Archive for the ‘Goal Setting’ Category
Perspective and Change
If you can’t see the world from another’s perspective you are incapable of changing the world in a forward-looking, progressive manner. Progressive here means improving conditions for people and the planet which we share with other life forms. Being willing to seek out alternative viewpoints, and seeking to understand them are key competencies needed for those looking to create change in themselves, in society and in the world in which we live. I am not talking about “alternative facts” which translates as lies. I am talking about viewpoints, which is how others experience the world and the society in which they live. Those who don’t go looking or can’t see from another’s perspective are only capable of adhering to the status-quo or of changes which are backward-looking, often disregarding science, facts and data, locked into a worldview which includes returning to the “nostalgia” of how great things used to be. It is of course a false nostalgia for things were never that “great”.
The same holds true for organizations. Those within an organization, who are not capable of seeing the organization from another’s perspective will be unable to create positive change for that organization. In times of turmoil being able to see things from other perspectives can be the difference between survival and extinction for the organization.
There are a few conditions which help enable those seeking out progressive change. First is the understanding that change is inevitable. Nothing stands still forever. You can let change happen to you and your organization or you can be a force, helping to create and craft the changes that will occur. A proactive change agent is likely to be more successful than a reactionary change agent.
Second, in order to see the world or the organization from another’s perspective you must have empathy. You must be able to put yourself in another’s shoes. (There are those who have absolutely no capacity for empathy. It is not physically or mentally possible for them.) I recently saw a speaker ask for a show of hands from a room full of (mostly white) people, “how many of you would be willing to go through the rest of your life being treated as Blacks are currently treated in the USA?” Not a single hand went up. That doesn’t mean that the group understood day-to-day what Blacks go through, but it does mean that at some level they could empathize with Blacks and understood that the treatment was different than how others are being treated. And that treatment was not as favorable as how they themselves were currently being treated. And that empathy does set the stage for the group to say, “it is not right, it must change”.
A third condition needed is the understanding that life doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game. For me to win, you don’t necessarily have to lose. Life, society and organizations can operate according to win-win principles. If I have enough to eat, it doesn’t mean that you have to go hungry. It can be more difficult to create win-win propositions, and it may involve some compromises, but in the long-run it achieves much higher buy-in from groups and as its name implies it is a win-win where everyone can come out ahead.
Right now, the world is faced with a global pandemic, an economy on life-support, and a racist miasma that has penetrated the halls of power and plagues the most vulnerable among us. But the conditions also seem ripe for change to occur, if the right people are put into the right positions. World War II legend and 34th President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower said, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” If you try to make the problem small you run the risk of half-way solutions that won’t truly change or fix things. Big problems require big solutions that are more likely to create lasting change. It is time for some Big Solutions.
The Power of Protest
Perhaps not since the Vietnam war have there been so many marches and demonstrations in the USA, where people have been protesting our government, its policies, practices, and the various actions it has taken. (Full disclosure, I have taken part in more than a few protests and rallies myself.)
The current administration is perceived by many – if not the majority – as incompetent, divisive, fundamentally corrupt, lawless, operating outside of the constitution, ignoring the checks and balances which define our democracy, imposing needless cruelty, perhaps illegitimate (with Russian fingerprints all over the last election) and certainly not operating in the best interests of the nation, let alone the planet.
In addition to the alleged obstruction crimes that the Mueller Report identified, the president himself is seen by many professional psychologists and psychiatrists as unwell and unstable. One group, Duty to Warn, is working on a Kickstarter-funded movie to document that assertion. Duty to Warn advocates for the removal of the president under the 25th Amendment stating that he is unfit to serve. The group pointedly states that the Goldwater Rule, imposed by the American Psychiatric Association to prevent its members from diagnosing someone without personally assessing them, does not apply as there is a higher order rule, which is the duty to warn if someone poses an imminent threat to others.
Additionally, Dr. Brandy Lee, psychiatry professor at Yale University and a renowned expert on violence and forensic psychiatry, co-authored a report on the president’s mental state as documented in the Mueller Report from the sworn testimony. In sum: “What the special counsel’s report revealed, through consistent and abundant data, was a pervasive and profound pattern of lack of capacity. This was demonstrated by: lack of basic comprehension (or the ability to take in information and advice without undue influence from false beliefs or emotional need); faulty information processing (or the ability to appreciate and make flexible use of information and advice without false representation); lack of sound decision making (or the ability to consider consequences based on rational, reality-based, and reliable thinking without interference from impulsivity, false beliefs, or fluctuating consistency); and behavior that places oneself or others in danger (such as inciting one’s followers to commit acts of violence and boasting of one’s own repeated violence). These are crucial failures in the basic components of mental capacity test, which in his position constitute a medical emergency that requires a response.”
