Chris revisits the key points made by Spriha Srivastava, adds his own insights and gives listeners some suggestions for practical actions they can take immediately to help them get where they want to go.
Welcome to every one of our Perspectives from the Top community of listeners around the world to “Reflections on the Top”. “Reflections” is to help you get the best from the series by me reviewing the key insights from our latest guest, Spriha Srivastava – London Bureau Chief and the International Executive Editor for Insider, overseeing over 100 journalists across the UK and Singapore newsrooms delivering leading news service covering business, politics and life.
Prior to joining Insider, Spriha was the Deputy Digital News Editor for CNBC International in London. She helped manage a team of reporters for CNBC.com and regularly wrote and edited market-moving, fast-paced business news stories. Previously Spriha worked at the Financial Times’ Money Management magazine covering personal finance, where she won an award for her work and at Thomson Reuters where she was one of the moderators for Global Markets Forum, a 24×7 live forum for traders and market professionals.
Spriha has won a number of awards for her work. In 2015 she was a runner up in newcomer of the year category in Santander Media Awards. In July 2020, Spriha won Women Economic Forum’s “Iconic Women Creating A Better Tomorrow” award, September 2020 was also shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Award in media category. She was recently also included as one of the Top 50 leaders in the UK recognized for kindness in leadership.
Spriha has a BA & MA in politics, an MA in journalism and studied business journalism at Wharton.
Having been born and brought up in India she had her first job there before moving over to UK, and also spending time in USA. One of the first things that became clear was Spriha has a multicultural perspective on both work and society. But not only the differences between India and Western countries have created this but also the fact that India itself is such a vast country with a significant diversity of cultures and languages. So as a result Spriha has naturally developed an understanding of, and ability to work with and develop, diversity as asset. Perhaps a capability that many brought up within western society sometimes lack.
Spriha has specifically mentioned this in respect of critical areas such as recruitment, development, and mentoring. Especially as diversity is becoming increasingly important to enable organisational performance and effectiveness. Diversity of experience builds diversity of thought which is key to agility and success.
Her account of her first job in UK in the world of financial markets brought out a really interesting point - that she was helped to become knowledgeable by her colleagues who, in effect, coached her to speed up her onboarding. This is worth mentioning as the proactive coaching of knew team members by more experienced team members is without doubt the fastest way to get new team members fully up to speed. On boarding is often a neglected area but getting it right can increase the joiners performance by over 25% in the 1st year. But sadly this is too often left to be an ad hoc event rather than something that is part of organisational practise.
In addition Spriha also mentioned the value that she got by just talking to customers about what they wanted from the service provided. That sounds like complete common sense but this emphasises the importance of everybody in an organisation understanding what the end customer wants. This isn't just about customer facing staff. If staff who are internal facing also understand customer needs, and if possible have met real customers, this adds significant improvement to the alignment of their effort onto the needs of customers.
Now what's interesting is that Sprihas next job from the world of global financial markets into personal finance journalism for the Financial Times about as far apart as is possible to get in the world of finance. So this was a massive change in what she was doing and another significant learning experience. But what was powerful about this role was that Spriha realised the real impact she could have for good all those who read what she was writing, so the job took on a real personal resonance, a purpose. As an example her realisation that often women don't take a major role being the financial planning around families and her encouragement for them to take more of a role.
But then after this role which you would see as a traditional journalism writing articles on a regular basis her move into the CNBC newsroom took her back to the news driven fast-paced world that was global finance. But she then, with the encouragement of her editor took up the job of deputy editor, leading a team of reporters not just doing her own article's and within that the need to be dynamically adaptable to incoming news events and adapt the plans for publication that had been previously drawn up. This pace of change is rarely required in most organisations and demands significant agile thinking and leadership.
But her comment about the real impact that her editors encouragement to her to take a step up into the new role played shows the importence of leaders having, and showing, faith in their people to take on greater responsibility, even if sometimes the individuals themselves aren't fully confident in their own ability.
But what is so great about this is the value of these learning experiences for the future, in that now Spriha does exactly this for her own people to help them grow and develop which makes her a really effective and inspirational leader.
