- Leandro Herrero - https://leandroherrero.com -

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent
McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it seemed like a universal problem of scarce talent, and a subsequent call to arms in a battle to acquire it, they skilfully managed to distract the attention from a problem significantly greater: hosting talent. The military analogy (that management loves with narratives such as ‘win-win’, or ‘kill the competition’, for example) implied that talent is ‘outside’ and therefore there is a war to ‘get it’. Undoubtedly true in some occasions, organizations have today a greater problem with retention, engagement, and, as I said, hosting that talent. The war on talent is global, the skills gap is widening and employees are demanding more from their employers.

Organizations need to adopt a strategic approach to talent management. They must create workplaces where employees feel value, challenged and supported. They also need to invest in developing their employee’s skills and knowledge so that they can stay ahead of the curve.

The wrong capital
‘Talent management’ ( a sub-industry in its own rights) focuses too much on Human Capital, with emphasis on skills (and with emphasis on people ‘who have done it before’). However, in today’s world, social and emotional capital are just as important.

The best talent management programs focus on developing all three types of capital: human, social, and emotional.

Defining Talent
You’ll be surprised how many people can’t seriously articulate what this means to their organization. The narrower the definition, the bigger the problem. Once you have a clear definition of talent, you can develop programs and initiatives to attract, retain, and develop talented employees

It is vital to move beyond conventional boundaries and develop a nuanced understanding of talent management to foster a thriving workplace.

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behaviours,Building Remarkable Organizations,Collaboration,Collective action,Communication,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Organization architecture | No Comments

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if we create a C home for A and B people together, they will talk. However, the new C people look mysteriously as uncollaborative as before.

At the core of this flawed thinking is the idea that structural solutions solve behavioural problems. They hardly do. Structural solutions, such as a reorganization, can indeed be a good enabler of behaviours, even a temporary trigger. But these behaviours have a life of their own, their own mechanisms of reinforcement and sustainability. They need do be addressed on their own merits.

Another way to look at this is to say that the traditional, conventional wisdom sequence of ‘structure creates process and systems, and then behaviours will come as a consequence’, is the problem. The real, forgotten sequence is ‘behaviours sustain (or not) whatever process and systems come from new structures’. Translation: behaviours must (should) be in the system first, not as an afterthought, a by-product.

Translation 2: install behaviours first.

It is simply another version of the old ‘we will tackle A, B and C first, then, when done, we will deal with culture’. This way of thinking (culture as the soft by-product) has been very harmful to management.

So, for example, restructuring for collaboration, when not much collaboration exists, is bound to create lots of anxiety and not much new collaboration.

In behavioural terms, if you see a sequence in which behaviours are last, it is likely to have the wrong thinking behind it. If you start with ‘what kind of behaviours do I need to?’, you are likely to be on the right track.

If you want to hear more about how we can address your organizational challenges, please contact my team at [email protected]. We have capabilities in organizational/cultural/behavioural change, leadership, organizational design and more.

Your organizational life is more than the sum of management activities and solutions.
We partner with you to create a smart organizational design and strategy plan that sits above your competitors and that all of your organization can refer to.
Learn more here [1]

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Critical Thinking,Leadership,Organization architecture | No Comments

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have a purpose, bring others along, plan properly, organise resources and implement the changes. Great organizations give people autonomy, their leaders communicate well and, above all, exhibit great alignment with their business goals’.

The above 3 statements belong to what I call ‘Impossible to disagree with school of management’ and represent a great deal of content seen in posts, books, reports and, even worse, ‘the latest research’. This lazy thinking brings zero value to the party. It is however, easy to produce and highly magnetic. It generates lots of ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ which grows quickly in the LinkedIn petri dish.

Infuriatingly, people who jump into declaring agreement, don’t just say ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ (exasperating in itself) but tend to repeat the proposition. That is ‘I could not agree more with you Peter. Indeed, good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example’.

I am highly suspicious of anything that seems to produce tranquilizer effects in the mind, that does not generate the slightest restlessness. In a recent post, whose authorship will remain private, I found an article that happily declares 20 reasons why change fails. You could easily add ‘bad weather’, ‘climate change’ and ‘long Covid’ and the article would stand, obviously highly enriched.

The ‘Impossible to disagree with’ school of management might as well also be called ‘The School of Not Thinking’.

The famous ‘Not even wrong’ category, attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe a very poor argument that does not even reach ‘wrong’, should have a sister category in our Platitude Management Industry called ‘Not even challengeable’. My view is that entire libraries of management books, HBR articles and ‘latest research’ could dwell happily there.

Please disagree. Even, just a bit.

Learn more about our interventions here. [2]
 

If you want to hear more about how we can bring some Critical Thinking and new approaches to your organization, please contact my team at [email protected].

