The Stanton Marris Blog

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• 

  The people side of mergers

  Most M&As are a mixture of planning and chaos.  Have you noticed, however, that those involved, looking back once the dust has settled, often forget the chaotic bits, and tell the story as if it all went according to plan in the end.

  In reality, integration plans are constantly changed in order to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities or problems.  Synergies which rely on people changing their behavior and ways of working often prove to be much harder than expected to realise in practice.  And the challenge for leaders tackling M&As is that most of the synergies they need to bank in order for the deal to add value for shareholders rely not on financial engineering, or restructuring, or even on a sexy new combined name for the merged entity.  No, they rely on people.

  Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz observe that leaders are often expected to know the answer, and therefore end up behaving as if they do, so as not to disappoint their people.  In M&As this is particularly prevalent because people really want to believe that everything is going according to a grand plan, even when there is no evidence of its existence.  The medium to long term benefits of merging intangible assets (which rely on people usually) come from emergent processes which allow people to push the boundaries, working together in new ways, contributing their ideas and insights, and gradually bringing their discretionary energy to bear at work.

  So what?  Well, if you are thinking about acquiring, merging or even selling, and if your intuition tells you that there might be valuable benefits in corporate brands, reputation, new streams of revenue, new management competencies, business processes, unique skills, customerrelationships, or management resources, then you are in the game of harnessing people’s intellects, emotions and imaginations.  This is not easy to pull off.

  The top tips are:

  • Remember what my grandma always used to say, “there’s none so funny as folk”
  • Allow time for things to iterate, and for new ways of working to emerge, but within a planned overall strategy
  • Be honest about what you know and what you don’t know– accept that leaders don’t know all the answers
  • Get people from all sides involved early on together so that the emergent process can proceed as quickly and fruitfully as possible.

  And lastly, don’t underestimate the long-term benefits of thesesynergies, because they will dwarf anything you get from cost cutting.

  Read the full article "The people side of mergers"

  Published November 23, 2011
  Written by Rupert Symons. This article is filed under: Leading change, Mergers and acquisitions
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• 

  Empowerment: What does it mean?

  Empowerment, like communication, often stands as a proxy for what the organisation is unhappy about. Feedback and staff surveys scoring low on empowerment or communication are a serious matter for the business, because they point to disengagement in the workforce.  And disengagement means people not giving their best efforts to achieve the aims of the business: bad news. But it’s only by digging beneath these findings that the business can discover what they actually mean, what’s really going on that is damaging performance and reducing the capability of the business to achieve results –and by understanding what’s going on, work out where and how to target action to improve matters.

  Ten years ago, the most common organisational complaint was about ineffective internal communication. The knee-jerk response from managers was often to introduce more communication products and more channels, filling people’s inboxes with newsletters and senior manager’s blogs. Unsurprisingly, communication ratings didn’t improve as a result – because, as we found, what people were really asking for was more (and better quality) face to face, two-way communication and dialogue – essentially, more and better engagement. Today, this is better understood, and measures of engagement get closer to true organisational concerns.

  Now, we find ourselves listening more often to clients concerned about organisational reporting of low levels of empowerment. This raises difficult issues of power and control. As one senior manager bluntly put it, ‘If people think we’re going to devolve budgets to teams under the current financial pressures, they’ll have to think again.’ On the other hand, senior managers worry that even exploring issues of empowerment risks unacceptably raising people’s expectations. But employees are generally reasonable, and power over business-critical budgets isn’t what they’re typically after. Addressing legitimate business concerns about low levels of empowerment can be
  a much less fraught business than many managers think.

  Investigating issues of empowerment reveals two broad areas
  for action:

  1)      The right systems and processes that help people to do their jobs effectively
  and don’t get in the way or generate wasted work

  2)      The right behaviour at all levels, a culture in which everyone is treated with
  consideration and respect, and their contribution is visibly valued.

  Most organisations have made more progress on the first than the second. But requiring common courtesy and listening skills in every meeting– especially those where people are on the spot, such as taking a paper to the Board – can make an immediate shift to reported levels of empowerment. Workshops with actors are often a good way to do this – light-touch and fun, but with a powerful and memorable impact.

  Read the full article "Empowerment: What does it mean?"

  Published November 23, 2011
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: Empowerment, organisational performance
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• Why carrots and sticks don’t always work

  I’ve witnessed many board level discussions about performance management systems – they all seem to focus on the technicalities, and to take place against an underlying belief that somehow a perfect cascade of objectives from strategic plan to lowliest employee will make for perfect corporate performance. And the debate then goes into the complex rules that attend theses systems, the rewards that get tacked onto them, and the rafts of performance indicators that are meant to give ever more objective measure of accountability.

  Onora O’Neill’s Reith lectures (2002) on a ‘Question of Trust’ gave a powerful critique of the accountability systems being put in place to govern much of professional life (doctors, police, teachers). Those systems, far from rebuilding trust created an environment of detailed control and prescription and went to undermine trust and proper professional practice. Admittedly Baroness O’Neill was delivering her lectures at the zenith of the Tony Blair’s delivery henchmen’s bid to manage everything from 10 Downing Street, with performance dashboards for targets government had set top down – what was happening to crime in local areas; what the teenage pregnancy rates were in Doncaster; and whether the Government’s targets on drug production in Afghanistan were being met.

