RIGHT ON TIME
Diana Hogbin-Mills is instilling a coaching culture at Network Rail that is collaborative, challenging, accountable and customer-driven. Her aim is to have everyone capable of being coach-like; her ultimate goal to make the railway operator a safer, more inclusive organisation.
Changing the culture in an organisation as large as Network Rail, which employs 35,000, is no mean feat. But it is one Diana Hogbin-Mills is helping to achieve.
The head of talent and executive development, who joined in February 2012, is playing a key role in bringing about a gradual shift from the traditional male-dominated, more directive culture, to one in which employees are becoming ‘coach-like’.
Of course, if ever the organisation gets it wrong, the press is quick to pounce. Network Rail was recently in the headlines after being fined for failing to meet punctuality targets. But it has shown itself willing to address its mistakes.
Network Rail also hit the headlines in July when the Transport Salaried Staffs Association launched an equal pay claim, the largest in its history. The claim involves 30 women, but could cover 3,000 if the case is won, according to the union.
Whatever the outcome, Hogbin-Mills stresses that diversity is higher than ever on the agenda, and that now is a really good time for women to join the organisation, especially those interested in engineering and technology.
An attractive prospect
Hogbin-Mills acknowledges that Network Rail may not immediately come to mind when thinking about companies contributing to the UK’s economy. But as the owner and operator of all Britain’s railway infrastructure, including 20,000 mile of track, some 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts and over 2,500 stations, it is a significant contributor. It is also undergoing many changes to make it more attractive to today’s workforce, including initiatives to improve safety and diversity.
“We have a number of staff networks with growing membership, each sponsored by an executive committee member. We are putting a much stronger focus on our early engagement activity than ever before, both as an individual company and as part of the whole rail industry.”
For example, Network Rail is running the UK-wide ‘Girls in IT – Could IT B U?’ competition annually until 2016, and will seek to raise awareness of the competition among 2,000 females aged 16-18 in 2014, 3,000 females in 2015 and 4,000 females by 2016.
At the heart of it
Although coaching has been around for some time in Network Rail, when Hogbin-Mills joined, a strategy did not exist. She was soon given a remit to redesign, implement and evaluate a centralised coaching and mentoring capability across the organisation.
She brings to the role, determination, passion, energy, creativity and a strong business focus. She is also lucky to have senior buy-in.
“We are fortunate to have an HR director, Richard Doyle, and an executive committee, who are fully supportive of coaching. We also have people internally who coach as part of their day job. They are passionate about coaching and much of what we have achieved is through them.”
Hogbin-Mills says: “Coaching and coach-like behaviour are now at the heart of many of our activities, including improving safety, increasing our leadership and people management capability and raising employee engagement.”
Empowering the people
“Network Rail has committed to our stakeholders – the Government, passengers, train and freight operators and unions – a series of deliverables in order to build a better railway for a better Britain. This, in part, requires us to do more with less. To achieve this we need to empower our people.”
Hogbin-Mills has had a number of different careers spanning market research, strategic marketing and HR consulting, in both public and private companies, large and small. She ran her own talent management consultancy, partnering with a US talent management, career development and employee engagement organisation, building a client base with global brands, including Nike and Invesco, and working around the world with the likes of NetApp, Amgen and Autodesk.
“I think the one thing that links them all is their focus on people and their behaviours, either as a customer or employee… quite a change from my first degree in mathematical sciences – but that’s another story!”
She is certainly still interested in facts and figures: “It is great fun to find out what people know about Network Rail and then share with them a few unusual facts. For example, “did you know that we’re the country’s biggest user of electricity?”
Time to listen
However, she has always had an interest in people, too, she says. “I used to read autobiographies in my teens. I was fascinated about what made people tick. While I was studying a psychology degree with the Open University, as a mature student… I started hearing more about this thing called coaching in the circles of personal development.”
“I went along to some early meetings discussing coaching and coaching skill courses and I became hooked.”
