In the past it was called mentoring or coaching, now it is called “Leaders as Teachers”.  The term is rather self explanatory: C-Suite leaders help the up-comers to become leaders.

Easy to understand, not so easy to implement. It takes up senior leaders time – a valuable corporate asset – and there is setup time if it is done right. These are the key impediments to get the C-Suite to help the up-comers.

However, there are company models that are working and the benefits are noteworthy.

Bersin & Associates, a leading corporate learning consultancy, highlights the benefits —

Our research clearly shows that “leaders teaching leaders” offers many benefits:

• It enables a company to build a culture;
• It demonstrates to employees that learning is valued; and,
• It provides leaders with a forum to consistently demonstrate company values, share business strategy, and set expectations of what it means to manage and lead effectively in the company.

One of the early adopters was Becton Dickinson (BD). They put in place their program early this century. The results are impressive– nearly all of the internal programs are taught by employees including all members of the C-Suite.

View a short video on BD’s program —Leaders As Teachers at BD

Read more about BD’s program. (PDF)

Another company that uses “Leaders as Teachers” is Capital One. The company started its University in 2004.

Noteworthy is that they embrace the corporate training strategy I mentioned in my post “The Revolution in Corporate Training”.

Capital One’s learning strategy is to encourage lifelong learning that is owned by our associates. Because the corporate university is all managed online, employees take control of their own learning

Source: Capital One University puts employees in the driving seat. (PDF)

A key offering of the University is the “Leaders as Teachers” program that ensures the transfer of knowledge from senior leaders to develop leadership skills in other employees.

The leaders as teachers program involves:

• the executive-speaker series;
• business-leader workshops;
• short sessions with a senior leader speaking on an area of particular expertise;
• leaders delivering entire training programs on particular subject areas, such as change management;
• leaders involved in particular sessions on training programs – for example, presenting the company’s strategic imperatives during its induction program, OnBoarding.

Other companies using “leaders as Teachers” include Caterpillar and  Infosys. Ed Betof who developed BD’s “Leaders as Teachers” program offers the following advice to other companies —

1. It’s important that the chairman and CEO and leadership team be involved and supportive.

2. Emphasize the value of teaching learning as part of the criteria related to leadership potential.

3. Use a change-leadership process (Kotter’s eight steps) for long-term sustainability.

4. Develop “Big Mo” (momentum). Worry little about resistance, and focus on those who want to be involved. Enough momentum always trumps resistance. People like to be part of successes and to be where positive things happen. Momentum and involvement beget more momentum and involvement. At some point, they become the norm and part of the culture.

5. Make teaching valuable, engaging, rewarding, fun, and hassle-free.

6. Maintain strategic and business goal alignment. Our programs all have a common purpose: to grow the business and our people.

7. Maintain a strong link between classroom and real-work application. All of our teaching is in the form of active learning with application to participant responsibilities

8. Make leaders as teachers cost-effective. Leaders often learn as much as, and sometimes more than, the participants.

Article On BD website (PDF)

Now consider getting your C-Suites to turn those Millennials and Xers into Leaders.

Image: Graziadio Business Report

 Leaders As Teachers

Would your employees nominate your company for a best place to work award?

Each year, various organizations hold “best companies to work for” awards programs.  Advertising Age published a call for nominees for its own Best Places to Work award earlier this month.  Do your employees believe in your company and your brand promise enough to nominate your company for such an award?  If your answer to that question is no, then you need to invest more time into building internal brand advocates.

If your employees don’t feel good about your company and believe your brand promise, then why should customers?  The answer is simple.  Customers won’t believe.

Your employees should be your first source for positive word-of-mouth marketing.  They can be your strongest brand advocates and most vocal brand guardians.

Not sure what internal brand advocates look like?  Spend some time on the Zappos corporate site.  Watch the videos, read about the Zappos culture and core values.  You’ll learn very quickly what people who believe in their company and brand promise look like, sound like, and are capable of in terms of brand advocacy.

The next question is whether or not you can do it in your organization, too.  Remember, internal brand advocacy comes from the top.  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh walks the walk and talks the talk when it comes to the Zappos brand promise, and Zappos employees believe.  If your leaders don’t buy it, then your employees won’t buy it.  And that means customers won’t buy it either.

Image: stock.xchng

 Would Your Employees Nominate Your Company for a Best Place to Work Award?

One of my great interests is how western capitalism (as focused through broad based consumerism) impacts those cultures and economies which don’t necessarily share such values.

This inevitably ends up as being a discussion about human and indigenous rights.  How the Bushmen are pushed off their mineral rich land, for instance, or how Apple’s i- revolution appears to have been underpinned by regular suicides.

