Send your rising stars to work elsewhere ⭐️

Hello and welcome back to Working It.

I talk to a lot of leaders, in a bid to stay “ahead of the curve” and hear what’s on their minds. These meetings are not just about good ideas and premium biscuits 🍪. I also enjoy the unexpected ways that life comes full circle.

In 2022, I went with my Most Successful Friend (as her “plus one”) to a new event: Anthropy at the Eden Project in Cornwall. It was an invigorating experiment: a coming-together of leaders from business, charities, government and beyond, to work on a blueprint of positive changes for Britain after Covid. Think Davos, but in a biome. And without the tiered ticketing structure/crazy egos.

I was in at the start (such a trendsetter 😎). Many more people have since got involved — if you’re interested, the next, much bigger, Anthropy conference is in March 2025. This week, I finally met its founder, John O’Brien, to talk about leadership and connection. (No biscuits, though).

Read on for the many benefits of younger people joining boards (PSA: “young” in board terms is 40 something.) And in Office Therapy we advise someone feeling left out at work. We’ve all been there 😥.

Send your stars out to shine as Neds (or become one yourself) 🙋🏽‍♂️

Why not encourage your talented executives to become non-executive directors (Neds) in another organisation? That’s the most original staff retention and career development idea* I’ve heard in a long while. It comes from Warren Partners’ Sally Dunwoody**, a specialist headhunter for leaders in financial services companies.

Sally told me: “If you offer someone who has an executive role the chance to be a non-exec in an organisation that does not compete with what they are doing, it is a great development opportunity for them and you will keep them. You will retain them, they will be trained in a whole range of skills that will be very useful to your business, and you won’t be paying for that training — someone else is.”💡

Even better, Sally said: “[Neds] immediately have access to, say, six other people from the board they are serving on, plus the rest of the company they are working with, plus their resources. All that brings a ton of extras to your business and access to people and places who can coach, mentor and help.”

Generally, serving executives will only have the time to take on one Ned role. What sort of person, I asked Sally, is likely to be a candidate for a Ned role? “You’d be in a broad business role — probably starting to be a functional specialist, so you are probably in finance or marketing, business development or HR. Tech in particular is good — anything to do with tech or data — or a general manager.” For the new generation of Neds, you’re probably at the stage of “ExCo or ExCo minus one”.

The biggest barrier to executives taking on a role elsewhere might not be an unsupportive boss, but age. According to the latest (2023) Spencer Stuart Board Index, the average age of Neds in the UK is 60.9 years: “Female Neds are slightly younger on average (59.3 years) than their male counterparts (62.5).” Boards are proving surprisingly stubborn about recruiting younger people — even those with relevant experience. The very youngest Neds are likely to be in their mid-40s.

It’s something that needs to change, especially now that many companies have four or five generations in the workplace (as discussed here last week). As Sally pointed out: “You need people who are younger round the board table as they can help shift the debate away from ‘this is how we have always done it’ and also they can help ‘get the customer in the board room’. Think about a payday loan business, for example — how many of their board members have ever been in the situation of needing that service?”

There are also plenty of programmes aimed at supporting people into board positions — Warren Partners, for example, has a Board Fellowship Programme that connects FTSE 250 companies with talented people from minority backgrounds. Women on Boards offers networking and training opportunities. And, *declaring an interest*, the FT Board Director Programme offers a diploma for aspiring Neds in the UK and Asia. (Tell me any others you have taken part in, or run, and we will mention them here.)

What can you do to improve your own chances of finding a non-executive position? Thinking several years ahead will help — whether you’re thinking of doing it alongside a corporate job, or as part of a transition to a portfolio career. Becoming a school governor, or a trustee of a charity, are good first steps. Sally’s advice: “Do something that speaks to you, so you lean into it properly and give it the energy and passion it deserves.”

*Got more ideas for expanding the Ned pool 🌊? Email me: [email protected]

**I first met Sally many years ago, on a campsite in France ⛺️. We reconnected recently, creating another “full circle” moment.

This week on the Working It podcast

Burnout is a huge issue, but very ill-defined — and there’s even more confusion about how to prevent and treat it. Into this void comes the expert voice of this week’s guest on the Working It podcast, Dr Audrey Tang. Audrey is a psychologist, coach and award-winning author. We recorded our talk earlier this month, live on stage at the FT Weekend Festival.