People inspire her, she says. “That may sound hackneyed, but the thing that gives me the energy to do what I do is the stories I hear from people who have done amazing things…hearing their journey, the ups and downs and what they have learned along the way. Such as how they realised that by not taking the time to listen to everyone in their team, they had probably left individuals feeling isolated and bullied.”
Coaching behaviours
Hogbin-Mills describes a set of four behaviours (rather than values) underpinning Network Rail’s desired culture: collaborative; challenging; accountable and customer-driven. On the latter, she says: “There are lots of passionate people in the railway. They love the steam and the track; their whole life is the railway. It’s about helping them think not just about the railway, but also the customers – helping them to lift their eyes.”
“Challenging [as a behaviour] is fascinating because we have lots of people who are used to a hierarchical band structure. So how do we get them challenging from a place of curiosity rather than seeking to blame?”
“Accountable is about taking responsibility, not just about getting the job done. We have a policy for everything to try and protect ourselves, but we are working to streamline these and to work with people to take greater responsibility. We can’t mandate for every scenario.”
The organisation has a small pool of preferred external coaches, and has reduced the cost of external coaching by 30-35 per cent “which means we can do more”, she says.
As such, she has introduced a set of criteria around the number of coaching hours, supervision and CPD. Business acumen is often more important in coach selection than where coaches did their training, she says. That said, “I had a discussion with a regional director who said they didn’t want a business coach but a psychological coach who could help them maximise their contribution.”
Better contracting
She has tightened up contracting. In the past, people were learning coaching skills but subsequently “coaching people without them being aware of it”.
Now coach training is offered to frontline managers, and contracting is part of the process. Employees are used to being told what to do, but gradually, as more and more frontline managers are coached or undergo coach training, there is a move away from a 150 year old blame culture of investigation to asking “why did that happen?” towards a fair culture, with Coaching at its heart, says Hogbin-Mills.
She gives the following example:
“There was a near-miss [on the line]. Normally a manager would have acted immediately, but because he had recently been on the coaching skills course, he sat back and asked what had happened, and what the person could learn from it. He said it encouraged the individual to be so much more open. They found a solution that would help everyone in the team to operate more safely. It was really powerful.”
About a year after joining, Hogbin-Mills brought in emotional intelligence expert Dr Martyn Newman: “Since then, interest in emotional intelligence has exploded. Getting people to be open to feedback is transformational.”
Coach-like ambitions
Coaching is helping to increase leaders’ emotional intelligence – one of the measures for leaders. High potential leaders on Network Rail’s Accelerated Leaders’ Programme, which integrates coaching throughout the programme, demonstrate above-average emotional intelligence, compared to the rest of the organisation.
An internal coaching portal has been set up where anyone from the business can sign up to a qualified internal coach.
“We’ve also increased our CPD activity, held internal coaching conferences, trained more people in coaching skills (including Coaching for Safety Excellence), qualified one of our coaches to be a supervisor and run an internal team coaching programme.”
The coaching strategy is to have ‘everyone capable of being coach-like’: “This links into Network Rail’s ambition to be a safer, more inclusive organisation.
“To help realise our strategy, we’ve also established a coaching steering group to put in clear governance around our activities, we are creating a regional coaching network to further support coaching to become part of everyone’s everyday activity and finally, something I am particularly excited about, we are creating our own coaching and mentoring app to record coaching hours.
Hogbin-Mills is also rolling out mindfulness for leaders “to get people to stop and reflect.”
“Historically it’s been about competency training, but going forward coaching is being increasingly integrated into all people training, and getting great feedback. It is often cited as the best part of the course.”
What makes her, her? “Energy, doing things the hard way, which has built my resilience, learning from my mistakes and striving to make myself a better person.”
She is passionate about the wider impact that coaching style conversations can have:
“Something I felt was wonderful and that made me laugh out loud was when my eldest son, who is seven, asked me his first coach-like question.
“In response to a conversation we were having, he asked ‘and what are you going to do about that, mummy?’ ”
If we can help more people, young and old, to be more coach-like, I think we will more amicably and collaboratively solve our challenges.”