Grassroots Leadership - Royal Dutch/Shell

Then came the "new Shell." The same guy goes to the men's room, but now there's a doorman who ushers him through with a smile. As he goes into a stall, he's handed his own personal roll of toilet paper. When he comes out, he's given his own towel. The service attendant even tries to zip up the guy's fly. The sequence was absolutely hysterical.

We showed every team's video and picked the best one. The Austrians won hands down - and that was the beginning of their turnaround. Their leader came back to an energized team, and he began to realize how much talent his team had and how capable his team members were. Over the course of the week, they changed the way they worked together. Later, they dramatically improved their business performance in Austria.

What kind of follow-up do you do after teams leave the program?

I do a lot of field visits - for example, going on bus rides with teams. I did one in Germany last week. We started out from Hamburg with a handful of double-decker buses, each loaded with 30 or 40 people from different levels and functions in the operation. While we're on the buses, the trip is like a traveling seminar, with discussion groups and videotapes. In the course of a day, we visit three or four customers, as well as other sites.

On this particular trip, we went to see a Mercedes dealership that we sell lubricants to. We spent an hour with the owner and his top people going over their business, what role we play, how we could do better. We walked through his showroom, and the owner told us about his selling issues. We went into his repair shop, and he described what it's like to run his backroom operation. Next we went to a Shell gas station. Everyone got off the bus and talked to the customers: Why were they there? Why did they choose us instead of our competitors? What could we do better? Our third stop was at a competitor's site. There we just observed: What are the differences? What do they do better than we do? What would we do to improve that site if we had it?

Then we got back on the buses and talked about what we'd seen. We all wrote down our impressions, and when we got back, we went over what we'd learned from the visits. It's a great learning tool - it breaks down the barriers between functions. You learn collectively, you learn to understand the customer, and you share the responsibility to fix the customer's problems - whether you're in sales or accounting.

What's your own take-away on leadership and change?

As people move up in organizations, they get further away from the work that goes on in the field - and as a result, they tend to devalue it. People get caught up in broad strategic issues, legal issues, stakeholder issues. But what really drives a business is the work that goes on down at the coal face. It's reliability, it's producing to specification, it's delivering to the customer.

Now, if that's true, then being connected to people in the field is even more critical. They need all the support you can give them. They need a common understanding of where they're going, and they need a common understanding of the business. That's what drives execution. And it's what provides the discipline in a grassroots change program.

Richard Pascale was a faculty member at the Stanford Business School for 20 years and is now an associate fellow of Oxford University. Based in San Francisco, he is a well-known expert on corporate transformation. His article "Fight, Learn, Lead" appeared in the August:September 1996 issue of Fast Company. You can visit Royal Dutch/Shell on the Web (www.shell.com) and reach Steve Miller by email smiller@compuserve.com .