Thanks to Ricardo Semler and a wonderful group of people that make up the team, we run our company differently to most.
- We try to ever-develop an open culture, where for example people share their rewards – see illustration!
- We try to harness the innate potential of our people through democratic practices – see video!
- We try to do all of this in a way that translates into happiness benefits AND financial benefits – read blog post!
But – alas – it’s not all candy floss and kittens in our world.
The more we practice what we do, the more aware I become of the challenges in doing what we do.
Here’s a few we wrestle with:
- Stress from openness and reality
- Honesty & conflict
- Non-participation
- Dealing with other people’s perceptions
- Managing messiness
- UK employment law
- Perceived slowness
- De-programming new people
- The need for personal change
- Forgetting how different it is
1. Stress from openness and reality
I think we all feel we’d like to know what’s really going on at work. But actually, it’s pretty stressful sometimes. Reality bites, and there’s probably a reality biting in every workplace but in ours it’s a special kind of ‘this is really real’ reality – be that new business data, financial information, having to share in big crunchy decisions, having to bear the load of big responsibilities and solving tough problems. I guess people that have or do work in start ups can absolutely identify with this, and probably freelancers and independent consultants too. But often when you live in a bigger organisation, this kinda thing is hidden away.
So the emphasis on openness is actually pretty tough to live with. As one team member put it when he first joined, “it’s like having the honesty volume turned up”. Good, but not easy.
2. Honesty & conflict
Being in an honest environment leads to more conflict. Hopefully more positive, and open conflict (as opposed to concealed, disguised, poisonous conflict) but conflict all the same. In reality, we don’t have enough positive conflict at NixonMcInnes in my opinion, and we’re taking responsibility for that and trying to work on it. But it’s hard. (A good book on this is Crucial Confrontations).
But as British people, as nice people, sensitive people, I think most of us find conflict very very scary. Especially in a professional environment. It’s hard!
3. Non-participation
You think the issue matters or that the opportunity to contribute is wonderful – you open up the floor – and then nothing. No participation, no contribution, no care. One of the thing that new starters find hardest is that simply asking for input doesn’t always work. People here are busy, capable and empowered – so they behave more like volunteers. You need to enlist them, excite one another with the mission, call and engage. An email won’t get it. Sometimes our guest board seats go unfilled, much to our chagrin. Just because you say it’s participatory, doesn’t mean it is!
4. Dealing with other people’s perceptions
One I find very hard. When I describe our working practices, culture and values to people, they usually don’t get it. Maybe it’s how I communicate it? But senior agency people and clients look at me like I’m a bit mad, a bit goofy and actually totally insane. They say things like ‘well, if that works for you….’ and ‘do they know how much YOU earn’…. and ‘but isn’t just like management by committee’ and perhaps worst ‘wow…ummm…that sounds really nice’.
It’s especially different with other agency professionals: to them it just feels alien and a total lack of respect for authority. But it can also be an overhead for family and friends and normal people – it’s hard because it’s different. But it can make for a lonely experience.
5. Managing messiness
Difficult to explain without sounding like a new-age-business-writer-twerp, but it goes something like this: we believe in participation, we believe in being networked rather than command-and-control, and in empowerment rather than over-hierarchy.
The result of this combination is that when someone says ‘who do I need to talk to about this’ the answer can often be ‘try Lasy and see what Tom says, and then speak to Max’. When someone phones up and says ‘who is the person that manages XYZ functional responsibility?’ the answer may not always be simple.
So some of the good stuff does result in a kind of functioning and effective messiness, which we’ve learnt some people just can’t tolerate. Some people – good people – have been attracted to the promise of our culture, but in the end repelled by the lack of simple answers to sometimes simple questions :)
6. UK employment law
UK employment law is a tricky thing for any company. I understand what it is attempting to do, and protecting people is a very important thing to do. Our issue at NM is that we feel we often put people before the company finances (which of course has a long-term benefit of translating into positive financial results) but that the law is an absolute blocker, minefield and inflexible mallet of an instrument.
Put simply, democratic principles and UK employment law are definitely not peas in a happy pod. A challenge.
7. Perceived slowness
When you have to involve people, it can feel slow. The pressure is on, you just need to get something done, the thought of canvassing opinions and experiences and inviting feedback is basically a very unpleasant idea. It FEELS slow.
So maybe you short cut it.
You don’t involve the people, you save the time, make the decision and go go go. BLAM!! Then, bit by bit, people ask the same questions, want to know the whys and wherefores, or perhaps just waste time while they wonder what’s really going on and why.
