Flower power to the people

Adrian Gilpin is the man Punch Pub Company has brought in to boost business by focusing on people. Phil Mellows investigates

The hippies are back. And this time they mean business. Think about it. Those drop-outs of 30 years back. How old would they be now? Fiftyish? And what would they be doing? Apart from a handful still holed up in a commune in the Welsh hills, they are probably living quite ordinary lives, doing quite ordinary jobs.

And it is statistically certain that some of them - and not just Bill Gates and Richard Branson - are capitalists.

You might just be able to spot them hanging out at the Institute of Directors. A tell-tale trimmed beard, a few wisps of hair below the ear-line, a tie-dye grandad vest under the Savile Row shirt. But what about those principles? Whatever happened to peace, love and understanding?

Adrian Gilpin believes they may be making a comeback.

Who is Adrian Gilpin? Ask any one of the 318 staff at Punch Pub Company's headquarters. He has spoken at their last two conferences. In fact he has transformed their last two conferences from a dry series of board reports into something that is, well, far-out and maybe even a little mind-blowing - for many in the audience at least.

Adrian is the founder and chairman of the Institute of Human Development, an organisation dedicated to nothing less than the pursuit of human excellence. His name is also attached to a well-known personality test - the Aspell-Gilpin Profiler - and a best-selling book called Unstoppable People.

His ideas are gaining currency on the fringes of big business. They don't talk about spreadsheets and systems but turn the focus on the people who do the work.

"Everyone I speak to in business is asking the same question - what's the point?"Adrian said. "It's the same question the hippies asked and the hippy generation is now running business.

"There was a cultural shift in the 1960s that is there again today. It's hard to measure, but it's there. Business has gone so fast that it's all been about efficiency rather than effectiveness and that has created such stress in people's lives. Now we are going back the other way. They are paying more attention to exactly how they are doing things."

By taking their eyes off the bottom line for a moment, and considering what their employees might be getting out of coming into work every day, companies can find that business actually takes off because they have motivated staff who are performing to their potential.

"All it takes is a one degree shift in behaviour and in five years time you finish in a completely different place," said Adrian. "That is what is happening at Punch and I believe it will put it at the forefront of the pub industry."

The conferences he organised were part of a broad HR strategy at Punch which is seeking to develop a new kind of culture at the company. One that, as far as its tenants and lessees are concerned, should ultimately have a positive impact on their dealings with head office.

At his first Punch conference, Adrian wanted to take people by surprise. "It was a big hush-hush secret, even from most of the executive," he said.

The walls of the conference hall were lined with paper and staff were asked to write on one wall what they didn't like about working for Punch and on the other what kind of things they would like to see happen.

"Then we stood everyone in the middle and asked them who was responsible for the bad things," Adrian continued. "Apart from one or two who thought it was 'them' everyone put their hand up.

"It was an emotional, powerful moment. Everybody was looking at their feet. It showed that people are intelligent. They know that it's about how they feel, that leadership is not about 'them' but about how people feel when they are at work. It is about giving people a choice and it is something every single person does.

"When it comes to making a relationship with a licensee, for instance, it's something that only they can do themselves."

The graffiti, cut out, is still pasted around the walls of Punch's Lichfield office.

For the second conference staff were asked to work a shift at one of the pubs, talk to the licensee about what they thought of the company and then write down what Punch could do to improve things.

Aha, you say, but that's going to cost money, isn't it?

"It's true that most organisations will come up with an excuse for not doing something better. It will say there is no money for it," admitted Adrian. "But if you can get a culture in which people are expected to find solutions and they feel they are making a contribution by doing that, they will find ways without having to spend any more money.

"The astronauts in Apollo 13 seemed to be dead. But they found a way to survive. I believe the only limits to what you can achieve are at the cutting edge of physics. They are way beyond what you feel they are but we are all living in a bubble we have made for ourselves. People who see beyond that bubble are the leaders."

There is a sense of danger about this, in the breaking of boundaries, that Adrian believes is an essential part of it all.

"People like the buzz, and if they don't get it at work they will go off and do scary things in their leisure time. Or they will turn to alcohol or drugs for their kicks. They don't want the kind of life where they are shut up in boxes.

"If you can create that in a business, get the adrenaline going, you can get people hooked."

For Adrian this feeling is the essence of a successful organisation. His argument is that, in most cases, the people who work for a company are kicked and shoe-horned into its systems. His alternative is to "focus on human beings" and develop the organisation on the foundation of their diverse personalities.

"People are put on training programmes but they don't really want to do it when they get back to work. They need to want to do whatever it is they've been trained for, otherwise it's just ticking boxes."

Box-ticking, in which people complete a course but don't necessarily take the benefits of the training into work with them, is widely disparaged. But companies can't help but like it. Ticking a box has the flavour of achievement about it. It is something tangible and you can tell when you've done it. In contrast, what Adrian talks about seems both daunting and difficult to get a grip of.

These are "soft concepts" he admits. "It is about changing the feeling of going to work. It's the emotional environment."

You will have noticed that it is in the nature of this kind of thinking that it is a little slippery and open to a natural scepticism, a suspicion of tree-hugging among the workforce.

"Some wait to see whether it's all some drug-induced hallucination," said Adrian. "Some still say that management isn't interested in hearing negative stuff about the company."

"We had staff coming out of the first conference saying it's a complete load of rubbish," confessed Punch commercial director Francis Patten, more bluntly. "But the second conference clinched it for some of those and now I'd say we've got 75 or 80 per cent on board."

And 80 per cent is probably good enough for Punch's purposes.

Punch Pub Company staff get Soul Power​

As part of the next phase of Punch Pub Company's cultural transformation all 318 staff have been given a year's free membership of Soul Power, a web-based personal development programme developed by Adrian Gilpin.

It starts with a personality test which sorts people into nine personality types: perfecter, carer, achiever, creater (sic), observer, belonger, adventurer, warrior and acceptor.

The theory goes that, by having a better understanding of who they are, people can change their behaviour in order to feel happier and more comfortable with themselves.

They can also gain an appreciation of the ways in which other people are differen