E12 - Professor Damian Hughes: A Change Management Catalyst and Professor of Organisational Psychology and Change.

Read the Interview Transcript Below:

Jo Palmer: 'We are doing an expert interview, and today I'm with Damian Hughes. We are talking largely about organisation development. So rather than me introduce your credentials, Damian, I think you'd do a better job than me.'

Damian Hughes: 'Well, thanks for inviting me on, Jo. It's a real honour to sort of chat with you. For anyone listening it's probably easier to explain the jobs I do, to give some context. So I'm a professor of organizational psychology and change, that's my main role. But I work as a consultant psychologist across a wide range of organisations from business to sport to education. And then the third job I do is I write. So I've done a number of books very much around the topics of high performing cultures and how and how to make change happen.'

The Barcelona Way

Jo Palmer: 'Fantastic. Before we get into organisational development, let's touch on your most recent book, The Barcelona Way, which is currently ranking on Amazon's best sellers. Damian, what was your inspiration for writing this book?'

Damian Hughes: 'Yeah, so I got approached a number of years ago by a publisher who asked if I'd be interested in writing a book on the topic of culture. And I said I'd love to do it. They said, would I be interested in trying to make it a little bit more accessible by viewing it through the lens of a sports team?'

DH: 'Now, while that sounded an intriguing challenge, the reality is, like a lot of businesses, a lot of sports teams sort of pay lip service to the topic of culture. So they'll tell you how important it is. But their genuine level of investment, or interest, or focus tends to be quite minimal. So we narrowed it down to three teams that genuinely use culture as a competitive advantage. So the first one was the New Zealand Rugby Union team. The second one was the New England Patriots in the NFL. And then the third one was FC Barcelona.'

'Choose Barcelona'

Damian Hughes: 'So I think it was air fair costs that meant the publisher said, "Choose Barcelona." But the reality was, it was the one that I felt had almost been unexplored and it was really rich to link it. So what the idea was was, I looked at culture through the lens of how Barcelona had decided to follow this process known as a commitment culture. And a commitment culture is where you have a really clear set of principles or behaviours, and you've got a really clear sense to why you exist. And what all the evidence says from all the research on the topic is a commitment culture tends to be a lot more successful over a sustained period than any other type of culture.'

DH: 'So I look at the different types of cultures, but then specifically this idea of a commitment culture and how that can be used and harnessed within any organisation, so anywhere where people are coming together for a common cause, how you can use it to then drive competitive advantage.'

Damian Hughes, the interview will conduct of him explaining organisational psychology and change

 

How Long Did it Take?

Jo Palmer: 'Fantastic. Brilliant. How long did it take you to write it, Damian?'

Damian Hughes: 'It ended up being about three years. So I was back and forth from Catalonia for about 18 months, back and forth doing interviews and things like that. But a lot of the research in terms of the most recent research and the papers, that took an awful lot of wading through to be able to give people sort of the idea that it isn't just about sport, it's about people that just happen to work in sport in this case. I'm lucky enough I've done a number of books, Jo. So what I've realised now is that you have to really be intrigued and love the topic, because it ends up dominating an awful lot of your waking hours. So it was a real three-year labour of love.'

Favourite Book

Jo Palmer: 'Wow. Out of all the books you've written, Damian, which has been your favourite and why?'

Damian Hughes: 'Oh, that's a difficult one, that's like asking to choose your favourite child. I love them all they're all subjects that I really am passionate about. They often remind me of certain times in my life. The book I wrote previous to The Barcelona Way was a book called The Winning Mindset, and that was a whole series of interviews that I did with elite sports coaches, but looking at the topic of engagement, so how do you get people switched on and engaged? But we again, we viewed it couldn't lens of the sporting world. I'd probably say particularly fond of that because I almost wrote it... So it's a bit of a love letter to my dad.'

