No Dickheads

It wasn't an uncommon situation. A small and close team, working hard, delivering results, getting noticed and looking to scale up. Some of them had gathered round a whiteboard to share ideas about recruitment aims, identifying principles and exploring the team culture they had helped create over the previous months.

The Sailor, who happened to be Australian, smiled his usual lopsided smile and said "It's simple. No Dickheads". He was right about the simplicity and the appeal was immediate. The Airman grinned and the Soldier wrote it on the whiteboard. And that was that - our new hiring policy. It worked and it was utimately broken, but not by us and that's another story...

The origin of the No Dickheads (NDH) policy is well known - the sixth of fifteen key team principles set out by the author James Kerr in his book Legacy, written after a year living with the All Blacks rugby team. The other 14 principles were undeniably good, but it was NDH which best seemed to encapsulate what really mattered to us. It was the absolute core of our culture, it was us and want we wanted from potential new joiners.

Our NDH had grown out of the situation we were in, the kind of people we were and how we did things. We had formed just before and started to norm during COVID - meaning that our very jobs were at stake unless we proved that our project could continue and we could work through the restrictions. There really wasn't the space or time for any DH behaviour plus we had a common purpose and we set about that, aligned because it seemed insane not to do so. We were constrained by the number of people we originally had due to travel restrictions (this was in a country that shut its borders, period) so we had to find all our strengths and maximise them whilst also being willing to muck in with scant regard for hierarchy. That is not to say we lacked egos - we just made sure we tapped the healthy, infectious, enthusiastic bits, harnessed our common experiences and delighted in our differences. The last bit was key - the full team came from different countries, multiple layers of cultures, several religions and ranged in age from two decades to six. We also had to be genuine and vulnerable with one another because we were thin on the ground; if we broke, there was no-one else. So we listened to one another, learned about each other, spoke the truth, laughed a lot and were kind. We made lots of mistakes and were far from perfect, but not DHs.

There are plenty of frameworks for organisational success and good ones at that (like James Kerr's book) so I am not going to synthesise the lived experience I have shared above into another one. Nor do I offer it as THE answer for any situation, because one of the people from that team would rightly come and kick me in the shins very fast and tell me that my foot size vs boot size equation was way out of kilter. But I do think, especially in a world of such diversity, complexity, challenge and fast change - there is a renewed need for people in teams and organisations to have ONE thing they can go to, that matters to them, makes sense to them and with which they fundamentally connect. There are certainly vast numbers of values, standards and purposes in corporate material around the world today, yet the 2022 UK Business Values Survey carried out by Oxford University highlighted that only 17% of respondent companies used a bottom-up approach to defining values. As workforces seek increasing value alignment with employers, it would seem more than just sensible to let them get involved in the talk that they will be expected to walk - if they are to do it with any conviction. The team I write about is now split up and spread over three continents and whilst I suspect few (if any) of us can remember the corporate values of the firm, I know that none of us will forget NDH in a hurry.