Involving people can feel slow – lots of contributions, lots of feedback, lots of input. But we feel the results are actually faster – once committed, people commit more fully. HR professionals say that employee engagement is the magic key – engagement = results = profits = win. We believe participation is the magic key to engagement. It can feel slower in the early stages, but the benefits come next and keep coming.
8. De-programming new people
It seems to take about 6 months for people to really get how things work culturally in NixonMcInnes. For people to work out how they can behave, how they can dress, how they can participate and voice their feelings and ideas. You can actually ’see’ it happening, I feel. It’s like deprogramming from a different way. I’m probably underestimating how much this happens whichever new work environment people go into. But it feels big when I observe it, so I’m listing it as a challenge.
The way we deal with the challenge is simple, fortunately: just patience. It happens.
9. The need for personal change
Lots of these other challenges end up resulting in the need for some kind of personal change: changing to cope with extra doses of openness, with more responsibility than normal, with a messier, more networked working structure, with the need to be honest to others, even though you (we / I) really, really would rather swerve it or take the edge off of it or grit and smile through it.
Perhaps this is the hardest of all the challenges? Changing is damn hard. I can’t think of an NM team member who hasn’t really changed since they’ve been here. Being a rose-tinted fanboy, of course I see it as positive change, as evolving, but I really believe it.
And perhaps I can talk with most strength about me. Because I’ve changed massively, thanks to the way things are here. I’ve become more confident and a bit less brash, learnt new communication skills which I occasionally remember to apply, learnt how to change and cope with change, how to help other people do the same. It’s been good. But not easy.
10. Forgetting how different this is
Finally, another big challenge with all this different culture gubbins is starting to take it for granted, forgetting that it’s different and special and ours, and just assuming that’s how life is out there in the working world. And that I believe is a little bit dangerous and a lot of a shame. As a professional service organisation, we achieve our results for and through our clients. To do that, we have to be cognisant of their environment, their pressures and needs and meet them halfway. We do that. But we don’t always remember how different this thing here is.
Lots to do, lots to learn, and at least 10 nice challenges to keep us on our toes.
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.07.10 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Culture, Democracy, Employee engagement, Enterprise 2.0, NixonMcInnes box
One of the words that is much used in business is accountability. And its correlate, a “blame-culture”, is much discussed, and much derided. We talk about accountability and blame here at NixonMcInnes; and we talk about them with our clients more and more, as we help them change the way they relate to their customers.
I guess we all routinely blame our colleagues, our customers, our competitors. We routinely blame the economy, the government and even the weather.
I really don’t suppose the weather does it on purpose. I know, when I think about it for a moment, that the weather really hasn’t got it in for me.
So why would I blame it? Or the government, or the economy, or our customers, or our competitors? Why do I think, if something doesn’t work out the way I want it to, that it is my colleague’s fault? It’s always their fault. And rarely anything I did.
Two concepts really help me around blame.
The first is the concept of contribution. If I accept that in any situation, I contributed something to it, and so did others, I start to move away from an attitude of blaming towards something more useful.
Blaming is often associated, for me at least, with unhelpful emotions – like anger. By accepting my contribution to a situation, not only do I start to accept those emotions, but I also start to move to a position where I can regain some influence over the situation.
When I am in a position of blame it is all so much easier. I don’t have to do anything, or change anything, because clearly it’s someone else’s fault. Nothing to do with me.
Which leads to the second concept: influence. Steven Covey put it best many years ago when he described our circle of concern, and our circle of influence.
The first contains those things we hold a position of blame about: what the government does, what the economy does, what the weather does, and maybe even what our competitors, customers, and colleagues do. These are things that upset us, but we don’t really have any control or influence over.
The second circle – influence – contains the list of things we can control, that we do have influence over. Blaming my colleague for something they did puts their action in my circle of concern. Thinking about what I did that triggered (or contributed) to the situation puts their action in my circle of influence.
As soon as I put something into my circle of influence, or as Covey suggests, take action to grow my circle of influence, I take back the power I need to start to change my world. I assume a position of self-responsibility. I start to work out what I can do about it.
So, that’s blame. What about accountability? Does accepting that I contribute to and have an influence on everything, yes everything, that happens to me mean that accountability goes out the window? How do I hold colleagues to account if I don’t blame them?
I think of accountability as a process, not an event, not a characteristic.
First, it involves commitment. Often commitments are made so rashly and loosely, that you really wouldn’t want to be held accountable for them.
I say “I’ll fix such-and-such by Wednesday”, knowing full-well, if I think for a second, that I’ve got a hundred and one more important things to do before then. Knowing that, from experience, it’ll take much longer than I said.
