23 | How Overcoming Challenges Creates Better Character

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hi there, and welcome to this edition of Face Forward. There's a graph that I use, I think LinkedIn put it together a couple of years ago, that I often use on my change courses when I'm talking about the acceleration of change. When you look back over the years, It's basically a chart around how long it takes various technologies to get to 50 million users, and it starts off with airplanes as a technology that took 68 years to get to 50 million users. You fast forward to maybe a few years back, Twitter took 2 years to get to 50 million users. You look then a little, a little closer to today, Angry Birds took 35 days to get to 50 million users, and Pokémon Go only took 19 days. And of course, a huge part of that is the very prolific nature these days of smartphones. I was doing some research earlier on and just looking at the numbers of smartphones that are sold, and I was amazed when I looked and I thought, God, iPhone's only been around for 10 years and they've sold a billion of them, and I thought that was amazing. Then I looked a little deeper, and only in 2017 worldwide there were 1.54 billion phones, smartphones sold in one year. And that's because actually Apple make up make up only a very, very small percentage of the smartphones sold. So obviously with lots and lots of smartphones, there has to be lots and lots of network to keep us all happy and make sure that we're all super 4G'd and very soon to be super 5G'd all the time. So it's great today to be here at OpenNet with Jenny Brown, who's the head of strategic organizational enablement. Hello there.

Hello. How are you, Scott?

I'm well. I'm well. I know you've listened to a few of these podcasts. Yes. You'll be an old hand at this. Because you know exactly the format and exactly what's going on, so that's great. And, you know, when I looked at your website earlier on, you know, the customer list is the who's who of world telcos, from Orange and BT and Vodafone to T-Mobile, Air, a little closer to home here in Ireland, Bell, Optus down in Australia, the other side of the world. So a real mixed bag of clients that, as I say, is like a who's who of global telecoms. Before we kick into some of the leadership and comms things I want to talk about, why don't we just kick off as we always do on this podcast with a few minutes about you, particularly your background, where you've come from, and a little bit about OpenNet.

Cool. So yeah, it was interesting. I was also doing some reading and I saw an article and it was talking about the HEA report and which grads did best. Very conveniently teachers, you know, do very well. They get their first job within 9 months and they get the best paid. And I was an arts graduate, which according to the HEA meant I was doomed to inequity and to a life of pointless exercise.

A life of baked beans from a tin.

And, you know, just generally having a permanent existential crisis. But yet here I am, and I don't know what that says about the arts degree that I did, which was in UCD more years ago than I care to remember and for which I would lie on the exact timeline as to when. But I suppose my journey to today has been a very, I think, probably similar to lots of people, a meandering one. There really is no such thing as a linear path, at least, and certainly not anymore. So when I left college, I had done an arts degree I had lived in France for a year on Erasmus. I did a Master's in European Studies, which was the very first year it was done, through Bridget Laffan, who was quite a well-known professor in that space at the time. But I've done nothing with any of that that relates to it, really. I started working in the voluntary sector. I lasted 3 years 3 and a half years, and I thought I had enough of that and moved over to the dark side, which would have been the private sector. And so I worked in IBEC for 6 years, over 6 years, which really is, for me, was an amazing experience, a great opportunity to do a real apprenticeship. You know, we're talking about apprenticeships a lot more now, and that for me was my apprenticeship into the world of organization, people, employee relations, you know, how do you actually drive business success through our people, and I looked and I was involved in many different aspects of that, and then I left and I got involved in the telecom sector and ended up here, and so you mentioned that Openet, you know, we are very much, I suppose, in the B2B space, face, people wouldn't know us, we're not a brand name, but yet we enable 11% of global mobile world traffic through our software and through the products that we sell to our customers who are, as you mentioned, the who's who. So we work with 7 out of 10 of the tier 1 and 2 operators globally, and so we have some specific challenges in respect of that. The mobile telco sector has been in a real flux and a real challenge and change over the last number of years, trying to understand how it presents a value proposition for its own customers. You know, people don't care anymore if they're Vodafone or they're Three or they're anything— AT&T, Verizon, Sprint.

You know, they're commoditized these days.

It's hugely commoditized, and it's basically an experiential transaction now. So who do I get the very best experience with? And essentially, that's what Openet seeks to do, is enable our customers to deliver an optimum experience for their customers. And that's been a change because we would have traditionally been very much a product-focused organization, and we would have been We would have done these huge, big software releases, and we have radically changed to being more of a services organisation delivering strong technology, strong solutions. But that required a change of mindset because we're now doing something continuous. We've moved to more of a DevOps model, which is really a mindset around how we deliver something continually for our customers. And so a lot of what I've been working on over the last year and a half, 2 years, has been how do we as an organisation enable our business strategy in that space to be, to have stickiness, to have traction, to have impact.

