The Responsible Business podcast series is produced with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). In this series, our host Professor Veronica Hope Hailey (the Dean of the Business School) and Katie Jacobs (former Senior Stakeholder Lead at the CIPD) speak with business leaders to explore the revolutionised responsible business movement and the topics that have influenced this change. Designed to guide, inspire and inform, we’ll hear from experts across a number of fields.
Since 2020, various crises have disrupted leaders on every level and have led to the emergence of some new and welcome leadership styles. In this episode, Professor Veronica Hope Hailey and her guest Nick Hampton, Chief Executive Officer at Tate & Lyle, discuss whether these new styles will stick, and talk candidly about the challenge of being a leader in a world beset by crises.
Find out more about the Business School’s research: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/business-school/research/
Read their Thought Leadership articles: https://www.cipd.org/en/views-and-insights/thought-leadership/insight/responsible-business/
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Transcript:
00:00:04 Katie Jacobson
What is the role of business within society?
00:00:07 Katie Jacobson
How do we build organisations that contribute responsibly and sustainably to the communities in which they operate and what does responsible leadership look like as we continue to lurch from crisis to crisis? This is the responsible business leading the way. Podcast from the University of Bristol Business School, working with the CIPD.
00:00:30 Katie Jacobson
I’m Katie Jacobson, CIPD and over this limited podcast series myself and Professor Veronica Hope, Hailey Dean of the University of Bristol Business School, are speaking to a selection of inspirational and insightful leaders about what it means to be a responsible business. We want to know, in the aftermath of the pandemic.
00:00:49 Katie Jacobson
What has changed about how we work, how we lead and how we think about responsibility and trust in business?
00:00:55 Katie Jacobson
Because when it comes to building more responsible, resilient businesses and a fairer, more equitable society, there is still everything to play for.
00:01:05 Katie Jacobson
Episode 4. Leadership through crisis. Can one person do it all?
00:01:10 Katie Jacobson
In late November 2021, Storm Irwin ravaged the UK. It closed railway lines, took down or damaged millions of trees and left thousands of homes without power, some for several weeks. So what’s that got to do with leadership? Well, as one senior HR leader we spoke to during our original responsible Business Research, memorably.
00:01:32 Katie Jacobson
Put it leading through the COVID-19 pandemic was storm Irwin for the mind.
00:01:38 Katie Jacobson
It disrupted leaders on every level, forcing them out of old ways of working, and much like those uprooted trees unfreezing deep seated assumptions.
00:01:49 Katie Jacobson
Many leaders adapted well through the initial shock waves of the pandemic. They showed themselves to be more capable, caring and committed to people and wider society than most might have thought possible. In fact, according to research by Leadership Circle, 97% of leaders reported that their leadership had improved as a result of the pandemic.
00:02:09 Katie Jacobson
Becoming kinder, more empathetic and forgiving, and more likely to relinquish control and democratize decision making.
00:02:17 Katie Jacobson
As certain political leaders were found wanting, business leaders stepped up to fill the void.
00:02:22 Katie Jacobson
A global Harris Poll study found that 61% of people felt companies were more reliable than the government in keeping their country running during the pandemic.
00:02:32 Katie Jacobson
And 55% said they trusted companies more than the government to find solutions to the pandemic.
00:02:38 Katie Jacobson
But what about now as the threat of the pandemic recedes to be overtaken by challenges as large and as complex, from the impact of climate change to the economic crisis?
00:02:48 Katie Jacobson
Can what leaders learn through the pandemic help them steer their organisations through the crises to come?
00:02:54 Katie Jacobson
Are our expectations of leaders simply too big and unrealistic, with complex, potentially existential decisions ahead of us as a society? Can one person, the CEO, really do it all?
00:03:07 Katie Jacobson
To explore how leading through the pandemic has changed leadership and what the future of leadership looks like, Veronica and I were joined by Nick Hampton, CEO of Global Food Company Tate and Lyle. I started by asking Nick to take a hopefully not too unwelcome and traumatic trip down memory lane.
