performance, which is the largest of its kind, containing 25 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries. We also drew on what we’ve learned from helping hundreds of CEOs to excel, from preparing for the job and transitioning into it, through navigating difficult decisions and moments of truth, to handing their responsibilities over to a successor.

The result of these efforts is a model for CEO excellence, which prescribes mindsets and practices that are especially likely to help CEOs succeed at their particular duties (Exhibit 1). What follows is a detailed look at these mindsets and practices. Although our findings are most relevant to CEOs of large public companies, owing to our research base, many will also apply to CEOs of other bodies, including private companies, public-sector organizations, and not-for-profit institutions.

Corporate strategy: Focus on beating the odds

It’s incumbent on the leader to set the direction for the company—to have a plan in the face of uncertainty. One way that CEOs try to reduce strategic uncertainty is to focus on options with the firmest business cases. Research shows, however, that this approach delivers another sort of outcome: the dreaded “hockey stick” effect, consisting of a projected dip in next year’s budget, followed by a promise of success, which never occurs. A more realistic approach recognizes that 10 percent of companies create 90 percent of the total economic profit (profit after subtracting the cost of capital), and that only one in 12 companies moves from being an average performer to a top-quintile performer over a ten-year period. ³ 3. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. The odds of making the jump from average to outstanding might be long, but CEOs can greatly increase the probability of beating those odds by adhering to these practices:

Vision: Reframe what winning means. The CEO is the ultimate decision maker when it comes to setting a company’s vision (where do we want to be in five, ten, or 15 years?). Good CEOs do this by considering their mandate and expectations (from the board, investors, employees, and other stakeholders), the relative strengths and purpose of their company, a clear understanding of what enables the business to generate value, opportunities and trends in the marketplace, and their personal aspirations and values. The best go one step further and reframe the reference point for success. For example, instead of a manufacturer aspiring to be number one in the industry, the CEO can broaden the objective to be in the top quartile among all industrials. Such a reframing acknowledges that companies compete for talent, capital, and influence on a bigger stage than their industry. It casts key performance measures such as margin, cash flow, and organizational health in a different light, thereby cutting through the biases and social dynamics that can lead to complacency.

Strategy: Make bold moves early. According to McKinsey research, five bold strategic moves best correlate with success: resource reallocation; programmatic mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures; capital expenditure; productivity improvements; and differentiation improvements (the latter three measured relative to a company’s industry). To move “boldly” is to shift at least 30 percent more than the industry median. Making one or two bold moves more than doubles the likelihood of rising from the middle quintiles of economic profit to the top quintile, and making three or more bold moves makes such a rise six times more likely. ⁴ 4. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Furthermore, CEOs who make these moves earlier in their tenure outperform those who move later, and those who do so multiple times in their tenure avoid an otherwise common decline in performance. Not surprisingly, data also show that externally hired CEOs are more likely to move with boldness and speed than those promoted from within an organization. CEOs who are promoted from internal roles should explicitly ask and answer the question, “What would an outsider do?” as they determine their strategic moves.

Resource allocation: Stay active. Resource reallocation isn’t just a bold strategic move on its own; it’s also an essential enabler of the other strategic moves. Companies that reallocate more than 50 percent of their capital expenditures among business units over ten years create 50 percent more value than companies that reallocate more slowly. ⁵ 5. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. The benefit of this approach might seem obvious, yet a third of companies reallocate a mere 1 percent of their capital from year to year. Furthermore, research using our CEO database found that the top decile of high performing CEOs are 35 percent more likely to dynamically reallocate capital than average performers. To ensure that resources are swiftly reallocated to where they will deliver the most value rather than spread thinly across businesses and operations, excellent CEOs institute an ongoing (not annual) stage-gate process. Such a process takes a granular view, makes comparisons using quantitative metrics, prompts when to stop funding and when to continue it, and is backed by the CEO’s personal resolve to continually optimize the company’s allocation of resources.

Organizational alignment: Manage performance and health with equal rigor

Ask successful investors what they look for in portfolio companies, and many will tell you they’d rather put money on an average strategy in the hands of great talent than on a great strategy in the hands of average talent. The best CEOs put equal rigor and discipline into achieving greatness on both strategy and talent. And when it comes to putting great talent in place, almost half of senior leaders say that their biggest regret is taking too long to move lesser performers out of important roles, or out of the organization altogether. The reasons for this are both practical (good leaders provide the CEO with important leverage) and symbolic (CEOs who tolerate poor performance or bad behavior diminish their own influence). Many CEOs also say they regret leaving adequate performers in key positions and failing to realize the full potential of their roles. The best CEOs think systematically about their people: which roles they play, what they can achieve, and how the company should operate to increase people’s impact.

CEOs who insist on rigorously measuring and managing all cultural elements that drive performance more than double the odds that their strategies will be executed. And over the long term, they deliver triple the total return to shareholders that other companies deliver.

Talent: Match talent to value. Many CEOs have confided to us that they worry about asking the same few overstretched “usual suspects” to take extra assignments because they can’t trust the people who would otherwise perform them. The best CEOs take a methodical approach to matching talent with roles that create the most value. A crucial first step is discovering which roles matter most. Careful analysis typically produces findings that surprise even the savviest CEOs. Of the 50 most value-creating roles in any given organization, only 10 percent normally report to the CEO directly. Sixty percent are two levels below, and 10 percent sit farther down. Most surprising of all is that the remaining 10 percent are roles that don’t even exist. ⁶ 6. Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger, Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019. Once these roles are identified, the CEO can work with other executives to see that these roles are managed with increased rigor and are occupied by the right people. Robust talent pipelines can also be developed so that important roles remain well staffed. The best CEOs ensure that their own role is included so that the board has viable, well-prepared internal candidates to consider for succession.

Culture: Go beyond employee engagement. Vendors of workforce surveys like to say that employee engagement is the best measure of “soft stuff.” It’s not. While employee engagement indeed correlates with financial performance, a typical engagement survey covers less than 20 percent of the organizational-health elements that are proven to correlate with value creation. A proper assessment of organizational health takes in everything from alignment on direction and quality of execution to the ability to learn and adapt. In the largest research effort of its kind, McKinsey found that CEOs who insist on rigorously measuring and managing all cultural elements that drive performance more than double the odds that their strategies will be executed. And over the long term, they deliver triple the total return to shareholders that other companies deliver. ⁷ 7. Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger, Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019. Doing this well involves thoughtful approaches to role modeling, storytelling, aligning of formal reinforcements (such as incentives), and investing in skill building.