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Collective action,Communication,culture and behaviours,Viral Change | No Comments
I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have you all here; now we can all look at our screens together.”

In the past, it used to be considered rude to have your laptop on during meetings and answer emails whilst somebody was presenting. It was rude but tolerated. Now there are fewer laptops on the table, but people are looking down at their phones. ‘Homo Erectus’ is being replaced by ‘Homo Thumbing ‘, which is an illuminated Homo-Looking-Down.

I have run client meetings with apocalyptic warnings against doing this and descriptions upfront of the consequences (from being put on the spot by me, including CEOs, to paying a nominal fine to buy the beers in the evening). Everybody complies at the beginning. By the end of the first day, trespassers are apparent. By the second day, everybody ignores the warning and looks down again, thumbing with an apparent vengeance.

There is an issue here of etiquette, politeness and respect that is big enough. But even more significant is the issue of busyness and the apparent inevitability of answering a trivial message on the spot. Our hyper-connected world has given us enormous possibilities but also a new Ego Archetype that reads like this: ‘What we say, surely, must be incredibly important for many people; to say it immediately is paramount, and if we don’t live in an instant reaction mode, instant thinking, instant presence, instant action, (perhaps not instant coffee), there is something wrong with us’. Why do we react and reply to the command of a beep of the smartphone? Because we can.

“The big issue is the busyness and the apparent inevitability of answering a trivial message on the spot.” 

Human interaction is being digitally re-defined every single day in millions of places. I don’t have a good answer, but what are we, human beings, losing? I know it may be a naïve question but the way ‘business’ dictates our everyday lives bothers me.

Learn more about our thinking here. [3]

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Management of Change,Organization architecture,Performance,Safety Training,Transformation,Viral Change,Viral Safety | No Comments
It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals in a room and train them on ‘something’, the job of achieving that ‘something’ will be accomplished. And if not, we will just train them again.

This naivety about behavioural and cultural change is widespread in business and society and cuts across a diverse range of topics. It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people.

We have traditionally seen it in the area of Health and Safety, where training is a requisite, and who could disagree with that? But training is a weak tool for behavioural change compared to copying and imitating others around you. Training to wear a helmet, telling people that it is a requisite, and people wearing it are three occasionally connected things. But if training is your essential tool, and you have a Full Division for it, then the old saying that ‘when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ applies well.

In this model of hammers and nails, when there is a health and safety transgression, the ‘punishment’ may be… more training. ‘Sending people back to training’ is not just a feature of Health and Safety. In recent years it has included unethical bankers sent on courses on Ethics in apparently ethical business schools. It sometimes seems as if we were following a rule: if you misbehave, we will train you a hell of a lot.

“Training and communicating have gone from a measured and necessary intervention to a single, sufficient solution for many evils.”

We also see it more and more in the controversial area of ‘training on the unconscious bias’ to fight gender and race inequality. It’s not going to stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change. There is plenty of growing data on how that training may be useless, yet we keep doing it. Accepting that society’s ills are not solved in training rooms seems complicated.

“Gender and race inequality, for example, will not stop anytime soon until people realise that rational and even emotional training on a subject has little power in sustainable behavioural change.”

In the corporate world, top-down communication programmes aimed at ‘creating culture’ continue to be entirely present even when the very same people who have authority in dictating and constructing them will tell you in private that they don’t expect a massive impact. It’s, again and again, the repeat of the old tale.

Two people are talking to each other in a garden. One seems to be looking for something on the ground. The other comes along and says, ‘What are you doing?’. The first response was, ‘I’m looking for my keys’. ‘oh, sorry to hear that. Where did you lose your keys?’. The man says, ‘Over there’, pointing to the other side of the garden. The other man says, ‘Hold on, if you lost the keys over there, why are you looking at the ground here?’. The other responds, ‘Because there is more light here’.

There is certainly more light in training and communicating, but the keys are usually lost in the corridors, in the day-to-day interactions with people and in the unwritten rules of the informal organization. There is less light (but you will find your keys) in a bottom-up behavioural change approach. The one that is not conceived as a communication programme but as a grassroots movement. If there is any hope in addressing the ‘S’ in ESG (the Environmental, Social and Governance agenda), it’s not in top-down communication and training programmes to tackle ‘culture’ but in an ‘inversion of the arrow’, from top to bottom to the opposite.

“There is more “light” in training and communication campaigns, but you will find your keys in a bottom-up behavioural change approach.”

An extra and obvious problem with training in large organizations is that you soon start running out of bodies. You train (and communicate to) leaders, the top layer and a few layers down, and then the system closes its eyes, hoping that the miracle of scale will take place. This mental model suggests that large scale is small scale repeated several times, which is the equivalent of thinking that if you just put large piles of bricks together, you’ll get a cathedral.

