How to resolve issues and overcome obstacles to a high performance culture.

Welcome to the fourth in a series of articles based on a recent OxTalks podcast in which Chris Oxley (Managing Director, Oxley & Partners) and Bradley Honnor (MatchFit Managing Director) discuss leadership and development training.

In this forth episode, Chris explores the MatchFit CLIMB model, how it can be used to resolve issues, remove obstacles and help build a high performance culture.

Chris: Part of the MatchFit suite is your CLIMB program. I wonder if you could walk us through that in more detail?

Bradley: CLIMB is based around what we consider to be the five pillars of performance psychology. CLIMB is an acronym, one that is very useful for thinking about people wanting to progress – a climb is a good analogy as much as an acronym. But the acronym is about ‘What is it you need to do to move from where you are to the next level?’ So C is about commitment. You need to decide what you’re going to do and really commit to that.

The L is for leadership. You need to have the leadership qualities to get yourself and or your team to do the things that you need to make that commitment happen.

And then you have intensity, which is the spark, the passion to begin something and to feel the enthusiasm and the drive you need to work towards that commitment.

And then motivation is the M. Motivation is interesting. It’s different. It’s different from commitment. Motivation is very much about sustained behaviours and finding what you need to find in yourself and others to be resilient and do the thing we talked about earlier, where you’re pragmatically and systematically approaching something for a period of time.

And the B is about belief, and then we’re down to a mindset. We need to believe in what we’ve committed towards is possible and we have the skills and tools and resources to get ourselves there.

So we shape our methodology around that commitment, leadership, intensity, motivation and belief, and if all those things are in place for an individual, team and organisation, then there’s a very good chance they’re going to get themselves to where they want to be.

Chris: Typically, what is an objective for a business that you see, what are people looking to improve?

Bradley: That’s a good question. What we find is that leaders drive success. And behaviours drive leaders. So the type of things that seem to be in the way of really effective Senior Leadership Teams (SLT) or leaders are operational issues. Things like systems aren’t integrated effectively because there’s been a merger or an acquisition and two cultures have come together and the processes and procedures are different.

Of course, there are operational aspects and efficiencies that can be tweaked and done differently to make the organisation more harmonised and effective. But it’s people that do all of those things. It’s people that will make that stuff happen, and it’s people that will implement your strategic plan, and it’s people that will work towards your overall vision.

So we find that very often, some of the most profound inhibitors of achieving greater success or growth or whatever the objective might be for an organisation—which could be financial or acquiring other businesses—often what gets in the way of doing that most effectively is the communication between the people involved and their understanding of their role within that.

So if I break that down a little bit, if there are tensions between certain individuals or different functions within the business, or people not collaborating or sharing information, then clearly that’s going to inhibit that harmonious move forward as a team that you would like, because people are working in silos. So we do find that one of the key focuses areas for SLTs is often what the relationships are like within the team. We look at how they can communicate better with each other, how they can resolve differences that are inhibiting how people work together, how they collaborate or share, what fears people have that are not making them more open and transparent with the information they have or the information that they need. We find at MatchFit that our work very much has a people focus. The collaboration between senior teams very often is quite difficult because you get lots of egos, very senior people with lots of experience and their ways of doing things. They have operated like that for many years and there’s a real clash of methodology and often personalities.

I heard an expression the other day, and thought, wow, that absolutely sums it up. It was: ‘disagree and move on’. Let’s unpick what it means. When we’re having a board meeting, for example, and something is being discussed and we need to come to a consensus and make a decision. As an individual I do, of course, have the right to be—and really should be — very clear about my view on a particular direction that we’re going to go in as a team. And if I disagree, I should make that known. But then what I should also do is, if the majority of the board want to take a certain direction that I don’t agree with personally, disagree and move on. What I should not do, is sabotage it or communicate it to my team in a way that makes them not want to engage. I need to fully embrace the board’s direction and engage with delivering that. For me, that’s a real maturity in leadership, and it is sometimes lacking. People feel that their personal opinion is more important than the team’s decision in terms of the direction they’re taking. And I think it shows real maturity for leaders if they can disagree and move on. It’s a wonderful phrase.

Chris: That’s really interesting. You bring up the M&A side of things, and in particular, the lack of transparency that can happen when two businesses come together. I’ve had these conversations before because quite often I’ll have people reach out to me who are looking for new positions, and the common reason they’re looking for a new position is because there’s been a merger or acquisition, and it’s not going how they’d like. And much of the time it’s because, whilst they might now be one entity, there still seems to be significant rivalry within the business and a real lack of sharing information or even wanting to collaborate. That’s certainly an area that needs developing and it sounds like you’re touching in that space now.

Bradley: Yes, we’re doing a lot in that space, and you’re bang on with what you’ve outlined there. That often happens. You get two completely different cultures coming together, two different ways of working coming together. And what can you do about that, why does that happen? I think no one on this call would disagree that very often, change isn’t managed particularly well. We have expectations around how the communication should be. Very often it isn’t like that. Sometimes we’re missing aspects of why things aren’t being communicated. So, for example, we can’t always share who’s buying who or when or how much for or what’s going to happen and so on because it’s confidential and can affect share prices. That said there are things that can be communicated that sometimes aren’t.

