I run a business based on creative ideas. These are our currency because we sell them to clients. But any kind of work can thrive on creativity because, whether you’re an admin assistant or a heart surgeon, it’s about thought processes and thinking innovatively. And creativity can be applied to everything from how you manage finances to how you employ and motivate staff.
Daniel Kindberg and Graeme Potter might seem an unlikely fit for my top-ten creative inspirations because one is a former army battalion commander and the other is a football manager. But they’re on the list because they’ve put emotional intelligence at the heart of what they do – as well as creative spark.
Kindberg became chairman of the small Swedish football club Östersunds after he left the army but quit when it was relegated to the fourth tier in 2010: he was sick of the arguing and blame that followed. Then the players turned up at his house, asked him to return, and he decided to do so but start again from scratch.108
When Potter became team manager, the men decided on a radical new approach in how to achieve their team’s potential. For a start, they took on the players that other clubs had rejected. One had been kicked out of a big Swedish team after repeated behaviour infractions; another, who’d played in the UK, had ended up working on a building site by the age of twenty for similar reasons. Potter and Kindberg saw the talent of players who had been effectively thrown on the scrapheap and teased it back out of them.
How? Well, I guess they must be pretty good at all the physical football stuff for a start. But they also took a uniquely creative approach to training by exposing their players to culture, including art, theatre and literature. And by putting them in unfamiliar situations, they helped them to think differently and encouraged mental and emotional, as well as physical, teamwork. So far, as a team, they’ve done everything from writing a book and creating art to working with local refugee centres and putting on a stage show of Swan Lake.109
How inspired was it to take all these men way out of their comfort zone, challenge them to explore different parts of their whole selves and see what happened?
It certainly worked.
Östersunds are now in the top league, won the Swedish cup in 2017 and qualified for the Europa League. The club from a tiny Swedish town even beat mighty Arsenal.
Thinking creatively, feeding the souls of their players, creating community and connection through shared experiences, produced quite extraordinary results and I, too, believe that inspired minds produce the best work.
We don’t play on a football pitch at Portas but sitting inside four office walls all the time isn’t necessarily the way to spark creative thought. So, just as Kindberg and Potter wanted to stretch their players, I encourage our people to get out there and see the world, connect with it in order to really understand how people are living. Only then can we give our clients the best advice on how to connect with their customers. Empathy doesn’t just strengthen the bonds between a group of colleagues, it can also help you to better understand whoever your work is aimed at – or how you’re doing it.
That’s why we have a pot of money to fund staff travel. They apply for it by telling us what they want to go and see, why and how it will help the agency. Often they’re looking at retail because that’s our business, and visits to everywhere from Berlin to LA have been paid for.
We also pay for museum passes and have created a library in the office for people to browse through. Plus there is a monthly meeting called People of Portas that’s all about sparking ideas and discussion rather than addressing specific projects, so pretty much anything goes.
Its core aim is for interesting people to talk about interesting stuff, so staff can go ‘off topic’ to talk about something that’s inspired them, or we might listen to a speaker from a thought-provoking project like Art Against Knives. It’s about developing people as whole beings, enabling them to expand their horizons outside what’s strictly ‘work’. First, because stimulated people produce better work (just ask Östersunds). Second, because I want anyone who’s worked at Portas to leave the business feeling as if they’ve grown – not just professionally but personally too.
Once again, creating a culture that really enriches those who work in it might be a key way for smaller companies to attract the best talent away from big ones in the future. Instead of focusing on material benefits, smaller companies can work on creating a culture that feeds anything from intellect to emotion, allows different types of people to thrive, and has core values that employees can identify with in a very personal way.
And if small businesses did this, I think many would-be employees might just give up the gym membership and company car to work in a place they not only want to be but know will grow them for the future.
Authenticity is another key part of bringing your whole self to work, and no one will ever be able to do that until we stop splitting emotion from work in the way that we’re currently required to.
Emotion is intrinsic to our whole self so why are we supposed to leave most of it at the office door? How can any of us ever reach our potential when we’re stuffing down half of what makes us who we are? It affects us all, but particularly women as we try to fit the alpha-male type.
So, for me, a key part of working like a woman is about allowing a far greater range of emotions to be more present at work and bringing our whole selves to it. It’s what experts call an inclusive culture: one in which everyone feels at home and able to stop pretending to be something they’re not.
Research has shown that we all ‘cover’ who we are to try to fit in at work. And while you’re more likely to do it if you’re gay, a person of colour or a woman, almost half of straight white men do so too.110 Most of us, in some way, are putting on a mask when we go into work. Helping us to feel accepted as we are in the culture in which we work has been proven to produce better results.
That is why, in addition to focusing on client relationships, we have also given a lot of thought to what happens between people at Portas. And the creation of trust has allowed us to stop putting energy into being something we’re not and devote it instead to tapping into our talents.
