Category: Leadership

I used to tell my teams a story from Star Trek. An officer walks up to the captain of the Enterprise and asks permission to leave the ship, to be beamed across to another starship or out to a station somewhere, because that’s where the next step in their career is waiting, and the captain agrees and wishes them well. Nobody stays on the ship forever. People come and go in any organisation; some stay until the day they retire, many more move through three or four in a working life, and I told the story so that nobody in the room felt disloyal for wanting to leave, and nobody felt abandoned when a colleague did.

What I never pointed out, because it never occurred to me, is that the officer asked.

This month my LinkedIn feed started filling up with posts from people in my network at ANZ, my old employer. Their positions have been disestablished, and they are in the holding period now, waiting to find out whether they can reapply for a role or will be made redundant. None of them asked to be beamed anywhere. The public version came out last week: ANZ New Zealand is proposing more than 100 redundancies in its technology team, with more than 400 roles affected, as it consolidates software testing under a single partner and considers moving that work offshore to India and the Philippines. The roles named include quality assurance engineers, lead engineers, product owners and project managers. It sits inside a group-wide programme to cut 3,500 jobs by September 2026, which the Chief Executive has described as simplifying the bank.

I feel for them, and it landed harder than the usual restructure headline because I’ve done the same thing at the same bank, sent the same kind of work to the same country, and back then nobody lost their job.

The same move, 18 years earlier

Between 2007 and 2009 I was the Manager for Consumer Finance Development at ANZ, and one job that came round like clockwork was Scheme Compliance. Every 6 months Visa and Mastercard revise their requirements, for security and for improvements, and every card issuer has to change its systems to match. We had to do it twice, because the bank still ran two credit card systems, National Bank’s and ANZ’s, one on Systematics and the other on Tandem with Base24. Most of the effort went into testing, and the people who could do the work were hard to find. Recruiting COBOL, Tandem and mainframe people in New Zealand was difficult then, so we relied on the old hands, the ones who had been in the organisation long enough to know every corner of both systems.

Then an idea got floated. ANZ had a growing pool of developers and testers in Bengaluru, so what if we sent the Scheme Compliance work to them? That’s what we did. We brought their developers and testers over to New Zealand and trained them on what had to be done, and we sent one of our own, the Systematics Chief Analyst Programmer, to Bengaluru to oversee the work and keep training on the ground. It was our first go at running a remote development team. The time difference was 6.5 hours, or 7.5 depending on daylight saving, and once we found the rhythm it felt like running an IT shop 16 hours a day: meetings early in the morning or late in the afternoon before we closed, work handed over at the end of our day, and results waiting for us the next morning.

We didn’t disestablish a single programmer, tester or analyst in Wellington. To us it was one technology team working from two places. To technology leadership it was a large saving, more output for the same cost, and my records put it at about $400,000 a year in development cost. The bigger effect was on the local team, who were freed from the 6-monthly compliance grind and moved onto product enhancements and new products, which was more meaningful work for them and more useful to the bank.

So the same bank has sent the same kind of work in the same direction twice. The first time, the local team moved on to better work. This time, more than 100 people are waiting to hear whether they still have a job.

Two books

Looking back, I’ve asked myself whether we kept two books in those years, and I’m not sure we did. I guess every manager keeps a first book, the people who produce and do the work. In harder times a second one appears, the list of people you aren’t so sure of. When things are going well the two books are the same book; there is more work than people, everyone is needed, and nobody has a reason to open the second. When the economy tightens, and when organisations bring in stack ranking (I wrote about how that works in The Merry-Go-Round), the second book separates from the first, and managers keep it handy, because the day a reorganisation arrives they will be asked for names at short notice and the second book is where the names come from.

The second book records who is dispensable, and salary has surprisingly little to do with it. In 2008 the most expensive people in my area were the old hands on Systematics and Tandem, and they were the least dispensable people in the building, because hardly anyone else in the country could do what they did. The market had written their entry in the first book for us.

This is what makes the second book so hard to argue with: neither book is lying. The first records something true, that this person does good work and the team relies on them. The second also records something true, that the organisation could get this work done without this person, cheaper, somewhere else, or not at all. Both can describe the same person on the same day. Nothing in ANZ’s announcement says the testing was bad; the reasons given are a cheaper place for the work to go and a cost target to meet. When an organisation is short of people, the capacity freed by sending work away goes straight into the next piece of work, which is what happened to my team in 2008, and the two books stay together. When it’s short of money, the freed capacity is the saving, and the books split.

