Get Social - The Connected Leader Podcast - Prof. Patricia Hind, Professor of Management Development Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School

Michelle C.: Hello, and welcome to the #Get Social Connected Leader Podcast where I, Michelle Carvill, interview business leaders around the practicalities of how, in this hyper connected digital age, they are embracing digital technologies to tune in and connect and communicate. You can find all episodes of the podcast, together with show notes, via our website, carvillcreative.co.uk/podcasts.
Michelle C.: In this episode of the #Get Social Connected Leader Podcast, I'm delighted to interview Professor Patricia Hind. Patricia is a Director of the Ashridge Centre for Research in Executive Development. She works with a range of clients nationally and internationally from both the public and private sectors, specializing in leadership, organizational behaviour, and change management. Her research interests include ensuring the effectiveness of management education, the impact of social media on leadership, and the role of responsible leadership in embedding sustainable business practices in organizations. As an organizational behavior specialist, Patricia has worked on many Ashridge customized programs globally. In the Middle East she has worked with the Sheikh Mohammed Leadership Foundation in Dubai, the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, and the EDEC, amongst others. Elsewhere, she has worked closely on the design and delivery of programs for organizations such as Phillips, BP, Aeon, Barclays, Alcatel, and AstraZeneca. In the public sector she has worked with leaders at all levels in the Civil Service and the National Health Service. Patricia has been appointed a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Stellenbosch and has a degree in psychology, an MSc in Organizational Psychology, and a doctorate in Managing Without Authority. A chartered psychologist, she has been appointed an Associate Fellow of the BPS and is qualified to use a wide range of psychometric instruments.
Michelle C.: So, Patricia, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
Patricia Hind: It's a great pleasure. I'm delighted to be here.
Michelle C.: Brilliant. I came across your work around social media literacy leadership via an article that was shared with me relating to some recent research that's been done by yourself and your team in partnership with UNICON. Do you want to tell me a little bit about how you started exploring this area?
Patricia Hind: Yes, certainly. I've been in leadership development most of my professional life, working with leaders and businesses around the world, helping them develop their leadership skills and their leadership cadre, so I'm always interested in what's happening. Leadership thinking has changed over the years quite dramatically, from heroic leadership through to behavioural leadership, and now we have a whole swathe of theories that talk about relationships, relational leadership, and the quality of the relationship being the definition of leadership.
Patricia Hind: I was always interested in this field, and then the real trigger for the piece of research that we've just done was, in fact, 2016 American election. I watched that being conducted by the potential leaders of the free world and noticed that there was one campaign that was being run very differently, through social media, heavy social media. I thought, "This is fascinating. What's happening here? Is this what people expect of leaders now?" Not all the candidates were using it as effectively as one particular candidate who we all know.
Patricia Hind: So I began to mull this over and realized that I'm not particularly interested in how leaders use it. I'm not particularly interested in whether they're competent at Twitter or well connected on Facebook. It wasn't that so much. I was really interested in whether the use of social media, the phenomena that social media was in fact changing our perceptions of effective leadership, i.e., if we expect now an effective leader to be fluent in social media, or literate, I think, is a word that is sometimes used.
Patricia Hind: So that's really what started it. Just watching that election unfold and then thinking, "Hmm, what's going on here, then?" [crosstalk 00:04:23].
Michelle C.: Yeah, fascinating. Out of that research, what conclusion did you come to on that level about those changes and whether or not that digital or social literacy as a requirement for a leader is kind of expected?
Patricia Hind: Well, I don't think we've established any causal links yet. What I think we found is that the fundamentals of what we believe leadership to be about are not changing. Leadership is about getting things done with other people, in effect. It's about influence, it's about communicating. So I don't think the fundamental concept is changing, but what we do think is changing is something that we call the granularity, the nature and the granularity, of the relationship between the leaders and the followers. We do think that there is something going on there that is changing in terms of expectations, in terms of delivery, and in terms of reach, obviously. So, things are happening, without a doubt.
Michelle C.: When you say granularity, from the report I read that to be that there is this expectation that leaders have to be more visible, and to influence they have to be more visible, more accessible, both to the external world and, indeed, within their own organizations. Is that what you're meaning by that granularity? Am I right in thinking that or...