Knowing, again from experience, that things rarely work out the way I plan them – nearly always something unexpected happens just at the very worst moment. It’s true for me – it’s true for you.
So the first stage in accountability is making a proper commitment – something that I am happy to be held account for. I can make this easier for myself by challenging myself before I commit; or someone else can help me get there by challenging my rash or loose commitments.
The second stage is challenging. This is where accountability so often goes wrong. Because we so easily step into blaming.
Cue “contribution” and “influence”. If we can avoid blame, then accountability is simply the process of observing accurately what happened. You said you’d do such and such, and then you didn’t. What happened? Who did what? What didn’t we do? What else contributed? And crucially what can we learn?
This is hard because blame and the emotion that goes with it is just so damn attractive. It’s so much easier to blame. And the emotion feels so good.
So much easier to blame Sepp Blatter and FIFA for failing to introduce goal-line technology. Than work on our own game.
Pete wrote this on 28.06.10 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Accountability, Behaviour, Blame, Business, Employee engagement box
When we talk about our democratic principles and working practices at NixonMcInnes, the common misconception is that we do this at some kind of traditional business cost.
The logic is that involving people in the whole management and direction of the business must be slower and poorer, but somehow ‘nicer’.
Kinda..’That’s nice dear – how much did it cost?’….
Yet we believe that we can win at the traditional business game, and reinvent that game, AND do all of this our way – having fun and being fulfilled at work.
Quick recap on some of the ways we work
- With open book accounting – everyone knows the bank balance, the performance against budget, and what everyone else earns
- With decentralised decision-making – a Rewards Team assess and approve all rewards proposals (including mine), when we moved into our new office the first time I saw it was the day we moved in because a team to manage the move had successfully owned and managed it, there are two guest seats for team members at every board meeting, we vote on all ethical decisions including new client opportunities, lots of people get involved in each hiring process, we set and agree objectives for the year as a team (not as a board)
- With personal development – we believe hugely in the development of our people and selves, and invest in these, especially in listening and communication skills, which we feel can unlock huge potential
- With the whole person – we don’t expect people to leave their soul and personality at home every day, and we expect and work with the challenges that life throws up, in HR speak this means totally flexible working, and lots more authenticity
- And more – and the above are merely the outcomes, powered by much-more powerful principles that we hold dear
It’s not always easy, nor is it for everyone
We’ve had many bumps in the road as a young developing company – we’ve changed and learnt along the way, going through a round of redundancies as the company fundamentally shifted from one generation and focus to another, being involved in unhappy projects, had many tough times.
We’ve also found that our approach and culture isn’t for everyone – it is demanding and can be uncomfortable, and for some people the fit is not good.
And finally, there’s a risk of becoming a tall poppy – putting ourselves on a pedestal of our own making, being perceived as arrogant, self-loving positive hype-rs. I’m very conscious of this, which limits how and where I talk about ‘us’ in terms of approach and culture.
But I do believe passionately in the power and inevitability of democractic principles in the workplace.
And I do believe that it can be a competitive edge, not a quaint ‘nice to have’.
So here’s a raised glass for the sceptics:
- We grew turnover by 23% in the financial year just closed
- We created healthy six-figure profits
- We shared £10,000 as a team in the form of profit-related pay
- AND we did all of this our way (the important bit) – including making the WorldBlu list for the second year in a row
Tomorrow we are celebrating our 10th birthday as a team with some of our clients, partners and friends.
With that in mind, I celebrate my co-founder and the only guy to have been involved for the full ten years Tom Nixon, and the team of smart, decent, real and talented NM people – a great, great team that I am delighted to be able to work with :)
We believe the future needs different ways of working; all we’re doing is trying to find our own.
Will McInnes wrote this on 20.05.10 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes, Strategy box
According to Wikipedia (!), a couple of guys Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 as:
the use of “web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.
Perhaps it could be simpler, something like:
Enterprise 2.0 is the harnessing of social web platforms and behaviours to improve how the people in big organisations manage and communicate within themselves.
But I hope you get the gist (if you’re not already ahead of me on this :).
So to me, Enterprise 2.0 is utterly irresistable – it cannot be resisted. And it feels incredibly simple and right.
Not everyone sees it so simply. The trigger for writing this was a brief conversation on Twitter between Euan Semple and Alan Patrick, two solid smart thinkers and doers, that I joined in with. As you can see, Alan summarises his (and many others) reticence as:
“thats what I’m grappling with re E2.0 – given its all been known for so long, why will things change now?
Here’s the conversation (read it from the bottom up!):
You can see that my input is flippant, naive, lacking in proof. But it is bourne out of an unshakeable conviction I have, based on what I see everyday in our work with some of the biggest organisations in the UK.
