This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Culture change
Rest, renewal & the global situation
When you drive a big rig, the time you drive and rest is regulated for safety reasons.
When you fly a plane, the time you fly and rest is regulated for safety reasons.
When you’re a senior leader making decision that affect 1,000s, maybe 100,000s, of people – employees and customers and communities – you can, and likely do, work many more hours than the 40 hour, 5 day standard work week [at least that's what it is here in Quebec, Canada].
I recently read a post - ”How to accomplish more by doing less” - that brought the implications of this to my mind again. Here Tony Shwartz talks about the absence of regular rest and renewal during the day and a good night sleep on individual performance. And, that made me wonder about the impact it’s having on the quality of thinking and decisions that are being taken by leaders who are are working 60+ hour weeks. Not getting breaks or lunches away from their desks. Working evenings and weekends because they are in meetings from 8 to 6 or later each and every day. Not taking vacations.
Could inadequate rest and renewal have led to our current global economic and political situation?
How can we help our organizations focus and prioritize?
Do less [but more of the right things]. Do it well. And maybe we can change the world!
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The ultimate question & employees
I just listened to my favourite podcast, Mitch Joel’s “Six Pixels of Separation”. In this episode, Mitch spoke with Fred Reichheld. Not surprisingly, since Mitch is a brand marketing expert and Fred is a customer loyalty expert and author of the Loyalty Effect and the Ultimate Question, their conversation focused on the customer and the ultimate question: Have I treated you in a way that is worthy of your loyalty?
So, what does that have to do with employees and employee communication? Imagine asking the ultimate question to employees. I did. And, it made me think that perhaps we should be scrapping our annual employee surveys and instead start tracking the employees answer to this one question.
What could we learn by knowing whether our employees were “Promoters, Passives, or Detractors”? Would an employee net promoter score actually tell us more than we’re learning from our annual engagement and job satisfaction surveys? Would it be easier to administer and manage? Would the results be easier to communicate and act upon? Could that deeper understanding help us better achieve our business goals and build toward sustainable success fast?
Even if you don’t think this is the ultimate employee question, the idea of the one question employee survey is an idea who’s time has come.
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Annual performance reviews may be making things worse. Now what?
If, the idea is to improve organizational and employee performance, then the annual performance review may be making things worse not better. Today’s Globe and Mail confirms that according to an “academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies… two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback is given.” [link not available - "Every year not enough, try weekly performance reviews", Rachel Emma Silverman]
Since it’s that time of year, the time of year when I know many of you are focused on reviewing this year’s performance and defining next year’s team and individual objectives, I thought you might be interested in learning about something completely different. Something that will really increase your chances of improving performance next year.
The “Managerial moment of truth” presents a framework and an approach to skill building. As Robert Fritz describes it, “the managerial moment of truth is a one trick pony. But, it’s a really really good trick.”
It’s not personal. It will help you build an institutional and individual ‘cycle of correction’ and learning. It will enable you to effectively increase organizational and individual performance.
Here’s co-author Bruce Bodaken, CEO of Blue Shield of California, speaking about the impact of this approach on his business’s leadership and performance. He believes that this approach has helped him and his team unleash between 25 and 40% of the underutilized capacity in his organization at little or no cost. In his 5 years as CEO, BlueShield has become the fastest growing health plan in California. They’ve doubled membership and grown revenues from $3B to 8B. A remarkable achievement indeed. Worth checking out the full video, especially after minute 6.
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Back to school. Back to work.
Rene Magritte’s famous painting Golconde. Work as a formalized dreary rainy man’s world.
This image, seems so right and so wrong. Today, after the official end of summer holidays here in North America and in much of the western world, we are returning to our work routines.
The good news. The opportunity for change is perhaps as great as at any time of the year as plans will be submitted for final approval for 2012 [and in some cases beyond].
Time to think about the institution’s real values. Time to think about the culture that will best suit your institutional objectives given those values. Time to make the business case for investing in the capacity to make it happen.
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It’s a diverse world
Not always. When I’m in the blogosphere, volunteering, or attending church, or at my clients find myself in groups that are mostly white [certainly mostly North American], mostly of a certain age and economic level. I’m operating in a bubble.