I firmly believe that if western consumers knew of such tragedies they would think again about buying the goods they take for granted.  Who wants to know that their mobile phone has perpetuated civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or that the cheap fashion they just bought may have just condemned another child to starvation?

There are many NGOs out there who seek to remedy this deplorable situation, and one of those who have my profound respect is Impactt.

Impactt are currently celebrating 15 years since their foundation.  As part of this they’ve released a report, entitled “Finding the Sweet Spot: Smarter Ethical Trade That Delivers More For All”, and will be hosting their first ever conference on the same subject in May.

Putting words into action

However I’m left feeling rather hollow after reading Impactt’s anniversary report. Not because it’s a bad report … it’s an *excellent* report and I recommend it to anyone capable of clicking on a hyperlink.

My feeling of hollowness comes from realising that Impactt’s golden rules, while aimed at developing world supply chains, can be equally and just as relevantly applied to any UK or western business.

Gareth Kane, Director of business sustainability consultancy Terra Infirma, recently blogged Seven pathetic excuses for doing nothing on corporate responsibility.  He’s right, down to a T, on every single one; not just on the environmental side but on the social and supply chain side as well.

No business is too small to be sustainable, and no business (even a sole trader!) is too small to consider its supply chain.  These rules should be adopted and promoted as best practice by all businesses across their supply chain.

Three golden rules of employee engagement

So these are Impactt’s rules, developed for international supply chains but just as relevant when every businessman inks a new contract.  When Impactt refer to “workers” they mean employees, subcontractors and freelancers.

1) Speak to workers as equals. Ultimately this is a matter of respect.

Much as yesterday’s Wild West coach driver was in charge of a team of horses, so today’s business manager relies upon harnessing the skills of others which he or she can never fully understand or appreciate.  Seniority in a company is all about what an investment driven business values, not about the empirical skills a person possesses or, even, the wage a person earns.

Business isn’t about power: get over the desire to dominate and instead learn to collaborate.  Good businessmen should always value their workers as equals, from the tea-boy up, and not treat them as animals to be whipped whenever results aren’t as expected.

2) Be curious: what workers have to say can be very important.

There are some wonderful cost savings stories out there. One of the best known is how the removal of a single olive from American Airline’s salads in the 1980s led to a saving of $40,000 per year.  Another is the Swan Vestas tale of how a factory worker’s idea of removing the striking strip from one side of the matchbox saved the company millions in the 1970s.

So workers can also have great business ideas around exploiting niches and bringing better products forward to the customer.  Only the tip of the iceberg is usually seen: those who have the confidence to set themselves up as entrepreneurs.

Countless other opportunities are lost to businesses because they’re not curious about what their workers think.  None of these opportunities can ever be fully leveraged unless a business treats those workers with respect, putting intellectual and technical insight on a par with financial and investment concerns.

It is this “employee liberalism” upon which the dominance of the likes of Microsoft and Google has been based.  It’s no accident that as the liberalism is stifled into still management structures, so the innovation of the company also starts to fail.

3) Keep your questions open.  Don’t influence your employees.

It’s a really fundamental part of engaging anyone in a formal environment but you’d be surprised how many managers don’t do it.  This is because business management is a form of politics through which you seek other people’s opinions and take on board those you agree with and dismiss those you don’t.  Promotions and sackings often hinge on such things.

But if you really want to engage, treat your workers as equals and be genuinely curious about their opinions, what then?

It’s easy.  Don’t try and get workers to reflect your priorities.  Instead, get to know their priorities and reflect them in management discussions.  Be open to change and get your board to understand that many of the best ideas grow from the grassroots up.

I’m not anti capitalist, but…..

In all honesty, there’s very little in these three golden rules which isn’t already part of accepted business practice.  But only if you put the word “pretend” and the front of each statement.  “Pretend to speak to workers as equals”; “pretend to be curious about what workers think”; “pretend to be open in your acceptance of workers’ opinions”.

How many businesses really speak to their employees or suppliers as equals?  How many employees or suppliers feel empowered to be able to talk to their employer or client in honest and straightforward terms?

This at the heart of what CSR is attempting to tackle.  CSR is not about enforcing blanket wide philanthropy upon businesses: it’s about a promoting a wholesale change in the imperative behind commercial activity away from maximised profit for shareholders towards equitable benefit for all stakeholders.

In other words capitalism is great, but it must realise that pursuing return on investment can have a detrimental cost on individuals’ freedom of expression, including their engagement with their client or employer.  The moment this is embraced by businesses and investors, the better it will be for business.

 Three golden rules of employee engagement

I find the results of a recent survey of FTSE 100 companies carried out by MoneyPenny really quite astonishing (via Brand Strategy Guru).