Psychiatrists often use the term Malignant Narcissism to describe the president’s mental illnesses while Clinical Psychologists and those who work in the employee selection space would often describe him as suffering from the Dark Triad, a trifecta of malevolent mental illnesses. Regardless of which term is used, there are many who are deeply concerned and are raising those concerns publicly. Long term observers of this president, such as Tony Schwartz, the author of The Art of the Deal, have also noted significant cognitive decline and increasingly discuss concerns about dementia in addition to his other issues.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has been reluctant to begin impeachment proceedings, worried that it will distract from winning the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and will play into the president’s hands. Lawrence Tribe, the noted Constitutional scholar and Harvard Professor, has proposed and actively advocates a path by which just the House can begin an Impeachment Inquiry and hold a trial, even if removal by the Senate won’t happen given its Republican majority.
The big question is, do all of these protests and actions matter? Can enough citizens of this country raise their voices loud enough and often enough to effect change now, or will change have to wait until the next election in 2020? There is legitimate concern about the level of Russian influence on the outcome of the election, especially given that Congress and the White House are doing little to nothing to protect the election process itself. It has become increasingly clear that various members of Congress and the president’s inner circle have deep financial ties or other connections to either Russia or China.
Michael Shermer, writing in The Moral Arc, cites the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. These two political science researchers entered into a database all forms of political protest, reforms, and revolutions that have occurred since 1900, both violent and nonviolent. Since 1900, non-violent actions had twice the success rate as violent actions. Non-violent actions are increasingly becoming more effective while violent actions are becoming rarer and when they occur and are largely unsuccessful. In answering the question why this change has occurred, Chenoweth states, “People power.” Non-violent actions have lower barriers to entry, attracting a more diverse group and a larger percent of the population. They are also more representative of the population in terms of “gender, race, age, political party, class and urban-rural distinctions.” Her data showed that non-violent protests that are active and sustained in an ongoing fashion, and which draw about 3.5% of the population, are always successful in meeting their goals for change. And once they hit that 3.5% threshold, involving that significant portion of the population they were always non-violent.
The current population of the USA is 327,000,000 +/-. In order to reach that critical threshold of 3.5%, a cross section of 11,445,000 people would have to engage in ongoing sustained, non-violent political protests. Sounds like a big number, but given the emotions that are running quite high and the level of outrage in the country it sounds quite possible.
Take Hong Kong as an example of what protest can accomplish. This last weekend, on June 16th, it was estimated that 2 million of Hong Kong’s 7 million people turned out to protest non-violently against an extradition law that would have allowed mainland China to take a citizen from Hong Kong to stand trial in China. Given China’s murky and opaque judicial system Hong Kong citizens were concerned that the law could be used to stifle political dissent and anyone could be snatched at any time. Given the size of this and previous protests the Hong Kong governor, who is approved by China, withdrew the law for consideration at this time. This protest involved much more than 3.5%, but does show the power of protest.
Does this or can these rules-of-thumb of protest apply in the corporate world? About 4,000 Google employees signed a petition demanding “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” (NY Times June 1, 2018). The employees were concerned that Google’s AI technology, including its facial recognition work, was going to be used to improve targeting of drone strikes and did not want their work to be used in the killing of people. After the petition Google withdrew from its AI military contracts. So, do the numbers hold up? Alphabet, the parent company of Google employs about 72,000 people. Therefore the 4000 petition signers represented about 5.5% of the workforce, which is above the non-violent and successful change threshold.
These are but a handful of examples but the numbers are somewhat startling and gives a sense that a relatively small percentage of non-violent protesters, who sustain their protest over a period of time, can affect change in the political as well as corporate world.
The Planet is in Trouble. What’s Your Organization Doing to Help?
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Sunk Costs
The patient in the ICU had given instructions for no heroic life support. Heroic is of course subjective as one person’s routine might be deemed heroic by another. Never-the-less over a period of almost two weeks the measures taken would be described by most any observer as heroic. How did it happen?
