In this executive‑education session, moderator Tom convenes a small, internationally diverse group (participants from the US, UK, Brazil, Norway, Spain, Channel Islands) to explore what it means to be a global leader. Sebastian Reiche, a researcher and executive‑education faculty, frames the conversation around three "buckets" of leadership capacity: (1) self‑awareness, (2) awareness of others, and (3) bridging various forms of distance (physical, operational, relational, technological). He defines global leadership as a social‑influence process that crosses emotional, cultural, and social boundaries, arguing that most leaders already operate globally through diverse teams, suppliers, and clients. Key concepts discussed include: the importance of self‑reflection (citing a University of Virginia study on the discomfort of solitary thought), the role of humility/downward deference (leaders who voluntarily reduce social distance and transfer influence to local teams), and empirical evidence that such leaders outperform peers by ~20% on financial growth targets and advance faster in their careers. The conversation links these findings to transformative learning theory, noting that disorienting experiences (e.g., cross‑cultural assignments) trigger habit change and the adoption of downward deference. The group also examines the informal organization: informal networks often outweigh formal hierarchies, and loss of influential informal contacts predicts turnover. Understanding and nurturing these networks is presented as a critical leadership skill. Senior leaders face higher task and relationship complexity, broader agency to redesign structures, and the pressure of being constantly “on‑show.” Strategies for managing this complexity include building reflective habits, fostering empathy, and using storytelling and collective sense‑making to create shared narratives and informal influence. The session concludes with practical suggestions—relationship‑mind‑maps, regular listening rituals, and intentional reflection—to embed these capacities into daily leadership practice.
Chapters
So we'll probably have a relatively small group today, which in the past we found is marvelous because we could really have a great in-depth discussion with each other. It turns out that we picked a holiday in the US, Memorial Day, and nobody's working. And apparently it's a holiday in the UK as well, a bank holiday. So only the Europeans are here on holiday-free regular workday. So Welcome to everybody that's, that's here. Maybe you could just put in the chat, where are you from? I see David's in California. Clarice, I think, is in the UK. I don't remember, Clarice, where you're from.
Brazil.
Brazil. That's right. That's right. Jonathan's from Norway. Sebastian from Spain. John Hibbs is from the Channel Islands. And we usually bring along a kind of a prompt or a question. And so Sebastian's curiosity in his research and his experience interacting with executives in executive training programs, really, if people don't know, the ESA executive programs are ranked in the top 1 or 2 in the world consistently, in the world consistently. And so he has the opportunity to work with business leaders and I think community leaders as well who have roles that cross country and continent and to understand what the unique challenges are for people in those positions and what the unique challenges are that they need to prepare for as they move potentially into those types of positions. And so We're really anxious to step back and, and have a look at this. And so I want you to meet each other in a short breakout and just, what do you think your global reach is, or what is the global reach on you in business anyway? How do you see global dimensions, if at all? So let's explore that, open that one up. Just one more brief background piece, and then I'm going to let Sebastian lead us through some discussion. And I'll share in the chat here a little graphic. You know, when Sebastian agreed to do this, then a couple months beforehand, we said, well, what do we want to learn from this session? And I came up with this little graphic, which I think captured it well. So I shared it there in your— A couple questions. So you got people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy and people at the top and people on their way up. And person at the bottom saying, how is leading here as it will be at the top? So how am I leading now the same way that I would, might be leading if I was at the top of the heap? And for those going up, what is a possibility as we climb, but a necessity at the top? Which to me means now's my chance to learn this because it's going to be a necessity at the top. It's a possibility now, so I can actually not only research it, but I can actually internalize this possibility now. And at the top, what are, uh, helpful capacities from this vantage? And how do my intentions or strategies change from this vantage? That kind of captures what was on our mind, and we'll talk around those things. And with that, Sebastian, I think you're on.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much, Tom. Thanks for joining. This is a lovely intimate group. I think we can make this as interactive as possible. As Tom said, I have prepared something to talk about, well, these, these 3 buckets, if you will, right? Depending on where you are in your leadership role, seeing leadership not as a position, but really as an activity, depending on what your role kind of entails. There's different aspects, different capacities, different characteristics of the context that might have a bearing on the choices you take. And so my idea was to talk about these 3 buckets, and then always talk about one, a couple of capacities that I've seen both in my research and teaching in different executive programs that are relevant. Now, a few caveats that I should mention at the beginning. One is, if you look at just global leadership research, and that's much smaller than the broader leadership field, Global Leadership Scholars have identified more than 160 competencies alone. So we're not going to cover all of those. So the idea here is going a bit more in depth rather than trying to breach and cover everything. Having said this, please jump in if you feel there's something that's very important that we haven't talked about, or that you feel is important for discussion. Please, please mention this. You can jump in the— put this in the chat, or— and then just in the brief breakout we just had, I asked Tom earlier, would be a good idea to think about your global reach. Now, in my group, David and Alena is how far is our global reach. Now, global is a big word, and I often start in, in the type of courses that I teach. I teach one MBA course, but the rest really is executive education with very diverse groups, from, from middle managers to, to senior executives, to sometimes to boards as well. And when I ask people, do you think you're a global leader, most of them say, well, I'm not sure, I don't really have a global reach. And my definition of Leadership is really, it's a social influence process. Well, that's on my definition. I think that's established that we're having an influence to a group of people. And global in my mind is really leading or having that influence across boundaries. Now these boundaries can be emotional, that can be cultural, social. So global doesn't necessarily mean I have a full global perspective. I'm jetting around the world. I have got global worldwide responsibilities, but it means that I, I have, I'm leading across boundaries. And then I would think most of us actually have, part of our leadership is global in nature. Even if you never leave your home country, your team is diverse. It's gonna be more diverse despite the current geopolitical tensions climate we're experiencing. I still feel given technology and given how our work is sliced, our teams will become increasingly diverse. At the interface of our teams, we have different stakeholders, suppliers, clients who are increasingly diverse. So we have to be able to have an effective social influence process that crosses boundaries. So that's kind of my, my, my definition, if you want. And that, that opens the, the scope of how we can think of Global Asia much, much more. Um, okay, so let's start out with with what's common to any leadership role. What— if I'm rephrasing Tom, what would you introduce at the beginning? What's— if you're sitting at the bottom, you may not actually be at the bottom, you might just be less, less senior in a role. Um, but what's common no matter what type of leadership role you engage in? Um, and one aspect that I start, and I almost do this in every single program where I have— sometimes I have just 2 or 3 sessions in a module.