We’ve fostered this shared connection in different ways. There’s a meeting slot called ‘What Got Me Here’ during which a member of staff talks about three things that got them to where they are. Who can fail to respond to the vulnerability it takes to stand up in front of colleagues and take off the mask, to talk about your family, your friendships, your failings, your dreams?
Random as it might sound, dogs have also been a great way to bring us closer because, almost without realizing it, people drop the mask in their presence. We all become a bit more human as we stop to stroke a dog and chat to its owner.
I walked into Portas the other day to find one staff member nervously waiting for a big client meeting to start. After fishing Ollie the Cavapoo out from under a desk and sticking him on her lap, she visibly relaxed within seconds.
Children do the same. So if childcare plans go south, as they sometimes do, parents can bring their kids into work. Not long ago, Mark brought his daughter with him and suddenly the guy who talks figures was a dad, a husband, a caring man.
All these things reveal different sides of people that help us to see each other as whole beings rather than work automatons.
Now, I know not all businesses can do what we’ve done. But it’s about redefining how work can be improved in ways that suit your business. A small, but significant, thing for us is a pot of money given to junior team members to spend in whatever way they think will bring some fun to the office. It’s kind of like a flash mob for joy. Even small moments can reconnect and re-energize the whole team.
These things don’t take a lot of time. But what they do is foster laughter and fun – and that in turn creates open, honest communication and emotional connection.
Work should be a place where you bring your whole self. Not just a part of it. And this kind of inclusion benefits a whole organization as well as its employees.
The psychologist John Amaechi, who works with businesses on everything from leadership to organizational culture, believes that inclusion starts with true honesty about what is happening in your business. ‘Any change has to start with [ … ] a real, pragmatic, honest assessment of the status quo, and I don’t think we have that,’ he says. ‘Inclusion is a threat. And it’s a threat to a certain group of people and that group of people is not straight, white, older men. It’s mediocre people. And our organizations are full of them. We call them the marzipan layer, we call them the permafrost, we know exactly who they are.
‘And so it’s no wonder that we don’t get the kind of movement we need because we have people who are perfectly adequate at the job and don’t cause enough trouble. They know how to handle appraisal and make sure that they get that [grade] four […], which means that they stay where they are.’111
I agree with John: our businesses are filled with people who are okay enough to stay in the job, not bad enough to justify sacking and difficult to shift.
I also agree with him that it’s time to shift the marzipan layer and let real talent rise to the top by allowing people to be their whole, true selves.
The final layer of bringing a whole self to work is about creating a connection to the wider world, because we don’t exist in isolation. For me, this involves giving something back through my business.
I’d learned at Save the Children that you get just as much out of giving as the person who receives does. Maybe more, in fact. Giving does all of us good.
I believe it also does my business good, so we try to give back in many different ways. That might be doing free work for a project we believe in, or just connecting people from the voluntary sector to businesses that will support them. We also offer free advice to small start-ups or, if we think we’re not right for them, help them to access a different business that might be a better fit.
We’re also working on developing a new internship scheme aimed at breaking down the class barriers in our industry through mentoring, coming into Portas to see what we do; and outreach work.
There’s no doubt that middle-class kids whose parents can fund them on internships are far more likely to do them than kids with parents on a low income. It means that many industries – mine included – are becoming more and more uniform in terms of class. I’m well aware that I broke the system but many kids today will find it far harder. The internship scheme is one way to tackle this because, like it or not, certain kids have connections via their parents and others don’t.
My elder son was lucky enough to have me, and I was confronted by a real dilemma about nepotism when it came to Mylo. After finishing his degree, he came to work temporarily at the agency as a junior member of the research and strategy team. He’s a bright, well-qualified young man and soon Caireen and Richard said they’d like to recruit him permanently.
But I found myself with conflicting feelings about it. It was great that Mylo had done well, that the team liked him and thought him worthy of a place at Portas. But, much as I wanted to make life easy for him, I wasn’t sure I’d be doing Mylo a favour. He needed to make his own way, to work somewhere that didn’t have his surname over the door. I also feared there would always be a barrier to colleagues seeing him as truly one of ‘them’.
I talked it over with his dad, who quite rightly said the decision was Mylo’s. And in the end, of course, Mylo made the decision for me. He thanked me very much for the few months he’d spent with Portas – plus the free rent and board at home – but told me he believed it was best for him to go and do his own thing.
He left London to start a new job in Manchester and is now thriving very separately from me as he should.
Of course we all want to help out our kids. And our friends’ kids. But this kind of social sponsorship is, if anything, getting more and more vital today. I’m not sure I’d have got a foot in my industry if I was trying to start out now, and while I’m never going to fix all of this, I hope the new internship scheme will encourage a different kind of talent into our business.
