What Leadership Looks Like

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0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Hi, Manoush. And on the show today, what leadership looks like. Hi, Patrice. Hello. How are you? I'm really good, thank you. This is Patrice Gordon. She works in finance at Virgin Atlantic. But a few years ago, the head of HR came to her with an unusual request. And she said, oh, Craig, who's the CEO of Virgin Atlantic, is interested in this reverse mentoring scheme. And he doesn't have any black females within his personal circle or within his work circle.

1:29Would you be interested in being Craig's reverse mentor? Basically, would Patrice be willing to mentor or coach Virgin Atlantic's CEO? I didn't have to think long and hard. It was an automatic yes almost. I didn't really know what I was getting myself involved in, to be honest. Maybe you've heard of reverse mentoring. Since the 90s, companies have been pairing up younger employees with senior staff to keep them up to date, usually about new technology. But this was looking at it from a different lens, right? It was looking at it from an ethnicity lens and from a female lens. So before you went to meet then-CEO Craig Krieger for the first time, what was going on in your mind?

2:14Did it bother you that he didn't have many women, no Black women, in his executive circle? No, it didn't bother me because actually it's incredibly common. Look, across the UK, there's 8 % of CEOs are female. I think there's only one that is a woman of color. So it didn't surprise me at all. For several months, Patrice and Craig met one-on-one. And actually, I drove us to our first meeting, which was a little bit nerve-wracking. I thought, well, they're not speed. And as they got to know each other, Patrice told him more about what it was like to be a woman of color at Virgin Atlantic, and in the world more generally.

2:54his intention was to understand the lived experience of someone who's very different to him and figure out actually within the organization were there any barriers to my success that he could help influence or change what did you say i said to him one of my key things was when you're looking at your pipeline or when you're asking your leaders to look at their pipeline or look at who they mentor, both officially and unofficially. Are they replicas of themselves? Are they hiring and promoting and developing because of that similarity bias? And he fully took that on board and he challenged his leadership team also.

3:39From discrimination to climate change and inequity, leaders today are being asked to solve big systemic problems. Many are also being pressed to take a new, more humble approach to taking charge. But can authority and humility coexist? And at a time when stories about authoritarian heads of state dominate the headlines, who can show us what leading differently looks like? Well, today on the show, ideas about evolving leadership. We'll hear how the head of one of the world's smallest countries is leading the biggest nations on fighting climate change. We thought, how could we make a difference?

4:24What issues could we choose to champion to try to shift the dial? And we'll learn what it takes to nurture a new generation of female leaders in a nation where educating girls is outlawed. Afghan women have fought many hardships. Each one of those acts of silencing women only awakens the anger and sense of resistance in thousands more. But first, let's go back to Patrice Gordon, the Virgin Atlantic exec who mentored her boss, the CEO. The experience changed him as a leader, and it gave Patrice a stronger sense of belonging. I knew that the work that I was doing made a difference, but from that relationship, I really felt like I mattered.

5:14The best type of feedback you can get is feedback from your employees. But most leaders suffer because they think too highly of themselves. because their opinion of themselves is actually disconnected from what others see. This is Tomas Chamaro-Pramožic. And I'm an organizational psychologist. So Tomas studies human behavior at work. Specifically, he researches why some people become leaders. And what attributes or qualities people actually should have in order to lead effectively. And Tomas says empathy and making an employee feel like they matter, that is good leadership. But he thinks the reason why Patrice's story sounds so remarkable to us is because it's still so rare.

6:02Empathy, kindness, emotional intelligence. It's far less controversial today to talk about these traits as emblematic of good leadership. And yet, how many of us are capable of naming famous CEOs who are known for their humility? There aren't that many. So you're saying we pay a lot of lip service, that we say we want compassionate and smart leaders, but the people who actually rise to the top of organizations are who? We go for people who are confident rather than competent. We go for people who are charismatic rather than humble. and we often even pick people who are narcissistic rather than honest.

6:45The reason for this is that for 99 % of our revolutionary history, we needed people who were tough, who were brave, who were courageous. It was easy to choose people who are ethical and honest because we mostly hung out with the same 10 or 20 people all of our life and everyone had a very, very accessible reputation. But if you fast forward 250 ,000 years in a complex world where we still want to cling to what we see and we want to decide whether somebody should be president based on whether they look good on television or in our own imagination, it will be fun to have a beer with them. Unfortunately, the results are what we mostly see, which is not so much competence in leadership roles.

