Inclusion during a merger - An ABC for the early days

Having experienced two major mergers I have seen the effect of both including and excluding leadership on engagement, retention and fair treatment. Paying attention to just a few things helps set the tone.

I've captured this as "the ABC".  A = Alignment; B = Behaviour; C= Culture and Conflict

A) People are going to be anxious ... grappling with all kinds of issues and differences. It's critical that leaders take the time to get and keep everyone  in the organization Aligned. They've got to know where to focus and how they can make a real impact. If individuals get lost here – they may never feel included or be competitive.

B) The way leaders Behave sets the tone. It is a responsibility to make the “new world” a place where everyone wants to give everything they've got - whoever they are. Leaders should demand that team members also behave in ways that are welcoming of others, that show respect and foster great teamwork. Allowing excluding cliques and one-up groups to develop kills the opportunity to create something new and better. It also drives out of the organisation great people who are not seen as “one-of-us”.

C) There are always differences in the way people in different organisations get things done – their Cultures. It's natural to want to preserve those cultures - things people are comfortable with.  Not being able to let go of some of that could be detrimental to the business. We need to be able to help people through this issue quickly and constructively. Getting bogged down arguing which approach was best for past situations is a waste. Get people focused on picking the best solutions for their collective future in the business – including ways of working together.

Few people like it - but in a stressful start-up situation – there will be Conflict. In fact there should be some as new teams test their ideas for the future. Leaders need to manage it constructively keeping the focus on resolving issues rather than company heritage, personal styles etc. Conflict needs to be addressed head on. Avoiding it poisons the new organization - just as it's starting up. If and when heritage issues start playing out unhelpfully, everyone needs a quick reminder that the competition is a) outside not inside and b) not waiting for the discussions to be completed!

Inclusion – The Power to Connect

“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality…”. _{Charles Eames, Visionary Designer (1907-1978)}

Connecting effectively with clients and colleagues is central to delivering both the outcomes they want and, as a result, the value which organisations need to create. Leaders have a responsibility to their organisations - to deliver the best possible outcomes from each connection relevant to their role. Ideally, differences (diversity) would not prevent us from achieving that. For teachers with diverse students, hotel staff with diverse guests, doctors with diverse patients or leaders with diverse team members – the outcomes (learning, repeat visits, recovery or engagement) should be consistently good. In reality we know that assumptions, attitudes and behaviours triggered by differences get in the way. There is nearly always a connection challenge for individuals and organisations and sometimes a price to pay in terms of customer satisfaction.

When was the last time, even in your mind’s eye, that you walked alongside a customer from their first touch with your organisation to their last? Are you confident that the impression they form of your business will be equally positive, regardless of who they are? Taking the walk right through to the last touch is important. In a workshop with a utility company someone shared a story of a very successful marketing campaign where a multi-lingual door-to-door sales team was very successful in signing potential new customers. Those customers then had to connect with call centre staff to verify the contract. Because the call centre was not equipped with the same language skills some potential customers “pulled the plug” and potential revenues were lost.

In some ways clients, guests or patients are like travellers who want to plug into your power supply – in what may be new territory. How much of a challenge do they face? Do you have one way of marketing products and offering services? Are you effectively offering a single type of socket where some customers are able to plug in but other potentially valuable clients are left disconnected? One practical example is the move to provide more and more services online. We know that this can work and is welcomed by many people. We also know that this kind of connection is not attractive to some potentially important groups of customers. This has been seen, for instance, in reponses to provision of online financial services in India.

For me, inclusive leaders and organisations are like universal adapters. Driven by the outcome they need to achieve for all kinds of people they find a way to create a high quality connection with as many of them as possible.

In this context Inclusion with a Purpose requires us to start thinking about the connections we and our organisations need:

Q.   Have we walked (recently) through the journey a customer, client or new recruit makes with us? Have we identified the places where diversity might impact the quality of the connection we make with them?  Did we ask for insights from a diverse group of people?

Q.  Have we analysed data such as brand awareness / customer satisfaction/ staff engagement scores by demographic group – at the level of detail to create knowledge we can really act on?

Q.  Is everyone who is connecting with our clients aware of how their own biases and limiting assumptions may affect the way they provide our service? Have we created in them the ability to prevent bias turning into inconsistent levels of service and satisfaction?

Can You Be Inclusive and Quick?

The idea of inclusion triggers a wide range of responses from different leaders. In one organisation I am familiar with inclusion was shunned because it would "slow things down" and "involve everyone in everything". It was seen as a potential barrier to speed of decision-making and rapid execution of business plans. The company had a strong hierarchy and my impression was of leaders who saw an inclusive culture as being like an army with no commanding officers. Nothing would get done, no battles would be won.

Many organisations have Speed among their core values or business principles.  Here are just a few examples:

Speed and Agility - HP

Speed, Simplicity, Trust - Vodafone

Speed and Agility - Tata Metaliks

Speed and Flexibility - JD Power and Associates

From recent experience, it's not uncommon for leaders to challenge whether inclusion is really compatible with speed. Can you really be inclusive as well as quick? These are important concerns that we should try to address. Thanks to a helpful conversation with my colleague Rachael Ross I’ve begun to put some thoughts together in three areas relating to the issue. I recognise they are of a very systemising nature!

