Royal Canin: ‘Allow people to be human and innovation will follow’

When a leader launches a transformation programme, they are telling people things are going to change. The organisation therefore goes into liminal space. The certainties people previously had - around their professional identities, capabilities and roles - start to fade. This may prompt troubling questions such as:

Do I have the skills to work in this organisation?

What's my role?

Do I have a future here?

These questions are very likely to become more pointed as the transformation programme progresses… and that is because most transformations go wrong at some point. In our latest Sa?d Business School/EY research paper released earlier this year, we found 96% of programmes experience challenges which require a leader’s intervention: what we called a “turning point”. How leaders respond to them can make or break the entire transformation.

But to be able to act on a problem, leaders must first be able to sense - and make sense of - it. And one of the key things leaders told us is that the best early signal of a transformation going wrong is the emotional energy of a group: when this becomes negative, there is an issue to address.

In this context, we identified successful transformation leaders as those who made sure they aren’t stuck in their offices. Instead, they spend time with employees on the ground: they are physically present. That way, they get a tangible sense of the health of people and teams as they do the work.

One such leader is Annick Tollenboom: portfolio, program and change management director at pet food company Royal Canin. She spoke to myself and Adam Canwell , from EY, on the fifth episode of a mini series on transformation turning points for my Leadership 2050 podcast. Annick led a transformation of Royal Canin’s data processes - and the people and technology that came with that.

Like most other transformation leaders, Annick encountered problems along the way. It was how she brought her workforce - as humans - to the centre of the programme that enabled her to navigate these issues. Here are five insights I took from the conversation.

1) Give employees the safety to vent

“When you allow people to be human, it'll actually open up to innovation. If you allow your team member to just vent for five minutes and say ‘this is happening and I'm struggling', sometimes it's enough. Five minutes. You give them five minutes of your time, they vent what is not going well, [and it] doesn't necessarily need an answer. Emotions are there to tell a story, and it is what it is, and you let it be. Sometimes it's enough for people to come out of that conversation, feel energised and pick it up where they left it and go back to the task at hand.”

2) Leaders shouldn’t pretend to have all the answers

“I think it's important as a leader to show yourself vulnerable and be able to say to your team members: ‘You know what, the meeting before this one was a difficult one, and I feel this way or that way.’ Because I think by showing yourself as a leader, vulnerable, you set the tone. And so that also gives the permission to others to allow themselves [to be] vulnerable.”

3) ‘Protect the total population’ of a programme

“[Transformations are not only about] what is best for the end users, what is best for our customers. Let's focus also on the people working on the transformation that are giving many, many hours of their day into that work. Same for vendors. We work with partners [and] often it's a forgotten group. But for me it's important not to make a distinction, and to consider that all the people working on transformation are part of one team working towards the same goal. It's important, then, to protect that total population in the transformation.”

4) Under-performing transformations require bold decisions

“Transformations that are going the wrong way - because often we lose track of what the objective was - [mean] people get demotivated, people don't see clearly anymore what was the guideline or the direction. And my advice would be: pause, reflect together, do an assessment with the people working on the transformation on what is working, what is not working, what to eliminate and make those hard choices. I think that's also often a problem: that we're not able to make courageous choices.”

5) ‘Tone of the top’

“It's a phrase I use a lot when I speak to senior leaders: ‘Tone of the top’. Inspirational leadership and tone of the top is crucially important to land some of the messages. When a leader will show up in a certain way, it'll trickle down in the organisation. But when the leadership is showing up badly, that shows also, and will have an impact on the organisation.”

There is much more in the full interview, so please listen. You can find the podcast in the following places:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/annick-tollenboom-royal-canin/id1587156278?i=1000658854222

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/14HhIaiGUF6rmgf8cB9I5Y

Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/20e08961-df52-4410-ae7b-5a8b3c01483c/episodes/700f511a-655c-4640-b81c-de3fc38dd386/leadership-2050-annick-tollenboom-royal-canin

A message from the author

Thank you for reading the 65th edition of the Leadership 2050 newsletter. As CEO of Transcend.Space and senior fellow of management practice at the University of Oxford’s Sa?d Business School, my work, research and teaching focuses on how leaders transcend 21st century challenges such as disruptive technology change, the climate crisis and creating diverse and inclusive environments… alongside the ongoing challenge of delivering profitable growth. Through Transcend.Space and Sa?d, where I direct the Oxford Advanced Management & Leadership Programme, I have worked with leaders from many geographies, industries and governments. All this has given me a deep understanding of how good leaders create value - and bad leaders destroy it. Never before has this topic been so important on a global stage, hence why I am undertaking this work.