The Strategy-Innovation-Knowledge Forum

Improvement in Time-Pressured Roles

Keith Miles — 2010-04-07T17:15:31-04:00

[Author’s note: a Chief Medical Officer from the mid-west asked this great question.]

Situation:

Busy personnel find errors and create immediate ‘workarounds’ rather than tag the issue and pass it off to a broader group to correct the process.

Question:

How can we create continuous improvement within valuable but time-pressured roles?

What we typically see:

Roles aren’t defined in terms of improvement ownership. Often technical or expert roles need the support of a broader group to enact improvements. The key is not to communicate that one or two roles are more important than other roles. Identify the expert roles and support roles only in terms of available time rather than by any difference in qualification (there may indeed be qualification differences but departmental improvement comes by engaging the entire department in shared improvement goals).
Busy personnel may not have a visible, easy way (e.g. process ‘opportunity’ ticket-card) to notify the broader group (across different functions and shifts) of a process issue and to indicate its impact on safety and/or quality.
There isn’t a simple view of the main processes – like a one-page PowerPoint slide – so executing a process revision requires, stepping in ‘quicksand’ so to speak, spending tremendous amounts of time mapping the process (usually with a complex method) since no map exists at present. If a simple map existed, defining the adjustment would be a few minutes work rather than many hours’ work (an effective deterrent).
Many hold the mistaken belief that staff improvement experts are responsible for implementing these changes.

Our suggestions:

Create an easy time-efficient way of capturing the process issue, its context, and its safety-impact potential – e.g. a 3x5 opportunity ticket.
Create a team behind the ticket generators to function as ticket resolvers. The busiest staff need to be seen as the ‘artillery spotters’ – who find holes that require the attention of the broader team – in a sense they find an issue then call for the process revision group to ‘fire for effect’ – and deploy a few resources to simply; research the issue, find its root cause then create and publish process adjustments.
Set the expectation for time and throughput – that processing an issue or ‘ticket’ should be fast and get faster every year – it’s about acceleration rather than creating busy work. It’s never meant to justify an improvement person’s job – that’s death to the process. The goal is abbreviated, visual, team-based improvement processes that speed suggested improvements into consistent action.
Create simple, visual maps of the area’s main processes otherwise a process adjustment requires hours and hours of work to make it clear. In addition, if your processes aren’t clear, visual, and posted – how can they be understood and followed by staff or learned by new employees?
The entire improvement - from finding an issue, to ticketing or logging, to processing, to communicating, to integrating back to steady-state – SHOULDN’T be long enough to track as a project. You could affix the issue’s ‘opportunity’ ticket to a whiteboard with sections labeled discovered, understood, proposed, tested, and resolved (or plan-do-check-act if you prefer). The ticket could be left on the white board until it lands in the resolved area – to provoke continued action but avoid higher-effort project management techniques. Track the number of issues completed.
It’s about speed, resolution and adoption. This means improvement actions remain observable (due to their short duration) rather than measurable (using the numeric or project-oriented accountability mechanisms typically in place).
People need accountability. We’ve found that holding individuals accountable for visibly contributing to improvement is one of the most important first steps in building a positive, improvement-oriented culture.

‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Programs Require ‘Lean’ Pixie Dust (or equivalent)

Keith Miles — 2010-03-23T11:09:10-04:00

As leaders demand evidence of effectiveness, consulting firms respond with pre-packaged methods. While it’s good to seek proven results, we must also demand real customization. Methods from organizations with different cultures, constraints, and business situations must be re-designed to complement what’s already positive to ensure adoption. Even a proven approach, if not shaped to fit your organization, can hinder progress in the following ways:

Resources Wasted

Without an operational review as a guide, the ‘approach’ often replaces well-functioning, familiar methods with less-effective, complex activities. Precious employee energy is then wasted on needless change.

Progress Slowed

Responsiveness suffers as routine tasks become bureaucratic, facilitated sessions and work effort is split between ‘approach’ and ‘normal’ requirements.

