Market change, economy change, technology change, workforce change, communication change, today change riddles stress cracks in organization foundations.  Whether 80-year-old companies, Fortune 500 stalwarts, or new-technology dynamos, change is as much an on-going assault on organizations as rust is an on-going assault on metal and your change agents are your organization’s saviors.  You see tomorrow’s relevance through your change agent’s lead.

What is your organization’s relationship with change agents?

How you and your organization treat change agents reveals as much about a dedication to relevance as it does about your organization’s relationship to market reality.

Change agents seed organization with the thought-leadership and options for tomorrow’s relevance.  At even greater impact change agents tend, weed, fertilize, and till the soil that produces market fruits.

Change agents, unfortunately, are also the ones with the figurative bulls-eye on their back.

It’s not the strongest species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.  Charles Darwin

Today the Internet and globalization constantly assault an organization’s business foundation.  The speed of information demands people and organizations become resilient to change and resilience to bend is the key to buffet a constant wind of change against organization strategy.

The cost of staying the same is the cost your company’s foundation.  Like a buildings foundation limits the height of a building.   What are you assembling to limit the opportunity your change agents bring?  Resistance limits growth.

Let’s start with how to recognize change agents around you?  Change agents are the ones that say:

• “What about … “
• “I have seen … “
• “We could … if … “
• “Do you think … “
• “Talking at a recent event and … “
• “I was doing some research and perhaps … “

Proclamation alone is not the only way to uncover a change agent.  You can spot change agents through their action?  Change agents are the ones that:

• Design the communication strategy
• Envision a new organization structure
• Lead by example while others stand back
• Scope options A, B, C, and D
• Articulate the difference between a process and the promise
• Revisit previous attempts with new insight based on new context
• Find tools that shine a light on new options
• Propose the unheard of
• Stand behind intent when others abandon the challenge
• Believe in the current talent for getting it accomplished
• Ask ever harder questions, while others tap dance, more concerned with keeping up appearances
• Don’t confuse polite with politics

Leader in change

Leaders create a compelling future-state.  A place people can see themselves succeed.  Leaders do not rule through title.  A titled role does not entitle a fiat of organization compliance.  The best lead through inclusion.  The worst through exclusion.  What roadblocks are you constructing against your change agents?

Controlling bosses and micromanagers are your competition’s strongest asset as they drive talent to regress to the mean.  Worse, controlling bosses and micromanagers drive change agents to check out of conversations or to just leave the organization.  Either way and your competition wins. Unfortunately, petty leaders designate change agents as the problem.  These type of leaders shift blame from themselves not wanting to change or type of teams shift their role in not bothering to understand.

Colleague in change

What are you, as a team-mate, as a manager, as a member of a working group, doing to invite more change agents to speak up?  If you are the person who says, ‘now wait a minute, who can add something on how that could work?’, you invite change.

However, if you are one of the first to roll your eyes or quick to offer another reason that it just won’t work than you feed antipathy and the politics over insight.  Do you lead the blame game?

Agent in change

By the time you hit the ‘print’ button strategic plans are barely relevant.  Stress cracks can’t form if the foundation can’t set.  Today change is constant.  People who can flex and remain resilient to what change demands are the real leaders in your organization:

• Change agents are leaders who bring new ways of thinking,
• Change agents are leaders who commit to on-going professional development to remain relevant,
• Change agents are leaders who are active in the quest for business trends across other sectors
• Change agents are leaders who develop insight from all conversation sources

Change agents do not fit the normal distribution of your organization.  And that is a good thing.  As any normal distribution analysis relies:  it is the dispersion, or spread, around the mean that really lends the most insight.

Change agents lead organization thought diversity, they lead this from 1 or more sigma away from the normal or the average.  So, to increase variance increase healthy conversations and an environment for change agents.

Perhaps we need to think of change not simply event by event, but as a constant organization environmental factor; like salt water’s constant corrosion effect on metal.

Change is not an event, but a siege and the strongest defense to the siege of change is your change agent.

Addendum:  While mucking about on this blog, I found a blog post to share:  An open letter to micromanagers

When performance reviews were created the goal was to collect and share observed performance feedback that would sustain good performance or the observed feedback needed to improve performance.  The performance review would then inform merit increase in salary or bonus based on performance feedback.

The goal:  a pay increase or bonus based on merit.  Transparent for all to see.  For all to count on to manage expectation and motivate.  To provide an organization cultural tipping point of expected performance.

Well, that was the goal or intent before new agendas replaced true diligence; otherwise known as due diligence.  True diligence, an effort to back merit with observable and detailed example, has too often turned into an agenda-driven, force fit to prove a political point.

Merit-based performance would focus on the employee’s behavior that exemplifies excellence or the employee’s behavior that needs to improve.  However, a performance review based on merit is often out-numbered and out-gunned in many organization cultures by 3 agendas.  These 3 agendas destroy transparency and sabotage employee motivation to work.  These 3 are rarely identified by a true name, but exist in their behavior for all to see:

1. Partiality to long-standing friends, especially by appointing them to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications:  Cronyism
2. Policies exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of officials or the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service:   “rule by thieves” affectionately translated to Kleptocracy
3. Group views the world strictly through the lens of its functional goals and judges the relative importance of other activities by the way they affect the group’s objectives:   Parochialism

Engagement becomes a façade when cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism exist, but are allowed or advocated within any organization culture:

• Who gets promoted?
• What type of employee gets the biggest raises?
• Who shows up on the high-profile projects and does very little hard work on them?  People see these in culture very quickly.

Politics trumps merit.

All of those should go to those who have shown reliable, merit-based performance.  When given to those with little merit, but through the politics of the above then you’ve sabotaged engagement and have little hope to achieve true engagement.  Every night at 5pm engagement follows motivation out the door while politics are allowed to exist.

In a one-to-one fight cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism each trump merit.  When cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism gang up meritocracy has no chance.

That is the real cost of culture.  How is your organization spending their time around performance review?  Finding merit or stuffing the ballot box with politics?  I’ve written about no more performance reviews before, why not abandon the whole game and get back to the hard work of delivering to your company strategy and maintaining the bottom line:  people’s motivation?

Jargon, clichés, rhetoric  – talking while saying nothing.   Companies develop their own language or accepted terms.  Professions develop their own lingo.  People use stock phrases or go-to frameworks.  All of these are an attempt to communicate, to create a common understanding, to fit in, to prove what you know, and to make sense of the situation.

The problem arises when these clichés obscure meaning and just fill in dead space.  This leaves people frustrated by lack of progress, lack of clarity, and a host of assumptions, never resolved.

Business jargon has led some to play a game known as bullshit bingo:

• Before a meeting or seminar write out top clichés within your company, team, or profession, as people speak, check off each phrase from your list; keep yourself amused;

• Add to the fun:  before a meeting share your bingo card with others, during the meeting make eye contact to find out who is paying attention to the large amount of rhetoric being slung about;

• Add an element of danger:  agree on a word or catch phrase before a meeting, when a card is complete, be the first to utter something like, “great idea”, your catch phrase, and regale in the glory of your win.  Of course, if “great idea” is your catch phrase to announce to others you won, there is a danger some suck-up, unaware of your game, will steal your thunder.  You might stick with “bingo”, as in “bingo, that’s a great idea boss”.  Ah well, you work it out.

Organization development has a tough enough go of it, as it is.  We organization development folks have a heavy burden:  a business can only develop when its people develop and change is constant.  So, in this challenge where does organization development start and stop?  What is a complete list of what organization development does and does not do?

Organization development needs to be relevant, so for my part I will change the way I talk.  Try to take a little rhetoric out of the world.  Here are 3 business clichés used in strategy, in organization development, in information technology, in project management, or just in conversation around the dinner table.  I now promise to turn from cliché to impact:

1.  Let’s change the framework people, process, and technology to politics, process, and technology

• Seems evident that people are often forgotten in this framework. The benefit of using the work politics is that people drive politics so people are accounted for, but more importantly you begin with the discussion on risk or around stakeholder impact.

2.  Let’s change the entire concept of change management to end-user adoption

• Change management is so often reduced to a process or a task during the project. Seriously, can you get any 3 people to give an accurate description of what change management even is? If we flip our thinking to end use adoption then we build in an expectation and plan throughout for user feedback, for stakeholder design sessions. Ultimately, the switch from change management to end-user adoption means we have not finished until we measure and monitor end-user adoption.
• Take this from a process to a project goal. End-user adoption shifts that focus.

3.  Let’s change seeing is believing to seeing is deceiving

• When someone describes what they saw, they describe what they processed. People communicate through their bias, mood, culture, values, agenda, and a host of other hang-ups we all have in place to make sense of the world.

… monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done.”*

• What you get is what people filter. What you ingest is what you filter. Stop relying on an obvious point you make or a picture you present. Solution: ask more what others see in the data, what others can recap from the assessment, what they think and confirm, confirm, confirm to set, to manage, and to keep on top of expectations.

Join me.  What suggestions do you have to help us move from cliché to impact?

And if you yell, “bingo” in a meeting I facilitate, I appreciate it, you kept me honest.

*The Boston Globe, Ideas Section How facts backfire

Industry myopia is business risk.   People who grow in one industry or cycle through only one industry may seem safe to hire, because they may slot in quicker or bring competitive advantage, but industry myopia rarely meets innovation’s need to break things to start over or to view things from a new angle. 

Innovation depends on breaking things.

New organization growth relies on fresh thinking and challenges to comfort.  A long-standing trend, out of step with today’s talent market, are job roles written to prioritize recruiting people with industry-specific experience at the cost of great technical skills.

Organizations stress to managers, who in turn stress to their talent, the need for innovative thinking and entrepreneurial ways of doing things.  When we look to hire industry-only experts, we exclude a whole range of great talent; talent that can provide cross-industry pollination of ideas, styles, and solutions:  innovation.

Innovative people bring innovative ideas far more than innovative processes bring innovative ideas.

Businesses and operations bandy about innovation and entrepreneurial thoughts as the cure-all to compete and to survive today.  However, innovation is risk.  Entrepreneurs are risk takers. 

A Fortune 500 company that calls out the need for innovation and entrepreneurial, but shies from hiring talent from other industries is an organization surviving on rhetoric.

Risk relies on diversity.  Risk relies on failure.  Hierarchy resists risk.  Hierarchies rely on repeatability, not variance.  Risk is variance.  Risk is not a process.

For more than 10 years I’ve consulted on human capital and continue to run against the tide when I advocate hiring outstanding talent no matter the industry.  Someone with great technical skill, but from a different industry has all the ability to ramp up and learn any industry-specific particulars.

Why convert a financial IT expert into the health care IT world?  The upside for your team or department from an experienced financial IT professional in a health care world is the outside perspective, the specific challenge to, “that’s the way health care works”.

Someone can learn an industry far easier than learning a technical skill or bring practiced competence from repeated delivery.  I can learn industry demands of financial services quicker than I can learn and successfully implement organization change.

The by-product of an industry move is refreshed thinking of the way things are done.  When a hiring company looks to fill a role, bringing together a diverse group means cognitive diversity brings new solutions.  This collaborative excellence is diversity and this is what innovation relies on.

When hiring managers or HR directors insist on 5, 10, 20 years of single industry-related experience in their job requisitions this myopia stems from fear.  When hiring requirements are sent through to recruiters it shows hiring managers are not aligned to today’s mobile workforce and today’s need for innovation:  diversity.

An organization surrenders in the war for talent when a company can not strategically hire from other industries.

Steve Jobs retired last week.  Steve Jobs had incredible impact as Apple CEO as well as a cultural icon whose products re-shaped and re-defined our relationship with technology.  Steve Jobs’ retirement reminds those in technology that a liberal arts view to their work could serve them better.

It might be a stretch to say Apple is everything Microsoft isn’t.  Well, the 2 companies have had a distinctly different approach to their products and different strategic paths through their existence.  Technology and people.  People and technology.

Since last week’s announcement, of all the articles I read on Jobs, I was most taken by The Genius of Jobs, Marrying Tech and Art from The Wall Street Journal’s, get this, Life & Culture section.

Striking a very sober chord in today’s technology first, reality be damned world, in a 2010 speech, Jobs, suggested Apple’s success had more to do with realizing that technology alone answers little.  His quote: ”[i]t’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough.  It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

In the presentation, he illustrates that point through an image of the intersection of 2 streets; to your, and to his left.

The article’s author, Steven Johnson, says this intersection’s image is meant … “as a description of the kind of thinking—multidisciplinary, sensitive to human needs and potential—that created [Apple] products …”

This humble blog’s perspective?  Thank you Steve Jobs.  When is the last time you sat with someone from your technology department who made the way Steve Jobs articulated?

Today, most strategy relies on technology.  The disconnect is that too often technology shows too little commitment to the end-user experience.  The enterprise end-user or as the customer end-user.  Let me clarify that last sentence, the enterprise end-user is also a customer.

Imagine your Information Technology (IT) department committed to an end-user experience similar to Apple’s iPad, the iPod, or iTunes end-user experience or your IT department producing products that are an intuitive joy to work with.  Imagine an IT department that creates products and services that make you say, “wow”, not “why bother”?

Well, there’s your challenge IT:  bring a bit more humanity into your function.  There is too much information in information technology and too little liberal arts.  Perhaps increasing the latter will yield results that “make our hearts sing”.

Technology and people.  People and technology.  Microsoft and Apple?  Are the differences as simple as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?

In their book Putting the Public back in Public Relations authors and technology bloggers Deirdre Breakenridge and Brian Solis wrote, “social media is 10% tool and 90% sociology“.

Let’s start more conversations this way.  Let’s start more designs this way.  Let’s start more requirements this way.

Thank you Deidre Breakenridge

Thank you Brian Solis.

Thank you Steve Jobs.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

What is organization development?

Yes organization development is training and leadership development and coaching and performance management and change management and communications and organization design and competency models and strategic planning and really so much, it is almost more confusing than helpful to really say what organization development is.

This challenge spills over when I am to bring organization development with me to look at a performance management plan, but told not to touch incentives, coaching, or talent development.

Or asked to provide change management, but not allowed to meet with the top of the house to identify communication points or told not to touch skills-gap analysis, training, or performance management.

When I look at an organization, a department, a team, or an individual, I see each in a frame of the system they work within.  The general characteristics of a healthy organization are cohesion, interdependence, and stability.

Systems theory relies on all interaction.  You can not divorce the pieces:  just as you can not take the ocean out of the carbon cycle.

What is organization development?  Well, who really cares, unless it helps people identify a need, overcome a challenge, and maximize resource return.

Simply, organization development is diagnosing the root cause and then designing the critical path to commitment.

Without commitment you only have a perspective.  The diagnosis without the critical path to commitment is rhetoric.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

In collaboration, there is a notion that we share thoughts and perspectives of what we know to make better decisions.

What we know and share is important for context to any decision and you may have seen some or heard something similar to this:

• What you know you know,
• What you know you don’t know, and
• What you don’t know you don’t know

It is not practical to strive for expertise in all areas; to the 2^nd bullet above.

Clearly, a rational person understands that you can not have seen or will have time to acquire all the knowledge available and you simply may not know; to the 3^rd bullet above.

However, there is a 4th bullet to this:

•  What you think you know, but really don’t know

In a healthy environment, admitting what you don’t know is part of the process to come to a shared understanding.

In an unhealthy environment sticking to a point you think you know, but do not really know drives people to defend positions from a point of weakness that can easily turn into an indefensible point of embarrassment.  Why is this bad?

People who know enough to be dangerous, but do not know enough to realize they are wrong< will not back down or admit their lack of knowledge.  Their position is a position of absolute:  they are absolutely correct.

The challenge comes to gently move awareness of what they thought they knew to a space of owning they really did not know what they were talking about.

Not easy.

Not fun.

And if this is senior person to you AND you do not do this with tact, not always a wise career move.

In a 8 steps to better decision making I made a case for a series of steps we go through to filter, to engage, to improve, and to conclude what is noise and what is needed to get to a decision.

1. Noise – all the 0s and 1s/bytes and bits throughout the web, over the airwaves, across the spectrum
2. Research – the initial question, I wonder if… that sends you to seek answers
3. Information – the all-source return dump from your question or a 1-way flare (information is different from communication: see below)
4. Data – the filter to makes sense of what is valuable and what is garbage
5. Communication – the 2-way relay of what you find and what needs further refinement
6. Interpretation – the unaccountable and unseen layers of values, wants, needs, bias, emotions, and agendas (to name a few) that your communication target has filtered your communicate through to draw their own interpretation of the information or data.
• Note: you have no control on how or what you communicate is interpreted as you intended; caution when proceeding
7. Conversation – the deeper dialogue to clarify responsibility
8. Decision – the shared commitment

If you want an idea of your organization’s culture there is no simpler place for this insight than your organization’s social media strategy.  Companies who view social media only as a marketing vehicle miss far more than an opportunity to engage.  It is as likely these companies have lost their employee’s motivation in similar fashion well before.

