Welcome, and I’d first like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the bunwaram people, in in the place that I’m calling in from. And, I’m sure many of you calling in from places with some traditional custodians. I pay my respects to all the elders, past and present who’ve looked after and keep on looking after our land and precious land. Anyway, delighted to be here today, and, I just saw Norman Buckley’s name, and I thought, oh my god.

For those of you who don’t know Norman Buckley is the author of Passet Five. So He’s the, one of the reasons why I’m here. I have been trained by him on Fast Five and, what a delight to see him today. So thank you, Norman, for joining us.

So today, let me share with you what I plan to share with you and explore with you.

So rethink leadership talent, advancing diversity equity, and inclusion by spotting your hidden leadership talent.

Those of you who know me already would know that I talk quite a lot about what’s called what I call quietly powerful leadership And if any of you are interested, I did a talk last year at Fastet Five Live, and, later on, we can share the link for you so that you can look at that as well. But today I’m building on last year’s talk to really think about it from an organizational point of view. In rethinking, what are we looking for in future leaders? And what are we doing at the moment? Is it helping? Is it not helping?

So so this is what we’re going to be talking about. But firstly, I’d like to share with you something that happened over a decade ago when I used to work in larger organizations.

And that is I was working in a large organization in a division, and there were probably about a hundred and twenty or so senior leaders, who led an organization or a division of about three thousand, I believe. And I was working with this colleague who I’ll call Janet.

Her name’s not really Janet, but just to, protect her privacy.

I I just wanted to share what had happened to Jacob, but I thought it was incredible.

I really liked working with Janet she was working with three general managers who were very challenging to work with because if any of you ever worked with three different or, you know, multiple leaders. They often have competing priorities and and different ideas, and so she had to mat navigate all of that And also her role was to work with the three general managers to transform the division into, more this intrigue organization.

And I watched her work with the general managers, but also the one hundred and twenty senior leaders that had to come along on the journey with her.

And what I found incredible was she was one of those, what I would call, quietly, calculators who was quite understated, very humble and very approachable. So I did notice how most people would approach her Janice first before approaching any of the general managers. And therefore, she was very much trusted. And the the program that she was, working on the transformation program I felt really relied on her because she was like the connector of everybody.

And so I was working with her as a consultant on the side and often facilitated sessions with her and and so on. So I thought she was doing an amazing job for over about two or three years, I watched her do what she did.

Anyway, one time I did realize that she wasn’t in the organization anymore, and I thought, where did she go? I had no idea because I hadn’t really I only kept in touch, on and off, and so I had no idea.

And I spoke to a colleague of hers who looked really sad and told me about what had happened that she had actually taken stress leave and she had, she hadn’t come back for quite some time. And I said, well, what happened?

And the colleague said to me, well, she was put through one of those what’s called leadership assessment centers, which I don’t know whether you know, can I, may I invite you to engage in the chat box, actually? So in the chat box, if you know what a leadership assessment entries, can you put a yes or a y? And if you don’t know what it is, then can you put an n? So I can work out, how much I need to explain or not So, okay, so quite a few yeses.

So for the people who said no, just briefly, it’s where, a bunch of leaders at a similar level go through almost, like a test, and, they get assessed on their leadership potential in groups quite often. And oftentimes what happens is they get given some tasks to do some, decisions to make and a group of people had to have a discussion and they get observed, or they make it maybe given a problem and they have to work through and analyze some some data and then put together a presentation in a short time and then present back to the the assesses if you like. So it was like an assessment.

Anyway, so she had to go through this assessment center, along with a another hundred or two hundred leaders at her level, And apparently, she came out and had a debrief with the assessors, and they told her she had no leadership potential.

I was so upset because how can you assess somebody’s leadership potential in a day when somebody’s proven some leadership capability over three years. And okay. She’s got some things to develop and, you know, maybe present and skills or something like that, but apparently the feedback or she wasn’t as, she wasn’t vocal enough and she didn’t seem very confident when she was presenting, and so that was why she had no leadership potential.

Now I saw her for three years, and I thought Yes. Of course, she has some skills to develop, but she had some leadership potential. So what’s going on here?

So this is the case where I believe it’s like this cartoon here, where, selection process only assesses a limited amount of abilities that a real lead and requires, and leadership requires a whole range of skills, not just presentation and speaking up and things like that. That tends to get assessed in these assessment centers. And so we’re limiting what we look for and therefore we’re we’re cutting out all these other abilities. You know, we’re we’re picking up the monkeys, but we’re certainly not picking up elephants who might be strong in other areas.

So I feel that such a a dangerous thing to do as an organization because what can happen is that the what I’ve read an article by, hogan assessments, which is another personality assessment tool that they talk about the the gap between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. And what they mean by that is leading to emergence, people who who gets promoted by they’re the ones that tend to get to senior levels and leadership effectiveness are people who manage teams really well and lead their their teams produce outcomes and have really engaged teams. So it’s the effectiveness of the leadership.

