Andy Swann

157: Andy Swann I got no satisfaction from my job

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who is going to give us the opportunity to draw some parallels between the employee experience and the customer experience and making change happen. 

Jim Rembach:   Andy Swann was raised in the UK as one of five children. Despite ambitions to become a rock star he found himself studying populations at the London School of Economics where he became a music editor of the student newspaper. It was this combination of interests and a lack of career direction that set him on the path to where he is now. A dad who spent 30 years in a career he didn’t particularly enjoy and a mom who started a lifestyle business from home that grew into a trusted local recruiting service inspired Andy’s entrepreneurial mindset and a fascination with the relationship between people and work. This curiosity grew as Andy gained work experience developing into a frustration with unnecessary bureaucracy and the idea that disconnect between people and organization was costing everyone dearly. 

This eventually manifested itself in the work project, a year-long experiment on workplaces with Andy as a guinea pig which took him from dairy farms to Downtown Abbey and into very famous 

Companies. From there his work diversified by designed to follow personal passions and maintain the adventure. Today Andy finds himself as the founder of Simple Better Human. A leading boutique agency creating fresh perspectives for global brands and complex organizations. He is a passionate, experimenter and investigator on the connection between people, work and organizations. As author of The Human Workplace Andy has become a leading voice and the drive towards people-first organizations and he speaks around the world on the benefits of taking a human approach to organizational development.  Through his role as change maker with BDG architecture + design, Andy creates people-focused transition programs for behavioral and habit change. He also consults and advises on strategies, techniques and actions for creating amazing human workplaces. 

Andy splits his time between Atlanta, Georgia and the UK working globally and enjoying every opportunity for adventure and exploration. People often ask him what he does with any free time he gets. His response is simple, everything I do is my choice it’s all free time it’s our responsibility to make the best of it. Andy Swann, are you ready to help us get over the hump? 

Andy Swann:   Hi Jim, I’m ready to go.

Jim Rembach:   I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Andy Swann:   My current passion is the relationship between people and work and the organizations they work for what makes people kind of passionate about. The mission of an organization, what makes a customer of an organization, why do you go to work for the company you work for, why do you do what you do every day? I really loved in your introduction. You just mentioned your legion I think for me that’s a really big thing—your followers. What are these people getting behind the mission and the message that you have? And this is exactly what fascinates me and how that same message comes across in organizations, companies, workplaces, all of these things.

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that.  You were talking and me getting an opportunity to look through the book there’s several things that actually stood out to me and I even had the opportunity to listen to you speak and you talked about how organizations and the technologies and things like that change but people don’t. However, in order for us to be innovative and continue to be part of an organization that does thrive we have to be able to pivot. And one of the things you talk about in the book is fluid iteration, give us a little bit more insight into that. 

Andy Swann:   Where do you start? People is where you start. I have a mantra that says, when people thrive organizations thrive too because actually who’s better to tell your organization how to pivot and best serve the customers than the customers themselves. Who’s best to tell you how they can work best than your employees themselves and all of the stuff the future and innovation and all creativity and all of these buzzwords of the modern business world they’re all based around people because people have ideas where innovation comes from so the future is based around people. And fluid iteration is literally the idea that is constantly plugging into your people constantly gaining insight whether it’s people inside your businesses, employees, whether it’s people outside your business as customers or your wider community or your legion all of these people can be fluid inside and outside your organization and they can contribute to ideas and you can take those ideas all times. You can constantly be changing and moving forward and that what iteration is you don’t have to pull the rag out and completely change everything, it’s that pivot, it’s a small change a little tweak it’s an iteration that you go from what we are currently to what the same thing looks like tomorrow, you don’t have to completely change direction and go somewhere completely different.

Jim Rembach:   I also love in the book—because when you start talking about the ability to really engage and cause people to want to be part of, be part of that community be part of the customer identified group—you talked about the structures associated with it. So when you start talking about the fluidity aspects of iteration is that you can’t have a whole lot of parameters and walls. You talk about ten key ideas on structure and to me that really stood out, if you could just kind of explain that a little bit.

