WASP males don’t tend to get too many invitations to be involved in the promotion of diversity management; which is a shame really.  I’m a firm believer in the notion that the promotion of diversity should embrace the full range of stakeholders; it should truly practice inclusiveness in the way stakeholders are engaged with the philosophy or it runs the risk of being seen as a marginal activity aimed at an exclusive audience.  A “push” communication approach may be one of the reasons why the diversity flag bearers within organisations sometimes find themselves struggling for real influence at the top table.

But this thought piece isn’t to critique the notion of diversity or challenge its increasing relevance to the organisation development and employee engagement agenda. I would like to share a rare moment of Belgian enlightenment.

Picture the scene.  The wonderful and irrepressibly inspirational Myrtha Casanova of the The European Institute for Managing Diversity had enlisted my help to co-facilitate a workshop she was running with the senior executives of a global producer of cereal crops and foodstuffs.  They had been embroiled in a PR war with NGOs and pressure groups worldwide because of controversial growing techniques and what was perceived as an arrogant communication stance.

The workshops were intended to develop diversity strategies across their global businesses.  Most of their senior executives were gathered in Belgium to that end – and they weren’t very pleased about it.

It was soon clear that their beleaguered HR Director had been forced into developing a diversity strategy by the board who were in turn responding to US legislation.  The executive cadre encamped in Belgium were 90% male, mostly of Anglo Saxon origin and frankly, felt they had much more pressing priorities.  In short, the workshops quickly regressed into trench warfare.

The turning point came, however, shortly after lunch on day one when, rather than push more and more statistics, facts and process at the group, we adopted a less evangelical approach and asked them to explore their brand from the customer’s perspective. 

They had traditionally seen themselves as a business to business organisation but it took one of the more junior managers, who also happened to have the largest team and who also happened to be a woman, to point out that housewives could make or break their company.  By drawing a simple supply chain model she was able to quickly illustrate the route their product ultimately followed to market and how it was immaterial that they weren’t putting the bread on the shelves themselves. Women still make the vast majority of purchasing decisions per household and the retailers were reliant upon their suppliers to provide raw materials in tune with the ethics and values of the consumer.  An epiphany!

This simple, jaw-dropping moment proves to be a revelation for her cynical peers who had clearly spent years developing competencies and promoting values appropriate for managing their equally macho purchasing managers in the businesses they were selling to.  Suddenly the link between organisational culture and their PR problems was put into stark relief. More importantly, they realised that, without a more representative management structure they would make similar mistakes.  The business case for diversity had become clear and the rest of the session was put to productive use developing a central and local diversity policy, strategy and engagement approach which owed much to a loaf of bread!

If you want to find out more about the EIMD (a not for profit organisation founded in 1996, with headquarters in Barcelona and which operates across the European Union), take a look at their website http://www.iegd.org/englishok/who.htm

Or feel free to drop me a line and I’ll tell you more about this and similar stories.

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Legacy is a loaded term. If you’re the glass half empty type it smacks of “ old fashioned, out of date, redundant”. If you favour the glass half full approach you’ll make associations like “firm foundations; proven track record and relationship equity” when you hear this term.

As a brand and engagement specialist, I’m acutely aware that one of the strongest but often most underappreciated assets many Old World brands have is their legacy. In times of crisis and change it can be comforting to employees to know that this organisation has withstood worse in the past.

As individuals, we seem to be increasingly interested in notions of legacy, family heritage – where we come from. The Haka, the famous tribal dance of the feared New Zealand rugby team literally attempts to summon up the spirits of the ancestors of the combatants to provide strength and courage as they face a new challenge. Perhaps this was what organisations like Walmart have tried to replicate with their company songs or may explain the communal song and dance rituals at employee conferences?

Now this overt attempt to conjure up corporate spirit isn’t to everyone’s taste. It illustrates the point that employee engagement has to be fit for purpose within local employee markets. But by mentioning what some may consider to be “naff” engagement initiatives that are puzzlingly powerful mutu for others does beg the question “what are you doing to engage your employees during the downturn”?

