Chapter 15
The challenge
In transforming the company from Telecom to Spark, the challenge was to re- invigorate the business from the foundations up. Spark was operating in an
industry that was (and still is) going through massive disruption, and it wanted to communicate the burning platform for adaptation, and the pace and momentum needed to drive essential change.
At the time of the rebrand, Spark decided to take a closer look at its internal values. It made sense for the internal Spark team to align themselves closely with the sense of vigour and clarity the rebranding of Spark was projecting to its customers. Lasting and authentic change needed to come from the inside out, rather than just swapping out the more publicly visible elements of a company brand.
To go about this, Spark wanted to involve its people in writing the new Spark story and the values that would be the DNA of its new brand. Getting this right was critical and, because of this, Spark put in place a collaborative approach with its employees.
The process that Spark went through in determining their values was, in my experience, unique. They ran three separate working groups (with approximately 30 people in each group), around the country, all completely independent of each other.
Each team started with a blank sheet of paper and was asked to write real values for real people, using real language. None of the output from any one team was shared with the other teams; the teams operated independently of each other.
Amazingly, all three teams wrote extremely similar values.
Spark then got 20 senior people in a room and presented them with the ideas from the three teams. They could find nothing that needed to be added or
eliminated — they worked on some minor ‘wordsmithing’, but that was it. Spark people knew and could convey, authentically and in their own words, how they would ‘be’ and show up for New Zealanders (internally and externally).
This process helped to create a strong sense of ownership and personal connection to the values and purpose from employees — because they were written ‘by the people, for the people’.
So their purpose was clearly defined: Our ambition is to be a winning business, inspired by customers to unleash the potential in all New Zealanders.
inspired by customers to unleash the potential in all New Zealanders.
Their four new guiding values (written by their people) then featured language to reflect this purpose. Their overarching values are:
We listen.
We’re straight up.
We get stuck in.
We win together.
The behaviours that underpin each value are also written in a way that is very different to normal values and behaviours. I particularly like the behaviours that are listed under ‘We’re straight up’:
We call a spade a spade — with respect.
We’re jargon-free — we use the language of our customers.
We create value for our customers and us.
We are up-front and we front up.
The opportunity
Heather Polglase, Head of HR at Spark Digital, was the key driver to introducing storytelling into Spark. Heather states,
“ We are on a journey to transform how we show up for and deliver for New Zealand customers and businesses — that takes a fair bit of heavy lifting and requires world-class leadership and teams … as such, inspiring and taking people with us is mission critical. Given that, storytelling is a skill our leaders and many of our people will all need and want!
Spark were looking not only to bring their values to life but also for ways to further develop their leaders and inspire and keep their people.
Based on feedback and experience in leading organisation change, Heather understood that leaders were key to communicating the values in ways that brought them to life for their people. For Heather, ‘essentially it could be the difference between values staying printed on the walls and values being walked and talked’.
Heather realised that storytelling was a critical skill for all their leaders to learn, stating,
“ We could see that in many cases our leaders didn’t necessarily feel or believe they could be inspirational in the way they communicated with their team and with our customers. Some of them perceived that this ‘inspirational’
messaging and presentation was reserved only for a chosen few, who were extroverts and ‘good’ at public speaking. That’s where the storytelling training needed to come in.
The process
The storytelling approach was initially piloted in July 2015 at the customer conference for Spark’s business arm. This was an optional workshop, offered as a way for the sales team and leaders who looked after delivering services to New Zealand businesses to build a new capability.
This ended up being the most widely talked about workshop in the optional afternoon of this conference. But it was reserved for just a few and didn’t necessarily have a clear ‘call to action’ back into the business. Fast forward to November 2015 and another chance to develop an incredible skill was found — storytelling masterclasses for the masses at Spark. An invite was sent to about 400 people throughout Spark to see what the interest was.
The masterclass was marketed as providing skills to not only help them communicate Spark’s values but also improve their communication in their everyday roles as leaders or sales and service people.
The invite was sent out on a first-in, first-served basis, with a strict capacity limit to room sizes, and all sessions reached capacity within a few days. I conducted four masterclasses in Wellington and Auckland to over 300 Spark leaders. Those who missed out on getting a seat were still trying to get in on the day!