The second book is an estimate, though, and sometimes a poor one. In The Redistribution Reflex I wrote about people ANZ made redundant who came back as contractors, sometimes within months and usually at a higher rate, because the knowledge they carried couldn’t be replaced. The first book had been right all along. It just wasn’t the one being read that day.

My name in someone else’s book

If I kept two books as a manager, then someone kept two books with my name in them. Whether you land in the first or the second comes down to whether you’re dispensable or indispensable, and I guess even the indispensable eventually run out of justification. At Te Pūkenga that was literal. The government had already signalled it was disestablishing the whole organisation, and when the organisation itself comes off the government’s books, every person in it goes with it, however useful they are.

When Microsoft retired Whiteboard this year, the app was still useful to me and no longer worth it to Microsoft, and I wrote in The Whiteboard I Love is Being Retired that I’d lived a larger version of the same thing when my role ended in November 2024. I had a good plan, I was ready for retirement, and I still got shoved out unexpectedly. There was no bitterness, and there still isn’t. What I didn’t expect is how long it took to get used to the idea of being exited on someone else’s terms. I guess you have to live through it to know you come out intact.

The playing field

None of this needs a villain. Years ago I read two books that shaped my thinking more than I realised at the time. Kenichi Ohmae’s The Borderless World, published in 1990, argued that national borders were mattering less and less to how companies compete. Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, in 2005, opens with Friedman on the Infosys campus outside Bangalore, as it was called then, where Nandan Nilekani told him “the playing field is being leveled.” In 2008 I was on the comfortable side of that playing field; we sent the work, kept our people and banked the saving. In 2026 my old colleagues in Wellington are on the other side of it. As long as work can move across borders there will always be a cheaper place to do it, and under the economic pressure most organisations are carrying now, it’s a race to the bottom that nobody in particular is running.

So what can anyone do about which book they’re in? In May I wrote The Four Unwritten Rules That Keep You Employed: be visible, be easy, be useful, be ready. I still think they’re right, and they will keep you in the first book for longer. They won’t close the second book, because the second book gets written about the work and its price, whoever happens to be doing it. You won’t know when your time runs out, and the only protection I know is a plan B in hand before you need it, so that when shit happens you’re still intact and moving on your own terms.

Which takes me back to the Enterprise. The officers in my story got to ask. A plan B is what lets you be the one who asks.

Always be prepared.

You come home late. The day has been long, the last meeting went sideways, and something you sent at 4pm is still sitting in your head unanswered. Your other half starts telling you about her day. You are sitting right there in the same room, close enough to touch her. You nod at the right moments, you make the small agreeable noises, and your eyes are pointed in her direction.

Then she stops and asks you what she just said.

You cannot answer. Not one line of it. You heard every word and you kept none of them.

I have been on both sides of that, and the uncomfortable part is that nothing misleading happened. You were not pretending. The sound arrived, your ears worked, your face did what faces do. What did not happen was the other thing, the expensive thing, the part where you put down what you were carrying and pick up what she is carrying instead. Hearing costs nothing. Listening costs attention, and attention is a fixed amount that has usually been spent before the conversation starts.

That gap does not stay empty. This is the part I did not understand for a long time. When someone does not spend the attention, they do not sit there with a blank space where your meaning should be. They fill it. They fill it with the reading that costs them the least, the one that fits what they already believe and what they were already planning to do. And then they carry on, quite genuinely, believing they have understood you.

So the frustration most of us call “not being heard” is not silence. The words arrived. Somebody nodded. Something even happened afterwards. It just was not the thing you were asking for, because what travelled was your sound, and what got acted on was their assumption.

The month the celebration became the problem

At Stats NZ we ran a programme we called DBS 2.0 inside Digital Business Services, and we measured how people felt about it every single month from 2018 onward. Not annually, not at the end, every month, with the score plotted on a chart so we could see whether the process had genuinely changed or whether we were reading noise. The first measure came back at -14. We were not popular, and the number said so.

It climbed in steps over the next three years. Not smoothly, and not because of any single intervention, but it climbed, and by February 2021 the top reading was 50. In August 2020 we were named a finalist in the CIO Awards for Best Team Culture. When I ran the Schneider Culture Model survey the shape of the place had moved into Collaboration and Cultivation, which is a long way from where a group of information technology people usually sit. The senior leaders around me celebrated, and they were right to. We had broken something that had been stuck for years.

