Beyond Deming
Conversations on transformational leadership and management, inspired by the work of Dr W. Edwards Deming and brought to you by the Deming Alliance.
Beyond Deming
The Cathedral Model – Frank Devine
In this episode of Beyond Deming, host James Lawther sits down with Frank Devine to explore the innovative Cathedral Model for leadership and management development.
Frank shares his journey from traditional HR roles to developing a systematic, evidence-based approach that challenges the status quo of conventional leadership development programmes. Through engaging stories and real-world examples, Frank explains how the Cathedral Model integrates purpose, values, and practical skills to reduce variability in leadership quality and drive sustainable results.
The conversation delves into the pitfalls of conventional HR initiatives and the importance of addressing root causes rather than symptoms. Listeners will gain actionable insights on fostering genuine employee engagement, building high-performing teams, and creating environments where everyone can thrive. Whether you’re a leader, HR professional, or simply interested in organisational excellence, this episode offers fresh perspectives and practical tools to elevate your approach.
Good afternoon and welcome to Beyond Deming. I'm joined today by Frank Devine. Um, and Frank doesn't like to do introductions'cause he finds them boring. He likes to let the quality of his work shine through. So instead of introducing Frank, We will, um, just pile in straight into, what Frank's gonna talk us about. So where should we start, Frank?
Frank:um. Back in, 2008, we started a process that's, uh, creating a, a competitive culture from the bottom up inside organizations. in dpu, part of Johnson and Johnson in, in, in Cork in Ireland. That site went on to win the first joint, first European Shingo Prize, So anyway. one of the senior team was a master student, taught by me and people like John Ccino, et cetera, at Cardiff. And what he was examining was whether my process effectively and, and what they did in co contributed to the massive improvements that were made on that site. so. This was interesting to me because I couldn't get involved because I had a vested interest,'cause it was me that I'd, designed and delivered the, the, um, workshops and trained all the leaders, et cetera. So anyway, I wasn't told the outcome. I knew he'd got a really good result. And then what Cardiff decided to do was get him to present the results of his dissertation at a conference. in front of a big, or which I was present, but I did not know what he was gonna say. So, um, anyway, bill started and he read out a very boring long academic title of his dissertation. And then he turned to me and said, or to put it more simply, is Frank talking out his ars. And that's how, that's how the, uh, at actual World conference speech was, uh. It was opened. Yeah. And of course it got a big, you know, my little heart, what's he gonna say? And of course it broke all the ice, everyone laughing. And the good news is there was a big, a strong correlation between what we're gonna talk about here and the success of that plant. Anyway, how it all began, though, a long, long time before that was that when I was asked for As to which organizations I should apply for after university, I got no university background in my family, so I had nobody to talk to from a familial point of view. And the university, advised me because of what I was interested in leadership and, what the best organizations were for developing leaders. They advised me to join either Shell BP or Unilever. So the first part of my post university career was Shell and then Unilever. So I actually took part in both of their graduate, leadership programs in Unilever. When you pass that program, you got exemption from the first year of a, of a two year, um, MBA at the stage to give you an idea of the quality of it. So obviously my expectations were high. I was very enthusiastic coming out of university, uh, supposedly working in the best leadership development, graduate program in Europe. But I was really disappointed. what I found was that people on the program, some of them were absolutely top class. They, uh, went on to be, have great careers in both organizations, but also there was some of the worst, people I've ever had the displeasure of working with coming outta the same program. A, it was a massive disappointment. B, it was if. If your process produces that degree of variability, we wouldn't accept it anywhere else. We wouldn't accept a production line that produced good product for 10 minutes and then rubbish, and then good pro, we would not accept that degree of variability anywhere else. Why do we accept it for leaders? Why do we expect so little from leadership development and the usual cop out explanations are things like, um, oh, people are different, people are varied. They, they vary across cultures, all of this sort of stuff. Yes, they are, they are different and all, and all of that variability is fine. I'd call but the variability on how an employee is treated, how an employee is developed, how an employee feels getting up and going to into work that day on that shift, how they feel about their work should not, is not benign. No individual ever in any organization should ever be concerned. If