They are changing towards an Enterprise 2.0 tinted-future (often whether they like it or not).
In my opinion no organisation can resist the influence of the social web as a driver of change upon its internal management, structure and communication, just as – regardless of the thickness of its skin or the stubborness of its culture – it cannot resist how the internet has evolved and disrupted its external environment and how it now needs to engage with the outside world.
Here’s why:
- People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
- We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
- Global competition is ever-fiercer
1. People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
For a selection of loosely related mini-trends in how we’re all adjusting, see variously:
2. We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
This distinction between inside the ‘enterprise’ and outside the organisations we work in is both useful and not useful. Yes, there are big, vital differences. But one of the constants is us, the people. (By the way, in my opinion the distinction between B2C and B2B is also helpful and (increasingly) not helpful – they are all people, just with different hats on and found in different decision-making settings – the family, the procurement team – but fundamentally people all, exposed to the same changing media landscape).
Increasingly the clients we work with at NixonMcInnes (who are pioneers in their organisations and industries) are finding their efforts welcomed internally in unexpected quarters, because the internal environment, the staff and people that make up their businesses, are catching up.
So businesses may find themselves turned inside out if they try to resist. It is happening – like it or not. Employees are choosing their hardware, publishing information outside of the firewall, formal control is melting away.
Although the definitions above, both the formal and my own plain English attempt, describe Enterprise 2.0 as about tools and stuff, the codeword ‘Enterprise 2.0′ actually means something much bigger and broader (and more exciting) to me.
The magical bit of Enterprise 2.0 is not the systems and platforms, but what they mean for the people, the organisational DNA, the culture.
3. Global competition is ever-fiercer
So combine the above two ingredients, and marinade them in an increasingly ruthlessly competitive global marketplace, and I think you’ve got change or die.
Thanks to the growing supply of competitors for many companies it’s getting harder and harder to win business – margins are being eroded by offshore lower cost alternatives, services are being commoditised by technology. The internet demands instaneous responses to market changes, news, customer service issues. This exacts Darwinian forces on the business community. How quickly an organisation can discover, understand and repond to these forces will determine its future.
To win, the modern Enterprise must act fast. To act fast, it needs to smooth and connect up the conduits and flows within itself. That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is to me.
See:
(As a side note, given this context and the persistence of the ‘how to measure social media’ meme, I wonder what’s the ROI on not dying?)
So that’s my opinion. It is happening. And it is utterly irresistable.
I’d always be interesting in thoughts and challenges to this in the comments (or elsewhere on the web!).
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.01.10 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Employee engagement, Enterprise 2.0, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Strategy box
As Will mentioned earlier, NixonMcInnes have hired a new helicopter commander which means that my reign as new boy (a title shared of course with the lovely Leesa), is soon to end. With this in mind, and armed with my shiny new profile shots (thanks Garage Studios), I wanted to record my thoughts on my first four months, and perhaps give our new starter an idea of what to expect. Read more…
Ross wrote this on 01.10.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes, Recruitment box
Just a short note to say that we’ve filled the vacancy that was advertised as the Social Media Helicopter Commander role.
We feel it was our most rigorous hiring process yet, and there were some really excellent evolutions to how we hire, further emphasising our desire to give people opportunities to directly prove their skills, problem-solving approaches and characteristics rather than talk about them in a traditional interview stylee.
But there were things we learnt and can get much better at. And it was hard work for us and for the potential team mates that got involved in the assessments.
About 80% of our team were also involved directly in some way in the hiring (by directly, I mean more than saying hello or making the tea!), in keeping with our belief of the benefits and power of democratic business practices.
As is our way, our new team mate will introduce themselves sometime soon after they start :)
Until then all I can say is that their career has been working in PR in the media, technology and consumer sectors, and we’re delighted that they’ll be bringing those experiences and skills to bear in their work with NixonMcInnes’ clients.
We also met some seriously talented other interested and interesting people; people who made that final decision very very tough, and people we’re hoping we can work with soon.
Thank you to anyone who got involved or retweeted the original blurb.
Will McInnes wrote this on – 1 comment
It's filed in the Brighton, Democracy, Employee engagement, Recruitment box
During the past few weeks at NixonMcInnes we’ve made some changes to the team, and I wanted to describe why and how, in as open a fashion as possible whilst still being sensitive to people’s feelings.
A little while ago it became clear to us as a management team that we had to take a step back and think about the shape of our company going forward and probably then make some tough decisions. We had to ensure that the shape of team fitted the workload we have currently as well as being well set up for our future vision for NixonMcInnes and our clients.