It started as simply some abdominal pain. A trip to the ER revealed a small perforation in the intestine, a complication of diverticulitis. The patient was admitted, put on intravenous antibiotics and a small amount of supplemental oxygen. At first the antibiotics seemed to be working, but then the patient took a turn for the worse. An abdominal abscess was discovered, the dosage of the antibiotics being given was increased and a pathology report led to a change in the type of antibiotic being used. Again, positive signs emerged. Up to this point fairly routine healthcare.
After a day or two the patient once again took a turn for the worse with the infection having turned into sepsis, an infection of the blood itself. Sepsis led to edema, where the fluids that normally travel in the bloodstream leak through small blood vessels into surrounding tissue, including the lungs. The patient now required large amounts of replacement fluid via IV as without the fluid in the blood itself, blood pressure plummets. Pressers, a class of drug to raise blood pressure, were now begun to help counter the loss of fluid. Increasing the amount of fluid of course also increases the amount of fluid leakage. And the continual fluid build-up led to each breath becoming increasingly more difficult. Abdominal pressure also caused by the fluid buildup was increasing to critical levels and it was putting dangerous levels of pressure on the internal organs. The patient was obviously struggling. A decision to intubate the patient, to breathe for the patient had to be made, it was thought that a few days, at most, of being intubated would allow the body to fight off the infection. It was only one small additional step. The family gave the go ahead to intubate.
The infection continued to rage and it was now thought that the abscess that had been discovered needed to be physically drained in order to help the body heal. A procedure was scheduled as it was only another small additional step. The abscess was successfully drained, but the patient did not improve. All of this had now been going on long enough that nutrition had become an issue. A nutritional IV bag, a very small additional step was hung and added to the numerous other medicines and fluids the patient was receiving. A few more days went by. Small signs of improvement were noted. Diuretics were started at a low level to relieve some of the pressure on the internal organs. As soon as the diuretics kicked in the blood pressure once again plummeted. One option that was out on the table was major surgery to clean out the abdominal cavity from additional abscesses that had developed. The odds of the patient surviving the surgery were not good. It was clear now that things were on a continual downward trajectory. If you took a step back and looked at the patient surround by beeping and whirling machines, IV bags, and numerous sensors, it was clear that the desire for no heroic measures had not been met and the culprit was sunk costs.
Sunk costs is a common factor in human decision-making. It is when a series of incremental decisions or investments are made, each one by itself relatively small. Each one requiring an investment in capital, effort or other resources that is made more likely because of the investment in capital, effort or other resources that have already been made. If the patient described above had known of the eventual end state of all of these incremental steps the decision path may have been different. Unfortunately, even highly skilled physicians are not omniscient. We begin to head down a certain road with our decisions and as we head down that road it is increasingly difficult to say to ourselves “we are on the wrong road, it is time to get off”. Sunk costs. The expenditure of resources makes it increasingly more likely that an additional expenditure of resources will be made to achieve a goal, even as that expenditure makes the goal less and less attractive or worthwhile.
It happens in all sorts of situations. You buy a cute little house, which you thought was reasonably priced. You find out that it has termites. You fix the problem, and then find out it needs a new roof. After the new roof, a new hot water heater is required, then in quick order you deal with refrigerators, stoves, leaky windows, poorly done wiring from a previous renovation, a broken furnace and an air conditioning system that is refusing to work. When you take a step back, you realize that your cute little house has turned into a money pit and if you had known up front what was going to happen you never would have bought it in the first place. Most of us are also affected by a sense of positivism or optimism regarding outcomes arising from our decisions, along with the difficultly of deciding when to get off the path.
In the New York Times (1/10/16) there is a story about how the economic slowdown in China is affecting commodity prices around the world. What path are the producers of these commodities taking as the value of the commodities in the market plummets? From the Times: Chile is expanding its largest open-pit copper mine….India is building railroad lines that crisscross the country to connect underused coal mines…. Australia is increasing natural gas production by 150 percent….Oil sands in Canada are just starting to produce….Iron ore mines in West Africa are coming online…Freeport-McMoRan is finishing up a $4.6 billion dollar expansion of a copper mine in Peru.” It is so big it will consume 10% of Peru’s electricity production when operational. Freeport-McMoRan’s board, taking a step back and seeing the big picture asked the CEO to step down.
So is there anything that can be done to better recognize that you have begun down a path of sunk cost decision-making? Can you improve your decision-making abilities? The answer to both of those is yes. Decision-making, like other skills, can be practiced and practice and training can result in improvement in your decision-making. The first step? Understanding how people fall into certain decision-making paradigms traps.