And their view and their based on their studies is that there’s a gap, and so it’s not equal.

So can I ask you again in the chat box? Have you ever seen people being promoted, where they probably shouldn’t have? Yes or no?

And I’m guessing this, there’ll be yes, and there’s lots of, exclamation marks there too. So So you see this happens where leaders who get promoted, perhaps not the right leaders, but then what about the other side? What about the people who didn’t even get looked at, but there should have been. So there’s the gap there too. So there’s two sides to this story.

And my view is that it is actually happening because otherwise we wouldn’t be having some of these issues, such as, and these are some studies that I picked up, but there’s many, many other studies I’m sure some of you have come across. So some of these, studies like the HBR, I recall which talked about the twenty percent of boards are com confident that they have a less than twenty percent of boards. Sorry, are confident that their organizations have a grip on their leadership problems. Eighty nine percent of people feel that psychological safety and respect is important yet twenty six percent of managers create a safe environment. That was a recent McKinsey research. Peace, companies fail to choose a right management talent a staggering eighty p eighty two percent of the time according to Gallup Research.

And then on the diversity front, so. That’s more on the leadership quality, but if you add in diversity, then you I’m sure you have seen many, many studies around the lack of diversity, whether it’s gender culture or anything that you what you can think of, that there is, slow progress as well as limited diversity, particularly at senior leadership levels.

So if we didn’t have this issue of leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness perhaps we could be narrowing some of these gaps that we’re seeing here or the issues that we’re seeing here.

So I thought in this presentation, I thought I would share what I believe are some reasons and I picked seven reasons why you may, you, as in the organization, may be losing the best leadership talent, and what it’s costing your organization.

So I wrote a white paper on this particular topic, and I’ve not presented it before, so I thought I’d share this. And the paper’s available for you, I’ll give you the QR code and a, maybe a link maybe later on, so that you can access the paper itself as well. But To give you an idea of what I believe some of the issues are, it is certainly related to what I’m sharing quietly powerful, but here are here are the seven that I wanted to share.

So the first one, which I often talk about, is that our mental model of leadership is too narrow.

So there’s so much written about the different types of leaders that we need more and more, like, empathetic leaders and people who are collaborative and all these things, but yet there’s still a sense of picking the one that appears confident, for example, and you hear after interviews people saying, oh, you know, they seem to be really confident. So there’s a little proxy going on about confidence equals competence And so, we look for confident leaders and perhaps that’s not completely accurate.

Because if we say if we can say confidence equals confidence, that’s a bit of a dangerous thing.

There’s a study by doctor Thomas Chamuro premises, or maybe it’s not his study, but he certainly referred to it. He talked about the overlap between confidence and competence is quite low. Who maybe in the chat have a guess? What percentage do you think the overlap between confidence and competence is.

I’ll be interested to see what your guesses might be.

Thirty, twenty five, ten, fifty, ten, Oh, quite a few tens, which is interesting.

So I’m sure you’d like to know. So according to Doctor Thomas Chamera Penazic, who is an organizational psychologist in America, and he wrote a book which I’ll refer to later on. He said nine percent.

So so there’s a real danger there, isn’t there? So again, there’s two sides to this. So the overlap is the accurate assessment of your competence. So because confidence is your self assessment of your competence, competence is the actual externally measured, way of seeing competent.

So there are people who are over competent and therefore more confident than they actually are competent, but there’s also the other flip side of people who are highly competent and not as confident because I there has some doubts about their competence.

It does remind me of the Dunning Kruger effective than any of you know about that where oftentimes people who, have less competence, competence, tend to be more over more confident because they don’t know what they don’t know. So so maybe there’s some of that playing in. Anyway, so the mental model of leadership I believe still is a bit narrow, somewhat related to our stereotypical view of military leadership, what we call strong leadership.

And, you know, sometimes we do talk about how we need to move on from that, but sometimes I think we still get pulled back into it.

So As a result, the choices of leaders are biased. So here’s Thomas Joma of Pemacic here. He wrote a book called, why do so many incompetent men become leaders?

And and how to fix it. So the men in the room, please don’t get offended. It’s a man who wrote this book, and he actually wrote more about these strong man type of traits like overconfidence and self absorption.

He says that it should be seen as red flags but instead they prompt us to say, ah, there’s a charismatic fellow. He’s probably leadership material, and he goes on to say that that that results in poor leadership overall because it’s taking up the space where there should be more competent men and women. Who should be taking those spaces. So that’s what doctor Thomas Timber optimistic talks about.

And he’s another one that I found more recently twenty twenty one study finds people who speak more and are more like are more likely to be viewed as leaders. And, this was recently published or I saw it in an article recently.