It comes as little surprise to me that I’ve seen a rise in the number of complaints from employees across sectors about the availability of their line managers.  There has also been a decline in face to face communication like Team Briefings and a rise in what I term e-mail management. When they can’t come up with answers to tricky issues many line managers are choosing to lie low.

In these dark days, leaders need to call upon all of their resources to speed up the recovery process. If your brand has a legacy, what initiatives are you undertaking to make the most of that heritage to provide confidence, assurance and a sense of stability?  Most importantly, how are your most important communicators, your line managers, being recognised and utilised as the eyes, ears and voice of the business?

A client, let’s call him David, works for a formerly blue chip multi-national.  Their core HR or people processes, post SAP, were re-designed by teams of Big Four consultants to maximise efficiencies and drive out non-conformances arising from human error.  In short, HR has, in effect, been replaced by systems, standards, Helplines and KPI’s. Managerial learning and development has been re-focused on technical rather than soft skills.

David, by his own admission, is a relatively old school, line and customer service focused manager. He’s a believer in sustaining relationships and in resolving interpersonal differences before they become formal issues (often over a coffee or a beer). He has worked for his company for two decades and has received awards for his work on a number of occasions.

Recently David encountered issues in his personal life which compromised his 8am - 9pm working routine.  As pressure built he started to struggle and turned to his recently appointed executive line managers for support. They responded by citing due process, changed his reporting line from 1:1 to 2:1 and offered him the option of submitting formal Grievances and visiting Occupational Health if he had a problem. They also placed this loyal middle manager on a series of Performance Contracts when they believed his standards (loosely defined) started to slip. Unlike David, they documented every conversation.

Sleepless nights led to longer hours; stress led to Psoriasis and eventually to depression and medication and now to extended absence on health grounds. He eventually submitted a grievance but the 2 and sometimes 3:1 micro management has seen the organisation close ranks and he faces the invidious choice of turning on his own company via tribunal or falling on his own sword. 

David is passionate about the organisation and his job. He has the experience and people skills which customer and staff surveys suggest are needed to help turn the organisation around. Yet David, and it turns out, many of his contemporaries, have become the victims of “due process”.

The growing number of Davids remain voiceless despite the CEO Town Halls and surveys. Yet the organisation flounders in a short-termist backlash, woeful line management skills and mismanagement freefall.

The CEO may understand the need for culture change but what’s to become of these invisible FTEs in the meantime when the HR offices are empty and the day to day processes don’t have ears?

As the Lloyds/TSB/HBOS shareholders attest, massive change is upon us.  And there’s nothing quite like the threat of change to test the metal of your leaders.  If leadership is partly about inspiring a community of individuals to undertake a collective endeavour, then stories are essential to articulate that vision. Noel Tichy in his book The Leadership Engine remarks that

“the best way to get humans to venture into unknown terrain is to make that terrain familiar and desirable by taking them there first in their imagination”

And Antoine de Saint Exupéry remarked that

“if you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”

When a leader inspires, he or she breathes life and energy into their followers. When we reflect on the extraordinarily motivating speeches Churchill made, it’s clear that no amount of PowerPoint (had it existed) and no amount of consultancy or accountancy models would ever have had the effect of his well chosen words. And Martin Luther King had a dream, he didn’t have a change goal and wasn’t at a critical point of inflection. Or was he?

The results of a study at the London Business School show how much of the message we retain depending on the vehicle of communication.

• Statistics = 5-10%
• Statistics and Story = 25-30%
• Story = 65-70%

And the moral of this story is that if you are delivering the ‘Who we are’ (Brand Identity), ‘this is where we’re going’ (Mission/vision), and ‘this is how we’re going to get there’ (strategy)’ piece, then don’t rely too much on statistics alone to land the message.

Business, emotion and non-sensory language (or why so many business speakers are frighteningly uninspiring)

Change may be scary but there’s nothing more terrifying than uncertainty and vagueness.

