Archive for May, 2005
Strategy + Business (the business magazine / PR tool of Booz Allen Hamilton) has an article up on “the value of corporate values.” It’s the reusult of a moderately robust research effort (300+ completed surveys but only 20 interviews) about “how companies are dealing with the challenges of managing values.” (Link here; PDF file here; free registration required.)
The findings are what you’d expect: lots of firms state similar values (”integrity,” “commitment to customers,” “commitment to employees”); the rub is in living them. Of course, we believe there’s another rub as well: not confusing value messages with strategy messages. At CRA, we encourage clients to communicate values as “how we play” or “how we work” and strategy as “how we’re going to succeed” or, if there’s a vision for the company, “how we’re going to get there.”
The challenge with values is that they’re not terribly actionable from a planning perspective. As a mid-level manager it’s hard to look at the next 12 months and plot (or articulate) how my team is going to “do” diversity or “do” integrity.
A strategy message fills that gap: If you tell me our strategy is to “improve customer service, improve reliability, and manage costs” … those are things I can take action on, whatever my level. I can then invoke values by saying: “And as you do so, act with integrity and encourage diversity.” Mission, vision, values, and strategy each have a linked but distinct space in the strategic message heirarchy. Strategy is the game plan; values are how we play the game.
As a former academic, I find myself still perusing academic journals from time to time (yes, I’m a nerd!). More often than not, however, I find an interesting article consisting of great theory and impressive empirical results, but, let’s be honest here…… such articles can be painfully boring to read. Still, an article published in the most recent issue of one of the most prestigious management journals, The Academy of Management Review, is worth a closer look. Hence, I offer you my quick and dirty translation of this article……
In our coaching business, many of our clients are taking advantage of a program we call “Coaching4Teams” an innovative program which combines one-on-one coaching and team based learning. In their latest article, A Theory of Team Coaching, Richard Hackman of Harvard University and Ruth Wageman of Dartmouth College tackle the question: How much of a difference does team coaching make to team performance effectiveness? Great question, right? I thought so.
According to the authors, coaching behaviors can and do help teams achieve and sustain team performance effectiveness, but only under certain conditions which may surprise you……
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Many leaders are so tied to their BlackBerrys that they view face-to-face conversation as more of a nuisance than a learning tool. But in an email era, this IABC-sponsored article “In Praise Of Small Talk”
re-affirms something we’ve been telling our clients for years: employees prefer face-to-face communication with their direct managers.
The article echoes our advice to leaders: make time for talk, use smart questions, build partnerships, share experiences, and create a clear & common purpose—-all things difficult to do over email.
A client recently called to tell me that, after struggling to convince his CIO to engage in these “informal conversations,” his boss is now a big believer in them. And the organization is seeing huge benefits. The informal leadership conversations they’ve organized with small groups of employees have reduced uncertainty during a recent outsourcing, improved performance, uncovered new information, and helped discover ways of working better.
We know you’ve heard it before … but if you want to be a smarter leader, consider leaving your BlackBerry at home for the day and start talking.
Over the years I’ve compiled a list of key terms used by production crews for stage events. They use a language all their own, and if you’re not experienced in the theater, most of it sounds like nonsense. Still, it’s always good to talk to experts in their own language, and you might find the list useful before you participate in or coach someone for your / their next big speech, town hall, or convention. I’ve posted it in the extended entry.
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In business we’re programmed to identify gaps, shortfalls and problems, and then fix them. If you’ve ever perused survey results, you’ll recognize the tendency to focus on the “misses” and breeze over the “hits.” We see an 85 percent approval rating, and immediately begin unraveling the mystery of the 15% who are dissatisfied to win their approval in the future. While it is valid and valuable to shoot for an approval rating higher than 85%, the positive deviance concept challenges the conventional wisdom about the best way to get there. Positive deviance posits that understanding and reinforcing the hits may be more useful than deconstructing the misses.
Can we succeed in fostering change when we focus on what’s gone wrong? Often we’re unable to make change stick. Why? Change initiatives, like transplanted organs, are often rejected by the very body they were designed to save because they are foreign. An alternative: “Amplifying positive deviance,” an approach that may cause you to rethink your focus on the historical misses, gaps and deficiencies in our organizations. “Amplifying positive deviance” means finding small, successful deviant practices that work and then amplifying them for the community.
The origins of positive deviance are a fascinating case study (see extended entry), but how can we apply it to organizational problems? Barbara Waugh, Worldwide Personnel Manager at Hewlett-Packard, used the process of “amplifying positive deviants” in an effort to become the best industrial research lab in the world. Waugh conducted a worldwide employee survey and canvassed for answers to basic questions. With “800 pages of frustrations, dreams and insights” in hand she identified three primary HP challenges around programs, people and processes. She communicated the findings to leadership, got buy-in and set off with two guiding principles: get the people of HP to move the organization forward, and create lasting change through incremental progress.
Next, she identified positive deviants and cultivated over 100 small and attainable grassroots initiatives to move HP Labs in the right direction. As Waugh stated, her job is to support the positive deviants…to feed them and give them resources and visibility. She sought small wins from within rather than massive transformation and discovered local answers to existing problems. Her efforts have had lasting effects and a tremendously positive impact on HP, including the development of a knowledge-sharing model that has helped thousands of HPers share ideas.
