Get It Together!

jim | March 1, 2011 | Communication, Human Resource Management, Leadership, Organizational Design, Performance Management

Why don’t people work together?

Why don’t sales and production people work out the tension between inventories and on-time delivery? Why don’t human resources and internal communication folks create and administer one employee survey instead of two? Why don’t department heads with competing priorities work out their differences? Why do complex organizational matrices throw unnecessary political friction into an already overburdened business?

Yes, it’s true that some organizations have worked out these issues. But by my count, not many have. Huge amounts of productive time are wasted trying to negotiate the conflicting priorities, or figuring out ways to work around So-and-So who’s known as a turf-protector but has all the right contacts in high places.

How much could we get done for the customers if we didn’t have this collaboration friction?

Here are four likely root causes of condition, which in fancy-talk is known as organizational segmentation (versus integration).

The root causes:

The organizational arrangements are based on antiquated business functions, not on value streams. That is, they have little to do with meeting customer requirements.
Leaders are being paid to meet the goals of their business unit, geographic region, department or functional unit. The compensation arrangement dictates that they make the numbers, all else be damned. (It’s not that crass, but that’s really what it’s saying.)
There are no priorities, or too many priorities (one in the same), or conflicting priorities. Everyone is on his or her own and until someone figures out what it really takes to win, everything’s up for grabs.
Processes aren’t in place to enable conversations across functions. Even if the previously mentioned causes were tied down perfectly, when there’s no formal or informal way to build consensus (as in over lunch), getting together is difficult.

Most CEO’s I work with or know wouldn’t put up with what others routinely face before that nicely packaged presentation makes it to the CEO’s desk.

To Be Agile, Listen Hard

jim | March 1, 2011 | Leadership, Performance Management

I attended a Corporate Executive Board meeting recently on the subject of adaptability. Hosted by Johnson & Johnson (always the most hospitable of hosts), about a dozen senior leaders from Fortune 100 companies identified ways to improve the agility of their organizations in a world where it’s so easy to become irrelevant.

Agile organizations focus on tomorrow, are intolerant of the way things are and systematically renew and improve themselves. They dig deep for new customer requirements and ways to meet them. And they obsess over getting their people involved in creating incremental and transformational improvements.

An agile organization is adaptive; it anticipates, constantly questions its assumptions and continuously improves its processes and systems. In short, the organization’s culture is to actively and simultaneously listen to its customers and people.

The balancing act that’s required is managing the tension between maintaining a core sense of purpose and a “what if” mindset. If you focus too much on the core, you become set in your ways and apt to stagnate.

If you are excessively “what if” focused, you flop around trying this and that, sending energy in multiple directions without a clear purpose or strategy. The nice thing about strategies is that they help you know what to disregard.

Connecting the Dots

jim | March 1, 2011 | Communication, Employee Engagement, Leadership

Many well-intentioned CEO’s conduct all-employee or town hall meetings, some in live sessions, some using web-based technology.

People welcome information about business strategies, competitors and customers. They want a minimum of rah-rah, just the unvarnished facts delivered in an authentic way.

The overarching context needs to be supplemented by “what it means to me” or the CEO’s message is likely to become “so what?” information as in, “That’s all well and good, Madame CEO, but what do you want me to do about it?”

If I’m sitting in the clinical development function of a pharmaceutical and I’ve just heard my CEO discuss the importance of getting new medicines into the pipeline, I want to know what my leader of clinical development has planned to get new medicines into the pipeline. More importantly, want to know what I need to do–what actions I need to take–to help us get where the CEO has told us we need to get.

The “what it means to me” needs be just as speed-driven and well orchestrated throughout the business as the CEO’s meeting.

Healthcare Safety: Beyond Checklists—The Easy Part

jim | December 16, 2010 | Change Management, Communication, Leadership

Depending on your source, between 100,000 and 300,000 patients die in US hospitals every year due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors. Many more are wounded.

100,000-300,000 is a wide range. So, let’s be conservative and call it 100,000. Now, contrast that with the number of deaths that occur in all of U.S. industry per year—4,340 last year.

There’s nothing different about reducing employee injuries and deaths and patient injuries and deaths. The approach is identical. If you want different results, you need to change the system that’s causing the current results.

In the case of patient or employee deaths, two things need to change—the way work is done and the culture that establishes the underlying values of the organization.

Thanks to Johns Hopkins physician Dr. Peter Pronovost and others, the simple surgical checklist during major operations has been found to lower the incidence of deaths and complications by more than one third. The checklist is usually a single page that requires only a few minutes to complete at three critical junctures of operative care: before anesthesia is administered, before skin incision, and before the patient is removed from the operating room.

