Change Acceleration: Developing a Need that is Shared

In my mind there is no single factor that makes major organization change easier than when people want to see the change take place.  As we know, this isn’t always the case.  Different individuals see things from a different perspective and that makes alignment toward a common goal sometimes very difficult.  Do you recall Mayor Larry Vaughn in the movie “Jaws“?  The mayor wasn’t evil; he desperately wanted to believe that there wasn’t a big problem and there was still an opportunity to salvage the tourist season for the little town of Amity.  Police Chief Martin Brody‘s concern was to be sure, certain, that the beach was safe before allowing visitors to swim again, but when the first sizable tiger shark was caught the Mayor and many others wanted to believe the beach was safe and opened it again.  As movie watchers, we knew that the film was only about 1/2 over so the really big shark was still out there, but if the great white had moved to other hunting grounds no one would have been the wiser.

Vaughn wasn’t evil or maligned, he didn’t share the vision for what needed to take place.  Brody had this vision, but wasn’t able to communicate it effectively enough to gain alignment and all push in the same direction.  Now imagine this among a business’ leadership team of a dozen or so individuals all representing a different perspective and various functions.

The first step of gaining alignment is a clear understanding of exactly what the problem is.  Given complex business problems, people will quickly jump to conclusions about why this issue is occurring.  One way to do this is to dip into the Lean Manufacturing / Six Sigma toolbox and utilize a “Why-Why” analysis: in short, this is the practice of getting the right people in the room and looking at the current major issue occurring; then ask why this is happening.  Upon getting various results, you ask why each of those is happening, and so on… sometimes this practice is called the “5 Whys” because most groups find that once they’ve drilled down in the process 5 times, things seem to be as basic as they get (“root cause“).  One other interesting thing often happens: themes or perhaps common root causes often result, indicating that there are three or maybe five things that if the organization can influence, this will make a major effect on the end result that you’re seeing.  In the process of this, organization leaders gain alignment and agreement around what specifically are the root causes of the issues at hand.

In the Jaws case, there was no doubt what the problem was; there was a huge fish out there eating tourists for snacks. The questions were, can we agree on a solution and how do we know when the solution has been attained?  Clearly when the first tiger shark was caught, the mayor was convinced it was over.  Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper are unconvinced and continue their search, and their review of the stomach contents of the captured tiger shark seem to confirm their beliefs.  Only when another great white attack occurs does the entire town commit to solving the problem right. By that time, significant time had passed; if this is your business or organization, significant progress or profits may be wiped out.

This is about mission.  Not the longer-term vision for the organization, but the mission for ‘how do we avoid this particular business obstacle in order to continue on toward our vision‘?  It’s typically short term, and if you’ve done a “Why-Why” analysis or other alignment exercise, you collectively understand what the problem is.  However, there’s one more problem to consider at this point: the organization’s willingness to challenge the status quo.  I once worked for a firm that said they wanted to see change and improvement take place, yet when anyone complained that we were playing in his backyard, it came to be an issue.  In short, the business was not willing to challenge the status quo.  As an HR leader, you need to test for this up front.  If the organization truly isn’t willing to challenge the status quo, perhaps now is not the time to embark upon the change initiative.  Work harder to try to understand how big of a problem this is (get data from internal and external sources) or partner with your business leader to develop the vision (find examples, best practices, model the standards for leadership more clearly).

Yet challenging status quo is essential and by very definition it embraces change, and accelerating change.  There is an early step here — your top leadership needs to be visible and credible about standing up in front of the organization and saying, “Here’s the problem… we need to fix it…. we are all going to join together and see this thing through to its conclusion.”  This combats the status quo, it effectively creates an internal crisis that we are all going to join together to fight, and therefore it develops a shared need.

The best example of this I’ve personally witnessed was in 1991 when General Motors ElectroMotive Division (EMD), which then held about 60% of the US market for sale of locomotives, was mentioned as a candidate for possible sale in some of the industry newspapers.  GE Transportation (GETS), then holding approximately 40% of the US market share, viewed this as a threat and then-CEO Bob Nardelli of GETS collected his management team together and brought with him Roger Penske, who as leader of Detroit Diesel Allison at the time, was a very likely successful bidder for General Motors EMD. Nardelli effectively used this discussion with the team to galvanize the need for change.  Everyone in the room learned that Penske had the capability of making EMD a much more dangerous competitor to GETS, which would translate to lost sales, downsizing, or even closure for GETS.  This drove the mission home, and GE was able to perform a remarkable series of cost-cutting and market development measures that turned the organization around and since that time has managed to win an approximated 70% of market share.  Nardelli effectively saw a risk, identified it as a crisis, and galvanized the organization to overcome the status quo.  This is the kind of thing your organization needs to do.  Warning: don’t “make up” a crisis — it has to be real and credible to be effective.  