Culture Weakened

The consultants describe current practice flaws in detail and praise ‘approach’ advantages. Employees see little respect or appreciation for current practice nor the effort (passion, imagination) that went into creating it. They perceive our message to be, “success requires ‘us’ to become less like ‘us’ and ‘more like some other organization’”.

Authority Weakened

Many ‘approach’ activities disappear quickly because the consultants did not seek to understand the reasons behind current activities. Management’s authority diminishes with the failure of each proposed activity.

[Authority is the cumulative impact of followed directives. Leaders use authority to convert employee energy into action. Abandoned directives weaken influence.]

Future Diminished

Our actions tell the next generation of leaders that management is more about setting targets and installing tactics (pre-packaged ‘approaches’) and less about understanding how things really work, respecting people, and appreciating the personal investments that created the current state.

Successful organizations build up their own culture at every opportunity and filter any new ideas through their culture’s protective lens to safeguard employee engagement and what already works well.

I imagine Disney taking what’s advantageous from popular approaches like six-sigma, then bringing core concepts to life within their effective and rich culture. I struggle picturing Snow White as a part-time Black Belt – though I could visualize Tinker Bell spreading ‘Lean’ pixie dust to approve an effective customer service process.

Ensure any new program starts with a real understanding of the operational and cultural aspects of your present situation and then tailor the program to reinforce what’s already good and target only what’s necessary to produce the performance improvement. The result will be a significant step forward that will forever lift your organization’s capability and capacity.

Rapid Performance Improvement? – Conserve Energy for Value Creation

Keith Miles — 2010-02-09T15:27:06-05:00

Background – Survival

We returned to help a long-time client whose industry has been battered by the economic downturn. Survival hinges on their next 12 months’ performance and they need to deliver greater value with an already depleted team. Cost cutting alone will not suffice.

Need – Enhance Value

This organization is already so ‘lean’ its bones show through. Senior managers wear multiple hats and run a disciplined, well-run, and well-measured operation. Employees continue to find ways to trim and improve effectiveness. New products and services are needed to attract new accounts and increase revenue from existing accounts. To meet this challenge the organization needed a quick lift in innovation and collaboration, and a greater responsiveness to sales opportunities.

Process – Build Out From Current Practice

The analysis showed a few things each department could do to immediately move the organization ahead. Even with a team stretched to the limit many things were done well. We limited our focus to identifying what changes would be absolutely necessary to accomplish the needed ‘lift’.

We studied their operation and created accountability for new activities molded around their current set of routine meetings, departmental hand-offs, and transition points.

Effective operating routines received only minor adjustments in spite of seeing other organizations heavily modify daily practices when implementing similar concepts.

The goal was to preserve employee energy for value creation rather than expend it on unnecessary organizational change.

The ‘lift’ was communicated as a necessary step-up rather than as a major overhaul. One could argue a crisis-style approach might better stimulate short-term compliance, but defensiveness and decision-uncertainty slow an organization’s reaction time – something they could ill afford. We highlighted examples of what they did well. Employees were given sets of realistic activities depicting what each person and department could do differently each day to propel the organization forward – as adjustments to current practice.

We invited suggestions to improve the activity sets’ reflection of departmental roles and practices. Accountability came by a link from the annual performance review (and compensation consideration) to each employee’s contribution as pictured within the ‘activity set’.

Reaction – Immediate

A concern was quickly alleviated that some may miss the seriousness and need for immediate improvement unless we disrupted the operation with a proliferation of improvement meetings. After the presentation a new employee commented to everyone present,“This flies in the face of what has been done in all the big companies I’ve worked for. It seems so common sense to start from where we are now and move ahead. You’ve left alone what we are already doing well and have adjusted what’s necessary to accomplish the performance change. This is so forward thinking.”

Current Results – Visible and Growing

It’s been a few weeks and the senior manager is encouraged with the ‘lift’ in focus and responsiveness to opportunities. Each department is looking for ways to bring more value to customers.

Previous Results – Double Digit Growth

The general manager is a believer. This is actually the third time the client has asked us to employ this approach. Two earlier projects (five years and ten years ago) focused efforts on responsiveness and cost reduction. Comparing the three years prior to the first project to the three years that followed, annual sales growth increased by 12%.