Cultural change is on all tables today, corporate, society, education… It’s about time we learn how successful approaches have managed to mobilize large numbers of people. No revolution has started in a classroom

Learn more about our thinking here. [3]

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Culture Change,Organization architecture,Viral Change | No Comments
The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was defined by inhabiting and dwelling within an area defined by the castle’s walls. The new view of the organization is similar to the concept of a modern city, where citizenship is defined by moving around a network of communications (in multiple directions with multiple connections) with very permeable borders, if any. Nodes in this network are both destination and point of departure simultaneously.

The ideogram of the old city is the enclosure; the ideogram of the old organization is the organization chart. The ideogram of the new city is the underground map, the rail network or the highway chart; the ideogram of the new organization is the network.

The citizen of the old organization lives in a box on the organization chart, only occasionally getting out of the box to talk to another resident in a bigger box called ‘team’. The citizen of the new organization is a rider of the network, moving around and talking to other loose connections, some with stronger ties than others. Three ‘B’s reign in the old organization: boss, boundaries and bonuses. Three ‘Is’ reign in the new organization: influence, inter-dependence and innovation.

Having acknowledged that the hierarchical organization with its functional silos (which can be visible in companies of 5 million or 50 employees) had a bit of a problem in cross-communication, but not willing to kill the power silos altogether, the invention of the matrix as a cross-functional way of working was inevitable. It became a language key (we have a matrix system) and a clever hierarchical plot (I have two bosses: one local and the other global). And the matrix became a very, very large petri dish for team meetings.

It was invented as a way to force people out of their dwellings to work together with other people (who were also forced out of their dwellings). It sometimes seemed that the conversation between them was temporary and long enough for somebody to look at his watch and exclaim: “Oh, my God, so late already! I need to get back; bye!” And back to their boxes, they went…

“We don’t need more team players. We need riders and navigators. Big time!”

What does this mean? Well, riders of the network navigate through connections inside and outside the organization. They lead from their own connectivity and ability to imagine their world as a vast, mostly undiscovered space. They are relationship builders, not team builders. They may not have a problem with teams and may even belong to some. But they tend to regard teams as the new silos.

Riders have meetings as well: 365/24/7 meetings. They are ‘meeting up’ all the time. It is their very ‘raison d’être’. Riders want networkracy, not teamocracy. These new leaders will take the organization to territories where ‘the answers’ might be found and will do so via relationships, not through processes and systems. They are social-intelligent: a rare characteristic, often invisible in many layers of management or even in top leadership.

This is how you advertise for Riders:

“We’ve done the team stuff. We have lots of it, and it works well, thank you.

We are looking for (social-intelligent) people who can establish a web of internal and external relationships. Management has promised to keep a relatively low profile and let them roam freely.

We acknowledge that, occasionally, we will have the temptation to declare some of them ’a team’, but we promise we will refrain.

We are particularly interested in people who founded a club at 11 or created a football team at 17.” 

Or something like that.

Learn more about our thinking here. [3]

Or reach out to my team with specific questions via [email protected].

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Critical Thinking,Leadership,Management Thinking and Innovation | No Comments
Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us to do?

Way number 2: I need you to approve A. We also have options B and C but would not recommend them.

Way number 3: Just to let you know that we are doing A. We explored B and C, but they did not rank as high as A.

These 3 ways describe 3 different concepts of empowerment, 3 different styles of leadership, also, 3 different organizations. The 3 are legitimate, but they are very different. Please don’t kid yourself; they are not simple variations.

Many people still ask for permission for things that the leadership does not expect to have to approve. But they may do so because it’s now on their plate, in front of them. Many boards complain that decisions are ‘pushed up’ too much but do very little to change the situation. On the other hand, many leadership structures expect to be presented with options for the latter to make a final decision.

Knowing whether ‘you are’ 1, 2 or 3, and, more importantly, whether you’d like to be 1 or 2 or 3, and which one of them your senior leadership team expects, is fundamental. These questions are, more often than not, simply not posed or articulated. In these cases, decision-making runs in automatic pilot mode, creating default positions that are never appropriately validated that, sooner or later, will drive people, top or middle or bottom, for different reasons, simply mad.

Learn more about leadership and its applications here [4]. [4]

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Behavioural Change,Behaviours,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Performance,Reputation,Safety Training,Social Movements,Values,Viral Change,Viral Safety | No Comments

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm.

Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated to safety training in major corporations. One death is too many. Accidents can be avoided. The cost of time lost due to incidents is considerable. Safety training is needed, but it does not necessarily create a culture of safety. Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. A culture of safety is not one of well-trained (on safety) people but one where safety behaviours are the norm. These two things are not the same.