Not only that but it also taught Spriha that she needed to be more confident in standing up and promoting herself to develop her career. In my senior HR roles, particularly as global head of leadership for UBS, I have often seen scenarios where young women in particular who have the capability but lack the confidence don't speak up for themselves, whereas in some cases young men who have the confidence but not the capability do so.
In the organisational context this is really important that the identification of those who can go further it is not just restricted to those who can promote themselves louder which links to why the mentoring of young women is so important to give them confidence to move forwards.
So that step up with CNBC was fundamental to Sprihas next move to be the editor at Insider where she was covering a wider range of topics from the financial world to wider society, has over 100 journalists reporting to her, not just in London but also in Singapore and also she is responsible for looking for opportunities to set up other newsrooms outside the USA. You can hear in her voice the amazing passion that she has for what she does. It's great.
Her comment was that the first thing that leadership is about is the need for a clear vision for what you want to achieve and the strategy to do it. Then it's about ensuring that you are absolutely clear communicating this with your people. Getting that right Spriha said was the reason that they were able to be able to deliver the quality of news as they are currently doing AND also to be constantly expanding. That ability to be expanding confirms the success of this clarity of communication of vision and day-to-day execution.
However the beauty of what Spriha then said was a true understanding of what communication really is, true communication is a two way process and too often we forget this as leaders. We get into this mindset that we are there to make decisions, to tell people what to do, to be people of action. Forgetting that two way communication is absolutely vital in ensuring that what we want to get done does get done. The second-half of communication is listening. As you may have heard said many times as we have two ears and only one mouth the logic is that we should spend twice as much time listening as we do speaking. Something but perhaps all of us should remember not only for our working lives but also for our personal lives.
Spriha beautifully described this as her “advice monster” where when someone comes to her with a problem there is a well-intentioned desire two jump in and give them a quick solution. Now whilst well-intentioned she said the effect of this is to disempower the individual in terms of the problem, and also to reduce the learning value that they could have gained if they worked out their own solution.
This is also a classic problem for senior leaders who become mentors, and we've already said how important it is for people to have mentors and for people to be mentors. But effective mentoring is about just what Spriha has said - giving the individual time and space and helping them develop their own answer to their own problem where at all possible. So please, if you are a mentor make sure that your “advice monster” is locked up before you start mentoring, and if at all possible whenever you work with your people, unless it used as a last resort.
But what then I found really interesting was the way that Shriha then talked about this communication and how she felt it was important to do during the pandemic with her people - to proactively support them more. Now that's what every leader should have been doing but the evidence is a significant proportion, by virtue of remote working, went more hands, off failing to give the support which people needed and as a result a significant number of people remote working felt disconnected from the organisation and around 15% said they suffered mental health problems as a result. Those leaders didn't do what Spriha did and what's they should do every day - proactively taking time to listen to their people.
Leading on from listening she mentioned the importance of giving feedback which she had experienced earlier in her career from previous leaders which significantly helped her. Now this doesn't only relate to Spriha giving feedback to her people on their performance because she ensures that each time these meetings happen she also always asks her people for feedback on her performance and how she could help them be better.
This is an approach that I have seen frequently used by some of the best leaders I've worked with, or a derivative of this is where the leader will sit down with the team and share their own performance management feedback from their boss and ask the team how they can get better.
Now I know for many of you listening who are leaders that sounds like a truly frightening prospect but actually it's a truly powerful opportunity. Firstly you might actually get some good feedback, secondly you might actually get some good ideas on how to get better, and thirdly the simple fact that you have asked will massively increase the level of trust and respect you have from the team.
Linking this through Spriha attended the World Economic Forum and she said that there was significant discussion around what leadership now meant and many said that it had significantly changed. Everybody everybody said that leaders now needed to be agile to meet the needs of a truly dynamic world and within that leaders need to utilise the expert capabilities of their best people to collaborate to find solutions to what's happening. To be honest I don't think that's new leadership at all that's what leaders should have been doing before the pandemic, It's just that most of them weren't doing it properly. Then Covid forced them to do it or fail. Now the dynamic market and the demands for better leadership by people mean they have to do it that's why they're all talking about it.
