Karen Mangia
Today on Success from Anywhere, we'll meet an award winning entrepreneur, catalyst, and author who's transformational impact on the workplace resulted in her being knighted in her native France. Please join me in welcoming to the show author of Dare to Un-lead: The Art of Relationship Leadership in a Fragmented World, the one woman who truly knows whether or not the pen is mightier than the sword, Celine Schillinger. Welcome to the show, Celine.
Celine Schillinger
Thank you, Karen. I'm so excited to be here.
Karen Mangia
Everyone listening wants to know, how did you get knighted? And what was the experience like?
Celine Schillinger
It was amazing. I'm not riding a horse. You know, it's not that kind of knighthood. It happened a few years ago, when I was still living in the US. It was in Boston,and I was knighted upon the recommendation of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for my involvement in diversity in the workplace. I had been an activist for diversity in the workplace for quite some time already. I guess this has been noticed. And it was completely unexpected. It was such an honor. I celebrated with my friends and family in Boston. It was amazing.
Karen Mangia
Did you get a sword? A sash? A trophy? How does that work?
Celine Schillinger
I got a beautiful medal. It's blue and quite big.
Karen Mangia
That's fantastic. Because we are talking about the world of work, I like to ask each guest, what was your first paid nine to five job? And how did that job influence your career trajectory?
Celine Schillinger
My first nine to five job was in France in a small startup, a high end tech company working mostly with Chinese clients and led mostly by people of Vietnamese origin . . . something a little bit unusual. One of the founders is considered to be one of the inventors of one of the first ever micro-computers. I think it's at the Museum of Computers. I didn't stay that long in that company because it was very small and fragile. It actually closed down about a year and a half after I joined. It added to my Asia bug.
I was passionate about Asia through literature and the arts and cinema. Working with Asian customers at that time really reinforced that appetite. I ended up leaving France and moving to Vietnam, settling down in Vietnam in a Vietnamese family, learning the language and spending four beautiful years there finding a job. That led me to other jobs in relation to Asia. I later on settled in China to lead the radio business of a French media company. So overall, that first job was the entry door to 10 beautiful years in Asia or with Asian customers.
I went to Japan quite a bit and other countries as well. It's still very, very deep in my heart. I've considered Vietnam as my second country. I used to speak the language pretty well at that time. It's now long forgotten, unfortunately, but I still have friends and I've been very marked by the culture and the aesthetics and the food . . . many, many things.
Karen Mangia
You're leading this diverse perspective of work from having lived it, which is a little bit unusual. You've already told us this few minutes into the conversation about living in France and the United States and Vietnam and traveling everywhere. And that makes me wonder, given the cultural context in which you've operated, what opportunities do you believe the COVID pandemic opened up for us to reinvent nine to five globally, not just in a specific country?
Celine Schillinger
This is the question of our times. Between the pandemic and what I just told you about this extreme diversity of experience, I joined a large pharmaceutical company in Europe and discovered the super traditional nine-to-five. I found good aspects in it. There were things I really loved and things I resented very deeply. The pandemic has shaken all that completely for all of us. I was already out of that company. I had already settled my own business at that time, so I was already working on my own from my house and using all sorts of digital networks. So, the changes were not a complete shock for me. I was not pushed away from a collective of colleagues like what happened to many, many people. But I could see the amount of change was considered almost as a revolution as compared to what we did. And I feel that the pandemic has brought to light some frustrations and even aberrations that were already here.
We were like the frog that has been put in cold water and heated progressively. We were not all aware of the aberrations of our operating mode. And yet, there were plenty of warning signs, like the burnout epidemics, or the employee disengagement, for example. So, there were already warning signs, but awareness was not generalized. The COVID pandemic has forced us to take a distance from those classical operating modes and to see how we were working and realize the waste of energy, the waste of time, the waste of human creativity, even the waste of people in the traditional nine to five.
Many people are still mourning the nine to five. There were things we loved there: the camaraderie, the work bubble, which is great for focus, or the change of scenery, but there were also things that were completely toxic. Now is a really great time to distance ourselves and reinvent or invent new ways to work together as a collective. The opportunities are precisely related to reinventing a form of collective performance that fits our human aspirations in the 21st century. And that fits also the economic environmental conditions of our century.
Karen Mangia
When you were working in that very traditional, as you called it nine to five, pharmaceutical company, you were inspired to become an employee activist. How do you define that? And what inspired you to start a movement? I mean, take us inside of how you rose up inside of that traditional environment to lead change.