Organizational design: Combine speed with stability. “Agility” is one of most widely used and misunderstood management buzzwords of the past decade. For many leaders, agility evokes speed in decision making and execution, as opposed to the deliberate pace dictated by the stable, standardized routines of large organizations. The facts show that agility requires no such trade-off: on the contrary, companies that are both fast and stable are nearly three times more likely to rank in the top quartile of organizational health than companies that are fast but lack stable operating disciplines. ⁸ 8. Michael Bazigos, Aaron De Smet, and Chris Gagnon, “Why agility pays,” McKinsey Quarterly, December 2015. Excellent CEOs increase their companies’ agility by determining which features of their organizational design will be stable and unchanging (such features might include a primary axis of organization, a few signature processes, and shared values) and by creating dynamic elements that adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities (such elements might include temporary performance cells, flow-to-work staffing models, and minimum-viable-product iterations). A services company CEO, for example, better enabled her “one company” strategy by shifting the profit-and-loss axis from products to geographies, reorganizing the back office according to an agile flow-to-work model, and creating a new agile product development group.

Excellent CEOs increase their companies’ agility by determining which features of their organization design will be stable and unchanging and by creating dynamic elements that adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

Team and processes: Put dynamics ahead of mechanics

The dynamics of a top team can strongly influence a company’s success. Yet more than half of senior executives report that the top team is underperforming. The CEO is often out of touch with this reality: on average, less than one-third of CEOs report problems with their teams. ⁹ 9. Fred Adair and Richard M. Rosen, “CEOs misperceive top teams’ performance,” Harvard Business Review, September 2007, hbr.org. The efficiency and effectiveness of a company’s core management processes also can change a company’s fortunes, yet less than a third of employees report that their company’s management processes support the achievement of business objectives. ¹⁰ 10. Scott Keller and Mary Meaney, Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths, New York, NY: Bloomsbury Business, 2017. Why the disconnect? The problem is not an intellectual one, but a social one: individual and institutional biases and clunky group dynamics can diminish with the effectiveness of the team and its processes. Excellent CEOs acknowledge this reality and counteract it in several ways.

Teamwork: Show resolve. The best CEOs take special care to ensure their management team performs strongly as a unit. The reward for doing so is real: top teams that work together toward a common vision are 1.9 times more likely to deliver above-median financial performance. ¹¹ 11. Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. In practice, CEOs swiftly adjust the team’s composition (size, diversity, and capability), which can involve hard calls on removing likeable low performers and disagreeable high performers and on elevating people with high potential. CEOs should also calibrate individual relationships, maintaining the distance to be objective but enough closeness to gain trust and loyalty. Further, they commit to making the team productive by regularly taking stock of and improving its operating rhythm, meeting protocols, interaction quality, and dynamics. They also firmly prohibit members from putting their interests ahead of the company’s needs, holding discussions that consist of “theater” rather than “substance,” “having the meeting outside the room,” backsliding on decisions, or showing disrespect for one another.

Top teams that work together toward a common vision are 1.9 times more likely to deliver above-median financial performance.

Decision making: Defend against biases. Cognitive and organizational biases worsen everyone’s judgment. Such biases contribute to many common performance shortfalls, such as the significant cost overruns that affect 90 percent of capital projects. ¹² 12. Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. We also know that biases cannot be unlearned. Even behavioral economist Dan Ariely, one of the foremost authorities on cognitive biases, admits, “I was just as bad myself at making decisions as everyone else I write about.” ¹³ 13. “Dan Ariely on irrationality in the workplace,” February 2011. Nevertheless, CEOs sometimes feel as though they’re immune to bias (after all, they might ask, hasn’t good judgment gotten them where they are?). Excellent CEOs endeavor to minimize the effect of biases by instituting such processes as preemptively solving for failure modes (premortems), formally appointing a contrarian (red team), disregarding past information (clean sheet), and taking plan A off the table (vanishing options). ¹⁴ 14. For more ideas about how to address common cognitive and organizational biases, see the McKinsey Quarterly Bias Busters series. They also ensure they have a diverse team, which has been shown to improve decision-making quality. ¹⁵ 15. See Sheen S. Levine and David Stark, “Diversity makes you brighter,” New York Times, December 9, 2015, nytimes.com; “Better decisions through diversity,” Kellogg Insight, October 1, 2010, insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu; and Bill Snyder, “Deborah Gruenfeld: Diverse teams produce better decisions,” Insights by Stanford Business, April 1, 2004, gsb.stanford.edu.

Management processes: Ensure coherence. The CEO typically delegates management processes to other executives: the CFO looks after budgeting and sometimes strategy as well; the chief human resources officer (CHRO) looks after talent management and workforce planning; the CIO looks after technology investment; and so on. However, sensible individual processes can cohere into a clumsy system that results in more confusion and wasted effort than accountability and value. Managers pushed to agree to stretch targets find at year’s end that they are being held accountable for full delivery; sandbagging ensues. Long-term strategies are set, yet talent promotions are based on near-term results. Urgent product ideas are approved, only to get bogged down in long technology queues and one-size-fits-all risk-management processes. Excellent CEOs don’t allow one management process to foil another. They require executives to coordinate their decision making and resource assignments to ensure that management processes reinforce priorities and work together to propel execution and continual refinement of the strategy.

Board engagement: Help directors help the business

The board’s mission on behalf of shareholders is to oversee and guide management’s efforts to create long-term value. Research shows that sound corporate governance practices are linked with better performance, including higher market valuations. ¹⁶ 16. Inessa Love, “Corporate governance and performance around the world: What we know and what we don’t,” World Bank Research Observer, February 2011, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 42–70, elibrary.worldbank.org. An effective board can also repel activist investors. Despite these upsides, many CEOs regard their companies’ boards in the way one CEO described his company’s board to us: as a “necessary evil.” The chairperson leads the board, and even in cases where that role is held by the CEO (as is common in North American companies), the board’s independence is essential. Nevertheless, excellent CEOs can take useful steps to boost the quality of the board’s advice to management such as the following:

Effectiveness: Promote a forward-looking agenda. To get the most from their time with the board, excellent CEOs collaborate with board chairs on developing a forward-looking board agenda. Such an agenda calls for the board to go beyond its traditional fiduciary responsibilities (legal, regulatory, audit, compliance, risk, and performance reporting) and provide input on a broad range of topics, such as strategy, M&A, technology, culture, talent, resilience, and external communications. Board members’ outside views on these topics can help management without compromising executives’ authority. In addition, the CEO should make sure that the board and management take up related activities, such as reviewing talent and refreshing the strategy, at the same times of year.