Recommendation – Conserve Energy for Value Creation

Rapid performance improvement doesn’t have to mean a disruption to value creation activities. Describe (with accountability) what each individual and department could do differently each day to move the organization ahead. This technique works quickly because it generates almost no resistance to change. Employees tell us they have been waiting for years for their leaders to tell them specifically what they should do differently to really contribute. The most common response we hear is, “Finally!”

Downturn Rx: Fix Leaks - Frame Leaps

Keith Miles — 2008-11-15T00:28:34-05:00

SMG’s powerful but less-obvious suggestions to help your business through this downturn.

1 - Fix Leaks

You've probably already stepped in to fix your company’s cash leaks. You’ve cut spending, reduced staff, and redoubled efforts on winning more business. Here are three additional ideas to conserve cash and customers:

Remove Process Inconsistencies and Assumptions

Most businesses fulfill customer needs using a core ‘relay race’-style process. A complete package of information must pass without contamination from sales/inside sales to customer service to operations to fulfillment to invoicing. If steps or handoffs are ill-defined, open to interpretation or require individuals to make assumptions then the company is wasting resources and producing service errors which negatively influence customers. Perform a start-to-finish process audit to make sure information is complete and passes quickly and clearly between steps. Note: a single error-at-a-time, corrective action approach can not deliver process-wide consistency. You must bring all the steps together and define what information is required at each handoff and ensure people know precisely what’s expected. Also forget about a complicated process analysis -- you're looking for a few meetings over a few weeks otherwise the audit itself becomes a waste of resources.

Revise Structures to Support New Strategy

Make sure the organizational structures which motivate employees support your downturn-strategy directives. For example, if your company is pursuing out of the ordinary sales opportunities, look carefully at your sales incentives (and other mechanisms) to make sure they reinforce the revised sales actions. Most organizations fail to revisit their incentives and give salespeople a rousing speech about a new sales emphasis while at the same time driving the old behaviors with the old incentives. The result: frustrated, less-engaged salespeople and precious little change in sales. Adjust your incentives and other structures before giving the ‘expand your horizons’ speech. Then you can send them out to execute the revised approach knowing the new, required activities are supported.

Strategic Customer Review for Additional Sales

List your top customers and quickly describe what each company must do to manage in this downturn -- put yourself in their management’s shoes. Take your list and for each customer identify which products or services you provide or could provide that would help them achieve their short-term goals. Forget long-term -- we're fixing cash leaks in the tyranny of the urgent. Done correctly this requires four to five hours, but no more. Involve your salespeople in the discussion, but this is a strategic analysis and occasionally sales staff need help thinking at this higher strategic level. This is a great opportunity for senior management to come alongside sales and provide quality assistance to help them revitalize sales.

2 - Frame Leaps

This is a perfect time to take a fresh look at your industry, where your business is positioned, and create opportunities to leap ahead of competitors. The current economic situation will encourage your people keep an open mind, even to revolutionary ideas.

Picture, Test, Move:

Picture

Picture your business upside down. Picture disadvantages as advantages.

If your IT infrastructure is more expensive to run but is superior to those of your competitors – could you offer administrative or customer related services to your less sophisticated competitors? You could increase market control, prevent competitors from making similar IT investments, and wedge your company between potential customers and your competitors.

Your company may have a higher cost structure with more qualified personnel. You could offer clients a more sophisticated level of service. You might offer skilled expertise to competitors if it were visible to clients that your company was providing essential expertise. Find a small opportunity for cooperation then communicate to customers that competitors seek out your talent.

Test

Find a simple, straightforward way to test your hypotheses. Anyone can easily test market ideas with hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is more prudent and more fun to tell everyone to test promising ideas with a limit - say $500 per experiment. No project should be allowed to proceed without validation of its premise, but the cap will unleash your people’s creativity. Just make sure you encourage the practical thinking that arises – it is critical to your company’s future.