And, of course, that means that if you’re quieter, you’ve got less of a chance of seeing being seen as a leader, which is what I often talk about when I talk about quietly powerful leadership that that is not the case.

So the Babble hypothesis is about regardless of experience, expertise, capability, and competence, the people who speak more tend to be seen as leader like, so the so that’s another reason why that, the choices can be biased.

Now there’s another issue on top of that, and that is the pool that we choose our leaders from is also already skewed.

And this is based on some work by BrianClass who wrote this book called corruptible. Who gets power and how it changes us. And his work is this is not a quote, but this is what I took away from his his writing is louder, dominant self promoting overconfident people who seek power and control are more likely to put themselves forward for leadership opportunities.

So what does that mean? Well, that means who is missing? Well, the, they’re the quieter understated, less confident appearing and self promoting types who tend to be less visible.

Often these are people in the minority, meaning when we look at diversity inclusion, there tends to be fewer people in the minority who put their themselves forward as as well, and then there’s another level of the choice being biased also.

So can I ask you in the chat box? Have you ever come across somebody who you believe would be an incredible leader or has the Cape potential to be a great leader who hesitate from putting themselves forward for leadership positions.

Yes or no. Have you seen that?

Is if you have?

It’s okay. So quite a few yeses here. If you have, then the pool is already skewed.

And, yes, tend to respond well to being approached, which is why if organizations aren’t being proactive in spotting them, then you’re in trouble, you’re missing out on a whole bunch of leadership talent. So thank you for that comment there.

So these are the the three things that are to do with who’s in the pool and who gets chosen. So that’s an issue in itself.

The fourth reason why I think there may be some issues here is that Some of the existing development opportunities may not suit some professionals, some styles of professionals.

And I say this from my personal experience, and it may be more of a perception, but I actually think it’s real.

Perception is reality for me, where you go to some sort of personal development leadership development program and there tends to be more focus on speaking up, speaking well, a lot of work around storytelling, about executive presence, our confidence, etcetera. Particularly, those of you who’ve ever done any women’s leadership programs, there’s quite a bit about that, about communication, But not as much about really valuing and developing further, some other skills like listening and more on the the quieter side of things. And, what’s interesting is I run these quietly powerful programs, which is very much specifically, appreciating and valuing those quieter styles and quieter skills and then adding some extra skills on top that works for them whether it’s influencing, presenting, speaking up, etcetera.

And this is the comment that I received from a participant that it’s really great to finally have a leadership program not aimed at changing who we are.

So that’s from my own experience. I don’t have a study to back this up, but my experience says that for some people, the existing development opportunities feels like they have to change themselves, so it doesn’t feel authentic.

So number five, which is very much related to the work at facet five. And that is that people in organizations often make poor use of differences in styles and perspectives.

So we do talk a lot in organizations about diversity and inclusion, There’s some talk about diversity of thought, but do we really make the most of diversity of styles, perspectives, which actually it’s interconnected with also with, diversity in other forms as well.

So, somebody actually recently approached me and spoke spoke to me about neurodiversity and what they require. And their styles, how they can be different. And so I thought about that. I was like, okay, there’s some intersectionality or connection between that and what I’m talking about as well. And then there’s many other forms of diversity that interconnects because when you’re in the minority group, if you like, it is actually harder to speak up, for example. And so that tendon to be a little bit quieter, and the the need to for people to create some space for them to contribute and and speak becomes even more important.

So what I love about working with Fastet five is that Fastet five is a little bit more nuanced than introvert extrovert.

I mean, there is an introvert extrovert scale, but there are four others. And what I love working with, when I use FastF five with teams, is really looking at an introvert is not just an introvert. There are many, many different versions of an introvert, and how do you get the best out of that style?

Also how do you work with differences so that they become complementary rather than conflicting, which can happen and I’m sure you’ve come across teams and organizations where there’s some personality clashes as they call them. But, actually, if you can work it through and if you can understand and appreciate the differences, then you can make so much better, outcomes and also diversity and inclusion in a different way. Also, I believe, results in divers diversity and inclusion in, some of the more traditional categories that that’s been talked about.

So, out of interest, can I ask you in the chat if, any of you work with different styles, in within your organization or with clients? So using whether it’s facet viable, whether it’s some other tool, do you use ways or do you help people to work with differences in styles and perspectives.

Okay. So I’ve got a yes yes yes. Excellent.

Definitely do by Norman, of course.

Excellent.

Oh, no, but would love to introduce it. Fantastic. Shall I do a sales job for you, Norman?

So I I believe faso five is really fantastic because it’s the language is, such simple language that that organizations can pick up really quickly. And so I use it a lot, and, it’s very, very beneficial.