One of the most effective tools I’ve used in this regard is the 4-block “Threat and Opportunity” matrix.  It’s structure is rather simple:  Threat and Opportunity are the columns, Short Term and Long Term are the rows.  Have the team identify short term threats and long term threats (“What are the issues to potentially overcome us in the short term or the long term if we fail to be successful making this change?”) as well as short term and long term opportunities (“What benefits or new markets are available to the business if we take advantage of making this change?”).

In short, your organization’s employees and leaders need to be properly aligned in the direction of change.  If your leaders aren’t ready, you need to get them ready, and test to ensure that they are ready before moving forward.  Use good leadership and communications strategies to confirm and demonstrate commitment to the success of this change to all employees.

Preserving Team Unity During Restructuring and Downsizing

Few decisions are as difficult in the business world than those following the realization that the business unit is wrongly positioned to suit the current mission.   Emotions tend to overwhelm good business reason, and sometimes decisions that seem to make sense are bad for many other reasons. This is not a course taught in business school, and managers are often ill-prepared to deal with the difficulty of the decisions needing to be made.

• Mistrust in this type of situation unfortunately runs rampant. Even when it seems silly, it is still there.  I once attended a management holiday party prior to an upcoming major January restructuring; all of the attendees there knew what was pending and there was a somber overtone to the festivities.  Our business leader had gifts for everyone on the team, beautiful candles chosen by his spouse that in any normal environment would be highly valued.  But some of the candles were short and stout, some of them were taller and thinner, and team members started whispering about who got the tall thin ones versus who got the short stout ones, and attributing that to who goes and who stays. It was terrible!  Yet no matter how silly it was, it still remained on people’s minds.
• Remember to always act with concern and compassion for the entire employee population during this time.  Good people face job loss; we should never treat affected employees as if they are lower than others or that they don’t have value.  Frankly, if they didn’t have value, then managers didn’t do their job in managing them out in advance of a downsizing event.
• With the broad employee population, develop a good communications plan with timing and message that precedes the event, to develop an understanding of business conditions and why this is the only alternative, not so far in advance that all of your best employees run for the exits — but also not so far delayed that they all see it coming and by not discussing it your leadership credibility becomes damaged.  Best practices also include individual one-on-one discussions with each ‘survivor’ employee following the event, detailing changes in job responsibility but also take the opportunity to genuinely note his or her specific value to the organization.  Have each manager perform due diligence on these discussions; they become memorable and valuable to the employee.
• Team unity also hinges on the belief among the employee population that the process is built upon the highest level of integrity, that this is a necessary action designed for the best possible future, that selections were made fairly and not just among the “good old boys” network, and that impacted employees will be treated fairly with sufficient severance and outplacement.  Employees also need to believe that another event is not going to happen again in six months or a year; if they believe this, your best employees are going to be headed for the exits anyway.  If you think this restructuring isn’t going to put your business in the best possible cost and strategic position following the job eliminations, then cut deeper to avoid another short term downsizing.
