In this interview, we ask Desiree Jonek , co-founder of WoMentor and the author of the brand new paper “5 effective measures to navigate the shift to an inclusive and performing corporate culture “, 3 big questions about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI):
According to Deloitte University Press, 86% of companies have identified developing new leaders as an “urgent” need. And upon closer inspection, it’s clear to see why.
When it comes to managers’ performance, alarmingly, the norm seems to be incompetence. In a recent study, Gallup found that companies fail to choose suitable candidates for management roles a staggering 82% of the time. Now to be fair, there are not many qualified potential people to choose from in the first place.
In another report, Gallup revealed that only 1 in 10 people possess requisite management talents, such as the ability to build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency. And of those who do end up becoming managers, their talent is seldom nurtured.
A survey by Career Builders found that a whopping 58% of managers receive little-to-no management training. Alas, most bosses aren’t necessarily good at making the people around them better. And how this plays out in workplaces across the planet is disheartening.
For instance, a Harvard Business Review study uncovered that 58% of people trust strangers more than their bosses. So arguably, they are more willing to let their children get into an Uber driven by a complete stranger than they are to let them work with their boss. In light of these findings, it’s no surprise that most employees—upwards of 80% according to some of the most comprehensive studies—are disengaged, looking for other jobs, and ditching traditional employment to pursue entrepreneurship.
As it happens, the modern workplace is overrun by bosses who aren’t qualified to lead. Reflect on your career for a moment by thinking about the best boss you worked for, as well as the worst boss you worked for. Once you’ve visualized them, ask yourself: whose leadership style do you strive to emulate?
If you picked the best boss you worked for, then you have an innate understanding of the complex problem at hand, as well as its embarrassingly simple solution.
On one side, it’s heartening to see organizations worldwide upgrade from simple Corporate Social Responsibility commitments to more holistic and comprehensive Environmental, Social, and Governance commitments, as well as aspire to B-Corp status.
Glimpses of a positive-sum thriving future are visible through the cracks of the prevailing zero-sum failing system. A full year before we plunged into the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, made this urgent appeal to his contemporaries at the 2019 Business Roundtable Forum:
“The purpose of business now transcends shareholders. We need a reinvented system focused on employees, customers, communities, and the planet.”
Benioff believes that companies should use their power to advance meaningful causes. And chief among them is the fight against climate change. In doing so, he joins a small but rising list of industry captains—including Patagonia Founder Yves Chouinard, who made headlines for relinquishing his entire stake in the company to fight climate change—who speak up about the necessary structural changes required to stand a chance against the world’s most pressing issue.
So on one side, it seems that leaders have their hearts in the right places as far as environmental sustainability is concerned. But on the other, a peculiar problem is intensifying: organizations are living shorter and shorter lives. Consider that in 1958, the average age of an S&P 500 company was a healthy 61 years. But in 2023, that number is down to a mere 18 years.
In fact, McKinsey calculates that most S&P 500 companies will disappear by 2027. I suspect that this rate of decay has a lot to do with the aforementioned issue of bad bosses. As I wrote about extensively in my pandemic-inspired book, “Leadership, Reinvented,” during times of change and crises, people don’t “step up”—they actually “fall back” and “sink” to the level of their values, training, and preparation.
Given that most managers are incompetent and that our world is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, the problem becomes clearer: overwhelmed and incompetent bosses are reverting to and doubling down on a counterproductive style of management—a remnant of the early Industrial Revolutions, known in the leadership literature as “Dominance.”
Dominance-oriented leadership it’s a one-size-fits-all style of management which relies on force and intimidation to induce fear. Below are common traits of this leadership style:
Dominance-oriented leaders are inclined to enjoy giving orders, intimidating subordinates, overly relying on reward and punishment, and prioritizing the organization’s needs over those it employs. The one critical problem with this management style is that it doesn’t replicate.
And so, in the truest sense of the word, it’s an unsustainable approach to managing. After all, think back to the bad boss you visualized earlier—you’re actively choosing not to replicate their management style.
Caught up in Dominance cycles, most companies—whether on the S&P 500 or FTSE Eurofirst 300—haven’t committed to comprehensive measures to fight climate change, such as running net zero carbon operations. Staring into the abyss of time, afraid, the managers of these companies are making the grave mistake of prioritizing greater profits.
All the while, they’re exacerbating the very problem that will upend their business. Intimidation can beget compliance, but relationships based on Dominance are less stable. Getting out of unstable survival mode involves looking to the opposite approach to Dominance, namely, Prestige.
