Talking about values is one thing. Translating them into what you actually do every day is another. That’s why I can’t give you a blueprint for culture change. It’s unique to every organization. But there are plenty of ideas to think about.
The tech company Satalia, for instance, has no managers or Key Performance Indicators. Even pay is transparent. The reason? Founder Daniel Hulme’s core belief that the way business works should enable ‘everyone to do the work they love’.107
I agree that expressing what you value through how you behave changes the way you work in very tangible ways. At Portas, we didn’t have to work on diversity because we naturally have a pretty even split between male and female employees. We’re okay on class and sexual orientation too. The board is made up of two men, two women, and between us we’re unmarried, married, middle and working class, gay and straight, parents and childless, so we’re a pretty thorough mix of just about everything.
For us, though, embedding the value of collaboration into the business was a key culture change. And, given that the core of any business is money, we decided that a good place to start would be the financials – and everyone’s relationship to them.
Until then, we’d been working along traditional alpha lines when it came to the numbers: the ‘lower down’ you were, the less you knew about money. Key financial information was kept to senior management, and while teams might have financial goals, they had no idea how these threaded into the bigger picture.
But if people had an increased understanding of the inner financial workings of the agency, we reasoned, they were bound to feel more invested in it and work together to succeed. To do that, we needed to create more financial transparency.
So, instead of splitting people into departments and telling them how much money we wanted them to make, we started to tell them about where we were as a business financially, where we believed we could get to and how we were going to do it together.
Then, rather than set financial goals at the top of the business – and implicitly tell teams to reach them come Hell or high water – we asked everyone to input. Creating collective ownership of figures makes everyone feel they have a stake in success.
Remember those Harvey Nichols board meetings that went on for hours as we pored over numbers?
Our new financial meeting was easily slotted into fifteen minutes one morning a week as we detailed quarterly and annual targets, how we had built the figures and where we were on achieving them. It wasn’t shrouded in complicated graphs and PowerPoint presentations. It was delivered in simple language because, after all, it was pretty straightforward.
We now approach the numbers as collaboratively as the creative work always has been tackled and in an equally relaxed way. We don’t whip people to get ideas from them. We work together to produce them. It’s the same for the numbers.
We have also created a profit share so that everyone has a vested interest in the financial success of the whole agency.
As I said: this is not rocket science.
Communicating that you value collaboration can be done in many ways. Take how meetings are structured. I’d sat at many rectangular board tables during my working life where the seat you were in showed how far up the food chain you were. My agency had one of those too. I thought that was the kind of table you had to have. I tried to make mine a bit unusual by buying a hot-pink one. But it was still bloody rectangular.
Then, over supper one evening at home, I realized that everyone felt at ease sitting at the large round table in my dining room. There was no one at the ‘head’ of it. Why couldn’t we do the same at work?
The table was hoofed from my house into the office and today you’ll find some people sitting at it, others on sofas and some standing during agency meetings.
It’s about showing – even in the physical environment – that you are more of a team than an army unit with different rankings.
One book that has really inspired me is called Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux. He’s an amazing thinker who’s looked at what he calls ‘teal’ organizations. For Laloux, these are the businesses of the future. One key way they work is by self-management – essentially a very pure form of collaboration. Many companies work this way and, in his book, Laloux looks at businesses that employ self-managing teams of everyone from nurses to car-part manufacturers and have produced spectacular results.
He believes that in this way natural hierarchies – rather than those enforced via intricate management structures – start to emerge as people take on different tasks.
When this is combined with the ability for people to be their whole selves at work and a shared sense of purpose, organizations can transform the way they work to become ‘teal’.
It’s fascinating stuff.
I hadn’t read Laloux when we started this journey but realize now that we instinctively did much of what he talks about. And as we became more collaborative, a natural hierarchy did indeed emerge.
We’re not entirely self-managing, though. A business like mine – one that’s a mix of skills, roles, age and experience – still requires some form of hierarchy. It is, however, one of competency, not power, and that is a key difference. Managers are there because they can guide, train and inspire. People want to work alongside them.
Competency doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be the most senior person on the team in order to lead either. Recently, I sat in on a presentation prepared for one of our major clients by a junior staff member. He’d done a lot of research on the market the client was in during the run-up to a meeting and his passion for the subject shone through when he presented it to us internally.
We asked him if he’d like to do it for the client, who was flying in the next day, and he agreed. Up before the sparrows, he arrived at the office declaring he hadn’t slept. He needn’t have worried, though. The client responded wholeheartedly to his enthusiasm.
There is a health warning on collaboration: creating it can be tough at times. Collaboration can create conflict that takes energy to resolve. During the first couple of years of changing the way we worked, we spent a lot of time managing people’s emotions and expectations. If being the leader of a business is like being the head of a family, I certainly sometimes thought that telling the kids to shut up and sit in the corner would be a whole lot easier than really engaging with them. Then I breathed through the aggravation and started to listen again.
We’ve also had to challenge our assumption that everyone would respond in the way we thought they would. In an effort to make our main creative meetings more collaborative, we introduced a weekly Creative Review. Everyone working on accounts would gather together and update on the main pieces of work moving through the business.
This was the one key meeting that I was always present at, and it gave me a chance to work with every level of the business. Instead of just working with the senior management, I was sitting down with the whole team.
So we’ve got the round table. We’re all feeding in. Everyone has a voice. I thought we’d cracked this thing called collaboration. Then it became clear that the ‘review’ bit of the meeting’s name made people feel as if it was an inspection or evaluation. They still felt as if they were waiting for me to sign off work – which therefore blew collaboration out of the water.
