“Workers watch your feet, not your lips” – changing culture at scale

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Today’s top episode goes to the heart of an issue that a lot of people raise with me.

They say ‘where do you start when changing a culture’.

To some extent it’s what the episode about the hospital trust in Barking was about, going in and changing the culture of a huge organisation.

I saw one of today’s guests Darren Ashby speak at an event – talking through the specifics of how his company Business Four Zero tried to change the culture of Tesco. Business Four Zero are one of a group of organisations who work with leaders to change company culture. I know there’s a few of these firms. I attended a dazzling event by one firm called Scarlett Abbot in this field about a month ago.

Darren is joined by Atif Sheikh as they talk through the specifics of what they did with firms like Electronic Arts, Aviva and Tesco. They’ve turned some of their work into a book which you can buy here.

Some of the things that stood out for me:

• What’s the number one thing you look for in a high performing culture? How internal are they? How much time are they spending on themselves vs the outside world?
• Only 28% of workers say they are connected to purpose
• Culture is what are you committed to as group – emotional commitment of what you want to create
• Values – before you define your values know that there are 6 core values shared amongst everyone (sometimes called the 6 Pillars of Character – Trust, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship). These should not be your differentiator. These are universal basic expectations. You need to define something differentiating
• Leaders’ role is to bring energy: Satya Nadella told Microsoft’s execs: ‘find the rose petals in the field of sh*t’
• So how do you elevate a culture? They introduce 2 or 3 critical behaviours that elevate a culture Might be ‘be kinder’ And they build a process of how you might enact those behaviours

For example Intercontinental Hotel Group

• Had switched from being a hotel owner to a franchise business
• CEO needed to remove silos
• What did they need? Too many people in the business didn’t understand how they made money – it made spending decisions hard. So they focussed on ‘think return’
• Additionally it had become complacent, so they decided to ‘move fast’
• Finally they agreed to ‘talk straight’ with each other

Full transcript (made by computer, so the normal health warnings apply)

Bruce Daisley (00:05.422)

Hello, this is Eat Sleep Work Up Here, I’m Bruce Daisley, it’s a podcast about workplace culture. I hope you’re well. I’ve been very excited. Rafa Nadal is set to play a tennis match today, so that’s a big day for me. Maybe only a few more weeks of Rafa left. If you subscribe to the newsletter, then you’ll know that I released a whole research deck in December, which is still available if you sign up. And I’ve got a nice project that I’ve been working on, which is along those same lines, really. I’ve put something new together.

I guess it’s something that could have been a book. More people listen to the podcast and read my newsletter than read the bestselling book every week in the UK. And maybe these new means of communication are more effective ways to get ideas out there. So I’m releasing something in a couple of weeks that’s involved me interviewing a lot of different people and bringing a lot of different thought together. So if you’re interested in that, please do sign up in the show notes. It’s the top link. Today’s episode goes to the heart.

of an issue that I think a lot of people raise with me. say, where’d you start changing a culture? How do you do it? And to some extent, it’s what that episode about the hospital trust embarking was about, and that’s linked in the show notes, going in and changing the culture of a huge organization. What’s the first step? What are the specific actions? And again, it’s just a constant fascination for me. I saw one of today’s guests, Darren Ashby speaking of an, talking through the specifics of how his company.

Business Four Zero tried to change the culture of Tesco. Wow, that’s a task. I Tesco is the third biggest employer in Europe. Business Four Zero are one of a group of organizations who work with leaders to change company culture by getting down into specific details. I know there’s a few of these firms. I attended a dazzling event by one firm called Scala Abbot in this field about a month ago. I know there’s a lot of companies who really sort of try and bring their expertise to bear.

Darren is joined by Atif Shaikh, his colleague at Business 40, as they talk through the specifics of what they did with firms like Electronic Arts, Aviva, Tesco. They’ve turned some of the work into a book that I’ve linked to in the show notes, but to be honest, the conversation really stands on its own and I’ve linked to them. Some of the things that really stood out for me, there was really nice little diagnostic thing that I think actually is a really important question that you could ask yourself.

Bruce Daisley (02:29.07)

An investor is asked how they judge a high performing cultures. The answer to come back with they say, how internal is the culture? How much time are they spending on themselves versus the outside world? That for me was a moment that really connected. I recognize that. I’m always cautious about purpose and we have a really good discussion about that. 28 % of workers are connected to the purpose. So it’s a really minority thing. And we wanted to explore how you might resolve that. I’ve put some of the details in the show notes, but they talked through.

critical behaviors that they instill inside organizations as a means of changing culture. And I’ve given a couple of notes in the show notes there. I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation. It runs long, I think, because there’s so much value in it. I hope you enjoy this discussion with myself and Darren Ashby, Attif Shaikh from Business 4.0.

Bruce Daisley (03:23.374)

All right, thank you for welcoming me in. I wonder if just to kick off, you could introduce who you both are and what you do.

I’m Darren Ashby. I started the business with Atif. I’m a partner and Chief Impact Officer in our business.

Great, I’m Atif, I’m the CEO, say start the business with Darren as he said.

I’d love to know exactly how you position the business. So the thing that was appealing to me is that I’ve seen that you’ve done cultural change projects for really big companies like Tesco was one that really struck in my mind, but like Electronic Arts and sort of other big companies as far as I understand it. So how do you position? Do you position yourself as a strategy consultancy or as a business consultancy? There must be like a one sentence elevator pitch that a business like yourself operates under.

