Hi, I’m Ian McLean, founder of Flow Group and Greenline Conversations. This podcast has grown out of the chaos that’s been thrust upon us, and in it, I share the best of 25 years of helping leaders in business organisations deal and cope with change. So as you are out there busy making sense of it all, trying to cope and repurposing your organizations, I’m hoping that some of this will provide some help some of the time.
I’ll keep it deliberately short because I know you’re busy. Let’s dive in.
So when residue occurs, and it impacts performance as it does, then it becomes the responsibility of the manager or the leader to go and attend to the residue. So in the Green Line Project, we became very interested in how does this manifest itself and how much time actually does it take leaders and managers in order to like highly paid janitors wander around with a mop in a bucket, tidying up and mopping up the residue that’s being created as a result of poorly conducted conversations. The results we found were pretty consistent internationally, cross industry, and geographically. We looked at all categories of manager leader across all organizations internationally, globally, and we discovered from newly appointed manager supervisors all the way up to the CEO of the organization that the international average of how long managers leaders spend tidying up residue is between 12 and 15 hours per week.
This becomes even more interesting when you turn it into pounds and pence because if you take even the lower amount, which is 12 hours, you multiply it by the number of weeks in a year, which is 48, and you times it by the cost per hour based on average salary. And this is something that we’ve done with all our clients when we work in this space.
So that it translates into something meaningful and you multiply that by the number of employees in the organization. And if I take the latest organization that we’re working with, which is 450 employees , it all works out to a total cost of over 13 million Euros, dollars, whatever currency you’re in, which is the silent cost of inefficiency.
Caused by poorly executed and handled conversations in the first instant as the root source. And of course, it’s really only one half of the problem because as a six point game for every one hour that you are tidying up residue, it’s one hour that you’re spending or not spending working on the things and the initiatives that are actually going to make a difference and drive your business forward.
And this, by the way, is a silent killer. It’s a number that never appears anywhere on a balance sheet. One other observation, the 12 to 15 hours that I mentioned, so the 12 hour calculation that leads to the number that I’ve just shared, that is more than 30% of the average weekly employment in most or many European countries.
I. And secondly, it’s the international average based on all tiers of leadership and management from supervisor all the way to the CEO. Interestingly, observing the data is the further up the food chain you go, guess what happens to that number? It only gets higher and increases. And one of the saddest responses that I’ve encountered in the room.
Whenever we’re discussing, this is one senior leader, in fact the head of operations for a state agency who’d worked with that state agency for 16 years and was listening to the commentary and the narrative around residue and everything that I’ve just described here, and he put his hand up to interject and he said, but Ian, isn’t that what work is?
Isn’t that what work is? And yes, it is. What work is if you accept the principle of the symptoms of poorly handled conversations and you expect and accept that conversations are going to have consequences that are going to affect the performance, so you can either deal with the effects. Which is the residue that results as a result of conversations being poorly handled, or the alternative is you actually go to the root cause and you deal with the cause, and that became the mission of the Green Line Project.
How do we create the basis for getting a system that enables people to have the best outcome potentially from every conversation, every time. You see, nobody sets out with the bad intention of having a bad outcome from a conversation. Yet we know that there are bad outcomes resulting in residue. Most of the residue by the way, happens unconsciously, or because people are bringing unconscious behaviors are habits to the table that when they interact with other unconscious habits, produce the outcome that nobody wants.
Simple things like. The assumptions that we bring into a conversation or interaction that may or may not be true, or the fact that we don’t really listen to understand what the concerns or points of view are on the other side. So ultimately, we codified conversations into seven dos and seven don’ts.
The seven don’s are the things that people commonly do unconsciously that cause conversations to go in the wrong direction and produce residue. And the seven dos are a framework to enable people to avoid all of that and keep the conversation on the green line, which is the path to maximizing two things, both productivity, so efficiencies and connectivity, people’s commitment to whatever the agreements are that come from the conversation itself.
The Green Line Conversations Method over the last 15 years has become the foundational piece that we use. When we’re working with teams or departments or whole organizations or cultural transformations, because ultimately the quality of the conversations and how we conduct them, and if we give ourselves a better chance of having better outcomes more of the time from every conversation, then the compound effect of that becomes exactly what you want.
If you wanna future proof your business or you wanna have more innovation, then it’s creating the space. The framework to enable the very best of people to come out even when times are tough or challenging. If you’d like to find out some more on Greenline conversations, then you can go directly to greenline conversations.com, or if you want to continue on the conversation with me, just connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn.
Until next time, stay safe. Stay sane. Stay connected.
