Collaboration and impact in extreme otherness

Victory!

I don’t usually write about soccer/football (in fact, never) but it was so fun to be in Saudi Arabia the very day its team beat Argentina in its first World Cup round.
You could see people beaming with bliss and pride.

The Green Falcons, which no one expected to shine, had scored two goals and put on a brilliant defense, challenging the legendary Argentinian team.

The media report that the players, galvanized by their coach, displayed their best collective performance in a long time – and won the game.

Against all odds.

I too felt upbeat that day, as the first piece of work I ever delivered for a Saudi client had gone really well.

To be honest, I was apprehensive about this mission. I pondered its ethical and practical elements.

I had little clue about local social norms—in a country that is changing fast; I worried my clothing, my attitude wouldn’t be appropriate. I was expected to design and facilitate a workshop for a male-only audience, about the integration of women in their workplace. Not an easy task!

I couldn’t co-elaborate the program with the client, as I usually do. I supposed some of the attendees would have been directed to this workshop rather than volunteered to attend it.

More fundamentally, on many aspects I was about to collaborate with my very cultural opposite. The amount of challenge attached to this one operation was frankly quite daunting. And yet together, we succeeded: the workshop was a win.

Against all odds.

Such uncertainty and extreme differences between stakeholders called upon to interact is frequently found in the business world.

So, I thought it might be useful to identify and share the main elements that led to a successful outcome. They are grounded in the philosophy described in Dare to Un-Lead: The Art of Relational Leadership in a Fragmented World.

1- Make relationship-building the first and foremost objective

Naturally, I was not commissioned to "build a relationship". I had a specific job to do: to impart knowledge, to satisfy a customer need.

But since this work involved people, their active participation was essential to its success. And we can't engage people by treating them as disembodied entities, vessels to be filled with information, as if who we are and how we interact don't matter. On the contrary, that is what matters most – because the quality of our relationship determines the collective outcome.

Esko Kilpi, whom I cite in Dare to Un-Lead multiple times, explained: “Work that humans do used to be a career, a role, a job; now it is a task, but it is going to be a relationship: work is interaction between interdependent people” (in ‘Redefining work’, 2015 – emphasis mine).

In another of my favorite articles (‘We need to shift our focus from competencies to agency’, 2018), Kilpi wrote that “Success today is increasingly a result of skillful presence: it is about empathy and interaction. Interaction creates capability beyond individuals”. And from that 2015 article again: “As we engage in new relationships and connect with thinking that is different from ours, we are always creating new potentials for action.”

This was my objective #1. And so, I came in with no other ambition than to establish a genuine, human connection with the participants; because everything else (learning, change…) would ensue.

It may sound like a terribly modest goal, but it is actually huge – and the one which requires a real effort. Putting together a meeting, a presentation, a plan… is easy. Establishing a genuine human connection with the “extreme other” requires a real curiosity, a complete and judgment-free attention, the exercise of that sensitive openness I talk about in Dare to Un-Lead.

It challenges our relative privileges or positional markers: expertise, years of experience, academic honors, social recognition… count for nothing in front of a group of strangers.

We must, if we want to succeed in this era of relational work, present ourselves vulnerable to human interaction and eager to be touched by it.

2- Build from the meta level for impact

The smartest design, the most relevant content and the best presenter do not make a good workshop. These should be brought about by a process that reflects and expresses the objectives being pursued.

In the case of my Saudi intervention, the objective was to build people's competence in the field of inclusive and mixed leadership. The ideal would have been to create this piece of work in an inclusive and mixed manner – because, as my friend and mentor Myron Rogers puts it, "the way you get to the future is the future you get". This was not an option here, so I came up with a very conversational design that called upon the participation of everyone throughout our workshop.

Above all, I put our interactions at the heart of the setup, as a model of male-female collaboration. If the participants could make me feel comfortable to be myself in their company, chances were that they would be able to operate in a welcoming and inclusive way with their female colleagues.

The more our intervention is designed to model the desired goal, the more likely it is to succeed. Think "impact squared": the impact of visible elements (knowledge, exercises...) is multiplied if the underlying elements (work processes, collective dynamics...) are purposeful and congruent with the objective.

3- Follow principles rather than structure

Navigating the socio-cultural unknown is obviously a source of much uncertainty. Things can go as planned... or not at all.

I thoroughly prepared the content I wanted to get across, so that I could detach myself from it if necessary. Were that to happen (and it happened!), my intervention would remain anchored in the principles that drove this work. I think it helps a lot if we are super clear with guiding principles, and very flexible with their execution.

My design was sophisticated and precise to the minute. From experience, I know it works perfectly with a Western audience. But here, everything felt different. Participants arrived at different times, thus the initial check-in circle at the start of the day intended for everyone to acknowledge each other gathered half of the people only. Participants came and went according to their professional urgencies ; attendance was almost more of a flow than of a group. It was not easy to "read" the room. At one point a participant intervened to express what I believed, from his expression, to be a criticism; in fact, he said this was one of the best workshops he’d ever attended.

Halfway through the day, the group asked to reorganize the afternoon sequence – I had to switch, shorten, and anticipate in a heartbeat. As a result, a new change became immediately necessary, as the first one didn’t take into account the right time for prayer. All this would have been more complicated if structure and content drove my intervention. But these were only derived from guiding principles, which I could serve in many ways.

This made the intervention "anti-fragile", or at least more resilient to disruptions.

Now what about women’s integration in the workplace, which was the topic of this assignment? More broadly, how do I approach collaboration in diversity, which is an important component of my work?

I don't think that a one-time intervention changes things radically. In fact, there is evidence that many diversity trainings have the opposite effect. Nevertheless, one-off interventions can be useful in pointing people in a certain direction.

From my perspective, it is vital that diversity unites rather than deepens the divisions of the world. My approach is therefore to:

De-dramatize the subject, so that the dominant group does not feel attacked - which would provoke a natural defensive reaction
Reject the essentialization of differences: gender does not determine behavior
Make it a business efficiency issue, not a moral issue
Work on the notion of relational leadership, which is precisely the ability to build collective leadership out of a group’s diversity

In Saudi Arabia, women now make up more than a third of the work force, which is a spectacular progression in just a few years. They are highly educated, which represents a potential that is well understood by employers. While still shaped by the cultural codes specific to this country, social dynamics are changing.

I sincerely wish all the very best to the Saudi women entering the workforce, as I do to their male colleagues.

I have no doubt that you will succeed in winning together.

Against all odds.