Yeah, I think it’s one of the problems with the consulting market is over specialisation. So you get strap people who scale stuff off the back of doing some strategy work, we get purpose people who, know,

Darren Ashby (04:20.718)

write nice purpose statements and do loads of comms off the back of that. You get cultured people who are looking at behaviour change and values, but not very many people connected the dots between those things. And so as a result, you don’t get much impact or change really happening and you just get a lot of activity happening in businesses. So that’s why we always wanted to connect the dots between those things. So that made it very hard to say what we were. We were always slightly…

So is it an emergency service where businesses that aren’t doing as well as they want would come and sort of ask for this? Or is every business now of a certain scale asking themselves to refocus and to recalibrate around these questions?

Atif Sheikh

I think there’s two or three ways, try these, because I think it depends, but I think there’s two or three ways we would probably talk about it. One is, we help businesses change fast in the world around them. That’s the challenge, and that is every business, basically, of any scale. And we very deliberately, we were like, that’s a big need. We don’t think it’s being served well by the big consultancies, nor is it being served well by the little boutiques who are really, I when we looked at the market, we went, big, credible consultancies with loads of PowerPoint and loads of results crawling all over your business. Small, agile, creative consultancies that are really human and creative.

are actually quite naive strategically and operationally, right? And in the middle, whacking great big gap. So particularly if you want to change fast the world around you, I think that’s important. So that’s one way we talk about ourselves. think the other way we talk about ourselves is we use our purpose. We go to our purpose is to get every team on a mission to actually do business better. And so that’s another way that I think resonates with people. think we really mean, I think the third way, I remember somebody teaching me about the difference between a sales value proposition and a brand proposition. And it was a revelation to me as like a lifelong marketeer, right?

And so the sales value proposition, you can say, is you’ve normally got a CEO or a CHRO, they actually know where they need to increasingly, 15 years ago they didn’t know, now they know where they need take the company, roughly what the strategy is, roughly what they need the culture to be like. Often what’s going on is they cannot get everybody else to care about that or run through walls making that happen. And I think we do that. And that sometimes does mean we do the definition work upfront. Sometimes half the definition has been done.

Atif  (06:30.424)

that will frankly get everybody else to give a shit.

Bruce

Okay, so because I guess that’s why I was intrigued by that. I think that I had a conversation with Darren and one of your other colleagues actually about specifically about Texco and the leadership team and how you might set about an organization as big as that with as many different touch points as that. Thinking about how you might get everyone aligned and I was just really intrigued. How on earth do you set about doing that? I’ve seen in the stuff that you write that you talk a lot about sort of this idea of purpose, strategy, then culture. Purpose, strategy, culture. It might be worth us going in and looking

The interesting thing about purpose is that, think, Atif, you’ve just mentioned that, but it’s been so heavily appropriated by other people that often it struggles to mean anything. And probably the best way that I can substantiate that is that you say 28 % of workers are connected to purpose. And in fact, you might conceivably say, if you take the Gallup figures and you reference Gallup a lot,

but 10 % of British workers are engaged with their jobs. So more people understand what their company’s purpose is than are engaged with their jobs. And it struck me that, you know, if what we’ve said till now is that there’s a lot of capable companies and going through these processes, there’s probably companies that have had purpose focus that still got workers that aren’t focused on their purpose. So how would you differentiate that? Describe to me the process of

horrifying a purpose for an organization and bringing it to life.

Darren Ashby (08:00.11)

There’s lots of businesses with a purpose statement out there, but very few purpose driven businesses.

And that’s because, I mean, in some ways, your purpose statement isn’t your purpose, right? You might have grant, but it’s a tool that you can use to articulate your purpose and use it to drive your business. And I think most people don’t do a good enough job of articulating it at the right level. In one of the things we say is, you know, for a long time, purposes gets bucketed with values and culture only. And it has a really important part of culture. We’ll probably talk a little bit about that later on. The thing that often gets missed is its strategic relevance. And we often

and talk about purposes 40 years strategy. Well, that that really means isn’t a 40 year goal. It’s a strategy that is relevant for at least the next 30, 40 years. And that’s a deeper insight about where you play the impact that you want to have and what really makes you unique and different. So, you you could take IKEA’s purpose, for example, as an example, and I could say something about making making homes lovely, or, you know, making living just, you know, a little bit better or whatever.

They’re fundamentally the core of their purposes, making the everyday better for the many. And that opens up their market for them. So they’re for the many.

They make the everyday actually better, so that’s a tangible thing they do. They do that by essentially making design more affordable and accessible. And they drive that through every single thing they do. So in their business model and now where they’re opening up into affordable homes, etc. And that strategy, for that strategy to be relevant, it demands you do good as well as do well.

Darren Ashby (09:37.0)

So you need to be profitable and successful as a firm in order to deliver on that purpose. But also, if you don’t take account of the impact that you’re having in the world, how you’re looking after the communities and environment that you’re operating in, you won’t have a market to operate in. So unless purpose can be articulated really too high and it just becomes a generalized statement of good intent, or it can be really too low and just be a description of the business that you’re in today. When you nail it,

It creates stretch, it demands that you change, it demands that you transform. And then it’s up to how you lead for it.

I’m always taken with the idea that the closer you are to the either genesis of purpose or the renewal of it, the more it seems to matter to people. And I saw you talking about one of Tesco’s former CEOs or current CEOs, talking about the importance of the team feeling like they’ve made decisions together. And I wonder if that plays a part in purpose. When a team feels like, albeit that it might be a 40 year thing, that there’s a sense of renewal.

I tell you why I say that. It’s because you quote, not what are your clients, the purpose value of a bank, I shan’t name the bank, all bit that is like, there’s a sub clause just before this. The thing that they say in their purpose is to make a real elastic difference to the economic lives of customers and communities. Now, I think that’s a decent purpose. You both described that as cold and transactional. And so I was just struck whether actually it often comes down to this.

