Gianpiero is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders. His interests bridge the domains of leadership, identity, adult development and experiential learning. He speaks widely to academic and corporate audiences on the topic of how to develop and exercise leadership in fast-changing, uncertain and diverse workplaces. A Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training, Gianpiero has worked as an executive coach and practiced as a psychotherapist.
We came across Gianpiero through INSEAD – where we both studied – and have been avid followers of his research and ideas. In this episode, we talk with him about his own career story, the importance of meaning at work, his work on the gig economy and independent workers, leadership transitions, experiential learning and his current interest in the value of friendship at work.
Links from the episode:
Thanks for listening!
Visit our homepage at https://disrupt-your-career.com
If you like the podcast, please take a moment to rate it and leave a review in Apple Podcast
Gianpiero is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders. His interests bridge the domains of leadership, identity, adult development and experiential learning. He speaks widely to academic and corporate audiences on the topic of how to develop and exercise leadership in fast-changing, uncertain and diverse workplaces. A Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training, Gianpiero has worked as an executive coach and practiced as a psychotherapist.
We came across Gianpiero through INSEAD – where we both studied – and have been avid followers of his research and ideas. In this episode, we talk with him about his own career story, the importance of meaning at work, his work on the gig economy and independent workers, leadership transitions, experiential learning and his current interest in the value of friendship at work.
Links from the episode:
Thanks for listening!
Visit our homepage at https://disrupt-your-career.com
If you like the podcast, please take a moment to rate it and leave a review in Apple Podcast
Disrupt Your Career – Podcast Transcript
Gianpiero Petriglieri - Turning Your Career into a Work of Art
April 2021
Claire
Today on DYC, we are welcoming Gianpiero Petriglieri, who is an extraordinary professor at INSEAD – that's where both of us first came across him. And he's here to discuss all kinds of things with us. So Gianpiero, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us.
Gianpiero
Thank you, Claire, for inviting me.
Claire
It's a great pleasure. So let's start with the rather varied career that you've had. Tell us about how you started out? How did you transition from training as an MD, becoming a psychiatrist and psychotherapist to the version of yourself that you are now? Can you give us an indication of how you've ended up being so interested in the intersection of leadership, identity, adult development and experiential learning? And probably loads of other things that I haven't yet found out?
Gianpiero
Like many careers these days, I can tell a linear story. But the truth is, it was a combination of interest and serendipity. Frankly. I trained as a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and as I was beginning to work in mental health, two things happened. One is I had an interest in systems. There's a big part of psychiatry, which is interested in how systems around us in groups and organizations can make us healthier, or can sometimes make us more ill. And obviously, in the clinical world, we spend a lot of time thinking about the family. But another big system that was obviously affecting people was the workplace. So I had an interest in how not just what happens inside people's heads, but what happens around people affected their life, even as a clinician. And the second thing that happened was that, it was around the beginning of the century, and there was really the booming of coaching. And one of my supervisors who would come to be known introduced me to someone who at the time, was working in Switzerland, launching some experiential learning. And, I went, and I was interested in learning a little bit more what was happening in this world, and what was a three-day exploration turned into a six-month residency, and then it turned into five years of my life in which I actually spent time, a little bit between the two worlds, working as a psychotherapist, with young managers, MBAs, but also working in consulting and leadership development. And, at that time, I really developed my interest in the role that work plays in people's life. At the end of the day, we don't just spend – people often say, “well we spend a lot of time on work so it's important for us” – but it's not just the time we spend. We invest a lot of ourselves at work. Work, in many ways, is the venue in which a lot of people try to discover who they are, develop who they are, find out who they can be. And so what happens is my original interest, which is what's the place of work in people’s life, just emerged. And then around 2006, INSEAD called me up and invited me to teach a course for six months, and I've been there for 16 years. I haven't regretted it. And so in many ways, mine seems to be one of these sharp transitions I am actually doing. I'm a management professor. And it looks like I'm doing something that's radically different from my training. But at the end of the day, I'm not. I still continue to be interested in how work out of the workplace makes us better, more human, if you want. And why does it sometimes make us ill? And, I love helping people, not just, maybe the transition I made is moving from helping people cope with different difficult circumstances, which is what you often do when you're a clinician. We get people who are suffering because of the moment of their circumstances and helping them find better adaptations to actually working a little bit on the other side, helping those who have the power to create those circumstances, create circumstances that are a little bit healthier for themselves, and for people around them.