Checklists aren’t new. Airline pilots have been using them for years. Checklists have been part of what’s often referred to as standard work in many industries for a long time. They work and they’re easy to make work because all you have to do is follow the list. What’s not easy is shifting the culture of an organization from one where the surgeon is the master of the operating room universe to one where all OR occupants work as a fluid team.

This culture shift doesn’t start in the OR. It starts in the office of the CEO and it needs to include every leader in the hospital, whether it’s the chief of the medical staff, chief of surgery, chief resident or the “chief” of human resources.

Shifting the culture requires a re-clarification of roles and expectations of each person in the hospital. It means measurement, communication, learning and development, work processes, technology and rewards and recognition all need to be focused laser-like on becoming and remaining a zero accident institution and nothing less. Checklists are part of the hard, technical aspect of change. Shifting the underlying values within a hospital or any other organization is the soft side of change.

But checklists are easy. Culture is hard.

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Congratulations to ITT for Winning Platinum

jim | November 13, 2010 | Communication, Customer Satisfaction, Human Resource Management, Leadership, Lean/Six Sigma, Performance Management

PR News announced that our client, ITT Corporation, won the 2010 Platinum Award for Internal Communication. The award recognizes the work we did in the company’s Texas Turbine Operation in Lubbock, Texas. Courtney Reynolds led the effort for ITT.

The project was focused on integrating the so-called hard and soft sides of lean to improve operating and financial performance. During the effort, sales increased 30 percent, productivity went up 10 percent, quality went up 40 percent and on time delivery increased from 70-95 percent .

This work now is serving as a company model for other facilities undergoing a lean transformation.

To learn more, watch the video on the our home page.

Your Position Has Been Eliminated?

jim | October 25, 2010 | Communication, Human Resource Management, Leadership

A professional at a client company with whom I had worked called the other day to tell me he was leaving because his position had been eliminated. I knew better. I knew there was a performance issue related to this person. But, when he was told he must go, his manager used “your position has been eliminated” as the reason, which it was not.

Yes, there are times when jobs must truly be eliminated. It happens in belt tightening efforts. It’s often why mergers and acquisitions occur in the first place–to take advantage of synergies. I’m not suggesting it’s right or wrong. But, it is a business reality.

However, firing people for this reason happens frequently without any consolidation activity in a company. I think it’s a crappy way to terminate people and here’s why…

What’s also a business reality are the managers who do not address performance problems straight on. They fail to give someone who’s struggling the honest feedback they need to succeed. They don’t help the person shore up his or her weaknesses. Then, when “the decision” needs to be made about the poor performer’s future, the cop-out “your position has been eliminated,” is offered as the reason the person must leave the company.

Leaders use this excuse for several reasons. Some by nature are conflict-avoiders. Some have done a pathetic job of documenting performance conversations with the under performer, so HR counsels the leader to eliminate the position rather than expose the company to legal action. Other leaders have never been adequately trained or held accountable for delivering constructive feedback. And there are some who know what to do, but consider leading others a major intrusion into their already busy work-a-day lives.

The worst thing about using the “position has been eliminated” rationale is that it’s an out-and-out lie. It’s the equivalent of the internal email and external news release that announces the under-performing CEO’s sudden departure for “personal reasons.” Certainly getting fired for poor performance is very personal. But we all know the guy was fired because he didn’t deliver. So we wink knowingly. But it’s still communicating to anyone who knows better that we are not telling the truth.

It’s the same with using the rationale that the position has been eliminated, when that really wasn’t the reason.

So rather than fix these root causes of a performance problem, we establish lying as a value to be perpetuated. It becomes a cultural norm–alongside customer-centricity, one company mentality, innovation, valuing people, integrity….

Why Can’t Politicians Learn From High Performance Businesses?

jim | March 31, 2010 | Leadership, Lean/Six Sigma, Performance Management

As I read today’s CNN headline, “Obama Signs Healthcare ‘Fixes’ Bill,” I’m struck at just how backward politicians of every stripe are compared to what’s becoming standard fare in the high performance business world.

In the high performance world, something that needs to be fixed after you’ve made it is called a defect. Defects represent a form of waste. They represent waste because defects have to be either scrapped or re-worked. Scrapping something represents money down the drain. Re-working it adds unnecessary costs.

