Nigel Paine at Creating Happy Workplaces Conference 2013

So we're very excited about our next speaker. So we've got Nigel Payne is just about to come up. Nigel was at the BBC running the learning and development operation in the days of Greg Dyke. And since then has done work all over the world on this kind of thing. And he's going to talk us through some practical steps to implementing these principles.

So Nigel. very much. Thank you.

Nigel: I'm going to tell you two stories before I start, kick off. First story, BBC, 36, 000 people, a big, big HR operation. When we wanted to do something good for staff, we'd set up a project team. Everyone fought to be the project leader, but if you just ended up being in the project team, that was okay. There was a room, I kid you not, called the team room, and in that, only the project team were allowed to go.

And they would be, there'd be whiteboards, flip charts, this place would be covered in paper. And after a month, what would emerge would be a PowerPoint presentation. Sometimes 29 slides. Sometimes 39 slides. But whatever it was, the slides were amazing. Out of the month, a whole week would be spent on the project presentation.

And the end product was to present the PowerPoint presentation to the executive team, at which point we all shared praise. Fantastic presentation. We really loved it. Oh, thank you. Slides, wonderful, wonderful. Will we get copies? Yes, we'll get copies. Thank you. And guess what?

That was it. That was it. You realized very early on, the end result was the PowerPoint presentation. There was nothing else. So, my first little message. My first message to you. Please, please, please. Do stuff. Don't just set up projects. Don't just work your way around endlessly talking about things. Do things.

That's the number one point. Second little one. Second little example. I was in a conference and a woman came up to me and said, I hate you. I said, fine, what did I do? And she said, you know your stuff about 360 and appraisal and all that stuff? Well, we didn't do that, and life was good. We introduced 360, and I've had the most miserable time of my life ever since.

She explained to me, she said, well, you know, I'm pretty good at this, I'm pretty good at that. But I'm pretty weak on numbers and spreadsheets. So guess what I get? After my appraisal, week after week of spreadsheets, of doing stuff I really hate, in order to get better at what I'm not good at. And to me, the exact opposite is what you should be doing.

Focus on what people do well, give them more of it, don't get obsessed with what people don't do quite well enough, and try and get them from mediocre to average. Maybe what they should have done after that is say, We'll never give you another spreadsheet. Let someone else interpret it for you. You just focus on these great things.

But so often, we use something that is powerfully good, which is giving people feedback and interaction, and turn it into something which is horribly negative. Don't do that. Please don't do that. So, it's rather like this. This little image. I love this image. One of the problems that I confront in organizations all the time is, We, up here, we spend all our energy on making the drop perfect.

We want it, I know this is physics, and you know, drops are drops are drops, but we focus on getting it perfectly symmetrical, beautifully round, or wonderfully polished, and we ignore what's really important, which is the ripple. What we want to do is make the biggest ripple. We don't want to get that perfect, and sometimes it's okay to be not quite perfect.

Good enough. Google's beta. Things can go out in beta. You don't have to be perfect in order to launch, in order to do stuff, in order to get things working in your organization. And that holds us back all the time. When it's just not quite as good as that, the happiness expert he told me, you know, that, that wonderful example in Cougar engineering.

Ah, it's just, we're not as good as that. And that just holds you back because we work on this and we work on this. And we don't think for one second what the impact is. So point three. Go for impact. Go for impact. Another image that I really love, the dartboard. Now, if you watch someone playing darts, guess what?

In darts, you do not score 180 every go. Not even the most brilliant darts player in the world scores 180 every go. So what do you do? When you play darts, you go, I've got to get from 5. 01 or whatever it is. Is that right? 5. 01? Yeah, good, excellent. Go from 5. 01. You get 17, not 180. So you regroup, you reanalyze, and you move on.

And then you get 26, and you regroup, you re And you may never get 180, that doesn't stop you doing stuff and completing the game. We're not all Google. You don't sit here and think, well, my organization, oh, we've got this problem, we've got that, and it's not as nice there, and we haven't got this kind of budget, and we can't do that.

Focus on the things you can do. And just remember the Dart player. The Dart player makes use of whatever they get on the board. And whatever they get on the board, they work with and move on to the next stage. And then they work on with what they've got, and they move on to the next stage. And eventually, They get down to their 501, down to zero.

But too many organizations focus on the thing, if we had another half a million pounds, or if we had this, or we had that kind of person, or we did this, we did that, focus on what you can do, work with the cards that you're dealt, and there is nobody in this room who can't go away from here. And go back into their organization and do stuff.

Because when you leave here, we're kind of happy, you know, we jump around, we laugh. You walk into your organization. It's not quite exactly like this room or this environment. It's different. And it's really easy by 11 o'clock. This conference is kind of faded. By two o'clock, it's gone completely. By next Monday, it's just a dream.

Oh, that would have been nice, but you know, stuff happens. I, I remember the dartboard. Keep that image in your head and say, I'll work with 17 rather than 180. I can do stuff. I dunno what you can do. If you're a chief executive, you can do something big. If you've got a small team, you can do something small.