Safety communication and training usually follow a top-down approach where facts are presented, guidelines and procedures exposed, tasks explained, and threats of noncompliance declared. It is a rational and emotional appeal cascaded down across all information channels of the organisation. It suits ‘information’, but it does not suit ‘behaviours’. Behaviours can’t be taught in the same way as a three-step process can be explained.

Behaviours spread via imitation of others. Behaviours travel via social copying and emulation, sometimes unconsciously. Training and communications on safety are needed – and major corporations usually have very good educational programmes. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’. Cultures develop – sometimes very fast – by the power of person-to-person influence.

“Training and communications are needed. But cultures are created outside the classroom and the auditorium, in the day-to-day life of individuals ‘doing things’.”

The most powerful influence in the organisation is not hierarchical; it is peer-to-peer; it is the conscious or unconscious emulation of ‘people like us’. The Health and Safety personnel teach the rules of safety, inspection, safety implementation and improve processes and systems. However, the day-to-day social copying of good safety behaviours in the workplace, plus conversations in the canteen (that is, informal conversations with people one trusts), is what creates a culture of safety in real life.

Viral Change™ is a way to create a fast and sustainable culture of safety which does not rely on the rational understanding of hundreds of people attending safety training workshops.

In Viral Change™, we identify a relatively small set of ‘non-negotiable behaviours’ which, when spread across the organisation, have the power to create a behavioural fabric, a DNA of safety. We also identify a relatively small number of individuals who have a high level of influence with peers, who are well-connected, and whose behaviours are likely to have an impact on others in a multiplying mode. These people may or may not be in specific management layers but occupy various jobs across the organisation. We organise and put together these components, behaviours and influences, in a well-designed format. We let the spread and social infection go, and we back-stage the management of it. We engineer an internal social epidemic of safety behaviours that can be observable and measured.

We do not ask to stop the ‘push’ of training and development! We do, however, orchestrate the ‘pull’ of connected and influential individuals and their role-modelling behaviours who engage with peers in conversations and real-life ‘doing’ and engage others in a viral manner. Viral Change™ is the only way to shape a culture of safety and maximise the potential and the investment of training and communications.

Viral Change™ LLP is currently leading programmes focused on the creation of a safety culture in the way described above. For example, using these principles and methodology, a global company – which has state-of-the-art, award-winning top-down training systems – has engaged us to create a culture of safety virally, reaching and engaging 50.000 people across the world.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [5].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Accountability,Activism,Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Disruptive Ideas,Leadership,Management Thinking and Innovation,Viral Change | No Comments

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are any.

The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking about what to give away to empower.

In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently.

If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually, it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong.

There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this.

  • Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something, perhaps in people’s upbringing, that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard.
  • Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared?
  • Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible.
  • Skills and competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to.
  • A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning.

A working definition of empowerment from the leader’s perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it so that you can free yourself for things only you, as the leader, can do, and, in doing so, you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources.

But the trick is to start by visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights, for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [5].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collaboration,Collective action,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Culture Change,Disruptive Ideas,Language,Leadership,Organization architecture,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero or below.

The line is: This is what I am very bad at; what about you?

And it’s plural, what are we very bad at; what is this company very bad at; what about you, yours?

The Old School Toolkit has a saying, “we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  [6]insufficient [6]. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.

The artist Alex Grey once said: “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.”

I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?

In a new situation (and old ones), when Peter, Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, hearts, and skills and competencies with them. They also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.

I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll see it rocketing soon.

The inevitable super-hero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’ sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you?’ points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.

Sure, you won’t see this in the PowerPoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

[5]
Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [5].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Write a script, not a strategic plan

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Critical Thinking,culture and behaviours,Framing,Management Education,Management Thinking and Innovation,Organization architecture,Storytelling,Viral Change,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we screwed up! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.”

“A year from now, you all are here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we succeeded! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there.”

Vey often I run these exercises (‘Success and Failure Scenarios’ ) with parallel sub-teams of Boards, top leadership teams or management teams. Literally I ask them to write those scripts down or at least find all the pieces and assemble them as a script would have been constructed – novel, film, short story… People are incredibly good at writing these scripts (the failure scenario is invariably faster …) and can relate to them much better than an account of goals and targets as written in the Strategic Plan. The storytellers inside all of us seem to enjoy the questions and the production of answers.

A long time ago, in my work with clients, I have switched from ‘Mission & Visions’ to ‘Space in the world’ and ‘Compelling narrative’. It’s not a simple change of terms. The questions are different. The emphasis is ‘What do you want to be remembered for?’ and ‘What’s the story, your story, perhaps your unique story?’ I also insist on writing down the headlines my clients would like to see in the newspapers in year one, or two, or whatever the time frame. A couple of lines, that’s all. I have seen more Executives surprise each other in this exercise than in many other times of interaction. These visual narratives are very powerful. They bring the authentic part of us to the surface.

