Inside Out Culture

Culture leaders we admire

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 15

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One of the things we love about our work is that we constantly read about and research the work of some fantastic leaders in the world of culture and take the time to understand the things that make them tick.

On this week’s episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we are sharing culture leaders that we admire.

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

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Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Inside Out Culture Podcast, and today something slightly different. Because one of the questions we get asked is well, who are the people who have inspired you, who are the business leaders out in the world that we should follow or we should read up on? So Cath and I are going to kind of pinpoint two leaders each who we admire, particularly in workplace culture. Cath right yeah, exactly.

Cath:

So I think it was a really useful reflection that we'd been citing, yeah, the terrible leadership across the Met Police, the post office, the music industry, I mean. There are so many examples, and what those give us is an opportunity to look at what's gone wrong. But, quite rightly, we should be thinking about you know who are the people who are doing this well, so we can get a clearer picture of what good looks like. And I think actually it's a trap sometimes inside organizations we try and stop the bad stuff. We don't have a real vision of what we want to move towards. So we thought we'd share a couple of the leaders one male, one female who are people that we have learned lots from and think are kind of useful role models. So who's your first?

Colin:

one going to be. So my first one, Cath, is Indra Nooyi. So Indra Nooyi, best known probably for her work at Pepsi, who she joined in the mid-1990s I think. I think she was there for like 10, 12 years, something along those lines. She was in the Forbes World's 100 Most Powerful Women for seven straight years. She was at the top of the fortune similar list from 2006 to 2010, and is frequently voted one of America's greatest leaders, and Pepsi now is one of the world's largest food and beverage companies.

Colin:

But it was done on her watch, predominantly with culture in mind. Now, I say predominantly because I want to reflect the reality of the corporate world is you still have to make money right, and I think sometimes there's this view that you can't make huge profits by doing it in the right way. Now, indra Nooyi is a great example of someone who did it in the right way. She really emphasized the importance of mixing business with family. And she talks if you've ever heard her speak or read any of her work, and I think she wrote a book with it in she talks about how it's important to make sure that there's a mix of both For most of us. We have to work, we have to earn the money, but actually switching off in the evening and actually spending that time with family is really great for who you are and your soul and all of these kinds of things. So she really emphasized the importance of that. But she wasn't afraid to make tough decisions. She drove the business towards healthier choices when the easier option would just have been unhealthy. You know that's the quick win, but you know, no, we want Pepsi to be healthier choices, social conscience at a time when no one was really thinking about social conscience.

Colin:

And she, you know, placed a great emphasis on innovation, creativity, new thinking. And often when I'm asked in a business perspective, is what's the one thing, even if you don't know we are, what's one thing you think we should do more of? And it's like you should make more time to stop and think how many times you do that. And she really emphasized that. There's a great quote that I actually wrote down here, knowing that I was going to talk about it, and she said you've got to make sure that the company does everything in a coordinated way. And the way we've approached it is we gave people 24 to 36 months to change. And then I said if, by the middle of the year. People haven't made the full change that we need. I'd be happy to attend their retirement parties.

Colin:

Now, she meant this because what she didn't want to do is to tell people to change overnight.

Colin:

So it was almost like a, you know, like a two to three year process to turn Pepsi around. To turn an organization like Pepsi around is like five, 10 year job and. And so she said listen, we, we want to help people, we want to give people the time, we want to make sure that we go about it in a way where they feel supported, where it's safe to do things, it's safe to change. But ultimately, what we're not going to do is allow ourselves to be held back, and I think many business leaders have this sense of fear, particularly people with long tenure maybe, or have always done things in a particular way that no, well, let's just do do. They are and you know, and her view was no, we want to create a completely different company. We want to achieve profits in the right way and we're not prepared to tolerate brilliant jerks. We're going to create a company that will reject those kind of personalities and actually place the emphasis on good human beings working in a coordinated way for the good of the organization.

