Matthew Emerson, Founder and Managing Director, Blackmore Four
There are many things in business that need attention ‘right now’. Irrespective of what is happening around us, running a successful business is complex and demanding, and it’s easy to move from one critical priority to the next, believing or hoping that everyone’s effort is contributing to your business’ performance.
Right now, however, many businesses are trying to work out how to survive, return to profitability or, if you have had a positive COVID bounce, sustain levels of performance that may have only happened because of extraordinary circumstances.
The fundamental anchor here is business performance and defining what that looks like in the challenging and changing circumstances of your industry or sector. Everything else has to be based on what you consider to be new, realistic standards of performance.
If you haven’t already, there is nothing more important right now than re-establishing the core of your business; why do you exist, where are you heading, how are you intending to get there and – this bit is critical – how do you ensure this is clear for people who work with you and that they are empowered to contribute to that journey?
Purpose
‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea’ (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
I love this quote. You do not have to know too much about ship-building (by all accounts a highly-skilled operation) to understand the point here. This addresses the very heart of team and organisational performance – purpose. More specifically, shared purpose. Individual purpose may be guided by our personal circumstances, aspirations or needs and this may be a powerful driving force for personal motivation, but it is the identification of shared aspirations, common interests and issues of mutual concern that form the basis for productive, high-performance teams to thrive.
Although three quarters of employees surveyed by the CIPD say that they understand the purpose of their organisation, less than one third believed that the purpose was shared through the whole organisation. So, how do you foster shared purpose?
- Employee Voice. Ensuring people genuinely contribute to shaping but also reviewing how your collective actions are aligned (or otherwise) to your shared purpose.
- Language. If people are genuinely engaged with the shared purpose, then the language associated with that purpose must reflect the team that it bonds.
- Storytelling. Being able to tell stories of how actions align to purpose enable members of your team to personally connect with the meaning and importance of what your business is doing.
- Challenge. It is important that people feel comfortable challenging each other in a constructive and helpful manner. Members of your team need to be able to identify and address action that contradicts your shared purpose.
Planning
I don’t think all enjoyable journeys need to have a specific destination but if your journey has purpose that can be defined by specific milestones or a destination, they you’re much more likely to be able to put together an effective plan of how to reach them. Similarly with our businesses, if you want the effort within your business to be effective and to reach certain goals then firstly, you have to be very clear and consistent in what those goals are – especially when they have had to significantly change – and secondly, you have to dedicate some time and resource to planning the complex web of activity.
Planning isn’t the most exciting word and in many respects it’s not the sexy end of business, but just as we need to anchor our teams to a shared purpose, we need to provide some cohesion to our efforts in order to generate confidence of reaching our targets. Business Plans, Financial Plans, Marketing Plans . . . People Plans . . . the list may be endless. I am not advocating planning as a form of procrastination but the activity of planning helps detect opportunities or threats to your business that might otherwise be overlooked and the outcome, even as a work in progress, can be the source of clarity needed when all around us seems anything but clear.
People
If you can invest time in ensuring the people who contribute to your business performance clearly understand and can engage with your ambition, then it is also critical that they are given the conditions, environment, tools and knowledge to be able contribute to the collective effort. That includes your employees but may also include your suppliers, partners, clients or customers. Whilst I agree with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s longing for romantic purpose, people also need to know where to find wood, know what a ship looks like and develop a range of technical and personal skills to enable them to be a valued contributor. We call this empowerment.
Effective organisations allow each member of the team to contribute to decisions in a natural way that promotes idea generation, information sharing, involvement and accountability.
- Idea generation. People with an understanding of your business need time to think of new ways of working and you need to create a climate that allows people to generate those ideas.
- Information sharing. Ideas need to be shared, tested and developed through open and honest communication that brings the best out of those ideas and makes them useful for your business.
- Idea generation and information sharing may provide the content for effective decision making but if the execution of that decision is hoarded by a privileged few then employees will stop contributing ideas, stop contributing to decisions and you’re back to being ineffective.
- You are running a business so people within your organisation need to take accountability for executing decisions, changes or improvements in a timely, high-quality manner.
Summary
However you are defining your new standard for business performance, the ‘right here, right now’ demands a reinvigorated shared purpose, a clear and consistent plan and an investment in people to inspire, engage and empower them to be at their best.
Matthew Emerson is the Founder and Managing Director of Blackmore Four, an Essex based management consultancy working with leaders of ambitious businesses to achieve outstanding performance through periods of growth or significant change.
Starting his career at Ford Motor Company, Matthew has developed his expertise in Organisational Effectiveness in key senior HR, Organisational Development and Talent roles, predominantly in Financial Services (Credit Suisse, Barclays and DBS) and most recently as the Group Head of Talent and Performance at UBS AG.
Having worked in and across Asia for six years as well as having ‘global’ responsibility in a number of his roles, Matthew has an appreciation of international and multi-cultural working environments. He also has a multi-sector perspective, having worked with organisations in Manufacturing, Healthcare, Education and Technology.
