Carrying It
Carrying It explores what responsibility creates in people.
Through conversations with people who hold responsibility, and people who feel it, the podcast examines how pressure, behaviour and influence move through work, relationships and everyday life.
Because responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
Carrying It
What Gets Lost at Scale?
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In this episode of Carrying It, Phil Scott speaks with Paul Alexander, Vice President and Managing Director of Nokia UK & Ireland, about what happens to responsibility as organisations grow.
Together they explore how responsibility changes when it moves through layers, functions and countries, and why scale can make the human impact of decisions increasingly difficult to see. The conversation examines matrix organisations, middle management, psychological safety, and the challenge of keeping responsibility visible as it passes from one person to another.
They discuss clarity, ownership, communication, and why the people who translate strategy into meaningful action may be some of the most important leaders in any organisation.
If responsibility becomes harder to feel as organisations become larger, how do we stop it becoming nobody's responsibility?
Responsibility doesn't disappear. It shifts, and someone carries it.
That's true inside organisations, but it's also true in society. Every episode of Carrying It supports organisations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are understood and supported in real systems.
You can learn more about the organisations we're supporting through the links below.
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/local-minds/
http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/
Responsibility is unavoidable in leadership and influence. In all kinds of roles, from military officers to managing directors to airline controllers. What matters isn't whether it exists, but what it creates and where it travels. Responsibility creates emotional load. That load doesn't disappear, it shifts, and someone carries it. Welcome to carrying it when responsibility doesn't stop. That's what this podcast is interested in. Not how hard leadership is, but what responsibility creates. This conversation is about scale. What happens when responsibility moves through layers, countries, processes, and lots of people. Today I'm joined by Paul Alexander, VP and Managing Director of Nokia UK and Ireland, who has seen responsibility move through one of the world's oldest and largest technology organizations. Welcome, Paul. Thank you, Phil. Good to be here. Okay, let's dive straight in. You work, as I said, for Nokia. Nearly 100,000 employees. Massive, massive scale. What does responsibility look like in an organization of that size?
SPEAKER_00That's a good question. And I've worked in small organizations and, as you say, in a big organization. Responsibility doesn't disappear, whether you're at the top or the bottom of a small or a large organization. As closer you get to the coalface, let's put it that way, the harder it is to own or to pass along, or frankly, sometimes to understand. So I think the challenge that I've seen in large organizations is that the senior guys, the execs, can make, you know, big statements, big strategies, set the direction of travel, paint the picture of the vision, etc. But actually that turning into concrete realities, outcomes, objectives at the front line, that needs a lot of interpretation. And you have to go through a lot of layers to actually get to that point where you're interpreting. This is where actually, let's call it middle management really comes into their own. It's interpreting the big vision and actually creating clear objectives and desired outcomes at the coalface. And actually, that that is essentially, in my view, the most important job of that kind of middle management function, sometimes overlooked, not really appreciated in all cases. But that is the fundamental challenge, interpreting that from the top to the bottom of the business. And when you get that disconnect, that's when you get dysfunctional companies and things start to go in the wrong direction.
SPEAKER_01So there's a gap there. And in one of my earlier episodes, I talked about how responsibility changes over distance. Here we're talking about a very, very large distance between the top of the organization and that coal face. So there's multiple opportunities for things to change. Your chances of getting the right thing at the end, as was said at the beginning, are very, very slim. So where do things get distorted? And how do things get distorted?
SPEAKER_00I think in a small organization, that responsibility is very visible. So you know who made the decision, who's affected by it, what the consequences, frankly, are. In a large organization, responsibility travels through layers: global, regional, country, functional, legal, commercial, operational. And as you say, that can be a bit of a game of, in a sense, people can put their nuance and their own spin on things. That message can get diluted, even frankly, quite radically change. So the handover at each layer, into each function, is a key responsibility of those individuals. So if you like the leadership challenge is to stop that scale becoming an excuse for that distance between the top and the bottom, that leadership job is really not to uh change the message, but to make the message relevant as you go to each N minus one of the through the business. And Simon Sinak is the master of this. And when he talks in his book about the why, right? So the why is the really, really important piece. So you you know, you can't say we're doing this. Here we go. First question is, well, why? You know, what does that mean for me? So the job really of the the management and each and and each person's responsibility in the business is to convert that into what is the what's the why? Why are we doing this? What's the outcome we're looking for? What's the consequence if we don't get this right? And that's not necessarily an individual consequence about a job loss, it's about a consequence about the performance of the business, for example, or the performance of that function within the business. So we can't use that distance as an excuse. It's really, again, it comes down to trying to not change the message, but make the message relevant at each layer in the business.
