We have these stories. A lot of clients that hire us, I would say, they have a problem with being too nice. Now, you have the rare people who are just too aggressive with each other. Sometimes these two things go hand in hand because you’re too nice, you’re too nice, you’re too nice, right? And then you flip because nothing’s getting done. So a public story I’ll tell you quick here is we did a lot of work with a well-known telecommunications company outside of the US called BT, British Telecom. We trained, my team and I trained, I don’t know, 5,000 people there. And then we were hired specifically by this business called Openreach. And by the way, I’m telling you the story because they told the story. They told the story to a group of the footsy 100, unbeknownst to me. And then I’m getting all these phone calls, ended up living in London for three and a half years, which was It was great. I just wish I would have known about it, but it was fantastic. And the Brits aren’t people who typically brag, but they’re proud about the work we did together. And it was certainly a huge collaborative effort.
It’s not like you just came in, we saved the day and went away. Not like that at all. We were with this group of people for two years, and these were open reach to the guys and gals who go up the polls and down into the holes to fix the faults in the telecommunications infrastructure. The whole country runs upon this stuff. At the time, you had like 35,000 engineers. They had spent tens of millions of pounds across the space for a few years, and they could not improve workforce productivity. They were still doing the same number of lame jobs, two jobs a day or whatever, 2. 5 or something like that. Somebody had the bright idea that, you know what? Their manager could probably know what they’re doing that’s preventing their productivity, what they need to do instead. Can we just get them to talk about it? And then we had been doing work at some other part of BT with good results. And they’re like, Okay, we want you to run your Honest Conversations program. So we took 2,800 managers through it. We trained up 90 coaches, there appears, to keep holding them accountable, to apply the methodology, and to keep developing them.
By the way, we cut through the 2,800 people in three months, maybe four months. But the initiative went on for two years. The concern was, Oh, my God, they just start being honest with people. This is going to go horribly. Union agreements are going to go up. Thicaps are going to go up. Employee engagement is going to plummet. You can understand because some people have been real assholes with their honesty before, and it created real problems. So it’s not like… Toxic honesty. You have a country that’s colonized half of the world, they may have a slight aggression problem, as do we. So you got some reason to be a little afraid, right? And so we came in and we did this thing. And I have to say, I have the good credit to the HR group there and to the master coaches that we trained. They were amazing people who took this so seriously and dedicated themselves to it. And it was some of the, don’t know, one of the greatest experiences of my life, even to do this work with them, to be shoulder to shoulder with them, to try to figure out how do you bring out the best from these people, these 30, 35,000 people, because we know they could do better.
And fast forward two years later, the CFO got an investment and efficiency team that measured the whole thing. They claimed across the 35,000 people, something like an 8. 92 % sustainable improvement in productivity, earning them a cost savings of what was in the US, a dollar equivalent at the time, $120 million. From leadership development unheard of. And even better, we didn’t say it. We weren’t even involved in the measurement. And then also sick absences went down, union grievances went down, and engagement on their engagement survey, every measure except one went up significantly. And yeah, it was just an amazing thing. And then the people who are the master coaches, there’s BTS, this great diaspora, they go to other companies. And I’ve met them before, just bumped into each other or have reached out to me. And they still say, yeah, this is one of the most profound experiences of my entire career. That’s awesome. So this is what’s possible when you turn speaking the truth into a confidence.
