Month: July 2011

Four times this week I went to Timpson's – a UK shoe repairer and key cutting retailer. Each time was about a mailbox key. The first outlet I went to in Cornmarket, Oxford the assistant first said the key would be a special order and it would take a week to come in. When I told him I was leaving within a week he spent several minutes looking for an appropriate blank and found one that he thought would do the job.
I watched him cutting it. Splinters of metal were showering off the equipment and, out of interest, I asked him if he had eye protecting goggles. "Oh yes", he said. "They're in my apron pocket." He pulled them out to show me. "Why aren't you wearing them? Aren't you worried about your eyes?" I asked. "No", he said, "I just look away."

I knew a bit about Timpson as I'd done some research about it and included it as an example of a well run organization in my book Organization Culture: getting it right .

It's a long-established private family owned company, and the current CEO, John Timpson, is proud of his organization – take a look at his management column in The Daily Telegraph. The company is determinedly employee centered. Not that I always believe what's on the company website , in this case, "Our culture is unique, with the colleagues driving the business being the ones that serve the customers. This is what we call upside down management"

I looked around the shop. It had a number of cheerful posters proclaiming the high caliber of the employees, the benefits they get, the selection processes and so on. I noticed that the clock was showing the wrong time and asked what had happened. "Oh", said the same guy who cut my key, "the hour hand doesn't work. We just go by the minute hand and guess the hour." The other guy was busy serving another customer, and I listened to the exchange. The customer wanted a tag engraved for his dog's collar. It was 5:20 p.m. the store shut at 5:30 p.m. The assistant said "It'll take more than 10 minutes to engrave the tag. We're shutting now. You'll have to come back tomorrow." Hmm – not what I'd expect from a high caliber employee.

I tried out the key when I got home. It was stiff but finally worked after a fashion – it opened the mailbox. Then I realized that I needed a second one. The following day I went back to the same store in Cornmarket. I hadn't brought the key he'd cut the day before but just the original. The same guy who cut the first key was the one I explained to that he'd cut one the day before and it worked ok and I needed another. He glanced at my key "Oh, I don't know which blank I used. Bring back the one I cut and then I'll know." OK – I'm used to English style "customer service" so I went back later in the day with the one he'd cut the previous day.

This turned into a big production. He found the right blank. I suggested that he cut from my original but he said no and then "if it doesn't work you can bring it back." Still no goggles on, and then he couldn't get the clamp to work. The second guy suggested that he take the clamp off a different machine and put it on the one he was working on. This took a bit of time but finally he produced a second key. Guess what? It didn't work.

Back for the third time. Since I needed the key I asked for it to be recut. It turned out that there were no more blanks. "You can try the other shop," the second guy said. I asked for my money back on the second key. He was reluctant to give it to me since he said I could produce my receipt in the other shop and they would cut it for free. Since I had no idea whether the other shop had the blank and this shop didn't offer to call through and find out I pressed for my money (and got it).

Fourth go. I walked over to the other shop in the Covered Market. I produced the duplicate more-or-less working key and the non-working key. I said I wanted a recut of the second key. The assistant looked at it and said "it's been very badly cut." He compared it with the first duplicate key and said "this key hasn't be finished properly either. Give me the original and I'll cut a new one and then finish the other one properly." He wasn't wearing goggles at the time. I watched what happened next. He approached the machine. Pulled out the goggles from his apron pocket and put them on. He cut the key from the original and then took it to a different machine to finish it (this hadn't happened in the first shop). He then compared his duplicate with the other duplicate and took that to finish. "OK – that should do it," he said. "There's no charge. Sorry for your difficulties." I got home to find that both keys worked perfectly. (Oh, and the clock in the shop showed the right time).

So I'm wondering, again, about company culture. How is it that two stores , part of the same organization, in the same city can have such different attitudes, to customers, to safety, to pride in their work? My experience suggests that it's down to employee selection, local management , some tie-up to performance measures, a link to customer feedback and satisfaction, and the right tools to do the job. It seems that Timpson's has some mis-alignment here. It's inconsistent between stores.
I looked for their process for customer feedback. The spiel looks impressive. I'll give it a go and keep you posted.

I've been involved in several change management discussions this week. The project I'm involved in is a large scale change in the way of working. We have a lot of good business reasons to move from what we're calling 'old ways of working' – compartmentalized, individual, space entitled, fixed location, single function – to what we're describing as 'new ways of working' – shared, collaborative, no space entitlement, dynamic, and cross functional.

We're struggling with manager incomprehension about the whole thing. As a colleague said, "I think we have a major hill to climb in obtaining management receptiveness to this. I believe they are generally wary of this form of change, this degree of change, and this need for change. They are reluctant through a combination of:

• 'rather leave as is' = 'life would be a lot easier'
• 'I am not sure how to do any of this'
• 'this sort of thing has failed before'
• 'I am very wary of being caught in the middle of something which could turn nasty'
• 'I am convinced the unions and staff will not go for this'
• 'I am not entirely confident about my leadership team and where they are'
• 'What? This as well as everything else?'"

For some reason people at work don't seem to be the same as the people not at work – although they look the same, have the same names, give the same addresses, and have the same family. It's a Jekyll and Hyde life. At work people are 'change averse', in their personal lives they embrace change – and often find it exciting. Out of work they can handle significant change like marriage, divorce, learning to drive, moving house, and less significant things like the bus not showing up, suddenly falling off their bike and breaking a wrist, dropping their i-phone in water, and moving from paper money to debit cards.

At work they find seem to find the thought of hoteling, or mobile working, or digitizing their files too much too bear. It leaves them as another colleague said, "Spinning in various states of confusion ranging from clueless to edging creativity"

So what's to be done? If we're to be competitive, reduce corporate real estate footprint, meet carbon emission goals, attract and retain young people into the organization, encourage people thinking of retiring to stay on with perhaps a more flexible schedule, draw on a wider labor market pool, retain our 'employer of choice label', etc., etc. we have to change our ways of working.

So I seized on an article that dropped into my in-box from Accenture this week. It announced a new white paper "Are you change capable?" which opens with the words "One of the most significant workplace and management challenges is trying to perform and lead as well as we can, knowing all the while that the presumptions by which we're working are likely to change at any moment. The state of constant, profound change casts serious doubt on many of the approaches and tactics by which organizations have conducted what is generally referred to as "change management."

The paper goes on to suggest that "Today, companies can no longer afford to think about organizational change as something separate from everything else they do. Change management must be an internal – and eternal – capability, present within the company at every moment. Organizations now have to be "change capable" all the time." The article follows by outlining five ways of getting to this using Cisco and Nokia as case studies.

1. Create an enterprise wide change network
2. Develop change competency across the organization.
3. Create effective change leaders
4. Measure progress
5. Keep on target

But none of these seem innovative or different from the usual, tried and tested, stuff about change management (see, for example, the Harvard Business Essentials book Managing Change and Transition, or my own Approaches to Change ). They are all programmatic and structured in their approach. This may be ok – at least it's what we're using to doing but I'm now wondering if there are other, more experiential ways of changing.

For example, do we need to announce 'change'? Can't we just do it? I'm reminded of Yoda's advice to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars 'Try not. Do or do not. There is no try' which I came across again today reading Mindfulness Matters and then watched Yoda speak the words in the YouTube clip.

Or could change managers learn from marketers and advertisers? What, for example, makes people want to change from a rotary landline phone to an i-phone? Are advertisers and marketers really change managers in a different garb?

Or are we taking the wrong tack looking at behavior and culture change in relation to change management rather than structure, system, and process change that then changes the behavior. After all people in the UK are behaviorally capable of driving on the right hand side of the road but they don't while they're in the UK because everything is geared to left hand side of the road driving (structures, process, systems). Brits who travel abroad and rent a car have very little difficulty adapting to right hand side of the road driving because they can't do otherwise.

Or should we take the John Kotter line and lobby for change leadership instead of change management?

I'm of the view that we need to do all of the above: just do it, act as advertisers for the new 'product', align the systems, structures, and processes, and have some form of consistent organizational language and toolkit of change, and (somehow) create change leaders.

Finally I think all of us in the change management field need to give up on the notion that people resist change. For the most part they are excited by it. We severely damage our chances of 'managing' change by this belief. Remember Henry Ford's phrase "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." If we think that people are totally change capable with our without our intervention we'd be in a better place to help them be change capable. We might even get over the hurdle of '75% of change efforts fail'. No one can be a credible 'change manager' if this is the case – who would even want the role?

Your organization is probably like all other organizations. It is continuously searching for ways to add value to its products and services in order to keep growing. Organization development leaders are in a key position to help their executives think through what both 'growth' and 'value' are and how to add them.

Effective and healthy organizations see value in more than just meeting the business goals. It is not enough to concentrate on, for example, financial performance, if it is at the expense of employee well-being. Value needs to be fostered and developed in all organizational aspects: people, process, structures, systems, behaviors and governance. 'Growth' is usually equated with size – organizations get bigger, extend their markets, products and services. But growth can be in other dimensions. An organization can, for example, stay small in size but grow its thought leadership so it becomes known for that. Alternatively it can grow its capacity to retain and develop its people, maintain customer loyalty, or introduce environmentally friendly practices – all adding value without becoming bigger in size.

Creating organizational value and growth is done partly through designing and implementing methods of developing workforce capability which Dave Ulrich , Professor of Business as the University of Michigan, defines as the firm's ability to manage people to gain competitive advantage.

As with many researchers and writers in the field Ulrich believes that it's your people that make you the winner or loser in your market. He says

Merely hiring the best people does not guarantee organisational capability. Hiring competent employees and developing those competences through effective HR and OD practices, underpins organisational capability. (Ulrich, D. (1991). Organisational Capability: Creating Competitie Advantage. Academy of Management Executive. Vol 5. No. 1)

Traditionally capability has been developed through formal training programs, coaching, mentoring, and sometimes things like job placements, and project work. Now these traditional methods are not working and are not enough. This for six significant reasons:

1. Technology advances mean that information is easily accessible and does not have to come from an 'expert'.
2. Collaborative technologies mean that knowledge sharing can be achieved in numerous different ways.

3. Organizational relationships with their stakeholders are changing – employees and customers are not passive players but are actively collaborating in creating shared value.

4. People's expectations about how, when, and where to develop their personal capability is changing – there is much more learning from each other and again less reliance on 'experts'.

5. Organizations have to be constantly adaptive and agile. Capability development must drive continuous change not respond to it
.

6. There is increasing understanding that organization development is more than 'training'. "It involves adopting principles and attitudes, which in turn determine and guide behavior. It is a way of thinking as well as acting".

OD leaders need to respond to each one of the six reasons above in a way that develops value and growth capability in their organizations. They can do this by taking the six following actions. Each of the actions listed offers some suggestions in how to do this.

1. Role modeling new personal capability development approaches via self-driven learning
a. Suggestion 1: Take or lead an on-line webinar and then use a technology to tell your colleagues what you learned.
b. Suggestion 2: Use the internet to find out 10 things you didn't know about your organization's industry
c. Suggestion 3: Set up an on-line forum with your workgroup to develop your joint skills on a particular topic. (Make it for a defined period, say six weeks, and then review what you've learned).

2. Equipping managers to engage their people through collaboration, participation, and involvement.
a. Suggestion 1: Ask the manager to pose a problem that needs solving to his workgroup and work with him to involve the whole group in solving it.
b. Suggestion 2: Establish an informal, frequent feedback process where workers can comment on work issues
c. Suggestion 3: Help managers have collaborative conversations with their staff on goal setting and performance standards. (Rather than the managers setting goals and standards for staff)

3. Initiating conversations with business executives on the future of the organization – what it might be and how to prepare for it – using five themes proposed by Dave Ulrich

Talent
Leadership
Agility
Outside-in Connection
Strategic Unity

a. Suggestion 1: Set up webinars on the topics and run a monthly series – following the Google model described above.
b. Suggestion 2: Invite key executives to meet with staff in a collaborative discussion on each of the themes.
c. Suggestion 3: Have key executives meet as a group and assess how the organization could improve capability in each of the themes.

4. Bringing working and learning together in a powerful way, to embed a development culture and to create more value through and with people.
a. Suggestion 1: Encourage managers and staff to have weekly conversations on what they have learned that week
b. Suggestion 2: Allow people to try out new ways of doing their work and capturing what they are learning as they do that.
c. Suggestion 3: Set up a communications channel 'Did you know?' that provides information on what's going on in the organization and asks people to comment on it.

5. Designing adaptive organizations that handle continuous change through resilience and agility
a. Suggestion 1: Assess the design of your organization (or part of it). See if there are misalignments and correct them.
b. Suggestion 2: Review policies and procedures and see if any of them are outdated and/or could be discarded.
c. Suggestion 3: Pay attention to trends and competitive forces operating outside your organization and plan your responses to them.

6. Removing the barriers between individual and organizational goals using powerful virtual feedback software tools. Rypple is one example of these. (see http://www.rypple.com)
a. Teach people how to give and receive performance feedback in a helpful and non-threatening way
b. Examine your career paths and ensure they allow lateral as well as upward mobility – match individual career and development goals with talent and succession planning
c. Publish organizational goals and hold conversations with staff on their individual contributions and accountabilities to achieve these.

As an OD leader, you can add value to your organization by agreeing what growth and value are in your organization, knowing the reasons why traditional approaches to capability development for growth and value won't work now, and taking the actions to develop organizational capability.

Two books caught my attention during June: Rapt: attention and the focused life by Winifred Gallagher and Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Gallagher's is concerned with individual well-being, and Turkle's is more concerned with organizational well-being. But the themes are complementary. Both describe the problems and issues that attention fragmentation and multi-tasking bring, and both argue for focused attention on 'what matters'.

Gallagher takes the reader through a discussion of various researchers' findings – and there is a very good reference list of these – noting that the overarching evidence suggests that your life is the creation of what you choose to focus on and pay attention to. Early on in the book she mentions one of the maxims of William James – a pioneering psychologist. He was of the view that 'The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.' Thus the book came at just the right moment for me as I've been spending an unaccustomed few weeks with my mother: a stressful time as she was having medical treatment.

Reading on I discovered that Gallagher's thesis is that 'your experience largely depends on the material objects and mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore'. She observes that the 'things that you don't attend to in a sense don't exist' and the book is a fascinating study in the science of controlling your well-being through conscious and mindful focusing on 'this' rather than 'that'.

The mere fact of learning that attention is selective, and that different people pay attention to different things and thus experience ostensibly the same situation from very different perspectives – although blindingly obvious – I found very helpful in the hospital experience. All of the players – nurses, radiologists, ambulance drivers, patients, and supporters – had different goals and perspectives. They may all have been trying to get to the same end point of patient recovery but things each was paying attention to different things in the situation.

There are plenty of things to feel negative about in a hospital situation – the waiting in reception areas, the uncertainty about the outcome of the treatment, the discomfort of the treatment itself, having the illness in the first place, and so on. But Gallagher's discussion of Barbara Fredrickson's work – among others – reveals that 'paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it'. Much of the evidence presented confirms the benefits – emotional, mental, and physical of shifting your attention away from the dispiriting and towards the productive, and life-enhancing.
So over the month or so I've been diligently practicing the various techniques Gallagher writes about including:

• Choosing carefully what to pay attention to and what to focus on (consciously directing my attention)
• Concentrating on one thing at a time
• Replacing negative thoughts and emotions with positive ones
• Savoring small pleasures
• Recognizing that my reality is not even close to my mother's or anyone else's reality
• Being aware that my feelings can affect what I am paying attention to and vice versa
• Maintaining a curious and wide angled perspective on life – I love the quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi "be surprised by something every day"
• Spending time doing things that demand concentrated effort but that are both 'enjoyable and challenging enough to be manageable'. My mother is delighted that I've almost finished making her a pair of crochet mittens.
• Staying focused in the moment and using the moment to do more of what's satisfying and less of what isn't. Carping about the lateness of the bus is not rewarding, but chatting about the lovely lavender outside the window to a keen gardener who I happen to be sitting beside is.

The key message for me is the point – surfacing several times in the book – that 'remembering your life is the sum of what you focus on helps to bring clarity to choices about where to spend that valuable mental money.' This is a maxim that is absolutely as applicable in organizational life as it is in personal life.

Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other takes a similar line – she is very against multi-tasking observing that it leads to a degradation in individual and organizational performance because we're too busy communicating through technology to think and create in ways that matter. She remarks that receiving 200 – 1000 communications a day through a multiplicity of channels changes what people 'do' from work to communication not only because the senders of the communication want an instant response from the recipients but also because just keeping up with the flow demands keeping track of multiple channels.

We've all been in meetings where none of this is going on, where people are texting and tweeting as the meeting progresses rather than being with each other. We've seen the same thing in restaurants – why go to dinner with someone and talk with someone else on your cellphone?

Turkle makes the point that the 'volume and velocity' of electronic communication means that we dumb down our responses and she is very concerned that text only responses don't give room for the nuanced conversations that facilitate creativity and relationship building. Her recommendation is that people and organizations give space -real and figurative – to have meaningful conversations which we are able to focus, concentrate, demonstrate human values, constructively collaborate, think, deliberate, and connect about the things that matter.

Realistically Turkle says that technology should not be described, as it often in, in the metaphor of 'addiction' but more as a substance that we need – like food – but with which we need to learn how to have a healthy relationship. Unfortunately given the difficulty many, many people in the US have 'relating' to food it seems that developing a healthy relationship to communications technologies could be an uphill task. But a third book – one that I talked about in an earlier blog – We have met the enemy: self control in an age of excess by Daniel Akst offers several tips on that score.