What I said at the celebration was that culture is the accumulated friction of everyday decisions, which is the argument I made in Designing Team Culture, and it is why it moves so slowly and slides back so easily, which is Why Is Changing Culture So Hard?. You do not finish it, tick it, and file the certificate. It has to be fed, and the feeding never stops, and a programme that runs 2 years is no longer a programme anyway, it is just how the place works now, or it is nothing.

That fell on deaf ears.

Except it didn’t, and this is where my own part comes into it. Nobody in that room dismissed what I said. They heard it, several of them agreed with it out loud, and then Monday came and they went back to their day jobs, because they had day jobs, with their own deadlines and their own people and their own problems flowing down from above them. Calling it deaf ears is Wayne taking Wayne a bit too seriously. The message landed in a room full of people whose attention had already been committed elsewhere, and in that condition the cheapest available reading of “culture needs continuous work” is “culture is good now, well done us.”

Through the second half of 2021 the score settled back to roughly half of where it had been. Not a crash, not a scandal. It simply stopped being held up, and it went back down to about the level that the actual daily behaviour of the place could support without anybody carrying it.

Because that was what I had been doing, and I did not know how much of it was me until it stopped. I had been retelling the story. Over and over, in every forum that would have me, what the number meant, what it had cost people to move it, what would happen if we treated it as finished. That retelling is real work. It is tiring in a way that does not show up on anybody’s plan, and there is no line item for it, and the moment you stop, the story goes quiet, and quiet gets filled with the easy reading again.

The board that said one thing and meant another

At Inland Revenue we did the visible version. I have written about this before in Two Kinds of Visibility, and about what it actually took to keep those platforms standing in Arcane by Necessity, so I will not retell the whole thing here, but the short version is that we put everything on the wall. A kanban board. A 45-inch TV. Priority one incidents, how many were open, how many we had closed, when the next scheduled reboot was going in. Anyone walking past could see the state of the platforms without asking a soul.

The message we thought we were sending was this: these platforms are old, there is no further investment coming, and we are keeping the tax system standing by sweating assets that should have been replaced years ago.

The message that got received was: Business Platform Services has it under control.

Which is, if you look at it coldly, a completely reasonable reading of a board full of falling incident counts. It was even flattering. And it was heard by people who were not being lazy or unkind, who were deep in their own transformation programmes with their own targets, and who now had one fewer thing to worry about. So the transformation work carried on at pace, and the platform work carried on being absorbed, and nobody upstream ever had to do the arithmetic on what absorbing it cost.

What it cost was people. They got tired, and then they got burnt out, and then they worked out that the future being described in all the transformation material did not have a version of them in it. Their job, as they understood it, was to keep the old world breathing until it could be switched off, and then presumably they would be switched off with it. Some of them left. In the end I left too.

Nobody misheard us. They heard us clearly and converted us into reassurance, because reassurance was the reading that let everyone else keep going.

The version you can watch happen in 10 seconds

I have been using these AI tools daily for a while now, and the thing that keeps stopping me is how familiar the failure feels.

You type a request. In your head sits all the context: what you are actually trying to do, who it is for, what you have already tried, the constraint you did not mention because it is so obvious to you that you have stopped seeing it. None of that goes into the box. What goes into the box is the request.

The model does not sit there confused. It fills the gap from generalisation, produces something confident and well-formed and aimed at the average version of what people usually mean by those words, and hands it back. It heard you. It did not listen, because there was nothing there for it to listen to.

Then you look at the output, feel that small flare of irritation, and rewrite the prompt with the context you should have given in the first place.

That is the same failure I have been describing for 30 years in organisations, running at a speed where you can actually observe it. Seconds instead of quarters. And it is cheap to fix, because the machine cannot take offence and there is no relationship to repair. With people the same mistake takes a year to surface and somebody has usually burnt out by then.

The list I wrote, and what is left of it

A couple of years ago, while I was at Te Pūkenga, I wrote a LinkedIn post with 10 tips for getting your message heard by busy leaders. Keep it short. Lead with the benefit. Bring data. Tie it to their goals. Pick your moment. Follow up in writing. Tell a story. Ask for feedback. Be persistent. Listen yourself.

I wrote it because it looked to me like nobody was listening to the real issues in front of us, and writing the list was easier than saying that out loud.

