A globally-renowned expert on innovating management practice, strategy and leading the modern workforce, Adam Kingl is an authority on generational paradigms in the workplace, the future of work and fulfilling organisational and personal purpose.
In our exclusive interview, Adam shares how organisations can build loyalty, what makes a successful leader and the importance of regularly re-examining your business.
Watch the full interview here or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Adam Kingl
I originally worked in the theater as a director and slowly, gradually, made my way into the world of business. So now I'm an advisor, I'm an educator, I'm an author, I'm an adjunct professor at the UCL School of Management, and at Hult Ashridge International Business School. I talk about leadership, creativity, culture.
What key topics and themes do you speak on?
So I talk about adaptability, so how does one personally adapt? And that's based on the maxim that I don't think an organisation can adapt unless its leaders are personally willing to adapt.
I talk about creativity and innovation in terms of the micro-processes that happen to make an organisation more creative. Sure, you can do strategic innovation, you can do management innovation, but how do you actually improve your team's creative capacity in those one-on-one conversations or in the team dynamics, how do you incentivize an individual to be more innovative?
I talk about the youngest generation in the workforce, very tricky group. How do you keep them engaged? How do you keep them in your company? Because of course, we know that, we're in the midst of a resignation crisis, we're in the midst of an engagement crisis.
So that, of course, leads us to the final topic, which I do, which is the future of work. If our paradigms about work and life, careers and leadership are changing so dramatically, what does the future of work hold for employers and employees?
What can employers do to build employee loyalty?
Once I realised that the loyalty crisis was real and that it was a paradigm, right? Regardless of what the employer does, Gen Y's or millennials are thinking, I'm probably not going to stay here for very long. That inevitably leads to the question, so what might help keep you for just a little bit longer?
I know it won't be for life, but maybe for a few more years, which is very valuable in the talent wars that we're in. So there are three things, three qualities that I found young employees are looking for. Development opportunities, so always try to make me more employable. So I might work for you for five years, six years, but I might work for you for eight or nine years if you are always demonstrating to me that you're adding value to me, you're making a valuable person more valuable by improving my skills, improving my capacity for leadership, whatever it might be. So that's one.
Second is culture, what it means to work around here. And culture is really experienced on a micro level, so a lot of organisations I think, get culture wrong because they think of it just as an employer value proposition, but those are really words on a page.
Most employer value propositions have been created by the communications department or maybe by the stakeholder or investor relations department, and it's theoretical. The culture that I experience in an organisation are the relationships I have with the person to my left and the person to my right. So therefore, team leaders have a huge responsibility for keeping their people together, because they're the stewards of culture.
First and most important quality is work, work-life balance. I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone, but note that of the three things I just mentioned, none of them are salary, bonus, anything that's a tangible benefit. It's much more to do with how we relate to one another. It has much more to do with the social architecture of an organisation.
What is human centric leadership?
We are still burdened by the management paradigms of the Industrial Revolution. So the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century said that a human worker is essentially a machine in this industrial cog. So you think about an auto plant, right? The Ford Motor Company in Michigan, if you're an employee there, you're responsible, you turn the screw twice and then the next car comes along and you put it in and you turn it twice. The only qualities that an employer expected from you were conformity, efficiency and reducing costs or resources as much as possible.
And even though we've arguably finished the Industrial Revolution, we have arguably gone through the Digital Revolution, the ways in which we manage our people have not significantly evolved. So yes, our work environment feels different and we have all these digital assets and we have the world at our fingertip, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But leadership hasn't changed very much. I could pluck a CEO from the 19th century and put them in an organisation in 2023, and they would recognise how that person manages their company in most cases. That's the biggest problem that we face, so what do we need more of? It's this human centric leadership.
So human centricity is how do we increase all those very human qualities that machines couldn't replicate? We don't need human beings to be machines because now we have robots. So we need people to be curious and inventive and reach out to people, customers.
We need people to think about how do we do this better? We need human beings to say, how do I create the next version of this product or service? And particularly in the west, in Britain, in the US where we know that service economy is a prime driver of the macro economy in these regions, then we know that we don't want people simply to be yes men and women, but instead to enhance their capacity for inventing and connecting. So that's human centricity.
