Conversations for Leaders & Teams

Redefining Leadership: Why We Rise By Lifting Others with Jenny Robinson

• Episode 82

Share episode

Send us a text

What if everything we thought we knew about leadership was wrong? Jenny Robinson, a successful Kiwi entrepreneur with five thriving businesses spanning three decades, has discovered something remarkable about how true leadership emerges.

When Jenny began her PhD research on leadership, she made a startling realization: despite a century of academic study, we lack a predictive model of leadership. This prompted her to strip away all preconceptions and ask a fundamental question: "What would leadership look like if we didn't know what leadership looks like?"

Her search for answers led her to study natural systems, where recent science reveals something counterintuitive - nature thrives through collaboration rather than just competition. Trees share resources, information, and medicine with neighboring trees when in proximity. This insight became the foundation for a revolutionary approach to understanding how humans lead.

Jenny and her colleague Phil Renshaw were inspired to create "Leadership on the Go" and author "Coaching on the Go," offering practical guidance for implementing collaborative leadership approaches. Their innovative tool "Gizmo" helps teams develop the skills needed for collaborative leadership without the stigma of traditional assessments. Now working across 25 countries in five languages, they've found that groups worldwide consistently identify the same key elements for effective collaboration.

Want to transform your leadership approach? Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/leadershiponthego/ or visit www.coachingonthego.co.uk to access the first chapter of her book, featuring a practical lookup table for common workplace challenges and research evidence on effective leadership practices.

BelemLeaders–Your organization's trusted partner for leader and team development. Visit our website to connect: belemleaders.org or book a discovery call today! belem.as.me/discovery

Until next time, keep doing great things!

Speaker 1:

All right, well, here we go. Hey there, and welcome to Conversations where today we have Jenny Robinson, a Kiwi entrepreneur with five successful businesses established over 30 years. The first was established at just 18 years old, a commercial radio station, and is still thriving today. Now Jenny runs an equally successful tech startup and an alpaca farm. Her PhD is in collaborative leadership and Jenny believes that we rise by lifting others, which is a quote from Robert Ingersoll. Welcome to the show, jenny. How are you today and where are you coming to us from?

Speaker 2:

Hi, dr Kelly, Thank you so much. I am in the middle of the UK, in the middle of England. I'm as far away from the sea as you can get and I'm on my alpaca farm so little example of an alpaca being held up for anybody who's watching. Um, and I have 16 of them, and this weekend I will be rolling up my sleeves and shearing because they have to have their fur taken off and so how, how often does that happen?

Speaker 1:

the?

Speaker 2:

first every, just every year, but it will take me a few weeks to get through them because I do it by myself. Um, I work. Actually, it's part of the same philosophy of leadership, which is they're bigger and stronger than I am. I can only succeed in this if they are going to not exactly help, but they're going to cooperate, they're going to understand what I'm trying to achieve and they have to play their part. That's right.

Speaker 1:

This sounds like another book Leadership Lessons from the Alpaca Farm.

Speaker 2:

Don't worry, I often use my alpaca to explain my leadership theories, and I often test my leadership theories out in the wild.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. Well, I would love to read this quote. It's a very intriguing quote that I have from you, and so I'm going to read that, and then we're going to go into answering some of the questions that I have for you. Sound good?

Speaker 1:

Yeah great, all right. So this is what I have. When you see that leadership is essentially about relationship, we also see that the way we name and develop leaders needs to include their skills as a leader who coaches and look for leadership in the collaboration between and across groups of people, whether that is formal teams or informal teaming. A new lens on what leadership looks like changes everything that was like to me when I read that. That to me was interesting, because it sounds like that we've gotten leadership wrong and so what?

Speaker 2:

say you about that. Okay, so I went to university to study leadership. I wanted a PhD in leadership. You know how it is when you go back to study All your preconceptions get stripped away. You get told by your professors to go find the evidence, to go and define your terms, to go and search out what everybody else has said. So I went off and I was looking at all the leadership studies. There's 100 years of academic research into leadership and what becomes very clear when you start looking at the research?

Speaker 2:

We don't actually have a good theory of leadership. What I mean by that is if you think about a different mode. So if you've got this infection, you have this antibiotics and you know that this infection will get better. So that's what a predictive model would look like. We don't have a predictive model of leadership. We have many, many theories of leadership, but none of them are to that gold standard, and part of the reason is because we keep treating leadership as if it's a single variable so input, process, output, output and I therefore stripped everything back and I said what would leadership look like if we didn't know what leadership looks like? So just take away all your assumptions, take away all the knowledge you think we have. So if you, as I said, we've been studying for 100 years, if none of that's working, so strip away that 100 years of theorizing and start from ground zero, start from fundamentals. What do you look for? How do you know? That is leadership.

