How to lead millennials – the generation which does not want to be led?

Whenever we at Pertec ask our clients the most challenging leadership situations that people are facing in their daily managerial activities, leading efficiently teams assembled by members from different generations typically always pops up at the top. How to create and orchestrate super performing teams comprised of people representing different demographics and backgrounds, and having therefore fundamentally varying viewpoints regarding making their living and leading their lives?

What we know for sure is that especially millennials – the Generation Y – do not wish to be managed and just bluntly told what to do. They’d rather be coached and empowered to be able to succeed and make a difference – an impact in the World. In fact, that is what pretty much everybody – all generations still on duty – expects from their leaders nowadays in organizations: As we promote I³ at Pertec - be inspired, inspire and innovate!

According to recent research from Deloitte (The 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey), perhaps surprisingly, millennials in senior positions in organizations rate information technology and social media skills as being of relatively low importance - especially when compared to attributes such as communication, flexibility, leadership, and the ability to think creatively and to generate new ideas.

Further, Deloitte’s recent research suggests that millennials appreciate working in a collaborative and consensual environment rather than one that directly links accountability and responsibility to seniority (or pay). The clear majority of millennials feel that balance between free time and work is way more important than a hefty pay check. Most millennials would rather have a job where they could choose the time and place for their contributions as opposed to a 9-to-5 commitment at a fixed office. Commitment to work in any particular company is much lower than it used to be: based on research from a couple of years ago, less than half of millennials expect to stay in their current job for more than three years.

As indicated above, communication, collaboration and consensus through intelligent and virtual leadership remains one of the corner stones in successfully running of versatile teams in organisations. One aspect related to that is something which I already discussed in an earlier blog is the importance for an intelligent leader to be able – and willing – to share oneself when leading people: the best leaders in the world whom people wish to follow and are inspired by are partially that – in addition to having enough core leadership competences – because of the way they are and behave as human beings: What kind of car they drive, how they dress up, how they behave in the queuing line in the company cafeteria, the way they appear when happy or upset; the overall look and feel of the boss. The more you humanize yourself as the leader towards your team members the more likely they are to support and follow you through good and bad times.

Do you have what it takes to lead millennials? Give us a call and let us exchange notes!

Juha Hynynen

Continuous renewal and fast learning are the critical success factors for everyone of us. However, learning and self renewal are not always happening very easily. There seem to be many learning obstacles which prevent an effective learning process.

The obstacles of learning are related to the different phases of the learning process. Obviously, by eliminating these obstacles we can intensify and improve our learning considerably. Bert Juch identified the following key obstacles to learning:

• small window that restricts the amount of observations
• thick skin that restricts the reception of observations
• narrow gate that prevents the implementation of plans
• wide river that prevents the completion of plans

We might look at things from too small a window. Our viewpoint is too limited and we are really interested in a few things only.  We do not actively collect data nor observe our environment in a wider sense. Neither do we pay attention to the feelings of other people.

Too thick a skin is about being impermeable. New thoughts cannot come through. We do not want to listen to the opinions of others, particularly if we disagree with them. Nor do we approve or want to listen to criticism directed to us. We are overspecialized and it is difficult for us to accept new points of view.

Narrow gate means that it is difficult to start new things. We hesitate and hang back when we should start something new. We want to be sure that we succeed before we try new things. We are preoccupied with the fear of failure. There is a long list of “should do” –things but we will never implement those.

Wide river means that things are often left unfinished. Difficulties and problems tend to discourage us. When we try to cross the stream we often notice that it is too wide and we turn back.

These obstacles all disturb the learning process. So we should identify our own obstacles to learning and try to look at the world outside through a somewhat bigger window, be more sensitive in adopting new things, set our gate wide open and try new working methods, even allowing for some risks. We should also be able to cross the wide river and finish the things we have started. When running into difficulties and problems we should try even harder.

We should always be able to challenge assumptions and see things from a different viewpoint. To quote the French novelist Marcel Proust : “The real wonder of finding new things is not in looking for new views, but in looking at things with new eyes.” We set our own limits and that means the limits of what we can learn.

Have you reflected your own and your teams learning obstacles? Maybe we could offer you good tools to abolish or deminish those. Pertec wants to be the Accelerator of Continuous Renewal for individuals, teams and organizations.

 Pentti Sydänmaanlakka

Whenever I nowadays ask managers in small, medium and large companies anywhere in the world about their most relevant daily leadership challenges, the virtual – or remote – leadership challenge always comes out as one of the top five mentions.