This is—
these are very short modules on leadership. I start with, with the self, with awareness, which some people find surprising because you, if you move to a leadership development program, you think, how can I lead effectively others? And the focus, our focus is often on the other rather than on the self. But it's almost preposterous if you want to tell someone else or advise or coach someone else how to how to behave differently, how to think differently, how to approach a problem differently. If you're not aware about yourself, it's very difficult to contrast another opinion with your own if you're not aware of your own perspective. And at the same time, it's very important to be able to take a stand and push through your decision if you feel that's more meaningful and more effective. But you need to be able to know where this comes from. So awareness is the self, Being aware, knowing about myself, and at the same time allowing others to get to know you, which in a technology media was even often more, more difficult. We jump into meetings, we cut to the chase, we move to the, to the issue at hand without actually spending enough time to connect. So that's that, but then there's also the aspect of awareness of the other. And ultimately the combination of knowing myself well and knowing the other well is helping to create complementarities, especially in increasingly diverse teams. Now, if you think about awareness of the other, I'm still surprised, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts as well. When you talk to leaders in whatever, in different roles, I'm surprised how many don't know much about their direct reports or the people that they lead, whether that's in a hierarchical or a lateral position. Even though this is a very distinctive human aspect of being able to connect, or if we want to connect, have some personal overlap, understanding the person that you're dealing with, whether that's your hobbies, whether you have a family, what type of family, where you come from, with a small icebreaker, whether that already— how do you create fragile initial trust if you don't have that initial connection? Um, that might sound very simple, but again, I don't see this as often as I, as I'd like to. Um, and not having that personal connection, not having that awareness of the other, makes your life as leader more difficult. One, from a personal perspective, think about motivations. They're very universal. What you think about motivation, there's no cultural, um, shade to it. As humans, we have different types of motivations. If you look at the psychological literature of the past 50, 100 years, we know We have— we're extrinsically motivated. Our behavior is kind of driven by rewards received, but these rewards can be tangible, it can be intangible. I choose to become healthy, so go out running every morning. That's an extrinsic reward. We're intrinsically motivated. We enjoy growing from a task. We take satisfaction, sense of purpose, sense of growth from a task. Um, and so for many years we've been knowing a lot about extrinsic, intrinsic, and over the last 20 years as management scholars at least, we've, we've started to understand much more about whether you call this altruistic or pro-social transcendent motivation. The idea is that the, the beneficiary, the main beneficiary of your behavior is not yourself, it's, it's someone, it's someone else. It's very difficult to say, to establish whether there's true altruism. We're going to solve this ourselves. But the idea here is there is A third part is motivation, and it's more altruistic in nature. Um, and, um, and we know less about it, but the idea of the whole debate we currently have about how important purpose, how meaningful work should be, that kind of attaches to, connects to that debate. Um, and so if you, if you were to poll all of, all of us, uh, on, on these three motivations, we all have these three motivations, but we all have a different profile. Each one of us probably has a slightly different relative profile of how these three motivations pan out for ourselves. What we know is that the younger you are in your career, we tend to be more, a bit more extrinsically and intrinsically motivated. You might have taken a mortgage, you started your career, you've done, Tom, your son's done the MBA, may have to repay some, some of their loan. But later on, as we become older, we tend to think more about the legacy we want to leave, the impact, the purpose in our behaviour. So that changes over time. But each one of us has a different motivation profile. Now, if you don't have that awareness of the other in your team or with your direct stakeholders, it's very, very difficult to distribute work effectively. And if you have extra work, if you're going through change, How do you, yeah, elicit change? How do you get people motivated in line with that change? So understanding the other through conversations, through deep conversations, helps you to establish what people's motivation profiles look like, and that will help you to lead more effectively because you're able to distribute work, task, roles in different ways according to people's motivation profiles. So that's one thing. The other is if you want to put the the cultural layer to it and ask what's fair leadership, um, fair leadership is not cutting your time in equal buckets and then spending it to the same amount to everyone that, that you're leading, whether it's lateral or horizontal or vertically, right? Um, if you have— if you're leading a team that's dispersed across different, um, contexts, and one team sits in the Middle East, another team dispersed in Europe. And you'll ask— I'm kind of culturally stereotyping now— but you ask your Middle Eastern colleagues how much time they'd like to see you be there for them, they'll probably tell you that they want more time from you. And the relationship-oriented culture of Brazil, Clarice, that probably resonates with you. In Spain, certainly too., and I have more relationship-oriented culture, there's a need for more interaction. So if what's fair leadership, is it spending the exact amount, same amount of time with everyone? Probably not. So understanding well the individual, um, and their culture heritage makes your life easy because you can gauge how much, how close or how distant