Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  It’s no surprise that businesses feel vulnerable and exposed. Old business models and leadership structures are broken. Even basic principles of how to run a company have changed and so must our thinking about what it takes to succeed in business. While it might be tempting to focus on nothing but the minefields ahead, what I see from the frontier of these changing times is a landscape of tremendous opportunity for those who are willing to listen, to learn and adapt. And that translates into golden opportunities for women especially, for whom listening, learning and adapting have always been among our strong suits. It won’t be easy. Mistakes will be made, and uncertainty will be a devoted companion. But if you are keen to collaborate and form new kinds of partnerships with the people you work with and for, the future is yours.

  We’ve Come a Long Way from Mr. Burns, Baby

  THERE WERE NO RULE BOOKS for me to follow when I started Twitter Canada. The playbook was ours to create. In the first year, “ours” meant me, a smartphone, and six staff who didn’t yet know each other. We were all in it together, starting something brand new in a country that hadn’t yet done much business with Twitter. We didn’t have precedents to fall back on, so when one of us learned something, we shared it with the others: “Who has a presentation I can use with a bank?” “Here you go.” “Anyone have the information on how Twitter appeals to moms?” “I saw it here: let me flip it to you.” We occupied an open office space, literally and figuratively without walls, and we built the business on a strategy that every team member helped to create.

  The beauty of Twitter is that it is a platform for expression, and open conversation. As I figured out how to build a team that could help our clients overcome the challenges of operating in a world gone digital, we abided by the principles of listening and discussing. We were able to build the Canadian office quickly by creating a safe place for our partners in a digital environment that can feel like the Wild West, where we and our clients could try new initiatives, and sometimes fail, but always learn something important about this curious new world.

  From my experience in television, I’d already seen how valuable social media could be in connecting a corporation to its customers, or, in my case, viewers and listeners. The web provided an unparalleled and precious chance to gauge audience reaction and understand viewers better. Instead of having to rely solely on focus group feedback, or wait for nightly ratings report cards that estimated how many people watched a show without the context of why they watched or how they felt about what they saw, Twitter suddenly gave me a glimpse into the real-time opinions of viewers. It was like eavesdropping: on Twitter I could listen in on those streetcorner conversations I knew were so important. Some of what I “overheard” informed key programming decisions I made. Fan reaction over the cancellation of the Murdoch Mysteries TV series on Citytv, for example, was a major tipoff to make a deal with its producers to revive the show on CBC (it’s still going strong).

  The possibilities for business to benefit from what it sees and hears online are limitless. All sorts of companies and executives now turn to social networks to “read” the word on the street. Guest reviews on TripAdvisor, for instance, have become a daily must-read for many hotel managers, and the smart ones respond to each one directly. One of the fastest-growing e-commerce fashion retailers to emerge in a decade is built on a model of very personal interactions with its shopping community. Using online outreach programs to gauge precisely what buyers want and to supply only what people are buying, ModCloth has gone from its one-woman launch in a home basement to a reported $100 million in sales, 450 full-time employees and offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Pittsburg. And the ModCloth story is not unique: a recent Forbes report estimates that customers reward companies that have a social media presence with 64 percent more business, and almost a third of companies with a social media presence report higher profit margins. Twitter itself has benefited immensely from the ecosystem of its own users. Twitter didn’t invent the retweet, or even the hashtag. Both were dreamed up by savvy users of the platform in 2007 and are now among the most widely used forms of distributing information on Twitter. These kinds of consumer-driven initiatives, whether co-creation, crowdsourcing or customization of everything from clothes to cars, has become a hot trend. When CEOs of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, as ranked by the 2014 survey of the Inc. 500, were asked where they go for ideas, 28 percent said they go to their customers. It’s increasingly a bespoke world, custom-tailored for individual tastes and needs.

  In today’s environment, there’s just no telling where inspiration will come from. But to tap into the possibilities, leaders have to bring a wide-open mind. Companies may once have had the luxury of creating strategic plans to take them through the next five years or more. Today, attempting to project out even two years seems crazy. When people ask me where TV will be in five years, I say, “Who knew Netflix would be winning Golden Globes and shutting out the traditional networks?” Yet just because it’s harder to see far down the road doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know from the get-go where you’d like to end up. Having a vision and long-term goals are still crucial to building any solid career or business. But adhering to a pre-formulated plan on your way to reaching those goals—because it’s the plan—limits your opportunities.

