Tag: leadership

Return of the Jedi (Training)

On By saigonsaysIn behaviour change2 Comments

Last Friday, I hobbled into a training room in Saigon on crutches, balanced my knee on a chair pirate-style, and spent the morning facilitating a ‘JEDI’ workshop for EXO Travel’s regional HR team.

I’ve personally used EXO Travel for the past fifteen years, and would commend them to anyone seeking travel and ticketing support across Southeast Asia. They’ve consistently supported my family’s adventuring around the globe and my own work trips. So, it was a particular thrill to be asked to join them and discuss various issues that are close to my heart, and to my livelihood as a consultant.

JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) is a framework I’ve been working with for a while now and, standing on one leg, introducing the session last Friday, seemed a visually fitting and auspicious way to kick things off.

The most interesting part of JEDI, at least to me, is the “J”. Most organisations are now reasonably familiar with diversity (who is in the room?) equity (is the playing field level?) and inclusion (do people feel they belong once they arrive?) But Justice asks a different question: why was the playing field uneven in the first place, and what are we prepared to do about it?

You could say that justice is the difference between helping somebody navigate a flight of stairs, and asking why the building still doesn’t have a ramp. As someone currently spending more time than usual thinking about accessibility, I have developed views on both.

What impressed me about EXO was that they weren’t approaching the topic as a box-ticking exercise. The company has developed a JEDI policy, shaped by its leadership and grounded in values that include “caring deeply, seeking excellence and inspiring joy”.

Before our workshop, they surveyed their HR leaders across the region, to understand the challenges they were facing. That input helped shape the session itself. The result was a conversation rooted in reality rather than theory. We explored what respectful workplace culture looks like in practice. We discussed inclusive recruitment and hiring. We looked at psychological safety and what prevents people from speaking up when they see problems emerging.

Most importantly, we worked through real case studies drawn from situations participants had encountered themselves.

I’ve seen organisations invest significant resources in developing policies that very few employees ever truly understand or feel ownership over. Equally, I’ve seen relatively simple initiatives create lasting change because people were given the opportunity to discuss difficult issues openly and arrive at practical solutions together.

The EXO team showed a genuine willingness to do exactly that. By the end of the session, participants had identified concrete actions they could take forward. Not vague commitments to “raise awareness,” but practical steps connected to their own teams and responsibilities. It was a great moment to oversee, when a group of people begin to see a challenge collectively and decide they have both the responsibility and the ability to do something about it.

I’ve written recently about the pressures JEDI is facing. One time arguing that companies must double down as the political winds shift, and another time tracking the pendulum swing as some Western corporations quietly retreat from the language they once championed with considerable zeal. Many large firms have been rebranding, scaling back, going silent. Others have quietly stopped talking about JEDI issues altogether.

And yet, sitting in that training room in Saigon last week, none of that felt particularly relevant. Here in Southeast Asia, diversity has never been an abstract concept. Daily professional life already involves navigating different languages, religions, cultures, generations and perspectives. The challenge was never whether diversity existed, but how to work effectively across it.

That pragmatism may ultimately prove an advantage and we might see, like I saw with EXO, more companies focused on solving workplace problems and helping teams perform better together.

A company can’t solve everything in a single morning, but in choosing to engage seriously with the questions, EXO created space for honest discussion. And they demonstrated that progress is still possible when organisations are willing to listen, learn and act.

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I can’t quite resist ending with the obvious Star Wars reference. The Jedi, after all, spent a long time in exile before the Force reasserted itself. But what mattered wasn’t that they disappeared from public view, but that the people who understood why their work was needed, never stopped practicing it.

In the meantime, this particular one-legged facilitator, for what it’s worth, has no plans to go anywhere.

And so, if your organisation is working through similar questions and could use a facilitator, then do get in touch. My company Coracle Consulting runs workshops on exactly these themes and more: JEDI and workplace culture, but we also deliver modules on communication and professional presence, team collaboration, problem solving, negotiation and self-motivation.

Drop me a line at timbishop@coracleconsulting.net if you’d like to talk.

Have a great weekend!

Viability vs. Visibility: The Tragedy of Modern Leadership

On By saigonsaysIn Uncategorized1 Comment
https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-elon-musk-doge-sec-target-conflict-2032567

Just been reading that Elon Musk is stepping down from his role at DOGE, the government department set up to save the US economy from wasted spending.

I’ve briefly shared my view on DOGE and on Trump, and I mentally flit between one day wanting to write more about how both entities are impacting the world (negatively, in my opinion) and the next day simply wanting the whole circus that is the US Republican administration to fall off the face of the earth.

If only there were some decent Democrat spokes-people out there, these past five months, to counteract the daily ordeal each of us faces when we read the news. Lucky enough I found this guy, Harry, to be a helpful and passionate critique of Musk and Trump.

There’s very little in this piece he posted recently with which I disagree.

The one thing I’d add to this latest piece “news” about Musk leaving DOGE is that, aside from the long list of grievances one would be well justified to level at Elon Musk (Harry covers this neatly, so I don’t need to), and aside from his general awkwardness with everyone he meets, and how he communicates, the thing that sticks most in my throat is his inability to collaborate.

His purchase of Twitter/X has only made his individualism and ego even more pronounced.

Forget the viability of something anymore (be it, say, the “truth” or simply the credentials of one’s EV business) many social media sites have together reframed what is important for society and that, it seems to me, is not viability, but visibility.

Misinformation thrives in these online spaces. Very complex ideas and hypotheses are flattened out into bulleted “top tips”. Twitter, in many ways, is a platform which has gamified shortened attention spans and praises individual’s visibility and their brand.

