By Alexie Seller, Co-Founder and CEO
I recently saw the power of taking senior leaders out of their regular roles and immersing them in another business context to reveal new opportunities.
My discovery came from a number of realisations built across cultures, countries and companies during our Leadership Impact Program hosted in May.
Through our fellowship programs we’d already hosted more than 1,000 students and professionals across India and Nepal. But what we wanted to achieve with the Leadership Impact Program was different. We wanted a deep focus on the individual and real opportunities for exchanging knowledge between leaders from around the world and our leadership team at Pollinate Group.
We were joined by four executives from Worley, Arup, ARENA and Finncorn Consulting for one week in Bangalore. On the first morning I was nervous, what could Pollinate Group offer that these leaders hadn’t already accessed in their 20+ year careers?
How wrong I was
Firstly, I realised what different worlds we operate in. India presents such sheer contrasts and varied experiences, sometimes in the blink of an eye, that your senses can be bewildered, including your sense of self.
Fighting for an Uber and battling traffic we traveled from highly developed, inner-city Bangalore, and the communities we serve—where families live in self-constructed tents with the most basic provisions. It was here that we all heard first-hand the resilience and aspirations of women entrepreneurs who have no education and have never worked, but are motivated and focused to grow their business to help their families get ahead. Not your standard day for leaders outside our team.
The combination of new sights, sounds and stories threw everyone out of their comfort zone and into a space of reflection and introspection, including the Pollinate leadership team. We were seeing what we do every day through someone else’s perspective.
Secondly, I realised how far the world of social enterprise and startups has come in six years, and how much leaders across sectors can learn from our approaches.
Throughout the week we were workshopping solutions to key business and sector challenges. We had to present daily, with limited time, to our colleagues. It was like ripping off a bandaid. This is something we’ve built in to our weekly meetings and check-ins, a way to be clear about what’s not yet finished but get feedback and support to improve.
Usually, leaders are asked to know the answers all the time and present a finished product. But on the program we had the chance to test raw ideas every day in a welcome space. We all agreed this significantly furthered our thinking over the week compared to if we had just done one final presentation.
Taking leaders out of their comfort zone is great for shaking up our thinking, but it’s what we do with that experience that matters
One of the Leadership Impact Program’s working groups were tasked with prototyping a solution to the problem statement: how might we scale our women entrepreneurship network?
Pollinate Group’s network of women was moving along in India, but we were moving slowly and sales were low, which was demotivating our new entrepreneurs and causing teams to lose faith in the opportunity. By the end of the week, after daily interrogations of our model and testing new approaches and theories the response was unanimous: we know how to solve this problem and now we need to go and do it.
Getting to this point was a huge feat – it aligned our thinking and helped us all recognise the priorities and major barriers in our way. We had just spent a large part of the week talking about leverage points to change systems, and that the most effective way to do this is to change people’s mindsets. Now the leadership team had clarity on where we were going, how would we bring the mindset of the rest of our team along with us once we got back into the office on Monday?
As I thought through the next steps, another major problem stared me in the face. We didn’t have the forum or space to flow this information quickly through to the rest of our team. If we couldn’t help the rest of the organisation progress their thinking along with us, we were never going to be able to enable them to operate creatively on the ground.
Without our front-line team getting access to the latest thinking and ideas we were holding ourselves back.
Fortunately, throughout the Leadership Impact Program we were introduced to simple yet effective change management theories that helped me address this new problem that was going to be critical to our success. Just three days later, we were ready to act.
Taking a risk to break our rhythm
To create a mindset shift somehow we needed to break up the rhythm in our system and allow new behaviours to develop—where our ground teams were part of the problem solving and learning and pivoting quickly.
To do this I formed a new, internal working group (Suryamukhi Squad) with the objective of working through the challenges of scaling our women entrepreneur network in India. The squad includes representatives from every location, every team, and from every level.
Most people don’t sit in on meetings with the CEO to think through strategy and test ideas, but at Pollinate Group, now they do.
The squad now explores case studies, mindsets, behaviour change, systems change, and whatever is relevant to the immediate obstacles our team faces when trying to increase women’s participation in our network. I quite simply realised that it was my role as the leader to expose as many people in our organisation to these new frames of thinking as possible.
Team members were rewarded for sharing a new approach they’ve tried, whether successful or not. We ran a live case study where we’d failed to support a new entrepreneur and asked everyone involved to reflect on what had happened and how we could improve. The group even co-created the project goal: the Suryamukhi Squad will cease to exist as soon as everyone in our team understands their role in scaling the women entrepreneur network.
In the beginning it was critical to create a new space that enabled our team to explore, without an expectation to have answers all the time. Most importantly, I made it clear that I didn’t have the answer. Our team used to default to asking me for decisions during uncertain times. The new approach has changed our team’s behaviour and empowered them to identify and solve the challenges they meet every day.
It’s worth investing time to let leaders step out
It has been eye-opening for me to see this change flow across our entire organisation. I gave myself and my leadership team space to reflect, explore, dive down and resurface over the course of the one-week Leadership Impact Program. Thanks to this experience we’ve now covered more ground in the last two months than we did in the past year on one of our biggest strategic challenges.
The results are compelling. Since Pollinate Group’s leaders have implemented what we learned after stepping out of our day-to-day environment we’ve seen 5-fold growth in sales from our women entrepreneurs, and it’s still on the rise! In fact, in the week since drafting this blog we’re now on track for 8-fold growth.
We’ve also completely changed the way we approach problems. No longer defaulting to setting a target or a number to affect change, we have all seen the power in focussing on shifting mindsets. This has unleashed a new wave of creativity across our entire team, and a new sense of ownership for everyone in our organisation to apply themselves to tackle our most persistent problems.
The benefits for our other participants is indicating similar impacts. Yoong Heng Tan from Arup demonstrated leadership in eliminating single-use plastic and steering his environmental committee to take bolder action. You can read about his experience of the program here.
I’ve never seen such rapid impact from a leadership program, and I know this transformation my team and I have led is here to stay.
What opportunities are you missing in your business by not stepping out?
We’re hosting our next Leadership Impact Program on 14-18 October 2019.
If you’re ready to invest in yourself as a leader, learning from us while we learn from you, I encourage you read more or contact us via info@pollinategroup.org