This style of management involves the sharing of expertise or know-how to gain respect. Prestige-oriented leaders are servant leaders who care about relationships with their team, avoid intimidation and coercion, strive to be role models, use soft power to influence subordinates, and create more organizational leaders. Below are common traits of this leadership style:
Compared to Dominance, Prestige is more tedious to manifest, for it requires substantial tailoring to the needs of individuals. But the caveat is that of the two, Prestige is the only style that is widely and willingly replicated. In this way, it’s the only sustainable option. But putting aside the question of ease, Prestige is actually better for business.
A ten-year examination of stock market returns for the 20 best-ranked public companies on Glassdoor reveals that 60% have beaten the S&P 500, and 91% have had positive returns. And behold, Fortune’s Top 100 best companies to work at also outperformed the S&P 500 over the past decade. The top company, Adobe, beat the market by 9.5% each year and returned 1762% during this time.
And according to the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, companies that promote a culture of health, safety, and well-being also outperformed the market by 2% per year, with a weighted return on equity of 264% (compared with the S&P 500 return of 243%). It turns out that exceptional places to work create outstanding returns for their shareholders. So while Prestige may be a more challenging path to the top, it’s absolutely worth doing.
Are there situations where a Dominance-oriented leader performs better than a Prestige-oriented leader? Yes. A top-down, dominant approach can be efficient when a solid plan is in place, and a highly coordinated, unified effort is needed to deliver it.
A dominant leader can make each part of a company adhere to clearly defined actions, and can save time through quick and firm decision-making. But all this assumes that there is a healthy relationship between managers and employees, and that good communication and buy-in have taken place.
Which, as we know, is simply not the case in the modern workplace. One way to rethink the Prestige-Dominance dichotomy is as a permission-based blend—the privilege of successful Prestige orientation is the earned ability to switch to Dominance as the needs of the organization and its people change.
For Human Resources and Learning & Development professionals, the business case is clear. And it needs to be communicated to managers across the organization—potential managers, newly minted managers, and C-Suite alike: lead with Prestige. Early in my career, a mentor advised me that a leader’s true purpose is to “develop new leaders.”
A coordinated contingent of Prestige-oriented leaders is critical to navigating our world away from impending environmental catastrophe and toward a sustainable positive-sum future. And this global effort depends on every organization’s ability to develop new leaders.
Keynote Speaker
Hamza Khan is a best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur, and globally-renowned keynote speaker whose TEDx talk “Stop Managing, Start Leading” has been viewed over two million times.
The world’s leading organizations trust him to enhance modern leadership, inspire purposeful productivity, nurture lasting resilience, and navigate constant change.
Over the last few decades, generational diversity in the workplace has increased significantly. The youngest Generation Z brings in new energy, while the oldest – Traditionalist Generation – often clings to used structures.
Sometimes it can be difficult when different generations work together. Keynote speaker Karen McCullough talks about such generation management in an interview.
Pew Research Center defines the birth years of generations:
Traditionalists: 1928-1945
Baby Boomers: 1946-1964
Gen X: 1965-1980
Millennials: 1981-1996
Gen Z:1997-2012
In Hermann Hesse’s “Morgenlandfahrt”, a spiritual seeker experiences how the disappearing servant turns out to be a true leader in retrospect. This story inspired Robert Greenleaf to develop his life’s work, the concept of serving as a leader. A number of well-known authors and CEOs of companies such as Starbucks, Nordstrom and SAS followed him in designing and practicing servant leadership.
A talent management executive at a large international corporation told me one day, “I don’t believe in the honest intent of servant leadership. To me, it seems more like a motivational ploy. In the end, the ‘servant leaders’ earn a lot more than the employees they seem to serve.”
Trick or mission? Manipulated motivation to high performance or the revolution of the working world that turns the hierarchy pyramid upside down?
Managers, especially CEOs, should ask themselves what kind of leadership culture they have and want in their own organization.
What is the purpose of leadership? This is a good question to start a reflection on developing your own leadership culture. The why question is closely related to the „for whom” question. Which stakeholders in an organization are given priority? The shareholders, the employees, the customers? Customers, in a broader sense, can also be certain groups in society or even parts of nature for which the organization wants to create added value.
Servant leadership is usually associated with a focus on employees. Greenleaf sees, among other things, employee growth as a hallmark of servant leadership. “Serving the community” is also found as a frequently mentioned goal. And then there’s the aspect of getting employees to perform at their best by serving. Shareholders understandably feel comfortable with the latter.
