See for yourself

Great leaders understand something that is often lost in today’s world of global connectivity – the critical, insight needed for effective leadership can come only from first-hand contact. The best executives get out of their offices to observe and engage with their frontline employees, competitors, customers, and suppliers on the job.

Most business gurus tout cleverly titled management concepts while ignoring this relatively simple practice. Each concept promotes itself as a silver bullet; most deliver benefits, but rarely to the extent advertised; and few prove sustainable over the long run.

To get the most out of first-hand engagement, consider the following principles:

• Go and see: no company embraces the principle of first-hand observation more than the Toyota Motor Corporation. A philosophy of genchi genbutsu, literally translated as ‘go and see’, permeates the organisation from the manufacturing floor to product development and even corporate staff functions. Toyota’s executive in charge of real estate visited every single property now in Toyota’s vast global portfolio of land and buildings before approving any of the investments
  
• Prepare to learn: in his autobiography, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton commented, “Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from someone else.” Walton, like other great leaders, was a true student of his industry, always seeking out new learning opportunities. Louis Pasteur’s comment that “fortune favours the prepared mind” leads us further along the path of capturing the full value of direct observation and engagement
  
• Look for problems and solutions: although visits may suggest a focus on solutions, the real power of engagement comes from listening and understanding the problems from multiple sources. Some problems may suggest obvious solutions. Toyota, always seeking the simple but avoiding the simplistic, searches for root causes by applying the ‘Five Whys’ principle: asking several ‘why’ questions in order to determine a problem’s genesis
  
• Helping others: Tom Taylor, former executive vice president of merchandising for The Home Depot stores, demonstrated how frontline visits offer opportunities to learn and to coach by looking for problems from a customer perspective. The Home Depot merchandising group no longer sits at headquarters making decisions far from the action. They now go to the frontlines to see what is happening and think about their decisions from a customer’s perspective
• Making it personal: it’s no wonder that many employees view executives as Dilbert cartoon characters: clueless autocrats anxious to implement the next management fad as a ‘strategic initiative’. Embracing first-hand engagement as an integral part of your personal leadership style and embedding it in a company’s culture can break the fad cycle. It connects everyone to reality and forces a collaborative, problem-solving mind-set that can produce enduring results rather than just temporary improvement

The Apprentice – helpful to business or not?

I’m not a fan of The Apprentice – my children are. For me it’s all got a bit silly. In the office we have a sweepstake as to who will win and the winner walks off with around £100 (last year the winner said thanks, and didn’t buy so much as a box of Maltesers...), so it provides some reason for watching, but even then I would rather watch re-runs of Shaun the Sheep who incidentally, knows more about team building than all the Apprentice candidates put together.

The point is, that for organisations to succeed there needs to be a collective responsibility for  getting work done, and therefore there is a big onus on teamwork. Often this needs to include teams from other organisations because they are integral to the organisation's success. 

Powerful and productive teams

This week I’m in Aberdeen facilitating a learning programme designed to build powerful and productive teams – teams that have a strong sense of trust, are open and honest and hold each other explicitly accountable for their contribution to the team's goals. 

This stage of the project requires the teams to work on focused and relevant challenges that have been devised to give them an opportunity to:

• Practice and develop smooth processes and ways of operating
• Apply and develop key behaviours and challenge the mindset of self and others
• Build and own a process of continuous learning and improvement
• Become a high performing team
• Provide an excellent outcome for a deserving ‘client’  

Part of the criteria for selecting an appropriate challenge is that they must have a tangible output – deliver value to a charity or equivalent, be something you can take pride in, be sustainable over the long term and have an ‘emotional’ content – building a produce garden on a waste ground at the back of the Remploy factory in Aberdeen ticked all these boxes and more.

Remploy was established in April 1945 under the 1944 Disabled Persons (Employment) Act introduced by Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour. The first factory opened in 1946 at Bridgend in South Wales, as the factory network grew, employment was provided for disabled people returning from the Second World War. It is a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) which exists to help disabled people achieve the independence, personal self confidence and wellbeing that can be achieved through sustainable employment.

Remploy is now one of the UK's leading providers of specialist employment services for disabled people and those experiencing complex barriers to work. Tailored services include development, training, learning and rehabilitation to help individuals prepare for, gain and remain in sustainable work, whilst providing employers – in the private and public sector – with the skilled staff they need to realise commercial benefits.

There are insufficient mainstream employment opportunities for all unemployed disadvantaged and disabled people, so job creation through commercial and social enterprise is critical. Remploy is therefore developing a model to support the creation of jobs for disabled and disadvantaged people through an alternative approach to the Remploy factories.

In order to develop the model Remploy has identified five of its existing sites to trial this new approach. The Social Enterprise model will enable each of the five factories to explore opportunities appropriate for their local economy and community, building on the existing skills and assets of sites and employees. Each of the sites is managed by an individual with a background in social enterprise. They are supported to develop a number of social firms, the nature of which will depend on each of their localities and markets. Expertise to support work experience and trainees is incorporated into each site.

The Aberdeen factory is one of five Remploy sites involved in a pilot project to look at developing some current activity into social enterprises. Ben Mardall has been employed as Social Enterprise Manager to take this forward. The aspiration is to develop a multi-functional building promoting active inclusion to support the integration of disabled and disadvantaged cohorts into the workplace by offering a cross cutting theme which addresses unemployment and provides work opportunities for people furthest from the labour market. Although all the businesses are commercially focused, all profit is spent on the social objectives of the enterprises. Our objective to offer a ‘hand-up’ not a ‘hand-out’.

The Aberdeen site is at the vanguard of that process.

Should you require any further information about Remploy Aberdeen, contact Ben Mardall, Social Enterprise Manager: ben.mardall@remploy.co.uk

Should you wish to learn more about lloydmasters learning programmes see our website or contact the team: info@lloydmasters.com