Chapter 10

Taking people with you

Connectivity is an organisational capability which needs time and dedication to build so that it lasts. Connected leadership is the route to achieving a connected organisation, one that can compete effectively at least in part due to its innate ability to adapt rapidly in line with changing customer expectations and technological innovations.

Changing the way you and your leadership colleagues lead the business is a significant step towards this, but it then takes everyone in the organisation to create the connections that will lead to the associated agility and collaboration in practice. That means engaging all your people in terms of what they know, think, feel and do.

In this chapter you will find:

• an overview of strategic engagement and how to engage leaders across your business
• insights into how to engage everyone to create the connected company
• practical steps to use communications effectively.

Finally, I suggest you retake the survey on how connected your organisation is, which was introduced in Chapter 3. By now you should have a much more precise idea of just where you are in terms of the five factors of the connected company.

Building a connected company through strategic engagement

Strategic engagement is about building effective connections between your purpose and goals, people’s behaviour and the resulting transformation in terms of customer experience and business performance. It is about making emotional connections in order to build and sustain momentum. As PwC wrote in a recent report: ‘Human behaviour is complex. Organisations don’t adapt to change; their people do. But this human element is overlooked again and again. About 75 per cent of all organisational change programs fail, largely because employees feel left out of the process.’¹

In the context of creating a connected company that is more agile and customer-driven, you are looking to create a sustainable organisational capability. What is an organisational capability? Ulrich and Smallwood state: ‘Organizational capabilities emerge when a company delivers on the combined competencies and abilities of its individuals. An employee may be technically literate or demonstrate leadership skill, but the company as a whole may or may not embody the same strengths. (If it does, employees who excel in these areas will likely be engaged; if not, they may be frustrated.) Additionally, organizational capabilities enable a company to turn its technical know-how into results.’² In the same article, the authors describe how InterContinental Hotels Group identified the key capabilities the company needed to develop as being collaboration and speed, which, interestingly, are closely aligned with the last two connected leadership factors.

In order to develop connectedness as a company-wide capability you need to engage your leaders and all of your people in the journey. But where do you begin? The MacLeod report into employee engagement concluded that the four main drivers of engagement are clear leadership, engaging line managers, colleagues feeling they are able to voice their ideas and be listened to, and a belief among colleagues that the organisation lives its values, resulting in trust and a sense of integrity.³ You can use this insight to prepare for engaging your people with the changes associated with becoming more connected. Note that the first driver of engagement above is you and your colleagues as leaders: how you put into practice the areas covered in this book so far. You are primarily responsible for providing clarity and building a culture where the factors of the connected company are explicitly valued. This also covers the fourth driver, the belief that as an organisation you live your values, and as we discussed in Chapter 5, this starts with you being an authentic leader.

In order to harness the power of the second and third drivers you have to engage with all the managers of people in your business so that they ‘get it’. They have to be well equipped to lead those they are responsible for in a way that demonstrates connected leadership in day-to-day practice, to listen carefully to their people and to ensure those messages are understood and acted upon within the organisation. It has been well chronicled that a key factor in engagement at work is one’s relationship with one’s line manager: if it is good, then we are more likely to be engaged and motivated to commit discretionary effort; if not, we are not.

Of course, this is linked to your business’s wider selection and development of managers and leaders across all levels and organisational units (as discussed in earlier chapters in relation to both devolving power and building a learning culture). If your organisation has effective talent management and leadership development, and if you have therefore an organisational capability of leadership, then your task will be much easier than if you don’t.

Engaging all the managers

In order to engage your colleagues across your business you need to engage your managers and give them the knowledge and tools to engage with their people in a way that is both consistent and authentic. It has to be consistent because you are looking for a shift in mindset and behaviour from across the whole business. It needs to be authentic because colleagues are not stupid and will not engage with programmes or initiatives that they see as being disingenuous, flavour of the month or manipulative. They will, however, respond to genuine changes in the way their manager works with them if they value these changes and see the purpose of them in line with the overall purpose of the organisation.