Timelines
“Time is an illusion.” – Albert Einstein
The US Postal Service just announced that in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas it would immediately begin delivering Amazon packages on Sundays (New York Times 11/11/13). The announcement, a recognition that American’s shopping patterns have been forever altered by Amazon, and coming at the start of the 2013 holiday shopping period, may give the post office a much needed boost to its profitable package delivery service. Sunday delivery of packages will be, for the moment, a clear differentiator for the post office, since no one else offers that service and for consumers it gives them a way to receive their purchases even faster. It is likely to be especially useful to Amazon Prime customers who get 2-day delivery included in their membership and those who have no one at home during the Monday-Friday work week.
Amazon and the Postal Service are making a pretty safe assumption that when someone purchases an item online they desire to receive their purchases as quickly as possible. It is in Amazon’s best interest to get the package to the consumer, as it helps to eliminate a competitive advantage of bricks and mortar stores and it is in the consumer’s best interest in that they don’t have to delay receipt of the goods they have purchased. Their respective timelines are operating in a congruent fashion and because of that it seems a safe bet that the offering will be very popular. And until Amazon can download your purchases directly into your home 3-D printer, Sunday delivery of packages may be the best way to shorten delivery timelines.
Timelines, however, don’t always line up between two people or entities in a congruent fashion, and in fact non-congruent timelines are the source of much conflict between people, organizations, investors and countries around the world. When timelines between two efforts or events don’t line up there is an increased potential for failure of whatever those efforts or events are, with the corresponding finger pointing of whom and what organization or country is to blame. Timeline incongruences are often overlooked as a potential risk factor that can derail an effort or event.
Think of a school system for instance. It may look at gradually improving test scores as a long-term trend that their policies and practices are on the right track. However, to parents, a long-term view of the trend of test scores is irrelevant to what they want as consumers of educational services for their children. They want the system to be at its best for their child, enrolled in the school right now. Not some future promises that things will get better for other “unknown” students. They want their child to do well in life, to be prepared to succeed, even though intellectually the parents know that change is often a gradual thing in organizations, including school systems. Their timelines of what they want can be fundamentally in disagreement with the school systems timelines and a source of conflict.
The teachers themselves may look at their course material as a gradually evolving, ever improving body of information, but the student typically only goes through the course once and that incongruence has at it source a fundamental difference between the timelines that a teacher is operating under (a teaching career that could span 30 or 40 years) and the student (taking the course once for 12 weeks).
There are endless stories of timeline incongruence between Wall Street’s quarterly-driven expectations for publicly traded companies and what those companies feel that have to do in order to build a robust, lasting enterprise. Sometimes public companies will be taken private when the timeline incongruence, along with other factors reaches a breaking point. Other times companies that could go public choose to remain private in order to operate with a longer-term view.
At an individual level, when you try to compress what you can get done within a shorter timeline, the potential for error or worse increases dramatically. At one extreme people are “multi-tasking” trying to fit more and more into an abbreviated period of time. Incongruence in the timeline exists between what it actually takes to do a good job on something, how much time and attention you should devote, and the expectations that you can do more and more activities within a compressed period of time. Many managers today feel that they must “multi-task” to be viewed as capable in their jobs. But ask yourself, how would you feel if a cardiac surgeon was multi-tasking while operating on your heart? Perhaps banging out a tweet while looking for that bleeder? Or what would your comfort level be in a combat situation walking behind the multi-tasking person responsible for spotting landmines? Does managing a group deserve the same level of focused attention? Or when talking to an individual, what does a singularity of focus, all of your attention on that person, in that moment in time, what does that buy you? Plenty.
While it is not uncommon for despair to take the form of immediate suffering and pain, ultimate despair seems to be driven when no positive potential future is seen for oneself or one’s children. And while people who can see a path forward to a better future are often very positive, even in trying circumstances, if you can’t see that better future, attitudes and behaviors can quickly turn in a very negative direction. It doesn’t matter if you are living in poverty in the rural south of the United States, within an inner city urban center, barely hanging on in a refugee camp, trying to survive a natural disaster or being controlled by a “benevolent” government. If you can’t see a bright future on your timeline, not the timeline of an organization, society or government, negativity will flourish.
