Management and Leadership
Business Day: 18 August 2008
Making the business of being human first priority
WHEN Hylton Bannon took on a management role within a multinational vehicle distributor he started searching for innovative ways to improve productivity and staff satisfaction. The company was already successful; what he needed, he says, was “a sustainable competitive edge”.
“We couldn’t change our product. What we needed to change was how we lead our people,” says Bannon, head of the automotive division of Toyota Tsusho Africa (TTAF).
“You can be efficient with processes, but not with people. People need to be fulfilled.”
TTAF is a subsidiary of the Toyota Tsusho Corporation, a trading company within the Toyota Group, and sells Toyota vehicles and spare parts in 23 African countries. The company has grown exponentially — from 12 employees to 1400 — since it was formed in 2000.
One of the challenges facing TTAF in reaching its 1400 employees was communication. The company is based in no fewer than eight different countries, with employees drawn from very diverse cultures.
The inspiration for how to overcome these geographical challenges came when Bannon attended a Strategic Leadership through Coaching course, offered by the Centre for Coaching based at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB), shortly after he joined the company.
The course was so successful for him that Bannon is now pursuing further coaching studies and his 12 senior managers and 100 middle managers are also receiving coaching training. He says their new approach “has definitely given us the competitive advantage by helping to change the way each person in the company thinks and acts. Coaching is vital to our long-term success”.
Coaching is gaining ground internationally as a way for business leaders to solve problems at work or to improve an already successful business.
A survey completed two years ago by PricewaterhouseCoopers International, commissioned by the International Coach Federation, showed that there are now 30000 business coaches globally, most of them in the US, and that the coaching industry was generating a hefty $1,5bn in revenue.
Bannon describes coaching as a way of helping business leaders see possibilities they could not see before, and explore these “in a safe, trusting environment”. It is based on values, which transcend culture, he said. “Respect is respect, no matter where you come from.”
“Coaching transformed the lives of many of our staff,” Bannon added. “The behavioural changes are cascading down through the organisation very nicely.”
These behavioural changes include not only showing others respect at all times but also an ability to be more fully present. In Bannon’s experience, the higher one rises in a big organisation the lonelier it gets.
“You may have 30 different conversations in the course of a 10-hour period, and each conversation is vitally important to the person bringing it to you. The course enabled me to ensure that when I am talking to the 20th person, I can give them the same energy as the first.”
To achieve this, Bannon adopted a new model for conversations, based on the philosophy of coaching. When a staff member approaches him he now spends about 60% of the time of a conversation on developing a relationship with the person or a better understanding of their circumstances and perceptions. About 30% of the conversation is spent on discussing possible action to take and only 10% on deciding what to do.
Towards the end of the discussion the parties understand each other so well they can quickly decide on the best course of action, he says.
“If you’re talking to someone from a different country, you’d spend the 60% of the conversation finding out what is happening in their environment,” said Bannon. “If it’s someone you know very well, you’d spend more time on understanding what they’re bringing to the table.
“Business leaders often take an entire hour discussing paths of action but are constantly held up by the hidden assumptions of both parties,” he said. “In the new conversation model, the participants start ironing out those assumptions from the start. This is very, very powerful. It started empowering the people who come to me and it speeds up how the organisation works, removing bottlenecks. And the decisions we make are of a far higher quality.”
In addition, Bannon said that coaching has also given the organisation a more effective framework for dealing with conflict. At TTAF he reports that it gave the different nationalities in the company a space to discuss, for example, what trust entails: confidence in someone’s competence, as well as their reliability and sincerity.
“Often in organisations, people say they don’t trust a department or team. That blanket statement can be incredibly demoralising. We have learnt to have discussions about trust — that show it is really just that someone might simply doubt another person’s experience in doing the job,” he said.
Coaching also changed performance appraisals within TTAF. Where a manager might have previously told an employee what he or she is doing well and badly, managers now have coaching conversations with employees which is working out to be more empowering for both parties.
Bannon’s experiences at TTAF have been replicated in other businesses and organisations in SA — including within the country’s main opposition political party. CEO of the Democratic Alliance, Ryan Coetzee, who is also an MP, took part in the same Strategic Leadership through Coaching course that Bannon attended.
Looking for something to boost him after an exhausting year, he opted to learn about receiving coaching because the DA leaders had been experiencing “a gap in how to get people to follow your direction, as opposed to managing them. “Coaching emphasises ‘conversations for understanding’, in which the listener asks questions to ensure they understand completely, rather than immediately begins to formulate answers,” he said. “It seems obvious, but it doesn’t often happen.”
With help from the GSB coaches, the DA has designed its own staff development programme and a workshop for its top management committee.
Old Mutual HR executive Malebone Masekwameng has also been using coaching in her organisation to boost leadership effectiveness. In her role she had been appointing coaches to work with other executives in the team and felt that she needed to understand the process of receiving one-on-one coaching better.
“Coaching focuses on any area of your life that you want to unravel, that affects your work,” she said. “It helped me a lot.
“There was a relationship that I needed to approach in a different way. It had to do with accountability and getting boundaries right: if you do that, you can focus on what you need to focus on.”
Janine Everson, Academic Director at the Centre for Coaching and convener of the Strategic Leadership through Coaching course, says that the experiences and results that Bannon and others are getting does not surprise her but that it is gratifying to see coaching in action in this way.
“Coaching receives good and bad press around the world, but implemented properly it has phenomenal potential to drive change and results,” she said.
“The bottom line is coaching works because it initiates a change in the behaviour of individuals, which is the hardest thing in the world to change. Once individuals have shifted, organisational change follows on easily .”- Jane Notten