Move

Find ways to build toward your leap. Start these projects and shield them from the standard requirements of the more established parts of your business. A promising idea has promise not established market results – that’s the promising part. Commit even limited resources to move ahead. Your employees will see your movement and will be tempted to bring their thinking caps to more typical parts of your business. Your customers will see it and will see your company as worthy of new business when money begins to flow again. Your competitors will see your actions as confirmation of your market leadership and will be more inclined to partner with you in the future.

Any way you look at it – your business will be stronger.

Four Elements of High-ROI Change Management

Keith Miles — 2008-06-26T12:41:57-04:00

Change management is critical to achieving expected results and engaging talented professionals in any enterprise-level initiative. When delivered with excellence, change management services provide an unparalleled return on investment both in terms of increased performance and enhanced respect for management.

What is Change Management?
It is normally a consulting-style intervention designed to positively alter the prevailing practice and operating philosophy of an organization to allow it to accommodate or exploit a strategic opportunity and achieve the expected return on the initiative or opportunity.

Excellent Change Management = Outstanding Return
A McKinsey study (1) of 40 organizations found the return on investment differed greatly depending on the degree of change management employed for significant change projects such as enterprise software initiatives or mergers and acquisitions. When a comprehensive change management program was integral to the initiative – the return on investment averaged 143%. The return on investment for projects was 35% which employed either no or poor change management.

Apply the McKinsey findings to a million dollar technology deployment and the difference in derived value would be just over $1M ($1,080,000). If the organization spent an additional $200,000 on excellent change management services the ROI would be 440%! - (880,000/200,000*100). A compelling return, but what is involved in comprehensive change management? Here are the four elements (in the center of the graphic):

Culture
As a first step, any large-scale initiative must be actively shaped to reflect and reinforce the beneficial aspects of the existing culture. If not, even a well-intentioned project can be misinterpreted and/or resisted by those whose support will determine its success or failure. This shaping goes beyond merely inserting a slide in the overview presentation and extends to making adjustments to how the project is managed and conducted. As leaders concentrate on the project and implementation tasks, it is easy to forget that the existing team worked with pride to create the present state and can react defensively to descriptions of its limitations, especially by ‘outsiders’. They are aware of the current state’s deficiencies but need to see a respectful depiction covering both the hard-won gains as well as the obvious weaknesses. The entire project should be shaped to respect past efforts, not blame contributors, and invoke continued support. We evaluate six culture dimensions to ensure a new initiative is seen as a logical extension of the organization’s history, values and mission.

Strategy
The change initiative must be framed within the organization’s overall strategy to show how it complements and enables the strategy to be achieved. This ‘business case’ justifies and summarizes the common behaviors required to support the initiative. Most organizations spend the majority of their energy developing a comprehensive strategy presentation and corresponding numeric targets. Comparatively few make the effort to consolidate and describe the common aspects required to support the strategic initiative.

Numeric targets garner executive attention and create clear pressure to deliver but if there are too many, they can conflict with each other and foster behavior counter to the organization’s overall goals (e.g. discouraging inter-business unit cooperation on critical projects as units shield resources for their own initiatives).
Even a well thought out set of numeric targets aren’t today’s complete answer as less-measurable and more-observable support behaviors are unaffected by targets (e.g. interactions between a manager and a direct report). These observable actions must also be guided.
In addition, here are two overlooked reasons why the strategy-initiative presentation often fails to produce the desired change in professional behavior:

Talented employees lack freedom not understanding. Most professional behavior arises out of the organization’s prevailing policies, procedures, and perspectives which influence what people do and how they do it. Professionals hear a ‘rational’ argument for change, understand, but are not really free to alter their behavior. Nothing has really changed for them since everything in the organization continues to reinforce the current activity set.
Talented employees need us to communicate in their time-frame. One manager complained the organization’s strategy dealt with issues out three to five years, while their department struggled without any practical guidance to sort out what should happen in the next three to five months.

To effectively portray the change initiative requires a consolidated view of what’s required to support the initiative expressed through a presentation as well as Practice and Tactics.