Claire
I'm curious, did you go into medicine already knowing that you would be most interested by the human side, the psychic side of things?
Gianpiero
Not at all. No, not at all.
Claire
Tell me a little bit. Just take us way back there.
Gianpiero
I'll tell you the truth. When I finished high school, I had two great passions: one was science, and the other one was literature and poetry.
Claire
Okay, that's tough in Italy, isn't it? You have to go for one or the other; you can’t have both…
Gianpiero
Yeah, so it's a little bit …. I've always been one in an impossible… sort of trying to combine difficult principles. But anyway, at the end of the day, I felt that medicine was a little bit more interesting and it was kind of pragmatic, and I've always liked working with people. My dad was a doctor, so it seemed, it was familiar to me. And I loved medical school. I absolutely adored medical school. It was just, it's just a way of thinking that I carry with me just diagnostic thinking, the trying to figure out an issue, trying to sort out what's the intervention that you can do, where with the minimum effort and harm, you create the maximum benefit. It was just some of the best years in my education. And then when I finished medical school, the question came, like, “What am I going to do? What am I going to specialize into?” And that's when I thought, oh, now I'm going to do psychiatry, because psychiatry is going to be the most poetic of the medical specialties. So now I've done the nuts and bolts, I've got the basics. And I'm going to go into psychiatry and I had a romantic view of psychiatry, which was going to be more kind of psychoanalysis, is going to be much more soulful, sitting there having these meaningful conversations. And I went into psychiatry, and honestly, it was very difficult because, it was much more plumbing than poetry. And it wasn't the circuitry that I had imagined, I wasn't particularly happy, I enjoyed it. It was interesting, but it was, it wasn't quite as medical as my medical training. And it wasn't quite as poetic as I had imagined. And then, I had this experience going more into psychotherapy, which is really where I find the possibility of being more creative, or having more meaningful developmental conversations. And then paradoxically, when I started working in management, I found that there was a place where really, that developmental cutting edge that sparked those experimental conversations around, “What makes you YOU, what makes a life worth living?”, that concern with meaning that, in I tried to approach from different ways was actually possible for me. So in many ways, I think, and especially the kind of the study and the development of leadership really is the place where it's a little bit possible to combine the two. Well, there's that famous quote, by Jim March, that leadership is a little bit of plumbing, and a little bit of poetry. And I think that I've landed in this field, because maybe that is the place which best suits the two things that I've always been interested in. There's certainly a lot of science into it, there's a lot of rigorous systemic way of looking at things, especially in the kind of research we do. But there is still a certain poetic spark, that at the end of the day, leadership isn't just a mechanical enterprise, isn't just trying to create a machine that gets you to achieve certain goals. It's also about making choices to bring a certain world to life. And that's a little bit like, and I kind of tend to think of leadership as applied poetry. You need the poetry to imagine, but you need the science to make it work. Yeah, so that's how I got to it. But you know, in many ways, I'm not going to pretend that there was an anonymous element of chance. Very often what makes us are the people we encounter and the people we lose, and there was a moment in which I encountered this field and people were working in this field, and I decided I was going to commit, I was going to commit I was going to commit to them, I was going to commit to this. And even if it costs, maybe burning a few bridges with a more traditional career in academic psychiatry. And obviously, looking back from now I can say, “Well, I don't regret it, look, it's made me who I am” . But at the time, it wasn’t at all sure. I spent years worrying sick about whether I was going to be able to make something of my career, on my life. And in fact, that experience then became the kind of spark for studying people who end up freelancing or working independently or working in professions that aren't just quite defined and figuring out how do you make it a creative moment. Now, when I look back at those years, in which I was working a little bit in between clinical work and organizational work, I recognized that there was an incredibly creative period. It probably takes me my whole career, to try to unpack all the experiences that I started learning about in those years. But if I went back then, it didn't feel about this blissful moment of creativity. It mostly felt about freaking out about what's going to happen in my life, to the few anchors I had, in order to stay safe and sane, and continue to move forward and discover who I was becoming, which I think is the predicament of a lot of careers, these days. Careers are no longer these very neat progressions where you make a decision about who you want to be. And then you figure out how you're going to get there.