Andy Swann:   I think for me structure is a big word. You’re hearing a lot of management theory and business  theory they talk about structure and they talk about removing structure and self-management and how the management frameworks look and how leadership works and how your organization of diagram looks and I think for me you can have any structure and you can work within that. The minimal structure you need to enable your organization to succeed, and what success looks like is the right people in the right places doing the right things whether that’s customers or employees, you’re building a community I think you just need to find the structure that’s right for your organization. So, for me a big word in that is freedom within parameters. You can remove as many parameters as possible to enable people to do their best work in the best way but there will always be some parameters, don’t kill anyone, don’t break the law, whatever it might be. For example, often when we talk about organizations or workplaces we think about office jobs. An office jobs, yes you can do from home, a lot of them you can do from a coffee shop, but if you’re a manufacturing company and you have to run a manufacturing machine between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. you can’t say to your manufacturing team the people running that machine, come in at midnight if you like because that’s when you work your best, actually that machine has to run so that’s the parameter for that business. But the real thing about structure is you look at what is the minimum structure you need? What do you need to achieve as a business? How do you need to do it? How do you need people to behave? And what’s the absolute minimum rules or parameters you can put around that while giving people the freedom to act and do their best work. The less structure you have the more things can happen like information can flow and when information can flow between two people or two points in your company that’s where new perspectives and new ideas come from that’s how you can understand the insight on how to serve your customers better how to give your employees a better experience of work to enable them to do their best job. It’s just all about building a community and enabling it to thrive.

Jim Rembach:   As you were talking I start thinking about something and I’ve always said for the longest time is how the word policy is just such a nasty thing it’s nasty from a customer experience perspective it’s nasty from an employee perspective. And when you start talking about fluid iteration if you’re overladen with policy it’s not going to happen.

Andy Swann:   Completely. There’s a lot of things in the book that talks about policy, we’re going into it in detail, but my view is if you can’t tweak a policy on the old-fashioned 140 character tweaks that was—if you can’t tweak a policy then it’s too complicated. Actually, everything should be minimal it should be common sense as far as possible and just get out of the way and enable people to be their best in pursuit of organizational goals.

Jim Rembach:   That’s so true. My wife and I when we first got married we lived in Memphis for many years so it definitely stood out to me when I looked and I and I read about the five tips to introduce Elvis into your organization, how do we get him in? 

Andy Swann:   I can’t take credit for introducing Elvis into your business idea. It’s from a guy called Chris Paris Brown he runs a company called Upping your Elvis and I was lucky enough to interview him for The Human Workplace book. He’s a friend of mine and he does some great work with some really big companies. Actually, the whole idea is around—if you bring that bit of rock and roll and a bit of sparkle into your work and your leadership and the way your organization operates then it’s going to be more successful because we succeed when we stand out when we do our own thing when we’re individual and when we actually pursue our own goals rather than trying to copy everyone else. We need to be excited by our work because when we’re excited by work or we’re excited by the products we’re consuming or the places we go that’s what we infuse about them that’s when we spread the word that’s when we do our best that’s when we contribute our best. It’s a really simple idea but it’s just about exciting people and bringing that a little bit of rock and roll sparkle into everything you. 

Jim Rembach:   As you started going through and I was looking at the book a lot of these things can be easy for a brand new organization in other words you kind of just set things in motion and in place from the beginning but as an organization starts to age and you have, talking about iteration you have the iterations of different leaders and leadership and different ways that they go about doing business and you start getting all of this heaviness about the organization and losing a lot of that fluid iteration we’re talking about having to change. We have to change our behavior and change what we’ve been doing in order to open things up so that we can take advantage of the opportunities that lay in front of us. I’ve seen a lot of different philosophies associated with change, the top down the bottom up the inside out the outside in, it goes all over and over but you presented something to me that I had not seen before which is free range change. First of all my mind want to chicken but that’s not what you’re talking about, what are you talking about?