Celine Schillinger
I was an accidental activist. I didn't think about it in the beginning. It didn't happen like that. I just got progressively involved, possibly because of that love for diversity in the first place that came from those first 10 years spent in an extremely diverse and entrepreneurial and fast movement environment, a moving, progressive kind of world. I think I became suffocated by precisely the lack of diversity in my workplace, which was great in many aspects, but extremely dull and uniform.
There was a single model of guys, basically at all echelons of power, and that was all. And beside that model, there was no hope for anybody else, who did not fit in the mold. So, at some point, I realized it was not just an individual issue, a personal issue, or an issue related to a lack of opportunities for myself or some of my colleagues, but it was a systemic issue. And this systemic issue was actually detrimental to the business. I could feel intuitively that in our modern economies, what counts is not so much the quality of your product or your service, it is the connection, the link, you can establish or not with your customer base, or your press, your ecosystem in general, even your suppliers, etc. These connections are possible if you include in the corporate brain, in the decision making bodies, people who look like, who feel like they have the same experience as your customers or your suppliers.
This diversity is not just a nice to have to give a good look for corporate booklets, those kinds of aspects. It is critical for the business itself. And that realization came to me in around 2010. And then I wrote a letter to the CEO of the company to advocate for diversity for the sake of our business. And this letter became viral. And it was not because the CEO agreed but because I had sent it myself to three colleagues of mine. They forwarded it to others and it became viral. And that was the beginning of a movement where we decided together without being prompted by anybody. It came from us. We decided that we would contribute to the organization. We would not fight against each other. We would fight for it. That was a very, very different mindset, right from the start. It was fueled with positive energy, with people going across hierarchical barriers, functional barriers, people who did not know each other before, but felt they were united by this common purpose. Men and women both were part of this because very early on, we realized, we should be as diverse as what we preached ourselves.
It was not about rebuilding a new silo, like a women's group, for example; it was about enabling this diversity that we were aspiring to. We thought that maybe we have a part of the solution, maybe it will not come by magic from somebody else, a senior leader or CEO, etc. And that was, for me, really a revelation: the power of self empowerment, the connection of digital networks (digital networks were a super important enabler of our movements), the use of enterprise social networks. This was around 2011 and very early for the kind of company I was at, which was absolutely not used to that type of group movements.
At the beginning, we were watched with suspicion. Even the unions looked at us with suspicion. They said, “What are you doing? Who are you? Who's the boss?” And we said, “ Well, there's no boss. We're a network. We're a community.” All those new words were coming into the landscape. It became a pretty big group of 3,000 in over 50 countries that grew beyond the boundaries of the company even and formed a network of networks.
It's been a long time now and it has become an official advisor or advisory group to the French Ministry of Industry. It has gotten lots and lots of awards. But for me what was really fascinating in this experience was what I discovered as a human being in this activism experience: how I was able to connect very deeply with other people and this trust we built. Because we wanted it, we created something. We are self organized. There was so much learning that evolved and helped make connections with the outside world, discovering Twitter, for example, and connecting with thought leaders. It's been a huge, huge, transformative moment for me and many others.
Karen Mangia
What you're sharing with us and teaching us right now is powerful wisdom. We have all looked around our workplace where we are employed and have seen some kind of condition we felt did not serve us or the people around us. And what you're sharing is, you didn't just wake up in the morning on a Tuesday and say, “Think I'll become an employee activist today.” You thought: “I see something that isn't working for me; it's not working for the people around me; what am I going to do about it?” And then you anchored it to business benefit. I loved what you said about fighting with and for the business rather than against it. How do you illustrate the business benefit? And then build a network of networks?
I really appreciate what you said there about not trying to create a silo. This isn't about a rebel movement. There is something to gain. And yes, there were the naysayers and the laggards and the people who are suspicious about your motive. Over time, it proved out to be a powerful uniting force, and you didn't wait for permission. That was the other message that stood out to me from what you were sharing, which was: you were the hero you wanted to see. And you weren't waiting for permission for someone else to say could you be in charge of diversifying our business.
