Module 6 writing discusison

08 Engage and align through conversations

Sir Nicholas Young, CEO of the Red Cross, tells an amusing story about advice he received when he first joined the organization. He says that the chairman of his board of trustees at the time was Lady Sylvia Limerick.

‘She called me into her office and said: “Oh, Mr Young, you’re new aren’t you?” I said: “Yes, Lady Limerick, I’m in charge of our UK operations.” ’

‘She said: “Yes, very good. Well, let me tell you something. You must remember this. If you want to get things done in the Red Cross, it can take five years. If you want to get them done quickly, it will take you 10 years.”’

Sir Nicholas says that point has always stuck with him and is a story he has often told. ‘It’s such an important point – you have to spend time talking with people to get them on board to changes you need to implement. You just have to take the time.’

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If there is one character trait common to the leaders in this book, it is that they all seem to have a restless urge to do better. They are typically challeng- ing and demanding, and that translates into a constant urge to change things, to enhance performance, to do more.

This primal drive in leaders to strive for difficult goals, if thwarted by employees unwilling or unable to change, can boil over into some very poor leadership behaviours. Frustrated leaders resort simply to ordering people to do what is needed; sometimes, it even becomes rage. In that case, employees will do what they are told, but not willingly, not with real commitment, and so change takes longer, and results are mediocre at best.

Ordering people to do something is often the right thing to do in a crisis, when there is no time for consultation, and somebody has to take absolute charge. In the event of a fire, nobody in their right mind would suggest a meeting to debate potential courses of action in order to reach a con- sensus. In those circumstances, one appreciates being told exactly what to do and where to go in order to escape danger. However, most challenges facing organ izations do not have that same life-or-death urgency attached to them. There is more time to align people to the cause, more time to get their ideas.

Sir Christopher Gent, chairman of GSK, agrees fully. ‘To get people engaged and fully supportive of decisions, you have to go through a process of vigorous debate. This conversation may take longer than you would like, but in the end, you will implement faster and more successfully if you do take the time.’

What is an engaged employee?

Both Sir Nicholas and Sir Christopher are talking about the need to engage people in change. It seems so obvious that, as a leader, you have to truly engage hearts as well as minds if you want to unlock the potential in every employee, and achieve a step change in workplace performance. But, sadly, many leaders I have encountered over the years have failed to truly grasp the power of engaging staff. They still make decisions and then say: ‘What shall we tell the troops?’ They have honest and good intentions to make sure that they communicate well, but they lose sight of the fact that broadcasting messages at people is not the same as engaging with them.

What is ‘an engaged employee’? Tom Hughes-Hallett of Marie Curie Cancer Care says: ‘I believe it means someone who is emotionally com- mitted to their organization, to their colleagues and to the job they have to perform. People who are engaged are fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, their work. Everything they do is aimed at improving performance and delivering a better service or product to the people who are their customers. Usually, engaged employees are having fun. The difference in attitude is palpable.’

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Myth: ‘People are our only asset’ I have often heard leaders talk about people being ‘our only real asset’. This is a fantastically misleading concept. People who are not committed and turn up to do the minimum amount of work are a drag on performance. Even worse, people who resent change and resist it can be toxic to the organ- ization that employs them.

The truth is that only committed and inspired employees are an asset. People who are inspired give of their very best, tend also to have fun – and they make a difference. They are the ones who are truly ‘engaged’.

In the autumn of 2008, the British government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills commissioned a special report into employee engage- ment. Ministers wanted to understand more about the potential benefits of greater employee engagement for the UK, for companies, organizations and for individual employees.

In particular, they wanted to know whether a wider take-up of engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, as part of the country’s efforts to come through the economic difficulties of the recession, as well as meet the challenges of increased global competition.

Entitled ‘Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’, the report concluded, unequivocally: Yes!