Claire
And then implement it for 40 years. Yeah.
Gianpiero
And anyway, there is no “there” there. A career is a constant process of discovering who we are, but even more who we are becoming.
Claire
Indeed. Let's go back to this theme of meaning, which you alluded to a little earlier, and which is coming back here now. You wrote an article in HBR, ‘Finding the job of your life’, in which you talked a lot about how people crave for meaning at work, in work and from work. But you also have said that meaning, like love is a consequence and not a destination? So is the idea of meaningful work an illusion? Or what? What is in this paradox, and what's your advice to help people to get as close as they can to a sense of fulfillment in their work life?
Gianpiero
Is meaningful work an illusion? I wouldn't put it this way. That's not the word I would use, but I also wouldn't disagree. Okay, in the sense that, if I can go along with I can play with the idea that it's an illusion, but then it's a pretty useful illusion. I mean, there are many illusions, if you want, without which life is absolutely unbearable. Such as, freedom. Or are we really ever free? Who knows? Freedom may be an illusion. But without a sense of freedom, life is unbearable. Love... does love really exist that we ever really fully loved? Perhaps it’s an illusion, well, but without a sense of love life is pretty empty. And meaning… does meaning really exist? Or is it just something that we construct for ourselves? Perhaps, but again, without a sense of what we do and who we are as meaning, life becomes incredibly empty. And so in that piece, I was making the comparison to love and meaning just to say that, even if you want to call these illusions, they're extremely important experiences. I wouldn't call it an illusion, I would say it’s a subjective experience. It’s an illusion only if you take a very hard-core kind of positivist scientific view where anything that you cannot track or measure, or, it doesn't have physical – let's put it this way – it doesn't have physical properties. Like meaning is a bit like love. You cannot show me, it doesn't have weight or mass like this bottle, but it's still significant. It's still important because it moves us, it moves us. And the question then becomes if we consider just an experience that moves us that gives us a sense of direction: When do we feel that sense of meaning? And what I was trying to point out in that in that piece, is that meaning is often a byproduct of an intense connection with our work. And that piece makes a comparison with love. Where, for example, if you think of love, sometimes there are moments in our life in which we are looking for love. We feel lonely, we don't have someone to be with, and so we wish “Oh, I wish I could be in love, I'm looking for love”. And philosophers have spent thousands of years thinking about what does that mean? What is really love about? How do you define it? Very undefinable. And then suddenly you meet someone. And if you are in love, if you fall in love, you stop thinking about love and you are actually thinking about that person. You only think about love, when you're not in love. When you're in love, you're not thinking about love: What is love? Can I ever find it? What you're thinking is “Will she call me back? Will he answer the text? Will he want to be with me? Is she right? Is he as much into it as I am? You're obsessing about another person. And love is the byproduct of developing that connection. And the more that connection with that person develops, the more love there is in your life, in the sense that love might be an illusion, but the person you love is real. Meaning the same way. A lot of existential philosophers say this. Meaning is the same way: we worry a lot about meaning when we don't have it. If you ask the soldier who was willing to die for their country, if you ask the surgeon who's kind of devoted their life to saving people in the emergency room, they're not thinking: “Oh, is this meaningful?” What they're thinking is: “What do I have to do next?” And their whole self is infused in the work. And we experience a sense of meaning paradoxically, most, when we're not thinking about meaning at all, when we’re actually so engaged, involved, infused, immersed in our work, that we are in it. We are all of our work, and in our work, and that's when work is most meaningful. When our connection to it allows us to feel like we're using our own talents, our own resources to do something useful for others. And in those moments, work is just a connector, it’s just a conduit to bring ourselves out in the world. And use them to do something useful for others. And in fact, that's what most research on meaning shows, when we feel the work allows us to express our values. And to do something useful to others, we have a sense of meaning. And when we don't, we don't. And then we think about meaning. And so it's not that meaning is an illusion, meaning is extremely real, but is an experience that comes as a result of living into our work.