Celine Schillinger
Exactly. And you see how these kinds of initiatives have sometimes been digested by companies into employee resource groups, which are super interesting and super important, but which tend to create new silos. You're either in the women ERG or another ERG. And because an organization tends to reproduce what it knows and apply it to the newness, to what's new, what's new is being digested into a structure with a hierarchy. By doing so an organization limits its capacities for change, unfortunately. At that time, there were no such things as employee resource groups. We were triggering more change than employee resource group members might be able to do now. Maybe not, but that's what I suspect.
About your connection to business: that is the critical point probably, in addition to the energy that is dormant, but this connection to business is key. And as long as I was involved in a diversity movement, unfortunately, it did not appear as a business critical topic. You and I know it is. But for some of the old fashioned, maybe senior executives, it isn't. We have to face the truth. It doesn't look like it is an important topic. It looks like more of an identity kind of topic. It's not.
I was determined to show the business value of this kind of approach. I advocated very seriously. I built a business plan. I documented myself. I pulled together lots of sources, etc. and managed after a while, about six months, to create a position connected to marketing, the marketing department. This position was called Stakeholder Engagement. It was the first ever position called as such within this whole big company of 100,000 people. That was in 2012. It was the very beginning of stakeholder marketing, even in the field of research, and I knew it was promising.
I managed to create, from that position, an initiative aimed at supporting the launch of a new product by connecting a worldwide community of stakeholders via a diversity of stakeholders, because diversity is key in those initiatives. By using such social networks, using the power of purpose, using the power of diversity, by connecting with different partners beyond the field of healthcare where I was operating, I managed to create this community of 250,000 people in less than a year. It got many awards as well. It got the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It became a case study for eHealth by the World Health Organization. I was proud and happy about that. I had, in my opinion, proven the point.
But in the company, some people still disagreed because they were pretty afraid or a bit scared and challenged. They were challenged by this way of operating in a network, opening up to dialogue with stakeholders from all over the world, rather than channeling content or channeling messages to people, which is the comfortable, classical, controlled kind of way. I think this is old fashioned. This doesn't work anymore with clients. We resent authority; we resent being talked to; we challenge experts, even knowledge, even science, and companies need to adapt to that. We need to find new ways. So that was my second experiment.
And that led me to a third, which is why I moved to Boston, to the US, where I led the transformation of our whole quality, not just the quality department, but the transformation of how people work together in order to produce better quality products. It was a big global project involving close to 10,000 people worldwide across very different cultures. And again, I applied this very same approach: activism, networking, diversity, inviting people to co-create, etc. And guess what? It worked again. It was amazing.
Karen Mangia
In addition to the activism and network of networks, you used a word a moment ago that I think is critical, which is patterns, meaning what you're describing is you created a pattern interrupt in the way things have always been done. That reminds me of a conversation we had in our Authority magazine interview. And you said people resent a poor work experience or they learned to conform and reproduce on others the patterns of domination they experience. What is it going to take to break this cycle and move organizations and employees within them from what I call organizations of blending to organizations of belonging.
Celine Schillinger
That's a great, great way to put it. I think it will bring greater awareness to new possibilities or other possibilities. By doing this podcast, you're contributing exactly to this. You're making it possible for people to see other ways. There are other ways. We always have more power than we think. We don't have to follow, execute all orders, or even what we believe is expected from us. We have the possibility to take risks. Sometimes, I did take risks. So I know I was able to take them.
I'm an optimist. So sometimes I underestimate the risks. I'm aware of that. But I also realized that I speak from a position of privilege. I'm able bodied. I'm healthy. I'm a white woman not struggling with life, really. So I am able, but this also gives me a responsibility to push the needle a little bit. If I don't do it, then who will? Not to say that I will save the world, on the contrary, because that's the danger a little bit that looms for change agents, sometimes. I have certainly fallen in that trap myself before.
Sometimes change agents want to save the world or change or save others. The problem with that is that in doing so they only reproduce the current system, where we put some people in charge, and everybody else waits for the savior to save them. So we don't develop our agency or our self motivation or self care, power, our awareness of our own strength. This is comfortable for those who use that passivity as there's a lot of interest in keeping us in the backseat or keeping us as a passive audience of consumers. As you know, this consumerism is interesting for business. But there are other ways and those other ways are more fulfilling for us as collective humans in the workplace and in society in general. There is this passivity that is entrenched and the idea that organizations will be more efficient if people just obey and march. This belief is leading us to catastrophe, to disasters. To solve global warming, to solve the crisis of democracies, etc. we'll need the energy, the creativity and the involvement of everybody, not just a few saviors.