Okay, and tell me, just tell me a little bit about your role today as Head of Strategic Organisational Enablement. What does that actually entail? What are you doing? You said there about kind of bringing the strategy to life. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Sure, I guess, you know, I was head of HR for EMEA and would have been involved in rolling out our culture programme and our culture and values globally, and in a way this is a sort of a continuation of that journey, but it's about being vision maker. It's really about looking at our structure, our systems, systems and processes and our people in a very holistic fashion and saying, how do we transform how we deliver? How do we change not what we do, but the way we do it in such a way that it actually adds value? It's not just the emperor's new clothes. It's not doing something because somebody else said it would be a great idea or they did it and it worked, but what is it that's important for us? I guess back in the end of 2017, really started looking at that in a very meaningful way and looking at our structure as both an enabler but also a block for change. And I think sometimes we forget that it's the obvious things that we should focus on first. We get very caught up in our culture. We talk about culture a lot. Something that is, you know, important and a driver. And we hear that, you know, culture eats our strategy for breakfast, it's got to be slightly constipated after that. But actually, my view is that if you change what people do, you then can change the way people think about what they do. So we've sort of flipped, you know, that view. And I've sort of— yes, we had our culture, we've laid it out, we've said it's really important, but in order to actually enrich it, rather than talking about culture, we're changing how people work. We're collapsing organizations, we're blending teams, we're clustering people, we're looking at how people sit, how we communicate, and I know we'll talk about that, and being really clear about that. So we have— my role is really about I suppose bringing that together and bringing the key stakeholders with me because, you know, everyone can have a great idea. It's the execution is when, you know, things really get interesting. And to execute, you need people with you. And so there's an influence piece. So a huge amount of what I've been doing is creating the vision, putting a plan in place, and working with now this new organisation which is delivering customer enablement, which is a combined organisation representing 424 people, where previously it would have been 5 organisations, we now have one. So we have a brand new head of that group, we have a new management team, leadership team, We have new language around, you know, people were services, now they're solution delivery. So there's been an awful lot of change at a global level in an accelerated timeline, and my job is basically to make it happen.

Okay, I think it's really interesting when you talk about culture and doing things differently. And for me, culture is almost an output or a byproduct, which sounds like it maybe belittles it, but it's not meant to be belittling. But it's nearly an output, how it feels to work in a place, the things that people do, the things they say, the things they believe are all outputs of the building blocks that are put in place in an organisation. So I don't think you go out to build a culture, you go out to put the things in place to create the culture that you think is the culture that the organisation needs to succeed. And that's the output.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we have, we created a very purposeful culture frame. We said we have 5 key values that are really important to us, they're essential to our success. We spent a lot of time thinking about what that would look like, what the behaviors would be and what they wouldn't be. But fundamentally, you know, people often, you know, most people come to work wanting to do the right thing and the reason they can't deliver around the cultural narrative of their organization has to do with the organization often.

It's getting in the way of itself.

It gets in the way of itself. It's either overcomplicating, it's too many processes, and, you know, we scaled hugely in a very short space of time, and we just added things on, and it was sort of like, you know, it was like, you know, you buy an old house and you go to decorate it and you pull down a layer of wallpaper and then you realize, oh wow, okay, there's another layer of wallpaper, and then somebody decided, because it it was the '80s that they put corkboard up on the wall and then there was this really weird violet paint color behind that and then there was parquet flooring that somehow ended up on the wall. And that's sort of what happens. Organizations grow in a very sporadic, organic, and not necessarily great way and we struggled with that. And so part of what we've been doing is, you know, there's an awful lot of conversation right now about this Japanese Scott McInnes philosophy of decluttering and, you know, does it bring you joy? And, you know, there was a lot of things that we were doing that didn't bring us much joy. And so we've been quietly and quickly packing things up and changing things and looking at our processes, looking at our tooling, looking at our capability, looking at how we structure people, looking at our lack of collaborative organisation, not because of the people, but because of all of the things that we put in their place and their way. So a lot of it has been very rudimentary, very fundamental, and we're nowhere near there yet, but we've done quite a lot of change, and that in itself can be very challenging.

Okay, so tell me, as you're going through that challenging change process,, and certainly for me anyway, companies, if they're not changing, are dying because your customers' needs are changing, their customers' needs are changing, the market's changing, technology's changing, 5G's coming in your world. What does that mean? So, you know, there's change going on all the time. And I wonder from your perspective what the role of the leaders in your organization have been as you've gone through that change? And not just you and the rest of the team at the top of the tree, but leaders through the organisation. What's their role as you go through change?