  Which is why most of our client meetings at Twitter usually involved epic brainstorms where we and the clients would imagine together what a campaign might look like. Maybe we wouldn’t get the deal. But, more often than not, we did. And by doing it this way, we didn’t just build a client list, we built relationships. Clients trusted us to try things out. Sometimes our ideas worked, sometimes they didn’t. But when the relationship was there, they would come back for another shot whether we succeeded or failed. The same trust we’d engendered internally in our team extended to our clients and partners. In the two years I led the Canadian office, we grew from nothing into a thriving enterprise, and Canada became one of the highest revenue-generating regions in Twitter’s global operations. I did not do it alone. My success had everything to do with the team, and the collaborative approach that’s now also essential to my new management role as Twitter’s vice-president of Media, North America. Leveraging content related to news, sports and entertainment, I head up a team of more than fifty employees who never go to an office together—ever. My team that handles government news is based in Washington, DC. The TV and film team runs out of Los Angeles and the crew involved in sports, news, music and entertainment works where I do now, out of Twitter’s New York offices. When we do get together it’s often to work at major events, as we did in Phoenix, for instance, at the 2015 Super Bowl, and then again at the Oscars and the NBA All-Star weekend. (It’s my version of visiting the factory floor, because our product—which is content—originates on-site.) While I was at the Super Bowl, our sports team liaised with our partners, journalists and the NFL, helping them get out the game highlights, behind-the-scenes colour and commentary, and related tweets from viewers and players. But outside of such big public events, the only regular face time I have with my team is through a screen: video conferencing. Otherwise it’s text, DM, gchat, tweet, email and phone calls. I’m not there to lord it over them or tell anyone what to do at any microlevel. They are the experts in their field. My role is to listen to their best information, communicate the company’s overall goals and offer my knowledge and guidance as we craft an ever-developing strategy to reach our aims.

  Our job is to set up people for success. How they choose to use Twitter is completely up to them. We treat our partners with the same respect I give my team. I offer guidance and the right tools, then I get the heck out of the way to let them do what they do best. There’s nothing Mr. Burns about it.

  Influence Is the New Power

  SO MANY OF THE DECISIONS THAT matter most today are made by a group. Collaboration has never been more critical to leadership, whether it’s among internal teams or with clients. Managing “out” is the new key to innovatio
n. Yet for eons, the chiefs among us—from tribes to boardrooms—have operated on the principle that power is personal; you don’t share it, you wield it. That style worked in a time when power belonged to the few people in the know and information would only be doled out as needed to accompany marching orders—or not even then. But now being “in the know” is just a Google search away. Information as power has lost its currency. Today it’s not having the information that counts, it’s what you do with it. It’s not having the answers, but knowing which questions to ask that makes you a leader. “Understanding ‘New Power,’” a hugely influential article by Jeremy Heimans (co-founder of Purpose, which has been called the “mothership of movement-building”) and Henry Timms (executive director of New York’s 92nd Street Y and instigator of #GivingTuesday), published in the December 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review, nailed the distinction between old ways of power and new: “old power” worked like a currency—held by a few, jealously guarded and leader-driven—where “new power” operates more like a current, made by many, participatory, peer-driven, and most forceful when it surges. It’s not to be stockpiled, but channelled.

  Working my way up from the corporate bottom, I learned from the leaders and managers above me that those who kept information and the power to make decisions to themselves were soon overwhelmed and, in the worst of times, paralysed. Since they didn’t bring their people into the circle of information, their people couldn’t do their part to handle a task and then that task was badly handled. There was danger, too, when leaders only tapped people they liked, creating an inner circle of their friends as opposed to seeking out those who could do the job best. In its worst manifestations, such a leadership style creates an emperor-has-no-clothes scenario, leaders surrounding themselves with the nodding heads of old boys’ clubs and protective circles of mean girls. A successful, modern leader doesn’t need a cheerleading squad. Quite the opposite. The first thing a leader needs is the trust, respect and support of her team, because trust encourages constructive criticism, disagreement and healthy debate. And though trust and respect is a two-way street built between leader and team, it’s up to leaders to set the example. A leader’s transparency can be shocking for some and a refreshing change for others. But it’s a necessary first step to building a healthy relationship with a team. It takes guts to share information, the good and the bad, and to trust a team to do its best with it. But in today’s world the risk you take by trying to go it alone as a leader isn’t worth it, especially when it causes you to ignore the wealth of brainpower you can harness when you are open.

  It has been hard for women in particular to share power; we’ve had it so rarely, the last thing we want to do is let it get away. And when information is power, sometimes we hold it back with the belief that we can handle a matter ourselves. I know I’ve often assumed that I could manage a situation solo, when I could have benefited by bringing other bright minds to bear. Sometimes we don’t share because we underestimate the significance of our knowledge or don’t recognize that we actually do have valuable information to contribute. That young woman who approached me after my talk at the Rotman School, for instance, likely had a whole wealth of valuable data points that were being missed because she felt she could only provide answers to questions the sales team asked. Yet how much more valuable would her research be if she served up the answers to questions they never knew to ask? How much personal capital would she build by allowing the team to benefit from her insights?