Researchers went mystery shopping across the biggest companies in the country, calling the main UK switchboards of the FTSE 100 to ask each company 10 questions over 4 weeks. They evaluated time to answer, friendliness of answer, clarity of information, welcome received, whether it was a human or automated response, how knowledgeable the respondent was, and overall satisfaction with the call.

Now some of these criteria are quite subjective, but over the course of many calls, you’d soon be able to compare companies. And for the most part, the responses were fine; most companies came out as pretty average (the full results are available and an opportunity to compare your own business performance with the FTSE100). But some of the detail is very curious; the poor performance of the retail sector overall, for example – though a few individual companies put in an excellent performance.

I think it is particularly interesting that more people could provide the web address of the corporate site (87%) than could name the CEO (56%) or provide the postal address (86%).

It was peak holiday season, but surely it can’t be that the switchboards were all staffed by temps (and even if they were, the temps could have been given a crib sheet), or that there had been a mass upheaval in the personnel at the top of the organisation? Chief Executives don’t come and go that fast…

We’ve discussed employees as spokespeople before; these front-line staff really are brand ambassadors, and deserve to be given training and resources to provide the answers to some of the most likely questions that they’ll have to field.

We’ve also pointed out that the most common reason to visit the corporate website is to check contact details. Having a visitor-friendly, welcoming website with easy-to-find phone numbers is great, but if the welcome received when the visitor does make contact doesn’t match, then the difference will be starkly apparent.

And it is exactly this kind of mismatch that makes people see the corporate website as spin and marketing.

 Employees know URLs better than their CEOs name?

Who speaks for your business? Who represents you in public?

Is it top level management? The public relations team? Nominated business spokespeople? Or everyone?

Who should it be?

It is standard practice for a corporate website to provide an archive of interviews, speeches and other presentations made by senior staff – some as documents available for download, some as webcasts.

Some of the better corporate websites link to these speeches from the board biographies, so that it is easy to find out, for example, what the Strategy Director thinks about future trends in their business (see Microsoft).

Often, the main contact for journalists on the corporate website will be the public relations team, who have phone numbers, email addresses clearly and easily available (see British Energy for a good example). Sometimes, there will also be contact details for nominated business spokespeople, with some explanation of their area of expertise (see Scottish Widows for an example). This is good – we like to see experts within the company available to speak.

On the other hand, the business conduct guidelines for most major companies play heavily on the idea that all employees are representing the company, and require individual employees to behave in an appropriate fashion. And this is quite right: employees, particularly those dealing day to day with customers, do represent the company, and their actions significantly affect the brand and image of the company.

Yet often, these employees have been taught to refer all requests for comment upwards, or across to the PR department. So are they only representatives in the way they look and behave?

For some companies the nature of the spokesperson for the company has been changing, and has become more devolved. As people within the company embrace social media, and blog, tweet or otherwise engage with people outside the company, these people are increasingly representing the company by what they say (or write), not just by their behaviour or dress. They are becoming ‘accidental spokespeople‘, and as a result, there is potentially a loss of control by the company.

So, how should you deal with that?

One option, of course, would be to ban employees from social networking at work … either completely or partially, leaving the official social media team to do all such activity. Cutter Consortium point to some interesting tactics of permissible hours for such activity. This keeps you safely within the old pattern of ‘refer upwards or call PR’, but may mean that you miss out on some of the benefits of social media.

Another option is the Zappos approach, which seems to work well for them:

For our culture, we just want to make sure that our employees are always exhibiting our core values. As long as that’s happening, we don’t really see the need to “police” what employees are saying, which is why we encourage our employees to Twitter and publicly post what employees are twittering at: http://twitter.zappos.com

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, quoted at Pierce Mattie

And there’s the approach taken by IBM and Intel, of providing clear guidelines on the corporate website, and tying these in with the code of conduct. (I notice that IBM has separate guidelines for behaviour in virtual worlds).

… we believe social computing can help you to build stronger, more successful business relationships. And it’s a way for you to take part in global conversations related to the work we are doing at Intel and the things we care about.

The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you do, please follow these guiding principles:

• Provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on at Intel and in the world.
• Post meaningful, respectful comments – in other words, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
• Reply to comments quickly, when a response is appropriate.
• Respect proprietary information and confidentiality.
• When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it cool.
• Know and follow the Intel Code of Conduct and the Intel Privacy Policy.

(from Intel – IBM’s available here)

Both these are good summaries of how to behave, and it is commendable that they are published on the corporate website.

Notice how Zappos, IBM and Intel all bring this back to the corporate values, ethics and codes of conduct. This demonstrates the importance of the corporate culture – if the culture of the company is such that you can trust your employees, then you can trust them to represent you in public in all aspects: in what they say or write as well as in how they look and behave.

And if you don’t trust your employees to interact appropriately with people outside the company, then I suspect you may be facing bigger issues.

 Who are your business spokespeople?