The report’s authors said: ‘Of course a sustainable business strategy and access to cash are vital, just as good policy and planning are for successful public services. But, in a world where most factors of production are increas- ingly standardized, where a production line or the goods on a supermarket shelf are much the same the world over, employee engagement is the difference that makes the difference – and could make all the difference as we face the realities of globalized competition and the millions of graduates and even more skilled and committed workers that China, India and other economies are producing each year.’

Engagement at the heart of strategy The report said: ‘If it is how the workforce performs that determines to a large extent whether companies or organizations succeed, then whether or not the workforce is positively encouraged to perform at its best should be a prime consideration for every leader and manager and be placed at the heart of business strategy.’

It went on: ‘Many company leaders described to us the “light bulb moment” when an understanding of the full potential significance of employee engage- ment dawned. Tesco chief executive Terry Leahy recorded his reaction when he realized that his company knew more about its customers than it did about its employees. Tesco then set about understanding what the workforce

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wanted, what motivated them at work and what workplace approaches would best build on those understandings.’

Increasingly, I am finding that leaders are making ‘engagement’ itself a strategic goal of their business, and they measure it, monitor it and manage it. They see it as a key enabler of success. Why? Because, when employees are motivated to go beyond that which they have to do to that which they very much want to do, the results can be transformational. This ‘discretionary effort’ can be the difference between success and failure – the difference that makes the difference. Anyone doing a moment’s research online can find evidence that higher levels of employee engagement bring better financial performance.

What we really mean when we say we want better engaged employees is that we want employees with more positive behaviours. We want them working smarter, we want them to innovate more, we want them to provide a better service to customers. But employees will not go that extra mile unless they feel valued, empowered and motivated, so that often means we – as leaders – have to change our behaviours first.

The key question is what do we, as leaders, have to do to inspire people to feel committed and positive and willing to change their behaviours? When we answer that question, we stand a better chance of engaging employees better.

Choice, not change I think part of the secret lies in a simple choice of words. People prefer choice to change. They prefer dreaming up choices and then selecting from those choices to the idea of having change imposed on them.

We all know that the leader’s job is to make strategic choices. Leaders have to decide on the destination. Ideally, we would like to know that our views had been taken into account before any decision was made. But, when we are in the role of follower, while we accept the right of the leader to make the choice of destination, we hate being told exactly how to get there. We like to be given the chance to generate options for the route, and make choices, together, about the best way of getting there. We’d like to be in a role where we are empowered to make the choice of route by ourselves. This is when we are truly committed – when we have made the choice. If leaders want to achieve this commitment, they must facilitate these conversations, and deploy great skills in communication to enable them, guide them and keep them happening.

Many of the leaders I interviewed said that it was not enough to be a good communicator yourself. You have to make sure that the whole organ- ization is communicating. This means ensuring that managers everywhere are encouraged to get out and talk with employees, to draw them into dis- cussing issues and coming up with ideas about how to solve them.

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Colin Matthews, chief executive of BAA, says: ‘The communication between employees and their direct managers is critical. If you think of com- munication as a cake, then corporate communications from the top is the icing, and the real substance is in the discussion between front-line supervisors and employees. Too much icing, without the cake, can make you ill.’

‘Leaders should ensure that those front-line managers have the tools and skills to have quality conversations with their staff. Leadership isn’t some- thing you do by yourself at the top; you have to have leaders everywhere in the organization.’

The ingredients of engagement The government’s report on engagement points out that there are differences between attitude, behaviour and outcomes. Leaders have to discern between these to make sure they’re addressing the right issues. An employee might feel pride and loyalty (attitude); but they might not be a great advocate of the company to clients, or go the extra mile to finish a piece of work (behav- iour). Outcomes may include lower accident rates, higher productivity, fewer conflicts, more innovation, or reduced sickness rates and employee churn. All three – attitudes, behaviours and outcomes – are part of the engagement circle. Engagement is not the same as culture, motivation or satisfaction.

