The Future of Leadership, AI & Success | Dr Nicola Hodson | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Every wave of tech has generated more jobs than have been lost, but there is a quite deep need to reskill at a population level. Only around 30 % of the skills we have now will be fit for purpose by 2030. Who is Nicola Hodgson? She's a businesswoman. She's a polymer. She loves working with interesting people, interesting things across a whole range of topics.

1:25You're the chair of IBM at UK and Ireland, so in a very prominent leadership position. A lot of my career has been around transforming businesses. I learned a few years ago the importance of coaching. And in a sales environment, by the way, it gives 5x better results if your managers are coaching people rather than telling them what to do. There's an element of how do you help people get better. In your line of work now, there's so much change. the world of tech, particularly with AI. I think what it certainly means is we all need to be able to use AI in whatever form it comes to us. The fact that you are a role model in business and all this knowledge and you love that mentoring and that coaching element, what advice would you give to someone coming through?

2:22Sorry to interrupt. I've never asked this before, but if you can subscribe and follow, that will allow me to keep bringing extraordinary guests onto the show. Now let's get back to it.

2:35Who is Nicola Hodgson? She is a mother, a daughter, a wife. She is energetic and curious. She is a mindful soul. She loves working with people. She's a businesswoman. She's a polymer. She will spend her life learning and enjoying that. And yeah, she loves working with interesting people, interesting things across a whole range of topics. That means we'll get on very well. And I love the fact that in the world of business, that merging of people and that intersection, which people buy people, people get on with people. That's a key part of probably what we can spend time talking about. And connected by someone that understands that so well, Steve Tappin, all about leadership and that awareness.

3:37And so I would love to take that back to a younger version of you that has gone into business to achieve some huge success, if you like. I'd love to know the kind of who and why influences there. So I grew up in Cheshire. I came from a very big family. My dad was one of 10. My mother was one of five. So I had loads and loads of cousins. Christmases must have been great. Christmas was bonkers. My grandma's house was bonkers. My father taught me to read and write and draw before I went to school. and so it was really interesting for me I already felt comfortable with learning when I got into the classroom and that love of learning has persisted throughout my entire life so but I grew up with one sister and we had a fun childhood my family's very active my father was a rugby player.

4:37So I spent a lot of time either on his shoulders or at the side of a rugby pitch. I still love the smell of deep heat. Just takes me right back there. It's a comfort smell. It's a comfort smell. And yeah, so that was my childhood. My parents were deep believers in education, even though they both left school straight after secondary school themselves. But, you know, they kindly supported us to go to grammar schools and independent schools. So they had to save to pay for that. And my dad, my dad was just a big proponent of get as much education as you can and then make the most of your life. And that stood me in good stead.

5:27I use the term always learning a lot. You know, I'd say that's a why behind these conversations is that you never stop learning, right? And if you in any way think that you know enough, then something's got lost along the way. Then you need to change. Yes, exactly. Lack of self-awareness. Once you've stopped learning. Yes. And I think we were talking off camera about the importance of curiosity. Yes. And I want to understand, because in your line of work now, there's so much change in the world of tech, particularly with AI. And I'm just interested to know that that kind of element of mixing business to be at the cutting edge of trying to be innovative and thinking ahead, but also just genuinely enjoying and stress testing, both in business, but also understanding it all.

6:16Where do you sit with that? It's really interesting. So one of the things I used to do with my dad, they bought an encyclopedia, which I'm dating myself big time but um one of the cross sec there was a cross-sectional picture of concord and concord we lived um on one of the flight paths of concord when it was going over to uh to the us and so we could watch concord every day and it came at the same time and and i absolutely loved it because it just absolutely fascinated me and so I trained in materials engineering and then I did a research degree which was about 50-50 coding and materials engineering.

7:02I did it with the automotive industry and I kind of just love like how do things work, why do they work, how can you make them better and I see all of that as sort of how do you solve a problem? And I moved, I was in engineering and engineering industry. I worked in the nuclear industry for the first part of my career, which I loved, weirdly. And it's great to see that resurging now. But I moved into tech. It's much faster paced. Nuclear industry used to plan over 20 years. Tech, you're lucky if you can plan more than a year ahead. It moves so quickly. So it's quite a natural space for me. I enjoy it.