She also said that CEOs had spoken about this concept of “leading by example” - Which is only been around for a couple of 100 years but let's forget that for a moment - but interestingly one CEO spoke about it within the context of burnout of executives. She quoted him saying that they had a problem with executive burnout but then somebody pointed out to him the example that he was setting in terms of the hours he worked and that in an attempt to follow his example people perhaps with wider responsibilities than he had trying to keep up his level of workload as well were not physically or mentally able to do so. What he then did was interesting - he reviewed his diary cut out meetings he didn't need to attend and delegated the attendance to others and he took one hour a day out to go for a swim. He communicated this across the organisation and subsequently other people started doing the same thing which had significant benefits in terms of well-being.
What I find shocking is that this CEO did not realise that his behaviour was being modelled by leaders further down the organisation. So listeners if you are a leader at any level please be aware that your people will follow your example and copy your behaviour to some degree be that good or bad. Maybe reflect on that and what example you are setting.
As a side point listeners all the evidence is that if you can get away from the work environment sometime around lunchtime to effectively let your brain cool down for a little time it will have significant benefits in terms of your health and, perhaps unexpectedly your creativity, by finding original solutions to some of the issues and challenges you might have.
Spriha also mentioned the discussions that she had had with CEOs at Davos about the challenges of hybrid working and how she personally had tried to implement this which by trusting employees and giving the, the responsibility to decide when it was best for them to come into the office dependent on their personal circumstances. From my perspective that is the most effective way to do it, with the caveat that the level of remote working is related to the balance between work that the individuals can do at home versus the need to come into the office to do any team working that is required.
So whilst individuals may be able to do some of their work at home more effectively than in the office there are times when they need to come into the office to collaborate, potentially also to do some of their development and contribute to and engage in the wider organisational community to maintain the culture of the organisation and socialise.
On this she made the really interesting point that some of the larger organisations at World Economic Forum had said that they were losing some of their talent to smaller organisations which had the flexibility to offer a larger degree of hybrid working than they were currently able to do which was forcing them to reconsider their strategy.
One of her final points which was I think of significant value is that when recruiting it's all too easy to go to the traditional sources of recruitment that you've used which sometimes are likely to produce candidates of limited diversity and what we need in our organisations now his diversity to give us diversity of thought. So Spriha said it is really important to potentially look at non traditional sources of recruitment true enable you to achieve optimal diversity across your team or your organisation.
When asked my usual final question about what leaders could do to be better, or indeed what colleagues could do to be better colleagues, Spriha was quite clear that this was about showing empathy to others, listening to them and understanding them better. That then allows you to collaborate with them more effectively to achieve what you, and they wish to achieve. And that this empathy also helps you understand the whole person because it is so important to we really appreciate the humanity of the people around us as much as their professional capability.
So perhaps that is the one simple output that you can take away from what Spriha said amongst all the other great ideas about mentoring, collaboration, seeing the big picture and similar ways to improve and grow. Maybe this is just about thinking genuinely and honestly about how you are interacting with the people you have around you at work and whether you are showing empathy, showing you care, showing interest in them as people rather than interacting on a purely transactional basis. From my experience of working with senior leaders for many years helping them develop in this sort of area it is very easy under the pressure of work to not realise that you have moved into a highly transactional attitude when dealing with people. You might not be aware that this is happening but they certainly will be.
Over the next week every time you interact with somebody after you've done it ask yourself if what's just happened a genuine interaction where I demonstrated interest, care, or however you describe it or was that purely a transactional interaction. Yes, some interactions will be transactional by virtue of time pressure, but when that pressure does not apply interactions should be trust and relationship building.
As with previous guests and now Spriha hopefully you are seeing a pattern of simple actions you can take to be more successful. Share these interviews colleagues who would benefit so they can grow and develop with you. Certainly I will be using these powerful points in my speaking and Masterclasses in the future.
If you have any thoughts or questions connect with me on LinkedIn or via email as detailed on the Perspectives website. Don't forget to sign up to Perspectives from the Top. It's free, so you don't miss any of the great episodes in the future.
That’s it for now, so from me its onwards and upwards until our next episode.