The document summarizes key discussions from two sessions of the Wavelength Connect 2014 Social Enterprise Members group on aligning vision and values, customer service, embracing ambiguity and risk, moving the board, recruiting and removing staff, and leadership. Top tips are provided on each topic, such as using stories to communicate values, allowing some failures to encourage innovation, and getting board members experience frontline work. Ensuring strong purpose, focused culture, and empowered staff are highlighted as important themes.

1. Wavelength Connect 2014
Social Enterprise Members
October 9th Session
Key Challenges and
top tips from the group

2. Aligning to our
Vision and Values,
our ‘True North’
How to agree our True
North
How to redefine our
vision in an uncertain
future
How to communicate
values through a
complex org structure
How to align everything
to ensure ‘unsupervised
moments’

3. Top tips and reflections – Aligning vision and values
• Create ‘evidence-based’ arguments for change and clarity of purpose. Move it
from a ‘fancy leadership exercise’ to a logical, rational business imperative
• Articulate values through people stories. Clear and simple messages which talk
about specific behaviours
• Relentless commitment to the purpose, vision and values – look for every
opportunity to align (people, messages, environment, processes, communication,
meetings, contracts, etc etc). Use creativity and keep going. The job is never
• The ‘Golden Thread’. Tie everyone’s objectives and performance management into
the values and the strategy
• Develop and use a behaviour framework – but beware, behaviours should be
positioned as a guide not a prescription. No one likes to be told how to behave!
• It must start from the top. If the board are not role-modeling this then don’t
bother trying to get anyone else to do it! In fact, make it work with the board first
before you launch it to anyone else
• Tone of voice – make sure it is consistent internally and externally. Treat your
people how you wish to treat your customers

4. Creating brilliant
customer service
How to articulate what
excellence is
How to align 3rd party to
our vision of service
Can we do one thing to
really improve it?
How to drive service
over our digital platform
What to control, what to
let go

5. Top tips and reflections – Brilliant Customer Service
How to articulate customer excellence
• Starts with clarity from leadership and clarity of vision
• What role does service really play in how the business actually creates value
• There should be no differentiation between how you expect your staff to treat customers and how you treat your staff!
• Must be a clear and simple definition. Ritz Carlton Service Credo. Four Seasons Get it right, get me right, wow me if you can.
• Must be a common understanding of the words used to describe customer excellence. eg 'brilliant basics with magic touches"
How to make it happen
• Right people – Southwest ‘Servant Heart’. People who truly love being ‘of service’. Use tricks in the recruitment process to test this
• People in the right place
• Right tools for the people – too many front line staff hampered by poor IT etc. Are you asking your people to try harder or actually giving them the tools that make
great service almost inevitable
• Right training for the people
How to share it
• Relentless messaging in appropriate way – remember Narey’s Decency Agenda
• Capture the stories. You must recognise day to day excellence as well as the occasional ‘wow’ story
How to drive it across digital platforms
• Be clear on what can and cannot be digitised
• Borrow best practices from other sectors
• Adopt a 'nudge' approach to achieve channel shift
Engaging 3rd parties/internal departments
• Put internal departments through customer training basics
• Put internal department staff on back to the floor programmes to understand their customers. Keep going on this rather than a one-off, and it must include the
board!
• Put customers in internal departments to help them understand their requirements and how they fit in.
• Everyone shares in a customer service bonus whether or not they are facing external customers
• Survey internal customers regularly and act on results
• Strive for the right balance between rules and flexibility
• Recruit for attitude, train for skills, build strong teams

6. Embracing
ambiguity and risk
How to encourage staff
to ‘deal with it’
How to empower people
to think of solutions for
themselves
Building a mindset which
embraces failure as a
part of ‘risk’ and
innovation
Getting the basics right
during periods of great
change
Giving people courage

7. Top tips and reflections – Ambiguity and risk
• Understand and qualify what you really mean by risk for people
– Value Protection or Value Creation
• Define as a leader the
– Acceptable risks – those that you can live with in order to improve the delivery and the
system
– Those that will threaten the business (the reality is there are very few of these!)
• Encourage collegiate decision making where possible. Involve the front-line where
appropriate. Everyone buys in to the risk and takes ownership
• Use ‘ideas’ to encourage ‘embracing risk’. Don’t just talk about wanting to take more risks
(everyone says that!), use the trial of new ideas to show what you mean
• Allow some failures and raise their profile rather than hide them or not talk about them
• Innovation awards that have an equally celebrated ‘fabulous failure’ category
• Agree objectives and, more importantly, purpose, and then let staff deal with the detail of
the how!

8. Shifting them from a
‘traditional’ reporting
group to a collaborative
team
Moving my
Board
Getting them to engage
with staff
Moving social purpose
ahead of commercial
purpose
Moving commercial
purpose ahead of social
purpose

9. Top tips and reflections – Moving the Board
• Clever agenda design!
– Board agendas can have specific sections where collaboration and co-creation is needed.
Even separate the agenda into 2 sections, ‘operational’ and ‘development’ for example
– Label agenda items for information, discussion, decision or creation
• Team/pair up trustee board members with operational board members on specific bits of
work that have to report back to the board
• Back to the floor – often used as a one-off and not repeated, which is a waste of time. If you
do it, keep going and insist it pervades through the whole leadership. No opting out!
• Help the frontline understand the flow of money, how the finances really work (remember
the chap who assumed revenue was the same as cash in the bank!)
• A set of agreements for a board to operate by. These are ‘how we work as a board’, a set of 5
or 6 behaviours that help align the group and call out those behaviours that are
unacceptable. These should be hi-lighted at the start of each meeting.