7:49Obviously, the tech is underpinned at a deep level by materials science, materials engineering anyway. But I love the pace. I love the innovation. I love the possibility. And it's that that keeps me alive in terms of learning. You lit up when you're talking about that. And in the last, certainly, gosh, you more than me would know that for me, AI has become prominent in the last, say, three, four years. And I'm using it now. I'm using it in how I go about various things. And I probably use it more than Google now. If I want to know something, I'll find I'm sort of plugging into AI. And that's shifting so many things.

8:25And I know particularly in the kind of venture capitalist space and investment space, people I'm speaking to, it's really difficult now to value a company. It's difficult to plan. You said like four years, let alone a year, because there's almost this fear of like, well, actually, the whole landscape could change. and are you experiencing that in your business interests? I think that concern is there. There's a sort of, wow, it's going to change everything and all the jobs are going to disappear and then juxtaposed with some reality of big organisations have complex array of systems and it takes time to drive change in those organisations.

9:04It doesn't mean you shouldn't start, but it also doesn't mean it's going to be done in six months, 12 months. It takes time and you've got to make sure that you're secure and you're looking after people's data, etc. So the possibilities are really exciting. The volatility is a bit wild. But there are ways of improving businesses that take a lot of the repetitive work out for people. So in the way you use it, it's probably saving you hours of research time that you otherwise would have been sat at your laptop or on your phone doing. It doesn't make you redundant or change the nature of your job, only for the better.

9:53So the vast majority of roles will be enhanced, I think. I think some more repetitive roles will change or morph into something else or maybe not be there. Every wave of tech has generated more jobs than have been lost. Now, there is literature. You can go either side of that spectrum of what does it mean for jobs. I think what it certainly means is we all need to be able to use AI in whatever form it comes to us for the right purposes. and we all need to be able to keep reskilling ourselves because that's just the nature of work these days and you know as leaders we have to help our employees and our organizations to sort of build those learning muscles and create the space for people to develop themselves so it's a more of I say an acceleration of what was what was already there and but there is a a quite deep need to reskill at a population level and the world economic forum did some data maybe a year ago and it uh it reckoned um uh you know significant percentages like only around 30 percent of the skills we have now will be fit for purpose by 2030 and so that is a big reskilling job there's an organization which we work with called t-har and they did some data as well and they reckon that 43 million people in the UK would need to be reskilled.

11:28It's not a small number, right? It's not a small number and it starts at school and it ends when we end. That makes it so relevant to all of us, right? You cannot ignore it. There are people that are a little bit like, I don't need AI, I don't want AI. But actually you can't ignore that because you could be left high and dry if you are in any way not using it, not embracing it, not knowing how to use it. But it's there in many helpful ways, isn't it? You know, customer service bots and things that actually sometimes the service experience is a lot better. And so people are generally very accepting of using AI, even accepting, and that's in the UK as well, even accepting that they will give their bank details to complete transactions using AI.

12:16So I think the possibilities are real and here and now. And most people, one way or another, will use AI every day. Yeah, it feels like it. My 14 and 16-year-old daughters are using it probably more than they should for homework and so on. But it's building the habit early, isn't it? That's the point. And the kids coming through now, the next generation, will have a friendly AI that will be a mate that you could argue we'd have loved to have had growing up. You know, with loneliness is talked about a lot in a mental health space, in the sort of startup world of business where entrepreneurs are facing a whole lot.

12:56Who do I speak to? I feel so alone with this. Well, actually, you can draw on unbelievable knowledge and experience from an AI point of view to pull the algorithm. Yes. And you have to be very conscious of where are the sources coming from. Is it correct? The data's not always correct. You know, if you've asked for some data and then you go back and say, are you sure these data are correct? You probably get the answer back a lot of the time, no. Yeah. And so you've got to push and probe. And, you know, it's giving you the next probabilistic answer. And so it doesn't mean it's always correct. So I think kids learning how to use the tools, but also how to use their human intelligence to know which parts of what they're reading are more valid than others.

13:49That's a really good shout out. The source is super important. I'd love to bring leadership into the conversation at this point because learning from a leadership point of view, and I think we haven't said it whilst we've been talking in this environment, you're the chair of IBM for the UK and Ireland. So in a very prominent leadership position. And I'd love to open up your kind of thoughts on the key values that you ultimately champion in leadership. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

14:35The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast.