One person’s cold and transactional is another person’s relevant. And actually the most important learning maybe for me from the outside there is actually the more you feel like you own something, so you know some of the things you’ve worked on you feel like that’s different for us. Whereas things that you don’t own. And I wonder, that for me then goes to the heart of purpose is something that is really vivid if you find it and is really cold if you handed it. And I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Atif  (11:31.546)

I so I don’t the core thing I agree with you just said Bruce’s You have to feel ownership for it Question is how do you feel ownership for it right and for sure we to whether sometimes authorship is it pretty It’s like the root one or feeling ownership something isn’t it? I created it. was there in the room. We did it together I wrote bits of it. I you know when I argued it out So that is for sure really important. I think there’s loads of other parts of so much by the way The example uses great example. I don’t think we’re going

it’s cold because it’s just rational language. think there’s a lot of rational purpose statements out there that are really powerful and feel really owned by people. I think the issue with it is, it’s not theirs. I mean, that is any financial services institution in the world. There is nothing tonally in the language in what’s different about them. like Darren said earlier, I think a good purpose statement, as hard as this is, it differentiates you, it captures what’s different about you. If you’ve got a franchise, if you exist in the market, there will be something about you that’s different, whether it’s in your culture or in your products or services

So the problem with that is it doesn’t, it’s a generic. It’s a total category generic, right? And it’s actually, to your point, it’s a much longer statement, so it goes on a bit. So look, so my thing is this, and go back to your root question. I think if you do the job of generating it well, number one, it’ll have truth, it’ll have DNA, it’ll have something that to people even four levels down the organization, they’ll look at it and go,

I’ve given it a generous ed.

Atif  (12:56.886)

That’s us. By the way, sometimes that’s negative. When we did the work at Aviva, and I think they’ve since changed their purpose statement, it’s been a long time. The purpose statement was about freeing people from the fear of uncertainty. Everybody, including half the exec team, had a massive patio with the word fear. You can’t have the word fear in your purpose, it’s negative word, you can’t have fear. They’d all go on this emotional loop where they’d do that, and they’d come out and go, but that is the fucking problem. That is the problem, the fear people feel of uncertainty. That is if you’re a normal person, not an exec, you know,

a six figure salary, driving your car to work without insurance creates fear. Going on holiday when you might be ill creates fear. That is the problem. We love the fact that we’ve put that and it gave them a, even five levels down, it gave them a hook. was like, is ours. We believe we’ve done something brave. We believe something, we own it. So I think that really matters in the way you formulate a statement. And if you don’t hold yourself to the standard, and I think most purpose work does not hold itself to anywhere near high enough standard, is, I’m just going again, it’s really hard.

to create a good purpose statement. Really, really, really hard. And I’m not saying we get it right all the time either, by the way.

But we’d all say, I think, that we’re team Satya Nadella in terms of iconic. But their purpose statement is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And it’s a bit meh, isn’t it?

I agree with you. I agree with you. But here’s the thing, so meaningful for that organization. Why? Because back to strategy, because in that moment, he was going, we’ve got to stop flogging product at people, right? We have to understand what they’re trying to achieve. And then we’ve got to figure out how we build a solution that will help them achieve the thing they’re trying to achieve. We’re fundamentally pivoting from a push product organization to a figure out what they’re trying to achieve and help them achieve it organization. And that was really meaningful given the journey where they’re at. I do think there is one other thing, sorry, Bruce. There’s one other thing that I just say on the subject of ownership.

Atif  (14:43.694)

is meaning something to people further down. I think how you launch a purpose to an organization really matters. We learned this the hard way, right? And there’s this really fine line. You cannot create a purpose with 500 people’s input. It’ll be rubbish. It’ll be really long and blah blah. I you can listen to them and use it, but ultimately a small team has to it. What you can do is when you go back out to them, we always say this, it’s really important when you talk to other purpose, all employees, all employees, that you give them a chance

to go, is there anything you don’t understand about that? Is there anything you don’t like? Is there anything you’re concerned about or doesn’t feel like us or you don’t think we can do? And then what do you love? I.e. the process of being able to debate it really honestly and to even though I don’t like it or I don’t think we can do it, whatever. I always say to clients, what you don’t have to do is react. When they’re having those, don’t react, that’s them processing and making sense of it for themselves. And if you give them the space to do that and to discuss it, let’s also not lose the social effect of teams.

to discuss it with their peers and to go on a of a journey around what does this mean? Is it meaningful for us? Is it going to make a difference to us commercially as well as societally? I think we’ve seen you get those things right and you line them up. It’ll mean, I’ve sometimes seen by the way it mean more to people five levels down the organization than it does the executive that formed it.

Although these are an important distance check, isn’t it? Because if you’re saying something that doesn’t have any bearing on the lived experience of someone on the shop floor. Totally. And PayPal being a sort of good example. think, you know, PayPal were talking about financial independence or finance. And, you know, one of the things that they suffered from is that they had a big organization and they weren’t paying the organization, they’re members of the organization. Very well. Very well. And so it was all very well sort of someone on.

a platform saying this is our new value or purpose statement, but if it didn’t match the realities of people who work there, it was kind of…

Darren Ashby (16:35.618)

I would say yes, it does need to, but not match their current reality. Because if it’s just a truth about the business as it currently exists today, then it’s not really going to achieve very much for you. It needs to be something that stretches every aspect of your business, demands you to be better, in my view. If you want to be purpose-driven, it needs to. And so it’s about the actions that leaders are going to take as soon as that purpose is out there. And I think that’s what PayPal did a good job of.

was actually recognizing the dissonance that existed in their business and then taking action around it so that everyone suddenly saw and felt the purpose in action inside their business. I mean, if you’re going to create financial independence for people in the world, how can you do that if you have no idea what it really feels like, if you don’t really understand what kind of change you have to go through to put that kind of control in place? So wasn’t all about salaries. There was an aspect of that. It was about

good, healthy financial discipline, coaching, behaviors. There’s a lot more to it. And for me, that’s one of the most iconic ways of embedding a purpose that I’ve heard.

