People, passion, performance, profit

He’s a former high-flying international change consultant with one of the biggest names in the game. Now, international talent and leadership expert Dr Javier Bajer is heading to HR Summit in Singapore and Hong Kong to turn everything you’ve learned about creating cultural change inside out. In what promises to be a high-energy, practical and inspiring presentation, Bajer will explain why so few change projects record real success. And how the answer lies in changing the very way businesses try to execute them. It’s about “changing change,” he says.

And it comes with a very real and successful example. The founding CEO of The Talent Foundation, a  network of multinational companies and universities conducting business research, will show exactly how his unique concepts helped turn around a major banking operation in South America. They helped transform the culture of HSBC in Argentina, with 6,000 employees, from a struggling organisation to a market leader in less than a year.

A new way

Bajer spent much of his consulting career with Accenture, leading change projects for big-name clients from Shell to Citi to the UK Government. He says the formula was always very similar, with much attention paid to the senior leaders in the first instance. Change, it was said, should come from the “top, down”.

There were certainly successes. Projects were delivered on time and for the agreed cost, and staff surveys indicated significant improvements in staff awareness and acceptance of the desired change. But all too often, Bajer says, that was only a “ticking the boxes” exercise. His client organisations were never able to measure success in terms of why the change was needed – “success was a measure of time and budget”.

Bajer decided to look more closely at the tangible results of change – and found much less substance. “Why can’t we create lasting, powerful, business results through the transformation of entire cultures," he asked.

He took time out to study ethnography (a mix of sociology and anthropology) before heading back to Accenture with a very different change management strategy. Instead of heading straight to the leadership group, Bajer worked with the rank and file members of staff first up. More to the point – he worked as the rank and file.

Bajer would take on jobs in each of his clients, spending two months as a typical worker to get a better understanding of the current culture. Over the next year, he worked as a call centre operator and even as a royal servant. From that experience, he developed a whole new model for change – and that formed the basis of a new stand-alone research and consulting business.

WorkforcePerformance LLP

After recruiting a small group of “like-minded” colleagues to form WorkforcePerfomance LLP, Bajer and the Talent Foundation went about refining their change management philosophy. Bajer essentially calls for organisations to implement changes “from the inside out”. He notes that it is the general staff population that will inevitably make or break the change project.

“The (traditional) model was completely upside down,” he says. “Leaders would paint a picture of where they were, and where they wanted to go, and then try to make it happen.

“But change only happens when enough individuals decide to change,” he says.

In this way, WorkforcePerformance LLP targets everyone in an organisation, from the board to staff members as the real drivers of change. Bajer says if you can give these people the space, passion and inspiration to find new ways of doing things, organisational change becomes both possible and very real.

Pilot success

It all sounds fair in theory, but what about the reality? Bajer’s HR Summit presentation, People, Passion, Performance, Profit will outline the Talent Foundation’s pilot program with HSBC Bank. The large multinational was curious about the new concept and keen to see it in practice. So it introduced Bajer and his team to the underperforming Argentina subsidiary.

At that stage, in early 2008, HSBC’s Argentina division was ranked a lowly sixth in the country on customer service tables of the banking sector. Employee engagement was measured at a low 40%, Bajer said.

The group then instituted the “100-Day Journey” for all 12,000 staff. This self-awareness and leadership course was made available to everyone, from cashiers to security guards to the board of directors. Bajer says over 98% of staff chose to voluntarily participate.

Each was trained to look at their own role as a leadership position. They were taught to think not just about that single job, but its role in the context of the entire organisation. “It’s about thinking like a business owner,” Bajer says.

While such courses are not earth-shattering on the individual scale, having the entire organisation learn these skills en-masse created a unique phenomenon. “Everyone was changing at the same time,” Bajer says. “They then reached a tipping point where (organisation-wide) change could be enabled.”

Bajer says it was a “two-step” approach. First, “Every individual is now trained and willing to act as a leader”. The second part of the equation is where the organisation then creates a conversation about where it wants to go.

“There’s always a gap,” Bajer admits, but says the number of people unwilling to commit to the process is miniscule compared to the change it can promote.

The results, he says, were very positive. In less than a year after beginning the “100-Day Journey” with the first batch of staff in March, 2008, HSBC had enjoyed a complete turnaround of its position in Argentina. It rose to be Number One in the country’s customer service rankings for banks; and staff engagement levels jumped to 78%.

Now, Bajer and his team are taking the 100-Day Journey to HSBC’s Mexico business, and also certifying coaches in over 20 countries to deliver their training at scale.

Asia-bound

Bajer says he is looking forward to relating all of this and much more during the Singapore and Hong Kong HR Summits in May this year. His extended plenary session will be available to all participants in each of the Leaders Forum, Talent Management, Performance ROI and Corporate Learning streams. “I’m hoping to share my experience with cultures,” he says. “We’ll answer the question: how do you truly connect people with profits?”