Practice
Many organizations mistake process for practice. While describing the necessary revisions to operating processes is definitely an important component of practice, more is involved. Practice also involves understanding and adjusting the policies, procedures, and preferences which influence professionals’ operating decisions.
Most organizations do an adequate job describing the required process changes but stop there assuming the setting of numeric targets alone will be sufficient to motivate people to change their operating decisions. This assumption is only partly true. Numeric targets and milestones are important but don’t alter the existing mechanisms which reinforce ongoing tactical decisions.
Managers and professionals often voice frustration over their inability to resolve opposing targets and policies. Talented professionals lose respect for management when these no-win scenarios are created then ignored.

I’ll never forget a conversation with two VP’s from the same organization. A VP-level incentive had been naively created to improve a specific outcome. They each complained, “When I make decisions to maximize my bonus, I reduce my colleague's bonus and vice versa.” They personally struck a compromise while both looked for new positions outside the company.

Practice involves evaluating and adjusting the relevant processes and the influential policies, procedures, and preferences to give people the information and freedom to support the initiative.

Tactics
Use tactics to communicate the strategic initiative. This change management element represents the highest return in terms of delivering concrete support for an initiative. Professionals expect management to describe strategy as actions. In the words of one incredibly talented manager, “Until [actions are suggested] the strategy isn’t real, it’s just a slide deck.”

Think about the last strategic presentation you gave to your team. Isn’t one of the first reactions from your managers, “I heard what you said, but what do you want me to do [differently]?”
Convert the ‘three to five-year’ strategic initiative into sets of actions which model initiative-support and match their decision-horizon. Professionals do not expect nor want every aspect of their role to be scripted, but they do want us take the time to illustrate initiative support using practical suggestions.
Some might say that line managers could (should) provide this translation. In most cases, they cannot. Managers, by virtue of their position, are subjective and focused on departmental and shorter-term issues. Strategic initiatives span the entire enterprise and require objective implementation (e.g. would a manager eliminate his/her department?).

Greater ROI Requires Greater Experience
A practice review is required to allow the generation of role-suitable actions. Conducting the practice review and generating actions requires extensive operational experience over and above the communications expertise held by a typical change manager. Due to the additional expertise and review effort required, this element is not included in typical change management programs. It also helps to explain why typical programs often fail to deliver expected results.

Benefits In Addition To Increased Execution
Taking the time and effort to suggest tactics (within a change management program) conveys respect for professionals and their contribution – increasing engagement. Also, by presenting suggested actions, professionals also learn to think strategically improving the cognitive capacity of the organization.

1- "Change Management That Pays," McKinsey Quarterly, 2002.

ROI of Engaged Employees

Keith Miles — 2008-04-24T09:55:10-04:00

What is the relationship between employee engagement and business success?
The outdated view: organizations should focus only on productivity.
The enlightened view: organizations with engaged employees out-perform competitors.

Many companies - same approach

The strength of this relationship came into focus at a Fortune magazine leadership conference in New York City. After a day and a half of outstanding presentations by senior executives from many of the world’s most admired and highest performing organizations, our group of attendees came to a consensus.
The showcased companies had something in common - their approach to people. The description of industries and tactics were varied but as each presentation touched on how people were managed – it was as though they shared the same PowerPoint slides.

The shared approach centered around:

Engaged employees serve customers and think up new ideas more effectively than disengaged employees.
Engaged employees sell more to existing customers while attracting and keeping new customers. This raises sales and the firm’s financial valuation.
Employee engagement should be tracked by periodic survey.

I bounced our observation off Geoff Colvin, Fortune’s amazing Senior Editor at Large, that in spite of being in some difficult industries (e.g. airline) the root of their success appeared to be their ability to focus and engage staff. He agreed and suggested that the ability to get more out of people might be the ultimate competitive advantage.

Three observations:

Engagement is a by-product

Craig Ramsey from Intuit presented, at the same conference, both their organization’s amazing emphasis on engagement and their detailed engagement tracking metrics. He stated that engagement remains high because senior management uses tracking results to guide ongoing mentoring activities. The CEO reviews the most current results before going to a location office, checking to see if site leaders need coaching on how to manage their team more effectively. Senior management maintains engagement by reinforcing among managers the actions which promote engagement (and ensuring only engagement-enhancing managers get promoted).