Karen Mangia
Your new book, in fact, is an invitation to dare to un-lead. What does this mean to un-lead? And maybe what do we need to unlearn? To unleash?
Celine Schillinger
I think we need to probably unlearn the traditional understanding or classical understanding of what leadership is. If I say the word leader we all, even myself, imagine this sort of exceptional person, probably somebody who's quite assertive and certain of his or her abilities and who is a bit superior to us all. Somebody who is standing above and who has followers. Leader and followers. That's the traditional understanding of what a leader is and this concept is probably deeply rooted in the human psyche. It's time to let go of that and realize that perpetuating this pattern will only lead us to destruction. Instead, what we need to do is consider leadership as a collective capacity; leadership is collective or is not. And if we are not able to develop this collective leadership, then there are no leaders. There are only autocrats. It's a collective capacity and, therefore, it relies on relational capacity and capacity from a technological standpoint. It is necessary to use all sorts of connection technologies, connection skills, and connection abilities to nurture those skills, developing them as much as possible. Connection skills are the new engineering skills. Developing them is developing the social capital, nurturing the social capital of an organization, big or small, it doesn’t matter. Any scale is critical and to do that requires people, individuals, especially people in positions of power to make the effort to sort of disappear in the collective, rather than stand above it. And that's not easy.
Karen Mangia
Someone listening right now, the naysayers are going to say, well, first of all, we're a business that makes a profit. So something has to get done, and somebody has to be in charge. What would you say to that naysayer, or perhaps many of them?
Celine Schillinger
Currently, your model relies on too few shoulders. You're putting too much work on too few shoulders; you have much more potential, much more capability than you think. And then you leverage, you can actually do much faster, better, exert more innovation, instead of having a few leaders drag the whole team, the whole organization. You know how it goes. Leaders complain about people below them being too passive, and people below them complain about leaders not listening, being detached from reality. The blame game is probably the most played game in organizations. And then R&D will complain about marketing, marketing, will complain about production, etc, etc.
Instead, what I suggest is not just concepts, ideas, and ideals. It comes from doing it on the field. It is because I've seen it work that I now try to offer those pathways to other people through this book. What works better is now in practice. One of the examples I bring forward in the book is this transformation of quality, where we were able, thanks to the involvement of 1000s of people, to solve problems that had not been solved for 15 years despite millions invested millions of dollars, despite tons of consultants, experts, etc. But all this investment in money and brainpower had not changed the patterns of relationships. They always maintained this pattern where knowledge and expertise is supposed to come from the top and drip down, to cascade down onto people. And it's based on the fantasy that people will adopt, execute, and change because they are told they are told to. It never happens this way. This is complete nonsense.
Karen Mangia
People are looking for meaning rather than mandates. When you tell a toddler what to do, or a trained professional what to do, the same force rises up inside and comes out as you can't make me. It sparks this force of resistance. You talk about the importance of relational leadership. What does that mean? Or what should we be screening leaders for now? If we're writing the job description for the most effective leader of our time, what characteristics and attributes or human experience would we be seeking to put this relational leader, this unbelievable leader in place?
Celine Schillinger
It's a hard question, because power changes people. So you take the best person. We're not perfect, but imagine there's a perfect person and you put him or her at the top of a large organization, this person will be changed by power. Rather than seeking profiles or specific profiles, I would pay attention to the conditions in which those people are expected to operate or how they're expected to relate with others. Of course, you can identify big egos and refrain from choosing them, but it's harder because of assertiveness and confidence projects. It plays with what we have deep inside us as the image of the perfect leader. So it takes us hiring people to deconstruct what we expect from leaders.
But in addition and to respond maybe more directly to your question, why don't we look at how those people connect on social media, for example. Do they? Or don't they? And if they don't, why?. I think nowadays, having a LinkedIn profile and interacting with other people should be the very minimum. How do they relate to people below them in the hierarchy? Do they pay attention? Or do they pay attention to the next level only? Are they still kind of stuck in this pyramid hierarchical mode which is obsolete and not very not full of opportunities, unfortunately. Or are they in a networked kind of approach? What are the networks? And what are the communities they belong to? Do they feel they are a part of a community? How do they contribute to communities?
In order to pick some of the volunteers that we invited to co-lead some of the projects I'm talking about, we invited people to select people on the basis of anonymized applications. This is great, because you're not influenced by who they are, where they live, how they look. You're paying attention to their answers to questions such as “What is leadership for you?” “Do you get involved in collective projects? Which ones?” “What do they bring you? What do you bring to them?” These kinds of questions are important to select leaders and should be at the center of our leader hiring process. I think that would work..
