Introduction
Change starts when someone sees the next step. William Drayton
If you’re a chief executive officer, managing director or general manager and you’ve been asking yourself ‘How can I improve my organisation’s performance?’ this book is for you. You may be in a manufacturing or service industry, in a publicly or privately owned business, charity or voluntary organisation. This book is for you. If you want to find out how you can change your company culture and move your business on to a higher plane, this is the book for you. My aim is to make you feel as though you are holding in your hand right now the main isolator switch to turn on the fantastic progressive firework display seen at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a series of illuminations that built up until you could see the complete structure of the Sydney harbour bridge. It is up to you whether you throw that switch and enjoy the results or simply put the book down and walk away. The contents will undoubtedly challenge you and your team, and together you will go through periods of pain and frustration during the implementation, but you and your people will come out on the other side of this process feeling invigorated, stronger and better prepared to create value for your business.
By the end of the introduction you will know the scope of this book and should feel it will be one of the most important you will ever read for your business; more than that, you will know that it is not just significant for your company, but also for your employees.
It doesn’t matter whether you lead a manufacturing operation or service business, whether it has local, national or global markets, or even if you’ve differentiated your business from the competition to date by developing different channels or better technologies than those commercially available to your competition, your competitors are still out there straining forward to beat you in the market-share leapfrog race. Unless you can shoot them in the foot to keep them hopping round in ever-decreasing circles while you continue on your well-defined growth path, this race will always be close; that is until you have one sustainable competitive edge.
This edge used to be availability of funds, but you only have to consider the frenzied explosion of investment in Internet start-ups to see that this no longer applies. Also, unless you are buying better capital equipment ahead of the competition to give yourself a short-term advantage, spending money on the latest commercially available technology is a very expensive way of playing catch-up and normally only brings your strategy closer in line with your competition rather than differentiating it further. The result is likely to be a lower return on capital employed unless you work harder to produce the same returns in the future. There is only one truly sustainable competitive advantage: the quality and motivation of your people. Why? It takes years to develop a really excellent team and the team performance will only be excellent if everyone is highly motivated. It is very true to say ‘motivating your people promotes performance’. The reverse also applies. For example, if your people feel sore about the way you treat them, how can you expect them to sincerely offer the best service to your customers? So how do we start to build our competitive advantage?
Transforming any profitable organisation from the ‘number two’ position to market leader, or to further enhance your profits and market share if you happen to already be in the fortunate position of market leader, takes a combination of leaders, managers, a highly motivated team and of course, some time! The key to this transformation is to establish a strong culture throughout the organisation, which means ‘the way we do things’ is known and practised daily by everyone. For the purpose of this book I have defined culture as follows:
‘The way we do things that affects how our people feel and behave.’
The first and main question has got to be ‘How do we achieve this cultural change?’ The second is probably ‘Where do we start?’ The prospect of making the first step may be daunting, but the aim of this book is also to give you many tactics and tools that you can apply in your everyday working life, about how to manage cultural change. I have picked the following simple example about the culture change of a brass band, chosen deliberately even though it is not a business application, to show you how broad the culture change concept is and how widely it can be applied. If you consider the band members to be your own employees you should be able to visualise many parallels in your own organisation. In this scenario, your role would be conductor.
Imagine a championship section brass band preparing for a band contest due to take place in a few months time. The band is made up of really high-calibre musicians who can all play the notes but have their own interpretation of the style, tempo and dynamics. They are conducted by someone who simply asks the band to play the notes over and over again without interpreting the score properly, who accepts when some players turn up late or not at all so the rehearsals don’t start on time, and keeps playing the one tune over and over again so the players get bored and frustrated, begin to leave and morale drops. Not surprisingly this band comes towards the bottom of the contest results table.
Then the conductor recognises the need to change and, together with key members of the band, works out a plan of changing ‘the way we do things around here’. He also explains to the other band members why changes are required and what the plan consists of. New uniforms are provided, the players are told about time keeping or risk losing their place in the band, rehearsals start on time again with a full complement of players so new chords previously unheard are unlocked from the score, and the conductor introduces and tells the players about the need to follow the dynamics exactly. Suddenly there are almost inaudible pianissimo sections and rousing loud fortissimo chords and the music begins to come alive. So far all we have done is to coach the band in the basic rules of how to play the piece but we have already improved the music’s quality.
