034: Accelerating Amid Complexity with Kevan Hall

Pete Mockaitis:
Kevan, thanks so much for being here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Kevan Hall:
It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh yes, well I think we have a lot of fun to discuss here, but first, I was intrigued be a little tidbit on your bio. You’ve delivered over 100,000 participant days of training. Within those training experiences, I imagine there may have been a couple of times which someone said something crazy, off the wall, a question that shocked, or made you laugh out loud. Could you share, were there any kinds of bloopers, or interesting outtakes that have occurred within all of these training days?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. I think most memorable ones are when you deliver training all around the world, kind of trying to deliver training in a portacabin in Bulgaria when it’s minus 20 degrees outside, and there’s one electricity plug, and you can either have the overhead projector, or the heater. That develops your skills in not using very many slides, for example, or training in a downstairs room in Turkey when there was a power in 42 degrees of heat, and having to run a coaching seminar with people standing up to their necks in a swimming pool because that was the only way we could keep cooling off. Those are kind of some of the memorable moments.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh that’s fun. You mean 42 degrees Celsius?

Kevan Hall:
Yes, yeah, UK temperatures.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh man, well that is cool. Well, it’s hot. It’s an interesting experience and memory I’m sure, so that’s fun. I’m excited, so you bring a wide array of this experience, and knowledge, and training across the world, and in many different kinds of organizations, particularly associated with the global world, and how work with different countries is changing things, and the Matrix Organization. I’d like to just dig into a bit of each of these. When it comes to the Matrix Organization, or any time you’ve got kind of multiple bosses or lines of responsibility, it can create some headaches and frustrations when one boss doesn’t know what the other boss gave you, and it’s kind of like reminds me of high school where the teachers don’t know what, how much homework, and it can sometimes just be a mess.

Kevan Hall:
Sure, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis:
What are some of your best practice tips to help folks who, they’re not at the top of the organization, they’re somewhere in the middle, kind of navigate that and stay sane with those conflicting priorities, and orders, and directives, and challenges.

Kevan Hall:
Yeah, I mean it’s worth defining. Matrix Organization strictly speaking, is where you have more than one boss, so if you don’t have more than one boss, you’re not in a Matrix, but we’re finding a lot of our clients now are using the word matrix to mean that whole thing where we have to work across functions, or geography, or business units. You might have called it virtual teams in the past, they’re calling it matrix teams now.

Matrix is, people are usually on multiple teams. There was a McKenzie survey at the end of last year, which showed that the majority of the people in the US spent at least some of their day, some of their week, working on more than one team. Multiple teams is pretty much the norm. Research shows that people who work in virtual teams are probably, on an average, of about four. If you’re on three or four teams, then whether you’ve got three or four bosses or not, you have these same problems of clarity. How do we make the situation clear when we’ve got, to use your analogy, different people sitting as different work.

Clarity is a big one. One of the insights we had is, if you read most of the management literature, it talks about leaders having to create clarity. If you’re sitting in a matrix, and you’ve got two bosses, you might be the only person who understands your own role. If you ask for clarification from one of your bosses, they’ll clarify all right, but they’ll only clarify their half, and you’ll get the same message from the other, and that doesn’t help you, because those demands, those goals, at the very least, will compete for your time and attention.

For example, let’s say you’re an HR manager, and your line of business box comes to you and says, “You’ve got to go out and you’ve got to hire five people, and we’ve got to have them tomorrow, or we won’t hit our numbers.” That’s real clear, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah.

Kevan Hall:
At the same time, your HR boss is coming to you and saying, “You know, you need to drive down the cost of recruitment and not spend so much money.” That’s also clear, but for you, when those two come together, they compete for your time, and attention, and priorities. That’s why clarity feels a lot different if you’re in that kind of matrix, multiple team world. The big leading for us was, it’s only you that knows that, and also, it’s probably only you that has the motivation to clarify it, so strangely, the more bosses you have, the more you have to clarify your own goals, and your own role.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay. When you do that clarification, what does that sound like in practice? I mean, I think both your bosses want it their way, and they want what they want, so what do you do?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. The first thing is to go and see if there is some strategic clarity around the business, and we find that the vast majority of, even managers, that we talk to in really great companies around the world, have got very little idea what the key goals are for their organization, or their department. Go find a grownup and ask them that, would be my first piece of advice, because that may help you. If you can prioritize around that, then that’s going to be helpful. What does that look like? Prioritize your strategic goals would be my first thing. The second is, we have a process we call the islands of clarity. If you imagine, you’re on a desert island, and you’ve got a certain amount of sand around you, a certain amount of island, and that’s your clarity. What we try to do, is to try to push that back and build a bigger island for ourselves. The first thing we should do is make a list of what’s not clear.

When I talk to people in complex organizations, they often start off by moaning and complaining that nothing’s clear. The first thing I say is, “Well is that really true? You don’t know anything about your job? Every day you come in and it’s completely new, and you have to make it up. It’s completely not true, is it?” Most jobs, 75% of what you did is the same as it was last year. You might be working on a different project, but you’re probably using similar skills and it’s recognizably similar.