Reading it now, it is decent coaching material. If a junior person asked me how to get a hearing in a large organisation, I would still walk them through most of it, and it would help them, and none of it is wrong.

It also would not have changed a single thing I have described above. Every one of those tips is a technique applied to the sending. The failures were all on the receiving side, in rooms full of people whose attention was already committed, where the gap got filled with whatever cost them least. You can compress your message, evidence it, time it, and follow it up in writing, and a person with no attention left will still convert it into the reading that suits them.

One of the 10 survives, and not in the form I wrote it. Stay persistent, yet patient. What I meant back then was keep trying until they cave. What I mean now is that being listened to is a thing another person gives you, at a cost to themselves, and it cannot be extracted with technique. So you keep retelling the story where there is presence in the room, and where there is not, you stop spending yourself on it and carry on with the work. That is not giving up. It is knowing what you are paying for.

And it goes the other way first. If I want that from someone, I have to have paid it forward: sat there, put my own day down, listened to somebody’s problem all the way to the end without reaching for a solution, and acknowledged that they have a voice and I heard it. Just that. Most of the time nobody wants the solution anyway.

So the tip I would give now is not on the list at all. It is a sentence you say before you start.

Can I have your attention for a moment? I need you to listen to this. You do not have to fix anything.

I still get it wrong at home. But I ask now, and that has been enough.

When we moved house, the hardest part was not the lifting. It was the packing, and inside the packing, the deciding. You pick up something you have kept for years, you hold it, and you have to work out whether it comes with you or goes into the pile for the op shop, and there is no right answer available to you at that moment, only a guess you will find out about later. On moving day the fear arrives in two flavours at once: that you have brought too much, and that you have thrown away too much. Both feel true simultaneously.

Then you arrive, and it starts again. In the old house my study was on the first floor and the living area was downstairs. In this house it is the other way round, the study on the ground floor and the living upstairs, so for days I walked the wrong way out of habit. I opened the wrong drawer looking for the scissors. I could not remember which box the good knives had gone into, and I could not remember which cupboard I had decided the good knives should live in, because that decision had not actually been made yet, it was being made again every time I cooked. Then there is the street, the neighbours, the new routine, the drive to the shops that takes a different amount of time from the old one.

None of that was a disaster. All of it was uncomfortable. And that discomfort, multiplied by a few hundred or a few thousand people, is what you are asking for when you stand up in front of an organisation and say we are going to change the culture.

That is the part I did not say properly the first time I wrote about this in 2019.

What I had then

A few years ago, while I was at Stats NZ, I wrote a short piece asking why changing culture is so hard. I had the symptoms right. Not invented here, so nothing from an external origin is ever quite good enough. The organisation’s immunity system, which switches on the moment something threatens people’s influence and control, and which does not live in the leadership layer, it lives with the people who man the cogs. Culture wrapped around leadership, strategy, structure, process and people like a rubber band, so that when you pull on one part of it, the whole thing snaps back to where it started.

I still think that is right. But it describes the machine, not the people inside it. What I could not name then were the two things underneath, the two that decide whether anything moves at all.

Belief and fear.

Belief

The status quo is a comfort zone people have earned, day in and day out, over years of doing the same thing with no threat to their safety and no threat to their routine. Ask them to work differently and you are asking them to move house. The boxes, the wrong drawer, the scissors.

So the standard answer is that you need a visionary leader, someone who paints the picture of the future and pulls people towards it. Apple gets cited, and Steve Jobs, and the argument is not wrong, but look at the position he was standing in. He was the founder. He was also the employer. If the vision failed, he failed himself, and everybody could see he had put himself on the line to the same degree he was asking of them.

Now take a senior leader of similar seniority in a large organisation. Not the founder. Not the employer. An employee, like everyone else, with a manager above them, a contract, and a term. They can paint the same picture, with the same conviction, in the same words, and from what I have watched, belief tops out somewhere around half. Maybe 50 to 60 percent of the people underneath will take it on. The rest will not.

They will not because they have no skin in the game, and because they have seen this film before. The senior leader can leave. The senior leader can be overruled by someone more senior, a chief executive, a chair, a board, or the founder himself or herself. The vision can survive one restructure and be quietly dropped in the next. And what people are being asked to sign up to, in the meantime, is a way of working that makes their own job harder today, for a benefit that lands somewhere else, later, if it lands at all. They are reading the odds correctly.