00:03:25 Katie Jacobson
Reflecting back on his experience as a leader at the start of the pandemic about 18 months into the CEO role at Tate and Lyle.
00:03:32 Nick Hampton
I suppose it was challenging and liberating in the same sort of level. I mean challenging in many ways, personally and professionally. Looking back on it, I suppose it required a huge amount of emotional intelligence, resilience and energy to get through. Certainly the early stages of the pandemic, and actually it then got worse when we went into year 2 because.
00:03:53 Nick Hampton
Everybody thought it was going to be a transitory thing that would magically.
00:03:57 Nick Hampton
Here and it just didn’t. It went on and on. And if you think about the sort of challenge on the one hand, the whole organisation that through a crisis is looking for calm, decisive, compassionate leadership, on the other hand, we didn’t have a rule book. You know, we had to make it up as we went along, and we were doing it all, staring at a screen at the same time.
00:04:18 Nick Hampton
On the one hand, you know you’re incredibly passionate about getting through the pandemic, emerging strong.
00:04:23 Nick Hampton
On the other hand, we all had families who are looking for us to be strong and take care of them at the same time she had this sort of duality going on, and both of those things were mixed together in a way that had never been before. It was actually quite liberating as well. We had no choice but to be different leaders. We had to reinvent what leadership really meant. And actually, I think.
00:04:43 Nick Hampton
What it taught us to do in some ways is to try and be the best version of ourselves leadership through the pandemic I think became much more authentic because it was kind of stripped bare in many ways and I think we learned a lot about ourselves.
00:04:57 Nick Hampton
And about what?
00:04:58 Nick Hampton
Leadership in the 21st century really can be.
00:05:02 Katie Jacobson
And of course, given the need for many of us to lock down at home, it required a different practical approach too.
00:05:08 Nick Hampton
Trying to control a global business from your front room. You’re gonna have to think very differently about how to do it. This is going to be all about doing two things, making your people feel you’ve got their best interests at heart, and secondly, empowering people and providing them with the tools to run the business very differently.
00:05:29 Nick Hampton
One of the first things I did when we went into lockdown was I called every single site leader across the world, about 30 people.
00:05:37 Nick Hampton
Total and they only asked.
00:05:39 Nick Hampton
Them two questions.
00:05:40 Nick Hampton
The first question was are you people safe? And the second question was have you got what you need to keep the business running?
00:05:47 Nick Hampton
I was only trying to achieve two things.
00:05:49 Nick Hampton
Through those calls.
00:05:51 Nick Hampton
One was to make them feel like we genuinely cared.
00:05:55 Nick Hampton
And we trusted them to do the right thing. And secondly, I needed to get a temperature check about what was really going on out there because the traditional routes of communication were kind of killed, right?
00:06:07 Katie Jacobson
Nick is just one example of what it felt like to lead an organization through such an intense, uncertain period.
00:06:13 Katie Jacobson
Having spoken to dozens of other leaders and CEO’s during the period of the pandemic, what did Veronica observe about how leaders as a group reacted to the challenge?
00:06:22 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
I think there were sort of three groups of people as far as responsible business was concerned. There were those that went into the pandemic as sharks and they carried on being sharks and they came out the other end.
00:06:36 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Of.
00:06:36 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Sharks. And then there was another group that had always felt a sense of responsibility.
00:06:43 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
To society, and actually what we saw happen with that second group is that the experience of the COVID pandemic amplified and accelerated their wish to be responsible into society.
00:07:00 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
It amplified and accelerated a sense of responsible business because the social justice issues just hit them in the face and I think it changed a lot of people.
00:07:12 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Or also at a very personal level and and then I think there was the third group of people who actually were converted, if you like, by the experience of COVID.
