You can be a leader at any stage in your life

Lynda Gratton, a British organizational theorist, consultant, and Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and the founder of the Hot Spots Movement, talks about her experiences, her latest book and more

You have been teaching for many years now and written many books. What have been your key learnings over the decades across the different areas that you have explored?

I’d say the most significant thing I’ve learnt is that people are basically cooperative, but organizations need to invest in good management and a collaborative working environment in order to benefit from that.

A lot of my early academic research looked at how people make a difference to a company. In fact, that was the basis of my first book, ‘Living Strategy’ which focused on how you build a company that aligns with people and their needs. I also looked specifically at cooperation and the role it plays within an organization. What’s interesting is that between that first book and the two books I wrote about on transformation – “The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here” and “The Key - How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems” – the one thing that hasn’t really changed is the role of cooperation. It’s still just as crucial as ever.

My work is about every corporation’s most important asset: people. I’m a certified psychologist and I think most people are naturally cooperative – and that is another thing that hasn’t changed over the years. Something that has changed in a very drastic way is the size and scope of organizations and that has become a major obstacle when it comes to cooperation. As companies become larger and larger, cooperation becomes more difficult, because they have created an environment where employees have to cooperate with thousands of people of different nationalities and age groups. This diversity makes it more difficult because we all find it easiest to cooperate with people who are in close proximity to us and who we perceive as being similar to us.

The solution to this problem really comes back to placing people at the center of the organization and making sure that every manager is trained to become more collaborative and to help ensure that the organization itself is cooperative at all levels. I think collaborative technology is also very crucial – social media technology allows people to talk to each other and take collaboration to a whole new level and companies need to start jumping on that bandwagon internally as well as externally. Consulting companies use technology for a huge amount of collaboration and that is making a big difference to the way they work.

You are a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and have chaired the WEF Council of Leadership. What are the key challenges that leaders face today in this fast-paced world and how can they overcome them?

The context of leadership has changed dramatically and repeatedly. The remit of a leader has evolved beyond an expectation to run their organization to include taking a view on what’s happening in the world. Today’s leaders need to be prepared to make comments about the developments in the world outside the corporation – and to be held to account for those comments very publicly, too. And on top of that, they have a lot of short-term financial pressures to contend with as well. In my latest book, I talk about the importance of the inner journey, which is the process any leader must go through in order to learn about himself and the world. It’s a process which is as vital as it is difficult. That is why leadership is so difficult: a good leader has to build their personal values and be prepared to be judged for them, and at the same time, they also need to have a keen eye focused on the world outside.

It takes decades for people to build the courage and respectability to be able to lead and that is why leadership development is so important. An example of a company that recognizes this is Hindustan Unilever. Part of their management training is to send their recruits to an Indian village. There, they learn about the world outside their organization and this experience helps to put them on that leadership journey when they are still quite young.

Do you think leadership development can be accelerated?

People can take up leadership positions at any stage in their lives. You can be a perfectly decent leader but not have the maturity. I think this is something people in India understand this better than anywhere else – they really grasp the way in which people mature and develop the ability to look at the world in its complexity. You can accelerate this process by making sure there is a coach working with them to ensure they develop that way of looking at their work experiences.

In your experience, what are the most problematic areas in the relationship between people and organizations?

The big difficulty is that organizations have often taken a “one size fits all” approach to development when the reality is that everyone is different. And this has caused problems. So, at this point, I think organizations need to create an alignment between what they are trying to achieve and what employees want. And it needs to be flexible, because people’s motivations are very idiosyncratic. There are some people who are primarily motivated by the prospect of having an exciting job and for others their motivation is a desire to feel purposeful and to have clearly defined goals. For others, their motivation is purely financial. There is a need for leaders to recognize that not everyone is motivated by the same things and that not everyone has the same level of motivation. Once you understand that, you can build a much stronger and productive relationship.

You direct the program ‘Human Resource Strategy in Transforming Companies’ at London Business School. What role do HR leaders play in transforming companies?

The primary role of the HR leaders is to work closely with leadership teams and CEOs and help translate their aspirations into practices and processes. I think some firms have incredible HR communities while in others HR is primarily an administrative function. Some CEOs simply want an admin person and not somebody who takes charge. But in general, I think today’s HR professionals are much more skilled and passionate than they were 20 years ago and they are taking on a bigger role when it comes to transforming the companies they work for.

In your previous book “The Shift”, you talked about how the future of work has arrived. Where does HR fit in the picture?

The role of HR is to build an engaging future. The big message from both ‘The Shift’ and ‘The Key’ is that the world is changing very fast and we need to think hard about how we respond to that change. I think that for HR, their response should be to build resilience. The one thing we know about the future is that it is very different from the present; today you see accelerated globalization, technology and processes in India. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but we should be strong enough and agile enough to survive whatever it throws at us.

Tell us about your new book “The Key – How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems”.

My most recent research has been concerned with two areas: One is what we would tell our children about how to prepare for the future and the second one was about the future of corporations. ‘The Shift’ was about what we would teach our children about planning their career, while ‘The Key’ is about what you would do as a corporation. The point I make in ‘The Key’ is that now is the time for corporations to look at what they can do inside and outside the organization, how they can help build the community and work to tackle some of the biggest challenges.