The first thing we say is, “Look, take those off the table, and admit this is not everything.” That’s the first thing we do. Second thing we do is we say, “Be specific about what’s not clear,” because often when people say it’s not clear, I say, “Well what’s not clear,” and they kind of go slightly vague, and they say, “Well, you know, ownership or culture.”

Pete Mockaitis:
Only what? Ownership and culture, okay.

Kevan Hall:
Culture or priorities. I say, “You can’t clarify that. Be specific. Which priority? Between which two things?” Once you get people to narrow down and be specific, the first thing you find is there’s far fewer of them, that if people can think of more than three or four, they’re probably making them up. Be specific, because you can’t solve generalities. Then we say, “Okay, for those specific things, is there someone in the business that should know the answer to that question?” More than half the time there is. If you’re not clear about, what’s the budget for this project, or what the deadline is for that deliverable, somebody in the business probably knows that. Really sophisticated leadership technique that is.

Now we’re usually down to a relatively small list, and people then say to me, “What do we do with these?” I say, “Well, let’s just summarize. If this is a big issue for you, no one else in the business knows the answer, guess who’s responsibility this is? It’s got to be yours. Right?” Our advice on both pieces of lack of clarity is you got to make a proposal. You know, if no one else is doing it for you, come up with some ideas, publish them to the stake holders and try and get something happening, because if you sit and wait for your bosses to solve your problems in a complex environment, you’ll probably be mildly disappointed at your leaving event. Right?

Pete Mockaitis:
Absolutely. Okay, well that sounds great. That just sort of reminds me of sort of my approach to learning in general. I go back to high school again. I think I would sort of know what I didn’t know, and then try to close that gap. It’s like, “Well they’re going to ask me everything. I don’t know this part, so I’m going to go learn that part now.” I guess they call that classic studying.

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. It’s a good analogy. The of that would be, if you weren’t clear about it, just sitting there and thinking, “Well I’m not clear. I do hope somebody will remember to come and tell me.” That’s not really a very successful strategy.

Pete Mockaitis:
Certainly not. Okay. That’s very handy. I guess now I’m wondering if there’s just sheer disagreement over the proportion of your resources. I’m thinking if multiple bosses each think they have a claim to you, there’s really only so many work hours you have available in a week, and you might be generous and do some extra, extra credit, extra hours there, but I guess I’m thinking if 40 hours is the norm, and you got three bosses and each think that they should have half of you, well then that’s adding up to, 20, 20, 20, 60 hours versus 40. I guess is that just another thing that falls underneath clarity? What needs to be clarified?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. I mean there’s a number of aspects to that. I think first of all, there’s a kind of contracting piece, which if you’re working for three bosses, right from the start, you’ve got to be realistic about how much time and priority you can give to that. Similarly, if you’re working on multiple teams, it’s good to be explicit with your team colleagues there about how much time and priority you’re giving to that team, because they’ll make the same assumptions as those three bosses. be explicit in the contracting phase.

The second thing is I talked earlier about competing goals. Goals that compete for your time and attention are completely normal. The only time you don’t have competing goals is if you’ve got unlimited resources. I don’t meet many of those people anymore. There’s a difference between competing goals and conflicting goals. If conflicting goals mean in order to achieve one, I’ve got to fail at another, and an example might be, “I’ve got 60 hours worth of work and 40 hours to do it in,” then you need to escalate.

The cardinal rule in escalating in the matrix is escalate up all the legs of the matrix at the same time. If you just go to boss A, they will explain to you how their 20 hours is a priority, and so will boss B, and so will boss C. It doesn’t help. What you might have to get is at least two or maybe three of those people in the room together to thrash that issue out.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay, that’s good.

Kevan Hall:
I know in reality, that’s quite hard because you can do that once or twice. If you do that every week, people are going to be looking at you as if you’re incapable of doing your job. I appreciate that gets tough, but the alternative is you taking all that stress on yourself and potentially burning yourself out.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay, well that’s very handy. I’m about to shift gears to talk about your book here, Speed Lead, unless there’s anything else you want to say about the multiple boss challenge.

Kevan Hall:
I think there’s one thing, which is we talk about clarity sometimes being a bit of a trap. When people push for clarity, it’s as if what they want is a really square box being drawn for them, and a very clear job description so they can tell you what they won’t do. My personal view is, my favorite jobs were the jobs that didn’t have a job description. Then if I thought it was really important, I just went and did it. Then if people said, “Is that your job?” I would say, “Yes.” If I thought it was trivial, and people said, “Was that your job?” I would say, “No.” It gives you a lot more flexibility.

I think that as people in complex organizations, we’ve got to get a bit more comfortable with ambiguity, and trade offs, and even dilemmas, and even conflicts, because that stuff happens and it’s healthy. The more passionate you are, the more professional you are, the more likely you’re going to have some conflicts. Get used to that and thrive in that environment would be my advice.