Do you remember the strapline to the ‘80’s movie ‘Alien’? ‘In space no one can hear you scream’. These few words create an image (space), a sound (screaming) and a feeling (not a very nice feeling). Compare it with ‘dedicated management capability’ or ‘randomised user-orientated response’ – These are non-sensory words, and they abound in the corporate world. Now, if you put enough of these non-sensory words together you will trip something in the listener’s brain and a film and a fog will appear before their eyes as they fall asleep or escape into daydream. These non-sensory words are the vocabulary of science, borrowed in business to give a veneer of credibility (‘it must be true, it sounds scientific’) Somehow we are not reassured by too much feeling or emotion in business. After all, the language of love, romance, of the emotional life is the language of metaphor (‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?…). This language excites the imagination; it creates feelings, images, sounds, smells. Remember your first kiss? The first record you bought? The smell of coffee roasting? The visual imagery of being surrounded by your loved ones? Often we believe that these feeling, these emotions, cloud and corrupt the experiment and enterprise we call business. Yet if you want to tell me about values, like trust and integrity, don’t give me the science or the text-book definition, give me the metaphor, give me comparisons to help me understand, give me examples, tell me the story.

 Getting the story straight: The Hero’s Journey

The most effective and versatile storytelling tool must be The Hero’s Journey. There is no space to do justice to it here, but by way of a simple explanation, the Hero’s Journey represents the central narrative that underlies any story of growth or change regardless of cultural origin. It is a framework which allows an organisation, team or individual to examine past and present change, both personal (largely emotional) and corporate (largely rational) and to anticipate and explore future change. Applied as a change management tool it can be a hugely effective way of making sense of  and embracing change.

But as senior leaders tumble, where will the heroes who will lead your people through these turbulent times come from?  Well, they’re all around you.  But sometimes it needs a little external facilitation and support to help you find them.

I was in the City, London’s financial district, for a meeting the other day and found myself in Pudding Lane.  For those who don’t know, this modest little street is infamous for being the source of the great fire of London, heralded by historians as the most tragic event to have befallen London as well as its saviour.

But “how can this contradiction hold true?” I hear you cry.  Well London had been in the grip of another epic threat at the time of the fire, namely the plague or black death. Many believe this cataclysmic malaise to have been caused by rats. In truth it wasn’t the rats, but the fleas that lived on the rats that caused the spread of the infection.

Ironically it was the catastrophic great fire that finally purged the City of the disease.

Now what has this trip through London’s history books got to do with matters in CEO land?

As we all know, the corridors of CEO land are populated by a nodding, bowing and scraping populace doffing their caps to the demi gods. Yet it’s increasingly the ceos or chief engagement officers i.e. the line managers, who do the real work.

It also can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the financial districts are being targeted by the worldwide press as the source of the current economic disease that is infecting world markets.  Indeed the high profile figureheads, the CEOs of a select number of those organisations within those financial districts are being demonised for seemingly single handedly bringing about the collapse of those institutions and indeed, spreading this economic plague to related markets and economies.

This is where history and imagination collide.  But if we allow ourselves to believe tabloid caricatures of “Fred the shred” and his peer group we undermine the core philosophy on which this column is based.  While I do subscribe to the notion that the CEO can wield exceptional power, he doesn’t do it alone. The iniquity of the CEOs themselves and problems the City faces are just the symptoms of a much, much more insidious infection.  The disease of selfishness, short termism and winning at all costs has become a plague which has arguably spread throughout Western commerce. Simply getting rid of the CEOs isn’t going to cure the problem.

Would anyone reading this column deny that they feel uncomfortable about the way many of their customer service interactions, regardless of industry, are handled these days? From the volumes of unsolicited cold calls we receive, the cost cutting off-shoring of our intimate data, the proliferation of mistakes or the relentless emails can anyone claim that customer service has improved in the last decade? Can you picture the last time you received excellent service which exuded empathy, humility and pride?  I bet you can think of several examples when a frontline employee called you “mate” instead of by your name, was clearly following a pre-determined script or appeared to have had an authenticity bi-pass, however.

