Can reading poems make you a better leader?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I’ve been out and about this week, including an illuminating breakfast at Simmons & Simmons, the law firm, about artificial intelligence in the legal profession. It’s always good to get insights on how AI is changing different sectors — in law, we learned, there is the start of a debate on how we assess staff contributions — is the concept of the billable hour going to become far less important? And what’s next? This is an evolving area so do let me know how AI is likely to change notions of value and productivity in your sector: [email protected]

Simmons & Simmons also commissioned some interesting research from 500 legal heads in global companies, showing that more than three-quarters of them (78 per cent) “still believe that more human traits, such as empathy and soft skills, will become more critical in the years ahead, as firms seek to fine tune their AI adoption”. Good news for humans 😍.

Read on to learn why poetry might make you feel better in a fairly dark world.

*Stop-press news 🗞️ The FCA is not going ahead with its proposed changes to diversity and inclusion rules for regulated firms, which we covered here. The non-financial misconduct rules (ie bullying and harassment etc) are going to be updated — by the end of June this year.

How poetry helps leaders and soothes souls 😌

I’m fascinated by the potential for poetry (yes, poetry) to play a bigger part in our working lives. Coaches who use texts as tools for executive training courses have told me that asking business leaders to choose and read poems aloud, in front of their peers, brings tears and raw emotion — as well as terror at having to perform. Dramatic stuff 🎭.

Why is poetry such a powerful way to access our deepest emotions? And how can it be useful for business leaders? I asked Deborah Alma, founder of the Poetry Pharmacy, and co-author of an unusual book published this week, The Poetry Business School. In it, Deborah and Mark Constantine, co-founder and chief executive of Lush, the global cosmetics group, have collaborated with Kate Downey-Evans, a business psychologist. Their aim is to show how poetry helps us towards decision-making, dealing with failure and uncertainty, and taking risks — as well as soothing us when times are hard.

Deborah acknowledges that business and poetry are not an obvious pairing. “It’s quite an odd, and apparently dissonant, juxtaposition of ideas, business and poetry.” She changed her mind after working with Mark, and in the book describes how “business, like poetry, may be a vision of the future, of doing something that hasn’t happened yet. Business people, like artists, may be more comfortable with risk, and, like artists, are concerned with the communication of an idea.”

Before founding the Poetry Pharmacy, which prescribes poems for individuals online and in its store in Shropshire, Deborah travelled the UK in a van, as the Emergency Poet, dispensing poems for those in need. She did many sessions at business conferences — where she got deeply emotional reactions. The process goes like this: “The poetry pharmacist asks quite odd questions, and, after listening, prescribes an appropriate poem. And almost every time, people will cry 😢 because they’ve gone into a vulnerable state and therefore a more receptive state. And poetry speaks intimately, as though from one person to another.”

Deborah first met Mark when she was a finalist for a small business awards scheme and he was a judge. They stayed in contact, and the book offers a glimpse into their email correspondence across a range of business and life topics, as Deborah also ponders whether to expand her Poetry Pharmacy into a London location (she did: it’s located in Lush’s spa on Oxford Street).

I read the book in one evening — it’s warm and humane, and packed with wonderful poems (as you might expect). Notable and slightly unexpected chapters include “Business as a Nightclub”🕺.

I asked Deborah for her opinion on how poems can help all of us — not just leaders — in the workplace. “It’s a step out of the world for a moment, and I would say that it’s really important to achieve a kind of in-between space, a more thoughtful space to take a rest. It will take you away from everything and then you can come back in again.”

Start with the short poem Deborah prescribes for us all in this uncertain and volatile moment: Seamus Heaney’s Postcript. “It’s a lesser-known poem by him. The poet goes out in a car and parks up. There’s a calm lake on one side, a rough sea on the other, and he’s somewhere in between. And it’s a great metaphor for that almost limbo-like state of being nowhere, floating free of things just for a moment.” I feel calmer already 🧘‍♀️

In a nutshell: Poetry gives a different perspective: try it next time you need to take a step back to see things clearly at work.