Cath:

So yes, indra, new is my first business I haven't read much about her, I can't imagine what it must be like at the top of such a huge corporation. You clearly have to have such strong guiding principles as she does, and I think you see some of the early underpinnings of what Netflix drew on, I think, with Reed Hastings and Patti McCord, to start challenging some of the traditional orthodoxy of HR around. You want somebody to stay for as long as possible. Actually, you want the best people, you want the people who connect with your culture to be the ones that stay and to actually make it okay, not in a firing quickly kind of clearing out kind of way. But how do you get that turnover to happen that's dynamic and actually works in people's best interest, because no one wants to stay away, no one wants to stay on in a job that doesn't really work for them, but of course you don't want the fear factor of clearing out. So I think that's like a real tension in the workplace that unless you come from a guided position of values and principles, it's really hard that not not to kind of actually become toxic. So I think she was the ones who because it came from her much more compassionate place that she believed in and giving the time but direction. At the same time she managed to sort of create a pathway for that. So, yeah, interesting, Cath, your first.

Cath:

Yeah, so my first one is going to be James Timpson, who has always been somebody happy to talk about culture as being the key thing that matters most in his business. So Timpson's is a shoe repairs, key cutting, I think, dry cleaning now as well business in stores all over the UK and it's a family-owned company and he has just always talked and led practically from a position of wanting a culture of kindness at work, not wanting to constrain people. The key metrics of business success for him are around satisfaction of staff and knowing that your company is giving back to society. So he's well known for employing ex-prisoners and creating a pathway for them to rejoin society, for them to rebuild their lives, and incredible opportunities that he has provided through that and, as part of that, started to understand more about the prison system and, of course, how poor it is at helping rehabilitation in lots of cases. So I mean huge social value that comes from what he does. It still has to be a profitable business at the same time.

Cath:

So he says there is only one rule, which is put the money in the till and look the part, and then he gives huge autonomy to those running each of those branches for it to you know, to be run how you want. You can have your character coming out in how you do it, how you set up the shop. You know, actually, some of the things that you can stock. That's then for you and, of course, giving people autonomy is hugely powerful in terms of motivation and that you've got a voice in how things can. Can you know in the, in your workplace, that you've also got a sense of identity. You know that that, again, who you are, can come out to through your workplace.

Cath:

Um, he's recently written a book and they've got a series of interviews that he did around that, so we'll put some links to that. There's a brilliant long interview that Channel 4 did with him. It's also on the Channel 4 YouTube setting and interviews with the Times he was talking about. The book is called the Happy Index and he calls it upside down management and I think what lots of our leaders are doing, like Indra Nooyi, like, actually, the Netflix example I gave you know, james Timpson, they are reversing.

Cath:

You know how we used to think about management, you know, over the last few decades of top down doing what you're told. Senior leaders know it all, and it doesn't really work in our working world anymore, either from an employee experience point of view or actually from a productivity performance point of view either. And so I think he is such a great role model. I always love talking sorry, I always love hearing him talk because it comes from such a place of just that authentic sense of he believes in this, and he's not doing this to be nice. He's doing this because this is what matters to him in his life.

Colin:

It's the values he has such a sense of contributing to community that I think he's just a brilliant role model and if you haven't, if, this is, if you've never heard of James Simpson he's got a TEDx talk where he talks about culture of trust and kindness, upside down management, if you search for that. He wrote a great article for the Guardian newspaper earlier this year about, and he made the point that the more money we invest in our culture of kindness, the better the business performs. And again, I think there's still this perception that a culture of kindness is, oh, isn't it fluffy? It's a bit soft. Yeah, it's a bit soft, absolutely not.

Colin:

You know, it's kind to let someone go when they're undermining the safety of the culture for everybody else. It's kind to the people who work in that kind of culture, which he, you know, didn't. You know Timpsons is a profitable business and James Timpsons is one of those people who is trying his best to reverse the trend. You know he talks about burnout. He talks about the fact that workers take for you know, workers are taken for granted people. He also says that, you know, business leaders are great at talking about how their people are the most valuable asset, but they don't actually demonstrate it.

Cath:

And so, yeah, he's a fabulous role model and definitely someone that you should read more about and follow we should be, I don't know kind of creating more of our leadership programs around his kind of work, that we should be drawing on that rather than some of the sort of existing theories that exist.

