I went back into work this week. Scheduled to meet a Shell senior executive, first, I found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with all my other colleagues in our canteen turned conference room, listening to the news that the decision has been made to close down our HQ campus and move all activity to London by the end of 2016. And that the voluntary redundancy process starts in May with the compulsory process to follow thereafter. None of this comes as a surprise to any of us in the room. Like other companies, operating in low dollar priced oil, Shell need to trim their costs. In addition, they also have the additional pressure of recouping some of the £45bn they have spent acquiring BG Group. And more broadly, the energy industry is undergoing another seismic shift, an urgent need for a lower and more productive cost base and more innovative thinking to secure cleaner and more easily replicable energy sources for all. Our Townhall meeting explained context and rationale, the leaders were open, engaged and responsive. The respect and care they demonstrated goes a long way to softening such difficult news. I feel proud to have belonged, to still belong. And my loyalty is shifting, away from the old and embracing the new.
But loyalty can often be misplaced. In some cases it can be determined by a bullying, mercurial, hierarchical leadership style which demands respect, creates fear and reduces individuals to shards of themselves often without them realising. 
Sometimes loyalty is not earned – “My parents always voted this way”. “My friends always go to this venue”. “We always go to the supermarket closest to home” etc. These are cases where loyalty is the default position, leading to complacency and sometimes malpractice.
So for me it’s interesting to think about loyalty in the context of the news I have heard and seen this week. The tragedy of Hillsborough, where 96 innocent Liverpool football fans were crushed to death due to inexperience, incompetence and ineffectual decision-making is a perfect example. This is the harrowing true story of grieving families being subjected to psychological bullying, harassment and terror for 27 years. And in this time, many police officers, 116 at least, if the doctored police reports are anything to go by, maintain a steadfast loyalty and silence to their employer. This is a situation where rank and file are firmly loyal to each other all the way up the organisation and where leaders remain unchallenged and firmly loyal to the rank and file. 
Demonstrated by the extent that leaders will blindly and categorically refute wrong doing within their command structure and will actively seek to apportion blame elsewhere. A situation where right and wrong and the personal values which bind the 23 pages of police code and ethics become grey and questionable.
Clear and simple values and ethics form a large part of creating a framework to guide leaders and teams. In the past when launching new organisation values, we designed the content to enable our senior leadership team to connect with what these values meant for them. This was done by writing several mainly real life conundrums and ethical dilemmas that our leaders face where there is no right and wrong, where the answer in itself is grey, where only the values of leaders will allow them to arrive at their best solution. Facilitating this session allowed me to see and hear the rich diversity of experience, belief and thought in the organisation and it also demonstrated that rarely is there right and wrong.
Of course one man’s truth is another man’s fiction and it is our perspective, our inherent cultural beliefs, myths, stories and legends, our experiences, peer group and leaders which inform our view and command our loyalty. To balance our bias, we set rules (laws) to help govern our decisions and ensure society abides by these. We charge our police force, to uphold, guard, protect and enforce these laws. And we hold them and ourselves to account when these are broken.
In terms of policing perhaps Hillsborough will be the final snapping of the rotten tree branch, shaming us all into demanding a different, more ethically moral and transparent Police Force. It’s surely effective justice that when situations occur like Hillsborough, the Guildford Four, Maguire Seven and more recently Plebgate, that those in charge are held to account. But we need to look further and deeper into how this institution ingrains loyalty amongst its rank and file. 
I don’t believe that all of these police officers blindly follow their leaders when untrue stories are being concocted and shared. I don’t believe that they all lack integrity and commitment. So what happens to force their silence, to bind them to their senior officers? How do you break the ingrained systemic behaviour and belief that if “I look out for you, you will look out for me”, no matter what it takes and the consequences it brings?
Prosecution of senior leadership is only right and proper and it will bring some kind of healing to the bereaved families. But it’s not the solution. Cutting off the head of the serpent only means the serpent learns new ways to survive.
For society to regain its belief in the Police Force requires the collective Force to recognise it’s time for root and branch reform. And painful though this will be, it’s the only way that they will regain the loyalty of society.
And those in big business, who demand unswerving loyalty in return for interesting work, fat pay checks and big benefits, would do well to remember that building a company this way creates shallow foundations. Irrespective of performance, growth or employee commitment, an organisation lacking leadership moral fibre and a strong purpose and ethos is always ripe for change.
It’s two weeks before my operation. The weight and enormity of my cancer diagnosis is behind me. I’m focused on the practical. All I have to do, prepare for, organise lies ahead. There are lists in every notebook, on every large magnetic surface. I am a whirlwind of efficiency, able to project risks, variabilities, possibilities and solutions. More loquacious than I’ve been for a long time, I ask for and receive help, love, support, kindness. In amongst this maelstrom, I open an email. Would I like to participate in IC Fight Night? An industry event where four executives postulate on various topics and be red or green carded by the audience. Immediate feedback. Immediate discussion. Immediate interaction and debate. Four leading industry executives. One winner. It’s in April next year. Months away. I think about it for less than a minute before typing “I’d be delighted” and pressing send.
Despite the people outcome – a loss of about 200 roles as the activity moved to our partner in India, the business case and benefits could not be argued. These included improved service, greater opportunity to learn from and streamline the work and data and eventually create a more integrated way of using information. And save a lost of cost. But our country managers fought tooth and nail to stop this from happening. Our Operating Model (the way we are organised to do our work and make decisions) was structured so that these country managers were kings of their own domains with little or no interference from the centre. They controlled their operation from end to end including their people and their activities. The role of the Centre was to provide guidance, expertise and solutions which the country manager could choose to implement or ignore. This made any global change very tricky! There was little room for tell and do, this was all about influence and persuasion, treating each country manager individually, recognising some are influenced by others, some need to see the change in action first, others need to see the intricate details of the cost savings, yet others needed to speak to and know companies who have implemented similar changes. Our stakeholder engagement plan was large and complex. This was not change implemented by ‘sheep -dip’. At the heart of it all was the fact that the operating model had changed, the centre was asserting control over the kings in country.
But I have great empathy with these country managers. My first role in Africa was as ICL’s Business Transformation Director, tasked with implementing our shift from hardware to software and services. When the Regional Director resigned in protest about this change, I found myself with my old job and my new – Regional Director for ICL East Africa and Malawi – poacher and gamekeeper! Getting under the skin of the new role gave me the insight that what we had planned back in the comfort of HQ in UK, would ruin our business across Africa. This was a continent that had no stable power supply, that needed layer upon layer of infrastructure long before we could talk about IT services. 
Our best sellers – cash machines to rival NCR, retail machines for the growing consumer goods market, laying network cables for business growth – had no room in the new strategy.
Throughout the negotiation and the development of the prototype, every document was poured over, debated, re-drafted and discussed by our legal and corporate strategy teams in the UK . On the morning of contract signature a call came from the UK. On reflection, they did not want us to provide the technology or service it. We were not to sign. It was the beginning of the end for ICL in the region. And the most difficult conversation to have personally with the President. This outcome and the reality of who really was in control was one of my big lessons in business.