Incongruent timelines may also be having a large and perhaps largely ignored impact on various peace negotiations around the world between countries. Americans tend to be fairly impatient, wanting to see progress on an issue within a fairly short period of time. Our maximum timeframe of focus is usually about one election cycle. But what if you are in negotiations with someone who has a very different timeline view than you? What if you are negotiating with someone who is thinking in hundreds or thousands of years and not driven by a 4-year election cycle? Their goal is not necessarily to achieve “immediate” progress on an issue or to resolve a conflict and put it behind them. With a long-term timeline view, the goal may be to simply do what it takes to pass time until more favorable conditions present themselves, 10, 50 or 100 years from now. And when you are dealing with multiple countries, each of which who view their ultimate success as being guaranteed by a higher power, the chances of a successful negotiation with immediate improvements in conditions is diminished.
Albert Einstein may be right about time being an illusion from a physicist’s view point, but from the view point of countries, people and individuals, all of whom live on a timeline, incongruence on respective timeline intervals and scales can at best cause miscommunications and at worst complete failure of the event or efforts underway.
© 2013 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: www.orgvitality.com
The Organization as Omnivore
An omnivore has certain advantages. Not being a picky eater, an omnivore can wander away from its traditional food source and expect that it will find some thing or other to eat when it gets to wherever it is going. When an omnivore, however, really wanders into unexplored territory and comes across completely foreign food, it faces a dilemma. The omnivore’s dilemma is a term first used by Paul Rozin and essentially states that omnivores as they move around must find new foods and new food sources, but at the same time must be wary of them until proven safe. Is this new food something that it can safely eat or is it a food, like certain wild mushrooms, that should be avoided at all costs? How can it know?
Jonathan Haidt describes omnivores as having two competing drives or motives. Neophilia is an attraction to new things, and neophobia is a fear of new things. And it has been shown than in the omnivores we call humans, neophilia and neophobia are not binary conditions but rather exist along a spectrum with each term anchoring one end of a “neo” scale. People who score higher on neophilia are more open to new experiences, including meeting new people and considering new ideas. Neophobic people do not prefer new experiences but do prefer tradition, guarding borders and boundaries either physical or social.
Now an omnivore’s survival as it wanders into new territory, much as the Vikings or Columbus did, depends on having evolved a disgust reaction to foods or environmental conditions that were certain to harbor pathogens or which could prove deadly. Omnivore flexibility only goes so far. For instance, you would be hard pressed to find an omnivore that would eat rotting meat, as only very specialized types of animals, such as vultures, can manage that without getting sick. Disgust as it turns out is also not binary but exists along a continuum along with neophobia and neophilia. And you guessed it, neophobics, people who are more fearful of new experiences preferring tradition; and those who feel a need to closely guard social or physical borders, have a more readily triggered disgust mechanism.
Organizations face the omnivore’s dilemma continually. Do they hire leaders from the outside, exposing themselves to potentially new ideas, new ways of doing business, a willingness to try some “new food” which unfortunately might prove poisonous, or alternatively might lead them to previously unattainable success? Or do they promote from within, utilizing those who have risen from the ranks, have found success in the organization’s current methods and processes, and are deeply imbued with the organization’s existing culture and ways of doing things? That is a surefire method of guarding one’s social and physical boundaries, which might lead to either the continuation of a success story or alternatively to obsolescence as the organization is stagnant and unchanging as environmental conditions change. If the leader of the organization is neophobic or neophillic will it affect which path they choose?
If one organization acquires another organization do they take the best of both cultures, processes and procedures, forging a brand new entity or do they bend the newly acquired organization to the will, the culture, the methods and processes of the acquirer? Do they guard their borders or are they neophillic, open to new experiences and the ideas of new people?
As organizations consider which products to bring to market, or which markets to enter, how to grow in their existing markets they have choices regarding when to stick to the tried and true and when to strike out, as Columbus did, in search of the new world. One path is not inherently safer or more sure than the other for both paths carry risks. How do you choose which path to take?
The omnivore organization roughly parallels the decisions that must be made in an ambidextrous organization. An ambidextrous organization is one that can maximize its current performance while at the same time building future potential. That is a balance that must be struck but is at the same time somewhat of a conflict or challenge. When you are building future potential, you are by definition not maximizing current performance, and if all you are doing is maximizing current performance, you are throwing away your future.
Leaders of organizations that are successfully ambidextrous relentlessly talk about the need to maximize current performance and to build future capacity. Their management teams below them tend to have differing groups focused on either the current performance or building potential, but not both at the same time. It is at the top that all points of view should be listened to, considered and the balance must be struck, by leaders that are practiced at being omnivorously ambidextrous.
