Helping people across the threshold from leadership to mentorship is our specialty at Roy Group. We were honoured late last year to work with teachers and administrators from Handsworth Secondary and Carson Graham Secondary schools in School District 44 (North Vancouver) in doing just that.

In the wake of the group’s participation in The Leader’s Discipline™, Handsworth Vice-Principal Mark Barrett wrote a reflection of his experience. (We’ve condensed it, redacted a few things that might give away the Roy Group secret sauce, and republished it below.) Mark, thanks for sharing your voice.

If you are an alumnus of one of our programs, we invite you to submit your reflections and stories of your leadership journey. We are all on this road together, and there’s richness in learning from each other’s lived experiences.

Until next time, remember: You are the work. And there’s no finer investment.

 

The Leader’s Discipline™ — by Mark Barrett

This month I had the privilege of participating in a professional development opportunity with a coaching and leadership organization called Roy Group. Twenty-one participants, including teachers and administrators, from Handsworth and Carson Graham Secondary gathered over an immersive three days to engage an experience called The Leader’s Discipline™. This work was facilitated by Roy Group founder, Ian Chisholm, as well as Carson Graham Principal, Ian Kennedy.

Much of what we were to discover later was shrouded in a bit of mystery, but the few instructions we did receive beforehand included to clear our calendar for the event, to plan to leave our cell phone off and emails unattended, and finally to make sure we came prepared to discuss a professional problem of practice. Oh, and to dress for activity!

We began with a Wednesday evening dinner that brought the groups from both schools to break bread and build relationships in anticipation of Thursday and Friday. Each participant introduced themselves and talked a little bit about their learning intentions for the experience. Ian Chisholm, or Chiz, as we called him, spoke a bit about his professional journey as well, and how it brought him to work with us today. A few of the aforementioned instructions were provided and we all left looking forward to the next day.

On Thursday morning we met at the North Shore Tennis Club. Although having lived in North Van for most of my life, I’d never actually been inside the facility, so it was neat to see. To begin the day we were each given a notebook, pen, and a series of custom stickers that included quotes, concepts and key ideas we would be working with throughout the day.

The first idea we played with was what it means to be a ‘mentor’; that a mentor is name you don’t give yourself – it needs to be given to you. Our first activity, without giving away the details, was designed to illustrate how being an engaged and attentive listener is such an important skill. And that way we conduct ourselves has real effect on those we interact with.

It was from this activity that I knew what we were learning was going to be absolutely applicable to my daily work; much of my day comprises brief five-minute interactions with colleagues, parents and students. And my ability to be dialled in for each of those conversations has a significant impact on my effectiveness as support in my school. How you conduct yourself is so important. We learned that conduct is where everything inside of you meets everything outside of you, and that the way you choose to conduct yourself creates an atmosphere in others.

With colleagues in the school, it’s important that the atmosphere I’m creating is one of safety… but not comfort. Particularly with all the changes happening in education, it’s more important than ever that educational leaders are encouraging movement from comfort through discomfort – but from a place of safety. High-performance professionals who are heavily engaged in their work are not comfortable.

Through our second activity we started to explore what meaningful feedback looks like. This is where we also began to examine coaching as a vehicle for feedback, mentorship and, ultimately, leadership.

In the afternoon this understanding was further refined. For the purposes of the first afternoon activity, we participants were arranged in trios, with a coachee (player), coach, and supercoach who would provide feedback to the coach on their performance. Coaches used something called The Question Funnel with their players — a series of questions designed to increase awareness and focus attention. Meanwhile, the supercoaches, who were observing the work of the coaches with the coaches, followed The Feedback Model. This model employs three simple but powerful questions that guide the conversation.

Once the coach had the opportunity to provide reflections of their own, then the supercoach was able to offer their thoughts. The ideas we had established earlier about quality feedback needing to be more informative than encouraging were also reinforced through this activity. We each had an opportunity to try all three roles, and from this activity I learned that as a coach/mentor it’s important to be highly attentive, to allow the student to define their own goals, and to remember that learning is a reflective process that works best when people feel safe.

For homework, we were challenged to carve out an authentic and meaningful pause: to take a break from the day, and to make a conscious effort to relax at some point between when we ended our Thursday and began our Friday. (Unfortunately for the Handsworth participants this also happened to be our Parent-Teacher Interview evening. But needless to say, we did our best!)

