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Fresh Eyes. 👀 You have them once and only once. If you are looking to drive change and transformation for growth or efficiency you must use fresh eyes.   Once you have been around a bit, you are an insider and lose those fresh eyes. If you don’t use fresh eyes then you will perpetuate what has gone before. I have entered organisations who have previously given the transformation brief to a long serving employee. They typically only move the needle a bit as they become bogged down in existing culture and practices. That's failed transformation. That is why you need fresh eyes. If you have this brief, you will need to cleanse yourself of all thought and understanding. Purge your preconceptions and rationalisations of why things are as they are. If you cannot do this, then you need to go out and find somebody with fresh eyes to do this step for you. This requires honest personal insight and self awareness. Ignore this and your transformation will fail.  The best approach is to bring in fresh eyes from outside the division or company itself. If you are a leader and need to transform but have no fresh eyes, then go outside and recruit. I would prefer to start with employing somebody who has led transformation in the past. If this doesn’t work for you then look for an individual on a short-term contract.  My last resort would be a large consultancy firm. That said this is the best use of them. They have fresh eyes and experience. On the negative side, they have their own culture. They will bring their own methodology. Most importantly they will do all in their power to sell the answer that they should implement the change. Remember that renumeration and success in a large consultancy is dependent on individuals maximising the length of their engagement and the number or resources they deploy. That’s the route to partnership. Rarely have I seen embedded culture change stick when using a large consultancy.  Use a consultancy to be the fresh eyes but be brave enough to limit to that step and control their mission creep away from implementation and leading change especially cultural. Need help then find a transformation advisor, either an independent or a boutique consultancy who focuses on this and helps augment your team. Follow me on LinkedIn  Charlie Herbert  for more transformation pearls 🦪. Contact me for help and advice. Or just read the book ' How to be the Grit in the Oyster '📖

Times are not great, and growth is challenging. I hear that a lot as business focus on costs. Are you getting growth ready? Do you have a transformation plan? As we know its cyclical. I suspect most organisations are currently planning for growth one to two years out. The cycle will come round as it does, and we will have growth opportunities. Often delivering that growth plan becomes challenging. Costs have been taken out and investment stifled. A sudden burst of positive business can leave organisations foundering and delivering low quality outcomes to customers or not able to win new business. The trick is to prepare for the coming upturn in the cycle. It generally takes a year to plan and set up implementation for a transformation, and we should be clear that supporting the j-curve of growth in your plans will require transformation. It will require more capacity in people, processes and products. Those you have recently reduced to save costs. Even if it is ‘switching back on’ they still need thinking about and planning. Therefore, if your latest 3-year plan has growth in years 2 and 3 then you need to be planning for that now. You shouldn’t just do things the way you were, but you should take the opportunity to rebuild them in a more efficient and modern way. You may want to automate some areas. You may want to replace some processes. You may want to revitalise the investment programme. Planned growth is often not in exactly what you were doing before. It will require some different things done in different ways. You should be planning now. That means you need to be defining what needs to be done, when and by whom. You need to understand the level of investment required in people, technology processes and capacity. Then you need to be defining the lead times and the triggers. If you don’t invest ahead of the growth curve in this then you will fall behind. The companies that succeed when the good times return are those who already know exactly what they will do when as the positive trigger points arrive. Those that fail try to react in the moment as their resources and capacity are stretched. You won’t be doing this now as your planning resources have all been removed or diverted to delivering the cost cause. It’s a small investment now to get independent advisors and consultants to come work that plan with you. This should be done discreetly so as not to divert the organisation from delivering todays numbers. Even if it then sits on the shelf for 18 months before that first trigger point – you will be ready to win. Want to engage more then reach out to Oyster Advisor who can help deliver a transformation plan to support your growth aspirations.