Excellent CEOs promote a board agenda that goes beyond traditional responsibilities to cover a broad range of topics, such as strategy, technology, talent, and resilience.

Relationships: Think beyond the meeting. Excellent CEOs develop and maintain a strong relationship with the chair (or lead independent director) and hold purposeful meetings with individual board members. Establishing good relationships and a tone of transparency early on enables the CEO to build trust and to clearly delineate responsibilities between management and the board. Building relationships with individual board members positions the CEO to benefit from their perspectives and abilities, and privately discuss topics that may be difficult for the larger group to address. Excellent CEOs also promote connections and collaboration between the board and top executives, which keeps the board informed about the business and engaged in supporting its priorities.

Capabilities: Seek balance and development. Excellent CEOs also help their boards help the business by providing input on the board’s composition. For example, the CEO might suggest that certain types of expertise or experience—be they related to industries, functions, geographies, growth phases, or demographics—would enable the board to better assess and support the business. CEOs can also help improve the board’s effectiveness by ensuring that new members complete a thorough onboarding program and creating opportunities for the board to learn about topics like changing technology, emerging risks, rising competitors, and shifting macroeconomic scenarios. First-time board members usually benefit from a structured introduction to what it means to be an effective board member.

External stakeholders: Center on the long-term ‘Why?’

Every CEO should know their company’s mission and values. Good CEOs know that these statements need to amount to more than slogans for office posters and use them to influence decision making and day-to-day behaviors. Excellent CEOs go further: they reinforce and act on a corporate purpose (the “Why?”) that involves not just making money but also benefiting society. This posture, along with a granular approach to prioritizing stakeholder interactions and a sound corporate resilience plan, lets CEOs minimize the company’s exposure to customer- and stakeholder-related risks, and capitalize on new opportunities.

Good CEOs ensure that their companies have an effective risk operating model, governance structure, and risk culture. Great CEOs and their boards also anticipate major shocks, macroeconomic events, and other potential crises.

Social purpose: Look at the big picture. Many corporate social responsibility programs are little more than public-relations exercises: collections of charitable initiatives that generate good feelings but have minimal lasting influence on society’s well-being. Excellent CEOs spend time thinking about, articulating, and championing the purpose of their company as it relates to the big-picture impact of day-to-day business practices. They push for meaningful efforts to create jobs, abide by ethical labor practices, improve customers’ lives, and lessen the environmental harm caused by operations. Visible results matter to stakeholders; for example, 87 percent of customers say that they will purchase from companies that support issues they care about, 94 percent of millennials say that they want to use their skills to benefit a cause, and sustainable investing has grown 18-fold since 1995. ¹⁷ 17. 2017 Cone Communications CSR study, Cone Communications, May 2017, conecomm.com; Eddie Lou, “Why millennials want more than just work: The importance of your ‘double bottom line,’” Forbes, June 9, 2017, forbes.com; 2018 report on US sustainable, responsible and impact investing trends, US SIF, October 31, 2018, ussif.org. And not demonstrating such results isn’t an option—wise CEOs know they will be held to account for fulfilling their promises.

Interactions: Prioritize and shape. Excellent CEOs systematically prioritize, proactively schedule, and use interactions with their companies’ important external stakeholders to motivate action. CEOs of B2B companies typically focus on their highest-value and largest potential customers. CEOs of B2C companies often like to make unannounced visits to stores and other frontline operations to better understand the customer experience that the business provides. They also spend time with their companies’ 15 or 20 most important “intrinsic” investors (those who are most knowledgeable and engaged) and assign the rest to the CFO and the investor-relations department. Other stakeholder groups (such as regulators, politicians, advocacy groups, and community organizations) also will require a portion of the CEO’s time. The efficacy of these interactions isn’t left to chance. Excellent CEOs know what they want to accomplish, prepare well, communicate audience-tailored messages (always centered on their company’s “Why?”), listen intently, and seek win–win solutions where possible.

Moments of truth: Build resilience ahead of a crisis. Good CEOs ensure that their companies have an effective risk operating model, governance structure, and risk culture. Great CEOs and their boards also anticipate major shocks, macroeconomic events, and other potential crises. There’s good reason to do this: headlines that carried the word “crisis” alongside the names of 100 top companies appeared 80 percent more often from 2010 to 2017 than they did in the previous decade. Excellent CEOs recognize that most crises follow predictable patterns even though each one feels unique. With that in mind, they prepare a crisis-response playbook that sets out leadership roles, war-room configuration, resilience tests, action plans, and communications approaches. They seek opportunities to go on the offensive, to the extent they can. ¹⁸ 18. For more, see Martin Hirt, Kevin Laczkowski, and Mihir Mysore, “Bubbles pop, downturns stop,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2019. And they know that stakeholders’ anger will likely center on them, in ways that can affect their family and friends, and accordingly develop a personal resilience plan.

Personal time and energy: Do what only you can do

CEOs can easily become overwhelmed, which is understandable given the sheer breadth of their role. As the dean of Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria, has said, “CEOs are accountable for all the work of their organizations. Their life is endless meetings and a barrage of email.” ¹⁹ 19. Stephanie Vozza, “This is how successful CEOs spend their time,” Fast Company, August 23, 2018, fastcompany.com. Plenty of research also suggests that many CEOs are beset by loneliness, frustration, disappointment, irritation, and exhaustion. While no CEO can escape these emotions completely, excellent CEOs know that they will serve the company better by taking command of their well-being in these ways:

Office: Manage time and energy. The most successful CEOs quickly establish an office (often including one or two highly skilled executive assistants and a chief of staff) that makes their priorities explicit and helps them spend their scarce time doing work that only CEOs can do. For example, a CEO’s office should carefully plot all aspects of the CEO’s meetings: agenda, attendees, preparation (including “alone time” for the CEO to reflect and get ready), logistics, expected outcomes, and follow-up. CEOs should limit their involvement in tasks that can be dealt with by others and reserve time to deal with unexpected developments. The best CEOs also teach their office staffs to help manage the CEO’s energy as thoughtfully as their time, sequencing activities to prevent “energy troughs” and scheduling intervals for recovery practices (for example, time with family and friends, exercise, reading, and spirituality). Doing so ensures that CEOs set a pace they can sustain for a marathon-length effort, rather than burn out by sprinting over and over.

