Leading the Flamingos: How South Africa helped create a vision of our future

I was busy building the picture of our vision of the future. The Objectives were great, and I could certainly put a Vision into words, which I was doing.

Then, one day, I read an amazing story. I’d seen something on it before, but now for some reason, it resonated with me and hit straight in the heart. I was on a plane and was reading a business journal, which talked about what had become known as the Mont Fleur scenarios.

The Mont Fleur scenarios were developed in South Africa in 1992. A group of political parties got together with other influential South Africans, and gathered at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre. They invited a facilitator from Royal Dutch Shell, Adam Kahane, who was asked to utilise his skills in scenario planning to help them understand how South Africa’s future might play out.

The interesting thing is that scenario planning does not involve mapping out the future that you want. Instead, participants were asked to work together to describe likely futures based on what they perceived could happen. In the commercial world, you then use these scenarios to test your own strategic options and plans, and to test your business against.

The group from Mont Fleur worked together for months, and were able to put aside political and philosophical differences to identify four scenarios that they regarded as likely:

1. Lame Duck – this is where a white government remains in power and, in attempting to appease too many interests, is unable to define a way forward for the nation;

2. Ostrich – a white government fails to recognise the need for change, and ignores the growing tensions in South Africa;

3. Icarus – a black government takes power and, by implementing reform too quickly, tanks South Africa’s economy; and

4. The Flight of the Flamingos – a unified nation rises slowly, and together, as flamingos do.

Building a Vision

When I first arrived at the Company in April 2007, the biggest issue was the leadership vacuum that had striken the legal team for the past 4 years.  There had been a cocktail of aggressive leadership, absent leadership, and passive leadership which led to large levels of turnover, and great dissatisfaction.

One of my challenges was to establish a plan for this team to emerge from mediocrity (more in reputation than in fact) and transform into a world-class legal function.

The challenge with leading lawyers is that they are natural cynics; respect has to be earned.  Lawyers are smart and agile thinkers, and no empty fluff will engage them.  This team, in particular, had seen years of empty promises about things that would be delivered, and very few of them were.

The team also had a terrible reputation externally.  Lawyers who had left years before were still telling their friends that it was a terrible place to work.  Some of them even gathered up new stories about what I was doing, and scornfully spread negative stories about us in the industry.  It got to the point where this Legal Team was the last place that anyone wanted to work; everyone knew it was a basket case.  This left the team decimated, and missing key expertise needed to service the business’s needs.

Where was I to start?

Well, first of all, Dumb Boss had given all his reports the goal of making the Corporate & Finance function “World Class” (whatever that means).  So this became our anchor.

I have a fundamental belief that people within the team have most of the answers to the hard questions.  They have existed under the poor leadership and have watched as things obvious to them have failed to be done.  So, I always start by asking them what they think we should do.

My mechanism for this was an offsite where on a blank page where I drew a spot on the bottom left hand of the page.  I wrote next to it “We are here”.  On the top right hand side, I drew another spot and wrote “World Class”.  And then I joined the dots.  The line was the journey that we were to take.

I then facilitated a session.  Starting by asking the group to close their eyes and visualise the future; a future where we were in a world class legal team, surrounded by excellence, wonderful colleagues.  I asked them to picture what it looked like, sounded like, felt like.  What did it feel like to come into work?  What sounds were in the department?  What sort of buzz was there?

I asked them to imagine that a reporter was visiting the department to see what a world class team was like.  The reporter began asking them questions: how did you get here?  What do you do that makes you world class?  I asked the team to imagine how they would answer those questions.

Open your eyes.  Now tell me what you saw.  We filled pages and pages with what a World Class legal team would be.  The team knew what it was; equally they knew we didn’t have it.

I broke them into 5 groups and asked them to come up with 2 ideas for what would make us World Class.  They had to define the “What” – ie state their idea, the “Why” – ie why it would make us World Class, and the “How” – with some ideas for what we would do to execute the plan.  Each team then came back and presented their ideas, and we began to put them into categories like “Skills Development” and “Reward & Recognition”.

