Andy Woodfield: Play to your strengths
By CA magazine
29 September 2021
Andy Woodfield, Global Client Partner at PwC, tells Laurence Eastham why many businesses are sleepwalking towards average – and how they can break free.
Andy Woodfield’s new book This Is Your Moment opens with a story from childhood. Each year, he was encouraged to stand on a coffee table in the living room and read his school reports aloud to the family. That meant sharing an “unbelievable barrage” of feedback, often negative. Too distractable, too unfocused, too naughty, the reports would say. It’s a model of critique – development feedback – used by much of the corporate world today, encouraging a focus on weaknesses and plotting out areas of improvement. For Woodfield, it’s a dangerous strategy that can lead to poor outcomes.
“People tend not to accept what they’re good at, because they’ve been told to focus on other things,” he explains. “For years, if I was sitting next to someone in the office, they had been told to get better at what I’m naturally good at, and I had been told to get better at what they’re naturally good at. Neither of us were focused on our strengths; we were both focused on trying to be better at our weaknesses. Everybody was moving to the average.”
Woodfield believes that the trend towards the average is where damage occurs for both employee and employer. With individuals focusing on mitigating weaknesses, rather than boosting strengths, each person is moving towards the centre. Not excelling, not embracing the inevitable failures that come with experimentation, but pursuing the myth of the well-rounded employee who is skilled in all areas.
“I always ask clients to explain how they can afford to have their people turn up and not be their best. There’s a real duty on employers to unlock people’s full potential. And, because everyone’s different, it’s ridiculous to try to manage everyone to a role profile. A role is a set of responsibilities – it’s not who you are,” explains Woodfield. “As an employer, you’re wasting money if you’re directing your people to be mediocre, when what you could do is mobilise teams based on their strengths. You could encourage people to go out of their comfort zone within their area of strength.”
That requires reframing development feedback to be a discussion around strengths, not weaknesses. The same methodology applies – identifying areas of improvement – but it relates to cumulative gains rather than mitigating losses. Here, Woodfield encourages specificity, pinpointing instances where employees have succeeded and using them as a springboard to discuss how further growth can be achieved.
“I recommend that people focus on when they were last at their best,” says Woodfield. “You need to find out: when was it specifically? Who was there? What did I do? What was the impact of what I did? The research says it immediately opens up the prefrontal cortex of the brain, allowing people to rationalise the feedback. You’re able to land some pretty tough development messages when it’s in the context of somebody’s strength. People begin to accept their areas of natural strength and can be pushed outside of their comfort zone.”
He adds: “People sometimes think that if you’re focused on your strengths, it means you don’t have to do all the things you don’t like. But you have a set of responsibilities within your job, and you need to find the best way to deliver upon those responsibilities. You find new ways of getting things done. When you focus on strengths, you still own responsibility, but you’re not obsessed with trying to get better at the things you don’t enjoy or you’re not particularly good at.”
The answer, says Woodfield, is for leaders to concentrate on creating teams with individual strengths and weaknesses in mind. By bringing together colleagues based on complementary skills, where one’s strengths are matched against another’s weaknesses, the responsibility for performance begins to shift from the individual to the group. People become unburdened from the expectation to be the model employee – the jack of all trades discussed earlier – and can collaborate more effectively.
Diversity of thought
But, there’s another obstacle that goes hand in hand with decades of development feedback. The pursuit of average has also created a prevailing culture of corporate conformity – an expectation that those who succeed in business must behave and conduct themselves in a certain way. For Woodfield, this is a major sticking point when it comes to unlocking people’s potential and improving business performance. Many firms are practising visible diversity, hiring and promoting those who may look different to the established stereotype, but there’s a risk that the commitment only goes skin deep.
“I really worry that organisations are becoming more diverse looking but, if you want to be successful, you need to act like a straight white man,” he explains. “There’s a predominant culture within most organisations that if you don’t conform to ‘how things are done around here’, you don’t succeed. It makes a mockery of diversity and it really messes with people’s mental health. If you do identify as someone who is different, you end up feeling like you’ve sold out.