Leadership model: Choose authenticity. Exemplary CEOs combine the reality of what they ought to do in the role with who they are as human beings. They deliberately choose how to behave in the role, based on such questions as: What legacy do I want to leave? What do I want others to say about me as a leader? What do I stand for? What won’t I tolerate? CEOs answer these questions according to their strengths and motivations, as well as the company’s needs, and create mechanisms to track how they are doing. Further, by expressing these intentions as part of the rationale for their decisions and actions, CEOs can minimize the risk of unintended interpretations being amplified in unhelpful ways. The importance of this can’t be underestimated. As a consumer goods CEO told us, “You are speaking through an extraordinary amplification system. The slightest thing you do or say is picked up on by everyone in the system and, by and large, acted on.”

Perspective: Guard against hubris. It’s easy for CEOs to become overconfident. While they must push ahead in spite of naysayers at times, they can also tune out critics once they learn to trust their own instincts. Their conviction can increase because subordinates tend to say only what bosses want to hear. Before long, CEOs forget how to say “I don’t know,” cease asking for help or feedback, and dismiss all criticism. Excellent CEOs form a small group of trusted colleagues to provide discreet, unfiltered advice—including the kind that hasn’t been asked for but is important to hear. They also stay in touch with how the work really gets done in the organization by getting out of boardrooms, conference centers, and corporate jets to spend time with rank-and-file employees. This is not only grounding for the CEO, but also motivating for all involved. Finally, excellent CEOs keep their role in perspective by reminding themselves it is temporary and does not define or limit their self-worth and importance in the world. Whereas Steve Jobs advised college graduates, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” we urge CEOs to “Stay hungry, stay humble.”

Excellent CEOs form a small group of trusted colleagues to provide discreet, unfiltered advice—including the kind that hasn’t been asked for but is important to hear.

Gauging CEO excellence

CEOs have many ways to gauge how well they are doing in their role. A criterion used in virtually every “best CEO” ranking for public companies is how much value a CEO’s company creates. Value creation makes it possible to sustain the pursuit of other goals. But financial measures of CEO excellence have a serious shortcoming: they are heavily influenced by factors outside the CEO’s control. For example, the “endowment” a CEO inherits (for example, the company’s revenue base, debt levels, and past investments in R&D) accounts for 30 percent of what enables a company to move from average to the top quintile of economic profit. Industry and geographic trends account for 25 percent. ²⁰ 20. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.

The remaining 45 percent that the CEO can control is what we’ve endeavored to illuminate in our model of CEO excellence. The gap between excellent CEOs and lesser ones is wide, as many directors know firsthand (analysis of our CEO database shows that 30 percent of top-performing CEOs take over from bottom-performing ones and 23 percent of bottom-performing CEOs take over from top performers). One thing to keep in mind: we are not suggesting that an excellent CEO is one who excels at every one of their 18 unique responsibilities. In fact, we’ve yet to meet one who does. Rather, we’ve observed that the best CEOs are ordinarily excellent in a few areas, able in all others, and challenged in none. The more areas a CEO excels in, the better their results tend to be.

What’s more, the emphasis that CEOs should place on individual responsibilities will change over time. Time spent setting the corporate strategy early in a CEO’s tenure will normally give way to fine-tuning and driving execution, and then to highlighting tangible results that build credibility with stakeholders. At some point, however, it becomes important to look at the company with fresh eyes and to decide on the next set of bold moves, realign the organization, refresh the team and processes, and so on.

To help CEOs figure out where they stand with respect to the mindsets and practices described in this article, we developed the assessment guide in Exhibit 2.

About the author(s)

Carolyn Dewar is a senior partner in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, Martin Hirt is a senior partner in the Greater China office, and Scott Keller is a senior partner in the Southern California office.

The authors wish to thank Michael Birshan, Naina Dhingra, Lauren Keane, Frithjof Lund, Vik Malhotra, Thomas Meakin, Monica Murarka, Volkan Oktem, Sven Smit, Nina Spielmann, and Kurt Strovink for their contributions to this article.

The post Mindsets and practices of the best CEOs appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Over the past nearly 60 years, I have engaged with many leaders of governments, companies, and other organizations, and I have observed how our societies have developed and changed. I am happy to share some of my observations in case others may benefit from what I have learned.

Leaders, whatever field they work in, have a strong impact on people’s lives and on how the world develops. We should remember that we are visitors on this planet. We are here for 90 or 100 years at the most. During this time, we should work to leave the world a better place.

What might a better world look like? I believe the answer is straightforward: A better world is one where people are happier. Why? Because all human beings want to be happy, and no one wants to suffer. Our desire for happiness is something we all have in common.

But today, the world seems to be facing an emotional crisis. Rates of stress, anxiety, and depression are higher than ever. The gap between rich and poor and between CEOs and employees is at a historic high. And the focus on turning a profit often overrules a commitment to people, the environment, or society.

I consider our tendency to see each other in terms of “us” and “them” as stemming from ignorance of our interdependence. As participants in the same global economy, we depend on each other, while changes in the climate and the global environment affect us all. What’s more, as human beings, we are physically, mentally, and emotionally the same.

Look at bees. They have no constitution, police, or moral training, but they work together in order to survive. Though they may occasionally squabble, the colony survives on the basis of cooperation. Human beings, on the other hand, have constitutions, complex legal systems, and police forces; we have remarkable intelligence and a great capacity for love and affection. Yet, despite our many extraordinary qualities, we seem less able to cooperate.

In organizations, people work closely together every day. But despite working together, many feel lonely and stressed. Even though we are social animals, there is a lack of responsibility toward each other. We need to ask ourselves what’s going wrong.

I believe that our strong focus on material development and accumulating wealth has led us to neglect our basic human need for kindness and care. Reinstating a commitment to the oneness of humanity and altruism toward our brothers and sisters is fundamental for societies and organizations and their individuals to thrive in the long run. Every one of us has a responsibility to make this happen.

