What is the best strategy you have implemented?
A few years ago we did a culture change programme with a company that was formed out of different merged businesses. Our job was to bring those cultures together. By the time we were finished teams felt like teams, not like a disparate group of people pulled together from different companies.
Can you take us step-by-step through why it was a success?
Although this is now a large part of what we do, this project was one of the biggest we had done to date so we learnt a lot. It became clear to me afterwards that there were three ways that we worked with the client that had the greatest impact. These have become our unique recipe. We always ensure these are front of mind in any work we do.
Firstly, we commit to their business objectives. We do whatever is within our power to help the client get where they’ve said they want to be. It’s personal to us. I think clients can see that we care deeply about their business and we’ve got skin in the game.
Sometimes the client wants to back down from their own ambitions because it’s become harder than they expected to get there. But we hold them to account for what they said they wanted. This client didn’t like us much for that at times but they said later it was our determination that got them through.
Secondly, we have very high expectations of our clients. We don’t step over much. We hold ourselves to these same high standards. There’s always a moment when, as a coach or facilitator, you spot something going on in the room. At that moment it can be risky and difficult to shine a light on it but that’s what we’re there for. It’s often the moment that changes everything.
With this client, that moment was when the board called into question the whole change programme. We could have lost the whole contract. But instead of focusing on what was at stake for us, we simply and neutrally asked “What are your alternatives?” If there was a better way, they’d better take it.
They thrashed it out in front of us, eventually deciding this was what needed to be done. At that moment I knew we had their real commitment.
Thirdly, we bring original thinking and fresh ideas to our work. There’s so much cliché in our business.
I decided a few years ago that we would never talk about Steve Jobs or Apple to our clients. I never met Steve Jobs and I don’t know anything about Apple from personal experience, so who am I to judge their approach to leadership? Instead, we speak from our real experiences with our clients and develop our own models based on what we’ve seen. We only draw on the work of others as a conversation starter, never as fact or definition. It means the leaders we work with end up developing their own model of leadership, relevant to their business at that time.
What do you recommend our readers do with this strategy?
Ultimately you have to ask yourself how emotionally engaged you are with your clients. Do you actually care about them and their business?
If you do, how do you need to re-think the way you work with them so that they benefit from all of that emotional investment by you? It isn’t about getting in to the muck and weeds with them. You still maintain your external perspective.
But it might mean getting shot of all the collateral – the handouts, the “take-aways”, the slides – which is often about you proving how clever you are, and instead allowing the people in the room to define what’s going to work for them and their company.
Blaire Palmer is Chief Executive of That People Thing, a leadership development company.
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