Is your organization:

• Theory X?
• Paternal?
• Hierarchical?
• Siloed?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy seem restrictive, bureaucratic, controlled or ghost-written,  blogs, no place available for user comments, no RSS feeds or other calls to action, agencies that write content, or site metrics that are not shared?

Or is your organization:

• Theory Y?
• Flat?
• Open?
• Matrixed?
• Transparent?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy use social media press releases, provide internal access to social media sites, post blogs penned and written by who it says wrote them, have internal departments writing their own web content, and openly share site data and metrics?

I wrote in a prior the similarities between social media and organization development the strength of the best organization cultures rely on a work environment that includes:

• Involvement,
• Communication,
• Listening,
• Collaboration

Your organization can not have an open social media strategy if your current organization does not have faith with involvement, communication, listening, collaboration, or the final trump card:  transparency.

The best social media companies rely on transparency for other’s to easily find and share information about your company’s goods and services.

The best social media companies only edit their site comments for fear of spam not for fear of negative comments.

Good social media companies already leverage transparency and involvement of others to provide feedback and gauge the relevance of the company’s message.

Mature social media company policy shows, documents, and leverages open trust for internal employee access to sites while at work.  Access based on a level of trust, not a level of distrust.  The best company’s know they hired, trained, and communicate with their employees the expectation for web access and company information.

The laggard companies that continue to manage in a pre-World War II management philosophy set social media policies because they are certain if their employees have access they will screw up, so the company protects them from themselves; how very paternalistic of them.

Strong cultures base their policies on trust and the strong management expectation to communicate, educate, and train direct reports on what is expected, not why management knows employees can not be trusted.

If web 1.0 brought about the concept content is king, the maturity to a web 2.0 and social media environment are only achieved when living the concept that community is king.

Without community you can’t have motivation.  How can you develop a community unless you are a transparent part of a community?  How do you seek to understand community without spending time invested in a community?  Well, as these hold true to an individual the same holds true for an organization.

Marketing 2.0, web 2.0, and social media present a revolution many companies continue to barricade their citadel gates against.  Is your company leadership and marketing cowering behind the gates hoping to outlast the pagan horde?  Does social media embody the best your organization culture has to offer?  I will look at this in a second, follow-up, post.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Meeting icebreakers can be as painful as a bucket of ice down your shorts.  The icebreaker’s intent?  Loosen things up, meet people, set the stage for effective work.

The challenge, if you are going to use an icebreaker, is to understand the difference between hokey and intentional.

Know your audience is a constant refrain.  But sometimes, as a facilitator, trainer, or consultant,  you may not, always, know your audience preference or style.  Icebreakers run the risk of turning people off before you have even started the heavy lifting on why you are there; that is no good.

Here is an icebreaker, or meeting kickoff, I learned about 10 years ago.  I am fairly certain I saw this at an Appreciative Inquiry training.  Apologies and much appreciation to who introduced me to this.

I particularly like icebreaker as it directly provides context to different perspectives and how people communicate.  I use the icebreaker with groups, I share the concept as an analogy in one-on-one meetings, and I find it not only resonates, but people find the metaphor immediately practical.

Best of all:  it has never been confused with Kumbaya …

I have never written this down, just have it from memory, so here is my first attempt:

Learning Goal: To realize perspectives affect how everyone views things and the impact alternative perspectives has on communication.

Preparation:

Tools: Index cards, flip chart (optional),
Time: as little as 10 – 15 minutes as much as 30 minutes or more – the intent, learning, and takeaway should resonate equally well within most timeframes.

Perspectives Ice-Breaker

1.  Set up:

Ask for volunteers (3 – 5). Tell the volunteers [or the reluctant] they are only volunteering to share their observations with the group. Nothing else is involved, no jumping, no trust fall, nothing but their keen sense of observation.

Tell the group that on each index card a volunteer gets there will be a unique occupation or job title.

The volunteers are handed an index card. They are not to share what is written on the index card. On each index card is an occupation, or job title, for example: race car driver, cook, candle-stick maker.

The volunteers are to take 3 – 5 minutes to look around the room and with the perspective of the occupation on the index card be prepared to describe the room to the rest. Keep in mind to look at the room as this occupation might.

2. Activity:

After 5 minutes, each volunteer, in turn, describes to the others, without telling them, outright, what their occupation is.  The volunteer should share what they see in the room, why it is important to them, and how the room setup impacts them.  Note:  facilitator helps guide the person describing the room with clarifying questions to illicit further insights.

The rest of the room writes down [as individuals or in teams, you decide] what occupation the volunteer is describing:  an electrician, an interior decorator, etc…

All volunteers finish.

Facilitate the room to guess who the first volunteer was, and so on.

Facilitators Note: If guesses are incorrect, work with the volunteer to tease out further details [as time permits] or just ask the volunteer to tell the room or you take the roll over to provide more details until they guess correctly, or you decide to tell them.

Some examples of occupations* and their perspectives may include:

• Secret Service Agent: number of exits, windows, what floor the room is on, how many doors, potential hiding places, drop ceiling, protection …
• Thief: access to sneak in/out, amount of purses laying around, computer bags, jackets, lack of security cameras, lighting (dark), …
• Interior Designer: furniture, décor, color scheme, paintings, light fixtures, carpet, …
• Electrician: the lighting, electric outlets, audio/visual, light switches, etc …
• Fireman: number of exits, fire extinguishers, exit signs, emergency lighting, water, what floor of the building, where the staircases are, emergency exit map on wall, flammable material …

Facilitators Note: Bring the discussions to a close and guide the conversation about some of the learnings in the exercise. Facilitate thoughts and conversation.

Key in on how, despite each of us being in the same room, we each viewed the room through what was important to their own occupation. The perspective of each occupation changed the dynamics of the room.

3.  Key learning opportunities:

1. How this exercise plays out in our professional [and personal] lives, examples you could include as you facilitate the discussion:
   • What is the potential impact of other perspectives to the same issue?
   • Think of a time when this may have played out without you realizing it; was it frustrating for you?
   • Was it frustrating for the other person or the rest of the team?
2. No one perspective is correct, each perspective is correct for each:
   • We all have different perspectives, one is not better than the other.
   • We need to have patience for each other and value other perspectives or viewpoints, as well as realize what we may think is clear for us may not be viewed similarly to another.
3. What should we do differently with this experience in mind?
4. You may think you are explaining your business need very clearly, but not through the other business partner’s filter.
   • Our need to qualify and clarify.
   • Why do you think this is valuable?
   • Try to keep this in mind as we move through the learning or facilitation.
5. On-going learning: After the exercise the facilitator should return to this theme to reinforce the message. For example, if team is terribly bogged-down or stuck, remind them of other perspectives that might help.

*Note:    The possibilities for occupations are up to you.  Do limit the options to only listed only in Section 2; some occupations, obviously work better than others, use your discretion: teacher, movie star, politician; some work better, for obvious reasons.  Alternatively, a police officer and a thief as part of the exercise may describe the same scene, but from different agendas – providing another good learning opportunity.

Also:  

1. This ice breaker can scale up to any size gathering or room
2. This ice breaker can kick off any meeting and any topic.

I look forward to your thoughts, recommendations to clarify, and further insights.

Competitive advantage:  the final frontier.

Today only 2 areas remain for competitive advantage:

1. talent management and
2. project management

Put another way, an organization has 2 ways to beat their competition:

1. their ability to motivate people and
2. their ability to reliably deliver projects.

Talent as a hard asset

Hiring the right talent and keeping that talent motivated and engaged, that is the challenge.  Presumably, all companies hire the best.  So, if you line up all the candidates for one job description across the industry, every company has to assume they would choose the best candidate.

Once that candidate starts, the resume is useless.  Culture takes over.  Politics take over.  Process takes over.  Hierarchy takes over.  Agenda takes over.

That once-eager-go-getter with all the potential and promise?

I am going to make a couple of generalizations:

• people don’t take jobs to do a bad job;
• when a job offer is extended, there is genuine excitement to join;
• people don’t choose to join bad companies

If we work with these generalizations [believe me, economists and sociologists make far weaker generalizations], the way an organization manages talent and motivation becomes a competitive advantage.

The project as competitive advantage

Strategy decomposed becomes a series of projects to implement.

Strategy comes and goes.  If you line up all the 3-ring binder strategic plans within an industry you would find very few that include some huge strategic bet that, if unmet, would bring a company to the brink of ruin.

Strategy design is terribly easy, but the ability to operationalize an enterprise strategy, before the strategy becomes irrelevant, that is where organizations truly succeed.

An organization’s ability to implement a strategy is far more important than an ability to create a strategy.  A company that cannot implement their strategy has far more at risk than the company that implements the wrong strategy.

A strategic plan is only relevant when the goals, objectives, and actions produce a series of projects that move the organization, project-by-project, to achieve the strategy.  When an organization fails to reliably deliver projects on time, on budget, and within scope, they fail to deliver to expectation.

When projects fail, people fail.  When people fail, blame is assigned. When blame is assigned, resentment builds.

A pattern of failed projects seeds doubt.  So, when new projects start, people are less inclined to volunteer to work on any project when failure is the pattern.

Those staffed or charged to lead new projects begin to see that the only people available to work on projects are those not essential to business; if they were important, they would not be available.  What manager would release an important employee to work on a project that will fail and risk the manager’s ability to meet their goals and their performance review at the same time?

Breakthrough or throughput

Deliver on projects, build motivation.  Build motivation, deliver on projects more reliably.  Deliver more reliably, increase margins.  Increase margins, beat your competition.

Breakthrough ideas are nice, but sustainable competitive advantage rarely comes from a breakthrough idea.  What is a breakthrough, though, is the ability to implement a breakthrough idea.

I would prefer an organization that has high project throughput over the breakthrough idea.

Who wins?

If your company and my company recruit the same person and your company can not motivate that person, but my company can keep that person motivated:  I win. 

I’ll take an employee with half the technical skills who is motivated, over an employee with more technical skills who is unmotivated.

If your company and my company need a series of projects to roll out a new strategic plan and your company can not deliver on those projects, but my company can:  I win.

Who’s strategic plan is better is irrelevant.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Does organization culture benefit with bureaucracy?  Bureacracy may, indeed, provide organizations a strong case to manage risk.

Policy, procedure, and bureaucracy tend to creep as an organization grows in size:  revenues, market share, employees.

While a small organization may have flexibility and ad hoc procedures based on 1-on-1 interactions, as an organization adds people the original interactions of smaller teams are stretched beyond 1st-level interaction.  This means the track record of things that may have been consistent is now flexed beyond 1st-level accountability.

You expect an organization grows to meet the demand of added revenue.  However, if your orignal processes and procedures were flexible and not well-documented, you now run a risk to quality when you grow to fast.

If the wheel is wobbly at 5mph it is teeth rattling at 65mph.  The Internet, as a tool, is a good example of the speed element in process:  just because I can do something faster, does not mean I can or should accelerate my output.  If I do not flex to meet acceleration, then acceleration, itself, becomes the stress that cracks quality.

In growing organizations the “way things are done around here”, also known as culture, turns into a secret sauce left to those originally initiated.  With growth becomes new jobs are added.  I’ve seen process and procedure looked at as a burden in organizations that are really only trying to manage and mitigate risk.

The alternative to developing a bit of bureacracy is a shoddy strategy soon left for those who don’t figure the culture out to just flame out.  The people who can not understand the culture needed are too easily relegated to the dustbin comment of “well they just did not fit in the culture”.

To combat risk organizations feel [or actually do] need more process and procedure.  Soon hierarchy is added to a sign off or review of things and to double/triple check decisions or products.  All in the effort to manage and mitigate risk and manage from a smaller shop to a larger, dispersed organization.

In some organizations it seems policy and procedure are intended to make up for active, engaged management or for management by walking around or an organization where management knows each and every employee, their role, their responsibility, their capability, and their limits.

You should not count on culture to snap someone into shape.  Culture is not a management process, culture is a lever for action, not a tool for punishment.  To counter culture [pun intended] policy arises.  Reporting structures become formalized.  Names begin to be replaced by job titles or job codes.

So, in absence of effective management, culture and cultural policy becomes the panacea for active, engaged management.

Business process re-engineering was the intended intervention to poor process.  As a radical review, business process re-engineering is to review an end-to-end process, not pieces or departments within who are part of the process.  If you can not review the process from the input through the final output, you are only adding bureacracy and process.

Organizations should grow and cultivate culture for resiliency, flexibility, rigidity, and flow.  Selective pruning of employees who no longer fit the future-state culture needs of policy and procedure is necessary and on-going strategy to stay healthy.

Here’s a good view to measure your bureaucry:   if you have sign-off authority for something and you can’t-for-the-life-of-you remember the last time you actually reversed a decision to what you were signing and refused to sign-off, then you are within an overly-bureaucratic process.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Project management is a profession.

Project management is a discipline.

Project management is a skill.

Project management is a function.

Project management is a knowledge

Project management is useless without scale and project management helps no one if it is not scaleable.

Compare an accounting function of a Fortune 50 company to an accounting function in a 60-person organization.  The goals are the same, the business function is critical, but the processes of a Fortune 50 accounting department would cripple a start-up.  The start-up employee would topple over trying to maintain form and procedure of a Fortune 50 department and never get time to build the company.

Scale is important to the tools, the techniques, and the discipline needed.

The best project management and the mature project management organization realize that yes, a project management plan rolls up and includes the following:

• quality management plans,
• schedule management plans,
• scope management plans,
• risk management plans,
• communication management plans,
• cost management plans,
• change management,
• staffing management plans,
• work breakdown structures, and
• staffing management plans

But to demand the the process and procedures of project plan sign off and closing have all of these as well as the multitude of tools to design these, is a matter of scale as well as a matter of sanity.

Accounting and project management both demand discipline, but both enable business operations, they do not cripple business operations.  The least amount possible to fulfill operational success, without gumming up the works.

The ability to translate project management rigor to the proper level of control within an operating environment is particularly acute for organizations that manage subsidiaries or manage divisions of various size.

Whether an Enterprise Project Management Office, a Project Management Office, or a project manager, know your audience.  Sure, push for standards, but realize the business of business is business, not unwieldy process chart protocols and templates.

Most, if not all, chafe at process and rigor and discipline.  Push-back on accountability may forever be with us, but let’s try to manage risk with project management, not through intimidation.

No one likes the accounting office, if we are not careful, no one will like the project management office let alone the project manager who arrives to join a team.

Let’s work smarter, not harder – together.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Change is fun for some:  the energy of the unknown, the passion instilled in people looking forward to a new adventure.  Some embrace the unknown as an opportunity to both learn, grow, and stretch their current perspectives.

Change is pain for some:  the feigned excitement for heading into unknown, the new roles and responsibilities to learn.  And having lived through so many failures that all began with the same patterned enthusiasm many can’t be bothered and opt-out.

Which side of the fence are you on?  Which side of the fence is your team on?  Which side of the fence is your organization on?

The Communication Mission

Regardless of the fun for some, there is a distinctly important group of people who need a bit more assurance that this time things are different, that this time you and your executives are not seemingly shooting from the hip, that this time you and the organization will see it through, that this time what you say will be delivered as expected.

Change requires a whole lot of communicating.  A main cause of change resistance is the resistance to enter, with confidence, into the unknown.  Think about this in your personal life, would you plunge into an effort where you had no idea what the end-game meant or looked like?  Now multiply that feeling horizontally and vertically through your organization.

If you believe you know what the end state is, are you confident your organization is equally confident?

To address this sense of aimless drift comes when you build your mission, vision, and values into your communication DNA.  When communicating change, if you are not completely and absolutely aligning change to your organization mission, your vision, and your core values, you’ve more than likely lost the war, let alone all the battles.

Mapping what you say you will do to these quality criteria for all the organization does takes your mission, vision, and core values from the 2 dimensional to the 3 dimensional.

As much as a strategic plan is improved through the value chain of goals, objectives, and actions.  Your communication, let alone your change portfolio, should undergo a distinct effort to align to the value of your mission, vision, and core values.