What can leaders do?

Be mindful

Cultivate peace of mind. As human beings, we have a remarkable intelligence that allows us to analyze and plan for the future. We have language that enables us to communicate what we have understood to others. Since destructive emotions like anger and attachment cloud our ability to use our intelligence clearly, we need to tackle them.

Fear and anxiety easily give way to anger and violence. The opposite of fear is trust, which, related to warmheartedness, boosts our self-confidence. Compassion also reduces fear, reflecting as it does a concern for others’ well-being. This, not money and power, is what really attracts friends. When we’re under the sway of anger or attachment, we’re limited in our ability to take a full and realistic view of the situation. When the mind is compassionate, it is calm and we’re able to use our sense of reason practically, realistically, and with determination.

Be selfless

We are naturally driven by self-interest; it’s necessary to survive. But we need wise self-interest that is generous and cooperative, taking others’ interests into account. Cooperation comes from friendship, friendship comes from trust, and trust comes from kindheartedness. Once you have a genuine sense of concern for others, there’s no room for cheating, bullying, or exploitation; instead, you can be honest, truthful, and transparent in your conduct.

Be compassionate

The ultimate source of a happy life is warmheartedness. Even animals display some sense of compassion. When it comes to human beings, compassion can be combined with intelligence. Through the application of reason, compassion can be extended to all 7 billion human beings. Destructive emotions are related to ignorance, while compassion is a constructive emotion related to intelligence. Consequently, it can be taught and learned.

The source of a happy life is within us. Troublemakers in many parts of the world are often quite well-educated, so it is not just education that we need. What we need is to pay attention to inner values.

The distinction between violence and nonviolence lies less in the nature of a particular action and more in the motivation behind the action. Actions motivated by anger and greed tend to be violent, whereas those motivated by compassion and concern for others are generally peaceful. We won’t bring about peace in the world merely by praying for it; we have to take steps to tackle the violence and corruption that disrupt peace. We can’t expect change if we don’t take action.

Peace also means being undisturbed, free from danger. It relates to our mental attitude and whether we have a calm mind. What is crucial to realize is that, ultimately, peace of mind is within us; it requires that we develop a warm heart and use our intelligence. People often don’t realize that warmheartedness, compassion, and love are actually factors for our survival.

Buddhist tradition describes three styles of compassionate leadership: the trailblazer, who leads from the front, takes risks, and sets an example; the ferryman, who accompanies those in his care and shapes the ups and downs of the crossing; and the shepherd, who sees every one of his flock into safety before himself. Three styles, three approaches, but what they have in common is an all-encompassing concern for the welfare of those they lead.

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Even as the overall number of petrol stations in Britain tanked, with owners cashing in on rising land values, Euro Garages grew. It has opened 380 sites around Britain and, since 2016, has bought thousands more around Europe, becoming the market leader in independent forecourts in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, second in Italy and third in France. Last year it bought almost 1,000 sites in America, as well as 560 in Australia. With more than 5,000 sites and 30,000 employees in nine countries, it claims to be one of Britain’s largest privately held companies by revenue, reporting takings last year of £20bn ($26bn), which would put it ahead of, for example, Virgin and Dyson.

The brothers were brought up in the terraces of Blackburn, but now spend more time in the air travelling between their acquisitions. The company’s executive jet shares a hangar with President Donald Trump’s personal helicopter at Blackpool airport. The Issas have invested in a mansion in one of London’s poshest districts. But they still live in their home town, and the firm’s modest headquarters on the edge of Blackburn are strictly functional.

Before Euro Garages arrived, there had long been plenty of retail forecourts on motorways, allowing travellers to fill up their cars and buy a stale sandwich and cold coffee at the same time. They were generally owned by the big oil companies. But Euro Garages extended this model throughout the country and started spending big money on making their forecourts more convenient, and civilised.

The Issas put all types of fuel on the same pump, making it easier to fill up. They put in more lights, making forecourts safer, and began running supermarket and fast-food franchises. Take one of the latest outposts, Frontier Park, a £4m forecourt development near Blackburn that is more shopping destination than mere filling station. Over two acres it includes a Spar supermarket, a Starbucks and a KFC, as well as a Totally Wicked vaping shop.

Euro Garages has consequently flipped the formula for making money at a forecourt. Whereas petrol stations used to get about 80% of their income from fuel sales, about two-thirds of Euro Garages’ revenues flow from its shops and fast-food outlets. Only 4% of visitors come just to shop, but they make up the fastest-growing segment. As footfall to beleaguered high streets diminishes, garages are pulling more people in. Retailers want to piggyback on this trend. Greggs, a baker, has reduced the number of its high-street branches. But it has opened 167 outlets at Euro Garages forecourts since 2013.

The forecourt formula has caught on. Ireland’s Applegreen has a similar approach. Motor Fuel Group, a British rival, is opening post offices at its forecourts.

The question is whether Euro Garages can handle its high-octane expansion. Chris Noice of the Association of Convenience Stores argues that the space afforded to the company at its big new American forecourts should allow it to expand its franchises. In Europe, the brothers will have to “tailor their offer” to local appetites and expectations, which may differ between Bologna and Blackburn. Same fuel, but proper cappuccinos.

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Joseph Walsh is Commercial Director UK & Ireland for Distell International, the leading producer and marketer of wines, spirits, ciders and RTD’s most of which are produced in South Africa and sold in more than 100 countries. With c£1bn of revenues, Distell has an extensive worldwide distribution network which is supported by local production capability in Scotland, Angola and Kenyathe.

On February 1st 2016 Joseph Walsh was charged with establishing their first in- market UK office, building a strategy and team that has since delivered impressive growth in a business where revenues are up +10% and EBITDA is +7%, no mean feat in today’s competitive landscape.

This big player, small on scale here in the UK/I has ambitious plans it is on track to achieve to double in size, which makes it one challenger well worth following…

What leadership characteristics do you look for when you are recruiting? What’s the most important skill set for successful leaders to develop?

Probably the three E’s, empowerment, enabling and empathy. I think I see myself as a bit of a fixer and I know when I speak to the various different channel heads or different departments, I like to try and let them fix things for themselves. But there comes a time when they have to come to me and then it involves moving it along the chain to see if we can get a resolution. And then I think having empathy, trying to understand who the people are, what makes them tick, what motivates them every day. And then I think empowerment, you’ve got to let people have the freedom to succeed. I’ve probably taken that through various different roles in my career and previous different organisations that I’ve been in I’ve been fortunate enough to work for a lot of good bosses, and they’ve always given me the freedom to succeed and that’s something I’m passionate about.