On Friday we moved locations from the tennis courts to a seminar room at a local rec centre. The focus for Friday was to take the theory and concepts we had learned, and bring them to bear on a real problem of practice we were dealing with. Essentially it was to bridge the theory with the real world and to make it explicitly applicable.

Our first activity was to form new trios of coachee, coach, and supercoach, but this time we weren’t refining tennis skills, but rather coaching our colleagues through real work issues. Ian and Chiz provided us with an exemplar to start, and then we broke out in to different spaces to work. It was a wonderful opportunity to practice using these new tools we had just been equipped with, in a real-world situation.

Another tool which was added to our belt to work through these issues was the GROW model. Each of the four categories includes a series of questions to be used to drill down into a problem and help work towards a possible resolution.

As a coachee, it was insightful to have a coach who could take my issue in unanticipated directions with their questions. It forced me to examine it from a new perspective. I also noted that I didn’t need my coach to have all the answers – the coach is not going to be the source of the solution; they are just there to facilitate my own reflection and to take it in different directions.

As we wound down the experience and debriefed some of our takeaways, we discussed how leaders don’t create followers, they create other leaders. And that good coaching is really about having the right conversation before, and having the right conversation after.

We were challenged to identify ten topics we hope to be coached on, and by whom, and to write them down. Lastly, we set some tangible goals for ourselves, moving forward, and committed to practicing our new coaching and leadership skills in some way. For me, I’m pleased to say I’ve already brought these lessons to bear on my own practice by using The Feedback Model in conducting performance reviews. I also feel better equipped than ever to navigate some of the complex relationships and difficult conversations I regularly encounter in my role.

This was a wonderful professional development experience, and I would highly recommend it for anyone in a position of leadership, or who works in a highly relational industry. It was great to have the chance to work with the team from Carson Graham as well. I’m looking forward to integrating these skills even more into my daily work, as I know they’ll serve me well. Thanks to Ian Chisholm, Ian Kennedy and the Handsworth and Carson Graham teams.

Fall 2019 update:

Mark writes: We’ve been integrating the language and skills honed during that experience throughout our school. “What’s working? What’s tricky? What would you do differently?” have become staples in our conversations with staff and students.

 

By Keith Driscoll

A little over six years ago, I and my colleagues on the management team at St. Michaels University School (SMUS) participated in a Roy Group experience called The Leader’s Discipline™. This two-day experience was the gateway to both a personal and organizational journey that is still continuing today.

It was during this experience that I began to see how my own philosophy could be best aligned with our organization’s to help foster high-performance teams — teams that utilize the many strengths of their members while honouring them as individuals. The foundation of the work would be implementing my particular coaching approach to leadership.

We recognized that, although our function is to lead and educate, it is our teams and students that ultimately have to perform — similar to a coach and a sports team, where the players play the game; or a conductor and an orchestra, where the musicians play the instruments. The success of the team hinges on its ability to execute in those moments that count: it is their actions — not the leader’s actions — that will affect the field around them. Therefore, as both leaders and teachers, we have some choices as to how we work with people to position them best for these moments.

Consider Roy Group’s definition of coaching as “the intentional positioning of others to perform at incrementally higher standards, to learn more from their experiences as they emerge, and to be increasingly engaged in their endeavours.”

When applied to one’s working relationships, this process not only helps in achieving the stated goals of a position or role, it also intrinsically creates a culture of ongoing learning and collaboration between both leader and team, and among team members. It does so by creating a space for dialogue that is growth-focused and low in judgment. The elegance of this approach is that it simply can become the way that we lead — every day.

At SMUS, we began by providing workshops on coaching and providing feedback to those who were interested. Management team members were allotted two Roy Group coaching hours per month that they could use, gift, swap or collect to use later for whatever they needed.

Gradually, leaders began to incorporate scheduled feedback meetings with their teams and to employ the principles learned in these workshops and through their coaching sessions. At first, efforts felt scripted and at times even artificial. However, as we practiced together, we honed those formal meetings into sessions conducted with ease and elegance, now comfortable with the beliefs, language and approach. Over time, we began to use coaching tools more informally, with people asking colleagues for coaching on the challenges, problems, idea and aspirations that landed in front of us.