What makes a successful leader?
If you had to pin me against a wall and say Adam, define what leaders do, what great leaders do, I would say, okay, three things, leaders, great leaders excite people to exceptional performance, they live the values and purpose, and they're stewards of the culture.
Notice everything I've talked about there are related to people. So we have had for too many years this idea that the key leader is a strategist. It's all about composing the perfect strategy, but we know that strategies typically become extinct after 12 months or less.
It reminds me of the Yiddish joke, if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans, right? So actually it's less about composing the perfect five or ten-year strategy, and it's much more about being adaptable, being creative, being inventive, being engaging with our people. If you are able to maximise the capacity of your people, then funny enough customers reward you and shareholders reward you.
So again, this returns to the concept of human centric leaders, but we need a lot more dialogue and a lot more literature frankly, about what great leaders do today because I think we're still very much burdened by leadership literature and paradigms from far too many years ago.
How often should businesses re-examine their business model?
Organisations should at least have the conversation about reinvention almost constantly. And I know that's scary, but if you think about reinvention as more reflexive rather than this episodic military campaign, then people will lean into the personal and collective adaptability. But that requires the organisation to have the humility to say, maybe the decisions we made even six months ago, is it still suited for today?
I absolutely believe that we have to encourage everyone in the organisation to be part of that conversation. I would go even further, why not involve in that dialogue your suppliers and your partners and your buyers and your regulators? Because they have perspectives that you don't, and yet those perspectives are also critical to the sustainable competitive advantages in your business.
So why not open the aperture of our perspective and have wider conversations all the time, sense checking, are we doing the right thing? That may have been the right answer six months ago, but it may no longer be right today. I think it's less about the success of any given business model that creates a sustainable competitive advantage and much more about a company's ability to adapt their business model on almost a dynamic basis. That is itself a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
Has flexible working changed the role of a leader?
With more people working from home, you do have the risk of greater silos occurring in an organisation. It is more incumbent on leaders to create connection. And I think it's a mistake for leaders to say, I can only connect with my people when I'm face-to-face. Of course, that's nonsense. I've been working with organisations who did some highly creative things in order to create bonds with their people, even in 100% lockdown.
It's things like touching base with one another, creating opportunities just to share whatever's going on in your life, not just following a strict business agenda. You can have creative social time virtually as well. I've had companies say, okay, we're going to have a business meeting for an hour, and then for 30 minutes we're going to do a mocktail creating class. And everyone ahead of time got a recipe, they all had everything ready to go, and then they had a mixologist come in and showed everyone, and it was a great social opportunity.
And yes, of course it's different from social opportunities that we may have pursued when we were always face-to-face, but we can't use that as an excuse to say, unless I'm working with someone five days a week, face to face, I can't connect with them.
Leaders have to be creative and proactive about connecting with people no matter where they are. And I think also with multinational companies, where you have often teams where your people do work from all over the world, you can't rely on those rare moments when you do see them face-to-face to actually create a valuable relationship with them. You have to leverage the virtual dynamic in terms of enhancing your relationship.
How do you see management roles changing as Gen Y assume C-suite positions?
As Gen Y's assume C-suite positions, the most important factor they told me that they would want to live as a leader in the organisation is purpose. So how do I enhance meaning for my organisation and how do I improve my purpose every day? Because that creates a golden thread between employer and employee.
In other words, if you know why you do what you do and that gives you meaning, and in doing so you contribute to my organisation's collective purpose. We have a bond between us, but too many people in organisations can't see the why in what they do. And if you can't see the why, then of course you're going to be mobile around your employer prospects, it doesn't really matter. So then you become very transactional. I'll just go to whoever's pay me more, I'll just go to a more pleasant work environment. But if I know that I am contributing to an organisation's big why in what I do, and I feel that I'm getting fulfilled in doing that, that creates a very powerful prospect.
Funnily enough, not just for employees, but for customers, because there's lots of more recent research that demonstrates that in organisations that are imbued with purpose, customers, clients pick up on that, and that enhances their own engagement and therefore loyalty to work with one company or buy from one company over another.
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