Now then we could also go down another path, which is: “But is that a good thing?” Because of course, it's like, if you continue that comparison with romantic love, one of the things we know romantic love is wonderful in many ways, but it doesn't make you think very rationally. And sometimes it can hurt you. It can hurt you very much because of course the flip side of that coin is loss. And so that, if you're deeply in love, and then you lose that or person or thing that you're deeply in love with, then you'll feel you lose a piece of yourself.
Claire
And that can apply in meaning and work as well.
Gianpiero
Very much, because it's very fulfilling. The more meaningful the work is, the more fulfilling it is, but the more demanding it is. And if your whole self is really invested in that work, then sometimes what happens is you can become completely possessed, really possessed by work in the sense that you don't technically have the work, the work has you. And you have the same fear that if the work were to disappear, then your self also disappears. And you and I'm sure know a fair amount of people and we have perhaps experienced ourselves the sense of the work disappears, and it's like the lights go off.
Claire
For whatever reasons…
Gianpiero
…for whatever reasons, yes.
Claire
So let's go back then to these gig economy workers. There are more and more of them, the pandemic probably added to the numbers. I haven't looked at the statistics recently to see which direction numbers are going in, but I would imagine that there are more and more people working independently rather than not.
Gianpiero
Oh yes, especially now.
Claire
Exactly. So, one of the things you found in your research is that independent workers create a feeling of mastery, and that they rely on a community or a tribe. I find that in the work that I do and Antoine and I are a little tribe of writers and thinkers about our little area. So we've got a mini tribe, and then we've all got our bigger tribes too. Can you tell us a bit more about these ideas of tribe and mastery that might help our listeners who are gig workers or who are going to become gig workers – either willingly or not?
Gianpiero
Well, you see – and this links to the conversation we were having earlier about meaning, right? – when you look at people that have a deep sense of meaning in their work, they often attach their meaning not to the organization, but to the act … Now, entrepreneurs are different, because entrepreneurs create an organization, then they often feel their primary attachment is this organization they have created. But for most other people, their deepest sense of meaning comes from the work they're doing. It's not the organization; it’s the work. And I was doing this work with Sue Ashford and Amy Wrzesniewski, at Michigan and Yale. What we were looking at was, if you look at people who are very successful working independently, you will find people who are probably the purest research setting for looking at people's relationship with their work. And what we found was an interesting phenomenon, which is, most of these people - and we studied, consultants, coaches, artists, filmmakers, people on the more creative end of the spectrum, people on the more business end, IT designers end of the spectrum - and on the one hand, they said how happy they were, that they weren't working for an organization, they didn’t have a boss, they were their own boss, they could actually pursue their interest and just only do work that interests them, and that, really fit their talent. And so they were very proud. They were very proud of working independently. And yet, at the same time, when you look at how they actually spend their working lives, they spend a huge amount of time creating connections, building these tribes that allow them to tolerate and enjoy the challenges of working independently. Because you see, when you work for an organization, in many ways, you always have a little bit of an excuse. If you're doing something that doesn't work, if you're doing something that doesn't really suit you, or maybe it's not as great as you thought it would have been, you can always say, “Well, I didn't have resources, it’s my boss, and I have to work in this way...” But what we found is when you work independently, you really can't explain anything away, other than by saying “Well, it was really me. If something succeeds, I was successful. And if something doesn't succeed, well, I failed.” And that's liberating, right? But it's also anxiety-provoking. And I find that lots of people now have this attitude, not just when they work independently, but even if they work in an organization. They think of themselves as independent workers. They say, “Yeah, I work in this company, but I'm really working for myself, I'm self-motivated”. And it's all well and good. But once you embrace that attitude, it will free you up, and it also will freak you out. And then the question becomes, how do you make sure that you have more days, when you feel free then you have days when you feel anxious. And really, Mastery is the word for a sense that you are likely to have more days of freedom and productivity than you have of anxiety, and despair. And that is impossible to achieve on your own. So it's interesting because to be independent, doesn't mean to be alone. And in fact, the most successful independent people often aren't alone. They're very deliberate in cultivating tribes.