This six-year coaching experience with Roy Group has provided SMUS with a foundation for better facilitation, leadership development of student leaders and improved interactions with our stakeholders. Ultimately, we have learned that leading means helping others be their best.

 

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Keith Driscoll is Director of Residence and Student Life at St. Michaels University School in Victoria, BC. Keith is also the winner of the MacGregor Cup, Roy Group’s highest honour, which each year acknowledges a remarkable individual whose leadership development activities have made a significant impact on their communities and organizations.

For upcoming sessions of The Leader’s Discipline, see Open Courses.

By Ian Chisholm

Five years ago, I sat across from Dave Mowat (former CEO, ATB Financial) at a long table in Edmonton’s Caffè Sorrentino. What made the Italian spread in front of us particularly rewarding is that Dave and I had each captained a team of ATBers that afternoon in Caffè Sorrentino’s kitchen, preparing this meal. Sitting down to actually eat it represented the ultimate phase of a very colourful, competitive and energetic duel between two fairly affable captains with a strong preference for winning, and equally psychologically prepared to do whatever it took to “get up in their opponent’s kitchen.”

Perhaps it was prompted by the intensity of our duel, or the Italian context, or the amount of time we took to share the meal together — I’m not sure — but Dave began telling me about a rehabilitation community in the province of Rimini in Italy called San Patrignano (“Sanpa”). It was a special place that he had visited in person a few years before.

It was hard to imagine that Dave’s description of Sanpa was actually possible. He described to me his first impression of the dining hall, and seeing the impeccable standards to which that building had been constructed in order to house all of the community members together for meals. He told us about the detail with which the tables had been set for 2,000 people, each place setting carefully laid so that it would send a message straight to the heart of every person there that they belonged, they were loved and they were important.

Dave also told me that, if I believed in the power of enterprise, pride in one’s work and the dignity inherent in human endeavour, I had no choice but to go and see Sanpa for myself. I could tell that he meant it, so I did a little homework.

San Patrignano was started almost 40 years ago, a corner-of-the-desk project of businessman Vincenzo Muccioli. Muccioli credited the rising numbers of addictions in Italy to a society struggling with a loss of important values. He believed the answer required “life-positive” solutions to bring people back to experiencing just how beautiful life is.

While Sanpa has a colourful history with plenty of triumphs and tribulations, it is best assessed by its legacy today: nearly 2,000 residents at any time, all of whom are recovering from serious addiction. They do not pay a single euro for their cure, and the program’s success rate is estimated to be north of 70%. Over 40 years, that means thousands and thousands of people who have their lives back.

* * *

On May 29, Anne-Marie, our sons Oscar and Jameson, and I arrived at the front gates of San Patrignano to spend the day. Two resident guides who had volunteered to spend the entire day with us welcomed us warmly.

There is no program or process that people are moved through at Sanpa; rather, belonging to this community creates the context for individualized healing which on average lasts just shy of four years per resident. Vitality occurs through a carefully nurtured passion for one’s work, one’s internal experience, balance and life in community.

The 42M-euro operation includes practice groups comprising approximately 10 individuals who live and work together in 54 areas across 22 industries. Each group produces a top-shelf product, service or experience. They create world-class cheeses, specialty meats and wine. They raise first-class horses and train award-winning dogs. Their graphic design and commercial printing operation runs day and night and is a multi-million-dollar euro operation. Recently Sanpa was awarded the contract for hand-screened wallpaper for a 1,000-room hotel in Mumbai. They also run 5-star restaurants, including what has been recognized nationally as one of the top 10 pizzerias in the country. All of the shops are united by their members’ common commitment to the highest quality of craft and a deep desire to be well, addiction-free and a contributing member of society.

We would need a very long dinner together for us to communicate to you all that we observed and experienced. The best way for me to portray my experience is to tell you that I was on the threshold of tears (in a wonderful way) for hours at a time. The beauty of the human spirit revealed itself to us around every corner of this remarkable community.

Personal impact aside, I was on the lookout for some leadership principles for our clients, a group of leaders who pay as much attention to their organizational culture as they do to their strategy for the future. What kind of leadership does it take to ground a place like Sanpa? What is its guiding philosophy? How do they sustain the intensity? How has Sanpa grown to be so special in a mere 40 years? What characteristics of Sanpa can Roy Group and our clients seek to emulate in our own operations?