7:31Okay, so we may think that our ideas about leadership have evolved a lot. But according to your research, we continue to consciously or subconsciously associate certain attributes with leadership. Like what? One of the attributes that first comes to mind is actually gender. If you ask people to think about a leader, probably eight or nine out of ten people that come to mind will be men rather than women. The other thing we know is that irrespective of the gender that people think of when they imagine a hypothetical or a real leader, they tend to think about attributes that are mostly masculine.

8:14things like confidence, assertiveness, bravado, toughness, dominance, aggression. But the big paradox that I have researched is that if leadership selection was like a wine blind tasting contest and we actually ignored the gender or the sex of the individuals and we only picked people based on their talent, on their merit or on their potential, out, we would actually end up with something like 60 or 65 percent of leaders being female rather than male. So the main question we should be asking is not why there aren't any more women leaders, but why so many incompetent men become leaders. Here's Tomasz Czemoro-Premuzik on the TED stage.

9:00My research suggests there are three main reasons for this. The first is we assume that confident people have more potential for leadership, but in any area of talent, including leadership, there is just very little overlap between confidence, how good people think they are at something, and competence, how good they actually are at something. The second reason is our love for charismatic individuals, particularly since the 1960s mass media explosion, but this has been turbocharged by the recent digital age. But in fact, the best leaders are humble rather than charismatic, to the point of even being rather boring.

9:39For example, imagine a movie on Angela Merkel. She wakes up, has breakfast with her husband, goes to meetings well-prepared, lets other people talk without interrupting them, makes rational decisions. There are no scandals about her. In contrast, there is a surplus of captivating biopics on charismatic leaders with a fascinating dark side who end up ruining their countries and organizations. The third and final reason is our inability to resist the allure of narcissistic individuals. Much of the popular advice that focuses on helping people become leaders nurtures and promotes a narcissistic mindset.

10:28Unfortunately, this creates a surplus of leaders who are unaware of their limitations and unjustifiably pleased with themselves. So, Tomas, I have to ask, so far we've been using terms like masculine and feminine to describe different attributes of leadership. But, you know, nowadays, so many of us are trying to avoid stereotypes based on gender. So are those really the right terms to use? it's absolutely fair to acknowledge that this labeling or denomination of masculine or feminine is based on somewhat archaic and ancient archetypes or stereotypes it's also important to acknowledge that when we talk about femininity and masculinity it is precisely an attempt to go beyond their biological gender or their sexual orientation to look at quantitative differences, so ordinal differences in traits that have historically been seen as either more dominant or, you know, more pro-social, more altruistic.

11:38You're suggesting turning traditional ways of leading on their head. But if someone has never seen that kind of leadership modeled for them or they've never seen it succeed, this could feel incredibly risky, maybe even scary to them. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, fundamentally, it requires taking risks. It requires a lot of humility and courage to try different things. You know, we evolve to trust our instincts, but actually the best leaders learn how to go against their nature to be the best version of themselves. So simply from a kind of group selection point of view in a crude Darwinian way, if you like, the safe and rational prediction to make is that institutions, organizations, and societies that are better led and that have more good, decent, competent leaders in charge will outperform their competitors.

12:38Good leadership is always an argument with tradition. Leaders fight with the past. They argue with tradition to replace it with something better. That's organizational psychologist Tomasz Czemaroprimuzik. His book is called Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Earlier you heard from Patrice Gordon. Her book is called Reverse Mentoring, Removing Barriers and Building Belonging in the Workplace. You can see both of their talks at TED.com. On the show today, what leadership looks like. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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15:03So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, ideas about leadership and how who we think looks like a leader is changing. I was very shy and quiet and very studious as a child and as a teenager. So I think people would never have believed that I would go on to do the job that I'm doing. This is Scotland's former first minister and first ever female leader, Nicola Sturgeon. She left the post in 2023. I spoke to her while she was still in office.

15:52The most important lesson that I learned from my mom and dad was to follow your dreams. Never let anybody tell you that you couldn't have a go at doing what it was you wanted to do. Nicola's life story is one of a political prodigy. At age 16, she joined the Scottish National Party. At 21, she became the youngest candidate in Britain's general election. She was first minister for a decade, longer than anyone else. But the path to being in charge was not that smooth. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you lost your first seven elections. Is that right? I think I stopped counting, but that's probably true.

16:36But you know what? That was the best. These were the best lessons I could ever have learned. Because you learn about yourself. You develop a degree of resilience. You learn to work out why you had lost and what you could do better to try to win. Now, of course, in politics and in party politics and elections, it's never just down to you as an individual that you lost an election. It's about the standing of your party and the general political context. But nevertheless, you still have a responsibility to bring something of yourself to that and those losses. I don't think I'd be where I am today had I not suffered all of those losses.