Pete Mockaitis:

Okay. Beautiful. That’s true. It offers flexibility and fun, and so take it. Make it work for you.

Kevan Hall:
Absolutely, yep.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay. Your book Speed Lead, that’s just a great title. Speed Lead, Fast or Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects, and Teams in Complex Companies. I imagine you’ve got a lot of takeaways, but if you could prioritize a bit and share, for the person who is in the earlier phase of career or managing just a couple folks, what are some of the top tactics and takeaways that you recommend to achieve just that, fast or simpler ways to manage people, projects, and teams?

Kevan Hall:
I guess my approach was informed quite a lot by my experiences. Plenty of years ago, I was in manufacturing at a time when a lot of these new Japanese manufacturing techniques came in about short lead time manufacturing and lead techniques. During that time, I spent an awful lot of time looking at, where’s the waste in the process. Then I moved to various other areas of my corporate career internationally, and then I started my own business. Throughout that, I kept this idea of where’s the waste.

One of the wastes I was always very aware of in my corporate career was meetings. I guess we’re all aware of that, and having worked with a lot of people on this, on average people tell us that managers and professional people spend two days a week in meetings, and only half of that time should they even be in the room. We’re wasting a whole other day of the week on meetings.

If I was going back to my manufacturing days, if I called my boss and said, “We want to put in place a new production line that will make 25% scrap,” or you went to buy a consumer product and it broke one fifth of the time, or that one day a week, wasn’t operating, you’d be pretty upset about that. I don’t know many places in business where we would be happy to accept that level of waste.

The other one is emails. 65-70% of all emails are waste. Yet, we write them, we send them, we store them, we buy service to process them, we read them, we delete them. There’s a huge amount of time goes into that. If you’re sitting there bored out of your mind, there is probably some work waste going on there. As businesses become more complex, and people get busier, I just think it’s unacceptable to have the kind of work that doesn’t need doing waste a day of work of people’s time.

Pete Mockaitis:
I’m well on board. I’m well on board. I’m intrigued by that stat about the email waste. Can you tell me a bit about the source, or how do we define a wasted email? That seems about right. I wonder, how do you prove it?

Kevan Hall:
What we found in working with this, and this is one of the big takeouts from the book, Speed Lead, was that underlying a lot of this stuff is just our belief about how we work together, how we collaborate, and the whole of my career has been the story of teams. Teams have become more and more important. I’m sure many of your listeners, you start with a new company, and the first thing they tell you is teamwork is a corporate value, and you’re evaluated against your ability to work in teams. You’re going to have a team meeting every month. Team, team, team.

I grew up in that environment and kind of accepted it, but then what I’ve found is that if you think you’re a team, then you’ve got to have a meeting, right? You’ve got to share lots of information. I got invited to meetings that just have no value to me at all. I developed the idea of what we call star groups and spaghetti teams. If you think about, if you have, let’s say six people, a spaghetti team is where all of those six people are connected to everybody else. They’re all working very intensively, they probably need some kind of live meeting, either face to face, or audio conference, or webinar, so they can all interact. That’s your classic idea of teamwork, right?

Pete Mockaitis:
Mm-hmm.

Kevan Hall:
The other way of thinking about a group is a group of people. A group is more. You may have five people reporting to an individual in the middle. The group is actually a really effective way of organizing work that isn’t too interdependent, so groups are great for the coordination of work. If you have a number of sales people who all have their own territories, their own skills, but report to a sales manager, they’re not so grouped, because the individual salespeople don’t need to coordinate with each other very much, just the center. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis:
Sure.

Kevan Hall:
Okay. If you think about those two modes of operation, once we think we’re a spaghetti team, then everyone has to share all information because we’re tightly interdependent. Yeah?

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah.

Kevan Hall:
If we’re a star group, we only need to share things which are relevant to the two individuals that happen to be talking, usually the person at the center, and you as an individual. Apply that to meetings. How much of the topics of the meetings that you attend are of interest to everybody there and everyone’s engaged in?

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah. The proportion doesn’t look so good.

Kevan Hall:
It’s not so good. We found that about 40% of all the content in meetings is what I call a transmission of information. It’s either the person in the center giving information out, or it’s a conversation that only engages two, or maximum, three people. That’s nearly half of the content. That doesn’t need to be done in a meeting. If you’ve got a boring 27 page PowerPoint then you could email that to me, and I could ignore it later. I don’t need to be sitting there pretending to be interested, right?

Pete Mockaitis:
I’ll schedule ignoring your PowerPoint for later.

Kevan Hall:
Exactly. The first thing we do with that, with meetings, is get people to think about, is it a star group topic? Is it a spaghetti team topic? If you read research on that online, you’ll quickly get to loads of stuff on our website, which will help explain that topic a bit more clearly.

Pete Mockaitis:
That’s just a great framework right there, is a quick acid test that can slice through a lot of unnecessary people being in the room.