• I’ve seen organizations believe that they are doing exiting employees a favor by announcing job elimination weeks or months in advance and having the employees work until their departure date.  In my opinion, this does not help team unity at all — it creates an awkward situation in the work area and it doesn’t take long before the work that affected employees are doing becomes less and less meaningful.  My recommendation would be that if you want to give them extra time, set up a career center and have them focus their time on finding a new position elsewhere, which is the most important thing for them.
• Leadership team unity is a complex topic unto itself; because of their role in helping to select team members who stay or go they have to be involved in advance.  They are in unfamiliar territory, they may have to choose between personal favorites and hand-chosen team members, and they may feel that they are personally at risk as well.  They need to be given guidance on how to choose (I strongly recommend a decision matrix here), with specific objectives by budget and headcount.
• Leadership team process needs oversight, typically by the business leader and the HR leader.   Keep fairness and equity an objective and decide in advance how to handle potential angles that may cause team distrust after the restructuring event is over.  For example, decide what ‘headcount elimination’ and ‘budget reduction’ mean in practical terms.  Eliminating a job that the manager was “thinking” or “planning” to add next year (therefore avoiding one more current team exit) becomes viewed with distrust.  However, eliminating a job that was just recently vacated and actively posted is different; so also is one that has been recently approved by a job requisition process and there is current activity to fill.  Eliminating a job or headcount by outsourcing the process may be appropriate, but then the cost of the outsourced process needs added back to the budgetary side of the discussion and must not be missed.  It’s best to decide and communicate these things in advance so as not to damage your own credibility later.
• I recommend a single, across-the-board objective for headcount and cost reduction, such as 15% in all areas.  Yes, some teams are stronger and have better players, some teams are more critical to the business mission, some teams have been managed tighter and more cost-effectively than others.  Yet when downsizing is looming, every decision becomes suspect and subject to charge of favoritism; even if not, the residual after-effects following a restructuring may cause team members to look upon each other with mistrust if one team is significantly less impacted than others.  Facing the same difficult objective that is evenly distributed across the board can actually help to bring management teams together.  I’ve seen the establishment of a “strategic team” to make the tough decisions for the business, but a pending downsizing tends create a much less sharing environment and management closes ranks.  Agreement becomes very difficult and this approach tends not to succeed.
• The business must maintain confidentiality.  No messages until according to plan, and don’t ‘leak’ word that announcements will take place at a future time — wait and delay is disastrous to employee productivity and morale.  You cannot tell your best employees that they are ‘safe’ just to try to keep them from leaving during the stressful situation.   By definition, those who you do not tell this are not ‘safe’.  And sharing this prior to completion of your process may run the risk of being wrong.
• Time the restructuring announcements appropriately.     Do not send a terrible message by waiting until Friday of the workweek.   Recommended would be a Tuesday or a Wednesday; don’t arbitrarily cancel all meetings in advance of that day — you’ll be signaling the upcoming event to employees.  Start right away at the beginning of the workday — don’t let managers agonize in wait.  Train managers well in advance, and script employee discussions with role play so all are comfortable that they are ready, preferably without reading from the page.  Prepare Q & A responses in writing and test them on managers in advance.  Experience tells me that this event is as hard on management making decisions and delivering messages as it is on impacted employees at the time.  Move affected employees directly into de-briefing sessions with a trained outplacement specialist and begin their focus on a future process of finding a new job.  Then following the exit discussions, call the remaining ‘survivor’ employees together and discuss new work arrangements and the priorities moving forward.