But in your small team, that impact can be even greater than what a chief executive can do. I, you know, I had a team of 529, my. Power to do things was far less than people who had teams of 12 or 15, because they could really do stuff. I had to negotiate and I had to spend an awful lot of time getting, and yet the illusion was, well, you're in charge.

You, you can really, really do stuff. Everybody has someone saying you can't do it. If it's the chief executive, it's the chairman or the board. If it's the chairman, then it's the shareholder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can all do stuff, but you've got to be confident and believe in it. Next point.

First thing, I think this is a deal breaker. Trust. If there is no trust in your organization, then it's virtually impossible to do anything else. This is where you've got to start. You've got to think very hard about how you trust, how you can build, not stupid trust, where you just believe what anyone says, but smart trust.

Organizations that smart trust each other, power ahead of organizations which are full of, trust. Due diligence, lawyers, what you can't do. And half of these, I was in a session yesterday on social media, insurance company. The issue with an insurance company, it wasn't about compliance and all the things they threw in the room.

Oh, it's, we're regulated. Oh, it's compliant. Oh, we've got to be really careful because they're illegal. It wasn't that at all. When it came down to it, what stopped them was truly, simply trust. They didn't trust their staff not to do something they And they'd never given them a chance because they just assumed that everyone we employ is a raving idiot or a kleptomaniac or a psychopath or whatever.

Funnily enough, we recruited them, we worked with them, the vast, vast majority. If you hand trust, we'll trust you back. But if you don't make that first move, you will never, ever move down this path beyond the very superficial. Trust is critical. So, question one. Just, what I'd like you to do is stand up, because you've been sitting down for far too long.

It's at least six minutes. If you could just go find somebody you haven't found before, and just, just have some strategies on trust. How do you build trust? For two minutes, how do you build trust?

Okay, can we just have, right from the back of the room, in front of Henry, what, what, how do you, how do you build trust? What did you come up with?

Yep. Not punish people. And the worst is when you say, we won't punish you. But that was a really bad mistake, so we are going to punish you. So you've got to, that needs to be followed through. It's not simply, oh no, no, we're cool about this. And therefore you've got to work out how you let people fail, and then what the parameters are.

You've got to be clear about that. There are many stories about, yeah, we'll embrace all of that stuff, but they don't. So it's, it's bigger than just saying, you can make mistakes. It's, it's a whole philosophy, really. What are, at this side of the room? Some ideas, yes. Heidi. Good tries. What does that mean?

Heidi: It mean something is not a mistake, it's a good try.

Nigel: Yeah.

Heidi: So it's a good try

Nige: Yeah, not, so in other words, you don't call them mistakes at all. You call them attempts. Good efforts that didn't quite manifest themselves. Okay, one more

Audience Member 1: Admit vulnerability.

Nigel: admit right the way through the organization. Yes, that we don't know everything. We can't have all the answers. It's tough out there. We're gonna get things wrong.

So let's do our best and let's work out what we can learn from what we didn't do very well. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Okay, thank you. We move on quickly. Now. My next point is, be honest, you have to look your organization square in the face and if you've got a bit of a culture or you've got people like that, you've got to be able to deal with that, you've got to face that down and don't go in tomorrow imagining, hey, we're 95 percent there, when you're actually 10 percent there or 15 percent there, and you've got to work on what will drive that person.

To be awake, at the very least. What will help that person feel good about their work. And that is not a training and development issue. It's not a, you know, this is, there's a whole world in that picture. If you think about the kinds of issues that that person faces. And his reaction is what you see. He's, it's not him and everything is merged.

It's the process. And he's the result of that. So see clearly is my next tip. And just work out ways of generating some excitement and some electricity. These were two guys in a Faraday cage, which is basically chain mail. That's 5000 volts passing between them. If there'd have been a chink in that cage, they would have been fried in about a microsecond.

But they do that as if it's their job. They're called the Lightning Boys or something like that. Yeah, they're brave. Braver than me. But we felt in this room a bit of electricity. We felt a bit of excitement, whether we're laughing or we're thinking about small things we can do tomorrow. We're just standing up and talking to people.

It's about generating electricity, and you can do that in a very small way. But think about electricity. Think about making an impact. And not just doing something that is worthy and nice, you can do those too, but think about what will make people stand up and say, This place has changed. My team has changed.

Well, this is, this is where we're moving from where we were to somewhere else. And it's electricity that does that most simply of all. And just focus on this, that, you know, I talk a lot to development people and knowledge is important. We need to know this stuff. We even need to be able to do it. But the fact that you know something and you could do it doesn't mean you will do it.

I think the only, the only game in town is behavior. You are changing behavior permanently in your organization. That is hard because we revert back to typical type and revert back to our, our ordinary behaviors, our behaviors that have got us through the last 35 years. But if you don't, if you just say, well, they all know about this now, or they can all do this.

Yeah, we all can do this. We can all. We can all give really positive feedback. The real issue is not that we all know how to get positive feedback. It's those people do it 100 percent of the time all the way through your organization and when you've got breaches and problems and issues, you can forget it.

Once someone says, well, you know, it doesn't happen in that place and well, they get away with it, but we never do, then you're not going to move forward. You'll just have this partial tension in the organization. I think it's all or nothing, and the all has got a lot to do with behavior. Really a lot to do with behavior.