In my experience of working across sectors, continents and levels of organisational maturity, there are a few simple rules that help to set things up for success in this area (see Table 10.1).

table 10.1 Engaging your managers in becoming connected leaders

10 rules	Description
1. Mean it	If you and your leadership colleagues don’t mean it, then it will not work (and it’s better not to start). So discuss this change in depth and commit as a leadership team to embark on the journey.
2. Be disruptive	To change mindset you need to challenge preconceptions and help people reframe their assumptions. So design uncomfortable experiences that take managers out of their comfort zones.
3. Make it enjoyable	If it’s dull it won’t be effective. Use humour and gaming to get people involved.
4. Build momentum	Change takes lots of energy at the beginning, as well as time and regular reinforcement, but once the flywheel is going its momentum will carry on.4 Be willing to invest time and effort heavily early on.
5. Give the tools	Give managers the tools to engage with their teams regularly and with impact.
6. Give the training	Train managers in key skills such as dialogue, facilitation and coaching.
7. Make it two-way	We make sense and adopt assumptions based largely on dialogue and reflection, so it is critical to base the engagement on two-way discussion and group dialogue.
8. Track progress	Measure progress through feedback loops focused on what people are learning and what they are doing with it in practice. Make the feedback visible and simple, and review it as key management data along with sales and the balance sheet.
9. Follow up	Make it stick by celebrating progress (and challenging lack of it with support to get going) and give people the opportunity to feed back and influence the process as it progresses.
10. Be a broken record	Persistence is vital as it takes time and repetition to make changes of this nature permanent. Keep telling the story, changing the language people use and recognising breakthroughs to encourage more.

These rules work. You may have other ways to make change stick, too, and I encourage you to use them, especially if they are natural to your company’s ways of doing things. But I would ask you one thing – to check that you are not using channels and techniques that may have worked in the past but which are too associated with a more hierarchical or traditional way of working.

Engaging everyone to create the connected company

The next stage is far more challenging because you now need to take everyone with you on the journey to becoming a connected company. You can engage people over a sustained period of time through helping them to know, think, feel and do things differently. In other words, they have to be encouraged to develop a new mindset and related habits. New mindsets mean new behaviours and new behaviours mean improved performance. In Figure 10.1 you can see how this progresses, from knowledge that drives new thinking to an emotional reaction causing changes in behaviour.

Going through these stages is important because when you seek to take people with you there is no point just telling them – they have to embrace it individually and collectively. This can be a messy process, especially when we are asking people to change habits or behaviours they like, which have served them well, which are familiar and which have probably supported their career progression to date.

We can better understand the way we react to change as individuals by using the transition model developed by William Bridges.⁵ He described three phases that we tend to go through as we adjust to change. First, ‘ending, losing, and letting go’, where we need to recognise the ending of what has been and the associated sense of loss, of having to let go. This is followed by entering what he calls the ‘neutral zone’ in which we feel mixed emotions of confusion and opportunity. As we go through the neutral zone we develop a stronger sense of and begin to embrace the third phase, ‘the new beginning’ of acceptance and exploration of the new world. In other words, personal transition takes time and benefits greatly from special management attention if it is to be navigated effectively. It is also worth remembering that as leaders, we might be well into ‘the new beginning’, while other people in the company may be just beginning to let go and coming to terms with the ‘ending’ of the old ways. So we need to be patient and persistent in engaging with people and helping them make sense of it and move into a new mindset in their own time.