But these tribes work in a slightly different way than the traditional sense of the word because there's a traditional stereotypical sense of the word tribe, almost offensive, which is a group, very homogeneous group of people that requires your absolute commitment. And if you try to deviate, then you become an outcast. What I found is that the groups of people that really made independent workers thrive were actually very open. They had deep commitments, but it was a deep commitment to everyone's individuality, rather than a deep commitment to kind of fostering a conformity where we have all the same. And this presents a challenge to try to replicate this in an organization. Because in an organization, when we try to get people together, we usually try to induce a degree of conformity, let's all agree on, not necessarily to all be the same, but at least to believe the same values.
I think many companies are wrestling with how do you crack that challenge? How do you have a strong culture without putting people under pressure to conform? Now I think the holy grail of any corporate leader these days is having the benefits of a strong culture, which is the sense of commitment, the sense of belonging, and the value of diversity, which is the kind of ideas and innovation that that brings.
Claire
Indeed, and it's a holy grail that is very difficult to seek out and, and achieve.
Gianpiero
Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s difficult if you think of a strong culture and a diverse group as being somewhat in opposition. But it's not if you think about building a strong culture on the ideal of inclusion. If you think of the strength of your culture not being advancing a single ideal, or a single story, but if you think of the strength of your culture as actually being able to host different stories. And that requires a little bit of a shift in how we think of ourselves as leaders, rather than being over committed to one principle to actually being committed to hosting more than one principle. So I think to the degree that we still have an old-fashioned image of leadership as fanatic pursuers of a certain idea, then yes, then to build that sort of culture becomes difficult. But the moment you shift the idea what leadership is and what it looks like, then actually building that culture becomes, a direct consequence is not necessarily difficult.
Claire
Let's move to some of the work that you do at INSEAD. You lead the Management Acceleration Program, which is the school's flagship executive program for emerging leaders. As you deal with many participants in the program, what have you been observing about how people best manage their transition to leadership responsibilities? What's helping them and what tends to derail them?
Gianpiero
Well, the biggest derailer is thinking first you have to be somewhat formalized as a leader, first, you have to be in the leadership position and then you get to show that you can lead. If you think that way, you'll never get there. If you think once I get in a leadership position, then I'm going to really be able to lead, then you'll never get there. Because it's a little bit like saying “Once it is easy for me to lead, then I can lead “. Leadership often is needed and is required when it's actually harder to do. And so in many ways, it helps to think that it works exactly the other way around. First, you actually, show that you can lead when you're not necessarily required, expected or appointed to lead. And then very often, you get brought into those positions.
