Accountability, Courage and Jerks
Andrew Fox
I'm in not-so-sunny Australia at the moment, living in a small country town between Melbourne and Sydney.
I was born in England and I first joined Mars in the early to mid-nineties. And then I emigrated to Australia with my wife. No family out here just fell in love with it as part of our honeymoon and said, let's go and start an adventure in Australia. When the immigration papers came through and said you've been accepted, I shook hands with Mars in a very amicable way and flew off to the other side of the planet.
Couple of years working for a law firm heading up L&D and leadership for the law firm, which was a real culture shift from working for an FMCG company before. Fate conspired to bring me back to the mothership and I rejoined Mars, Inc in 2001 out in Australia. And since then, I've done a myriad of roles, but after about a year or so in sales, I was tapped on the shoulder and was told, “Hey, you're a bit of a troublemaker come and might trouble with us in HR. And that we want someone to shake things up a bit.”
Predominantly been a salesman. When I first started, I wasn't a great salesman. I noticed very quickly that I tried really hard and got average results at best. I wasn't bad enough to get fired, but I wasn't good enough to really go anywhere. Then I attended some training programs and I couldn't believe how cool the job looked on the other side of the desk, the guy running the training sessions, I thought, wow, maybe I could go over the desk and do that side of the equation. Then when I got the chance to do that in ‘96, I fell in love with it and I didn't seem to be working half as hard and I was getting twice as good feedback.
So that was my first little insight of right person, right role. And I think we'll come back to that when we talk about team configuration and untapping that potential.
And then I got a global job heading up senior leader development. So, anyone at director level and above that Mars, Inc., basically, what are we doing in development for leadership for those guys? And I loved that job. And then I got a job to look after the leadership college for a couple of years I took over in February and COVID hit in March. So that was an interesting two year experience.
And then finally, back to the senior leader program. I do a lot of work with our general manager population and general managers at Mars are like mini-CEOs, they head up a business in a geography. I’m starting my third week now in a sabbatical
I've shaken hands with Mars. I'm going to six months sabbatical and then come October of this year. I'll reassess what I want to do, if anything. So you’ve found me in a very relaxed frame of mind.
Right Person / Right Role
What is the earliest really positive experience you have being a member of a team, what was it about it that made it so spectacular?
Spectacular as a high bar. Yeah, it's a strong one and it should be no, I think it's good to have those. You need those really powerful words to, to force you, to prioritize and cut through the clutter and the, in the sameness.
I've been blessed. I haven't been on many, if any bad teams. In my entire career I’ve had two line managers have been subpar out of probably 20. So I've had a pretty good hit rate and I'm blessed to have experienced that.
That first experience is the one that sticks with you. Isn't it? So for me, it would have been when I stepped out of sales that first time when I knew I was trying really hard, but quite frankly, it wasn't going to go anywhere and I got that chance to go and work for a guy called John Williams. He was and he headed up the UK sales training team.
I was never turned on by chasing the number, the cyclical nature, it never did anything for me. People around me love that part of the job. It just wasn't something that resonated with me. But connecting with people, making them better versions of themselves was what I loved. But when I jumped across that desk to get a chance to run some sales trainings. Yes, you’ve taught sales, but you also taught presentation, negotiation, difficult conversations, all those soft skills people would term them, we taught all those as well. I remember.
This was a specialist team, their aspiration was to be on it and work in that space.
And as soon as you've got that group of like-minded people that all wanted to be there, and quite frankly, they were good at what they did as well. You had that perfect storm. And on top of that, you had a line manager was a, and I always remember it. He'd have a conversation with you over coffee, and you think you're just having a chat about the day and you'd walk away from that “chat”, and you suddenly had this message in your head saying, “I think I want to go and do that.” And he wasn't some kind of a stage magician, the hypnosis, right. This was a guy that was, as I found out, a great coach and he would ask those right questions for you to unlock what you wanted to do next and how you wanted to go about doing it if you were stuck And so, and he was incredibly kind. He cared about you as an individual, and I can give multiple examples of how he demonstrated that for me. And I thought, wow, this guy cares about me. I'll walk over broken glass for him.