My contribution is small fry, though, compared to what businessman Hamdi Ulukaya is doing. Born and raised in a dairy-farming family in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey – an area long riven by political fighting – Ulukaya never aspired to create his own company. In fact, he arrived in the US to study English in 1994 with an entrenched scepticism about American business, believing it was selfish and the gap between working people and CEOs so wide he could never be a part of the corporate world.
But when he started living in the US and saw a different side of business, Ulukaya decided he wanted to make a difference.112
Fast-forward almost twenty-five years and he has done just that. Chobani yoghurt, the business he founded in 2005 that now employs 3000 people, has social conscience running through its core. From the outset, employees got full healthcare and were paid above the minimum wage.113 Many employees will also get shares in the business, worth more than $1 million to the longest-standing workers, when it is floated or sold.114
Today 10 per cent of Chobani’s profits go to charity, the company works with the local community and also small food companies with ideas to challenge what Ulukaya believes is a broken system of mass food production.115, 116
But it’s his personal commitment to some of the world’s most vulnerable people that really sets him apart. Some 30 per cent of Chobani workers are refugees, and Ulukaya has pledged to give the majority of his personal wealth to humanitarian causes.117, 118 He’s also created the Tent Foundation, which partners with businesses to give short-term assistance to, and create long-term solutions for, the global refugee crisis through hiring, training and employment initiatives worldwide. Its aim is to aid twenty million dispossessed men, women and children.119
Why? Because Ulukaya believes that business can be a significant force in finding solutions that governments alone cannot come up with. ‘We can move faster, think bigger, and modernize approaches to relief and resettlement that haven’t changed since the 1940s,’ he wrote, as business leaders prepared to gather in Davos for the World Economic Forum in 2016. ‘We can do what entrepreneurs do best: hack the way we handle this problem.’120
Don’t underestimate the significance of what Ulukaya is doing. Refugees and the politics around them are an incendiary political topic. But here is a big corporate leader persuading others to give a very public commitment to people who are often demonized.
Ulukaya has been attacked by the far right and received death threats.121 There have been calls to boycott his business because of his stance. But he believes that work is a vital way to help rebuild lives torn apart by conflict. ‘I can tell from my experience [that] the minute a refugee has a job, that’s the minute they stop being a refugee,’ he says.122 He’s put social justice and the fair treatment of workers at the heart of what he’s doing. He doesn’t just talk about his values. He does something about them.
If only most businesses would do the same.
Our journey to working like a woman is definitely still a work in progress. We’ve been at this for four years now and probably will be for another few at least, putting in place the ideas that effect real change. Some of our ideas have been outright failures, and even when they’ve succeeded, it hasn’t always been easy.
Take radical candour: it’s more and more in vogue in business and is about being completely honest about successes and failures. There’s no more smiling in meetings and then going off to bitch by the coffee machine.
We’ve used it and it’s certainly been helpful – as long as it’s underpinned with kindness. But I’ve also felt like cracking my head against the wall a few times when staff have been honest about the negatives and forgotten the positives. It can be frustrating.
As is the fact that even after we’ve done all this work to create a great working environment, people still leave. Unbelievable, right? We’ve had periods when a string of people have resigned around the same time, and that’s tough in a small business. Some got new jobs, others were moving away, but there were certainly those who genuinely didn’t want to be in our type of culture, and didn’t feel comfortable at Portas.
I get it. I really do. I’ve certainly found all this personally challenging at times. Changing the way I’d always worked occasionally felt like digging out my emotional drains. Letting go of that core alpha belief that power and authority lay solely with me wasn’t easy. Participating fully in the process and listening to my first group feedback gave me a sleepless night. Am I really that impatient? Hmm. And do I sometimes ignore the people I don’t feel an obvious connection to? Yes. Sort it.
But doing all that made me realize that as much as we tell ourselves it’s ‘only work’ we also take it very personally.
I used to feel snubbed when people resigned and told myself we were better off without them. Working like a woman has meant a whole new approach focused on maintaining connection with people even when they’ve gone.
I’ve learned to accept that great employees do leave – for life reasons, career progression, you name it – and I can’t take it as a personal slight. Today I’m certainly sad to see valued people go but also proud to see them doing well in big jobs and grateful that we have provided a stepping-stone on their journey.
I, like everyone else working in the business, have learned something from all this. I’ve learned to take it all less personally by being more personal, if that makes sense. And I’m glad I have because people, like businesses, wither if they remain static. We’ve always got to be learning to keep moving on.
Take all of what we’ve done to change the way we work in isolation and it might seem like throwing stones into a hurricane. But between them these changes have knitted together to create a heart to my business that it didn’t have before. It’s also produced brilliant results and my agency today is working better than it ever has done. We are now doing as well financially as we ever did. But, most importantly, I have a better business because it has soul. And that for me is working like a woman.
It sure beats just totting up the numbers.