With these questions in mind, I plucked out the following four themes:

1. Taking Initiative Without Hesitation

One thing that you will notice when you go to Sanpa — see how I did that? There: you’re going! — is the immediacy with which people learn to craft beautiful moments. When people are in conversation over lunch – SNAP! – that and only that is what they are doing. No distractions, no cell phones; even the coated waiters (who are residents themselves) are mindful and don’t interrupt.

When someone can’t reach a tool they need in the workshop – SNAP! – someone hands it to them.

When someone asks for help – SNAP! – a community member will follow them without asking how they will be assisting.

When a group of (obviously) non-Italian-speaking guests nervously crosses the threshold – SNAP! – people stop what they are doing to look them right in the eyes, smile and say, “Ciao!”

In each moment at Sanpa, there is no hesitation: only presence, focus and a deeply practiced balancing of all that is going on. During our tour, the residents were present and gave a clear response to whatever was happening around us. It appeared they have learned (and are learning) how to weed out all of the nonsense and clutter that gets in the way of their (and our) ability to create a quality moment.

2. Engaging Conflict for All It’s Worth

One of the most fascinating aspects that we took away from our experience was Sanpa’s transformational use of conflict.

With people being in community, living in close quarters with each other and working together to attain such high standards, conflict is not only inevitable, it is the magic sauce — and in Italy, that’s saying something! In addition to uncovering opportunities for finding a better way forward, emerging interpersonal conflicts provide the fodder for all residents to convert a deeply engrained pattern of escaping what is difficult, to engaging what is important.

The very nature of conflict requires the parties involved to articulate themselves, outline personal boundaries and endeavour to understand other and self to a much deeper degree. At Sanpa, conflict is recognized as the arena in which we all deepen our awareness, re-find right action, advance, and learn to do so without judgment.

3. Valuing Apprenticeship and Mastery

Another aspect that you will notice is the seriousness with which people take their work, their learning and their craftsmanship. After the smile and the “Ciao!”, members return to whatever piece of work lies in front of them. Whether graphic designer, vintner, butcher, furniture-maker or chef, each has a visible desire for what they are working on to be better than any that have come before: a deeper expression of practice, and one step closer to masterpiece.

Where does this high degree of discretionary effort come from? By design, it comes from inside. No one is paid for their work. No one is acknowledged or rewarded publicly for their accomplishments. Consultation and specific feedback on pieces of work is sought and offered, but in the absence of any flattery or flowery encouragement from others. Intrinsic motivation is awakened, kindled and stoked, with people knowing deep down that they themselves are giving all they have and by doing so, are responsible for unleashing their own potential.

It looks, at times, as if their lives are on the line — which, in a very real way, they are. The community thrives on the intensity of each person’s journey towards mastery. Over 40 years, Sanpa has learned that neuroplasticity — our brain’s ability to rewire, change, heal and reset itself around the trauma and damage it has experienced — takes time, patience, practice, repetition, honesty and immersion within a totally new setting.

4. Setting Standards That Defy Reason

Interestingly, whatever work is in front of an individual is relatively new to them.

Residents are placed into working groups bearing little to no resemblance to their former livelihoods. One of our guides who had started in the dog-training barns had never even had a pet; the other had come from a world of high-risk investment. After beginning in the swine barns, our guide was now in charge of marketing Sanpa’s Barrique Project, which asked 40 designers from Milan and Florence how woods from wine barrels could have a “third life.” The answers were breathtakingly beautiful. The task now for the woodworking and marketing practice groups at Sanpa is to replicate these luxury pieces and to create a worldwide demand for it.

Newness to task is no excuse for a substandard product at Sanpa: the standards are zealously high. This is no therapeutic activity designed to keep people busy for the afternoon craft time. Learning curves are steep and intense – and there is a lot at stake. This is business: sophisticated, high-standard, luxury business. Every corner of the property is impeccably maintained. Its farm machinery is mostly Ferrari and Lamborghini. Its buildings are beautiful and every corner of the property is maintained by the Landscaping and Gardening practice groups like palace grounds. One is reminded often that this place exists on amore per la qualità — the love of quality — in both our inner and outer lives.