So it's about growth and cohesion and culture and performance. I think they're all locked together in what I call the positive spiral. But we've all worked in organizations, or most of us, where there's no cohesion, poor performance, lack of a shared culture. Very little personal learning, very little growth, and down we go, down we go.

You've got to get, once you start kicking that into life, the spiral goes upwards. Once you start that process, it's like a, like almost a perpetual motion machine. It will keep generating itself. But the focus is on performance and innovation, personal learning, personal growth. Then you'll get the organizational learning and the organizational growth.

Now, how did Google get Google Mail? That didn't come out of, Larry Page saying, you know, I think we need an email system. So I'm going to make you lot develop an email. It came out of the 20 percent time. Someone said, wouldn't it be cool if we, why don't we have a go at that? It should be quite straightforward.

How's that change the organization, change the nature of the organization? It did not come out from top down. It came out of that sense of achievement, and I can do this, and cohesion, and a willingness to take the organization forward. It's very, very important. So. Just finishing now on just two little points.

The first one is that it is good. You need to think about work teams. You need to think down here. But you need to think across your organization. Communities of practice, that's maybe a poor word, but learning communities, interest communities, people who share a passion or an expertise across the organization.

Get out of those silos. And then I think massively powerful encourage external learning. Most people get punished for their working in external networks. They don't get praised for it. And yet, it is the lifeblood of an organization to bring in ideas, to say, we could do this better. There are other people who do this in Belgium, a hell of a lot better than we do it in London.

So. Encourage people to form networks and don't say, Oh, they're not committed. They're always off at that bloody organization. Oh, yet another day at the forum or whatever it is. You know, we're going to stop that. That's wasting that, wasting their time. We're not paying for that. Why should we pay them to go to Birmingham every month?

I think you should be encouraging people to go to Birmingham every month. Even, even going to Birmingham every month would probably do a huge amount to your organization if you never get out, never get out of the place, never see anything. So these are the two most important things. The most difficult, we can build good work teams.

It's actually quite easy to build good work teams. Are we good at that? Most people work in fairly productive, positive work teams. We don't have many people in communities. How many of you are in communities of practice? How many? Three or four. We want more people. We want 80 percent. And how many of you have external learning networks?

How many of you got external? Again, not enough. Not enough to bring power and energy into your organization. So think about Druka. This is Druka's definition of innovation. I love this quote. It's only eight words and it says it all. Druka nails it. If, if you are in the change business, it's not about shifting A to B, changing the color of A and making it pink instead of blue.

It's about a new dimension of performance. That is your aim. The whole purpose. The purpose of this is to create new dimensions of unbelievable dimensions of things that you never dreamt that you could ever do you can do now because you've got the entire staff working with you. There's an expression I use which is discretionary effort.

Discretionary effort is what people bring to their job over and above their job description. The difference between an okay organization and an unbelievable one is usually only discretionary effort. Increasingly in knowledge organizations. And we're all competent. We all know stuff. We don't, you know, all this nonsense about, you know, competency, competency, competency.

We need a more, bigger competency framework, a more complicated competency framework. We don't. If you can't write it on one sheet of paper, a 23 page competency framework, it's a complete waste of time because no one will read it, it will cost £100, 000 to develop it. It's a waste of time. Focus on getting everyone together to change the way you do things.

Fundamentally, it's about new dimensions of performance. Never forget that. That's the purpose. And you want to be able to look back and say, we step changed at that point. We did things we never thought we could do. Then you're motoring. Then you're really going there. And this is a school. This is a school.

Our students and staff thrive in a mature, supportive, focused, innovative environment where individuals have enjoyed great success, hard work, service, respect. Good. This is a school. They can do it. You know, they, that place in Leicester lives it. Beecham College. If they can do it, for goodness sake. You know, we can create mature, supportive, focused, and innovative environments.

And we ought to take each of those words and say, you know, just how mature, how supportive, how focused, how innovative, and what can we do to be more mature, more supportive, more focused, more innovative. Here we go. My final slide. Just forget about, Building the perfect solution, the perfect program, the perfect whatever.

Forget about that. Think about the journey. Think about your staff on a journey through the organization. How can you make that journey better for them? Forget about the individual bits. They will all come together. You don't have to be, as I said at the very beginning, word perfect on that. You just have to make sure the quality of the journey, For the new people coming in and for the existing people who are there, if you're 20 or 50, the journey is more exciting, more better.

And if you focus on that, how can we make this journey? I think all sorts of other things fall into place. So, second question. The critical one, you know, that, that, how do you ensure that what people actually experience lives up to the promises that you make? You go back and you say, we're going to make this place, blah, blah, blah, blah.

How do you ensure, because the, the first area of cynicism is the gap between words and reality. And the bigger that angle, the mimetic angle between words and reality, the less chance you're going to have to do anything whatsoever second time around. So how do you ensure that that angle is as small as it can possibly be?

Two minutes, is that okay? Two minutes. Stand up again. Please, up we go. Another six minutes. Too long sitting down. Find someone else. Ask a question.