Hello. Welcome to Working It.
I holidayed last week at a retreat at Chalice Well Gardens in the town of Glastonbury, the center of English folklore and magic. This tranquil garden (no phones allowed) is home to an ancient spring said to have healing powers. Even if you don’t believe in spirituality at all, this is a wonderful place to visit and sit quietly in nature 🌳.
And a digital detox is a valuable opportunity to rest and reflect. (Even if they don’t take place under a full moon 🌕, like in my case.)
Read our tips for 2025: Coaching and peer support may be the best way to keep women (or anyone, really) in senior roles and prevent CEO and leader “attachment.”
There will be no office therapy this week as you are too busy partying to share your worries with me 🤢. But in the new year, we’ll be back to talk about new challenges at work and Jonathan Black’s career dilemma.
Please email [email protected]. Thank you again for your emails, messages, and ideas this year💌. Please keep coming. (Even if it’s negative👀)
Leadership 2025: Invite your coaches and support group 🙌🏻
We’ve been filming a Working It video (coming soon) that explains how companies can most effectively approach CEO and senior leader retention and succession planning. The world is unstable, and CEO turnover is at an all-time high. But what comes up again and again in my discussions is the isolation of people at the top of organizations and the lack of time and space to reflect, much less support 💪🏼.
One of our video interviewees, Valerie Mocker, an experienced board member and founder of the coaching firm Wingwoman, said: It can be incredibly lonely. And behind the scenes, we know that many CEOs are also burnt out or on the verge of burnout. ”
Leaders need support, and organizations are beginning to improve their ability to provide that support. (Although the base is often low.) One of the ideas Valerie mentioned was creating more opportunities for others to step up and gain organizational management experience (perhaps on vacation or during the sickness insurance period). This attracts a broader pool of talent, including both potential leaders and those who understand the pressures CEOs face.
And providing the support of a coach or a peer can actually help you grow — perhaps for everyone, but it’s proven to be effective for women in leadership, says Dr. Leadership Partner Claudine Menashe-Jones said. This is one of the findings of her research on women leaders, published earlier this year. As Claudine told me, “Coaching is not regularly provided by organizations, so many women are left to fend for themselves and create the support they need.
“One of the pieces of advice that the women interviewed wished they could give to their younger selves was to ‘take time to think.’ In some cases, it can help you better serve others. It’s important to find a way to “put on your own oxygen mask first.” . . The emphasis here is not on learning new leadership skills or pursuing specific goals, but on developing a sense of yourself as a leader. ”
While Claudine’s work has focused on women leaders, the role of coaches, trusted mentors, and even colleagues who “know how you feel” because they’ve walked the same path is important. Another option is to actually “lean in” to a formal or informal support group (see what I did there). As Claudine told me, “What I thought was really interesting is that this study shows that just being in a group with other people who are experiencing the same challenges as you, It’s about feeling like you can deal with it more. Not because you get advice or tips, although you might get them, but because of the feeling of “I’m not alone in this, I’m not alone 👯♂️.” . ”
In my (many) Working It conversations and interviews this year on the theme of leadership, coaching and peer-to-peer mentoring and support are constantly mentioned as essential to developing and maintaining healthy and effective leaders. I did. If everyone knows it, why isn’t it practiced more often? As Claudine pointed out, “coaching is still often considered a therapeutic intervention.”
My observation – unscientific, so feel free to tell me if I’m wrong – is that coaching and support in 2024-2025 will be perceived (at least in the UK) in the same way as personal therapy and counseling were around 15 years ago. It means that it has been done. When I first went to therapy in 2008, many friends and family said I must be so debilitated that I had to resort to therapy. It was considered a personal and remedial intervention 🫤.
Things have changed a lot since then, and talking treatments have become mainstream because they are effective. Will leadership coaching have a breakthrough moment in 2025? We’d love to hear from you: [email protected].
This week’s Working It Podcast
What happens if you miss out on that big promotion? How well can you handle rejection? FT recently reported that thousands of Citigroup employees missed out on title changes and raises this year, while Goldman Sachs just announced a new partner. The company only does this every other year, and only a small percentage of employees get the coveted promotion.