There was probably one defining moment in my career. I remember being approached by the Head of Channel at the time who said to me, I’ve got this other role for you. We don’t want to lose you, do you want to come and speak to me? We met in The Belfry in around Birmingham, and I didn’t want to do it. I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want to take this position.

I thought it wouldn’t be as exciting as the job I was doing. And he said to me, look, why don’t you take it, it will give you some very good grounding, it will give you a good background and do it for a couple of years. He said, if you don’t like it, move on and if you do like it, you’ve got it on your CV and curve a niche out for yourself.

And I say this to everyone in my team, make yourself indispensable, curve a niche out for yourself that no one else is doing and you’ll be a valuable asset to the business.

Interviews are difficult. You get a couple of hours with somebody. You can do your due diligence, you can speak to the current employer or you can canvas around if anybody knows them, but you’ve got to take them at face value and you got to try and gauge whether they’re right for your organisation. So I think trust is important. I also think they’ve got to be respected by their teams, by the structure and I think they’ve got to be seeing that they will run through a brick wall for that particular person.

View this Insight: Global Changes & the Impact of Leadership of Beers, Wines & Spirits Organisations

I think we’ve had a few structural changes and I’m happy with my direct reports. Now I think we’ve got a great bunch of guys in my direct reports and I do think we’ve got a great deal of energy, great deal of motivation. We have clarity on what we need to do to achieve results.

In terms of interview questions, what do I always ask? Probably two curve balls that I throw in, the first of which is when was the last time you screwed up? And I ask that because I don’t think people are expecting that, but you try and gauge if they answer honestly, if you get an honest answer out of them. And the other one is a bit more cryptic and it would be, is it better to be good and on time or perfect and late? It’s interesting how people answer that because they don’t know what the right answer is.

And the answer is, some people say there’s no perfect, you can never be perfect so it’s better to be good and on time. But I like to say, and actually I don’t have that right answer, but psychologists will say it’s better to be good and on time because if you’re perfect and late then you’ve failed. 

If you were to start from nothing with what you know now, would you have sought more help with? 

I think it’s probably the importance of relationships. In a previous organisation I thought is was very much all about the brands in that if people move on, the brands still exist and that’s true. But I think as you get older and a little bit wiser you realise those people still pop up in other places and still have a great deal of experience to offer. I think I’d probably sought more advice from my colleagues and around me and asked for more genuine 360 feedback.

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We’re going through an exercise now actually which HR…we have a relatively new HR director and we’re doing an exercise where you can nominate so many people to give you 360 feedback, I’m keen to see how I fair it’s an interesting exercise. One thing I’m passionate about is I don’t believe in anonymous 360 feedback, so on every exercise that I complete I’m going to make sure I have to follow up face to face with people so they know what feedback I’ve provided.

Which business achievement are you most proud of and why?

When I joined Distell in February 2016 we had pockets of the organisation focused on wine down in Richmond London, and we had a small structure in Scotland which focused on our spirits and they were never really integrated. Historically, we’d always traded up in Scotland so that’s where the bigger part of the organisation was.

I was keen to merge the organisation together so we consolidated the offices to Richmond and built up the capability here to build the UK infrastructure missing which meant we could only ever really supply big customers like Waitrose, Tesco, Matthew Clark.

One of the things I was keen to do was to speed up service because we were delivering direct from South Africa on a lot of key wines. What we can do now is we can take an order day one and then deliver on day three. That’s a big step change for us, that we weren’t able to do.

So we built a UK hub, we built up the sales capability, and we built up knowledge in our people as well. We’ve got brands with great stories but it’s about communicating that to the customers, so we have to build up our own knowledge, which we’ve done as we’ve moved a lot of things away from agencies.

So we’ve grown exponentially our customer base because we can service so many different levels of customers on the different portfolio that we were never able to do before. So they were difficult conversations with the agents we released especially having been with them many years and it wasn’t through anything they weren’t doing right. But I think once you bring it in-house, you’re not just an agency with a number of brands from all over different brand houses, you’ve got focus. Nobody knew who we were and even now, we’re still growing. No one had ever really heard of Distell because we’d hidden behind the agencies, whereas now our name is out there.

We’re at various different trade forums and shows and different hospitality occasions, and we’ve done some work around raising awareness on who Distell is and what we’re about, and people know who we are now which I’m proud of. It’s incredibly exciting. There’s no two days the same. It can have its frustrations but ultimately, I buy into it because I believe we can make a difference.

I think one of your earlier questions was what does success look like? And it’s probably doing something that no one else has done before. That’s what excites me. We‘re an interesting business because we’ve got this huge scale business in South Africa and we move like a big scale business in South Africa. And one of the things that I wanted us to do in the UK was be agile and be flexible and listen to what the customers and consumers are telling us that they want.

And we have a changing culture because we are humble and accept that what we are in South Africa we’re not in the UK yet, we’re still getting our name out there. People need to buy into what we’re talking about. I’m talking about people in Distell to say, we can switch it on first and we can deliver on time and full and think out of the box. You know just because we’re doing it, think if we’ve always done it one way, let’s think a different way.

It’s been tough because not just in Distell UK but Distell globally there has been a period of continual change for a couple of years. I think this year more than previously we seem to settled. Everyone in the UK knows we’ve got three more supreme battles, it’s premiumisation of wines and spirits, it’s winning in whisky so growing our global whisky malt brands, and it’s growing global brands as well, Amarula, Savanna, Bain’s.

We’ve got a big diverse portfolio. I think when we first started, everyone was running around trying to see what’s going to land. Is it going to be this? Is it going to be Klipdrift? Is it going to be Two Oceans wine? And now we’ve said, look, strip all that back. Let’s just get absolute focus on what we’re trying to do. Let’s have a core ten or 11 brands, which I still think it’s a lot, and let’s really drive hard behind them.

When you try and create a new culture in the organisation and try to become a high performance organisation, there are going to be some casualties and some very difficult conversations. And then it’s the worst part of the job because people are human, and it’s families and it’s people’s reputations and people need to survive on an income. I remember someone said to me don’t burn your bridges because it’s a small industry and people talk, and I think you should always go in the right way. But conversely the company should do it in the right way too, I think that’s important.