We can also draw on the wisdom of strategy expert Henry Mintzberg again, who identified four learning processes that work across an organisational system to build a collective capability, as described in Table 10.2.⁶ These processes work at the three levels of individual, group and organisation. It is helpful to understand how the learning starts with each individual and then develops through teams and larger groups to finally change the way the organisation thinks and behaves. But it takes time and dedication as well as an understanding of the psychology of how people engage with and embrace new ideas and turn them into new ways of working to make the transition successful. In my research I found that the main (and perhaps obvious) pre-requisite for creating a connected organisation was senior management commitment to make it happen. Where this was lacking the changes were ineffective, whereas where it was strong the changes made a major impact on organisational engagement, culture and performance.

table 10.2 How you can help the organisation learn to be connected

Process	Description
Intuiting	The first process is happening at a subconscious level. It is the start of learning as people begin to make sense for themselves of what is happening. It must happen in each individual’s mind, as a foundation for the next process to work effectively, so each person needs time for this to work well.
Interpreting	The second process picks up the conscious elements of this individual learning as people begin to share their thoughts with others through dialogue, i.e. at a group level. Your job is to catalyse the discussion about becoming more connected in and between groups.
Integrating	At the third process and as a consequence of the social interpretation the collective understanding changes at the group level. At this point the mindset of the organisation is starting to change. You can maintain this effect across the whole organisation if you sustain it over time.
Institutionalising	Finally, the fourth process incorporates that shared learning across the organisation by embedding it in its systems, structures, routines and practices. Here you can build new organisational habits to reinforce the connected mindset.

Let’s take each process in turn and consider what it might look like in practice in developing a connected company.

Intuiting

The first process is intuiting, which happens in the individual subconscious. We can draw on Weick’s sensemaking (described in Chapter 4), which helps us to understand how people are making sense of what is happening around them all of the time.⁷ Here are a few tips for engaging with each person’s intuitive response in order to get their initial buy-in to being connected:

• Emphasise your higher purpose as an organisation to leverage how people identify with the organisation, such as ‘working together saves lives’ in a pharmaceutical company.
• Link to the past by communicating how the connected future builds on your heritage as an organisation and relate stories of how yesterday’s figureheads demonstrated the connected characteristics themselves.
• Change your language as a symbol of what is now important, using words like agile, collaborate, values and customer.

Through these signals you will reinforce the idea that change is necessary and beneficial.

Interpreting

The second process is interpreting, where people make sense through dialogue. As Weick wrote: ‘Human thinking and social functioning are intertwined . . . We make sense through action, interaction, reflection and “fit” . . . Dialogue is key.’ You can use formal and informal social interaction to help people engage with the messages about being a connected company:

• Formal channels such as training courses, induction, colleague forums, works councils and special interest groups, and use rituals such as company briefings to reinforce the messages.
• Informal opportunities are equally important, including meeting people in kitchens, dining rooms, by water coolers and the like as well as social gatherings and parties.

Seed these with visible symbols of change, ask questions to start discussions and encourage people to challenge, debate and come up with ideas to envision what being connected means in practice and how to make the changes more effective.

Get teams to do things that explore new ways of working, such as asking them to explore how their goals and values align with those of the business, to create a new mental model of the connected company through dialogue.

Integrating

The third process is integrating the thinking within and between teams across the business. Start with working teams as your focus. Develop simple team diagnostics, do-it-yourself workshops and facilitated events that help each team leader, at whatever level, to engage with their whole team in the process of developing more connected ways of working. These can include questionnaires (such as the one at the end of this chapter), structured discussions, group activities and games. These can be in person and online, depending on what’s going to work best with different parts of the business.

Get people to do things that demonstrate new ways of working, such as removing barriers to cross-functional collaboration, in order to create a new ‘reality’ through action. You are looking to take people on a journey through connected leadership on which they can understand each factor, identify where they are at the moment, find ways to improve and develop practical plans to put it all into practice. Introduce this through progressive cycles of coordinated activity, run by managers and cascading through your business, building momentum and giving people time to process each factor before moving on to the next.

In Figure 10.2 you can see the evolving nature of the process, with learning what works well in each iteration taking you into the next wave of activity. Creating the ‘drum beat’ in the organisation by continuing the cycle is what will make the change ‘sticky’. Momentum gathers as each cycle is achieved until it is lived and believed throughout the organisation. Each cycle starts with leadership providing clear direction and creating a common language through sharing stories throughout the business, reinforced by simple and eye-catching communications and learning activities. Team leaders run workshops and lead discussions which lead to action, which is then fed back to the rest of the organisation. It is all evaluated for impact and embedded through changes to processes and ways of working.