What’s Tesco’s purpose?

the original one? So the original one was serving shoppers a little bit better every day. That’s almost exactly right. And we evolved it to serving the planet, communities, and customers a little bit better every day. And it was interesting, whether we went through a process which was kind of looking at it going, does this need to fundamentally shift? How strong is this? How well embedded is the thought we’ve already got anyway? So that’s their purpose, is serving.

Bruce Daisley (18:11.264)

adjacent to every little house it’s the customer marketing that was the case in businesses

It’s really integrated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think when they know, no, by the way, I think should they always be linked? Yes, like because I think I think in a good process, my view would be I used to brand marketeer, right? So what kind of know both these worlds pretty well. My view is you need to determine your organizational purpose. It’s 2030 40, know, decades long in terms of what you’re trying to get done. Then depends, by the way, are you a multi brand business or, you know, one brand business, whatever anyway, but

As you then express the external brand proposition, and I it’s become fashionable to call them brand purposes and we can have that whole debate another time as well, but in the end it’s a brand proposition, whatever you call it. When you express that, part of the brief should be, organizationally we’re trying to do this, right? In the next few years we’ve got to do this with customers, okay, now how do we find the right expression to engage customers in that? So I think there should be a link, but they’re not the same thing. And they’re not always, yeah. that’s probably the closest example.

organizational purpose in its brand communication, but there’s very few of those and I don’t recommend it. I’m a horses for courses guy. Organizational purpose is doing a particular job. Brand proposition does a different job. They can’t not be linked. Otherwise your organizational purpose is bullshit. But they’re different. They’re different jobs. They’re doing different things.

Let’s talk a little bit about culture. How would you both describe, how would you define culture?

Darren Ashby (19:32.942)

God, the teeth just looked at me with a wry smile because I did a Masters in Cultural Theory so that question for me is a really difficult one to sort of again pin down. But what I would say is the way we talk about it is really on three levels. So the first is actually what are you committed to as a group? And I think that’s often missing.

when lot of people talk about culture. And there are lots of different ways of forming the identity of a group. You know, we’re a family or we’re against this in the world, you know. And the problem is, is those can be quite powerful. Leaders use those as tools actually quite often, but they can also be incredibly dysfunctional, right? There are all sorts of implications of those ways of bonding a group. We think purpose and your strategy

and being committed to that is actually your core identity as a group. This is, we are a group because we are trying to do this in the world, right? So join us if this is the impact you want to have, right? It’s a much more forward-facing, it’s a much more adult-to-adult sort of core to who you are as a group. So that’s for me, the first thing is emotional commitment to something that we’re trying to create. The second thing is then values.

Now, we have a view that a lot of, and I’m being quite specific about values as in the kind of things most of us would recognize as values like respect and integrity, citizenship, these kinds of things. There are quite universal values. Now, the application of those can be different, you know, in different countries, et cetera. But there are some pretty core concepts that unify most human beings. I don’t think they’re aspirational.

He said there’s basically six core values that are shared amongst almost everything.

Darren Ashby (21:17.082)

There’s research and I’m sure there’s lots of different research around this, but there are some pretty basic fundamental things. Slapping those up on your wall and saying, we’re aspiring to have respect is a pretty poor thing to do as an organization. If you don’t have respect or we don’t have integrity, you shouldn’t be a part of this organization. That is the flaw of the culture. But getting that flaw really strong is absolutely vital. making sure that your code of conduct and how people behave and how leaders

buy a hire, treat people is in line with all of our core human values is essential, right? And you we shouldn’t be missed in good culture work. The real problem though that we’ve encountered is actually how do you elevate a culture? How do you get it to be the best it can be? And I don’t believe in trying to overly define our culture. think, you know, culture, people often are trying to make sense of culture in it with this and with that color or with this sort of typology.

think that’s pretty much a hiding to nothing. I think what we introduce around culture is two or three critical behaviors that are going to elevate our performance. And we don’t get too analytical about it, right? We get pretty gut-based. We talk to people, like, what are some of those things? And they’re probably about seven or eight things that are at the core of, like, most of our clients’ needs. And they’re often around accountability or being more commercially-minded or, in some cases, like, being kinder with each other.

And when you articulate those behaviors very, very specifically, very actionable and build a process where people are all engaging with those behaviors and trying to stretch the culture, it’s like injecting vitamins into the business, right? We’re not saying these are the only behaviors you need to have in order to execute the business, but these are going to stretch us to be better together, to work better together. So that’s how we think about culture.

I wonder if it’s probably going to really enhance that conversation if we think of some examples. So maybe organizations that have had two or three or four specific behaviors that they’ve wanted to talk about. you do any spring to my

Atif  (23:22.862)

Yeah, could, I mean, Intercontinental Hotel Group, it’s a great example, right? It’s, you had this business, context is important, right? You this business that had delivered fantastic shareholder returns by basically moving from a business that owned hotels to a franchise business, basically was what they’d done under the old CEO. And we started working with the new CEO, Keith Barr, when he came in. And one of the things that was going on was, I look, if he was going to…

grow and perform, he needed to take a load of cost out, he needed to get the business operating therefore more interdependently, right? Less silos and fiefdoms and blah blah blah. And frankly, we’d do a better job for guests as well if we do that. And anyway, so, load of work on strategy and we got to the culture conversation and you know, I love the vitamins and allergies. So what vitamins do they need? Actually, too many people in the business because that commercial strategy becoming a franchise business.

I had done so much for them economically to quite a lot of senior leaders around the place, this is seven years ago, who didn’t fully understand how we made money and therefore I was the default to, let’s just not spend any, or would spend money all over the place, right? Neither rich is helpful or good for any of the stakeholders that you’d want to be dealing with. And so one of the behaviors we defined was think return. That’s what you need to be doing. You don’t need to be thinking cost. You don’t need be thinking, you just need to think return. If you can think return and understand the dynamics of that, we’re doing well.