a job comes up about the quality of their boss, that the quality of their boss should be a given. The variability will be reduced upwards, not downwards, not, not, not upwards so, so that nobody who has responsibility for anyone else. Is not highly skilled in doing that job to very, very precise standards of what that means and definitions of what that means. So that's the, that's the big vision. There must be a way of doing this. And I just looked and looked and looked and look. And what I found was some things were working very well. They were moving the dial. They were increasing productivity or increasing engagement, blah, blah. Other things were not, so the investment in them, uh, was not producing return and some things were actually damaging Leaders didn't have a reliable way of knowing which was which. there were things missing in the way we, uh, trained leaders and there were things that we were doing that were counterproductive
James:let me just, lemme just summarize what you said then, Frank, so I've got it. So you started off, and if I'm right in saying this, you started Act off actually as an HR professional. Is that right? Or personnel as it would've been called then. But you went through all this leadership development stuff and you were just a bit disappointed by it. So really the challenge for you was to work out what works and what didn't.
Frank:And, and the reason I was. Um, directed by Shell into the HR function.'cause back then, in the late seventies, early eighties was a period of massive strikes. we had the winter discontent, so my trade union and student union, I was president at Warwick, and things like that experience was seen as suitable for someone. Who could handle conflict and negotiations and things like that. So back then, things like leadership development, employee engagement with things we talked about. But in practice we were tied up with stopping strikes and dealing with all this sort of stuff. So that's how I got into hr. But I am actually a very unusual, or was a very unusual HR guy. just to give an example of that, I said to my team, our role as HR professionals is not to tell our leaders what they can't do. Our role is to find a legal and effective way of helping them do what they need to do. It's not, the computer says, no, it's the computer isn't giving us the result, but we'll work with you and problem solve to find a better result than what the computer's saying. a very service orientated approach to all the other functions
James:so my rather joined is view of hr. So having spent 30 plus years in corporate Britain is that they throw out a lot of initiatives,
Frank:Hmm.
James:some of which are helpful, some of which are deeply not helpful. Your point about what works from a leadership development perspective and what
Frank:Guilty. Guilty, guilty,
James:Yeah. So how did you, um, how did, how did you go about finding out what worked and what didn't? Because most people, HR departments just seem to follow the, what's currently in vogue.
Frank:yeah, and there is a problem as well if you look at the, scientific background of most HR people. they will come from either an arts or a social science background rather than a hard science background. So one of the key things in testing what works and what doesn't is data and knowing, knowing how to do scientific experiments and et cetera, et cetera. And these are not strengths in the HR function. It doesn't mean there's not really good people. Who are capable of doing that, but as a generalization, that wouldn't have been a key, criteria for promotion and recruitment of people into hr.
James:Yeah, as a discipline, it's not where they're at.
Frank:Yes. Now that's got better, but the fad hasn't, you know, we gotta do something. This is something, let's do that and it can make it worse. typical topical example recently is the reaction to Black Lives Matter, to that murder of that, individual in America by the police officer. You know, the reaction to that among my profession was very poor. In panic, they just reached out. For people who write about racism, a lot of the people who write race write about racism are actual political activists not helpful to businesses and organizations, But anyway, the process was essentially test it. let's see what works in practice. So for example, the, there was a, it was very faddish a few years ago, to emphasize body language when talking about how to give people genuine, sincere appreciation. Um, so I tested it. So the way we tested it was, we had, four sites uh, as equal as we could have in terms of engagement, quality of leadership, things like that. So you want, you wanna reduce variation as much as possible in an experiment. And, and we added into two of the four sites. What was regarded as one of the best, body language consultancies that existed at the time. And we asked them to focus on, particularly in body language giving recognition. And then the idea was to just track levels of engagement, but in particular, levels of employee responses to feeling appreciated at work.'cause that's what recognition is about, not about giving people things. so my intention was to keep this experiment running for about two, two years. I had to call the experiment off because we were getting such bad results from the two plants that had the body language training.