Fear

Fear does the work belief cannot. Fear of losing your job. Fear of losing your subsistence, the mortgage, the school fees, the amount that arrives in your account every fortnight. Fear of losing your seniority, your influence, your position, the standing that took you 15 years to build and can be removed in a 20 minute meeting.

Ask why some organisations change quickly and the answer is usually sitting right there. When people genuinely believe the organisation may not be an ongoing concern, they move. Their livelihood is at stake, so they adapt, they adjust, they learn the new system, they stop arguing about whose team owns what. Belief and fear point the same way for once. And a second belief switches on alongside it, that if they do not contribute to the change, they will be as guilty as everyone else for not putting in.

Not everyone behaves rationally. Some people look at exactly the same situation and say, this ship is going down, why am I still standing on it, and they go. They are weighing a different risk, and from where they sit it is a fair call. Self-interest is part of belief too. A person who believes the effort is wishful will not spend their remaining energy on it, and they will certainly not be moved by a poster in the lift lobby.

So fear moves people. It also moves people out the door. Fear on its own, with no belief attached to it, buys you compliance and a resignation queue.

Why you cannot do it one lever at a time

Belief without fear gives you polite agreement. People nod in the workshop, they take the sticker, they go back to their desk and do what they did last week, because nothing bad happens if they do. Fear without belief gives you compliance, which looks like change for about two quarters, until people work out the minimum they can do without being noticed. You need both, pointing the same direction, at the same time.

That is why culture cannot be changed sequentially. People are programmed to do things one at a time, so we take strategy this quarter, process next quarter, technology after that, and people when the budget allows. It is orderly, it fits on a Gantt chart, and it fails, because every lever you have not pulled yet is a question you cannot answer, and every question you cannot answer is a reason not to believe.

Someone asks what happens to his or her role in the new structure, and if the structure work has not started, you have nothing to give them. Someone asks why the leadership still behaves the way it always did, and if you have changed the process but not the behaviour above them, they will believe the behaviour, because that is the part that decides their next performance review. People read what stays the same far more carefully than they read what changes.

That is the rubber band. Culture wraps around leadership, strategy, structure, process and people. Pull one of them on its own, and you feel the tension for a while, and then it snaps back, and everyone who did not move feels quietly justified for not having moved. Pull all of them together and the whole thing travels.

What is invisible from the outside is how much preparation that takes. When an organisation appears to change quickly, you are watching the last 10 percent. The other 90 percent happened before anything was announced: the sequencing, the deciding of who can answer which question, the working out of what people will ask on day one and what the real answer to each of those is. That preparation never shows, which is exactly why the next organisation copies the visible part and wonders why it snaps back.

What I could and could not do at Stats NZ

Inside my own group, it worked. Over 2 years the engagement score in my area went from -14 percent to an NPS of +50. Not because I gave better speeches. In my own patch I could pull all of it at once, who led what, how the work was structured, how the process ran, who sat in which seat, and I could answer nearly every question a person put to me on the spot, myself, without going away to check. Belief was available because the answers were available. And fear had a floor under it, because people could see I would take the hit before they did.

Outside my patch I had none of those levers. I could influence, I could argue, I could write. The wider organisation had its own rubber band, and it snapped back, and I sat there writing a short article asking why changing culture is so hard, which is how the first version of this piece came to exist.

That is the limit of the story. I have changed the culture of a group I was accountable for. I have not changed the culture of an entire organisation from the position of an employee, and I have not met many people who have, unless the organisation was frightened enough to let them.

When the senses agree

Here is the test I use now. It is not scientific, it is just what I have watched happen. Culture has changed when what people see, what they hear, what they feel, what they taste and what they smell all agree with each other.

They see leaders doing the new thing when there is no audience in the room. They hear the same story from their manager, from the chief executive, and from the person two teams over. They feel it in what happens to them personally, their workload, their pay, their standing, whether the person who spoke up last month is still here. They taste it in the small daily things, the meeting that got shorter, the approval that took a day instead of a fortnight. And they smell it, because people can smell a change programme that is not real from a long way off, the same way you can smell a house that has been repainted to cover something.

If four of those agree and one does not, people believe the one that does not. Every time. That single disagreement is where belief leaks out, and once belief has gone, all you have left is fear, and fear on its own will get you through a transition and hollow out the place on the way.

I know where the scissors live now. It took a lot longer than I expected it to.