Mission Impossible

A lot of missions plainly stink.  Too many organization missions are built by people who believe their position alone shows them to be far smarter than their organization.  These self-appointed organization Mensa members take it upon themselves to design their version of the mission as the only logical option.

These stewards of the future then bring back their mission, vision, and core values and impart it to the organization … magnets anyone?  This misses more than just a few principles needed for successful change and adoption.  Just as you can crowdsource your organization strategy, you can crowdsource your mission, vision, and values, if you really care about organization alignment.

A further benefit of mapping communication to mission, vision, and values is the ability to let you and your organization realize if your mission, vision, and values are worth the ink used to print them.

There is no quicker way to decouple your organization than the revelation of a an organization with a wildly loose herd of change projects that are disjointed, malnourished, or walking dead.

• Couple projects to your mission, vision, and values.
• Link them.
• Cull them.
• Align them.
• Tether them.
• Reposition them or retire them.

Make the case for change alignment through communication’s alignment to mission, vision, and values along the project life cycle.

The Vision for Value

The effort to communicate change aligned to mission will seem hokey at first.  It will seem forced.  Just as starting any exercise always starts with a bit of stretching and a bit of pain, this effort needs a learning curve before it proves its value.  But there is no doubt through a commitment to aligning these the value is realized.  Your mission will move from magnets to common business dialogue.

Communicating is a critical component to differentiate from getting it done to getting it accomplished.

A distinct benefit is the chance to involve more of your organization in developing the mission, vision, and values together.  An organization of people who opt-in is certainly a preferred workplace to one of people who opt-out.

Poor communication is a symptom, not the disease.

The goal of communication, change, and your mission is transparency.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

A successful message retains the oomph of intent.  For this to happen communication must travel an obstacle course to reach each person.  Some of the bulwarks against communication’s smooth path to understanding include:  values, bias, mood, culture, agenda, and emotion.  These force communication through filters that affect both the intent and the impact of the message communicated.

Each layer adds a filter to sift, interpret, and frame communication that leans more towards confusion than clarity, and confusion is the biggest enemy to change.  Communication has a rough road to travel to successfully reach your target.

One filter we all may have experience with is the rational/emotional dialogue where we find at the individual level the rational dialogue is many times trumped by the emotional dialogue:

• Waking up at 5 am to go to the gym is the rational payoff to get in shape
• Sleeping in late is the emotional payoff to stay within a comfortable bed

The battle between the rational and the emotional is constant.  This rational/emotional filter where one consistently overrides the other is how habits form.  If we want change to succeed we need new habits to form.

To understand the potential filters involved an organization change effort needs to understand 2 items:

1. The conversations by which people interact and
2. The structures that shape these interactions

These conversations happen at their view, not your view, their frame, not your frame.   These provide a view of the organization’s filter, or culture.  Rule 1 in communication: know your audience.

The more the communicator ignores how filters affect communication, the more the communicator discredits the importance of people.

So, as you view the world through your filter, keep in mind the world views your message through their filter.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

The success, or failure, of organization change may have more to do with the frame of change you and your leadership view your organization culture through than any other challenge to change.  Adopting and sustaining organization change rarely succeeds if you can not frame communication to emotionally and rationally resonate throughout the organization.

For change to hold, you need to capture both the head and the heart of the organization.  The key to both is to clearly understand the frame to view your organization in.  Does 1,2, or 3 describe the frame you view your organization through?

1. An organization is the rational coordination of the activities of a number of people of the achievement of some common explicit purpose or goal, through division of labor and function, and through a hierarchy of authority and responsibility.  Where the design of the organization is effective to the extent that its information processing capacity matches the level of uncertainty facing the organization.  The organization is viewed as a technical organization.
2. An organization is a coalition with ill-defined and inconsistent preferences with the critical question not how well we are doing? but to whom and for whom are we doing it?  Governance, control and political processes are related to issues of structure developed where coalition s must receive inducements from belonging greater than the contributions they are required to make.  Coalition members, then, are continually calculating whether they might fare better if they altered their participation.  In addition to the allocation of resources, policies, and policy commitments are important, and they are the objectives of bargaining as well.  The organization is viewed as a political organization.
3. An organization is held together by people’s beliefs in a set of norms that make up the organization’s culture.  Organizational and individual effectiveness is enhanced when the organization ensures ‘a maximum probability that in all interactions and in all relationships within the organization, each member, in the light of their background, values, desires, and expectations will view the experience as supportive and one which builds and maintains his/her sense of personal worth and importance’.  Organization development (OD) is concerned with a normative orientation to organizations that lead to prescriptions for change.  The organization is viewed as a cultural organization.*

The challenge of viewing your organization through a frame is that an organization will fit squarely within the frame and you miss those cues or areas outside the frame.  The organization will begin to support only the area within view and important nuances are missed.  More importantly, often termed the Pygmalion effect, the behaviors you see begin to support the frame you view.

Organization change communication often frames either/or views:

• The technical frame of organizations as rational and driven towards efficiency and effectiveness;
• The political frame of organizations as a coalitions bargaining among interests that dominate the allocation of resources; and
• The cultural frame of organizations as internalized rules, structures, and systems that perpetuate and reinforce values and norms

The frame compliments the picture.

The reality:  an organization is never 1 frame, but a mix of all 3 frames.  If you only view the picture with 1 frame than critical nuances outside the border are lost.  To kick change off correctly, you need to take the frame off and realize that your organization exhibits all 3 technical, political, and cultural attributes together, in constant flow.

The frame should not detract from the picture.

Organization are less a technical, political, or cultural organization, because organizations are a combination of all 3.  Ignoring any 1 at the cost of the other(s) means your change misses a host of critical variations.  Isn’t change hard enough to accomplish without the potential to talk over the hearts and minds of the people that within your organization?

The frame you choose uniquely affects and accents the picture; where your real focus should lie.  Be prepared to switch frames readily or better yet to get a better view of the big picture hang remove the frame altogether.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

*Systems Theory for Organization Development; A Social Network Perspective for Organization Development; Noel Tichy

Crowdsourcing relies on people to participate in a meaningful process as potential partners.  In crowdsourcing people who were formally known as the customer now become the collaborator.  The power of collective collaboration can not only drive product innovation, but has been leveraged for decades to build organization strategy.

Where most organization strategy process finds more analogy to Moses’ descent from the mountain, crowdsourcing, itself, is an open call; and an open call to, an often, undefined group.

Crowdsourcing for a solution is the antithesis of the bureaucratic and often autocratic work performed by chosen few, behind closed doors, and then unleashed onto the masses.   What was once kept closely guarded is now outsourced to a group of  people.

Crowdsourcing has a strong sociological theme and shares this vital link with a vibrant change approach known as Appreciative Inquiry (AI).  AI taps into the impact of collaborative discovery, the wisdom of each as well as the collective wisdom of the crowdsourced insights.

An AI process is where people participate and co-create a future they wish to be part of.  Where people formerly known as an audience of employees or stakeholders now become the collaborators and designers who are approached as partners in modeling and forming organization strategy.

An original presentation of crowdsourcing, found in a 2006 Wired article, highlights the power of tapping into the crowd:

• “The strength of a network … is exactly the diversity of intellectual background”.
• “…the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise”
• Central tenet of crowdsourcing is network theory,
• sociologist Mark Granovetter describes as “the strength of weak ties.”

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is usually thought of as a collaborative change approach for organization and community strategy and change.  The AI model relies not on changing people, but, by using a behavioral approach to invite people to engage [that's crowdsourcing] and to build organizations and communities that they, themselves, want to work and live in.

As sociology is the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society, both AI and crowdsourcing tap into the sociological power of people potentially unfamiliar with each other or with the situation.

Crowdsourcing your organization strategy using AI principles moves the entire change management conversations from “buy in” to “all in”.  There is no stronger way to create organization alignment and commitment than to invite people into a conversation.

Typically, AI is leveraged as an organization development or change process that involves collaborative discovery towards an organization’s peak effectiveness.  More importantly, AI then invites people to contribute new knowledge and shared knowledge towards a future-state organization they want to be part of.  AI is often leveraged to maximize crowdsourcing for:

• Knowledge management,
• Organization innovation,
• Joint ventures,
• Post-merger integration,
• Customer service,
• Business process innovation,
• Strategy and development,
• Evaluation,
• Capability development

Where AI looks at organizations and communities, crowdsourcing looks at a catch-all I identify as opportunities.  Opportunities such as:

• product design,
• innovation,
• marketing, and
• focus group discovery

Crowdsourcing has for 4 basic approaches*:

1. Collective intelligence [direct overlap with AI]
2. Creation [direct overlap with AI]
3. Voting
4. Funding

A look at AI principles with a crowdsourcing cultural lens finds distinct common ground to leverage**:

• Encouraging a broad range of stakeholders, within and outside, to create a shared meaning of answers and responses.
• Sociological research to show things tend to flourish when there is a focus on ideals and achievements, peak experiences, and best practices.
• Organizations [opportunities] are manifestations of human imagination.
• If things are not envisioned, they can not, ultimately, exist.
• Being intentional with the data we focus is unusually effective in improving organizations and communities [opportunities].

Most important, and most difficult, for both AI and for crowdsourcing is crafting the question***:

AI is based on the power of positive inquiry.  But how can a simple question nudge a whole company in a productive new direction?  … [t]he learnings that surface through the AI process begin to shift the collective image that people hold of the organization.  In their daily encounters, members start to create compelling new visions of the company’s future together, grounded in their understanding of past successes.

These visions initiate “ripples” in how employees think about the work they do, their relationships, their roles, and so on.  Over time, these ripples turn into waves; the more positive the questions people ask, the more they incorporate the learnings they glean from those questions into daily behaviors and, ultimately, into the organization’s infrastructure.

Is it dangerous to ask people you think may not know anything about what your’re trying to do?

People with experience outside your particular field can actually be the best at solving certain problems.  Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, studied the crowdsourced problem solving of InnoCentive. “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background,” says Lakhani. “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise,”

The power of your crowdsourced need relies on the power of your question and the power of your social cache.  Like a change management approach that first looks at organization change readiness to reinforce the best methods of prior change, as well as what to avoid, you can not expect a solid crowd response without a genuine, transparent effort to engage.

The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.  Where once a crowd was reliant on proximity to engage, technology now enables a crowd to form with little geo-proximity limitation.  When not be bound by proximity, knowledge that was once a scarce commodity now becomes a powerful, abundant catalyst.

To me, crowdsourcing is simply a technology-enabled AI approach:  both views, crowdsourcing and AI, are 2 sides of the same coin, both equaled to the coin’s value.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Resources:

1. Appreciative Inquiry for Collaborative Solutions: 21 Strength-Based Workshops, by Robyn Stratton-Berkessel
2. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change by David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
3. The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and David Cooperrider
4. *Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Jeff Howe
5. **The Essentials of Appreciative Inquiry: A Roadmap for Creating Positive Futures, Bernard Mohr , Jane Watkins
6. ***ibid

Information is not competitive advantage, knowledge is competitive advantage.  What you know is information, only when you socialize your information does it then have potential to become knowledge.  An organization’s socialized knowledge is really their competitive advantage and information and knowledge are both human capital issues.

Enterprise knowledge management is a critical strategic need and how you collect and share information maximizes your organization resources.  However, the value of knowledge comes only when knowledge is aligned to strategic and tactical need.  Socialization of information is the critical step to align and coordinate resources:  people, time, and financial.

Too often organizations build strategy as an executive exercise of information and tightly-controlled knowledge.  This high-level review leaves out the opportunity to invite in fresh perspectives and leverage the organization’s cognitive diversity.  Strategy created in a vacuum invites change resistance.

You, and your organization, can only know what you know when you socialize your knowledge.  Only through socialization can you convey your knowledge and test your knowledge against alternative perspectives and views.  Socializing information and knowledge is an opportunity to realize the gap between what you thought you knew and what you know.

In that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, the value chain concept is a framework I have had great success communicating strategic planning.  This sample of the strategic value chain is link of goals, objectives, and actions; others call it the goals>objectives>action value chain, regardless, the linkage importance:

1. Goals are the desired result of the objectives and represent what we want to achieve, not what we want to avoid doing. The goals taken together, when achieved, should enable all the stakeholders and resources to achieve the mission or vision.
2. Objectives reflect what will be done, but not how, to meet the goal. Objectives are milestones along the way, and indicative of progress toward goals.  Important:  you can have many objectives per goal.
3. Actions reflect how the objective is to be met, actions are time-bound and measurable* given the availability of resources. If an action does not link to the objective clearly, it should not be specifically linked to the objective.  Important:  you can have many actions per objective.

The information value chain shows critical linkage from information through development.  There 4 critical links for information to move to development.  Each link needs to mature before moving into the next phase:

1. Information — knowledge gained through study, communication, research,instruction; 1-way show of ideas
2. Knowledge — awareness of something that is or may be known [information socialized]
3. Communication — a 2-way flow of shared knowledge constantly sent and received and always maintained for modification
4. Development — a joint, on-going effort to upgrade knowledge, skills, behaviors, and abilities

The strategic value chain links every resource in justification of the mission, vision, and executive strategy.  You can not have development without communication, you can not have communication without knowledge, and you can not have knowledge without information:  the information value chain links the organization to development.

Only through socialization can information create development competencies.  So, socialize what you think you know as this is a crucial opportunity for development to become an organization competitive advantage.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

In this age of cheaper, faster, better, resource management is critical to organization survival.  The resource that is the  biggest organization challenge to manage is motivation.  To drive organization health both internal, employee, motivation as well as external, customer, motivation need alignment.

Each day when the closing bell chimes, whether that bell chimes in your head or on the production floor, the organization, management and leaders need to be fully aware the employee who left for home often comes back with a completely different mindset tomorrow.  Organization risk is expecting an equally motivated employee returning the next morning.

Leaders, managers, and coworkers are all under intense pressure to manage their motivation to show up at work and deliver within themselves, yes, and within their organization.

An added complexity to motivate comes when juggling our own professional motivation as well as the motivation of others to work with and for you.

A rule of thumb I adopted from project management estimations is to only expect 6 hours of effective work from an employee per day.  No matter how long they work, 8, 10, 16 hours, do not expect more than 6 hours of progress towards a goal (project).

The motivation challenge takes on added  gravity when an organization identifies the motivation linkage that each employee has to motivate the customer.

In talent management many times a customer is defined as an internal customer or external customer.  I strategically agree with this, but I would like to direct all eyes to only the external customer and the concept that strategically and tactically every action an employee has should relate to revenue.  No customer, no revenue.  No revenue, no job.

The current customer, potential customer, or lost customer is motivated towards only those services or products that meet their need.  Marketing today has put the ball firmly in the court of customer transparency.  What motivates and influences a customer is the degree their problem is solved; in both for-profit and not-for-profit worlds.

Today your customer can reach out to any social connection to get advice, testimonial, caution, or endorsement.  I look at this ability as less crowdsourcing and more crowdsurfing to find answers.  Brand loyalty is a hope and hope is not much of a strategy.

The bottom line to your organization really is managing motivation as a finite resource.  And to look at motivation as a resource that is easily expendable, easily stored, easily dissipated, and easily wasted.

Adding to this challenge is that the sum of the parts of organization motivation and customer motivation will never equal 100%.

Managers maximize resources.  Motivation is a resource.  Managed by both the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.

Leaders motivate the future state.  Motivation is required to journey to the future state.  The future is opt-in-only by both the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.

How can you manage motivation?  Knowledge and communication.  Not an either or/neither nor option, but to build confidence, knowledge and communication transparency is critical.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Bill Hybels, on stirring change, says, “Leaders move people from here to there… The first play is not to make ‘there’ sound wonderful.  The first play is to make ‘here’ sound awful.”

Though this is a quote on leadership, the key to so many change mantras is that change only comes about when the level of pain for each individual in their current state drives change to a future state.  The level of pain motivates change.

So, when thinking of change strategies, transformation strategies, organization development interventions, diets, exercise, it seems the advice is to look for pain to enable change.

Do we need to start with pain before we can expect change?

The hope for change is that the future is a better place to be part of:  a new organization culture, new revenue streams, new markets, new consciousness, new body image.

Why not look towards the future-state as a place dramatically improved instead of raising the specter of our current-state deficits?

Who wants to be associated with failed business process, failed organization cultures, failed projects, failed teams?  And if we focus on failure, we focus on blame, not on possibility.

Appreciatie Inquiry is the cement I have found that binds and resonates a community to move towards change.  This place is where people choose to be part of, not the place they are marched single-file, heads cowered towards.