Karen Mangia
The new leadership screening questions are fantastic. And you use the word in there, I want to come back to the community. The same Authority magazine series that brought you and I together interviewed almost 800 leaders about this topic of reworking work. And what struck me after all those conversations is that we've reached an inflection point of companies as command and control entities, to companies as communities. That's what employees are really saying: that they want my company to be a community, a place where I feel a sense of identity, belonging, purpose, and trust. How do organizations create community leaders, inside of the organization? Because for some organizations listening is a very new concept.
Celine Schillinger
It's a very new concept. Absolutely. And some organizations believe that, since they are an organization, they have a boundary, then they are naturally a community. They are already a community, but it's wrong. They are an organization, they are a structure, but they are not a community. The community is a process. A community is not a geography. It's not a territory. It's a process. It's an experience. And it relies on the integration of diversity, the experience of commonality, the integration of diverse perspectives, the open invitation to anyone, because a community is not an elitist group. If you imagine having a kind of leadership where some people are better than others, you just reproduce the old system: activist networks being transformed into ERGs.
A community takes efforts from leaders to step down as the soul. Leaders are the sole people who will direct the group; it takes them to share their power, to invite, to be open to have their minds changed by other people in the community. That's what community is about. And it takes a very strong magnet or glue to keep the community together. This is that purpose. Constantly making sense together of what the world is what we need to do. Not taking a why as something that's now written on the wall. We will live the next 15 years with that established by our board. This is wrong; this is the old world in practice. We need a much more conversational activist and open type of engagement with people. but as we said before, it takes new behaviors from leaders and from everyone, any one of us. It's not just leaders making efforts. It's also that some people are very comfortable and waiting for instructions and just you know, nothing more. And now we're inviting them to step in and co- create. So it takes effort and learning and new skills from everybody.
Karen Mangia
Communities and co- creation. I love it. And our listeners are a community and they would like to get to know you a little bit better. I think about this as our virtual water cooler segment, you know, the place of spontaneous conversation. So I've got five quick and easy questions for you just say the first thing that comes to mind. Are you ready to join our virtual water cooler?
Celine Schillinger
I love that.
Karen Mangia
What time of day? Do you do your best work?
Celine Schillinger
Oh, at night for sure. After dinner when everybody's you know, my kids, my husband are in bed or doing their own stuff. And I can do like 9pm to 1am no problem. I got good music. I've got my you know, warm tea, my nice light. And I love that time of the day of the night.
Karen Mangia
I share that with you. If there were no dress code, what would you wear to work?
Celine Schillinger
Flip Flops.
Karen Mangia
I'm a night owl and a beach bum. You and I are like soul sisters. So what is the part of your daily routine that you most look forward to each day?
Celine Schillinger
I look forward to drinking my first tea. In the morning. I drink enormous amounts of tea every day. And it's always green tea, but different sorts of green tea and I love the first one. It's really, really good.
Karen Mangia
Something special about tea. If you could do any job in the world, what would you do?
Celine Schillinger
I would read. I would read the whole day long. That's not really a job. That's an occupation. I don't know if I could be ever paid for reading, but I would just read, read, read, read. Read.
Karen Mangia
Maybe it'd become a part of Goodreads. Right? Reading community. You're gonna read this and review. Who knows? All right, imagine a situation where now each day has 25 hours instead of 24. How would you spend that extra hour?
Celine Schillinger
Well, then I would read an hour per day, which I'm not doing now. I want to make sure to save that precious additional hour for sure.
Karen Mangia
Before we close, where can our listeners connect with you?
Celine Schillinger
They can connect with me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram. Basically on my website, social.com. And I'm always here for a chat. I'm curious about people. So if anyone's curious about me, welcome. Let's chat.
Karen Mangia
And what is the one un-lead behavior that you believe would forever shift work for the better?
Celine Schillinger
It's questioning our own contribution to maintaining or changing systems. What do I do that keeps the system in place or changes it?
Karen Mangia
Well, thank you to Celine Schillinger, CEO of We Need Social and author of Dare to Un-lead for conferring strategies to move from command and control companies, to companies as communities. Success from Anywhere . . . because success is not a destination or location. Success is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Transcript from Success from Anywhere podcast.