I think the role of leader is very much to take responsibility for the success of the vision and to craft the vision, to have vision. And, you know, I think I was thinking about this over the last few days, I was having different conversations with people around a number of things and It strikes me in a way that leadership is very much a behavioural-driven existence, whereas management is much more of an activity, it's task-driven. So it's, for me, leadership is a very deliberate, conscious thing, and you've got to decide what it is that means for you and how you act. What you do, your behaviors, and, you know, looking at different things that are important in leadership. I think really, you know, I was looking at this idea of the leadership contract and this idea of accountable leadership, and I think that's really it in a nutshell for me. It's this leadership is accountable. There is no one else they can look to if something doesn't happen the way we said it was going to happen or the way it should have happened, we ultimately are responsible and accountable for that. So we own it. So we have to do everything within our ability to make sure it happens. We ourselves don't need to do it, but we need to enable it to be done and to create that urgency. And I think that's, I think that can be the thing with change that we forget the urgency of it. You know, having a burning platform is always very helpful. And, you know, although I think honestly it's very hard for anybody to say that they don't have a burning platform at any level. And, you know, and so for us it's really been about getting ourselves into that spot in the market where we can really deliver for customers in the way that they're looking for now, that their demand on us is different. And our technology is essentially what it has always been. It's always been, but the way in which we deploy it and the way in which we offer it to customers has changed transformatively. And so how we work has to change.

I think it's interesting that the burning platform is the analogy that we often jump to during change, and I think you can extend that out to the kind of the carrot and stick. The burning platform is very much the stick. We have to change or this raft's going to sink. And we're all going to die and be eaten by sharks, and so we have to do something different. Or we paint a picture of a really compelling future, a really compelling purpose that's achieved by living the values that we set within the organization and putting in place the building blocks for success. And to me, that's probably more the carrot. And I wonder which is, which is more effective, the carrot or the stick?

Well, I'm not sure that you can choose. I mean, I've listened to some Napoleon stated that mankind is only motivated by two things: fear and hope. And— or is it fear and money? I think that actually sounds more like it.

Which in some people's case is hope.

Is hope, yeah. Well, you know, so I think you need to give people a reason to get off the starting blocks, and I think that's your stick. That is your 'we cannot The status quo is not something that we can persist with. We have to change. But we have to give people more than a negative motivation. We need— that's the incentive, if you like, but the motivation, the thing that keeps people persisting and working hard is that common, you know, unity through purpose. So what is our positive purpose? What is that? Vision and coming back again to the role of leader, that is the role of leader is to consistently push that positive future and that vision in front of people and to give them the sense that we know where we're going. It may not feel like it right now, but we know where we're going and we are confident in that and we are committed to that. You know, and I think I think that that's— there's a need of courage in leadership. I think leadership can be a very vulnerable thing. People think of leadership and they think of, you know, everyone goes, "Oh, well, Nelson Mandela is my idea of a great leader." Well, you know, he spent a great deal of his life in prison and isolation, disliked, distrusted, disregarded, ignored, invisible, voiceless. And yet he became one of our, you know, dominant leaders of our recent age. So, and again, that comes back, I guess, that touches on another view that I have, that leadership is contextual. People are not always leaders all the time. You look at Winston Churchill, for instance, and I know I'm looking at, I suppose, more historical figures, but he wasn't noted as a leader before he became Prime Minister. In fact, he was highly disliked by his own party and had to cleverly create allegiance with his opposition party for him to actually cement his position and his influence. So, you know, leaders are wily and influential as well. They have to play the cards that are given them. They don't have a theory, they don't have every tool in the toolkit that they can work with, and there's a creativity and ingenuity sometimes in leadership that's necessary, and a tenacity. I think grit is a highly underrated quality in leadership. Grit. But when he, he didn't, you know, he, but he became a leader when no one else wanted to be a leader at that time, and he was the the only one saying, "No, we will not concede, we will not, we will not." And he saw the challenge clearly. I think that's important. He was very clear on what the challenge was and what was needed to overcome it. But then when that moment was gone, he was no longer a good leader. He was terrible when he didn't have that enemy to fight.

About that. I mean, if you talk about burning platform, by God, did Winston Churchill have one.