Speaker 2:

And I started by saying, okay, there must be a place where leadership is evident that doesn't rely on our past theorizing. And where is that? So I've just been talking about my alpaca. It's in the wild. So you look into natural systems where natural systems have to grow, where natural systems have to grow, they have to thrive, they have to survive and they have to adapt. And when you look at nature, the new theories of nature are collaborative and cooperative. In the past we used to say you plant a tree here and you plant a tree here because they're competing. But the new science is showing that they need to be approximate to each other because they do share information, medicine, water they share. Now they can't be in each other's shade, but they can be far closer together than we ever realized. But they can be far closer together than we ever realized. And the new theories that are emerging in nature show that nature survives, adapts and thrives when it collaborates and cooperates. So I picked that idea up and I moved it towards leadership and I said, okay, now I've got some idea of what leadership might look like.

Speaker 2:

And I took a video camera into some very large organizations and I videoed people as they solved unsolvable problems. I'll give you an example. So the emergency services in the UK like pretty much everywhere in the world, I guess they have a finite budget. You know that's what they get, yet they have infinite demand. The demand always exceeds what the budget is available.

Speaker 2:

And I watched or my video camera watched as people came together, they coalesced, they started different conversations, they began to unpick and unravel and suggest and move and shift and then I showed them the video of themselves back and I didn't ask them who is the leader. I asked them video of themselves back and I didn't ask them who is the leader. I asked them where is leadership? So you'll notice, when I wrote, when I wrote to you to set up our first conversation back in March, I always put ship s-h-i-p in capital letters to remind us that we're looking at this idea of everyone's on the ship. If the ship gets there, we all get there. If the ship sinks, we all sink, same as organizations.

Speaker 2:

So I asked them where is the leadership? And they always said oh look, it's like a dance, it's a bit of this and a bit of that, and a bit of something else and a bit of something else. And that really lit me up because I began to see that leadership is cooperative and collaborative we're. We're in it all together. Now some people have different titles, they have different hierarchy, they have different authority, but that is different to leadership. Leadership is this emergent, fragmented, punctuated, messy process of everybody, sort of navigating to this future, navigating through big problems. When you're in a complex world, one brain won't do it. You need multiple brains.

Speaker 1:

That's right, regardless of title. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what might be the consequence of redefining the way that you are defining it for us? What are some of those consequences that we might find?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I want to acknowledge that my definition of leadership is built on other attributes of leadership that are needed, but I was very interested in this idea that it's not me, it's we, and when it's we, then what matters is our behavior towards each other in a way that builds our bonds, breaks our bonds, strengthens our bonds or increases the number of our bonds. So I was really interested in leadership and relationship, and do we understand, when we're working in leadership, how we are working with relationship, and do we understand, when we're working in leadership, how we are working with relationship? And I know that this is something close to your heart because you've done systemic team coaching, which has many parallels to this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and helping teams understand. I mean, when you are working with leaders or even in your research, what did that even look like? Like how are you coming in and you're not. You're probably not saying much, like you said. You had your camera with your research and then you are bringing you know the team back in, or the group back in and having them pinpoint where they saw. Leadership back in, or the group back in and having them pinpoint where they saw leadership.

Speaker 2:

Were these aha moments for them? Yes, very much so, yes, very much so, especially in, for example, organizations which are very hierarchical Emergency services. They're built on the same hierarchy as the army, the navy. You know, they have inherited this idea of a chain of command. They need a chain of command because they go to emergency situations and they need to know who's in charge. But nevertheless, they had the ability to address problems in this emergent manner, using their relationships to investigate and to understand and to unpick and to explore. So that was my PhD and the work that I did. That got me really excited. What then happened is a funnier side, but it is a funnier side.

Speaker 2:

When I started my PhD, the university lined us up in alphabetical order. They literally lined us up in the lecture, lecture theatre. For three years. We always sat by name, in alphabetical order, and the guy I always sat next to was a guy called Phil Renshaw. So he's a Renshaw, I'm a Robinson R&R.

Speaker 2:

We were always together and kind of inevitably, you know, we got talking and he was the one who said to me one day let's write a book. I think, you know, we have a book inside of us, and so we set about trying to write about this concept of leadership that was focused on raising everyone up. You know, we rise by lifting others, as Robert Angus Sall says. And we were really lucky. We got a great publisher the Financial Times and Pearson and we launched just in COVID.