I gave everyone 3 dots to put onto the ideas that they most believed would make us World Class, and 10 minutes to go around the room and consider how they wanted to vote.  We then counted up the dots, and our three top priorities emerged as “Skills & Knowledge” (by a long way – I was relieved that the team understood there was big gaps), “Reward & Recognition” (they felt underpaid and under-loved) and “Customer Service” (this one usually comes up – you can usually always improve here).

So, I took all this away and typed up the verbatim feedback, and then created summaries of the top 3 priorities.  We circulated this and asked people to sign up to work in groups on delivering the change they called for in these ideas.  And so the journey commenced.

I put all of this into a simple picture of our journey each year as we would work together on defined Objectives and deliver them into Business as Usual.  As they became part of our foundation, they formed stepping stones that we would use to continue to rise higher as a team.

This year, we were proud of what we delivered in our teams; only the Customer Service initiative failed to deliver everything we had hoped for.  The lesson here was that the team that was put together was full of passive or princess-types (yes, Mark was on that team!) who couldn’t bring the Objective to delivery.  That’s OK – it’s inevitable that some will fail to live up to their promise, and you learn the lessons and move on.

I did inject one objective that I was keen on: Innovation.  This, plus Customer Service, External Relationships (ie how Legal relates outside our Company) and Knowledge (ie prcedent development, knowledge management) are our Objectives for 2008.  We have already announced team leaders and the teams, and they’ll kick off their work in January.  In future posts, I’ll tell you about our model for delivering these Objectives, and using them to raise up the next generation of leaders and to test our people.

In any event, the wisdom of our own team has proved to be accurate, and using their ideas has been the core reason for our success.  If I had imposed my ideas without fully understanding theirs, we would have had some success, but it’s likely that we would have failed to gain the sense of ownership that is necessary for becoming “World Class”.  As new people join us, we explain to them how we formed this plan, and why we are spending time delivering on non-legal projects so that they can buy into our Vision.

The year end: when pride and melancholy merge

It’s when you reach the end of each year that you really appreciate how quickly they go.  Life is full of that sad cocktail of time whizzing by, but also grateful awe with what has been achieved.

I started my year consulting to the corporate regulator on a major corporate collapse, looking after the wash-up of mum and dad investors losing all or most of their dough because of some selfish and negligent corporate management.  Corporate Lunacy at its worst.  But I did some good for real people, and am so proud.

Before I started with the Company, I spent 7 wonderful weeks travelling to places as diverse as New York, Italy, Greece and Fiji (I basically just got to list all the places I wanted to go to and shove them into the one air ticket – spending some of my pay-out was truly fab).  My favourite moment was on the Greek island of Santorini where, after 5 weeks of travel, I was waiting for the bus to the capital, Fira.  One of Greece’s crazy taxi drivers asked me if I wanted a ride for 10 euro, saying the bus wouldn’t be along for another 45 minutes.  Normally, I’d have jumped at the chance.  But instead I slowly considered it and said “No thanks, I’ll wait”.  That moment, I think I was the most relaxed of any time in my life.  It was wonderful: relaxation in my core, the depth of my being.  Why oh why can’t life be like that more often?

Then I started at The Company and set about resolving the issues that had beset the Legal team for so long.  Sure, there were some bumpy times and some desperately low moments.  But they are behind us.  In that time, I have started to turn around our recruitment reputation, and brought on board some really wonderful new team members.  Plus, we’ve motivated and focused the great people who were already there.  I laid out a 3-year vision so they can see where we are going; no-one before had done that with them and followed through.

We had a bit of turnover in the first few months, as people who had waited too long for new leadership got itchy feet and headed off.  Happily, most left with regret as they wished they could also be part of what we were doing.  Two went overseas.  One very talented young lawyer told us she wanted to try private practice for a time, so I picked up the phone to the law firm she wanted to work with, and organised for them to meet her.  And she got that job.

Of course there were the people who we were glad left: the team is lighter, more hopeful without the weight of them.  But God there were tough times.  I learned a lot of new lessons this year, I can tell you. 