James:Okay.
Frank:And they were, they were also very funny'cause I,'cause I was seeing the, I was seeing the numbers going in the wrong direction. But, but I'm, I was also interested in the employee commentary on why, you know, why they, and there was comments like, I don't know what's happened to the, managers recently, but they've become very peculiar. They're acting in a very peculiar way. so the conclusion we drew there was. That focusing on, on body language, it's, it is not adding enough value and potentially could be damaging. And then we gave, we gave everybody a very simple guideline. Um, don't worry about your body. Get your heart in the right place and your body won't, won't let you down. So just, just get your. Intention as to why you're giving recognition, not giving it because you want something back from something, You're doing it because no employee should be taken for granted at work. And if you stick with that philosophy and learn how to do it properly, you don't need to worry about your body language.
James:But that's really interesting, Frank, isn't it? Because I have seen lots of initiative, not just HR initiatives, but lots of initiatives rolled out in organizations. And people get behind them and then they don't back off. Whereas if you go in with the view that I am going to test this, and you've actually said that you're gonna test it, then it becomes very easy for you to say, well, that didn't work, but we tried it and we learned from it. See, there's no loss of face. So actually it puts you from a very strong position from the get-go.
Frank:Now you could argue, you could argue you shouldn't experiment on your employees, but, but my argument was we have to test things to try and improve. It's just a scientific method. Now, we didn't say to the employees they were part of an experiment,'cause that has hawthorn effects. we just. And we didn't even say to the managers in the local plants we were doing that. We just offered them this additional training. We asked them to do it by a certain date and then stood back and watched. We didn't want to, um, in any way influence the outcome of, of what was happening. Um, but that, that process of what works, identify this is moving the dial. Right? We consolidate that. If it's not, if something's not working to dial hypothesis, then what do we know? And not just psychology, but also from other areas. What do we know about from, for example, elite sports? What do we know from medicine? What do we know from, um, acting? What do we know from, social anthropology? That might work here. And just being open to doing that But, but that, but, but that's the approach. The approach is, first of all, Pareto. Concept of a Pareto break or if you like, argument dilution. So if we do this additional intervention, will it actually, add value or because it's taking time away from, higher up on the Pareto interventions, is it dilutive?
James:what did you learn then, Frank? That's what really interest me. So you looked at all these different things and then presumably you had stuff that worked, but what did you come to The conclusion not so much, didn't work, but didn't work as well, then
Frank:I think the key conceptual thing is first of all to see leadership as a system. So to apply systems thinking to leadership, not to see it as, um, a collection of specialist interventions. Taught by subject matter experts narrowly academically in their own field, but to see it as a interactive system, and therefore when you look at leadership as a system. You are, you're much more conscious of all the things that relate to each other. You're much more aware of unintended consequences. You're much more aware, uh, aware of the way you can leverage one skill against another.
James:So you developed a model then to put all of this together called the
Frank:Called the Cathedral model. So the con, the concept of the model is that, above the Pareto break, so the stuff that makes turns to dials, how, how can we teach that to leaders as a system, as an interactive system, and. Emphasize that other stuff is, is probably in isolation, possibly valuable, but when you allow the other stuff to dilute the impact of your Pareto, you're actually making yourself accidentally less effective. so the, the discipline to stop doing things, and by the way, this was, um. This was career threatening, you know,'cause corporate was telling me to do stuff and, and I was saying, well, I can't, don't see any evidence that it's working, so why should I waste the time of my leaders? You know, I've, and I, and I've got a better way of doing it as well. So this was not good career wise, you know,'cause I'm obviously, I'm talking to my own bosses in the learning and
James:I have some sympathy for being in that position, Frank.