you'll, you'll lead the other. So that's awareness of the other. Um, The, the second part is obviously, uh, is awareness of yourself, is understanding yourself. If you want to create complementarity, complementarity is, is understanding yourself. And that's often difficult. It's— we're given— it's the one thing that no matter how wealthy you are, how privileged you are, how much status you are, where you grow up, we're given time to engage in introspection. We're given time to spend with ourselves. In fact, with technology, social media, we're— all this eats more into the time that we're given. But even if you are given the time, you're forced to avoid all other distractions, is something that we don't often like to do. There was a fascinating study by a group of researchers at the University of Virginia. They had to do this 12 times, the study, to be able to publish this. It was published in Science. The most prolific scientific journal. But when they started out, they wanted to understand if you're given 15 minutes just with yourself sitting at a table, at a desk, there's a table, there's a chair, nothing else. You're given 15 minutes, it's luxury to spend time reflecting about yourself. They started with students, university students. And then after these 15 minutes, people were polled how they felt. Like we give them a short survey, how do you feel about that, fill this out. And the general gist of that experience was they didn't feel great about it. So they didn't like the activity. So they did this with different professional groups, managers, with university teachers, with school teachers. And the general experience was that being given 15 minutes with your own thoughts is not something that people like. So the last one, now you know what I have to do this 12 times in this experiment. People were given a choice. You could either spend 15 minutes with your own thoughts, or you can choose, and I say this as a German with my own history at the moment, or you're given an electric shocker and you can give yourself small electric shocks. Now, about two-thirds of men, and I think 40% of women, chose the electric shocker rather than the pain of spending time with your own thoughts. So you can take it for what it's worth, but the idea is that you can, we can all engage in self-reflection. It's easier said than done. We don't often do this. So I guess one point, and that's one thing I see a lot in the leadership development programs that I run is just building nudges into your day-to-day. How can you build in time for reflection and self-awareness? That's important for yourself, but even if you think about how others, um, rate leaders— if you think about performance appraisal systems in companies, most organizations have formal performance appraisal systems. Some of them are formal, some of them are informal. If you look at smaller companies or startups, they haven't formalized this. But if you ask people How would you rate your leader? We tend to give them categories. Does that person have business acumen? Can that person lead effectively across diversity? I'm not sure people are able to fill out those categories, but people use their own heuristic when they assess other people. If you think about what heuristic people use when they assess others, often it is their own perception of whether the leader, him or herself, is self-aware or not. Because you're giving feedback all the time, whether formally or informally. You're working with someone, whether that person's hierarchically higher or is, is a, is an informal leader in a group, you're giving feedback. Your outside view is whether the person listens to the feedback and implements some of this feedback. That's the only thing that you can assess. So even If you may feel I'm not self-aware myself, it's still important to convey whether you've heard that feedback and it has triggered a reflection and has triggered some change. So that's awareness. If you think this is kind of what my first capacity, if you will, meta-capacity, that's important, that's common no matter where you are, no matter in which group of leaders I would approach. This is to me a very important capacity that helps leaders be more effective. And maybe between in this group and when I meet people after an executive programme, weeks, months, sometimes years later, and I ask them what's one of the key learnings they have said as an educator, I would hope there's more learnings, but one of the kind of very consistent things that people have been doing is actually just creating some space in their weekly agenda for consistent, regular self-reflection. And if you're able to do this on a weekly basis and you build this into your day-to-day, I think that's very, very important. And of course, you're protecting this time and you're using that time for reflection rather than crowding it out with something else. And then the other thing I'll say on awareness is important as a preparation as you become more senior is our habits. We develop our habits. Many, many books have been written about how we can think about habits, how we can change habits. Personal change, just like organization changes, is very difficult. And being aware of our habits is very difficult. A lot of the habits happen early on in our career. Our MBA students when they start out in their first weeks, a lot of how they'll go through the 2-year program is how will they decide to start preparing for a program in their first weeks. I remember when I talked to our PhD students, the way they'll approach research as academics when they work, when they feel they're at their best, how they approach writing, how they approach reading. A lot of this actually happens early on in their PhD, and that if they can do this more intentionally, if they're aware of those habits, it's easy to, to mould them and realise which one of those habits will serve them well as they move up, or which habits they may have to change if they move to, you know, to an academic, in this case, academic role, or as a leader, you're moving into a more senior role, which of these habits actually serve me or which habits do not serve me. So this is awareness. Tom, shall we open up for questions? I can continue talking about other capacities.
Yeah, no, I think that's a good prompt. I think we should jump into the breakouts.