For more information about the concept of positive deviance at Hewlett-Packard, check out this link.
Where can you find opportunities to “amplify positive deviance?” Consider situations where you’re planning to:
* Perform a survey
* Undertake a “change” effort
* Solve an existing problem
* Institute a reward or recognition program
All of these situations are alive with opportunities to find what already works in your organization; to learn from the “deviant” successes, magnify them and see that they’re shared with others. Solutions that already work are likely to keep working. You need only to support, sustain, and communicate the untapped resources inherent in your organization.
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Also of note at Fast Company Now is this FC blog entry about an email CNBC sent to staffers earlier this week announcing the cancellation of Dennis Miller’s show (be sure to read the deconstruction … it’s funny, sad, and spot-on). This entry is eerily reminiscent of examples we use in our consulting practice (our favorite: this memo at InternalMemos.com.
The problem here is medium, not message, and as we’ve written before, it’s a function of media richness. CNBC made a classic mistake: pushing a rich message through a lean channel. When that happens the message is always misconstrued … in this instance, as being relationally insensitive, and surely for some, cowardly.
(CNBC also made another mistake: waiting until the fifth sentence to deliver the bad news. If you have a hammer to drop, drop it right away. It makes you look candid rather than cowardly. “Folks, I’m writing to tell you some bad news: This Friday’s Dennis Miller Show will be the last. Now let me explain why.” … that’s the way.)
CNBC’s missive reflects the rub of extremely cost-efficient channels like email. They’re fast, easy, and most of all, inexpensive. But unless the content is lean, they’re also a primary cause for misunderstanding at best, and for damaged leadership credibility at worst.
At least they didn’t text “U R Fired :-(” …
Several things worth noting over at Fast Company’s blog, FC Now, today.
The first is the blog itself: It’s a nice example of a single blog authored by multiple folks with similar but varying content expertise. It also reflects sound blog practice (first person voice, brief and pithy entries, links, un-spun and candid information … see Jeff Jarvis’ excellent take on blog ethics here).
Most interesting, however, is how the blog — which uses Movable Type’s standard software (as does CommLog) — incorporates so well into the rest of FC’s site and web branding. We’re often trying to convince IT and Corp. Comm. folks that they don’t have to use a $400,000 piece of content management software for blogging functionality – that the standard (and dirt cheap) software that’s out there easily allows for incorporation into nearly any existing site or page. FC’s blog is a great example.
Steve Crescenzo wants to slaughter the “fun page”. And in his sentiment, he’s right. Of course, making the “strategic direction” page the fun page … there’s the rub.
My colleague Robin passed this Jack Welch-authored Newsweek article around the other week. In it Welch summarizes his eight “rules” of leadership, and it’s worth reading. My favorite line from the article isn’t actually one of his rules:
Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
It seems I express the same sentiment most often to folks entering the GM / Managing Director ranks for the first time. It’s a big shift to make, from superstar to the creator of superstars, but it’s absolutely one of the things that separates admired leaders from the rest of the crowd.
Earlier today I took a call to help a client think through how they could use message boards and blogs to manage and disseminate competitive intelligence among their employees (+/- 10,000 folks, globally distributed). In doing so, I sprung wikis on them … a tool with which they (like many people) were unfamiliar.
Here’s how I described the three tools:
* Message boards are like cocktail parties. Walk in, poke around, start a conversation about nearly anything with nearly anyone. Of course, like a cocktail party, you miss a lot, and finding the conversation you want can be difficult.
* Blogs are like radio shows. Get one or more passionate experts together, give them the mic, and let them go. The audience may be hundreds of thousands, and they’ll vacuum up the content as long as it’s relevant. And if they want to engage, they can call in and be part of the conversation (through comment threads). What’s more, the broadcasters will talk about what each other is saying, and in doing so, drive the discourse along.
* Wikis are like encyclopedias. Or archives. Or a filing cabinet. They’re where the reference documents go. You don’t know you need it until you look for it, but with a simple search what you’re looking for rises to the top. What’s more, the material is in pencil, not ink, so the people before and after you can improve the article as they see fit, making it more and more robust over time, and adding any articles they think should be part of the reference set along the way.
In this schema, my suggestion was:
* Find 10 or 20 opinion leaders in the company who are passionate about competitive intelligence. Give them each a blog, or let them all contribute to one blog, and let them start broadcasting. Don’t worry about the ones that don’t post often or do a poor job – the best will rise to the top and the audience will read the best.
* Set up a wiki to which all 10,000 of the employees in the audience can create and update topics related to individual competitors and matters of competitive intelligence. Link to it from the blog / blogs, and encourage the opinion leaders to archive their wisdom there as they see fit.
* Create a message board just for the heck of it. Use it as a “tip line” where any of the 10,000 employees can start, join, or eavesdrop on a conversation about competitive intelligence. Have the bloggers prowl the message boards for things worth broadcasting, and when you find stuff that’s worth keeping, archive it in the wiki.
That was my thumbnail take. I’ll add to it this article from CommonCraft (a very strong blog by Social Design Consultant Lee LeFever that’s worth a regular read, by the way; tip of the hat to CorporateBlogging.info, and tip of the hat for it to CommEcon … see how this “blogs linking to blogs” thing works?) about how blogs and wikis can interrelate. It’s consistent with my thumbnail, and goes to the next level of granularity.
