In this first episode our CEO - Martin Saville asks Tony about his change in career from a background in sales and the corporate world and then transitioning into the world of OD. How was that transition and what did he hold onto as he moved from one world to the next!
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Claire Newell
Hello and welcome to the Mayvin podcast. This episode is part of a special new miniseries called Conversations with Tony.
'Our' lovely director Tony Nicholls has decided to ‘stop working’ from the end of March 2025. (He still finds it hard to use the ‘r’ word...). So we decided to make the most of him for these last few weeks that we have him . and try to bottle his wisdom and experience / milk him for content before he goes. We will be releasing one of these short 10min episodes every week for the next 8 weeks – which will take us up to his last week. Each episode will focus on a different topic – a different element of his time at Mayvin and/or his career at large. They might be questions that we’ve always wanted to ask, or topics that feel pertinent at such a reflective time.
Please do feel free to get in touch with us or Tony directly if you would like to pass on any well wishes for his 'r' word.
Martin Saville 00:00
So Tony, this is a bittersweet conversation to be having with you. You've been with us seven and a half years, and this set of conversations is really by way of marking your your transition into a non working mode. We don't use the R words No, and we said that we would have a series of conversations with with you to mark that and to think about what you've learned and celebrate and honor what you've brought to Mayvin. And the thing that I'd love to hear your thoughts on are really around. You know, when I think about your career, you started in sales quite kind of hard edged sales. Moved into a corporate environment, and then when we met seven, eight years ago, it was a point where you really were quite early in a transition that you'd been making towards becoming an OD practitioner. You discovered that world, were very committed to it, enthused by it. You completed your masters. You were looking to potentially write a book which you were able to say, able to do while you're at Mayvin, which is brilliant, and now you've had seven and a half years of working at a senior level as an OD consultant, while supporting us to lead and develop our own business as well. So quite a career. And I'd just love to get your reflections on that so on that journey. And you know, in particular, as you've made that that move from one world to quite a different world, what are the things about that that you've really hung on to?
Tony Nicholls 01:52
Well, if I focusing on the salesy aspect of that, what I think the phrase that comes to my mind is, is around customers, so customer centric environments where we were selling financial services of some form or other or in other, well, yes, mainly financial services over my career. And yes, very KPI driven, a target driven, profit oriented environments and great fun in the main, the main great fun and very developmental and very good management and leadership in the main, some not, but mostly good. And I think what I've held on to from that, I would, I would start off with that customer, customer in mind, if you haven't got that in mind, no matter what role you have in the organization, and I think you're going to struggle to to add as much value as you could, because you don't, you aren't necessarily thinking about doing things with the with the end result being, what's the impact on the customer? Related to that I think I would, I would add the importance of relationships so early on in my career, noticing that to get things done, I needed to develop really good relationships with with internal stakeholders, with customers. I can always remember right back in my early sales days, those sales people that would ring head office to try and get their applications through the system in order to get paid, and they would scream and shout and slam the phone down and swear and all do all sorts of things. And I looked at them I thought, they're just not going to get anything done. On the other hand, I develop relationships. I would travel down to head office, you know, offer flowers, offer chocolates, chat to people, develop relationships. And sure enough, my stuff got through. You know, it's really basic stuff, but if you haven't got good relationships with people, you know, banging, shouting and screaming at people isn't going to work, and people aren't going to buy from you if they don't trust you. I think the other thing for me is, and this is perhaps a longer answer than than we've got time for here, is the idea of a consultative sell in terms of whether you're actually selling to customers or whether you are in influencing internal stakeholders. I think there's a way of doing that that is relational and focused on as much on their needs as it is on on your your needs to actually, you know, get a product shifted. So there's a consultative process of developing an idea of what's what's in it for them, what are their needs, what are they what are they losing sleep over? Or what is it that they don't yet know that they need, but actually become motivated when they find out this thing exists, and then matching product features to that. And there's a consultative selling there, which makes it a lot easier and a lot less stressful and actually more enjoyable, because what you end up after a consultative sale process is that people want to buy from you, rather than you have to sell to them. So the closing business takes care of itself. So I think they're probably the main things I'll hold on to.
Martin Saville 04:40
Yeah, lovely. So, so customers, relationships, and then this idea of a consultative relationship, consultative, yeah, I guess I can see a line between those three. You know, there's a way in which those potentially all fit together really nicely in a particular mindset.
Tony Nicholls 04:56
And I've just thought of another one, yeah, so the little one would be really good quality management and leadership development. So I've been looking up during my career to be offered that a lot, and I've also sorted out myself. So I've done a lot of personal development work through self study and reading, but I've also with the from a very first organ, my second organization in first in sales, but second in my career, exposed to a lot of really good quality selling skills capability development, influencing skills, management skills and leadership skills. And that's carried on through my career, through through to the masters that you talked about, and then and has continued beyond that in Mayvin. So exposing oneself to really good quality management and leadership development, I think, is paramount.
Martin Saville 05:38
Lovely. Yeah, that's nice. And I mean, just before we come on to talking around the differences and maybe what, what you've let go of along the way, the customer question is, I think a really interesting one for us in OD, because I think there's a way in which, if I were to be critical of us, of us as a profession, of organization, develop as a profession, I think I can, I'd say we can sometimes fall a bit in love with our own, our own tools, and lose sight of the customer. Just just welcome your your comments on me. What does customer centric od look like at its best?