So that’s another reason why. So when we don’t make use of differences in styles and perspectives, what ends up happening is you see only a handful of people speaking in a meeting, Everybody else doesn’t have any space or they’re not able to speak up, they don’t feel safe to speak up, or what can happen is, one of the things that I’ve noticed is people just go with, the person with the most senior position or person who’s paid the most and, often that can cause some trouble because they may be blind to some issues or perhaps they don’t really appreciate what’s going on in on the ground. So so then there’s some serious issues there. Very much linked to psychological safety, as well as that ability to work with differences.

So the result of all of this is that the hidden talent disengaged, they lose confidence, they withdraw, they become even more hidden, and you may lose them without even you knowing.

And I suppose the story of Janet is one of those where she had this talent and certainly a potential to be a good leader, with some development, and she lost confidence. She withdrew, and she ended up leaving.

So is that good enough for organizations? And my view is, no, it’s not. And they’re actually missing out on a whole group of potential leaders that we probably need more of, which is what I talk about in quietly powerful leadership.

So one of the reasons why this can also happen is because we misunderstand some of this hidden talent and in particular people who are quieter.

So often I hear people talk about being quiet equals introversion.

And that’s not the only reason. There’s many, many other reasons. One of course is personality, but even within personality, There’s introversion, extroversion, but there’s also those of you who are familiar with facet five emotionality is actually a very big one. So those people who, who feel emotions intensely on the inside, they tend to get more anxious, more easily, And, in fact, I’ve noticed that quite a number of people in quietly powerful programs that I run do have high emotionality because I use at five.

So I’m very familiar with that. And so it’s not because of introversion necessarily. It can be more to do with, emotionality and feeling anxious. Worried about what people might think of them and so on.

Another one that I’ve come across is around being highly sensitive So people who who are extroverted but highly sensitive can go be quiet because they’re totally overwhelmed sensory overload is what can happen with them. So it’s really not just introversion, even if you just look at personality.

But there’s other elements to why people may go under the radar or stay quiet as well. And one is conditioning.

And the conditioning can be of a cultural nature, so some of us I include myself in it being Japanese, as my, upbringing that I can go quiet, particularly if there’s a senior person in the room because I’m I’ve always been taught to be respectful and allow other people to speak, also being taught not to interrupt. And so I do do interrupt when I’m facilitating sometimes in the role, but I still find it really uncomfortable.

And so there’s a lot of conditioning that can play out. It could simply be your upbringing that you were told to be seen not heard as a child, and so it’s something that that you’ve been brought up with.

And then there’s finally what I mentioned earlier about power dynamics where any group will have some level of differences in power and rank. And this is not just about hierarchy, and there’s a whole other field of work around power and rank. Which I’ve, done quite a bit of study around, but this whole power dynamic around hierarchy as well as what position or what role you play in an organization. So often, in profits, profit making organizations, profit centers tend to have more sway than the cost centers, for example, or it might be, if it’s like a medical organization, often the medical people have more sway and influence and power than those who are in the administration that will be the same in academia so there’s all sorts of different things that play out in power and rank. And then there’s also when you’re in the minority. So if you’re the only colored woman in a group of, men, then it becomes much more difficult.

So there’s many, many reasons why people stay hidden. And so unless you look for them, then they will stay hidden.

Unfortunately, they stay hidden for another reason, and that is often because they’re quieter. They get this feedback And I’ve received this feedback over and over again. In fact, can I ask you in the chat? Have you ever give been given this feedback?

That you need to be more confident, you need to speak up more need to be more visible. You need to believe in yourself. Any of those. If it’s a yes or no, it’d be really interesting to see.

So, okay, many times, and yes, yes, yes, so quite a few yeses. So all of this Oh, good. There’s somebody who said no. I’m glad because, it’s really quite unhelpful to receive this feedback. In fact, have any of you given this feedback to somebody else.

Because if you have, please stop because what happens in my mind mean, my mind, if when I get given this feedback, you need to be more confident is I start to doubt myself going, oh, I’m not coming across as very confident. Oh, that’s not good. Am I doing wrong? And I start to go into this spiral of self talk that causes me to feel even less confident and more anxious same with speaking up more, I’ll be sitting in a room thinking, I need to say something. I need to say something, which results in me being not very present. And not being able to think of the right thing to say. So it’s much better to just relax into my style and then say something when I when I can think of something to say because I’ve been present and listening.

So all of this can end up being very well meaning, unhelpful feedback.

For those people who are hidden.

There are many other better ways to help them to build confidence and speak up more and so on. And and it’s not telling them to do that. So, so because all of this leads to this unfortunate situation where these people start to feel like there’s something wrong with them. And this is many people have researched this this idea called inter interjection is one way to say it in in psychology, but also internalized marginalization.

Is the phrase that I’ve learned. And it could be internalized racism, internalized sexism, internalized, etcetera, isms, but it could be acquired a person in any shape or form being told you need to be more confident, you need to speak up more, causes us to start to doubt ourselves going off. I’m not doing a very good job. I’m not as good as some people who are more outspoken, and therefore we start to, think that we’re not as good as everybody else. And so all of these combined result in those hidden talent people who are quieter with some real amazing p potential capability to really shrink and and become even more hidden.