Speaker 2:

And again we were really lucky because a couple of people approached us and said we really like your ideas and your book and, as we're going into COVID, can you think of a way of working with us in this new online environment that we're having to adapt to? And actually it was from that that Phil and I started our business. Our business is called Leadership on the Go and our book is called Coaching on the Go, and we decided that we would try and turn this into a series of ideas that organizations could take and use and think about a new form of leadership which is more agile, more adept, more distributed, more collaborative. And so we set about building tools and teaching and some technology that we've got so that organizations can sort of investigate this for themselves. And that's what we've been doing for the last couple of years is building a business that helps other businesses to take these ideas and investigate them.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I know on your website there it says great leadership achieves great things, right, so tell us a little bit about that and maybe some of the evidence around the work. I'd love to hear about that.

Speaker 2:

Strongest evidence comes out of the Chicago School of Economics and Stanford University, so others are also looking at this and trying to quantify. Is this a unique idea and does it really make a difference? So the best evidence comes out of a study which is called something like I've got it here, which is called something like I've got it here. It's called the Value of Bosses, and the reference is Laser et al 2015. I'll put those in the show notes for you, and what they are able to show is that a great boss can increase the productivity of a team by about 50%. That's huge, huge right. Everybody wants that.

Speaker 2:

So, 50% uplift in productivity, three times the normal level of engagement and approximately 30% top talent reduction. So that means that the highest performers in your team are not going to leave as quickly as they would otherwise. So you've effectively leveraged your top talent by working this way. So that's the value of a great boss. Then there's a second study, which is Hoffman and Tadellas 2021. And they then drilled down into so what is this good boss, what is this great boss?

Speaker 2:

And it's exactly the stuff we're pointing to. It's exactly the sets of skills that we're working around. We call them coaching skills, but we're not trying to turn leaders into coaches. We're trying to say these are the skills that will help you with the bonding, so building the group, more relationships, better relationships, deeper relationships, so that people are able to step forward and make that contribution. So those two are, and those two studies, which are by economists they're not by people in the leadership field and they're not by people in the HR field, so they're really rigorous. Those two studies really helped us to evidence that this is worth pursuing.

Speaker 2:

Now in the meantime, sorry, please go ahead. No, no, please go ahead.

Speaker 1:

Well, I also wanted to note about the 10% uplift in stakeholder satisfaction, and many times people aren't thinking about stakeholders, so I'd love to hear, maybe about that as well.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot more evidence about that. So there's a lot of evidence that says what happens inside the organization is directly reflected back in terms of levels of customer service satisfaction with that service, reputation, brand awareness, all these external factors that you might want to look at. They are almost directly proportionate to whatever is happening inside the organization.

Speaker 1:

Excellent, very good, and now would you like to finish your thought.

Speaker 2:

Well, my thought was just simply that the way that we work with organizations is we help organizations to look at this broader concept of leadership.

Speaker 2:

So we take groups of people, irrespective of title, irrespective of hierarchy, also irrespective of age or experience.

Speaker 2:

We can help each individual to look at the skills that they currently have and then we help them to build out for themselves more skills or different skills which are focused on this idea of leadership as an emergent property across the group. But we also look at the experience of culture for each individual. So nobody else is doing this, but it's really important because, of course, we are not an island. We are always in relationship with somebody else and if you don't feel safe and if you don't feel you belong and you don't feel like you can make a mistake and you feel like somebody else is grabbing the starlight from you, then your willingness to step forward, even if you have those skills, will be reduced. So this interaction effect between the individual and the culture and the culture in the individual is really important and we now have a way of helping individuals, teams, functions and organizations. So, all the way up, how one person and many people are interacting and how that's building culture, but how the culture is also building them. So we look at the two together.

Speaker 1:

And I imagine that that spans across not just the organizational culture but national culture as well, because when we're talking about organizational culture, we also have to think about what are people coming to that culture with?

Speaker 2:

Yes, and the way that we're working is from their perception, not our perception. So, exactly as you say, it's not our way, it's their way. It's for them to say what's going to work. It's for them to say what's going to work. It's for them to say what's appropriate in their culture. We're working in 25 countries currently and we're working in five languages, and that means that we've got to be as inclusive and as understanding of different norms and different expectations wherever we're working, for exactly the reason that you say, people, they start from a different place. We've got to start where they are.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about Gizmo. Oh, I'd love to. Let's hear about that, okay.