Yes, and he put out that fire. But, you know, and we talk about communication, and I think he was a very strong communicator. He engaged people, you know, we still reference his quotes, you know. Nelson Mandela, the same, you know, there are a lot of people who led and used the power of communication to lead albeit not in a digital age. But so for me, leadership is contextual. So it's a decision. It's a decision. I decide to— nobody else is doing this, but it needs to be done, and I'm going to take on the mantle, whatever it may be.

I think you're absolutely right. That whole idea of mindset is spot on. When I talked to Mary Davis in episode 1 of this podcast, the very, very first guest, we talked a little about leadership and she said, you know, there are still people who think that leadership is something you can diarise from 9 till 10 on a Tuesday morning, which of course is a load of bull. It's something, it's just how you are. It's a little bit like engagement, it's a little bit like culture. You don't do engagement, you don't do culture, you don't do leadership. You are.

I think so.

Those things, you live those things. And if you don't, then actually you're not particularly trustworthy, you're perhaps not given the opportunity to be vulnerable. You know, there is that say-do gap, you know, because I'll do my leadership, you know, on a Tuesday morning, but actually the rest of the week I'm horrible to work for. And I think what's really interesting as well with those two people that you picked, Churchill and Nelson Mandela, what they were great at for me was getting into your heart. It wasn't about— you know, we talk about leaders who lead from the heart and leaders who lead from the head, the rational versus the emotional. They were very much, you know, even somebody like Winston Churchill with his hard-nosedness and his cigars and his bulldog British, you know, Britishness, still somebody that actually got people by the heart, you know. And that is probably testament very much to his success. When that went away, as you rightly said, he was an abject failure as a prime minister. And I think you're actually the second, I can't remember who else was the talked about Churchill on the podcast, but you're certainly the second guest that's talked about him specifically. So it's really interesting, but that whole idea of context for me is absolutely right, that sometimes you're a leader, sometimes you're not. And you have to kind of be, I think as a leader, you have to be comfortable in your own skin with that ebb and flow. That actually sometimes might be somebody on your team where you say, you know what, mea culpa, I don't actually know as much about this as you know, so why don't you lead this part out? And be comfortable doing that.

Yeah, and I think it comes back to the purpose of leadership is to grow leaders, and I think sometimes people confuse that idea. There is, you know, we are, we live in a society now that is much more individualistic. It's much more look at me, hear me, you know, if we don't have a blog, we're just not living. You know, if you don't do podcasts, you're just not living.

That's true. That one is true. That was very true.

But you know, there is this— it's more about— it's this can— it's this— to what you're saying, it's this being thing. It's like, so a lot of people are acting as a leader, but they are not leaders. And they are consuming more management theory books than is possible. Possibly good for any one person to do because they have an absence of their own opinion. I think leaders, for good or for bad, must have an opinion, whether it is popular or not. It must have— so there's a need for conviction. You need to have conviction. And there is, you know, you talk about leaders ebbing, there is that, you know, I was saying it, there's a sense of forging leaders that, you know, we there's this kind of raw metal, there's this unrefined diamond that we forge and they become leaders, but there's that existing element there already, but context will forge, challenge will forge, opportunity will forge, and timing. It's a lot of it. History's funny, you know, you see people and, you know, if they lived at any other time they would be ignored. And so I think the best way to deal with leading is to not think about it too much. I think we overthink it. We've got too many competency frameworks around what leadership is and what does great look like and, you know, what does it mean to be a leader and do you have a growth mindset and, you know, are you— and you're like, oh my, it's It's exhausting.

It's like business buzzwords.

But like, if you spend so much time trying to think about what being a leader is, you don't lead. And also, you've got to have confidence and be convicted. If you have no conviction, if you have no opinion, you will never lead because all you will do is acquire other people's opinions. For sure, you seek out expertise, you defer to others who know more than you in a particular, but you've got to make it your opinion at, at a certain point and go, I really like what you're saying about this, I really think that's true, so I, I, I'm that, I'm now convicted that that's, that's an opinion I want to have, and but I'm not adopting it just because you said so. Um, and I think there is, you know, that, that whole Emperor's New Clothes, um, dynamic kicking about a little bit, and, and in that In so doing, we actually create a lot of insecure people because they're not sure. There's so much out there. The people are so much better than them. And how could I possibly do this? And I think by default, the more emphasis we've placed on leadership, the less likely we have made it for people to be able to lead.

Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. It's a really, really interesting angle. When you think about leadership and communications, as you're again back to, I suppose, your change program you've been going through. What's been the role of communications during the change, and whose responsibility is that? Whose responsibility is change communications as you're going through that process?

