Is it that the Iraq War has made Europeans dislike North Americans, or is it that North Americans feel that they only have the right answers? I am not quite sure, and recently I have been involved in a Battle Royale. I am talking about a large software company where both sides have acted like school children on the playground. In this corner, North American sales team. And in this corner the Rest of World sales team. Let’s come out fighting fair.
But they aren't fighting fair. Both teams have lied, cheated, and stolen opportunities from the other. Can this go on? What is the cause? Is it just about the wallet or is it about power? Is it that the compensation model is broken, or is that there is a lack of leadership or not enough negative consequences to change behavior?
The history between senior executives is literally hostile, and brokering an agreement can’t currently be done with both of them in the room. Getting to the VP’s and Directors has been difficult because of time constraints and the pressure being put on each team at the top.
Being the facilitator is exciting because our rule is simple - brutal, and I mean brutal honesty!! Defining the rules of engagement will take hard work and deep understanding of emotional intelligence and defining the social complexity and mastering collaborative communication (if it even exists).
We have now had two meetings where no punches have been thrown and we discussed the social complexity that exists and the organizational constraints that limit collaborative interaction. Getting everyone to talk about the obstacles is progress.
I would be very interested in hearing what others have done in similar situations.
We have typically promoted three types of resistance to change: fear, embarrassment, and loss. These have their roots in people's innate desire to be successful. They are probably built-in very deeply to our survival mechanisms from when being successful meant staying alive.
Fear deals with uncertainty about the future. A person may realize that there is potential to do things better than they are currently doing it. But if the way they are doing it isn't getting them fired and they aren't completely certain they can be at least as successful in a new way, they will resist the change until their fear is addressed.
The important thing about addressing fear is that fear is in the perspective of the person who is facing the change that matters, not the people initiating the change. Historically, we keep doing what we have always done because it kept us alive.
Embarrassment deals with admitting that the way we have done things isn't the best way to do it. People have a very strong drive to be right and to be appreciated. When you point out that they aren't doing things the best way, they tend to become defensive. You don't understand how things got that way. It sure is easy to come in after the fact and point out the problems. You must think they are stupid if you think they don't understand the flaws in how they do work.
Embarrassment is dealt with by letting people tell their story. Let them know it is clear that they made the best choices they could over time. Its ok that things got the way they are because the got the way they are.
Loss is much broader. People have made an investment into developing the competence that they have been rewarded for and that gives them influence. Any of these points can be an emotional sticking point, loss of investment, competence, rewards, or influence.
Explaining how things will be better for the business on the new .NET platform doesn't help the guy who spent the last 20 years becoming the absolute expert in the COBOL application. Explaining the focusing benefits of social marketing techniques doesn't make the sales person who spent the last 20 years developing relationship more valuable. The manager who has thrived in chaos and been rewarded for it will resist the effort to put in standard processes.
When we change the way we do things, we can't replace the investment made by individuals in developing the competence that has led to reward and influence. We pull that out from under them. Loss is the most difficult challenge to deal with. We can commit to supporting a new investment, although it is difficult to replace 20 years of experience. People want to be valued. Try treating them with a great deal of respect and recognition for what they have accomplished. This will help with the transition, but won't necessarily set them up for a complimentary level of success in the new way of things.
The bottom line is that overcoming resistance to change is critical to the success of most strategic changes. Typical change management approaches teach us to communicate, communicate, and communication again. But, notice how of the sources of resistance are all at a personal level. Explaining how the change will benefit the business, or the manager, or even the customer isn't sufficient.
Next time you are facing resistance to change, don't push - listen. The person resisting understands the benefit to the business. It is fear, embarrassment, or loss that is motivating the resistance. Often it is a combination. Spending time understanding and addressing resistance at its root may seem like an unneccassary investment. However, the investment is almost always less than the cost of the resistance itself.
One of the core problems in getting the most out of people is that HR gets treated as a kind of black art. Everything is wrapped in a veil of compliance, secrecy, and touchy-feeliness (I made that word up). The HR practictioner's are often generalists who are trusted (they deal with compensation information) and well liked (that's what HR is about isn't it), but there is a lack of business discipline in their approach.