Leaders need to be available..... Are you, my boss, available today to help me? It’s not like an emergency, but we need some guidance. The response…..OK as its urgent, 7.30am next Thursday, that’s the first slot.   Diaries follow Parkinson's Law; the work expands to fill the time available. In corporate life we seem to have created this availability treacle and then we observe that decisions take a long time. Smaller companies and those designed around small, empowered teams move faster.   I chose to challenge this. I imposed on myself, a 10 o’clock to 4 o’clock day with a two-hour lunch between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. I made my calendar available a mere four hours. At the time, I was running and transforming a 2,500-person operation across a dozen locations.   The first set of actions was on me. I brutally cut my attendance in meetings.   I moved weekly 1–2–1s to monthly and cut to 30 minutes. Previously they had consumed 8 hours a week.   I exited every standing meeting in the business. I spent 16 hours a week in trading, governance and board meetings. I waited for complaints regarding my nonattendance and negotiated with my boss to attend 2 hours a week.   I set every meeting to half an hour. Why do we assume every meeting takes an hour and then fill that hour?   I made it clear that meetings needed to immediately get to the point. Tell me what you want upfront. Nobody ever goes to a senior leader’s office without wanting something.   What a great feeling it was to then open the two hours at lunchtime for urgent or off-the-cuff meetings. I was always available. There was never a day when somebody couldn’t get to see me. I could also be visible.   I also had time before 10 and after 4 to do some actual work such as managing e-mails! See previous post.   I have done this now for 10 years.   Decisions get made quickly. Stuff gets approved quickly. The machine moves at pace not at snail’s pace. If you start to do this you will deliver better results faster and maybe those around you may consider changing their ways too.

It is my observation that we, in corporate life, seem to be a little surprised by the outcome of chasing diversity. It seems to be an unexpected consequence that people will behave differently in a more diverse environment. We cannot expect to effectively emancipate generations and see no behaviour change in corporate life. Changes and experiences at the very heart of society are driving generations to behave differently and corporate culture is no longer able to impose its way of thinking and behaving on individuals. There is a kind of freedom of thought and expression embedded in younger generations because they are now allowed to simply be whomever they want to be this is the diversity paradigm we face in the workplace. There are three areas we need to understand and work around in our thinking and behaviour. Intergenerational divergence. The four generations in the workplace today are miles apart in their life experiences, expectations and the way they operate on a day to day basis. The world I went to work in as an 18 year old some 40 years ago could not be any more different than the one an 18 year old enters today. Its the pace of the changes that cause challenges as we try to assimilate huge societal change within one generation. The last time we experienced anywhere near this level of change was the Industrial Revolution which arguably took 4-6 generations to evolve and assimilate. Workplaces adjusted slowly to the radical changes. Behavioural diversity. Technology has driven diverging behavioural paths for individuals particularly through social media. The way we consume and utilise information has drastically changed in a relatively short period of time. Minority causes become mainstream alarmingly quickly. The way data is used has changed. No longer is there a single trusted version of the truth but rather data is manipulated to prove and back a point or cause. Search glass of wine a day for fun and you will see that the data says it will save your life or kill you! Business model divergence. No longer is profit the sole driver of value. Unicorns are built on customer numbers and distant future growth plans not on current day and next years performance. Investors back a range of business models and the playing field is no longer level. Your closest competitor may be funded to make losses to win or be subject to a short term privately backed growth plan with no view on the long term. Internal investment profiles differ massively, largely based on when your company first adopted technology, causing further bumps.                                                                                            We as leaders need to understand this diversity and divergence not from any political or judgment stance but simply as a guide to our new leadership challenge. As leaders, we need to take people with very different experiences and views on life and turn them into a team to drive common, shared and beneficial corporate outcomes. Our historical leadership models have been built on the imposing of and adherence to a corporate culture to coalesce largely non-diverse populations into teams. These are simply no longer relevant, yet we have no data on which to build new models. We, therefore, must understand the diverse and diverging nature of the people we need to form into high-performing teams and bring appropriate leadership qualities to bear. Painting the zebra crossing or crosswalk in rainbow colours is not going to achieve this. Each and every leader needs to adjust how they bring themselves to work and the habitat they create to drive value from this increasingly diverse and diverging melting pot. For more hints and tips on how to be a better leader, more efficient and take advantage of our new paradigm - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster

This is my equation for business transformation. 75% or more of them fail. Is your programme set up to fail? The equation highlights how easy it is at a mathematical level to turn a transformation into a failure. One negative in the equation turns the whole thing red. Yet nobody comes to work to fail. Nobody sets up a transformation with the expectation it will not succeed. If that’s the case, why do they fail and why do so many fail? Two key reasons come to mind. The first is the adoption of traditional leadership practises and the second is using the same generic processes or small variations away from it that have led to this poor success rate. Together these can be regarded as the often-misattributed quote that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Looking at the process and behaviours around it, here are my top 10 observations leading to failure. Any one of these is enough to turn one of the elements in the equation red. How we articulate The Problem - it has be be big and complex. How we Sell it to the executive and board teams - it has to be a big costly solution. We pretend The Benefits  are fact and not just a set of directional guesses. We present multiyear Plans  as detailed facts and are not honest they too are guesses. We do all this with a very small Team  and don't allow others to help build and challenge when they join to help deliver. Often the leader gets carried away and allows their Ego  to become a driving force. Too often we give Change Management  lip service and don't plan and execute it properly. We launch a branded programme with mug instead of making our First Steps  baby steps. We sell it well and the CEO and CFO convince the Board, it soon becomes Too Important to Fail. The CEO and the Board believe the hype and demos are real until it becomes Too Late to Intervene....... As per the equation, only one or two of these need to come to pass to increase the risk of failure. If you can tick the top 8 then you are doomed to be in the 75%. To understand the transformation equation, for more detail on the 10 reasons and how to avoid these traps read - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster .   It also include many more hints and tips on how to be a better leader.

Are you an inbox slave? Do you use Outlook as the record of everything you do at work? Your safety net? I have questioned people with the largest mail histories in various companies and none have ever actually gone back through their mail history to prove a meaningful point. By this, I mean saving them from losing their job or helping them get a pay rise or promotion. Live in the moment. Delete your email history regularly. Then start the new habit of living the title don't send e-mails unless you absolutely have to. This is a goal. An unachievable goal you may say. Having a go at reaching this goal will change your life. When discussing what takes up time in the day with people in the business workplace, the volume of emails is near the top. People feel slaves to the email machine. Sadly, I remember the days before email, and I am sure my physical inbox was lower volume than my electronic one. The reason for this is the ease with which we can create communications electronically and the ease, that we can send them far and wide. My email rules are as follows: Don’t send an email if you can call, speak to in person or direct message. Read and delete. Never reply to an email. Especially never say, thanks or okay. Tell people to assume you have read it if they have sent it—they will ask why you didn’t respond. Tell people you will only respond if asked a direct question to you as a named individual. Do  use email to share a document or for mass communication to your teams. Delete every email that gets into reply all wars. Work on the basis that if it’s that important people will call you. Unsubscribe from every sales email—including the internal ones. The basic rule of thumb is the less emails you send the fewer you will receive. I have been running this method for 10 years and on average receive less than 20 emails a day. I always end the week with fewer than 10 emails in my inbox. Impossible I hear you say. Frankly, if you choose to use your inbox to cover your rear; keep a history of all interactions; your delegated task manager; your project management tool and so on then it will be very full. Amazing what happens when you talk to people. The culture around you morphs into something rather lovely. This is one of the 10 don'ts in my successful leadership model. For more hints and tips on how to be a better leader, more efficient and take control of your work self - read the book - How to be the Grit in The Oyster

Choose to be Happy at Work Look around you. How many of your colleagues smile or laugh at work? You must remember that work is a serious thing. It is in fact the most serious thing in a lot of people’s lives. They don’t like it either.   I do. I have made a point to love work. I must do it if I want to live a decent life. I accept that it is imposed on me by society. My view is that if I must do it, I might as well enjoy it. So, I do. I always tried to love my job. It makes me happy. I smile and I laugh. I crack jokes and I use humour a lot in the workplace. Some of it a bit brutal and close to the bone I must admit but all in the right spirit. I choose happiness. This is one of my 25 leadership principles.   Sometimes it gets hard and dark like all things in life. It becomes difficult to choose to be happy when under stress but hold on to the thought that this is a short-term blip and sunshine will return.   The trickiest thing is when the dark clouds will not shift and there is no prospect of the happy spring. Then it is time to choose happiness. Leave that job and find a new one. One that will make you happy. Most of the time there are lots of jobs out there. Go, find a better one. Don’t become a slave to the darkness. If you get out of bed and don’t want to go to work for an extended period (a couple of months) then vote with those feet to get that smile back. I have left three organisations as I no longer enjoyed the job and could see no way of getting back to that happiness. I voted with my feet to find a happier place. Usually, about six months after I should have done.   Also, remember that happiness is infectious. Remember it’s the shadow we cast!   Follow me  on Linkedin for more excerpts and pearls of wisdom!   Or just buy the book for the whole story ‘How to be the Grit in the Oyster’ by Charlie Herbert on Amazon

