The Design & Art Direction Festival is devoted to all things creative, full of bright people with bright ideas. And, judging from the latest exhibition, the move towards a more diverse world is inevitable. Even white, middle-aged, middle-class men attending the event – the ones with most to lose – agreed that it was time for things to change.
Diversity right now is a hot topic – a business buzzword – because it’s pretty much accepted that men dominate the top of work and something has to give. Most large businesses are working on bringing more women – and anyone else who is under-represented – into their business and understanding how they think.
It’s simple, really: a diverse group of people provide different perspectives, and harnessing their individuality as they work together offers more powerful possibilities than employing a group of people with a more similar mindset.
Jaguar Land Rover faced a huge challenge in recruiting more women because engineering has historically been a very male industry, and Jaguar Land Rover is the kind of company people stay with for years. So while they wanted to make their business more equal when it came to male and female employees, they knew they needed to start from the ‘bottom’ up. In 2012, Jaguar Land Rover began targeting young women to recruit as engineering apprentices by offering them the chance to spend a week with the company, seeing how it worked.
It was a great success.
The company’s current apprentice and graduate intake is now fifty:fifty. In years to come, as those young women move up through the business, its engineering workforce will be far more equal.
Good on you, Jaguar Land Rover, for thinking creatively about doing your bit to tackle issues of gender diversity in the workforce.
Elsewhere, the drive to get more women into UK boardrooms has also begun to work. Companies like Sky have significantly increased their numbers of women leaders and others, like Goldman Sachs, are working to empower women at grass-roots level by supporting female entrepreneurs in fifty-six countries.
I applaud all this. It’s vital work. But I don’t believe focusing on numbers is enough, and even formalizing them via quotas won’t be either. We also have to believe in changing the culture in which we work and start to create one that values and rewards long-suppressed but vital feminine characteristics and viewpoints. This is what will create a more balanced way of working that enables women to reach the top.
In my business, that has meant tapping into my deepest truth about who I am as a woman, bringing my full self to work and creating a new culture based on those values. And I think other small businesses like mine could have a key advantage over the big ones in creating a similar culture shift.
Big business is certainly talking about this but I’m not yet convinced that always goes deeper than top-line statistics. Changing the culture of a big organization is like turning around a tanker: it’s heavy work and takes a long time.
To create real change, you’ve got to put some soul into it. This is what the best businesses need. And when I say ‘soul’, I don’t mean accountancy firms offering meditation classes, or retailing coming up with such clever packaging it looks as if their eggs were hatched on a Devon smallholding rather than battery-farmed on the outskirts of Clacton.
Soul, for me, is about a shared personal connection within your organization that allows everyone to achieve their individual and collective potential. And, because of their size, this might well be easier to inject into smaller businesses that have a head start on personal connection in comparison to massive corporations.
The good news is that almost half of us in the UK don’t work for the big hitters.106 For every GlaxoSmithKline there are a hundred companies like mine, employing everyone from plumbers to bookkeepers, architects to sound engineers.
These smaller companies may therefore be crucial to changing the way we work, and while they certainly face challenges – namely, that they don’t have either the money or time needed to create headline-grabbing leadership programmes and diversity initiatives – what they do have are leaders who can be far more closely connected with staff at all levels, and the ability to be more nimble.
So if all our smaller businesses got stuck into this, I believe we could see quite remarkable – and rapid – change.
It’s entirely possible. You’ve just got to believe in what you’re doing. And so must your staff.
In late 2008, doctors at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital revealed serious misgivings about care, safety measures and unresponsive senior management that together were putting patients at risk. A government inquiry was launched. Something was clearly very wrong with both the working environment and the culture it was rooted in.
Sarah-Jane Marsh was BCH’s chief operating officer at the time and the board of directors asked her to step in as interim chief executive while they looked for a permanent replacement. But after struggling to find one, the board realized a new approach was needed. The chair asked Sarah-Jane, who was thirty-two at the time, to take on the job. It was a huge task: she had relatively little board experience and would be responsible for 2700 employees, as well as patients.
Now, every culture change is different. BCH didn’t need to get more women into their workforce because 83 per cent were female. Instead, it was about putting more female values at the heart of a failing institution as a way to heal it.
Sarah-Jane started with urgent practical tasks, like funding and staffing levels. But then, instead of going the classic route of sitting in her office, looking at the data, writing up lots of well-meaning culture documents and getting other people to do the on-the-ground work, she did something unusual. Sarah-Jane got herself a video camera and started talking to staff. She wanted to know what values they believed were at the heart of the organization that employed them.
Over the next two years, Sarah-Jane carried on talking to staff about these values: compassion, courage, trust, commitment and respect. Then she took the talking and used it to enable people to enact cultural change on a wider level because, just like I do, Sarah-Jane believes that work isn’t just a numbers game.
The NHS might be a vocation for many of those working in it but I don’t think many people in any job do it just for the pay packet. It’s about everything from meaning and community to purpose, a sense of progression and not getting stuck on the sofa watching reruns of Real Housewives all day.
At BCH, Sarah-Jane started to transform the culture by rooting each working day in the core values her staff had told her about. They were referenced everywhere from appraisals to staff events and used as tools to aid decision-making: did a proposed action reflect BCH’s core values? Even junior team members were now able to feed into decisions made by more senior staff – often rare in the classically alpha environment of medicine, with its adherence to rigid hierarchy – by referring to the values.
Voices from all staffing levels were heard and this was key to creating the idea of ‘team BCH’ – another crucial plank in enabling an organization filled with individuals to transform into a group of people pulling together to do their best work.
The final strand to culture change at BCH was to admit failures and use the lessons learned to improve. Instead of stonewalling criticism and refusing to face up to errors, Sarah-Jane wanted to serve patients’ best interests by listening to and acting on what they said had gone wrong.
In 2017 BCH became the first children’s hospital of its kind in the UK to be rated outstanding by inspectors from the Care Quality Commission. In just eight years, this large organization had undergone profound cultural change.
Sarah-Jane’s masterstroke was to understand that, while she had to lead from the front, her job was also to create the conditions in which thousands of people felt their viewpoints were heard, then pulled together and created radical change.
And I believe she achieved this by putting feminine values, like flexibility and collaboration, at the heart of her organization, as well as allowing herself to be led by her instinct about what would work to create change.
Imagine if there were more people like Sarah-Jane leading the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that are currently operating in the UK right now. We’d all be working like women – and benefiting hugely from it – before we knew it.
As well as embracing uncertainty and allowing intuition to drive my business – and creative – decisions, there were other characteristics that I valued as a woman and wanted to weave into the way I – and my company – worked.
They were the qualities that I, as a woman, felt reflected my best self, which was why I put them at the core of all I went on to do. And they have become the building blocks of how we restructured the culture of our business to start working like a woman.