Productivity and Morale Turbocharger: Knowledge Management

As businesses hunker down and move into survival mode, the typical reaction is to eliminate staff and cut spending. While this will cut absolute costs, it really doesn't begin to touch the most important factor: employee productivity & morale. Lots of employers "gain productivity" by giving employees two jobs but paying them for one, thus killing morale. I think the better focus is improving knowledge management (KM), or how an organization systematically creates, applies, and shares information within and across its boundaries as a source of enhanced productivity and competitive advantage.

In a knowledge economy, ideas create and sustain value so it's essential for organizations to execute on better ideas faster than the competition. You don't have to look far for real life examples: consulting (McKinsey) and design companies (IDEO) typically have very strong KM practices because the firm's value comes from unique combinations of deep & varied specialists applying their knowledge for client benefit.

Companies with robust KM practices have higher productivity per employee, better and faster innovation, and stronger relationships with customers and partners. The key is that leaders try and make their employees more efficient by making the process of knowledge creation, application, and sharing efficient and an essential aspect of the culture. KM is a concept (ie, efficient creation, sharing, and application of knowledge) that gets enacted through processes, tools, and programs like integrated design teams, new hire orientation, learning & development, subject matter led instruction, waste reduction efforts, customer communities and partnerships, etc.

Generally, in order to share knowledge with someone you need (1) awareness of others' knowledge (2) belief that that knowledge is high quality and useful (3) trust that the individual will do you no harm. The same things must be true, albeit at a much larger scale, in order for knowledge sharing to occur at an organization wide level.

Internally, leaders must encourage teaching and sharing, essentially moving the knowledge from inside the "heads" of their specialists (called tacit knowledge) to something more accessible, or explicit (like blogs, videos, expertise locators, case studies, classes, webinars, etc.). The more discoverable the information, and the more the organization has fostered relationships across groups, and championed this as important, the more likely it is that individuals will (a) have a rich professional development plan with identified skills to acquire and/or share (b) permission and access to actually acquire, share, and apply that knowledge and (c) awareness of others' expertise and opportunities to build relationships. By the way, younger employees absolutely expect instant access to a variety of knowledge sources so be prepared for that generational curve ball.

Externally, KM allows organizations to build deeper relationships with their customers. Technology breaks down barriers of all types (distance, legal boundaries, supply chains, etc.) but it's the organization's culture that uses these tools to deeply understand the customer, build trust, and create services or products that meet customer needs (or create the next "must-have" product).

I think it's easiest to think of KM in a 2x2 grid that contrasts internal versus external activities and those which are purely online versus those which are done in person. Here's a visual to give you a sense of the types of activities that can fall under the broad header of KM:

KM's form should follow its function, namely advancing your strategies and helping you achieve objectives. Here are some areas:

- Profitability: What strategies exist to boost your profitability? What of those require specific skills or experiences to successfully implement? Are your people aware of others' tools or technology that might be easily adopted for their projects?

- Innovation: What do your customers need and want and how do your employees acquire those insights? How do your employees stay on top of bleeding edge research and competitor offerings?

- Staff flexibility: Do you have an employee who is the guru in an area but cannot seem to "find the time" to document, teach, or share that knowledge? Would your business benefit from employees being able to sell, support, or develop multiple areas? Do new hires have a positive onboarding experience? Do they slow down their peers as they come up to speed?

- Collaboration: As companies grow larger than 50 people, it becomes impossible for people to be aware of others' work, competencies, and to have the kind of relationships that allow knowledge sharing and collaboration. Organizational network analysis (ONA) is a KM tool can assess the current state of relationships and knowledge flow between individuals and groups so that positive investments can be made to further organizational performance. In other words, org charts are one view into an organization (hierarchy) but say nothing about how people truly collaborate within the company (graphic: www.networkingroundtable.com).

Here's a quick primer on ONA from Dr. Rob Cross at the University of Virginia with quick case studies showing how organizations improved their KM to improve bottom line results.

Employers are already spending money on staff - the question is really an issue of return on investment. They often view it as a pure trade-off, a choice between the traditional choices of tangible investments and budgets, or something more complex, difficult to implement, and non-linear like culture and knowledge.