You may find it helpful to identify and train up some coaches for this whole process. These could be people from within the business who have the commitment and aptitude to coach others in making these activities work in practice. I often find that some managers need more support from such coaches than others, but that if the coaches are effective they will develop and draw out of the managers more confidence and skill. Then the managers can facilitate the workshops and discussions over time, which creates more effective line managers as a side benefit.

While working between teams sounds like an obvious thing to do, I find it is often neglected in change programmes. The emphasis is too often on the individual and their local team, which is fine but insufficient. You need to develop strong inter-team connections if you are to get the process benefits of connected leadership.

Silos continue to be a major issue for organisations of different geographies and sectors. The organisational structure creates barriers that inhibit effective and efficient end-to-end process working, such as managing the supply chain to get product from raw materials to customer consumption. By making the connections between teams in, for example, production, distribution and merchandising work well, you can see reduced cycle times, reduced waste and improved customer availability as a result of high levels of collaboration, mutual influence and respect.

A common complaint I often hear from leaders of these silos is that they and their teams are too busy making the process work to find time for involvement in cross-functional working as it is often seen to be a ‘luxury’ activity. It needs determined commitment from senior leaders and a strong sense of why this is important (and therefore what benefits you expect to see as a result) to push through this resistance. The benefits can include millions of pounds’ worth of cost savings in the process itself, commercial benefits such as new cross-category customer propositions, improved stock availability and increased employee engagement because of more satisfying ways of working.

Activities I have seen work well include inter-team events to develop closer alignment of process, improved understanding of each other’s priorities and constraints, and increased levels of feedback to improve collaboration. Regular and ongoing inter-team discussions, sometimes including the whole team and sometimes with representatives, can help to maintain and accelerate progress. And online forums to share and solve issues can make the dialogue very visible to all the people involved.

Institutionalising

The fourth process is institutionalising the connected company journey and the shared learning along the way across the organisation by embedding it in its systems, structures, routines and practices. Now you can encourage new organisational habits by reinforcing the connected mindset in the ways of working such as the overall processes that drive coordinated activity.

This stage can be happening in the background while the first three are playing out. For example, you can redesign in a more connected way the human resource processes that support the employee life cycle, the systems that support learning, and the financial systems that provide management information to support more devolved decision making, more collaborative ways of working, and increased learning and sharing of knowledge to fuel innovation. The key thing is to introduce these changes only when the people who use them are ready for the change and understand why they are the way they are.

Communicating connectivity effectively

For all of the activities described so far in this chapter, the line manager is one of the main conduits for increasing connectivity across your business. There are four levels of communication you and they will find can make a difference when used appropriately and which are outlined in Figure 10.3: broadcast, response, dialogue and decision making. Each level has its place.

1 Broadcast

The ‘broadcast’ approach is useful when disseminating headline information and reinforcing key messages, just as we experience when we watch advertising on the television. It is a little crude but it does get simple messages out to a large audience. Unfortunately, as we also know from watching television, it is neglected by the majority and rarely sufficient to change behaviour by itself. Regular CEO briefings by video, email or webcast can be a part of effective communications, but it would be unwise to rely on these alone.

2 Response

Response-level communications can gauge opinion and start a more connected approach to engagement. The classic engagement survey itself is a case in point. As each person replies to the request for input they are increasing their involvement and their likely commitment to the outcome. Their expectations are also raised by this and so follow-through becomes essential if people are not to feel disappointed by the lack of response to them. You can use polls and mass bulletin boards to get more spontaneous feedback from people.