Where does your own knowledge of yourself has come in particularly handy, and maybe where, where has it been limiting you as well to understand some of the boundary conditions? Okay, so you split an office building, your team is growing, half the team you move to the second building, there's just a street separating the two buildings, and then you look at people's email patterns of who they email. People tend to email the people that they're sitting physically close to. So here we're not talking about thousands of kilometers that you're sitting apart working with others, but you literally have— you're separated by building, by 100 meters. And so distance doesn't have to be 1,000 kilometers. It can be a different building. And we all know the moment you're physically separated, our relationships— there's downstream consequences. I'm not sure they always suffer, but there's downstream consequences for relationships and how you lead.. And I think this is particularly important because if you think about how our work context is structured, I was mentioning in the breakout group, I'm writing a book that's still in the process of being published, but I really look at work not only in terms of global work, but as distributed work. Work is distributed. Global work is distributed, is a form of distributed work. You work as a gig worker, it's also distributed work. You're not fully connected to an existing organization, right? You, you juggle different roles. We work remotely, a hybrid format. That's also a form of distributed work. And so all these types of work make, make bridging over distance more important. Um, and so that's why distance— so how do you do this, right? So that's, that's the context has bearing on how you lead. But you thinking about as a leader, how can you actually bridge distance becomes very important. I feel it's important in any leadership role. It becomes more important as you move up because your roles will increasingly have more dispersion, more scope, if you will. And so you can think about this. How do you bridge physical, just the mere physical distance? How do you bridge the operational distance, making sure we actually have common norms of how we work together effectively? And that entails communication norms, often simple things of how do we write emails. If I look around the room here, we have a diverse bunch of people. I'm originally German, and I write a long email to Tom, a colleague from the US— I'm stereotyping now— with a to-do in the last sentence. It's a page long, very German structured, and nobody responds to me because the to-do is in the last sentence. No one will read the email if it's not— if the to-do is not in the first paragraph. If that's a concern, If you're concerned that people make assumptions based on how we communicate, then you've got to cut that out. You need to think about how should we communicate? What should be our operational norms? That's what I mean by operational distance. Then there's relational distance where we talked a bit about already before the breakout. How do you bridge that distance? Then technology-mediated, well, that's even more important. Distance also has bearing on my second very important capacity that I feel is is critical, especially as you start move climbing up, which is humility or deference. Now, you think about deference when you're at the bottom, if you're in a leadership role or in a non-leadership role, we tend to be deferential to those in leadership roles. And we know from research that when you're talking to someone who is more senior, either hierarchically, informally, or formally more senior, we tend to speak more politely. Our volume, the voice volume will drop. We tend to be quieter. So we show deference to those above us. But the question is, if you lack expertise, if you lack local networks, if you lack local influence in a in a leadership role that bridges distance, how do you get work done? And if you don't have the expertise on the ground, you don't have knowledge of your local stakeholders you'd have to influence to get your work done, if you don't have the network, what do you do? You still have a team, hopefully you have some people you can rely on, but do you actually rely on that team and how do you do that? So this was a study we've done, a colleague of mine at HBS, Sir Taddeo Neely, and then myself, We try to understand how, as leaders, if you operate in a context that you're not familiar with— we looked at, in this case, global context. So these were leaders who were assigned to a non-native country. They had large roles, but they were essentially thrown into the cold water. They were operating in the country, in a country context they weren't familiar with, and they had to achieve organizational objectives without in-depth expertise, influence, and networks to do that. And so we went to one large organization that has 170,000 employees around the world. So they were operating every, every single context you could imagine. And we interviewed 120 of those leaders. And in the breakout group I mentioned earlier, if you ask people, what's your leadership style, they'll all tell you, I'm a servant leader, I'm empowering. If that would be the case, we wouldn't have those problems. We would be living in a very different world. So you have to obviously try to get at people's leadership in different ways. We use a narrative method. We ask people, tell me how you go about leading in a context that you're not familiar with. And we listen to people's stories. They talked about their most recent example, but they really talked about the journey, the leadership journey that they had. And so, and then we had access to, John, to your earlier point, what's the benefit of some of those things? Are you a better leader? We had access to their performance appraisals, which were big financial growth goals. So their supervisors were rating these leaders' performance. And we also looked at their career trajectory so we could see how fast people moved up the career ladder. And so as we looked at these interviews, we found that about 40% of the leaders we talked to across very different cultures, origin cultures. So you had a Korean being responsible for customer access in Latin America, a German doing backend operations in Southeast Asia. So there were big roles and there were leaders from very different native countries. Operating, or operating in unfamiliar contexts. And so 40% of the leaders that we, that we interviewed repeatedly talked about stories of how they would actually defer to their team, not defer upwards, they were deferring downwards. And so we called this later on downward deference. It's not that they were taking away their formal power, they still had formal power, So they were in, in influential positions, but what they tried to do is essentially they tried to make themselves more equal to their teams, which we thought was fascinating because if you look at the social psychology literature on power, we know that the moment people engage or have reached a position of power, they tend to entrench themselves. You try to maintain your position of power, you often try to maintain or increase your social distance to those below you., so you are more secure in your, in your, in your role, in your powerful role. Well, what we found is that those leaders essentially were kind of reducing social distance to those that they led. And these were the local teams, the local teams in those contexts. So they were reducing social distance. They were also transferring influence to the team members. So some people were talking about that's, if you will, it's a form of empowering leadership, right? How would you go about taking that decision? I'm unfamiliar with the concept. I don't know the client. I don't know how best to engage the client. How would you go about doing this? So those two types of behaviors that we've consistently, regularly, and repeatedly had seen in those interviews reducing social distance rather than maintaining, increasing it, and the second, transferring influence to, to those local teams. And so the other 60% of leaders were using more traditional kind of command and control type of leadership behaviors, right? Instructing if they felt they hadn't been understood, repeating in different words, making sure the instruction was grasped. But it was more hierarchical, top-down type of way of leading. They were essentially using what they were used to earlier on in their career. And when we looked at their performance data, it turned out that those leaders who were able to defer, who talked about this deferring to their teams, were 20% more successful. That's a big difference. Again, here we're talking about big financial, big growth goals. And they were faster in their career progression too. So if we looked then 5 years later, we looked at kind of their, how fast they moved up in their career, they were more successful in terms of objective career indicators. Now you may say this is instrumental, it worked for these leaders. It's nice, we were fascinated by this because if you will, there's anecdotal evidence being humble, deferential is good. It's— you're a good human, but does this actually pay off? Well, it seems to have paid off for these individuals. Interestingly, in a context, the organization we looked at was a very hierarchical company. So this is not a company that trialed self-management or was empowering in large scale. So these were leaders who themselves voluntarily decided to engage in a leadership behavior that was more more empowering, more, more differential. Um, Jonathan, you have a question? Go ahead.