I was recently reading Michael Porter's writings on innovation and sustainable manufacturing practices, and he saw parallels between the old trade-offs of cost, quality and innovation with today's concerns about the costs of environmentally sustainable business practices. In the 80s, before total quality management allowed organizations to design quality into the manufacturing process, leaders felt quality could only be improved by adding more inspections, thus driving up costs. It never occurred to them that higher manufacturing quality could come from better design processes. Their filters and old ways of working prevented them from asking the right questions and innovating until someone else did it and then they had to play catch-up. Environmental sustainability is simply another innovation opportunity and you're already seeing pioneers reframing the issues and offering new ways to delight customers at lower costs in a sustainable way.

So instead of just surviving the recession, spend some time examining your organizational mission and strategies for creating sustained competitive advantage. If they're largely about execution without a strong focus on sustained innovation across all aspects of your business, I urge you to step back and consider how that will give you a sustained competitive advantage. Anyone can copy your ideas, steal your employees, or meet your prices but your culture can't be copied and those that nurture innovation are the ones that will attract and retain the best talent and win in today's world, even if you're in a capital intensive enterprise.

This has been a lot of information, but please realize any organization can create a culture of innovation with the right people, commitment, and assistance. I'd welcome the opportunity to help your leadership team with this crucial strategic differentiator.

Sustainability, Leadership, and Culture Case Study: Wal-Mart

The NY Times had a great article today on Wal-Mart's corporate sustainability journey. It describes how then CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. went from fierce opponent to strong advocate. In the end he realizes that it is both a short term salve from fierce criticism but also a way to generate profit.

Sustainability is just one example of something that starts off looking like a threat and ends up, if properly acted upon, turning into a benefit. I think much of this has to do with two things: (1) business is faster and more complex than at any point in human history and (2) many CEOs and senior executives have not evolved their leadership styles to match today's environment. The result is that companies struggle to execute, leaving little time for the kind of creative exploration of ideas that may produce the next big advantage.

If you're a student of organizational development, you might have heard of someone named Peter Senge who coined the term "learning organization". Senge describes how organizations can produce sustained competitive advantage by moving away from old-school command-and-control leadership techniques and adopting practices and attitudes that foster learning and creative destruction at all levels of the company. Organizations that nurture a culture of active learning will do better than simply surviving change. They pioneer new ways of thinking, interacting, and creating that, in turn, produce benefits to profits, products, and organizational reputation.

I thought the NY Times article was a great contrast between Senge's ideas of an optimal learning organization and what often happens in today's companies. Established processes, strategies, leadership techniques, and values that brought them success in the past can end up freezing perspectives and openness to new ideas. The CEO himself struggled to listen to outsiders and proactively explore new ideas and concepts that were a shift from their norm, and as a result had to be told by his Board to change behavior.

As Jack Welch realized at GE, sustained competitive advantage comes from empowering your employees to truly transform your business. That means the CEO needs to focus on cultivating leaders and a culture that breaks down boundaries, constantly absorbs new information, and balances the need to deliver the short term with the need to create new sources of value. Some will get adopted, others won't, but the key is a mandate to always improve, to question, to challenge the status quo in a way that can be turned into a competitive advantage.

The globalized economy demands a shift in leadership and organizational culture regardless of your business type or sector. When President Obama said in his inauguration address, "the ground has shifted beneath us" he was calling on government leaders to look at a broader picture and work collaboratively to make progress faster. The same citizens who demanded a new approach to government look for progressive organizations that balance innovation with results. Google's commitment to allocate 20% of an engineer's time for pure R&D has been a fantastic recruiting tool and, judging by their level of innovation and customer satisfaction, a huge competitive advantage.

I'd welcome the opportunity to help you foster sustained competitive advantage by improving the capability and engagement of your people.

Communication Tips Between Generations

Here are some interesting tips on inter-generational communication between baby boomers and millennials.

http://EzineArticles.com/?id=1902297

Understanding Organizational Culture: Apple Computer

I'm a big fan of Apple computers and do my best to sell my friends and family on the entire suite of products. The products are nearly always better designed, easier to use, and simply work and look better than anything out there so I feel comfortable recommending them to my loved ones. 