Another one was, had become, I think, they wouldn’t mind me saying this, it had become a bit complacent as an organization through that old strategy and the massive success it driven with shareholders, et cetera. And, you know, they’re up against two 800 pound gorillas in Hilton and Mario. So move fast. Like, let’s just be really clear. We just need to do everything we do faster, right? We need to move fast. The one that I think was the most powerful for them was the third one. Imagine a hotel business. In a hotel business, you walk in as a guest, Bruce, into a hotel.

and somebody talks directly to you about a problem, you do not like it. I’m the guest, I spent a load of money to stay here. I didn’t stay here so that you could get in my face and tell me stuff right directly. And that culture of being a hotel business permeates their business. mean, nobody talks straight at that point inside the business. We didn’t call out problems, we didn’t talk to each other about performance directly, you know, we were very, very nice and hospitable because we’re hotel business. And they knew to perform and to build a healthier culture frankly as well because at its worst,

Atif  (25:43.384)

Cultures where you don’t talk straight, very nice, really passive aggressive because we don’t actually say the things we really mean to each other, right? But we can feel them because we’re human beings. So the third one was talk straight. And so those, think they were a great example and helped, and I think you could ask any of their senior people, helped power, not on their own, there’s lots of things that go into transforming a business, but they became…

fastest organic growth I’ve ever had, three years running. They recovered from COVID faster than anybody else. They’ve also got better engagement scores, much healthier culture than their competitors. They’ve performed outstandingly. And those three things really powered that shift. I think one other thing I think is worth saying, think, Darren might disagree with me, I think one of the other ways we think about culture is, I really learned from my wife on this. She worked at Barclays.

when John Varley left and Bob Diamond came in, she went, culture of business changed in three months. One person changed. Just happened to be the top person. She’s like, we say a lot of stuff about culture, but in the end, we are primates, we look up, it’s amazing how fast the feet start moving differently up here, how differently everything else starts operating in a business. And I think we do believe, you mentioned Tesco earlier, at Tesco,

The massive change in their culture that’s happened, not all done, it’s not perfect, but the massive shift that’s happened that’s driven their performance in the last two years, which has been quite remarkable, really came from 500 leaders operating differently in a 400,000 person organization. But if enough of the 500 shift the way, I mean their CPO had this phrase, which is, know, when you talk about changing behavior and culture, people watch your feet, not your lips. Right, love it, love that phrase. Stolen it, used it ever since, thanks, Latasha.

People watch your feet, not your lips. If you can change the way 500 people’s feet move, and your organization sees it, and it’s in line with what you’ve said you want your new behaviors to be, cetera, nothing more powerful. And then there is some stuff we believe around some killer processes that will get in the way, that gives a lie to, do you really mean we’re going to be agile and collaborative? Because look at the way governance works. Clearly, you don’t mean that. So, I think at Tesco, we shifted the way 500 leaders led around three or four leadership behaviors, and we changed two or three core processes.

Atif  (27:51.182)

And that was enough to build a belief and a momentum that I think then became self-fulfilling in terms of the way the culture shifted.

There was one of the behaviors, whether it was the same or similar methodology that Microsoft had, that was generate energy. And I guess that was directed at leaders as well. was about, you know, quite often if an organization lacks energy, it’s because a layer of middle management, senior management isn’t injecting energy.

I’d love you to sort of talk about that, role of, if you are trying to change your culture, what role senior or middle managers might have in terms of re-energizing it.

I think you have to click on what really gives people energy.

I think a lot of people in business interpret positivity in this very generic way. And I think it actually switches people off. get, Tifa was mentioning earlier on, can’t put the word fear or kill into behaviors and values or these sorts of words or fight. I’m working with a bank in Hawaii and they’ve just introduced fight as one of the fight for better as a behavior. And it’s just rubbish. People in business are ambitious, they want to achieve more.

Darren Ashby (29:04.366)

They also want to feel like they’re part of a reality, not some sort of bubble that’s being created by their leaders. So for me, creating energy might be having a direct conversation about how I’m actually performing so I know where I am. One of the things that undermines psychological safety is just lack of clarity about where I am. That would create energy. Having open discussions as a full group together, bringing together a community and talking about what’s going on, what’s not worked.

I worked with Electronic Arts and they had this incredibly iconic moment a number of years ago where they launched a game and it got completely panned for microtransactions and there were politicians coming out saying that EA was creating gambling for children. And so inside the business there was a sudden like…

fear that, you know, like, the corporate center is controlling the games makers. And none of it was true. There were things that the corporate center had done wrong and there were things that the games teams had gotten wrong. And they did this very open debrief, a sort of retrospective on the culture. And it flushed out, it like unsilted, you know, all of these conversations, flushed it out through the organization. People were being really real with each other. And that created massive amounts of energy.

And so to me, that’s the point. think that’s such a great quote. So when you become a leader around here, your job isn’t to moan about the coffee or moan about, you know, like didn’t get a bonus last week. It’s to find the rose petals within the pile of shit. And I didn’t take that as that means being overly positive. I thought that was like you just got to, you actually got to find agency as a leader and you’ve got to help other people find their agency.

What can they control? Where are we now? Where do we need to be? What steps can we make? What progress can we make? Leaders who create that. I think in the book we talk about this, know, leaders that create an environment where it feels like no matter what is thrown at us, we together, we pull together and we can move forward. That is real, meaningful energy inside of an organization.

