Sometimes leaders create their own version of a new normal. Sometimes it’s forced on them by events like this Pandemic. In 1972 five young German guys left their promising careers at the industry giant IBM and rented a two bedroom flat. They paid a graphic designer 200 George Marks for their logo and they started a software business. Many thought they were mad to leave the security and great benefits of a progressive company, but in doing so, they created a new norm. 20 years later, over a period of four years, I coached a huge range of their people, including one of the first hundred employees. There’s geeks, HR people, business development people, marketing people, directors, second level board members. Even. It was exciting. They were all driven and madly enthusiastic about their jobs and their company. Graduates were flocking to this company and the lucky chosen ones enjoyed a new and intoxicating world of work.
The situation, business leaders today still aim for. Some thought the company was a temporary dangerous bubble. The attitude to their employees was different to what was the norm. They were disrupting the status quo in conservative German industry. Eyebrows were raised when you were working new, normal last year. SAP, a hundred thousand staff and turnover or 27.5 billion euros. SAP has always done lots differently in a country, obsessed with clocking in and clocking out of work. They didn’t. Nine to five hours. They didn’t do that either. 60 minutes of lunch bags take as long you want. Instead of the 27 or 26 job ranks at one of the big German, uh, banks. SAP had four or they didn’t really, they had about six. But you get my point. It’s one legendary myth, mythical figure. Nobody ever saw him nighttime man. He used to get to work at 10 at night and leave before breakfast.
But the creativity and design that he brought into the building overnight occupied his team every day. The director told me they did these crazy things because they, they weren’t obsessed with what time you arrived, where you worked, but what you did management wasn’t absent. You’re just focused on outputs like projects, not inputs like presenteeism, Google, Apple, Facebook have all followed in their footsteps on blue Glassdoor. SAP still has phenomenal satisfaction ratings with many reviews, praising the ability to work from home. We’re not at a client’s office. When I was a kid, my family moved countries in Africa and the removals truck with our entire household had an electric fault and the truck burnt up decades later. My parents still classify things as before the fire or after the fire. Just like we all know. Elderly relatives classify everything is before the war. Well after the war, like the second world war, change them coven change us. COVID is like the war in some ways including extended levels of uncertainty. The war democratized society with women working becoming normal, COVID could mean working from home becomes normal for us. We often have people say, we are all in this together or there’s replying. No, we may all be in the same storm, but we’re all in very different boats.
Some say that face to face meetings and chance encounters with colleagues can only happen in a shared workplace. Often inspiring discussion and creativity, but others, others love working from home because there’s no commute, no disruption from noisy colleagues. COVID is a great disruptor, but in unexpected ways. It’s also a great level. People who cannot leave home for one reason or another can now access things around the world that they couldn’t before. Opportunity focused leaders. Could you change as an attitude and advances in technology to recruit talent who’ve been excluded because they struggle to get into offices for a five day, nine to five week? Well, leaders in the post COVID and new normal advertise, remote and flexible working as a standard option and could they access a whole new pool of full and part time talent. As a result, a time-starved lawyer tells me losing the hour commute each way from home to the city is a blessing.
He’d happily retain three days a week. A CEO tells me they get more done in shorter, more to the point. Virtual meetings. A CFO tells me that allowed messy lunch with his wife and kids is like refueling. Another person tells me virtual neat things are pretty cool. I prefer them. I’m a bit of a loner for whatever reason. No, I don’t need an excuse to be me outside. Big tech. Working from home was historically considered a soft book, but the Coronavirus pandemic cause it turned remote work into a reality for millions and a necessity for businesses around the world. Germans delay Germany’s labor minister Hubertus Heil wants to make it a workers, right may not need a law. Some of my clients are already subletting some of their prime London office space and putting in place permanent working from home capabilities partners at a global law firm.
I know I’m debating ditching some of that ego boosting London office floors after their most profitable fee month ever was delivered. Mainly working from home. Recent research by PWC says that over 50% of CFOs want their companies to offer working from home full time after the lockdown has lifted. CFOs. Really conventional thinking has always been that working from home is bad for productivity. It doesn’t help collaboration or creativity or interdepartmental thinking and the benefits of socializing in the canteen or at the coffee machine or too important to lose Stanford economics. Professor Nicholas bloom conducted research on working remotely in 2014 and found that the working from home group was 13% more productive and they could rate were hot Haft. One of the big business challenges I help my clients with is reducing unwanted churn. Reducing the TA the right talent leaves a company is huge because turnover rates are directly related to recruitment costs. Automatic two T’s. The company behind WordPress was founded in August, 2005 it was valued at $3 billion in September last year has 940 employees who all work remotely in over 43 countries. The founder Matt Mullenweg said working from home has been amazing for the company in that we can attract and retain the best talent without them having to be in New York, New York or San Francisco or one of the traditional tech centers.
I know that is a tech company, but many industries could have significant percentages of their employees working from home part time or full time reducing pollution, commuting time and stress. Well, increasing satisfaction and retention rates. When SAP created a new normal people focused on the superficial clocking in and clocking out. The covert new normal focus has been on technology companies like Slack and zoom, but there needs to be a conversation about communication too. Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. He differentiates between wartime CEOs and peacetime CEOs. Most CEOs of wartime CEOs at the moment, of course, VUCA. VUCA is a concept that originated with the students at the U S army war college to describe the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of the world after the cold war. It sounds a lot like the current environment at the moment, doesn’t it?