Frank:Yeah. So what I did was, and I'm not recommending this to any young person listening to this for their career, but what I did was I just agreed and then ignored them
James:Yeah.
Frank:then, and then showed them afterwards, and that, that there can be some dangers in that. Okay. So I'm not recommending it. so the idea was can we distill the things we know work So for example, within recognition. That's taught what works and what doesn't work and why, and,
James:Well, so let me, let me cut across Frank'cause let's get to the juicy bit'cause I'm dying to know. So what, what did you find that really you thought this is. Not helping. What are the things which given your systematic view you'd advise people to think very strongly about? Don't do these things.
Frank:Outcomes if you like. So for example, teaching coaching in isolation is actually dangerous what happens is people then deploy coaching in situations where they need to do constructive feedback, or sometimes they need to just intervene and stop the person doing what they're doing'cause it's dangerous.
James:Yeah.
Frank:So, so knowing how the, the actual skills in leadership, first of all, what are the most important ones above the Pareto break? But then is there is other sequence effects? Uh, do are things more effective when they're done before or after? So to give you an example, just a simple example, if someone's emotional and you deploy logic, what chance has your logic got? So you've got to, you've got to get the emotion to down, so you have to use specific techniques, acknowledgement, um, selective agreement reframing, just to name three, to, to, to create the curiosity and the openness for your logic to have a chance of affecting the other human being. The same thing you say after applying acknowledgement, selective agreement and reframing can be very, very effective. But if you say it before doing that, you are wasting your time and you're probably irritating the other person. So knowing about not just whole series of random tools and techniques, but understanding how to create in that case, how to create curiosity. So you are really mad at me and I say, you know something, James, if I was in a situation that you are in, I'd be pretty irritated also. You're not expecting me to say that. So immediately you are curious. Once you're curious, you are open now to what's coming next. Game of Thrones. You know, the la the last thing in the, in the first series of Game of Thrones, the big star that everyone knows about. He's probably watching it because of him, gets his head chopped off. What did that do to anticipation to the second series of Game of Thrones. And if you look at the viewer, it's the same thing. And that's learning from, from, if you like, people who are involved in the arts, people who know how to write plays, people who know how to write, who do films, people who know how to write music and poetry. We can learn from those guys.
James:what you're saying is as far as the cathedral model goes, there's a important sequence, but you're getting me off the topic, Frank. What I'm really interested is what you found that didn't work. So what else would you say? What else would you say
Frank:well, for example, let me give you an example. Many organizations train their employees in resilience. It's a tough market out there. It's a tough world we're in at the moment. Um, there's a lot of bad things going on and organizations in response to that are training their people to be more resilient. To me, that's useful, but it's a typical example of treating a symptom rather than a root cause. So a application of improvement science to leadership. So what's the root cause of people feeling stressed out, overworked, et cetera? It's something called, mostly, it's something called overcommitment. So in the cathedral model, that issue is not addressed by resilience training. It's addressed by going to the source of overcommitment. People self diagnosing where their overcommitment comes from. Sometimes it's from themselves. High performers often do it to themselves. Sometimes it's from their boss or colleagues or corporate or customers, whatever it is. But identifying all the causes of it and then addressing those causes using a systematic improvement process so in the cathedral model, there's nothing on resilience. You don't need all your employees to be resilient. Our duty of care is to create an environment where people can perform very highly without burning them out. We don't need to exploit our people to get high levels of performance. So that's a root cause analysis.
James:so if you think the solution is to put some fruit on some work tops, you are sadly mistaken, is really what we're saying. Yeah. All those types of initiatives, which are just addressing the symptom.
