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Culture eats technology for breakfast Leading the charge for a world class virtual culture
Written by Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? authors: Chris Martin and Josh Trebilcock
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020
Foreword Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? have built a business on enabling companies to adopt Olympic-winning strategies to improve performance and results. We help businesses implement proven, practical habits to enable them to create high performance cultures. We believe that in the next twelve months building a world class virtual culture will be the most crucial foundation stone for UK businesses as they strive to maximise the performance of their employees What follows is our view of the challenges the Covid 19 crisis has posed to our clients and how we are helping them to overcome those challenges to survive and then thrive in a more virtual world. Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Authors: Josh Trebilcock & Chris Martin.
The world has changed forever The societal shutdowns and economic downturn following the Covid 19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way organisations will operate for the foreseeable future and maybe forever. As governments and businesses around the world continue to request /allow/ encourage people to stay at home, working remotely has become our new reality. In scope and scale this has never been done before and as Lu-Hai Liang aptly wrote for the BBC, Covid-19 almost overnight led to the biggest working from home experiment we’ve ever seen (Liang, BBC, 2020). Working remotely, whether we like it or not, whether we have done it before or not, is here to stay. Companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Mastercard are all allowing employees to decide when and for how long they wish to work from home. Twitter’s grand, sweeping declaration was to allow employees to work from home ‘forever’ (Guardian, 2020). Barclays CEO Jes Staley is amongst many others who have already challenged the need for such expensive retail estate to be owned and serviced by their organisation (BBC, 2020). Even the largest sceptics would find it hard to argue that we have reached a point of no return in terms of office presenteeism and a more flexible approach to when and where we work. So, what has this meant so far? Initially the focus during this crisis, when discussing home working, was a technological one. Choosing the right technology to allow us to adapt to such a change, then increasing the ability of employees to use it, was every bit as important as the budget reforecasting, contract reviews and headcount decisions that dominated those early weeks. But when it comes to creating or maintaining a high performance culture, the technology to connect is just the beginning of what is needed when your workforce is spread across cities, regions and countries. How you actually work together when no longer in the same space becomes one of the next big pieces of the jigsaw.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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It’s a challenge that isn’t going to go away. The crisis has of course shaped much of what we have seen to date but as the horrors of Covid 19 gradually ease it will be deeply revealing to see what unfolds in terms of working methods and cultures. The desire for more home working from employees, the recognition of the financial benefits, the efficiency and talent pools on offer for many businesses, means there is an opportunity to lead the charge on how to create a powerful virtual culture in 2020 and beyond.
“ …there is an opportunity to lead the charge on how to create a more virtual culture in 2020 and beyond.” So, for now, what must teams and leaders be doing to develop their virtual culture? We believe Its crucial to re-establish how teams lead and operate together within these new market conditions. To carry on trying to work the same way, the same number of hours, with the same focus is destined to fail. As Bain & Co. suggest, the key to maintaining, or indeed improving, your performance levels through these times is to focus on strengthening your teams (Kleweno and Gerend, Bain & Co, 2020). In the face of crisis, there is a great need to put time and resources into ensuring teams across an organisation have a clear template for success, including, potentially, a whole new set of goals. We certainly agree with McKinsey that yes, the delivery and method of how we achieve and pivot to those goals is now different and tech has a role to play in that (Kshirsagar, Mansour, McNally, and Metakis, McKinsey, 2020). However, if you had a dysfunctional team beforehand – you can guarantee that Zoom won’t fix that. Likewise, if your team didn’t know what success looked like in their roles, you can guarantee they still won’t after rolling out Slack. Technology won’t fix what is a business problem. At best, it may help paper over a few cracks, but you can’t afford to hold off on directing greater consideration to what is now necessary to make employees thrive in a more virtual world. Facebook anticipate that by 2030, 50% of their workforce will work from home (Byers, NBC, 2020). That is almost as big a gear change to working cultures as that brought about by the internet.
“ Developing a high performing culture within your teams will lay the foundation for everyone to build on in this unfamiliar and uncertain environment.” So if the supposition is that large scale change to the working environment is inevitable and a world class virtual culture an enabler to success, what else must be addressed in 2020 to allow such a culture to emerge? It’s a complex picture.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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The challenges to overcome At WIMTBGF?, we’ve spoken to many of our clients over the last couple of months, from global organisations with people in their thousands to smaller UK based workforces. The fallout of this new norm has caused great upheaval and initially the rapidness of change has led to a widespread feeling of a loss of control at every level from the Chief Exec’s office right down to the front-line employee. Immediate concerns and crisis responses from the leaders we have spoken to have been varied:
◉ Initial crisis management
maintaining my cash flows and orders, reducing costs, maintaining/ adapting supply chains, keeping customers.
◉ Employee wellbeing and safety
responding to consequences of extreme change, ensuring my employees have short-term plans to continue moving forward. How to help look after physical and mental health.
◉ Clarifying changing goals
re-evaluating our business priorities for the coming days, weeks, months.
◉ Communicating effectively
reassuring our employees, managing in the virtual world, reaching everyone.