17:16I mean, to push past those losses, I hate it. But the word that comes to mind for me is ballsy. But you were given a different nickname at the time. Nippy Sweetie. Yes, Nippy Sweetie. Which, nippy is not a nice word though, right? You see, Nippy Sweetie is a Scottish term, obviously. And in its negative sense means somebody who's, you know, a bit grumpy and bad-tempered and bossy and stride and not particularly pleasant, I suppose. but the nickname was given to me by a guy who I think the world of was a trade union official in the shipyard in the constituency I was contesting at the time and he meant it in its positive sense he meant it as somebody who was ballsy, who stood up for what she believed in who fought her corner but in the world of politics it was immediately taken in its negative sense and used as part of the efforts of my political opponents, elements of the media to characterize me in a particular way, which lots of young women, I think, encounter in politics and in other walks of life too.

18:25Yeah, so what did you do? Would you, you know, ignore it or laugh at it? Or what was your reaction? Well, one of the things that I look back on and understand now is when you are a woman, particularly a young woman in a very, very male environment, in order to be taken seriously, you end up almost emulating the behaviours of the men around you. Yeah. In terms of dressing a bit more severely, behaving in a much more strident, adversarial way. And what I now understand is that in trying to do that to fit in, you actually play into the stereotype that people are trying to label you with anyway. Yeah.

19:11You know, you've been in office now a long time and you've seen what it was like when women were expected to emulate traditionally masculine qualities, maybe strong arming people. But I'm wondering, after the Me Too movement, did things change? Do you feel like this younger generation is saying, no, we don't want you to use those qualities to lead? In fact, that is not leading anymore. I think it is changing. I think it's still got a way to go. I think women are finding it easier, perhaps, to be themselves and not to fall into those traps, because it is a trap. What I found was if you weren't behaving like the men around you, you were not taken seriously.

19:55But as soon as you started to do that, you were described as a nippy-sweetie and not feminine enough. So it's a double bind, a double whammy. And I think we are seeing women now lead in a way that is much more natural and actually makes for much better leadership. And I'm generalizing, I suppose, here. But I think women tend to lead with much more emotional intelligence, with much more ability to understand the real impacts of the decisions that they are taking. So I think we are seeing that female model of leadership come more to the fore, but we've still got a long way to go.

20:38So let's dive into the two big global issues that you have been tackling in Scotland in some pretty unique ways. You've actually given two TED Talks on these topics. And the first one is about rethinking GDP as a measure of a country's success. Yeah. Well, firstly, I think it's time to turn away from GDP as the sole measure of a country's success. I'm not saying it's not important at all to measure our success in that way, but I don't think it's sufficient. I mean, if you take GDP measurements, you know, we don't measure unpaid care. You know, people who look after elderly relatives or children, but we do measure illegal, the proceeds of illegal drug use.

21:25So there's something a bit wonky in having that as the sole measure of our success as a country. I believe overall, the most important metric is how happy are we? Here's Nicola Sturgeon on the TED stage. You know, when we focus on well-being, we start a conversation that provokes profound and fundamental questions. What really matters to us in our lives? What do we value in the communities we live in? What kind of country, what kind of society do we really want to be? In policy terms, this journey for Scotland started back in 2007 when we published what we call our National Performance Framework, looking at the range of indicators that we measure ourselves against.

22:18And those indicators are as varied as income inequality, the happiness of children, access to green spaces, access to housing. None of these are captured in GDP statistics, but they are all fundamental to a healthy and a happy society. And that broader approach is at the heart of our economic strategy, where we give equal importance to tackling inequality as we do to economic competitiveness. It drives our commitment to fair work, our path to a carbon zero economy. I mean, we know from economic transformations of the past that if we are not careful, there are more losers than winners. And as we face up to the challenges of climate change and automation, we must not make those mistakes again.

23:16So you mentioned climate change here as something that goes along with building a happier, obviously healthier society. And you actually gave another TED Talk more recently about the role that you and Scotland are trying to carve out for yourselves. At the recent big climate talks, Scotland was the host, but they weren't formally at the negotiating table. So talk to me about how you're trying to position Scotland as a leader on climate change. Well, I just wanted to do, I suppose, a couple of things. Firstly, make sure Scotland and the Scottish government was doing everything we possibly could to contribute to the best outcome from COP26.

24:01And we thought very carefully, given that we weren't around the negotiating table in our own right, how could we make a difference? What issues could we choose to champion to try to shift the dial a little bit on them? So that's the first thing. But then the other thing I wanted to do was showcase Scotland, because all countries, as we make this transition to net zero, we want to be the places where investment is coming, where the research has been done, where the innovation is happening. And this was a great opportunity to showcase Scotland to countries and companies and investors from around the world.