Frank:my specialism is, uh, engagement and en enablement of employees and the number of organizations who think, like you say, let's give them, um, to get people to come back into the office. Let's give them nice coffee. Let's have. Pool tables. Nothing wrong with that, but the key thing is, if I want to go to work, if I'm passionate about doing my work, if I know that I'm going to enjoy the exchanges with my colleagues, dealing with issues that I'm gonna learn from, I wanna get to work. I don't care about the coffee, obviously you have to pay properly. You, you have to decide where you wanna be in the market, but don't try and buy engagement with money. get into the weeds on this, find out what. What drives people, for example, all this stuff about generations, ZZ, however you pronounce it, and they're all being very political at work and all this, snowflakes and all that. No, no, no. They're just, they're simply, they want. A purpose. And the problem is the only people are offering it tend to be political activists, so that's why they get off on stuff. That's very unhelpful. if an organization genuinely, genuinely has higher purpose, engages enablers, workforce as top class management and is therefore contributing to the society in which it's. It's based. Kids can buy into that, that that's what they want. so rather than criticizing them for being activists, let's give them something that's nonpolitical and worthwhile that they can buy into.
James:So if we go into the cathedral model, and so people who are watching this on, YouTube or on video here is a, picture of the model for you to see, but let's, um, unfortunately not everybody's doing that. So just talk me through your systematic view, Frank. How
Frank:Okay. It's, it's in the form of a cathedral, because of a, a famous story about the, the two brick layers, which I, I won't retell, but many people know it. Uh, when asked what, what, What are they doing? And one gives a, a purpose answer and one gives a a different kind of answer. Yeah. But it's also, it's also because at the time, you've gotta go back now to the eighties, the quality movement often described things, uh, with columns as kind of house like we had the house equality, for example.
James:remember the house of quality very well.
Frank:so hard scientists who regarded a lot of the stuff coming out of l and d and the HR department as, in their words, soft shit. I needed to present something in a format that was, if you like, familiar. And they took other things in that format credibly. And I want'em to take leadership credibly as well. So that's why it's displayed, if you like, as a, foundation with columns, which are the leadership skills, it starts at the bottom. the foundation is what, provides the purpose and the values. that influence your application of these skills. So that's what, that's why you've got purpose in there where the employees have designed their own culture. We call that behavioral standards. Because it's local, it's in the, it's in the language of the local site. It's a differentiator locally. It's not an integration like a corporate set of values is an integration across lots of sites. But in the foundation, it's the local. The local culture as designed by the employees. All of the employees design this. It's not designed by hr, by management, it's designed by everybody.
James:So you start off with really being very clear about values and purpose and what is an acceptable way to behave. Because if you haven't got that in place, nobody will want to work there anyway.
Frank:And. Not just an acceptable way to behave, James, the, the behaviors that will drive what the organization is trying to achieve. So it's not soft stuff,
James:Yeah,
Frank:it, um,
James:could you gimme an example,
Frank:yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you a real example. in one particular site, It was a medical devices site, so obviously quality of products crucial because if you put medical devices into people's bodies, you can kill'em. Um, but the reaction on the site to quality issues was, people were marched where there was a problem, people were marched off the line. they had to prove they weren't guilty to get their job back. Um, and you can imagine how humiliating that felt. So when we were in the workshops with the employees, this issue was the top issue that came through to the eventual joint meeting, which decides what the company's change plan's gonna be between senior management and the employees. And then when we were doing the culture to drive a different approach to mistakes, there was no point in saying we have a no blame culture. I mean, how can you measure that? How can you test that? So the particular behavioral standard that was created was, and watch how it works. See if you can see how easy this is to measure in practice, if you're watching someone's behavior when something goes wrong. So it's not all the time, it's in these particular circumstances. When something goes wrong, we ask what happened. Why did it happen? How do we make sure that doesn't happen again and we don't ask who did it? Now, every supervisor, every manager, every person can observe a conversation going on. Test it when the mistakes happened, can test it against that standard. So the fact that the employees prioritized it as number one problem, the fact that the employees created it as their number one behavioral standard had a massive effect on quality on the site. Now, other organizations have made the mistake of liking that particular behavioral standard and trying to bring it in top down elsewhere, but when it's.