According to Workforce.com's new article, HR Dinosaur's, some HR departments view HR as an "art" rather than management science. The article advocates technology as a solution. While I don't agree that technology alone will solve the HR problem, there is a need for systematic approaches to managing the talent in the organization. Here are four key problems from the Workforce.com article that arise from a lack of business discipline in HR.
- Silo's: As long as their jobs remain a mystery, they are powerful. They build power by limiting information and controlling access to management on anything HR related. They use the need for secrecy around compensation and HR issues to drive this secrecy. But the strategic power of HR doesn't come from compensation, compliance, or handling behavioral issues. There needs to be consistency, transparency, and partnership between HR and the organization when it comes to getting people in the right jobs.
- No measurements: What are the result metrics associated with HR? There don't tend to be any. If there are any, the metrics are around how quickly jobs are filled. Not around how well the jobs are filled. Or, they are around legal and compliance issues. Everyone has the training required by law and all the paperwork is in place to protect the business from law suits. There is no value add in this, just risk management. This is like everyone else showing up to work. The metrics should be to make that there are no Knowledge, Skill, or Ability related obstacles to successful job performance. HR should be making sure that qualified people are getting hired, placed, developed, and measured so the organization can achieve its strategy.
- Relationships rule: Instead of using business results to determine HR investments, they are made based on who has the best relationships with HR. Want more money for some special training you think will benefit your employees, take the HR person to lunch and smooth talk him.
- They are not experts: This is my favorite quote from the article. They are just "highly paid HR assistants who help general managers fill out forms, get through the performance appraisal process and handle troublesome people issues."
We have reached tremendous value in organizations through process improvement and technology. In an economy that is moving towards service and knowledge as the accelerators of value, we need to establish systematic ways to leverage the talent in our organizations. This is done through the application of systematic business discipline to placing, developing and measuring the peformance of the people in our organizations.
Is HR serving a purpose beyond compensation, legal compliance, benefits, and behavioral issues in your company? Does your organization have a systematic method for ensuring that the right decisions about talent are being made? How important is this to your company today? How important will it be in the next five years? Is it time for your HR organization to start running HR with business discipline?
Over 20 years ago, as a young Marine, I learned about something called the FEBA, or the forward edge of the battle area. This is where our troops engage with the bad guys. This is where things are messiest, and the point where every logistical aspect of the Marines are focused on supporting.
Now, forget for a second that we are talking about combat. Let's talk about serving our paying customers. This edge is the most single most important aspect of your business. Let's call it the forward edge of the customer area, or FECA. It is also where things are messiest. Sue Willet at Bird's Eye View has a great cartoon that scoffs at the implementation of automation to control costs at this point.
Serving our customer's is what it is about. I haven't read about or been in a single strategic planning meeting where the objective was to reduce our ability to provide service to our customers. We need our best, most prepared, most flexible people there. We need to focus our all of our automation, logistics, and process support at preparing these people to deliver value to the customer.
Yet, in the interest of cost savings or consistency we make decisions about compensation, outsourcing, and automation at these points that result in a less favorable customer experience. If you did a detailed inventory of the capabilities within your organization, it is likely that less than 15% are actually directly interacting with the customer. This is where effectiveness is more important than efficiency. In every other aspect of your business, you can focus on efficiency, but not here.
Unwelcome automation, inflexible service, blaming the customer for lapses in the organization, failure to deliver what was promised to the customer -- and I experienced all of these in the last week. What are you to make sure your customers have great experiences? What are you doing to focus all other aspects of your business on the forward edge of the customer area?
I was reviewing the February 8, 2007 Silence Fails data today. Over 80% of people are engaged in at least one significant organization wide initiative they know will fail to achieve the advertised results. Let me say that again.
Over 80% of people are engaged in at least one significant organization wide initiative they know will fail to achieve the advertised results.
60% of the people don't believe the important issues have been discussed.
On projects that have failed, 60% knew it would fail right away or shortly into the project and 90% of the people new half-way into the project.
In over 80% of the cases, the project could have been gotten back on track if changes had been made. In 70% of the cases people tried to get to the person that could make the change but were unsuccessful.
