Wavelength Connect 2014

Social Enterprise Members

October 9th SessionKey Challenges and

top tips from the group

Aligning to our Vision and Values, our ‘True North’

How to agree our True North

How to redefine our vision in an uncertain

future

How to align everything to ensure ‘unsupervised

moments’

How to communicate values through a

complex org structure

Top tips and reflections – Aligning vision and values

• Create ‘evidence-based’ arguments for change and clarity of purpose. Move it from a ‘fancy leadership exercise’ to a logical, rational business imperative

• Articulate values through people stories. Clear and simple messages which talk about specific behaviours

• Relentless commitment to the purpose, vision and values – look for every opportunity to align (people, messages, environment, processes, communication, meetings, contracts, etc etc). Use creativity and keep going. The job is never

• The ‘Golden Thread’. Tie everyone’s objectives and performance management into the values and the strategy

• Develop and use a behaviour framework – but beware, behaviours should be positioned as a guide not a prescription. No one likes to be told how to behave!

• It must start from the top. If the board are not role-modeling this then don’t bother trying to get anyone else to do it! In fact, make it work with the board first before you launch it to anyone else

• Tone of voice – make sure it is consistent internally and externally. Treat your people how you wish to treat your customers

Creating brilliant customer service

How to articulate what excellence is

How to align 3rd party to our vision of service

How to drive service over our digital platform

Can we do one thing to really improve it?

What to control, what to let go

Top tips and reflections – Brilliant Customer Service

How to articulate customer excellence• Starts with clarity from leadership and clarity of vision• What role does service really play in how the business actually creates value• There should be no differentiation between how you expect your staff to treat customers and how you treat your staff!• Must be a clear and simple definition. Ritz Carlton Service Credo. Four Seasons Get it right, get me right, wow me if you can.• Must be a common understanding of the words used to describe customer excellence. eg 'brilliant basics with magic touches"How to make it happen• Right people – Southwest ‘Servant Heart’. People who truly love being ‘of service’. Use tricks in the recruitment process to test this• People in the right place• Right tools for the people – too many front line staff hampered by poor IT etc. Are you asking your people to try harder or actually giving them the tools that make

great service almost inevitable• Right training for the peopleHow to share it• Relentless messaging in appropriate way – remember Narey’s Decency Agenda• Capture the stories. You must recognise day to day excellence as well as the occasional ‘wow’ storyHow to drive it across digital platforms• Be clear on what can and cannot be digitised• Borrow best practices from other sectors• Adopt a 'nudge' approach to achieve channel shiftEngaging 3rd parties/internal departments• Put internal departments through customer training basics• Put internal department staff on back to the floor programmes to understand their customers. Keep going on this rather than a one-off, and it must include the

board!• Put customers in internal departments to help them understand their requirements and how they fit in.• Everyone shares in a customer service bonus whether or not they are facing external customers• Survey internal customers regularly and act on results• Strive for the right balance between rules and flexibility• Recruit for attitude, train for skills, build strong teams

Embracing ambiguity and risk

How to encourage staff to ‘deal with it’

How to empower people to think of solutions for

themselves

Getting the basics right during periods of great

change

Building a mindset which embraces failure as a

part of ‘risk’ and innovation

Giving people courage

Top tips and reflections – Ambiguity and risk

• Understand and qualify what you really mean by risk for people– Value Protection or Value Creation

• Define as a leader the– Acceptable risks – those that you can live with in order to improve the delivery and the

system– Those that will threaten the business (the reality is there are very few of these!)

• Encourage collegiate decision making where possible. Involve the front-line where appropriate. Everyone buys in to the risk and takes ownership

• Use ‘ideas’ to encourage ‘embracing risk’. Don’t just talk about wanting to take more risks (everyone says that!), use the trial of new ideas to show what you mean

• Allow some failures and raise their profile rather than hide them or not talk about them• Innovation awards that have an equally celebrated ‘fabulous failure’ category• Agree objectives and, more importantly, purpose, and then let staff deal with the detail of the

how!

Moving myBoard

Shifting them from a ‘traditional’ reporting

group to a collaborative team

Getting them to engage with staff

Moving social purpose ahead of commercial

purpose

Moving commercial purpose ahead of social

purpose

Top tips and reflections – Moving the Board

• Clever agenda design!– Board agendas can have specific sections where collaboration and co-creation is needed.

Even separate the agenda into 2 sections, ‘operational’ and ‘development’ for example– Label agenda items for information, discussion, decision or creation

• Team/pair up trustee board members with operational board members on specific bits of work that have to report back to the board

• Back to the floor – often used as a one-off and not repeated, which is a waste of time. If you do it, keep going and insist it pervades through the whole leadership. No opting out!

• Help the frontline understand the flow of money, how the finances really work (remember the chap who assumed revenue was the same as cash in the bank!)

• A set of agreements for a board to operate by. These are ‘how we work as a board’, a set of 5 or 6 behaviours that help align the group and call out those behaviours that are unacceptable. These should be hi-lighted at the start of each meeting.