24:36You have really, I mean, despite Scotland being a really small country, you have decided to do a few things that other bigger countries are not doing. You announced that Scotland was going to be the first government to contribute to a loss and damage fund, offering money to countries who have faced harm from climate change. But really, how much of an impact can a country like Scotland really have? You are part of the UK. You are a very small country. Where do you see your ability to have real impact on the issue? First and foremost, we have to lead by example in what we are doing at home. But I think we demonstrated at COP that small countries can have a big voice.

25:21Loss and damage was one of the issues we decided in advance that we were going to champion. Because it's just a recognition that climate change, for many countries, they are suffering the loss and damage right now. They're suffering the harm right now. And the countries that are suffering most of that loss and damage are the countries that have done least to contribute to climate change. So those of us in countries like mine, industrialised countries, have a moral obligation to help those countries deal with that. Small countries have no time for small objectives. And we see examples of the leadership that small countries show everywhere we look.

26:01Take Bhutan. One million people or thereabouts became the first in the world to commit to being carbon neutral for all time. Since then, 130 countries of all sizes have followed suit. Or Fiji. In 2017, it hosted the UN Climate Conference and did so much to highlight the existential threat that climate change poses to island nations. Now, a country like Scotland, with a rich industrial past, has a special responsibility. We have disproportionately contributed to climate change, so we must do more now to help tackle climate change. So in recent years, Scotland, this small country, has decarbonised faster than any G20 country.

26:55We have just become... APPLAUSE

27:01We have just become the first nation in the world that is not an independent nation yet to publish an indicative nationally defined contribution showing how we will meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. So we've pledged to cut emissions by three quarters by 2030 and to be net zero by 2045. So my point today is that, yes, big countries matter, But the leadership of small nations matters too. I mean, it means rethinking the entire economy, right? How Scotland functions. We see Germany going through that as it tries to phase out coal and turn to wind. The United States is trying to figure out how to do that.

27:54How is Scotland going to do that? Because you have set very, very aggressive goals in terms of reducing your carbon emissions. way before, years before other countries have been called to do so? Well, yeah, I mean, we have, but I would argue that we're only doing what we are required to do in terms of the Paris obligations in order to play our small part in averting climate catastrophe for the planet. But this is something that is, it's an obligation for countries everywhere. Every country will have particular challenges. Scotland is a country that still produces oil and gas, so that transition is one of the most difficult for us.

28:34Every country has its difficulty, but the alternative to this is climate catastrophe and not leaving to future generations a planet that is habitable, and that is just, in my view, unthinkable. First Minister, this sounds like a naive question, but I really am wondering, do you love your job? yes yeah I do but it's not a naive question I suppose it's what does that mean I wouldn't do my job if I didn't love it it is the biggest privilege imaginable to be the first minister of your country and I love it and I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it I think what makes me sometimes step back from that question is when you say you love something it kind of creates this impression that it's really easy it's a bit of a breeze and it's always joyful and none of those things are or should be true about a job like mine you know there are some days particularly in the last two years where it's been you know really really tough where the decisions have been awful where I've you know really struggled with the magnitude of all of that.

29:53So yes, I love it, but I don't want in saying that to create the impression that it is a walk in the park because no job like this ever should be or ever could be. So when we first started talking, we discussed the different challenges that women face as leaders, sometimes the double standards that they have to navigate. And I want to bring up a topic that you have been asked about recently, which is menopause. I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of frustrating that this question is even being put to you in the first place. No male politician would be asked about his body. But on the other hand, as a woman myself, I feel like it's refreshing to hear you be honest about it.

30:41Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I've kind of said. I will try to do. I'm only beginning to, I suppose, experience what that means in reality and work out how I'm going to deal with it. But I suspect I and most women in positions like mine will find that going through the menopause, you just have to work that much harder to overcome some of this. So, you know, maybe we just get better. I don't know. Maybe having the world ruled by menopausal women would be the best thing for everybody. but I don't mind admitting it's not something that I feel all that comfortable with when even although I know intellectually there's no reason for me not to feel comfortable with it every woman goes through it but I don't it's very personal it's not something that women have been openly talking about yet for very long so I do feel a little bit nervous and uncomfortable about it but then I also feel if somebody like me doesn't you know open up about what it's like and how I cope with it, then I'm not doing what I could do to make it a bit easier for the next female First Minister of Scotland who might go through this to not feel quite so at sea about it.