EP03 - The Concept of Heavy Lifting
In business conversations today, it’s common to hear that “AI does the heavy lifting.” I’ve always found that phrase intriguing because my experience with heavy lifting predates AI by decades, and it has little to do with technology.
In this Episode:
In leadership, the real heavy lifting lies in aligning diverse teams to move in the same direction and execute change that lasts.
When you work inside a global corporation with its thousands of employees, layers of governance, and tribes within tribes, change is a daunting prospect. From the outside, progress looks glacial. From the inside, however, it is relentless. A ship of that size does not turn because of one person at the helm. It turns because hundreds of individuals, across departments and borders, choose to lift together.
Early in my career, I made the mistake of trying to push change alone. I spoke to everyone, I worked harder, and I painted my small section of the ship white. But from afar, nothing moved. The turning point came when I learned to bring all the teams together into the conversation. To create not just alignment of tasks, but alignment of intent.
Heavy lifting happens at the interfaces, between compliance and sales, between finance and operations, between people who see the world differently. If those connections are weak, progress collapses under its own weight.
This is why diversity matters not as a box to tick, but as an operational necessity. You need those who think differently, who see risks you don’t, who care about clients in ways you might not. And you need to empower them to speak and act without fear.
The most profound example I witnessed was a simple yet critical initiative: adjusting insurance tariffs in a way that satisfied actuaries, kept clients engaged, and stayed within strict compliance frameworks. It required everyone to engage, disagree, and ultimately lift together. Once the alignment happened, it became routine and the ship moved.
Heavy lifting is not about force. It is about direction, coordination, and trust. It is the quiet work of convincing everyone that their effort is meaningful and that the weight they bear leads somewhere better.
As leaders, our job is not to carry it all ourselves. Our job is to make sure everyone believes in where we’re going and that we carry it together.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction to Heavy Lifting
01:04 The Power of Teamwork
03:02 Diversity in Teams
04:41 The Six Hats Method
07:00 Building Effective Teams
09:15 Practical Examples and Conclusion
Francois Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
The heavy lifting is a concept we discussed. I don't know if we can call it a concept, but we hear that a lot now with AI, that AI does the heavy lifting. My experience with heavy lifting goes much before AI was as famous as it is today and as used and spoken of as it is today.
I was embedded in a very large company, more than a hundred thousand employees in lots of divisions. It's a packet boat, it's not a speedboat that goes very fast. A packet boat is very powerful, very strong, very stable. When there's a change to the packet boat, the view from an outsider is that the change is very slow. But to change a packet boat, you need a lot of strength, power, willpower, activities, energy, and teamwork. Teamwork is the key here. It's not one single team. A large company is made of tribes, and those tribes need to be able to work together. The interface between those tribes or those teams is what matters.
The team I was mentioning at the beginning is a team made of members of other teams or other tribes. If they don't work together, the packet boat will not be able to change, or the color will not be painted. If you paint a little bit of white on the packet boat from far away, you don't see it. The key is that everybody works in the same way, in the same direction, and has the same goal. The heavy lifting is the ability that many members, employees, colleagues from various teams, have the ability to lift a heavy weight at the same time in the same direction. Then it becomes easy. I've learned it the hard way. If I try to do it all alone and speak one-to-one with all those team members, it's not moving. But if we are all aligned, everybody is convinced that it is the right direction, then we change the tide, and things are moving. So you can then start seeing that the painting on the packet boat is getting wider and broader and broader. Then you can create what I created at the time in internal division, which was international, bringing several units of the group together.
Diversity is important. Diversity has several levels. The first level would be sex, then ethnicity, then the country, then there is the culture, then you can say age, then you can say character, approach to business. People are risk-averse or not risk-averse. They have a client-facing role and they like it very much, or they're very organized and operational. Variety in compliance insurance is highly regulated, so compliance is extremely important. The key when you select team members is first to select people that are not like you. If you take people like Francois and Francois, six or ten, or much bigger, then it is not going to work. That's a very important element. You need to select and establish when you make your team selection.