15:10Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I think ultimately as a leader you've got to be very self-aware and very tapped into what are your values and how do you bring those to bear in the leadership context and how do you knit them together with the values of the companies you might work for and and then how do you stay true to those values when things get tough because that's when it really matters and so you know amongst my values I'm really big on family and nurture and I'm really big on courage and grit and trust and so that for me is gives me a sort of inner core as to how do I bring that to my work work and if I'm staying true to my values then I'm acting with my level of integrity that's important to me and I'm treating people in ways I would like to be treated myself and I'm being nurturing and caring when I alongside obviously all the other things like delivering results and making sure your business is on the right footing, making sure you're looking after today's numbers and the future, but also staying true to who you are and making sure that comes across.

16:53And what's really, really interesting is, you know, over the years, I've been in tech for more than two decades now, and some of the relationships you make persist for decades and the ones I'm most proud of where it's a customer relationship where you might have helped someone out in a difficult situation and you maintain a friendship for decades and that feels really special actually it's and that's not built on it is built on the fact that you help them out but you help them out because you've got some core values that you want to make sure live in those relationships and live on once the immediate issue is passed.

17:37I love that. There's empathy there and trust, as you said. And for that relationship, you're smiling, you're probably thinking of a specific relationship with something you did 20 years ago and there's still a business relationship and you're friends. And I think for me to ask you about leadership and say that you are the chair of IBM, a global well-known business, but you need to be bringing up self-awareness, empathy, trust. I love that because you've not mentioned numbers, you've not mentioned stats and milestones. It's people, it's relationships. It's really important that. And that's, in my much smaller environment of my business interests and so on.

18:22People say, how did you, and why did you start the podcast? I'm interested in people. I want to learn from people. And that's so important. The thing is, the numbers go without saying, right? You, you're, you're, if you're in a leadership position, you have to perform first and foremost. That's, that's the survival criterion in the worst case and the way you thrive and your team thrives in the, in the best case. But if you want the best out of people, you have to create the conditions where they can be themselves, where they can be relaxed enough to be creative. And if you as a leader can create that space for them, then you're going to get the best out of them because you know what it's like when we're under stress and pressure, not as resourceful.

19:14The brain doesn't work as well. The body's all tents and when business is challenging that's when you need people to be at their most creative and so it's really important to I feel to my leadership anyway that that I can maintain those conditions for people even even when they're up against it so that they can stay free and flexible to perform at their best that's brilliant so you're so effectively your role is is almost like making sure that the environment of the team and then be having the awareness to be a spot he's under pressure that team's underperforming why and then you immerse yourself into that to then make that environment better and what about you personally you know i mean that humanizing nicola so you're super relaxed by the way to be with and uh and that's a pleasure to speak with and there's a lovely low tempo to you but I get the feeling that when you need to you can turn that up and you can crank that up to meet the pressure if you like but what do you do to de-stress from what can be a stressful environment what works for you look I set myself a bar that I set for everyone else which is pretty high and so I expect myself to perform at my best.

20:32And, um, and to do that, I'm super aware that I need to be very tuned in to when I'm not at my best and to know when to intervene. So I wear my aura ring. I, I check in on how am I get just basics, right? Am I getting enough sleep? Um, am I taking enough exercise? Uh, Is there anything I should be aware of that's making me less alert? All of that's really important. So I'm very big on exercise. I like to be outdoors. I run, I swim, I do a lot of walking, I ski, I play tennis. All of those things that sort of have you immersed in something that isn't your day job helps the mind to relax and freewheel.

21:26and it's important to get the mind into freewheeling mode. And it can be tough, right? If you're full time, you're working every day, sometimes breakfast, sometimes dinner, creating the space and the time for that's really important. I do yoga, which helps with the mind-body connection. I do jigsaws, which just have to immerse in something that's not reading books or focusing on work papers or staring into a laptop. I do Lego. It's about engineering as well. Yeah, and then I really enjoy time with my family. They keep me very grounded. I'm the butt of all the banter and it just makes me laugh so much that that's sort of my happy place where I can just de-stress but i put a lot of time into that it's it's clearly a priority for you there's a discipline there uh and it's great as well that you've shared so many different interests that i really appreciate you doing that and but the the role by default uh probably there's there's only so many hours in a day right so there's a lot that's said in countless success books and podcasts about uh successful people getting up really early in the morning and running a marathon reading a book and meditating before 8 30 in the morning where do you sit with that are you are you a morning person do you try and because there's a lot you've got to fit in do you try and get that morning owned I am a morning person um but I don't run a marathon before breakfast before lunch not every day I do my yoga early in the morning what's early 6 30 6 45 uh it's an hour it's done I sometimes I'll swim early or if I'm fit I'll go for a run early, not every day.