So so that was reason number six. So reason number seven is that losing the hidden talent, whether it’s through a disengaged model, actually losing them from the organization has a multiplier effect.

And what’s interesting is noticing that somebody with capability who’s been overlooked, people notice that because there’s like a hole in that position or in that when people like that leave, you know, everybody knows they do a good job and they they’re amazing to work with and so on, and then they get over And so people look at that and go, oh, oh, you know, not really supposed to be like that. And so it’s really discouraging for other quieter members or other people who, appreciate that style as well. So that’s one multiplier effect suppose that’s why I put the bird up how, you know, one bird starts to fly and everybody else starts to fly.

But there are also other might multiply our effects in my view. And that is that as I’ve spoken about in other talks around quietly powerful leadership, they exist. I’ve written a book about them. I’ve interviewed forty plus of them, and they are indeed quite a humble understated but they’re incredible leaders.

And these leaders, you see on the screen here, C suite leaders, partners of professional services firms, chairman’s of boards, senior leader, there’s a rear admiral from the Australian Navy former rear admiral. There are some assistant commissioners from police there’s a, CEO of, a hospital.

There’s, you know, there’s entrepreneurs and there are many other senior leaders in this group. So these are very successful, leaders. And some of the leaders I actually interviewed some of their team members as well. And what they said about the leader is incredible. They said that they one of them said it was the best executive teams I’ve ever worked in because this leader, the quietly powerful leader often created more space or the team to step up, to contribute, to challenge ideas with each other challenge, the leader’s ideas, and, and that made a huge difference in terms of their engagement, their willingness to contribute more than themselves. And so They created incredible teams around them incredible organizations around them.

And so as you start to overlook some of these potentially quietly powerful leaders. Maybe they need to develop some skills, but they can potentially be quietly powerful leaders. You may be using them.

And if you’re losing one, then you might lose a few more as well.

And so what you may also lose is that you may be neglecting and undervaluing some of these quiet superpowers that these quietly powerful leaders can bring, such as a calming influence.

I talk about calm as being there’s two versions of it. There there’s a calm that’s about actually looking calm on the outside because you are quieter, but you’re really stressed out on the inside like a duck looking very smooth on the outside paddling really hard on the inside.

Some of the quieter leaders have that advantage of appearing calm, I’m one of them. And, on top of being quieter, I also have a Japanese waste, which is really handy. I can very much cover the stress I might be feeling on the inside. So that’s one version. But of course, more even more powerful are the leaders who can be calm in the midst of chaos. And I spoke to one leader who was able to bring that and, in a case where she had to be a leader in an organization that was closing down.

And she said that it was incredible how just simply her showing up and talking about just focusing on the things that we can control and her coming across as being calm, has to be around actually allowed the team to be much more present and able to work through things and and actually they had a very successful way forward in terms of closing the business. So so that was a an incredible influence of her calm.

And of course, listening is such an underrated leadership skill.

And, I actually also run with a couple of colleagues, a project or an organization called leaders who listen, And because every single quietly powerful leader spoke about listening as a key leadership strength, And I see there’s so much more now that, if you if you look at any media, any news thing, you know, most recently the optus issue in Australia was big thing. The whole network went down.

And I I just wonder if they were listening to the people who might have known what the and issues might have been, what what might have been different.

And, so so this thing is a huge thing. And one of the the quietly coupled leaders that I spoke to you about around the team, saying it was the best executive team.

They’re that the team said that the leader was such a great listener that he created space for people to to speak, but also he invited, challenge from the team to say, oh, this is something I’m thinking about. I really want you to pull it apart and tell me what’s wrong.

And then he’d listen and then he’d actually go away and really think about it and come back with okay. I thought about everything what people have said. So coupled with listening is this deep thinking.

So when you think of deep thinking, it’s not it’s it’s listening, really thinking about it, and then thinking about the the different angles, being able to hold multiple perspectives rather than going either or or taking sides as we often see in the in in society these days, that ability to think through things in very complex ways is another core superpower.

And then finally, all of that combined, I believe, leads to being very inclusive.

Because you’re allowing people voice, you’re thinking about people’s thinking and what they’re suggesting, your actually acting on that because you’ve thought about it. And if you don’t act on it, you know, these leaders often talk about, you need to get back to people that you’re not incorporating their their ideas.

So all of these, these are very thoughtful behaviors, which results in them being seen as inclusive.

And I use the phrase seen as inclusive as an important thing because so often leaders would say, oh, I’m inclusive and yet others may not see them as inclusive, and it could be because they don’t listen very well. It could be because they don’t get consulted on on important issues.

So so these are the the issues, or the superpowers that you may be neglecting as a result of not looking for some of these quieter talent or hidden talent.