As for the Dispute Resolution Team, they are in a state of flux.  The new manager is wonderful – the whole team loves her, and she was exactly the right choice.  Two of the lawyers, Lisa and Anne, are like the Bobsy Twins - they always have their heads together.  They are the biggest fans of Mark, and live their lives seeking his approval.  As it turns out, they seek approval a lot, including from me.  Lisa is more the problem child – she’s like a duckling who adopts whoever walked past last as its mother.  Anne, on the other hand, is different.  Between the two of them, she’s the leader.  She resigned earlier this year, before I arrived, because her manager was such a disaster.  When I announced her old manager was going, she rang me the next day and asked to come back, which she did on a 12 month contract.  She was grateful for a second chance and, even when I announced Mark was leaving, she said I had her support (even though she knew her friends would crucify her if they heard her say it).  Our strategy with Lise and Anne is to divide and conquer.

This last week, we told Anne that, not only did we want her to lead one of our project teams next year, but that we were making her role permanent.  She was overjoyed, and said “I’ve been vindicated!”.  I think she’s referring to the frequent drinks/dinners/lunches that the DR Team (both current and former members) have to pick over the bones of old times, and bitch about old and new management in Legal.  I imagine they all told her that I was systematically trying to get rid of all of them, and I wouldn’t make her role permanent.  How wrong they were.

Meanwhile, Lisa was told that she missed out on leading a project team in 2008 – that she didn’t have the leadership skills the others had.  She is disappointed, but will be uncertain how to react to Anne’s being successful.

We’ll see how that goes the next year.

How long does transformation take?

Just as I was leaving tonight, I walked past my assistant, Sarah.  She was sitting at her desk, close to tears.

A few posts ago, I lamented how hard good help was to find.  About how a couple of members of our admin team aren’t performing properly.

Sarah is really suffering with the thought that she is failing to turn around the admin girls.  How they fail to work the hours they are paid.  How, despite all the promises they make, they fail to meet them.  How she wants to believe them, but feels she can’t.

I sat down and talked to her for over an hour.

And I explained to her how long transformational change takes to deliver in a team.  And, let me tell you, it’s a while, even in a team of just 26 like ours – often the real change doesn’t manifest itself for a year or even more.

In delivering a transformation, you have to deal with years of stuff, of poor habits, of crap culture, of leadership vacuum.  You have to give people opportunities to learn the new rules, and to comply with them.  To get their feedback on issues, and consult on key changes.  Many members of the team will respond brilliantly.  But, with some, there’ll be excuses, and more excuses.  You’ll need to monitor behaviour over time, until it becomes apparent from a number of angles that it isn’t good enough.

I said that creating real change in the admin team (particularly the Dispute Resolution girls) would take at least another 6 months.  Now, of course I don’t mean The Manipulator; she’ll be gone by the year’s end.

I mean the others, who don’t do enough work, who are late most days, who don’t deliver what they promise.  These are harder to pin down.  Often, they are like pinning jelly to a wall.

 Sarah will continue to work with the girls, and outline and agree with them the bounds of acceptable behaviour and how they are tracking.  But, odds are, not all of them will buy in.

She’ll need to wait until our new Manager for the DR Team starts so they can work together to identify what the real problems are.  And keep on their tails.

We aren’t all currently in the same spot on the floor, so Sarah has to walk around to the other side of the floor to see the DR admin girls.  In November, the floor gets refurbished, so my team will all be sitting near each other.  She’ll be able to use the fact that we will all be together to monitor their work, and even see when they arrive at work in the morning.

And then, when we finally grade performance in March 2008, the reality of poor performance will hit home to the admin team.

Change takes time.  It’s like a game of chess: you have to make smart moves early to set up the board.  Focus on gaining a strong position so you can execute your middle game. 

No-one can take the King on their first move.  If you make too many moves too quickly, you’ll miss something.  Be prepared to lose some pieces along the way, to get to your end game.

And see the whole Board – every piece has a function and an impact.  Threats are all over the board, as are opportunities.

But, above all, you need to be patient.  Change takes time to embed.  Just because you can’t resolve your issues straight away doesn’t mean you won’t get there in the end.