And the thing I often think is most people make the transition and I think people are, really more open now than ever is realizing that you always need a foundation of technical expertise. You need some kind of strategic ideas about where we are going and how we might get there relative to the competition or maybe in an entirely new field. But at the end of the day, your leadership hinges in being able to work with people and manage yourself in such a way that you can maximize the value of your expertise, and realize the possibilities of your strategic ideas. It's really that personal and social work, that actually allows your strategy to create value and your expertise to create value. And so I think this focus on using yourself and using your relationship as a way to really enhance the value of your strategic ideas, and your technical expertise is what allows leaders to succeed. And I think it kind of challenges a little bit, there used to be this old theory from, from the 70s, that, as people progress in their careers, first, they have to be technical experts, then eventually they have to be able to manage people, and then they eventually have to have a strategic mindset and manage the whole enterprise. And this was a sequence. And of course, if you think about it, is that really the case? No.
Claire
It’s never ever been that simple. Plus there's nothing to say that a 23-year-old can’t have an incredible strategic vision, he just may or may not be able to implement it…
Gianpiero
… and the other way around. You couldn't have someone who was very strategic and has no idea of what the technical core of the enterprise and be an effective leader. In fact, what makes you a leader is that you integrate your technical expertise, your social abilities and resources, and your strategic insight. A lot of what we do in the Management Acceleration Program, in a lot of leadership development work we do is think about how do you deal with moments in which these three lenses, the technical lens, the behavioral lens, and the strategic lens, are in friction? And leaders face that all the time. What seems to be the right strategic direction is not really politically palatable. And it doesn't quite fit the technical competencies we have. And so what do you do? Which directions do you go to? And how do you kind of resolve those potential moments of frictions and trade-offs? Who do you have to bring in the room? How do you bring people together rather than making them drift apart? What really helps is understanding that leadership is not a progression towards more and more abstract thought, or more impersonal views of the organization, but it's actually an integration of what’s strategic and technological with the human social side of the organization. And I think if you can bring those together in your work, without being blindsided or thrown back, when they come into frictions, then you'll become, a pretty grounded and effective leader.
Claire
Very interesting. Can you tell us about the experiential part of learning that you've been developing for that program?
Gianpiero
I think the experiential part of learning has to do with learning a little bit about what you bring to groups and what groups bring to you. If you think about what makes us tick in an organization, not just leaders in general, there's really two big drivers, two big worlds we have to live in. One is our inner world, the world of our history, where we come from, but also our aspirations, what we are moved by, where we come from and where we are trying to go. And we need to come to some grips with it. And the other world that's really important for us to deal with and live in is our social world, the world of our incentives and opportunities, what's possible around us. And leaders have to live in this. These are two real worlds, by the way. Some people say, well, that's the social world, the real world, the inner world is imaginary, your illusions earlier on… No. These are both two very real worlds. And leaders have to figure out “How do I position myself in relationship with these two worlds?” Now some of us live really right at the intersection of the two where my aspirations are a perfect fit for the environment and not just execute. I just go in autopilot. And sometimes you take a holiday or go on a meditation retreat, or you go and see a coach or a therapist, and you put yourself up there. And you really look from a distance. You're not executing, but you're kind of more like a critic, and you really see it. But what I'm interested in is, how do you get yourself in the middle of those two extreme positions, when you're really in full autopilot, or in a critic mode, when you're not neither replicating nor analyzing. Because I think leaders live in that space where they honor their inner and social world, but they don't take it for granted. So that they can make choices about what they want to keep, and what they want to change.
