Case studies - Michael Brown
Michael Brown: What a stirrer!
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Executive summaryMichael Brown specialises in training and development interventions that bring about cultural and behavioural change, and uses the TKI instrument extensively in his work. His sessions often include shock tactics that generate conflict live in the training room, bringing him into emotive clashes with his clients. Supported by the TKI conflict framework, he then skillfully turns these clashes around to facilitate highly productive, open discussions that result in tangible and lasting change for the participants - resulting in measurable financial improvements. |
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Business need: You've fallen asleep at your desk
What do you do when your organisation's or team's culture seems to be stagnating? Give it the shock of its life, according to Michael Brown.
Dubbing his development interventions as "Wake up calls for people who have fallen asleep at the wheel", Michael is a self-employed behavioural consultant specialising in bringing about culture change for organisations, teams or individuals wanting to improve their performance in the workplace, or to avoid derailing in their career or corporate trajectory.
Michael's use of the TKI Conflict Mode Instrument is particularly unusual, and receives widespread acclaim from his clients. When a client requests a development intervention in one of the wide range of fields he specialises in (including teambuilding, leadership development and negotiation skills), Michael uses conflict as a vehicle for bringing about surprisingly honest discussions to solve the real issues that underlie the problems people come to him with.
Product choice: The TKI model as a bedrock for change
Michael uses the TKI both to address conflict as a business issue of its own, and as a framework to help clients talk about other issues. Michael explains: "The TKI is a very good way of putting a metric on something very woolly in order to change a culture. I find it especially helpful when working with clients who are in denial about an issue - when you present them with the data, you can get into a proper discussion about what needs to be done about their issue. There aren't many situations where doing this TKI analysis isn't useful - which is why I've used it so much as an independent; it's so wonderfully generic and simple. People don't get stuck on it or debate it or resent being put into a box. It works quickly and effectively."
The solution: Using conflict as a vehicle for culture shift
One of the key tenets of Michael's work is that people learn faster and better if they are stimulated by the training - not just intellectually, but emotionally too. His development sessions are distinctive because they actively bring conflict into the training room.
"I work on the premise that encouraging your clients to take risks results in more powerful and memorable outcomes from the training," Michael explains. "My point is to try and encourage clients to bring conflict in for real. Let's look at it in its ugly form and see it in action. By opening up people's default responses, the raw version, you can create the basis for an extremely frank conversation and sort out what is really causing the problems they came to you with."
Helicopter trauma
Michael gives a couple of examples of his proverbial 'flying by the seat of his pants'. The first had him challenging a team of customer service staff at Cisco to agree to getting into a flight simulator that would mimic a helicopter crashing into water. Despite the extremity of the challenge, the majority of the team ended up being persuaded, apart from one hold-out. The brief was that the whole team had to agree to the challenge, or else no-one would do it, so the rest of the team encouraged and cajoled the final team member until he agreed to take part. |
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Overview
Client profile: Michael is an independent Behavioural Change Consultant with 16 years of experience. He works with many different organisations offering tailored training events, coaching and L&D consultancy, including Cisco, Jaguar, Deutsche Bank and Cornwall Council.
Business needs:
- Negotiation and sales training
- Conflict management
- Team development
Solution: 'Wake-up calls' in the form of training and development interventions built around conflict and the TKI
Benefits:
- More honest and open discussions between teams
- A straightforward, accessible model for dealing with conflict
- Excellent return on investment with financials to back it up
http://reallearningforachange.wordpress.com |
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However, the customer service team were practically out of the door and in their swimming costumes when Michael casually announced that in fact the flight simulator story was all a ruse, and that there was no such activity at all.
This is how Michael brings genuine, live conflict into the training room. The participants turned their anger and frustration onto him, feeling let down and deceived. However, when asked the question 'What have you learned about yourselves and your group?', the penny dropped. The group had a three-hour discussion after that, facilitated using the TKI.
Tracy Brown was Cisco's Leadership Foundation Program Manager at the time. "When we debriefed the exercise using the TKI, it provided a really good foundation for the discussion, and quickly helped the participants to link their responses during the activity to their TKI profile. Bringing a real-life scenario into the room in this way, albeit virtually, was in my view an excellent decision, but is certainly not to be recommended unless you have thought through how to handle the fallout from it, and are prepared to go through an uncomfortable phase before participants get the point."
Benefits: Real learning for a change
Pheasant frenzy
Another example Michael gives is working with Haringey Council. They wanted to discuss how they dealt with conflict and solved problems. Michael gave them a list of 20 things to do in a day - bake a cake, catch a fish, make a film - to see how they would handle it. "I would wind them up a bit, move deadlines around - not dissimilar to some working environments.
"After the first day, they had done abysmally! That evening I stayed with my sister, and it just so happened that she had a garage full of pheasants, so I brought in two pheasants and told the team I wanted them oven ready in 20 minutes.
"A lengthy debate took place on whether they should take the challenge at all, as they may break health and safety rules. In the meantime, one person had snuck out of the room, and returned 20 minutes later with two oven-ready pheasants! Whilst he was gone his team had said they wouldn't take the challenge - then they saw that he had sorted it and retracted the statement!"
What followed was a discussion about values and ethics - the butcher who skinned the pheasants may have his license taken away; the 'maverick' individual had acted impulsively to make his team look good, but had not considered what effect this would have on others outside the team. Michael describes this as "the most powerful bit of the few days - and it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had a real situation come into the room. People are human beings, not just employees - and helping to expose people's deep-down feelings raises the stakes, and hugely magnifies the potential benefits."
Return on investment: Why stirring is good
Whilst Michael's style is undoubtedly provocative, his innovative and lively training sessions using the TKI have gone down a storm with clients, and he is building a veritable army of supporters convinced by his approach with the TKI.
In addition, he is keen to emphasise the financial return on investment associated with this type of work. An assessment of one business development training initiative that he ran last year identified over £1m in tangible additional revenue from just 20 learners. Another initiative involving a sales team, whose behaviour towards their customers had been too Accommodating and Avoiding in TKI terms, encouraged them to be more Competing and Collaborating - asking more questions and getting to the real roots of customer needs. This resulted in bigger pieces of work coming through, which in turn translated into a 40% profit increase within 18 months of the TKI awareness-raising training.
So even though some of his training participants have wanted to bash him over the head at times, Michael is thoroughly convinced of the profitable potential of being a complete stirrer.
Read Michael's blog at http://reallearningforachange.wordpress.com.
Michael has created a short video on the TKI; view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WI1Gfk1B-4.
For information about how OPP could work with your organisation for individual, team or leadership development, please contact our Sales Team on +44 (0)845 603 9958 or by email at enquiry@opp.eu.com.