And I've got a team that love what they do. For those that use engagement lens, super high engagement. They were the right people in right roles doing work that was meaningful to them and making a difference.
And for me, that was the lasting memory of a great team, that early experience when I jumped across into a thing that was a far better fit for me.
So, you know, one of my tenets was, have you got the right people on the team and are they in the right roles so they can really do the most good in their lives. And, and so that was, that was something that sticks with me.
What struck me about that story was having people who want to be there is so foundational to a great team.”
If I look at patterns, another team, when I first got brought out of sales back, you know, back in that team where they said, you're gonna work on all these projects I jumped in and I looked around They weren't just good at what they did. They all had a good name. Highly regarded within the business. And I'm now in a team with all these highly regarded stars. They were really good at making a difference and all feeding off each other and being very, very supportive. But there was no competition within that team. I think that was another thing that stood out.
Another common thing, the leader, the line manager, set in that environment, managing you through those things, ensuring that you've got the right fit of people on the team. We've all been on teams where we've had great work, but it only takes one noisy wheel to start to unravel.
Jerks at work
Let’s go there…Yeah but there’s always a jerk…
Yeah. What do they say? If everyone you meet in life is a jerk. the chances are you're the jerk. I think that's the expression. If you find that happening a lot, you’re either very unlucky or you’re the problem. So, a bit of self-awareness for you. Hold up the ugly mirror and embrace it.
So let’s…what do you do with that jerk?
I would break that down into slightly more granularity: what if that jerk’s the line manager?
Okay. Let’s get there. There’s the jerk that’s a peer and the jerk’s the boss.
I've interviewed a lot of the senior presidents over the last few years about lessons learned. One of the global presidents said, “Look Foxy, one of the biggest learnings I've had was I didn't act fast enough. When I inherited the team I kept trying to turn it around and cut more slack to these certain individuals. And in hindsight, I wish I'd acted earlier. And that is a common thing I hear from many, many of their general managers. And sometimes that individual is thankful when you tap them on the shoulder and say, look, this isn't working out. because they know it and they're just not living up to it. And it's heartbreaking to see someone drive themselves into the ground into a role they're never going to flourish in. How long do you hang on to someone and keep trying to turn around before you say it's probably more humane for everyone involved to, to cut ties and find something else for them to do where they maybe are a better fit.
And then there's how they go about doing that. Often when we have jerks, it's not…people aren't jerks because they can't do the job very well. Often people that can do the job just do it in a really shitty way. And they treat people poorly whilst doing it. It's a behavioral element rather than a competence element I would argue. Right.
I'll start with my, my own team. I had a pretty good team across AsiaPac, and I had one person who was competent, very competent. Did the job well had a very complex geography and quite frankly, was really hard to replace. Often it is the ones that are hard to replace because that's where you tolerate it because you offset it against the fact that they're hard to replace.
I'd had a few other members of the team coming to me saying, “I can't work with her anymore.”
And I'm thinking, “Oh, I kind of get it. She's hard work. By that point, I'd had hundreds of people in my teams across the years, and I couldn't work out what was going on with this. I could not read this person. I knew that she rubbed everyone up the wrong way, but the customers loved her because she worked her ass off. She delivered, she was relentless in that.
But she wasn't a team player in any, in any part of the definition. She was just about, “I'm going to do what I need to do to get my job done. And quite frankly, screw the rest of you if you get in my way. I don't really care about that.” I had this tough equation and said, I can't let this geography hemorrhage by letting her go. But equally I've got to try and protect the rest of the team from her so that she doesn't bring the team down whilst we find a solution.
And in hindsight, I should have gone earlier because that one person can, can erode the engagement of other team members to where they don't want to work, or the tone of the room changes when they come in. That's a slow burner. It erodes maybe 5% of the things around the edges, but across another eight people in the team you're eroding 40% of impact. So that was on my own team where I didn't act fast enough
They weren't happy in their role.
Let me just check this…you were hesitant but when did, you found out this person isn’t happy anyway?
I'd love to say in Hollywood style, it was that one conversation suddenly the whole world changed. She said, “But look what I'm doing! My customers love me.”