The post Lessons from Leaders: Distell Commercial Director Joseph Walsh, Filmed Interview Part 1 appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

In the enterprise world, the phrase ‘start a business doing what you’re good at’ is common advice.

While it certainly can help to maximise on your career background when launching a business venture, there are several entrepreneur case studies which prove this advice isn’t strictly true.

In fact, you can start a business in an industry you don’t know anything about and make it a huge success with million-pound revenues, strong profits, a thriving team, global expansion and more.

After all, becoming a successful entrepreneur is more to do with possessing and developing specific skills and traits such as confidence, commitment and emotional resilience than capitalising on your career history.

Don’t believe us? Read on to find out how some of the UK’s most high-profile business men and women made weird career changes to get to where they are today…

Michelle Mone OBE – Marketing beers to building a brassiere business

As founder of the Ultimo brand, Baroness Mone is arguably one of the country’s most influential business women and well-known female entrepreneurs, but back in the 1990s her career was a world away from brassieres.

Mone started her career as a marketeer for Canadian beer company Labatt and went on to become head of marketing at the company’s Scotland office.

When Mone was made redundant from Labatt, partly out of necessity and partly out of a desire to create better-fitting bras, she decided to leave the world of breweries behind to launch Ultimo; the lingerie business that Mone would scale to become a company with revenues in excess of £39m.

Fast forward to 2018 – three years after exiting Ultimo –  the millionaire mogul is now board member of tech company Ve Global and has also branched into investing. This month, it was announced that Mone had launched a venture capital fund, Equi, with Douglas Barrowman to invest in UK tech and bio start-ups.

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Richard Reed CBE – Account management to smoothie making

Reed’s multi-million-pound smoothie drinks and ‘juices with the little hats on’ can be found in supermarkets, homes and offices across the country but the Innocent Drinks co-founder had no prior experience in food and drink before he launched a business in it.

A geography graduate from Cambridge University, Reed spent four yours as an advertising agency executive before deciding to launch Innocent with friends Jon Wright and Adam Balon. So why make the move from ads to smoothies?

Reed has admitted that it was a decision that the trio had made for them while running a festival market stall; they asked festival-goers the question; ‘Should we give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ and had a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ bin for the empty juice cartons. The rest, as they say, is history…

In 2013, Reed and his Innocent founders sold 90% of their shares to Coca Cola for an estimated £100m and he now invests in fast-growth start-ups via his venture capital fund JamJar Investments. Reed was knighted with a CBE in the Queen’s 2016 birthday honours list.

Nick Jenkins – Commodity trading to greeting cards

The man who founded Moonpig and whom was responsible for helping create an online greeting card revolution had a very different career before he moved into the e-commerce sphere.

Jenkins spent eight years in Moscow working as a commodities trader for a sugar operation as part of Glencore. He decided to return to the UK after he had a death threat nailed to his door following the arrest of a client who had stolen $10m worth of sugar. Jenkins said of the threat: “The Russians are quite sensible; if they give you a death threat and you take notice of it, you’re not going to get killed.”

On his return to the UK, and away from Russian threats, Jenkins undertook an MBA to hone his business skills and would launch Moonpig – the name of which was inspired by his childhood nickname – in 1999. 12 years later, in 2011, Moonpig was sold to PhotoBox for £120m.

More recently, Jenkins appeared as an angel investor on the popular enterprising TV show Dragons’ Den.

Justine Roberts MBE – Sports journalism to parenting portals

The Mumsnet and Gransnet co-founder made an interesting career choice which would lead her to launch the online community for mums, and later the sister site for nans. Roberts was previously a sports journalist, spending several years covering football and cricket news.

In interviews, Roberts has said that she doesn’t miss her career in sports journalism: “During the football games I covered, I wasn’t really viewing and enjoying the spectacle, I was just hoping no one scored last minute and wrecked the intro to the piece I’d already written. It’s not the same thing as enjoying the drama of the game as a spectator.”

Since launching Mumsnet in 2010 with co-founder Carrie Longton, Roberts has been named as one of the most powerful women in the UK by Women’s Hour and was appointed a CBE in the 2017 Queen’s birthday honours list for her services to the economy.

Paul Lindley – TV executive to toddler food

Paul Lindley’s organic baby food brand Ella’s Kitchen is beloved by mums and dads across the country yet his past career saw him more focused on what kids were watching, than what they were eating.

Lindley was previously deputy managing director of TV company Nickelodeon – the network behind original series such as SpongeBob Squarepants. After spending nine years at the channel working his way from accounting to deputy MD, Lindley quit and went on to launch the first Ella’s Kitchen range in 2006, named after his daughter.

While his background was in television and not toddler food, Lindley was able to put his connections at the network to good use. He signed an innovative advertising deal with Viacom Brand Solutions agreeing that Ella’s Kitchen would give the media sales house a percentage of its profits in return for advertising its smoothies on its Nickelodeon channel.

Today, Ella’s Kitchen generates revenue in excess of £50m and Lindley has gone on to become a serial entrepreneur. He launched bubble bath brand Paddy’s Bathroom in 2015 (it has since closed), and now runs social enterprise The Key is E. Not content with managing multiple businesses, last year Lindley became a best-selling business author after penning the book Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like a Toddler.

Will Shu – Investment banking to food delivery

You’d be hard pressed to travel to any major UK city and not spot a Deliveroo driver, yet just five years ago the concept of restaurant-quality meals delivered by couriers with kangaroo-adorned uniforms was merely an idea. An idea possessed by Will Shu.

A former investment banker for Morgan Stanley, Shu would often work 100 hour working weeks and would order take-away most days; facilitated by his company’s $25-a-day food allowance. When Shu was transferred from America to the company’s Canary Wharf office in London, Shu’s penchant for take-away food remained yet he found London’s local take-away options lacking:

“I had to go to Tesco’s every night or Chilli’s and it just became really depressing. I know this isn’t a global issue right; you’re probably thinking ‘Oh, he couldn’t get great food delivered!’ but, when you’re working that hard and you don’t think about anything else, your sense of reality becomes warped and it becomes a huge issue.”

So, with the help of friend – and later co-founder – Greg Orlowski, Shu set about creating a solution and decided to leave the world of banking behind.