Commercial activities like this project generate 18M euro per year toward the 42M-euro annual operating budget. Sanpa accepts zero government funding, finding it easier to exist without the fickle, complicated, distracting, political and short-term nature of government funding. The rest of its annual operating budget is provided by friends — wealthy, powerful and influential friends — who are drawn to Sanpa’s story, its standards and its significance. Many of these friends spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve at Sanpa for their own inspiration and recovery. Thousands more visit each year and become supporters — all starting with a welcome as warm as the one we received.

* * *

Going on a field trip like this, on the advice of a good friend, was a reminder in itself to keep venturing out into the world to find incredible stories that will leave a dent in you. We toured most of the day and did not see all of San Patrignano, which means we will undoubtedly go back someday to learn more from all the Sanpa community is doing.

The lessons from that day continue to inspire and inform our approach to the work of leadership development. We are actively weeding out our tendency to hesitate and / or avoid conflict. We are hungrier to learn new things and are setting our standards higher than is reasonable. We are also building time for friendship into our day-to-day operations. And we are eating better food, with the kind of people who tell you that you have to go and see something to believe it.

If you are planning on being in Italy and would like to visit San Patrignano, please be in touch and we can introduce you to their International Coordinator. And then we can share the wonders of the experience (over dinner) when you return.

 

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Ian Chisholm is a founding partner of Roy Group.

By Ian Chisholm

Small, large, quirky, established, entrepreneurial, institutional — these are some of the adjectives used to describe organizations that are as varied as the people who work inside them. Yet often this wide array of adjectives is unable to communicate what it actually feels like to work where we do. That’s when we reach to the top of the language shelf for a metaphor.

The subtleties that everyday language fails to convey are often better expressed in a metaphor: management describes their current project as a trainwreck; a protégé labels her Mentor as a Jedi; a disenchanted team defines their office environment as a nest of vipers; a journalist writes how the marriage between two countries is being tested; a team refers to the next phase of their business as Everest; a school faculty terms themselves a family.

In the realm of symbol, where one thing represents another, the spare language of poetry has the ability to capture the multiple layers of meaning inherent in a situation in just a few words. A metaphor allows the listener to instantly grasp a deeper, richer meaning and to experience the feeling behind a concept. Someone using a metaphor in conversation is expressing a desire to have the listener fully understand all the aspects and unique complexities of an evolving situation. We should pay attention.

While there are boundless options for metaphorically capturing the essence of our workplaces, as leaders we would be wise to choose our metaphors carefully for, once chosen, a metaphor has the power to shape our work and to shape us.

Back to Basics: The Metaphor of Family

Family is an enticing metaphor that has surfaced more and more across sectors in the last few years. Highly accessible and easy for anyone to relate to, since we all come from one form of family or another, the family metaphor is common in business today. But for thousands of years, family was not a metaphor at all. Family was the work unit of society: the family farm, the ma and pa shop, Vendor & Son and Acme Bros. These familiar shingles have hung throughout our history, clearly signalling that families of related people routinely worked together.

Today we’ve moved on from the actual to the metaphorical family in the workplace. We have cast unrelated people into roles where they work closely together, as “family.”

Why has family re-emerged as a symbol to engage people in the workplace?

We suspect that, with up to four generations working together and attempting to find function in their differences, organizations are trying on this most familiar of organizational metaphors. We suspect that the popularity of the family metaphor stems from organizational leaders reaching out to engage Millennials — the generation that has made it clear that they value balance, strong social connections, active feedback loops, and an emotional connection to their work and manager.

Undoubtedly, choosing the family metaphor to describe our work together is an attempt to connect with the themes around families that we hold dear. People care about each other in families. People protect each other in families. People share in families, grow and develop in families. People in families are deeply — even unreasonably — invested in each other’s success. At their core (under varying levels of crust and quirkiness), families are often tender and tenacious. We choose family as a metaphor because we believe we want to create and work in an organizational system that is loving and resilient.

Sound like a great idea? Just be careful.

Families, as fundamental to our existence as they are, have their shadow side: they can be painful, awkward and irrational. As adults, there are few of us who do not wrestle sooner or later with family-of-origin issues, the barrage of hang-ups, fears and mental models, authority figures, and/or learned helplessness that contribute to the stew of dynamics shaping who we believe we are.