00:07:23 Katie Jacobson
So leading through such a profound and destabilizing crisis forced many into new models of leadership. More than three years on from those first phone calls to his sight, leaders around the world, what does Nick feel he has learned about leadership and?
00:07:37 Nick Hampton
The thing that I learned more than anything else through the pandemic is this power of being a genuine your genetic leader, somebody who has the confidence to be the best version of themselves. Serena Reagan talks a lot about that when she talks about creating a very different culture within the women’s football team and at the center of that for me is.
00:07:57 Nick Hampton
Purpose that leadership purpose isn’t about.
00:08:00 Nick Hampton
Philanthropy. It’s about having a positive impact and delivering great performance for all of your stakeholders because you can’t have a positive impact without performing a lot of it. For me was about putting purpose forefront of what we do and that allowed us to set very clear priorities through the pandemic. For me, that intersection between purpose and authentic leadership became much clearer through the pandemic.
00:08:22 Nick Hampton
I think the other thing that I learned is something that I held true for a long time, but really came through is it’s much better to be honest with people about the situation you’re really facing into and if you don’t know the answer, don’t try and pretend that you do.
00:08:37 Nick Hampton
Probably the last thing I learned always reinforced for me was this need to have courage of your convictions as a leader, especially when you’re going through a crisis. You won’t have all the answers. You have to have the courage to be decisive and agile and move quickly. Even though things may be more uncertain than they have they ever have.
00:08:57 Nick Hampton
00:08:58 Katie Jacobson
As Nick says, we continue to operate in uncertainty and perhaps one unforeseen challenge for leaders is that they performed almost too well during the height of the pandemic, meaning employee and societal expectations are higher than ever.
00:09:13 Katie Jacobson
For instance, the accessibility of some leaders during the pandemic means some now expect an open hotline to the CEO, something that is simply not practical nor sustainable.
00:09:24 Katie Jacobson
While compassionate leadership is necessary, non-negotiable, even some expectations of leaders may need to be recalibrated. Here’s Veronica on that conundrum.
00:09:34 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We had how leaders LED before COVID then I think we have how leaders led during COVID and the pandemic.
00:09:45 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And now we have a new phase and I think it’s perfectly acceptable for leaders to adjust their behaviours again. So what was necessary and work well in the height of the pandemic? I don’t think we should necessarily expect.
00:10:05 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
All those practices to carry on through, and I think it’s for every leader and every organization to sort of recalibrate.
00:10:16 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
What is appropriate now? Undoubtedly, the increased communication and dialogue that Nick has talked about, that the really good leaders went into in 2020 and carried through as best they could into 2021.
00:10:35 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Has created, I think, enormous expectations of how much dialogue and communication the workforce can have with senior.
00:10:44 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Leaders, I remember 1 C-Suite leader saying to us.
00:10:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
The problem is.
00:10:50 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
They have so much expectation now of communication and what we can be held to account on and what they expect responses on that as we slowly get back into a slightly more.
00:11:05 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Normal pattern of.
00:11:08 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
So that’s a really hard judgment call for CEO’s like Nick to make because on the one hand, you don’t want to lose that incredible enthusiasm there was for understanding leaders as more human, more accessible, using the technology to have much more frequent dialogue.
00:11:28 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But equally, I don’t think we should expect them to hold themselves to the same frequency and.
00:11:36 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Level of accountability that they actually chose to hold themselves to in the first few months of the pandemic, so it’s about each side recalibrating what should we expect of each other at this point?
00:11:54 Katie Jacobson
And here’s Nick on how that recalibration could play out in practice.
00:11:58 Nick Hampton
The pandemic was just an extreme event that highlighted this world that’s in constant change and crisis. The part of that change is also a workforce who have different expectations of their leaders and actually different expectations of the experience of work.
00:12:15 Nick Hampton
As well, and yes, we are expected to be more visible. We are expected to be more compassionate. We are expected to be held to higher standards. We’re still learning about this and trying to recalibrate the contract between an employee or an employee is changing, but it has to be a two way.
