Accessing the Power of Pull Conversations

      A LARGE Australian telecommunications company hired a dynamic young consultant to work with its Unit B in social mapping, strategic planning, and other processes.

      Amanda, a woman in her thirties, met with the team once a month in the red upper room of a funky downtown restaurant, with a standing invitation to anyone else in the company who was interested.

      The Red Room, as it came to be known, was an oasis for conversation – just conversation. Sometimes Amanda kicked things off by introducing new tools or ideas that were exciting her, letting things proceed from there. But the main point of the Red Room was to get people face to face in a place of trust and honest exploration, where they could say what they really wanted to say. People didn’t necessarily even talk about work, just about whatever was important to them. They spent whole afternoons in these conversations (often continuing them elsewhere into the night).

      One afternoon Amanda introduced an exercise called the Team Trading Floor, created by Loretta Rose. She had team members brainstorm the services they needed from one another and those they could provide (work related, relational, family ... anything at all). Then they traded among themselves.

      The team loved the idea so much, they tried it back at the office. One member had written down that he wanted to learn to dance salsa. To his surprise, “I can teach salsa dancing” was on the list of one of his teammates. He signed an agreement with her for lessons, offering to help her with her departmental budgeting in return.

      A couple of weeks later, Amanda got a call from one of the VPs.

      “I want to come to the Red Room,” he said.

      “Of course!” Amanda said. “It’s open to anyone. You’re welcome to come.”

      “I just never gave it much thought before, but now I’d like to come and see.”

      “What changed your mind?”

      “I don’t get it,” the accountant said after a long pause. “What is it you do up there?”

      “We just talk.”

      “I don’t get it,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Last week I was down to visit Unit B. As I was walking through the cafeteria, two people were dancing salsa. And that unit’s income has doubled in the past six months! When I ask them how they’re pulling that off, all they talk about is the Red Room. What are you doing to them in that room?”

       Conversations and Energy

      What she was doing, or, rather, what everyone in the Red Room was doing, was releasing energy through conversation. The energy flowed personally and even idiosyncratically, which is what had the VP shaking his head. But it also flowed into the everyday processes of the company, creating better results – which is what really caught his attention.

       Conversations Are Atomic in Nature

      An atom is a small thing, but depending on how it is split, it can productively light up the city of Toronto (read nuclear energy) or destructively light up the city of Hiroshima (read atomic bomb).

      A conversation is like that. Depending on how it’s conducted, it can create large-scale productive results or large-scale negative results. Every conversation is a chance to release either positive or negative energy. Simple performance appraisals can leave employees feeling supercharged and ready to throw themselves back into their work, or deflated and ready to throw in the towel. Every interaction you have with someone is an opportunity to release energy inside them. And energy is very important when it comes to getting things done.

       Every interaction you have with someone is an opportunity to release energy inside them.

       Feeling the Energy

      Several years ago I was doing some leadership coaching inside Purolator Courier’s central hub operation in Toronto. I was shadowing supervisors on the job to understand exactly what their worlds were like.

      I was overwhelmed when I first saw this operation in which twenty-four trailers simultaneously unloaded thousands of parcels onto a series of conveyor belts, with twenty-four belts converging on one massive sorting area up high in the sweltering hot building. This was the primary belt where the parcels were sorted onto secondary belts and redirected to many load-out docks around the plant.

      As I moved toward the primary belt I heard a sound that made my pulse quicken. It was a deep-chested rumbling chant that rose and fell and resounded even over the deafening din of the conveyor belts: O-O-O-H – o-o-o-h – O-O-O-H, O-O-O-H – o-o-o-h – O-O-O-H, O-O-O-H – o-o-o-h – O-O-O-H.

      As I climbed the stairs I saw a lineup of chanting men working together like a massive muscle machine. They were pulling boxes off an endless steel slide and lifting them onto conveyor belts at different heights.

      Each worker hoisted boxes of fifty to sixty pounds every few seconds. The pace was relentless. No matter how many boxes they lifted, the slide remained packed. The plant processed as many as 150,000 parcels every twenty-four hours.

      Then I noticed a guy in a white shirt and tie weaving in and out of the men. I learned that his name was Dino. He was keeping the energy flowing by bantering away with his men, asking them how it was going, pitching in to help here, un-jamming a bottleneck there.

      I later learned that absenteeism was a brutal problem for the supervisors of this plant of 600 employees. Not for Dino, though. His men showed up regularly and their productivity was outstanding. He had discovered the secret of releasing energy in his employees, and this energy was enabling them to move smoothly through a mountain of work every night.

      As I interviewed and watched Dino, I discovered what his secret was: he showed respect for his men by engaging them in frequent face-to-face conversations. He was leveraging what Edward Hallowell dubs “The Human Moment at Work” (Harvard Business Review Jan.-Feb.1999).

      The human moment has two prerequisites: people’s physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention ... To make the human moment work, you have to set aside what you’re doing, put down the memo you were reading, disengage from your laptop, abandon your daydream, and focus on the person you are with. Usually when you do that, the other person will feel the energy and respond in kind. Together, you quickly create a force field of exceptional power. [emphasis mine]

       Energy Unlocks Effort

      Several years ago I was intrigued by a research project in which employees were asked, “If you were to put in 15% more effort, do you think your manager would notice?” The employees’ general response was, “No, my manager isn’t that tuned into my daily reality to notice anything like that.”

      The researchers then asked the employees, “If you were to put in 15% less effort, do you think your manager would notice?” The employees’ response was no again.

      If this dynamic is true, it means that some employees have up to 30% more discretionary effort to offer but aren’t feeling energized to offer it. What percent of your employees do you think could be offering more? Engagement studies reveal that only 20% of the North American workforce are highly engaged. Of the remaining 80%, 60% are moderately engaged and another 20% are disengaged.

       When Employees Are Energized ...

      What if you could enable 10% of your disengaged employees to become moderately engaged? How would that change your reality? What if you could enable 10% of your moderately engaged employees to become highly engaged? And, finally, what if you could free up 10% of your disengaged employees to pursue a career with your arch-competitor? When employees are energized, they offer their discretionary effort and that changes your reality as a leader. There’s less turnover, higher productivity, higher revenues, decreased costs, and greater profitability.

       Intelligent – Not Raw –