Traditional command and control leadership doesn’t really work well in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times, but neither does traditional communications. What worked last year, I wouldn’t necessarily work this year, who was a great CEO last year, won’t necessarily be a great CEO this year. Leadership leaders have to constantly differentiate between things outside their control, things they can influence and things that can actually control. The top thing that they can control, they are a hundred percent responsible for is how they communicate. There are probably a thousand blog posts being rehashed today by communication gurus with clickbait headlines like crisis comms during covert or 10 ways to be a better Zoomer fact is the basic essential rules and tools of recurrence that are documented and taught in a thousand places and have existed for 2000 years. Well, still correct and valid and will continue to be. Sir, of course, I’m talking about logos, pathos, ethos, the color of metaphor, the art of the analogy, emotional stories, the power of three. These basic rhetorical rules, tools and tactics are valid and always will be, but for leaders to succeed in the new normal, they need more.
To be a leader, you need to grow believers. It doesn’t matter whether you own a restaurant and you’re running the front of house and your staff or cooking your reputation in the kitchen. Well, you run a global business and you sell them. Have ever see your staff, let alone altogether. As Simon Sinek says, you and your people have to be clear about your your why, but it’s more than that. Are they believers? Are they doing what you would want them to do if you were watching? Do they have skin in the game? It’s always tempting here to talk about political leaders like Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Hillary, all known to their tribes and other believers and others by their first names, but I prefer business examples. The client asked me to coach a new joiner, well, they were surprised to find was a particularly bad speaker.
She performed badly in pictures and they didn’t know what was wrong. We spent half a day together and she did appear muted and disillusioned until I moved the conversation to her horses. She transformed. I flagged the false diagnosis since she was a great speaker. She just wasn’t a believer. The partner invested time with her talking through projects the consultancy had done and showing her the grateful emails received from from magic circle partners. She became believer and a key part of it, but I coached them around 40 people for one of my Silicon Valley clients. Super geeks tasked with giving talks at recruitment fairs and at universities in a successful effort to attract talent successful. Partly because of their personalities, partly their sense of purpose. Many had left big tech firms and big store salaries to work for this health tech startup because they believed in its purpose.
They were believers who prepared for and gave those talks during their own time and then worked a full 60 hours a week. Us the two. A synchronous demands specific specific communication and patients. We are used to judging performance based on speed of response that may be good for creativity, but your team is no longer on tap and available in the new normal. Successful leaders had to be even more clear and specific in what they write and say because there is no instant feedback. Check what was received is the same as what was sent, what was said. So what was heard? Clarity of thinking leads to clarity of communication. The upside of asynchronous communication is that more thought can go into the reply to because the focus isn’t on speed of reply, but where the boss, the busy boss, maybe you should be rewritten to be way the busy urgent.
Ben Horowitz speaks about how general the unspecific instruction had unintended negative consequences that Uber, here are some other examples off the top of my head. Take the phrase, do the right thing. It sounds good, doesn’t it? Imagine that you’re a purchasing manager. The decisions you make affect whether the company makes a profit or a loss, but then a situation comes along. What about buying and farrier? Cheaper products like cladding for a towel, bro. That’s right for profits, right for your promotion and right for your bonus, but bad for safety, bad for people’s lives and bad for the longterm success of the company.
What about the customer? The customer is always right. Imagine you’re a taxi driver. Do you break the speed limit and risk losing your license or causing an accident? If your customer is late for a flight, you jump a red light to make the customer happy. Of course you do. Point three the listening leader has big ears. The listening leader listens harder. I worked remotely with someone for nearly 10 years now. We used to work together in my office because I was a fan of presenteeism. Despite it being logistically tough and not always productive. He’s a talented person who adds value, but now as a stay at home dad, he’s simply not available nine to five in my office. To be honest, he doesn’t need to be. It doesn’t matter to me anymore when he does the work, but it does matter to him. Working remotely only works because we speak often and I invest time listening.
It was all our work relationship has matured, the way we work has changed. We now hardly ever see each other in real life. Did we communicate regularly? I’m learning to be more specific, more clear, more thoughtful about what I’m saying to him so that it can be said once and then done once and then we’ll get on with the next thing. One of my clients has a general, he tells the story of how he was given a project. He gathered his team, told them what was required and by when and how it was going to work. Then he listened actively. He looked around and he waited a 22-year-old corporal, shook his head. The general didn’t look around the room for support from greeters. He went straight to the corporal and asked while he was shaking his head, it’s not going to work. Why not asked the general, the corporal explained to the general that one of the assumptions the general had made that’s just wrong. Generally say we’d better check that it turned out the corporate was right. The how was changed and the mission was successfully accomplished. You could say because of the bravery of the corporate to put his hand up. Well, you could say because of the leadership listening skills of the general plus the environment he had created that gave the corporal the confidence that he would be listened to.
Perception is reality. What people hear is their reality. Just have to actively listen and check that what they say is what their people hear. Now, some people will say that leadership, a leadership leopard can’t change his spots. Postcode, there’ll be such a shortage of jobs that bosses will be able to get away with murder. All three. This isn’t relevant to everybody. Leadership in a factory is very different between a professional services company. Huh. But you may agree that there is a new normal and that we can’t use the old rules from the old normal to engage and retain talent, to measure increase productivity or to inspire creative thinking and innovation in the normal, normal new rules.