I said, “Yes, they do love you. And you're doing great work with them, but the environment, the wreckage you’re leaving behind you I'm having to deal with and that's not acceptable.” So, it was all about the how and not the what in that person. When you look at jerks, it's the how not the what and the cultural fit, isn’t it?
Alright, that’s what you did as a manager. That is a conflictual situation. It’s even harder when it’s a peer. What have you done when you have been on a team with a difficult personality? Let’s say you and I are on a team, and you’re a jerk. What’s the advice to a team member in terms of dealing with that difficult person?
So, there's, that's one example, but it's not a peer of mine. I'm not proud of it. My initial response was, “For the love of God guys, if you've got some interpersonal glitches with this lady, sort it out amongst yourselves. You're paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you’re big grownups, you’re professionals…
And in American dollars that’s like $5,000…
[LOL] Yes! Sort it out. I don't need to be the parent. This is not a parent-child relationship you need…Now. And I thought I was being very empowering all these kinds of things.
I don't think it went down particularly well in hindsight. The first point of call is, can they sort it out in themselves, or can you sort out yourselves? Do you need to triangulate through a line manager? I think that's your final kind of point of call if you can't seek resolution yourself.
One thing I'm quite good at is finding that common ground with all different shapes sizes of people culturally political, whatever those prickly edges might be that offend others, I can invariably find a connection with those people. Over those 20 or so teams, I don't think I can think of a peer that was a jerk that I've not been able to work with. Indeed, I can think of two examples where the line manager was the jerk and I was on the team. So, it's just different dynamic at play when you've got a line manager.
Let’s talk about when the manager is a jerk. We sometimes talk about it as managing up.
And yeah, absolutely managing up, and in some really tough cases, it becomes managing around, right? Managing around them up to another higher level. Because you haven't managed to solve it within your immediate sphere of control.
I think, two examples: one was that classic looking down from above, pointing the finger and ruling by fear type role. That didn't work for me at all. Very counter to my own style. To that point, I said, this line manager’s an ass and why do I want to work for him? I just don't know how this guy’s got away with this kind of behavior for so long. So that was one example.
The other one was a guy who was very nice to talk with, very congenial, but completely hopeless. There was no structure. There was no clarity of what you're supposed to be doing. Some of the more senior members of that team were saying, “We're going to have to go above him because this isn't working for us and we're going to have to report this to HR and maybe the ombudsman or whatever because this can't go on. We can't keep being just left to do our own thing. It's negligence.”
So, there are two examples of where the leader was a jerk for different reasons. One was a nice guy that just had no clue, quite frankly, and didn't really care that much. The other one just had a bit of a mean streak. Someone that liked to pick on people and demonstrate their inadequacies in front of the wider team, which is pretty poor.
What do you do? You’re on a team, you want this to be a great experience…Is there a way to succeed with that going on?
It's really hard. think the natural human reaction is you try and find a way to work around it. You say, well, what work can I do that doesn't require too much input from that individual? How do I keep my own career moving and still keep kicking goals despite this person, not because of them? And, and that's, yeah, that's, that's heartbreaking. A line manager has a bigger influence and impact on your health and wellbeing than your GP.
So, let's just sit with that for a second. Your general practitioner, your doctor. Because you spend so much time at work, if that person lacks care, lacks consideration, has an axe to grind. So it's not just indifference. It's actually going out of the way to make your life difficult. Right? That will manifest itself, not just at work, but every time you leave work, every time you're thinking about going back to work you get filled with that sense of dread, and reluctance. It's horrible. Right? And I really feel no one should have to suffer that.
Accountability is essential
In my daily leadership RSS, there was an article that asked, what are the most effective techniques for managers with their teams? The answer was, “Put people first”, a lesson we’ve been learning for 50 or 60 years! Why do we have to keep teaching the same lessons? The world still has a problem finding people for leadership positions who know how to deal with people.
