Kevin Vaughan-Smith, EY Leadership Development Director, presentation to TLC

Catching the Growth Wave
By Kevin Vaughan-Smith
Leadership Development Director
EY

Introduction
Steve Fletcher welcomed members to EY’s inspirational building right next to HMS Belfast, which will be the centre of a lot of attention on Friday, the 70th anniversary of D-Day.

Kevin treated TLC members to a fascinating insight into the way in which large, complex organisations can come out of a deep recession and chart a path to future growth.

It was interesting that it appears that ‘Recession’ is a disease. Although EY performed better than would be expected, with consistent growth through the longest and deepest recession arguably of all time, the business acted as if there was a crisis, introducing travel bans, cutting down on Leadership and ‘soft-skills’ development and freezing recruitment.

It is also notable that people are still talking in terms of the ‘current economic climate’, despite the fact that the UK is currently in a period of 3% plus growth, although it is yet to achieve the 2008 activity level in total.

Mark Weinberger arrived at EY with a different, progressive and ambitious vision. The so-called ‘moonshot-thinking’ of JFK – NASA in 1963 had 104 goals. In one speech, these became focused on just ONE – to get a man to the moon and back safely. This way of thinking has now overtaken the cautious, timid and risk-averse recent history in EY. The result is a vision encapsulating the EY Brand, business performance, leading to a historically record recruitment of partners as well as other ‘staff’.

The nature of EY business is that of the 4 key pillars – Assurance, Advisory, Tax and TAS, when one or other reduces in business, others will be increasing, so on average there is a platform for growth.

However, there are other metrics that will cause the achievement of this bold vision. Those are the dynamics of people engagement. By lifting the blinkers off people’s working expectations, enabling, rather than being suspicious of flexible working, by putting engagement back with the staff (Kevin also pointed out that the name ‘staff’ may not be the best to describe the EY people of the future), there is a huge upside opportunity.

As Kevin outlined, highly engaged organisations outperform others significantly. In fact in 2009 a study of 50 organisations and 664,000 people, the highly engaged employees achieved a +19% growth, the low engagement -32% shrinkage.

As a former Franklin Covey Director, Kevin uses simple, short organisational and behavioural models to deliver change. The SEE-DO-GET, a virtuous circle of change created by Thomas Kuhn. By focusing on the EY values, the opportunity is for a true win-win (possibly with more wins added too).

Another plank of the change process is to identify people on the basis of their ability to achieve the numbers and their adherence to the values. Those who achieve both are rewarded, who achieve neither are removed (after a year of opportunity to change), those who have values but do not achieve the results are developed and those who achieve the results without the values are warned and given the opportunity to change or they, too would be removed. This sounds dramatic, however it is in fact a very reasonable way of increasing the bar on both performance and ‘doing it the right way’.

The vision of ‘Building a Better Working World’, employee engagement events and the continuous reinforcement of the message is helping people to accept, welcome and embrace change. In conjunction with the message of values WITH performance, this will achieve the overarching goal.

One cohort who will provide challenges are Partners. Where organisations have an aspirational level of role which has ‘ownership’ as well as status, there is a danger that these people can become intransigent. This is experienced within the NHS – Consultants, in Supermarkets – General Managers- and is only less visible in the military because the tenure of positions is restricted to approximately 2 years. Clearly the breakthrough in EY will be as much a result of these people embracing the future – if not more so, thus Kevin’s challenge is complex and yet potentially rewarding.

He summarised by saying:

• Simple things work best
• Change the mindset and behaviour follows
• Engaged people find ways out of problems, disengaged people find roadblocks
• If we can unlock the potential for engagement, the 2020 vision is ‘in the bag’

Nigel Allfrey thanked Kevin on behalf of The Leaders Club and Steve looked forward to the exciting calendar of events ahead, with Google the next London attraction on the 16th July.