Kevan Hall:
Yep. I have an even quicker one. I often say to people, “If you sit in your meetings listening to a series of boring, irrelevant updates from other people, but you’re happy to be there, because in a minute, you’re going to give a really fascinating insight into what you did last week, then you’re in a group.” If you really were a team, you would need to know what they were doing in order to do your job, because that’s what teams are. Teams are interdependent.

Pete Mockaitis:
Perfect, okay. That’s great. What else do we got for speed leading?

Kevan Hall:
That also has a big impact, by the way, on decisions, because there’s a tendency again, because we think we’re a team that all decisions are made collectively. I often use the example, during my last corporate job, I had a real busy international role. I was averaging three countries a week for three years. I was traveling like crazy. My boss was based in the UK. I was living in France at the time. He invited me to a multi-meeting, which had no relevance to me at all, and he insisted that I come.

I sat in there, and it was an HR meeting, and somebody started to do a pay and benefits review. With the greatest respect to any pay and benefits listeners you have, that isn’t the most interesting presentation you’ll ever see. That’s just your own pay. I started to do my emails, and my boss got angry and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well this isn’t relevant. I’m really, really, really busy. I’ve got lots to do. Do you mind if I do my emails?” He dragged me outside the meeting room and said, “I insist that you look interested,” he said. I went back.

Pete Mockaitis:
I’ve heard that before too.

Kevan Hall:
You’ve seen that before, so you have to look interested, and your face starts to hurt from smiling after about a minute. After a minute I thought, “Well I can’t just sit here. I have to participate.” I didn’t know a lot about this stuff here, so I started asking questions. These are questions I don’t need to know the answer to. I’m interrupting a guy who already knows these things and wasting his time while he explains it to me.

About 10 minutes in, because I’m a smart sort of guy, I start to have opinions, so I offer ideas, which of course are terrible ideas, because I know nothing about this subject. The person presenting has to be democratic and pretend to listen, right? At the end of the presentation, there’s probably 10 people in the room, only one of them knows what he’s talking about, and nine of us don’t. At the end of the presentation, what do we do? We vote on what the guy should do next.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh boy.

Kevan Hall:
I mean, it sounds absolutely crazy, but I bet all of us have been in that meeting about once a month.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh boy. That is, that is … What happened afterwards? You got me on the edge of my seat? What’s the story’s conclusion?

Kevan Hall:
That was about the time I decided to start my own business, I guess. That’s the nice thing about being an external person, you can kind of hold the mirror up to some of those dysfunctional behaviors, and pretty well everybody agrees. They go, “Yeah, we do do that.” It’s just a habit we get into, and I think once you become familiar with this concept, and particularly with a critical mass, when you’ve got a few people in the meeting, or that the company, they understand that. Some of our clients say that all that happens is somebody will look up and just ask the question, “Is this really spaghetti?” People will go, “No, no. You’re right,” and they move on. Just the power of the concept and the language can be quite transformational in this.

Pete Mockaitis:
Absolutely. I’d love to hear, do you advocate any particular script or language to do a good push back on, “Hey, I don’t really think it’s necessary for me to be here.” How do you communicate that in a way that it’s received? It seems like your boss wasn’t hearing it, but what do you recommend for folks to successfully extricate themselves from unnecessary meetings?

Kevan Hall:
You’re right to point that out, because that would be an awesome, but short career if you said that to your boss I bet. That’s one of the reasons I created the language star and spaghetti, because it’s kind of nonjudgmental. I think if you can download one of their press articles or something around the idea, or get a copy of the book and introduce that to your boss, what’s really useful to do is to have that discussion about where’s the spaghetti and where’s the star in your meeting. What you’re doing then, is you’re building a consensus in the meeting about what people don’t need to be involved in.

If you just start not showing up to meetings, or canceling your meetings if you run them, people will feel a bit upset, but if you explain the rationale, your people are delighted to get out of boring meetings. I think you’ll be explicit about, “I’ve been reading this book, I’ve been reading this article, listening to this podcast, this maybe we’re doing that all.”

Another really interesting way of doing it is, and again, I’d be explicit about your boss before doing this, is just make yourself a little checklist. Down one side, the left hand side of your checklist, put there the topic names of your meeting, and along the top columns put the people attending. As the topic goes along, every time someone talks on that topic, you put the tick in the box. At the end of the meeting, what you’ve got is a visual record of how many times people talked, which people talked, for each of the topics.

Pete Mockaitis:
That’s brilliant.

Kevan Hall:
I know that’s sort of how much people talk isn’t the only indicator of participation, but it’s an easy one to get. At the end of it, what’ you’ll find is there will be some topics where everyone talked, and they’re probably spaghetti topics. There will be other topics where only one person talked, or only two. They’re almost certainly star group topics. If you have individuals who don’t say anything, then I think it’s a valid discussion to have with them, do they need to be at that meeting? Our finding is, on average, 19% of participants at meetings we evaluate shouldn’t be there at all.

Pete Mockaitis:
19%?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh that’s good.