3 Dialogue

Where we really get into something more useful is with the third level, dialogue, where people are engaged in discussion, which is a social process of making sense and processing the topic at hand in a conscious way. Through this they internalise the topic, such as a team relating their own experiences when they are asked for more collaboration along a particular organisational process and thinking through what it would mean to them. This is why I have been emphasising the role of structured discussions in team activities, because it enables groups to take new ideas on board and to consider their response to them.

4 Decision making

This leads on to the fourth level, decision making, which is useful where we want people to make a conscious choice, to adapt their mindset and to decide to behave differently in some way. By making a choice they have made a commitment, just as a consumer buying a product makes a decision when they take the product to the checkout. If you amplify this decision making across your whole business you will see how powerful this can be.

If, for example, all of your people decide to undertake reviews at the end of projects and learn from their experiences to improve performance next time, you will have changed gear in terms of building a learning culture. The decision provides the motivation to act and to put it into practice, together. There is a group sense of accountability to each other when teams decide to do something together. If it is encouraged and reviewed by the team leader, it will lead to changes in behaviour and therefore performance. For remote teams in particular it is helpful to support this review process via an online sharing facility through which concerns, insights and learning can be shared among the team.

Essentially we want leaders at all levels engaging their people in relevant discussions which lead to the best decisions they can make. When followed up and reviewed these will then become new habits. This is when change occurs.

In conclusion, in all of this work you are seeking to embed a connected culture where people, whether they are customers, colleagues or other stakeholders, are the priority and where connecting people is a means to a more agile, customer-driven company. At one level it is as simple as finding the right balance between the natural focus on tasks that dominates most organisations I visit and this clear focus on people. But beneath that there are some very specific ways to think and behave that are radically different to the historical emphasis on heroic leaders driving performance with a command-and-control style of working. Taking people with you on this journey is a challenge, but one made easier if you believe that it is the right journey in the first place.

Connected company survey

In Chapter 3 you first encountered this simple survey that covers the five connected company factors in order to analyse where your organisation is currently relative to the connected company model and therefore where you might want to focus your attention in developing new ways of working.

You might find it useful, having gone through the book, to take it again and compare the scores. Have they changed at all? You can also use it to review with your team as a basis for discussion. Try using some of the techniques we have suggested for improving shared conversations in Chapter 6.

Critical connections index – organisation

Your personal details

Please rate each statement based on your honest assessment of how true this is as a description of the organisation in which you work. Where you are assessing a part of the organisation, please answer in relation to that part only.

The rating scale is as follows:

• 1 – strongly disagree
• 2 – disagree
• 3 – neither agree nor disagree
• 4 – agree
• 5 – strongly agree

If in doubt, please choose the score that best reflects your overall assessment of the situation currently in your organisation.

Score summary

Interpretation

Total scores of 20–40 indicate a low level of connectivity. This is typically either a more command-and-control environment or a bureaucracy.

Scores between 41 and 60 show limited levels of connectivity.

Scores between 61 and 80 indicate a high level of connectivity, with significant levels of empowerment and learning across the organisation, coupled with a strong sense of collective strategic focus.

Scores over 80 suggest a highly connected organisation committed to distributing leadership in a coherent way and encouraging high levels of innovation based on shared values and a customer-centric mindset.

Notes

1 Dawson, M. J. and Jones, M. L. (2007) ‘Human change management: herding cats’, London: PwC, 21–23.

2 Ulrich, D. and Smallwood, N. (2004) ‘Capitalizing on capabilities’, Harvard Business Review, June, 119–128.

3 MacLeod, D. and Clarke, N. (2009) ‘Engaging for success: enhancing performance through employee engagement’, A report to government; http://www.engageforsuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/file52215.pdf. London: Office of Public Sector Information.

4 Collins, J. (2001) From Good to Great, 1st edition, London: Random House Business.

5 Bridges, W. (1991) Managing Transitions, Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press Inc.

6 Mintzberg, H. (2009) ‘The design school: reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management’, Strategic Management Journal, 11(3), 171–195.

7 Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations, London: Sage.