Not so much a question, but an association. So a few weeks ago, I read Adam Grant's book Give and Take, and he had a lot of research on the, the way in which this quality of giving without being overly compliant and a doormat actually did result in that kind of success. So what you're saying seems to really fit well with that.
Yeah, and I, I love, I love this book. I think that's, uh, uh, I mean, Adam Grant has written many books, I think that, but that's my favorite too. And I think it's, it's a nice— exactly, it is how much can you be deferential, uh, but altruistic, helping, pro-social without being exploited. Um, And there, and I will say, so I look at downward deference as different from delegation. There's many different forms of how I can engage my team. I can delegate. You tend to delegate things that are strategically not as important. In fact, our kind of heuristic of delegating is you're clearing your plate so you can focus on what's more strategically important for you as a leader. Delegation still has a communal activity in the sense that, to the extent that you're delegating tasks, you're enabling the team to grow in their, in their, in their roles, right? They'll take more decision, right, activities or a greater kind of set of behaviors than they would if you, if you weren't to delegate. But you tend to delegate things that are not as important, whereas here what these leaders were doing, they were really involving, they were deferring to their team for strategically important tasks. They wouldn't achieve their organizational objectives if they weren't engaging with their teams. But so it worked for the leaders, but it is, this dumb deference behavior is very communal as well, because by, to the extent that you're doing this with your local teams, you're creating much more likely successes you're enabling the team, you're, you're growing the behavioral repertoire of your local team. So it is very much instrumental for the leaders, it worked for them, but it certainly worked for the team and it worked for the organization. You're building talent depth if you do this at scale. Now, if you ask why did these leaders do this, um, we, we try to understand this as well. So, and so, so we looked at these leaders' career histories, which kind of looking for indicators why some leaders would engage in these behaviors, uh, whereas others did not. And what we found is those leaders who decided to defer over the course of their careers had all been involved in more disorienting experiences. They had been working in, in more distant cultures before, they had been learning to bridge distance, they've been learning that they were in context where they where their learned behaviors wouldn't get them as far. So it was that very, if you know, I don't know whether you've heard about Mesero's transformative learning theory, the idea that very disruptive events, disorienting events, culture researchers call them culture bumpers to extend that there's something that doesn't make sense initially. And we're back to self-reflection, triggers you reflecting about it. It's a trigger event that makes you rethink learned behaviors, habits that kind of triggered that, that change in leadership behavior for these leaders. And again, they were engaging in a voluntary behavior. The organization didn't mandate that. They were free. They could, there was no non-hierarchical way of how they should lead. They chose this themselves. They learned this. Now, what does this mean if you think back, how do you actually enable this at broader scale? It is, how can we give leaders these disorienting events? As you flip this around, now the edge of— we have technology. We can delegate a lot of tasks. The tough tasks, we go into ChatGPT increasingly, helping us to draft a difficult letter. I've done a lot of research on— originally I'm coming from global work. I've done a lot of research on expats, people who have double careers. And when you talk to relocation service providers, uh, global mobility managers, they all say, to the extent that you've spent more assignments abroad, you've spent more time abroad, you may have learned that it's painful to go through these events, but you often ask for additional protection. How can we— how can you protect me against eventualities that I've seen previously in my life. I don't want to go through them again, but you're throwing away some of this learning. So what these results and Mesmer's theory originally says, these disruptive events are very, very useful for us. And to the extent that we're trying to simplify our lives, we're over-relying on things that take care of the very things that actually help us learn and grow. And I think We thought that was fascinating too. And I think that has very, very strong implications for leadership development. We need to put people in those tough places so they learn, they rethink themselves to prepare for the next role.
Well, it seems to me as one of the things I got to travel with Edward Deming, and I was really into a lot of continuous improvement and things that were broken. And so as I've sort of approached this in a whole different way with leadership and being deferential and being more holistic and being more leaderful and being more servant leadership oriented, I really never thought about the ones that maybe had more broken things, had more opportunity to grow. So in a way, if you think about Deming's work, if you really realize that things were that bad, you would realize the disruption that you've had in your business or in your life. And you would actually evolve much easier.
It's interesting on that point. So how do you, how do you deal with the disruption in the moment? There's many ways of how we deal with disruption. You can see this as a threat and then try to talk it away or forget about it, or you can see it as an opportunity. I think that comes back to, up here, to our self-awareness. How do we work on our identity, on our leader identity? Do I see this as an opportunity? I could learn something from this, or I try to avoid any other potential context where this might happen again, then it's a threat.
Tom? Yeah, just, you know, Kathy Al observed that the tie to Deming is those habits that let us notice the difference. Deming might say something like, slow down and notice the little differences that are occurring so that you can learn from them. So it's not just the big disruptive things that break you that you can also learn from. So in terms of our idea about what can we learn now or learn as we go, what habit can we build? It's this habit of noticing differences and seeing them as opportunities. That sounds pretty cool.