Patricia Hind: There is a bit of that. Certainly we are beginning to expect our leaders to be visible, and that's not simply on the job, if you like. There is a trend now for the leaders to be seen as thought leaders. So you [inaudible 00:06:16] day job in the business, but you are also beginning, as a leader, to express views and opinions on bigger issues perhaps. There is this slight shift from simply being task focused to leadership taking a view, if you like, about other things, and that's to do with visibility. Of course, what that might mean is we may be seeing a little bit of a full circle coming round. If we want our leaders to be visible, to have opinions, to communicate on a broad level with us, then we are maybe returning to the great man, to the heroic leader, who has a view about a lot of things and is much more visible than other people. We can't yet conclude that, but that may be may be a consequence of what we believe effective leadership to be about if it's about visibility.
Michelle C.: Of course, the social technologies, given that they can extend that reach, as we saw in that 2016 election that triggered the interest, they can extend that reach and they can extend that visibility outside the norms of that kind of extension. That's having an impact, isn't it?
Patricia Hind: It is. I think the phrase you've used is walking the floor at scale.
Michelle C.: Yes.
Patricia Hind: I like that phrase, but what we've found, when I talk about the granularity of the relationship, there's a tension built in there because people are expecting this visibility, but the reach of leadership is much greater. You can get to second and third and fourth levels of contacts through social media, but people are expecting the information they receive to be much more targeted to them. They choose what information to allow in. They can switch you off. They can unlike you, unfollow you. There's a choice. People expect those communications to be intimate and relevant to them, so there is a tension between this scale and intimacy that I think leaders are going to need to be able to manage. They're going to need to be able to work up and down this scale in order to create trust and develop effective relationships. I think that's one of the big changes that we are seeing. It's a skill that perhaps leaders haven't needed so much of in the past, but it's now coming to the fore.
Michelle C.: Yeah. That's interesting because just before we went live on the podcast we were talking about, very briefly there, touching on the different skills, and you said that what is required of a leader around communication, around influence, around getting the job done, hasn't changed. It's really the expectation of the consumer, whether that's their employee or the wider consumer, that has changed. That's probably aligned with, I suppose, the empowerment that digital has brought to all of us.
Patricia Hind: Absolutely. The other thing about, obviously, social media communication is that it is now expected to be interactive. Good leadership has always been about listening as well as telling, but I think even more so people are expected to be able to shape views and to have an input. In terms of leadership, that redistribution of power at some level, it's not total, obviously. Leaders still lead. But people are expecting to be heard, to have their opinions valued, and subsequently have their opinions acted upon. So we begin to think about what the impact of that is for strategy, for strategic thinking.
Patricia Hind: I think there's a couple of things that we need to bear in mind when we think of the role of leaders as direction setters or strategic thinkers. If we are going to say that other people's opinions need to be listened to and valued and respected, then they ought to be impacting on strategy. There's no point having a view on something that doesn't matter to the business. How far leaders can let that power go and have other people input to strategy I think is going to be something that we need to look closely at and work with before.
Patricia Hind: Of course, another piece of that jigsaw is that social media communications are instant, they're quick, they're fast. Is there going to be a casualty in leadership skills? Is strategic thinking, long-term strategic thinking, considered and thoughtful strategic thinking, is that going to suffer because of this need for quick fire responses? I think the picture that's emerging is very interesting indeed.
Michelle C.: It is. It's interesting because, as we talked about, I've been interviewing on this podcast some leaders that are utilizing social technologies, championing them, if you will, within their organizations, both for themselves and also as resources within their teams or their organizations. It's interesting that from the listening side of things, and I found this when I was writing Get Social, the thing that kept coming up is that from a leadership perspective it was really useful to get that insight as to what was going on at the ground level and also to almost thought share the wisdom of the crowd, to get those insights in. You'll hear on future episodes of the podcast that some ideas that came out came from people that would never ordinarily have the opportunity to be heard, and yet they was really innovative, driving innovation, really helping the organization to move forward and to think better. So sometimes that kind of thinking environment can be broadened, can't it, from outside of the boardroom?
Patricia Hind: Absolutely. That's one of the huge opportunities that the new technologies and new communication technologies are going to bring to organizations. That's why leaders need to be able to harness that and to use it skillfully, rather than just engage in tennis match communications, if you like, backwards and forwards. They have to really be able to curate the information. Again, this is, I think, a change in the skillset for leaders that we'll need to think about going forward, this need to filter manage the amount of information that is available to them and the vast amount of communications that are available to them.
