Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself back in various rooms with lots of people. We seem to have gone from everything being on a screen to events, get togethers, training courses and general meetings all thrown back into the mix, starting now.
I’m not complaining, I love meeting up with people in conversations and it has made me realise that I much prefer being in the same room. The sudden increase in actual meet ups with people caused a bit of reflection from the last water leadership voices I heard talking about just that, ‘people’. I thought this was a great time to drop some thoughts in this round of Knowledge on Tap.
“One thing I think we often forget is engagement with our people” – Dave Hinton (South East Water)
This was a comment I resonated with when I heard Dave talk recently. I see lots of strategies, programmes and projects, not just in water, that focus heavily on processes and systems improvements, but give little or no thought to the biggest opportunity within any business, the people.
Improving the work is always going to be critical, but how you go about doing this is even more so in my opinion. The best way to help improve the work is by engaging people, helping them connect, generate new thinking and build new skills. It’s easy to say we are going to be more people centric but it is what we do and not what just what we say that translates. To ‘not forget engagement with our people’ requires a certain type of leadership that supports the idea of connection. I heard Warren talking at length around this just after Dave.
“The emotional connection became more important” – Warren Buckley (Thames Water)
This is the idea that covid has intensified the need for leadership to put more into supporting people and building connection. For me this comes down to one starting point and that’s the idea of building more trust by leading with more high trust behaviours. This requires constant self-analysis and the desire to improve as a leader.
This thinking draws me back to the sectors desire to improve trust with customers (currently measured at 68% of people) and the belief that to increase trust outwardly, with your service users you must have developed high trust environments internally for those that provide the experience for your Customers, otherwise all bets are off.
What behaviours are you currently engaged in, that foster greater levels of emotional connection with your people?
If it’s difficult to answer there could be an opportunity for improvement