Question: OUR CHANGING WORLD: GRASSROOTS LEADERSHIP COMES TO SHELL17
Royal Dutch/Shell (Shell) has over 100,000 employees in worldwide operations in 130 countries. It has a market capitalization of around $180 billion and annual revenues of $130 billion. Shell has been around for almost 100 years and is quite well known for consistency and . . . being around for almost 100 years-something not too many companies can say. But cutting-edge, fast-moving, and innovative are not the sort of adjectives that are normally used to describe Shell. Traditional, highly structured, and bureaucratic are words more typical of Shell. Steve Miller has the job of transforming Shell. He is the group managing director of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies. But after several years of efforts to transform itself one layer of management at a time, everything at Shell looked the same for the frontline activities. Shell was not going very far and certainly not very fast. Miller decided he needed to make an end run around the bureaucracy and go directly to employees in the field-or at the "coal face" which is the term Shell applies to its frontline activities. Miller and his team developed a system that brought change to the coal face and then let it spread to the managers above this level. Miller spends more than 50 percent of his time working directly with grassroots employees. For six months Richard Pascale, formerly a faculty member at Stanford Business School, observed and talked to Miller at his home in Houston and his office in The Hague, where Shell is headquartered. The following, which appeared in Fast Company magazine, describes some of the grassroots leadership changes in Miller's own words. CHANGE THE BASICS OF LEADERSHIP In the past, the leader was the guy with the answers.
Today, if you're going to have a successful company, you have to recognize that no leader can possibly have all the answers. But the actual solutions about how best to meet the challenges of the moment have to be made by the people closest to the action-the people at the coal face. The leader has to find the way to empower these frontline people, to challenge them, to provide them with the resources they need, and then to hold them accountable. As they struggle with the details of this challenge, the leader becomes their coach, teacher, and facilitator. GRASSROOTS APPROACH We brought six- to eight-person teams from a half dozen operating companies worldwide into an intense "retailing boot camp." One example, from Malaysia: In an effort to improve service-station revenues along major highways, we brought in a cross-functional team that included a dealer, a union trucker, and four or five marketing executives. Then those teams went home while another group of teams rotated in. For the next 60 days, the first set of teams worked on developing business plans. Then they came back to boot camp for a peerreview challenge. At the end of the third workshop, each team sat with me and my team in a "fishbowl" to review its business plan, while the other teams watched. The peer pressure and the learning were intense. At the end of that session, the teams went back for another 60 days to put their ideas into action. Then they came back for a follow-up to analyze both breakdowns and breakthroughs. TEACHING METHODS One of the most important techniques we use is the fishbowl. The name describes what it is: I'm sitting in the middle of the room with members of my management team. One team is in the center with us, and the other teams are all around us in an outer circle. Everyone is watching as the group in the center talks about what it's going to do and about what it needs from me and my colleagues to be able to do that. It has completely changed the dynamics of our operation.
1. Do you agree with Miller's ideas on leadership?
2. What is Miller's method of bringing change to Shell?
3. Do you think the "fishbowl" is an effective way to teach leadership?