James:relevant to their context, so it really
Frank:It's, it's probably always relevant'cause it's a good problem solving approach, but it didn't have the emotional power of the employees saying, we, we said that we created that, that's ours. So that's the, that's the foundation. Now it go, then goes, it goes left to right. So the order matters'cause it's a system. So recognition is before, coaching is before constructive feedback, for example. But it starts on the left with setting expectations. So the, the sequence of the more, if you like, usual leadership skills is you have to set expectations first. So if you look at the Gallup study on, on their, 12 questions, which one most strongly correlates with high engagement, knowing exactly what I'm expected to do is. What came outta that big study. So you set expectations, but while you're doing that, you manage over commitment because a large part of overcommitment comes when people are set work to do, and that's where you can pair it away and make it much better at that stage. So it's, you set expectations and you manage your over commitment at the same time.
James:And can you gimme an example of that, Frank? Managing over commitment. How
Frank:For, for example, um, okay. Uh, the Elizabethan line in London, original design spec for the organization doing the tunnels. and the stations was very high spec paint because that line strategically, the government at the time, I think it was Johnson at the time, wanted anybody coming into the uk. So inward investors, tourists, to have every station. They stopped in to see something that would display the UK in a very good light. So the spec for those, for those stations is very high spec. so we took a practical example for over commitment So I just said to them, um, what's the paint spec for the tunnels? Compared to the stations, and they all looked at me and said, this, the paint spec is the same, very high quality paint. So I said, how hard wearing is that paint? And he said, no, it's not very, it's poor. It. Compared to the paint you'd normally use in tunnels, how often would you have to maintain it? Is it at least two, possibly three times more often. What's its price? What's it cost? Said, massively more expensive so, uh, when you go back to the customer and say, you can save'em a lot of money and reduce their maintenance costs, you know, and, and they did. And so, but the point about that was that was overcommitment in the sense of all the extra work that would've had to be done to maintain those tunnels because they were using a spec that was not appropriate.
James:and presumably it's dark in the tunnels. Nobody
Frank:Nobody's certainly gonna see it anyway. Yeah. so that's over commitment. Then you have to make sure that nobody in your organization feels taken for granted. There's a lot of people who Are taken for granted. High performance people adjusted their high performance and kind of expect more from them because of their previous record rather than appreciating that they're above the mid standard and they're doing great stuff. Uh, but there's also, um, hidden heroes, people who quietly stop things going wrong. So management don't even know what they've done. How many employer the month awards do they get? By the way, that's why I abolished. Recognition schemes and stuff like that. Unknown to corporate for many, many years, but put in something stronger and, and, and bottom up based. So you make sure people are, uh, not taken for granted. Then you coach, you use coaching not as a remedial tool. That's in the HR for HR disciplinary procedure coaching as a way of systematically developing every human being in the business. Coaching Not, not, not confined to executives to get executive coaching, but coaching for everyone delivered by lots of people who've been trained in coaching. A number of my clients, we've trained the entire workforce how to coach, not a minority, uh, skill for top people, A skill that every employee can use to improve them.
James:that's interesting'cause you, in reality, if you sit back and think about it, you want all your employees to get better. But what most organizations do. They look at the bottom bit and they slap'em about, they look at the top bit and they might give them some coaching, and the people in the middle just get ignored.
Frank:But also.
James:a huge opportunity.