Andy Swann:   Okay, absolutely. I think it would have been really easy for me to write a book from a start-up perspective with all of these ideas and just go, yeah when you’re three people stick your hoodies on you can do this stuff and it’s great, but I think what I really wanted to do with this book was understand how this stuff can come through in larger, more complicated, older organizations but actually who’s out there already doing it. We found some great examples and a big part of the work that I do with organizations is helping them change for the future helping them be simpler, better, more human and how they bring those behaviors and habits into their work and their workplaces. Actually, this idea of free-range change is that it can come from anywhere in your organization. It shouldn’t be a change process that says, we’re here we’re going to hear that’s their end to end we’re going to do it I’m putting the change in a box. Actually what you really need to understand is who are these people? How are they behaving? How do they want to behave? How does the organization need them to behave? Are they the right people? Who within that group is able to be part of that change? How do we leverage their support in adopting the changes we need to bring in? It’s just kind of unleashing the change and all the different aspects of it from this kind of box of process. That goes back to what you’re saying about policy, you don’t need to put things in a box we can understand the big overview but also understand that change is cyclical. Today’s change isn’t an end to end thing it’s part of tomorrow’s organization and tomorrow’s organization will keep moving forward as well  because there’s almost a world spinning things keep evolving. The minute we stop still or we think that a change is finished or anything we’re doing is complete that’s when we get left behind in the business world so we need to be constantly moving and that was just the idea behind free range change.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so when I start thinking about this whole change process, and I get what you’re saying from the free range perspective and essentially finding your champions, because we do know—just look at the empirical evidence associated with change and activators and all that. Really the folks who are the champions of change that can actually do something more than just say something about it is it’s a really small percentage of folks, we’re talking two three percent that actually can be the ones who can take it forward and leave the change process and they are scattered throughout your organization. But we have to identify them, how could we identify those folks faster?

Andy Swann:   Identifying them is absolutely key. There will be people in your organization and it’s really wrong to assume they’re going to be the leadership. Yes the leadership might say, we’ve got some insight we need to change but broadcasting that from the top down isn’t going to drive adoption. You need to think of any change, I think of it like the day an iPhone comes out. Who’s the person waiting outside the Apple store overnight, wait to high-five the employees when they open the door and be the first in their walk out celebrating they’ve got that brand new product so they’re your ultimate change champions they’re the first people you need to find. Actually, putting the word out there is what’s happening and if you communicate within the organization and see who comes forward and says, this is an amazing idea I can’t wait for this, they’re your number one champions. 

Your second wave all the people who are going to the store on the first day to buy the phone and being very excited about and talking about it. He goes right through to those people who are the people and digging their heels and said, no I’m not going to buy this phone even though it might be a good thing I’m going to pretend I hate it. Actually the adoption curve just needs to go over the halfway point to get the weight of popular opinion in favor of change. And that’s what you doing you identify those evangelists those excited people who are going to bring everyone else with them because they’re infused about it and they could be anywhere within your organization. They could be at the top admittedly but actually they could be anywhere. They could be the intern who’s just come in on their first day and can’t believe what they’re seeing. But you really need to be plugged into your organization in terms of information and communication to allow them to rise to the top so you can really leverage their excitement.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, as you were saying that I started thinking about as a society oftentimes what we’ve done to those types of people and we’ve outcast them. They aren’t the ones who we typically run around and embrace because they’re always causing us to think about things differently and slowing down something that we’re trying to get done. You’re talking about embracing, it’s not just embracing as a person who may be responsible for identifying and finding those people but it’s also having the organization embrace those types of people. So, how do we help them be successful? 