So if you think about downward deference, to me is one source of informal influence. And to me, that's a very important additional capacity as you're moving up. I think it's important in any role too, but I think it's as you're moving into more senior role, understanding where, where your source of influence really are, which you can leverage. I think that's, that's, that's meaningful and it helps you to be effective in, in, in leadership. And so what I mean by informal influence is essentially, if someone would strip you of your formal power, why would people still follow you? Why would they— and you, when you look at emerging leadership in self-managed teams, for example, where you don't have formal leaders, it's really interesting What are some of those sources that make some people move, emerge as leaders, whereas others do not? The thing with informal influence is you can't force it, right? You have to earn it, like love. Hopefully your spouse loves you, but you can't force your spouse to love you. You have to earn, you have to gain that, like, like trust and respect. And so downward deference is, is a source of informal influence because to the extent that you, you engage your team, you rely on your team you're more likely to gain credibility by that team. To me, very, very important source of leadership capacity being understanding what your source of informal influence is, but there's many different sources. So I'd be curious to hear, and maybe that's something we can discuss in the breakouts. First of all, what are different sources of informal influence that you may have? What are your individual sources of informal influence? If you think about yourself in whatever leadership role, why would people— why do they respect you? Why do they love you as a leader? Why do they follow you, even though you may not have formal position power over them?
So that'll be our prompt for our breakout right now.
You're all still smiling, so you're engaged. That's good. OK, I was just saying to Tom, we're in the same breakout. There's so many things we haven't talked about. We've obviously deep-dived in just a few. That probably means that we've opened more questions than the things that we've answered. But I did want to kind of come back to that third bucket, which is once you have that vantage point more at the top— and top is maybe not necessarily the right— you don't necessarily have to be sitting at the top of an organizational hierarchy. You can be in a very senior role senior leadership role and what, what are the things that, that are unique to that particular perspective compared to other leadership roles you might engage in. Um, and, and I guess one, one aspect that kind of has been sitting there, we've talked, has come up in different ways throughout our conversation, is, is one, is one on complexity. I mentioned distance earlier. Um, being in a more senior executive role, a senior leadership role The way I've been defining this in my research on global leadership is by how we think about the type of complexity you face in your role. So that's one aspect. By complexity, I mean both complexity in the task and the activities that you engage with. That can be the number of different elements you have in your task, how many competitors are there, how many countries are you responsible for, how many languages you engage in, and so It's more complex to operate in a multilingual context than in a bilingual context or monolingual context, for example. And then to the extent that these elements change, how much change is there in my task context? And then the second part is the relationship complexity. How many different boundaries am I crossing with different stakeholders? How many interconnections do I have with relevant stakeholders? Do they change? Do they vary? Okay, so that's what I, that's what I understand under complexity. And to me, a senior leadership role is one that faces substantial, significant tasks in relationship complexity. That's essentially the context that has bearing on the type of decisions you take as a leader, the choices you make. But when you think about, when I think about the classroom and Whenever I engage with senior executives who have senior leadership roles, the one thing that changes a lot compared to people who are less senior in the roles is the type of discussions they have with the same question that I'm trying to elicit. When you talk to a functional manager, they'll talk about a particular issue from, from their particular functional perspective. A senior executive will see the same issue from an operational, from an HR, from a market access, from a governance, from, from from a financial perspective. So the type of conversation that you're having and the way you think about problems is necessarily more interconnected, which means it is more complex because you're thinking as you're discussing a problem, you have the different elements in your task environment in your, in your head, you're thinking about different stakeholders that have a bearing on this. So the type of conversation on the same problem shifts a lot. And that's something that I see day in, day out when I use the same case or same decision-making problem with different groups. The one thing that, that changes is exactly that, that more broader discussion. Um, the other aspect that I've seen, and I find this fascinating, is on one side you can flip this around, it's, it's, it should be relevant in more different roles, but people are only aware and talk about this whenever they are in senior leadership roles, is this idea that they're constantly on show. When you're a leader, when you're in a senior leadership role, you feel you are very visible. No matter what you say, anything that you say, people will listen to, they'll react to. Um, and so this, this difficulty, same time, of, of being by yourself because everything that you say is, is taken in a certain way. So you're on show no matter what you say. And so dealing, dealing with this combined with this, with this idea of, but I have broader discussions. I need to see problems in a very interwoven way. So these are things that I see in the classroom. The big difference I feel once you are in a senior role is one of reach. I mentioned this earlier. And so to me, reach is the agency you have to change structure, not just in your behaviors in your team. So when you think about the example I mentioned earlier on downward deference, which is a form of empowerment, um, no matter what type of organizational context, you can choose voluntarily to engage in a certain leadership behavior, which is I might defer more or less to my team, no matter— and the organization we looked at was very hierarchical, it was not structurally empowering organization. But if you're in a senior leadership role, you actually have agency over changing how the organization is structured. You can empower the organization structurally. You can change organization structure, you can change organization processes, you can change organizational systems. So leadership becomes enablement in a sense that you actually— and a leader the leaders, how they think about their role is, I can actually— I may still have to report, I still have shareholders, I might— there's limitations I have, but, but actually I have agency, I have discretion over changing structurally things in the organization, whatever type of organization that is, which I don't have if I'm, if I'm, if I'm lower. Um, and so the sphere of influence increases. When I talk to more junior managers, I would often still give the message: you need to diagnose the type of system you have in place in the organization. If you, if you can't lead effectively because the motivational system, the incentive system doesn't work the way your career system doesn't work, you need to diagnose, you need to give that feedback. Nobody else