Another method I use is to ask people to answer (all in writing, again) a question posed by their children (or other children if they don’t have of their own): ‘Dad/Mum/Sir, what do you do exactly?’ The exercise always starts with some light jokes until it gets really serious. Try to articulate ‘maximize shareholder value’ to your 5 year old.

It’s scripts, narratives, stories, not targets, numbers and earnings per share. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with targets, numbers and earnings per share, but the signposts are not the places themselves. If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

[7]
Learn more about our Leadership and Culture interventions here [8].

Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Collective action,Communication,Critical Thinking,Culture,culture and behaviours,Leadership,Marketing | No Comments
When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change that refuse to go, you are left with a few strong and powerful drivers. I’ve got 40 of them. And I am seriously resisting the urge to ‘get them down’ to the most vociferous few.

“Campaign it” is one of them. Let me explain it in this short video:

[9]
Why “Campaign it”?

In the social change arena, you don’t survive if you don’t “campaign it” – that is if you don’t campaign the changes you want to see. Yet, in organizations, we are not very good at campaigning. We often focus on top-down messages or run campaigns every few months.. that’s not enough.

People in the social change arena know that they need to campaign constantly. Leaders and organizations need to learn from this.

For successful organizational change, you need to campaign it!

If you want to hear more about the full set of rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [10] or via [email protected].

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Communication,Corporate anthropology,Culture,culture and behaviours,Decision making,Organization architecture,Tribal,Workplaces Of The Future | No Comments
We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not the only silos. Functional silos are often stronger: IT, Finance, the medics in a pharmaceutical industry, sales forces, HR, Communications people, etc. In this case, silos and tribes are the same.

The trade industry (and conference organisers) perpetuate this. Global conferences are set up where HR people talk to HR people, Internal Communications to Internal Communications, techie to techie, marketing to marketing, even CFOs to CFOs. These almost medieval trade groups talk to themselves. And have fun. It’s cosy, rewarding, predictable, and, despite what they may say, hardly a place for breakthrough thinking. By the way, it’s not unusual to find that, in those trade/silo/tribal conferences, 80% are ‘consultants’ and 20% ‘real people’.

Functional silos. Cosy, rewarding, predictable, but hardly a place for breakthrough thinking.

Yet, we desperately need the cross-pollination. (I want to see conferences with quota: how many HR, how many business leaders etc).

If a techie concept is not worth explaining to a non techie audience, it’s not worth marketing it. If a HR idea is not worth presenting to non HR, they’d better keep it to themselves.

The tribes will not go away. They never will. They do exist to provide a glue, a sense of belonging, a protected house, a defense castle, a place with an aura of accessibly, or lack of it. Corporate tribes are here to stay. But we need to use our imagination to allow, and promote, tribe A to talk to tribe B, routinely.

Gillian Tett, who heads the Financial Times in the US, an anthropologist by training, wrote an anthropo-journalistic-wonderful account of silos, and their cons (and also pros) – The Silo Effect. [11] It’s a good read and good account of these tribal ghettos (my term, not hers).

The trick with social phenomena like this is not to fight them blindly. Tribes, even intellectual ghettos, have a place. The question is how to establish bridges and communication channels. How to make sure that they all have windows that can be opened and fresh air let in. I don’t have a problem with tribes, even medieval-guilds-intellectual-ghettos, as long as their walls are very thin and with plenty of doors and windows.

And another thing. Make it compulsory for business/operational people to spend some time, perhaps six months, working on those Tribal Reservations: HR, Communications, IT. If they resist, make it a Conscript Project. In Situ Fertilization works.

For more on this you can also read my article: Corporate culture? Start with subcultures, find the tribes, and look for the unwritten rules of their dynamics [12]

The Myths of Company Culture
Explore the broader topic of corporate culture – watch The Myths of Company Culture webinar. Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. In this webinar we look at the many outdated assumptions and discuss some of the inconvenient truths of company culture. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is now ‘the strategy’.
[13]
 

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact me at: [email protected] and my team will arrange a suitable time for us.

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Posted By Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Collaboration,Communication,Culture,culture and behaviours,Peer to peer infuence,Viral Change | No Comments

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion.

Traditional management was established to work top down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures, in the informal networks of the organization.

Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for mangers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.

But, in the last few years, we have gone a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s of course at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, sharing and establishing new ideas.

Understanding and nurturing informal
relationships has become an
essential part of organizational leadership.

In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three quarters of the game.

There are of course ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system.

