CRA Inc

Showing you’re serious about…

Given the current state of our economy, it shouldn’t be surprising to any of us that it’s difficult to get people to pay attention to anything else. But, when you’re making changes to keep the organization afloat, you need your employees to hear and believe what you’re saying.

So, how do you get some instant credibility; how can you demonstrate that you really mean what you say? Whether you want to highlight the importance of a new initiative, a shift in direction, or compliance issues—as a researcher, I’ve found one of the strongest “convincing decisions” that leaders can make to demonstrate they really care about something on their leadership agenda is to measure…then act.

As organizations increasingly rely on metrics and dashboards to guide employee efforts, a highly effective way to get people’s attention is to ask for their feedback about whether (and how well) your efforts are moving the organization in the right direction—and then to be very transparent about what you heard from them and how you plan to act on it. And, this approach offers some nice side benefits: (1) You make better decisions when you know the landscape in which you’re operating and (2) you’re more likely to get employee buy-in for your plans when you’ve listened to their input first.

Improving Productivity with Social Network Analysis

Whether you’re aware of it or not, social and informal networks throughout your organization and within your team influence how decisions are made, framed, and carried out at work. As a result, companies are beginning to chart informal, social networks as a way to identify communication gaps, information bottlenecks, and under utilization of employees. This approach, often referred to as social-mapping, allows organizations to uncover a whole new level of workforce dynamics. Check out a recent Wall Street Journal article that highlights this method here (registration may be required).

The Crystal Ball Post-Mortem

As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:

• Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
• Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
• Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
• The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.

The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).

Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.

In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.

We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.

We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.

Getting the Goods: Ten Tips for Interviewing Effectively

As noted in the post, Managing the survey process, researchers must be mindful of the methodology we use to gather data. While a survey containing closed-ended belief statements make it easy to gather input from many people in a timely manner, interviewing allows us to delve deeper, examining the nuances of an organization’s culture and providing context for our work. As the author of InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing notes, “[Interviewing] goes beyond mere fact gathering and attempts to construct meaning and interpretation in the context of conversation.” 

If you’ve decided that the right methodology for your project is an interview-based approach, you’ll need to be prepared. After you’ve chosen your sample of participants and designed the interview guide, you can use the following interviewing tips to help make the most of your data. 

1. Ask questions that require descriptive answers. Start with “Why, how, where, what kind of . . .” 
2. Make the interview conversational. Don’t worry if you haven’t specifically asked each and every question in the order that it appears in the guide. Focus on getting good and useful data. 
3. Encourage participants to share – don’t commiserate. Avoid telling your “story.” Rather, listen to what the participant has to say and encourage them to share. When they do share, try not to bias the interview by commiserating with them. 
4. Ask about what others would say or do. For example, “What do you think are the perceptions of others in your group?” Or, if you think someone is holding back… “It may not surprise you to hear that other people feel X. Do you know people with this perception?” 
5. Let a good story be told. Don’t interrupt because you have thought of a question or because the participant is straying from the outline. If the information is pertinent, jot down your question so you will remember to ask it later. 
6. Stick to the topic. If the participant strays into irrelevant subjects, try to pull him/her back as quickly as possible. Example: “Before we move on, I’d like to find out . . .” 
7. Listen for inconsistencies. Probe to uncover detail and determine reality. 
8. Probe early and often. Some examples you might use:
• Would you explain that further?
• Can you say more?
• Why do you say that?
• How often does that happen?
• Is that the norm / usual practice?
• I’d like to hear more about this
• What’s your assessment of how this came about?
• Can you give me an example? 
9. Pause to probe. Don’t let periods of silence fluster you. Give the person a chance to think of what he/she wants to add before you move into the next question. 
10. Recap throughout. By doing this after each section, you will help to clarify thoughts and make sure that you’ve captured the intended messages.

(Source: Kvale, Steiner (1996). InterViews: An introduction to qualitative research interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.) 