In particular the things driving this were:
- The blend of work we are being asked to do by the market
- The capabilities we feel we must have in house and those that we concluded were not absolutely essential
- A necessity to grow a higher ratio of fee earners to support staff
This is because unlike many of our peers, we are not a new business. The company is in it’s ninth year of trading! We started at the very bottom of the foodchain, originally as a regional web design agency doing web stuff. So whilst longevity in business is generally thought to be a good thing, it has meant that we have had to evolve, and rapidly in more recent times. And change isn’t always easy.
Back in the day the very first book thrust into my hands when Tom and I teamed up was The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that exactly described the future of the web and that we understood, believed and bought into from the very off. So although our clients were mainly interested in ‘getting a website designed’ or ‘doing some email marketing’ our interest has always been in the human and social aspects to the web. But we were patient.
During our time as a generalist digital agency we grew a signficant in-house high quality web development team. I don’t say that as hype: we carefully hired discipline experts rather than website all-rounders and eventually ended up with two or three specialists in each of the major web design and development areas: designers, front end developers, back end developers and producers. That was our whole team – our design and build team.
When we saw how the client community was finally readying for the social web our moment had arrived and we weren’t going to let it pass us by – we capitalised. I reckon our timing was excellent. We made significant investments in creating the market, through speaking, training, product and service development, internal learning, industry collaborating.
And during the past 18 months we have massively evolved and changed to reflect this.
Today we’re able to offer a tried-and-tested stack of services that go from the start of a client’s journey – with training, strategy development, research, all the way through to full design and build together with online pr and social media marketing – and now find the balance of services we provide weighted roughly 50/50 between ‘consultancy’ and ‘design and build’. Our consulting team has been steadily growing, matching the growing scale of our consulting work.
Importantly, demand for our consulting services is significant and steady whereas demand for our design and build serivices is much more variable and lumpy – that is, it comes in big peaks and troughs which makes planning and resourcing a challenge.
The blend isn’t showing signs of staying at a 50/50 split. So our plan is to retain our expert social web-flavoured design and build capability – which allows us to actually execute and deliver against strategies, and create the vital hubs and platforms for conversations – but to grow our consulting team in line with the demand we get for those services (which is lots, and growing rapidly).
So as a management team we agreed to make some changes to the team shape and structure to reflect all of this. I say management team which sounds grandiose and besuited, but actually in keeping with our particular culture and approach to business it was our board members (only one of whom is non-exec - so all normal people, active and on the ground) plus two ‘guest seats’ – two of the guys from the team that aren’t part of the regular board, to give us fresh perspectives, balance, reality, sanity and diversity.
So that ‘make some changes’ is the tough bit: as a group we ultimately decided that two positions from the design and build team were to be made redundant with a further person in that team going from full-time to part-time. And our full time marketing position was also made redundant to reflect our emphasis on existing clients and existing external relationships (eg with journalists, collaborators, event organsiers etc). So I guess a change of 3.5 people.
It was very hard on everyone in a tight-knit team where the culture is transparent and inclusive. We tried to be dignified and sensitive and above all to ensure that our business decisions didn’t irreversibly damage our team ethos and trust. Even so I’d say it was a pretty shitty couple of weeks.
Having made the changes, we now move forward confidently.
We are working in increasingly long-term client engagements, we are winning lots of exciting new business, we are clearer and more confident about what we do and we feel we took the difficult but vital decisions we had too.
So that’s us, warts ‘n’ all.
The future? I’m sure there will be change. As a consultancy operating in such a mentally-fast-changing world as ours, we know our areas of interest and practice will constantly evolve.
And as and when we change we will try to talk about it openly – for better or for worse.
Thanks for listening.
Will McInnes wrote this on 04.09.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes box
I stumbled across this article from the Management Issues website which discusses a report from the consultancy Watson Wyatt, which argues that employers are missing a trick by trying to clamp down on the use of social media in the workplace. Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt who writes the report, suggests
“..employers that avoid social media altogether are missing an important opportunity and running the risk of alienating Generation X-ers and Millennials. Embracing the technology with proper planning, guidelines and change management for its use are effective approaches to ensuring success”
Instead of restricting Generation X employees from using tools they are familiar with, engaged in and enjoy using, it discusses how social media can be used to fulfil the important internal communication objective of engaging employees.
The article touches upon ways that employers can use social media to communicate information & memos to employees, and also encouraging them to participate in company-wide discussion through the use of blogs, blog feedback, wikis, podcasts and so on.
Great idea. Read more…
Anna wrote this on 19.03.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Employee engagement, Social media, Strategy box