Engagement is about contribution

Engagement isn’t soft – it is about giving people a clear guide to allow them to gauge their own progress within their work. I mentioned this earlier in my blog about Teresa Amabile’s excellent Rotman Magazine article. Amabile found people were put off by insincere praise or other trivial schemes designed to entertain. Professionals believe their work has significance and deserves both consideration and objective oversight. We need to describe crucial work in bite-sized, daily steps so professionals can derive a sense of accomplishment as they contribute. Amabile also stresses that professionals need to perceive respect from management for both themselves as individuals and their contribution, which leads to the final observation.

Engagement is about observable respect

Pixar’s Oscar Winning Director Brad Bird is interviewed in an excellent McKinsey Quarterly article, by Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, both professors from Stanford, with Allen P. Webb, a McKinsey Quarterly editor. Brad’s comment about low and high morale should be memorized by every manager.

Please also note his comments about directors who restrict people’s input and ignore efforts to bring up problems (alas typical management behaviors). These are observable actions which powerfully influence morale (or engagement) but fall outside the influence of metric-centered management techniques. SMG’s method is specifically designed to bring accountability to observable actions like these.

Here are Brad’s comments on morale and the associated ROI of morale from this article, but leaders should read the entire text to glean other insights. For example, how Pixar hired Brad to stir things up and keep them off-balance, even though Pixar had been wildly successful in every venture and Brad had failed in his previous movie.

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.”

“What gets watched gets done.”

Keith Miles — 2008-04-15T14:34:03-04:00

J. Paul Haynes – Entrepreneur

Mr. Haynes started his first venture in 1988 and his talents have brought forth a string of successful businesses. Now a professional engineer at the helm of a successful business is not overly rare but an engineer who also has outstanding sales, strategy, operational, and motivational skills stands within a very small, select group.

His presentation to a local business group was a delight. He switched effortlessly between the key aspects of the firm’s success, describing each clarity and candor, and then helped other businesses by realistically describing how to sell into large organizations. What I found most intriguing, however, was his statement about how to keep everyone aligned and focused in high-growth businesses. He said, “What gets watched gets done.”

Visible Steps

Over coffee he shared the story of how his philosophy developed over his career. In high-growth businesses, he explained, the long-term goal may shift but what is most important is to break down the plan into a precise picture of where you need to be at the end of each quarter. Accomplishing small steps ensures continued progress toward the firm’s objectives.

Probably learned, in part, from the high-level coaching he received while water-skiing competitively, he sees breaking down large goals into component elements as fundamental. Also important is the ability to make the achievement of these smaller steps easily visible for both those performing the function as well as those overseeing the enterprise. His management team discusses the status of all outstanding projects in about an hour since he believes tracking progress related to the plan shouldn’t absorb the entire week.

Haynes considers no organization capable of concentrating on twenty different things at the same time, so as a result limits the focus to a few priorities. As a practical guide to follow for bringing goals down to the quarter, he espouses the work of Verne Harnish.

Quarterly Direction

In his rapidly evolving industry, each year contains a host of major industry shifts. As a result, the typical annual assessment/bonus cycle is too coarse a tool to direct staff activities. He finds assessing individuals each quarter not only allows a higher degree of oversight but also allows targets to be adjusted mid-course to affect the current year's performance. In turn, bonuses are presented quarterly to remind all of the connection between work done well and the company’s success.

Software Management

In a software development environment, he stresses realistic expectations are needed to deliver on time and retain talented people. Managers must understand how people really think and act, for example, the extra time needed to unload and reload complex software elements from the minds of developers as they are distracted to handle unrelated software issues. This 'distraction' of key development resources represents a significant loss of efficiency and must be minimized. His solution: create a "no interrupt" zone for a portion of their week to ensure development progress continues and support or other obligations are still satisfied within a reasonable time-frame.

This talented entrepreneur focuses the overall strategy down to clear structures to guide talented individuals. He believes the overhead associated with managing an enterprise should be kept low and watching each quarter’s outcomes ensures the year’s success. His practical and elegant management approach yields demonstrated results and serves as an outstanding model of effective leadership.