© 2013 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: www.orgvitality.com
Why Improving Employee Engagement is not Strategic
[tweetmeme source=”jeffreysaltzman”]Employee Engagement is often viewed as a magic bullet. All we have to do is increase our levels of employee engagement and all will be well. Is your engineering done poorly? That is because your engineering employees are not engaged enough. They would exceed your customer’s expectations if they were more engaged. Putting your stores in under-performing locations? That would not happen if your real estate people were more engaged. Are your customers unhappy with the quality of your products? If only you could make your sales people were more engaged. This kind of thinking is of course nonsense, but there is a deeper issue here.
Some, if not many organizations have bought into the notion that increasing employee engagement should be part of an organizations’ strategy. But that is like saying reducing an ill person’s fever should be the strategy to get them well, without addressing the underlying cause, like the tumor that is spreading rapidly in their pancreas. Maybe if we brought the fever under control that tumor would resolve itself? Not likely.
As we conduct employee surveys there are several distinct kinds of questions that are used to gage what is happening within an organization and how it is functioning. One question type is called an independent variable. These are items like “do you have the training you need to get your job done?” They are directly addressable if the response scores are low. Another question type is called a dependent variable, such as “I am proud to work for XYZ”. These kinds of questions are dependent on other things driving them high or low, such as, we were just caught up in a bribery scandal, so I am not so proud to work here. How would you address pride in that circumstance? While there may be other underlying issues, simplistically, you would address ethics in order to bring pride back to higher levels. There are other kinds of questions we use in surveys but discussing these two types will make my point.
Good strategy for an organization is strategy that is simply stated, easily understood and directly addressable. Good strategy could be thought of as independent variables. Is your engineering done poorly? Good strategy may be to upgrade or bring resources to your engineering group. Maybe you hire or maybe you acquire or maybe you outsource, but the hallmark of a good strategy is that you can directly address the improvement needed of the engineering function. The engineering employees will become engaged when they have what they need to do their jobs well, are treated in an equitable fashion, with respect etc.
A strategy that states, we will increase employee engagement as the strategy itself, is not directly addressable and does not give the management team any insight into specifically what needs to be done to accomplish that goal. Without insight into the direct strategic actions that must be taken you get warm and fuzzy words that are not directional and will be impossible to accomplish.
Having high levels of employee engagement is a good end result, but it is an end result of other strategic actions you take and is simply not strategic by itself.
© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: http://www.orgvitality.com
Sense of Direction
[tweetmeme source=”jeffreysaltzman”] “You are going to have to help me with this people thing.” That was what the ex-McKinsey consultant turned CEO of a major Fortune company told me years ago. He was the nicest guy. He explained to me how he could handle all of the financials to run his company but this whole people thing, what motivated them, what concerned them, he just couldn’t get his arms around that. He was baffled. What to him seemed like simple business decisions, trim here, reorganize there, in order to fine tune his company’s financial performance resulted in all sorts of emotional morale issues. “Why didn’t people see the obvious?” He thought that there should be no emotions involved in financial business decisions, that if he did what was best for the company, to ensure its survival, that people should not mind (or at least not get emotional about) being moved around like pieces on a chess board, even if it meant losing their jobs. While this company had solid financial performance, it also had a fairly high degree of turnover, with some employees after a pretty short period of time feeling burned out and not being able to continue with the firm. Yet this company also had a high degree of employee commitment and employee loyalty. How was that possible?
I participated in a graduation recently. A group of MBA student’s to whom I taught a leadership class were graduating with their degrees in hand. It was extremely emotional in a positive way for the students, their families and friends that were present. The students were smiling from ear to ear and the parents were beaming. As each student came across the stage, amid the flashing of cameras, I rose shook their hands and congratulated them on their achievement. As each student passed me, I wondered “what direction will their lives now take?”
Sense of Direction. Having a clear sense of direction, a sense of mission regarding what the organization (an organization can be anything from a poker club to a nation state) is going to accomplish, and how people can personally and meaningfully contribute to that goal will affect one’s overall sense of well-being and happiness. It helps to increase a sense of purposefulness which in turn can greatly impact people’s sense of commitment and loyalty to the organization. Most people struggle with this, looking for a sense of direction and purposefulness for at least a portion of their lives, others struggle with this for most of their lives. For the newly-minted MBA’s, they are at an inflection point, where they will be examining the decisions they have made so far and will be reflecting on a host of choices they now have which will affect their own sense of direction and sense of purpose.