So how does Apple consistently do it? One word: culture.

Culture is the collective norms, behaviors, and ways of working that define how people behave in an organization. Powerful cultures are reinforced by leaders who embody those beliefs. The work is shaped by processes and organizational designs that reflect the values. Culture is a powerful force in attracting, retaining, and developing people who fit those beliefs. I believe there are three essential elements of culture: clarity, authenticity, and talent.   

Clarity: 

When an organization is small, a culture is largely a result of the personalities in the room. People navigate the individual quirks of their colleagues and intuitively understand whether a particular outsider, or other element, would work amongst the colleagues. 

As organizations grow, leaders can find themselves in fire fighting mode if they have not grounded that growth in clearly articulated values and beliefs that get translated into things like work processes, rewards and recognition, organization design, leadership styles, etc. An easy test to determine whether you have a strong culture is to ask ten people in your organization about the core values and priorities. If people can tell you the values, and stories that reinforce those values, or point out processes or ways of working that embody those values, then you've got a great start. 

Here's an example of clearly articulated beliefs from Tim Cook, Apple Computer's COO: 

There is an extraordinary breadth and depth and tenure among the Apple executive team, and these executives lead over 35,000 employees that I would call "all wicked smart". And that's in all areas of the company, from engineering to marketing to operations and sales and all the rest. And the values of our company are extremely well entrenched.

We believe that we're on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that's not changing. We're constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

And frankly, we don't settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change. And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

That's coming from an executive in a press conference, so you can imagine that Apple has something more concrete written down, with specific examples, probably with something tied to their onboarding processes, job requirements, and talent evaluations.  The stories that employees tell, or that Apple executives share within Apple, act as proof that the values are real, or authentic, which brings me to my next point. 

Authenticity:

Organizational cultures fundamentally are no different than any other relationship. If you're being honest and do what you say you'll do, people will believe you and act accordingly. This means that leaders are a gigantic influence on a culture and nothing will kill a leader's credibility faster or poison a culture than a leader who says one thing and does another, or who starts an initiative and then does not follow through fully.

I've seen tons of values statements and 90% of them are so generic that they're useless. They need to be real and if they're aspirational, then indicate that somehow and set objectives and involve your whole company to make them turn into a reality. Kill the old processes that don't align with your values, or change your leadership style or priorities to make the cultural goals a reality. You can't control a culture because it's the collection of everyone's individual assessments of life inside your organization, but you can lead your people differently, enroll them in new possibilities, and then walk the talk. Your culture will shift over time as people see the words actually put into action.

Talent:

Your people are the most important aspect of your culture. A well defined, credible culture will attract the right talent, filter out the wrong folks, and grant authority and status to those folks who embody the culture and deliver the results.  This is critical for all leaders - you need to hire folks who are smarter than you, who completely align with the values, and who can scale for growth by scaling the capability of your people while staying true to your core values.  Bad leaders slow everything down, so give people a chance to change, be honest with them and actually discuss your expectations and needs (way too many CEOs are simply conflict adverse or have trouble coaching), and then make the hard calls if necessary.  It never fails - once you get rid of a low performer everything suddenly gets easier. 

I think Apple is successful because all three of these elements are in place and feel very real to everyone involved. They'll be able to survive when Steve Jobs finally leaves and it's because they paid equal attention to the tangible and intangible aspects of leadership. 

I'd welcome the opportunity to help you explore your organization's health, culture, and talent. 

Employer Tips: Onboarding!

This posting describes why new hire orientations properly done can save your organization money, improve productivity, and retain your employees. Let me illustrate with a real life story.

Someone very close to me recently started working at a mid-tier restaurant chain (we'll call this Restaurant A). They've got six or so restaurants but seem without an HR plan. They're in a state of constant firefighting, are scrambling to fix their food waste problem, don't allow any breaks, and offer their employees no training, including new hire orientation.  My favorite story involved the Head Chef hovering over my friend and announcing that he was monitoring his speed. He wasn't coaching him, but simply "measuring speed". He told him later to "speed it up" but didn't give any targets! 

