How to use buy-in to build strong and productive teams

Welcome to the age of buy-in. Any company serious about keeping pace with a market that’s evolving faster than ever must create an environment where ideas can truly thrive. They must let go of slow and cumbersome models of leadership born in the industrial age. Managers must loosen the reins and ask people to think for themselves, generate ideas and find ways of bringing them to life, without waiting for someone higher up to tell them what to do.

This means exiting the world of leading by decree (top-down managing) and entering the world of ‘win me’ (using a collaborative approach), where people collaborate across teams and influence without authority.

Aside from its strategic importance, the emphasis on generating buy-in is something employees expect. Companies are asking more than ever of their people: more of their creative genius, more hours, more ownership, more initiative, more flexibility, more tolerance of ambiguity, change and chaos. In return, employees in this creative economy need and expect more – and that doesn’t just mean money. It means more autonomy and more freedom.

People who give more expect to have a voice. They expect to be heard and to be able to shape decisions about their work. They expect leaders to earn their support, not take it as a given. We want to work in organisations that match our own values; we want to be part of, and to initiate, company projects and initiatives.

We’re seeing a generation of people who are making decisions about where to work based on how their personal values map to company values.

David Noël, who heads internal communications at audio sharing service SoundCloud, sums it up perfectly: “We’re seeing a generation of people who are making decisions about where to work based on how their personal values map to company values. Today, more than twice as many employees are motivated by work passion than career ambition.”

It’s one thing to talk about the importance of getting people’s buy-in; it’s another to achieve it. In my own work, I regularly come across managers who are struggling to let go and give their team members the space to experiment, create and even (gasp!) fail. Often, these practices are at odds with the diet of management on which they themselves have been raised. It makes them feel uncomfortable. It seems chaotic and risky. At the same time, managers still need to manage, so how do they do that without managing by decree?

Some teams also struggle to embrace the degree of autonomy and entrepreneurship that is offered to them. Suddenly faced with a multitude of people they need to work with, and without a clear instruction manual from management, their mindset and skills are put to the test.

This is where teams and organisations can easily fall over: by failing to create a culture where people are able to influence and lead others, even when they’re not in a position of authority, and by failing to equip them with the skills to do so.

Well, there’s a new kind of power in town. It’s the power that comes to those who are able to cut through all of these challenges by engaging others and building buy-in. This is a skill that comes more naturally to some than others, but the good news is: it can be learned.

The gentle art of buy-in

To master the gentle art of buy-in you need a blend of the right skills, attributes and mindset. I use the term ‘gentle art’ because it requires patience, empathy and careful thinking. You need to know when to yield control in order to maintain it. You need a healthy dose of emotional intelligence. You need to be willing to go slow in order to go fast.

But even the best ideas in the world can languish in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to engage and influence others – or worse, someone who simply puts people off.

Equally, buy-in shouldn’t equate to paralysis. Many of us have worked in a team or a company where there was so much consultation and committee-style decision-making that nothing ever happened. If that’s the case, your relationship with the idea of building buy-in might be a tad strained.

You need to know when buy-in is a function of gentle persuasion and dialogue, and when it’s a function of getting your train moving and asking others to jump on board.

The culture you’ve grown up in has a big part to play in whether you relate more to the ‘decree’ or ‘win me’ approach. For example, certain countries operate to a very formal, hierarchical norm, while others have a far more informal, egalitarian norm. Cultural norms can also come from your family upbringing, or your previous workplaces. All will shape your assumptions about the roles of authority and autonomy in the workplace.

Jim Collins: What the best leaders have in common

Jim Collins, leadership expert and author of the bestselling book Good to Great, is surprised by the findings of his latest research into what makes great companies successful, a topic he has studied for 25 years.

“To me it’s the most delightful bit of new research that we’ve done,” he says, joie de vivre crackling down the line from Boulder Colorado. That Collins and his long-time collaborator Morten Hansen found that luck does not distinguish the winners from the “others” was a huge surprise for him. “Our most successful leaders credit luck as helping them along the way. But luck itself doesn’t distinguish, it’s what you do with it. The big swing variable is return on luck. When luck hits you, whether it’s good or bad, it’s how the best leaders recognise it and are able to pivot on it in such a way that they get more out of that luck than anyone else would.”

CLIMBING MOUNTAINS

Collins is now “puzzling on this delicious idea” and wants to know the “alchemy of the ability to get a higher return on luck”. He’s also getting ready to head to this country for a series of presentations in Sydney and Melbourne and the long-time climber also wants “to test his hands on some Australian rock”. He sees close parallels with the approach he brings to his research and the vertiginous world of rock climbing – where he has scaled frankly scary edifices such as the 914-metre south face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. The trick is to approach each challenge as if for the very first time. He declares: “I love to be a beginner and be pushed to expand my capabilities. The research journey has never been about finding what we expected to find. It was being open-minded and childlike about what the data would show.

The research journey has never been about finding what we expected to find

“In rock climbing I like picking the kind of climbs I’m not good at. I’ve been climbing for over 40 years, but every year or two I identify my two or three deficiencies as a climber. If I just did the sorts of climbing that suits me well, well that’s relatively dull.” Recently he’s been practising “off-widths”, a type of hold that’s apparently horrifying for a climber. “It’s a crack that is a really bad size – not big enough to get inside of, but it’s not small enough to wedge your hand in – it’s an in-between space. You feel like a victim of drowning when you try to climb up one of these spaces,” he adds quite gleefully.