Kevan Hall:
I love it how you’ve taken something that conceptually we know and frustrates us like, “Rrggh”, and then you’ve come up with a way to put some quantification behind that, and then you slap that on top of the compensation of those people per hour, and then it becomes a pretty compelling case. “Get them out of here.” “Get me out of here.”

Pete Mockaitis:
We did some work with a large, fast-moving consumer goods company last year, year before looking at meetings, and we helped them put together a business case on this. They found that the unnecessary meetings alone, so not all of the meetings, but the ones that didn’t need to happen cost them 500 million dollars a year, and they also drove another 400 million dollars of travel. It was nearly a billion dollar a year problem.

Kevan Hall:
Oh, that’s wild. That’s wild.

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah. I tell you, I use some similar math when I’m kind of justifying the return on my enhanced thinking and collaboration training programs, is that we’re going to reduce waste associated with unnecessary and redundant analysis proven to be this many hours, and we’re going to reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings, and by golly, that adds up. It makes you and I look like a bargain.

Kevan Hall:

Well we are a bargain Pete, because you know …

Pete Mockaitis:
I agree. I agree. I’m well on board there. Now I’m about to shift gears into talking about doing some management coordination with offshore, outsourced business process outsourcing kinds of folks, unless there’s anything else we should talk about Speed Lead.

Kevan Hall:
No, I think that’s good. We repeat that theme in Speed Lead through other form of communication to decentralizing control and a few other things, but the basic philosophy I think you’ve got from that example around collaboration.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay. Now I’m thinking about, I’ve been here several times myself, as well as others. In a previous interview we had with Claire Patel about rising like a star, she was given a choice by her manager, and she said, “Okay, well I got some resources available for you to expand your team and you can have either one person in the United States, or two people in India,” and it’s funny because some people would say, “I want one person in the United States,” because there’s a bit of miscommunication, difficulties, assumptions, cultural stuff, educational, learning differences. I, several times, have given some instructions to folks helping me out on things in the Philippines, and by golly, it just didn’t come out the way I thought it would when it was returned to me, and it’s like, “What’s the holdup? What should we do in terms of maximizing the clarity in that particular two way streaks of kind of west to developing outsourced country?”

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. I think the first thing to realize is that any time you make a cultural observation, it’s 50% about you and 50% about them. If you see another culture as not very clear, it may be you’re too direct. If you see them as very emotional, it may mean you’re repressed. I always take a cross cultural observation as a reflection on myself. When I run my class, it runs it’s time. I’m one of these people, I’m on time for everything, and I love to look about speed, for them to sync, so that kind of sparks my interest.

When I go to other countries where time is much more flexible, if I’ll go to Mexico and I do some work in Mexico, the whole Mexico isn’t going to change just because I was there. By the way, the Mexicans are pretty good at getting things done, they just do it a different way than me. I’ve learned from that. I’ve generated some more techniques by experiencing that, and I’ve gotten much more comfortable about it. Quite often, particularly when you are visited to another culture, you can’t do anything about the other culture, all you can do is change the way you feel about it.

Pete Mockaitis:
All right.

Kevan Hall:
If you take the example of punctuality. If likely you come from a culture where being punctual is a sign of respect, then when people aren’t punctual, what you think that means is they don’t respect you. Actually, it’s not the fact that they’re late that makes you feel upset, it’s the fact that what you think that means.

Pete Mockaitis:
Certainly, like, “You don’t care about my time.”

Kevan Hall:
Exactly. Where as in a culture where time is more flexible, very often what they prefer is flexibility. They would rather change things at short notice. We do stupid things because we’re obsessed about time. For example, you ever been to that meeting that finished at 10:00, and the next meeting starts at 10:00 in a room a half a mile away?

Pete Mockaitis:
Yes.

Kevan Hall:
What do we do? Teleport, do we have that? We finish the meeting at 10:00 even though we haven’t reached a good outcome, because it’s 10:00.

Pete Mockaitis:
Right.

Kevan Hall:
There’s pathology of either side. I guess my first is, see all the cultural difference or reflection on yourself, and think about, “What can I change to get more comfortable with this, rather than necessarily expecting the rest of the world to spontaneously work the way we work?”

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay, well that’s fair. That’s a good gut check, “Look in the mirror.” That’s a two way street. Then, in this particular instance of western folk, in the Europe or United States, getting some assistance from some folks in India, China, Pakistan, Philippines, what are some particular, specific things to be on the lookout for in terms of adaptations we should make, so ones on the time front? Are there some others?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. There’s a whole load. This is one of the best researched areas of social science, so there’s a ton of research on this. There’s some really good books. I recommend one called, Riding The Waves Of Culture, by a guy called from a few years ago. The ones that have the most impact on work, there are five. We’ve talked already about time, that’s a big one. In some cultures, time is more lenient and direct. In others, it’s more flexible and changing. We talked about that a little bit already.

Second is, the difference between how do you get things done? Some cultures like to get things done through rules, and processes, and systems, and very often in the US and the UK that’s what we do. In other cultures, if you want to get exactly the same thing done, you would start by using your relationships and your network. If we’re working with colleagues, let’s say we are the rules and process based people, what we may do, is we may underestimate the value of relationships, we may not invest in it, we may jump straight into doing the work without having found out anything about those people.