The report says: ‘Leaders must be careful of manipulating employees through mechanistic approaches. Employees see through such attempts, very quickly, and they can lead to cynicism and disillusionment. Engaged employees freely and willingly give discretionary effort, not as an add-on, but as an integral part of their daily activity at work.’

The report concludes that there are four key enablers of engagement:

leadership which ensures a strong, transparent and explicit �M organizational culture which gives employees a line of sight between their job and the vision and aims of the organization; engaging managers who offer clarity, appreciation of employees’ effort �M and contribution, who treat their people as individuals and who ensure that workers are organized efficiently and effectively so that employees feel they are valued and equipped and supported to do the job; employees feeling they are able to voice their ideas and be listened �M to, both about how they do their job and in decision making in their own department, with joint sharing of problems and challenges, and a commitment to arrive at joint solutions; a belief among employees that the organization delivers its values, �M and that espoused behavioural norms are adhered to, resulting in trust and a sense of integrity.

We have already heard about all these points from the leaders in this book.

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The first and most important task of a leader when communicating with employees is to show up! All too often, one hears stories about leaders issuing instructions by e-mail and not bothering to have face-to-face discussions with their staff. Leaders need to find ways to ensure that managers and supervisors are engaging with their employees.

Measure and monitor engagement Tom Enders, chief executive of Airbus, has made engagement one of the four pillars of success for his company. ‘When I first started here I thought hard about what we needed to do to propel us into the future. Competent people are, of course, a big asset. But competent people who are not motivated don’t get you very far. I realized that we had to put engagement at the heart of our strategy.’

‘As a leader at the top of the organization, you must hold your own con- versations with people throughout the company. I love to get out and meet people, and talk with them about what is happening, because this is how I pick up indications of problems, or information about things that are going wrong. This is part of my job that I really love – doing site visits, talking to young people, spending more time with people on the shop floor. If you stay on the executive floor or in the boardroom, you will never fully understand what is going on in your business. But my doing that is not enough.’

‘We have roughly 2,500 management units, and we require the managers of these units to sit down with their people and ask about what really motivates them. We survey staff to find out how they feel, which enables us to talk with managers about why their engagement scores are low. Many of our managers, who had bad scores in the first round of our employee survey, told me that it gave them a real wake-up call. They hadn’t realized that they simply weren’t spending enough time with their people, and now that they were, performance was improving.’

As discussed in the previous chapter, I believe that relationship audits, in this case employee engagement audits, are a more reliable predictor of future success than past financial performance.

Leaders today face an environment of constant change. But constant change leads to uncertainty, and uncertainty leads to a loss of confidence, which in turn leads to low morale. Positive, forward-looking companies become negative, backward-looking, failing companies. The challenge of change is that leaders must keep people motivated in spite of uncertainty.

Line managers and front-line supervisors must be the most important communication priority. Leaders must spend time, money and effort on communicating with those leaders and enabling them to have better-quality face-to-face conversations with front-line employees.

As Phil Bentley, managing director of British Gas, says: his business is built up brick by brick, conversation by conversation.

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Input equals buy-in Damon Buffini of Permira says his style is to set aggressive goals and then sit down to discuss with people how to achieve them. ‘When you do that, people are going to want to talk with you about what their concerns are, and they are going to want to feel that you are engaged.’

‘You set the direction but then you consult on the how, that’s how you create buy-in. Getting people engaged in your vision is fundamental to any business. The only way to get people engaged is if they have had some input into the process. The only way they can have input into the process is if you sit down to talk with them about it.’

Simon Calver of LOVEFiLM says leaders cannot create alignment unless they have given their people time to understand and talk about what is going on. ‘My way is to have what I call brown-bag lunches with different groups of people. We simply get sandwiches in a brown bag and then get together and talk about issues. We talk about what’s working well, what’s not working well, or what I can do to help them. What are the issues in the business that they’re worried about?’