As a CEO, you need to have managers, executives, middle managers, executants, and people who are able to be stars and who have a drive. But you also have to have solid performers who achieve the task that they have been assigned to, with the ability to improve it, to actually give opinion about the task, but also achieve the task. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to cluster that, to bring that into a cluster of individuals that work in the right direction.
There's another element here I'd just like to speak about: the six hats of Bono. That's a concept in management where you create a team of six people who have a goal to solve a problem. It's problem-solving, but it could be a project team. We talk a lot about scrum agility and so on, where you have different team formations. Or when you're yourself in a smaller team where you need to be able to develop a concept, and you're not six people, but two or three, or even all by yourself, you need to be able to view a situation from different standpoints. I've always used these six hats in my approach because I find that extremely important to have various points of view to create a solution or an outcome which is better than if you just have, "I know it all. I know it's going to be. I write it down, and everybody follows." We never know everything. I believe that more than 50% of the time, if you're alone developing the solution, although you're the most intelligent person on Earth, you will not be able to achieve it. I'm not the most intelligent person on Earth. Einstein, when he developed his theory of relativity, he was actually very bad in geometry, so he went to a friend of his to have that.
Going back to the six hats and applying these principles, then yes, I usually take a person who is in favor of the solution. I take a person who is not in favor of the solution, or the role needs to be not in favor of the solution. Somebody's more client-facing, somebody more back-office facing, or a specialist in one or two fields, and a compliance person who is very important, as I mentioned earlier, in answering the previous question, to be able to actually hedge against creating a solution which is outside what we can do. So that's the core of developing a team for solution building or project execution.
The value chain of a company is always split into several elements. You can't do otherwise; it cannot be a monolith. It has to be an addition of several smaller pieces. It's the nature of things. The universe is built like that. All things are built by addition of little things: atoms, molecules, human beings, trees, planets. That's a guiding principle, I think, in how we function. The interfaces of those elements that come together are where you can win or you can lose. An unworking interface is a place where there's going to be a lot of problems and where failure will arise.
You've asked me the circumstances where and when I need to build a team which is diverse, with different opinions, different profiles. It's usually to create a solution, whether it's client-facing or for operations or finance, which goes beyond the little department. In 99.9% of the cases, it has an impact on external stakeholders or needs input from external stakeholders. At that moment, if you don't have this diversity, this ability to view and to take the standpoint of those various stakeholders in the team, then you waste the time of the people, you waste money of the shareholders, and basically, you also fail to create a better opportunity by locating the resources on something else. So that's why it's extremely important.
There are plenty of examples. If you need to improve a product, let's say we need to change a feature of a product, then these products need to be sold by the online team and need to be managed by operations, but also accounted for and registered in the finance of the company. A little feature of the product, an addition of a small feature, if it's not sold or if it's not understood to be sold, then it's not going to be successful. It could even hamper your core product by the inability from the team to even get across to the client the advantage of this additional solution. It could actually be counterproductive, or it could be tons of problems that I can imagine that I've experienced that would arise from the lack of integration of a team to execute and implement this solution or even test it.
I will take an example of a tariff increase in insurance. Every year life gets more expensive, so the insurance premium that we ask to our clients needs to grow as well. The increase is a controversial element because the people on sales say, "Oh, it's too expensive. Clients will not stay." And the actuary is going to say, "No, it's not enough. You have to grow it." Then you have to create the compromise, and all the elements of all the departments of the company need to be represented, compliance included. Why compliance? Because if you sometimes communicate wrongly the increase, then you're not allowed to apply it. Or if you mistime it. This is a moment in a lifecycle of a company I managed where a team needed to come together and was successful in implementing it. It became part of the routine. So it was not even an exception. It was a routine way of applying this methodology of building a team and executing successfully the task at hand.