If you’d put yourself in the position of a relationship person, suddenly I’ve got this guy from Europe or the US on the phone, asking me when something is going to be delivered, and I’m not following the process. I don’t even know who they are yet. Why should I give them any priority, when I’ve got people I’ve known for 20 years sitting next to me with a problem. I think you’re learning to do both the rules on the relationships.

Second is around status and hierarchy. Now we get that. In some cultures, you’re only as good as your last appraisal. Status comes from what you do. That was traditionally the American way, although we have to admit that social mobility has reduced in western Europe and the US in recent years. That was the traditional American dream, right?

The other side of it is, you are who you are. What school did you go to? In India, what cast are you a member of, still have an influence in big parts of the world. The best person to do that international project may be a 24 year old, fresh out of college, because they’ve got good technical knowledge, but in a culture that has a high respect for age, they may not be very effective. What do we do about that, and vice versa. Status is a big one.

A third is the relative importance of the individual in the group. US and UK are both very high on individualistic scores in their research, which means that we start with the individual and work out that. Yes, we work in teams, but we work in teams so that we can be successful. In more collective cultures like Japan, like Korea, for example, it starts with a group. Unless you maintain group harmony first, you as an individual can’t be successful second. The harmony of the group, the relationships of the group, are much more important than you as an individual, and that’s a big one to get over for people from individualistic cultures.

Pete Mockaitis:
Mm-hmm.

Kevan Hall:
The third one, the final one, I’m sorry, which I think may be behind what you mentioned about your clients in the Philippines, is directness in communication.

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay, yes. They’re very friendly.

Kevan Hall:
What we often say, we’ll call somebody up and say, “I need you to do this. Can you do it?” We hear, “Well, I’ll do my best.” I come from the UK, so we have all kinds of slightly indirect ways of saying no. We say things like, “You’ve obviously worked very hard at that,” or “That’s an interesting point of view. Let me get back to you.” We have all these things which sound kind of vaguely positive, but we have no intention of doing anything, right?

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah.

Kevan Hall:
In the Philippines, and Indian places like that, people will often say yes or hi in Japan, but what they mean is, “Yes, I hear you. Yes, I respect you. Yes, I’m going to do it.” For example, working with the Japanese, the most pointed no that you will probably get from a Japanese colleague is, “That could be a little difficult.” That’s basically, go away. Learning to listen in a different way.

You ask your colleague in the Philippines if they’ve understood, they will probably say yes, because that’s kind of the right answer, and helps them save face. If you ask them, “Okay, so I think we’ve, can you just summarize back to me what you’re going to do?” Turn it around, or “What do you think of the steps,” or “What do you think will be the challenges in implementing that,” or “When do you think that will be ready?” Don’t say, “Can you have this done by Friday?” Because again, the answer may be yes. It’s, “When do you think this can be ready by,” and “What help will you need to do that?” Ask those kind of open questions and explore it.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh, thank you. I think you’ve maybe saved me many headaches in the months and years to come with that little gem right there. Thank you.

Kevan Hall:

It’s a really fascinating subject. I first began interest of it when I was helping my previous company, M&M [Miles 00:33:27] to setup businesses in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Russian, just after the fall of communism. I did some cross culture research, and I found out I was landing in countries for the first time. First time I ever went to, what was then, Czechoslovakia, and I did some cultural research, identified the gaps between our culture, and their Czechoslovak culture, and I came prepared with, basically a template that said what challenges are we likely to have, and after a day, people who had been there for three months were saying, “How do you know so much about the culture?” Literally it was just by doing a cultural profile. I found it so valuable around the world, really, really helpful.

Pete Mockaitis:
When doing a cultural profile, I guess you recommend some great book resource there, what are some of the other key things one does to conduct a cultural profile?

Kevan Hall:
Well, use the five dimensions that I’ve talked about, the rules and relationships, data, individuals and group, communication, directness, and time. We draw a Chinese abacus and we say that for each of those dimensions has one leg of the abacus, one strand of the abacus, and then the question really is, if you look at the books, there is research that says, “UK scores 90% on individualism, and Japan scores 35%,” so there’s that data out there.

The real question we ask managers is, try and work out, where are they relative to you, first of all, and is it a big enough gap you need to worry about? If you’re thinking about levels of directness, for example, you’re going to work that out pretty quickly, right?

Pete Mockaitis:
Certainly.

Kevan Hall:
If you’re thinking about different ideas about time, you’re going to start that, possibly before you even meet for the first time.

Pete Mockaitis:
Yeah. “Where are they?”

Kevan Hall:
It’s not actually that hard to come up with a simple gap analysis. You can obsess about are they 72 and am I 73. If you’re close, don’t worry about it. If it’s a big enough issue for you to do something about, you’ll notice it quite quickly. The question then is, “What do I do about the differences?” You’ve always got five choices. Whenever you see someone who’s doing something different than you, and in this case, it’s culture, it could be other things.