Pertec’s recent assessments amongst our global client base verify this finding: in our seven layer Intelligent Leadership™ framework, Leading Distributed Teams is systematically found as one of the most important but difficult areas of leadership of our times.

Surely we at Pertec have been addressing the above need in many of our leadership trainings during the past years: The fact that the teams to be led are distributed may be coped with, e.g., through coaching and shared leadership, using intelligent performance management practices, by frequent and systematic teleconferencing-enabled communication, using social media and other community-based platforms, and so on.  We have many solutions we are happy to share with our customers.

Companies and entire societies are transferring to become micro and macro networks. Therefore, also our readiness to adapt to decentralization is getting better.

One aspect of virtual leadership which is often forgotten, however, within the myriad of systems and methods being set up for coping with the distributed nature of organizations and associated need for proper leadership is related to sharing oneself. Surely sharing one self is a core component in self leadership. It is also something that was recently brought up by Mårten Mickos in the series of AVP Masterclass interviews on entrepreneurial leadership hosted by Dr. Aino Tenhiälä at the Aalto University in Espoo.

The best leaders in the world whom the people wish to follow and are inspired by are partially that – in addition to having enough core leadership competences – because of the way they are and behave as human beings: What kind of car they drive, how they dress up, how they behave in the queuing line in the company cafeteria, the way they appear when happy or upset; the overall look and feel of the boss. The more you are able to humanize yourself as the leader towards your team members the more likely they are to support and follow you through good and bad times.

Ok – fair enough, you might say, but how do I then do that using phone or Skype? It does not actually have to be that difficult if you have a little bit of imagination, and willingness to step down from the ivory tower of formal leadership. You just have to figure out how to leave a permanent mark as a cool human being in your team members’ memories, and how to make them to want to communicate with you even if it is just a remote connection.

Mårten’s recipe was to sing a song. Yes, after every company-wide monthly business update conference call at MySQL he personally sang a new drinking song. Well, of course Mårten as a born Finnish-Swedish person had the luxury of knowing enough of different such songs but I believe it is a brilliant example of going out of one’s comfort zone for the purposes of establishing a true tribe with decentralized members but still with a common culture based on being humans and not just components in a company matrix.

How do you share yourself in your distributed organization? Should we try to find out ways together?

 Juha Hynynen, Senior Partner, EVP International Operations

Happy Holidays!

Year 2016 is already almost behind us and it is time to unwind a bit for the holiday break. Pertec’s year has been full of renewal and change. New customers have been secured in both the private and public sectors resulting in Pertec’s good and solid financial performance.

The international chapter of the company has been more active than ever in several continents of the globe through leadership training and consulting assignments. On the other hand, a very successful one-week Learning Expedition to Finland was organized in May to the Board of Directors of a major Kenyan financial institution.

Progress has also been made what comes to offering a full-blown management and leadership training program associated with an academic degree. Based on extensive product development done during 2016 we are proud to launch an Executive MBA Programme in Kenya during Spring 2017 in cooperation with the award winning Finnish Haaga Helia University of Applied Sciences (http://www.haaga-helia.fi/en/frontpage). All our Kenyan friends, please check the link for how to apply.

What comes to expanding our own team, in addition to some key Finnish hires and the renewal of the Pertec Fellows team, we have also been fortunate to have Ms. Beatriz Vizcaino to join our team this December. Beatriz is of Mexican origin and will enforce our efforts especially in the Spanish-speaking Latin America, and to continue the rollout of our services already initiated in April in Costa Rica.

Special season’s congratulations go to our team member Susanna Rahkamo who just successfully defended her doctoral thesis on leadership titled “The Road to Exceptional Expertise and Success”. It is a study on the collective creativity of five Finnish Olympic medalists, bringing many innovations also to everyday leadership. It is great to have one more doctor in the team.

Pertec’s mission is to boost the renewal of individuals, teams, organizations and networks. This work has continued already for more than twenty years. Along our mission we are also renewing ourselves. To strengthen Pertec’s activities in expanding in markets outside Finland – one of the key strategic initiatives for us in 2017 – Juha Hynynen will personally assume from the beginning of 2017 a more focused and dedicated role in securing that in the role of the CEO’s deputy and EVP of International Operations, while the founder of Pertec, Dr. Pentti Sydänmaanlakka, assumes the role of the company’s CEO. The core of our vision is to do our best is building up an intelligent network society in all of our chosen regions in the world.

During its entire existence Pertec has been active in supporting people – especially young people – who are in desperate need of help, care and shelter. For the past 14 years we have been engaged with the Finnish chapter of Plan International with Pentti acting there even as a Board member for the past two years.