This struck me over the head a while ago when I was attending the Living Art in southern Vermont. I looked up early in the training and realized it was the most diverse group of people I’d ever been in.
There we were 24 people. A few more women than men, but not by much. Ages ranged from 21 to 75. The youngest was an African American who’d served in the military and was now studying at Columbia Univerity. The 75 year old was a contemporary art expert and the daughter of holicaust survivors. There were two married couples. Two french Canadians, an Aussie, a Kiwi [affectionate term for someone from New Zealand] and a German. There were three East Indian Americans. There were about 4 students and one full-time mom. There was a chiropractor and a financier. It was an incredible workshop on creating. And working with this group of people was an amazing experience.
Back to reality. According to an article in the Globe and Mail a while ago, it will take women in Canada 151 years at the rate we’re going “before the share of men and women at the management level” will be equal.
That’s not just shocking because we know that women make up almost half of the work force in Canada, or that women make most of the buying decisions, but because we know lack of diversity hurts “employee retention, productivity and innovation.”
If as an individual I know I’m in a bubble, how can I expect the organizations I’m involved with to be? How can we, and the institutions we work for, break out of our bubbles?
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A marathon is not a sprint!
As I wrote yesterday’s post, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a client of mine a few years ago. I’d commented that the people in his organization were acting as if they were running a sprint when they were really in a marathon. In their case, it was more like a very, very long, cross-country ultra marathon every day for over 5 years and a stream of change programs and reorganizations. My client laughed. He’d been a sprinter in a past life and reminded me that a 100 meter sprint lasts under 11 seconds!
Not anything like a marathon.
No wonder people were exhausted. They all believed that if they just pushed harder then they’d catch up and things would get back to normal. And the CEO, the execs, the professional communicators and human resources professionals all believed it too. Well of course this wasn’t true then and it isn’t true today, 4 years later. I hear that the organization is still working people at a sprint pace. Busy “sweating the small stuff” as the current CEO said in a recent interview.
Doesn’t sound like a prescription for being the best we can be – institutionally or professionally – to me. And, it made me think. What, if anything, can we do to help institutions that are behaving as if they are in a sprint when they are in a marathon?
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Making “magic in the marketplace”
Today, thanks to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation, I came across this key note address by Bill Taylor, the founding editor of Fast Company Magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.
Here’s what really caught my attention: ”You can’t build something special, compelling, distinctive in the marketplace unless you also build something special, compelling distinctive in the workplace… Strategy is your culture. Culture is your strategy. Success today is about so much more than just price, performance, features, technology, pure economic value. It’s about passion, emotion, identity, sharing your values… Real magic in the marketplace is when you make your organization more memorable to encounter.”
And that my friends can’t happen when the relationship with employees is the last thing on the C-Suite’s agenda! It can’t happen when leaders do not trust employees [though they expect employees to trust them], where leaders are not loyal to employees [though they expect loyalty from them] and where they are not proud of employees and the work they do [though they expect employees to be proud of the leadership and the organizations they work for]. Broken cultures on the inside will always show on the outside sooner or later!
Recommend you take the 20+ minutes [Bill comes in at about minute 4] to watch it. Some great stuff on bench marking too!
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A case of “internal communication deficit disorder”.
This week a Canadian University was diagnosed with internal communication deficit disorder. Though not rare, the disorder is almost always fatal if left untreated.
Concordia University is an institution I know well. It’s 45,000 students studying in over “300 undergraduate and 200 graduate programs” are at the centre of the downtown community I work and live in. I studied and graduated with my MBA from there; began studies for a PhD there; taught there; consulted there; worked with a student intern and volunteers from there on an urban farming project. And it’s an institution that has seemed sick at the core for some time; perhaps even further back than the Fabrikant murders in 1992.
Last year, for the second time in 3 years the President left before the end of their contract. After considerable bad press and internal finger pointing, the interim President, Dr Frederick Lowy, asked an external committee to review the governance of the university. This week, Concordia University received the report “Strengthening governance at Concordia: A collective challenge“. The review pulls no punches in reporting the situation and recommending changes to all aspects of governance.