If you imagine you’ve got a grid, and you’ve got two axis. You’ve got you on one axis and them on the other axis. The first option is to just do it your way. “Okay, we’re having a meeting. You’re late. I want to do it my way. Can I impose my view on you?” Sometimes, frankly if you’re the boss at a big company, sometimes you can. You need to have the power to be able to do it.

The second option is, “Can we do it your way?” My example, I went to a business meeting with a very senior golf Arab in the Arab a few years ago, and I think I waited about four hours for the meeting. Could I change that?

Pete Mockaitis:
It sounds powerful. I don’t think you could. You got to sort of do it.

Kevan Hall:
I’m sitting in his office. I’ve done the cultural research, so I know it’s likely to be a long wait. Even for me, and I think about this stuff a lot, I was getting frustrated after an hour and a half, and then I started to change the way I thought. I thought, “Actually, the real challenge in this part of the world for me, is getting to meet influential Arabs.” I’m sitting in a meeting room with lots of Arabs, so I thought, “Hold on. What I’ve actually got here, is an opportunity to meet quite a few new people.”

Pete Mockaitis:
Lovely.

Kevan Hall:
I started having conversations, and I met some people, and we exchanged business cards. When eventually, three hours later, they came and started the meeting, I was a little bit disappointed because I was having a good time. That’s an example of again, what I said before, change your mindset. Those are the two boundary options.

There’s a third option that says, “Can we compromise in some way?” In the UK, very often we say, “Well the meetings at 9:00 for 9:30.” Which means, you can arrive at 9:00, and there will probably be some donuts, and we’ll have a bit of a chat, and we’ll socialize, and catch up, at 9:30 we’re on it.” That gives people a little bit of chance to have some flexibility.

Pete Mockaitis:
9:00 for 9:30, that’s funny.

Kevan Hall:
9:00 for 9:30. A fourth option is to do nothing. Just say, “We’re different. So what. It’s not worth fighting over.” A final option is one that you know all this research at this, all we need a solution, which kind of makes me sick most of the time.

Pete Mockaitis:
That word, yeah.

Kevan Hall:
Yeah, it’s just the word. Sometimes there isn’t just a creative reconciliation of the differences, but sometimes you can find different ways to do things. I run a conference once for a Swiss company, and the Swiss companies are off the scale on punctuality, but the conference was being held in Bahia state in Brazil, which is real flexible. The hotel was very, very flexible, it’s in Bahia Brazilian time. Then when we discussed their meals were late, their sessions run late, because most of the participants were from Latin America. The Swiss were very frustrated.

This hotel was on a beautiful beach, and at 5:00 it got dark, so when the conference finished, there was nothing much to do. I talked about these five choices I’ve just outlined with the group, I said, “Come back with a creative way of running the meeting for the next couple of days that meets your culture.”

They decided that they couldn’t change the hotel. They tried, but they couldn’t. They said, “We’ll just adapt to the hotel. Whenever they serve a meal, we’ll break then. We’ll compromise a little bit on everybody being in the room,” because these were salespeople. A lot of them needed to be on the phone and so quite often, you couldn’t get 100% of the people in the room, so we said, “Okay, compromise. Well, if 85% of people are there, we start.”

Then the one that was really the top right, the reconciliation one was they said, “Look, how about we took a break in the afternoon, so we could kind of go to the beach, go swimming, go sailing, and then we come back in the evening and work late, because then we can enjoy the facilities of the hotel. We have a nice break. We feel as though we got some benefit?” The Swiss guy said, “Yes, but only if we work however late it takes to finish the agenda for the day.”

Pete Mockaitis:
All right.

Kevan Hall:
We agreed on that package of measures, which was a little bit do it my way, a little bit do it your way, a little bit of compromise, a little bit come up with something creative. It was a great success.

Pete Mockaitis:
That’s a lovely illustration. It’s funny. I’m thinking of the Swiss people with their fancy watches.

Kevan Hall:
The Swiss are fantastic, and if you’ve ever been, if you fly in to Zurich Airport for the first time, you take the train everywhere, because the train system works great in Switzerland. There’s a clock on the station, and literally, it counts down the seconds. If the train isn’t pulling in, I think sometimes that if the train didn’t pull in at that second, people would just step off the platform anyway, because the whole system works.

There’s a lot of research, actually, that says that if you look at people’s, the culture’s orientation to time, it correlates with all kinds of stuff, such as how well the trains run on time, the average accuracy of clocks in public places, and even the speed at which people walk. It’s very persuasive, this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis:
That’s fascinating. Well, we could talk at length, but in order to have a reasonable length of episode, I’d like to shift gears here into hearing about some of your favorite things, unless there’s another quick tidbit you want to make sure you get out there first.

Kevan Hall:
No. I think those are the main things. We’ve talked about Speed Lead. My more recent book is called, Making The Matrix Work, which is a bit more around the clarity stuff that we talked about earlier on. Those are the two main sources for more information.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh perfect. We’ll definitely link those.

