Picking The Right Team

Now that Pakistan has elected its new leaders, the focus shifts to how they use this mandate to select the team that will govern us. Will they focus on loyalty or capability, on past track record or intentions, on homogeneity or diversity? Who ever they choose, it will say a lot about the future direction of our country.

Of course, the same can be said about creating a collaborative culture in an organization. The composition of a team is a great indication of performance. So, as a team leader, how do you pick the right team members? You have to find the right balance of people that you believe will collectively bring individual strengths that work best as a whole.

When it comes to compiling a team, there has to be a list of things a leader is looking for. Here is my personal selection criteria:

1. Can they deliver?
The most important criteria should be about whether an individual has the capability and capacity to deliver on overall objectives. Working for a personal agenda can get in the way of team building and can been seen in delivered results.

2. Are they committed?
For an individual to deliver he has to have both the ‘will and skill’. Having the skill but not the will won’t get you anywhere. Are the person’s interests, motivations and passion aligned with what they are being asked to do?

3. Are they different?
Thirdly it is all about diversity. The power of a team is in the combination of different personalities coming together. If everybody thinks the same, acts the same, likes the same ideas, I promise you that the outcome will lack the creativity that a team brings to the table.

4. Are they willing to learn?
A person that is curious and willing to learn will grow, will not be stubborn and will only ‘defend’ his point of view. The willingness to learn means wanting to build on other people’s points of view and creating a dialogue from which breakthrough solutions can result.

5. Can they have fun together?
Lastly, it’s all about enjoying being and performing together. Having a positive experience and outcome is about being able to hold each other accountable, argue and fight about the things that matter and then to realize that no one in the team is more important than the team itself. I don’t know many people who can give their best if they don’t have fun in what they are doing.

It is all about bringing people together to create synergy and achieve greatness. In your opinion, what should leaders keep in mind while planning the company’s future and assembling their dream team?

- Paul Keijzer

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Democratic Enterprise

There are two things that I love about elections. Firstly, everybody is equal. Everybody has one vote, no matter how rich, poor, educated or illiterate they are. Whether they are from the north or south, male or female, everybody has only one vote.

The second thing I love about elections is that it is an opportunity for people to vote for the person that they believe will help them build a better future. For people to believe in political leaders, the candidates have to rise tall in front of the nation, explain what they stand for and what they will do to make those changes happen. They are criticized, scrutinized, challenged and pushed to the limit. However, as a result of all this, people get to know the candidate and how he or she may or may not be their best representative.

Although I think there are some interesting similarities that you can draw with companies (one I have touched upon earlier in CEO Elections), one parallel that I wish leaders of companies would learn from is the communication aspect of elections. Can you imagine the engagement of the whole company, from senior managers to the peon, if leaders in the organization spent the same amount of time as political leaders, in explaining their vision and strategy of the company. If leaders were to allow themselves to be challenged and analyzed then they can come up with a blueprint of the future that everybody in the company strongly believes in and is committed towards.

I have only met a few leaders who actually do this. Safaraz Siddiqui, Managing Director of DHL Pakistan, has spent a lot of time discussing and jointly agreeing with colleagues the way forward for his company, and through this was able to transform DHL (and became the Best Place to Work in Pakistan in the process.) Lynda Gratton, the London Business School Professor wrote one of my favorite books called the Democratic Enterprise in which she “built a roadmap for companies to Liberate their Business with Freedom, Flexibility and Commitment. It delivers the blueprint for a business built on choice and commitment, a business people would choose to work for”.

What do you think? Can you set your company on the path of becoming a Democratic Enterprise?

- Paul Keijzer

Change From The Inside Out

The Women@Work Study aims to understand what would help enhance female participation in the Pakistani workforce. Apart from the survey, in which we will ask female employees of participating companies to fill in a questionnaire as well as HR departments to share their best practices, we will also conduct one-on-one interviews with working women. The power of these interviews is to understand real life scenarios that you can’t always capture through surveys and focus groups.