For an organization, clarity on this subject allows members to self-select, for if I don’t agree with the goals of the organization (stated or otherwise), or what the organization perceives as my role in helping it to achieve those goals, it is pretty clear, that if I can, I should leave. Over time, with a clear sense of direction (stated or otherwise), what an organization can achieve is a fairly tightly knit core of people who are extremely dedicated, ferociously loyal to helping the organization achieve its goals. And yes, there is a risk that too tightly knit of a group will put goal achievement and gain for this core above all else including societal or customer well-being, potentially bending or breaking various articulated operating standards, societal rules, regulations or laws. An inner core can arise, and as C.S. Lewis pointed out a long time ago, people will do almost anything to become part of the inner circle. As with everything there needs to be a sense of balance, swinging too far in any direction is generally not good for people, the organization or society at large.
Knowing where an organization is going, what it stands for and the values it will employ while getting there can be critical to actually getting there. Each person having a sense of direction and knowing how they can contribute to that direction is a fundamental building block for organizational performance and morale.
One aspect of sense of direction having a positive impact is movement, or the direction of the sense of direction. People tend to get frustrated with stagnation and get unhappy pretty quickly about what is perceived as a backward slide, even if that slide is relatively small and from a very high place or performance level. People notice and feel positive or negatively about the direction things are headed, oftentimes more than the absolute level of the measure suggests that they should.
For instance, as we have measured Employee Confidence over the years, what we see are increases and decreases in Employee Confidence on a national level that are related to the direction of a nation’s economy and not the absolute level of economic performance. Employee Confidence goes up if conditions (e.g. unemployment levels, GDP growth) are seen as improving and it declines if conditions are perceived as dropping, regardless of the absolute levels of those conditions. Employee Confidence can be very high in rapidly developing economies as people feel that conditions are improving and that their economy is on the rise, even if the absolute economic standards are pretty low. Likewise, Employee Confidence can be low in highly develop economies with high standards of living if economic performance is seen as in decline.
As humans, we tend to perceive events and make judgments on a relative basis and not on an absolute basis. What tends to becomes normal is relative to what we routinely experience. But every once in a while we are able change the standard dramatically when a critical mass of organizational members compares what they are experiencing to other extra-organizational standards.
Let me illustrate relative decision-making in a simple fashion. Say you needed a pair of shoes and had your eye on a pair that normally costs $300. You are prepared to spend $300 on those shoes. You open the Sunday paper and see that a store 40 minutes away across town has those same exact shoes that you have been thinking of purchasing for half-off or $150. Would you be motivated to drive across town to buy your shoes at half-price? Many people are inclined to do that. Now say you needed to purchase a new car. You are looking at a car that costs $27,900 at a new car dealer near your house. You are prepared to spend $27,900 on that new car by financing it with the bank and paying it off over 5 years. You open the Sunday paper and see that same exact car for $27,750 at a new car dealer 40 minutes away on the other side of town. Would you drive across town to buy that car? Many would say no. Yet in these two examples in each case the buyer would save $150 on the purchase price. You could use that $150 to purchase the same exact things, regardless of where the savings came from, 2-tickets to a Broadway show (partially obstructed view), or a hot dog at Yankee Stadium. Yet there is a tendency for people to be more willing to save $150 when it represents a larger portion of the purchase price, rather than when it represents a smaller percentage. We make relative and not absolute judgments on how worthwhile the savings are.
The same holds true at the organizational level. If organizational performance is seen as improving relative to where it currently is, employees tend to be more upbeat regardless of the absolute starting level of that performance and if it is perceived as in decline, employee spirits will also be in decline (even if you are still the best in your industry). So how could the CEO I mentioned lead a company that achieved high levels of employee commitment and loyalty, even as people were burning out? The answer is that it was an exciting place to be, they were cutting edge, an industry leader with rapidly rising levels of performance, beating the competition and with a clearly articulated vision of where the company was going.
© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
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Naturally Innovative
“But if you will it, it is not fantasy” – Theodor Herzl
Recently, virtually every organization that I speak with has put innovation front and center as a necessary, in fact imperative characteristic of their organizational cultures. The thinking is clear. In order to thrive in turbulent environments organizations must innovate, must examine the way they do business, update their products and services, and must differentiate themselves in order to outperform the competition. Competition, environmental stress and the need to survive as an organization spur on innovation.
Innovation is often described as coming in bursts, but much more common is the rolling-up-the-sleeves, hard work, incremental innovation, building on other’s breakthroughs, often in a collaborative fashion, that over the long run can radically change the way things work and the products that an organization offers.
