An interview with Kevan Hall

Citation

(2007), "An interview with Kevan Hall", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 21 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2007.08121eaf.001

An interview with Kevan Hall

An interview with Kevan Hall

Kevan Hall is the author of Speed Lead – Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies. He is also the author of Effective Cross-cultural Meetings and a regular speaker at international conferences. Kevan founded Global Integration Ltd in 1994 to focus on the needs of people and organizations who work internationally. He manages his own cross-cultural and remote organization and has clients and suppliers around the world, so he has to practice what he preaches.

What attracted you to working in this field?

I was working internationally within the company Mars for most of my corporate career. I did a number of things in human resources and in manufacturing and planning, and then towards the end I was responsible for learning and development in a number of different countries. I was traveling all the time, doing about three countries a week, and constantly going from one meeting to another, so I became very interested in cultural differences.

At the time we were setting up new businesses in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Russia, so we were very different cultures. At the same time we sold the European businesses together in one business, so we worked much more closely with different cultures – we had guys sitting in Germany managing people in the UK.

I found this quite complex but quite fun. Originally I was interested in cross-cultural working but then I quickly realized that the difficulties did not just involve cultural differences but also the fact that I could not get face-to-face with people. When you are in the same base you can look each other in the eyes and solve the problem, but you cannot do that when you are in different countries, or not as often, and the costs were going up and it was getting slow to get things done.

My original interests were the skills of working internationally, so when I set up my own business 14 years ago that was the focus. We started with cross-cultural working and how to make remote teams work. We trained about 40,000 people in over 200 companies to teach skills of working together internationally. One thing that we noticed is it is a big challenge to get people working together internationally, but once you do connect them up the problem is you get too much communication; all of a sudden there are too many meetings, too many teams and too many emails.

When we sat down to write a book a few years ago we came to realize that actually a lot of what was working well in training involved simplicity; how do you break down all this complex stuff, how do you really make it work. And so half of what we do now is training people to work internationally; and the other half is how to speed up all this complexity.

What kind of reaction do people have to the suggestion that there is too much communication in businesses?

It is quite interesting because initially when you say there is too much communication going on people are a bit shocked, because the outcome of every training course they have ever been on is that there should be more communication, or more teamwork. But when you hold the mirror up and say “Is this happening to you?” the answer is usually yes, and if you ask people whether meetings are worthwhile they say no. When I ask people how many emails they get, and how many they need it is always a fraction of that amount. So I think that people very quickly recognize it, despite it appearing counter cultural. Having been brought up in a company where teamwork is the right answer it is also a shock for me, and it is very hard to break out and say, well I actually do not need to have a team for this.

What is the best medium for communication if meetings are not the answer?

I think you have to consider the purpose of the communication. If all you are doing is sending me information then do not get on a plane and come and visit me, I would prefer an email if it is just facts, information. If you really want me to interact with you and participate then let’s try and do face-to-face if we can. We have a bandwidth scale in the book: one end is face-to-face, the other end is just text, and you can use that to think about what is the right technology for the task.

We used to do a version on one of our training courses, a simulation where we give people the same tasks to do, and some can do it face-to-face and some just by text, to see what works. Unless there is a need for a visual component in what you do, the visual stuff actually slows things down. So telephone calls are much quicker than a face-to-face conversation, because once we are face-to-face we start to diverge a bit and chat about other things. It is not that face-to-face is always better; it is just that some situations such as interviews or conflicts really need a face-to-face discussion. But we have not got time to do that because we are too busy trying to listen to PowerPoint presentations!

Do employees still need to be trained in teamwork skills?

Yes. I am not saying that teams are not important; I am just saying you do not need them very often. So when you do need them, they are so critical and so expensive you better get them right. There is a saying in training that if you are only trained to use a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – and teams are our hammer.

One of your chapters is titled “Dismal meetings, useful coffee breaks”. Are you suggesting that informal learning is more beneficial than formal learning?

I think there is a place for both. What happens in the very dispersed kind of organizations that I am working in is that there are very few informal contexts, so what we need to do when we are face-to-face is allow that informality to happen, because it will not happen by email. In a traditional office you will probably bump into each other at the coffee machine, but you cannot do that when you are working virtually throughout the world across 12 time zones.

Do you think that training and development attracts enough attention within organizations?

I would say I did most learning outside of a formal context. I did fantastically well with job rotation. They took a real risk with me by moving me into different job functions. I learned far more moving from HR to manufacturing than I would have on a training course, but that would not have been in the training budget anyway.

A number of the clients we work with do what I call “action learning training”, where you embed skills-learning into a project; I think that is a really valuable way of doing things. I suspect if you look at the whole learning context we probably spend a lot more than we think on learning and development, I just think some of it is misspent; some of it is spent on techniques which just do not work anymore.

What is your biggest achievement to date in the learning and development field?

The team I have got now in my own organization. If you work for a large company you inherit a team; you can add one or two people at the margin but fundamentally you have to work with what you have got. If you start, as I did, a business from nothing and you recruit everyone yourself, the connection with your team is much better because you chose everyone there. If you get recruitment right, everything else is easy.