23:16I'm often doing breakfast meetings so there isn't time to sort of squeeze that in beforehand. So I squeeze in my exercise where I can. I do make sure I get it so I might go for if I've not managed anything all day I might get home at nine and go for a walk um and i i quite enjoy that yeah it's dark it's decent weather it's quite nice to walk around and now listen to a podcast or something and then i'm moving and i'm switching off but i'm also uh getting some exercise i appreciate that i mentioned the word success and we can attribute to to a number of different aspects of your career and and what you're doing right now is successful sitting here now with kind of maturity perspective and looking back how do you define success it's about your life in the round and um i think that's got to feel like um i'm happy i'm surrounded by energetic and happy people my family's doing well and succeeding whatever I'm doing that day and in that period, my job, generally speaking, and that I'm finding ways where I can give something back.

24:39So I've got some kind of reward equation in there as well. And, you know, as you go through life, it's really important to be healthy as well as all of that. And I mean healthy in mind and body. And so putting all of that into a package is the way I think of success. And so every year I draw myself a mind map and it's got all of those facets and that's how I define my year. That's what I want to achieve in the year. And it's pretty holistic. And that's really visual as well. It's very visual. You put that out there, Yeah, you draw it out so that you can see it and you've physically written it.

25:19Yep. I like that. I do it with coloured pens and that's my one pager. I really like that. You mentioned giving back. We've only met for the first time today, but I feel like there's a part of you that loves mentoring. And I want to call you out as a role model here in the context of not just being a business leader and the chair of IBM, But the fact that we're seeing it more and more now, which is great, but more and more female C-suite and chair leadership roles being occupied by women. But 20 years ago, that was very much in the minority. So the graph's going in the right direction. But to call you a role model for aspiring female entrepreneurs, female aspirational business women coming through, how much do you see yourself as a role model?

26:08And what do you do to try and in any way encourage more women to come through in business? This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

26:48It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I think look I think the point around mentoring and coaching is really important the part of the way I succeed myself is to have a pit crew and my pit crew is pretty wide and varied my yoga teachers in there I have a business coach I have a couple of mentors don't maybe don't see them very often some come in some come out and I have someone who helps me I have my office team my husband and my family you know so it's a pretty big crew and I don't mind asking for help when I need it and so and that's one of the things I hope to pass on to other people is sort of how do you build that support network around you so that you you can be the the driver of the car and you can come into the pit when you need to you've got all of that crew around you to support you because you're working at full throttle a lot of the time in those roles.

28:09So that's part of what I hope to pass on. I do a lot of mentoring. Most importantly, I do a lot of coaching. And I did a big piece of work. A lot of my career has been around transforming businesses. And I learned a few years ago, the importance of coaching. And in a sales environment, by the way, it gives 5x better results if your managers are coaching people rather than telling them what to do or inspecting what they're doing or, you know, maintaining a traditional

28:47manager-employee relationship. There's a nurturing element to that, right? There's an element of how do you help people get better and how do you ask the right open questions that they think for themselves. Otherwise, you're just telling them what to do or giving the benefit of your experience. And it doesn't necessarily fit because scenarios are specific. And so a lot of that is about how do you help your managers to become better coaches? And then as an individual yourself, what can you do to coach other people and help them to become their best yes and that that has massive impact on business performance by the way massive impact on personal performance but also leaves people stronger uh coming out of it and it's quite energizing for someone to be in that kind of conversation because they've come up with their own way forward and try it yeah yeah if it's done for you you could relate this to parenting as well i was thinking yeah yeah if you just keep doing it for your kids they're not going to learn where it is actually to and then the empowerment the fulfillment and the confidence that's the word yeah that comes for me they're happy it's harder as a parent right to back off and yeah what's especially helicopter parenting it's a conversation i have with my wife quite a few times where don't do it and then the next minute you're doing it on something else and there's this whole like but it's an interesting one because having probably done a bit of that when they were younger to now be the age as they are actually the moment you back off they are happier kids for it yeah you know and that they need to be because they're coming into adulthood yeah i think one of the best things you can give them is uh resourcefulness yes um you know is the world's a changing place as we talked it's moving pretty fast and you know as long as you're resourceful in that scenario you're willing to learn you bring some compassion and kindness you need all the smarts and stuff as well going on but but there are some of those core people skills that remain important throughout life and that i think it's important they get definitely relating that to you actually so you kindly mentioned about the various sports you do the jigsaw puzzles which like engineering brain can you absorb yourself i know that last time i did a jigsaw puzzle was at christmas time and we're filming you know in the summer now but um the the way that i forgot about everything else around me and just wrap myself around this puzzle.

