About 10 years ago I was travelling across the whole of the UK, I was doing lots of great HR innovation; working with different teams looking at change management.
The organisation I worked for would win lots of work. Then we had new staff coming on board that we would have to integrate into our organisation and so I loved it. It was great fun. I was working on different projects with different people, learning loads of really great stuff.
One day I had a sales guy come to me saying he was trying to win some HR work with one of our current clients and that they had submitted a proposal that hadn't been accepted because it was a bit too technical. So, they asked for someone who understood the client to help write it. I read what the previous person had written (I had no bid writing experience) and I went to the department and spoke to some staff to get an understanding of what was happening there and we completely rewrote it. It was submitted and we won!
Then a month later my manager came to me and told me that the sales guy thought that I was amazing for how I had written the bid and how I had dealt with the client and the stakeholders. He told me that they needed someone who's going to manage the team once they come across and asked me if I would be down for that. I thought great, it's a new opportunity. It's an opportunity for me to manage a larger team.
The department was 60 people, they weren't all directly reporting to me, but they were all ultimately my responsibility.
I was so naïve!
I’d never managed a huge team and I'd never managed a big team and at the same time had to manage making the changes that we had agreed with the client.
We agreed on a whole raft of changes to the systems and the way the team was structured.
We were implementing a brand new HR system and other systems that were going to integrate with it.
I was full of energy to implement the changes but I forgot that while the organisation that I worked for had agreed to do the work and while the client had also agreed, nobody had really spoken to the team about it.
So while I was there working with them trying to get this new stuff in place, they were still trying to run the day to day and so whenever I was trying to get them to do work they were saying well, “look I've got this backlog of this, a backlog of that…”, “I've got no time to think about the new stuff because right now…”
So I found myself coming in early and staying late trying to do all the additional things that we promised the client, rather than getting my team to do it because it just felt like a struggle. It really felt like I was pushing water up a hill.
I had to take a step back and think what am I gonna do? I have committed to doing this and when I commit to doing something it needs to get done.
How am I gonna make this work?
I took a step back to assess this. My thoughts were that if a manager came to me and said I'm talking to my staff and I can't get them to do what I need them to do I would need to understand where the problems lay. Is it with the team or with the manager of the team. I soon realised that I hadn't approached it in the right way.
I had taken this team and I hadn't taken the time to get to know them or for them to get to know me and so I changed the structure of my team meetings. Instead of only looking at the KPI's (key performance indicators) that we agreed with the stakeholders we talked about what their frustrations were? What were the challenges? What is causing the issues and then I could start to look at how the new system and efficiencies we put in place would help to solve that. This was how I was able to get their buy-in and their time.
One of the biggest challenges is when you tell someone to do something and they have no understanding of why. You need to explain what you need to be really clear on the reason why we're making this change, e.g. The reason why we're doing this thing is so that when we have 20,000 clients instead of 5,000 clients we can still manage to fulfil the orders
Once people understand what you're doing you’ll get them on board and they will come with you.
The other thing that I was I did was, get some quick wins to address some of the challenges they had. There were some people who had only have one screen and I needed to have a dual-screen. The whole office space needed a bit of refreshing. This actually made a huge difference.
As you go forward in working with your team, take the time to get to know them, take the time to understand, their frustrations. the struggles of the people on the ground with your clients.
They will have a really great insight into what the clients need and their struggles as well