People also frequently hide things in families. We sidestep uncomfortable topics so that all can save face. Often there is a strange sense of avoided accountability: “Oh, that. That’s just Uncle Fred being Uncle Fred.” Or, “It’s just always been that way.” Families can come with all sorts of unfair obligations, unchallenged truths, and compromised autonomies. Bad habits, mimicked patterns and suboptimal survival mechanisms are often acquired in families. We might be prepared to lie, cheat or steal for our family. Our souls take some bruising in families; it’s an inescapable dynamic of being human.

And then, one day, in order to fully leverage our own personal sovereignty, we leave our family (in a real or metaphorical sense) to begin our own lives. So why would we want to model our organizations after an entity that people have to leave to fully become themselves? Do we really want to work for “the family”?

Side note: There’s a reason that organized crime uses the family metaphor to get things done.

The tough thing about families is that someone has to be parental and occupy the throne of power. But in business, the metaphor of leader as parent has several serious limitations when it comes to describing the kind of stewardship organizations need today. Placed on a pedestal of biblical proportions, parents are not questioned, they are revered. What mummy or daddy says, goes.

Parents are never subjected to performance reviews, or given honest feedback or encouraged to admit that they need to learn more about their craft. We position them as unquestionable authorities who will tell us what is proper and to be valued, and what is not. Parents are not allowed to show weakness or to admit fear. Instead, we believe in the Santa Clauses they swear to be real and believe that we are safe because our parents are in control.

While the metaphor of family is neither exclusively good nor bad, we need to realize that, as Chief Poetic Officers of our organizations, when we brand ourselves with a metaphor, we create possibilities and also impose limitations where our good intentions may be matched with unintended consequences. As leaders, we must be alert to both potential outcomes.

Going Tribal: The Metaphor of Intentional Community

At Roy Group, we prefer the metaphor of tribe for organizations. At its best, it is a colourful metaphor, one with character, ritual and mystery.

In an ideal tribe, autonomy is not traded in for accountability. Individuals have responsibilities to the collective, and within those responsibilities are able to leverage themselves into the work to create a virtuous cycle that assists the self with personal growth and knowledge. This is a far cry from participating in an ongoing vicious cycle that subjugates the self to unconscious familial patterns.

As Seth Godin points out in his brilliant little book Tribes, modern-day tribes have been appearing for several years now, largely due to social media’s capacity to introduce and unite people who share a passion. We like the metaphor of tribe better than the metaphor of family because it embodies some of the strongest, best elements of the family while allowing more personal autonomy. It also invites adult-to-adult, rather than parent-to-child, relationships to flourish.

Defined by a blend of three key characteristics, the paradigm of a modern-day tribe proffers an exciting new metaphor to which our teams and organizations may aspire.

1. Tribes are fundamentally about something bigger than themselves.

Some noble promise has been made. Tribes have a purpose they pursue with focus. They are protecting something, questing for something, yearning for something. They stand for something that unites the whole.

2. Tribes value the archetype of the elder or tribal leader within the community.

An elder embodies the spirit of the community’s purpose at what feels like a cellular level. Tribal leaders have no need to explain their values or philosophy: they wear their intentions on their sleeve. They are teachers, advisors, and confidantes to the next generation. They invest in the next generation. Tribal leaders are trusted and become more potent with each organizational challenge. They invite tribal members to present their finest selves and make their finest contribution, continually fostering in others the ability to take up their own personal leadership challenges.

3. Tribes use tools, rituals and ceremonies to deal with arising concerns.

Even though the content may be new, tribes have a predictable system of practices at hand for responding to issues. They know what kinds of gatherings or discussions are needed to plan for the future, respond to a crisis or address a wrongdoing. Tribes convene whatever conversation is necessary in order to realign them with their noble promise. Moreover, there is a functional transparency of how business is conducted for all tribal members to see, which holds them accountable to each other. There is less nonsense in tribes: the costs of not staying true are too high.

Are we prepared to honestly examine our shadows, old and new?

Crafting this article enabled our Roy Group team to take our own advice: we weighed the shadow side of a modern-day tribe against its strengths before completely signing on.