I have come to understand that all the following things are important to working women: commitment from the top, supporting gender diversity, organizational support in the form of specific facilities, coaching and networking, ability to manage your work timings and support from family and the society. However, one thing has also become clear and that is the importance of the mindset and bias that leaders, line managers and colleagues have. All the policy papers and communication material can look fantastic, but if the person you work with is not able to understand and empathize with what is required for a woman to work in Pakistan, then you will still end up with the shorter end of the stick.

A woman who recently left a ‘what we thought was a progressive and female friendly workplace’ shared with us that although all the facilities were there and she really needed to work, she could not take her working environment anymore. Ever since she had become a mother, her line manager had taken away all the ‘exciting assignments’ and given it to young and upcoming trainees. She was given mundane tasks far below her capability as a line manager and after two years she has decided to resign.

It is one thing to have a biased male boss but it is even worse if, as a woman, you have a biased female boss. An example of this is a woman, who in line with the company policies, has reduced her work timings but her female line manager is not agreeing to this stating that “I have been able to do it, so you should be able to do it as well.”

Improving the gender balance and retaining women in the workforce will require more than good intentions, a few role models, beautiful statements and the right policies. At the end it requires people to change from the inside out, men and women alike.

What is your story? Have you seen the need for change?

- Paul Keijzer

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Is Following Your Passion Overrated?

In October I wrote a blog called “Do What You Love or Love What You Do” in which I talked about finding the right balance between three intersecting spheres: (1) What are you interested in? (2) What can you be the best in the world at? (3) What lifestyle is important for you?

The first two spheres, pitch skills against passion, and over the last couple of decades passion has been winning over skills. This come from assuming that if you are passionate about something you will learn to be good at it.

The problem however, is that a majority of people don’t have an inbuilt passion for something when they are at the start of their career. Kids, for example, change what they want to become rapidly, from an airline pilot or astronaut, to a footballer. When they realize that they don’t have the required skills to be the best footballer in the world, they change their minds and want to become engineers, doctors or accountants. As a result of students not being clear about their own interests, many follow the footsteps (or are influenced by the practical advice) of their parents.

Recently in an interview with Eric Barker, one of my favorite bloggers, Cal Newport (who wrote the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love) says “Long-term career satisfaction requires traits like a real sense of autonomy, a real sense of impact on the world, a sense of mastery that you’re good at what you do, and a sense of connection in relation to other people. Now, the key point is those traits are not matched to a specific piece of work and they have nothing to do with matching your job to some sort of ingrained, pre-existing passion.“

He advises “to abandon the passion mindset which asks “What does this job offer me? Am I happy with this job? Is it giving me everything I want?” Shift from that mindset to […] “What am I offering the world? How valuable am I? Am I really not that valuable? If I’m not that valuable, then I shouldn’t expect things in my working life. How can I get better?“ Newport calls it the craftsman mindset.

This idea connected with me. A craftsman hones his skills, keeps at it, pushes his limits, learns from others, tries out new things and doesn’t give up. As a result, over time a craftsman becomes better and better at what he does.

It is likely that for most of us, passion follows craftsmanship. When we feel that we are good at something, that we can have an impact and that people recognize us for our craft – then we are more likely to become devoted to what we do.

Many of you will argue that in order to invest so much time and energy in honing your craft, you need to be somewhat enthusiastic about it. But think back to your own career start and that of the people around you. How many of them were passionate about what they were doing from the very beginning? My guess is only a lucky few.

- Paul Keijzer

Are Women Their Own Worst Critics?

Diving into our research and immersing into how to enhance gender diversity in Pakistan through our Engage Women initiative and the Women@Work Study, is like peeling an onion. Every time you think you have one insight, it leads to a deeper layer with even more profound insights. The more I learn, the more I go jumping from and connecting one thought to another.

While surfing the web I came across Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches initiative and was blown away by this social experiment. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but the concept of letting an artist make two sketches of the same woman, one as she sees herself and one how she is seen by a stranger, is utterly genius and mind boggling. The results were fascinating; only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful. The dove website says it all; “women are their own worst beauty critics.”