Looking at the future-state possibilites relies on flipping the coin from deficit to possibility.  It is the same coin, just a different side.  Using this new side relies on some elemental points of departure*:

• Our organization evolves in the direction of the images we create based on the questions we ask as we strive to understand the systems at work.
• Change begins the moment we ask questions.
• Our behavior in the present is influenced by the future we anticipate.
• Just as poets have no constraints on what they can write about, we have no boundaries on what we can inquire and learn from.
• The more positive the questions used to guide a change process, the more long-lasting and effective that process will be.

Leading change to operating change relies on leaders to create a vision people want to be part of.  Try to flip the coin and present, instead of the current-state pain, the future-state co-created by those expected to operating within.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.   Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to  add value.

Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry (.pdf download)

*The Essentials of Appreciative Inquiry:  A Roadmap for Creating Positive Futures; Bernard Mohr and Jane Magruder Watkins

In growth as well as organization maturity what becomes important is the ability to identify the key traits, values, behaviors, and norms of the culture and to create behavioral questions to identify how well a recruit fits or does not fit. The Competing Values framework allows you to identify how your organization values ability and the norms of getting things done.

When we recruit people we really have to look at a person’s fit on at least 4 levels and critical to understand these levels you need to understand organization culture.

1. person to job;
2. person to team;
3. person to manager; and
4. person to culture

If you care about diversity, someone who does not fit your culture can indeed be a strategic hire, but for that strategy to work, there needs to be high regard to coach and cultivate cognitive diversity, not just qualitative diversity.  This means you and your organization meld the diverse views and that no one view is trumped; that is diversity.

• An awareness of your own emotions
• An awareness of emotions in others
• An understanding of emotions
• And the ability to manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others

The Competing Values Framework identifies “how things are done around here” or better known as:  culture.  When I pair EI with the Competing Values I get a view of the behavioral competencies of the individual, how they work and motivate others and how the culture and the team interact.  As the matrix below outlines, there are distinct competencies the lend themselves to different cultures.  Your team’s job is to craft the questions during an interview process that identify fit.

Neither EI nor Competing Values should be a used as a final assessment of fit.  They are part of the final piece.  The danger of using it as assessment of fit is clear because people are smart enough to game the results.  

Both Emotional Intelligence and Competing Values should be part of the total picture of fit. The sooner you understand the culture the sooner you can move beyond technical excellence and into collaborative or emotional intelligence.

Increased risk deeply affects cultures, so don’t just look for people to fit in 100% of the time, because the cognitive diversity may be a strength.  To assess your team’s ability to recruit and interview ask yourself these top-level questions:

• Does your organization have a consistent, organization-wide recruiting strategy?
• Does your organization provide interview training skills for your interviewers?
• What is your on-boarding strategy to integrate new employees?

I believe you can find some recruiting or interview questions to ask around each of the cultures listed above.  Obviously, the first step is to identify your culture and that can be done with a culture survey – guess what, if you get in touch with me and I can administer and diagnose your culture.

In the prior post, Hiring the right person is more emotional than rational I mentioned I would give sample questions to tease out emotional and cultural fit, I’ll provide questions in a follow-up post titled:  ”Hiring questions for emotional and cultural fit”.

Don’t let your recruiting strategy turn into a crap shoot, most organization experts believe it takes 1 year for a recruit to integrate and to get up to speed enough to begin to earn their salary…caveat emptor.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Innovation is based on circular reasoning and the key to innovation is change, but change relies on community, but what does community rely on?  Let’s try to break into this circle [stay with me, further down the list reveals why I started on 2.]:

2. Can’t have community without transparency

3. Can’t have transparency without diversity

4. Can’t have diversity without trust

5. Can’t have trust without safety

6. Can’t have safety without speaking your mind

7. Can’t speak your mind without a forum for dangerous dialogue

8. Can’t have dangerous dialogue without innovation

9. Can’t have innovation without risk

10. Can’t have risk without confidence

11. Can’t have confidence without commitment

12. Can’t have commitment without motivation

13. Can’t have motivation without communication

14. Can’t have communication without community

1. Can’t have change without community

2. Can’t have community without transparency…

…rinse, repeat

If you took a climate survey of your organization today, using a 5-point Likert scale for each of the above, with “1″ representing rarely shown and “5″ representing always shown:

1. Would the results surprises you?
2. Would the results give you confidence you are doing all you can to create community?
3. Would the results give you insight into where your organization is headed for trouble?

The great news?  The results of your climate survey would show you exactly where you need to focus immediate triage and short-term rehabilitation.  If you can break into the circular reasoning for change, you can create a sustainable, resilient, change culture instead of a culture tired of change efforts that continue to beach themselves and only result in creating increasingly wary [if not weary] people.

And you can’t have community without transparency…

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

This post drew inspiration from a recent Peter Block presentation on Community: The Structure of Belonging presentation at The New School.

A small company is a dynamic, creative place where it is necessary for people to take risks to build a new organization.  Leaders of small companies are visionaries and there are strong demands for innovation to do more with less and to bite off grand goals.  The people that work in small companies work around an assumed amount of risk, some even revel in this dynamic environment.  However, organizations and leaders may also fear growth.

While organizations crave increased revenues, more sales can actually cause an organizations to crumble.  Increased revenues increases liability and the risk to deliver on contracts, manage finances, manage vendors, manage customers, and manage employees.  Increased sales can cripple an ability to deliver to customers as this can stresses the ad hoc organization culture.  Small businesses and high-growth companies that rapidly increase revenues need to prepare for increased accountability, responsibility, and risk.

Commitment to innovation and experimentation keeps the organization on the leading edge of new knowledge, products, or services.  Pushing the boundaries is the daily state of existence and soon a culture emerges from collective:

• behavior,
• values,
• norms,
• assumptions,
• expectations, and
• process

When organization culture is set, it is difficult to change.  Processes and hierarchy are a way to mitigate risk, but many times the early employees of small businesses chafe at new processes and they begin to resist organization changes around them.  Why is this dangerous?  Change is constant and if your organization resists change, you can expect organization sabotage will undo, limit, or cripple your growth and your ability for needed change.

The same people who revel in the small company resist the changes that process, procedures, and protocol bring.  Their skills and talents might be capable of change, but their motivation may not – this creates organization resistance and drives the low rates of success for organization transformation, mergers and acquisitions, and partnerships.

Initial ad hoc procedures may prove to drive those early revenues and perhaps the same procedures can manage a firm’s expansion to 30 employees, 75 employees, or 100 employees.  However, as the growth of a firm increases the amount of interactions and the dynamics of each interaction become more important.  This is where repeatability and human capital strategies are vital to have in place before growth.

Putting process aside for a moment, without a human capital growth strategy the organization leaves chance to decide that the talent that helped prop up the company has the knowledge, skills, and ability to take your company to the next level as well as manage those changes needed for success.  Imagine a workforce that can take company from a $1,000,000 in sales to $250,000,000 in sales; different capabilities are required and are needed for a $250,000,000 company to either compliment or replace those capabilities that can not change.

I’ve relied on the competing values framework [below] to identify and assess an organization’s culture.  This tool is equally effective human capital strategic planning.  In the upper right hand corner, Ad Hoc, you can see the characteristics of smaller company environments.

Within the matrix you’ll find an interesting view of how culture competes, resists, or is at odds with another culture.  Below, I added a red line between Ad Hoc and Hierarchy.  This represents 2 cultural opposites of organization styles.  Ad Hoc and Hierarchy represent very different operating environments with very different skill requirements – as well as the working environments.  The same opposite culture values are found between Clan and Market cultures.

What to Retain, What to Change (As Is/To Be)

A Competing Values survey identifies individual, team, business unit, and organizational culture styles.  A startup’s commitment to innovation and experimentation keeps the organization on the leading edge of knowledge, products, or services, but pushing the boundaries as a daily state of existence may work in a larger company where there is a need for consistency and reliability; from a talent view and a process view.

For a company and their talent to grow it is important to identify what to start, what to continue, and what to stop.  The cultural snapshot the Competing Values provides gives a view of where your talent is most comfortable operating.  Without the Competing Values Framework your culture is left to chance and with a Competing Values assessment your organization can diagram changes needed in skills, competencies, knowledge, and roles.

If the Competing Values Framework reveals an overwhelming organization bias in one quadrant you have a gap that needs to be filled to grow and to scale effectively.  The assessment gap identifies the skills and abilities you need to either train current staff up to or the skills new hires have to have.

If the Competing Values Framework reveals a diversity of responses, the more alternative views there are amongst your talent disrupt changes.  However there is just as much an opportunity to leverage diverse views in your growth strategy.

What do you do, for example, when you identify the need for more talent who have worked with more hierarchy-style experience?  How do you blend these professionals into the founding team’s Ad Hoc culture?  The identification of new skills and the new needs is how an organization can manage both successful growth and decrease organization resistance.

During growth it makes sense to hold on to what worked, incorporate what needs to be modified, blending the best of both.  Change is less daunting when there are elements of familiarity for people to see.  The decision of what to start or what to continue is as important as what to stop.   This approach not only honors the legacy of what was built, it celebrates the best of what was.

So, what to look at when planning a human capital growth strategy?  Here are a few items to identify, baseline, and categorize:

• the current attributes most valued
• the current cultural attributes,
• the skills inventory of leaders,
• the preferred cultural attributes,
• a manager’s view of current strengths and his team’s view of current strengths, and
• any future-state needs attributes inventory

With some of the above identified you can build competency models and identify the growth needs that now inform your human capital training, your strategic hiring, and your leadership development needs.

Your college roommate may have been a great initial director of marketing, but may not have the skills or the desire to take your company to $250,000,000 or to work in an environment necessary to manage the risk to meet this growth target.  Rather than dealing with his potential resistance a Competing Values Framework identifies to both you and your old roommate his organizational and cultural preference.  Now the discussion between the 2 of you becomes far easier:  let’s find a match for his desires and his skills.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Source:

]]> http://www.tobyelwin.com/when-a-small-business-should-fear-growth/feed/ 0 http://www.tobyelwin.com/the-bureaucrat-and-bureaucracy-revisited/ http://www.tobyelwin.com/the-bureaucrat-and-bureaucracy-revisited/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:24:44 +0000 Toby Elwin http://www.tobyelwin.com/?p=2370

Max Weber (1864 – 1920) was a German sociologist, political scientist, and economist and was an admirer of forms of organizations found in German government circles.  His views on bureaucracy, when revisited, provide an interesting set of implications, my comments, if any, are in brackets:

1. Each office has fixed duties
2. Impersonal rules and regulations apply to governing conduct [most HR handbooks]
3. A hierarchy of offices with graduated levels of authority coordinates efforts [executive suite and management layers]
4. Reliance is placed on written communication and files of documents [documented process/procedure and knowledge management]
5. Employment is a full time career for the members of the organization [also known as a professional]
6. Officials are appointed to office by their superiors [performance reviews]
7. Promotion is based on merit [360 degree performance reviews]

Seems there is a lot of carryover from Max Weber’s 20th century observations.

Is bureaucracy bad?

Bureaucracy is important to manage risk.  If an organization grows too quickly there is risk in an ability to perform work in a repeatable consistent way; very necessary to deliver quality goods and services at a good price.  As organizations grow, those one-off solutions that may have been needed in the early days can now cripple an organization.  Bureaucracy provides investors and customers accountability.

Where bureaucracy is bad when it stifles ideas and drowns people’s motivation.  When layers upon layers of processes, rules, and approvals become an excuse for active management, your work force disengages; your customers become a distant nuisance; and the greater danger:  you exist to assure the firm’s owners and shareholders are taken care above delivering to the customer.

Where latest management continues to plead for innovation, does a bureaucrat or bureaucracy enable or disable innovation?  Certainly growth needs to be scalable, but growth built on a deck of cards is not stable.  Bureaucracy can unleash innovation by letting people understand their role and create a sense of shared responsibility, but management and leadership must remain active.

Bureaucracy is the combined organizational structure, procedures, protocols, and set of regulations in place to manage activity, usually in large organizations. As opposed to adhocracy, it is often represented by standardized procedure (rule-following) that guides the execution of most or all processes within the body; formal division of powers; hierarchy; and relationships, intended to anticipate needs and improve efficiency.  Wikipedia

Structure, protocols, and regulations with standardized procedures?  That’s not bad, is it?  If the bureaucrat takes the place of management, yes.  If bureaucracy takes the place of leadership, yes.

The best management is engaged management.

The best leaders create a vision each person, employee, customer, and shareholder sees themselves as part of.

Revisit what bureaucracy can mean, not what it has come to mean.  One person’s bureaucracy is another’s hierarchy.  You’ll hear someone positively say, “we have a decision-making hierarchy” or “approval hierarchy”.  Rarely is it positive to hear someone say “we have a bureaucratic process” or “bureaucrats set our strategy for what to do”.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

In addition to sales and finance, there are 2 complimentary organization priorities that leaders should focus on to achieve and sustain excellence:

1. understand motivation
2. deliver projects in a routine manner

Organizations can stake out a competitive advantage by doing things cheaper or doing things better.  Motivation and project management are 2 ways an organization can reduce costs and do things better.

Organizations need to leverage motivation as a competitive advantage.

I think people are aware of how important motivation is to gauge the effort or quality they give to a task, to a team, to a manager, to a leader, or to an organization.  However, organizationally and individually, few have taken steps to understand their accountability to motivate others.

I’ve written often about motivation.  Here’s the deal with motivation:  every morning when someone starts their day, if they are not motivated you and your organization will get none of their potential.  Motivation is as much their responsibility to maintain, as it is yours to leverage and to lose.  And I use the term leverage with all its implications.

Organizations need to leverage project management as a competitive advantage.

I am a certified project manager professional, the Project Management Institute (PMI) is the largest professional organization in the world.  PMI operates and acts as if the world spins on its axis by the grace of project management.  The reality:  project management is applied too much within a scientific or engineering frame and too little as an elemental professional discipline as important as financial management or accounting.

Project management has its adherents and those industries or technicians that have come to rely on project management are mainly construction, information systems, or engineering-based ventures.

The reliance on a scientific process has presented project management as a set of tools or very linear process.  This has left project management in the basement of organization options and short of its potential force in business excellence.

Any item not currently operational is a project.  Any new option or strategy, until operational, is a project.  I want to quote a section of the Project Management Book of Knowledge, I know this book does not on show up on any list of business professional’s reading list:

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result [author's emphasis throughout].  The temporary nature of projects indicates a definite beginning and end.  The end is reached when the project’s objectives have been achieved or when the project is terminated because its objectives will not or cannot be met, or when the need for the project no longer exists.  Temporary does not necessarily mean short in duration.  Temporary does not generally apply to the product, service, or result created by the project; most projects are undertaken to create a lasting outcome. For example, a project to build a national monument will create a result expected for centuries.  Projects can also have social, economic, and environmental impacts that far outlast the projects themselves.

Every project creates a unique product, service, or result.  Although repetitive elements may be present in some project deliverables, this repetition does not change the fundamental uniqueness of the project work.  For example, office buildings are constructed with the same or similar materials or by the same team, but each location is unique – with a different design, different circumstances, different contractors, and so on.

An ongoing work effort is generally a repetitive process because it follows an organization’s existing procedures.  In contrast, because of the unique nature of projects, there may be uncertainties about the products, services, or results that the project creates.  Project tasks can be new to a project team, which necessitates more dedicated planning than other routine work. In addition, projects are undertaken at all organizational levels.  A project can involve a singer person a single organizational unit, or multiple organizational units.

A project can create:

• A product that can be either a component of another item or an end item in itself,
• A capability to perform a service (e.g., a business function that supports production or distribution, or
• A result such as an outcome or document (e.g., a research project that develops knowledge that can be used to determine whether a trend is present or a new process will benefit society).

Examples of projects include, but are not limited to:

• Developing a new product or service,
• Effecting a change in the structure, staffing or style of an organization
• Developing or acquiring a new or modified information system,
• Constructing a building or infrastructure, or
• Implementing a new business process or procedure.*

What intrigues me is the great opportunity project management can provide any organization.  Project management organizational governance and commitment is a comparative differentiator, an operational competitive advantage, a corporate finance requirement, and an organizational talent motivator.

Motivator?  Well, crucially, when projects fail, people associated with projects fail and who wants to be associated with failure?  Who wants to set out to fail or continue to fail again and again?  Project management builds wins, builds wins consistently, and builds wins based on realistic starting points:  scope.

The ability to scope, manage, and deliver projects:

1. increases margins,
2. frees capital, and
3. improves return on involvement also known as motivation

All crucial to become and maintain competitive advantage.