SPEAKER_01So it's not just about re-amplifying what was said from the top again and again. It's about using your judgment at whatever layer in the organization you happen to be, and taking the bit of the message that is going to resonate most and then amplifying that and potentially downplaying some of the other elements that are the big strategy, as you talked about, that aren't as important or relevant at uh your layer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely, because the pressure changes shape as it moves down the business and down the organization. Essentially, what starts as a strategic ambition at a group level can quickly become quarterly target or a delivery challenge for a country or very personal workload issue for an individual manager or employee. So again, it's really, really important that the exec does paint the vision and indicate the direction of travel. And so that's something that we've I've seen in my own company now and much more recently. And in fact, it's having a very measured impact on the perception of Nokia from you know from the from the market. Our share price has nearly tripled over the last two or three years. And that's really because that vision has been explained clearly to the market. But that vision is a vision at a very high level. It's a vision at a thousand feet. You've still got to turn that into concrete actions and objectives at the coal face. And that isn't just continually giving the message about the vision and the direction of travel doesn't actually help you to achieve that. So it's really important that that's turned into measurable objectives set at the coalface.
SPEAKER_01You said a perfect line there, which is definitely going to be one of the captions for the show. Pressure changes shape as it moves. That's been one of the main themes throughout this series so far. What shapes, what forms do you see it taking in large organizations like Nokia?
SPEAKER_00Pressure, yeah. I suppose in in reality it takes a certain shape in consequence. Um, well, the consequence of us not getting this right is we may not be as successful. And if we're not successful, that may mean we have to further reduce headcount or cut costs or do various different things. But I think this is where you probably see some differences in behavior because in an organization like ours, and I'm sure many large organizations that have gone through acquisitions, they have a mix of cultures. The culture can be somewhat different at the top, again, than it is somewhere in the middle, somewhere, and then somewhere further down. So I think the shape of the message, if you like, is key. So tying that again to the consequences is important, but those consequences don't want to be well, if you don't get it right, this is your job on the line. Because that isn't ever a message that lands well. It you know, damages psychological safety. People start to retreat, they start to say uh that they're doing the right things when they may not be doing the right things, you get silent quitting, all sorts of things potentially. I'm a firm believer in creating the vision, selling the why, and taking people on the journey. Because if you don't do that, then you usually don't get the right outcomes. I think for me, it's that cause of consequence of not doing the right things and how you interpret that message and how you deliver that message is to how it can change, shape down the business dependent on culture and all that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01Um, what about how it travels? One of the earlier episodes in this series looked at patterns, and we got into a rather disgusting conversation about brown stuff rolling down the hill, um, which is a common phrase that we all talk about. In a flat, relatively small organization, that's easy to understand. There's one hill and everybody's on it. In a highly matrixed organization with a lot of employees, there's lots of hills. It's the mountain range, it's the Andes or the Alps. So how does it move around? Who feels it more than others?