Why is it Difficult to Integrate Best Practices?

Keith Miles — 2008-03-31T17:37:43-04:00

There is an entire industry related to moving “best practice” activities from one company to other companies within the same industry. This moving of practices is generally accepted as an essential component of a corporate improvement strategy.

Differences?
Why, however, are there still dramatic performance differences between industry participants?
The original idea has been compromised. “Best practice” pioneers looked carefully at competing or complimentary firms for practice examples that could represent a step of progress if brought back to the sponsoring organization. They studied, brought these examples back, and then fitted them carefully to the client organization and supported their implantation to ensure successful adoption.
Over time, however, others short-circuited the most valuable part of this fitting process and now merely ‘copy and paste’ activities into client firms. The results are not as positive as initially proposed.
Why is it so hard to transfer activities to other organizations?

Cultural Support.
Consider for a moment Disney or Ritz-Carlton. Both have made a substantial income from training competitors to be just like them. Do both really want competitors to steal market share and profits? No. They understand the underlying support is the reason for their success rather than the actual practices and they also understand that this cultural support is extremely difficult to replicate. So they continue to train waves of people and enthused executives rush to ‘paste’ just-learned, obviously-effective activities into their organizations.

The long-term prognosis, however, for these transplanted practices is less-than encouraging. Most often the target organization’s culture acts as an immune system which attacks the ‘alien’ practices like a body rejects foreign organisms. Professionals see another rejection and add this failed initiative to the organization’s lexicon of less-than effective change efforts.

Both Disney and Ritz-Carlton know the power of culture.
Unless the ‘best practice’ happens to coincide with multiple needs and pre-existing management perspectives, the new ‘practice’ is doomed to fade since it lacks the cultural and management support necessary to survive.

Vest Practices™ vs. Best Practices
We promote ‘Vest Practices™’ as opposed to ‘Best Practices’. A ‘Vest Practice™’ represents an improvement in strategic practice that is pre-fitted to fall within the organization’s range of cultural support. We shape each practice until it can be demonstrated to fall close to the heartbeat of the organization’s values and operating modes. It is intentionally constructed to look as though it grew out of the target organization’s culture – to avoid rejection and facilitate adoption by the organization’s prevailing practice.

Each practice, therefore, represents a step out to the limit of the culture’s support but not a step beyond it. Only in this way is it possible to, over time, expand an organization’s capability while preserving employee engagement.

While it is entirely legitimate to look to other organizations or industries for examples of practices that represent a tangible step forward for your organization, each ‘prospective practice’, however, must be tailored to your organization’s operating culture.

This ability to ‘fit’ practices to an organization is a main component of our consulting distinctive and took over a decade to develop. When we propose a set of actions to support a strategic priority, we have already conducted a sophisticated eight-step operational and six-dimensional cultural analysis to ensure the suggested actions will be readily adopted.

Raise Performance with Progress and Respect

Keith Miles — 2008-03-28T15:18:04-04:00

To lift professionals' performance, organizations must ensure progress and respect are easily discerned. One of the important findings by Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor, in her article “Inner Work Life”, describing her research on factors affecting professionals’ happiness and work motivation. She found the most important factor affecting motivation and performance was how clearly professionals sensed they were making progress in their work. The next most important factor was whether they felt respected for their contribution to the work.
How can we ensure professionals tangibly perceive progress in their work and respect for their work?
Daily, actually.

Daily Progress
We no longer work in factories where counting the number of good widgets produced is everything. Professionals collaborate on large teams to deliver outcomes which are often months or years away. Giving professionals a sense of progress, therefore, requires shifting the focus from merely delivering end-of-year targets to also providing examples of how professionals act daily, weekly, and monthly to move things along. Drucker affirmed this concept when he said “contribution” was more important than “achievement” for knowledge workers.
It is easy to see how examples of daily contribution would give a better sense of progress. When driving, objects on the horizon appear to barely move (especially in South Dakota) but the roadside signs zoom by (especially the stream of “Wall Drug” signs– if we’re still referring to South Dakota).
Professionals need to be given examples of observable actions which illustrate daily support for strategic objectives. Then professionals can clearly see their progress - their contribution as they act daily to deliver needed outcomes.

