"I quoted from CIPD research the other day: “Allowing people the opportunity to feed their views upwards is the single most important driver of engagement”: Simply ‘allowing the opportunity’ is not enough and it lets managers and leaders off the hook..."

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Storytelling in Business (3) - An Exercise in Wishful Thinking...

Do you remember this sentence from this post, quoted from a piece of CIPD research:

“allowing people the opportunity to feed their views upwards is the single most important driver of engagement”?

Well I was thinking about this one today and I think it’s nonsense: it lets managers and leaders off the hook. Simply ‘allowing’ people to feed their views upwards is a supreme exercise in wishful thinking.

Let’s remember the point of what we’re talking about here: it’s about getting people more engaged - the presupposition being (supported by the statistics) that the community of people we need to reach out to are not engaged at the moment. Obvious.

So let’s imagine what happens when we implement our shiny new business process to ‘allow people to feed their views upwards’. How likely is it that our un-engaged teams are going to take the blindest bit of notice? Forget it. All that’s going to happen is lots of rumbling down in the basement about ‘yet another empty exercise’ and ‘how much did they pay the consultants to come up with that one’ and ‘more window dressing - why do they always move the deckchairs instead of actually asking us what’s really going on’.

Don’t get me wrong: engaging with the views, opinions and experience of everyone in a business is indeed the key to success. But it takes much more that ‘allowing’. It has to be a serious commitment on the part of the most senior people in the business and it has to be followed through with genuine integrity. How often do we come across people in business living by Lawrence Olivier’s comment: “Acting” - (substitute “Business”!) - ”is all about truth and if you can fake that, you'll have a jolly good career”.

People aren’t daft and if you’re not genuinely interested and committed they’ll soon catch on.

I worked for some years in a major technology company which had rather lost its way during a period of massive industry change. CEOs came and went, same old story, same old rumbles in the basement.

Until one particular CEO: suddenly the rumblings changed. Instead of the whinges and ‘recreational complaining’, new stories started to circulate: “I was in one of our regular project meeting the other day and Duncan just turned up”! Every Friday, a newsletter from the CEOs office - not the usual woffle but clearly from the hand of the man himself talking about issues and sentiments that were real in the business. Not offering easy solutions or platitudes, but acknowledging the realities of the organisation and honouring the concerns of the teams tasked with solving the problems at every level. This was a man who genuinely ‘showed up’ and took an interest in our stories.

The result was extraordinary: the degree of engagement at the ground level transformed in just a few weeks.

Sadly this extraordinary man ran into the conservatism at the heart of the parent company and the inevitable happened: within a year we were back to where we started with a new CEO and the old ways. But then the most extraordinary thing: the organisation seemed to go into mourning for several weeks. CEOs had come and gone before, but they had barely been noticed. This man had truly engaged the organisation.

It wasn’t perfect, of course - business processes (and many of the old-timers in senior and middle management) never quite caught up with the new enthusiasm so there were a lot of new frustrations, but the mood of the organisation became buoyant, energetic and optimistic.

But the power of actively engaging with people was clearly visible - and the recognition that the future of the business lies in what’s happening on the ground. The ‘strategic decisions’ could now be seen to be made in the context of a more genuine understanding of the business as a whole, and people responded.

A few years ago I was engaged to design and run a change programme for a senior sales team in another tech company: the future of the organisation depended upon deeper cooperation between ‘competing’ teams. The same exercise had been tried several times before (adopting, I suspect, a rather militaristic ‘you will do this…’ approach) and failed (fancy that!), so the stakes - for me and the project sponsor -  were quite high!

It seemed to me that a crucial first step was to get familiar with the mythology about this whole issue within each of the teams involved: what had gone before, why it had failed, what their concerns were about the impact on their own team, why it would fail this time just like it failed last time. And sometimes (as proved true in this case) people will share their stories with an outsider much more readily that with someone inside the business. As a result, this time around we were able to draw together all the right resources to answer all the right questions, able to put in all the checks and balances to make sure nobody was at risk of losing out on commission or kudos or key accounts, and able to make sure all the right processes and resources were in place so that nobody was at risk of having to sell something they didn’t understand.

We put together a training programme that was completely different to the usual death-by-bulletpoint approach.

And it worked.

Those stories would never have emerged if they had just been ‘allowed’. They had been ‘allowed’ for years. Even encouraged. What was  missing was someone who took the trouble to actually show up, sit down, shut up, draw the stories out, listen and do something different as a result - and to undertake that the stories could be told in complete safety. Now we could craft a new story that honoured all the old ones, and because we knew where people really were, we were able to start the whole process by validating their own past and present experience. Only then could we hope to turn the collective gaze to the future.

So just ‘allowing’ people to feed their views upwards won’t cut it. It’ll be (rightly) dismissed as window dressing. You need to get out of the boardroom and down onto the floor - and once you’re there, just remember to hold your peace, let people know they are safe, and give them a dam’ good listening to…