To be able to lay down the foundations of mastering this hold Collins will have to go back to climbing basics. “There’s so much pressure, especially in the world that I walk, to always be an expert and I kind of like being a beginner and I hope I have that until the day I die.”

A GOOD LEADER ASKS QUESTIONS

Collins reads widely outside the business discipline and takes courses in esoteric subjects and believes managers can benefit from letting the outside in. “If you are a manager why not understand the history of China or biochemistry, you have the joy of learning which never ends.” Another tip a former Stanford professor gave him is to “rather than try and be interesting, be interested in others”. “It was a life-changing moment, you never know who you might be sitting next to at a dinner party or on an aeroplane, discover their passion or their inner life or specialist field.

“One of the things we learned way back in Good to Great was that these great leaders had a somewhat Socratic style. They were humble enough to know that they may not have the answers, but what they were really good at was asking the questions,” says Collins, who also rates detachment as a quality of a great leader.

“I think people confuse empowerment with detachment. The best executives that I’ve studied really know the details of what their people are doing. That doesn’t mean they are directing them but they are hyper aware because they are really curious. That doesn’t mean they jump in and are micro managers, it means they are micro aware.” He cites a former student’s experience of being a product manager at Microsoft in the early 1990s. He told Collins that when he was putting the packaging information on Windows 95 together, the person most interested in the process was Bill Gates. “In the early 1990s Microsoft was already a juggernaut and he was really engaged in this particular detail. He wasn’t telling, he was asking. If he could do that while running Microsoft then we could all do that,” he says.

 

PASSION AND DETERMINATION

Celebrity CEOs is another hot button issue for Collins. He’s adamant that his research shows no correlation between personality and leadership. “People confuse charisma and leadership. Being charismatic or not is as relevant as having blonde hair or brown hair. It’s about whether you are fundamentally ambitious for the company and willing to make the hard decisions. You have an incredible passion and determination for an organisation’s long-term role in the world. And it’s about your ability to get people to do what must be done rather than it being about you.”

But then what about the late and mercurial Steve Jobs, who was considered the messiah by Apple fanatics worldwide? “Steve Jobs was dedicated to doing everything he could to make Apple an enduringly great company. If he was a genius with 1000 helpers how do you explain Tim Cook or the designers or software writers? He is someone whose great successes were pretty boring – it was about getting the right people in to build the systems and organise them into an incredible culture. He was focused on building a great company that would last beyond him. And towards the end he was racing against the clock to do that.”

Collins believes that middle managers in not-so-great-companies can even make a difference with this attitude. He says take a leaf out of the military and focus on your “unit and troops”. “If you make it a pocket of greatness you are more likely to die of indigestion of too much opportunity for responsibility, than starvation for too little. Even if you don’t, fundamentally you owe it to your people to create a great place to work, if you manage six or 20 people, it doesn’t matter.”

JIM COLLINS’ LEADERSHIP GLOSSARY

Level 5 Leaders:

Level 5 is about really relentless extreme ambition but it’s channelled outside yourself. That’s the essence of level 5 – it’s ambition channelled into something that’s bigger and more enduring than you are – that often shows up in more self-effacing people but it doesn’t have to.

The bus:

To illustrate how people-smart leaders work, Collins uses the analogy of the bus driver. He says most assume that these “bus drivers” start the journey by announcing to the passengers where they are going, by setting a new direction or articulating a fresh corporate vision. Not so. Great leaders start not from “where” but with “who”. “They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline – first the people, then the direction – no matter how dire the circumstances.”

Hedgehogs:

“What being a hedgehog means is that you are doing something so distinctive and with sheer excellence that if your company disappeared it would leave a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution. In an uncertain global business environment being a hedgehog is even more important not less. Push yourself to the next big thing rather than worrying about what others might do. You still need to be hyper vigilant about outside market forces and changing consumer tastes, but to truly be a great hedgehog, you are not asking ‘what’s the next big thing’, you are asking ‘what’s the next big thing we are going to do?’”

Gender diversity means nothing without inclusion

Having a quota for women and minorities isn’t inclusion if you treat them as outsiders.

By Jane Caro
Jane Caro is an advocate of inclusion.

Many years ago I appeared on a TV panel show. There were usually four men and a chick on the panel – sometimes me, sometimes someone else. We used to joke among ourselves about rotating in the mandatory “chick’s spot”. I’d brought up the lack of female panellists with the producers on occasion and, one day, for the first time, I was sharing the desk with two men (plus the male host) and another woman. The producers had paid attention!

But I noticed as we sat waiting for filming to start, the three men had a very blokey conversation about footy. Me and my fellow female panellist sat silently as they talked over our heads. Did we feel included? No, we did not.

There used to be an annual advertising awards event dedicated to the year’s best newspaper ads. It was run over a weekend as part of a conference, and I was a regular on the panel. It was a lot of fun, mostly, but there was always tension between the women delegates and the men. Women were often the butt of the jokes. It was always made clear to me that we were there on sufferance, rather than our merits, even if we sometimes won awards. I noticed the same barely disguised aggression towards the few openly gay men in the industry, too.