Which, of course, offers the perfect ground for performers like Trump and Musk, who pretend to be leaders, but act more like ham-fisted Copperfield illusionists. All accountability is removed. All sense evaporates as soon as they start speaking. They don’t answer questions, they gaslight, they lie, they rinse, they repeat.

While Musk claims to build for the future, with neural interfaces and colonies on Mars, he is a caricature of all the shitty habits and traits that we’re collectively adopting from spending too much time, ironically, scrolling through Twitter feeds.

It’s well documented that many people find it ever harder to hold their attention on simple tasks and activities. Young professionals, in particular, embrace more performative ambitions about what they want to do as individuals. It feels, a lot of the time, like there is a fading appetite for collective progress, as folks rush about in a melee of self-made busyness and unfinished projects.

As Musk bounces from city to city, flexing his enormous bank account in front of politicians one day and Silicon Valley the next, we watch as climate plans get drafted annually at COP Conferences, before being routinely shelved. We observe social justice campaigns that trend for days, before being eclipsed by celebrity gossip or some other geopolitical outrage.

Musk is a symbol for these contradictions. His own portfolio reflects a restlessness where the next ambition supersedes the existing one. Bored of this project now, move on.

Perhaps all of this is inevitable, given the world’s richest man is able to sway the markets with a single tweet, and can basically say or do what he wants today, and then pay for the damage afterwards, knowing that tomorrow we’ll all have moved on to the next click-bait article.

Nice heels, cowboy.

Musk is not alone, of course. As Jeff Bezos floated into Cannes earlier this month, in his $500m schooner, the irony was not lost on those who’ve followed his outspoken support to address climate change. And let’s not forget his Blue Origin space flight debacle. No, let’s.

Whichever of these wealthy elite you handpick for analysis, you’ll find the same paradoxes. The allure of the solo operator, at this echelon of society, remains powerful, there’s no doubt about that, and especially in a world that feels increasingly ungovernable. But the actions and behaviors of these individuals, forging ahead, indifferent to consensus, and chucking U-turns on a weekly basis, smacks of ending up brazenly erasing the work of thousands of others.

And, this approach fundamentally ignores the necessity of institutions, of partnerships, and the wholesome bindings of community. All of which are needed if we’re to arrive at long term solutions to global problems. We don’t need Musk or Bezos to do that.

You can tell me that Musk is responsible for cutting edge technological breakthroughs but, even if I choose to believe that, the nature in which he is conducting himself does not sit well with me, nor fill me with anything other than fear.

Musk, Bezos, Trump: these characters are in the headlines all the time, and they dominate how we think about change because of that. That’s a red flag.

Change that the world urgently requires is slow and deeply collective. We need sustained cooperation, and instead we run the risk of remaining stuck in a loop of promising beginnings and spectacular distractions.

Respectfully human

On By saigonsaysIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

(John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States)

Whilst many conflicts rage on around the world, the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia has repercussions on a seismic scale. The ominous sequencing and nature of what we’ve been watching unfold is steeped in derangement, and pulls on our every fear about the dark capabilities of man.

Separated by distance and our screens, we can only wonder at what impacts are being hoist on innocent lives, on both sides – the collective unpacking of what it all means seeping into everyone’s daily discussions.

At a business networking event yesterday, it was in reference to this war, with its nuclear connotations, that crystalised a debate we’d been having about corporate responsibilities, and about the world’s sustainability agenda.

Like the ultimate trump card, all possible solutions and interventions to patch up society’s failings and our handling of climate controls, can be swiftly rendered obsolete at the mention of events currently unfolding across Europe.

And still, a bright and intuitive lesson was shared, as our forum closed out, by one of the panelists, an erudite businessman who spoke from the heart about the issue of ‘fatigue’.

On the surface, for someone who has money in the bank and a comfy bed to sleep on, one solution to fatigue, for him and for others alike, is in plain sight. Many millions of people can only fantasize about having access to such “luxury”.

A deeper point he drove home, however, was less about physical exhaustion. It was, instead, more pertinent to a fatigue of the soul.

The disruption caused by the pandemic over the past two years has had far-reaching implications on just about everyone. As each day paints for us another bleak picture of just how much Covid-19 has come to redefine and reframe reality, we are internalising new sets of questions about almost everything.

Impossible, though it may be in practice, I think there are unifying aspects to this from which, perhaps, we can draw.

As this same panelist spoke about his own coming out, as a gay man in the 1980’s, the challenges of which were ever present both in and out of the workplace, he offered the audience an insight into some of the things that had shaped him as a leader.

“Once I was able to feel accepted as who I was, particularly by my peers at work, I was able to give 100% of myself to the job in hand – before that, this was impossible.”

Therein lies a truth that all of us, but especially those of us who are managing others, must never underestimate.

Whilst many employers have policies and practices in place, which might support workers’ rights and protect their safety, how often and how easy it can be to miss the finer details. The tone of an email, the implications of a decision made, perhaps. Or the inequalities that some organisations perpetuate every minute of the day through thoughtlessness and unconscious power plays.

Each example of which can chip away at the spirit and the productivities of those employees who will, always, hold the key to that same organisation’s only truly viable and long term success.

If we are to stand up to those who misuse their power, on any level and in any scenario, then we must show up, consistently, with a different set of tools and approaches.

Diversity and inclusion (favoured parlance of our current times) do not simply manifest because a policy is drawn up. They happen when we break down the essence of what they embody – the ability to empathise, to listen, and to allow others around us to give their 100%.

None of which advice needs to be couched in terms of democracy vs autocracy, nor should these attributes be waved off because of “cultural differences” or “behavioural norms.”

They transcend beyond the connotations of leadership, even, because they are intrinsically bound by one thing only, and one thing only – a respect for being human.