What does it take to unlock the full value of experience in your organisation? Anderson Studios Head of Marketing Alex van Eeden sat down with organisational transformation expert Charles Moyo to discuss how an empathetic people-centred approach can shift mindsets and boost profits.
Alex: Transformation is often imposed from the top. But you have had tangible success approaching it from a different angle. Tell me about that.
Charles: I was tasked with turning around a business unit of a South Africa-based multinational. The unit was originally established for intracompany supply.
Three years ago the company decided to focus on turning a profit by selling to the broader market. But the strategy at play when I arrived did not yield the desired outcomes for the business.
The business unit was a small team whose members had served different lengths of tenure in the company. Some had been with the company for more than 30 years and knew the inner workings of the organisation.
The team’s mindset was largely informed by the fact that the company was doing business with itself. There was no sense of urgency and no commercial mindset.
At some point there was talk of letting team members with the old mindset go. I said that instead of getting rid of them, we should shift the way they think and operate.
When I expressed my profitability aspirations, the team said my new approach would not work. Within a year, annual profits rose from negative to north of R100 million – and the team could not believe it.
I recently asked one of them what he thought of our journey. He said: “I’ve realised that I’ve moved a lot, but I never felt myself moving.” [Laughs] I said, that was the whole point.
So you saw unrecognised value in those legacy employees.
The solution isn’t to discard employees. It’s to re-engage them and give them a renewed sense of purpose.
Long-serving employees can be an untapped goldmine of organisational knowledge. When they leave, so does that knowledge: years of skill, experience and insight disappears. Sometimes the challenge is that their deep institutional memory can be used to resist change.
Transformation starts with human interaction
So to transform the business, you first needed to transform their mindset. How did you go about that?
Transformation is about the human being. But we often try to force the business into the person. For me, everything is about understanding and interacting at a human level.
First, I had to get to know the team – and allow them to get to know me. I would tag along on their sales trips.
I would ask them to come to the office for collaborative sessions on business matters. These would be three or four hours long, after which I would initiate light conversations – about their kids, their family, their holidays. This was my influence time. I found that if they respected my views on life in general, they would then easily respect and embrace my business perspectives.
Within two weeks, one of the team members said to his colleague, “We thought we knew and understood this business, but this man has demonstrated that we actually don’t know much.” That was without me having said anything yet about business or their competency levels.
And that’s when the mindset shift started.
The employee as leader
How does that personal interaction lead to a change in workplace behaviour?
It’s about influence, not authority. Once they got to that mindset, I ushered the business side of things into the human space.
I asked questions like “How do you view yourself?” and “How do you look at your job?”
I would say to them, you are not salespeople, you are business people. That means you are a leader – in everything you do. You lead your customers and your colleagues. Your customers don’t know your business or your products, even the products they buy from you. You lead them into that. And your colleagues – marketing, technical, engineering, all the people who support you – you lead them into your opportunities.
Always look at how you can influence the people you work with, as a leader.
Moving from motivation to inspiration
So, again, the focus is on the person – not the business
A fundamental mistake is to look at people only from the perspective of their professions.
The challenges we face come from a part of them we have no line of sight of, and we’re not tapping into: the human base level.
Our attitude should not be that we serve at the pleasure of the organisation, that we are coincidental beneficiaries of our organisation’s process of making money.
Instead, we should view the organisations we work for as coincidental beneficiaries of our journey in life. And in that journey, we embrace the attitudes that make us the best at what we do in our roles at work.
Everything you do is your thumbprint, your identity. Do it because this is for you.
When you get into that mindset, you get to the point of inspiration rather than motivation. If you are inspired, you understand that this is about you.
This will make you an inspired, resilient high-performer whose performance is not influenced by the salary you get and the treatment you are subjected to.
This becomes true because you know why you are at work. Your job description devolves into a rough guide to your full set of unstated responsibilities as the leader you chose to be.
This is how you get that kind of growth mindset working in people.
Retaining and unlocking organisational memory
You have a wonderful story about the transformation of one of those legacy employees.
One of the most powerful attributes a leader can have is kindness. But it has to be authentic and genuine. People can read authenticity when they see it is human-centred.
You must want good things for your people, and be the main facilitator of those good things. When people see you are advocating for better salaries, benefits and treatment for them, it creates fierce loyalty. With kindness, you’ll be amazed at the level of commitment and loyalty people will give you.
One of the members of my team had been with the company for 36 years. We say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But after a work trip with him, I realised he knew so much about the business that we didn’t know. That is rich organisational IP, and we need that knowledge.
But we need it sitting in transformed minds.
Now, I sit with this colleague in meetings and he’s an invaluable resource. I could be struggling to find a solution to a customer’s challenge, and he’ll interject from a perspective that’s completely new to me. He takes the solution to a completely different level.
After the meeting I’ll ask where the idea came from, and he’ll say, for example, “That’s what we did in 2001.”
He has fully sold out to us, to the new way of thinking. He will support us and defend us, and has become one of the most resourceful people in the team. That’s what you get when you make everything about the people.
This is the first of a two-part conversation with Charles Moyo exploring what high performance really looks like when it’s people-centred. His drive to challenge transactional thinking and unlock authentic, people-led change in organisations aligns powerfully with Anderson Studios’ mission to design learning solutions that create measurable impact.