Bruce Daisley (31:07.822)

Do you think there’s been a change in creating a sustaining culture since COVID? How have the realities of it changed? If the way you’re describing culture is it’s about behaviors, it’s about the way we do business, it’s habits. None of those things should have fundamentally broken. But if we look at culture as a sense of cohesion, a sense of human interaction,

energizing each other some of that does appear to have changed I just wondered I’d love your practical experience of what businesses are saying to you since the year 2020

I mean, we could have the best set of arguments and discussions on this topic, we? So I’ll tell you personally, I’ll share my personal view, right, which is, think, I think if you were a well-run business before COVID, you didn’t really care where people worked. Right, but you did care about a few key things. You did care about your point, sense of cohesion, how deep are the relationships? Have we got the web of relationships in our business that means we can perform as a team better than we as individuals?

I think you cared about teams and how they operated. think you care. You know, there was a number of things and I think the dialogue sort of became like, and I understand why before COVID, everybody was in the office all the time and that’s what was expected. And after COVID, we should be able to work wherever we want. Right. And I think the reality is slightly different or should be different. Let’s talk about our business actually, rather than talk about the theories. So in our business, where we got to is we need be together more than we’re not. Just that. There’s no policy. There’s no rule.

just need to get them all in our body. You can be together at Darren’s house as a project team. You could be together in the office when we’ve got moments when we need to be together. But there is a certain amount of being physically together. I remember talking to a leader at Wreck-It, a guy who took over a big division. I thought this was really interesting. Globally dispersed team, right? We know it’s much harder to be together when you’re globally dispersed, and that’s the reality of lot of organizations. His first year, he got his top 20 together every single month.

Atif  (33:10.03)

And then year two, he dropped it to once every two months. And in year three, he dropped it to twice a year. And he was like, I just needed to do that. To build the relationships, right? To not have the transactional nature of what does happen, I think, when you’re on Zoom too much and you’re, it’s a really valuable footprint. He was like, I needed to over-invest. It’s really interesting. I’ve not heard any other leader ever do that, by the way. They tend to just go, well, we should meet every quarter, and they meet every quarter for like 10 years. He went, no, we’ve got to a set of bonds and relationships. We’ve got to have a series of fundamental arguments that are much better had face-to-face than they are over Zoom.

And then we can move to a more flexible fluid model of operating. So, look, I think the things that you were talking about still matter. They still matter just as much as they did before. I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think, well, that’s changed. I don’t think that’s changed. We’ve been like that as human beings for know, X thousand years. I think we’ve got to be much more thoughtful. There’s almost, more permission for what I think should always have been there, which is to be adult with people, right? To just go, look, do your work where you do your work. By the way, your work doesn’t just mean transacting your task.

It means being a part of this team. means having the arguments. It means investing in your relationships. That’s all part of your work. So I think we hopefully what has changed is we’re now all much more closer to adult adult. But I think in there, in a bid to please everybody and not look like a dinosaur, I think there’s a bunch of leaders that have pronated. I know there’s some that have gone back to parent child like you will now be in for all those weeks, but I think there’s also a whole bunch of other leaders that are pronated too far the other way and just gone, you sort of just do whatever you like and I’ll sell all the officers and it’ll be fine. And I don’t think

I think there’s leaders that are going, I feel something, I think they’re bad at articulating it. I feel like we need to be together more than we are. I think it’s fashionable to say that what those leaders are doing has become fashionable to kind of go, well, that’s just old fashioned, they just want to watch people and make sure they’re doing their work. I don’t think it is. My experience of dealing with leaders is, most not all, there are some, the ones who are mandating five days a week in the office, they’re dinosaurs, but I think there’s a whole bunch of leaders who can feel a thing that they can’t articulate very well about what we’re losing culturally by not being together enough.

And they’re failing to articulate it. That’s why I’m out on it. Yeah

Bruce Daisley (35:08.918)

Because I think you talked about the importance of events for sort of catalyzing important moments. But does that suggest that if we bring an event mentality to the way that you run the week, so Wednesdays look different, could that inform a lower amount of face-to-face time? Is there sort of learnable lessons that you could…

Atif  (35:32.501)

I mean, I think this is the thing. I think there are general rules. I think different businesses, different teams within businesses, I think you need something quite simple. For our business, this idea of be together more than we’re not. We believe in the power of being together and that’s why. Beyond that, would they have a decision kind of trade? They go, what’s the right thing for our client? What’s the right thing for our team?

then what’s the right thing for me? And that’s the way to make those decisions about how we work together. And I think what happened over COVID is that it’s for the first time the individual just went, it sort of just suddenly became the top of the tree. And actually God knows that was needed. It wasn’t even on the list before. But I do still think we’ve got to remember we are businesses.

We are trying to do something. We’re not trying to just do jobs transactionally for the short term. We’re trying to businesses that can have commercial success and impact over the long time. And I think the more people start to think of their job as being part of a group and part of something that is on a mission to do something in the world, the more they can start to evaluate that there are other things that are drawing out where I need to be.

It’s a very live issue, it, for a lot of firms right now, to try and build a sense of we-ness, a sense of who are we and what are we part of. Have you seen any organisations who’ve been effective at maybe inspiring their employees to be more collectively minded and to overcome their resistance to being together?

Darren Ashby (37:16.526)

That’s a good question.

I think we’re in one right now. We’re working with a company called M &G, asset manager, FTSE 100. And it’s right to your point, Bruce, in the last two years, there’s not many companies we could do our work with where even if the brief is like purpose, strategy, and culture, there wasn’t this side conversation going on in the exec where they were all getting themselves really exercised about people are in like one day a week. And we know we’re not being effective and we’re not.

How are we going to drive a cultural shift? We’re not being effective anyway in the stuff we’re trying to do. How are we going drive a cultural shift? That sort of debate is happening in lots of businesses. I think when you get, in the end, to Darren’s point, come together to do what? I think that’s the question. think the debate is, I was talking about team effectiveness with execs. I’m like, effective to do what? Teams form to do something. Teams don’t, it’s not a religion. not like teams are just a great, we should all be in teams. No, teams exist to do something.