10. Recruiting and
removing
How to really get people
who ‘feel it’
How to remove the CAVE
dwellers (completely
against virtually
everything)

11. Top tips and reflections – Recruiting and removing
• Use a creative approach in your recruitment process to understand whether they are
‘naturally’ the type you want
– Take them out to dinner – are they nice to the waiter
– Team task – how do they serve their team mates
– Bring something to the interview that truly reveals your character (those who are
honest vs those who bring what they think you would like to see)
• Use your network to check out the people you recruit. What’s their take? Do they spot
anything you don’t
• A ‘don’t know’ is a ‘no!’
• Spot the early signs of it not working and act fast, see it through. Remember the examples
– She just came in to me on day one and told me all the reasons why she couldn’t do this
and couldn’t do that so I said “this isn’t going to work”.
– We brought in 2 regional directors and bit the bullet and got rid of them within 3
months
• Non-negotiable’s! Someone who constantly does things in a way that is inconsistent with the
way the business needs to work may have bought into the ‘why’ of the business but not the
‘how’. Are you being explicit enough on the non-negotiable’s? Is there a consequence to not
doing things a certain way?

12. Leadership.
Speaking
personally
How to ask the right
questions
How to create space and
thinking time
How to climb above the
day to day noise
How to kick start change
When and how to admit
doubt – I don’t have all
the answers

13. Top tips and reflections – Leadership, speaking personally
Run
Walk
Go for walks with your team
Agenda-less meetings
Breathe!
Breathe some more!
A good PA will create space for you
Delete your whole inbox ‘by mistake’
Keep breathing!
Keep connecting back to purpose – it helps
you ask smart questions
Personal Boardroom – are you balanced and
are you tapping it
The Box!
Know when you are in it
If you think you might be, you are!
No one but you can put you in it
Use the list to help you get out

14. Wavelength Connect 2014
Social Enterprise Members
April 2nd Session
Key Themes

15. ‘Your True North’
Creating that sense of purpose that moves people beyond
‘task’
From burning platform to burning ambition (Lars Kolind)
Giving something meaning – ‘Its time to stop marketing to
people and start mattering to people’ (Geoff from Unilever)
It comes back to your moral purpose (Sue Campbell)
Having strong business purpose means you can remove
irrelevance – not being afraid to stop doing things
Aligning your purpose with your values – do your values
really drive your purpose, or are they just ‘nice’ ways of
working

16. Culture as a true competitive
advantage
Being very specific about the culture you wish to create, and
what you don’t want
Giving it boundaries – who we are, who we are not!
Intolerant of those who don’t fit – not turds allowed in the
pool!
F.I F.O – Fit in or feel free to leave!
Steve Cadogan at LinkedIn. The only way to compete with
Google is culturally.
Continually reiterating what the culture is – Ritz Carlton line
ups and storytelling

17. Focus - on what matters
‘Unused Value = Waste’ – Lisa Gansky
‘What more could you do’ – Sue Campbell, who found
unused value in her people (The lady who became the drug
information guru)
Don’t simply make the irrelevant more efficient
Relentless implementation – we know what we need to do.
Incremental improvement can transform

18. Empowerment and
Permission
Pushing decision making to the front line where possible
Unsupervised moments of service – how you create the
conditions where people feel trusted, creative and caring at
those moments.
Allowing people a ‘Hinterland’ – Martin Narey
What do you do, what more could you do? What’s stopping
you? – Sue Campbell
Permission to work differently, unencumbered by ‘the way
we do things round here’. Eg, Lisa Gansky’s digital sabbath

19. Storytelling
Keep saying it until it becomes true – Lisa Gansky
Using stories to illustrate what’s important to us, customers,
behaviours
People don’t like lists of behaviours, so if you want to tell
them what good looks like, tell them a few stories
History, heritage, vision, customers, values, strategy – they
all make good stories

20. Resourcefulness and
Resilience
‘Leave time for Love. Nurture those parts of your life that
are nurturing to you’ – Helena Kennedy
Look after yourself! There’s only so much you can do!
Create a hinterland – thinking and assimilation time
Martin Narey enforced KPI’s on a team member ensuring he
spent time with his kids and got home on time.
Connecting to purpose – spending 2-5 minutes through your
day consciously connecting back to your purpose for… this
meeting, this project, this phone call, this relationship etc
Make a small difference every day

21. Agitated, itchy, even angry
‘People follow leaders who are up to something’
It doesn’t have to be massively transformational –
‘Relentless implementation (Martin Narey)
Martin Narey’s decency agenda
Do you need a plan to start? No, that comes later or is even
retrospectively fitted!
Every day everyone should come in and do one thing to
make it a little bit better!
Look for small margins that can make a big improvement –
Sue Campbell

22. Leadership is a mindset
‘The true quest for leadership is an inner one’ – Sam Conniff
Its about how you think, then what you do
‘Doubt is healthy’ – Martin Narey
Its ok not to know all the answers.
‘Its misguided to think you have to have all the answers just
because someone who doesn’t have any of the answers has
made you a leader!’
Not knowing is as much a part of authenticity as knowing
Always accept invitations to do things that are challenging or
frightening (Helena Kennedy)