Andy Swann:   Big word, big phrases positive activism. Traditionally organizations will do what they’ve always done because it’s worked before and they’ll continue to do it but actually that doesn’t work in the modern world. We live in an age of disruption and innovation you need to be challenging you need to be looking for what’s the big next idea? What’s that pivot that’s going to create the future for us? So you do have to have that different mindset to be able to plug in to that you need to enable those people who are going to challenge the organization for the right reasons, let’s be clear on that has to be for the right reasons. Disruption in a negative sense is bad but disruption in positive sense for the right reasons within the organization is a great thing. So, call those people positive activists they’re the people who will be excited about doing these things in favor of a great future so they’d be happy to put their job on the line, for it their reputation on the line because they believed so much in doing something positive and there are great examples of them in the book. I found people in big organizations who time and time again we’re modernizing their organization and getting in trouble with the board having their colleagues go against them and having people say, this will never work. But they believe so much that this was the future of the organization they went for it they risked their own jobs and their own reputation on it time and time again it pays off. 

Jim Rembach:   Well hopefully that’ll give many others encouragement. With all of this you have to have the resiliency you have to have the ability to overcome and adapt and go against the grain and it all requires some energy. And one of the things that we look at on the show are quotes to help give us that. Is there a quote or two that you like that you can share? 

Andy Swann:   Okay, so absolutely I think energy is a big one word here it goes back to what we said at the very start. All an organization needs to thrive is the right people in the right places doing the right things, if you’re the wrong person you’ll know it so take yourself away go somewhere else there’s nothing wrong with shaking hands and just saying, this isn’t my place, but actually you get energy from being somewhere where you believe in it. I’m trying to think of a sound bite as I talk here but energy—energy comes from being in the right place. You know when you’re in the right place and when you’re not. Having that shared mission and being able to achieve something together is a very exciting thing whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. That’s your absolute starting point so you get energy from being one of the right people in the right place doing the right things. And I still go back to what I said in the very start when people thrive organizations thrive too and thriving is about energy as well. 

Andy Swann:   Well and a lot of this—going back to what kind of started on is talking about fluid iteration and in order for us to reiterate in order for us to pit it and do all that means we’ve had means we’ve had to get over. Is there a time where you’ve had to get over the hump that you can share?

Andy Swann:   Completely. Back in September 2014 I had been working in an organization I didn’t particularly like. I was responsible for a lot of things. I’ve got no satisfaction from my for my job and it really badly impacted my home life and my mental health and my physical health and all of these feelings and negativity. I took it upon myself to really go and experiment with what work is, what my relationship where there was, what enable me to thrive. Over time I discovered an ability to design my own career and do the work that I really wanted to do and that energize me and as I put that together I kind of realized this integration between life and work rather than these this two separations and that’s the energy that I now take forward by bringing to organizations and bring to individuals as well. So, it’s my own journey has actually enabled me to share a lot of insight into the work that I do.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so back then I’m starting thinking I’m seeing you in this organization I’m thinking that like with many of us we carry the burden and just think about sinking lower and lower by the weight of that burden and at some point we cast it off. Do you remember when your cast off point was?

Andy Swann:   Absolutely remember. I just remember I was sitting at barbecue I was having a conversation with somebody and I watched him tell me that he’d been in his job for ten years. I congratulated him he told me, he hated it he hates his employer he hated the company he work for everything he did. And I said, why do you go there? And he said, I go there for the same reason everybody else goes to work and that’s to pay for the time I’m not at work. And I sat down I thought, what a shame and then I realized I’ve been doing exactly the same thing. And so I took it upon myself and I made a resolution right there and then to do something about it and I don’t regret it at all.

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that. And I can tell you what you just did right there is one of the reasons why I continue to spend the time and effort to do the Fast Leader show. Somewhere sometimes somebody is going to hear somebody else’s story and then self-reflect and say, oh, boy I got a pivot. Oh, boy I have to reiterate, oh boy that’s me. We all fall into that trap it’s just a natural progression of being a human being that’s what evolving is all about, so thank you for doing that. Okay so, I had the opportunity to chat off mic and you’re actually splitting time between here and the UK, we shared reasons why, but when you start thinking about the difference in societies and the work that you’re doing over there versus here, what is some of the subtle differences that you see?