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If you feel that you are a bit behind in all this, or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with some simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.

Start of course by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at The Chalfont Project [4] undertake work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people through our Viral Change™ programme [14].

Certainty! Or reduced uncertainty! We all can practise it. Not rocket science, just zero cost behavioural science.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Change,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,Language | No Comments

Managing uncertainty is something our brain loves to do. And it loves even more  to be helped.

At macro-macro-level, Theories-Of-Everything do the trick. Very elegantly, Nobel Prize (Medicine) Jacques Monod (1910 – 1976) [15], whose Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology made a significant impact on me as a young doctor in my 20s, described as ‘mythical ontogenies’ those that explain everything from religious beliefs to Theory of Man.

But, on a small scale, we can see this in every little piece of uncertainty in daily life: the difference a little decrease of that uncertainty can make is not to be ignored. Behavioural Economics, to its credit, understands this very well and creates ‘nudges’ that can, in their own simplicity, travel a million miles between the certainty and uncertainty territory, and, in doing so, decrease our anxiety and tell the brain, it’s ok, relax, it’s not that dark out there.

Here are some examples

Each second part alternative contains that little extra piece of info that tells the brain to stop worrying.

We could construct an entire management system on this basis. The zero cost question is, how can I decrease uncertainty by 10-20-50%? Perhaps 100%, because how much you need that delta reduction and how much I need it, may be very different. In other words, the anti-anxiety effect is not linear, the difference between ‘from flight delayed, to flight delayed by 45 minutes; new update in 10’ may be for me the 100% difference between complete panicking and redirecting my attention to key things with zero anxiety.

In fact, I would go further and say that, delta reduction is far more effective than a full blown ‘I have all the data’. Uncertainty avoidance (a feature described as characteristic of some national cultures) does not require full avoidance, just a dose of decreasing, that magic delta. The pursuit of total uncertainty avoidance is futile. Unless of course you want to use the management equivalent of Monod’s mythical ontogenies (I have an answer for everything, what is the question?): these are all the answers, these are all the Gantt charts, this is what reality will look like on Wednesday 27 in the afternoon. A management practice that comes well below the weather forecast in efficacy. But could also be very effective even if wrong.

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The Chalfont Project Academy [16] – these resources are for you!

 

 

If you work in change, transformation or culture, whether you are a business leader, HR/OD/Communications professional, or with a remit in people engagement, the resources in our Academy, will take you into the mobilizing world with very practical insights that will be enlightening for everybody.

The Chalfont Project Academy [16] is here to enable us to share our many resources developed through the work of Dr Leandro Herrero and The Chalfont Project, enabling you to gain a greater understanding of topics around large scale change, leadership and organizational design – all based upon our unique approach. Read, watch, absorb, then share, enhance, enlighten the world with what you learn, observe and engage with.

You can take our flagship course: Mobilize! Masterclass [17]Enter the world of organization architecture and acquire a complete blueprint for mobilizing people whether you are working on change, transformation or shaping culture.

Or start with a comprehensive collection of learning resource packages which include videos, webinars, papers and book extracts.

You’ll be able to choose from:

  • Viral Change – The Principles
  • Viral Change – The Key Players
  • Behaviours – Part I
  • Behaviours – Part II
  • The Informal Organization – Part I
  • The Informal Organization – Part II
  • Peer to Peer Influence
  • The Art of Storytelling
  • Leadership Principles – Part I
  • Leadership Principles – Part II
  • Social Movement Principles
  • Designing remarkable organizations

 

What people are saying…

“I really like the way that this excellent masterclass successfully challenges our traditional approaches to change leadership. The content is both impactful and thought provoking, and there is no doubt in my mind, that Leandro has changed my way of working.”

Philip Watts
Senior Executive Pharma

Sharing thoughts, being carriers, and why there are no idiots anymore

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Behavioural Economics,Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Communications | No Comments

I have described before the role of managers in many ways, often pointing to the risk of becoming ‘information traffic wardens’. The ones managing the valves of the pipes that carry information across the organization. Sometimes they open the valves and the stuff flows. Sometimes they close them, or a little bit, and the information gets stuck.

Indeed this is a pejorative view, but nonetheless a frequent representation of the reality. Valves open or closed, we are all a sort of ‘information traffic warden’. The question I often ask myself is whether in the effort to ‘share’, the sharing itself, a mechanism of the type I-do-because-I-can, takes over the meaning or even the intention of some sort of impact.