We know from reviewing past research that most projects fail to deliver the promised results. The thing is, the people on your projects know before it happens, and in most cases while there is still something to be done about it. Why aren't we having these conversations in our organizations.
For the most part, because no one is asking. And if someone tries to bring it up, no one is listening. We punish people for bringing bad news or being nay-sayers. We think they don't understand the problem.
We need to learn to listen. How should we listen. As usual, Hal Macomber is out ahead of this issue in Revisiting Two Great Wastes. Here's one thing to remember. Adopt an unconditionally positive stance when speaking (and listening). Operate from a concern for keeping the promise of the project. When you take care of the client and the promise(s) you made to the client you can't go wrong. Don't attack people. Instead, express your concern or worry that continuing on the current path might lead to failure. And if you get chastised for speaking up, then you know you are on the wrong project.
Organizations, the initiatives to create change, are getting more complex. At the same time, the rate of necessary change is increasing. Isn't it time we learn how to listen in our organizations?
This comes from a paper I wrote with Dr. Stephen Walsh a couple years ago. One of the points of the paper is that we believe pretend that the management methods that we practice are working, because we are doing what we were taught or have seen other effective managers do. But we know they aren't working. But without other insight, we continue to pursue what "has always worked in the past". This might come from the Swiss Army Survival Guide. "When lost in the woods, if the map doesn't agree with the terrain, in all cases believe the terrain."
A project plan, an executive's vision, and the team members' perspective all tend to be based on how things ought to be or were supposed to be. That's the map. The terrain is what is important to the success of the project. You can't manage from the map. You have to get grounded and manage from the terrain. That means deeply understanding: your objectives and obstacles, what has really been accomplished and what needs to be done (whether the project plan reflects it or not), the performer's motivations, the organization's values, and what we personally are capable of and interested in achieving. Why spend a lot of energy pretending that a map is valid when we know that it isn't?
As innovators in management we need to look for the realities of the people, the organization, the work, and ourselves to be successful. When the map becomes more important than the terrain, we aren't helping anyone.
Once again, Tom Peters provides inspiration for what we are trying to do at Synaptus. In his post yesterday Now Don't You Worry Your Little Self..., he raises the alarm about 40 million jobs moving out of the US in the next 10 years.
40 million jobs, is that a lot? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 150 million Americans in the work force. 40 million jobs moving overseas is over 25% of the jobs in the US. What could cause this to happen?
China has 798 million people in their labor force. India has 509 million workers available in their labor force. Their real wages are far below the US and Europoe. As education rises in these countries and communication technology improves, businesses will move work to where it can be performed well-enough at the best cost.
Stop and think about what this means. The way companies do work is going to change. We are just entering the knowledge-based, or project-based, or information-based world. My kids will be entering the job force as this world becomes predominant. It took 50-100 years to get really good at managing industrial based organizations. The businesses and individuals that figure out how to thrive in this new world of work are the ones that will survive and grow.
Aligning a dynamic organization with strategy, understanding and improving processes across your business (regardless of your organizations boundaries), productive collaboration, talent management, and project management become key skills to build and manage organizations that will thrive now and survive in future.
The ability to gain competive advantage from these shifts, both for you and your organization, is there today. On the other hand, 10 years is a long way away. You can wait for someone else to figure out how to run businesses profitably and manage the new workforce. I chose not to wait. What will you be doing in 10 years?
My organizational project maangement presentation at the Magic City Technology Council went well yesterday. It was well received and almost everyone wanted more information later. You can see the slides here.
Almost everyone agreed with the idea that it is important to think about how other aspects in the organization impact project maangement. But, it is also obvious from the feedback that organizations have a difficult time looking at themselves from a bigger perspective.
The most important question was how do we drive advocacy from management for organizational project management. I believe the answer is to identify those organizational capabilities where breakdowns are costly to the project. Identify some metrics on the capability and the cost of low performance to the project.
Present the data to management looking for help or improvement on projects. If it is presented in a its-not-my-fault way, it won't be well received. You have to set the context that you are not deflecting blame by showing how capabilities external to the project negatively effect your project. You need to show up with an answer on how that capability can perform better and how it benefits them.