00:12:35 Nick Hampton
On track as well, companies are not here to take care of your family life for you. They’re here to create a context where you can have a great work experience where you can. You maximise your own potential, where you can bring your whole self to work because of the nature of the inclusive environment we can.
00:12:53 Nick Hampton
Rate, but the other side of that contract is delivery of performance and expectations in Rob. But ultimately as leaders were also here to demand results in the.
00:13:04 Nick Hampton
Right way from people I.
00:13:06 Nick Hampton
Think we’re learning how to recalibrate that in a very different environment to the one that maybe we started working a few decades ago.
00:13:14 Nick Hampton
So.
00:13:15 Katie Jacobson
As Nick mentions, the pandemic was just one extreme event that highlighted a world that’s in constant change in crisis that many of the lessons learned are applicable to the challenges we now face, according to Veronica.
00:13:27 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
All the really good things that came out about leadership in the pandemic about how to lead with.
00:13:35 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Certainty how to lead with a sense of responsibility. How to lead with pace through a rapid transition. I mean, these are as necessary now with this sort of AI digital tech transitions that we’re all about to go through.
00:13:55 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
With the economic uncertainty, with the war in Ukraine, I mean these things that were learned and applied during 2020, I think there’s a huge amount of applicability now. So I don’t want people to think that because the height of COVID is.
00:14:13 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
The need for a very different kind of resilient and empathetic leadership is over.
00:14:20 Katie Jacobson
The March of Artificial Intelligence Shifting employee and societal expectations, economic uncertainty, the war in Ukraine. It’s a lot to cope with. So I asked Nick, how do you manage the responsibility? And yes, the stress when you’re the person with ultimate accountability.
00:14:37 Nick Hampton
Leadership is a privilege. The best way to manage the stresses of leadership is to share that privilege with others. And the best way to do that is to build a world class team.
00:14:48 Nick Hampton
And you half people are better than you bring contrasting points of view who strengthen the to make it a team game if you like. Rather than making it about individual. To me the age of Hero leadership is over, you know, authentic leadership is about building a team of leaders. I think of my job almost as asked me as the CEO of the company as being the.
00:15:08 Nick Hampton
The chief architect and the chief cheerleader for the company. So you provide clarity, direction and and clear purpose. You build a world class team and you inspire, mobilize and coach them to deliver results and inspire them to be the best leaders they can be. You ask them to lead in partnership rather than doing it all your own.
00:15:28 Nick Hampton
And if you do that, you’re sharing the perceived stress a.
00:15:31 Nick Hampton
Bit.
00:15:32 Nick Hampton
The other thing I always think about is is you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously either. There’s a danger that we start to believe in our own self importance.
00:15:40 Katie Jacobson
And his Veronica on the need for collaboration and humility.
00:15:43 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We can go back to the nature of the COVID pandemic and why it made this people shift the nature of the leadership game because I think it became pretty obvious pretty soon.
00:16:01 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That no one person could solve the problems of that pandemic in that first year, no one person had the answer, and whether you were a health professional, a CEO of Tate and Lyle, local government chief executive, you literally had to reach down.
00:16:23 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Into your organization to find out.
00:16:26 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
What superstars were sort of lying at levels that you didn’t know. Did anyone have any intelligence that could help move this situation on hierarchy? Slightly got thrown out of the window because it was? Does anybody have a really good idea here? See CEO’s had to lean out into society.
00:16:46 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
To get intelligence from other parts of their ecosystem. And so there was this enormous humility that a lot of the CEO’s talk.
00:16:56 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
About.
00:16:57 Katie Jacobson
While no one would wish for another pandemic, there’s no denying it was something of a leadership development professionals dream. It can take enormous amounts of energy to shift ways of thinking and working, but the pandemic forced it more or less overnight. What I wanted to know, does this mean for the future of leadership selection and development? Let’s hear from Nick first.
