In Mumbai to conduct a workshop with top business leaders in February, US-based Berger spoke to Forbes India about how leadership is a skill that can be learnt, how leaders can motivate their teams and foster good culture at a time of mass layoffs and low employee morale, and how leaders should be allowed to fail, much like sportspeople. Edited excerpts:
There are different challenges in these two sorts of organisations; they have different strengths and weaknesses, and what the leader has to do to pull into the future is quite different. In legacy organisations, the challenge for leaders is to change, and change fast enough. A lot of these organisations are not just old, they are also quite large and often with a lot of parts that fight change. Culture change, making innovation happen, and being more agile are tricky, and what works in one part of India, or in one country, may not work in a different place. So, the huge challenge is: How do you innovate while keeping the lights on?
In a startup, they’re not trying to change, but are in a wave of change all the time. They’re trying to figure out how much of their vision they can hold on to, and how much they have to be flexible with, since a lot of the funding and power comes from outside and the funders are looking for short, fast returns; their objectives are often very different from the founders’ objectives. The companies are growing so fast that it strains the leadership capability. They think they don’t have time to stop and breathe and develop the leadership capacity they need.
Q. In a world where companies are laying off thousands of employees while announcing staggering profits, is there anything like employee loyalty anymore? How do business leaders build it?
There’s less and less employee loyalty for exactly the reason you’re describing. This is a place where competitive advantage starts to blossom. I am very hopeful, because in finance-only focussed organisations, culture declines. As the culture declines, the talent declines, then innovation declines, and the company is dead in the water eventually.
If fear is the most motivating factor, it can be so only briefly; over time people will leave. With the next generation, this is just not going to work. People are understanding that money is just one of the goods that an organisation can provide, but it’s not all of the goods.
Q. In companies that are not conducive to nurturing loyalty, how do individual leaders keep their teams motivated and get them to align with their vision?
There are ways for leaders to build islands with their own culture within organisations. Research suggests that your satisfaction at work is much more about your individual manager than about the organisational culture. If you’re in an organisation with a great culture, but you have a terrible manager, you will hate your job. But if the organisation has a tough culture, but you have a great manager, you’re more likely to love your job. Leaders who create these conditions can find their way to having more power within the organisation.
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Q. How do you maintain a status quo of good culture with changing leadership?
Leadership is really important because leaders are culture enablers. And if you don’t talk about leadership, you’re going to have as many cultures as there are leaders. And when one leader leaves, the team culture could totally change. We’ve seen this happen again and again, that you can have a high-performing team and you put in a new leader and suddenly the team falls apart.
If we have a practice of talking about leadership, sustainable cultures can be created. Leadership doesn’t just happen; it’s an art and it’s learnable. But if we don’t teach it, then what we’re going to get are people’s reflexes, and people’s reflexes are not necessarily to be good leaders.
Q. The Peter Principle says that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. What does a leader do when they find themselves at a level of their incompetence?
It used to be very common for companies to tell us that they have a culture problem or a leadership problem. The CEO would say, we have this problem; it’s not with me or my team, it’s with the people who report to my team. And then, over time, we would find that the problem lay with the bosses. Now, more and more leaders come to us and say, I used to be incredibly good at what I did, and I feel incompetent now; I need help.
This is great because there is a lot of help available. The idea that really good leaders should be able to make these changes by themselves is very unhelpful. Nobody is naturally good at this; we all need to grow to be better at this.
Q. There has been a lot of conversations recently about long working hours and how, for a lot of people, work is just drudge work. How can leaders motivate their teams when they are aware of this?
I don’t believe in drudge work. I believe organisations have often created a lot of ‘make work’, which is soul sapping and it’s very hard to create a good culture when people are doing work that is boring or does not use their potential. This comes from a couple of different directions. One of them is this idea that, I had to do it and so now you should have to do it as well. The other is that a lot of organisations have created climates of fear, where [for instance] the PowerPoint deck needs to be perfect, and you have to have every possible question that anybody could ever ask in the appendices.
We should stop such activities. Those humans could contribute to the world. It’s not like the world doesn’t have a lot of problems. Put those smart minds onto something else. A lot of the drudgery can be fixed by leadership practices, some can be fixed by AI, and better automation. In a world that’s short on natural resources but big on humans, the resource of humans is extraordinary. Good leadership could capitalise on that.
Q. The best of sportspeople have the ability to bounce back from very low points in their careers with help from a supportive ecosystem. How can leaders deal with failures in the same way and bounce back?
People in sports have coaches to help them with build resilience; resilience doesn’t just happen, it has to be developed over time and it can be developed intentionally. In sports, you’re winning and losing all the time; losing is allowed, and you’re just supposed to win more than losing. But, if you’re in leadership, you’re supposed to win all the time. And this is not a reasonable narrative.
So, creating a narrative that says, we’re going to win more than we lose, and experiment and learn, is more helpful. Leaders can create a narrative that says, yes, we don’t know what’s going to happen next, and we cannot predict whether this thing will be successful or not. It’s time to have a culture, where leaders can say, I don’t know.
Jennifer Garvey Berger, designer, teacher and coach of leadership programmes