Patricia Hind: Filtering, managing, curating, and using is something that leaders do on a daily basis. But here's where we've got scale. The amount of information and material is going to be exponentially growing, so leaders are going to have to be much better at that. We as leadership developers will need to be factoring that into our programs, into our executive education, so that we're helping leaders of the future manage with and develop these new skills.
Michelle C.: It's interesting when you were saying that because I talk about that curation piece. It's almost like they become a facilitator, this curator of this insight. But, as you say, what do they do with that? There are lots of tools and resources out there that I suppose have been developed over the years that are allowing brands, shall we say, brands and organizations, to understand the sentiment of what is going on within their customer base. It's almost a similar resource is required, isn't it, for the leaders, that filtering process, that sentiment analysis as to, well, what's a good idea, what's not a great idea, because that tech, that content, as you say, those social technologies, can deliver so much information, but it's almost information overload.
Patricia Hind: Absolutely. One of the other things that I think is going to be very necessary is that we have to drive strategic thinking much further down through organizations so that leaders at all levels are able to curate, is the word we've used, to curate the information that is coming in to them in alignment with organizational objectives and visions.
Patricia Hind: It is often surprising how difficult it is for leaders within organizations to articulate that strategic vision. But in order to effectively use social media in the service of the organization, as well as themselves as leaders, there's going to have to be that strategic awareness much further down. Again, that's something for leadership development professionals to think about, how we ensure that so that the tools can be used effectively to support organizational growth and vision.
Michelle C.: Yes. I did a talk recently about the disengaged employee and the disconnected leader, and that's exactly what we were talking about. That scenario that, even if you are a leader in an organization, often there are fuzzy definitions about the strategy, so it's very difficult for you to be aligned strategically if you don't know what the-
Patricia Hind: Absolutely.
Michelle C.: ... yeah, if that clarity is missing. So it's championing, really, the need. When I go back 16 years ago, and we started our conversation offline before we went live, and I was talking about how I was interested in social technologies because it connected the customer with the organization, the organization with the customer. They were going to have to have real world conversations and connect. It's as if the social technologies from a leadership perspective, are... Those leaders have to absolutely be not only clear but on point with strategy and continuously communicating that effectively throughout the organization.
Patricia Hind: Absolutely. One thing social media is really good at is putting that fuzziness, that kind of inconsistent thinking that may be around, or lack of clarity, putting that right under a microscope and really exposing it for what it is. So it's critical that leaders are able to stick to the message that they're working towards.
Patricia Hind: That's another area of potential difficulty, I guess. A lot of leaders that we spoke to in our research are troubled, if you like, by the boundaries between their professional public life and their private life. Again, that's something that I think is changing quite rapidly now. I think we're seeing age differences there, definitely. But that's another tension. How much do you put out there? How much do you hold private? At what point does authenticity come into question? Where can privacy go, where can it stop? It's a very interesting area, I think. I don't think we fully understand the impact of all of this yet on what it will take to lead in the next 20 years.
Michelle C.: No. I remember a piece of research I read, and I can't find it. I've tried to find it. I'm sure it was a report out of Cisco, and it was probably about 10, 15 years ago that I read it, and it said the leaders of the future will have to be masters of social technologies. It will become part and parcel of the role.
Patricia Hind: I think that's very true. I really do. Leadership development over the last years has gone, in a sense, "soft". We've focused, quite rightly, on the soft skills required for leadership, the relationship building, the establishment of trust, and those sorts of things. And that's absolutely right because if leaders aren't able to help other people and work well with them, then they can't lead. But I think we're going to need to put a bit of hardcore technical expertise right back into the heart of leadership development. People need to feel confident using social media at all levels if they're going to make the most of the opportunities that are afforded. Technical skills, using the stuff, choosing the right platforms, targeting the right audience, just the hardcore technical skills, I think, need to be back on the curriculum.
Michelle C.: I think that comes because when we talk now about strategy, it's interesting that we talk about business strategy, digital strategy, social media strategy. It's strategy, isn't it?
Patricia Hind: Yes, yes.
Michelle C.: We live in a digital world. It's very difficult to extrapolate any one of those components and say, "Oh, but it's separate," because they're so linked.
Patricia Hind: And they will continue to be more and more so. We're beginning to see research come through on multi-sector collaborative partnerships that are not formal, that are led by individuals, and they gain influence. The model, I guess, is disaster management, but organizational collaborations are now coming forward, and I think social media is going to have a huge part to play in how those collaborative partnerships communicate. And again, huge opportunities to be missed if leaders are not able to take those opportunities.