Frank:Also the kind of position coaching is remedial. If you put coaching into your disciplinary procedure, you're saying to people, if you are a bad, you get coached. So it actually creates, a negative attitude towards coaching, you know? But anyway, so, so that coaching delegation column is, is crucial and, and it's interesting how it drives recognition, which I'm gonna talk about in a minute. Then things go, uh, things will go wrong. Constructive feedback deals with it. Quickly and assertively, but maintaining the relationship. And if all that fails, you get into escalation, which is things like the disciplinary procedure. Now what,
James:you don't get into that unless all the other stuff has
Frank:well, you can have severe conduct issues. So if I come into work and hammer someone over the head with a hammer, I'm not gonna go through recognition, coaching, constructive feedback before being suspended, you know? So in, in the absence of, severe conduct issues. Or repeat offenses, then you're always going to try and, approach the issue once you've diagnosed it properly in the appropriate part of the cathedral model. So the cathedral model gives you a diagnostic tool as well. You look at it and say, where is this problem? Where are we in this problem? If I haven't set the expectation properly in the first column, what right have I got you to give, give you constructive feedback for not meeting a standard you don't know about? So I have to set the standard before I can give, re give constructive feedback about, about failure to hit the standard.
James:But that makes sense to me, Frank, so I can see that that's all systematic as you put it. Um, the one thing that you haven't got in there that most organizations will go through is this sort of every six month round of appraisal and putting people in boxes and things like that. So does that work with this or where's
Frank:You don't need it. I mean, the key issue about appraisal is, is what's it for? And just to give you an idea, a few years ago when I studied it, when I was back in corporate life, so that's 25 years ago, I got the suppliers to do market research for me, on the expenditure, on appraisal on the one hand, and recognition, coaching and constructive feedback, the three core central parts of the cathedral model combined. In one year in the uk, um, training spend across the uk, um, what do you think the ratio was?
James:Oh, I would imagine the vast, vast majority of time was spent on appraisal. On Very little was
Frank:four to one. So we spent four times more on appraisal than the combined total that we were spending on recognition, coaching, and constructive feedback. Now, if you see a book.
James:And actually, sorry to pile in then Fran, but appraisals are pretty much as an after an event, is that after the effect?
Frank:Well, it can be done well, I mean, the, the, it can be done well, and I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying it has no value, but it's comparative value is what happens. so if, if nobody's been taken for granted, you're given high. High quality, sincere recognition all the time in, in, when appropriate, you're coaching lots and lots of coaching is going on and anything goes off track. You deal with it with constructive feedback, the appraisal becomes very simple. You just look back on all these other conversations and you have a little debate about it, and then you set your objectives for the year to come. So that's useful, but the, it's, the foundations have to be in place to make it useful. And therefore it doesn't hit the, it doesn't hit the Pareto, so my strong steer is make sure your recognition, coaching constructive feedback, you're setting expectations, you're managing over, commitment is humming, and your appraisal will be fine. You'll find you probably don't need as much paperwork. You won't need as much time. It'll be a much simpler situation and people will engage with the process better anyway. So you may not abolish it, but you de-emphasize it compared to the building blocks if you like. It's like I, work in elite sport, and stuff like that. So if you get your football players passing the ball, well, um, moving well, running well, jumping well. You know, heading the ball. Well, supporting each other. Well, yeah, you do a review of the game afterwards, but if you get all those things right, you've got a good chance of doing well in the game.
James:Yes.
Frank:If you just look at the results, you know, don't look at the scorecard, look at what's going on, on the pitch. Now, accountability coaching didn't exist. So it was what, like managing over commitment had to invent it. Simplified for this audience. If a Deming audience accountability coaching is similar to the Check Act, part of Plan do, check Act, so you're looking at what did, what did you expect to happen with a standard? It could be a standard leadership, it could be a financial standard, it could be call any standard what? What would you expect to happen with that standard in place? What did happen and then you react to what the, any difference between what was expected to happen and what did happen by bringing it back to the standard. But you also react when there's no difference. The person's done a really good job. Your reaction there is recognition. So you, you derive both the quantity and the quality of recognition from those conversations and you therefore maintain all your standards, not just your leadership standards, all the standards in the organization through accountability coaching.
James:But there's the key point then is it is the quality and quantity line.
Frank:And that's why you need training. And so the cathedral model process is six workshops over nine months. Um, where people have a, okay, it's a tough day. People say their brain hurts at the end, but they do a tough day in the workshop, but then they go and do it for six weeks, then they get tested on how well they've done, and then they go to the next section. And every six weeks we've, we found over time again with experimentation was the sweet spot between memory loss problems and giving busy people the chance in their busy lives to be able to apply what they've just learned. So six one day workshops over nine months was what we found was the best model.
