Encourage innovation in a safe and inclusive environment
Selfridges is the UK’s premier high-end department store chain and must continuously asks itself “how can we make a point of difference?” EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] is at the heart of their response to that question, as Melissa Clottey, the founding Chair of Selfridges’ Diversity Board, told an audience at the 2021 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. She explained that if you prioritise EDI, you are encouraging difference, which breeds innovation, which ultimately increases growth and impacts the companies bottom line. Innovation is critical, and having the thought process of “nothing is off the table, there are no right or wrong answers, all ideas are in, how do we collaborate together?”
Diversity of thought brings added impact and credibility
Clottey highlighted that Selfridges’ EDI strategy has given the organisation the framework by which to truly embed EDI into the DNA of the company. Twelve people from different parts of the company, ranging from retail to the head office, to whom ‘EDI’ meant something very different, came together to build their EDI strategy. It was this diversity of thought and experience from within the group that enabled their strategy to be so impactful. They came up with three pillars which cover ‘people, customer and product’ and, as Clottey admitted, “We wouldn’t have come up with such a wide-reaching strategy without that diversity of thought in the group.”
EDI is a collective responsibility
Clottey and the EDI group at Selfridges recognised that in order to truly embed EDI they would need buy-in from both the executive level and people ‘on the ground’. However, they believed that step one on their journey should be a bottom-up approach; to listen to their employees, understand what they need and want, and build their strategy from there. This being said, having support from the executive level has also been crucial, and every month they invite one executive member to sit in on their meeting and ask for a task from them. “We listen to the director, take on their advice, and build it into the strategy,” said Clottey. They introduced a ‘diversity squad’ to help drive engagement, and make sure it was always being pushed on the agenda, and fully embedded into the DNA of the company.
Cultural identities – how do you tell the story of yourself?
Clottey explained that a cultural identity is when you tell a story of yourself to others so “you can find similarities and celebrate your differences.” This was something that, though their links with Management Futures, a management consultancy specialising in business and leadership skills, Selfridges were able to roll out across the whole organisation. They allowed people the space to speak and be open, so they could share their lived experiences, “the things you wouldn’t necessarily think about someone based on their visual representation.” This allowed them to find connections with one another and improve that sense of inclusion and belonging.
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More than half of FSTE 100 CEOs are believed to use an executive coach. “The senior leaders of those organisations recognise the need to find time to step away, reflect and be coached,” says Dave Slemen, the Founder of Elite Performance Partners [EPP], a search, selection and advisory firm working across elite sport and specialising in performance.
“The number of CEOs, head coaches or performance directors in sport using coaches is not that high – we did our own research. It’s interesting that it’s a cultural shift that needs to be made within sport. I wonder how important it is in terms of that organisational purpose and culture that has an impact on learning.”
Slemen opens the floor to Scott Drawer, the Director of Sport at Millfield School in Somerset, and Simone Lewis, who currently works as a Technical Leadership Expert with Fifa.
The panel came together for this EPP Webinar, titled Creating Effective Learning Organisations, to discuss why organisations that prioritise learning are gaining a critical competitive edge.
Leaders Performance Institute members logged in from across the globe to hear the trio discuss the creation of learning cultures, tips to ensure your staff are continually engaged in self-development, and useful models of feedback to ensure that learning is captured and applied.
You need to make learning happen
Often sports organisations talk about learning but there needs to be a concerted effort to ensure your coaches and staff are continuously engaged. “It’s no different to training an athlete,” says Drawer, whose background includes time spent working for UK Sport, England Rugby and the Team Sky Innovation Hub.
“You’re fundamentally trying to change your memory state. There’s some underlying physiology and neuroscience that drives that. You’re trying to drive information and behaviours from short-term memory to long-term memory; and there’s some tools and techniques to do that based on really good pedagogy.
“The way I describe it: the best coaches we have are often the best teachers; and the best teachers can be the best coaches. We often forget some of this foundational knowledge that exists in pedagogy and andragogy.”
Drawer’s time away from sport has helped him to coalesce his thoughts. “If you’re really serious about this, you have to be deliberate and focused about it and create time to let it happen,” he continues. “You have to really think about how you’re going to structure those opportunities.”
The role of leaders in creating a culture of learning
“It’s very hard to have a learning culture if it’s not enforced by senior leaders,” says Lewis, who is an advocate of role modelling. “You can learn as an individual without [necessarily] being in a learning culture.” It is complex, although Drawer outlines some tips for teams looking to develop a culture of learning. “You have to feel safe and supported as an individual where you’re not going to be ridiculed for asking questions or questioning the norm. At lot of that starts with the leadership in any organisation,” he says.
“‘Psychological safety’ is used in lots of contexts, but you have to feel it. Equally, an individual has to feel vulnerable enough to want to expose themselves. All of that is around that principle of safety. Once you have that, it’s then around the support that you put around them. If I’m going to ask a question, I’m given freedom to explore it.”