Jessica Helfand, designer, artist, academic and author, struck a cord when reading her beautiful book Design: The invention of desire. In one of her chapter she says:

And just what is it we’re sharing? Regurgitated content produced by others? In many cases, we don’t share; we re-share, positioning ourselves not so much as makers but as carriers, aligning ourselves as the purveyors of so much trivia, supporters of the eminently forgettable, participants in a spontaneous assembly line, a delivery mechanism of any number of random things—for what is more terrifying than being alone, staring at a blank screen or empty page, peering head-on into a creative void? Far easier to redesign and retrofit, to appropriate and go from there.

The figure and the concept of ‘the carrier’ made me think. We are all carriers of ideas (good or bad) or behaviours (good or bad). We all share, certainly, as Jessica says, re-share. The alternative is vegetative status, or, in today’s world ‘non participant’. Perhaps a modern version of the idiot, a word that in Old Greece meant ‘non participant’ (in the public life), as opposed to ‘the citizen’, before it degenerated into something related to intelligence.

Modern professionals, idiots we are not, participants and ‘sharers’, yes sir. But what do we carry? How much re-sharing or sharing do we do?

Are we carried away by that effortless possibility at the cost of original thoughts? Just wondering.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [4], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change™ [14], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project [10] or email: [email protected]. [18]

See here [19] for all workshops and masterclasses developed and delivered by Leandro and his team.  Or to discuss any of The Chalfont Project products and services call: +44 01895 549 144

 

Walking e-bays bearing second hand thoughts

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Communication,Communications,Corporate pathologies,Critical Thinking | No Comments

We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking notes is not enough. You need to say something. And because this is universal, it sometimes feels as if saying is more important than what you say.  Meaning evaporates soon on behalf of content.

You may have been in meetings and conferences where everybody seems compelled to intervene. May worse moment is the ‘do you have any questions moment.’ I wish they didn’t. The short showering of triviality finds you naked with no raincoat.

Many team meetings are composed by walking e-bays selling second-hand thoughts. Nothing is terribly profound or cooked. However, if a figure of status or authority is in the room, the nodding increases and the probability of more second-hand thoughts increases as well. ‘You’ve made a fascinating point Jane.’ Actually, not. BTW, ‘fascinating’ is only reserved for you Jane; otherwise ‘very interesting’ would have done it.

Mind you, this is interesting. When the Brits say ‘this is very interesting’ , chances are it is the least interesting thing. Particularly when the sentence is left hanging as if anticipating a part 2 that never comes. Never take credit for something that a Brit has qualified as ‘very interesting.’

The trouble with group meetings, team meetings and any gathering of humans around mints and biscuits, is that the natives take the campfire very seriously. Uncooked ideas are great if you allocate time for them. Uncooked ideas at the time of serving the meal is only palatable to the few lovers of raw fish.

The best Time Management course is, of course. in Ecclesiastes 31:8:  To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up.  A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

And it carries on.

Even second-hand uncooked thoughts have a time. But it is not all the time.

I am switching off over the weekend, giving my thoughts a chance to avoid becoming e-bay goods.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project [4], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change™ [14], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.

An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project [10] or email: [email protected]. [18]

See here [19] for all workshops and masterclasses developed and delivered by Leandro and his team.  Or to discuss any of The Chalfont Project products and services call: +44 01895 549 144.

Preach your values all the time, when necessary use words

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Agency,Behavioural Economics,Communication,Communications,Models and frames | No Comments

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13th Century Saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary use words’. Translation, do more, talk less. Lately recycled as ‘walk the talk’. Twisted by me as ‘talk the walk’. That is, you walk first, then you explain the walk.

Yes, I think the ‘walk the talk’ order is wrong. As leader, you walk, and walk; then, you bring people along and explain the walk, whilst walking, that is.

In our organizations, we have conceptual tsunamis of values and beliefs. Most of them dwell in the corporate graveyards of annual reports, reception halls and HR systems. These are words, not behaviours. People copy behaviours, not words on walls, not bullet points in PowerPoints.

We need to agree the non-negotiable behaviours of values and beliefs so that we can ‘do them’ and exhibit them, not just explain them. Those behavioural translations are life or death.

The ‘when necessary use words’ should be the motto of so called change management processes.

The pending role model/employee/peer-to-peer revolution, will be driven by deeds, not by words.

But let’s not forget. Words certainly engage and motivate. Words are the wake-up, the alarm bells, the declaration of intentions, the intellectual vehicle and the pre-emotional triggers of action. So we’d better be good at them as well.

However:

Words are pre-social, the revolution is social.

‘The things you don’t have to say make you rich’ – William Stafford’s [20] (1914 – 1993)

Let’s get richer. We act more, then, when necessary we will use words.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road [21], available from all major online bookstores [22].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 [23],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 [24]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

 

 

Thesaurus – based value and behaviours systems are meaningless, exhausted and cheap

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Building Remarkable Organizations,Communication,Communications,Corporate pathologies,General | No Comments

Let’s start somewhere else. What is the logic behind Listmania?

