Phil's Leadership blog

…to make a difference to morale and the ability to get the job done in these tough economic times?

I was talking to Andy Cosslett recently. He is CEO of IHG, the world’s largest hotels company (Holiday Inn is one of their brands).

He said he spent two days working in a Holiday Inn a while ago and came back with a list of things head office could do to make life easier for people on the front line, delivering the service, running the business, making the money (because that’s what the front line do).

It reminded me of when Allan Leighton spoke to us at Leaders in London. The Chairman of the Post Office had turned up at the crack of dawn at a depot, unannounced. He asked the depot manager what was the one thing he (Leighton) could do to make the manager’s life easier.

The manager said that his posties came into work at 4am or earlier and that the coffee machine had been broken for over two weeks. The requisitioning process to get a coffee machine replaced took so long that his crack of dawn staff had had no access to coffee for all that time.

“They lose confidence in me as a manager, and I lose credibility, and it looks as if I have no interest in their welfare. That’s terrible for morale”, said the depot manager – or something like that: I don’t have my notes in front of me, so I’m paraphrasing.

“What do I need? I need a new coffee machine!”

So, Leighton went back to his office and arranged for every depot manager to have a £200 (or something like that) contingency fund to cover emergencies or situations where the central system just couldn’t deliver what the depot manager needed with enough urgency.

So, what can you do that is low cost but absolutely important in sending the right signals out to people who may be suffering low morale, and/or that removes a frustration or problem for them, and that shows that you are still fighting their corner?

The New York Times calls Umpqua Bank “Starbucks with tellers.”

Jerry Fritz of Madison-Wisconsin University told me he’d discovered a cool new bank several years ago, called South Umpqua Bank, that re-designed itself from the ground up . Now, as Umpqua Bank, it is possibly the coolest bank in the world (vying with Grameenbank, which is cool for completely different and more substantial reasons).

The CEO Ray Davis, who led what he calls a ‘banking revolution’ in re-designing Umpqua’s processes and its external as well as internal brand, has written a book on it, which I recommend, called Leading for Growth.

From the book jacket: “When Ray Davis took over the local 40-person South Umpqua Bank in 1994, many people in the industry poked fun at his insistence that employees answer the phone with a cheery “World’s Greatest Bank.”

Eleven years, $7 billion in assets, and 128 branches (or ” bank stores” in Umpqua lingo) later, the moniker seems quite apt. Other banks scratched their heads when Davis sent his tellers to Ritz-Carlton to learn customer service and were intrigued when he hired a cutting-edge design firm to completely re-think retail layout.

Now, with a top design award under their belt, a name change (there never was a North Umpqua bank), and a completely new definition of the banking business, Umpqua has become the darling of the entrepreneurial press and a growth powerhouse.”

Five steps to re-invent management and leadership

We once home swapped with some people who live in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. The small town goes by the proud title of “Pumpkin-Growing Capital of The World”, which means they must be doing good business in the run up to Hallowe’en right now. So, we ate a lot of pumpkin and wandered around their seven bedroom mansion, while they (the people we homeswapped with) were squashed into our two-bedroom flat in Chiswick, West London. We got the use of their talking Chrysler Le Baron (“Your seatbelt is still undone”). They got the use of our Nissan Micra. I think we won.

So, when Gary Hamel, whom the Wall Street journal rates as “The Number One Most Influential Business Thinker In The World” convened a big think tank in Half Moon Bay a week or two ago, I snapped to attention, as it seemed such a sleepy location for such a powerful think tank. It wasn’t just pumpkin soup on the menu (delicious, I recall) – It was the future of management (and leadership!).

I’d love to have been there, as Hamel brought together CK Prahalad, his former tutor and collaborator, Peter Senge (author of the Fifth Discipline, and pioneer of ‘the learning organization’ and systems thinking), Henry Mintzberg (the strategy guru who spoke to us at a previous Leaders in London), Ed Lawler, Chris Argyris, Jeffrey Pfeffer and other enormous management brains.

The event was called “Inventing The Future of Management”. For those of us who couldn’t be there to eavesdrop on their findings, Gary Hamel himself is coming to Leaders in London 2008 and I’m sure we can prevail on him to share some of the outcomes with us there.

The two days of debate concluded that we need to re-invent management using the following five principles:

1. Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management

2. Orient individual and collective effort around a higher and broader purpose

3. Increase trust, reduce fear (My note: Boy, is that important right now in the turbulence facing all of us)

4. Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past

5. Reinvent the work of executive leadership

Powerful stuff. The gurus reported after the event, according to the FT, that “natural hierarchies require natural leaders, individuals who are able to mobilise their fellow human beings despite having no ‘positional authority’.

“A 21st century management model demands a 21st century leadership model – where leaders are no longer seen as grand visionaries, all-wise decision makers and heroic deal-makers, but are viewed instead as ‘social architects’, ‘constitution writers’ and ‘entrepreneurs of meaning’.”

I love that ‘Entrepreneurs of meaning’. Leaders make meaning. More to come from Gary Hamel when he presents his findings to us at Leaders in London 2008