SPEAKER_00The the key challenge there is the matrix organization. There isn't a better way, in theory, of you know having a large organization than having a matrix. It just seems to be that whilst it's not a perfect kind of structure, it seems to be the common type of approach for large organizations. But the reality is you rarely have one person that owns everything. In fact, you don't. You can't. You have multiple people that own part of the problem. So in that scenario, you get people that will purely focus on the element of their part of the problem, but it's part of a machine. It's the one cog in the machine that makes the machine work. So the guys at the top have to have visibility of the full machine, and the guys that are driving it at a middle management layer have to have, you know, ownership of there. But they have to look left and right and see the other parts of the machine because if they don't do that, then they're probably things that will fall through the gaps. And in a matrix organization, quite often things fall through the gaps. It's not clear who's really responsible for something. And if people aren't prepared to go above and beyond the job description, if you like, that's when things can start to go wrong. And in my own experience, by the way, uh, and you you've been a sales guy for a long time as well, Phil, right? You you've probably seen this. It's often the sales community that end up spotting the gaps and having to plug the gaps because right, we're at the sharp end. We see what we're trying to do. And let's play, let's be honest. What are we doing as a business? We're trying to create stuff and sell that to a customer. So we're right at the sharp end. We see what the customer wants. We're trying to shape something to give the customer what they want. If we can't get what we need from the business, we see the gap and we have to go and try and fix that and call that out. And that's kind of difficult. It takes a lot of time in any kind of large organization. And from my own personal experience, it's it's somehow sales that end up with the challenge. But at the same time, if you've got a sales culture and a sales-focused organization, the salespeople should be empowered to help solve that challenge. But again, that varies by company as well, right?
SPEAKER_01There's an interesting thing there to dive into a little bit more. The the pressure and the responsibility can and are shared in larger organizations, but not necessarily proportionately. Classic example: salespeople carry the number, they live and die by the number. Do they feel more of the pressure even though they don't have the corresponding amount of responsibility?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, that can happen. But of a bit of a disease of the larger organizations because there's so many more layers and then it's people from left to right, up and down. Having that ownership of something end-to-end is very difficult to do in that large organization. So I think people have their own uh challenges to solve at each layer in the business. But it's really important for that feedback loop to be there for senior management to really understand the challenges at the front end and not sort of somewhat gloss over it. And you know, you can see examples of good management, good leadership where people really communicate, they connect with the guys at the sharp end of the business, and they really take on board what the what the challenges they are and try to solve those. And then you see other leaders that maybe just almost step out of the way, as you say, as the proverbial brown stuff rolls down the hill, they go, Well, look, that's the message from the top. Good luck, guys. Yeah, that that that's not helpful. So I think that that kind of feedback loop is really fundamental to help fix some of those issues.
SPEAKER_01So that could be described as firing pressure back. How have you seen in such a large organization that pressure can be diverted from where it may have landed or dissipated by potentially splitting it out and moving it into different places?
SPEAKER_00It can kind of comes back a little bit to this kind of truth from the front line, if I can call it that. So in this larger organization, it's more likely that bad news is somehow softened as it moves upward. Scale can create abstraction from the issue. The bigger an organization becomes, the easier it becomes to manage through dashboards, processes, governance, et cetera. See the guys, and I'm looking at the dashboard, I'm I'm checking every day, you know, what the bookings are or what the orders are, or various other things. But that's kind of like a window on a vast universe, and it isn't always telling you the full story. So the more you have that kind of stuff, uh situation, the harder it becomes to see sort of lived experience in the front-end shop end of the business. People try to mitigate this through tools, systems, processes, calls, governance, all sorts of things. But in reality, the more you try to do that, the more you try to extract that information from the front line in an easy way that you can, like let's say a dashboard at the CXO level, the more you're tying people up in internal reporting and actually often preventing them from doing the job you really want them to do, which is be out there in front of customers selling stuff.
SPEAKER_01The recipients of that information, the senior leaders who are using those dashboards, why do they view that as the window and not peer further into the window and realize there's a whole other landscape that was obscured?
SPEAKER_00Companies are quite often very short-termist, in my experience. So you're only as good as the last quarter or the quarter you're in, and the next quarter is the most important quarter of your life. It it's actually a narrow view of life. So we, you know, a business might have an extremely good Q1, but they might have a really challenging Q3 coming up. And can the business really see that? What all companies try to do is to get visibility of your direction of travel, landing points, or are we in a plan to hit our objectives? But the further you are away from the front line, the more that you might be missing the reality. And it really relies on people or a cult a culture within a company to rely on transparency, honesty, and truth. Because if you don't, you could actually hit a wall without even realizing that wall's coming. That's part of the challenge. So for me, those dashboards that you know the CXO might look like on a daily basis and say, okay, we're we're booked what I'd expect us to have booked at this point in the process, or we're resolving these things, or we're managing those challenges. But I wonder sometimes if as we go through the layers of the business, people get better at reporting and governance and telling the right story. And I wonder sometimes if that's always the reality. But I guess to your point, can they see those issues at the top line? You can see general trends, sure. And if you if the if the pull from the business shows through all the CRM systems to the top, say, this is the number for the quarter, these are the upsides, these are the risks, these are all the various other things that we're trying to do as a business. Yes, at a thousand feet you can see if we're on track. But again, it tends to be a bit of a short-termist view. It's less about, okay, we might be okay this quarter or next quarter, but what about the quarter after that? What about the year after that? Are we building the pipeline? All those sorts of things that I think sometimes uh in a we can be short-termist from that point of view.
