Remember Behaviours?

Leadership, Accountability, Teamwork were Behaviours promoted in Shell from 2004-08

Thinking back to the reserves crisis of 2004, I think the first months of Jeroen van der Veer's CEO tenure set the tone brilliantly, and were a great example of leadership in crisis.

First, there was humility and lots of communication. I remember we had two or three sessions for all Hague staff in the C16 atrium, which were very well handled. At the time, Jeroen said something like "in my entire career, I don't recall a similar town hall type meeting to this". I remember thinking then that the statement summed up what was wrong with Shell and its senior leaders before, and how such a simple step had taken us forward a long way. The regret is that it has not been followed up as a regular way of working - though I do love the monthly homilies, and maybe they are better as they reach more people more efficiently.

Then there was effort to fixing the immediate problem, with all its ramifications - the legal side, dealing with analysts, creating a fair playing field for regulation etc. This also went so well that only four years we tend to forget how tough a task that was.

Third there was setting a basic direction for the future. One part was strategy or content - the genesis of More Upstream, Profitable Downstream. That has served us reasonably well for four years. But in my view the more important part was the attitudes and behaviours part - more important because basically it was the human brand of Shell which has been undermined (not our strategy). This was the emphasis on Enterprise First and LAT behaviours.

This simple piece of prioritisation, focus and consistent follow communication was brilliant in my view, with LAT the most important part. Again, I have a regret for Shell that it has not been fully followed up. Touchy feeling doesn't sell well with analysts, so externally LAT was dropped as soon as it was decent to do so: fair enough. But what about internally? Can you list all the LAT behaviours now? When was the last time your boss referred to them? Or his/her boss? Probably a while ago, and that is a shame, because these things can change a culture, but only slowly and with a lot of persistence. Once the crisis was over, I'm not convinced that persistence was there for long enough - and my guess is that Jeroen had it (still has it) but some of his fellow leaders didn't support it with all the energy needed. Only a guess, I don't have any evidence.

Our own team ran a couple of sessions where we tried to highlight where our main opportunities to improve in LAT were, and define steps to do so. These were helpful sessions which led to good actions - I recall Focus being an item for discussion, and indeed I think my personal Achilles heel among all the LAT behaviours. Being a Myers Briggs P has lots of merits, but one of the downsides is that I don't always provide enough focus: "setting clear priorities and reduce complexity". I don't close enough things down. My style is to leave a lot of freedom, sometimes too much. And I'm certainly an agent for complexity.

But I for one would love there to be a sustained campaign around Shell helping to address all the LAT behaviours. Where so we see a real step change in Shell since 2004? I'm not sure I see it anywhere. Maybe discipline has improved a bit? Maybe our approach to capability has become stronger (at the expense of being more rigid)? But are we really showing more drive? Are we really rewarding success and addressing failure? Is the external mindset that much stronger? Some days I think so, but other days I see evidence to doubt it.

There was another word used a lot in 2004, hanging over some of the LAT behaviours, that word being bullying. In my first twenty years in Shell, I don't think I saw any significant bullying. Then the crisis happened and the word was used for a while, so obviously there had been some problem. But I'm not sure things have got better. Actually I think I've seen more bullying behaviour over the last two years than ever before. I've even suffered it - I have one senior stakeholder I'm dealing with currently whose methods I really struggle with, and I'm working out how best to deal with that. Any ideas? Who else has seen bullying? Or have you got stories of improvement?

So, time for an LAT revival campaign?