Since launching the company in London in February 2013, and spending time as a Deliveroo driver himself, Shu has seen Deliveroo scale to valuations of over $2bn with operations in 35 UK cities and 40 cities internationally

Annabel Karmel MBE – Musician to infant nutritionist

Annabel Karmel is known to most as the go-to expert for children’s nutrition with her eponymous company which spans books, ready meals and snacks, but her early background lay in music.

A talented harpist – she studied music at the Royal College of London – Karmel landed her first job playing at the Savoy Hotel in London and would go on to play music at major venues, yet she opted to leave music behind to pursue authorship.

After losing her first child to a viral infection at just 13 weeks old, Karmel changed direction into the field of nutrition and became cautious around feeding her second child. She set about devising her own recipes and shared these in 1991 in her first book New Complete Baby & Toddler Meal Planner.

Over the past 27 years, Karmel has published a further 36 books on feeding toddlers, babies and families and has a popular range of food products for toddlers which are stocked in top UK supermarkets.

Duncan Bannatyne OBE – Job-hopper to business juggernaut

Last, but not least, in our list of business men and women who made weird career changes to get to the top is serial entrepreneur and ex-Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, whose colourful career history proves that you don’t have to have knowledge of business to make a success out of it.

Having joined the Royal Navy in 1964 at the age of 15, Bannatyne spent 12 years as a junior second-class engineering mechanic. After being discharged from the Navy aged 20, he then spent his remaining twenties moving from one job to another; jobs included working as a deckchair attendant, ice cream seller, and a hospital porter. What’s more, Bannaytyne has stated that he didn’t even have a bank account until the age of 30!

With a bank account in tow, Bannatyne bought an ice cream van for £450 and then expanded by buying more ice cream vans, later selling the business for £28,000. He used this money to buy nursing home company Quality Care Homes, which he later sold for a whopping £26m and this pay-out would see him go on to pursue a number of business interests.

Today, Bannatyne – known by many for his role as an angel investor on Dragons’ Den – is a multi-millionaire with ventures in hotels, health clubs, spas, media, TV, stage schools, property and transport.

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Victoria Young is General Manager of Europe for the challenger brand Yes To, who create natural, innovative, fun and efficacious beauty solutions from head to toe, ‘free of all the nasties and filled with all the goodies’. Founded 12 years ago, the brand is an early pioneer of the natural beauty phenomenon which is now enjoying huge success in the USA as the number 1 face mask brand across both natural & mainstream beauty, with double the share of its nearest competitor. In the natural category Yes To contribute the largest amount of growth versus any other natural brand, and they have recently secured fresh funding from Viking Global Investment LP.

Established in the UK just 4 years ago, their growth has been exponential. In the last year revenues have doubled, and distribution points have grown by 88%. A multitude of high profile awards have recognised their challenger success including the Beauty Oscars CEW, Pure Beauty, and Beauty Shortlist, whilst also being finalists for many more.

Much of Victoria’s experience has been with large multinational organisations including Heineken, Unilever, Mars, and Danone where she was Sales Director. The switch to an entrepreneurial challenger was inspired by the potential of the Yes To brand, it’s award winning innovation, and the opportunity as a challenger to shake up the skin care category. Victoria leads the Yes To mission to empower millennial women to both discover and celebrate their natural beauty, inside and out. What do you say Yes to?

View others parts of the interview with Victoria here

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What leadership characteristics do you look for when you are recruiting? What’s the most important skill set for successful leaders to develop?

So I think there’s a couple of things here. The first one I would definitely say is hire the best people and then let them tell you what to do. I find that incredibly useful. Get some great people into your business that really understand your organisation, your culture. Support them. Develop them. But really give them the opportunity to bring insights and new ways of thinking into your organisation. It’s incredibly helpful.

The other area I’d call out is resilience. And I guess, being more serious for a second, it can be quite lonely at the top sometimes. And therefore really identifying how you manage your energy, how you keep your resilience up, and how you use a network of people around you. And also to make sure that you’re supporting your team through all those times with moments to celebrate success.

The main things I look for when we’re recruiting, especially as a challenger brand is people that have the agility and the entrepreneurship. I think what’s really interesting, having been through this process, is that I’ve interviewed quite a few people now who really think they’re comfortable with the dynamic of working for a challenger brand but when you probe under the surface, what you start to find is actually the security blanket of a big organisation isn’t there.

And whilst the highs are exceptionally high, the lows can be low. And I think it’s really important to get under the skin of that and help people really understand that it’s a very different set-up to a big corporate organisation. So that’s definitely one area I really, really focus on.

And then I guess the second would be a bit of self-awareness as well because it’s so helpful to really understand what makes you tick and how you come across to others. So the question I always ask is what’s the toughest feedback you’ve ever had. And really probe that self-awareness and just hear how people have absorbed that. Why it’s been so tough for them and how they’ve taken action accordingly.

If you were to start from nothing with what you know now, what would you have sought more help with?

So for me, this one is really easy to answer actually. It’s ask for help. Always ask for help. Because I’ve learnt, right the way through my career and right the way through my personal life actually, that the sense of coming across that you’re in control and you don’t need to ask anyone for help, and it could look bad if don’t, is actually really self defeating.

And so what I’ve really tried to do is learn from that and understand that people are there to help you. Joining this business, I reached out to lots of different people to get advice, help. Having come from big FMCG organisations, I didn’t really know much about the challenger world and I’d never worked in beauty before. And I really started to reach out. And what was fascinating was how many people wanted to help me, how many people really supported me and went far above and beyond what I thought they would.

So I think, from a business standpoint, I would absolutely really advocate that. And then, personally, it’s been really helpful for me as well. So I got married five years ago. And after our honeymoon, my husband had a very bad motorbike accident and was severely injured. And just that learning of being able to ask people for help and support was incredibly helpful and powerful and really got me through it.

Which business achievement are you most proud of and why?

So of my achievements to date, the ones I’m most proud of all relate to Yes To. I’m really thrilled to have recruited and got fantastic team around me that have great credentials as a team but really embody the Yes-To culture. And they go out there, and they make it happen. And I’m really proud of that. And I’m really proud of the success that we’ve achieved in the last 12 months.

We doubled our turnover year-on-year, and we’ve grown our distribution points by 88%. Really I am very pleased with that.

View more of the interview with Victoria and view other interviews with leaders here

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