SPEAKER_01The longer term signals are maybe not magnified or amplified as much. I talked about amplification of the right bits of the message as it travels down. Now we're kind of talking about amplifying the right bits of the message as it travels back up again. They're two very different things.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes, they are two very different things. It it's probably a disease, a little bit of a large organization, that the the message that travels upwards may not always be the message that the guys should hear or is not always completely connected with reality. And I'm sure people at the sharp end of the coalface would say, yeah, but the guys at the top don't really understand the challenges we're facing at the coalface either. So I think that's where the disconnect can come in those big organizations. So it's really understanding the true challenges, the true true issues, and managing those and not just sort of looking at the general trend, uh, because that might hide some of the challenges you face. And by the way, it's different in each market, of course. You know, the US market is very different from the Europe markets, different from the APAC market, etc. They're will facing different challenges, be those geopolitical security, be that the operating environment, regulation, uh you name it, there are a bunch of different operating challenges in each market in each region. So, yeah, distilling that up into one small bowl of soup that you're isn't always going to give you the flavor of reality, if I can use a terrible analogy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like you've gone all the way around the circle, but then you have to turn around and go all the way back around the circle again to the beginning. So you're almost doing double, which is increasing your surface area and your opportunity for things to get diluted or changed or lost. But when we talked about that message flowing down, one of the things you said was that's when middle management come into their own, and sometimes they're not respected enough for doing that. And that's really the core of their job is to take that message, and if they do that well, then the business functions. Do you think they're better at translating and amplifying on the way down than they are and translating and amplifying on the way up?
SPEAKER_00In some ways, yeah, because the message tends to be distilled to s to sort of short sound bites, short objectives. But perhaps the the challenge sometimes is distilling the issues at the at the coalface into something that's really resolvable by executive management. That's a lot of complex stuff that you have to distill into something that's meaningful to them. So I think actually it is probably harder to get those issues folks. But I think in in an organization that really embraces openness and really tries to gather that kind of information through surveys, through regular connections, through executives going out and doing town halls, meeting people at the front line face to face, that that's really, really important that they do that because then they can stay a little bit more in touch with reality, feel the heat, if you like, from the guys that are really trying to do the job at the coalface.
SPEAKER_01And that introduces the human side of things. We've talked a lot about processes and structures and governance, dashboards reporting, all of that kind of stuff. Ultimately, a company is a collection of people. And whether you've got a 10-man team or a hundred thousand-person team, the human side of that is really important. Far more important, in my view, than all the governance and structures and processes you can have. Because it's the human impact on an individual level in that environment that really is critical to a person and their well-being and their health and their outlook on life and their enjoyment and their fulfillment, all of those things. So, in a large organization, how do you encourage the recognition of that human impact in these things and not just become process and structure and robotic?
SPEAKER_00I think that this comes down a little bit to what do you reward and celebrate as an organization. So sometimes organizations celebrate the people who save the day, the guys who bring in the big order at the last minute and various other things. Or, you know, large organizations often reward people who are best at navigating the complexity when sometimes the more valuable aspect of what they do is reducing complexity for others. The other thing I would say is if you're not careful, the organization starts to reward the appearance of control rather than the reality of leadership. So I think it it comes down to the environment. So this is where leadership is really, really important. Creating the right environment, creating a sense of psychological safety, ensuring that people are feel empowered and rewarded for speaking up, telling it how it is, calling the issues out. You don't need wallflowers. I I speak to the people who are challenging, even if they might do it always not in the right way, because you get useful information, you get useful insight. And I think that can be the issue, right? So I think creating the environment where people can speak up, they can express themselves, they feel psychologically safe in doing so, it is the right kind of culture. Because if you don't do that, you're up, you're really encouraging people to disguise the reality of a situation. And again, you know, companies can live or die on that kind of challenge.