It could easily be argued that innovation occurs naturally among all of the earth’s creatures. Species innovate constantly and naturally in the never ending battle to survive. One species of cuckoo finch has eggs that mimic the coloration of another species so that when the finch deposits their eggs into the other species’ nest, the hatched baby birds are raised by the tricked surrogate parents. As a defense the second species, the tawny-flanked prinias evolved more colorful eggs that looked different form the finch’s eggs but the finches responded by evolving and again mimicking the more colorful eggs. Evolution is innovative.
The mitochondria that inhabit our cells and produce the energy which powers cells originated externally from the cells they now inhabit. They have their own DNA and can reproduce only from their own DNA, indicating that they were a separate life form somewhat like bacteria. Prior to their role in our cells they existed independently. Mitochondria entered into a symbiotic relationship with cells and then that combined organism evolved into the variety of cells that make up human beings. Today we would not be able to survive without these creatures living within our cells and the mitochondria would not exist without us. Evolutionary innovation is often collaborative.
Beyond evolving on a biological front, humans evolve and innovate their behaviors constantly if not quickly, with our ancestors developing new forms of stone tools over millennia, fire being tamed, the taking up of living in shelters of one sort or another, and placing metal strips on the teeth of our children to improve function and appearance.
Many of the inventions that propelled our civilization and were described as deriving from “ah-ha” moments were nothing of the sort. Rather the innovative breakthrough came from groundwork that laid the foundation and was then built upon. Basic innovations often sit dormant until additional development work and insights are gained allowing the innovation to be applied in day-to-day life.
Take Edison’s light bulb for instance. It is often credited to Edison as a singular event. And in fact Edison played a very important role in the light bulb, but without the innovations of those who came both before and after him the light bulb would not have become as wide spread as it has. Here is a chronology of the major milestones.
• The first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy. When he connected wires to his newly invented battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light.
• Much later, in 1860, physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan was determined to devise a practical, long-lasting electric light. He found that a carbon paper filament worked well, but burned up quickly. In 1878, he demonstrated his new electric lamps in Newcastle, England.
• In 1877, Charles Francis Brush manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. These arcs were used on a few streets, in a few large office buildings, and even some stores. Electric lights were only used by a few people.
• Thomas Alva Edison experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.
• Lewis Howard Latimer improved the bulb by inventing a carbon filament (patented in 1881); Latimer was a member of Edison’s research team, which was called “Edison’s Pioneers.” In 1882, Latimer developed and patented a method of manufacturing his carbon filaments.
• In 1903, Willis R. Whitney invented a treatment for the filament so that it wouldn’t darken the inside of the bulb as it glowed.
• In 1910, William David Coolidge (1873-1975) invented a tungsten filament which lasted even longer than the older filaments. The incandescent bulb revolutionized the world. (Enchanted Learning).
Rather than being the exception the “evolution” of the light bulb is very often how innovation occurs with multiple people contributing, often working collaboratively over a period of time.
There are multiple methods available for measuring the existence of innovation in organizations. You could count the number of patents issued to the organization, or the age of each of its product’s since design, the amount of time that employees spend on innovation, the R&D budget, the headcount assigned to “innovation”, or the perceptions of the customers towards the organization’s products and services as being innovative. One method for measuring the degree of innovation in organizations is through the perceptions of the employees.
Employee surveys will often ask about the “emphasis” on innovation within the organization, but I prefer asking about whether innovation is actually occurring. Critical when measuring innovation through employee surveys is to ask about:
• the generation of innovative ideas;
• the ability to test out those ideas from a funding and other resources standpoint;
• the ability to evaluate innovations to see which one’s should be implemented organization-wide and which ones rejected.
Examining or asking about the reward system is also often very informative as an organization may truly desire to be innovative, but is actually rewarding its employees for playing it safe and not trying new things rather than the innovative efforts desired.
Slack and redundancy are two concepts that are also critical to be in place for an organization to successfully innovate. If an organization is being run in such a tight fashion with no slack so that it can’t try new things, because all resources are dedicated to getting the work done the traditional way, the ability to be innovative does not exist. And likewise if the organization does not have the ability to experiment with new methods, while another redundant process is performing in a traditional fashion, the evaluation of innovative ideas and processes will be very difficult to objectively assess.
Organizational innovation is critical and creating organizational cultures that support innovation rather than suppress it is within reach for all organizations.
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© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
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