Oh, I can write a book about scope’s impact on motivation.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Source:

*Project Management Book of Knowledge, Project Management Institute; 4th edition (December 31, 2008)

When organizations promote star talent, I’ve never once heard about their star’s organization development technical skills as key to their promotion.

When I read a press release for a C-level hiring, promotion, or bonus being paid out, I’ve never once seen organization development highlighted as a key to their success.

When building job roles, descriptions, or competencies I’ve never been part of a conversation that starts with how this role succeeds by consistently  showing organization development behaviors, until I bring organization development knowledge, skills, and abilities up as an important component of individual and team success.

Why should anyone care about organization development?

What does organization development have to do with a firm’s or an individual’s success?

A classic definition of organization development(OD) comes from Richard Beckhard’s 1969 Organization Development: Strategies and Models:

Organization Development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organization-wide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organizations “processes,” using behavioral-science knowledge.

To me Beckhards’s 1969 pronouncement is even more a critical capability for both today’s organization as well as a anyone’s success.

But what, specifically, is an intervention:

“Interventions” are principal learning processes in the “action” stage of organization development. Interventions are structured activities used individually or in combination by the members of a client system to improve their social or task performance. They may be introduced by a change agent as part of an improvement program, or they may be used by the client following a program to check on the state of the organization’s health, or to effect necessary changes in its own behavior. “Structured activities” mean such diverse procedures as experiential exercises, questionnaires, attitude surveys, interviews, relevant group discussions, and even lunchtime meetings between the change agent and a member of the client organization. Every action that influences an organization’s improvement program in a change agent-client system relationship can be said to be an intervention.*

To intervene or not to intervene, seems less of a question than a core competency.

We need to intervene before we lose even more of your organization’s ability and desire to achieve both individual, team, and organization goals.

We should revisit what has become the noise surrounding essential knowledge, ability, skills, and competencies organizations need from people ready to lead.  Is it all about sales and finance?  Does increasing shareholder value have to come at the cost of your talent’s return?

What if we  begin to build more job roles and responsibilities around organization development and promote and reward those with organization development competencies and behaviors?  Then your entire organization wins:  the people, the organization, and all stakeholders.  Return on investment or return on involvement?

Those that think you can throw money or resources at human conflicts or expect people’s frustrations to go away or magically improve have a great opportunity ahead.

Organizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the most decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and – if and when that may become necessary – the destruction of culture. - Edgar Schein

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

*Richard Arvid Johnson (1976); Management, Systems, and Society: an Introduction; pp. 224–226.

Today in Human Resource Executive Online I eagerly read a post titled Is Business a Foreign Language for HR?

Anyone who has seen or read my blogs knows, I’m pretty insistent that HR (organization development, organization behavior, training, diversity, compensation) does not deserve a place at the table until HR understands the essentials of business:  finance and sales.

The article brought a deeper perspective:

According to Dave Ulrich, “we have consistently found that knowing business is not as highly ranked as a predictor of HR effectiveness.” Much more important in determining an HR executive’s effectiveness is whether the individual is viewed as a “credible activist” — someone who offers a point of view, takes a position, and challenges assumptions. They practice HR with an attitude, and are able to influence others.

The article brought to light something new that I appreciate:

…knowing business (finance, marketing, operations) is the ante, or ticket, of admission. Without this knowledge, HR won’t be included in key business discussions where they could provide a point of view, take a position, or challenge an assumption. And, if invited, they won’t be asked to stay.

I hope you enjoy Is Business a Foreign Language for HR? and the call to arms to amp up our business acumen as much as I enjoyed it.

Here is a link for a free subscription to Human Resource Executive Online, a great publication for anyone who wants to be a human resource professional.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Organizations are, quite simply, made up of social interactions:  groups of people.  Organizations will not change if people do not change.  There is no such thing as organization change, they don’t change, people change.

All change:  transformation, business process reengineering, technology implementation, mergers & acquisitions, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, strategic planning or, if you prefer:  downsizing, rightsizing, restructuring, reengineering, redesign, flattening of the organization, and self-managed work teams are all examples of organization change.

What are the common themes between them?  All of them rely on people for success; the best process is useless if people don’t routinely follow the process; the best technology has no use if people don’t plug it in and use it to its capability.

It is people at the heart of organization change.  People are the key to any of the above organization changes.  Whether strategic or tactical, mandated or self-initiated, change happens in organizations with or without warning.  What becomes important is proper planning for change to succeed.  And what rarely is factored for, in for too many change projects, is the most important variable to change and transformation success:  people.

It’s not the strongest species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.  Charles Darwin

Why is it transformation projects succeed or gain institutional resilience only 10% to 20% of the time and that long-term,institutional rates of change success even smaller?  Do these small rates of success justify the capital expense and effort to attempt change without a proper change management plan; it seems like executive insanity to ever sign off on without identification of and  full review of a change management plan.

To put it more clearly:  it is executive irresponsibility to not review a change management plan before, during, and throughout any enterprise-impacting project.  Executive blessing for any project without a concrete change plan, puts the firm’s investment at risk.  Also, the risk of going forward without a change plan adds unnecessary risk to all stakeholders to a degree that any project launch without a change management plan can only be labelled executive hubris.

Planned or unplanned, clearly there are a sea of conditions that force organization change.  Change can come from any front:  outside conditions, a new mission, new mandates, new technologies, and organizational growth.  These are all drivers and all compelling reasons for organizations to change, but how can you increase the odds that change will succeed?

No organization can maintain or remain the same and hope to compete, let alone survive.  You can dramatically increase the odds of change success with a dedicated change management strategy.  Let’s begin with what change management is:

• Change management is the processes, tools, and techniques used to manage the people-side of a business change in order to achieve the required business outcome, and to realize that business solution effectively within the social infrastructure of the workplace
• Change managementgets results by:
  1. building sponsorship,
  2. creating leaders who will act as change agents, and
  3. changing behaviors in front-line teams and individual employees in business units

If only 10% to 20% of projects succeed, do you believe change management stewardship is fully accounted for before launch?

Ask yourself when you review procedures of a business process reengineering project, a new technology implementation, or a strategic planning implementation what ratio (financial, budget, goals, metrics, communications) of that implementation’s resources dedicated to the human element of change?

What part of the plan is set aside to help people, those responsible, accountable, and within the very processes and charged to succeed using the new technology we perceive will deliver success.  You may find clear procedures in place for process or technology implementation, but what percentage is allotted for change management?

Has your team built a process to assure project success to run in concert with present transformation projects built to increase success odds?

What does change management account for?

The focus of change management is the human and social side of the organization.  Organizations are, quite simply, made up of social interactions and groups of people.  The foundation of change management:

• create reasons that compel the need for change,
• what the change will deliver,
• what an employee is expected to do as a result of the change,
• how someone can contribute to the changed organizations success, and
• how each person’s job is affected in the change

Change management is crucial to how the organization will embrace and institutionalize the change.  You need to devote the same energy and discipline to data collection, analysis, planning and implementation for organizational changes as devoted to process and technology changes.

Be mindful when you move from a 10% chance of success to a 100% chance of success, your change project not only succeeds, but as it becomes institutionalized, your organization is now more flexible and better prepared for future change(s).

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Organization development has yet to earn a role in all organizations.  Only the most progressive companies even have an organization development role, staff, department, or group.  The challenge to organization development success is that it is hard to find a linear trajectory for success.  Organization development may have clear goals, but the reality, there is rarely a linear path.

What is organization development and why does it seem organization development is an after-thought or only found at bigger Fortune 500 firms or identifiably progressive organizations?  Is organization development really a business luxury?

The Massachusetts Bay Organization Development Learning Group writes:

Organization development (OD) is a professional discipline with focus on improving and enhancing capabilities within organizations to meet strategic and tactical goals. That focus is directed at the performance of people:  individuals, groups and teams distinct from capital or other assets at the disposal of the organization.

Unlike sales, finance, or accounting OD is not part of the playbook for organization DNA like sales, accounting, or finance.  To date OD is thought of as a nice-to-have, instead of essential to operations.  OD is not discussed or staffed from a firms inception and is not perceived as a critical organization function, as important as the finance office; never mind a case to be made that an organization development office should be placed next to the finance office.

OD professionals pay particular attention to motivation, behavior, group dynamics, skills and values development and
performance measurement.

Some people think this focus is “soft”. Historically, there may be some truth to this assessment, but as the discipline of OD emerges and matures, attention is increasingly paid to measurement to determine value and effectiveness.

Not dissimilar to the evaluation of an income statement or balance sheet, such measurement is increasingly essential for organizations to evaluate their most valuable and cost-rich asset: their employees.

There is little discussion at business schools that drill into their class anything close to:  ”sales, finance, accounting, and organization development are vital to any organization’s success; you can’t have an organization without these 4.”

In clear terms what is OD?  Well OD is includes:

• strategic planning,
• organization design,
• leadership development,
• change management,
• learning,
• innovation,
• succession planning,
• performance management,
• coaching,
• visioning,
• diversity, and
• talent management

All essential for a healthy, sustainable organization.  Perhaps there are too many looking for OD to provide steady, linear impact.  Unlike a sales trend or accounts payable records, there is little in an OD intervention, that shows linear growth.

Like joining a gym, the results of an OD effort are not obvious or evident in the first visit or the first week.  However continued dedication and focus on the correct form begin to show results.  Subtle at first, but dramatic in time.

OD involves people and people rarely act in predictable fashion, OD charts new discussions, new interactions, and conversations, and new innovations – this is change.  Change is hard.  Change is not linear.

So, don’t expect an OD intervention to immediately deliver.  Like a doctor office visit, OD starts with a diagnosis and then a design or plan – like a prescription.  There is rarely an immediate result or an immediate change, but change comes in increments, sometimes small, sometimes larger, and sometimes there is a backslide.  The goal is that change becomes progressively iterative:  the new skills are built; the new competencies are reliable; the new behaviors obvious.

Why look for OD to chart improvement then?  Because lack of motivation, disengagement, poor performance, and high turnover, to name a few, are symptoms.  A good OD practitioner will address the disease and design an intervention to mitigate the disease.  This takes a commitment.  This commitment relies on performance measures and constant review.  Yes, like any patient undergoing treatment or rehabilitation.

The great news:  anyone, in any function, can add organization development skills to their current capability, as an individual, as a manager, within a team, or as a leader of an organization.  OD, like “management” and “leadership”, is a competency, a skill, a profession, with a deep knowledge base to learn from.  As a behavioral competency most effective people, not just organizations, adopt.

There are a host of people who feel seeing is believing, but more often, the reality is when you believe, you will see.  Some people don’t see organization development, some see organization development in every aspect of what they do.

A great source to start your inquiry is the OD Network’s regional network search where you can find a local chapter:

• in New England there is the vibrant Massachusetts Bay Organization Development Learning Group,
• in New York, the OD Network of New York, and
• near Silicon Valley you can find the South Bay Organizational Development Network

These above groups usually include speakers series, networking, collaborative learning opportunities, and webinars.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

An intervention.

Interventions are principal learning processes in the “action” stage of organization development (OD)*.

An intervention is what people outside organization development [the majority of professionals are distinctly NOT part of, or aware of, organization development] might call a project, change, or transformation.   The reason a professional might call for an organization intervention, or project, can easily be identified as organization sabotage.

Organization sabotage?  Why call it sabotage?  Well, too many professionals believe all you need to do to run a team, manage a group, or lead an organization is to line people up yell, “ready, steady, go” and they hum along without guidance, motivation, communication, or care.

Unfortunately, many of the same professionals also believe you can happily plug people in and they automatically fall in line and only in a moment of extreme agitation might there be a need to prune dead weight or those who don’t seem to get where the line is going.

I use the word sabotage because too many professionals believe the only motivation people need is their pay.  Or that people should feel lucky to just have a job.  When these professional see people are not always motivated, they feel their leadership and their management are sabotaged.

What constitutes sabotage?

1. Low level of collaboration / difficulty meeting objectives
   • Limited buy-in and support
   • Lack of employee motivation
   • Increasing resistance to transformation and change
   • Lack of alignment across key stakeholders and business leaders
   • Potential conflicts due to lingering non-addressed issues and differences
2. Operational obstacles and delays
   • Lack of alignment of business and critical support functions
   • Difficulties and misunderstandings in communication due to unclear objectives, varying expectations and competing business priorities
   • Eroding trust and loss of good people
   • Loss of productivity
3. Loss of leadership credibility
   • Lack of accountability or empowerment with the teams
   • Early results not sustained
   • Difficulties on implementing the transformation initiatives

To combat sabotage, enter:  the intervention.

And crucial for any intervention:  manage expectations.

Managing expectations means when you diagnose, design, and implement any project, there is never a linear path towards project delivery.  Any expectation for linear progress is unreasonable.  There is no linear projection because people stumble, people get confused, and people need constant communication to move towards a shared goal.

Linear results are as unreasonable in an intervention to combat sabotage as it is for people expect linear results in a dieting, an effort to stop smoking, an effort to communicate to their partner better, or for results at a gym.  Some days it is progress, some days it is a struggle.  Over the long term and with commitment results are achieved.

A transition from sabotage to development, in reality needs to expect natural dips and changes of direction – it simply can’t expect a straight-line trajectory.  As change surrounds you, the team, or the organization, managing new roles, requirements, and skills brings uncertainty.  Like sabotage, an intervention is less a linear direction and more like a flight of the butterfly.

Though a butterfly’s flight is a bit raged, the butterfly does arrive.  And to hang another yoke around our butterfly’s neck it helps to manage expectations to think of interventions more like the butterfly effect in that:  small differences in the initial condition, for example:  lack of motivation, may produce large variations in the long term behavior.

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location.

The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events (compare: domino effect).  Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not “cause” the tornado in the sense of providing the energy for the tornado, it does “cause” it in the sense that the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado, and without that flap that particular tornado would not have existed.

Thinking through change with the end-state in mind helps manage expectation, manage resources, and, importantly, manage motivation.  The butterfly effect has a both a positive and negative impact, but diagnosing, designing, and continually monitoring your organization’s health throughout all stages of growth and operations, helps limit sabotage and the need for radical interventions – this is a commitment to your organization’s health and that is sustainability.

I’ve never been comfortable with organization development’s use of the term intervention.  It sounds drastic, it sounds reactive, and it sounds like its far too late in an organization’s health.

Where do we, in society, use the term intervention most?  In drug or alcohol abuse and as a drastic last resort measure.  We shouldn’t let our organizations get to a place where drastic measures are needed, as organization sabotage affects profit, revenue, customers, and stakeholders.

Change is constant, so is managing change.  As this “change curve” represented above [click to enlarge], there are symptoms to treat and manage change along the entire change life cycle.

Sadly, many organizations do wait for drastic measures before addressing human capital risk, but I prefer to think there are leaders and managers, always monitoring and managing talent as their firm’s greatest competitive  advantage.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

*Richard Arvid Johnson (1976). Management, systems, and society: an introduction. Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Pub. Co.. pp. 224–226.

Another good read is:  Reducing Employee Sabotage, this article from Human Resource Executive Online outlines physical or plant and equipment sabotage.  But offers insight into all forms including those above.

How to handle the micromanager? Raise your hand if you love working for a micromanager? Are you a micromanager?  You can raise your hand if you are, no one else knows, actually everyone already knows.

Micromanagers grind work to a halt. If there is no confidence in work getting done, the fish rots from the head down: the management is to blame.

The solution:  recruiting, TRAINING, and retaining people who have the ability, competency, confidence, and authority to perform their job.   Micromanagers sap motivation and cause more grief by checking, double-checking, asking for reports, and rechecking their workers.  Micromanagers are the bottle-neck for decisions and strategic performance.

The grand solution:  manage strategy and your organization like a timeline.

When you think about strategy and results as a timeline you realize not only how unlikely your strategy is to succeed, but more directly, who your true boss is:

• Need something done today? Who do you rely on?
• Need something done in 3 months? Who do you rely on?
• Need something done before the end of the year? Who do you rely on?
• Need something done beyond 5 years? Who do you rely on?

It should be obvious that when people mix needs of each timelines of a day, a month, or a year, that they have different stakeholders, different customers, and of course different bosses.  Each timeline relies on different performance expectations.  As I’ve said to many clients, “fire de jour is an operating strategy for a broken organization”.