So the multiplier effect goes into if we don’t have these inclusive leaders or leaders who are perceived to be inclusive.

Not getting through because they’re being overlooked, then again, you’re actually losing out in another level, in terms of diversity and inclusion.

So I’m interested, this is a multimeter tool.

And, thank you, Nicole. She put up the the link there in the chat as well. I’d love for you to use this this link and tell me, I’m I’m really curious to hear from you. I talked about the reasons, and I was wondering if you feel that this would help advanced diversity, equity and inclusion in your organization or in your clients. So I’ve flipped the reasons around and talk about what things you could focus on. So expanding the mental model of leadership.

Consciously challenging biases in talent promotion or recruitment processes. Of course, you know, we often hear about, blind CVs and things like that. Often to negate some of the unconscious biases that exist, but perhaps we don’t look at con biases around things like whether people appear confident or not, or whether somebody is quieter or outspoken that kind of style type of bias, perhaps we don’t look at that as much.

Re assessing the talent pool from which you choose leaders So remember number three was about the talent pool is already skewed. So how can you shift that so you spot some talent and as one of the comments were was saying, actually find them and tap them on the shoulder, and they might actually join the talent pool.

Exploring different professional development op development opportunities to suit different styles.

So maybe there’s different ways to develop people so they don’t feel like it’s about changing themselves.

And then if improving how teams leverage differences in styles and perspectives, which is where Bass five comes in very handy.

Spot and engage your hidden talent pool more effectively So, when you notice that, quieter person goes even more quiet to be able to engage with them, but also consider and appreciate some of the the quieter skills that they might bring.

And then retaining and showcasing your hidden talent. One of the things that I’ve noticed in working with organizations is I might do a talk around quietly powerful leadership, and then I’d talk I’d interview in front of the group.

A real quietly powerful leader from the organization. There’s usually one or two of them. And so I interview them in front of the group and and they just go, I didn’t know that these leaders were like this. And so actually showcasing can be really, really powerful as well to say, oh, you don’t have to be a certain prototype.

To become a great leader in an organization.

So so this is the flip of the seven reasons. I’d love to see from you what you think. So I’m going to switch over.

Let me see if I can find the stop share.

And okay. Thank you for sharing that.

So challenging biases is a big one, improve how teams leverage different styles. Fantastic. That’s quite high as well.

Good news for facet five, I reckon.

I I agree. I think if you were able to, yeah, improve how teams work across different styles. It makes a big difference not just about leadership, but actually how teams function.

In terms of enhancing, diversity and inclusion at the leadership levels, I think, the the first three are quite critical. Anyway, all of them are pretty high. So I’m glad that some of these are resonating with you. Thank you.

So what can you do about it? I suppose I want want to leave you with some thoughts So what is possible and what could be done? So firstly spotting the talent, spotting the hidden talent, and you’ve already mentioned that in the comment four. So what was really interesting for me speaking to the quietly powerful leaders, some of them said that they did not see themselves as leadership talent.

Or they never thought of themselves as a leader, and which is the issue that we talked about around the gap between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness.

And one person in particular said the CEO of that, the the country CEO of the organization had known her and had, you know, had some interactions with her through her work. And he was the one that said to this this leader or dispute your leader, should I say, you’ve got some amazing skills that that could be really useful in leadership. And she said, oh, oh, really? She was quite a technical person, so she never really thought of it. And, the CEO, country CEO said to her, you know, what you’re really good at that some other people aren’t so good at, and that is working with people.

And so he spotted some tiny little behaviors and the way she went about doing her work that’s demonstrated some future leadership potential.

And so the leader was a observant enough to spot that.

And it wasn’t about whether she was coming across as competent, etcetera, because she was quite a nervous and, sometimes get anxious. So it wasn’t about that. It was actually about how she worked with other people how she led some of her project teams and so on.

So how how well do your managers in your organizations or your client organizations spot their hidden talent. Can they see past the the surface of know, somebody who looks confident versus somebody who might seem a little less confident or anxious, but they actually have some really incredible skills. Competence can build, you know, so it’s that’s not the the key thing here.

The second thing you can do is to develop your talent differently And this is where I’ve been working with an organization to, to introducing the quietly powerful program. And it’s been an incredible journey. I’ve been working with them for nearly three years.

And the first time was interesting because people were concerned about being labeled quiet.

That’s that’s how stigma, there is around being quieter. But once they overcame that and we went through the program, and then one of them bravely shared her story of what she learned and discovered about herself and how she can make the most of her talents.

Apparently, she put that on the newsletter, and she received a ton of emails, and then the HR team received a ton of emails saying I wanna go on this program. So now they have a wait list, and so there was this incredible flow on effect of this small group of people who went through a talent development process in a different sort of way, which really valued and appreciated their different styles and also adapted. I I often talk about appreciating fully and adapting purposefully, so both sides of the coin.