Speaker 2:

Well, we were inspired by the paper by Laysa et al in 2015. And we ran a series of workshops. I think we've probably done this more than 600 times now and I don't want to give the game away, because if we've got people on the podcast who actually come and do any of this with us, I don't want to completely foretell what we're going to do, but what we do is we run an exercise with groups in the organization that they're in and we get them to tell us what does this look like, what should this look like? A bit like the way I did it with the video, which is it's not us saying what great looks like, it's them and we take them through a little process. It doesn't take very long and it's fun and then we put up what they say and then we show them what every other group we've ever done this with and it's it's like a hand in a glove. There is very, very little deviation from group to group about what they think is going to help in terms of making the group more collaborative, more cooperative, more innovative, more agile all of the good things that we want.

Speaker 2:

Groups, when they're allowed to define what it'll take to do that hand in glove, match every other group we've ever done it with all over the world and, as I say, I think we've done this 600 times now. So that gives us a huge database and it gives us a huge level of confidence to say, okay, that's what it looks like. So let's put this through our gizmo. And the gizmo is we've used the word gizmo so that we don't suggest it's a test, we don't suggest that it's a psychometric, we don't suggest that it is investigating your character. The gizmo is simply saying what is it do you do will have an impact on those bonds, the relationship that you have and you hold.

Speaker 2:

And through the Gizmo, we produce the COTG skills report and then that opens up the discussion amongst the team and across the team about, ok, if that's what we do, what else could we do? Or what do we want to do less of? So it's just do we want to dial it up? Do we want to dial it down? And there's 15 dimensions and each of those dimensions has been defined through that exercise that I was talking about, where we've worked. It's academically referred to, as you'll know, as inductively. We've worked inductively from the ground up to help with that definition.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's exciting, and I know that you are doing amazing, amazing work with leaders and teams, and it is so impressive to have learned a little bit more today and I know that the audience is at their peak interest for sure. I would love to be able to direct people to connect to you and learn more about the work that you're doing, as well as how they can maybe look into Gizmo Coaching on the Go, your book. So tell us where they can find you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great, I'd love them too. Anybody who is interested in collective and collaborative leadership you can check me out. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm Jenny Robinson, and you can search for leadership on the go. If you're interested in our website, it's wwwcoachingonthegocouk, and otherwise you can email me, jenny at coachingonthegocouk, and I think in the show notes we're offering a couple of giveaways. One giveaway is going to be the first chapter of our book and I'd like to say just a little bit about that before I sign off today. But the second giveaway is the data that we have got and collected around the best bosses. So we've extracted from not just the laser paper, but we've also looked at other researchers and what other evidence there is in the public domain and we've literally collated. We call it a dashboard, but it will give you all the evidence for all the work that we're doing and we're super proud of that. So that's the dashboard. So those're super proud of that. So that's the dashboard. So those two are available on the show notes.

Speaker 2:

If I can just circle back to the chapter, because I know that not many people read these days and a chapter is still 30 pages of reading and probably more than 10 minutes of your life. But from page 23 to 27 in the chapter that we are giving away, you will find literally a lookup table, and I'm super proud of this because you can run your finger down all the problems that you have in your organization. Goals always change Somebody hogging all the information and not sharing it, conflict in the team, having a difficult conversation, people having different priorities and not being willing to collaborate. So we've literally listed a hundred different problems that we have seen come up a time and time and time again. And then in the middle of the chart, we've said this is what we think you will need to break the situation or to move it forward.

Speaker 2:

And then we've got a lookup table where it says go to page 81, go to page 190. And I've never, I've never seen anybody do that. I was so pleased with the idea of making it sort of like we're not pretending that sure, we have huge academic qualifications, we've done huge amounts of research, but we wanted to just make this stuff accessible and usable and our tagline is how to lead your team effectively in 10 minutes a day. So everything in our book, everything that we do, we try to do in 10 minutes.

Speaker 1:

Oh, truly encouraging, inspiring. I can't wait to get into those and check that out. Thank you for making it easy for us busy leaders and also thank you for being able to give people permission to understand what leadership is, what it looks like, Because so many times I feel like people need that permission for them to move forward, and if they're not getting it from someone, then you know it doesn't go anywhere. So thank you for that.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate that you know it doesn't go anywhere. So thank you for that. I appreciate that, and thank you, too, because I I see on your website something that just made my heart sing you were born to lead, and that is absolutely where we're coming from. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are. You have a part to play. We talk about leadership because everybody's playing their part, and but that idea that we don't have to associate it with power or title or hierarchy Just get in there, step forward and great things will happen, that's right.

Speaker 1:

Well, there you have it, folks, jenny Robinson. Thank you so much. Until next time, keep doing great things and we'll see you soon. See you soon.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, bye, bye.