If you can expand the project management context a little bit. You will begin to improve the ability to deliver projects. Then show the next person how to expand the context. Maybe over time, the organization is working together to deliver project results. Take the presentation. Ask questions. Help spread the word about organizational project management.
In our e-zine this week, we published an interview with Ric Merrifield at Microsoft. The subject was Business Architecture. It wasn’t well received by some of our subscribers.
Microsoft! Business Architecture! Heck, if I wanted to read technical stuff I'd subscribe to Joel Sposky. I had three people unsubscribe to the e-zine over straying away from business and into this technical area.
But business architecture isn't technical -- and Microsoft is very interested in the business models of their clients. It helps them provide better solutions than just pushing software out the door. But when you hear the words Microsoft and Architecture together, you mind jumps to technology. You bring a specific background of obviousness to how you listen to everything after that.
Ted Walls and David Walden discuss the problem of different backgrounds of obviousness in Understanding Unclear Situations and Each Other Using the Language Processing Method "Unfortunately, however, when two or more people are trying to understand, discuss, and act on a complex business situation, the fact that each person has a different background of obviousness and therefore reasons differently can lead to confusion and unproductive effort. We talk past each other."
We participate in different conversations in different ways. Based on how we participate, we may we decide to listen and interpret the information differently. The situation, certain words, how someone looks, the location, and our prior experience can all trigger the way we participate. I am participating differently with my 11-year-old daughter than I am with a senior executive.
Based on the trigger of Microsoft and Architecture, the subscribers came to the conversation with a preconception that we were talking about something technical. We were talking about a way to develop a common understanding of an organization’s business model. This is important when you are trying to align people, process, and technology improvements with the strategy of the organization.
This break down happens between different functional areas all the time. People stop listening to things they could understand because they choose to participate in a way that keeps them from understanding. It is the responsibility of both parties to get past this problem.
Are there words, or situations, or people that trigger a specific way of participating in conversations with them? Does your ability to comprehend someone break down based on different backgrounds of understanding? Pay attention to those situations where you are participating in a way that is unproductive. See if you can shift to a more productive way of listening.
Several of my favorite bloggers have discussed multi-tasking. Reforming Project Management, Focused Performance, and Clarke Ching often explain the dreadful impact of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is bad for a number of reasons. All of them have been widely discussed. But I want to discuss four of them here.
One.
Starting sooner doesn't mean you will finish sooner. Let's say you have three people that want you to do something. To simplify this example, each thing takes three days to perform. You want to make everyone happy so you start working everything as soon as possible. You switch between them each day to continue to show progress on each thing. So your work looks like this.
ABCABCABC
You deliver "A" on day 7. "B" on day 8. And "C" on day 9. In trying to make everyone happy, you pushed A and B back and didn't do C any favors. If you had worked on these things in sequence, your work would look like this.
AAABBBCCC
You deliver "A" on day 3. "B" on day 6. And "C" is still delivered on day 9. Starting sooner didn't get work done sooner.
Two.
Sometimes work needs to be expedited. It just happens. In the second work flow above, you could just drop the expedited work into the queue as the next thing to do. You don't interupt other work in progress, and you will finish it just as fast as possible. Remember, starting it as soon as possible isn't what's important. Finishing it as soon as possible is what's important. Mixing expedited work into the middle of the flow will slow everyone down.
Three.
When you take longer to deliver work, you raise the risk that the customer requirements will change. You want to have the shortest amount of time from when the work starts to when the work is delivered to the customer. This will reduce the risk that the customer requirements will change on work in progress. When customer requirements change on work in process, it creates rework. Rework is extremely expensive.
Four.
Task switching is expensive. As this NY times article points out, we are not effective at getting back to productive work when we are multi-tasking. Having multiple tasks active at a time increases the likelihood of interuption.
Our work lives are probably impacted by most of these issues. Often in combination. The multiplying effects of multitasking is devastating to performance in organizations. Just fixing this problem can double the productivity of a work group. You can have the right people, the best processes, and a solid strategy. Managing the flow of work through each person in the organization has the potential to boost productivity as much as any people, process, or strategy improvement.
What can you put into place to reduce the impact of multitasking on your organization?
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