“I once put together a team that had people from different parts of the country, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ages, different genders, different ethnicities, different sexualities. Did it make them more inclusive? Absolutely not. They still wanted to conform to the predominant way of working. In business, that often ends up being process-driven types versus creative types. The power is in bringing together different ways of working. It allows you to be more effective and identify risks and opportunities.
“That’s why diversity and inclusion are so different in concept. If you really embrace different ways of thinking, if you really embrace different types of people, you will get different skills and experiences. And you will be able to match across those different skills and experiences. You can mobilise much stronger, much more respected and much more inclusive teams. People are happier, healthier and manage their stress better, as well.”
The onus, then, is very much on leaders. They must balance their teams appropriately, not only taking into consideration people’s skillsets, but also the ways in which they work, so that no one group can dominate the working culture. It’s not an easy task – Woodfield jokes that truly inclusive teams can be “really bloody annoying” to manage – but it’s necessary if firms are to break away from the pack. Tomorrow’s winners are already undertaking the journey to transform diversity into inclusion.
“We’ve got a long way to go when it comes to inclusion. As a leader, it’s much easier to force your way of working on everyone,” says Woodfield. “Encouraging everyone to be patient and tolerant, and embracing different thoughts and feelings and ways of working, took much more time and effort from me as a leader than I imagined. But I can only do what I know – I’m limited by my knowledge and my experience – and that’s not a good basis for leveraging a team.”
Putting purpose first
Woodfield believes these are modern management and leadership strategies for a modern world, reflecting wider trends that are taking place in business and society. Existential threats like climate change and the pandemic have dramatically shifted expectations around employment. More than ever before, people want to work for firms that reflect their values and respect their individuality.
“People will not be led by you because of your experience or your role in a hierarchy,” he explains. “Folks joining PwC expect to be heard, to have world-class experiences with clients around the world, and to do stuff that matters to them. They expect to be led by people who are invested in them, and who are human and authentic and vulnerable."
If you’re not inspired by your leaders, and encouraged to develop and unlock your potential, then when an opportunity comes up to leave, you will take it.
Now, to attract and retain talent, leaders and their firms must discover and communicate their purpose to the world. Employees, customers and investors alike will be encouraged to interact with businesses they feel closely aligned with. It’s all wrapped up in growing expectations around transparency. As well as sharing their successes, firms must be honest about their mistakes and shortfalls and explain how they are being rectified.
Now, to attract and retain talent, leaders and their firms must discover and communicate their purpose to the world. Employees, customers and investors alike will be encouraged to interact with businesses they feel closely aligned with. It’s all wrapped up in growing expectations around transparency. As well as sharing their successes, firms must be honest about their mistakes and shortfalls and explain how they are being rectified.
“Just as you can’t diversity-wash, you can’t purpose-wash either,” says Woodfield. “I’m always intrigued by people who suddenly want to be authentic because it’s fashionable. You can’t suddenly become authentic. In many ways, if you’re not prepared to point to your actions and bring your words to life, it’s better to shut up.
“As a leader, it’s really important that you live and breathe your purpose – that you can be a good storyteller of what you’ve done. There’s a lot of leaders where you can tell they’re reading off a script. You can’t just change your vocabulary to one of purpose. People are very clever at detecting that stuff. You have to change your actions. It needs to be real.”
Financial professionals are essential in enabling businesses to bring those potential buzzwords – purpose, values, authenticity – to life. Woodfield sees the technical skills underpinning accountancy as providing a jumping-off point for firms looking to realign their operations. And as accountants increasingly occupy advisory roles that rely upon their wider business knowledge, they have become perfectly placed to steer businesses that are serious about putting purpose first.
“It’s absolutely essential to understand the fundamentals of how businesses work,” says Woodfield. “You can cut through all the noise and understand the lifeblood of an organisation. Then you can enable an organisation to move towards purpose in a more authentic way – thinking about how it aligns with the foundations of the business. I always coach people joining PwC to do audit work, because you learn how an organisation really operates.”
Andy Woodfield is speaking at CA Summit. Register to book your free place.
This Is Your Moment (Panoma Press, £14.99) is available now.