And so what we do is we offer people a chance to work in actual groups – work with each other, work between each other, to try to figure out what are the moments in which I go on autopilot? What are the moments in which I just sit back and critique? And what are the moments or the states or the situations in which I am able to be both fully present, but also aware enough that I can make some changes? And one of the things that I often say is, as a leader, you don't need to be perfect, you need to be awake. And going back to what we were saying earlier, it turns out that very often, we are able to stay in that middle ground between autopilot and critique when we have people around us that are willing to help us. And we have what we call friends of learning. Most of us are surrounded, especially the kind of people that come to our executive programs, are very successful often. Yes, they're struggling, but they've done well enough that they're surrounded by friends of their performance, by people who praise them for what they do, and by people who reassure them, that everything is going to be okay. But very often, we have fewer friends of learning, which is people who kind of praise you for what you could become. And that push and that don't just reassure you, but also challenge you to that work, in another gap. I always say “inside all of us, there are three: in the present we are one, we have the kind of steady state, we imagine we become exist, things just continue rolling the way they are status quo, then we have, then we have an aspirational future, an image of our best self, who we might become if things really went well. And then we have a kind of road to hell. Some picture of what we fear, we don't tell anyone. But what we fear might happen if things don't go well. Yeah. Now, most of us are surrounded by people who will help us close the gap between the steady state and the road to hell. Without us now it's going to be okay, you're going to keep doing well. But what I'm really interested in how do we create? And I think actually executive education, that's what you should do. That's the most important thing. It is even more important than the knowledge you acquire, and then the insights you have is: Do you build relationships with other people that actually operate on the other gap, the gap between the steady state and your aspiration state that help you really move yourself up there? And part of experiential learning is also helping people not just acquire information from experience, but it's also, help others become a better version of themselves, which happens to be what I think, is one of the most important job you can have as a leader.
How do you that really practicing too, if here's what I believe to be the two most powerful tools, any leader has to have. And they're extremely simple. I'm a big lover of simplicity and plain language, and I also happen to think that these two simple tools have changed the world many times over, and one is your ability to pay attention. And the second one is your ability to have a conversation. If you think about it, very often great. social movements are started with someone saying, Hey, we should pay attention to this. And we should talk about it. Why can't these people vote? Why should they sit on a different part of the restaurant? And every great dictatorship tells you, you shouldn't pay attention and you should be scared to have a conversation. Now, leaders’ work begins with orienting, knowing where they are orienting their attention, and being able to have the conversations that actually allow their teams, their organizations to move towards a better place. And so, when we do experiential learning, a lot of what we do is actually inviting, nudging, helping people to look at what is it that you pay attention to in any given moment, if we're doing an exercise? What did you pay attention to? And what did you talk about? And what did you ignore? And what could you not talk about? And you were talking earlier about culture in, in another way of defining an organizational culture is basically a set of implicit rules about what is okay to talk about, and what is okay to think about? Indeed, and if you want to be a leader, one of the things you have to do is to be very deliberate about that. You have to be very mindful about, what are some of the things that we want, that we've always paid attention to, that we want to keep paying attention to? But what are some other things that maybe we haven't paid attention to? And we want to start paying attention to what are some things that we always talk about, but what are some things that we maybe don't talk about, and we ought to talk about if we want to have a different outcome? And that's where, I think, a lot of what this a lot of our designs, when I work with people who either aspire to become leaders or think of themselves as leaders, but they like to lead in a different way. A lot of where we end is this idea that leadership in many ways, it's an argument with a tradition. Right? as a leader, you're always in relationship with a tradition. And sometimes some parts of the tradition you want to preserve, and keep alive. Some part of this tradition, you want to really tweak and change, and some personal traditions need to be like. And leaders are usually the people who are able to make the judgment, not just themselves, but then also help others see the value of those judgments and go along with that. Go along with that. And some leaders really, primarily work to preserve traditions, which is okay. Some leaders really primarily work to disrupt traditions, which is okay. But many leaders, and I actually think that the harder kind of leadership, is the leadership that sort of works a little bit between those two extremes, where they are trying to figure out, how do you keep a tradition alive, which means that some elements have to stay the same, and some elements have to change?
Claire
Well, that is, that is an extraordinary experience to be going through in that program. And I must say that I constantly recommend it to clients, and encourage them to go and demand their company send them.