Listen in for tips on spotting early warning signs of burnout in yourself, and in colleagues, and learn how to keep yourself afloat when you are working in a dysfunctional organisation. Lots of great audience questions, too 🏆.

Office Therapy

The problem: I recently found out by chance that I had not been invited to a select workplace dinner. When I heard, I felt like I was in the playground and nobody wanted to play with me. It was pure humiliation and later I was furious. I’m over it but I’m curious: why was my response physical — and how best to deal with “bruises” to our status🤕?

Isabel’s advice: I decided not to answer this myself because my reaction was visceral. It took me back to that moment when I realised my daughter was the only one in the friendship group not invited to the Alpha Girl’s birthday party. It sucks 🤬.

Here’s the rather more impartial (and more impressive) Ben Tye, CEO at digital transformation consultancy Gate One, and also a psychotherapist and executive coach:

“Ouch, I feel for you. Rejection hurts, and being excluded is a powerful form of othering that can bring up feelings of shame, impotent anger and rage.

“It’s telling that you describe an intense physical reaction and feeling like you were back in the playground with no one wanting to play with you. We all carry what’s called our ‘inner child’ within us. It’s a way of describing the younger parts of ourselves that can sometimes emerge during stressful or traumatic situations. In psychological terms, it’s a form of regression when an experience can suddenly take us back to feeling very young and vulnerable.

“Be good to yourself, acknowledge the pain of being excluded and find a way to be kind to yourself on the day of the dinner. Maybe have one of your own with friends, family and people you love, who love you in return? Finally, if you experience this regularly, you might consider working with a psychodynamic coach or a psychotherapist to work through what is happening and address whatever is there.”

*Got a workplace problem for Office Therapy? Big, small — we tackle them all. Send to [email protected]. We anonymise everything.

🚨 Office Therapy will be alternating here with the extremely popular “Dear Jonathan” careers advice column by Jonathan Black. Send your career dilemmas to [email protected].

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Uber’s next act: taking on Amazon. Newly profitable Uber is in the business of expansion — a great case study on corporate ambition from Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu and Camilla Hodgson. Is it really going to turn into the “operating system for your everyday life”?

2. The office is not the only solution: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent the “return to office” debate into overdrive when he announced that he wanted workers back at their desks five days a week. Emma Jacobs asks how something as boring as the office ended up being such a hot topic.

3. Young women are starting to leave young men behind: Women are making strides in education and workplaces, but the more startling thing is that some young men are actively disengaged — and their prospects are going backwards. A worrying data trends piece from John Burn-Murdoch.

4. Get a grip: why has the UK’s Labour government been so bad at politics? A classic tale of dysfunctional office politics, except this time they are governing the UK. Jim Pickard and Lucy Fisher investigate.

5. PwC average UK partner pay falls to £862,000 as sales growth stalls: No further commentary needed, but PwC is the first of the Big Four to report results, says Simon Foy.

One more thing . . .

If you’ve ever wanted to look more “put together” in your clothing choices, or have felt you don’t really “get” fashion 🤷🏼‍♀️, please read “How I Lost (and Found) My Style at 67“, by Cathy Horyn in The Cut. What will make you feel instantly better is that Cathy is a fashion critic. If she has been uncertain about what to wear, what hope for the rest of us? It’s also a great example of positive ageing — embracing change and making the most of it. (Yes, this is a piece aimed at women — but there are many universal lessons.)

This week’s giveaway

OK, I lied, not a giveaway . . . but a big NY-based future of work conference that’s free to join online. Charter’s Workplace Summit 2024 is on October 8. Register here and join Charter co-founders Kevin Delaney and Erin Grau and other top names on leadership and the future of work. Sessions that caught my eye include JPMorgan’s head of AI on how humans and AI can best work together.

A word from the Working It community . . . 

The newsletter on the benefits of journaling about working life brought in interesting replies, including a couple of readers who questioned the ownership of such artefacts. If you are writing down who said what in meetings . . . does it belong to your employer as evidence if something goes bad 🤢? I will investigate (do send me your expert thoughts).

But my favourite email came from Trigvie Robbins-Jones, known as Trig, a director at PwC. He wrote: “I do something similar in cartoon form because work is too funny to be taken seriously”. I agree, but Trig actually draws his thoughts. And they are brilliant. He’s got a blog, or follow him on LinkedIn, where he posts professional-life-adjacent strips that will lighten your feed when it gets bloated with earnest posts from self-promoters and overcaffeinated conference attendees 😱.