The metaphors of HR, culture and talent with Dirk Rossey

Of the countless experts in leadership you’ll come across today, a few notable ones exude real-world knowledge of how to steer business because they’ve fought in the trenches. There are the likes of Laszlo Bock, Amy Edmondson and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

Fewer still transform that practical knowledge into their own creative interpretation of the world – with metaphors and syllogisms.

Among them is Dirk Rossey, an expert in organisational development recognised for his work with top employers such as JPMorgan, Dubai Holding and Inchcape Asia-Pacific.

Dirk has been quietly building the corpus of his work into an upcoming book after decades of building high-performing teams.

This prolific mind and founder of Be Real Consulting takes many of the old, dusty and taken-for-granted concepts of HR and talent leadership and turns them into metaphors for explaining how the world works and how people behave. He spoke to People Matters in this exclusive interview:

What fascinates you about organisational development and the related concept of change management?

What fascinates me the most are the tools and metaphors. Before that, I’ll explain what organisational development means to me.

There is a narrow definition of OD that means to help HR organise and manage tools, such as engagement surveys and capability models, and bring them into the organisation. Whilst that’s very good and necessary, I believe OD is much more about the organisational support mechanism that brings success to the business.

I'll give you some examples of tools and metaphors. I always say I have a Mary Poppins bag from which I can pull tools and techniques that have grown over the years.

Organisational alignment. One of the tools I used most is organisational alignment, which is literally the concept of working with 70 to 80 companies and finding out where the arrow pointed: the organisational vision, mission and goals.

And then how, as you can imagine that, the departments, divisions and individuals, as well as stakeholders outside the organisation, are aligned with the direction of the arrow. Organisational alignment used surveys, tools and techniques to help organisations.

Square wheels. Another tool that I feel works well is something called ‘square wheels,’ which was a team building tool where you would put up a picture of a car that was being pulled by the leader and pushed by the people in the department, but it had square wheels.

So then, you would say, “OK, people, what’s wrong with this picture? And how well does this reflect your department or your company?”

They will say: “Oh, yeah, we know the square wheels we have.” What doesn’t work. You would say now, “What are the round wheels we can put in there?” So these are two quick tools.

Experiential learning and ‘The Great Wall’. A third one is to use what I call experiential learning and ‘The Great Wall’ program, which brought in 17 managers from Hong Kong and 17 managers from mainland China.

We had some sort of monastery that we had found very close to the actual Great Wall, and you woke up and you looked at the Wall. We did exercises using the Great Wall as a metaphor.

By making education very pragmatically experiential, all managers could see each other’s strengths and weaknesses in a much more realistic way rather than sitting in a classroom. That worked very well.

The Passport. I also introduced a customer service concept called, The Passport, where we gave everybody a passport, whether they were in the front office or back office, and literally made them do a set of reviews of their processes. We also then gave lectures and insights and, every time they participated, they got a stamp

Organisational plasticity. At Arowana, I created a concept called organisational plasticity, which is a change management process using the metaphor of neuroplasticity in an organisation. Here, we see which aspects of neuroplasticity help [to understand how] an organisation can change in an organic way.

How should leaders pull the right levers of people management and leadership?

Interaction with the CEO and senior leadership is very important. There has to be alignment, and if there is alignment in what you believe, if the leader of the organisation has a vision, and if you put your energy behind that, magic happens.

If there's no congruence between the people and the leaders, it's just going to go all wrong.

It’s going to go all toxic. I’ve seen organisations where this toxicity overtakes efficiency and then people just play games. But if you go back to how it works, then you have a good organisation.

I worked for 12 years with Kevin Chin of the global investment firm Arowana. The company is very pragmatic, very engaged in the development of the companies it has in its portfolio. And whilst keeping a very small head office structure, we had tools around creating the right HR structure.

Kevin is very involved as a leader in creating a culture of learning. One of the really brilliant things that I think Kevin has always had is to disconnect HR and Learning. So he always says Learning will report directly to the front office, to him as a leader.

There's a debate on the dichotomy between culture fit and culture add. What’s your take on that?

Culture fit is really looking for people who – through interview techniques, testing, and a bit of gut feeling – will fit your culture. Culture fit is good when the culture and company work well, when all is going in the right direction.

If the culture isn’t going in the right direction, then you need to do a culture add.

That means, putting in people that you believe have a culture that is distinctly different from what’s going on now inside the company, and will help the company push into the right direction.

Once, I was asked to run a media business in Singapore for 18 months. It was a company where the leader had left and the culture wasn’t what we wanted it to be. It was really a sales-driven culture, which wasn’t too bad. But it wasn't producing the right results in terms of innovation. They kept doing the same thing over and over again, organising seminars and conferences.

When I came in, we used the tool that you may know very well – the Rockefeller habit – which is now called Scaling Up.

Taking over as the leader, I had carte blanche, as we say, and I got free rein to implement changes, and they were all around how to keep what’s working and aggressively change what’s not working.

For that, we had to then bring in people, a lot of division heads, and add them in to bring that innovative mindset into the organisation. All the other people were just churning the wheels and churning out the programmes. The change resulted in a very good sale process for us. The company was sold 18 months later to an American Consortium.

There, we had to change the leaders of the departments and we recruited for innovative thought and the ability to bring technology on board. That was an example of a culture add.

Finding culture fit is not easy, but it’s easier.