Last night I had a dream. You remember that note I sent to the CEO yesterday? I dreamt I got an out of office reply which read:
Dear colleague
I’m sorry I can’t reply to your note personally right now, I’m managing by walking about (MBWA). I find MBWA a great way to listen to colleagues and learn from them. I really enjoy taking action based on what I’ve heard, and seeing this action make a difference to the working lives of us as a group of staff, and in turn, our customers. Of course we don’t get it right all the time and that’s fine, with creativity and innovation come mistakes, and from these mistakes arise further opportunities to learn and improve.
I will call you when I’ve finished today’s MBWA and arrange to pop by and see you soon. Alternatively give me a call and come and find me, if that’s easier for you.
Hope to see you very soon.
I awoke from my dream imagining the possibilities sparked by such a reply. And like all dreams I have, things fade quickly from my memory as reality bites. I’m glad I wrote the note down before I forgot it.
Just over three years ago I had a reality. I was working for a new divisional CEO brought in to clear up the mess left by the previous one. To be clear I didn’t work for him directly, there were two layers of confusion, oops sorry I meant management, between him and me. When the new CEO arrived he asked, nay he begged for people to be open, to lend him ideas and help. “Please drop me a line with your ideas; I can’t get us out of this mess alone”. Encouraged by this appeal I began to look for and suggest ways of making work better. I found real cost savings, small in comparison to the size of the hole we were in but we were told every little helps. I found opportunities for growth too.
I received replies to my notes. Not from the CEO, but from people on his team reassuring me that although he is very busy, all these things were being looked at. And without fail that was the first and last response I received to every single note I sent. I used to write a blog for the business so I would recall some of these ideas on there, and I often found out via blog comments these ideas were really being considered, and in some cases actioned. But I never found this out via the CEO or any of his cronies.
Then all replies from the CEO office stopped, just like that. I kept the ideas flowing for a while with no clue if they were even getting through. What was I to do? I wrote one more note. I titled it “Are You There?” and I politely asked if I was ever going to get a reply directly from the CEO to any of my notes. I was as encouraging as I could possibly be, and I got a reply. It read:
Thank you for your note to Bert (name changed to protect the ignorant). Although he is too busy to respond personally he appreciates you being in touch blah blah blah.
Based on these experiences I’m heading back to dreamland for my next dose of inspiration. If you have news of where the boss has engaged and created a positive outcome I’d love to hear them. Surely the news ain’t all bad?
Great post Doug,
I suspect the messaging tools available to CEO’s have a great to deal to do with your experience of the lack of responsiveness. It IS simply too time consuming to individually email or comment back – it is too formal, requires wasteful attention to tone and the threat of continued correspondence – hence unknown resource risk – is very real. In this context, I think it’s understandable why CEO’s have relegated ‘getting back to you’ down on the list of things they need to do.
I’m convinced social media changes things; we have an entirely new way of communicating – instead of electronically writing (it IS electronic mail, after all), we have electronic talking (tweets, updates, chat etc) – quick, do-able, low cost exchanges of information – a decent fascsimile to real life F2F dialogue.
The availability of these tools, and their growing adoption by the C-Level, will trigger a cultural change in how business leaders interact within their business. They will talk more, because they can, and the dreamland you imagined will fast become business reality for most. We can already see it in the brightest new businesses of the day – all seemingly characterised by being led by individuals who are personally engaged with their business, and unobstructed by layers of purposeless management. I suspect your dreams are closer to reality than you might realise!
A very good read, will be back.
Best wishes
Hung
Hello Hung, it’s a real pleasure to see you here thanks for your visit.
You raise a lot of interesting points. This matter of being too time consuming to reply every time is interesting. The Group CEO in the company in this story used to make a point of replying to everyone personally (I probably should have mentioned that in the tale). This made his subordinates choice more of a surprise, to me at least. In conversation with the Group CEO I noted his ability and wish to reply and the divisional CEO’s opposite behaviour. The group CEO unwisely in my opinion, sought to defend the other guy’s behaviour saying “he’s too busy turning the division round to reply to everyone”, to which I replied “so you’re not too busy running the whole company, and he is?” That conversation stopped there. What this scenario showed me is it’s all about the will to do stuff, not so much the technology, or unknown risk (I love your term). In fact on the unknown risk side the Group CEO told me that hardly any employees contact him directly – I was unusual in that respect.
I am heartened by your final paragraph, and I have seen an example of a CEO (Peter Wanless of the Big Lottery Fund) using Twitter to very powerful and engaging effect. I hope there are more like him, otherwise I am concerned the gap between the ivory tower and the coal face will grow ever larger, and that serves no one well.
Doug,
Two thoughts come to mind. The first is a statistic I recall (correctly I hope) that over 70% of Fortune 500 CEOs are introverts! They do not manifest that way as they have learnt more extrovert behaviours in order to succeed, but at their core they are not all that comfortable dealing with people. This has been born out through experience with a number (though not all) of the CEO’s I have worked under during my. Interestingly many of the “quieter” ones have been accountants – I wonder if there is a link? (raised eyebrow)
The second is, and again this may just be from my time in financial services, the CEOs seem to get busier, more “protected” and the aversion to personal risk (by all concerned) just grows each day. The obsession with crafting messages and not saying what is seen as risky, removes most authenticity from anything that is delivered. Some of this is learned behaviour when you see the catastrophes caused by some leaked emails etc, but I think we lose more than we gain, but being uber-cautious.
Look for the extroverts, look for those who are comfortable in themselves and you will find the CEOs who respond, who exercise MBWA (rather than making it a reluctant chore). I don’t mean they should be reckless, but rather they should be genuine and sincere.
I could suggest that Richard Branson (from what I hear), maybe Stelios, maybe Alan Sugar are more likely to behave as you suggest, but there world is not rich with examples.
Hello Ian. Your stat fascinates me, it’s a shame that such a high percentage of people in these roles are there fighting against their preferred behaviour. Doesn’t really set a good example eh?
I think your second point is very powerful and I have seen it extend way beyond the world of financial services. I wonder for how much longer this protection culture can survive? The world is becoming a more open place (I think) and command and control are bacoming increasingly difficult things to manage.
Amen to genuine and sincere – that’s where it’s at.
Cheers – Doug