The desired leadership culture is derived from the purpose of the organization. If the purpose of the company is to maximize profit, then human resources tend to be seen as a mean. And servant leadership will consequently be a downstream mean to promote the purpose of “motivated, high-performing human resources.”
While the upside-down pyramid is well suited to question a culture of exploitation of the powerful over the subjugated that has been going on for ages, contradictions arise if taken to its logical conclusion. Institutionalized leadership almost always goes hand in hand with power, e.g. with the right to impose positive and negative sanctions. This makes it easier to achieve organizational goals and often also benefits the led, e.g. through higher security.
However, the history of mankind until today shows that power has often been used for one’s own advantage. And in order to maintain the privileged position of the leadership group, subtile and brutal suppression mechanisms have been used.
The inverted pyramid thus also expresses the desire that leadership does not exploit but support and that the leader put others before themselves. For at least 2000 years there have been rulers who have called themselves servants, from Marcus Aurelius to Joseph II, Frederick the Great to Queen Elizabeth.
In this way, they have expressed how they interpret their privileged right to rule for the common good. Even if they did not donate their castles to the poor, they may have done more for the wellbeing of the people with the servant attitude than absolutist rulers with a “the–state–is–me attitude.”
There are also good arguments why a radical reversal of ruling relations and privileges would not be fair: Those who make an above-average commitment to goals that benefit others should also be entitled to a reward. This commitment can be in terms of time, talent and resources. However, it is questionable whether this justifies a CEO earning 147 times as much as a typical worker in Germany and 300 times as much in the USA.
In addition, there is the legal perspective with the legally anchored liability of the CEO. Someone has to take personal responsibility for wrong decisions and this is normally the managing director registered in the commercial register. Payment defaults or accidents can result in liability. Who bears this liability risk if we turn the pyramid upside down?
In the end, it will probably remain with individuals and they must then also have the possibility to implement decisions. We can flatten the pyramid, we can supplement it with self-coordinating networks, we can develop an empowerment culture – employees and managers can service each other – but ultimate, personal responsibility will remain.
Companies associated with servant leadership include Nordstrom, Fedex, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines (Herb Kelleher), SAS, and Marriott. Let’s look at what each of these companies value. In most companies, the positive impact of employees being treated well is seen in good customer service:
The term “servant leadership” could be misunderstood in the sense of continuity and exclusivity. I.e., that the manager always acts as a servant to the employees and that therefore, there would be no room for the manager to be supported by the employees. This seems onesided and unrealistic. Robert Greenleaf also called his first publication “The servant as leader” and wanted to emphasize that the desire to serve should come before the desire to lead.
Just as the communist countermovement to industrial age capitalism did not yet represent the final chapter of economic history, servant leadership also offers itself more as a line of thought and less as the terminus of a leadership culture. If we understand leading and serving as polarity, then this makes it possible to find a suitable balance for the situation in the interaction between employees and managers.
Similarly, the misunderstanding would be that serving goes in one direction. Namely, that only managers should serve their employees. Transactionally, this would be a reversal of the parent-ego to child-ego relationship. Traditionally, leadership has been seen mostly patriarchal and sometimes matriarchal, i.e. the leader has to care for the children similar to parents, but can demand obedience.
The inversion of the parent-child relationship does not really work. The relationship of two adults who support each other would be more constructive. Especially nobles and rich people have servants. The term servant indicates a subordinate position. This could be resolved in a contemporary understanding of leadership: Employees and managers support each other, partly in different ways and with different means, but at eye level, with mutual appreciation.
This application of the reciprocity principle will often bring the desired, voluntary support from employees to leadership. But there is a more enduring motivation than this psychological barter: when leaders and employees pursue common goals or a shared mission out of inner conviction and support each other to the best of their ability.
Ultimately, it is the intent of the servant leader that makes the difference: Do they care at least as much about the well-being of others as they does about their own, or do they just want to make employees feel serviced so they will work harder?
The term “servant leadership” is misleading to many. But undoubtedly, one of the most important tasks of leaders is to support their employees. This starts with perceiving and listening to what the employees need from the leader.
In summary, the main meaning of Servant Leadership could be seen as a pendulum swinging away from autocratic and exploitative leadership, but not as a final leadership concept. Rather, partnership-based cooperation at eye level between employees and managers is more suitable for this in order to pursue the jointly shared corporate mission.