Colin:

Well, I think it's something that I've talked about, something that we've talked about on the podcast before Cath, is that what James Timpson talks about, and where he puts his emphasis, is on making sure that managers know what to do and that they understand how to create a culture of kindness. I wrote about this a few weeks ago. It's too often what we do is corporate organizations see management as too big an investment. We've got too many managers, it would cost too much money, and instead they select a special few people, who are usually the ones that don't need any further development because they have that intrinsic motivation anyway, and so I think what James Simpson would advocate if he was on the show is hey, listen, why don't we educate managers on how to be great managers? That way, we'll get a culture of trust and kindness everywhere across the business. Rather than emphasizing, let's train these three potential leaders, and so I think that that's the lesson.

Colin:

Indra Nooyi talked about it as well is that it's one thing to be told to be empowered and it's another to be empowered, and often you can only be empowered if you have all of the skills in order to carry out the instructions that you feel that you're getting in a coordinated and consistent way, because everybody kind of interprets things in a different way, and so I think more people should be looking at leaders like that and say well, okay, well, how are they setting their business up for success? And what they'll find is that there isn't a leadership development program for six people. The upside down management you talked about it. The management is completely different, not the leadership. Yeah, and I think that's where the greatest gains are.

Cath:

Yeah, fantastic, great. Okay, your next role model leader.

Colin:

So my next one is Richard Branson, and I know it'd be easy to point the finger at me and go God, really you've gone populist with Richard.

Cath:

Branson. Bit of a Marmite choice. You could say Totally, totally. It is a bit of a Marmite choice.

Colin:

You could say Totally, totally. It is a bit of a Marmite choice. I started my own practice when I was 46. That was when I left my job and Richard Branson's book was one of the first that I read and he's someone that inspires me and he hasn't always made the best choices and I think in selecting him I wanted to make the point that, you know, these people aren't perfect. They do make the odd mistake from time to time, but actually what they do is they have a high degree of humility, a high degree of humanity. They're not afraid to talk about it.

Colin:

And you know, the great thing about Branson is he started from nothing. He was absolutely nothing. Thing about Branson is he started from nothing. He was absolutely nothing. I think he's. He started out selling Christmas trees and budgies. I think budgies. I sounded really scat. I was like he started selling budgies. He did.

Colin:

And then he I think it was a paper he launched a magazine for students. That was the thing that got him going and of course then it was. He used the money from the magazine to start start advertising records, and the records was was where he really took off. And of course Virgin Records became huge. Mike Oldfield, tubular Bells, of course, the Sex Pistols, for anything you've read about it. And then it was the airline.

Colin:

But from a leadership perspective, he's someone who's slightly different, not afraid to challenge the status quo. Go and read about why he started Virgin Atlantic. He started Virgin Atlantic to challenge the big boys, the British Airways I think it was Pan Am at the time. He really wanted to provide low cost for people just ordinary people to be able to fly transatlantic. He also built a vibrant brand and a vibrant culture. Too often organizations get stuck in this. If we build a great brand, that will automatically mean that we've got a great culture. Too often organizations get stuck in this If we build a great brand, that will automatically mean that we've got a great culture, and that's absolutely not true. You know, I've worked with Red Bull. The drinks company have a vibrant brand and a vibrant culture. This is a fabulous organization to work with, and Branson was the same with Virgin.

Colin:

He was one of the first that I read about where he openly said create the kind of workplace and company culture and that will attract great talent, and he was very open about it. There was a great post on LinkedIn. Oh, it must be about five or six years ago when LinkedIn was good, but five or six years ago where there was someone had fallen asleep. In their London offices, they have a rest and relaxation area and he talks about the importance of being able to switch off and there's a picture of a guy asleep. And then Richard Branson, of course, is posing behind him with his thumbs up, and he did this whole post about why Virgin will always be the kind of company that encourages its employees to stop, take some time to rest before they crack on with their work.

Colin:

And for those of you who have listened to our previous episodes on burnout, I mentioned about Toby Lutker from Shopify, who was someone who also encourages that, and so Richard Branson is one of those people that we wanted to create the kind of organizations that encouraged creativity. If you get a good idea, grab it, develop it fast. He wrote a book called Screw it, let's Do it, and of course, that comes with a certain amount of risk, but he's very big on learning from failure. He's very big on no regrets and or what can I learn? You know? And even now God knows how old he is now he must be into his seventies he says I'm still learning and I hope I never stop and for me definitely a leadership role model.