While I was thinking over on this insight, my monkey brain leaped to Sheryl Sandberg’s, Ted Talk video on Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders (she has recently translated these thoughts in her best selling book: Lean In.) In this, Sandberg explains that amongst others, one of the main reason why women progress less in the corporate world is that they are the own worst critics. According to her, when a man achieves a certain task, he screams it from the roof tops and gives high fives all around, whereas when a woman achieves a similar task, she still wonders what she could have done better.

So maybe women are not only their own worst beauty critics but also their own worst career critics. Maybe a boost of confidence is all they need, or maybe they need to see their achievements through the eyes of another. What do you think; are women getting in their own way by being too critical?

- Paul Keijzer

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Help Us Pull Unilever Over The Line

Two weeks ago, Engage Women (an initiative of Engage Consulting) launched the Women@Work Study. We invited 20 companies to participate, in hopes to get better understandings and insights into what enables the participation of working women in Pakistan. To date; Pepsi, Engro, GSK, Nestle, Shell, Phillip Morris, Mobilink, Ufone, PTC, Novartis, ICI, Reckitt Benckiser and Telenor have all confirmed their participation. That’s a pretty good result! 6 companies still have to come back to us and only one company has declined…

Strangely, Unilever was the one that decided not to participate. I am surprised as I was always under the impression that gender diversity is really important to them. They were role models and pioneers, with Musharaf Hai being the first female CEO and Chairman of a multinational company in Pakistan. Even now, they have two high potential female leaders in their management team.

I know from their HR Director, Ali Zia, that they have implemented a number of work-life balance initiatives in order to support female participation and career progression within the company. Not only do they promote gender diversity in the boardroom, but are also constantly working to find a gender balance internally. They provide security-guard staffed housing for female engineers that work near their remote facilities, promote flexible working hours to benefit all managers and even have a day care center to help working mothers.

So, I am not sure what their reason is, but maybe with your help I can pull them over the line! If you are interested in understanding Unilever’s position and best practices on enhancing gender diversity in Pakistan then email me at paulkeijzer@engageconsulting.biz to sign my petition. I will collect all the responses and present them to Ehsan Malik, Unilever’s highly successful Chairman and CEO. I will try my best to convince him of Unilever’s social responsibility in this matter and to share their experience and heritage in driving the participation of women in leadership positions.

- Paul Keijzer

When Was The Last Time You Did Something For The First Time?

I was always a big fan of the old Emirates Airlines ‘Keep Discovering’ campaign. The most memorable ad for me was the one where two African men check into a hotel during winter and were over the moon to see snow for the first time. I love it when I can create the same “first time” sensation for my clients.

This week I spent three days in the north of Pakistan with the top team of a pharmaceutical company. Their aim was to forge personal bonds, allowing them to collaborate better as a team and lead their organization through a number of exciting challenges coming up. From my previous blogs you know that the Leadership Outbreak Journeys are my favorite interventions and this one was no exception.

These journeys combine taking people out of their comfort zone, creating experiences together, having conversations that matter and embracing first time experiences. The Leadership Outbreaks are always such a success because they combine all these 4 elements in an exciting cocktail, transforming the team in the process.

The ‘First Time Experience’ is a key component as it forces people to do things that they haven’t done before and often allow people to confront their fears. There is nothing more powerful for me (as a facilitator) to see people overcoming their fears. This Outbreak was no exception. On the contrary, it was even more exciting as we created experiences that were also new for me; we went paragliding!

Picture taken of my paragliding shadow

One of the activities I did this time was climbing a 60 foot rock (of course fully secured and safe) and subsequently then repelling down the same rock face. One participant was particularly fearful of coming down the rock face, as the top had a bit of an overhang that made it quite difficult for beginners to start. He was unable to overcome his fears, despite coaching and guidance from the instructor that was with him at the top. He finally amassed enough courage when his colleague, who went down before him, told him “Zahid, do you trust me? You can do it, you just have to let go.” Can you imagine the power? Not only of the person overcoming his fears, but also of the bond that was created between these two team members. 

Rock Climbing

Similarly at the end of the three days the most senior team member, who had been awesome in completing all the activities, despite his age, physical conditions and vertigo, said that it was an “unbelievable” experience. He shared that he would never have done any of these activities on his own, but as he was part of the team he completed each task and was rightly so very proud of his achievements.