The last year I ever attended, one of the very few female creative directors in the advertising business (there remain almost none) made a very moving speech about her day and how hard it would be to fit in having children with her incredibly demanding job. She was acknowledging that unlike her male counterparts, she had to choose between career and family.

With some honourable exceptions, the male delegates reacted to her speech with hostility. Having children was “a lifestyle choice” and entirely a woman’s problem, we were told. The fact that many of the men holding this view were frantically trying to bed as many pretty young creatives as possible, while they had a wife at home minding the kids, escaped them. For self-declared smart men, they missed a lot.

“Being included and feeling included are two quite separate things.”

I liked her speech but, as the mother of two, I wanted to let some of the young women delegates know that it was possible to combine a successful career in advertising and a family. I got up and said so, citing my own career and those of a few of the other women in the room.

I was cut short. “I don’t think we would say you’d had a successful career, Jane,” opined one of the men on the panel – a man, I might add, with far less of a track record than me. (Oh, for the towering confidence of a mediocre white man.)

After 35 successful (by any measure) years in my industry, did I feel included? No, I did not.

Being included and feeling included are two quite separate things. I suspect that’s why the majority of new businesses are started by women. Sooner or later we get the message we are not wanted.

Inclusion is not about grudgingly allowing a few chicks and/or Indigenous/Muslim/Asian/LGBTQI/people of colour a seat on the panel, the management committee or the board. It’s not about driving numbers, although that matters. You cannot feel included if you are not actually wanted.

Inclusion matters because those of us who are outsiders (basically anyone who isn’t white, male, Christian, under 60 and, probably, with a private school education) have different views of the world. That richness of diverse views and experiences matters. We’ve all heard the stats on how diversity in management increases a business’s profitability and even share prices.

Indeed, one of the reasons I won awards in advertising creative was because my gender and feminism gave me a different way of looking at things. I saw the world in a way the majority of blokes didn’t see it. My perspective wasn’t better or worse – it was different.

We need difference. It makes life more fun and interesting and it makes businesses better at their business. We just need to make a little effort to make the different feel, well, less different.

Jane Caro runs her own communications consultancy. She worked in the advertising industry for 30 years and is now an author, journalist, lecturer and media commentator. Follow her on Twitter: @janecaro.

The Conversation: A Measure Of Love

Fitness Industry high flyer Elaine Jobson says setting a strategy means finding a vision that ignites your entire team and rallies them to your case. But first, take the time to listen

 

Elaine Jobson FAIM is a fitness industry veteran who, over the past 23 years, has worked for a number of large fitness brands in executive positions. Her roles have taken her all over the globe, including Asia, Europe, South Africa and now Australia.

She has teamed with entrepreneurs including Mike Balfour OBE, founder of the Fitness First gym chain, Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson and Brendon Levenson, owner of Jetts 24 Hour Fitness Gyms, where she is now chief executive officer.

Jobson is passionate about building successful companies through great cultures, and her work as chief operating officer at Virgin Active South Africa helped create a base that transformed the organisation. (It topped Deloitte’s “Best Company to Work For” survey for Southern Africa in 2012.) She sat down with AIM chief executive David Pich to talk about the importance of strategy in business, and love.

 

DAVID PICH:  This issue’s theme is around setting strategy, which amongst managers and leaders is quite often viewed as a very scary word.

 

elaine jobson:   I don’t find strategy scary, I find it really exciting. But I suspect that people find it scary because – unless you spend the time clarifying and being very purposeful in knowing where you’re going – it’s almost impossible to set strategy.

Business is so frenetic today that leaders don’t often get the time to come up with their endgame so they can build a meaningful strategy. It takes a couple of years for a true strategy to even be implemented. And then it takes time for the results to be realised.

You see this during the merry-go-round that happens when chief execs and managing directors are appointed every couple of years. As you know, business is not patient, investors aren’t patient and private equity is not patient.

I think sometimes people just run out of runway before they’ve even had a chance to implement their strategy. I think that’s the association of feeling scared about setting a strategy – you’re thinking, “Is it quick enough? Am I going to get results quickly enough?”

 

DP:   You’ve taken a number of jobs where you’ve gone in as the leader. What’s your approach to setting strategy?

 

ej:   I have a pretty systematic approach. The first thing I do, before I even think about setting strategy, is actually look at what the challenges are, where are the opportunities, where do we need to be useful and what do we need to actually fix in the business? When you decide that, you know what you need to get you there.

One of the things I learned from Mike Balfour, the founder of Fitness First, was to spend plenty of time understanding the problem before rushing to find the solution. Once you do that, the solutions become quite easy and really exciting. I think you can rally a team behind that solution once they understand that it’s actually going fix the issue. So the strategy for me kicks in at that point.

It starts with a lofty goal – some people call it purpose, some will call it the mission or the vision. But you have to go out to your teams and rally them behind a cause. And that cause has got to be big enough to get the energy going. If it’s about conquering markets, then that needs to be translated to the people, and then they need to be given the battle plan.

