2nd March 2021 | Managers | Dove
The trust problem of managers; brands with purpose
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The trust problem of managers
The work researcher Stowe Boyd has an interesting piece in his newsletter looking at recent research on how businesses, workers, and managers are coping with working at home during the pandemic.
Workers who have been able to work from home during the pandemic report that they want to be able to continue with more working from home after it than was the case beforehand. At the same time, companies were pushed into home-working without any preparation (technical, cultural or organisational) and so it has challenged norms.
One of the researchers quoted in the piece talks about the pillars of trust in an organisation, and how they can be eroded by virtual working.
First, they need to believe that others will deliver and that the work will be high quality (competence trust). Second, they need to believe that others have good intentions and high integrity (interpersonal trust). To trust colleagues in both of these ways, people need clear and easily discernible signals about them — what they’re doing (actions), why they’re doing it (motivations), and whether they’ll continue to do it (reliability).
In other words, not seeing the pizza boxes and coffee cups after a team has worked until midnight reduces the signs that we’re used to reading for. But: monitoring doesn’t work:
One, you can’t monitor everything; two, people will game the system to meet the implicit measurements involved; and three, it only makes the trust problem worse, because there is no faster way to demonstrate lack of trust than surveillance.
The data on monitoring are also striking:
One survey found that 49% of employees subject to stringent monitoring reported severe anxiety, compared to only 7% of those subject to low levels of monitoring.
So in a European context, companies that monitor may be found to be in breach of their duty of care.
(Panopticon meme by Adam)
The second piece of research Boyd references is focussed on managers. Its starting point:
Research shows that managers who cannot “see” their direct reports sometimes struggle to trust that their employees are indeed working. When such doubts creep in, managers can start to develop an unreasonable expectation that those team members be available at all times, ultimately disrupting their work-home balance and causing more job stress.
When you dive into the data they report, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s the notion of management as a form of control that is the problem here, and secondly, that as it turns out, perhaps because of this, men are worse managers than women. We’re still trying to work out how the 21st century organisation works, but one of the biggest barriers to innovation is 20th century management cultures. As the management thinker Peter Drucker said, “90% of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” Just get out of the way.
The article also includes an interesting model of a “trust staircase”—four steps you can put in place to remedy a trust gap.
Mark Kramer was the co-author with Michael Porter of the famous 2011 paper on ‘shared value’, so he has pedigree on talking about brands and purpose. He also teaches at Harvard Business School, and its podcast invited him on to talk about his business school case about Unilever’s Dove brand. (23’45”)
Obviously it is a classic case. Dove—Unilever’s largest personal care brand— completely owns the space of self-image and self-esteem through its ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, and it supports this through outreach in schools and elsewhere, backed with significant partnerships. I hadn’t realised until I listened to the episode that Dove originated as a product to clean wounds and burns in World War 2, rather than as a cosmetics product.
Kramer runs through the elements that purposeful brands need to succeed:
Commitment from the CEO (I think he says ‘buy-in’, but he means commitment)
An organisational culture that supports the purpose. In Dove’s case, every member of staff goes into schools one day a year as part of the company-backed training programme
Proof of social impact
Proof of business benefit.
The numbers are interesting. Although products need to mix up purpose-driven advertising with conventional marketing, Unilever’s research suggests that the purpose-driven stuff has four times the impact. It also producers a 10-25% uplift in intent to purchase.
Kramer also suggests that Dove’s ‘Evolution’ ad, below, which costs $150K to make, has generated $150 million in revenue.
The host asks about other brands in the portfolio which don’t have the same social purpose (and they seem to be talking about Axe/Lynx, although Unilever has completely repositioned these ads so they’re more about an authentic sense of self). In class, apparently, Kramer points out that other personal care brands have now followed Unilever’s approach in the personal care space, so the differentiation it gets from ‘Real Beauty’ is shrinking.
I’m not a Harvard Business School student, and maybe this is a trick question, but I’d have thought in an age when brands increasingly need a moral centre and employees value purpose, the answer would be to double down. After all, there’s still a long way to go on improving self-image and self-esteem.
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