Andy Swann:   Absolutely. I do a lot of work with global companies and I see a lot of mindsets a very corporate mindsets, I think they’re quite global and they’re easier you kind of break them apart and you try and bring some energy in. But if you’re talking kind of culturally the difference between the mindset—you might get over in the UK compared to the US, I think in the UK we’re very hesitant we’re kind of pessimists we wait for the worst to happen. If we have an idea we would say, oh, it might not work so we won’t try it which is why we then resolve not to do anything about it. I think in the U.S. you have the opposite, you have an idea and you just assume it’s going to work and it’s going to be amazing and everyone’s cheering it and going for it, and it’s great. In those two parts are opposites there’s a really happy medium somewhere in the middle where you should have the enthusiasm going into an idea but also just making sure you’re constantly sanity checking the whole way, is this going to work? Do I have the insight to tell me how it’s going at the moment? Well just kind of plunging in headfirst and hoping for the best and then surfacing to find out what’s gone wrong. So I think there’s a lovely happy medium which is why I’ve bounced between the two places. I see myself kind of mid-Atlantic somewhere adopting that happy medium. I really love the positivity of the U.S. everybody has that kind of belief that it can make something happen when they really want to. Yeah, that’s why I like being over here but equally every now and then you need that kind of dose of British-ness.

Jim Rembach:   It’s an important point because a lot of times even for me when I start thinking about even just the way that I think about things. It may not be a universal or a global perspective I think we do have some very important commonalities amongst us all. The need to be part of a community and a group and have a have a purpose but how we actually execute within that is where some of the differences occur. And we need to appreciate that diversity in order for us to move the entire collective forward instead of leaving some behind.

Andy Swann:   Absolutely. I think diversity is a really, really relevant point and we touch upon it in the Human Workplace as well. I think particularly where you need perspectives to have ideas and creativity the biggest most important thing any organization can do is to be completely inclusive and as diverse as possible because that’s where you get the biggest contribution and the greatest range of opportunity and perspectives from, so I couldn’t agree more.

Jim Rembach:   Okay, so now you got the book, you’re doing some consulting you’re sure you’re splitting your time between here and the UK, you got a lot of things going on but if you look at one thing that was a goal, what would it?

Andy Swann:   One thing is a goal—that’s a great thing. This year one of the things I would really like to do is—I have an idea, in the U.S. one of my favorite things is sweet tea. It’s something we don’t have in the UK, we’re a nation of tea drinkers we drink hot tea you drink amazing sweet tea, it’s cold and it’s the most amazing thing I’ve discovered over here. So my mission for this year, and it’s completely unrelated to my standard job and I love the idea of passion projects and side projects that enable us to do these alternative things, one of my goals for this year is to bring sweet tea to the UK.

Jim Rembach:   And the Fast Leader Legion, and even the southern boy here, wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor. 

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Jim Rembach:     Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Andy, the Hump Day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Andy Swann, are you ready to hoedown?

Andy Swann:   Let’s do this 

Jim Rembach:   Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Andy Swann:   Insights, lack of self-confidence, lack of self-belief.

Jim Rembach:   What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Andy Swann:   Listen, listen and listen.

Jim Rembach:   What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Andy Swann:   Informality under your tie under your top button and just be part of things stand back and see what happens.

Jim Rembach:   What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Andy Swann:   Communication. The ability to listen and to speak back.

Jim Rembach:   What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, and it could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to The Human Workplace-People Centered Organizational Development, on your show notes page as well.

Andy Swann:   Thank you. I love The Purple Cow.

Jim Rembach:     Okay Fast Leader legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Andy Swann. Okay, Andy, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you. But you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skill or a piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Andy Swann:   It took me a lot of years of trying to compromise before I realized that just being myself was my biggest asset. So I would I would say don’t compromise. Don’t try to be someone else at work be yourself because it’s the best thing you can ever do.

Jim Rembach:   Andy it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you? 

Andy Swann:   Likewise, thank you for having me. My website is andyswann.com, I’m on Twitter and @andyswann. I’m on Linkedin and all the usual places and please stop by on my website. Always get in touch I’m always happy to have a conversation.

Jim Rembach:   Andy Swann, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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