I’ve never given a six-month strategy or even a 12-month strategy. I actually give at least a three-year one. I’ll tell the team: “This is where we’re going be in three years’ time.” And I will give them an outline of what that’s going to look like and I’ll get them really excited about the last bit of the strategy. I tell them it’s not going be the most glamorous and sexy bits first, but be patient, we’ll get there.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done with Jetts. We are now in year three of a three-year strategy. And we’ve had some amazing gains and we really rebuilt the business over that three years. But every one of my team knew what the end goal was from three years ago.

 

DP:   What is the strategy or, more correctly, what was the strategy three years ago?

 

ej:   The problem was that Jetts has been a fast-growth company. Being a value-for-money, 24/7 gym, it had a great value proposition early on in that journey. But it started being squeezed by competitors who were offering pretty much the same thing. So we figured out that was the problem – how do we rebuild our value proposition for the customer in this more competitive market?

We knew we had to build a competitive defence based on more than price. We knew that what we’d become quite good at was culture. We knew that we had good people and the right kind of people. And we thought that from a brand perspective, we had some real credibility in the market.

So we decided they were going to be our linchpins. We knew that if we could attract the best talent and give our members a great service experience that would create another value proposition at what’s perceived to be the “value end” of the market, where that expectation of great service wasn’t there with the customer.

We also decided that we wanted to be “Australia’s something”, because we were the first 24/7 brand in Australia. We’re an Australian company and all our competitors are American, so we wanted to reclaim the Australian piece.

We actually anchored this around the vision of being “Australia’s most loved gym”, and that was what our team fell in love with. They didn’t want to be the biggest, the most profitable – they wanted to be Australia’s most loved. They got out of bed in the morning thinking, “Actually, I want my club to be the most loved in my area.”

DP:   How did you get to that vision and those words? One of the things that I find really interesting about strategy is it starts with a vision.

 

ej:  We knew we needed something really appealing, emotional, and that wasn’t monetary because our people in our gyms are passionate – they don’t care about money. So we actually went and hung out with them. We videoed a lot of our teams and a lot of the members. We actually went out and asked members, “Why come here? What do you like about being here?”

And this ‘love’ word just kept hitting us in the face. And then we said, well you know, maybe that’s the thing. Maybe love actually features because it’s a bit like a relationship when a member joins. You know, they join, they’re all excited and they’ve got these great ambitions of getting the body they want. And then they go on this journey with us and, obviously, it’s quite intimate.

Then we thought, “Well, Australia’s most loved,” because we also felt that was humble. It’s easy for companies to say, “We’re going be the biggest and the best or world class,” and all of that. But we thought that’s a little bit egotistical.

 

DP:  Being the most loved is about what someone thinks of you, not what you think of yourself.

 

ej:   Exactly, but we didn’t know how to make it measurable. So this whole “How do you measure love?” became a thing. Now we have four key metrics that measure what we call love. They range from net promoter score [how willing customers are to recommend a company’s products or services to others] to average length of stay, to yield, but we always put it back to “If somebody loves you, they stay.” And so if they stay then we obviously get more profit. It marries the emotional and logical quite nicely.

 

DP:  How far into the strategy setting process did the vision come? Did you continue with setting the strategy before you’d come up with the vision?

 

ej:   It had come upfront and centre. Yeah, we had to do it because I could never rally the energy that the strategy needed if I didn’t have a compelling vision. It had to be something that literally got thousands of people out of bed in the morning. If it couldn’t do that, it wasn’t good enough. It’s got to resonate in the minds of the people in the front line. And I think that’s a mistake in businesses that, you know, you’ll see five pages of what our vision is but it is meaningless to those in the front line.

 

DP:  So you have to get the buy-in of the people on your side of the fence before you sell that outside?

 

ej:  Yes, that’s right. We needed buy-in from everybody: our personal trainers, our club teams, and our business owners – because a lot of our clubs are franchise owned.

 

DP:  And that’s because vision is almost meaningless to the customers if the people on the inside are not selling it.

 

ej:   Well, that’s another interesting thing. I’ve been under pressure to also sell the strategy to customers because our teams get really excited about what we’ve achieved, especially over the last three years. But I won’t let it go to our customers, because until I’m absolutely confident that every customer feels that we are the most loved, it’s belittled, it’s not real in their mind.

 

DP:  So let me just get this straight because this is really interesting – your vision at the moment is a ‘secret’ vision. But it’s only a secret externally. Everybody internally knows that. Do you think that has something to do with your vision having the word ‘love’ in it? Because there’s something that could turn people off with that word, isn’t there?

 

ej:   And that’s why we need to have that metric in place; we’re being measured by everybody else who’s around us. That’s why things like net promoter score are really important, because it’s industry-based, we don’t just do ourselves. So we know where all our competitors sit in terms of how happy their customers are.

 

DP:  And where do you sit?

 

ej:   Well, we’re top.

 

DP:  Of course, when we’re talking about strategy, we have to bring culture into the mix. That statement, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, is still in the annals of management history. So is it true your culture can make your strategy fail?

 

ej:  Yes, it can. We’ve all probably seen it at some level in our own careers. You know, the boss arrives one day with an amazing idea or an amazing execution plan. But if everybody thinks he’s a bit of a prat, it’s not going anywhere. I always think of it as passing a ball and having your team run with your ball. You pass it in a way that they want to receive it. And if you don’t have the right culture, they won’t take the ball, they won’t run with it. They’ll actually actively do things to stop it when you’re not looking. Culture is whatever happens when you’re not there.