This drives me. Pushing people’s boundaries, letting them do things they thought were not possible and in the process enjoying the experience to the full. Thanks team for a wonderful outbreak. I know for sure that together you will achieve your dreams! So next time you are faced with a new task, a scary yet thrilling experience – ask yourself the same question; “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

- Paul Keijzer

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Women @ Work

Last year I wrote a blog in which I confessed “I Am a Feminist“. Since then, Engage Consulting has launched Engage Women and has approached a number of companies to partner with us in conducting a study to identify what drives female talent in the workplace.

I am now happy to announce that we have found that partner in PepsiCo. International. Pepsi has been one of the trailblazers in Pakistan and together with a few other leading companies has been taking the lead in driving the gender and diversity agenda in the country. According to Pepsi, they have the highest female participation rate in the Pakistani FMCG industry and most likely within the corporate world.

The purpose of the study is to establish how organizations can enhance the female workforce, identify what practices others have introduced that have had an impact, to get a benchmark on the number of females working in organizations and how women rate their own company on efforts to enable female workforce participation. As part of the study, we will also interview a number of female role models that have made it to the top of the corporate world and ask them to share their insights into what made them successful.

I am really excited, as I am not aware of any other study currently being conducted in Pakistan on this topic and as a self-proclaimed feminist this study is something that is close to my heart and which my team and I really want to drive forward. We will use the launch of the Women @ Work Study to introduce a number of other initiatives from our Engage Women platform. We plan to share data, build connections, introduce career advice forums and develop a network for working women in Pakistan.

At the moment we will focus our study specifically on a number of leading companies in Pakistan to establish what works and what doesn’t work for talented women in moving their career forward.

I know of one female CEO of a multinational in Pakistan and she, Musharaf Hai, is an exciting example for many aspiring Pakistani women out there. We need to make sure that more and more women will follow in her example. Join us, participate and help women succeed in the workplace.

I would love you to help. Join our Facebook Page, keep connected through Twitter or reach out to Anushey Matri (anushey@engageconsulting.biz) if you are interested in more information, would like to identify female role models to share their experiences, or if you have ideas (and maybe want to help put them in action) to move the female participation agenda forward.

- Paul Keijzer

Are You Being Bullied By Your Boss? Bully Back!

During our careers we all come across them; bosses that are difficult to deal with or worse, bosses that are simple bullies. They push you into a corner, don’t listen, don’t give you an opportunity and are only driving their own agenda. I don’t have to explain the impact that these bosses have on the workplace. Disastrous!

All our defense mechanisms go up to ‘survive’ a bullying boss and all the conversations between employees center around ‘did you see what he / she did today?!’. Not particularly the signs of a healthy and high performing workplace.

I had my fair share of bullying bosses and overtime I have become more adept in dealing with such people. The turnaround came, when after months of being bullied by the boss of my boss, I was against the ropes and had basically given up. I was unable to do my job and didn’t want to be part of the organization any more as it had such a negative effect on my happiness and performance. That is when I decided to move on and move past his behavior.

A funny thing happens when you make such a decision, your attitude completely changes and what first impacted you negatively suddenly is not important anymore. The same happened with me, I simply didn’t care what his problem was and whenever my bully boss started to deploy his abrasive techniques, they no longer had the intended impact. You know what happened… the bullying boss stopped bullying me. He had realized that his technique didn’t work anymore and I didn’t have to quit the job that I loved.

I had gained a valuable lesson, the best way to deal with a bullying boss is to bully back with maturity. Two things happen: by having a mindset that you will not be affected by actions of others, the impact of their actions will disappear. Secondly, the one thing that a bullying boss respects is a person that stands their ground.

Of course you have to stand your ground and push back in the right way, you don’t want to stoop as low as your bullying boss. Psychology Today published a number of strategies on how to deal with a difficult or bullying boss:

1. Be Pro-active: Anticipate how your boss might react to a certain proposal and have an action plan if he behaves the way you anticipate.