00:17:16 Nick Hampton
That the thing the pandemic did for us more than anything else was it gave us this massive opportunity to accelerate cultural change in the way the world’s going.
00:17:24 Nick Hampton
Need as we move forward in a much more complex, volatile, fast moving environment, you need much more agility, much more bravery, much more ability to experiments in a controlled way and organisations aren’t used to that. We’re used to strict rules and frameworks and repetitive processes to deliver repetitive outcome. You need all of that in certain.
00:17:44 Nick Hampton
Parts of businesses, but elsewhere you need much more agility and experimentation in a way that most business leaders haven’t experienced in the early parts of their careers. You know the traditional model of kind of developing a career and organization. You start by demonstrating your brilliance as an individual contributor.
00:18:02 Nick Hampton
Then you start to manage people where effectively you’re managing activity and then quote UN quote you start to become a leader where you’re, you know, setting directions strategy, creating the future of the business. We’ve almost got to reverse that process and create a model where we can teach people early on in their careers to be leaders.
00:18:21 Nick Hampton
And to create this coalition and create the ability to.
00:18:26 Nick Hampton
Learn from others and connect the dots in a way that’s very different than just. I demonstrate my value by not just by doing, but by leading as well. We’re almost trying to create this model where we’re empowering people more and more to lead in a way that allows us to learn faster and experiment and move quicker because the world is moving so fast.
00:18:45 Nick Hampton
I’m spending much more time talking to peers in other organisations in other spheres because the kind of challenges we’re trying to deal with today to create successful businesses require very different ecosystems and partnerships. Take climate change as an example.
00:19:02 Nick Hampton
Or, you know, either we all win or nobody wins. It’s the reality. And the only way we’re going to win and beat the climate challenge is by partnering with others externally to make it happen.
00:19:13 Katie Jacobson
And here’s Veronica, reflecting on, developing that next generation of leaders.
00:19:17 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Knowing what you stand for, what’s your source of integrity? Those softer skills that really came into their own in that first year of the pandemic? If we’re talking to people about developing technical experts in AI, or the implications of cybersecurity, anything.
00:19:38 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Coming out of computer science, then again, what the?
00:19:40 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Employers are saying.
00:19:41 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
To us, you’ve got to get people with some understanding that yes, they’ve got technical skills, but if they don’t understand how to operate the power of that knowledge and that technical ability in a way that is mindful of the impact on society, that has an understanding of ethics and integrity.
00:20:03 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Then you know we are not advancing society in terms of the next generation of leaders.
00:20:09 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
The one thing I think.
00:20:11 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That COVID is taught leaders.
00:20:13 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
This you’ve got to know what you stand for. You’ve got to know what your set of values is. You’ve got to know your own personal sense of integrity. You can’t just mimic people because the more uncertain the world is, the more you’ve got to be certain of your sense of right and wrong going forward.
00:20:31 Katie Jacobson
Powerful undebatable stuff.
00:20:34 Katie Jacobson
So to draw the episode to a close, I asked Nick what the future of responsible business mean.
00:20:40 Katie Jacobson
To him.
00:20:41 Nick Hampton
The future of responsible business is to put purpose at the centre of performance and what I mean by that is purpose for me in responsible organizations is all about delivering extraordinary results for all of your key stakeholders. It’s about having a positive impact on the world.
00:21:03 Nick Hampton
Around you and it’s about allowing your entire workforce to achieve their potential.
00:21:10 Katie Jacobson
And to deliver that, we need responsible and human leadership. Now more than ever.
00:21:20
Thanks.
00:21:20 Katie Jacobson
For listening to the responsible business leading the Way, podcast produced by the University of Bristol, working with the CIPD.
00:21:27 Katie Jacobson
Find out more about the business schools, research courses and opportunities to [email protected].
00:21:34 Katie Jacobson
And if you want to read the original research, this series is based on search responsible business through [email protected].
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