Daily Respect
Demonstrating appropriate respect for professionals’ contribution is the key, Amabile said. Inappropriate respect just makes matters worse. Her research found undeserved praise didn’t raise motivation but could increase cynicism and if deserving work didn’t receive some type of recognition or if it received criticism then negative feelings were created.
It is difficult to gauge appropriate respect and recognition activities without some realistic examples of strategic daily behaviors, and especially if it appears management only cares about end-of-year targets. It becomes easier for managers to unintentionally reinforce negative behaviors – like ‘diving catches’ (where poor oversight creates crises which are resolved in the nick of time through super-human effort). Without the guidance provided by a daily strategic framework, typical managers only see extra effort and positively reinforce those who create havoc for others and clients due to poor administration.

Increased Performance – Daily Strategic Framework
To get the most out of every professional, we need to create a framework which describes individual contribution to strategic outcomes. These examples help individuals to clearly understand strategy support within their roles and clearly perceive their progress, their contribution to the organization’s goals. As well, a daily strategic framework gives management a much more realistic model of behavior to guide recognition activities.
Such a daily framework is critical to successfully managing scarce professional resources in today’s business environment.

References:
Amabile, Teresa, and Kramer, Steven; “Inner Work Life”, Rotman Magazine - March 2008, pages 20-25 link
Edersheim, Elizabeth Haas, “The Definitive Drucker”, McGraw Hill - 2007. Page 174

`Measuring Things' Does Not Equal `Doing Things'

Keith Miles — 2007-06-01T17:25:43-04:00

During one of our seminars this week we discussed customer service and customer satisfaction as a strategic objective and specifically what we, as managers, could do to lift satisfaction. Service as a core strategy can be quite powerful. As proof, Herb Kelleher, CEO of the remarkable and profitable Southwest Airlines considers his company to be in the customer service business rather than the airline business.

As we discussed making organizations accountable for service excellence, a financial services executive suggested measuring customer satisfaction. All nodded in agreement and next we debated the effort and length of time required to create an effective customer satisfaction survey. The group's consensus: six to nine months to fully test and deploy a functioning satisfaction monitoring survey for a sizable organization.
I asked whether sending the survey would impact daily service activities. They concluded it might, but not directly. Organizations spend months measuring service without ever defining what specifically needs to change in the daily activities of those delivering service to customers.

Pseudo-Work
We have become accustomed to considering measurement as real work, when measurement (as suggested by Peter F. Drucker and others) was intended to track real work's value.
In reality, measuring is not work - it is pseudo-work. An organization with 900 monthly measurements would not be more profitable than another with 80 monthly measures.

Change First - Measure Later
I told the group how our company worked with a busy IT client to improve service satisfaction quickly and, most important, perceptibly. We suggesting specific changes to a few strategic, daily activities and told employees they'd be accountable for changing their daily activities accordingly. The service level went up immediately prompting a "What happened to IT? They care now," comment from a facility administrator which the IT group served. We felt it more important to, first, change the level of customer service prior to measuring the level of customer service. Now the client has a survey but still must be careful to actually make visible changes as a result of the survey responses.

Value Measurement More Highly Than Real Work
Historically, managers in most organizations made specific changes and then looked for a way to gauge impact. Now, we value the measurement of important issues more highly than the actual changing of the daily activities involved. This pattern of management behavior is a reaction to senior management fixation with numbers and their inattention to the actual activities involved. It is now routine in many organizations to merely identify an opportunity, install data collection and measurement policies, and never discuss what people should do differently to effect the change in question.

Mentors Point Out What Needs to Change
This practice hollows out managers who now see their roles as adjudicators rather than mentors.
Isn't the role of a mentor to observe ongoing behavior and make specific recommendations on what you could do differently to achieve a better outcome?
Again let's look to Herb Kelleher as he discusses Southwest's strategy, "We have a `strategic' plan. It's called `doing things'."

Reset Required
It's high time we reset management and changed both the sequence and the associated value of doing things vs. measuring things.