About Jeremy

Jeremy Solomons is the UK-born and USA-naturalized founder and president of Jeremy Solomons & Associates, which helps current and future leaders to connect and communicate effectively across all cultures – national, organizational, professional and individual.

The Global Contrarian – Blog 8

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Jeremy

Ending Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying and Masculine Imbalance – Part 1

by Jeremy Solomons

Early Spring greetings to those of you in the Northern hemisphere. Or early Autumn greetings to those of you in the Southern hemisphere. And if you are right on the Equator, take your pick.

It has been just over two months since I wrote my last “monthly” blog on “A Very Inconvenient Truth about Global Leadership”, which focused on “Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying” and “Masculine Imbalance” (which you can still read on http://jeremysolomons.com/blog/).

But that’s an improvement on the two-year gap between that blog and my previous one in January 2014.

These two months have allowed me to hit the tarmac running in terms of my 2016 work on global leadership and they have allowed others to respond to the January blog.

A colleague in Brazil likened “Masculine Imbalance” to what Barry Oshry calls the “Dance of Blind Reflex” in his book “Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life”.

A colleague in China preferred to call “Masculine Imbalance” either “ego-based” or “lower-self” leadership, as opposed to “wisdom-based” or “higher-self” leadership.

Whatever terms we use, there clearly needs to be action taken on all levels – societal, organizational and individual.

SOCIETAL

On a societal level, conscious and proactive governments can certainly bring about change in terms of “Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying” and “Masculine Imbalance”.

Goal #5 of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explicitly calls on all countries to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.

In 2003, Norway broke new ground with a controversial law requiring all of its larger companies to have 40% of their boards made up of women. There was deep initial skepticism about these “quotas” but the law has helped change Norway’s corporate culture for ever. Instead of tokenism, women now have a critical mass in power sharing and decision making and are making a vital contribution to corporate strategy and success. Other countries have taken note.

Elsewhere, true democracy and free speech can be the best cures for “Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying” and “Masculine Imbalance”.

The best recent example of that is in Myanmar where Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released from a total of 15 years of house arrest and led her National League for Democracy to victory in last year’s general election.

And here in the USA, it will be very interesting to see what the people will decide in this year’s presidential election, which at the time of writing looks likely to feature a Republican candidate, who was recently denounced in an unprecedented way by his 2012 predecessor for his “personal qualities: the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics.”

ORGANIZATIONAL

On the organizational level, grassroots activism is important but in the end, senior leadership vision, support and action are the key drivers for sustainable change in terms of fairness and balance.

Vision, Mission and Values are usually good places to start.

One well-known energy company was very explicit about what it wanted and did not want in its blunt values statement: “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves … We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don’t belong here.”

What was this enlightened company? None other than Enron whose leaders committed all of these crimes.

So words are clearly not enough. Action is necessary.

In the late 1990s, Mark Moody-Stuart became chairman of Royal Dutch Shell – which was known for being dominated by tall, white, British and Dutch men – and soon realized that this oil behemoth needed to “re-cultivate its garden” to attract, develop and retain high performing women and other under-represented groups in senior leadership positions.

And so he launched a worldwide campaign to increase Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), which has fundamentally altered Shell’s corporate culture.

In the late 2000s, Jim Turley, who freely describes himself as “a pale, stale male” did likewise at the staid Big 4 accounting firm of EY (formerly Ernst and Young).

Believing that “inclusive leadership is good leadership nowadays”, he sponsored and participated in a series of high level forums to discuss these tough issues and then launched a series of targeted training programs cascading down through all of EY’s senior to middle level management. They are called “Leadership Matters” and they are still ongoing around the world eight years later.

Partly as a result of this initiative, EY is now fourth in Diversity Inc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity, compared with 43^rd in 2007. It is comfortably ahead of the traditional global D&I powerhouses of Sodexo, Wells Fargo and IBM but Novartis, Kaiser Permanente and PWC still lead the pack.

So how can other organizations take concrete steps on D&I and make their cultures more fair, balanced and inclusive?

A great place to start is with the unique and profoundly usable and useful Global Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks (GDIB).

It is a comprehensive checklist of organizational standards and outcomes that was first created 10 years ago by Julie O’Mara and Alan Richter, based on earlier research by TVA and in conjunction with a group of global “expert panelists” (which now numbers nearly 100 practitioners and researchers around the world, including this blogger).

The fourth edition of the GDIB has just been completed and it now includes 14 categories in four distinct but related groups:

Foundation, including vision, strategy, leadership and structure
Internal, including recruitment, retention, benefits and training
Bridging, including assessment, communication and sustainability
External, including community relations, products, customer service and supplier diversity

Each of these 14 categories also includes concrete action steps, which can be of great help to board members, management teams and diversity councils alike.

And best of all, the GDIB can be downloaded for absolutely no fee at http://diversitycollegium.org/downloadgdib.php as long as you tell Julie or Alan what you are doing and share results.