Then the band enters another contest but this time the conductor takes the score away in between rehearsals and studies it meticulously. He begins to see things he hadn’t been aware of before, the structure of the whole piece rather than just the notes on the page. He begins to have a vision of how the piece should sound. He communicates this to the band members who now understand what the conductor is trying to do. He can now ‘mentor’ the team, take them past just the rules of playing in tune at the right tempo and dynamic. Suddenly the band moves onto a new level of playing; attentive, listening, watching, even breathing at the same time in order to be completely ready to start as the conductor raises his baton to begin the piece. Each player knows what to do, what is expected of him, and trusts that his friends on the opposite side of the band will support his playing. Most of all the conductor encourages and congratulates all the players when a particular section of the contest piece begins to sparkle during rehearsal.
On the contest platform, under the spotlights and with a hushed, expectant audience, the band delivers the best performance of their lives. What a victory! What a dramatic effect the culture change has had!
It all started with the conductor deciding the culture change was necessary. This led on to developing the culture change plan with a small subset of key band members. Then came the team coaching about raising the standards required, the new uniforms that visibly signalled change, and the dismissal of one or two players who refused to practice sufficiently. The result enabled the conductor to mentor the team, and lifted the playing on to a new level. During this process the enthusiasm and dedication of the leaders filtered through to the rest of the band, raising their own commitment and team spirit, with the winning performance as the end result.
So, thinking of your business again and how to achieve this cultural change, we must first answer a few fundamental questions to be sure that a cultural change makes sense.
WHY START 'LEADING YOUR PEOPLE TO SUCCESS'?
Continuous investment in your people is critical if they are to feel valued,
remain with you, give you their best service and thereby reinvest back into
the company your investment in them. No longer is there a job for life, and
the best employees will change jobs often to rise to the top of the employment
pool. Without doubt the best people produce the top performance, providing
they are encouraged and coached rather than controlled by blame and fear;
trained and developed rather than buried and left to rot in a bureaucratic
administration glue pool; trusted and valued to enhanced levels of responsibility
and confidence; and also led and talked with, rather than talked to, so they
understand their role in this employment partnership. There shouldn’t
be whispered discussions behind closed office doors, but open presentations
to all employees, whether the news is good or bad.
Another beauty about this cultural change process is that although it takes up much of your time, consider the powerful benefit of having not just one brain trying to lead from the front; with the right culture you could have everyone thinking how to improve the organisation, how to redu ce costs, how to make life better; in short - helping you to make the company more successful.
Consider too, that part of this culture change process benchmarks your organisation against the best; not necessarily in your industry because in the proverbial pastures new there is often a different kind of grass, new techniques and new ways of doing things. The book Who Moved My Cheese?1 indicates what happens if you simply sit back, enjoy your current comfort, and refuse to find new opportunities, new customers, new capacity, and ever improved levels of customer service. The corporate graveyard is littered with derelict buildings devoid of people, where the ‘leaders’ have refused to lead their people to pastures new, let alone to ‘success’.
Also there are two key parties interested in your culture change; your shareholders and your employees. Your shareholders, who are looking for a decent and improving return on their investment, and your employees, whose lives, livelihood and career depend on the business’s success. The other directly affected groups, your suppliers and customers, are beneficiaries of the culture change rather than drivers. Customers, for example, are attracted because they can rely on you, trust you and enjoy working with you as their supplier; which is why a strong culture that gives excellent customer service together with great employee attitude and behaviour are so critical.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY 'LEADING YOUR PEOPLE TO SUCCESS'?
Put succinctly it is ‘Guiding Corporate Culture Change’ through
the five steps of:
Benchmarking - Planning - Investing - Improving - Reviewing.
This book focuses on what needs to be completed to establish a strong culture, along with practical examples of how to foster this success. Most important of all, it recommends how to integrate all these individual culture-defining elements into an open, friendly, and highly motivational working environment. The book’s title, Leading Your People To Success, reflects the importance of people in the daily management of your business.
Let’s look at where we are heading with Leading Your People To Success. Let’s create a picture of the future. Let’s call it our ‘Vision of Success’.
Imagine the following scene of an open plan office, light and airy with everyone within a few metres of windows. Standing up from your desk, located in the middle of the office, you sweep your gaze around the room and can see all your staff. At each end of the office is a series of glass-fronted meeting rooms; there are no offices for individuals. At the entrance is a small, but attractive, informal rest area where people from any part of the company come to drink and swap news - it’s amazing how much informal communication goes on there. Large pot plants break up the rigid lines of desks, laptops and portable phones (so you can be contacted at work regardless of location). The wall-mounted TV screen keeps everyone up to date with the latest company news via the intranet, and everyone has his or her own personal e-mail address. Communication is so good that everyone knows what is going on without having to ask.
