February 2010

Every Day is Halloween on “Undercover Boss”

Just when I thought I’d heard every stupid leadership idea in the world, along comes another one.

An article in this Sunday’s Washington Post by leadership consultant Carol Kinsey Goman will report on a new CBS series called “Undercover Boss”. The series follows chief executive officers who go undercover on the front line of their organizations to learn more about their company and people while a TV camera rolls.

I know enough about the show to shout loudly at all leaders reading this: “Do not try this at home!” 

The premise may make good TV, but a leader who resorts to dishonesty as a way to learn about her 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. You are the CEO. You have immense political and personal influence. You 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.

Now, a few people may disagree with me. They may submit that walking incognito, "among the troops" is a good thing.  But, I’m not so sure. Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong about the relationship between a leader and his people if he has to fake it to stay in touch?

After the Employee Survey—What To Do Next

You’ve just conducted an employee survey (aka; values survey, engagement survey, culture survey, or climate survey), and now have a huge stack of data, compliments of an organizational research firm, a consulting firm, or your home-grown Zoomerang survey.  Regardless of what you called it or how you got it done, you have two jobs ahead of you.

•    Decide what to fix.
•    Communicate results and action plans to the people you surveyed.

Let's focus on the fix part.

There are two approaches for deciding what to fix: focus on improving survey scores or focus on improving the business. I favor the latter and they're not the same thing.

Let me give you an example.

A CEO charges the human resources department with improving employee survey results. Dutifully, the head of HR sets a company and HR goal of improving the survey scores by some number, say 15 percent. Further, HR then conducts a series of meetings with department managers to encourage involvement in the improvement process.  All managers are expected to meet with their employees, identify their two lowest survey scores and create specific action plans designed to improve the scores.

There are problems with this approach.

1. Not all questions on an employee survey are created equally.  Some questions reveal conditions that when improved have marginal impact on the business, but others have a much larger impact. Statistical modeling can tell us which questions are the most or least important to organizational success. The two lowest scores may not have much impact when improved. In fact, two questions with average scores may have the biggest impact when addressed.

2. Who says a 15 percent increase is enough?  What if your survey reflects a condition that’s say, 60 percent worse than your competitor's? And what if, as a result of that condition, his sales force is beating the pants off your sales force? This is not about comfortable incremental improvement. It's about where the market says you need to be to win. 

3.  If all managers successfully improve the scores they’ve chosen in their departments, where does the organizational boost come from? The process of permitting managers to improve what they’d like to improve doesn’t coincidentally boost overall performance.

4. Organizations are fickle. Some parts of organizations contribute more to success than others. Improving across the board ignores the fact that your improvement efforts may be better focused where your strategic or operational weaknesses are.

What to do

Don’t improve survey scores.  Survey scores are perceptions that reveal symptoms. If you “fix” the scores you're likely to merely fix symptoms.

Instead, eliminate the root causes of the symptom. A root cause typically lies within one of the organization’s core systems: Leadership, Communication and Involvement, Goals and Measurement, Learning, Rewards and Recognition or Work Processes.

Use the survey to improve overall performance where it matters most. By addressing root causes of symptoms you're more apt to make the problems go away forever. 

Start a conversation on our website--Funny Business!

Our new blog is up and running, and I know a bunch of you have clicked through to read it.  Let me hear from you!  What's going on in your organization that's working? What's your greatest leadership challenge or people problem?  Do you disagree with something I posted?  Argue with me. Let's have some fun.

Jim Shaffer