Among other things, the review panel reported that the university was “…blatantly deficient internal communications“… had created “…a lot of distrust, often bordering on mutual contempt, between the various communities of the University.” And that “…the chorus of negative response [to the most recent President’s departure], the depth and even the fury of that response could only have arisen in a context where long simmering governance and internal communication problems between the Board and the University community, to say nothing of other outstanding matters, had neither been addressed nor resolved.” The report reflects my experience and understanding of the good [and there is a lot of good there], bad and the ugly of Concordia.
Today, the University has a decision to make: To take the recommended course of treatment for internal communication deficit disorder or not; to act on the letter and spirit of the report and its 38 recommendations or not.
If they do, it won’t be either a quick or easy recovery but recover they will. Concordia has an opportunity to change how they do things. To become a place where the board, faculty, administration, and students work together to create a unique and compelling experience for those who want to study and learn, to teach and do research, to invent and explore new ideas. In the end, this report and its recommendations are less about fixing something that is broken and more about supporting Concordia in becoming the great institution it has always had the potential to be.
As a neighbour, alumnus and friend that’s my hope.
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Looking for our own revolutionary ‘spring’!
It’s been quite a week! A week that is making me scratch my head and wonder and brings me back to a topic I’ve written about here at least once before.
Michael and I are very lucky to live in Montreal for many reasons, but one of them is that there is a lot going on here in terms of institutional sustainability.
A friend of mine, Milla Craig, is leading the nascent Finance and Sustainability Initiative. This is a “cross-section of finance and sustainability experts and professionals focused on transforming the traditional business model and enabling the finance community, business leaders and government institutions to make and value socially and environmentally responsible investments.” This is a good thing.
And, the David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise has recently launched the Sustainable Investment Professional Certification. The certification program will introduce finance professionals to a new way of thinking about investing. A way to ensure sustainable investment by understanding potential future risks to business from an environmental, social, and governance point of view. This is a good thing.
As a member of Concordia University’s extended community, I participated in a recent David O’Brien Centre Corporate Roundtable earlier this week. The room was full. The perspectives widely varied – academic, corporate, entrepreneurial, NGO, volunteer. But everyone in the room was interested in questions of sustainability and how they might contribute positively to changing the world [my words]. This is a good thing
Dr Peter Brown from McGill started off the discussion with a brief presentation. The topic was ‘Degrowth’. There will be an international conference here on the topic next year. The premise is that growth as the underlying motivation for our current economic system is the main factor driving the decline of the environment. Though we didn’t go there, I’m sure that we could also argue that organizations that focus on growth as their primary motivation will increase social and governance risk as well.
Now here’s what I found most interesting and perplexing. As a student studying Biology in the mid-70s I read “Limits to growth”. The case was compelling. So here I am 40 years later. I asked Dr Brown what had changed since then. He said: “We have more evidence.” This is a bad thing.
So, how do we move from research and raising awareness to system wide action, fast? How do we take the energy, focus and action of the grass roots sustainability movement to move our political and economic systems. Do we need our own revolutionary ‘spring’?
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Celebrating failure
Engineers without borders publishes something called a failure report. They “…believe that success in development is not possible without taking risks and innovating – which inevitably means failing sometimes.” And, they go on to say that they “…also believe that it’s important to publicly celebrate these failures, which allows us to share the lessons more broadly and create a culture that encourages creativity and calculated risk taking.”
Talk about missing the point. The organizational objective isn’t failure. The organizational objective is learning. Celebrating failure isn’t the same as celebrating learning.
And for me it raises a question. How is it that good ideas like organizationally learning becomes something that ‘glorifies’ failure. Is it really so hard to learn from our organizational failures?
For two other perspectives, more individually than institutionally focused check out:
- Steven Parker’s post “Are you part of the cult of failure?”
- Bill Jensen’s post “I F@#ked Up: Big Time… Introspection is Hard!”
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Recent posts
- Do you know the 3 best headline writing tricks ever … anyone can do, guaranteed!
- You have a presentation to make
- Shocking news!
- Shining eyes
- Why oh why do presenters put so, so much text on their PowerPoint slides?
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- Rest, renewal & the global situation
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