Recruiting and removing

How to really get people who ‘feel it’

How to remove the CAVE dwellers (completely

against virtually everything)

Top tips and reflections – Recruiting and removing

• Use a creative approach in your recruitment process to understand whether they are ‘naturally’ the type you want– Take them out to dinner – are they nice to the waiter– Team task – how do they serve their team mates– Bring something to the interview that truly reveals your character (those who are honest

vs those who bring what they think you would like to see)• Use your network to check out the people you recruit. What’s their take? Do they spot

anything you don’t• A ‘don’t know’ is a ‘no!’• Spot the early signs of it not working and act fast, see it through. Remember the examples

– She just came in to me on day one and told me all the reasons why she couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that so I said “this isn’t going to work”.

– We brought in 2 regional directors and bit the bullet and got rid of them within 3 months• Non-negotiable’s! Someone who constantly does things in a way that is inconsistent with the

way the business needs to work may have bought into the ‘why’ of the business but not the ‘how’. Are you being explicit enough on the non-negotiable’s? Is there a consequence to not doing things a certain way?

Leadership. Speaking

personally

How to ask the right questions

How to create space and thinking time

How to climb above the day to day noise

How to kick start change

When and how to admit doubt – I don’t have all

the answers

RunWalkGo for walks with your teamAgenda-less meetingsBreathe!Breathe some more!A good PA will create space for youDelete your whole inbox ‘by mistake’Keep breathing!Keep connecting back to purpose – it helps you ask smart questionsPersonal Boardroom – are you balanced and are you tapping it

Top tips and reflections – Leadership, speaking personally

The Box!Know when you are in itIf you think you might be, you are!No one but you can put you in itUse the list to help you get out

Wavelength Connect 2014

Social Enterprise Members

April 2nd SessionKey Themes

‘Your True North’

Creating that sense of purpose that moves people beyond ‘task’

From burning platform to burning ambition (Lars Kolind)

Giving something meaning – ‘Its time to stop marketing to people and start mattering to people’ (Geoff from Unilever)

It comes back to your moral purpose (Sue Campbell)

Having strong business purpose means you can remove irrelevance – not being afraid to stop doing things

Aligning your purpose with your values – do your values really drive your purpose, or are they just ‘nice’ ways of working

Culture as a true competitive advantage

Being very specific about the culture you wish to create, and what you don’t want

Giving it boundaries – who we are, who we are not!

Intolerant of those who don’t fit – not turds allowed in the pool!

F.I F.O – Fit in or feel free to leave!

Steve Cadogan at LinkedIn. The only way to compete with Google is culturally.

Continually reiterating what the culture is – Ritz Carlton line ups and storytelling

Focus - on what matters

‘Unused Value = Waste’ – Lisa Gansky

‘What more could you do’ – Sue Campbell, who found unused value in her people (The lady who became the drug information guru)

Don’t simply make the irrelevant more efficient

Relentless implementation – we know what we need to do. Incremental improvement can transform

Empowerment and Permission

Pushing decision making to the front line where possible

Unsupervised moments of service – how you create the conditions where people feel trusted, creative and caring at those moments.

Allowing people a ‘Hinterland’ – Martin Narey

What do you do, what more could you do? What’s stopping you? – Sue Campbell

Permission to work differently, unencumbered by ‘the way we do things round here’. Eg, Lisa Gansky’s digital sabbath

Storytelling

Keep saying it until it becomes true – Lisa Gansky

Using stories to illustrate what’s important to us, customers, behaviours

People don’t like lists of behaviours, so if you want to tell them what good looks like, tell them a few stories

History, heritage, vision, customers, values, strategy – they all make good stories

Resourcefulness and Resilience

‘Leave time for Love. Nurture those parts of your life that are nurturing to you’ – Helena Kennedy

Look after yourself! There’s only so much you can do!

Create a hinterland – thinking and assimilation time

Martin Narey enforced KPI’s on a team member ensuring he spent time with his kids and got home on time.

Connecting to purpose – spending 2-5 minutes through your day consciously connecting back to your purpose for… this meeting, this project, this phone call, this relationship etc

Make a small difference every day

Agitated, itchy, even angry

‘People follow leaders who are up to something’

It doesn’t have to be massively transformational – ‘Relentless implementation (Martin Narey)

Martin Narey’s decency agenda

Do you need a plan to start? No, that comes later or is even retrospectively fitted!

Every day everyone should come in and do one thing to make it a little bit better!

Look for small margins that can make a big improvement – Sue Campbell

Leadership is a mindset

‘The true quest for leadership is an inner one’ – Sam Conniff

Its about how you think, then what you do

‘Doubt is healthy’ – Martin NareyIts ok not to know all the answers.

‘Its misguided to think you have to have all the answers just because someone who doesn’t have any of the answers has made you a leader!’

Not knowing is as much a part of authenticity as knowing

Always accept invitations to do things that are challenging or frightening (Helena Kennedy)