Lewis has also found that leaders often need help when structuring difficult conversations. “Giving and receiving feedback is hard,” she says. “Using things like ‘greens and reds’ and neutral language, always starting with the positives, and then following up with the things that can be improved upon. ‘You and me agree’ is another one. ‘You go first, what do you think?’ then I offer my opinion and we discuss it rather than me as your boss diving in with feedback. BAR is another one: behaviour, affect, request. Using the ‘affect’ and ‘it makes me feel’ can be really powerful for giving and receiving feedback to bring about learning and change.”
Inevitably, as Slemen points out, some people will be resistant to change, either openly or secretly and he asks Drawer how he might overcome such reluctance. “I need to understand why they’re resistant,” says Drawer. “There could be some fundamental psycho-behavioural reasons why that’s the case because of their previous learning experiences.
“My experience is that the brilliant people, the brilliant leaders I’ve worked with in a number of domains, they make you feel safe to go and explore.”
Learning is not a case of cause-and-effect, so time and support are both requisites. “That means better resources, that means putting time aside, that means having a leadership that recognise your next competitive advantage is going to be in that space.”
Help people to self-reflect
Lewis explains that the key to supporting individuals in their learning is to raise their self-awareness and helping them to self-reflect. She says: “It’s about helping them reflect on what they know, how they learn.” There are a number of tools freely available and Lewis suggests the ‘so what? /now what?’ model as an example. “‘Everything’s gone on, so what have I learnt? And then the key question is what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do differently? What am I going to implement?’” she continues. “If you’ve had a whole season let alone a whole game it’s about distilling the key learning and what I’m going to take forward. Build a habit and a system of capturing that and sharing it, if that’s relevant, whether that’s sticky notes, voice mails or old-fashioned note-taking – find a way that works for you.”
Learning experiences need to be designed and tested. Says Drawer: “If I knew intervention X would definitely give me Y, I would be doing it all the time and that’s not the real world. You need to try lots of things and see how individuals respond.”
Teaching curiosity
Studies around andragogy – adult learning – demonstrate that adults need to see immediate value when learning. “You’ve got to find ways of making that happen,” says Drawer. “If you feel supported in doing that, that will just evolve over time. If you encourage the opportunity for people to question because they genuinely want to understand, and then create the space, we can test an idea and explore it.”
Lewis suggests that mentoring, including support for those who have never worked with mentors before, is important. As is peer to peer learning and communities of practice. “We’re social animals, we learn together, but in terms of adding a bit of structure around a project, say, with a group of people in your organisation, [it helps to use] action learning principles or just giving a little guidance around how to define the problem better, how to be creative in brainstorming solutions for how to move forward with a project.” That way people learn, solve a problem, and become better leaders in the process.
Maintaining a long-term learning lens
Performance is always the inevitable focus, so how can teams and individuals retain a lens on learning when the pressure to obtain results begins to tell? “I’d never polarise one or the other,” says Drawer, who puts himself in the position of a coach. “Of course, you’ve got to win, but there are still opportunities to learn, there are still coaching moments and it’s therefore probably the time and effort you spend on that versus the reality of trying to get an outcome. Whatever you do, even if you’re focusing on one thing, there’s still opportunities to do that. You just have to acknowledge that’s the reality of that environment that you’re then in.”
He believes that leaders need to be pragmatic when trying to exploit learning opportunities when everything is what he terms “full gas”. “There are ways that we can capture and sort this unstructured data so that you don’t miss the moments of long-term opportunity,” he says. “Every time you’re having a conversation, all that unstructured data, body behaviour, language – all of that is quality information that you can learn from. By the time you get to the end of the season, when you’re doing a full debrief, you can pull on it and extract themes; and that might help you move.”
Staff learning can also be periodised, just as training might be for athletes. Drawer discusses psychology theory about how leaders can structure learning opportunities, but preaches patience. “It can take you a year to understand the rhythms and culture of the organisation / ecosystem you’re going into,” he says. “Anyone coming in will need that and be able to recognise when those opportunities are and when you’re most likely to be in a position where your brain is free, you’re not cognitively loaded, and you’re ready to do those things.”
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Written summary here.
“It’s evolutionary – if you look at how everything started and how we survived – learning is what enabled you to progress and move on. We’re now in a hyper-connected world and there’s more information available than there has ever been,” he says.
“But sometimes the day job is a blocker to that and we need to recognise that to progress and move on, and evolve, it’s a fundamental part of survival.”
Drawer is joined by Simone Lewis, who currently works as a Technical Leadership Expert with Fifa, and Dave Slemen, the Founder of Elite Performance Partners [EPP] to discuss why learning organisations are gaining a critical competitive edge as part of EPP’s Creating Effective Learning Organisations Webinar.
Leaders Performance Institute members logged in from across the globe to hear the trio discuss the creation of learning cultures, tips to ensure your staff are continually engaged in self-development, and useful models of feedback to ensure that learning is captured and applied.