We decided to change the format to Workshop Wednesday, to communicate that this was a meeting at which we were all feeding in rather than one in which work was reviewed. It worked.
But while working more collaboratively is not without challenges, it’s certainly produced far more positive effects than negative. We now draw ideas from every layer of the business in a way we didn’t before. People who are employed at Portas are there because they’re talented so it’s vital that they have a voice. Instead of all the thinking being left to management and implemented from the top down, we now actively seed more ideas from the bottom up.
Caireen, for instance, sits down in one-on-ones with everyone in the business and asks them to put forward ideas as part of ‘What would you do if you were MD for the day?’ People see things from different – and interesting – perspectives.
Akio Morita, the man who made Sony among the most recognizable brands on the planet, believed in the power of collective input so strongly that he put much of the company’s remarkable success down to its atmosphere of free discussion. ‘A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management,’ he once said.
Hear, hear, Akio.
But collaboration isn’t just about generating ideas. It’s also about the basics of how you employ people. Culture documents such as Netflix’s are the stuff of legend these days, and ours took months of tweaking to get completely right. But we knew it was an important statement both to those already at Portas and to people who were coming into the business, which is why we worked on it so much.
Today, we’ve summed up the spirit of Portas and our mission as follows:
| WE DO THE BEST WORK | Everything we do is driven by our desire to produce the best work we can, for our clients and for ourselves. Work that is clever, creative and commercial. |
| A FOCUS ON PROGRESS, NOT ACTIVITY | We’re not interested in how long we spend on something or how many activities we undertake or how long we sit at our desks. What we’re interested in is that we are producing the right work and are focused on the right things that make impact for our client’s business and ours. |
| EVERYONE HAS A VOICE AND A PART TO PLAY | We’re each here because we have something of worth to offer and should take time to understand and respect each other’s role. We listen to each other because we all have something to contribute, no matter our position, seniority or number of days on the payroll. |
| WE ARE SHARERS, NOT HOARDERS | Ideas are our common currency and we share them. No campaign or piece of work is the result of one person. Everyone will have played a part. It’s ‘WE’, not ‘ME’. Together we are stronger. |
| USE YOUR INSTINCT | If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and you think it’s a pig – it’s probably a pig. Trust your (well-trained) intuition. Live by the belief of always balancing head-based intellect and heart-based values with gut-based instinct. |
| DRIVEN YET FAIR | We are ambitious. But we believe we can be the best by being ethical and respectful of each other, the people we work with and the relationships we build. Yes, that means it can sometimes get emotional and passionate but always with purpose, intellect and empathy. |
| WE EMPLOY RADIATORS, NOT DRAINS | Being a Portas person is special. We only want to work with passionate and clever people who give their best and get the best from those around them. It takes stamina always to be a radiator but through support of each other we believe we have a team that does this. |
| HONEST AND OPEN | We believe in transparency and candour, having moments of reflection and ‘always on’ guidance and coaching (that means giving it, receiving it and encouraging it). Demonstrating vulnerability, asking questions and admitting mistakes takes courage but it’s only when we know that it is okay to fail and learn from it that we’ll be brave enough to aim high. |
| WE DO NOT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN WORK AND PLAY | We are at our creative best when we get to bring our whole and true selves to work. From building an inspiring workplace that feeds our creativity, doing a collective downward dog at an agency yoga session, working around the school run, sharing our cultural loves with each other or volunteering at one of Mary’s Living & Giving shops, we always look for ways to better integrate all aspects of our lives. Our work is our calling rather than a job. |
| ALWAYS LEARNING | We believe in creating a culture of learning and live by the belief that we continue to learn and grow no matter how old or experienced we are. To be experts in our sector we need to be innovators in our thinking and sponges to the world around. |
To further ingrain the idea of collectivity we also did away with one-on-one annual appraisals because we felt they were rooted in judging or evaluating. Now we have career-progression plans that are based on two-way conversations looking at how people are getting on, what they’re finding challenging and how the agency can work with them to fill those gaps – from paying for life coaching to courses to develop new skills.
And it’s not just about what the person you directly report to thinks either. Several colleagues – from junior to senior – are asked to give their views on how someone is doing and to create a fuller picture than just a boss’s impressions. After all, most of us have had a manager who we feel never gives us a break. Personalities clash. It’s life. So group feedback is a safety mechanism against people feeling unfairly treated. You can hardly argue when everyone from the receptionist to the MD thinks you’re a bit of an arrogant twit.
It’s a way more powerful tool to see the whole of a person and their skills. And it’s also a two-way street: individuals receive praise for what they’re doing well and constructive criticism on what they might improve; managers get a fuller picture of their staff.
I learned years ago how important this was when I had a deputy I thought was fantastic because he was so efficient. But when the whole team sat down for a couple of drinks together after an event, tongues were loosened and I discovered that he was in fact verging on being a bully.
This guy was good at giving me what I wanted but treated everyone else badly. I soon let him go and resolved never again to sit in a separate office. Since then, I’ve always sat among the team, and when I want to talk to someone, I try either to go to them or sit together informally on a sofa rather than call them into an office. It’s far more powerful to sit in a group of people doing great work than shut yourself away behind a closed door.
Improved collaboration had unexpected results, too – such as weeding out the odd person who was, to be frank, just not that great at their job or didn’t want to pull their weight. It’s easier to stay hidden behind others and their work when you’re cut off from each other in a linear structure. Far harder, when everyone is feeding into work and assessments.
Strengthening collaboration has been key to creating a hierarchy that’s based on competence alone at Portas. It’s also about shifting work from a place that hems people in and penalizes them to one where everyone feels happy, heard and in harmony.
And I believe that is the starting point of great work.