2. Be Prepared: Prepare your different responses beforehand, think about how he might come back and prepare yourself for those as well

3. Be Professional: Never lower yourself to the level of the bullying boss. Keep the moral high ground, follow proper procedures

4. Be Persistent: Keep in it for the long run, your boss and his behavior are not going to change overnight, don’t let your guard down and continue to be prepared at any turn.

If you have tried everything and you continue to be at the receiving end of a bullying boss you do have the opportunity to follow a formal complaint procedure within the organization. A good friend of mine, who after trying different techniques to stop his bullying boss (and having seen two of his colleagues quit), decided to take his problem to the companies ethics committee. He was courageous enough to go through the procedure despite significant pressure from his peers and other line managers to let it go. At the end, the company decided that the bullying boss was not acting in line with the company values and decided to let him go. My friend is still working at the organization and is doing a wonderful job. The bully has moved on, hopefully he has learned from this experience and has changed his approach. Maybe, but not likely though…

Bullies often remain bullies and the best way to deal with them is to have the courage to stand up against them. Do so, without turning into the thing you hate, and watch your workplace experience drastically change.

How many of you have encountered such issues in your organizations?

- Paul Keijzer

Engaging African Talent

I just flew back from Nairobi, where I had the pleasure to facilitate a group of 125 leaders from across 20 different African countries. This was the first step of their journey to become apart of an organization that is driven by purpose and strong values. It was a tremendous success, and although participants had low expectations, we had everybody dancing by the end of the conference. It was an amazing and gratifying experience.

Engaging African talent is the same as engaging Asian talent. It is all about how you create and maintain energy flows, how you touch on the design and flow of the conference to come to a desired outcome and how you make people part of the process. Most importantly, it is about how you guide them to follow the philosophy that the answer for any problem is (for 99 out of 100 situations) already present within the knowledge of the group as a whole.

My secret recipe for success in facilitating large-scale conferences is:

1. PREPARE, PREPARE, PREPARE…
Every good cook knows that the success of a well-cooked dish is in the recipe. It is essential to think through which tools to use, in which order to deploy them and to ensure that you have got the venue and logistics set up to support your program. For me, if I get the flow right, everything else will go by itself.

2. CREATE ENERGY FROM THE START
Start the conference with an exercise that requires people to get off their feet and meet as many other people as possible. Do something that requires them to get to know others, that gets them interacting. The energy that this creates is tremendous and will keep the conference flowing for a couple of hours.

3. KEEP ENGAGING PEOPLE
The worst thing you can do is to organize a conference where people just have to sit and watch a dry and lengthy PowerPoint presentation. If presentations are needed, keep the slides to an absolute minimum, let the presenters share stories and talk from the heart, involve and engage in issues that are important to the audience and ask the participants to answer their own questions. Ensure you cross-fertilize and people can build on each other views to create alignment.

4. KEEP THEM ON THEIR FEET
Have you ever been to these conferences where on the fifth and final day “that guy” is still sitting on the same table in the same chair. It’s as if he has not moved once. He has only viewed the world from that perspective and limited his interaction and learning to the few people on the same table. Don’t let people get comfortable, keep them on their feet and mobile. Let them move to a different table / chair / position after a couple of exercises. It gets people to mingle, share different experiences, learn from others and it creates energy.

5. STAY FLEXIBLE
No matter how well prepared you are, there will always be moments and/or topics that the group wants to spend more time on. Let them! Don’t worry about your own agenda and whether you are able to finish the topics that you thought were important. They are not. What the group wants to talk about is important. At some point you can make an intervention and ask the group whether they want to continue talking about it or whether they want to move onto the agenda that they had agreed before. Let them focus on what issues they feel most passionate about. Stay flexible, stay in the energy, and as facilitator, adjust where necessary.

6. END WITH A BANG
Most of the time participants will remember the beginning or the end, so make sure you make it an end to remember. It can be an emotional and powerful story, it can be an activity that brings all the discussion together or it can be something physical. This week, the groups and I ended with a combination of the two; a real powerful story that laid bare the authenticity, vision, aspiration and commitment of the leader to the team he is leading and a chant / dance that we had been practicing over the last two days. I promise you that the participants shared the power of that story and dance with their families that evening.

- Paul Keijzer

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