Cath:

Yeah, he is, I find him very likable. And yeah, he is somebody who has fun at work, and so he's you know, will also say why would I stop this?

Cath:

You know he has fun and yet he's also always had time for his family. I remember sort of his children talking very powerfully about how they met all these incredibly sort of well-known presidents and you know, and he would never sort of shush them into the background or say, well, I can't do this, he would simply bring them into the room and you know they were part of an incredible journey. And I think actually his daughter, holly Branson, is becoming a very impressive leader. She leads Virgin's People, purpose and Culture initiatives I think a lot of stuff. She's co-founded this big change charity that supports social entrepreneurs. So I like a lot of what she's doing.

Cath:

I think he's also really continuing his thinking, his ethos and, yeah, I think of him as being famous for saying look after your colleagues and you look after your customers, and that was the first sort of inversion of what had been the orthodoxy to that until that point of you know the customer's always right.

Cath:

You kill yourself in order to serve the customer and you know again, I think it's that emphasis on the human environments you create are really important and I love his endless curiosity. That is still fueling him now and that's really quite, yeah, quite lovely to see the joy that he takes in taking on. You know some of these companies that, yeah, that need taking on. I think he's coming back into the railways now potentially, which you know is coming around that cycle again. The fact that he wants to do it in actually a railways now potentially, which is coming around that cycle again. The fact that he wants to do it in actually a space that, my goodness, it is not delivering in the UK. So it'll be interesting to see how that next adventure goes. But, yeah, unafraid to Fail and through that has achieved incredible success.

Colin:

Okay, Cath, and who's your second leader?

Cath:

Yeah, I'm going to go into the world of sports and choose Serena Vigman, who I think we often look at male coaches a lot in football, in the Premier League and in sport generally. There are very, very few female coaches and that is a real issue Again, sort of we've got the Olympics coming up this year and people often say, oh, we've got equality now We've got 50 percent of athletes who are female and male. But if you look behind the scenes, we are way, way from that and of course, the experience that you have as an athlete if you're only being coached by men doesn't matter whether you're a female or male athlete. Uh means you know you're probably an environment where we haven't got necessarily the best coaches we could have the best environments, and so I think she's somebody who you can look at uh in sport sport as being quite a role model for creating her own path for being a successful female, and who comes from a really strong, centered approach, being very human, very calm, and you know the players love to play for her and she has incredibly high standards, but it's through really open conversations, through enabling people to be themselves, to relax, to have fun along the way. She always makes sure that, wherever they're set up in the hotel, the England football team and, of course, she was previously coaching the Dutch women's football team, both of whom won the Euros. It's really important that she makes camp a really fun place to be is something Alessia Rousseau was saying. Baroness Sue Campbell, who has really masterminded the women's football evolution over the last period and is going to move on later this year. Baroness Sue Campbell, who was part of the masterminding the Olympic transition to a completely different system in 1997 and led the Youth Sport Trust so just a titan of sport has said how much she admired Serena Wiegmann, not just for being a technical coach that's the least of it but she built a collective and also it's a collective not just of players but of the whole team, so the team around the players, and so the experience that is created for those who are supporting, you know the physio, the doctor, the psychologist and all of the others. You know they feel part of the team, they feel able to contribute. She works with a brilliant psychologist, kate Hayes, who has previously worked in Olympic sport. Quite a few different roles. So they don't now just sort of try and, you know, fix individual athletes or anything. They're working all the time at this collective level about creating that sort of shared identity. There's lots of sharing stories. They take time to do that. There's a sense we're looking out for each other.