And then finally engage your talent proactively.

So it’s quite easy to just work with people who are visible. So what about you actually consciously work with develop coach people who may be not so visible or may not come across as so confident? And do that consciously.

So if you were to look at this, and this is some of the results that I’ve certainly seen with the organization that I work with, just as an example, you know, people who did the program felt valued because they appreciated for their style, but actually other people in the organization who didn’t do the program also felt valued by the fact that these quieter leaders were being developed And so it had a flow and effect there.

And then we’ve had, I think, five or six cohorts and the retention rate of those cohorts has been a hundred percent.

Promotion rates of this group, apparently it’s been about thirty percent which is more than their usual internal promotion rate of about fifteen percent, ten to fifteen percent.

And the very first cohort went that went through sixty percent of them have been promoted. So so that’s incredible.

And then the leadership quality obviously improves because that they’re bringing in different sort of leadership and that means it means it’s inclusive, and then that means diversity can improve as well because inclusion is required for diversity in my view. And then as there’s more diversity and inclusion, improvement, engagement, and performance continues. So to me, that’s a a winner in my mind, and so that’s why I’m hoping that, organizations can start to see this as a different way of working with Douglas and in inclusion.

So question for you and organizations is are you spotting and developing your hidden talent?

And my encouragement is that we really consciously start to think about that. And if you want to learn more about that and and how you might go about doing it. Here’s the white paper that goes into little more depth than what I’ve just shared with you today. This is a QR code.

I know it looks like a dinosaur, but it is a QR code. You can download this paper, through this QR code. And I think did I share with you, Nicola, the link as well if you’re able to share that? I can’t remember if I shared that with you.

I’m pretty sure I did.

It’s not the menchie link, but there’s another link that I might have shared. Anyway, if you didn’t get that, then that’s okay.

You can use a QR code and, otherwise, I’ll send a link with the recording afterwards as well if that’s helpful.

Anyway, to finish off, I want to share this quote from a very recently released book by Adam Grant, professor Adam Grant from Wharton, organizational psychologist, many people know him his new book that only recently came up is called hidden potential, and I thought, yes, He speaks actually about your personal hidden potential, but I also think it’s about organizations finding their hit hidden potential.

He said, when we fail to see hidden potential, along with shattering people’s dreams, we lose out on their contributions.

So it’s got an individual effect and an organizational, the organizational effect as well.

So my wish is that we really do start to look for that hidden potential hidden talent. And And as a result, improve and advance diversity, inclusion and equity, as well as improving leadership quality overall.

So thank you. And, if you’d like to keep in touch with me, I I know some of you already are in touch with me, but, I suggest connecting on LinkedIn is probably the best thing. I’m most active on LinkedIn. I’m not very good at, Facebook and X for example, but, if you have any questions or if you’d like to, talk to me about some of the things that I’ve shared, please feel free to keep in touch.

And, I might I do have some time for questions if, Nikola, if you had any questions that come through, or if you’d like to add a question in the comments, please feel free.

And I’ll stop sharing some questions. Just yet. But as as Magumi said, feel free to even if you want to unmute yourself to ask a question, now is your chance or pop something in the chat. We’ll be more than happy to help.

Lots of thank yous, megumi. I have to say people are have really enjoyed your session. So thank you. But as if there are any questions, please submit them through the chat or unmute yourself.

We’ll be happy tonight. Sorry. It’s Caroline Ward here. May I ask the question? Please do.

Of course. I thought you had a question actually. I I remember seeing question mark in the chat at one point? I’m just interested to understand, how those organisations who have run some quietly powerful leadership programs or have invited participants because that’s something that and I’ll be in touch with you separately, megumi, about this.

But I just wonder how to encourage people to come to a program like that, or do you have any sort of tips or experience? Yeah. Sure. So it was really interesting at the beginning with this organization They approached me because they noticed that their their talent cohort had some quieter people So they had a talent process and they identified talent.

So there was quieter people in the talent pool already but also secondly, they noticed that the when they were speaking with the women leaders who are in the talent cohort, they they actually said that their styles would, were not appreciated. And it wasn’t just about being quieter, but they certainly said that their styles were not being appreciated. So that’s how they put the two and two together and said, okay, we need to do something different and and really introduce different styles of leadership and really appreciating and valuing that. And so in terms of encouraging people, they were already in the talent pool and they were nominated by their managers.

And what was a little tricky was to make sure that the managers invited these people, usefully.

So, we I did have a couple of people join the program and said they were really hesitant in joining because there was a stigma around being quiet. And so that when they got us, they were they were thinking, oh my god, I’m seeing this. That’s not good.

So, but as as we went through the program, they realized it was about really making the most of that. And so they felt absolutely comfortable. But just at the beginning, it was a little bit trickier. Some managers did a really good job and framed it in a way. That was about really harnessing the best view.