will. Um, you might be lucky hiring a consultant who tells the CEO to, to change something, but you have to— you live this one up. On a daily basis, you need to give that feedback. Now, if you're a senior executive, you may diagnose, but you can actually change it. You can receive that feedback. You can act on that feedback. That comes with a very important responsibility. Often what I see is you realize that you have that agency. You don't make the changes because change is difficult, and you actually have to get the whole organization on that change. But the perspective of actually having that discretion, having that agency, is one that you don't have when you're, when you're in a less senior role. And, and the other is that comes with, with this agency is also just realizing if I'm leading within an organizational system, have I actually designed a system that's aligned with what we want to achieve? If you think about our organizational purpose our vision, our mission? Have we aligned our organizational systems, practices in supporting that strategy, that mission? If not, we would have to change it. Do the different practices we have in place in the organization, do they make sense? Do they support each other? It's the alignment between different elements of the system. And do we have the right people who can help us achieve our mission? So it's kind of these three different— I think about this as three different levels of alignment. It's a strategic alignment, Does how we've designed our system, does this help our strategy, our mission? Does the system itself make sense? Is it, is it aligned? Is it consistent, coherent, or do the different parts point in different directions and confuse people? And do we actually— are we able to attract the right profile of people with their values, their abilities, their capacities to support what we're trying to do? You can diagnose this at any level., but it's easier for you to change the system and realign. And that's a dynamic process. You can change a strategy on the back of an envelope, uh, easily, but aligning the entire organizational system, the practices, is a much tougher and much, much slower process. So to me, that, that's, that's, that's a core aspect, not necessarily global in leash. It's just being a senior, being a senior executive, having that different vantage point and the discretion agency that gives, but that you're afforded in that role. I'd be curious to hear how this resonates. I know many of you have been engaged with leaders, with senior leaders too, so I'd be curious to hear what you're thinking. Maybe we can then move into an open discussion, Tom. We've had two breakouts. We can talk about this.
I don't think we have time for breakouts, so I think we just handle it in open discussion in our last 15 minutes. Yeah, I have two things that I thought of as I listened. One is everyone has influence in their sphere of influence, right? They have— they can change the structure within their sphere of influence. And the higher you are, the broader your sphere of influence. But even there, there's things, especially if they're culturally rooted, or there's things embedded in organizations that no no executive really can, can change either. I mean, they can— it's not that they should step away from that goal to do that, but, you know, some of that change comes with a lot of difficulty. David Day.
Hey, thank you, Sebastian. I'm interested in your thoughts about the formal versus the informal organization relative to what we're talking about, formal leadership versus informal leadership. One of the things that I see happen too often in organizations is that leaders recognize the formal chain of command, and they have— they're pretty ignorant about the informal organization and how things actually work at the lower levels. Including leadership. One of the things that I think is a truism is that informal leadership is often much more powerful than formal leadership in organizations. And I'm just curious as to your thoughts about that, because your previous comments were about this notion of agency and being able as a higher-level leader formally to change structure. And I think that's also where a lot of organizational change efforts go wrong, it's focusing on rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic and not understanding the informal organization and the way people are connected more informally. Yeah.
No, very much so. In fact, in our breakout, we were kind of started talking a bit about if you were to put an informal network of informal relationships onto the formal organization chart, you'll see the connections look very, very different. Now, which ones are better? Now, if you try to mimic the formal organization chart with the informal network, you'd be dismantling a lot of things that help you get your work done, right? And you can't— Kim's point earlier was you may not be able to move someone who is informing the person, the go-to person to a higher position because he or she may not have the capabilities, the expertise, or tenure to move there. But knowing, understanding that informal network is very, very important. In fact, currently I've done some research on what drives people to leave organizations. And we're actually finding that to the extent that other people leave who have been nominating you as— who are giving you social standing, they're nominating you as someone to go to for information. If those people leave, you're more likely to leave yourself because you actually— your social position is undermined. Not one person, but to the extent that other people, multiple people are leaving the organization and your social standing is being undermined, you're almost, you're dismantling your social informal influence. You feel the need, I'm maybe out the door because I've lost my influence to get things done. So very, very important. Now, what this means for a leader, do I understand who are my informal influential people? How can I protect that they don't leave? How can I protect the network? And I don't necessarily have to be involved as long as things work. I don't have to be sitting in all of those decisions as a leader. I can actually cultivate and nurture that informal network without being part of it even as a leader.
David, I want to say, do you have any insights about how to change the informal network? I just want to mention that make up that it forces you to be more and more clear about, you know, what's the main thing, and to be uncompromising about, you know, uh, principles and values. I mean, the— how do you change the deep state? You're uncompromising about what it is that you want, potentially.
And, and, uh, I know I'm rambling, but, uh, just a, a quick comment on that. I get your rambles, Tom. I get your rambles before I defer over to Jonathan there. I think one is just the recognition that there is an informal organization. I think there's too much focus on who's in what positions, and that misses where a lot of the power in any organization actually resides, and it's the informal connections among people. And, you know, there's a whole literature around social network analysis that, that shows that. But it starts with, first of all, recognizing and understanding that there is an informal organization and these informal connections are important. And I believe that there's some research, I think, from Martin Kilduff and maybe some others that have shown the degree that leaders can accurately envision what their networks look like is associated with their effectiveness positively.
Hmm. Can you put the name of that reference in the chat? Be great.
Yeah, I wish I could think of it. I can't, right?
I think it's Martin Kilduff. Yeah, it's Martin.
He's at— yeah, Martin Kilduff. He's at University College London now. And another guy who's at Carnegie Mellon, and I'm blanking on his name. Senior moment. Sorry, folks.