We’re not clear enough and we don’t care enough what we’re trying to do. Why would we come together? Do you mean physically? And so I think in every case, and it comes back to, our view is purpose, strategy and culture are all culture. They’re all identity. you mean? Every layer of that’s identity. can’t have one. And when they’re misaligned, your identity ends up completely buggered. It ends up fractured. It’s why we’ve gone. You need all three.

And you need to ideally not have 10 other layers because then people can’t remember and they lose the will to live. So simple enough, in 35 words or less, what is identity? What are we trying to get done over the next 40 years? Why do I come into work? Why is my work worth it? Purpose. What’s the plan for the next five? What are we going to be focused on? How are we going to prioritize? How does that filter down to what I’m going to do on a day-to-day basis? How does that add up to that? And then how do we need to operate day in, day out, all of us? How do we need to behave in order to unlock that? I think when you get that right,

Atif  (39:04.334)

and you launch that in the right way, and it’s that simple, right, it’s 35 words or less, and it’s meaningful language, it creates that sense of we, and I think, you if we tie these two conversations together, think you’d see, and we’ve done work at Santander, you’d see, I don’t know why I’m only naming financial services anyway, you see I’ve done quite a lot in that one in the last year, but you see that dynamic starts to shift. That dynamic of not just the we, but also the how much do we need to be together, because now we’ve got something to be together for.

Pulling back, whenever you look at the behaviors that organizations come up with or when you look at the solutions that organizations solve, almost consistent amongst one of their behaviors is a sense of doing things quicker, speed, trying to be more action-oriented. And it just makes me wonder whether the prevailing hegemony across all organizations is bureaucracy and slow movement.

whether that is defined by the tools we use, that you know, now it’s never been easier to put time in other people’s calendars or send a message into someone’s inbox, whether we’ve actually got these sort of big boulders of culture that we don’t even notice because they’re so ubiquitous messages. I can send a message to someone that will take an hour to read. there’s no limitation to that or can put a meeting in that will take an hour. I just wonder your thought about that, about the speed of business and whether that plays fundamental part in addressing cultural change consistently across all the organisations.

Yeah, we, we’ve, mentioned earlier on, right, this, this idea of moving faster than the world around you, right? That’s not unlimited pace, right? That is actually understanding what are the things I need to move faster than first. The second thing is I, I actually see a culture of busyness versus pace in most organizations. And there’s a lot of organizations that are moving fast, but they actually don’t have a clear sense of direction. And this is where I think the strategy industry has really fallen down.

Darren Ashby (41:06.282)

There’s lots of clever strategic decks and materials in the world. But what’s strategy for? If it’s not to actually become something that can live in the hearts and minds of everyone down the business, so they make better decisions about and so that we can move in the same direction. And then the other problem with the way the strategy works and leaves people without that sense of direction is that they then take it too deep and then try and go, look, you know, we’ve sort of done the top line of the strategy. Now let’s figure out every

product idea that we could possibly do, build a concept and a business case around that and then brief everyone to go and execute it. But that’s not the way that things work, right? You need to set strategy just at the right level, give people not just what outcome we’re trying to get back, but something about the how, right? How do we need to execute that? One of the drivers that we, to give an example, one of the drivers at Tesco was Love My Club Cards.

And I look at it because the teeth did this work and But you know what I love about that that that thinking is they could have been a driver around better data Or could have been you know make the club card You know more successful for us or whatever it might be but that fundamentally the shift the change that needed to happen in this world of very transactional we’ve all got these

various cards in our pockets is we need to create an emotional relationship. We need it to become indispensable. People love, they get a reward from just, you know, from the club card that is beyond just a couple of pence off here, there and everywhere. So something that they truly valued and it became something that they were committed to using. And in that very simple articulation of the actual strategy, the strategy was to get people to love it. And so then when you think about all the different program teams and project teams and briefs and agencies and data scientists and everything that’s happening underneath that driver in order to achieve the outcome. They now have something in their heads that they can execute that consistently. It doesn’t tell them how they’re going to do that specifically. It doesn’t tell them like these are all the things you need to now go and do. It gives them a sort of a sense of direction. Now that is pace.

Darren Ashby (43:17.486)

Because we’re moving, we’re not just being agile, we’re not just running all over the place, we’re just iterating and experimenting without any kind of guidance. It means that we know actually where we’re trying to get to. I think that creates pace too. And just to take it back to what you were saying about bureaucracy, I think there is a real lack of agency in organisations where people do not feel that they can actually make a difference. And as a result, there becomes a kind of pervasive attitude of survival. rather than, you know, what can I do to make things better? And I think that’s a real leadership problem inside organizations. And I think that needs to be addressed. And I know I haven’t got a clever answer to how you do that.

to gifting agency to individuals.

Agency is really important and the thing that I think is the solution to it and what we’ve seen work is where when things feel really impossible lower your horizons to the next step, right? What is the next best thing I can do that will create progress and I think businesses are obsessed with celebrating success, celebrating big things, right? And not enough goes into progress step through the hard yards the next inch, right?

and celebrating that together. And as a result, people don’t think their work matters. And then when they don’t think their work matters, they actually, they try, they figure out how to survive by doing the bare minimum. Right? And I’m not criticizing them for that, right? At all. That is not denigrating anyone that’s, that has become like that in a business. I think that is a symptom of the organization. I think it’s leaders jobs, not to then go, we’ve got a frozen middle. They’re the problem. Right? It’s, it’s a leadership failing.

Darren Ashby (44:57.792)

in how people are leading, how they’re getting alongside and being practical and coaching and figuring out what that next best thing they can do and then celebrating and lifting their people up to celebrate the progress that they can make. I think that’s how you cut through it.

