In his autobiography, Virgin's founder reveals a barometer capable of instantly measuring the state of relationships among employees in any company. According to him, it is how these employees use the words “we” and “they.”
Richard Branson gives a simple example: you ask a salesperson about a product, and he says, “Sorry, they decided to stop making that item.” Or you are at an airport check-in counter, and an airline employee says, “Sorry, they just canceled that flight.”
“They,” that mysterious, anonymous entity, is held responsible for countless problems. Bad news tends to be delivered in the third-person plural, while good news is usually communicated in the first-person singular.
Therefore, if the requested item is in stock, the salesperson will most likely respond, “Yes, I have it.” When a flight is on time, the employee will say, “I would like to announce the correct departure time for flight 123.”
Business managers and leaders should be wary of this trend. A company whose employees overuse the word ‘they’ is a company with a problem. If employees do not connect themselves with the company by saying “we,” it signals that people throughout the chain of command are not communicating. If so, you will always find secondary problems across the company, affecting everything from development to customer service.
Employees are a company’s greatest asset, especially in service businesses, where your people are your product. When a company fails to grasp this simple business principle, the result is always an ‘us versus them’ divide between frontline staff and management.
Listen to complaints from the front line, such as “They [management] are a bunch of idiots who never ask us about anything,” or “If they had ever asked, we could have told them that the new square block they introduced doesn’t fit the round hole we work in!”
Meanwhile, from management, you may hear: “They [the employees] seem to understand nothing. Don't they know square blocks are what customers want these days?”
Just as two wrongs never make a right, conflicting versions of ‘they’ never make a ‘we.’
How Do You Resolve Conflict?
According to billionaire Branson, solving this underlying problem is not too difficult. If employees feel they are on the outside looking in—so distant that they refer to their company as “them”—whose fault is that? Managers and executives may be making no effort to ensure employees feel like valued insiders.
For example, try asking employees where they learn about new products and other important company news. If the answer is the press or a neighbor, they are clearly stuck in the “they say” quagmire.
Repairing an “us and them” environment is a cultural challenge that always requires greater employee involvement and improved internal communication, from the director's office all the way to the shop floor. In Richard Branson's experience, middle management is a useful place to look for the cause of a problem.
Feedback traveling up and down the chain often hits a wall at middle managers who fall victim to the ‘knowledge is power’ syndrome. Identifying these blockages and obstructed arteries within a business will yield tremendous results.
For example, whenever a new cabin is being planned for a Virgin aircraft, he and the group's leadership always involve the marketing, design, and management teams from the outset. Representatives of the product-delivery team, also known as the cabin crew, work alongside them, because ultimately they are responsible for the new working environment's success or failure.
Without such input, you risk having the cabin crew step into their new billion-dollar cabin for the first time and say, “Hmm. Beautiful, but where is the waste compactor?”
Richard Branson also believes that involving all relevant employee groups in development not only helps design better products but also adds an enormously important factor, it is the pride of contributing: “We developed this idea as a team.” Everyone wins, including customers and shareholders.
This “us and them” problem is widespread in business operations, and Virgin is no exception. When someone at Virgin tells him, “Sorry, Mr. Branson, but they no longer provide that service,” the billionaire's usual response, with a smile, is: “They? Oh, sorry, I thought you worked here.” That attitude may be a little stern, but it certainly makes the point clear!
He also noted that this problem is worsened by our reliance on digital communication technologies, without singling anyone out. One of the greatest challenges for today's leaders is getting people to truly talk to one another. Face-to-face meetings and the old-fashioned use of collective intelligence are essential to the success of any growing business.
Emailing a PowerPoint attachment to a hundred people may work in some situations, but most of the time nothing beats gathering everyone contributing to a project, collecting their ideas, and acting on them.
So, instead of emailing the production team, why not go over and talk to them right now?
Collected.
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