‘As the leader, you have to have these open sessions with open dialogue. But you also have to make sure that managers are getting out there and talking with their people. Our way is to set employees quarterly goals upon which they are measured and rewarded. Managers have to appraise their staff every three months. That way, I’m forcing communication between the manager and an employee.’

Philip Green, former CEO of United Utilities, feels that conversations are crucial ‘because your people want to be heard. They care about the organ- ization that they work for, they want to contribute to thinking and want to give their opinions to their leaders. It is really important for them to have that opportunity. When leaders do sit down with employees to talk, you get a lot of really good ideas. People on the shop floor are often more in tune than most boardrooms, so you find out what is actually going on.’

Sir Nicholas Young says he and his Red Cross managers have a deliberate process of consulting staff and volunteers on big decisions. ‘In a commercial organization, I can see leaders feeling our way is ridiculous, that it takes too long and is too consensual. But actually, it’s really important to get our volunteers and staff along with changes, so we take the time to go out and ask them, and discuss ideas with them.’

‘It really makes it much easier to inspire people if you know where they are coming from, if you know and understand what their issues are. It is only through these conversations that you can encourage and support and inspire others to achieve.’

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Don’t dominate the conversation But, says Professor Nigel Thrift, vice-chancellor of the University of Warwick (a public research university located in Coventry, United Kingdom), you have to be extremely careful about showing up and then dominating the conversation.

‘Leaders tend to be forceful and the danger is that you interrupt too much. My wife tells me that I tend to obtrude into conversations too much of the time, so I have to be really careful when I sit down with groups of people, to let them have their say. People need to tell you things, they want to tell you. And it’s their right to tell you and you have a duty to really understand what they’re saying. But as a leader, there are times when you do have to guide a conversation, and you do have to put forward your point of view. You should never be afraid of doing that, but you do have to get the balance right.’

Barbara Cassani, formerly of Go Fly, says conversations with staff have to be about their agenda, first and foremost. ‘I deliberately scheduled plenty of time in my diary to talk with groups of 15 people, usually from different departments, and I would go and listen – that was what I was there for. My agenda was them. I had to learn, though, and I used to make a note to myself that said: “Ask everyone first!” instead of “Here is my agenda.” ’

‘Ultimately, when you do this, you realise your objectives more readily. You may even end up modifying your objectives. Leaders who don’t take this time can hit invisible barriers. I mean, we all feel that if someone has not taken our thinking on board, we will resist change. And, frankly, it is just disrespectful not to ask employees their views.’

Beverley Aspinall says she has regular interactions with groups at Fortnum & Mason. ‘I very much see my role is to ask the question and then listen to the answers or draw out people’s viewpoints. I find if you ask the question and then let people discuss issues, nine times out of 10 if you ask the right questions in the right way, the answer will emerge without you having to give it. Just occasionally, two competing answers may arise and then your role is to say: “Well, you know, bearing in mind what I’ve heard, this is the path I think we should take.” But it’s very rare that that happens, very rare; people nearly always come to the right solution themselves, as long as you keep asking the right questions.’

‘Absolutely the wrong thing for me to do is to go into meetings and express my view before anybody else has, because that just renders them impotent. It completely negates the point of them being there. The problem is, as people become more senior, it becomes more and more tempting just to jump in and say what you think. You must avoid that.’

Dame Barbara Stocking is chief executive of Oxfam GB, a leading UK charity set up to fight global poverty. Oxfam was founded in Oxford in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. Oxfam is now an inter- national confederation of 15 organizations working in 98 countries to find

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solutions to poverty and injustice. Oxfam GB is also the largest second-hand bookseller in Europe and has 20,000 volunteers in the UK.

Barbara says that, when meeting with groups of employees, leaders must remember that there are three parts to communication. ‘There is what you say, there is what you hear and there is the interpretation of what you hear. Good leaders will sit in on these conversations and try to understand where people are coming from, what it is they’re really trying to tell you.’

