Fiona Stark

Fiona Stark is General Counsel at E.ON, and a champion of Future-Engage-Deliver, and she’s been asking the legal firms that she employs to imagine a world and a way of working with E.ON that is very different from the one which currently exists. “We are up to something new here” she explains “and recently we invited all the external legal firms we use to a meeting in order to explain the changes that are going on. Instead of going straight to the business agenda I asked them to imagine a different future  – one where they would be proud of working with us, where they would be as passionate about our customers as we are, where they would be bringing innovative ideas to the table and where they would be billing us by value rather than by the hour – because at the end of the day our customers are paying their bills”.

“Painting a strong picture of the future helped me to engage people in a way they didn’t expect – and this was important because we want and expect to build much bigger relationships and want a quite different mindset from our partners in the future. We want external lawyers who can help us come up with new and creative answers not people who tell us what their services are. This is a wake up call for some firms of course because it requires a different level of partnership and collaboration than we’ve ever asked for before.”

Fiona Stark’s invitation and way of opening this meeting is a great example of how to use vision to energise what might otherwise have been a fairly dry meeting. It took courage and confidence to set a new context in which relationships are paramount but in doing so she opened up the possibilities for much needed new thinking and conversation. (For a longer version of this article click here).

Leadership nudge: Where do you have relationships which are a bit stale? What new conversation could you open up with them?

By Anthony Landale, FED consultant and coach and Editor of Future, Engage, Deliver and Leadership Plain and Simple