If you want to learn more about the GDIB and other organizational initiatives to end bullying and increase balance and fairness, you may want to join me and about 1,000 other committed D&I change agents at the Forum for Workplace Inclusion in Minneapolis on March 29-31 – https://www.stthomas.edu/workplaceforum/.

If you can’t make it, I will report back in my next blog in April and I will also explore what individuals can do to end “Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying” and “Masculine Imbalance”.

Happy Spring! Happy Autumn! Happy Whatever!

The Global Contrarian – Blog 7

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Jeremy

A Very Inconvenient Truth about Global Leadership

It has been two years since I last wrote and posted my “monthly” blog on this website.

I could come up with some great story about being abducted by aliens for extensive brain draining or orchestrating a humanitarian relief operation in a flood ravaged corner of the world.

The reality is much more mundane but no less powerful or instructive.

Since January 2014, I have been more than busy supporting my daughter as she has been wading through the nerve-wracking shoals of her senior year at high school and first semester in college.

On a professional level, I have been trying to help global leaders navigate the treacherous waters of economic pressures, regulatory clampdowns, organizational politics, team dysfunction and personal trauma.

And on a societal level, I have been observing the seismic shifts in geopolitics as China, Russia and the USA have been playing out a bizarre new version of the Cold War while terrorists, narcos and madmen massacre innocent civilians from Mexico to France to Syria.

There is a key theme that runs through all of the above activities but it is one that is rarely recognized, acknowledged or discussed. It is what I would call “Institutionally Sanctioned Bullying”.

On college campuses and even high and middle schools in the USA and beyond, many young women and people of color live in fear of gender-, race- and religion-based aggression and attack, often while educational leaders do little of practical use beyond delayed knee-jerk responses.

If you don’t believe me, watch the shocking documentary “The Hunting Ground” or read Ta-Nehisi Coates award-winning book “Between the World and Me”.

In the workplace, leaders don’t just rise to the level of their own incompetence but also to a point where they become tinpot dictators who can make lives truly miserable for all of those around them and get away with it. Sometimes for years.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s recent HBR article on “Why Bad Guys Win at Work” makes compelling reading. He mentions the “Dark Triad” of Pyschopathy, Narcissism and Machiavellianism. Know any bosses like that?

And around the world, both self-appointed and elected political leaders abuse, browbeat and even torture the very people that they are meant to be serving, protecting and inspiring. And not just in the Middle East. Hal Marcovitz explores the history and implications of political abuse in his recent book: “Exposing Torture: Centuries of Cruelty”

There are many causes for these linked behaviors and as a conscious but empowered man, I tend to focus on what I would call “Masculine Imbalance”.

I am careful not to say “Male Imbalance” because this type of behavior is not just exhibited by men. Although it is mostly the case.

Some of this imbalance may be biological but then I am no expert on testosterone and such.

But I believe that much of it is systemic within existing societal and organizational cultures.

A case in point was last Spring when I began the first in a series of coaching engagements with mid-level woman leaders at a few different globalizing companies.

This first coachee was an extremely smart, dedicated and passionate team leader who had a reputation of always getting the job done but burning personal bridges along the way as she was a perfectionist who could and would not suffer fools or failure.

Early on in our six-month engagement, she invited me to observe her facilitate the last day of a week-long large team meeting. She was obviously on best behavior. She did interrupt some people and ignored some others but overall, she was very gracious, inclusive and efficient.

Towards the end of the day, a much more senior male leader joined the meeting and displayed exactly the same kind of boorish, domineering and dismissive behavior that she had been accused of. And worse.

But no one complained about him. He was just being a “strong, proven leader with executive presence” in a highly masculine organizational culture where aggression and exclusion are not only condoned but praised and prized under the euphemisms of assertiveness and distinction.

So should she still try to change the behavior that she displayed outside the meeting? Should he change the behavior that he displayed inside the meeting? Should the organization they work for change its culture to eradicate such bullying masculine behavior by anyone and promote a different way of leading and getting results?

Clearly, the answer to all three questions is: YES!!!

But this is obviously much easier said than done.

The next blog will focus on what can be done to correct “Masculine Imbalance” and end bullying on an individual, organizational and societal level.

And hopefully, it will be written and actually appear on this website well before early 2018.

In the meantime, may I wish each reader a very happy, healthful and balanced New Year.

The Global Contrarian – Blog 6

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Jeremy

No Coincidences, No Regrets

Global Leadership Lessons from an Unlikely Source

“Maybe this all happened for a reason?”

These are the words of my wise, reflective 16-year-old daughter, Emma, who has had two near brushes with death in the last month.

Firstly, she experienced violent road rage first hand when another driver got so angry at not being able to pass her that he tried to ram her car and barge her into oncoming traffic. A few weeks later there was a split second of inattention and she ended up plowing into the back of a long traffic line and totaling her shiny first car.

Fortunately, she walked away from both incidents shaken but unscathed.

The same was true for this blogger six weeks ago when he got sideswiped by another car and for my daughter’s best friend a few nights ago when she fell asleep at the wheel and burst through two fences, ending in a ditch and totaling her car. My car was damaged but fixable.