 

DP:  Identifying the problem is quite easy, but what if you have to change the team of people? How do you go about that?

 

ej:  I find that whenever I arrive in a company and a change of leadership has happened because I’m arriving, that the people are not stupid. They know what the problems are and often have most of the answers. They just haven’t got the authority. So I spend a lot of time with them actually just listening because, eventually, they will tell me what the issues are and they’re usually right.

 

DP:  So you’re the new boss. You have a board or an owner or a bunch of venture capitalists who want their return on investment. How long have you got for the rubber to hit the road?

 

ej:  Well, it depends on the size of the problem. The first thing I do is negotiate that space. Sometimes when you’re making change, things get worse before they get better. And I think an executive that goes into a job and doesn’t have that hard conversation with the person that’s hiring them is setting themselves up to fail

When I went into the Virgin company [in South Africa], I had to remove 40 per cent of the workforce because, from a cultural point of view, they were never going to change. And if I hadn’t managed that expectation with the board, that might have been a very sad story.

I also look for two or three low-hanging fruit that I can just throw to the board as performance improvements that, you know, perhaps they’ve not thought about. And they get confidence [in you]. So you have to do that to get the slower, longer burn of the sustainable change that you can make over time. Because when you get that, that’s when you get that beautiful world of, “this is not going to disappear overnight. This is not just a smoke-and-mirrors improvement.”

 

DP:  Do you revisit your three-year strategy each year?

 

ej:   It’s probably more accurate to say I set a three-year vision and I have themes. So I’ll launch the themes, “This is the first theme, the second, and the third. And if we do this one, then we’ll move on to the next.” So they always know that there are three bits to go through and that’s what is going to get us there. But we’ll have, obviously, the measurements and the milestones in between.

 

DP:  You’ve just had a big change in the business, with the company being sold [for $100 million to Quadrant Private Equity]. How exciting is this sort of strategic change?

 

ej:   Jetts is Australian home-grown, being owned by its founder Brendon Levenson for the last 10 years, and going from nothing to more than 200 clubs. But it got to a point where it’s a mature business in Australia and we had to make a decision about what’s next.

For me, businesses never stand still. You grow or you decline and you have to decide which one you are going to be. So we decided that there’s a lot of things we still want to do, and international markets was our ambition. We wanted to dip our toe in the water and try out Jetts overseas. The first company that knocked on our door was Quadrant and they ended up buying us, so we didn’t even go out to market.

It’s exciting because we’ve done all our homework and we’ve got a really rock-solid foundation. We’re going international now and, you know, we’re ready for it! I just have to make sure that, obviously, nothing goes off strategy here.

So the question is… are we going be the world’s most loved gym? Not only Australia’s? It’s going to be taking on the world.

 

DP:  That’s right. You have to keep the present situation in mind while thinking of the future. How do you do that as a leader? It just sounds incredibly complex.

 

ej:   It is complicated, because if you haven’t spent that time building up a team that can take on the baton from you, you’re screwed. I had to bang the drum of vision and strategy for the last three years, but I’ve banged it lighter over the last year because others are banging it. It doesn’t need me to do that anymore. It will keep going. But I will have to spin the plate every now and again, so I have to make sure I still give it enough attention and profile that it doesn’t lose its momentum. But equally, now I’ve got to go and get some momentum behind the other [international] strategy as well, and then tie them all in together. The vision should be a shared vision.

Why lying is rife in the workplace and how to stop it

Even experts can fall for a lie. Leslie John is the last person you’d expect to have been duped. The Harvard Business School professor teaches negotiation tactics for dealing with liars, so she was blindsided when she fell for the oldest trick in the book. She found herself in a six-month relationship with a man who, unknown to her, was married. “To be fair, it was a long-distance relationship,” she explains on the phone from Boston.

John had been “catfished” – fallen prey to a person who uses technology to construct a false identity.

Some liars are so convincing that even experts are snowed, despite all their training, their psychological profiling and their lie-detecting technologies. While many people believe they can identify dishonesty through body language, research shows that people’s success rate at picking lies is no better than chance (50 per cent to 60 per cent). Trained police detectives fare no better.

Recalling her “catfishing” experience a couple of years ago, John says awareness of lies doesn’t make you invulnerable to them.

“This is someone who completely duped me. He just flat-out lied,” she says. “When you are motivated to believe someone and see what you want to see in them, it is amazing what you can be blind to.” They were talking every few days on the phone. “It is exhausting holding a lie,” she says. “I don’t know how he functioned.”

When is it ok to lie?

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive, according to studies. However, some untruths are seen as more forgivable than others, says Mara Olekalns, professor of management (negotiations) at the Melbourne Business School.

“Withholding information is considered reasonably acceptable. Engaging in what would be considered competitive behaviours, such as an exaggerated first offer or misrepresenting what you are willing to accept, is considered reasonably acceptable because it is seen as part of the negotiation game,” she explains.

“And then you move down to things that are a little less acceptable, like faking positive emotions, such as liking the other person, or faking negative emotions like anger to try to influence them.