The same friend recently supplemented his hours and joined another mid-tier restaurant chain that's been around longer and has more restaurants (we'll call this restaurant B). My friend described the difference between the two as "night and day". Here's what restaurant B did so well:

• New hire orientation process started *before* employees' first day. My friend got a giant manual with the history of the chain, in depth articles on the culture and customer experience goals, and key things he needed to learn for their food list.  There was even a detailed questionnaire to complete to ensure employees read the material. 
  
• The actual first day session was led by the General Manager and key Chefs and began with something simple: food tasting! Simple idea but powerful because they talk about the concept, the preparation, and help the employees understand how to sell the items.
• Culture: During the first day the GM talked about the culture and the desired customer experience so people made the emotional connection and adapted their behavior to match. A truly effective culture is something people can feel and they take seriously.
• Structured Learning: My friend is now scheduled for three consecutive days of training where he is shadowed by the Sous Chef who will give him tips on preparation, food waste, and portion size, and will approve all trainee meal preparations. 
  

Contrast this to Restaurant A which did none of this! Their most recent staff meeting consisted of a lecture by the Head Chef describing the restaurant's numerous challenges but still no training or anything proactive to involve the employees in problem solving.

My friend is seriously considering leaving restaurant A because, by contrast, it now looks like a complete joke compared to restaurant B. It's not like restaurant B has done anything that complicated - they simply thought through the best way to get employees productive faster and to teach them early how to avoid known issues (like food waste, preparing portion sizes that are too large, etc). 

The days of new hire orientation being all about paperwork and being led by the HR Coordinator are OVER! That stuff should be fast and painless and then the rest should be about the experience of joining the organization, absorbing the culture, understanding key items, goals and processes, and building skills and relationships in a supported way. 

Employers absolutely need to get this right because people will simply quit quickly if you end up looking clueless. This is especially true for younger employees who have zero qualms about having multiple employers on their resume. 

Here are some easy things to consider about bringing people onboard:

• What can the employees learn or experience before they start?
• What things does everyone need to know about working there? 
• What things are specific to a location, group, function, or job level?
• What happens on day one, later in the week, later in the month, and so on. Remember that people only retain what they need to know or will use within a very short period of time, so spread out the onboarding.  If you have people starting all the time, get videos loaded on your internal site so people can do it on their own. 
• Keep it high quality and high visibility: New hires want to do things right and are very keen to absorb information and cultural norms. Have your best people participate in these sessions and make it a point for key leaders to participate. 
• Assign a buddy so the person has someone who can help teach. Ideally this is someone from the same job role or function and, most importantly, someone with a great attitude who "gets" the culture and can take your values and mentor the employee on the ways to show the behavior through expected situations. In my friend's case, for example, because the restaurant wants a fantastic customer experience it has certain meaning for the kitchen staff. There are acceptable ways to prepare the food, and then there are the ideal ways. There are hundreds of moments of truth for each job function that allow your culture to be cemented by having people understand how to demonstrate those behaviors. The key is to keep it focused on observable behaviors (ie, what people do in the job...not a characteristic)!

How much do you think restaurant B spends (direct and indirect) to onboard the new hires? If you think it's less than the food waste, oversized portions, or the sub-optimal productivity of restaurant A, you're absolutely right. 

Employers waste money all the time and there are simple fixes, like onboarding, at their disposal. 

Contrarian Recruiting

Contrarian recruiting works very similarly to investing - go against the crowd. In this case, my recommendation is to use the economic downturn as a fantastic opportunity to build your employment brand. 

Am I nuts?

No, and I'll tell you why: people are nervous right now. Candidates are edgy about their jobs, career growth, and the long term prospects for their company. So is your competition and they've all but stopped recruiting.  In other words, it's quiet out there right now...the perfect time to build relationships with the best talent.

