Like a Virgin

THEY SAY

I have always found that an instant barometer to the state of any company’s employee relations is the way their people use the words ‘we’ and ‘they’.

You ask a salesperson for an item and he says, ‘Sorry, they decided not to carry that brand any more.’ Or you get to the front of the check-in line at the airport and the airline agent tells you, ‘Sorry, they have just cancelled that flight.’

This mysterious anonymous entity ‘they’ is held responsible for limitless problems. Bad news tends to be delivered in the third-person plural, whereas good news is much more likely to be relayed in the first-person singular. I wish my old English teacher could read this, as he was convinced I never listened to a word in those lessons!

So if the requested item is in stock, the salesperson will likely reply, ‘Yes, I have that.’ When a flight is on time, the agent will say, ‘I would like to announce the on-time departure of flight 123.’

Managers and business leaders should watch for this tendency. A company where the staff overuse the word ‘they’ is a company with problems. If employees aren’t associating themselves with their company by using ‘we’, it is a sign that people up and down the chain of command aren’t communicating – and if that turns out to be the case, you’ll usually find secondary problems throughout the company, affecting everything from development to customer service.

A company’s employees are its greatest asset, particularly in service-based operations where your people are your product. When a company fails to grasp this simple business tenet, the result is invariably an oppositional ‘us and them’ divide between management and front-line staff.

Listen for complaints from the front line such as ‘They [management] are a bunch of idiots who never ask for our opinion on anything’ or ‘If they had only asked us, we would have told them that their new square peg doesn’t fit the round hole we operate in!’

Meanwhile, from managers and executives, you might hear: ‘They [employees] just don’t seem to get it. Don’t they know that square pegs are all the rage with our customers these days?’

Just as two wrongs have never made a right, these two conflicting ‘theys’ will never make a ‘we’.

Resolving the underlying issue is not that difficult. If employees feel they are on the outside looking in – so far outside that they refer to their company as ‘they’ – then who’s to blame? Managers and executives may be investing no effort in making staffers feel like valued insiders. For example, try asking employees where they learn about new products and other important company news. If the answer is the newspapers or a next-door neighbour, then they are truly stuck in a ‘they say’ quagmire.

Repairing an ‘us and them’ environment is a cultural challenge that usually calls for greater employee involvement and improved internal communications from the executive suite all the way to the shop floor. In my experience, middle management is a good place to look for the source of the problem. Feedback from up and down the chain often hits a wall in the person of a mid-level manager who has fallen victim to the ‘knowledge is power’ syndrome. Identifying such blockages and unclogging corporate arteries will bring huge payoffs.

At all the Virgin airlines for instance, if we are creating a new aircraft cabin we will always have the marketing, design and management teams involved from the very beginning. Representatives from the product delivery group (aka cabin crew) will work alongside them, as the crew will ultimately be responsible for the success or failure of their new work environment. In the absence of such input, you risk the crew walking into their new multimillion-dollar cabin for the first time and saying, ‘Hmm. Nice, but where’s the trash compactor?’ Such retrofits can be very expensive!

Involving every relevant employee group in development not only drives better product design but also adds a huge pride-of-association factor: ‘We came up with this as a team.’ Everyone wins, including customers and shareholders.

This ‘us and them’ problem is endemic to corporate life and Virgin is no exception. When someone on our team tells me, ‘Sorry, Mr Branson, but they don’t have that any more’, my standard response is, (with a smile!) ‘“They”? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you worked here.’ Tough love, maybe, but it certainly gets the point across!

This problem is exacerbated by our reliance on impersonal digital communications technologies. One of a leader’s greatest challenges these days is getting people to actually talk to each other; one-on-one meetings and old-fashioned brainstorming are vital to the success of any growing business. Sending an email with an attached PowerPoint presentation to a hundred people may be effective in some situations, but most of the time nothing beats gathering all the contributors to a project, soliciting everyone’s input and then acting on it.

So, rather than sending that email to the product team, why not walk over there now and talk to them. I am sure ‘they’ will thank you for it!