So how those transitions and mergers and acquisitions are managed is certainly an issue. In reality it will always will be an issue because you have that individual experience of what that transaction was like specifically for me. And it’s impossible to get that right for everybody. That dynamic will always exist but it’s then what do you do with that when you have two different cultures working together, and different ways of operating, and people not sharing information. It’s often left to circumstantial chance that things will settle down in the end, and people and teams will find their way. And what that does is allow norms to form, and some of those norms will be effective and work for the business. But some won’t be, like people working in silos or not sharing information.

So what we need to do in that situation is drive more productive norms. We need the norms to be formed deliberately, as opposed to taking place due to time and circumstances and letting events take the lead. Why doesn’t that happen? It doesn’t happen because people are doing their job. They’re working hard to deliver what they’re meant to be working on. And what they’re not necessarily doing is stepping back and looking at the dynamics between the different cultures and teams, and thinking about specifically, how do we engage with these people to bring them together in a more cohesive and collaborative way? Which is why MatchFit works. Because that is our focus, and that’s what’s interesting. So it’s a very good example of why a consultancy like MatchFit can be so effective. It’s not that we know more than everybody else. It’s the fact that everybody else is actually doing their job and everyone’s really, really busy, but what people aren’t doing is taking that step back and going, right, let’s look at how everybody’s getting on and how everybody’s feeling about the merger or the acquisition. And what can we do to make people feel more secure or clear or how do we eradicate duplication and so on. That’s, the stuff we’re working on. And I think that’s a great example you highlighted – where people feel a lack of clarity in their role. They’re in a team they weren’t in before; they’ve got a leader they didn’t have before, the objectives and vision of the business are different. It’s a completely different existential event for people generally, to really go through something so significant. And that piece of, how am I in that and how do I operate within this new world order is very often lost and left to chance. Some people navigate that more effectively than others, but it should be picked up and dealt with deliberately as part of the process.

Chris: I couldn’t agree more. I’m in quite a unique position, and the super-common phrase that I always hear is ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’. But it seems almost a simple fix, like to send out some reassurance to the business and individually. Can a business not sit down and highlight the positives of why this merger might be happening, and start to work with people and what they are feeling about it. And engaging with the employees more instead of exactly what you’ve said, just leaving it to chance – those who fall out, fall out, those who don’t, don’t. Because the reality is, you’re always going to get a few people who were just one nudge away from moving anyway. And it might not even be anything to do with the business. It might just be they’ve been somewhere for 15 years, and they don’t want to finish their career there. They want to see how another business runs. Maybe I’m being ignorant here, but it seems almost like there’s a simple approach, like just having that human conversation with somebody to try and understand their feelings about the potential merger and trying to maximise the positives of why this might be happen. But then at the same time showing empathy about why somebody might be feeling negative about the situation. And I want to really focus on this, because I think it’s super relevant, especially in wealth management, because there is so much consolidation going on at the moment. But what are the key things that companies are just missing? Is there anything basic that’s just being missed?

Bradely: It’s definitely more complicated than we might imagine at times. If an organisation has 10 people, it’s pretty easy to communicate to those 10. But when you have 4,000 staff, they might be in different countries, speak different languages, the culture might be very different, there could be different levels of seniority involved that can be in the know to a greater or lesser degree, or to no extent at all. It’s much more difficult to communicate in that way, and certainly to have those personal conversations.

So what we see is almost an over communication, where I receive email after email or newsletter after newsletter about what’s going on about every single detail within the business, including the merger. And I’m busy. I’m doing my job. So I don’t read it all, or I can’t read it all. So I miss a lot of this communication. So one of the considerations is how does an organisation do better and more targeted communication so that Bradley receives stuff that’s relevant to him specifically. So if I get communications, it’s definitely relevant to me, and I need to read it rather than the wider piece that would be nice if I had time, but it’s not so relevant to me. We see a lot of that and need to think about how we balance over communication with under communication. And how we get that more targeted communication. That’s certainly key.

And then the more personal side of things is that it’s very difficult to do that touch point with people, where you sit down and say: How are you doing? What do you need to understand? How are you feeling about what’s going on? Are you lacking clarity? And let me help you understand in a bit more detail. For that, we need to rely on two things – good leaders communicating that down to their managers and saying: have those conversations, you’re responsible for these individuals, with the expectation that they will do it. And then we need those managers to be equipped to have those conversations appropriately. And again, some people are better at doing that than others.

So what you typically see is pockets of people that have an understanding of what’s going on because their manager is a good communicator, and then pockets of people that don’t, because their managers aren’t so good. So the leadership role really is to ensure that those conversations are taking place. You could critique leadership at times for that, and you could critique the managers at times. But the only scalable model that you could have is to ensure people are taking responsibility for their own teams and creating clarity. And if they’re not getting it, they need to be asking upwards and making sure they are clear. And that would put people in a position where they’re feeling less uncertain and they have more clarity about what’s going on.

We hope that you enjoyed this conversation and remember look out for Episode 4 soon. You can listen to the whole conversation here The Transformative Impact of Personalised Development with Bradley Honnor