Kevan Hall:
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis:
Could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote? Something that inspires you again and again.

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. I used to do some competitive motor sport. I used to drive rally cars, again, back to my obsession around speed. One of my favorite quotes is from Mario Andretti, who was one of the world’s most successful racing drivers in all kinds of different formulas. He said, “If you feel like you’re in control, you just aren’t going fast enough.”

Pete Mockaitis:
Okay. That’s fun. How about a favorite study or piece of research you find yourself sighting frequently?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. A very recent one actually. There was a study by McKenzie, that looked at the matrix, which is an area I’m spending a lot of work on at the time, and very often the matrix gets a bit of a bad press in the literature, because it is more complex and it does have some challenges. What the McKenzie showed was that the more people were matrixed, the higher their level of engagement, which kind of reinforces the point I’ve been making for some years, that there are some benefits in this. People kind of like the complexity, and the freedom, and the scope that that gives them, and so there are advantages to complexity as well as costs.

Pete Mockaitis:
Well thank you. How about a favorite book?

Kevan Hall:
There’s a saying that I like that says, “When you encounter a person of rare intelligence, ask him what books he reads.”

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh yes. That’s one of my favorites.

Kevan Hall:
The problem is, I read really trashy science fiction and fantasy books. I read a lot, but that’s what I do for kind of fun. In terms of leadership books, the one I always recommend is called Leadership And Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute. It’s a really excellent book. It’s got some real life wisdom in there as well, so that’s one I come back to time and time again.

Pete Mockaitis:
Perfect. How about a favorite habit? A personal practice of yours that has really expanded your effectiveness.

Kevan Hall:
I think during my corporate career, my principal was always kind of read two books more than the next person, and actually implement the ideas. I moved around a lot. I started in human resources, I moved into manufacturing, I’ve been moved into sales and strategic planning, I then moved into national and business development, and all kinds of things. Whenever I moved, let’s say when I moved into manufacturing, I’d get six books, and by the time I started the job, I’d have read the most up to date six books on manufacturing. When I arrived, I’d be amazed that people didn’t know half of the stuff I was talking about.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh wow.

Kevan Hall:
The other thing I would do, is if I read a book, I would say, “okay.” I’d try and satisfy myself that it was good stuff, because it was a lot of fatty stuff, but if I found something I thought was really good, and I’d check it out with some friends, and maybe talk to my friends at University and say, “What do you think about this,” and maybe a couple of practitioners, but then if I thought it was good, I would actually just say, “Okay. They recommend doing 10 things. I’m going to do all of those.” I would just systematically blitz that stuff, and guess what? Having any kind of strategy normally beats having no strategy. What I found in general, is when I executed on that stuff, I saw the benefits.

Pete Mockaitis:
That’s exciting. Good. That reinforces this podcast is worth existing in the world.

Kevan Hall:
Absolutely. I think one of the things now, since I’ve been an entrepreneur and grown a business is really to try and get beyond selling your time. If any of your listeners have read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I’d recommend that to anybody, wherever they are in their career. Just get in beyond that sense of, I just have to work hard, and make more money, and spend it all to getting into, how do I create assets, how do I create passive income, and how do I live off the money that that makes, rather than just spend my whole life on the hamster wheel.

Pete Mockaitis:
Agreed. How about sort of a fan favorite nugget? A piece that you share that gets people nodding their heads, taking notes, re-tweeting, kindle-book highlighting?

Kevan Hall:
I think if I look back over the two books, probably the one that our participants reference the most is the star and spaghetti idea. I think because it has the potential to make a big different for people. I’m kind of really proud of the thought of people coming into work and actually doing their jobs rather than wasting their day in meetings.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh fantastic. How about a best way to find you? Would you point them to your website or Twitter or email?

Kevan Hall:
Yeah. The website is www.global-integration.com. On Twitter, I’m @Kevan, and my name is spelled K-E-V-A-N, so kevanhall. Be careful, because there is another Kevan Hall spelled the same way, who’s a famous Hollywood dress designer, so if you come across someone who looks in any way stylish, it’s not me.

Pete Mockaitis:
I think your headshot looks pretty stylish. How about a favorite parting word or call to action, a challenge for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Kevan Hall:
I guess one of the things I was taught during my corporate career, I worked for some great companies, and they always said there’s two ways to progress in your career. One is to kind of apply for the next job and go on a selection, and win through. The second is to just start doing the job at the level you want to be at, and eventually somebody will say, “Really? You’re not already at that level?” And will ratify it. I think the second one is much more the successful strategy, so I would say, just start doing the job at the next level up straight away.

Pete Mockaitis:
Oh I love it. Kevin, this has been so fun and helpful for me, and hopefully all the listeners as well. I wish you tons of luck, and success, and smooth travels as you’re gallivanting across the globe here.

Kevan Hall:
Thank you very much. I wish all your listeners good luck.

Pete Mockaitis: Thank you.