Want more? An alternative reset idea, if you and your team prefer “do-ing” stuff, might be a craft session. It gets everyone into a “flow state” and creates an income stream for talented makers, according to Alexandra Lunn of Well Crafted.

Office Therapy

Many thanks for the responses to last week’s problem (mine) about when and how to disengage from work during illness. Working from home has made it easier to carry on, even if that’s at a lower intensity. But is that always desirable? Well, no – but there’s more to it, as outlined by Working It reader Julia Nowicki, programme manager for Headspring in Madrid. (Headspring is a joint IE Business School/FT venture.)

“For me, it’s crucial to identify what drives us to shut out our need for rest and downtime and find the underlying reason why we continue, almost past breaking point. Is it the fear of disappointment or letting others down? The need to be perfect? Our defining ourselves by doing and not being? Or ultimately the fear of not belonging or not being loved?

“This is a great starting point to untangle and think rationally. Another tool I recently allowed myself to try is to let my mind roam free and let it go as far as it wants answering questions like ‘What’s the worst that can happen if I allow myself to rest?’”

Send us your problems and dilemmas: [email protected]. We anonymise everything, properly.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Companies are failing to convince staff of AI benefits: AI is not in use as much as you might imagine, is one big message from Janina Conboye’s comprehensive analysis of available data on who uses AI at work, and what they gain from it.

2. What bankers and care home workers have in common: Pay is most volatile at the top and bottom of the income scale — and for the low-paid, that is stressful. Sarah O’Connor outlines the problems and some solutions.

3. The UK’s academic recession is in full swing: An opinion piece from Glen O’Hara at Oxford Brookes University outlining the crisis in the university system, with no clear path to solving it. Good reader comments, too.

4. What makes a good self-help book? The excellent book mentioned here is Philippa Perry’s The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read. Rebecca Watson’s column also contains mention of Cate Blanchett’s hatred of leaf blowers, a highlight of my week.

5. Perella Weinberg trial lifts veil on bitter feud among top bankers: It’s taken a decade to get to court, but lots to enjoy in Sujeet Indap and Amelia Pollard’s report of the battle over an investment bank “rainmaker” leaving and “improperly coaxing” some colleagues to join his new firm.

One more thing . . . 

I’ve talked to many people this week about the enormous implications of brutal DEI rollbacks in the US and beyond, but it strikes me that sometimes we aren’t talking about the same things. Nobody has defined what DEI means, and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf takes this point and examines it properly — DEI Has Lost All Meaning is a clear and important read about a lack of communication on both the left and right of politics.

A note from Charter about the US workplace: Five years on from lockdown

Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief at Charter, this week highlights a new publication (free to download) called The United State of Work, edited by Julia Hobsbawm, that came out this week to mark five years since the pandemic began.

Kevin says that the essays in the collection — by workplace researchers and company executives — highlight how fundamental tensions in the workplace remain unresolved. Notably, there are still struggles in many organisations over flexibility, as employers desire workers to be more physically present.

In his essay about the state of work in the US, Kevin suggests that a US economic downturn could loosen demand for workers, and further undermine the spread in the US of four-day workweeks, subsidised childcare, or other human-centric approaches to managing.

Before you log off . . . 

I resisted watching AppleTV+’s Shrinking, mostly because it’s annoying when people evangelise about their favourite shows, and this is one that some people really love (others very much don’t — it’s a Marmite show). Now, having binged both seasons, and with series three being filmed, I can see why people love it. (Sorry I didn’t trust you, friends 💐.)

It’s a workplace dramedy, at heart, about three psychotherapists who work together in LA, and their wider circle of intertwined family and friends. And while the themes are dark — grief, ageing, finding a purpose in life, and dealing with serious illness — it’s also very funny. Bonus: if you grew up with Han Solo and Indiana Jones; Harrison Ford plays one of the leads here, still pleasingly grumpy in his 80s.