I think everybody's responsible, but certain people own it, and not everybody has a, has a role to play. And so certainly it's been something we've been I've been very conscious of and persistent about in terms of communicating to our management team the value and the importance of communication and their role in that. And so it is something that we are looking at. I think it's historically been an area that we have struggled with. We're a highly technical company, so we're very good at transferring information, And we have left-brain rational piece. Yeah, we've convinced ourselves that that means that we're communicating, and obviously we're not. And, you know, I've said sending out an email is not communication. And so there's been a piece where we've been, you know, my role has been to define communication and go, what is it and how do we do it? And there are different ways. So I have on my board communication strategy. So we have podcasts, obviously. Because, you know, you're not living if you don't have a podcast.

That's the in thing.

You know, looking at an intranet for the new group and making sure that there's a one touch point for everybody to find things, making sure that we have, when we consolidate our buildings, that we have screens where people can see what's going on and they can see what our strategy is, they can see updates, that we have Kanban boards, people can see where they are in terms of the projects. We have regular town halls, we have skip-level meetings, we do what we call, you know, we used to call them brown bags, but I prefer the term learning circles.

Bring your lunch and have a chat with the, with the board team.

And, you know, so there's that, we're, we're sort of, really it's about trying to find as many possible ways to say the same thing as possible, because I think, you know, it's very difficult, people consume information now in a way that entirely different to before, and so we need to be, we need to communicate to people in the way that they consume it. And so it takes a huge amount of effort to actually do that, and there is a requirement there, but it is absolutely, for me, key to change and transformation. And I think if we don't, and again that comes back to this idea of the vision and the endgame, and this is where we're going to, and this is our purpose, And just making sure that we persist around that, that we are, I suppose, we're conscious, deliberate.

Consistent is another big one for me as well. All your leaders who are out there speaking are bringing that consistent message of where we're going as an organization, the destination, the vision, where we've come from. But perhaps they're actually taking that and they're able to contextualize and translate that for their teams.

Exactly.

Locally on the ground, what does that mean for us?

Yeah, and I mean, part of that is even just understanding what our template is. So what are we all communicating in the same way? So, you know, trying to understand that, just making sure our language tallies, because we have, you know, we have a situation where we have, um, people sitting together and, and the same team where, you know, not that long ago they were shouting at each other across the table because they were not working on the same team. That takes a big decision to actually go from that to working collaboratively and for common purpose and understanding that the way we communicated before may not be the best way to communicate now and what is that and what does that look like and having again that clarity of purpose, so what are we we're here for. And I think that's— sometimes we forget to invest in that piece, and we go hell for leather on collateral and, you know, making things nice and doing good videos, and they're all great. But if we don't understand why we're doing it, the purpose of it, our role in it, and that actually the little things, the simple things, can really matter quite, quite, quite a lot, and particularly when we are looking to, I suppose, metamorphose the way we work, you know, appreciating that that creates a huge level of uncertainty for people and not everybody is comfortable with that. And so trying to find points of consistency and structure and certainty is important. And there's, so there's little moments that we kind of have to watch for. And not get too carried away with our own greatness.

It comes back to the point we talked about earlier on that you can set direction, you can set purpose, you can agree vision, you can agree values, but actually it's for the leaders. With the best will in the world, the senior team in the organization does not know the be-all and end-all of every single person in the organization. That's the leader's role. So actually, they're the one that's best placed to know how best to bring that to life for their teams, from my perspective. So, very last question. Tell me what leadership advice you would give to your younger self. One thing. What's the one thing you would tell yourself to be better at?

Don't do it.

Don't do leadership?

Don't do it. It's too hard. It's hard. Just learn to be okay with, you know, not wanting to change the world. Yeah, you see, it's kind of difficult because— and I asked for one word, that's also very difficult— but if leadership is something that you are, you you are, not that you act, and if it's something that is forged by time and circumstance and challenge, you know, then there's kind of nothing you can tell yourself that's going to matter except that it matters, that everything you do, all your experiences, all the difficulties that you have, all the challenges that you face will make you better if you let them. And I think how you perceive the world is key. The world is not out to get you. The world is just intrinsically a difficult place to live in for everybody for different reasons, and some people win and some people lose. And seek out challenge, actually. Don't run from it. Challenge creates character. Character which is needed to lead, I think.

I think that when this goes up on the website, that's probably going to be the quote. Challenge, what was it you said? Challenge?

Challenge, well, seek out challenge, don't run from it.

Yes, exactly.

Because challenge creates character and you need character to lead.

Brilliant, that will be the quote right there. There you go, see? Jenny, thanks so much for having me down here in Open that. I've really, really enjoyed having the conversation and the chat.

Thank you.

And I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it.

Thanks.

Take care.

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