Tony Nicholls 06:13
I guess I would go back to this consultant, consultative, sell process. That process is, is first and foremost, based on relationship develop a relationship with with the potential customer, such that they start to trust you, such that they feel you've got something interesting to say, and that they feel heard, that they they genuinely feel that you are genuinely interested in a minute, you know, so that I've written about this in the book you've got, I think you've got to take a presence that is about I'm genuinely interested in you as a human being and your context and your challenges. I can't pretend to be interested. I've got to be genuinely interested. And I am. I'm genuinely curious, a bit nosy and a bit curious about these things. So I think that's the starting point, then asking really good quality questions about them and about their context and about their challenges. That, for me, is the ultimate customer interested, because, again, that gives them, the customer, an opportunity to articulate their hopes, their fears, their challenges, what the problems they're trying to solve, that they're struggling to solve, their needs, and if they feel heard, then you can start to think about, Okay, so we've got this, and that might, you know, we might be able to adapt that to to look at that. So I think first and foremost, customer centricity is about being genuinely interested in them as human beings and their context, and then taking the time to really explore their context and find out about it before you then start to try and match anything.
Martin Saville 07:36
Yeah, yeah. So the expression that's sort of loud in my head as you're talking is this idea of meeting the customer, meeting the client, where they are,
Tony Nicholls 07:43
Meeting them where they are, yeah.
Martin Saville 07:44
And we're doing a lot of thinking at the moment around how we decode and translate, become bilingual between OD language and OD world and client language and client world.
Tony Nicholls 07:56
And yeah, yeah. That contrasts with, well, you're bound to have a challenge with well, you're bound to have a challenge with management development, aren't you? So here's one we've got off the shelf. Here. Have one of these sell. You sell something with an assumption that they've got a need in that space. And I think that's that's bringing a full file.
Martin Saville 08:13
Yeah, lovely. When we talked about your your book, I feel we must, we must pull that out and at least one of these on the screen. Yeah. So the book we're referring to is that Managing Change in Organizations by Mr. Tony Nichols, brilliant. So what about the other side? So what are the things that you might go off all the way?
Tony Nicholls 08:33
Yeah, I think what comes to mind there is the, what I would say, called the harder end of performative oversight, so the banging the drum of targets and having to hit targets without paying attention to developing capability, motivation, fun, engaging culture. If all it is about is just hitting numbers and hitting numbers, then people will last so long, but they'll just disappear. And I've worked in environments where there's been massive turnover, because all it all, it's about is hitting the target, but give them enough training to so that they're compliant and or they can actually sell the product, but the target hitting is just the only thing that really matters, and people just soon tire of that. So I think, I think it's about having a good balance of, yes, you've got to be commercial. We've got, we've got numbers to hit. But how do we, how do we generate the motivation to hit those numbers from a relational, motivational perspective? And that's that's very much around how you manage and lead those environments.
Martin Saville 09:34
Yeah, lovely. And as you're talking, there's something for me, showing up around, paying attention to the humanity in organizations. You know, organizations are human systems. And yeah, something about how it's possible to drive the humanity out of organizations. Yeah, absolutely. Some of the best sales environments in terms of having fun, where you were literally every day you were, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't get through a day without a really good belly laugh and somebody taking the mickey out of somebody else in a nice way, and and have some kind of fun going on in terms of what we watched on TV last night, or somebody dressing up, or something daft like that. They were the environments that, for me, actually the most successful, because people were just truly engaged in their work and wanted to come to work and wanted to deliver for the leader who was creating that kind of environment. I think that the other, the other thing that I that's related to that, as I talk about managers, is is letting go of, not so much micromanagement as over management. There's, I think there's a difference: micromanagement is that dotting the i's crossing the t's, over management is, for me, feeling that you need to see everybody and have sight of everybody and feeling that you need to check in with everybody on a regular basis, not the same. I don't think it's quite the same as micromanagement. It's not far off. So this idea that you can't let people just get on with it and find their own way things, again, I write about this in the book. Even in the most regulated, constrained environment, system led environment, there will always be a need for human agency. There will always be workarounds that need to be done and decisions that need to be made in the second in the moment, in order to fulfill and to meet the customer where they are, as we spoke about before. If you try and control that out, if you try and systematize that out, then you really are, I think, on a hiding to nothing, because I've never seen a system that can manage, that can take away every bit of human agency that's needed in those decision points. Can AI do that in the future? I don't know. Can we create, you know, I don't know. I'm yet to be proven wrong. No, and do we want to? Right? Do we want to? Because, you know, in contact center environments failure demand that repeat calls are caused when the human being or the system doesn't pay attention to what the customer is actually looking for, which is not quite what they're isn't necessarily what they're asking for. They might be asking for something, but they might want something else. And if the human on the end of the phone could go, Ah, I think what you're looking for is this, suddenly you don't have a second call, so it reduces call demand. Nice, nice. Any final thoughts? Just as we we begin to wrap up, we're recording this in January, so we still have a few months with you. And looking forward to, to taking advantage of,
Tony Nicholls 12:20
I think, I think, I think the key thing for me, in terms of, you know, moving from where I've been in my career, which has been great fun and learnt a lot, and moving into OD, is really OD has brought that spotlight on a couple of things for me, the complexity that that exists in human systems. That's the been the biggest thing, but also an invitation to continue to bring the humanity that I think I developed in my career anyway as a leader and a manager, to retain that relational perspective. I think, I think it's giving me permission to continue to do that and then give me an insight into how complexity arises in organizations and human systems.
Martin Saville 12:54
Lovely. Well, even post retirement, these are things that you'll remain interested and committed to, and so look forward to our ongoing conversations.
Tony Nicholls 13:02
Thank you, Martin
Martin Saville 13:03
And I used the R word, sorry,
Tony Nicholls 13:06
I'll forgive you.
Martin Saville 13:07
Thank you. Good. Cheers.