That sparked my interest. We all face disappointments at work. How we deal with it and move on is critical to our future well-being and progress. On this week’s podcast, we speak with Sarah Ellis, co-founder of Amazing If, which specializes in practical training to embrace a “wavering career.” Not all trajectories need to be inexorably upward. And my colleague Angeli Laval gives us a top-down view of how senior executives view their careers. Can they “ripple” too?
5 Biggest Job Stories of 2024 🚛
These are the FT’s most popular workplace and workplace-adjacent articles of the year, based on the number of online pageviews from January to December. The winner was John Byrne Murdoch, the FT’s chief data reporter, whose article wasn’t even published until September. (It’s not a competition. It’s supposed to be 🏇🏻)
Young women are starting to leave men behind: Even my Gen Z descendants, who don’t love the MSM, have read John Byrne Murdoch’s important and viral article about the increased education and incomes young women are gaining ( Or at least watched TikTok). Meanwhile, many young people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied. I’ve already seen this quote quoted in several presentations on the future of work.
FT’s 25 Most Powerful Women of 2024: The magazine’s annual feature always attracts a large audience, and it’s no wonder. The design is great and the author himself is top notch. The 2024 edition includes Gillian Anderson’s Charli XCX and Sheryl Sandberg’s Taylor Swift.
The workplace under a Labor government: Employers preparing for the biggest change in a generation: Delphine Strauss’s post-election blockbuster, covering all the promises made by Britain’s new government on zero-hours contracts and more. (But no one saw the NI rise coming.
EY fires staff who took multiple online training courses at once: Nos. 4 and 5 (see below) on the 2024 hit parade are the most common cases of people being fired from large companies for such minor (or minor) infractions. It’s a story about people. Are we clicking on these articles because we’re concerned about our own stationery and meal ticket habits, or is it because being fired is abnormal?
Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credit: see above 👆.
One more thing. . .
Every year, the team at our market blog FTAlphaville publishes a roundup of what FT journalists have nominated as the year’s best non-FT writing and podcasts. Learn about them here. Selected stories include a first-person account of a personal finance professional who was scammed and a secret gay sex car in the Mexico City subway. (That’s where I piqued your interest 🕵️♀️)
This week’s (winner) present📕
The FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year for 2024 is Supremacy by Palmy Olson, about the conflict between Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and the dangers of unregulated AI. , is a story that touches the heart. Last week’s awards dinner at The Peninsula in London was a great event (think Oscars, but for hardbacks 🏆).
Click here for the rest of the outstanding shortlist. All titles are perfect last-minute Christmas gifts for the (other) FT readers in your life.
We have several shortlisted books to give away, and we plan to send out a “potluck” book to each winner in this week’s giveaway. At least 6 books, probably more (depending on how many books you can scoop up!). Please enter here 📪. We will draw randomly from all entries in the box at noon on Friday the 20th and notify winners.
Celebration support AI content 🎁
At the end of a year full of AI hype and misconceptions (and it was just me), we spoke to real experts about the real state of AI in the workplace. The resulting Working It video was a hit on YouTube, especially because it featured Azeem Azhar, founder of the influential tech trends newsletter Exponential View. Azeem told me about a group of AI “agents” he had already sent to the conference. One person to take notes, one person to give performance feedback, etc. 😳.
We’ll see you or your agent AI here again in 2025 🤖.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude. . . 💐
. . . Thank you to our colleagues at the FT who are making Working It a reality in 2024. Most importantly, our amazing and supportive manager 🏅 Alice Fishburne.
And the wonderful Working It team. Gordon Smith edits this newsletter, Mischa Frankl-Duvall produces the podcast, and Claire Justin is the video mastermind. Claire Allen, Claire Barrett, Cheryl Brumley, Hannah Dokal, Sarah Ebner, Petros Giampasis, Kritasha Gupta, Michael Hepburn, Freya Hyde, Emma Jacobs, Veronica Cann-Dapah, Elena Rosavio , Charlotte Otterson, Manuela Zaragoza, and Bethan Staton. Richard Topping and Carolina Vargas 🙏🏻.
