Any according to the Londoner who uses the tube to travel to work will tell you how annoying it is when the trains are delayed. For Tube Lines, the company that is rewarded and penalised performance of the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, it’s more than annoying – it’s literally money down the drain.
“We are fined if there are performance failures,” says Darren Hockaday, who heads up the learning and development team at Tube Lines. “So if a station is shut, we pay for every lost customer hour. In rush hour, even an hour costs a fortune, given the amount of people that use a single station. Likewise, if we fail to .x a broken seat in a staff toilet at, say, Canary Wharf station in a set time, we’ll be financially penalised.”
Tube Lines was formed in January 2003 under the Public Private Partnership agreement to manage the capital and performance improvement programme for the next 30 years on these three tube lines.
Little wonder that one of the company’s key business challenges is to create a new performance and delivery-based culture – no mean feat when you consider the different cultures brought together from the two shareholders, Amey and Bechtel, as well as the key customer, London Underground.
Hockaday points to a further challenge: “When we did an employee survey two years ago, it became clear that leadership was affecting people’s motivation in a negative way, and needed to be improved.”
As part of its leadership development strategy, the company decided to use coaching provider people business results (pbr) to help line managers improve their own and others’ performance, and to spread a coaching style to managers in the organisation. Initially, admits Hockaday, it was an uphill struggle.
“In the simplest terms, it’s ask versus tell,” he says. “In a predominantly engineering-based business, people like to .x things. So they can’t resist giving solutions. We wanted to move towards a culture where people could think for themselves a bit more rather than being told all the answers.”
The journey has been worth it, insists Hockaday, who explains that the coaching programme has three main strands. “The first strand consisted of organisational-led programmes, where we targeted 800 of our leaders to introduce coaching to them as a concept and dispel myths that it’s fluffy, soft and doesn’t really work. In that programme, they got an opportunity to practise some coaching,” he says. The second strand consists of those in a critical role within the business – 18 people to date – being provided with an external coach.
The third, and final, strand consists of Tube Lines offering two-module interpersonal development programmes, which any of the 800 leaders can attend to improve their own coaching skills.
“Already we have seen the start of improvements initiated by our employees as a result of leaders asking them what they wanted to get fixed and improved,” he says, adding that the long-term aim is to empower all the employees to become better performers. “You just stifle ideas if you tell people things all the time, and coaching is enabling us to get rid of that culture.”
Lee Jones, line infrastructure manager for the Northern Line, agrees – although he probably wouldn’t have done 18 months ago. Having been assigned to an external coach in December 2004, he admits he was cynical at first. “Coaching was something I was asked if I wanted to participate in at my performance development review and I was sceptical,” he says. “I thought, do I need any help? Probably not. Have I got time for this? I probably haven’t. But I agreed to go along to the organisational-led programme and have an initial meeting with a coach, and I have to say it started working for me quite quickly.”
Like all 18 coachees within Tube Lines, Jones was matched with a coach who the learning and development team considered would be a good .t in terms of both coaching style and personal chemistry. He then got involved in clarifying the objectives of the coaching and was initially assigned three one-and-a-half hour sessions which took place once a month. At this point, the team always takes time out to ensure the chemistry is working and the business objectives are being met, while ensuring confidentiality is maintained. If this is the case, five more sessions are held, after which an evaluation meeting is arranged, along with any necessary follow-up sessions. In Jones’ case, he has continued six-monthly meetings to ensure the focus is sustained.
“I can’t speak highly enough of one-to-one coaching now,” he says. “In fact, I’ve recommended it to a couple of people in my team.” He provides the example of his time management skills having dramatically improved, and says he is better able to recognise and deal with problems head-on. “As a result of coaching, I was able to tell a fleet manager that I didn’t think he was working out in his role and it turned out that he was relieved I’d said it,” he says.
He adds that since going on the interpersonal development programme, he uses less formal coaching himself in his day-to-day leadership. “It doesn’t feel as though I’m juggling coaching with other aspects of my job,” he says. “It just feels part of it.”
Many of the benefits of Jones’ coaching are measurable, according to pbr. After just six months of one-to-one coaching, he saved 40,000 lost customer hours in one month, representing a £240,000 saving. Meanwhile, the return on investment works out at a staggering 623 per cent.
Phil Morgan, director of pbr, says the process that they use to come to such conclusions is based on a simple estimate of financial return with a set of confidence factors built in. “The coach explores with the coachee the impact that the coaching has potentially had on their personal business objectives, and looks for measurable changes that can be easily quantified in financial terms,” says Morgan. “It is our experience that with approximately 50 per cent of coachees, it is quite simple to identify a measurable and financially quantifiable change which could be at least partially attributed to coaching.”
In Jones’ case the following is applicable:
Savings in lost customer hours of 40,000 £240,000
% confidence in estimate 90%
% attributable to coaching 25%
% confidence in coaching contribution 75%
Savings = £240,000 x 90% x 25% x 75% £40,500
Cost of coaching £5,600
ROI = (40,500 – 5,600 / £5,600) x 100 623%
(Over a one-month period the coaching paid for itself 6 times over when looking at this one measure)
As coaching at Tube Lines is purely about performance improvement and focuses on line managers, pbr has incorporated both directive and non-directive coaching into the programme. “Mainstream coaching is typically recognised as the coach using questioning and listening skills and following the coachee’s line of interest and agenda. As a line manager, that’s great when people are knocking at your door asking for help,” says Morgan. “But in lots of organisations, including Tube Lines, there are many performance gaps where people show no desire, interest or inclination to close that gap. In other words, they’re not knocking at the manager’s door. So as the line manager, your agenda needs to be followed – at least initially. It makes sense to start with a directive approach, then move into a non-directive approach.”
Partly for this reason, Morgan says coaches at pbr use a range of coaching models. “We have our own home-grown coaching model, which focuses on the energy and momentum needed to link an individual’s current reality with a future reality. But we use others, such as the GROW model, where it feels more appropriate or is more consistent with previous work.”
Tube Lines does not work exclusively with pbr. Its other coaching providers specialise in areas such as voice-carrying and 360-degree feedback and, as such, the learning and development team feels it benefits from an eclectic and complementary mix of coaching expertise. Whether the company will continue working in this way with multiple providers remains to be seen. Indeed, Tube Lines is the first to admit that coaching is an evolving process for it and while it has learnt a huge amount about what works and what doesn’t in the past two years, its journey isn’t over yet.