The other thing I think I’d add is, just to articulate an unpopular view I have, but I really believe it, around this issue around paces, it’s normally businesses with really high margins that are the most bureaucratic, because they end up with too many people. They can afford to just have loads of people, and by the people want to do a good job, so everybody gets busy doing things. Quite a number of those things, if you’ve got too many people, aren’t about those outcomes, know, aren’t, or they are about,

doing things that do make sense, they have got good intention. And it’s amazing how businesses are strapped for resource and margin, et cetera. How fast they can move, how much faster they can move. I’m always struck by when Dave Lewis took over Unilever in the UK, which is the business I started my career in, which perennially could not grow more than half a percent a year and could not take share and could not, you know, actually wasn’t even being that purposeful back then.

And he did many things really, he created a sense of purpose, know, so I’m not going to try and oversimplify. But one of things he did do was take out, I’ll get it wrong, but something like a fifth of the workforce, right? And what he said happened was that it simplified the matrix dramatically. And I remember him describing once the first initiative they tried to put out into market after that. It’s like he used to put his foot down as a CEO and it’d be like revving a fiesta, do mean? And then he put his foot down and they almost executed too fast.

because it just removed loads of complexity. And I just think, if you think about meaning at work and me being engaged and I worked in big businesses, there was nothing worse than you’re sitting there going, I cannot see through, I actually, even for being off an agency, I can’t see how the hell to make anything happen because there are so many nodes in this system that I have to wade through that I just, I can’t as a human being make sense of it. And I do think there’s a thing which is a combination of, it’s a leader’s job. Big businesses are complicated and what they’re trying to do is complicated.

Atif  (47:03.87)

is fundamentally at the heart of a leader’s job to simplify all of that enough that we can execute. And I think that is about the strategy and the priorities and the phasing of the priorities, but it’s also about have we got the right thought. I think we obsess a lot about organisational structures. I’m like half the time, I don’t know whether the structure matters. I think what really matters is that we got the right number of people to do just enough.

to just enough and being bold with it I mean the number of times we’ve been around we need to strip out some cost right and look you know we we don’t make our money out of running cost-cutting programs nothing to do with us right but the biggest the bit of advice we always go is be bold do it properly do it once deeper than the deeper than you then you then you will

Be honest about why, be honest about what the end benefit is. was just with a client, worked with Bain Capital and I was just talking to the CEO of one of their portfolio companies in the US. They knew they were going to have to take out a lot of cost to help the organization survive and move forward and thrive. Then they were separately talking to us about mobilizing the business around purpose and strategy. One of the things we talked to them about, one of the things they want to talk to us about was what’s the timing of how we do these things. My view was together.

I think a lot of organisations are to take out the cost, take the hard yards, everything will really painful, then we’ll lift them with an inspiring purpose. No, no. Let’s get clear on what we’re trying to do and why we’re trying to do it. Then let’s talk about how to do that. One of things we’re going to have to do is take some pain, right? But let’s be clear why we’re taking it. Let’s be kind about how we execute it. And look, I’ll give you three examples, IHG and Tesco and this firm. In each case, in the same business year,

They took out more cost faster than they thought they were going to and grew faster than they thought they were going to in the same year. That’s not how businesses think. I think our businesses think is do the hard yards cost and then like in year two we’ll start to grow again. Every time we’ve touched and you can imagine in the current world there’s a lot of these. When we’ve touched it we’ve managed to create that integration and frankly that level of honesty about what’s really going on here. In every case they’ve simultaneously taken out.

Atif  (49:03.02)

the cost and growing the business and engagement levels have gone up while they did it. that is not how, and I just think, yeah, anyway, so I think that.

The alternative is, because the process of doing the cutting is really intensive, so things will get worse. you’re like, my God, we’re sucking up more resource in now, looking internally and cutting things out. so what, then through the process of negotiation and a little bit of the dark answer, well, maybe I can get away without losing that head here or hiding a bit of money here. All that happens is they actually achieve nothing. And then guess what? Six months, same position, doing it again. Six months, same position, doing it again.

And there was a private equity partner who’s related to one of our team, and she asked him, what do you look for in a high-performing culture? And he said one thing, how internal are they? And he said, I don’t really have a clever metric for that, right? But I can get a pretty good sense of when I meet the leaders and I talk to people, I look at the agendas of their meetings about how much time they’re spending on themselves versus the world around them.

Right. And when you’re constantly going through cost cut, cost cut, cost cut, all you’re doing is focusing on yourself.

And yeah, and if you can do that with actually, because this purpose, because these are the things we’re trying to achieve in the next three years, then you’re right, on one level it just creates a balancing effect in the narrative, which is we’re doing this because this. Okay, this is the thing. But as I it also creates this just honesty to the dialogue.

Bruce Daisley (50:30.926)

You mentioned Barclays before, what did the boss of Barclays do to initiate such fundamental change in three months? you remember?

I what they went Bob. Yeah, I’ve by the way. I think don’t be honest. I think she was saying culture got worse Okay, not go better When Bob diamond to go from John Varley, I think she said it fun to me. No, it’s the beginning of bar is becoming everything that we’ve known it became for a while I think her point was And maybe it’s not true of all CEOs why suspect it’s true of many maybe all I think her point was just

The way he operated immediately started changing the way the executive operator immediately started changing the way the 200 operators immediately started. She was just like the cascade effect of that was, you know, right.

Chaps, thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

Bruce Daisley (51:19.79)

Thank you to Darren and Atif. I’ve really enjoyed that discussion and like I say, I’ve put some of the takeaway notes in the show notes and if you’re interested, there’ll be some detail in this week’s newsletter too. Thank you so much for listening. If you are interested in receiving that forthcoming research project, do sign up in the show notes because I think you’ll really enjoy that. I’ve been Bruce Daisley. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.