The risk we currently face is that in a desperate attempt to fight the current economic disease, the focus is going to be exclusively on the high profile figures, forgetting that the disease has already spread and infected the culture of the organisations they headed up. 

Unless we can whip up a firestorm of people centred change that will:

-         reinvent HR

-         proactively manage employer brand

-         professionalize communications

-         respect and prioritise organisation development

-         focus on the development of line managers as a priority

-         forge more effective relationships between the external manifestation of brand and the link to the organisation’s values and the employees who keep the promises

this disease is going to spread and spread.

Food for thought, but lean times are quite possibly causing you to consider postponing that employee survey; to cut back on your training budget; to force through more “push communication” or prioritise that pile of  impressive looking resumes of former “big hitters” who seem to hop from company to company every two years above appraisals of existing employees. 

If you’re considering “re-sizing”, pause for a second before you reach for the axe, and consider your existing employees once again.  What more can you do to re-connect them with the brand they’ve been loyal to for so long? How can you re-focus them on the next phase in the evolution of the company, to re-energise them?

Now look again at those cvs. 

You may think you know who the rats are…. but remember the humble flea!

Still struggling to make the business case for employer branding? 

Ian@by2w.co.uk

Available now: Brand Engagement - How Employees Make or Break Brands (Buckingham, Palgrave/Macmillan 2007)

I recently met the Marketing and Brand Director of a very well known (thanks to their quirky advertising strategy) but struggling (possibly also due to their quirky advertising strategy) telecomms brand.

Needless to say they have been wrestling with employee brand engagement for some time and although they reeled out the “our greatest asset” clichés, they also spoke about their internal culture as if the employee demographic was loitering by the bus stop with contraband fags and cider.

The corporate HQ had a frankly schizophrenic feel full of jazzy gimmicks like “oh so witty” voicemail and Dali-esque interior design.  It was certainly matched by the surreal logic of the marketing team and their talk of “magic moments”.  In a market where even their owners confess to being baffled by their brand, the director answered my question about what an engaged employee looked like with a remarkably casual “oh we’ll know one when we see one.”

I tried but I couldn’t see the tv cameras in the Board room and I swear I’ve rarely spent a more baffling hour and half.  The brand engagement strategy was so baffling I half expected the CEO to waltz through the room in his birthday suit, leap over his stretch goals and reveal his burning platform.

Why, oh why do so many leaders persist in believing that the art and science of engaging customers with brand is the same as engaging employees with it?

Customers seemingly crave fantasy as part of the purchasing process.  As gurus like Seth Godin or Phillip Kitchen remind us, convention dictates that the stories marketers relay to the market about products, services and brands are laced with illusion to such an extent that customers don’t just expect magic dust sprinkled over the marketing mix, they demand it.

Employees, however, have a very different, much more intimate relationship with the brand.  They not only demand but need sincerity and authenticity. They have an intrinsic understanding of the values underpinning the culture (whether officially sanctioned or not). They largely reject and often subtly undermine communication which is not in touch with this reality.  They’re a tough and demanding audience, particularly for leaders who are so blinded by notions of the aspirational culture that they overlook and underestimate the prevailing culture. 

By all means ensure that employees are aware of and are even excited by the new ad campaign or better still embrace storytelling as an engagement advice. But don’t forget that it isn’t just Seth Godin who believes that all marketers are liars.  Internal marketing campaigns, glitzy launches and suave internal PR may serve a purpose but cynical modern employees, in the words of rap pioneers Public Enemy’s Flava Flav simply “don’t believe the hype”. True and lasting engagement can only be built (and please pardon the pun) from the bottom up

So the next time someone makes the smart suggestion that they can align the employees behind the brand strategy with a video and supporting powerpoint slides, please remember to point out that office lighting is fairly unforgiving.  And who in their right mind would want to be an internal marketer, today’s naked Emperor?