Innovation for Business Leaders, Putting the Heart Back into Business

Article by Andrew Thornton co-author, with Eudora Pascall, of Putting the Heart Back into Business: How to place people, planet and purpose at the core of what you do out

There’s an adage in business that says, ‘what gets measured gets done.’ In my experience this is true, and if you want to get business leaders on board, especially CFOs (who today arguably hold disproportionate power on most boards), you have to make it measurable. As part of my journey to help develop the ‘heart in business’ concept, we used my London supermarket Thornton’s Budgens as a laboratory to experiment with ideas and I sought to find a way to measure its heartbeat.

My theory was that if you could measure the heartbeat of a company through each of its employees, you’d be able to get a much better sense of how things were going than any P&L could ever tell you.

Innovation for Business Leaders, Putting the Heart Back into Business

The situation Tesco got itself into pre-2014 is a good example of this. They lost their focus on the customer being king and started to focus more and more on the numbers. The reports about the culture were pretty bleak – yet each year their profits increased. Of course, as it transpired, the board and shareholders were being misled by false numbers and the Serious Fraud Squad ended up being called in. With a heart index measurement in place, I believe their board would’ve had a much earlier warning that the train was about to crash.

My search led me to a partnership with BEING at Full Potential whose approach is straightforward – the outputs of a business are the sum of how all of its employees show up each day (on top of the given market and environmental circumstances in which the company operates), and you can measure how these people express themselves. You can then start to see how you can grow individuals and give teams access to more of their own potential.

The outputs measured at Thornton’s Budgens (as a small business) were mostly financial – sales, margin and costs. We used to top that up with an employee survey every 18–24 months. BEING at Full Potential studied how big corporations measured input and made sure their model included the most common measures used in balanced scorecards, such as inventiveness, customer orientation and employee engagement.

However, some important aspects are rarely measured. They examined how the Indian mystics looked at life and considered many of the psychological aspects that I know impact people’s behaviour such as gratitude, individual awareness, humility and trust vs control. The data is captured by employees filling in an 83-question survey.

This is unlike most employee engagement surveys, which tend to be linear – i.e., there are a set of questions about your manager, a set about working conditions, and so on. With this model, the questions are used to generate 23 dimensions against which you can measure human behaviour – and how you score on each dimension is drawn from responses to several different questions.

An individual, team or company can measure how well they’re expressed on each of these 23 dimensions. I’ve intentionally used the word expressed – it’s not that you’re good or bad; what’s measured is how well you can tap into that dimension.

Early in 2017, the whole team at Thornton’s Budgens took the survey. We were 3 years into our journey to becoming a more heartful business and I wanted to see how it had impacted our performance and understand how we could access even more of our human potential. To benchmark our results, we recruited another well-run Budgens store as a control group. The store, in Islington, was in many ways similar to ours, but they hadn’t done all the heart work with their people. To help us make the comparison, their team took the survey at the same time as ours.

What the Human Potential Assessment gives you is data about how people feel about key issues facing the organisation and how that’s showing up to the outside world. It presents the ‘now’ in a unique way, allowing a trained Human Potential facilitator to work with the leaders of that company to identify how they might be able to develop their culture in a more heartful way.

When we compared our data with the Islington store’s, we scored higher on every single measure and our scores where much more consistent than theirs. That suggested to me that our heart work had helped us produce a more balanced access to the total human potential of our team.

Overall, the data showed that we were using 64 per cent of our human potential versus Islington’s 59 per cent. Indexed, that was 8 per cent higher; and our 2016 versus 2015 sales performance was 10 points higher than theirs – a direct correlation. Accessing 8 per cent more human potential led to a 10 per cent increase in sales. Even more astounding was that our average length of service, at 8.4 years, was more than three times higher than Islington’s.

Here are some other financial measures (all covering the previous 18 months):

Margin: up 3 points Waste: down 4 per cent Packaging costs: down 31 per cent Repairs and maintenance: down 17 per cent Credit card and bank charges: down 19 per cent

In simple terms, the combination of a clear purpose and our heart approach helped our people develop a sense of care and responsibility that ensured they attended to details such as waste and packaging costs. It makes sense to me that helping people to be more authentic and harnessing more of their potential will lead to improved financial performance.

We then used the model to help us develop to the next level – but that’s another story!

To access a free Human Potential survey, please use this link: http://www.heartinbusiness.org/freehpassessment

Article by Andrew Thornton co-author, with Eudora Pascall, of Putting the Heart Back into Business: How to place people, planet and purpose at the core of what you do out April 21st 2022.