Absolutely. Sometimes it's because they don't know any different. So, they're not getting the development that they need to show them how we want you to lead. I think that's, that's a big part of it. Sometimes it's the accountability within the system. I might work for you, and I might've given you feedback that says you're a 4 out of 10, not an eight out of 10 but no one does anything about it. It just sits as a 4 out of 10 in a, in a file somewhere. So, how do we close that loop? Their behavior was what got them there and therefore they keep doing it. And until someone calls them on it, until someone says, culturally, this isn't how we do things they sometimes don't realize. Now some are able to embrace change, and thankfully others just exit stage left because they're not able to, or choose not to do it.
I'm glad you picked up on it. This idea of how the hell can you pick up something from a cutting-edge, leading sort of a thought leader, if you will, and it tells you something that you knew you knew about read about and I've been practicing for 40 years.
And part of the challenge I think is that there are so many models and approaches and shiny objects out there that people are trying to peddle to organizations. Everyone wants to be at the cutting edge.
And often it's those things that aren't sexy, those fundamental things that will not change, that are part of human nature. The organization has taken their eye off the ball for a while, and then and it starts to drop off. And then it's only when the dashboard starts to show an organizational problem in terms of metrics that they start to think, hang on, we've lost the plot here, we've let go of those basic things that made people good leaders or good associates in the past. I think that's a real risk.
We've done a lot of analysis recently. We did a massive sweep of all the data we had on our leaders. And I can share this, I think, for an organization that prides itself on being very people, relationship oriented, they're not great at process, they're not good at following command and control. It's all decentralized, but they're wonderful “people-people,” they're friendly, they get on, they connect well, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And yet, and yet this data painted a very different picture that said, actually your core areas of opportunity are empathy, are listening within empathy, talent development…
I was sitting there thinking, this is completely different to what I was expecting. There were a few others. Performance management. We had our own people saying, we just need you to manage performance better. And this is our people telling our leaders this.
I think the data challenges our stereotypes of what we think we're good at. And, and that was a good outcome for me.
So. everything went to 12-inch Dell screens, and everything was done remotely. And as people sat in their rooms for two years and never left was that they lacked managers that cared about you cared about your family, what was going on in your life, outside of work and how they could help you be better inside of work.
The pandemic brought to surface the importance of humanity and checking in. I interviewed my favorite former manager, Sylvia Burberry in a former podcast. When I asked, “What did you learn?”, she said, “Its remarkably simple: Ask, “How are you doing?” Not just how are your projects going, but how are YOU feeling?” Wouldn’t you love it if when we get back face to face that’s the first question we ask each other?
Yeah, and it should have been the question even before pandemic. It should’ve been the question we should've asked people. Showing an interest in your team members as human beings first, I don't want to jump onto a call and talk to you about project X or pre presentation Y when I haven't asked how you and the family doing, because that foundational thing, if that's, if that's screwed or, or crumbling, everything else will fall over as result. And so,
It’s the right thing to do anyway,
From a purely cold calculated, How-do-I-improve-performance perspective, it's essential.
Because otherwise if that foundation isn't that, and people don't feel that you care about them and we'll go into bat for them and have their back and all those kinds of cliches, if people don't believe that about you, they're less likely to go those extra yards and be resilient for you when you need them to be.
You mentioned the Q12 questionnaire where you’re asked to rate the phrase, “Someone at works cares about me.” When it’s my manager who cares, it makes it doubly powerful.
Absolutely. People say to me, oh, but hang on, people are only engaged when performance is good. Doesn’t performance drive engagement? And I say, hang on, stop for a second. And just take a chill pill. Stop trying to be the smartest guy in the room because you're not. Let's just think about this: I will tell you categorically over a 19-year period the leaders we have today in our organization are so much better, so much better than they were pre-engagement.
The culture of the organization is, “this stuff really matters,” and you're not going to be a leader unless you can embrace it. And that is a fundamental shift that I've seen.
I have to believe that the commitment to measurable accountability has a lot to do with it. You talked about the extensive research on leaders at Mars that was done to find out what Mars leaders needed to do. Good on ya for asking the question, even after 20 years of using the engagement survey.
Data has challenged our, our kind of internal bias. But I do think you need that kind of accountability woven into the fabric. Metrics really help to really help you keep that thing alive.