'A Love Letter to My Dad'

Damian Hughes 'My dad's quite poorly now, but he was in elite boxing coach all through my childhood. So my background is I grew up in a boxing gym. While he's poorly now I wouldn't to sort of pay tribute to some of the stuff that I'd seen him do. So I include some of the stories from his own career as well. But in my head, it was a bit of a love letter to my dad and the sort of work he'd done.'

JP: 'Oh, how lovely.'

DH: 'Yeah. But I'd say The Barcelona Way is a love letter to my professional life as well because that's where I've ended up spending a huge proportion of my working life has been working around this topic of creating high performing culture. So yeah, I'm just as fond of that as well.'

JP: 'Yeah. Well, I won't make you choose one then, Damian. That's fine.'

DH: 'You won't what? Sorry.'

JP: 'I won't make you choose one.'

DH: 'No, yeah, it's a brilliant question. I've never really thought about it. But like you say, when I reflect on it it is like choosing your favourite child, which is not something you could really do.'

JP: 'I get it. Because if someone said to me, "Jo, pick your favourite child." I wouldn't be able to. I love that answer.'

DH: 'Thank you.'

Organisational Development

Jo Palmer: 'Thanks for that, Damian. Let's talk about organisational development.'

Damian Hughes: 'Okay, brilliant.'

JP: 'What is organisational development and what are the key values?'

DH: 'So organisational development is the idea of how do you create an environment where people can flourish and blossom, and subsequently perform at their best? That's the purpose of it. Now, the best way I would describe that is it's like an ecosystem. There's a whole series of different strands that have to come together to be able to facilitate people for performing at their best. So there's no silver bullet answer to this. There's no one size fits all. It will always be unique to the organisation. This will range from things like your guided behaviours. It will be about your speed and ability to transition quickly. This will be the things that you get that are most important in terms of delivery, people development, leadership development, all of this comes together. So it's quite a complex area.'

'Start at the Idea of Behaviours'

Damian Hughes: 'But I think that when you work with teams, a lot of organisations that are looking to understand organisational development and how it can be a competitive advantage, the place I would urge anyone to start is start at the idea of behaviours. Now I make a distinction here between organisational values and organisational behaviours. So what I mean is that values are quite an abstract term. You can say that you want people to adopt a value of being fair or demonstrating trust. But the reality is people can just say, "Yes, I agree with that." Without ever needing to give you any evidence of it. A behaviour is something that you have to clearly demonstrate.'

DH: 'One of the big things that I find often inhibits performance in organisations, Jo, is ambiguity. So when things are ambiguous or when things are a little bit opaque and not particularly clear, you get confused reactions, people behave in a subjective way. When people behave subjectively, you get lack of consistency, which is a big frustration, whereas high performing organizations consistently deliver.'

DH: 'So that's why I think behaviour has become really important to be able to articulate, what are the non-negotiable behaviours? So the phrase I use is I talk about, what your trademark behaviours? So the behaviours that define you when you're at your very best.'

'What Elite Cultures Do Is They Prioritise'

Damian Hughes: "The second mistake I see a lot of organisations do is though they might go down the behavioural route, they come up with a big long shopping list of all the behaviours they want people to adopt. What elite cultures do is they prioritise. So they don't have any more than three behaviours, three non-negotiable trademark behaviours. And a nice way of doing this, if there's anyone listening to this that think they'd be interested in maybe adopting it in their world, the exercise I encourage everyone to do is something called success leaves clues."

DH: 'Now, what that means is you start by answering the question, "When we're good, why are we good?" When you're able to articulate what good looks like in your world, you will find consistently present behaviours that exist. And then they become almost your foundation stone to build the culture on this. So the idea is, how do you then create an organisation that facilitates the delivery of those behaviours at the highest level as consistently as possible?'

JP: 'Wow. So it's about simplifying it to get the best of the behaviours.'

Types of Cultures

Damian Hughes: 'Yeah, and that's often a big challenge for all of us, like I say, that what you find is that I've made reference from, we're talking about different types of cultures, and one type of culture that often can exist is a bureaucratic culture, the bureaucratic culture is almost where it's driven by rules and regulations and policies and procedures. So decisions tend to be made by a consensus.