Some of you are thinking "ah, that doesn't work since people only want to talk about open positions" but I think it's fundamentally about high quality, authentic relationships.  If you're doing talent planning you'll know the kinds of skills that are either missing or that need to be augmented by either more people or better performers. You don't need to have a ton of recruiters or money to make this work, either. Using this targeted information, take people to coffee, sponsor industry events or discussions, involve outsiders in strategic brainstorming, write a blog, write articles for industry websites, etc.  The key is that your representatives have to sound intelligent, have a vivid vision for the company and its role shaping the industry's future, and come across as an ideal future teammates. 

So spend some time asking yourself whether you're passionate about your organization and its future. If you are, hone your pitch and figure out ways to build relationships with the best people now, before the economy heats up. When it does, you'll have actually have relationships with the best candidates which should give you a competitive advantage and may even lower the need for joining incentives.

Let's grab a coffee and talk about how I can help you with your pitch!

Objectives Part IV: Strategy, Operations, and Culture

If you want you a highly functioning organization you absolutely need a robust strategy and operations framework. 

Winning organizations study the competition, understand their customers, know their own internal capabilities, and methodically define and achieve their plans. It's a discipline and a process that starts with the CEO, influences the work of everyone in the organization, and requires fantastic teamwork to achieve. 

CEOs trying to change to culture of an organization would do well to first uncover people's assumptions, or beliefs, around topics like growth, competition, customer satisfaction, technology changes, internal capabilities, etc.  You can summarize these in a "beliefs statement" that talks about those factors as they are now and where you believe they will be in the future. It's a way of "getting people on the same page" and collectively saying "this is the way things are and where we think they're going" and will influence the types of strategies and objectives employed.  Belief statements are different than value statements because values focus on how individuals treat each other and are really timeless while belief statements are typically focused at the industry/sector and/or organizational level and are time specific. 

Here are some high level things to consider as you create your strategic plan:

• What's your assessment of the external environment?
• How well do you understand the existing customers and markets?
• What is the best way to grow the business profitably, and what are the obstacles to growth?
• Who is the competition?
• Can the business execute the strategy?
• Are the short term and long term strategies balanced?
• What are the important milestones for executing the plan? Don’t do it just once a year.
• What are the critical issues facing the business?
• How will the business make money on a sustainable basis?

Once you have clarity on those ideas, you can create a plan to deliver the results. This is your operations plan and it's really the nuts and bolts behind the strategy. It's a realistic assessment of what will be delivered this fiscal year, by whom, when, how, at what cost. It has contingency plans built into it so that the organization can quickly adjust in a way that allows minimal disruption to the overall plan attainment.  

The discussions that build up to the creation of corporate operations plan are essential. High performing companies like GE take their key leaders offsite for many days to host in-depth discussions, get educated on key market or technology shifts, and really understand how the other businesses are evolving and where partnerships across units could create fantastic value. These discussions are only effective if people are comfortable with each other, vigorously discuss the merits of each idea and truly commit on all aspects of the plan. If this will be new to your organization the CEO will need to be a good role model until people change their behavior.

Once you have a prioritized, well thought out operations plan you are ready to allocate the budget.  This is the right way to do it - it's efficient because you've already debated the relative merits and priorities of each goal.  Unfortunately this is not how most CFOs do it, as many of us painfully know.    

Each CEO direct report then takes her objectives and cascades the relevant ones to members on her team who either own that objective and budget allocation themselves or assign/cascade it to people on their team. Everyone should have written performance objectives, some of which link to the operations plans (not every personal goal needs to link to a corporate goal) and some of which are about professional development. 

Ensure progress by coaching people often, holding 1:1s where employees update their managers (and managers support as necessary), and holding financial or product reviews at key milestones.  These practices will be a hugely positive impact on your culture. 

This wraps up my series on creating a culture of execution through objectives. This is not brain surgery - it just requires discipline,  good role models, and maybe a little outside help. 

Objectives Part III: Building A Culture of Execution

There's a saying that "culture will eat strategy for lunch", meaning you can have the best idea in the world but if your culture isn't tuned for execution you will not succeed.  In this post I'm going to focus on how to establish a culture of execution by changing your leadership style and managing the core people processes. In my next post I'll detail the core processes of strategy and operations.  For more depth on this topic, I recommend a book called "Execution - The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan  (2002). 