Common language is important. Leaders think, “Oh, I didn't, I didn't know how to refer to that, but now I've got this way of compartmentalizing it and seeing it now I can zoom in and say, that's the thing I'm not doing at the moment, and I need to do more of it.
Neuroscience says, if we can’t name it, we can’t envision it
Language gives us a framework to talk about these things.
Which we know is important. You've read about that study on the blue sky, The Odyssey - 4,000 years old book. They looked at the number of times the colors were mentioned right in this, in this, in this massive ancient Greek text, and they found that red was mentioned 25 times and brown and all these things, but blue didn't come up at all. And then they looked to other ancient texts around the world of a similar period. And again, apart from the Egyptian texts blue never showed up ever in any of these texts.
Why is that? If you don't have a word for something, you can't see it. They found this, they found this small tribe in Africa, where they have about 13 words for green, but no they have no words blue in their culture. They had these guys, all these, these warriors for the tribes sat there with headphones on looking at laptops is out in the middle of this, you know, this station and they, they put up all these squares and they said, right, tell us which ones are these squares of blue, right? And you and I would look at these set of squares and you'd say, well, it's clearly the top right one. And these guys would agonize the 3 to 4 minutes and some would get it, some wouldn’t and it was completely random.
And then they put up a slide that showed, tell us the one that's darkest green. It was all green. You and I’d be looking at it thinking they look the bloody same. And yet within about 10 seconds these guys would say, “That's the greenest one.” But what it showed was because they had all these words for green, they could spot nuances in the physical sense, whereas they couldn't say blue and they couldn't pick it out.
Why do I go down this, this weird wacky story? It is because, if you don't have that kind of construct, that language where people can identify something and name it, label it, it's very hard to be aware of it and notice it. And it's very hard to do anything about it. If you want to change a culture, if you want to lead a movement, to get people marching in a particular way, unique language is really important. There's a neuro link to having language - you don't see stuff you're not aware of stuff if you don't have a word for it.
I reflect back on earlier story about someone who was a jerk not changing because there were no consequences
That's true. How much do you tolerate before you act? And people always tell themselves stories. “I'll give it another week it will settle itself.”
Conflict’s another one. “Oh, it's probably me. We'll just let run it.” And the lesson that I've learned from this is it pays, with respect, to confront the issue then have the conversation to raise awareness. Sometimes the other person is totally unaware of the impact they're having. Sometimes just by flicking that switch, you can make life easier for yourself and your peers within that environment. Now, people don't do it often because they're afraid, “Oh, if I do that and I upset them, it's going to go 10 times worse.” And the numbers just don't back that up. Invariably, you'll make things better. And if things get worse than guess what you bring it to a head anyway.
Courage
People sometimes don’t act on conflict in a relationship because they fear they can’t handle what they get back from the other person. In my experience, though, people are way more courageous than they know.
It's this whole bravery, courageous thing that in my head, I always remember bravery was things that you would do like that. And courage was being afraid, but still doing it. That was the distinction. it's okay to feel afraid or uncertain about something. And people catastrophize that in their mind, “Oh, it's going to be the extreme on the spectrum.” And invariably it doesn't become that extreme.
Put yourself in the shoes. If someone came to you and told you something out of left field, you might be shocked, you might be a bit, “Oh, bloody hell really. That's what they think?” But ultimately, you'd be quite thankful that you knew what was going on rather than it just going on behind the scenes and you being oblivious to it.
So I think if you apply that thinking, we’re mostly wired the same way as human beings, right? So, if that's the case, trust yourself, be courageous. You might feel uneasy, do it anyway and gradually that circle of courage will gradually grow as you do it and realize things aren't that bad. You do it more and more. Someone said to me, look, if you're going to get in a scrape over something Foxy, or they're going to bring that to head with Carlos, you need to weigh it up very quickly. Is it, is it small enough for you to be able to manage and is it big enough to make a difference? Right. And if it doesn't tick those two boxes, then let it go. And when I say, let it go, you have to let it go and move on. You can't just keep ruminating and going back to it,
Foxy, Thank you for taking this time with me
Yeah, you're most welcome. Keep up the good work, my friend.
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