• https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/karriere/ceos-verdienen-300-mal-so-viel-wie-arbeiter-a-1041409.html
• https://www.amazon.de/Spiele-Erwachsenen-Psychologie-menschlichen-Beziehungen/dp/3499613506
• https://www.amazon.de/Die-Psychologie-%C3%9Cberzeugens-Robert-Cialdini-ebook/dp/B01MUDPFCC
• https://www.marriott.com/about/culture-and-values/history.mi
• https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/06/01/5- real-life-brands-embody-servant-leadership/ • https://www.pallikkutam.com/edu-news/servant-leadershipstories#:~:text=FedEx%20 believes%20that%20engaged%20employees,and%20ultimately%20ensure%20organi-
zational%20success.
CEO | MDI Management Development International
Gunther Fürstberger is a management trainer, author and CEO of Metaforum and MDI – a global consulting company providing solutions for leadership development. His main interest is to make the world a better place through excellent leadership. He has worked for clients including ABB, Abbvie, Boehringer Ingelheim, DHL, Hornbach, PWC and Swarovski. His core competence is leadership in digital transformation. He gained his own leadership experience as HR Manager of McDonald’s Central Europe/Central Asia. At the age of 20 he already started working as a trainer.
Is it the work, the salary, or perhaps the interaction with your colleagues?
The latter is being neglected in many companies, especially during the pandemic. Until then, people had lunch together from time to time, chatted briefly at the coffee machine or worked together on projects.
But how do you foster this exchange, this connection in a hybrid or even virtual environment?
Find out here in this article.
Read this article to find out how you can get everyone to listen to you in online meetings and what you need to keep in mind in a hybrid setting.
You know it – sometimes you are leading an online meeting and you get the feeling that the participants do not pay enough attention to you. Even if the topics discussed seem exciting to you, it is sometimes simply not possible to keep everyone on the ball. Read this article to find out how you can get everyone to listen to you in online meetings and what you need to keep in mind in a hybrid setting.
The very start of the meeting is important. In a virtual context, we often lack “arriving in the room.” That makes it more important to pave the way for a pleasant start: make brief small talk and ask how people are doing. This can often be enough before jumping right into the topic. Activation methods, which you should use thoughtfully and appropriately, have a further influence on attention.
It is also important to clarify the expectations of the meeting and its process right from the start. If you want people to listen and participate, you should make this clear from the beginning and mention that the meeting will not be a frontal lecture. Then your participants can prepare themselves. You should always avoid monologues – keep your participants active, let them talk and discuss, contribute actively. This way you will have their full attention right from the start.
To activate people, you can use simple techniques that also work well in face-to-face meetings. Ask lots of questions – These can be short chat questions that you address directly to individuals to get their attention. They can also be rhetorical questions that encourage participants to think. Short surveys using tools such as Slido or Mentimeter, as well as scale questions (e.g. from 1-10) also work very well.
People love to self-assess. This can be a question about a specific topic, but it can also be a question about the energy level after some time in the meeting to decide if it needs a break. Break-out sessions create interaction and get quieter participants to become active. Make sure you have the right group size (never assign less than 3 and more than 5 participants to one team).
Also, try to make the content as interesting as possible. Think about what is appropriate for your audience and use storytelling to bring your facts and figures to life. Relevant examples will help you relate to your target audience. Dale Carnegie said nearly 100 years ago, “Talk to people about themselves and they’ll listen to you for hours.”
As a facilitator, you should always keep an eye on the group, proactively address quieter participants, and cut frequent talkers short to the extent appropriate. For larger groups, you should work online with the “raise your hand” function. This allows you to keep a list of speakers and always see whose turn it is next. In addition, activate the view of the participants to always see all names and try to actively address people whose camera image you do not see. Otherwise you tend to address only the people you see in front of you.
Hybrid meetings bring additional challenges. The most important thing is not to forget the online participants. It’s best to have a separate screen for the video overview that everyone can see. In addition, practice has shown that an extra moderator on site for the virtual session is very beneficial. This can also simply be someone from the group who puts on the hat to look after the participants. In most cases, the overall quality of the meeting will suffer if you’re running the meeting and managing the virtual participants on the side.
As you can see, it is definitely possible to make your online meeting so exciting that your participants want to listen to you. Try out some of the tools next time!
Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner
Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.
He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.
How do you deal with knowledge management as a leader? What do we really know and how can we use it to our best advantage?
Our MDI partner Anita Berger focuses on mentoring and knowledge management. We asked her a few questions on this topic and came up with some exciting approaches.