“Then we move one further step down to deliberately misrepresenting information in order to influence outcomes. That is actually perceived as not very acceptable at all and is possibly illegal.”

Lying in business

The business world is awash with untruths. Around 36 per cent of managers admit to telling lies every day, according to research by the UK’s Chartered Management Institute (Managers and the Moral Maze). Olekalns advises her students to avoid this ethical minefield of game-playing by moving to a problem-solving orientation, which requires them to be more frank and open with their information.

But she warns that first they must test the other party’s willingness to play by those rules, otherwise they leave themselves open to exploitation. “Try to be as honest as you can until you have evidence you are being exploited,” she recommends.

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive.

Enterprise bargaining is one area of negotiation where distrust of “the other side” is almost a badge of honour and it is a field of engagement Clive Thompson knows well.

Thompson is a director of CoSolve, a consultancy that uses a non-adversarial problem-solving process called “interest-based bargaining”. These union-versus-employer engagements are full of theatre, he explains, with each side performing to their own audience (workers or investors). Old suspicions and hatreds die hard.

“Once or twice I’ve had cases in the union space, mainly on the union side, where a very dyed-in-the-wool, class-analysis person has come along with the attitude that capital/the bosses are the Devil. There is never a moral reserve about lying to the Devil.”

Yet although there may be congenital liars among employers and ideological liars on the union side, both cases are very rare in Thompson’s experience.

What to do if you’ve been lied to

So should you “call out” a lie? Perhaps… but Harvard’s John says it is better to take note of it as a “data point” and use it as a cue to probe further.

Thompson advises going down the denouncement route only if you’re confident the liar will be removed by the other party’s team as a result. If the liar is not removed from the negotiation, it opens up a whole new area of unpleasantness and debate about whether or not actual lies were told. “It is a high-stakes card, only to be played when either you are desperate or there is no other option,” he says.

If you don’t confront the lie, then you have to proceed on the basis that the other party can’t be trusted, fact-check everything that the other party divulges, and keep your own confidential information close to your chest, he says.

Because of the difficulty in identifying lies, a better strategy in a negotiation is to prevent any lies in the first place. Thompson, for example, asks that all announcements be made jointly by the negotiating parties. This stops them from misrepresenting each other’s position when reporting back to stakeholders.

An alternative is that an announcement will not be made until the other party has had it for 24 hours and has the opportunity to comment on it.

“In practice, that sharing of the draft typically does elicit comment. And that comment very regularly does move the first party to alter it,” says Thompson.

One of the occasions when it is often regarded as acceptable to stretch the truth is in a job interview, when people boost their successes (and sometimes appropriate other people’s wins) and exaggerate their current remuneration packages.

This crosses over to fraud when people claim qualifications they haven’t earned and concoct an impressive, but imaginary, work history. About 50 per cent of resumes include false information, according to research by both the Society of Human Resources Management and CareerBuilder.com.

Catching a liar

Liars will get caught. The Australian corporate world is, in reality, fairly small. It is more like a village, says Jannine Fraser, managing director of career management company The Career Insight Group.

“If you misrepresent the truth, people will always find out,” Fraser says.

Even gilding the lily on LinkedIn carries huge risks because former colleagues can read it and spread the truth. Fraser says when she hires for her own 200-person company, it is easy to do a police and reference check.

There is no excuse for employers to be caught out by the likes of Andrew Flanagan, who was sacked on his first day as general manager of strategy and business development at Myer in 2014 when it was discovered he had falsified his work history. Flanagan had falsely claimed to have previously held the job as general manager of strategy and business development for Inditex, which owns international fashion brand Zara.

The recruiter, in this case, had contacted two overseas referees supplied by Flanagan. According to one report, an email address for one of them was traced to the IP address at Flanagan’s home.

Flanagan had duped a list of big retailers into hiring him on false pretences (in Australia and overseas) before he was “outed” by Inditex, which had seen the announcement of Flanagan’s Myer appointment.

Fraser is still mystified how this could occur in such a well-networked industry: “In Australia, we use our networks. We don’t just rely on the candidate’s nominated referee. Nobody else does that,” she says.

As for habitual liars, Fraser says it can be a form of mental illness. “I think for some people it becomes a form of power and there is adrenaline attached to it. It becomes a matter of ‘What can I get away with?’.

“People kind of move into the zone of the hustle. We are all vulnerable to getting full of our own story.”

4 critical skills you’ll need in the future workplace

The workplace is changing, and with it the skills that workers need to thrive in a digital and diverse environment. Here are four skills that will be in highly sought after by employers in the future:

1. Emotional judgement

EJ, the new EQ, is now a top priority for many employers. “Emotional judgement is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathise with their position,” says Dr Marcus Bowles FIML, founder of the Institute for Working Futures. “It’s also about understanding the impact of the decisions you have to make.”

“EJ correlates strongly with the customer experience in service organisations. For technical experts, engineers and doctors, it’s about empathising with the outcome the client might want and being able to understand that the optimal solution may not be the best solution.”

2. Global citizenship

This encompasses cross-cultural work and diversity, says Bowles. “If you can’t empathise with different views of the world then it’s very hard for you to work in that context.”

Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?