31:17I loved it. What, you know, to de-stress away from busy work and the fact that there's, of course, the fulfillment from sport, the goals, the sort of challenges that come with that. But just outside of that, reading, other interests. I want to know where that goes. Where does Nicola get stimulation from? I love cooking. I love it. Just the creativity of it. I've got books in every room of my house, There's piles of them everywhere. So I read a lot. Any particular genre or is that how you get your impression? You've got cooking books in the kitchen, you've got fiction here, you've got... I've got all sorts of books.

31:56I've got some business books, I've got novels. I pretty much read anything. I enjoy the relative... I guess in the last five years, there have been some quite well-written books about business that are written more like a novel. So they're quite, you know, they're quite exciting. And, you know, you want to read into the next chapter and see what happens. I quite like those. But I, I'll read, I'll read all sorts. And I'm very rarely without a book and a Kindle, very rarely. And then I, I have a motorbike. You can only go on that when you are 100 % focused. and so that's also pretty good all of those things are good it just your mind needs to be focused on that one activity yeah and that's really important because everything else has to fall away gosh i had never pictured nicola on a motorbike that's brilliant i love this is the bit i love is the whole like you have a whatever the idea might be of the chair of ibm and then you going out for a ride on a sunday morning whatever it might be it's freedom isn't it's freedom, it's adrenaline, it's pace, and you see all the beauty of the world around you.

33:14And the focus I find is really good. Conscious of time, and I want to sort of almost go reflective with the perspective maturity you've got now, and the fact that you are a role model in business, and all this knowledge, and you love that mentoring and that coaching element. What advice would you give to someone coming through? Number one, it doesn't matter where you start. I know a lot of young folk feel anxious about what's my first thing, my first job. I started in the nuclear industry. I worked as a checkout girl years ago. You know, you do all sorts of different roles. Your path takes you in the right direction.

33:55So it's important to have a sense of direction, but it really doesn't matter where you start. And just starting somewhere, figuring out which bits of it you enjoy, which bits you don't, and moving with your energy, I think is really important. The second is, I've been blessed with some outstanding leaders through my career, and I've taken something from each of them. And I think you have to choose the right boss. And be at choice in choosing the right boss, because if that's not right, by the way gallop poll i think for 40 years or more has been saying that 70 percent of people leave a bad manager poor manager so um there's a pretty good indicator of why people move on so choosing the right boss is really really really important it's a lot of your life is uh in the working day and stay learning we talked about that just make sure you're curious and you're uh you're learning new stuff and be broad about what you learn.

34:58You never know. I've done, worked on boards in different sectors. What you learn in one sector, you can bring across to another and it might be in a slightly different way, but, you know, just being broadly read, broadly understood, having hobbies, getting involved in life. Pigeon holding into a niche. Yeah, because you're much more useful in your roles at work if you've got a broader perspective. So those would be the things. And there are so many people who tell you what you can't do. I don't know, especially as a young woman, when I was coming up, maybe it's different now. I have a house full of boys, so I can't comment much on what it's like for young women.

35:44But people told me throughout my career what I couldn't do. And I think it's really important just in your core to have a sense of who you are and what you believe you can do and to do it anyway. And just let it all wash. It's not helpful. It's not a good narrative to take on. And it's really important just to reference inside yourself as to who you are and what you can do, what you want to do and set out for it. I love that. Self-belief, back yourself, give it a go. Self-belief. And when you're a leader, by the way, your organisation's relying on you for that belief. So it's really important.

36:28It's coming from the inside and you're bringing your energy and optimism to it. So that I think is quite, I think I would, I wish I'd known that when I was 21. That's exactly why I asked you. Yeah. And actually, I've got one other question that's just a bit more specific, which is possibly a bit of a harsh question because it goes against what you're saying about trying lots of different things. But if you were now with this knowledge and perspective you have looking at the, specifically the tech advancements and innovation we are in right now, what would you go into? Which sector would you go into?