The Power of Upward Feedback

I drove to the Toledo airport Friday evening amidst a flurry of NPR commentary about Scooter Libby’s indictment and Harriet Mier’s stepping down (gotta love All Things Considered). At the end of the segment, Bob Siegel made an interesting point…and one that many of us make almost every day: One of the most out of touch people in any organization (if not the most) is the person at the top.
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Managing the survey process

Gathering data from employees and stakeholders (both internal and external) helps us make smarter decisions. But if we want our audiences to continue responding to our surveys and to take our improvement efforts seriously, we need to make sure that all data-gathering efforts:

* Reflect the Right Methodology (the right sample, questions, data collection method, and analyses)
* Send the Right Messages�implicitly and explicitly, to the respondents whose perceptions we�re trying to improve
* Have the Right Follow-through Strategy (we know how we�re going to translate the data into action)

Here are some questions you may want to ask before deploying a survey.
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Embracing Instant Messaging

It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about the backlash from messaging.

Not anymore.

According to a recent article on CNET, “Businesses are getting the (instant) message.” While some companies have locked down their systems to prevent personal IM use, many companies (including those) have implemented enterprise-specific applications for employee communication. It seems that financial industry is one of the first to take hold as a group:

“If you don’t have IM in this business, you’re not there,” says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. “I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time.”

Organizations face obvious challenges, too. Go here to read the CNET article…it outlines the cons, as well as pros, to implementing IM.

Radio Shows, Cocktail Parties, & The Encyclopedia

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.

The Most Important Outlook Tool Of All Time

Some time ago I stumbled across David Allen�s Getting Things Done, and it�s been extremely influential in helping the members of our firm enjoy dramatic increases in our ability to manage our time, understand our priorities, and true to the title, get things done. With our lives of relationships, tasks, and travel, it�s been our killer app of 2005.

Given how wired our professionals are, however, and given that our information platform is Outlook, David�s method would be more difficult for us to implement if not for his Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It�s difficult to describe what it does, but I can tell you what it creates: a full inventory of everything you need to do, now, soon, or someday, on your PC (sorry Mac owners) and your PDA of choice, and � best of all � an empty inbox at the end of every day.

That alone has been invaluable: we�ve all found the add-in a remarkable tool for managing email, and the days of 10, 100, or 1,000 (you know who you are) emails sitting in an inbox unprocessed are long gone.

The add-in has a free 30-day trial, after which there�s a $70 fee to register the tool. Worth every penny, and in fact, I would have paid more. And I�ve been referring it (and the book) to clients daily � indeed, the more senior and busy you are, the more you need the tool.

A CEO Blog As Direct Channel To Employees

I posted yesterday about how Thomas Nelson publishing encourages employees to write blogs. The CEO, Michael Hyatt, as published a blog on personal effectiveness for a while now, and he inspired the corporate policy.

But here�s something new: Michael has also launched a blog, From Where I Sit (which is available outside the corporate firewall) as a platform for him to communicate directly with Thomas Nelson employees. Talk about embracing transparency.

I think it�s a fantastic idea. It�s a symbol of openness, not just to employees, but to current and potential shareholders. And if Thomas Nelson, a publicly traded company, can do this with the approval of their attorneys, other firms can as well.

What�s more, the CEO blog in particular has potential as a powerful tool of leadership. It�s an opportunity for a leader to express his or her style, communicate values as well as direction, and not least important, address uncertainty quickly and directly. Witness this recent post by Michael regarding a hiring freeze rumor:

Twice yesterday, I heard, �Management has put a new hiring freeze in place.� I was dumbfounded. Where does this stuff come from? Not from me, I can assure you.

Yes, we are trying to be very careful about adding expenses. Yes, we are scrutinizing every new position request. And, yes, we are even asking managers to justify replacement positions. But we have not put a hiring freeze into place�and we don�t plan to.

Rest assured, our company is healthier than it has ever been. If you haven�t already, take a look at our operating results through the December 31 quarter (our fiscal third quarter and our most recent reporting period). Revenues are up 8% over the prior year; profits are up 18%. This is healthy by any standard, and I want to keep it that way.

What�s more, once a leader begins to put such an unfiltered face on his or her leadership via such public statements (inside or outside the firewall), it pressures the leader to deliver. In this, blogging can become an accountability mechanism not for the tasks of leadership so much as its character.

These reasons are precisely why I�ve been counseling leaders to blog for several years. If only more would follow Michael�s example: their leadership would be better for it.