◉ Crisis leadership
crafting my key messages, taking the lead while performing in new conditions, all while under pressure
◉ Employee effectiveness
making sure my employees focus on the right things, avoid worry and distractions in what is for many a new environment to WFH.
◉ Team togetherness
maintaining a sense of closeness in teams despite geographical distance – keeping team morale up.
◉ Personal worry
this is an often hugely overlooked one - we’ve had Chief Execs, MD’s and HRDs all questioning “Am I up to it?”, “I’ve never handled this before” and most common of all… “I am exhausted”.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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Priorities to address Taking these challenges into account, how do we ensure shorter term business continuity while maintaining a focus on the culture and type of business we want to have, need to have, for the next 12 months and beyond? There is no doubt that this question poses significant challenges to leaders as they juggle multiple priorities in order to simultaneously address the immediate business need and longer-term future. We believe it’s crucial to ensure you’re set up to perform in 4 areas of activity in the order of:
1 Goal Clarity – clearly define what you and your team are aiming for, and ensure roles and skill sets are aligned to deliver this. 2 Prioritisation – More than ever giving everyone a ruthless focus on what is most important now. 3 Leadership – Finding the space and time to review your capacity to perform across the areas of ‘my fitness’, ‘my business’, and ‘my leadership’. 4 Teams – placing greater emphasis on how the teams around you will work together effectively in this new working environment.
Goal Clarity
1
1
4
Prioritisation
Teams
2
3
Leadership
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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Goal clarity It’s easy to feel lost in this time of upheaval not knowing where your time is best invested. Defining clear goals and allocating clear roles to achieve them is a critical area of focus. Whether it’s a short-term goal that addresses the here and now challenge, or a broader strategic goal to aim for, team goals should have the following 3Ms:
◉ Mutual desire Everyone needs to know why they want to achieve the goal. Job security? A greater financial future? A platform to showcase talent? Whatever it is, even though we are in crisis, it’s still important that everyone wants the goal on an individual level. Ensuring that the same goal benefits everyone and they can see their own individual reward in achieving it, means that every team-member is bought in and motivated to get there.
◉ Mutual reliance Making sure individual skill sets in the team are fully utilised and best aligned to deliver the goal. In doing so every person has a vital role to play in delivering the goal. Crucially, everyone knows what is expected of them and of each other- they now rely on each other to deliver.
◉ Measurability We spend a lot of time ensuring our client’s goals have a clearly defined finish line. It sounds obvious but there is often a vagueness to anything not directly attached to the latest set of budget numbers! If the team goal is measurable then it’s crystal clear to everyone involved when they’ve achieved it, or are making progress towards it. This becomes ever more important the further down the organisation you go as it builds autonomy and momentum.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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TEAM GOALS
THE 3Ms
Mutual Reliance What can we all achieve together Mutual Desire Why we do we all want this
Measurable How will we know when we have achieved it
Prioritisation Once you have a clear goal established, you can of course prioritise actions. During this crisis response, that has been easier said than done. We all have felt a range of worries and concerns surrounding the virus, be it directly or indirectly. It’s also easy to get distracted in any number of ways with a loss or lack of established routine, the changes in market conditions and frankly the unprecedented level of disruption to our worlds. However, by encouraging a focus on a) what’s most important and b) what’s in your control, you and your teams will be able to action the things that will give you the most boat speed towards reaching your goal. We have a saying at Will It? - “control the controllables”. In the Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? book, Ben tells the story en route to Olympic Gold of how the Men’s GB Rowing 8 crew couldn’t control the conditions in which they rowed, nor how fast their competitors were going to go – so they didn’t worry about it. Instead, they decided to focus on what was in their power to control, as it was that which they could directly impact that would give them the best chance of achieving their Goal – to win the Olympic Gold Medal. Stephen Covey’s famous spheres of influence advances on this idea in the diagram below. The risk at the moment is that there is a culture where teams lose focus or clarity on what they need to be working on. In order to keep working towards a team’s goal, make sure employees are focusing on operating in the below circle of what’s in their control in service of the goal.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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CONTROL THE CONTROLLABLES
Concern
Influence Control
Stephen Covey
Leadership Earlier we unpacked some of the common challenges we’ve noticed leaders facing in these fast-changing circumstances. While time is scarce to address these, we think it’s crucial that leaders protect and make space to reflect, focus and assess their performance ‘fitness’ in the 3 below areas of activity. So please ask yourself the following: My fitness
◉ Am I working at my Olympic best? ◉ What steps do I need to take to bridge the gap? ◉ Resilience, health and well-being – have I got the right balance (e.g.
exercise, diet and routine) that allows me to take care of myself in a way that allows me to give my best in my role and working environment?