The strategic objective here is to avoid having your leadership team and employee teams become torn apart by behaviors during a downsizing or restructuring event.  By thinking through several of these objectives in advance and keeping the concept of team unity as an important outcome, you stand a much better chance of being successful through the event.

Getting Started with Change Acceleration Focus

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

What is change management or change acceleration?  It’s a response to a business problem.  John Kotter of Kotter International has studied major change processes for over 40 years and it’s his estimation that over 70% of all major business change initiatives fail.  So astute leaders who don’t want change to fail decide to plan and create a program designed to improve our change’s factors for success.

Multiple practitioners around the world have studied change for many years.  The typical practice is this: line up a whole bunch of successful change initiatives on one side, a whole bunch of failed change initiatives on the other side, and compare and contrast.  In the end, most of the models developed have a whole lot of similarity.  General Electric’s model (GE has maintained change leadership as one of their core initiatives since the mid-90’s), for example, resonates with nearly all of the Kotter 8-step process.  In the end, we find that there are some tried-and-true methods or practices that leaders may engage to improve their chances for success.

Keeping with our practical but strategic focus of this blog, we’ll share some of the core principles and also some of the popular tools used with organizations seeking to improve change.  This is likely to take more than one blog due to the size of the topic.

First, a basic premise.  In addition to the major model components, many adhere to a basic concept, which I’ll refer to as “Q x A = E“.  That is, the Effectiveness (E) of a change initiative is directly proportional to the product of the change’s Acceptance by the population, and the Quality of the change initiative.  Few are the initiatives such as the Pet Rock (extremely high Acceptance but didn’t need high Quality) or the Concorde (extremely high Quality technology, but Acceptance challenges with regulations, maintaining technical standards, and just plain profit).  The practical point to this is that so many times we focus on the quality of the product or program when frankly a bit of attention to ensuring that it’s what the population actually wants may be in order.  Or, alternatively, that we’re trying to enthusiastically sell folks on our half-baked concept idea that just needs development.  Looking at both of these core elements might give us the first thing to improve on our program.  Hey, I certainly wouldn’t knock IBM’s Thomas Watson (above) for his belief that Acceptance of the computer was going to be very low, because eventually he got behind it and realized that computers by their very nature have both Quality and Acceptance, therefore hugely successful as a change initiative.  Do you remember life before the Internet?

Successful programs need a vision.  A vision helps to articulate where it is that we’re heading, and by definition a new program will almost always require a new direction.  The vision helps cut through the misconceptions of the population, the personal agendas of those seeking to counteract the program’s direction, and provide the ‘rallying cry’ for those still not clear about how he or she fits into this new program.  The vision needs to be clear and legitimate.  It is best to have it described in behavioral terms, so we know the way we should act when acting in accordance with that vision.  It needs to be communicated to the population, so all understand and also avoid giving rise to personal interpretations of what it means.  This is perhaps what was missing for Watson and the way he saw computer markets in 1943; there was no vision (from him or anyone else), no real understanding of what life could be like in 2015.  Vision came later; it came from the likes of Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft as well as many, many others, and our world is not the same.

One of the most popular and effective tools I’ve seen to help shape the vision into actionable, behavioral terms is called a “backwards imaging exercise”.  If you have the leadership team together, ask them to do the following:

• Imagine a point in the future when this change initiative has been very successful.
• Use words to describe the way what you see, hear, understand in your interactions with your key constituents:  employees, leaders, vendors, customers, etc.  as they work in the new, changed state.
• Test, modify, improve.  The words and concepts you agree upon can help to articulate your vision.

Shaping this vision into an actionable, behavioral statement is important to leading the change initiative.  It helps to support strong, committed, visible leadership that provides a framework for individuals to take personal initiative, and to challenge the status quo.  The better leaders enable each individual in the population, the more likely our change initiative is likely to be.

Part of shaping this vision, and by extension part of leading change initiatives, is the leadership of a cross functional team and excellent facilitation skills to help guide the exercises to success.  This does not have to be HR, but often these kinds of cross-functional leadership wind up with HR support or leadership, hence its inclusion in this blog.  Also, since we’re clearly focused on major change initiatives of the firm, it’s definitely in the strategy camp.

In future blogs we’ll look at several other popular tools utilized for change management and other ways to improve the effectiveness and success of the programs.

Be aware of your bias and challenge it

You have bias, even if you think you don’t.  So do I.   I want to say I accept each and every individual just for who they are, and I really strive to act this way, but I’m also aware that I don’t always trust certain people the way I trust other people.   We are bound by society and by law to be ‘color blind’ in the hiring and selection of candidates for jobs, or the promotion process once they’re inside the firm, but certain people don’t get presented to higher management with the same fervor and vigor that others do, sometimes resulting in what my grandmother used to call “damning with faint praise”.   (“Yeah, Lakisha is pretty good at her work, but Emily, she’ll knock your socks off.”)

The Emily-Greg vs. Lakisha-Jamal study shocked me when I first read it.  You should take the time to read it, too.  Perhaps you think it doesn’t apply to you.  My first reaction was that I’ve long worked in middle-America markets and we just don’t think the way people in Boston and Chicago think, period.  Not just about colorblindness, but about so many other things like politics and education, morals and values.  Therefore I certainly didn’t think we would treat individuals of varied backgrounds any differently than anyone else.

Yet I’ve taken the opportunity to re-read this study and they have done an excellent job erasing as many variables as they can.  The results are astounding:  with resumes identical to one another but only the names changed, 50% more of the callbacks went to white-sounding names.  We’re not talking about a 5% or 10% difference of a relatively small number of candidates, we’re talking about 50% difference over thousands of resumes.  Plus, increasing the skills and qualifications on the resumes had far less impact on their success than just changing the names!  I pause to think about my firms’ hiring practices: a lot of managers don’t want to get too scientific, they want to pick who they like, or they make up their mind really quickly without a whole lot of data collection between who they want to hire vs. who they don’t, etc.  Others in the interviewing process often bow down to the wishes of the hiring manager, and typically HR doesn’t want to be the only one in the room channeling potential bias or nay-saying, job after job.