Gianpiero
One of the things that was interesting is, I've been doing this now for a few years. And the MAP also allowed me to make a point, which is 10 years ago, there was a belief of pretty widespread, I would say, in management education, which is, people that were, are the sort of what we traditionally call the high potential talent level, mid 30s, early 40s, they’re really interested in getting kind of the nuts and bolts, the technical strategic part of leadership, but not really in the more personal, soulful, cultural aspect of leadership. That's something you think about when you're later; there was almost an element of prejudice and ageism into the old-fashioned leadership development theory. And one of the things we say is, what if that's the problem? What, what if that's the reason why we get so many leaders who are emotionally illiterate, extremely powerful, but emotionally illiterate? And what if instead, we actually did a program for high potentials, which was very deep on the leadership development element, and what we found over these years is, people are not only interested but they're eager. They're eager to become the kind of leader who doesn't need a remedial intervention when they have a midlife crisis in their 60s, because they've done so much harm to themselves and others that they want to figure out how to make it right. And this goes back to my idea: we shouldn't try to fix things. We should try to figure out our with our work with our learning with our consulting with our research, how we actually create healthier, healthier career path, healthier workplaces, healthy, healthier relationships at work.
Claire
Now I feel that it's probably time to start winding up but would you like to share anything about stuff you're working on at the moment that you're finding particularly exciting before we call this to a close?
Gianpiero
What I'm really interested in right now is looking at all that we have lost in pandemic, and, working from home working digitally, and not so much with a focus on the digital tools. But with the fact that, we are realizing that a lot of what used to happen in the office in the workplace was not really driven by a desire to be more productive, but driven by a desire to be connected. So I'm working on, for example, that the value of friendship at work, a lot of the stuff that used to happen in an office was, for better or worse, our working cultures are still very technical. And so we would have a formal space, a meeting, in which, will be a little bit tough and very numbers oriented, trying to get what needs to be done, done. And then leave the meeting. And there'll be the informal spaces, which would be for reconnecting reparation… “I'm sorry, I said that; I didn't mean it that way. What do you think up in there, I couldn't give you that budget, but I will give it to you maybe in the next quarter, if things are well”, and all those little moments of, friendship with a small f allowed us to kind of tolerate and stay on the course of the on the more challenging aspects of work. No, in this new world of work, we have kept the formal spaces, but we have lost a lot of those connective spaces. And so what you're seeing is a lot of people struggle with mental health, with isolation with a sense of, not quite knowing where they stand while they continue to be productive. So the productivity hasn't suffered, but it becomes a lot more costly. And one of my hypotheses is that one of the reasons why the productivity has become a lot more costly is because we have lost a lot of the informal connectivity. Again, those connections that allow us to, that allow us to not just be productive, but to be productive in a somewhat healthy way. And the more organized and if you have to think that over the last 30 years, organizations have become yes, more and more agile, but also more and more and more and more insecure. And, and so people have really been leaning more and more on their informal relationships, and on their friendships at work now in a work environment in which we maintain the work. But we've lost a little bit of the richness of the friendships, yeah, they individually carry the cost. And so one of the things that I've been working on and trying to pay attention to is how do we make sure that we preserve the social aspect of work.
Yes, productivity requires that we move back and forth between solitude and sociality. And again, going back to where we started, the reason why work is meaningful is because on a good day, not every day, but on a good day, it allows us to fulfill our desire to kind of, go deep into ourselves and find who we are, and then expresses, express it and use it to connect with other people. And now, we have we are in a particular moment in which solitude vastly, vastly overtakes sociality, and then productivity becomes costly becomes. And so, I'm interested in, in the question of, how do we find each other again?
Claire
What a beautiful theme to end on, and we look forward to hearing the results of the work that you do. Gianpiero it's been an absolute delight to have you here with us. I think we've probably gone longer than I usually do, but I couldn't bear to stop it. It was all fascinating and interesting. And I suspect that if we were at the same table with a bottle of wine between us it would have gone on for hours, but thankfully for the audience's patients, it didn't sell. Thank you for joining us.
Gianpiero
You are very welcome, Claire. Thank you for having me.