Discomfort, discipline and demographic dividends: Holly Ransom on better business

Leadership expert Holly Ransom has interviewed a host of legends, including Barack Obama, Venus Williams, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Malcolm Gladwell. Here she discusses hacks for leaders to make more time for learning, broadening your horizons and why Africa should be on your radar, ahead of hosting the ADMA Global Forum in August.

Have you ever had a moment of professional overwhelm, where you wish the pace of change would just chill out for a moment to allow you to catch up? If so, Holly Ransom has some bad news for you: “The days of longing for the world to slow down have well and truly passed us.”

Ransom knows a thing or two about adaptability and change. She spends her days consulting to top businesses about leadership development and organisational transformation - the definition of change management which is something marketers need to be thinking carefully about, given the ever-evolving forces shaping the industry from technology to the economy.  

However, she says, in her experience the companies and leaders who stop longing for a slow down or return to the good old days are creating a “competitive advantage of being able to navigate a landscape that is changing constantly, and therefore has a continuous element of unpredictability”. 

Her message for marketers is simple: “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. By that I mean comfortable with the unknown, comfortable with the complexity, comfortable with the fact there's no clear right answer, or there's no blueprint for how we do this and how we can guarantee it. Thinking really intentionally as a leader around the goals I've got for my organisation, or for my career, and what things I don't feel all that comfortable and confident about but are going to be critical, and then how to close the learning gap to do them?”  

However, the challenge is that leaders are often impatient and demanding on themselves when it comes to new areas of mastery, and are not prepared to go through the necessary discomfort of being bad at something in order to improve. This rings true for marketing leaders in particular, with modern day marketers expected to be abreast of more technical elements than ever to perform in their roles.

“When we're talking about leaders, we are often talking about A-type personalities,” Holly explains. “They have a tendency to try and optimise before they establish competence, so tend not to be very kind to themselves when they do things that make them uncomfortable and lurch outside their comfort zone. They demand too much of themselves in the first instance. 

“So the one caveat I would have on building your confidence and getting uncomfortable is to think about how you do it in small steps. Don't try and take a giant stride at a time. Rather think about some small ways you could start to build your familiarity and confidence?” 

‘Busy’ has become a default response for many people when asked how work is, but is that constant ‘busyness’ getting in the way of the kind of development people need to achieve to become successful leaders? One of the things that moves all too easily to the peripheral is creating the discipline to do the learning, or to have the time thinking on things,” Ransom says. 

The trick, she explains, is to “carve out small chunks of time” to make this happen: “Don’t hunt for the perfect hour or try and find the pristine entire afternoon. Just see if there’s a way you can steal 15 minutes on your commute, or repurpose a lunch break once a week to sit down with someone who can provide a learning conversation. Although, if you do get the opportunity to attend an event like ADMA’s Global Forum, a fantastic way to boost your learning is from hearing insightful speakers and engaging with other industry experts - but it’s not the only way to keep learning.

“Find ways to seize existing parts of your schedule and repurpose them for learning. Just make sure you're building a habit, because we talk a lot about lifelong learning, but we're a long way off practising the idea of lifelong learning.”

For marketers at the other end of their career, Ransom recommends being intentional about what you are doing, looking for opportunities to showcase your skills, lead projects and expand your opportunities. 

“Early in your career it's sometimes hard to get your hands on those sorts of opportunities,” she says. “So be thoughtful about the types of roles you seek, and maybe even intentionally go to a smaller firm where you'll get more exposure to being hands on the tools earlier.

“Or think about how you volunteer alongside your employment, supporting a nonprofit organisation with your skills and being able to use them in a different way than you might be afforded in your full time professional capacity.”

So what, for Ransom, is the biggest untalked about thing in business today? Her answer: “Africa’” 

“I think we need to be talking more about Africa, and specifically about the demographic dividend that exists in Africa, and just how much more significant I think they're going to be in the near term,” she explains. 

In an increasingly globalised economy where trading across borders is becoming more relevant for businesses, this is an interesting perspective for marketers to consider. Given the rush from Aussie businesses to conquer the US, UK and Asia there could be a first mover advantage to be gained from a relatively untapped market for many Western brands. Especially, as Holly explains, Africa is a continent of 1.2 billion, with 72% of them under the age of 30. 

She says: “That’s an incredible amount of the world's younger population. They're the fastest growing population and by 2050 one in four people on the planet are going to be African and I think we're really unprepared for that.”

“If I think about it in an Asia Pacific context, it's not a part of the world we have developed soft power relationships with, or that we have on our strategic radar in the way others do. I think it's a sleeper issue that we will wake up to in a decade and realise significant opportunities to invest in dynamic startups being run by young African entrepreneurs, shape policy relationships and build strategic alliances, have come and gone.”

"We can't predict the future, but we can prepare for it," Ransom concludes. "Leaders who are best prepared are ones who are consciously widening their worldview, because you just naturally have a broader set of data points that are helping you have a sense of what might happen next and the consequences of particular events." 

This, for Ransom, means getting outside your regular areas of expertise and experience, pushing yourself into new areas and talking to new people, using those insights to expand your marketing strategies and building resilience for the inevitable change to come.

Holly Ransom is MC for the ADMA Global Forum which takes place on August 20 in Sydney. She will be introducing a host of world class thinkers including Professor Scott Galloway, Mark Ritson and Tom Goodwin and senior CMOs including Uber’s Lucinda Barlow, Nine’s Liana Dubois, IAG’s Michelle Klein and Joanna Robinson of The Iconic. See the full lineup and get tickets here.

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