‘We do regular staff surveys to understand how motivated employees feel, and one of our challenges at the moment is that employees don’t feel our managers are listening well enough. We’re looking at ways to enable our managers to go out and meet their teams and communicate better. That means listening as well as talking. It is almost more important to be a good listener than a good orator. In a volunteer organization, motivation is fanta- stically important, and that depends on how engaged people feel and whether they feel their views are being taken into account.’

If communication is so important, where is the training? This brings us to ‘the big gap’. All too often I heard leaders talking about the importance of communication, but then later worrying about the lack of communication skills among managers and supervisors. Many complained that managers either did not bother to communicate key messages or were inclined to put a ‘spin’ on the messages when they did deliver them. Often the spin was unhelpful, if not damaging. In spite of putting enormous effort into cascade briefings, leaders found time and time again that people on the front line had not heard about key initiatives and were not clear about what they were now required to do.

Frequently, leaders talked about using employee feedback to determine where line managers were falling short. Where they picked up signs of poor morale and a frustration at the lack of communication, they used this in their appraisal of line managers, which in turn would lead to individual coaching to help the managers improve their people skills.

When I asked whether leaders gave their managers communication train- ing, all too often the answer was no. As Colin Matthews of BAA says, com- munications from the top is crucial, but it is in the conversations between line managers and front-line employees that the rubber hits the road. So the critical question for leaders is: How best to encourage your managers to engage with their staff? And how will you know if they are doing so? Just showing up for a conversation can make all the difference, even without training.

But imagine how much more potent those conversations could be if leaders throughout the organization were given more training in communication, especially listening skills. (More in Chapter 10.)

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It is in these meetings that leaders can most usefully ‘bring the outside in’. By helping people understand what effect their actions will have and how people outside the organization will feel when they are successful, leaders can engage the emotions of their employees. As Unilever’s Paul Polman says, it is when people have this sense of external emotional purpose that their passions are ignited.

‘The single great problem about communication is the illusion that it has taken place,’ said George Bernard Shaw. One of the greatest barriers to com- munication is a lack of understanding of the audience. Delivering carefully crafted messages to an audience that is more interested in something else is a definite recipe for creating the illusion of communication. Thinking about the audience is the first and most important stage of being able to commu- nicate successfully...

K E Y P O I N T S F R O M C H A P T E R 8 The saying that ‘people are your only asset’ is trite and �M dangerously simplistic. Employees who turn up to work to do the bare minimum are �M a drain on resources, slowing everything down, and people who actively resist change are toxic. Your real ‘people asset’ is that group of people motivated to give �M the organization their discretionary effort, wholeheartedly. It is that effort that drives super performance. Measure levels of employee engagement, and use this measurement �M as a strategic tool to find ways to keep people motivated and committed to the cause. Study after study has shown that companies with high levels of �M engagement among employees outperform their competitors, by some margin. Take time to engage; ultimately you will achieve your aims faster �M and more effectively. Engagement is achieved through conversations.�M Conversations must be structured in a way which allows �M employees to fully understand the big objective, and work out with their leaders what they have to do to help achieve the goals. These conversations create a ‘clear line of sight’ between the �M organization’s purpose and goals and the actions of the individual. Because of these conversations, employees can make choices, �M and they don’t feel victims of change. Their choices make the difference between success and failure.�M

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Too often, these conversations are neglected, and middle managers �M are neither trained or equipped for, nor measured on, their ability to hold these critical conversations. Top management doesn’t check on the quality of those �M conversations, or seek to get the feedback from those conversations in a systematic way. If you require leaders throughout your organization to have �M regular conversations with employees, you must model this behaviour with a programme of your own conversations. During those conversations, encourage people to voice their �M opinions, and guarantee them a no-blame culture. Be prepared to guide the conversations, but only after listening.�M You must spend time helping teams to communicate with each �M other, so that everyone not only knows what their role is, but also what other people will be doing in support of reaching the goal.

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