Grassroots Leadership - Royal Dutch/Shell

A big part of your leadership style involves a shift toward teaching. What does it take to be a leader-teacher?

Two things. First, you have to know your material. Whatever you're teaching, you have to know it forward, backward, inside, and out. At the start of this process, when my team and I taught the business model ourselves, we had to know it cold. If you're teaching your people about market segmentation or value propositions, you've got to have a thorough understanding of everything behind each of those concepts.

Second, as a leader and as a teacher, you've got to open yourself up. You simply have to make it personal. A lot of executives I know can get up in front of an audience and give a presentation. They're very comfortable speaking in the third person: "Here's what the company is doing." It's a safe way of talking. You don't have to put an "I" in very many sentences.

But real teaching means giving of yourself. To reach people, I had to talk in the first person. All of a sudden, I'm standing in front of 70 folks, talking about my transformation. That creates a personal connection - and it changes how we talk with each other and how we work with each other. After that, because of this personal connectedness, I can call up those folks anywhere in the world and talk in a very direct way.

Where do you, as a leader, get the chance to make a personal connection with your people?

One of the most important techniques we use is the fishbowl. The name describes what it is: I'm sitting in the middle of the room with members of my management team. One team is in the center with us, and the other teams are all around us in an outer circle. Everyone is watching as the group in the center talks about what it's going to do and about what it needs from me and my colleagues to be able to do that. That may not sound revolutionary - but in our culture, it was very unusual for anyone lower in the organization to talk so directly to a managing director.

In the fishbowl, the teams in the hot seat lay out their business plans in front of me and all the other teams. They think the pressure is on them to measure up. The truth is, the pressure is on me. The first time I'm not consistent, I'm dead meat. If a team brings in a plan that's really a bunch of crap, I've got to be able to call it a bunch of crap. If I cover for people and praise everyone, what do I say when someone brings in an excellent plan? That kind of straight talk represents another big culture change for Shell.

The whole process creates complete transparency between the people at the coal face and the top-management team. At the end, these grassroots folks go back home and say, "I just cut a deal with the managing director to do these things." It has completely changed the dynamics of our operation.

What learning tools produce the most change?

Breakthrough learning can come from the most unexpected places. For instance, we give teams an assignment: "Here's a video camera. In the next 90 minutes, make a 5- or 6-minute video that illustrates the old Shell and the new Shell." That one exercise completely changed the future of our business in Austria.

We had an Austrian team in our first program, and it was clear from the start that it didn't want to be there. During the exercises we did in the first workshop, out of the six teams participating, the Austrians consistently came in seventh! Whatever the exercise was, you could count on the Austrians, individually and collectively, to be last. As the week wore on, they were having less and less fun. They were getting shown up in front of their peers and in front of management, and I wasn't sharp enough to know how to deal with it. We were all just soldiering on, hoping that something would happen to turn things around. What turned things around was the video exercise.

As it happened, the Austrian team leader was called away suddenly, and he wasn't there for the exercise. Now this struggling team was leaderless and facing an "unconstrained problem": Here's your video camera, you've got 90 minutes, go make a video. Good luck!

What the team came up with was the story of a guy who has to go to the bathroom very badly. The "old Shell" video opens with this guy walking cross-legged, in great pain, looking for the men's toilet. He comes to the door marked "Men," and it's locked. He goes through a bureaucratic procedure to fill out the form required to open the door. The person he hands the form to has to get it approved by his supervisor. That person rings a bell, and the supervisor comes over and reviews the whole process. Meanwhile, the guy is practically turning green - until he's finally given the key, and he lunges into the men's room. That's the "old Shell."