Everyone is happy, motivated and surprisingly relaxed; there is a good balance between the needs of work and family life. Everyone is staff status and on first name terms.
On the walls where plenty of people pass daily, are the company Mission, Vision, Value and Strategy statements; together with this quarter’s objectives and team Key Performance Indicators as decided by each team, not by management.
As the business is now an e-business, even training is done via the Internet and intranet, at the convenience of each individual. You note that efficiency and output are up again; innovation and continuous improvement just seem to keep happening without the need for regular re-launches of ‘new’ initiatives; there are leaders throughout the company, not just at the top, and excellence is the standard expected, especially for every experience our customers have when they interact with the company. You read the latest customer feedback received via your customer service desk; an e-mail that mentions how pleased this customer is with the latest delivery and the great attitude of the delivery driver. Nothing special, but it’s good to see anyway.
You had a meeting earlier on today with someone writing a book about the company, someone who asked if he could speak to some of your staff about what it is like to work for the company. You smile, as you remember their answers: ‘Dynamic!’ ‘Previously you had to give everyone the information [about how the company was performing]. Now you can spend time discussing the information [as everyone knows how the company is performing].’ ‘Everything keeps changing.’ ‘I am really proud to work here.’
Perhaps we have got a few things right but we’ve still got a long way to go. Must get on...
HOW DO WE START 'LEADING YOUR PEOPLE TO SUCCESS'?
This book will guide you through the principles, introduce practical ideas, and lay down the interlocking crazy paving of culture to create your ‘people path’ to success.
We’ll start by ‘Benchmarking Your Success’, using the characteristics of ‘poor performance’ and ‘success’ cultures. You can quickly and easily assess where your company lies on the cultural scale now, and identify areas to focus on throughout the rest of the book. There is also a concise, easy to complete questionnaire, which should provoke much thought by identifying themes you may not have considered before. The more questions you can honestly say yes to, the closer your organisation is to a Success Culture.
Throughout the book are ‘Case Studies Of Success’, as I want to excite you and give you ideas for your own organisation to implement. All the case study firms are examples of ‘best practice’ successful cultural change. All, apart from Investors in People and Shell Chemicals, are also host companies for the Inside UK Enterprise scheme, whose primary aim is to help spread best practice. The case study companies are all international businesses, many are household names, and they come from a specially selected diverse range of service and manufacturing industries to provide a broad spectrum of interest for the readers. Each case study has its own theme, general principles that can be applied elsewhere, and a ‘Summary Action List for Your Business’.
In the second section, called ‘Planning Future Success’, we’ll identify the steps required for Leading Your Culture Change. We’ll guide you through preparing your Mission, Vision and Values that everyone lives by. Then we’ll introduce the Strategic Business Plan, Quarterly Objectives and Key Performance Indicators, show the link between these three, and the importance of communicating these plans to the whole organisation.
Thirdly, ‘Investing In Success’ introduces the ‘Culture Champion’ and covers five other areas associated with implementing culture change; raising standards, training, changing attitudes, the ‘walk round’, and making work fun.
The fourth section, ‘Improving Your Success’, looks at how to initiate and stimulate continuous improvement. We will uncover the workings of suggestion schemes to help you change from ‘we’ve tried that before but it failed’ to a series of open scheme principles. These should result in a significant percentage of your team putting forward and implementing suggestions as visible evidence of their ability to change the working environment. This section will also give you ideas on how to develop a safety culture by continuously reducing your accident levels at work (which is probably most relevant to a manufacturing or other non-office environment).
Finally we shall be ‘Reviewing Your Success’ to ensure you have truly been Leading Your People To Success. This brings the whole subject of culture change together, including lessons learned from the case studies, and summarises in a one-page figure what constitutes the Leading Your People To Success model.
So now we’re at the start of a journey into the unknown, a path no longer defined by or based on pure extrapolation, investment, and unit cost reduction. It’s a people path to a strong culture. Have you got the courage to proceed along this culture change journey? Can you look your employees in the eye tomorrow and say, “Let’s Do It!”?
I invite you now to start Leading Your People To Success.