James:Well, let's just expand on that a wee bit, Frank for me then. So how do you get people to update this model? So six workshops, so how does that
Frank:Well, first of all, you don't say there's gonna be an executive summary stuff, and then there's gonna be middle management, senior management, middle management, and then supervisors. Don't do that. You can't, you can't model what you want your people to do unless you are doing it yourself, and you can't do it unless you understand the technical detail of how to give recognition properly. To get the right results, the technical detail of how to coach properly and not turn it into psychoanalysis. So you can't do that unless you do the same training as everyone else. So the leadership team typically at site level will do phase one. Six weeks later, their managers, all different levels will do the same phase one, and they will be asked at the end of their phase one, have they noticed any difference in the behavior of their senior leaders. They will give feedback upwards. So the accountability is not just downwards, the accountability is upwards. And that first accountability session I have with the senior leaders who do phase two the next day, and I give them the feedback. And some of that feedback can be, guys, I'm not seeing enough results here. You know it, it's not about signing a check and walking away. If you are not leading this by example, we're wasting money here. I'm happy to walk away from it. You know, I have walked away from it. So, but you've gotta take it seriously. You have to lead by example, and you have to make a difference to show that you are sincere about what you're doing. It's not, it's not for them. It's for you. And, I have sometimes some difficult conversations there with people say, oh well, busy executives, they haven't got time to do this, so, well, if you haven't got time to do this, it's not gonna work anyway. So I'm not prepared to do it unless you, if, unless you invest in it by making the changes in your own behavior that you're asking people below you in the organization to do, it's not gonna work and I won't do it.
James:you've written a book, Frank called Rapid Mass Engagement and
Frank:right. Yeah. So, so
James:how do you persuade a senior business manager that this stuff works? And they're getting well bang for their book.
Frank:Well, partly there's two reasons for writing the book. One was to give, to leave behind, if you like, by way of legacy. A guide to how all this works with the, with the, the, demonstrated case studies from, uh, organizations all over the world in different sectors that was I was offered the first book contract in the year 2000. I wouldn't do it because I didn't believe from a scientific point of view, the sample size was big enough. There wasn't enough sectors. There weren't enough parts of the world tested, so the book was published in 2023. By that stage, over those 23 years. The sample size is much bigger. The actual experiments, if you like, go on longer and we're covering, for example, more than 30 states in the United States, parts of Asia, Africa, et cetera. So, so the evidence base is out there. Mostly leaders come to it by going to sites where they've seen it. Mostly it comes through word of mouth.
James:So people hear about the cathedral model and they understand that it works and then they want to try it out. but this is part of the rapid mass engagement program. And that really, or can be, and that really is where employees get involved and start to. Modify their organization and deliver the financial improvements that most senior leaders want. Which of course is why you go behind into a lot of this leaders leadership and development for the first place.
Frank:Well, the two, the two things kind of happened in parallel, but um, I was frustrated with leadership development and offer as a customer for many years. so the leadership stuff was being developed and then the engagement material was also developed as a method of rapidly transforming the culture and performance of organization, transforming or. keeping a, a site, for example, ahead of all the other sites. So some of my clients were already the best site globally, but they weren't complacent. They wanted to stay ahead and get further ahead. So that's where rapid mass engagement comes in.
James:And so if we want to learn about rapid mass engagement, Frank, what's the best way?
Frank:Um, get the book or look at my website or, or, or, or just put my name in and you'll get lots of, lots of stuff on it. Or maybe I could come back and do another podcast if you're
James:try and twist your arm, Frank, and maybe we'll do
Frank:yeah. I don't need much twisting. I like talking to you, James,
James:Super. Thank you very much for talking to us, Frank. I do appreciate it.