Someone somewhere was clearly watching over us or playing a cruel joke or – as my daughter concluded – just trying to give us a warning and teach us a lesson.

But what was the lesson and how does this relate to Global Leadership?

This whole topic of really listening, reflecting on and learning from life’s many lessons is particularly appropriate at the end of the calendar year, which the Germans call “between the years”.

And it is particularly appropriate for new and old global leaders, who are usually so busy throughout the year that this might be their only chance to slow down and take stock for a little while.

They could begin with such questions as:

What was the highlight of the year just passed?
What was the low point?
What did I gain during the year?
What did I lose?
Who enriched my life the most and why?
Who challenged or drained me the most and why?
What do I hope to achieve in the coming year?
Whom do I want to become?
How will I know I am being successful?
Who will keep me accountable and how?

And more specifically, a current or budding global leader might also ask:

What does it mean, in a general sense, to be a truly global leader?
What does it mean to me personally to be a truly global leader?
What do I hope to achieve as a global leader?
How will it enhance my career, my work, and my personal life?
In what ways might it actually impinge on my career, my work, and my personal life?
What natural strengths, learned talents, overarching passions, and core values do I already possess to be a global leader?
What gaps do I have and what hot buttons and blind spots do I need to be aware of?
How can I best overcome my shortcomings through meditation, stretch assignments, travel, studying, coaching, etc.?
What else do I need to be successful on a global level?
How will I and others hold myself accountable?

All of these questions can and do lead to some very valuable insights, ideas and plans but they will not matter much if they are not accompanied by a strong set of personal values and an unerring belief in the power of positive, sustainable change.

Which brings us back to my daughter, Emma and recent events.

It would have been very easy for her to shrug off the recent incidents and only focus on the future and how quickly she could get a replacement car.

It would also have been very easy to get stuck in the past, wallowing in victimhood and blaming others for what happened or what nearly happened.

It is much harder to remain in the present and try to understand what happened and why and then come away stronger and more grateful, realizing that there are no coincidences and no regrets in a life to be lived fully and reflectively.

Or in the words of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (a Swiss American Psychiatrist famous for her five stages of grief): “Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

How many adult leaders can do this? Whether they are faced with life-threatening adversity or not?

The Global Contrarian – Blog 5

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Jeremy

Passing the Baton

How leaders ensure continuity and seal their legacy

The most recent JSA blog ended by mentioning Nelson Mandela and his 27-year imprisonment, which helped him to prepare to be the leader of the new South Africa in 1994. What it did not mention was the incredible fact that after waiting so long, he served only one five-year term before making way for his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.

Not only do great global leaders take responsibility and decisive action during their reigns of power but they also ensure that their good work will continue long after they are gone by carefully planning for their succession and grooming their successors.

A recent example of this comes from the most popular sport in the world: football (or soccer as it is known in the USA).

Last month, Sir Alex Ferguson, who is one of most well known, successful and feared managers on the planet, suddenly announced his retirement as the coach of Manchester United, which is in turn one of the richest and most widely followed teams in the universe. It has no less than 14 different nations represented in its first team squad. (No hyperbole here, of course, although this blogger does need to confess that he has been a rabid fan of his home town club for most of his 54 years).

Continue reading →

The Global Contrarian – Blog 4

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Jeremy

Leaders Behaving Badly – Part 2

The second in a series of two blogs about why global leaders fall down and how they can stand up again

In a week where people around the world are decrying the behavior of Algerian terrorist leader Moktar Belmoktar, puzzling over the mea culpa of fallen cycling hero Lance Armstrong, celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama’s second term as US president and praising Bulgarian politician Ahmed Dogan’s single-handed disarming of a point-blank assassin, it seems very timely to continue this examination of bad and good leadership and how it relates to failure, rehabilitation, renewed hope and different kinds of success.

In the first blog of this two-part series, we explored what makes leaders at the pinnacle of their careers abuse their power and risk their reputation and why it seems that more and more of them are getting found out – http://jeremysolomons.com/samples/.

This second blog will delve into what tainted leaders can do to stand up again once they have fallen and more importantly, what current and future leaders can do to stay on the high road and avoid this kind of irresponsible behavior altogether.

Much has been written about the kind of qualities that leaders of the present and the future need to be effective in an increasingly globalized and cyber-connected world.

For every power hungry politician or cheating soccer player, fortunately there are many heart-warming stories of leaders just doing the right thing, such as Malawi President Joyce Banda’s untiring struggle for women’s rights or the unusual honesty of German soccer player Miroslav Klose, who was awarded a goal in a close game in Italy but then freely admitted that he had handled the ball on its way in. The referee duly disallowed the goal and shook his hand.

But what about new or experienced leaders who have allowed themselves to get caught behaving badly?

Public humiliation and shame can bring out the best and unfortunately the worst in a fallen leader.

The first step towards rehabilitation is usually full disclosure and a sincere apology in both public and private to all of those affected.