The Peabody Employee Conference 2015

This week we had the Peabody Employee conference. This is my second conference attendance. There are now approximately 1,000 employees so these are enormous events. The venue was Westminster Plaza and from 8.30am we had games. At lunch time you can book on therapies such as massage, but these get taken very quickly. I got to go on a car racing game which I have probably done about twice in my life. My audience, once they had explained to me how to press the various knobs to name my car, choose the track etc kept telling me to go faster. I picked up my daughter from the airport this week. She also told me to go faster. FH used to say I was the only person he knew who slowed down to overtake.

Anyway, the Chief Exec, Steve Howlett, gave his introductory speech which had quite a lot of facts and figures in it. Basically Peabody are doing a lot better than we were 10 years ago. I like our Chief Exec. He is the sort of older man who is happy in his skin. In fact all our senior team are very credible leaders, but the one who impresses me the most from a looking in, not really knowing her perspective, is Sandra Skeete who is our Executive Director of Housing. She is the Peabody Michelle Obama right down to the big mouth and awesome smile.

Before an excellent lunch we did a group exercise then in the afternoon had a motivational speaker to compound the message of the conference which was, ‘I make a difference’. We had Michael Heppell. I always find it impressive when not especially physically attractive people overcome that by pure force of personality, verve, energy, will…. What did I learn in one hour?

Being a leader is not a position. It is an action. I am the most important person in the world followed by my family, colleagues and customers. You cannot be better for others unless you are better for yourself.

Success is what you do. To avoid being a one hit wonder you need to keep doing it. Positive thinking is a nice place to be, but it doesn’t change much.

When people ask you how you are today you should not say ‘fine’. You should say ‘brilliant!, the premise being that if you manage your physiology or ‘state’ you will never have a bad day again.

It’s also important to break out of your comfort zone. Every time you step out of your comfort zone you get a new one that is bigger and gives you more confidence.

Fear stops us. He described it as False Evidence Appearing Real. He then did a little audience exercise called the Hair Bear Dance to demonstrate how initial fears could be overcome by creating pace, (just doing it), doing it as a team and having fun.

 

Every employee role within Peabody is ‘to improve the quality of people’s lives’. He talked through how doing a poor, good or fantastic job always ends up with a slightly worse result so if you did a poor job you would be out of the game, a fantastic job will end up with good results etc. To offset this every employee needs to work at offering outstanding levels of service to each other and to our residents. We must take every single opportunity to put an emotional deposit in each other’s bank accounts.

We all need to work on bringing our active detractors on a journey through silent customer and satisfied customer to loyal raving fans. We do this by telling them stories through our communication with them.

Finally we must set goals! Personal, positive, present goals – ‘creating a future history’ rather than a ‘to do’ list.

www.michaelheppell.com

Bless.