3. Courage

“A lot of organisations don’t just want people who can innovate, they want people who can advocate for the customer,” says Bowles. Courage is a desirable quality that shows up among natural learning strings in organisations. “Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?”

4. Foresighting

Visionary leadership is about to take on a whole new meaning. “Can you see through the macro-trend to spot the business opportunity?” You’ll need to.

How creativity and innovation help make happy customers

Mark Wengritzky believes creativity is the greatest competitive advantage that humans have over machines, so he’s often puzzled why companies invest in innovative technology but don’t put the same money into innovative thinking.

“Too many companies think that being innovative is about building an app or getting the latest and greatest technology,” he says. “Technology is just an enabler. Creativity is the real source of innovation.”

As business development manager of Akqire, a Melbourne-based product development and innovation company, Wengritzky specialises in helping organisations come up with creative ways of reaching their customers and expanding their business. Rather than working as a traditional marketing company, Akqire helps companies cut through advertising noise to reach the heart of their customers.

“If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

“A lot of companies are spending so much money on marketing without actually looking at what their customers want,” he says. “We help companies create innovative products and services by looking at who their customers are and what their pain points might be.”

Brightday, an online platform that aims to make it easier for people to make choices about their superannuation, is one example of Akqire’s work. Akqire’s research showed that people were looking for greater control over their investment decisions, so it worked with Eureka Report to design a new model for advisory services. The Brightday platform provides investors with research and knowledge to assist them in managing their own superannuation.

Sometimes a company’s culture is its own impediment to innovative thinking, says Wengritzky. “Companies know they need to innovate and they may have innovation teams and gather customer insights, but their culture often gets in the way. It may be that people just want to follow their boss’s ideas to keep them happy without ever saying what their own ideas might be. It just means that the breadth of ideas become restricted.”

Mark Wengritzky

Mark Wengritzky believes more companies should invest in creativity (Photo: Eamon Gallagher)

He adds that businesses may need to think beyond their traditional service offering if they want to remain relevant to their customers. He points to the challenges insurance companies face in engaging with millennials. “Instead of following a traditional approach to marketing or engagement, why not look at what is changing within the demographic, what they want now and what service they might need that’s not necessarily insurance in its traditional form,” he suggests.

It’s this kind of creative thinking that can lead to innovative solutions. “If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

When I grow up I want to be an ethical hacker

The work landscape of the fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, looks very different to the one we grew up with in the 20th century. Industry 4.0 is characterised by universal connectivity, technological breakthroughs and fast-paced disruption that are facilitating a widespread shift to automation at the cost of traditional jobs.

We hear a lot about the jobs that we have lost, but what about the new jobs created thanks to advances in technology? Once children wanted to be firefighters and astronauts when they grew up. Now they want to be ethical hackers and drone pilots. Here is a selection from the growing list of jobs that didn’t exist five years ago.

11 jobs that didn’t exist five years ago

  1. Ethical Hackers help institutions identify the vulnerabilities in web applications and networks.
  2. Chief Growth Officers are also on the rise, along with growth hackers, typically social media or viral marketers or product managers, who focus on building the customer base by running rapid experiments.
  3. Chief Listening Officer oversees all customer communications, from social media to face-to-face.
  4. Chief Innovation Officer encompasses both product development and strategic direction responsibilities.
  5. User Interface/Experience Designers focus on making technology instinctive to use.
  6. Cloud services architects oversee a company’s cloud computing strategy.
  7. Cognitive computing architects make machines “think” like humans.
  8. Drone pilots, once the preserve of the military, they’re working in utilities, mining and insurance with roles in deliveries and wedding photography ramping up.
  9. Autonomous vehicle operators remotely operate driverless cars, collecting data for engineers.
  10. Digital prophet: a trend predictor. AOL has one.
  11. Jolly Good Fellow is the personal and spiritual development adviser at Google. Where else?

The problem with the open-plan office and how to fix it

The open-plan office: collaborative and egalitarian or noisy and unproductive? Whatever your view, it’s a layout many Australian workers are familiar with.

The open-plan office developed in the 1950s in post-war Germany and then swept across the corporate world. Its two perceived benefits are cost and increased collaboration.

There is no doubt that, on paper, open-plan offices offer the cheaper option, as you can accommodate more people in a smaller area to cut down on your office space. In the United States, the average office space per worker fell from 20.9 square metres in 2010 to 16.3 square metres in 2012. In Manhattan, where real estate is at a premium, each worker occupies just 11.1 square metres.

The open-plan office’s other selling point is that it fosters a flow of ideas between employees that would be impossible if they spent their working days isolated in private offices. However recent research casts doubt on this claim.

Instead of improving communication in the workplace, one Australian study found that the open-plan office, and its latest variant, hot-desking, had a negative impact on colleagues’ relationships.

Instead of improving communication in the workplace, one Australian study found that the open-plan office, and its latest variant, hot-desking, had a negative impact on colleagues’ relationships. The researchers found that offices occupied by one, two or three people offered “the best situations for workers”.

Another study that surveyed workers who moved from private to open-plan offices had a similar conclusion. “The benefits that are often associated with open-plan offices did not appear: cooperation became less pleasant and direct and information flow did not change,” wrote the authors.