This year we have decided to donate our traditional “holiday gift” directly to a children’s home in Nairobi. We encourage all of our customers and partners to similarly support the youth in those parts of the world where the starting point for a good life is the most difficult and challenging.

But, before hitting the New Year, we need to take a few days of well-deserved time off. We would like to wish all our customers, partners, and friends all over the world very peaceful and happy holidays.

 Pentti Sydänmaanlakka, Chairman of the Board                Juha Hynynen, Managing Partner
               

I have been recently fortunate to facilitate the annual strategy discussions of a few internationally oriented companies. Some of them are large, some small but all great companies. The script & flow of the events has followed the mountain climbing paradigm:

The group is on a common MISSION and has a strong common VISION to climb the highest peak of the mountain. It is really far away and partially behind the clouds but, nevertheless, everybody understands that it is the top of that mountain where we wish to go.

The group first gathers in the village in the valley to catch up after being separated since the previous adventure.  An update of what got us here, i.e., implementation of the STRATEGY so far is shared, and everybody gets excited about the continuing journey ahead.

Then the enthusiastic and inspired planning starts: To give more structure to the climb the expedition is split into smaller teams, individual STRATEGIC FOCUS AREAS. The teams around the focus areas first start figuring out “what do we want to be in the future”, or, “how does our dedicated strategic focus area look like when we have reached that shiny peak of the mountain”? As we obviously have been successful, what does our success look like when viewed from the top of the World?

Now the target – the vision - is set for all strategic areas and the planning continues. The journey to the top takes a while and requires phased planning: What are the intermediate base camps, MILESTONES, on our path all the way to the top? There might be different SCENARIOS as to the detailed routes between the basecamps. Alternative scenarios are useful, as the weather conditions and other circumstances are unpredictable and you need to be prepared to finalize the detailed action plans once the circumstances get known to you.

Now the teams have clear goals and a set of intermediate stages to reach the vision, they  need to understand what gear is needed on the journey to be successful: Which VALUES to hold onto, which behavior to enforce, what to stop doing, which COMPETENCES to acquire, what systems to build etc. Without proper gear the expedition is bound to fail and the group might have to return back to the village from the first base camp.

But these teams are clever and they now have the vision for all strategic focus areas, the base camps defined to guide the journey all the way to the top, and the required gear to be successful. The last thing to do before some rest to precede the start of the climb is to define clear actions for getting to the first base camp; getting there typically takes one year: What exactly and in concrete terms is going to be done and by when, and who in the team is in charge. Moreover, how do we measure the success of the ACTIONS, what are the KPI’s and their target values?

The atmosphere in all of the strategy planning discussions following the story line above has been full of excitement, laughter and a feeling of communality. Everybody gets to participate in the planning of the expedition and at the end, cannot wait to get going to start the climb. The used approach to strategy planning makes understanding of the strategy very clear, and breaks it down to individual strategic focus areas of manageable chunks.

How do you run your annual strategy updates? If interested to get on track to tame the Kilimanjaro we can help you!

 Juha Hynynen, Managing Partner

I have many dreams. One of them is figuratively and literally strategic in nature.  This dream is simple: agile crafting, revisiting and implementation of strategy. This dream is about strategy development and implementation that contributes to inspiring employees to fulfil or exceed strategic goals.   It is refreshing to see many companies leaving aside clunky and expensive strategy processes that mostly leave people disenchanted and devoid of energy for the most important part of the process: strategy implementation.   However, we have many steps to take before widespread agile and inspiring strategy processes.

Looking at the marketplace, we can learn about what great companies are doing well in crafting and implementing strategy.  These companies keep speed and agility in mind while understanding clearly the long-term focus.  Within this balancing act of speed and quick wins with a long-term focus, I organize the learnings into three areas:

1. People
2. Framework
3. Mission, Vision and Values

People are the heart of sucessful strategy crafting and implemention.  Great companies are bult by people with desire to collaborate, imagination, motivation, and who are not insulated by success .  These team players can balance excellence and growth, are self-driven and self-organizing, less concerned with politics and focused on results.  Strategic thinking is a competence required by all and not reserved for an elite few.  Similarly, leadership is a service shared by all rather than the job description or responsibility of a few.  These leaders execute with stamina, make decisions, create clarity and come back from setbacks ready to share and act on what they learned.  In doing so, they reflect common values in action.

