Connections Count!
If you think your people are delivering peak performance, you may be out of touch with your business.
Every organization wants more from less. They want to kick sales up and push costs down. Many suffer because their industries are unhealthy (think auto and home building). Some want to capitalize on industry strengths (think pharmaceuticals and health care). But no one seems to be getting anything close to what’s possible from their people.
Every day I listen to frustrated people tell me they could do their jobs better if only…. And I hear almost daily from leaders about their struggles to get more from their people.
Why, after years of practice and tens of thousands of books and articles on leadership, do so many business leaders feel thwarted in their attempts to generate higher levels of productivity willingly given from their people? The formula is simple, but simple isn’t necessarily easy.
“Just connect me. It’s no more complicated than that.”
The leadership formula is precisely what an employee told me in Illinois a few weeks ago. It’s so basic. “Just connect me,” she said. “Help me understand how I can impact the company. I want to do more than just do a job. Give me information to make smarter decisions. Ask me what I think. And let me know when I’ve done what I need to do. It’s no more complicated than that.”
Radical stuff, huh? Of course not. Here’s an example of how simple it can be.
One of our current engagements is in Lubbock, Texas with an ITT Corp. operation making pumps that drive huge irrigation and municipal water systems and industrial processes. They’re a top performer now, but boosting people performance even more will make them a company showcase.
The process in Lubbock begins with a customer who orders a pump for a certain delivery date. The ITT operation’s foundry makes a casting for the pump. They send that casting to their manufacturing operation across town, who then makes and ships the pump to the customer.
Because the casting operation is the first step in the process, the foundry needs to get the pump to manufacturing on time every time or the whole process gets messed up and the pump doesn’t get to the customer on time. Missed delivery dates make customers unhappy. Too many of them drive customers to someone else.
When we started our work in Lubbock, castings were getting to manufacturing on time about 20% of the time. We asked people in the foundry why that was happening. There were a variety of issues causing the problem but the fix revolved around better connecting people and their daily work to meeting the on time delivery goals.
The short answer: We aren’t connected.
Kelly Turner, the foundry manager, explains, “When we started posting and updating our on-time delivery results daily in prominent locations around the foundry, and when we turned our huddles into continuous improvement conversations, we started sharing a positive and heightened sense of urgency to reach our goal.”
The chart below shows what these folks have done. On-time delivery skyrocketed from about 20% to 100%–roughly a 370% improvement–in just a few months.
Pumps are on time every time now because of strong leadership, intense communication, improved business acumen, a new spirit of continuous improvement and because people are getting recognized for a job well done. It’s no more complicated than that.
When people hit special goals in Texas, they often celebrate with barbeques. Rod Smith, who heads the Lubbock lean transformation and is the site’s brisket chef extraordinaire, did the cooking. The whole team did the celebrating!
15 Priorities Means No Priorities
“How can you have 15 priorities?”
That’s what the head of a business unit asked me the other day. He and his leadership team decided to chase 15 key goals this year. They’re doing well on some unimportant ones but poorly on the ones that matter most.
Goals communicate what’s important. But how can 15 things be important?
Knowing What Matters Most
The head of the business unit needs to pare down his list. Here’s what he’s doing.
First, he’s separating the results goals from the drivers of those results. In his case, the results goals are financial. But financial goals are lagging indicators. They’re met or unmet because something else happened. So it’s critical to know what needs to happen to cause the results. Cause and effect. Typically the drivers relate to goals around customers, employees or internal business processes (e.g., improve on time delivery, as in the ITT case above).
This sounds incredibly simple, but despite its apparent simplicity, many business leaders don’t get this right. They seemingly cluster a bunch of goals and hope for the best. If they get the results it’s more coincidental than anything else. The fact is, they usually don’t get the results they want, but when they do it’s often at a higher price than was needed.
Here’s a real example.
Last year we worked with a company whose leadership had bundled goals into four or five categories and called it a “balanced scorecard”. But the bundled goals didn’t create the desired results.
For instance, one goal was to deliver a certain amount of training hours. Hitting that goal only meant that people sat in training classrooms for a certain number of hours. It said nothing about whether the company improved the skills and knowledge that was needed to build deficient capabilities. The goal was meaningless.
Goals need to be balanced between what we want to achieve and how we plan to achieve it. People need to understand those goals so they can connect to them. They need resources that help them make the right decisions and take the right actions to achieve the right results. Then celebrate when they do.
Is Collaboration Good or Bad?
Collaboration is a hot term these days and well it should be. Collaboration across people and processes can drive innovation and productivity. But, as with anything else, collaboration can also drain resources if it isn’t channeled properly.
Some of us remember the days when teamwork was the rage. Business leaders abandoned their offices and trekked to the American Southwest; climbing ropes and scaling fences to prove that they were loyal team members.
Back at the office, teamwork goals were set for everyone. Conference rooms were filled with teams doing teamwork and making team decisions. Many of these organizations practically came to a halt. People were dutifully teaming, but often at the expense of creating any results that mattered. They were focused on the process, not on the results.
Collaboration is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.
Morten T. Hansen’s excellent article in April’s Harvard Business Review, “When Internal Collaboration is Bad for Your Company,” makes this case.
There are times when collaboration represents a drain on value because the costs to collaborate are higher than the results created. Only when an initiative will create a collaboration premium is that initiative good for the business.
Employee Free Choice Act or Card Check
It’s appearing that The Employee Free Choice Act–or Card Check–won’t make it out of committee this year, but it’s receiving the attention of business people in the U.S. Some are telling me if it becomes law, they’re moving some or all of their business offshore. Some are currently assessing their vulnerability to an organizing attempt.
If it does become law, Americans are likely to see an end to the secret ballot in labor elections. There’s also apt to be an increase in unionization efforts.
I’ve consulted successfully to companies with and without unions. In each case, the result was the organizations got better, not because they were or weren’t organized, but because they focused more on their customers and their people than they did before.
The Leadership Report is not pro-union or anti-union. But I have a fundamental bias, which incidentally is backed by a lot of research. Companies that focus simultaneously and intensely on their customers and their employees will do better by every relevant financial measure than those that don’t.
I believe this condition tends to occur when a well-led team works closely together toward a common goal and in a spirit of mutual respect, candor and trust. When this happens, there’s no need for a third party to represent a portion of the team.
Unfortunately, when leaders do a lousy job of leading, their people seek a third party to give them what their leaders aren’t giving them–rightly or wrongly. This can further splinter the team, bog the organization down in petty rules and restrictions, reduce flexibility and increase costs–all at a time when customers want high quality, service and value that comes from speed, flexibility and eliminating any cost that doesn’t add value. Think General Motors.
If leaders do the jobs they’re supposed to do, we’ll all be better off—by the customer.
Jim Shaffer