One of the best discoveries I’ve had in business thinking over last 3 years came when I discovered Requisite Organization. Initially, I found out about Requisite Organization while working at Deloitte Consulting from Michael Raynor, a Distingquished Fellow with Deloitte, and his book The Strategy Paradox.  Mr. Raynor modifies Requisite Organization to Requisite Uncertainty, but for this blog the concepts remain similar.

In essence, strategy, like predicting the future, becomes more difficult the longer the timeline:  need something tomorrow, you might have a 50% accuracy of predicting an event; need something in 5 years, there is a pretty low probability you can accurately predict the likelihood of that outcome.  The longer the timeline, the larger the variables and the larger the variables, the larger the risk:  both known and unknown.

So take a corporate strategy, any corporate strategy.  At the executive level (C-level suite), the operational level (directors, business unit leads, regional managers), and the technical level (do-ers, skilled workers, producers) each have different needs and these needs are really based on how time plays a role in variables and risk at each the level:

1. Executives care about the health of the organization 5 years and beyond, their goal is to not only assure the organization both exists in 5 years, but healthier 5 years and beyond;
2. The operational level is concerned about all that happens within the year, mainly how to execute the operations from 3 months to a year that will combine to deliver to the executive, or 5-year, strategy; and
3. The technical level is concerned about getting their work turned around from 1 day to 3 months.  That is where they need to deliver, they provide the work that combines to deliver to the quarterly and annual results – they deliver to the operational demand

Here’s the part I love:  executive and operational levels can combine for a robust dialogue and planning session, after all the operational level should provide great insight into the needs at a more specific level, but after the executive strategy is finalized, there is no more dialogue, no more alternatives and the operational level now turns their attention to the 3 month to 1 year horizon.

At the 3 month to 1 year horizon they, the operational level, have been empowered by the executives with complete flexibility to modify and react to the changing marketing, economic, or business demands.  And the executive team must not micromanage or poke their nose into the operational sphere.  Executives have to provide complete flexibility, hear updates, and be available for counsel, but really empower their people to make it run within that year.  Executives may now rely on quarterly reports to understand if the program is on track or off track and what options the operational team have tried or will tried.

Just as the executive level needs to keep their view at the 5 year horizon and maximize all their effort to learn about shifting conditions, the operational level looking at 3 months to 1 years, must, in turn, not interfere with the technical level.  Though the executive strategy has been cascaded to the operational timeline, the technical management has now taken work packages apart to assign resources to plan to get all the things they need to deliver from 1 day to 3 months.

The operational leads, in turn, should empower their technical team and their management to use their ability to modify and make adjustments to meet the timelines to deliver.  They operational leads should not micromanage, they should empower.

When strategy is converted to time, it really provides great framework to assign resources, manage risk, empower employees, communication, and clear out all micromanagement.

Good luck and I welcome  your comments.

Check out Michael Raynor’s great book here where he also talks about scenario planning and strategic flexibility as organization enablers:

The drive to evaluate operations and to contain costs is mistakenly applied as an operational issue across the board.  Too often human capital assessments are lumped into the systems theory world of process and become a technical asset for management’s diagnostic view for cuts.  The result becomes an assessment or evaluation process that is really the disease responsible for symptoms such as high turnover, low morale, and mismanagement.

Human capital is a sociological asset, an asset that does take up to 70% of your costs, but an asset that can not be treated like a process map or put on an accelerated depreciation schedule. Human capital, like all capital, however, is an asset that can be depleted, wasted, or strengthened.

Human capital also has the same risk associated with other capital options and in the world of equity valuation, high human capital valuations positively relate to a venture’s valuation:  it takes talent to create the good or service, the process does not create the good or service.

Just as financial capital is intended to reflect underlying or expected enterprise value. Valuation models should be built to reveal the proportion of intangible valuation [human capital] as tangible valuation.  And as the picture alludes, the intangible outweighs the tangible:

The disproportionate weight of tangible to intangible in assessments

The reality is few want to dissect a market projection or discounted cash flow as purely fuzzy and inherently flawed.  And fewer like to admit the longer the projected time line the more fuzzy these projections are.  A case should be made that market and financial projections are really a greater leap of faith than any assessment of human capital value.

Because human capital is an asset that cannot be controlled, it must be managed wisely and managed with a waste, preservation, or acquisition in mind.  Unlike other capital, human capital is not as an asset that can be stored, banked, or squirreled away and human capital can neither be kept in reserve nor wheeled out of the shed for future use. Human capital has to be managed daily, otherwise human capital is mismanaged.

How is human capital mismanaged in today’s knowledge economy and creative class?

The priorities of top performers* are:

1. Teamwork
2. Customer focus
3. Fair treatment of employees
4. Initiative and innovation

The priorities of average performers* are:

1. Minimizing risk
2. Respecting the chain of command
3. Supporting the boss
4. Making budget

There should be no surprise that people in organizations are often afraid to take risks.  In spite of what is said by their manager or is presented in their organization’s values statement to encourage innovation, too many organizations create a culture that it only accepts risks as long as they get it right.  People are incredibly perceptive to people who say one thing and do another and even more perceptive for organization cultures that say one thing, but reward another.

I don’t know how many organizations expect to survive with a stable of average performers, at any level.  Human capital is driven by motivation and each person’s view of their world.  If you want an organization of high performers, you have to stop treating the symptom of low morale, high turnover, missed deadlines, cost over runs, market failure, and group-think and go after the disease:  human capital as process after-thought.

Stop treating the symptoms with a Lean/Six Sigma roll out, a business process re-engineering, a Total Quality Management, a weekend retreat, or an all-hands meeting and begin to treat the disease of your executive and management team looking at human capital with an opinion that those people are lucky they have a job or that their paycheck is sufficient motivation.

In today’s world culture eats strategy for lunch.

Source:

Classic change theory: leadership drives change; leadership must be committed for change to work.

Seems to make sense, but in reality leadership is irrelevant. The organization’s ability to change is dictated by the operational units and employees, not leadership. The reality: culture eats strategy for lunch. Your workers dictate change and strategy.

Leadership doesn’t drive change, total quality management, Lean manufacturing, or Six Sigma. None of it relies on leadership. Change relies on culture and in the case of culture, leadership is along for the ride and rarely in the driver seat.

The reason your changes fail is because you don’t get that change has less to do with you and everything to do with them. They change for their reasons, not yours, not the stockholders, not the competition, not the tax payer. If leadership does not get culture, if leadership does not realize culture is more powerful than they, themselves, are, if leadership thinks their winning smile and advanced degrees are enough to influence change, then, sadly, yes – change will fail.

In the assessment stage, I generally lead with John Kotter’s 8 Step Process for change:

Step 1: Create Urgency
Step 2: Form a Powerful Coalition
Step 3: Create a Vision for Change
Step 4: Communicate the Vision
Step 5: Remove Obstacles
Step 6: Create Short-term Wins
Step 7: Build on the Change
Step 8: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

I believe Kotter’s 8-steps, but the slow reality I experience time and again is that Kotter presents less a prescription than a wish list. The one, and only one, of the 8 steps that really matters is Step 8: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture. This should not be the 8th step, it should be the 1st step. Better yet, start your change assessment with a diagnosis of your culture to understand how change will roll out or whither.

Culture will dictate the compelling urgency and at what level the term “compelling” means to whom. I am, in no way discounting John Kotter. His book, Leading Change provides a top framework. I am simply amping up the role culture has in any change effort’s likelihood of success. Culture drives your organization’s success or drive’s your organization out of business, through a culture-driven framework how does your organization or business unit look at your change initiative?

Think through your organization with the organization or business unit culture when thinking change and you’ll get a better gauge of the road ahead. Even Kotter estimates 70% of all change fails. Isn’t your next effort worth a better effort and the right planning? Culture and competing values is what drives your organization’s resistance.

No one individual, or leader, can change a culture, only when a majority acts on change and localizes change can the majority not only commit to the change, but find a commitment to change by contributing themselves to the evolution of the change.  People conform because it helps them escape uncertainty.

Leaders can inspire through a vision, but groups define that vision by placing their future in a position comfortable within that change, if there is not a comfortable position for each or for the team, the future is rejected, no matter how powerful the CEO believes their are.  There is wisdom in crowds.

As it stands statistically your strategy will fail, so let’s start with culture, forget leadership.  Once you know more about the culture you can manage the scope needed to impact change.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

What is the cost of culture? Why is it even worth identifying corporate culture? Let’s start with what is culture. Culture is the values, norms, assumptions, expectations, and definitions that characterize organizations or affectionately known as: how things are done around here

Culture is often a holdover from the founder(s) actions; sometimes developed consciously by management teams who decide to improve their company’s performance in systemic ways; and sometimes, in the absence of direction, a culture is adopted as a way to manage the mismanagement.

Organizations have cultures and can be defined as 1) sociological:  where culture emerges from collective behavior, and organizations are cultures or 2) anthropological:  culture resides in individual interpretation.

Sustained success has less to do with market forces than company values; less to do with competitive position than personal beliefs; less to do with resource advantages than vision. Sustained success has to do with managing culture. Organization change without an awareness of what drives the organization’s culture may be the reason close to 90% of all projects fail.

CSC, a consulting firm that invented the term reengineering, probably the most common approach to enhance organization performance, surveyed more than 1,700 companies from both the United States and Europe and found:

• 69% of the U.S. firms and 75% of the European firms had tried at least one reengineering project;
• 85% of those firms reported little to no gain from their effort; and
• less than 50% achieved their primary goal: to increase market share

The effort to improve organization performance usually fails because an organization’s culture remains the same because too often the change is at odds with the culture. When change is at odds with culture, culture will always win. If you can’t change the hearts and minds–the values, ways of thinking approaches to problems, management styles, motivations–the culture then soon adopts resistance to change as a coping mechanism and default way forward.

If change was as easy as a directive, then the companies that made 1999′s Fortune 500 list would not need to say goodbye to 238 of their peers a mere 10 years later, a change of almost 50% from the 1999 Fortune 500 to the 2009 Fortune 500.  MIT Sloan School of Management professor, Peter Senge, presents the average life of a Fortune 500 company is 30 years.  Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, notes only 71 companies on the original 1955 Fortune 500 list are there today.

Change never succeeds on prescription, but will succeed with diagnostic inquiry. Just as the best doctors ask about the entire well-being of the patient, lasting change has to begin with well-crafted inquiry.

Let’s look at how important culture is, not just for change, but for how you currently operate, try this perspective in a different light:

• Ethics: the dominant characteristics of the organization
• Risk: the explicit values foundational for decisions and actions
• Trust: the dominant work environment
• Accountability: the unwritten performance expectations
• Integrity: specific behaviors that are valued
• Alignment: leaders who walk the walk and who talk the talk
• Rewards: criteria of success people are evaluated by

I welcome your communication on how to inquire, diagnose, design, and manage change for the impact you intend, not the outcome that is, unfortunately, most likely.

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. We have meetings to clear up confusion, to communicate, to interact, to make decisions, to listen, and to collaborate. Too many meetings end without clear decisions and too often it is not until after the meeting is finished when the real conversations begin when people:

• complain about not being heard,
• complain about pushy agendas,
• hold back their cooperation,
• complain about lack of involvement

Those type of meetings waste time and create acrimony, which wastes energy. They don’t accomplish anything more than creating more work and derailing collaboration.

Groups are smarter than individuals, but only when groups allow individuals the chance to contribute.

Here are 5 tips to help manage meetings:

1. Pass out an agenda, with goals, objectives, and actions as well as sources for important information to be discussed in the meeting. Pass this out as early as you can, as late as 24 hours ahead of the meeting, if you can. Review the agenda at the start of the meeting. Tie the goals, objectives, and actions to an on-going strategy to remind people the linkage to executive or operational strategy as well as progress
2. When a new idea is presented at a meeting, the next person who speaks must support that idea: instead of devil’s advocate, an angel’s advocate
3. Use meetings to collaborate on risk resolution, not to update people on status or progress; when you count on people to deliver as promised you shift the meeting from accountability to creative collaboration to resolve risk: results. Make sure to assign responsibility and an estimate date to resolve new items. The Project Management Institute defines risk as anything that can positively or negatively impact the outcome; positive risk is called opportunity
4. Read body language and understand what people are saying through their body language, 80% of communication is body language. Clear communication is the intention of holding meetings. Don’t ignore body language: Before a decision is made, facilitate group involvement, to include supporting lone dissension or providing time when a teammate is clearly uncomfortable
5. Build on the ongoing discussion, someone can only signal a change of subject by first asking, is it OK to change the subject…

Getting things done and getting things accomplished are 2 very different goals. The effort invested to run better meetings is saved from later misunderstanding. Poorly run meetings might be the root why upwards of 90% of all projects fail. Is it better to get through a meeting and drive consensus if people don’t commit and don’t understand?   Time is a resource as much as money, and unlike money you can never earn time.

If you take time to guide meeting involvement, with the above suggestions, you will find meetings can become a source for great energy and collaboration, instead of dread and fear.

Make the above suggestions part of your pre-meeting communication, coach and cultivate people to adopt and own their commitment to these or other meeting guidelines that are created.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

2 sources:

2.  Project Management Institute

Bonus insight from: John Cleese and his corporate training video:  Meetings, Bloody Meetings

I see and read so much about offers to teach or facilitate innovation, but what is innovation?

• Innovation is risk
• Innovation is dialogue
• Innovation is opportunity (also known as diversity)

Are you innovative: Do you ask good questions or do you listen without judgment or without looking to interrupt? Do you allow yourself and people around you to remain in the moment? Have people told you that you are a good listener? Are you known to cultivate, mentor, or develop others or are you surrounded with people afraid to point out an opinion different than yours or alternate view from yours? Are you risky or risk-averse looking to always do what is safe and expected?

You are surrounded by smart (IQ) and technically accomplished people, but who are innovators? Who are the people that lead by example and inspire greatness in others?

What makes someone innovative? Is it IQ and IQ’s measure of problem solving, pattern recognition, and memory? Is it technical skill acquired through study and experience? No, what separates professionals is not IQ or technical skills, but Emotional Intelligence:

• Studies of people in high-IQ professions requiring advanced degrees such as Ph.D.’s and M.B.A’s for entry into a field, IQ and training do not differentiate star performers. Emotional intelligence accounts for as much as 80% of the variance in differentiating star performers from average performers in these populations. These groups are made up of highly intelligent and trained professionals.
• A long-term study of Ph.D. scientists found that social and emotional abilities were 4 times more important than IQ and training in determining overall career success and level of personal prestige in the scientists’ chosen field of study.
• The higher people rise in the ranks of management, the more likely they are to have distorted self-perceptions. Senior level managers are likely to rate themselves as much higher on emotional and social competencies than their peers and direct reports rate them.
• Reports show that IQ and technical skills make up only 1/3^rd of the variance outstanding performers have from average performer Emotional Intelligence accounts for the remaining 2/3^rds variance from average performers.

No, innovation is not an earned degree, it is both a skill and an ability – but most importantly innovation relies on motivation. Motivation?

Some are born with higher Emotional Intelligence skills, but these skills can dull if not maintained. Yes, the most promising aspect of Emotional Intelligence is that, like a muscle, anyone can build and increase their emotional intelligence competence. Competence areas such as: self awareness, self motivation, social awareness, and relationship management are the bedrock of Emotional Intelligence and the bedrock for providing an innovative culture and developing innovative people.

Yes, just like working out or exercise takes motivation, so too, does identification that Emotional Intelligence, like exercise, is important and that working to improve your Emotional Intelligence takes motivation, not rhetoric.

Innovation and creativity are not captured in a bottle. Professionals in a knowledge economy are not innovative only from the hours of 9 to 5.

I invite you to challenge your IQ to be more innovative and see how Emotional Intelligence will raise yourself and your organization above your competition. This economy demands more Emotional Intelligence, it simply lacks innovation to expect otherwise.

I invite your comments or questions and look forward to talk about emotional intelligence, innovation, and creativity.

Learn more about Emotional Intelligence and a compilation of the set of figures highlighted above.

You can take a free Emotional Intelligence test at The Hay Group where I was certified in Emotional Intelligence.  The Hay Group site offers a rich resource for further study.

When did systems theory get hijacked by process engineers and change management stormtroopers?

When did we allow our organizations to be built and led by analytical, causal, deductive, drones and an over-adherence of frameworks to analyze past events?

Frameworks and theories that rely on past events ignore all opportunity for organizations to interact in an interdependent cogenerative way: systems theory.

Systems theory and systems thinking relies on interface, feedback, organizational goals, input, throughput, output, differentiation, and integration.

Systems thinking is relational.

People are relational.

Systems thinking has moved us beyond deductive, logical analysis to context, association, meaning, value, and perception.