Cath:

I think there was a real moment in the recent World Cup where Lauren James very young, credible player, you know made a silly on the moment decision and sort of kicked out. Incredible player made a silly on-the-moment decision and sort of kicked out and she got a red card and that was really obviously a kind of a poor moment. And at that point you've got the lens of the whole world on you, condemning you particularly. You've just risked your whole team's performance and place at the World Cup. And I remember I think we all probably remember Beckham moment 20 years ago and he spoke about it in his recent documentary where he was sent off recorded for a silly moment of kicking out and he was vilified. He talks now looking back about how you know England hated him. He couldn't walk in the street, the abuse he got for that and there was no one sticking up for him. In fact the coach did the opposite. The coach sort of blamed him afterwards as well I think it was Glenn Hoddle.

Cath:

I mean criminal that by actually exacerbating the emphasis on it all being his fault, and I thought it was so simple and remarkable and refreshing when, of course, the media piled in afterwards what are you going to say to her? What are you going to do? What do you think about that? And she just simply said I think you know we'll put our arms around her. I think she needs a hug. She's a brilliant young player and she needs our support. Just very simple, very human, almost. How could you do anything else? Quite clearly, vilifying her, blaming her, is going to do nothing but set her back. This is something she needs to learn from, as all the players are learning all the time from what they do, and so I loved that moment of humanity and compassion and just the simplicity of like what else would you do? How cruel are you that you think we should do anything else? I think we need more of that in our leaders in sport, and so I love that balance of real high performance alongside a very human, thriving, fun environment.

Colin:

Yeah, culture first leader. It reflected in the fact that the players will openly say in Serena, we trust how every leader would like their employees to say those kinds of things. She, I suppose famously she took time to learn about the English culture when she first took the job. I think sometimes, particularly if you're from overseas, especially in the sport and when you hire foreign coaches, don't learn about the English culture. They try and impose their own culture on you.

Colin:

Now that's not to say that she, you know, kind of gave up her Dutchness. She's very direct. Some players have talked about her direct style and you know that. You know she talks openly about the fact. Yes, I'm a direct style but I want to be open and honest in my communication. But yeah, she thinks, as Cath said, she thinks a lot about that supporting structure that she has and they're all part of that team and it's reflected in the results. Again, it's another great example and we've shared quite a few on the podcast of people who actually invest the time, thought, effort and money to build a vision, build a strong set of values, involve the players in it, really strengthen those relationships. Ultimately they get the results. But it requires the people above them to think differently, and she's been trusted to do that, and that trust has been repaid with a fantastic set of results, including England winning the euros, which is the first major trophy that england have won for years I mean that's absolutely massive.

Cath:

And she came in and really, yeah, really created something that had never happened before but people thought, you know, could never happen. That's right, uh. So I love her humility. Her autobiography is lovely.

Cath:

Lots of sort of personal you know talks about, yeah, things that are that her family and her sister died recently around the euros, and that was a huge experience she had to manage at the same time. And so, again, that that sort of sense of perspective I mean she's under pressure at the moment because actually, they've got some injuries, a few people have retired and you can see everyone now sort of starting to pile in, but you know she stays true to her approach and in the long term, it will pay off. I think it's been absolutely brilliant that we were able to get her and, yeah, tribute to Baroness Sue Campbell for bringing her over, because she has really transformed what it looks like and something that could have taken probably a few decades, because she's able to sort of set up a new way of working, a new culture, but also these, these ways of working around the people that are then hired in to support the team come in on a different basis. So you know, we see some of that behind the scenes stuff that's that's so important.

Colin:

Yeah, I think she's fab so this episode's been slightly different. We hope we've enjoyed it. We, I mean. Obviously we want to be relevant and topical and we want to talk about some of the things that are happening in the world, but we accept that they're not always the best stories, so we've just taken a different approach. Um, these, these people are everywhere. Don't think that they're all high profile people. There are people on the front line who provide fantastic leadership. There are people in your organization right now who are doing fabulous things. Not all of them are authors and put on pedestals. Inspiration is everywhere around you if you're looking for it.

Cath:

Yeah, so it's been definitely a positive pod. And yeah, think about your cultural role models. Who are they? Who can you learn from, who do you admire and who's going to help you to keep contributing positively to your workplace? Yeah, I feel very uplifted from that, me too.

Colin:

Yeah, great to chat, Cath. Thanks a lot.

Cath:

Bye. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture.

Colin:

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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