An individual reacted negatively to my book launch on Linkedin as they are clearly not happy about some hard decisions and actions in the past. It reminded me of one of the 25 Core Leadership Principles in the book ……   Management and leadership are not in themselves a popularity contest. This will be an exceedingly difficult concept for some individuals who have built their lives on likes and heart-shaped emojis.   Being successful in business doesn’t correlate with being popular. It helps to be likeable or in other words to be a good person who others appreciate being around.   The problem with leadership is that it requires direction setting, decision-making and performance management. It means that quite often you are telling some of the people that they need to do something different. It will also involve telling people that they are not doing their job very well or could do it better. It will at some point also involve firing people, ill-health retiring people and making people redundant to save costs. None of these are popular moves.   Accept your role is not to be popular. Tell your people that your job is not to be popular, and they will get it. Tell yourself regularly that you will not be popular. Then you must accept that at social events you will be expected to stump up some drinks and then get out of there so they can have an enjoyable time. Embrace this warmly as part of the journey to leadership.   Be good. Be fair. Be kind. Be honest. Just don’t bother thinking any of that will make you popular.   By the way, if you think you are popular as a leader, you are either deluded or you are compromising so much you will fail.   This is one of 25 Core Leadership Principles – you need to do all 25 so don’t take this in isolation for the other 24 and more pearls of wisdom read my book ‘How to be the Grit in the Oyster’ by Charlie Herbert available at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel and Waterstones and I suspect other bookshops are also available.

I was in the first 1% of users but how has LinkedIn become the new Wonderland? I joined LinkedIn in 2007 as one of the first 10 million users. It was the mobile app launch that I think dragged me in. It’s now over 1 billion members. I have used it for networking over the years and when I have needed work or to change job it’s been a great tool in the box. I have recently, well just over a year ago, sort of stopped working. I don’t want to say retired as in theory I still have over ten years left to work before retirement age and the word retired has, at least to me, some negative connotations. I won’t bang on about that here, maybe in another post? Anyway, the point of this post is that I have written and published a book as part of my ‘sort of stopped’. It’s a business book built on my experiences over the past 30 years, and it offers a framework of leadership behaviours and processes to drive successful transformational change in our diverging world. Given books should be read, I have taken to LinkedIn to share the word. It’s a business book and LinkedIn is the premier professional networking site so a decent place to start. Wow, it’s a whole new world this algorithm thing. I made the mistake of entering the rabbit hole. Like Alice, my curiosity and it turns out unlike Alice, my stupidity got me in there. The game one must play is madder than the tea party, the Linkedin algorithm is unwieldy and mad. I did Drink Me and Eat Me. I certainly cried my own pool of tears in frustration. I engaged with some of the advice on how to best manage LinkedIn (on LinkedIn) but it appears there are many grinning cheshire cats and caterpillars out there with cryptic clues and riddles, most of which are time critical and must be done within so many minutes, hours, days of the previous action. I started to come to my senses when I realised, I was about to become a full-time player. I had found my flamingo, sourced a hedgehog and borrowed the Mad Hatters pocket watch. I was about to bash the poor thing at the hoop when ‘Off with their heads’ echoed in mine. It’s barking mad yet I see many out there playing the game. I can now spot a player, not because they have a flamingo in their profile photo but because amongst other things they over comment, over post and find the most tenuous of links to videos of a 12 year old skateboarding to make their leadership point! I have already woken up, I am not willing to dedicate such time to playing the game. I didn’t ‘sort of stop working’ to replace it with a full-time job managing the algorithm. I guess I will reach fewer readers and sell less books, but I will retain my sanity.