And so, yeah, it’s it can be a bit tricky, but, I I think working with the managers seems to work really well.

Thank you.

Thanks, Carolyn.

Megan, we’ve got a question from Allison in the chat.

Says you said not to say to people you need to be more visible. However, as a quieter professional, I have found this a useful approach. I’m wondering if the term visibility can be used in different ways.

Yeah. Maybe.

Allison, maybe if you can talk to us about what’s been useful. How did they frame it so that it was useful for you?

Would that be okay?

Yeah. Can you hear me okay?

I can.

Yeah. I mean, very dark ring. So on Well, I’m just wondering, I mean, I’ve not worked this with you actually, you know, some approaches to be calm or visible and, to say leadership in my organization.

So I found this a really useful thing, I think to try to work on, and putting myself there out there in a loud way.

So then what you said, you know, I’m wondering if there’s a different way of looking at it if it can be actually a thing like saying you need to be more confident.

Yeah. Could be typed that way as well? What do you feel? Yeah. No. It’s a it’s a great question because I think what’s not useful is the sort of one line feedback you need to be more confident, or what does that mean?

You need to be visible how, you know, that’s that’s the issue. And I hear that so often That’s why I’m highlighting some of these unhelpful feedback, which is, you know, not enough, nuance and, like even confidence you can help people to be confident by helping them to do things that they haven’t done before or try, a different approach and they can succeed in that or, you know, rather than telling them you need to be more confident, actually help them to do things.

So so that’s different.

Same with visibility rather than saying you need to be more visible. If you can help them say, oh, why don’t you try this? Why don’t you do that? And work with them at around how it works for them, which is what we do in a quietly powerful program, then then that’s helpful. That’s that’s okay. So it’s more than one line of feedback. That’s really unhelpful.

That is helpful. Thank you.

I like this comment, really affirming on the power of difference. I I do absolutely believe that, and, it’s great to see that.

Any other final questions?

Well, if I’m allowed, I’ll come back in with another question.

What’s the sort of you you touched on, the best advice for managers in terms of sort of creating space for people to to speak and and and the focus on listening.

Other than sessions that you run for for managers or leaders in terms of how to draw the best out of quieter, people with, you know, who are quieter but with lots of potential.

Mhmm.

Oh, so is the question, do I run that with. Yeah. Is that is that a sort of training session that you’ve that you’ve run?

There’s a couple of things that I do. So with the quietly powerful program that I ran with the organization, I have some tip sheets for the managers.

So that and and they’re actually invited to the kickoff session so they know what the participants are going through. So they can support the opponents in a useful way rather than telling them to be to speak up more, for example, which is often what they used to do.

And, so so that’s one thing. The other side of the coin is I briefly mentioned that I work with a couple of colleagues around the idea of leaders who listen.

And that’s for all leaders in my view. If they’re not listening, I don’t believe they’re really leading. Because it just it’s just a monologue.

And so the working with leaders to firstly understand that the critical importance of listening and also creating the space and the safety to allow voices to emerge.

That’s a separate thing that I also do. And, and that’s been an interesting process. I have to say some people pick it up pretty quickly, and other people really struggle.

But they, over time, with some real examples of where they are able to bring some new voices into a conversation.

They start to see the value and they they start to continue to work on that. So, yeah, I know it’s really, quite a process, which I also enjoy doing.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Caroline, while you’re there, there was a question mark that I saw from you.

And I wasn’t sure what what is more helpful was the question that I saw in the chat? I don’t know what that was.

I think you’ve just answered it.

Okay. Because I’m wrestling with the fact that in our in my organization, we’ve just gone through our performance review process. Mhmm. And there’ve been a lot of comments about juniors, particularly I’d say I would see a correlation with, a candidate or individuals who are in the minority.

Who are being told that they need to have more gravitas that they need to speak up more, etcetera.

So the point that was then made a bit later about just not giving that feedback as one liners, but helping people understand how Yes. It is is is useful. So that’s what I was what is more useful because sometimes we do know. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. People’s voice into the room or into the team, but I I can completely see that as a one liner, it’s not helpful. But if it comes with how can we work differently as a team to to ensure that you speak up or whatever, then I can see that’s more helpful.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And also helping them around the how for them individually. So for example, with confidence, we often assume or maybe have a view that you need confidence to be able to do something.

I learned from a, sports psychologist called Doctor Sean Richards and that that’s actually a false assumption that it’s that confidence comes afterwards. So you don’t need competence to do something.

You have to be brave to do something, and then the confidence follows. So so it’s actually about, you know, that’s not useful to say you need to be more confident because you don’t need confident, to do something.

And so it’s about helping managers to help their people to have a go at something and supporting them and setting them up success. And and even if they don’t succeed, they’ll still learn, and they’ll they’ll grow, and they’ll build confidence that at least they had a go. So to me, that’s different.

Thank you. Thank you.