The framework for the strategy starts with the customer and brings together growth, creativity and appetite for risk and failure.  Companies exist to serve customers.  Profits and shareholder value are derived from serving the customer with excellence.  Therefore, customers need to be the starting point and the strategy should reflect clearly how the company is going to satisfy customer needs with excellence. In the strategy process, great companies reflect their hunger for growth, creative thinking, innovation, appetite for risk and a learning orientation to failure. 

Mission, vision and values are commonly understood, reflected in everyday work and clearly answer the why question. Inspiring strategies go beyond profits.  Strategies that get people excited outline the plan to achieve financial results but do not stop there.  These strategies help connect the company also to bigger and broader objectives, beyond profits.  For example, how to satisfy a market need with safer, cleaner and more sustainable services, solutions and products.  Inspiring strategies outline the plan to reach goals that have a clear purpose and answer succintly the why question.  Therefore, the uniting and driving force is why we are doing what we are doing and then we focus on what we need to do to get there. 

How are you crafting and implementing inspiring strategies?

Laura Vargas

Have you ever asked yourself, why some companies succeed in international markets while some others with similar products and services stumble?

Many leaders think that as the world has become a global village, business teams will understand and communicate effortlessly in different cultures. These leaders then continue staying in their autopilot leadership mode in a new culture.

True, geographical borders are gradually becoming irrelevant, but cultural differences remain very real and they often obstruct business success and effective leadership in new markets. We could say that globalisation has helped up to this level in cross-cultural integration, but also created wrong beliefs for many leaders that they know everything about other cultures already. Cultures are like onions, with many layers on top of one other - and when it comes to business, many are starting to realise that cultural agility competence is a major requirement for their leaders to succeed in new international markets.

“More than ever before, organizations need a pipeline of professionals who possess cultural agility, the ability to quickly, comfortably, and successfully work in cross-cultural and international environments. As the competition for culturally agile talent grows, meeting this critical human resource challenge requires highly effective, cutting-edge talent management practices.” - Says Paula Caligiuri, Ph.D, in her book, Cultural Agility.

Therefore, for any company to succeed in today''''s global economy calls for the development of professionals who can operate effectively around the globe, irrespective of country or culture.

In Pertec Consulting we have developed the Four Worlds model of Culture in which cultures are divided into four types: pragmatic, holistic, humanistic and rational. However, you will never find any one culture that is purely of one type. Thus, an effective way of leading in the current digital economy might be to equip yourself with all of them - knowing the proportion or emphasis of utilisation of a particular type as the situation and context dictates. This requires agility and adaptability so that one could capture the unspoken norms and cues in a culture, and shift personal responses spontaneously and accordingly. This requires putting in place a culturally agile business development process, that supports both individuals and teams in international markets.

Apart from a formal process, I found the following three tips amazingly relevant in developing strong and sustainable international business relationships - and believe that, leaders could achieve a lot by turning these tips into regular habits.

Be discovered authentically

In any relationship, first steps of engagements are critical and in business even more critical as people are inclined at this stage for evaluating and judging each other. It’s a complex phase that combines personality, culture and business discoveries. Business people representing companies and proposing solutions are judged vigorously at all levels in this phase. So it’s vital to be aware of this and prepare yourself to make an impactful and authentic first impression.

Position your company’s solutions effectively

Once the discovery phase is successful, presenting your company’s products and services well and positioning your company’s solutions in the minds of the customer requires cultural agility and intelligent sales competence. Many leaders think that their best-of-breed products sell themselves. But remember, everybody has the best-of-breed products these days. If this stage is carefully and professionally managed, it could be a major advantage for company’s market entry.

Co-creating solutions with your customer builds trust

At this level of engagement, solution providers and their clients could become a community of co-creators – succeeding and celebrating together cheerfully. Many companies understand the importance of managing international accounts well and deepening relations meaningfully. At this stage, the two partners’ teams understand, trust each other and exchange ideas easily. More often than not, many global innovations happen at this stage, because innovations happen when solution providers and their clients co-create and collaborate effectively.

In conclusion, companies that exercise cultural agility, will gain a substantial competitive advantage in this culturally different but global village.

  Abdi Jama

I have been truly blessed to work with inspiring colleagues.  One of these inspiring colleagues, the late Mauri Metsäranta, planted in me the interest in the application of neuroscience research to practical development actions in leadership.  Our conversation started in 2009 and while Mauri left us much too soon, the fascination and his inspiration on the topic is still with me.  It is in the application of this field where I have seen the most concrete development in my own leadership and working methods and in that of my own clients. 