  Information moves at high speeds and volatility rules the markets. Data about trends, opportunities, the competition, about customers and from customers, flies in around the clock from everywhere. And it demands the attention of a nimble team to digest it because any of it might require action. The kind of leader who is going to excel under these conditions doesn’t keep knowledge under lock and key, but sets it out in the wild for her team to absorb, analyze and interpret. The modern leader’s role is to appreciate the information flooding in from multiple inputs and then to consult with the team to figure out the best way forward. Ultimately, it remains the job of the leader to act. But today, the only way to build power is to share power, because leadership is not really about exercising power at all. It’s about influence.

  The old ways of working centred on the idea of power as the key to maintaining control. But having control is a vain hope today. People resist being led by fear and don’t want to work for companies that don’t have their best interests at heart. The best you can aim for is the capacity to indirectly shape people’s opinions and behaviours because they believe what you say, what you stand for and see you and your organization as trustworthy. The global village doesn’t judge companies on their bottom lines and, increasingly, not even on their brands, but on their authenticity, their reputations and the integrity of their interactions with the people they serve. The more empathic, innovative and responsive a company is, the more influence they are likely to wield. Which is why I think we’re about to see a meaningful breakthrough in the numbers of women in leadership roles. Those qualities the market now demands of its companies and corporations are traits long considered “feminine.” Caliper, the Princeton-based talent management company, recently studied the personal attributes of male and female leaders from nineteen different business sectors. The research, which included in-depth interviews with fifty-nine women from top companies in the US and the UK, such as Bank of America, Deloitte & Touche, Deutsche Bank, The Economist Group, IBM, Kohler, Molson Coors and several others, found that women scored significantly higher than men on sociability, flexibility, the ability to read situations, build consensus and form strategy—and form it quickly.

  If we women can get over the temptation to hide what we know, or what we think, and put it out there, we have precisely what it takes to lead today: an aptitude for synthesizing information from many sources, anticipating needs and appreciating various viewpoints, even those contrary to our own. What’s more, as research has also shown, women are particularly strong at encouraging others to share their views and contribute their creative energies for the betterment of the team. And that’s the deal-breaker. Because what hasn’t changed amid the seismic shifts of the information age—what has only become more important—is that any organization is only going to be as strong as the teams who work for them. Today, it’s all about the people.

  Growing the New

  IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, human capital is the asset that matters the most. When the world’s leading hotelier, taxi company, retailer and information provider owns no hotels, no taxis, no stores, or publications, it’s not a leap to conclude that what’s crucial for any enterprise to succeed are ideas—and those don’t roll off the old assembly lines. You have to grow ideas, and that means first clearing a field, planting the seeds and then nurturing them. The right leaders for success today know to rule not by law but by motivation: giving people a voice, respecting individual values and encouraging brainstorming to create an environment where it’s safe to experiment, and propose new, even unorthodox, ideas. Leading today is not about what the boss thinks, but how the boss responds, and the more input a leader can draw from a dynamic and eclectic team, the better that response will be.

  According to the Center for Talent Innovation, this is another area where women have an advantage because they’re naturals at fostering these kinds of innovative teams. Its research, based on 1,800 survey responses and interviews with dozens of executives, team leaders and employees at Fortune 500 companies, finds the kind of leaders most likely to create these inclusive, speak-up cultures are those who keenly appreciate the value of different perspectives because they themselves are different from the traditional leader—as in non-European, under thirty-five, or female. In short, mix it up at the top and those bolts of brilliance are more likely to shoot up from the bottom: bolts that might well pay big dividends. When business professors at the University of Maryland and Columbia University studied the effect of gender diversity on top compani
es in the S&P Composite 1500 list, they found that firms that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

  I think a woman’s leadership strength comes from our general inclination to want to do not just a decent job, but the best job we can do. While we might sometimes be inclined to play our cards close to the vest, we’re also usually comfortable admitting what we don’t know and reaching out to our networks of people to find the information we need. If it means assembling the best team and ignoring the conventional company structure to figure things out, as I did at the CBC to prep our coverage for the Sochi Olympics, that’s what we’ll do. If you want to encourage innovation or solve a problem, then gathering multiple perspectives and creating teams diverse in background and in ideas is the best way to get it. Input from different cultures, genders and generations usually brings constructive challenges to the status quo. Diversity is as good for a garden as it is for business—not just to be socially conscious, but to stay competitive. If your firm is filled with people who all have the same backgrounds and tend to share the same opinions, chances are, as the folks at Nokia learned the hard way, opportunities will be missed. A recent article in the Guardian told the story of Beam, the bourbon company whose net profits soared to a record high of $2.5 billion in 2012 after it acquired Skinnygirl Cocktails, a line of premixed drinks created by reality-TV star Bethenny Frankel. She had approached all the major liquor companies, run mostly by males, and they had turned her down flat, so she decided to go it alone. Frankel went on to sell so many cases that the men from Beam came to her, offering $39 million for the brand. It was a stunning example of how the largely male-run liquor companies had missed a major market opportunity by thinking they knew their customers best. But it’s hardly the only evidence that firms lacking diversity are losing out.