Michelle C.: Yeah. This keeps coming to me as overt, particularly as I've been recording these podcasts and doing more reading around another book I'm writing. I keep coming back to this... Social media is almost the wrong word. It's more like a social science, isn't it? It's beyond just the tools and the tech. It's a new way of communicating.
Patricia Hind: Absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. I'm not entirely sure if it's a science. It's certainly an art form at the moment, I think.
Michelle C.: Brilliant.
Patricia Hind: But yeah, you're right.
Michelle C.: Fantastic. I really look forward to seeing the research when it finally comes out, the research piece. I don't think the report is out yet, is it, formally?
Patricia Hind: It is in draft, and it's having its formatting bits done at the moment, so it's very, very close to completion.
Michelle C.: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much about that. Now, Patricia, before I let you go from the podcast, I like to share just a little bit of insights about our guests. I've got three quick fire questions for you. Are you okay if I fire those to you?
Patricia Hind: Sure.
Michelle C.: Okay. They're pretty big questions, but this is top of the mind stuff. So whatever comes first. Patricia, if you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?
Patricia Hind: I don't know about change. I have maybe a wish or a dream, and it would require changes to come about. I would like to be able to offer meaningful and fairly paid employment for everybody who wanted it.
Michelle C.: Perfect.
Patricia Hind: Very important, yeah.
Michelle C.: Yeah. Very important. Again, it comes back to that huge being heard, being valued, isn't it?
Patricia Hind: Absolutely.
Michelle C.: It's such an important part. Which book have you read recently that's inspired you?
Patricia Hind: Well, that's really hard, because I'm one of these people who reads constantly and all the time and quickly, so I can never really remember what I've read. But I remember the book that inspired me to read. It was a children's book. In fact, there were two. It was Swallows and Amazons by Ransome and Wind in the Willows. I remember reading those under the covers, and I don't think I've stopped reading since. So it's not quite your answer, but I'm reading the new Sebastian Fox one at the moment, which I'm really enjoying.
Michelle C.: Yeah, brilliant. He's a great writer. And Swallows and Amazons, one of my all-time faves.
Patricia Hind: Absolutely, yeah.
Michelle C.: Classic. Beautiful. And last but not least, what's the best piece of advice you have been given to date?
Patricia Hind: Just given? I don't have to say I've taken it, huh?
Michelle C.: No.
Patricia Hind: Check your assumptions before you lead to conclusions. That's a great piece of advice.
Michelle C.: Very wise. Very wise words indeed. Thank you so much Patricia. How can our listeners find out more about the report that's coming out and, indeed, the work that you do?
Patricia Hind: The research has been done in partnership with UNICON, who are the Consortium for University Based Executive Education, and I'm director of the Centre for Research and Executive Development, which is a research center that we run at Ashridge Executive Education, part of Hult International Business School. We're easily found on the web, and I'm easily found as a member of faculty there.
Michelle C.: Fantastic. I'll make sure all the links in the show notes and everything so everybody can find you. Thank you so much. That's fascinating insights, and I think it really aligns with the topic that we're talking about here on the podcast. It's wonderful to see more research going into this, more insights coming out about what this means for leaders in the future. So that's been really interesting hearing about that research, and I really look forward to tuning in and staying tuned and, indeed, awaiting that report to see if there's any other findings that come out. Sincere thank you for sharing that insight with us on this podcast.
Patricia Hind: It's been a pleasure, and I'd be delighted to hear from anybody who has research interests in this field, indeed has a project going on, or anything they'd like to share would be great.
Michelle C.: Fantastic. I'll make sure that we can get direct contact to you in there via those links. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Patricia.
Patricia Hind: Thank you. Bye bye, Michelle.
Michelle C.: You've been listening to the #Get Social Connected Leader Podcast. Thank you to my guest and indeed thank you to you for tuning in. Please do feel free to share the podcast with colleagues and friends who you think will enjoy it and indeed subscribe to tune in for more episodes. You'll find the podcast on all the usual platforms, and all episodes are also on our website, carvillcreative.co.uk/podcasts. You'll also find some really useful digital and social resources on that site too, so be sure to check those out.
Michelle C.: So for now, from me, Michelle Carvill, your host on the podcast, thank you so much for tuning in, and goodbye.
Michelle C.: Oh, P.S. If you're a business leader with something to share around digital and social technologies, and you're keen to be a guest on the podcast, then I'd love to hear from you. You can email me, michelle@carvillcreative.co.uk.