My business
◉ Have we a clear set of goals for the immediate and short term. ◉ Does our short-term team priorities match our immediate ambitions? ◉ Are we creating an environment where success is possible? My leadership
◉ Leading others – my Board or Exec Team – who needs what support and ◉ ◉
direction from me? How well am I Informing others – crafting key messages that align and motivate teams across the organisation. What plans do I have in place, and what support do I need, to get my immediate team working at a world class level for the foreseeable future.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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There is no shirking away from the fact that this is an incredibly difficult time for leaders who will have to juggle multiple priorities. As HBR suggest, in the short-term, leaders are navigating new and ever-changing priorities with limited time to respond (Nichols, Hayden & Trendler, HBR, 2020). As such they may need to adopt new behaviours and use as-yet not fully developed leadership muscles to manage their business’s crisis response. But those who can, will come out as stronger leaders in the long-term and will have started to build a virtual culture critical for the following years.
Teamwork It’s not difficult to make the case that right now the ability to create a culture for effective, high performing teams is as tough as it’s ever been due to:
◉ the initial hurdles to overcome with technology ◉ the delicate balancing act of work and family that has been merged like never before
◉ the challenge of day after day working from your own lounge, bedroom, office, kitchen
◉ the absence of the water cooler conversations
and chat that makes the world go round on a daily basis.
…and that is just the tip of the iceberg. But we have seen good evidence already within the two months of the current crisis that many of our clients are beginning to establish effective virtual cultures. Teams are becoming clearer on how to work together effectively to achieve success regardless of location.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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We have distilled here four approaches which are proving critical in the current environment to achieving high performance teamwork: 1
Team Rules Ben and his crew were very clear through their team rules as to how they were going to deliver together and for each other. Being clear how teams will work and stay connected in a virtual world is mission critical. Teams need to generate their own virtual team rules that build connection and engagement and crucially allow them to hold each to account on how they work.
2
Accountability How do all the roles and responsibilities fit together in a team? More than ever its critical teams organise themselves so that rather than stepping on one another toes the team works together cleanly and seamlessly. This enables greater levels of autonomy and accountability.
3
Feedback Tell it as you see it. Now is not the time to avoid the difficult conversations no matter how tempting that may be. How do you effectively share feedback –tell it as you see it –in a way that others will engage with despite not being together.
4
Evidence Wall Increase the amount we share success and progress – both need to be noted and recognised. By creating an ‘evidence wall’ teams are able to share their own evidence ‘bricks’. Not only is this a great way to show how progress is being made and to measure it, but we all need to know right now that we are making progress!
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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Conclusion We are facing the most difficult and uncertain business conditions since the Second World War. Working across industry sectors we see the scale and complexity of the challenges ahead. To overcome those challenges, we strongly suggest the need for a greater focus on building an organisational culture that can deliver now and in the longer term. Goal Clarity, Prioritisation, Leadership and Teamwork are the cornerstone of that response to reach and maintain high performance with the best crew members remain on board. It is easy to believe that we are all unique and that the route out of the crisis will be bespoke and tailored to organisational need. While of course there is some truth in that, WIMTBGF? firmly believe that the creation of a world class virtual culture will be the driving force of how businesses rise to the top in the next five years and especially in the next 12 months. The world has changed forever and those organisations who can lead the charge on maximising the performance of their leaders and employees will yield the competitive advantages of that approach.
Source List 1
Liang, L. (BBC, 2020) BBC online article, published on 9th March 2020: How Covid-19 led to a nationwide work-from-home experiment.
2
Paul, K. (Guardian, 2020) Guardian online article, published on 12th May 2020: Twitter announces employees will be allowed to work from home ‘forever’.
3
BBC 2020 online article, published on 29th April 2020: Barclays boss: Big offices 'may be a thing of the past'.
4
Byers, D. (NBC, 2020) NBC News online article, published on 21st May 2020: Mark Zuckerberg: Half of Facebook may work remotely by 2030.
5
Galgani, M. (IBD, 2020) Investor’s Business Daily online article, published on 18th March 2020: IPO Stock With 275% Growth Keeps Zooming In Coronavirus Stock Market.
6
Kleweno, P. and Gerend, P. (Bain & Co, 2020) Bain & Company, published on 20th March 2020: How to Make Your Teams Stronger in a Crisis.
7
Kshirsagar, A. Mansour, T. McNally, L. and Metakis, M. (McKinsey, 2020). McKinsey online article, published in March 2020: Adapting workplace learning in the time of coronavirus.
8
Nichols, Hayden & Trendler, (HBR, 2020) Harvard Business Review online article, published on April 2nd 2020: 4 Behaviors That Help Leaders Manage a Crisis.
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? © 2020 Leading and Developing Teams Through an Economic Crisis
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If you'd like to see how we are supporting businesses in building this organisational culture by implementing our above practices then please do view our WIMTBGF Virtual Brochure here. We are very happy to have an initial chat and share our thoughts. If you’d like to get in touch regarding any of the above offerings then please contact us here or alternatively give us a call on +44 (0) 20 3870 7088. We look forward to learning how we can help you ‘press play’ on development at this most crucial time.
All the best,
Josh Trebilcock, Chris Martin and the Will It team www.willitmaketheboatgofaster.com
+44 20 3870 7088 www.willitmaketheboatgofaster.com