SPEAKER_01So one of the hypotheses that we tested earlier in the series was who makes the best leader? And you have your rock stars, those people who bring in the big order on the last day of the quarter who are celebrated. But you also have the people that very quietly go around making sure that everything is functioning. They are empathetic, they they're the ones that will hold the team together in the times of trouble. Um, one of my guests suggested that they actually would make much better future leaders for an organization, but because they do it quietly and unassumingly, they tend to get passed over for promotion. Do you see that similar trend happening in such a large organization?
SPEAKER_00I think the challenge sometimes with large organizations is, you know, people feel responsible for a part. And therefore to have people go beyond, plug the gaps that we talked about earlier. You need that the special kind of person that's prepared to sort of say, Well, I know this is what I should be doing, but look, I see these issues here, and let me help, what can I do to sort of help plug the gap? Those are the people that are really valuable in any organization, especially a large organization. And I can kind of know who those people are, and I call those the guys the seams of gold, you know, in in you know, when you're trying to mine those for those people in the business, those are the people you want to keep uh in, you know, close to you or close to your organization. So I think when an organization is looking at promoting them or bringing them on. Or moving them into new roles. Again, you've got to be careful what you're looking for, what you're rewarding. Because to go back to the analogy of the guy that brings in the big deal at the end of the quarter when he said it was two quarters away or was unlikely, there's no such thing as a good surprise. Surprises are not welcome, good or bad. It's actually managing expectations. And this is one of my stock phrases when I'm talking to teams when I'm coaching generally around leadership is one of the most important things a leader can do is manage expectations. And that isn't, no, that isn't filtering the information to only tell people what they need to know. Managing expectations is can you help me solve that problem? Immediate response, absolutely. I'll do what I can, I'll own it, give me two days and I'll come back to you. If you get an email and you look at it and it says, can you help me? And you go, I'll think about it for two days and then go back. You haven't managed anybody's expectations, right? You've just said, I'm ignoring you, or they have no idea. So I I'm a firm believer in that managing expectations piece. And I think that's a real fundamental job of leadership. But the other element of leadership is vision. You know, you have to be able to set out where we're going and why and bring people on the journey. Leadership isn't necessarily management, that's task-oriented. Uh, and Karen Brady speaks brilliantly on that, and I think she's she's sort of somebody people should look to for the difference between management and leadership. But I think um, yeah, I think it's really important that we will reward the right behaviors and the people that go above and beyond, not the guys that just land something you weren't expecting. Those are the sort of behaviors that we need to reward, and those are the people we should be looking to promote in a business because those are the ones that will move the needle for you in the longer term.
SPEAKER_01You talked there about emails and waiting two days and everybody's inbox explodes every single day. I think most people will admit that we send far too many emails, but nobody has yet figured out a way to make particularly large companies run without that volume of emails. And it's always very easy to say, oh, well, that's just how large organizations work. Is that ever an acceptable answer to these kinds of problems and questions?
SPEAKER_00Emails in a large organization is a nice way of moving the problem onto the next person who has a partial responsibility. And this is one of the challenging symptoms of a large organization. Email is a fundamental thing that we're not going to be getting away from that anytime soon. But should we replace that with meetings? That's also, you know, we've got too many meetings, and we really try to spend time figuring out how do we reduce the governance, reduce the cadence, and try to give me more people time back. But short, sharp emails, I think, can be useful. But I think it absolutely has to focus on on three things. And I saw this earlier and I and I made a note of it, because you need to know what needs to be decided or what was decided. You need to know who owns it, and you need to uh be clear on when is it needed, when is it due. And those three things should guide everything in terms of that communication. If we can work around those sort of three things, then we can shorten that communication, get very focused on outcomes, and because outcomes are what we need to move the needle, right, move things forward.