People seek association, meaning, and value.

Systems thinking introduced the wholeness of an organization’s personality, integration, cohesion, and environment as a key determinant for choices the organization has made.

People’s personality and environment are clear determinants for decisions and choices they make.

Who hijacked systems thinking from pattern recognition to process mapping?

Who advanced the practice of analyzing parts of the organization away from the whole?

If I had a nickel for each time I have heard the word silo as a description of corporation, federal agency, college, hospital, startup, or boy scout troop organization dysfunction, wow, consider me retired! Hmm, there is a pattern to be recognized in how each group feels a divine right to their silo mentality, but I digress…

When did we forget that organizations are interdependent and that process summation of individual elements cannot account for the whole?

Anyone who relies on interaction to achieve a desired outcome needs to stop thinking about engineering process maps. We need to stop dehumanizing our relationships. Are we in such fear of political correctness or liability that we avoid interaction and dialogue with a preference to believe a process map or blue print will not offend?

We need to start building accountability for outcomes. We organization development practitioners need to step up our abilities to add process, rigor, data sets, and accountability or we will lose our place at the business table.

In short, organization development needs to take back systems theory.

Next time you meet a process map wonk or change management consultant, ask them to add more Gestalt and ease up on Visio.

Postscript: I recommend Systems Theory for Organization Development, edited by Thomas G. Cummings as a great resource

Series:

• Change management stormtroopers and system theory
• Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 1
• Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 2
• Mergers and acquisitions systems thinking strategies, part 3

Change Management is the Illness

Overwhelmingly, organizations rely on process analysis to identify opportunity for savings. Process analysis is most commonly identified as change management.

Change Management: Analyze and diagnose business and operations processes with a focus on the greatest areas of improvement in cost, schedule, and quality.

Very few enjoy having themselves and their work process diagnosed for inefficiency. Change management, or its red-headed step child name: business process re-engineering, never account for motivation or talent development in its audit. Without motivation you can not accurately assess cycle time or throughput.

People do not willingly choose an inefficient process, a process is usually adopted as a workaround and becomes part of the work. Under any microscope, people don’t enjoy the realization that they are inefficient or eagerly divulge their role to contribute or perpetuate inefficiency. Still others resist the wholesale autopsy that change management, process analysis, or business process re-engineering brings because they believe they will be laid off as soon as their knowledge is cataloged.

Who benefits under this scrutiny?

Project Management is the Symptom

Projects are the means to achieve organizational goals and objectives. Projects deliver a strategic plan’s objectives. Without a strategic plan from an executive level there is no way to identify criteria of project success or which projects to start or stop.

Project Management: Identifies requirements to address various needs, concerns, and expectations of the stakeholders as the project is planned and carried out. Project management balances organization and project constraints included, but not limited to: scope, quality, schedule, budget, resources, and risk.

The latest version of Project Management Institute’s Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK4.0) refers to the word project 6,030 times, the word process 1,841, the word change 760, the word results 234, and the word people 49 times.

It takes people to deliver a project, execute a process, manage change, and deliver results and the largest professional organization in the world, The Project Management Institute, has a people to process ratio of 1:123?  Project management’s only brush of talent management is within the project team, but not the people, team, or organization’s performance, capacity, or culture.

Does it mean people are only 0.006% important to a project’s success? Is the minimization of people the reason why roughly 65% to 75%, about 3 out of 4, projects fail?   I would say a 25% success rate is an unusually high rate of luck when I think about how little people seem to be valued.

Your Organization Develops or Dies

Neither change nor project management seek to understand, leverage, and develop an organization’s culture or people. Without people at the front of any change effort to participate, envision, and understand their role in the change and the impact the change or project has on their very livelihood, it is no wonder the majority of projects fail. But why are people and organization culture not considered more genuinely in projects, changes, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic intentions?

If your company has 5 projects underway, the statistical likelihood all 5 projects will succeed is less than 1% [0.35*0.35*0.35*0.35*0.35=.005].

No gambler would accept those odds, but yet you and your leadership do. Even worse you continue to expect new results from old habits. Isn’t Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results?

Intervention Awaits, but Wait

Organization Development: a planned intervention(s) using behavioral science principles to change a system and improve its effectiveness through holistic participation, collaboration, and learning of the organization and its members

Most or all definitions of organization development (OD) describe:

• A planned process intended to bring about change (Change Management)
• Through the use of various interventions (Projects)
• Using behavioral science knowledge theory, research, and/or technology, and
• Have an organization or system-wide focus

The greatest barrier to OD acceptance is that many OD practitioners do not have the ability to evaluate business impact or deliver business results in context of an OD intervention.

Behavioral Science? Holistic? Intervention? This does not sound like business, but a therapy session.

Organization Development the Cure? Not Quite Yet

Organization development has ~75% success rate. However, OD will never take a seat at the business table until we practitioners become better at scoping, managing, and delivering any intervention as a project with a budget, time line, risk assessment, quality standard, clearly defined scope, and criteria to measure an OD project against other business options.

No executive would evaluate a capital finance opportunity without an identification of risk and the payoff weighed against a portfolio of options similarly analyzed, but continue to sign off on projects throughout their organization that will most likely fail.

• All OD involves change management; change management does not involve OD.
• All OD interventions are projects; all OD professionals do not manage their interventions as project managers.

Until more OD practitioners take it upon themselves to learn project management, we will continue to see executives and organizations look to change management as their savior and not understand why the project failed.

Isn’t it our responsibility to educate ourselves and make any compelling case for change or development as a business partner, not simply an OD advocate?

How do organizations survive?

The only way an organization survives is to grow. Like people, an organization grows and develops by developing new skills, knowledge, and abilities. An organization’s strategy is nothing without an organization’s development.

Most professionals have an image of what marketing, sales, accounting, or human resource professionals do, but fewer are naturally exposed to the specialists within each of those fields.

Organization development is not only a specialist field within human resources, but practiced by individuals across all functions and at any position within functional, operational, and executive levels. A marketing manager can be an organization development expert as well; a line supervisor can be an organization development practitioner.

Organizations are made up of people, more specifically teams of people who interact through multiple relationships and networks. Just as people learn and change, organizations can cultivate people and team development to align and support an organization’s growth. An organization reflects accumulated knowledge, ability, and skills of the talent within.

Below are a few excerpts around organization development:

Definition: Organization development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organization-wide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s processes, using behavioral-science knowledge.

1. Organization development is a planned effort
2. Organization development involves the total system
3. Organization development is managed from the top
4. Organization development is designed to increase organization effectiveness and health (expanded below)
5. Organization development achieves its goals through planned interventions using behavioral-science knowledge

Increase organization effectiveness and health – expanded:

1. The total organization, the significant subparts, and individuals, manage their work against goals and plans for achievement of these goals.
2. Form follows function (the problem, or task, or project, determines how the human resources are organized).
3. Decisions are made by and near the sources of information regardless of where these sources are located on the organization chart.
4. The reward system is such that managers and supervisors are rewarded (and punished) comparably for:
   • short-term profit or production performance,
   • growth and development of their subordinates, and
   • creating a viable working group
5. Communication laterally and vertically is relatively undistorted. People are generally open and confronting. They share all the relevant facts including feelings.
6. There is a minimum amount of inappropriate win/lose activities between individuals and groups. Constant effort exists at all levels to treat conflict and conflict-situations as problems subject to problem-solving methods.
7. There is high “conflict” (clash of ideas) about tasks and projects, and relatively little energy spent in clashing over interpersonal difficulties because they have been generally worked through.
8. The organization and its parts see themselves as interacting with each other and with a larger environment. The organization is an “open system”.
9. There is a shared value, and management strategy to support it, of trying to help each person (or unit) in the organization maintain his (or its) integrity and uniqueness in an interdependent environment.
10. The organization and its member operate in an “action-research” way. General practice is to build in feedback mechanisms so that individuals and groups can learn from their own experience.
11. Organization development achieves its goals through planned interventions using behavioral-science knowledge.

Kinds of organization conditions that call for organization development efforts:

1. The need to change managerial strategy
2. The need to make the organization climate more consistent with both individual needs and the changing needs of the environment
3. The need to change “cultural” norms
4. The need to change structure and roles
5. The need to improve inter-group collaboration
6. The need to open up the communications system
7. The need for better planning
8. The need for coping with problems of merger
9. Need for change in motivation of the work force
10. Need for adaption to a new environment*

Wow! Organization development hits every area: marketing, sales, accounting, human resource and more. I am blown away that the above excerpt on organization development printed in 1969, in its entirety, remains relevant today.

We live in a constant change, change affects our relationships with our co-workers, our customers, our internal processes, our work conditions and the technology we rely on. Our skills and our systems demand flexibility and adaptive resilience.

There is little expectation that a strategy will remain relevant before the ink is dry (that I even refer to ink almost dates the analogy), however too many organizations plan, set their plan in motion, look for it to cement, and then wonder why it is abandoned, let alone deemed irrelevant.

The shock comes that 40 years after this article was written an overwhelming majority of leaders, managers, and organizations still don’t get it. They continue to manage and lead through fear, intimidation, and provocation. I have been an active organization development professional for the past 10 years and enter every engagement expecting a C-level leader or senior manager is familiar with organization development as an enabler to success, but too quickly find they count on their goal to get the project done, not to get their people or organization to develop.

Reread the excerpt above and rate your roll in your organization’s commitment to develop sustainable, healthy relationships between their people and systems? and rate your roll in your organization’s commitment to develop sustainable, healthy relationships between their people and systems?

It continues to surprise me to see leaders and managers move up in their career and forget, or are simply blinded by their ego to recall, what it meant in their work and their life when they are motivated and what a good manager or leader has meant to their development.

It’s time to go back and dedicate yourself to the most important element in your organization’s success: people. Your people and your coworkers are where your organization’s health to remain competitive and relevant resides. Organization development is not a management fad, but as early as 1969 was called out for impact. Organization development is just as valid in 2009 as it was in 1969.

So why is organization development important? Because every single thing your organization chooses to do relies on developing first your people, then their role to develop the organization. This is not an human resources challenge it is an organization challenge. There is a distinct difference from getting it done and getting it accomplished.

*Excerpt from: “Organization Development: Strategies and Models” edited by Edgar Schein, Warren Bennis, and Richard Beckhard

Postscript: The latest book by Edgar Schein, released in 2009

Reading a blog on the venture capital website Start Up Hire called: Should Startups Compromise When Hiring? I found a reference to a blog Dharmesh Shah, Chief Technology Officer & Founder of Hubspot* and Onstartups.com, wrote, “Why Startups Should ALWAYS Compromise When Hiring?”. I posted a comment to the blog as I felt Start Up Hire’s blog and Dharmesh Shah’s blog both have valid points, but neither blog strikes a talent management, financial case.

I post the thread here as I found it relevant to my last blog: The VC’s Missing Formula: Human Capital Discounted Cash Flow.

Below, you first see the Start Up Hire blog [initalic], then Dharmesh Shah’s blog [in blue text], and finally, my comment follows.

From Start Up Hire’s, Team Building Blog, page:

Dharmesh Shah shared some thoughtful insights recently on “Why Startups Should ALWAYS Compromise When Hiring?“ It’s true that any new hire brings a balance of skills, traits, experience, and relationships. Finding the right balance (or compromise) is the key, and this needs to be done in the context of both the specific job and the broader organization. For a team to be more effective than the sum of its parts, there must be a constructive mix of different experiences, complimentary skill sets, industry relationships, ages, and personality types. The requirements matrix for any one job may contain binary criteria like cultural fit, passion, intelligence, integrity, etc. The subjective criteria will vary by position with “relevant experience” being high on the list, especially for more senior roles.

Time is a scarce resource at emerging growth companies and speed is critical to success – speed to market, the agility to change direction on the fly, and the ability to iterate faster than the incumbents. To quote Rupert Murdoch, “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.” The implication for startup hiring is that there is little to no time available for on-the-job training nor room for the rookie mistakes. Good ideas and ripe markets get competitive very fast … thanks partly to the flood of venture dollars (but that’s another story.) While every hiring need will have its own prioritized criteria, relevant experience will invariably rank towards the top of the list. Experience is not surprisingly well correlated to relationships … and the right relationships provide tremendous leverage and the ability to move that much faster.

From OnStartups by Dharmesh Shah

Why Startups Should ALWAYS Compromise When Hiring?

Startups should hire the best people possible. But, if you re-read the title, you”ll notice that I’m saying you should always compromise. Why? Because there’s no such thing as the absolutely perfect hire along every possible dimension. If you recruit people that you think were a “no-compromise” hire, you’re deluding yourself with unrealistic expectations. Nobody’s perfect (and if they are, you probably couldn’t recruit or afford them anyways).

Everyone you bring on is a compromise. The trick is to compromise on the right things.

Let me explain. Here are several different attributes or “dimensions of awesomeness” you might seek for your startup recruit:

1. Passion: Are they fired-up?
2. Experience: Have they done this particular job before? Did they succeed at it?
3. Intelligence: Are they smart?
4. Academics: Do they have the right degree? From the right place?
5. Hunger: Are they motivated? Are they ambitious?
6. Risk-Tolerance: Can they share the risk? Or, are they looking to make fair market value?
7. Scrappiness: Can they get by with little? Are they resourceful?
8. Loyalty: Can you get them to commit to your cause? Will they be fiercely loyal?

Those are just a few I thought of off the top of my head. It’s by no means a complete list. I intentionally left out things like “integrity”, because it’s hard to argue in favor of compromising on integrity. That’s just plain stupid.

But just about all of the attributes listed above could be compromised a little in exchange for something else. For example, if you were somehow able to grade a recruit along all these dimensions, you might find that someone scores “average” in the academics dimension – but is off-the-charts smart (happens all the time). So, you might decide that it’s OK for them not to have an ivy league degree. Or, someone might be so smart, passionate and entrepreneurial – but lacking in experience. Perhaps that’s OK too. Or, maybe you really do have to have the absolutely perfect person along every possible dimension, but they’re so good, you’re just not sure you’re going to be able to keep them engaged. Perhaps you’ll have to compromise on the loyalty front.

The point is, like with just about everything related to startups (and lots of things in life), there are tradeoffs. You need to figure out which dimensions are absolutely critical (where you will not give), and which ones you’re willing to compromise a little on. There’s no right answer – it depends on your business, your culture, your values and your instincts.

Toby Elwin says:

August 11, 2009 at 3:37 PM

Startups should never compromise, if their human capital is as important as their financial statements.

My current work as an independent consultant is almost entirely framed in a 20-year history of organization development and marketing. I find human capital the most important discussion to have and to relate direct to business results. Your talent is your bottom line.

Most organizations are continually challenged to hire the right fit, manage their success, and maintain their motivation [known in some circles as recruit, train, retain]. The “X” factor in all organizations is how to manage talent.

Technical ability and motivation are mutually exclusive. It takes talent to implement a strategy, it takes talent to leverage technology, it takes talent to follow processes. If your talent is not motivated none of the above will happen.

I have come to analyze likely executive, operational, or functional success with talent-related research such as emotional intelligence for team and relationship predictors; cultural assessments to match talent to corporate culture; and a group of communication strategies to align an organization’s talent to expectations and goals.

The ability to manage an organization through rapid growth relies on bringing the right talent in, identifying the characteristics of risk in current- and future-state talent needs, and being aware that managing a $1 – $5 million a year company relies on a different work force than managing a $100 million company. The CFO of your start-up may have little ability or comfort to take you on the road to an IPO.

Many post-merger culture assessments don’t provide a road map for that growth, don’t account for the human capital [talent management] role to realize synergies, and don’t focus on talent strategies that can manage towards strategic needs. It is a stock market fact that acquiring company stocks drop when an acquisition is announced. If your acquisition’s top talent leaves, you are left with hard assets, but perhaps little motivation of those who stay on. The cultural fit is the most overlooked in an assessment of synergy.

Passion, hunger, risk-tolerance, scrappiness, loyalty can all be managed with human capital assessments. Experience, intelligence, academics are all technical accomplishments that rely on motivation. For an organization or a leader, hunger is less important than knowing when people will be hungry and what your people feed on. No matter the knowledge, ability, or skill, if there is no motivation, there is no contribution.

I believe VCs and private equity firms can realize a greater portfolio return when they build human capital into their risk beta.

The link to the blog is here human capital valuation.

[*In the spirit of disclosure, I count Hubspot as one the best businesses I have dealt with for social media and inbound marketing analysis and impact. They define the term community and I count on Hubspot, their employees, and their learning environment as a singular source to navigate social media and the new world of marketing and public relations. I am not professionally affiliated with Hubspot.]