Very often there isn’t one. But starting a note/blog/communication with ‘the 10 things that’, or similar, apparently is very good for the rankings. I have to confess I have followed this many times. Not by force of headline management. I do make lists, and I do publish them. So if you see rubbish, please shout.

But the non-logic logic I am talking about is the one that is simply fabricated around the same concept or idea, and sold as a clever list, which actually only an idiot can buy; a condition that ostensibly is unrelated to headline effectiveness management.

It goes likes this:

The 5 characteristics of successful managers are:

How’s that for a successful full page ‘on management’ on a prestigious blog, of a prestigious business school of some sort? I’ve seen it.

Thesaurus-like list (mania) is a silly version of other things that pretend to be more serious. For example, a value system.

Imagine this:

Value = integrity
Behaviours = honesty, openness and candour

Value = openness
Behaviours = sincerity, integrity and honesty

Etc.

There is absolutely nothing in the above sentences about anything remotely operational, behavioural or otherwise. It is pure Thesaurus-management.

If you want openness, you’d better define what exactly it is that you want to see, and not to see, in real life, concrete, unequivocal, so I can understand what you want. And this is the first step to agree (if we have to) on how to go about creating a culture of openness. I know, harder than right-clicking on ‘synonymous’.

A ‘culture of X’ is not the same as a culture of ‘training on X’. Safety is a good example.

Posted By Dr Leandro Herrero On In Backstage Leadership,Building Remarkable Organizations,Change, Leadership and Society,Communication,Communications,Culture,culture and behaviours | No Comments

Organizations have traditionally used a three-legged approach to creating a ‘culture’: Communications, training and compliance. None of those in isolation have the power to shape a culture. The three together are a good machine gun approach and, as such, result in lots of wasted ammunition.

Communicating about what a culture looks like, or should look like, in terms of values or behaviours, for example, is a noble and necessary task. But communication per se has a diminishing power from the start. Channels get saturated, people become more cynical and eventually, they switch off.

Communicating is necessary, but hardly sufficient. Let’s take safety, for example in an oil and gas enterprise. Communicating that safety is a key goal, perhaps stressing that it is not negotiable is a given. Reassuring that the entire leadership of the company is behind this drive is something very important, expected, and surely welcome. But it‘s hardly an engine to create a culture of safety. Look at any single oil and gas company with a safety disaster (or worse) and show me that the importance of safety had not been communicated. You won’t be able to.

So, then, we have Compliance. Rules and Regulations naturally follow, particularly in territories such as oil and gas, transportation, civil engineering, etc. Compliance systems explain what needs to happen, and what is not acceptable. But a Compliance system, as many Health and Safety systems are, is mainly a threatening one. When you learn to drive, you remember the penalties for speeding and the thresholds in different places more than why those speed limits and regulations are there in the first place. Any compliance system has a bypass mechanism in waiting, and they will be used if people can get away with that. Compliance systems in themselves have very little power to create a culture.

The third leg starts in Compliance but goes further. It’s called Training. Training systems provide you with information, knowledge and skills (plus a clear reference to the penalties of non compliance). Training, (instructional, informational, rational or emotional), does not create a culture. It creates a well-trained workforce. We can say that a culture of safety is not the same as a culture of training on safety. The organization may become very proficient at training but not necessarily at building a safety culture, other than… a culture of training.

The Perfect Culture does not need much communication or compliance, or training. We know, of course, that this is unrealistic. A culture of safety, for example, is then one where safety is a normal day-to-day conversation equivalent to football, or soccer, or whatever conversation is the usual one around a water-cooler. If safety is an add-on, something one has to think about and ‘bring in’ (artificially) to the conversation, then this is not ‘a culture of safety’.

Cultures, in fact, are not created in classrooms. Cultures require behavioural spread and scale. Behaviours don’t like classrooms, they like the playground and the courtyard. Behavioural scale up (a fancy way of saying ‘shaping a culture’) requires a peer-to-peer, bottom up system as an engine. If this exists, then training and communications top up and multiply. But the other way around, banking on communications and training only, is a waste.

A Push system (communication, compliance, training) without a Pull system (behavioural, bottom-up, grassroots), is a very weak system. You need a strong Push-Pull combination.

Entire companies become proficient in training X, without ever getting close to creating a culture of X. They become very proficient at training X. But this is unfortunately what many organizations do, because it is an easy answer to problems. It is the wrong answer.

A ‘culture of safety’ is not the same as a culture of ‘training on safety’. A ‘culture of customer-centrism’ is not the same as a culture of ‘training on customer-centrism’. Etc. Now, substitute the word ‘safety’, or ‘customer-centrism’, for anything else, and it will still hold.

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