In the high performance world, when you produce defects you understand that as long as the systems remain the same you’ll reliably keep building defects. So in order to stop building defects, high performance organizations change their systems and processes so they won’t produce more defects. They try to get the right results the first time.

But in the political world, when you produce defects you first try to find someone to blame for creating the defects. It’s especially convenient to blame the other party. That’s in part because politicians are often less concerned with the results as they are with the process–especially the process of getting re-elected. (That’s why Kennedy and Deal in their book Corporate Cultures referred to bureaucracy as a process culture out of control.) “Just work the process; we’ll fix the problems we created later,” they say.

That’s foreign thinking to high performance organizations who understand that customers won’t pay for those fixes and that everyone needs to accept personal accountability for continuous improvement.

It’s hard to think like this unless you have a high level of emotional intelligence and maturity. Given the spectacle we’ve seen in Washington lately, this may be the primary reason politicians can’t seem to learn from high performers.

Undercover Boss Should Stay That Way

jim | February 8, 2010 | Leadership

I alerted our Leadership Report readers to this new CBS “reality” TV show last week. It came after last night’s Super Bowl. I couldn’t handle it after watching such a great game. Sort of like chasing a perfectly grilled prime ribeye with a cheap white zinfandel. (Is there an expensive white zin?)

For those who were watching more serious fare, like I Love Lucy re-runs, Undercover Bossis is about corporate CEO’s who masquerade as someone else so they can snoop on their employees. Some snooping may be perceived as good and some bad by the producers. But snooping is always disingenuous in my book.

It may be cute TV but a leader resorting to dishonesty to get in touch with his organization and its people is perverse, uproots the concept of authentic leadership and eliminates the leader as a candidate for teaching the corporate ethics class. Its potential for abuse is horrendous.

In today’s climate, it’s important for leaders to tell the truth. Authenticity has its virtues. CEO’s have immense political and personal influence. They have opportunity to inflict both good and bad. But when you tell people you’re a dockworker when you’re not, you aren’t telling the truth and you compromise yourself and your position. And your real motives come into question.

Some may say that walking incognito “among the troops” is a good thing. But, I believe there isn’t something fundamentally wrong about the relationship between a leader and his people if he has to fake it to stay in touch?

Some news media are desperately trying to hang on to the separation between the editorial and business sides of their business, although it’s getting awfully murky out there when advertising appears on news pages and is camouflaged in magazines as news stories) but I wonder about any dilemma CBS might face as its news people seek transparency from leaders while its programmers celebrate CEO’s who lie and hide.

Your thoughts?

One Banker’s Mindset

jim | January 18, 2010 | Leadership

According to a piece in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, at least one banker attempts to rationalize high pay in the financial industry with the need to fund the industry members’ personal lifestyles.

In an objective article by Steven Brill, a banker defends the need for high pay that’s paid now–with no deferral.

“A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments and other obligations that require substantial current cash.”

So the notion here is that compensation structures should be designed to accommodate the financial needs of the employees rather than to encourage and pay employees to act in ways that are consistent with meeting customer and shareholder requirements. This employee-comes-before-the-shareholder-and-customer mindset is dangerous in any business or industry. But it’s no doubt the same mindset that encouraged other goofy behavior, including former Merrill CEO John Thain’s decision to spend $1.2 million on his office and a couple of conference rooms.

It’s putting me over we and that’s dangerous in banking or any other industry.

Is “They just don’t get it” a fair observation?

Leadership Lessons in the News

jim | December 10, 2009 | Leadership

You can learn a lot about leading an organization by watching the news.

The Tiger Woods episode should remind all of us once again to respond fast to the news media, tell the truth and get on with. Dragging it out as he did added several days to a story that could have been over in two news cycles.

President Obama’s approval rating continues to decline. As a strictly non-partisan independent, I see him doing exactly what George W. Bush did right after his second election, but from a different philosophical point of view. Obama, like Bush, seems to be throwing all kinds of mud at the wall hoping like hell something sticks. Obama, like Bush, seemingly has a different agenda or country he’s travelling to every day. The message has blurred and focus is diminishing. (Retrievable, of course.)

Employees in many companies call this “program of the day.” Saying to themselves, “First management is talking about such and such. Next they’re talking about something else. We just tune it out because eventually it’ll all go away.” Isn’t that what’s happening?

For business leaders, the lesson is the same. Create your “story.” Tell it through what you say and what you do. Keep telling it over and over through your walk and talk. And then when you think you’ve told it as many times as you need to and you’re sick of telling it, tell it one more time.

In that respect, running for office and governing in business or politics is very much the same.