I challenge myself to write blogs that might start a conversation either leading to change or to sustain what is working.

I want to present an idea to provide a spark for action or follow-through. Anyone can come up with an idea, that’s easy, the hard part is to take an idea into implementation.

My goal is that you come to rely on blogs that are compelling, concise, and provide nuggets in exchange for the time you took to read the blog.

I enjoy writing about leadership for 2 reasons:

1. to share skills top leaders rely on to motivate people
2. to communicate symptoms or patterns of poor leadership

If you are part of an organization with strong leadership you know that a leader, at some point, has to tell someone something they don’t want to hear. A good leader communicates with that person in an honest, empathetic way. This discussion leaves little doubt about who is accountable and what outcome is expected.

The conversation may irritate the recipient for a couple days and they may not agree with the leader, but there is no doubt remaining after the conversation. A leader does not avoid these hard conversations.

A leader will never identify an issue and ask that someone else have the tough conversation for them. A leader knows teams and individuals need feedback and need follow-through if they are to ever develop trust and continue to be a motivated contributor.

If you are in an organization that does not show this type of leadership, I offer my blogs on leadership as a way to realize, no, you are not crazy. The leaders you are around are leaders in name only. They are not leaders, but bullies.

No, you have not gone down the rabbit hole, leadership is a rare commodity. There are standards at some organization where an absence of leadership drives bully behavior. Many organizations neither know how to build leaders nor have the desire to cultivate leaders. It is more likely the organization you belong to manages leadership with politically-correct, lip service, if leadership is managed at all.

If you identify that your organization is full of bullies, not leaders, you have at least 4 options:

1. stay and hope for change,
2. dumb down your expectations,
3. join in, or
4. look for an opportunity where leaders work

There are organizations that excel in the development and cultivation of leaders. Finding another job is never easy, but if you look, there are companies you can find where you will thrive. At these organizations, if you are willing to work hard, they will value your diversity and hold themselves accountable to provide opportunities for your success, provide consistent feedback, and will back you up, even when you make a mistake. Their culture is a culture of development, not punishment.

When you find the right organization your motivation is constantly topped-off and charged. Some words of warning: you may discover at your new organization that your work has turned into a passion. After all, most of us are at work for longer hours than we are with the people we love and choose to be with. Work can be energizing.

Blogs about leadership are the most challenging for me to write. While it is easy to present leadership symptoms, I continue to wonder if it is wise to present blog-related prescriptions.

I look forward to your continued comments as they help me develop blogs you find more valuable.

Some resources on leadership cultures and best places to work:

• Talent Management Magazine
• Leadership Development Planning

On 2 earlier blog posts I write 1) that motivation is the bottom-line success and 2) diversity is about opportunity. In this blog I want to dig into how diversity can negatively affect motivation.

First, let’s look at 2 definitions*:

• Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
• Being or perceived as being overly concerned with such change, often to the exclusion of other matters.

No, these are not definitions of diversity. These are definitions of politically correct. Diversity is not political correctness. Diversity is opportunity, the opposite of political correctness. Political correctness has given diversity a bad name.

HR professionals must own a suitable amount of blame for the politically correct hijack of diversity. People do recruit, hire, and promote with a bias towards those most like themselves. Some fight against it more than others and while some fight against their bias, they can over-compensate to the extreme: a reverse bias. Hiring or promotion decisions soon become based on fear: fear of legal action.

Fear is the domain of the politically correct and we should not be confused about the politically correct–they oppose diversity. Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Laws look to equalize the talent pool and to provide opportunity.

Bias is not white man’s burden alone, it happens between and within all race, religion, or creed. We all have a bias. Diversity is not served by an arbitrary quota of under-represented groups as an unalienable right.

The politically correct pass judgment on what is appropriate; on who deserves opportunity; and on who should be censored. HR allow themselves to be the pawns of the politically correct. When HR efforts limit diversity to a percentage, the percentage of minority candidates or the percentage of female executives, diversity no longer means opportunity. HR no longer focus on talent and organization development, but on compliance.

When an organization uses an excuse of not upsetting anyone, the norm becomes the politically correct notion of truth. The organization derailed by the politically correct becomes obedient to those most strident. HR then becomes bullied into an emphasis on the role of women, the ethnic minority, someone’s sexual orientation, or religion over an opportunity for all. Worse, those that do not, the politically correct alienate.

When all can contribute thoughts, skills, and abilities, the entire social network benefits. Diversity is the opportunity to contribute a view and share your perspective. When an employee expects a fair opportunity to stand on their own merit, the only barrier to their advancement is their motivation. When all have comfort to contribute then motivation becomes the core work culture and inertia of sustained excellence.

Diversity does not keep an organization out of public relations or legal trouble. Diversity provides opportunity. Diversity impacts an organization through opportunity, not fear. Political correctness is the enemy of diversity.

Does your organization enforce diversity or celebrate diversity?

Is your diversity initiative a political correctness campaign in disguise?

*Source:   answers.com

I admit each organization is unique. Each handles and manages industry and firm-specific stress and demand differently. I do not admit that organizations are anything more than a system of human interrelations. The organization is a product of human interaction and social construction. Organizations do not follow ordained, industry-driven culture. There is no set of industry commandments or blueprint all organizations must follow.

Organizations are a product of social interactions not industry feature. People come together to inter-act and inter-relate. Organizations are made and conceived as products of human interaction and social construction rather than an expression of an underlying industry, natural order. People form the organization, the accumulation of organizations make up an industry segment.

It is not the industry that demands an organization norm. People create process, not the industry. People plug technology in, not the industry. And people in all industries are too lazy to make a pot of coffee, seemingly, just to piss you off; people, not the coffee maker or the industry.

People drive the organization’s effectiveness, mood, and culture. Any badge-of-courage discussion about how specialized the health care industry (the education industry, the nonprofit industry, the law enforcement industry, the music industry, or whatever industry you want to call out) is, should question an ability to reason against the sociological laws of interaction, leadership, culture, and communication.

On every engagement I find one certainty, at some time I will hear someone in the organization sing their divine right to the blues in one of the following sentences:

• …you really have to work here to understand,
• …this is not like other industries,
• …if you’ve never worked in this industry you will never know,
• …people who work in this industry are incredibly special and unique,
• …we have special Spidey-sense that no other industry or organization has, or
• …outsiders will never get it, they will never understand how different we are

Those comments are the product of learned helplessness. Though I will never enable any of those points, I do listen to their lecture and I do acknowledge their cautionary tale and the burden they must carry. I also make sure to burn the notes I took while they lectured me.

Studies in organization behavior and change management focus on the human, sociological side of the organization. Organization change management professionals approach organizations, as a system of human interrelations; therefore, human behavior and social interaction is the focus of change. Not the industry. Not the sector.

If you are afraid a management consultant will challenge your assumption, then you should hire them immediately. If you refuse to hire or listen to a management consultant who has challenged your assumption, you should not waste your time or money on a management consultant. Keep your money and buy automatic coffee makers for everyone, because you have fostered a culture of sycophants afraid to tell you the truth for fear of their job. And long ago you or your organization already marginalized or fired the squeaky wheel who cared; that may be more to do with values than culture.

Your organization is only effective when they feel like it.  Have you coached your management and executive team on how to motivate people around your vision?  The bottom line is motivation, their motivation, not yours.

A leader holds management accountable to understand, commit, and own their role to translate your vision to their team.  Your management’s ability to own their role and translate that to their team is the break point on if your organization succeeds or fails.

Leaders inspire and role their sleeves up to continue to check the pulse of their organization.  Leaders sit with their talent and find out how they can better lead.  Leaders lead.  Managers manage.  Both motivate.

The alpha and beta of motivation in the workplace is Frederick Herzberg’s “Motivation to Work” study, published in 1959.  This 180-page book should reside on every leaders Kindle, iPad, desk, or book shelf.  No one in human resources should write a policy without a thorough understanding of this study.

From Herzberg’s study, what fuels an individuals motivation:

• achievement,
• recognition,
• the work itself,
• responsibility,
• advancement, and
• growth

Source: Justin Gerber

What is interesting is achievement is the single most important factor.  Someone’s achievement will drive their motivation and their achievement does not need to be recognized to sustain a positive effect.

Recognition tied to achievement is powerful; but only in combination with achievement, not separated.

In other words being called out for recognition is hollow if the person knows they did not achieve something.  And achieving something you know took effort will both bank and sustain motivation longer than other factors.  Achievement is intrinsic and intrinsic motivation is the only lasting motivation.

Every employee wants to know how they make a difference:  how they contribute to the goals of the organization. Whatever strategy you build and announce is immediately translated by each individual as to how your strategy impacts their job and their role.

As a leader can you sit at any desk of the organization and confidently hear that that employee knows exactly how they make a difference in the organization and that what they do in their role to deliver to your strategic goals?  Do you hope this would happen? Hope is not a strategy.

Motivation is the bottom line to success and motivation is your responsibility. You, the leader are the most influential force for your organization’s motivation.  You set vision and you set expectation. More importantly you motivate by modeling expected behavior.

Each employee has knowledge, ability, and skills; however, without motivation they provide their knowledge, ability, and skills to you only when they feel like it, not when you expect.  You are as much a coach as a boss.  You are as much a mentor as a boss – and, no, financial compensation is not motivation.  Motivation comes from appreciation, acknowledgment, and alignment.

If you have not made clear that each manager will operationalize a plan with goals, objectives, and actions and the resources needed to deliver and be accountable for, then you are crossing your fingers – and you are not a leader, but a bully.  Bullies hide behind titles and layers of bureaucracy – they perpetuate bureaucracy.

Motivation matters.  Whether not-for-profit, public-sector, or private-sector motivation delivers bottom line results.

Whether a donor’s dollar, a grant, a budget approval, taxpayer dollar, shareholder investment, or revenue – how you maximize each and every dollar depends on motivation.

Both motivation and profit measure your leadership effectiveness.  Profit without motivation is hollow and will not sustain satisfaction.

You won’t read a better book on leadership and management:

In a prior post I advocate emotional intelligence as a more important quality job interview criteria than a corporate or team culture fit. What is emotional intelligence or EI? And what does the EI vs. IQ debate mean?

Where IQ intends to measure the ability to reason deductively or inductively. Much has come to light to say it is wrong to expect the higher someone’s measure of logical reasoning, math skills, spatial skills, understanding analogies, and verbal skills [IQ] the higher someone’s success is expected. The alternative key to success measurement may be found in thinking, behaving, and communication skills [EI].

EI attempts to measure, amongst other traits:

• self-awareness,
• self-regulation,
• motivation,
• empathy, and
• relationship skills, and
• social skills

Though IQ continues to find advocates for expected success, my point was to discontinue the culture fit interviews (or IQ) and start emotional intelligence interviews. Isn’t thinking, behaving, and communicating more directly tied to performance and bottom-line growth than how smart someone is?

Again, I am pleased to reference the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section and again I reference Drake Bennett’s front-page article: The Other Kind of Smart [open an Acrobat file here]. Here Mr. Bennett reports a legion who support teaching emotional intelligence skills to our children in conjunction to reading, writing, and arithmetic. These advocates propose teaching our children the soft skills of social and emotional knowledge to provide better preparation and skills to manage future success.

Please think again about the opportunity to turn your organization’s recruiting or talent management effort from culture or IQ to emotional awareness.

For those who find this is too touchy-feely and does not pertain to the business of business, I provide a link to Kumbaya.

In organization change I always avoid the term buy in. You may hear the term in some variation of the following: now we need to get [insert stakeholder here] to buy in.

I have never been comfortable asking anyone to “buy in” to a strategic plan, a new product launch, or an organization change. ‘Buy in’ sounds too much like slippery salesman’s jargon. I don’t need the person to “buy in” and then feel they were sold something bogus. I don’t need surprises and a revised sell job.

Don’t ask people to “buy in” to something. Instead invite them in to what is happening. Draw them in. Communicate with them. Share with all that are impacted the difficulty ahead. Ask them for their view, ask them how they see their role.

I prefer a stakeholder who understands their role in the change, they are the ones who provide commitment and  motivation. Seek their dedication.  It is far easier to invite them, then to sell them. It takes far less effort to communicate from the start than to keep information and risk the entire change from a passive or active revolt. Some people may never “buy in”, that’s OK.

Stop trying to sell them something.

Try helping them understand and commit and you are responsible to keep them motivated. You need your stakeholders to succeed. These are the people that will rally others, that will infect the people on the fence or that are unsure.  These motivated, committed stakeholders will energize the rest.

In today’s world change is constant, try to treat your stakeholders as motivated, interested colleagues. Not some low-interest, finance customer.

Managers manage.

Leaders lead.

Are these roles so different?

A manager is charged to manage their resources against a budget.  Does this allow a manager to maximizing their talent, to cultivate creativity in their team, or to take risks?  The manager needs to deliver to their budget and align their resources to successfully enable their team’s role to perform against the plan.

Leaders shape a vision.  Leaders look beyond the horizon for opportunity and threats, they calculate risk, and communicate goals.  Leaders are responsible for results against their vision.  That makes communication and motivation a primary skill for leaders.  Leaders make change, but look towards their team to execute tactically.

Very simply, managing resources may compete with the ability to develop and communicate a vision.  The skills for management may be entirely different for the skills needed for leaders.  Perhaps one set of skills would fail in the other’s role; the identification and acknowledgment of this may be a large part of managing (in the true sense) expectations.

I feel cultivating success in either role is more important than expecting a manager to also dual-hat as a leader.  Both are very difficult roles.

Does your company have a hiring philosophy to find people who fit into the company culture?

Do you interview people to fit into the culture of your division?

Do you interview people to fit into the culture of your team?

Why do we look for people who will fit in when what your business needs are people who stand out.  What good is it to hire for culture fit when we work and live in a dynamic world where change is constant?  You may not want change in your personal life, but you better be building for change in your professional life.

Don’t believe in change?  Look at the Fortune 500 from 1998, how many companies are no longer on the Fortune 500 2008 list?  Do the same with the S&P 500?  The Russell 2000?  The English Premier League?

Please, do interview for people who are reliable, who communicate effectively, who respect dialogue.  But hiring people who fit in to your culture is like adding people to build your organization’s coffin and headstone.

You need diversity, you need different opinions, you need contrarian views, you need the pursuit of alternatives.  It is important for people to make mistakes, because the people who fear mistakes and fear those who might take a risk are the ones that drive your company off the Fortune 500.

The people who don’t fit your culture are the people who keep your business and your team sharp, they aim beyond the horizon, challenge the status quo, drive new conversation, and stimulate cognitive diversity.  Emotional Intelligence provides a clearer picture of traits I value and I interview for.

Think about how your hiring strategy might go differently with Emotional Intelligence (called EI) as a framework.  Obviously relevant skill and talent needed for the role you hire for, but emotional intelligence is far easier to interview for than some esoteric, poorly-mapped, culture fit.

When an organization’s words do not match action, who is to blame?

How many companies have you seen or worked with that have literature, speeches, employee handbooks, or marketing that just does not match the actions or culture inside the organization? Ever been around a company with printed materials that talk of putting people first, but do not provide flexible schedules or project opportunity for staff development? Ever been around a company committed to diversity as long as no one offers a contrarian view?

What does a child of 5, or even 2, do when a parent does not follow through? They ignore you. They break you down with tantrums or arguments and do as they see fit without fear of your follow through.

People, at every age, are insightful, quick to see words not followed with action or commitment are hot air. Organizations who hang core value posters without backing up all aspects of those values risk an organization that tunes out and turns off.

Who is to blame for the company that promotes teamwork, but does not allow an environment of dialogue? Organizations are social networks. They take their cue from the organization leaders. Leadership without follow-through will impact values, behaviors, and norms more then any print propaganda or speech.

If your leader does not ask for input or marginalizes employee contribution what behavior is the organization likely to model? When the organization heaps praise on the rainmakers and superstars that act outside the values, a wedge is further driven between rhetoric and reality.

If Return on Involvement reveals itself as an overwhelming failure, do you just search for a new, pithy slogan?

It is not easy to turn posters and marketing into professional deeds, but anyone in the organization can lead by example. You can call out your organization values in your daily work, in meetings, and with customers. You can contribute to organization integrity by setting your organization values at the forefront.

Perhaps leaders take note, perhaps not.

Leadership is a skill, a verb; a leadership is not a noun, just as leader is not a title.

Be the change you wish to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi

I promise I will never to quote Gandhi again…