We foresaw how:

Thus, even when we embrace the modern-day tribe as a metaphor, we must keep our radar keen for signals of corruption, arrogance and insularity within our organizations.

What would it look like if your team grew into the vision of the high-quality team that has been wavering on the horizon?

As a leader in your own organization, you can connect with the upcoming generation to discover your own organizational metaphor by engaging them in a conversation. What adjectives describe how it feels to work together now? How would they like it to feel? What metaphor would invite your team to perform more masterfully, to learn more voraciously, and to engage more completely? What metaphor “represents the world that you inhabit now and the next, larger world that awaits you” at the same time?

Find an imaginative way to convene that conversation.

And choose wisely.

 

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Ian Chisholm is a founding partner of Roy Group.

By Bob Chartier

It’s the reward-and-recognition season again. Chances are high that mugs will go once more to individuals and teams who lead the charge during one crisis or another. Listen for it: fires, floods, and disasters (literal or figurative) are often the focus for our award ceremonies.

In your work life, if you have ever had the opportunity to take part in any sort of crisis response, you will know that people say, “It was our finest moment.” There is just something about blatant adversity that brings out the best in us.

I would also bet that, a short three months after the crisis, the same folks would say their workplace was back to the same old, same old. Oh, sure, people are still working hard, doing a good job and getting the work done, but with nowhere near the spirit, energy, and personal accountability that arose during the crisis.

So, the question becomes, How do we invite the same engagement that appears during a crisis into the everyday?

Lately, I have been working with an interesting leader who has been wrestling with this question. Ryan Jestin heads up the roads department for the City of Calgary and was front and centre with Mayor Naheed Nenshi during the devastating floods in 2013. In any crisis situation, transportation becomes a key factor, and Ryan’s team of over 1,000 frontline public servants responded to that flood with an ingenuity and focus never before seen, even by them. Engagement was through the roof. People felt that what they did was important.

In returning to business as usual, Ryan and his team expected that this “high” might wane a bit. What they did not expect was a complete return to the engagement levels they had before the crisis.

Ryan is ex-military and has an ability to lean into the punch of a tough conversation. He opened up the discussion, engaging in an after-action review, and decided to challenge his leadership team with the question, “Where did our extraordinary teamwork go?”

Using a collection of engagement methods I had shared with him, Ryan convened the conversation with his entire team. Here are some of our key findings that the conversation unearthed:

People capable of high performance can be engaged less than 50% for all sorts of reasons. Multiply that across your entire team and you have a seriously compromised capacity to deliver something excellent. This dynamic is presented very clearly in a one-year study conducted by Gallup around employee engagement that found 28% of employees were engaged, 54% were not engaged, and 17% were actively not engaged.

In other words, well over half of the workforce is either underperforming, or actively undermining productivity.

What we came to understand through our conversations with Ryan’s team was that if an organization was typically around 40% engaged during regular times, in a crisis situation the engagement scores would spike into the high 90s. Not magic — just people being fully engaged, counted on (a nice way to see accountability) and aware that what they were noticing and contributing was important.

How do we maintain the levels of engagement that we see in crisis situations in our everyday work affairs? Crisis is by its very nature unsustainable; it is temporary. Real engagement has to be fully sustainable, built into the everyday, and is best done through the everyday practice of those leaders who know how important it is. Engagement work must be more purposeful than serendipitous, more strategic than tactical, and more cultural than policy.

It’s a long game, not a fast hit. And if you are not getting stronger and stronger, you are going to lose ground.

Sustainable engagement is about having rituals that people can count on that allow them to have the conversations that they need to have every day — exactly the way we do in a crisis situation. Good intelligence, no-nonsense feedback and status reports, coordination of resources, a suspension of silos, and maybe most of all (around the edges): personal check-ins with people about how they are really doing. Regardless of the content that we need to tackle, we know that the processes exist for us to make sense of it together in real time and act accordingly.

The slow and steady leader wins the long game, using tools and practices every day, developing their own people to convene these conversations in a cost-effective way, and quietly but firmly building systemic engagement where the lasting difference is made — in the everyday.

 

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Bob Chartier is Roy Group’s learning lead on engagement.

For upcoming sessions of Tools of Engagement, see Open Courses.