You can find them here in this interview:
Executive Coach, Consultant, Trainer & Managing Partner MDI
Anita Berger is an executive coach, consultant and trainer specialising in leadership development and international human resource management. She is a partner of MDI Management Development International. For more than 15 years she has worked in management and leadership positions (among others as HR-
Director at Coca-Cola Hellenic and HR Manager at Konica Minolta Business Solutions).
The active and conscious generation, the use and sharing of knowledge in organizations are decisive competitive factors. Managers and mentors make a relevant contribution to this. They can make knowledge available themselves, as well as create the framework and an environment that enables and promotes knowledge management.
Knowledge management seems to be easier when it comes to explicit knowledge. That is, when “we know what we know” and it is “only” a matter of making this knowledge available.
It becomes more challenging when it comes to tacit knowledge. Implicit knowledge is the kind of knowledge that we are not always aware of – where we don’t even know what we know.
The development of explicit and tacit knowledge can be vividly described using the following example from everyday life: In the beginning, we learn explicitly: traffic rules, shifting gears, operating the clutch, … Every single step is thought through consciously. After some time, we just “drive” – it has become implicit knowledge.
We cannot easily describe what or how we do something, how we came to a decision or how we acquired the knowledge.
The STAR method – often known as an interview technique in recruiting – as well as the Knowledge Management For Implicit Knowledge Canvas – both are methods/techniques to become aware of what you know as a leader or as a mentor, so that you can then share this very valuable knowledge.
The STAR interview method is an acronym and stands for
If, as a mentor or leader, I want to pass on knowledge about how a particular customer project was won, a cultural initiative was successfully implemented, a critical discussion with challenging stakeholders was conducted in a solution-oriented manner, or even what was a real “fuck-up” in team leadership, the STAR interview method can help.
It enables us to identify more clearly what contributed to success or to recognize what needs to be done differently in the future. Thus, implicit knowledge becomes explicit again.
The Knowledge Management Canvas provides a framework to identify where tacit knowledge may exist. It provides valuable starting points for active knowledge sharing through active engagement with the areas of the Canvas.
So how we can promote and share our knowledge is not too difficult. Often, it simply requires a more structured approach to share as a leader or mentor relevant information.
Long-term OKR scheduling
Long-term scheduling makes it easier to adjust to spontaneous changes on short notice. OKR meetings should become a routine. Habits, once achieved, require little energy. When team members have learned that, for example, the OKR quarterly planning meeting is always on the last Thursday of the quarter and an OKR check-in meeting is scheduled every other Thursday in between – OKR becomes a no-brainer.
Experience has shown that only the timely meetings are a challenge due to many other planned events. If you always send the appointment invitations for the entire next year, the company will get used to it and you will have more energy for content-related work.
Very practical are serial appointments with individual corrections, e.g. if they fall on holidays or on the Christmas vacation.
The optimal OKR meeting size
4 – 8 participants are an optimal size for quarterly planning meetings, in order to consider sufficiently different perspectives on the one hand and to be able to discuss actively and time-efficiently on the other. However, if the team consists of fewer members, that is also OK. 2-3 people can manage with much less time.
In planning meetings at higher hierarchical levels, such as when developing the OKR set for the entire company, more people often want to be present. This is understandable, since the quarterly priorities are set for the company.
However, discussions with more than 8 people can be lengthy or lead to different levels of participation.
One proven way to keep the number of participants low is for owners of similar departments or functions to take turns participating. If you personally do not have a place in the next meeting, you can make your wishes known in advance via the backlog list or another representative.
Never has it been more important to adjust continually to a dynamic environment. OKR proves to be a great method to overcome crisis situations – read more about it here.
Discuss your progress regularly
Choosing well-worded OKRs is one side of success, the other is discussing progress regularly, e.g. bi-weekly. For this, it helps to visibly grade progress. Some prefer to work with color codes from the beginning. I.e. all Key Results start in red and partly reach the colors orange, yellow and green during the quarter. Others prefer to work with the numbers 0,0 – 1 during the quarter and use the colors only at the quarterly review. A third possibility are progress bars, where the filled area increases step by step.
Progress visualization increases motivation because messenger substances such as dopamine and endorphins are released in the brain.
CEO | MDI Management Development International
Gunther Fürstberger is a management trainer, author and CEO of Metaforum and MDI – a global consulting company providing solutions for leadership development. His main interest is to make the world a better place through excellent leadership. He has worked for clients including ABB, Abbvie, Boehringer Ingelheim, DHL, Hornbach, PWC and Swarovski. His core competence is leadership in digital transformation. He gained his own leadership experience as HR Manager of McDonald’s Central Europe/Central Asia. At the age of 20 he already started working as a trainer.