A 2013 study found that any benefit from increased interaction between staff was wiped out by losses due to noise and lack of privacy. Employees who work in open-plan offices also tend to report higher levels of stress, take more sick days, and are less productive.

But if we accept that for cost reasons the open-plan office is here to stay, what improvements can be made to address its shortcomings?

 

modern office

The use of ‘segmented space’ is a growing trend in contemporary office design. (Photo: iStock)

One answer is the ‘segmented office’, a design philosophy “based on the idea that different spaces are needed to support different tasks and different personalities,” explains Libby Sander, a lecturer at Bond University, in a piece published at The Conversation.

A segmented office might have small rooms where people can work uninterrupted, larger rooms for meetings, communal tables for informal catch-ups, standing desks for brainstorm sessions, and phone-free quiet zones. Workers move around the office to suit their different activities.

The segmented office is not the perfect solution, however. Sanders reports that employees often feel frustrated having to carry a laptop, cords and other work materials around the office, and annoyed when they can’t locate a staff member. A shortage of rooms and private spaces was another common gripe.

 

CASE STUDY

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CADET BUILDING Deakin University CADET building

Deakin University’s new $55 million Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training (CADET) building is an office-free zone.

Designed by Gray Puksand and built by Cockram Construction, its workspaces comprise a series of ‘blended environments’ designed along activity-based working principles to use space more efficiently and effectively.

“It’s understanding what activities go on and then designing spaces to suit those particular activities,” explains Kean Selway, chief operating officer at Deakin University (an AIM Affiliate Member). “[But] it’s not just a case of pulling the walls down and everything works. We have to be very careful about how we zone certain activities.”

 

 

 

 

There are, for example, quiet zones that cater for people who need to concentrate. “You can go into that area with the expectation that you can sit in silence and you won’t be distracted or interrupted by people. You don’t need to build offices and walls and locked doors to create that quiet environment,” says Selway.

“At the other end of the spectrum, there are highly collaborative spaces where the table heights are raised to almost a bench height, and the seats are raised as well. It’s a far more active, almost stand-up environment where people can move around easily and collaborate and talk around tables.”

Privacy – or the lack of it – is another issue. Deakin University has replaced its landlines with mobile phones, so people can walk and talk. “We have a range of rooms that people can step in and out of to have a private conversation,” says Selway. “It’s a very dynamic use of space.”

Meeting rooms that lie empty for most of the day have been replaced by “collaboration spaces”. But there are still a few meeting rooms available, where “you can close the door and have a formal, private meeting with typically between four and 14 people,” he says. And with Deakin University spread across four separate campuses, they’re equipped with video-conferencing and presentation equipment, “As a university, we use video-conferencing equipment as a natural extension of everything we do,” explains Selway.

“Everyone has ended up with much more functional, more beautiful, more usable, more enjoyable spaces because there’s been this shift in practice from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’.”

Small power point-free meeting rooms – “so people can’t charge up their laptops and their phone and spend hours in there alone”– complement the more formal meeting spaces.

The CADET building also aims to cater for people’s different working styles. “A person may want privacy for part of the day, or part of the week, but not all of the week,” says Selway. Those who want desks have them, he adds. “Some people have a highly reliable, predictable work pattern and workflow, so… staying in the same place all the time actually works highly effectively because that’s what they do day in, day out.”

Where people don’t require the same “reliability of environment”, that space can be freed up to improve productivity and engagement. “It’s embracing the complexity and sophistication of the way in which different groups work,” says Deakin’s COO.

 But perhaps the biggest shift has been in moving attitudes from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’.

“Traditionally in a university environment, certain people would have certain offices with four walls, lots of bookshelves, and an exclusive right to that space. The one thing we understood was that the more walls that we build and the more doors that we lock, and the more exclusive use we enabled when people don’t actually need it, we are spending…  hundreds of millions of dollars on new development of floor space that we don’t need,” says Selway.

“[We have tried] to remove this right of ownership of spaces, by an individual or a team or a faculty, and say ‘we’ll design beautiful, usable, flexible spaces… but share them when you don’t need them’.”

This approach means Deakin University has been able to invest in the quality of the spaces rather than increasing the volume. That’s saved the university $400 million that would have otherwise been spent on new buildings. Instead, $200 million has gone into renewing existing campus buildings. “Everyone has ended up with much more functional, more beautiful, more usable, more enjoyable spaces because there’s been this shift in practice from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’,” Selway says.

While it’s difficult to measure the effect of blended environments on productivity, Selway points out that increased usage represents a better return on investment in physical space. He adds that people have told him they’re having more conversations in a more natural way, which encourages the development of new ideas and innovations. “If you look at the innovation companies around the world and you look at the way they’re designing their office spaces, they’re designed for people to come together and collaborate, not to retreat and isolate.”

And how do the staff feel about working in the new building?

Reaction is split, says Selway. “There’s a group of staff that are up for anything, and they find any change a really interesting, positive environment with new opportunities. There’s the group that is reasonably positive, thinking ‘I wonder how this is going to work for me personally. I’ll give it a go and see.’ And then there’s the group who will always be reticent to changing what they’ve grown to know over time. You always have a small group that says ‘that doesn’t really work for me, I don’t like it, it’s not the way I’m used to.’ You just have to accept [that].”