Lisette van Breugel, director of the General Employers' Association of the Netherlands: ‘Leadership is about how you treat the most junior employee’

How do you bring out the best in others?
I try to really understand people and explore what matters to them. That can be very different from one person to the next. At ArboUnie, some people felt deeply connected to the mission of contributing to a safe, healthy and energetic working environment. Others were mainly driven by achieving financial targets, while others again were energised by bringing in new clients.

In the past, I sometimes tried to encourage people in a direction that I, personally, considered important. I no longer do that. It simply does not work. What I have done occasionally is appoint someone to a role they had never aspired to themselves. I noticed that digitalisation was becoming increasingly fundamental at ArboUnie, yet the gap between IT and the rest of the organisation was vast. So I decided to make someone from the business fully responsible for IT. You have to think that through very carefully, but at that time it was easier to organise the hard IT expertise around someone than to bring the heartbeat of the organisation into the IT domain. In the end, it worked out very well.

What do you do when your course clashes with that of others?
You take the time. It does not happen frequently, because a course of action is a big thing. It is the strategic direction, and therefore very fundamental. I always try to involve both senior management and younger people in the organisation in shaping the strategy. So if a clash occurs, it is important to take the time to explore whether there really is a disagreement about the assignment at hand, or whether someone has simply become irritated somewhere along the way. In that case, you need to resolve that first. And sometimes it turns out that, for example, the market is moving faster than we thought. You have to take that seriously as well. We always find a way through in the end.

How do you go about that in practice?
The best answer I can give relates to the supervisory boards on which I serve. They are often composed of very diverse people. The advantage is that you can look at all facets of reality from different angles, but it does make it more difficult to find one single direction that you can truly pursue together. Sometimes I ask myself the following question: if we are a year further on, and we look back at this moment and the path we have chosen, do we see the full picture? Has anything gone wrong along the way? That helps. It is a thought exercise I learned during a leadership programme by Manfred Kets de Vries, The Challenge of Leadership. There were twenty of us, board members of many different nationalities. At one point, he posed the question: you are in a small boat with your mother, your partner and your children. The boat is about to capsize and you can save only one person. Who do you take with you?

Your child, of course.
That is what we tend to say, yes. I still remember thinking at the time: do we really have to discuss this? But in Middle Eastern cultures, for example, people look at this very differently. Participants from those cultures immediately answered: my mother. That exercise was very instructive in showing how differently people can think and what they consider most important.

What would you like to pass on or leave behind?
I find it important that a working environment is safe. Organisations are a reflection of society. When society hardens, that resonates within organisations. And the reverse is also true. If we ensure that organisations are socially safe, this also has an impact on the wider environment. They are communicating vessels. When I started at ArboUnie sixteen years ago, I encountered a neglected and fearful organisation. People were afraid of redundancy, afraid of unpredictability. Unpredictability has a very beautiful side, but when it turns into unreliability, people no longer dare to stick their necks out.

How do you change a culture of fear?
Very slowly. If I had known in advance how much time it would take, I am not sure I would have had the confidence to start at all. I was very deliberate in explaining, again and again, what we were doing and why. This is the route we are taking. This turned out differently than expected. That disappointed me, or in some cases pleasantly surprised me. Being honest, showing predictability in your own behaviour, and reflecting on it openly. That is how I built, block by block, a different organisation.

I can imagine that transgressive behaviour is also an important theme in your field of work. 
Absolutely. Just over a year ago, I was in a meeting with a group of men who said: we can’t say anything anymore, I feel like sitting duck. How interesting, I said, because that is how I have felt for years. Welcome to my world. I would not wish that feeling on anyone, because it is deeply uncomfortable. But it is also a sign that things are changing, and that change is badly needed.

What have you learned that you would actually rather not have known?
How important status symbols are to people. My ambition is about the impact I want to make, not about status. That is why, when I am a supervisory board member, I never want to be chair. In that role, your responsibility is to keep everything running smoothly, and you can no longer be the thorn in the side. And that is precisely the role I enjoy. I find it painful to see how people sometimes choose positions and make decisions that come at the expense of others. That darker side of ambition can be very ugly.

There is an interesting study in which fifty games of Monopoly were played, each time between two players. Player A was given twice as much money as Player B. In every single case, Player A became increasingly unpleasant and condescending towards Player B as the game progressed. At the end of the game, which Player A always won, the winners explained that they were simply better at Monopoly. They knew they had started with an advantage, but according to them that had absolutely nothing to do with their victory. This is what power can do to you. I hope to show that it can be done differently.

What is the most difficult decision you have ever had to make?
About eight or nine years ago, I went through a major governance crisis. My fellow board member had been dismissed, and we were dealing with a massive IT debacle. The migration to a new system had failed spectacularly. We could not go back to the old system, but everything in me told me that a restart would be the wrong decision. My intuition said no, but I could not yet put it into words. So I brought in an external expert and talked through what I felt needed to happen. After that, I convinced the supervisory board. They were almost shocked. A huge amount of money was at stake. Millions had already been invested in the IT system. But I was given their trust. Because I had done my homework, because I fully stood behind the decision myself, and because I had personally committed to it.

What did you learn from that?
That my intuition is right, even when I cannot yet articulate it properly. I now act on that intuition when I decide not to hire someone. I am honest about it. We are not moving forward together. I cannot yet explain it fully, so I will call you next week and tell you, more clearly, what led me to that decision. People appreciate that.

What is the best advice on leadership you have ever received?
When I became a board member, someone told me: communication is extremely important. I remember thinking at the time: is that really it? But in hindsight, it is absolutely true. I thought leadership was about strategy. In reality, it is about expressing what your organisation stands for, and showing that consistently in your behaviour.

As a teenager, I had a part-time job in the catering department of the Dutch central bank. I remember wearing a hideous apron and standing nervously in the lift on my first day, next to our coffee trolley. Then a man stepped into the lift, wearing a beautiful suit, carrying a fine briefcase, with a wild head of hair, and he said: good morning, ladies. Later I learned that it was Willem Duisenberg. That he called me a lady at a moment when I felt so small meant everything to me. That, to me, is leadership. How you treat the most junior person in the room.