  And I’ve long felt that the way the many organisations seek to motivate their people is based on some naive premises, or simply the crude motivational psychology of ‘if… then..’.

  All this has come together for me in a book by Daniel H Pink ‘Drive’. * This is based round the often overlooked theories of intrinsic motivation. In short, we’re motivated to do things because of our desire to them and because of the satisfaction we get from doing them. All the more so in intellectual or creative jobs, where traditional ‘carrot and stick’ approaches just don’t work. Of course, people need to be paid enough to support their life adequately (Maslow), but rarely in creative jobs is reward a major motivator. Key elements of what Pink calls ‘Type I’ system (as opposed to Type X) are autonomy , mastery, and purpose. In Type I systems we are rewarded for what we achieve; we are motivated as much by the satisfaction of doing the job with control over how we do it, with our skill in doing it, and in the knowledge that the job has some overall worthwhile purpose.

  Carrots and sticks do have a place. In routine jobs people will work a bit harder to produce a bit more if they get paid for that extra production. That use to be called piece work. But the world of work is rapidly relegating routine work to automated solutions. And the world’s stronger economies are driving value through creative and intellectual jobs.

  *Daniel H Pink, ‘Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us’ (Canongate, 2010)
  

  Read the full article "Why carrots and sticks don’t always work"

  Published November 23, 2011
  Written by Andrew Jackson. This article is filed under: employee motivation
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• 

  What are the risks of working with leaders?

  A client asked me this very good question in a discussion about leadership capability. You’ve talked about the risk for us as leaders of the organisation, he said, but what are the risks for you as leadership practitioners? What keeps you awake at night?

  This is the answer I came up with:

  • Being spat out. If leaders don’t like what we have to offer, they are in the driving seat and they can simply reject it by disagreeing with it or devaluing it. That’s why we work so hard to tailor leadership work to the real needs of the business, and make sure we work with real business challenges, not just set-piece leadership material.

  • Not having impact. By impact, we mean getting through to leaders, getting under their skin so that they personally choose to make the effort to do something differently. I’ve heard Harvard residential leadership courses described as, “Great networking, but not really relevant to my role here.” That’s not having impact.

  • Cynics, perhaps surprisingly, don’t bother us. They are sometimes just looking for something to engage them, and their energy can quite suddenly turn around to become a positive driving force. One of my best moments running a leadership course was hearing a cynic say, “I’ve never before seen a good reason to change my default style. Now, I see a reason to make that effort.”

  So that’s what keeps us awake at night … and the challenge that makes us want to go to work in the morning.

  Read the full article "What are the risks of working with leaders?"

  Published November 17, 2011
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: leadership development
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• 

  Conversations as a leadership intervention

  We hear a lot about the art of giving feedback, but less about the skills involved in receiving feedback. The way you respond when you perceive a critical message sends a powerful signal about what leaders care about. That makes it one of the most important factors that shape the culture – usually not something best done off the top of your head.

  • You can send a positive signal in response to even the most negative or clumsily-phrased message. I once saw a Chief Executive turn the mood of 500 people around just by the way he listened to and acknowledged the fierce anger of a junior employee when she attacked him in an open meeting about the downsizing he was leading.

  • Don’t take it personally – however personal it is. Remind yourself that learning can be extracted from almost any experience, and you can put this one to good use.

  • Re-frame if necessary. Look for a meaningful or useful message in what’s being said (however buried) and play it back: “What I’m taking from this is…”

  • Say thank you for taking the trouble to talk. It’s not easy to say difficult things (much easier to talk behind your back), so make it easier for them, not harder, and acknowledge the courage and effort it took, even if you didn’t enjoy it.
  Read the full article "Conversations as a leadership intervention"

  Published October 18, 2011
  Written by Beatrice Hollyer. This article is filed under: communication, leadership
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• 

  Keep strategy simple (KSS)

  It’s one of the lesser joys of being an organisational consultant when the client hands you their latest strategy study. It’s invariably long and full of great analysis. All very clever stuff you are tempted to say, but does anyone really understand it? Most good strategy comes down to a few simple ideas which you can often express as simple ‘shifts’. These capture the essence of what is going to be different in the future, for example:

  • ‘Moving from being a regional player to being a global player’
  • ‘Moving from being a set of disconnected businesses to being one firm’
  • ‘Moving from a series of different technologies in different boxes to making the best use of all technologies across the company’

  So next time you’re confronted with a complex strategy document, just ask what are the three or four things that are going to be different in the future from how they are today.

  (And if anyone wants your theoretical source for this, point them to Ockham’s razor from the 14th century philosopher William of Ockham’s dictum that in complex things, keep to the simplest explanation)

  Read the full article "Keep strategy simple (KSS)"

  Published September 14, 2011
  Written by Andrew Jackson. This article is filed under: strategy process
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