1. Situation - knowing when it adds value to gather diverse perspectives and ideas.
2. System - taking a broad perspective and paying enough attention to the potential consequences when decisions are made in isolation
3. Practices - learning how tools and resources can help us be efficiently inclusive

Situation

We can look at a decision making process through the lens of diversity and inclusion – see the 2 x 2 matrix below. For me there are clearly phases, like idea generation phase, when relatively high diversity adds value. We are “filling the hopper” with ideas or perspectives.  Things change at decision time – leaders still retain their accountability for making decisions. It is appropriate to have lower diversity and inclusion. Once the decision is made we go back to higher inclusion - thinking about how to communicate key messages to a range of audiences. Where will different aspects of implementation come on the matrix?

   Where do your own work and personal experiences fit on the matrix?

System

In cultures where speed is demanded – individuals inevitably feel pressured to make the decisions they own as quickly as possible. It would be natural to exclude other people from the process, saving the time involved in engaging them. The problem can come when we zoom out and take a broader perspective (see below). What the individual decides, in isolation, may then be seen as a poor choice for the organisation as a whole.  Where this requires rework or causes disruption – the quicker decision at the individual level can have a high overall cost.

Practices

Understandably, one concern pace-setters have is that “it will take forever to get everyone involved”.  So - how can we be “efficiently inclusive”? How do we make it possible for many brains to become one brain, accessing all the diverse and unique knowledge to solve problems at pace?  

Who are the best practice organisations in this area?  Please do share your knowledge with me freddie.a@schneider-ross.com

Developing Inclusive Leaders - Exploring Invisible Diversity

In workshops designed to help leaders develop skills around inclusion I have been using information about the invisible diversity inside the room. 

Especially for groups of leaders from the same organisation / function / department it can be a real eye-opener to see just how much diversity there is among their peers. 

A pre-workshop survey, interactive voting or physical movement in response to questions can all work well in capturing and presenting real data back to the group. 

The debates triggered around issues like attitudes to work/life or conflict management are very powerful.

I've shared some of the materials used on Slideshare.

Diversity Goals / Quotas / Targets / Aspirations – The Impact of Language

I was recently leading a workshop for a group of HR professionals from several different countries. At one point we were discussing their organisation's ambition to increase diversity at leadership levels and what could be done to help achieve that.

We talked about some of the messages being communicated from the corporate centre. More importantly, we discussed how these messages had been interpreted differently by different people in the room. It illustrated in a very practical way the challenges faced when implementing a diversity strategy globally. 

Key messages were being written in English by people with English as their first language. There were good intentions – the messages would help everyone understand the direction being taken and guide their actions. On the ground, the impact was rather different - reflecting in part the impact of differing knowledge of English vocabulary and national cultural norms.

Take the word Goal. In the absence of a common definition, the spectrum of interpretations in the group ranged from a mandatory quota to an optional aspiration. The attitudes and potential actions being driven by these alternatives are dramatically different. At one end – an individual leader could pursue a policy of positive discrimination - potentially illegal as well as risking a destructive level of backlash. At the other – a leader might opt to do nothing risking the loss of diverse staff, personal credibility and corporate reputation.

My experience tells me that different organisations also tend to have rather different interpretations of words like Goal or Talent. For anyone leading an agenda across boundaries of language or culture (national or organisational), inclusion requires dialogue and the creation of common language. For me, that is inclusion in action.

Are you certain that everyone knows what you mean and want to achieve? Do you “take the time to define”?

The Value Proposition for Inclusive Leadership - Slideshare

I have created a presentation summarising some thinking on:

• the value proposition for inclusive leadership and
• what a leader can do to manage diversity for higher team performance

The presentation can be found here

Please contact me if you would like to discuss these ideas further.  

Consistent Care? Unconscious Bias, Doctors and Patients

When we need the help of a doctor, solicitor, care worker or sales assistant we hope or expect that we will get the best advice or service possible from them - whoever we are. But are our hopes realised? Or is it the case that (often unconscious) biases and assumptions about people different from ourselves create some big barriers to that hope? If, for example, we unconsciously associate a certain accent with poor education - are we less likely to take the time to provide needed information to someone with that accent?

One doctor from Harvard, Augustus White, has captured his thoughts about demographic differences between doctors and patients and variations in the care and treatment patients experience. He was subsequently interviewed by the Boston Globe and their headline take on his work can be viewed here. You may need to log on to the Boston Globe site for access. Dr. White's book is called Seeing Patients; Unconscious Bias in Health Care.

For me - here is where inclusion comes in. An inclusive approach to providing a service sees an organisation paying close attention to whether diversity is impacting customer experience - taking action where needed. For example, a bank might analyse whether all their customers feel able to access their account information in a way that works well for them. Do some customers with visual impairments report a much lower level of satisfaction? If so, what can be done about that? 

Reducing the variability in satisfaction ratings among customers in different demographic groups would be a key indicator of success for an organisation setting out to be inclusive. This focus on outcomes will drive the right investment decisions in terms of understanding and responding to customer diversity.