Additionally, really, what else have you done to improve your pipeline to help counteract these potential biases?  Do you target schools or universities that have a stronger minority population?  Will you build and support an internal program to provide equal advantage to those who are perceived as different?  In one of my assignments, my team worked really hard to create a Maintenance Trainee Program that could build up qualifications of women interested in maintenance.  We worked with a vendor to develop an assessment that would target aptitude rather than skills, knowing that it was the program’s job to build up the skills.  The program was open to anyone, but we specifically encouraged women to apply for entrance into the program.  We had two early successes early on, refuting the conventional wisdom of “women don’t want to do maintenance, look at how few enroll in maintenance schools” or “women aren’t any good at maintenance”.  Now, culturally, we had a different concern later as they integrated into the workforce, but that’s another challenge to overcome, and equally subtle as well.   When challenged with an EEOC audit, the auditors were very impressed with the progress of our program and commented on this several times.  More than that, we surprised ourselves with the outstanding potential of this type of program.

Don’t think that your team doesn’t have biases, no matter how unspoken (or even unaware) they may be.  Search out those biases, and take opportunities no matter how small to support and promote and encourage people of all types and kinds within your organization.  Take a critical look – a real look – at your Affirmative Action Plan, dive down into the numbers and look at the names on the roster checklists, so you are aware of areas where you can do better.   Diversity of life and background is a very good thing, not just because it’s a popular buzzword or program but because it’s the right thing to do and it’s strategically good for your firm on so many levels.   Take it upon yourself to make this kind of a difference.

Leaders, verify your recruiting strategies.

This is a holiday week, so I believe a short post is in order today.  This is a simple encouragement to do what you should be doing anyway, and a quick exercise you can do to confirm your thinking / benefit your organization’s future.

Too often in my career have I heard blame misplaced for new hires who just don’t work out in the organization.  Recruiting doesn’t do their job, HR doesn’t find us the right people, nobody wants to work for us, this guy didn’t tell us the whole truth about his background, that headhunter sold us a bill of goods. Or, the manager truly thought he needed this particular set of skills, yet when he saw them in practice he decided he didn’t want them after all.  Sometimes the interviewers on the interview team are not calibrated and they’re all looking for something different in this candidate.  In my experience, these are all just excuses for a system that’s not designed right, and with a little help you should get your organization back on track to have it designed right.  A hiring process gone bad is a waste of time for everyone – the company, the employee, other employees.  This isn’t somebody else’s problem — fixing it benefits the entire organization, so it’s smack dab in top leadership’s lap.

This process is easy. It’s designed to get to the facts and slice through all of those excuses, and provide management an agreed-up touchstone for future reference and calibration in hiring.  Step 1:  Identify a list of “what it takes” to be successful in your organization.  Refer to your own leadership competencies, or if you don’t have them, find a competency listing like the ones in the “Successful Manager’s Handbook” from PDI / PreVisor, one of my favorites, and review the competencies listed there for success in your organization.   Step 2:  Go get the personnel files for the five highest performing and highest potential individuals in your organization (if you can’t agree, pick 8, or 10, it doesn’t matter, but no fewer than 5).  Ask the direct managers of these individuals join your little task force for just a few minutes to share his/her thoughts on the abilities of these individuals against your competencies, and rank them on a 1-10 scale for each element. Step 3:  Pull out the personnel files for the last 5 (minimum) individuals above entry level who just didn’t work out for the organization, and it doesn’t matter whether they quit or got fired, they just didn’t work out.  Ask their direct managers to join the group for just a few minutes to share his/her thoughts on the abilities of these individuals against your competencies.

Now time to do a little compare-and-contrast exercise.  Which skills/competencies have the most impact on an individual’s success in your organization?  Which skills/competencies are the most likely failure factors?  Which skills/competencies do we look for in the recruitment process, and what methods do we use to evaluate those factors?

What you do with this information is important to the future success of your recruitment strategies in your business.  Take the initiative to update your recruiting strategies and include these key learning points into manager interview training.  Use this exercise to help confirm the competencies you have defined for your organization, and tweak appropriately.  Decide whether early-career or early-management training needs to be added to develop these skills or competencies.  The success of your organization’s recruitment strategies depends on it.