SPEAKER_01And clarity, I think you used the word clarity there, is so important in that. Language and communication is a huge part of that clarity. Why say something in 10 words when you can say it in two? AI hasn't exactly helped us be more concise. And when you look at the reams of responses that you get in some of the tools and the flowery language that they put around things, do you think that extraneous use of language is another way of moving that responsibility and hiding from that responsibility?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, in a sense, yeah. Because if you can't make a clear statement in one or two lines or a short paragraph, then maybe you don't understand the problem yourself. And they're really trying to pass it on to someone who can then explain it to you and pick up the issue. I think actually, for me, AI has the power to really help us in this regard. So you draft your email and you put it into A and you say, right, make that short, sharp with two or three absolute key messages that need to be driven home. So I think that's actually where AI can help us for those people who are a little verbose, and I think we all know them. Um, and the guys that we just want to sort of bat the ball along rather than sort of picking it up and actually really trying to understand what the issue is. And again, I think that's a key skill for anyone wanting to move into leadership. The shorter and sharper you can make your message, the clearer you become, the more likely you are to get promoted, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_01Those people who speak plainly, who have clarity, short communication, they're the kind of people that survive well in large systems, large companies, or is that generally across business that is true regardless of the size of the organization?
SPEAKER_00I think SD is probably a truism across most organizations, but it's even more important, arguably, in a large organization. Because again, there's so much data, so much information, so many people with split responsibilities, the people that can really distill it down to the nub of an issue. And again, what do we need to do about it? Who owns it, and when do we need to get it done? Those are the most valuable people in the business, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_01All right, I'm gonna ask you one more question, Paul, as we're coming towards the end of this, which I think hopefully summarizes a lot of the stuff that we've talked about. When responsibility is spread across tens, hundreds, thousands of people, how do you stop it becoming nobody's responsibility?
SPEAKER_00Maybe let's try to distill it down to some sort of practical behaviors or practical things that I think people uh and organizations can do. We just talked about one, which is clarity of ownership. So who decides, who executes, who is consulted, who's uh who is accountable for the outcome. We really need to know that. And if it's not, you know, that should be the objective of every meeting to come out with those things clearly understood. The other thing is that the executive part of the business needs to stay close to the customers and the frontline teams. One of the things I saw our new CEO do when he first joined the company is he spent three months talking to customers, one on one, not with three or four other people in the room, one on one to really get the truth of the challenge or the opportunity from customers. So really staying close to that and what needs to be done to be successful going forward is really, really important. Also, potentially ask what the process or the systems or the organization is hiding. I say that in a sense, you know, because again, we work up through the layers and we talked about that. If everyone says the process is working, well, ask where people are compensating for it. What's what's not coming out of the process. That's I think really important. We talked about protecting psychological safety so that people feel empowered in a safe environment to tell it like it is. That's really important. And again, as part of that, we need to reward openness and honesty. So celebrating the people that bring those challenges or those resolutions or the issues to you and encouraging that within your team or your organization is really important. From that leadership point of view, as you go down through the layers, translating that global strategy into local meaning is really, really important. So the why at each n minus one level as you go through the business is really important. I think that message needs to become distilled and real as it gets, you know, goes through down through the business. Those are the things that I think are really important. That for me is the way that you resolve or try to mitigate the challenge of a large global organization with a matrix kind of structure, with people with part responsibility for a whole bunch of different things. If you can do those things, then I think you go a long way to solving the scale issue and making it feel more like a small company where you can tend to get these things done more easily.
SPEAKER_01Good stuff, Paul. Thank you very much. It's good to highlight the people and the emotional side of things, but I also like finishing with those practical elements for people that are listening. There is a takeaway that they can take, and whether they're a leader or working for a leader, and they can use that in their working life. So thank you very much for spending the time to talk with me today. Really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for thanks. Each episode of Carrying It supports organizations working to improve how responsibility and mental health are handled in real systems. Links are in the show notes. This conversation was about scale and how responsibility can become harder to feel when it is spread across layers, processes, and distance. Large organizations are often designed to move forward quickly, but people usually aren't.