My continuous learning on the topic took me to London in 2013 where I met two more inspiring thought leaders on the topic:  Josh Davis and Caroline Webb.  Both Josh and Caroline are passionate about this topic and have translated their passion and wisdom into recently published books.  Using these two valuable resources, we can learn practical scientifically based ways to help us get the most out of our day.  In order of publication date, I will start with Josh’s Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done.  In his book, he presents five concrete ways to be “awesomely effective”.  His deeply researched strategies, based on solid neuroscience and psychology, are simple, practical and achievable. Caroline’s book, How To Have A Good Day Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life brings together combined insights from psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience. In her book, she translates the findings from these three fields into every day practical wisdom.  She identifies seven building blocks to having a good day and gives us insight into how to put together each of those blocks. 

I have been working on implementing these strategies and building blocks myself and also with my clients.  The results are very powerful.  One of my clients told me last week “I get so much more done. I am happier and I even lost weight!”  While I have, unfortunately, not lost any weight while implementing these ideas into my daily routine, I can see the power in the application of these strategies.  Mainly, it has translated into increased productivity.  Very simply, these is what I am aiming for:

1. Sleep:  finding the optimal amount of sleep and protecting the quality of that sleep sets the foundation for the next actions to be successful.  Sleep depravation undermines our efforts to be productive and inspiring. 
2. From hardest to easiest:  When I am not working with a client, I start my “office day” with the most demanding task.  With a fresh brain and a full energy tank, I find that those first hours of work are my most productive.  If I need to have a creative session with a client, I try to schedule it in the morning. 
3. No multitasking:  All alarms and indications of new mail, new messages, new anything are turned off from all my devices.  While doing the intense brainwork, my phone is on silent (not on vibration mode but on silent).  I give the task at hand my single focus. The result is that I finish my task sooner and with better quality. 
4. Email as a discreet activity:  Due to the nature of my work, I am out of office several days a week so I need to find concentrated time to tackle the inbox.  And on “office days”, I close my inbox after spending the planned time on it.  Email is not an all you can eat buffet available all the time. 
5. Choose thoughts: Just like choosing what I am going to eat for breakfast, I am trying to choose my thoughts, being mindful of keeping a positive bias in my thinking.  While I cannot control other people’s behaviour, I can certainly choose how I react to it and what I think.  If I think positive, I can do my work much better and also enjoy it. 

How is science helping you improve your day?   

Laura Vargas

Are there some common challenges faced by leaders all around the world? Last year we facilitated leadership development programmes in diverse locations in Europe and the Middle East, in the USA and Asia, and finally in East Africa, giving a great platform to ask company leaders about their challenges. And to ask myself, what do they have in common?

I got some answers in Hargeisa, Somaliland. As I sat sipping the sweet, spiced local tea, I asked the CEO of a local company the same questions that I’ve put to company leaders around the world: what is the outcome he is looking for from the leadership development programme he is investing in? What should we concentrate on with the managers from his telecom company we will be working with this week?

His answer was pretty much the same as I’ve had from CEOs in very different parts of the world.

He mentioned three leadership competences:  1) Coaching. Build up the coaching competency in my managers, so they can coach and challenge each other to grow and develop; 2) Self-leadership. Help my managers to develop their ability to manage themselves – their ability to manage their time more efficiently through better planning, decision-making and implementation. 3) Innovation. Help my managers to develop their creativity and innovation competencies – we need new thinking, new services and new products in our rapidly changing business environment.

I was struck by this answer as it is pretty much the same wish list as from any other CEOs I’ve asked around the world. Somaliland tea needs a spice mix of ginger, cardamon, cloves and cinnamon. And Somaliland leaders need a skills mix of coaching, self-leadership and innovation. 

It seems companies around the world are looking to their leaders to be innovative, self-managing individuals who are willing and able to coach and develop their colleagues.  

David Goddard

Very often in a coaching process a coachee will say: “I need to improve my decision making skills.”  I get excited and follow up with a question: “How do you currently make decisions?” Depending on the coachee, at this point there is silence or a pause followed by: “hmm… interesting question.”  It seems that many leaders fail to understand how they make decisions which makes it difficult to communicate with their team members how or why a decision was made.  Often, the rationale for a decision is built from the decision itself i.e. this is how and why I justify this decision.  How would you be a better leader if you understood how you make decisions, what biases are built into your decision-making process and how can the team members support each other in decision-making? If you are looking for agility in the workplace, this is a topic that may interest you.

The first step is to crystalize the criteria you need to make a typical decision.  This is your decision-making model.  Of course, we face different kinds of decisions that will require tailored thinking but, in general, we tend to be comfortable to make a decision when we have “done our homework”.  This “homework” could entail answering questions like: