Hello and welcome to Working It.
Last week I took a break at the retreat house Chalice Well garden in the town of Glastonbury, epicenter of English folklore and magic. This tranquil garden (no phones allowed) has an ancient spring that is said to have healing powers. Even if you don’t believe in anything remotely spiritual, it’s a wonderful place to visit and sit quietly in nature 🌳.
And any digital detox is a valuable opportunity to rest and reflect. (Even when they don’t take place, like mine, under a full moon🌕.)
Read on for a tip for 2025: Coaching and peer support could be the best way to keep women (or anyone) in senior positions and avoid “churn” of CEOs and leaders.
There will be no office therapy this week because you’ve all been partying too hard to tell me your problems🤢, but we’ll be back with new workplace problems and your professional dilemmas for Jonathan Black in the new year.
Write to me at isabel.berwick@ft.com. And thanks for the emails, messages and ideas this year💌. Please keep coming. (Even the negative ones 👀.)
Leadership 2025: Bring on the coaches and support groups 🙌🏻
We’ve been filming a Working It video (coming soon) on how companies can better approach retention and succession planning for CEOs and senior leaders. It’s a volatile world and CEO turnover has never been higher. However, what comes up again and again in my discussions is the loneliness and lack of time and space for reflection (let alone support💪🏼) from people at the top of organizations.
Like one of our video interviewees, Valerie Mocker, an experienced board member and founder of a coaching company. wing womantold me, “The job of CEO can be incredibly difficult. It can be incredibly lonely. And behind the scenes we know that many CEOs are also burned out or on the path to burning out.”
What leaders need is support, and organizations are starting to get better at providing it. (Although from an often low base). One idea Valerie mentioned was creating more opportunities for other people to step up and gain experience running an organization (perhaps during vacation or sickness cover). It creates a broader group of both potential leaders and people who understand the pressures the CEO faces.
And providing a coach or peer support really works to help development, probably for everyone, but it’s been shown to work for women leaders, according to Claudine Menashe-Jonesinternational coach and leadership partner. This was one of her discoveries. investigation among women leaders, published earlier this year. As Claudine told me: “Organizations do not routinely offer coaching, leaving many women to fend for themselves and weave in the support they need.
“One piece of advice that the women interviewed wanted to give their younger selves was ‘take some time to think.’ Sometimes it’s about finding ways to “put on your own oxygen mask first,” so you can better serve others. . . The emphasis here is not on learning new leadership skills or pursuing a specific goal, but on developing that sense of self as a leader.”
Claudine’s work has focused on women leaders, but the role of a trusted coach or mentor (or even colleagues who “know how you feel” because they have walked the same path) is vital. Another option is to actually “lean in” to formal or informal support groups (see what I did there?). As Claudine told me: “What I find really interesting is that this research shows that simply being in a group with other people who are experiencing the same challenges as you makes you feel more able to cope with them. Not even because you get advice or suggestions, although you might, but because of that feeling of ‘it’s not just me, I’m not alone in this👯♂️’.”
In my (many) Working It conversations and interviews on the topic of leadership this year, it has always been mentioned that coaching, mentoring and peer support are vital to developing (and retaining) healthy and effective leaders. If we all know it, why isn’t it practiced more frequently? As Claudine noted, “coaching is still often seen as a corrective intervention.”
My observation (not a scientific one, so feel free to tell me if I’m wrong) is that coaching and support in 2024-25 is perceived in the same way as therapy and personal advice (at least in the UK) a few years ago. 15 years. When I first went to therapy in 2008, many friends and family told me that I must be too weak to need it. It was seen as a corrective personal intervention🫤.
Things have changed enormously since then and talking cures have become widespread because they work. Will leadership coaching have its own defining moment in 2025? I’d love to hear your opinion: isabel.berwick@ft.com.
This week on the Working It podcast
What happens after you miss out on that big promotion? How well do you handle rejection😢? Heist recently reported that thousands of Citigroup employees missed out on title changes and pay increases this year, while Goldman Sachs has just announced his new partners – he only does it every two years, and only a fraction of the staff get the coveted promotion.
That piqued my interest: we all face disappointment at work, and how we handle it and move on is critical to our future well-being and progression. In this week’s podcast I speak with Sarah Ellis, co-founder of Incredible yes, which specializes in practical training to help us adopt “wave careers”; Not all trajectories have to be relentlessly upward. And my colleague Anjli Raval offers the perspective from the top: How do senior executives view their careers? Can they also be “scribbles”?
The five biggest job stories of 2024 🚛
These are the FT’s most popular stories about workplaces and workplaces this year, based on the number of online page views, from January to December. The winner is Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch, and his article wasn’t even published until September. (Not that it’s a competition. Although it should be🏇🏻.)
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Young women are starting to leave men behind: Even my non-MSM-loving Gen Z descendants have read (or at least watched TikToks about) John Burn-Murdoch’s vital, viral article on the educational and income gains made by young women, while that many young men are increasingly dissatisfied. I have already seen it cited in several presentations on the future of work.
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The 25 most influential women of 2024 according to the Financial Times: This special article from the annual magazine always attracts many readers, and rightly so. The design is stunning and the writers are top-notch themselves. The 2024 edition includes Gillian Anderson’s Charli XCX and Sheryl Sandberg’s Taylor Swift.
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The workplace under the Labor Party: employers were preparing for the biggest shake-up in a generation: A post-election blockbuster from Delphine Strauss, it delivers on all the promises made by the new UK government on things like zero hours contracts. (However, no one saw the IN increase coming.
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EY fires staff who took several online training courses at once: Numbers four and five (see below) on the 2024 hit parade are stories about people fired from big companies for small (or rather small) infractions like this. Do we click on these stories because we care about our own stationery/food stamp habits? Or because it is extraordinary that they have been fired?
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Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credits: See above 👆.
One more thing. . .
The team at FTAlphaville, our markets blog, publishes an annual round-up of FT journalists’ nominations for the best non-FT podcasts and writing of the year. Read about them here. Selected stories include a first-person account from a personal finance expert who was scammed and a secret gay sex car on the Mexico City subway. (That’s where I piqued your interest🕵️♀️.)
This week’s (winning) giveaway 📕
The FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024 is Supremacy by Parmy Olsona gripping story of the rivalry between Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and the dangers of unregulated AI. The awards dinner at The Peninsula in London last week was a fantastic event (think Oscars, but for hardcover books🏆).
For a reminder of the rest of the featured shortlist, watch here – all titles make great last-minute Christmas gifts for the (other) FT readers in your life.
I have a selection of the shortlisted books to give away and will be sending a shared volume to each winner in this week’s giveaway. There will be at least six and maybe more (depending on how many books you can collect!), as well as enter here 📪. I will draw at random from all entries in the box on Friday the 20th at noon and notify the winners.
Festive Joy-AI Content 🎁
At the end of a year full of hype and misunderstanding about AI (and that was just me), we spoke with current experts on the current state of AI in the workplace. The resulting video, Working It, is a hit on YouTube, not least because it features Azeem Azhar, founder of the influential Exponential view Technology trends newsletter. Azeem told me about the fleet of AI “agents” he already sends to meetings: one to take notes, another to give performance feedback, and so on😳.
See you or your AI agent here in 2025 🤖.
Finally, a thank you. . . 💐
. . . to the FT colleagues who made Working It work in 2024. Most importantly, Alice Fishburn, an incredibly supportive manager🏅.
And to the brilliant team at Working It: Gordon Smith edits this newsletter, Mischa Frankl-Duval produces the podcast, and Claire Justin is the mastermind of our videos. Thanks also to Clare Allen, Claer Barrett, Cheryl Brumley, Hanna Dokal, Sarah Ebner, Petros Gioumpasis, Kritasha Gupta, Michael Hepburn, Freya Hyde, Emma Jacobs, Veronica Kan-Dapaah, Elena Losavio, Charlotte Otterson, Manuela Saragosa, Bethan Staton, Richard Topping and Carolina Vargas🙏🏻.