Um, yeah, I, I was just thinking about, you know, influencing these, and I'm thinking about our, our good friend Dave Snowden and, you know, notions of sensemaking and collective awareness of micro narratives and people's own interpretation of them. So how can you create what I like to call collective awareness of collective experience? And then guide people through some kind of process of making sense of that to use collective intelligence to see, oh well, this is what's going on, this is where we could do something, or this is where we have some ability to influence things, or where influences, or why things are happening. So, so I'm curious if those kind of approaches would help address that.
I think that was— so to me, storytelling communication is obviously a way of establishing that influence. If you think about senior leaders, if you think about an organizational context, I feel often whenever you're an employee, you look at your CEO or C-level executive and you hear them speak, they say the same thing, and you feel, not again. I've heard this 10 times, but until a message is really trickling through the organization, you create, you craft that coherent shared narrative. You've got to repeat and repeat and repeat. And I certainly see it in our leadership development programs, the idea of executive presence, being able to tell compelling stories is something that is high in demand to create some—
And I'm talking about something different than that. I'm talking about people anonymously submitting stories about experiences they've been impacted by and then saying in a structured way what does that mean to them, because people are going to have the same experience but have very different interpretations of it. And then you can look collectively and say, are there patterns in the kinds of experiences, and why do they mean different things to different people? And that can create a form of inquiry about these informal influences.
I think that, yeah, I think that would work. I also think, coming back to the discussion we had earlier, if you spend time with your team and you have personal connections with your team members, you have a sense of who is influential, right? It's maybe more difficult to do if you work fully remotely, but understanding how people work with each other and, yeah, that would help.
A larger scale is challenging to do with personal stories.
Yeah.
Well, if we could get leaders to spend time listening to the people in their circle or their network, however they describe it formally and informally, whatever they think the right network is, and if they develop that skill in the people that they were responsible for, et cetera, et cetera, you'd have a whole hive of listening and storytelling in an organization, which doesn't exist in most organizations right now. And so you could get a fancy tool to try to do that work for you, but wouldn't it be richer or more effective if that became part of the norm for interactions? I, I don't think that's an idealistic thing. I think that's just a neglected thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, and to that point, I just wanna say that goes back to, we might not have the time, but if we have our self-awareness, we kind of almost don't need as much time with other people because we understand we have stuff, we have insecurities, and so does everyone else. And so we're not, we're not then, you know, having to be all for everyone under us as a leader. We can just simply know and have that compassion because it, it's here. And we can give it. Just wanted to add that.
No, very much so. Yeah. And I think we, we didn't— in our breakout group, we talked about empathy, but I talked about awareness of the other, the self. For me, combining those is a prerequisite to engage in empathy. My perspective on, on how our work is designed in many ways works against us being able to engage in empathy. And that's why I think we have to make conscious efforts to do this, because if you think what we have, one meeting after the other, our work is distributed, dispersed, uh, at the end of meeting you're with your thoughts already in the next meeting rather than being present with the person you're engaging with. All that works against us and engaging in the most humanly distinctive emotions like compassion, admiration, empathy. But that would help yeah as well to understand informal influence so the informal network. So have we— do we have clear takeaways of what we can do to improve leadership tomorrow? I don't know, I mean we've talked about it right, I think rationally we're not sure yet but maybe you want to say something on this one or Stefan? Agreed on many things, but I think, yeah, starting small, how can we elicit the impact, understanding sort of source of social influence, informal influence. Yeah.
Well, I think that I should write something up on my relationship mind map approach, which I've been sharing with clients this year, and I've gotten great feedback on. And get some feedback on it, one. And two, I think we should train people to, to take time to listen, tell stories, and notice how they're, how they're responding to those stories. And we do that in our Warmer Voices practices. So there's two things that we can do right away. At least I could.
I'm gonna up the voltage on my electric shock treatment. So people are gonna be more inclined to, to self-analyze rather than take the easy option. I was gonna say, now you don't, you don't need this. Now you know, you, you rationally know the benefits of self-awareness. You don't need the shocker. You sit through the first 15 minutes of pain to reflect. Good. And in many ways, I think a lot of things that we've, we've talked about, and that's, that's something that I often see in, in products as well, is that short-term sacrifice for having longer-term benefits, right? We have to change our day-to-day. Think about how do I build in reflection time? How can I listen better to my team? That initially requires me changing my habits with an uncertain upside. On the Donald Deffrance study, that's why we thought it was fascinating, there is actually also a tangible benefit if you engage in those behaviors that research wouldn't necessarily tell you is the most effective way to go about this, which is to reduce your social distance. But yeah, investing short-term sacrifices, investing so that you benefit something in a longer time. I think that's what leadership is about as well. It's taking those small steps so you can benefit people around you more sustainably.
Yeah, I was just reminded while you were speaking, Sebastian, that I used to use a video clip. My— I put this clip up on YouTube years ago. It's got like 10,000 views now, but it's an extract from an interview with David Whyte, and he's citing this poem called Lost, and it's like, what do you do when you're in these kind of situations? And the best thing to do is to stand still, because the forest around you knows where you are. You have to let it find you. And of course, he does this much more eloquently But there is something to this principle of slowing down and even stopping to get your bearings and let the world in the context you're in give you the feedback so that you can see where you're at before you go charging in and messing up the system.
That sounds good. And we come to the top of our hour, Sebastian. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for agreeing to spend time with us and your great pleasure.
Thank you for the great, great comments and very generative discussion. So that's been great. And Julia, 15 minutes, not 5-0, just 1-5. So you don't need to reflect for 50.