Many executives feel their job is setting "vision" and they should fully delegate the details of execution to subordinates. They fear being labelled a micromanager, someone who directs every decision without context or opportunity to contribute.  Strong leaders know that it's in the details of execution that agreements are established, resources allocated, people coached, and processes established to aim for maximum success. Your people come to expect this way of working because the organization makes it a core process and leaders model effective behaviors. It's how you move from firefighting to ensuring growth, success, and satisfied employees and customers. 

Because a culture is the sum of shared values, beliefs, and norms of behavior the surest way to change your culture is to start behaving differently at an individual (i.e., leadership skills & style) and group level (processes and structure).  Attitudes will always catch up to required behaviors.

For a leader, this means managing yourself and your people differently:

1. Know your people and your business: walk around, build trust, really understand the nuances of how work gets done and how people feel about issues, leaders, etc.
2. Insist on realism: ask for the positive and negative of how employees feel about your organization and follow up on suggestions and comments
3. Set clear goals and priorities: keep it simple and focus on the most important things
4. Follow through: people pay attention to what the leader focuses on, so do what you said you would do
5. Reward the doers: honor the changed or desirable behavior and pay more to people who produce better results
6. Expand people's capabilities: coach them, create learning moments, ask questions to help spur thinking, support training, mentoring, etc. 

At an organizational level, it means creating consistent processes around people, strategy, and operations that, over time, build up your bench of talent, differentiate your company's offerings, and allow it to deliver against that promise. The most important process is the people process because without the right quality and supply of talent you simply cannot define or execute your strategies.

People Processes: They should (1) provide a framework for identifying and developing the leadership talent needed to execute your short and longer term strategies; (2) fairly evaluate individuals and (3) fill the leadership pipeline so you have multiple candidates willing and able to do current and future jobs.  

This means your organization will probably need the following things:

• Values and/or leadership behaviors that people can use to shape their behavior. This becomes the basis for evaluating "how" people achieve their objectives (ie, are they a bull in a china shop?).
• Objectives - did the employee achieve her goals? It's the "what" portion of the performance evaluation.
• A conversation and a document summarizing performance. You can keep this very simple by doing it quarterly as part of the normal 1:1 and then having the manager document the conversation via email to both the manager and employee (and HR person if you have one). Some organizations do a big once-a-year process; I've seen both work provided regular feedback is occurring throughout the year. My hunch is that regular shorter reviews are better if you're trying to drive towards an execution culture and honestly I think it's less work since you should be having 1:1s with your team anyway.
• A consistent way to review everyone relative to each other in similar functions and grades so you can have a "curve". This allows you to see your top performers (performance and potential) and prioritize their retention and development accordingly.
• A very clear strategy so you can discern skills, knowledge and roles your organization will need in the future. For example, if you're going to move into a retail operation you're going to need to hire people with different skills sets performing new roles. 
• A workforce plan that shows the breadth and depth of talent you will need for the upcoming FY with assumptions on the external environment, additions, terminations, and promotions. If you're constantly running out of talent you need a workforce plan.
• A succession plan that sets you up for multiple candidates for each critical role. This is hard to do because your assumptions need to integrate the employee's preferences, current and probable capability, and the expected organizational changes with the realities of achieving the current FY deliverables. The key is preparing multiple candidates with the core skills and experiences that every leader will need prior to moving to the next level of responsibility and then constantly reviewing and iterating on your plan as you would with any other strategic goal.  Figuring out the successor to Steve Jobs at Apple is a real life example of the importance of developing and retaining multiple candidates. 

You do not need a gigantic process or staff to do these things.  Keep it simple, important, and demand regular progress. The CEO's level of passion, ability to mentor, and attention to detail around these goals will have a huge impact on whether this becomes just another exercise or truly becomes central to the culture. 

In my next post I'm going to talk about the core processes of strategy and operations and their impact on execution.

Objectives - Part II: Having A Great Launch

My last post focused on a process to help you introduce objectives into your organization and I'd like to spend this blog sharing some pointers about the launch to your employees. I've boiled this down to the minimum and it's more complicated to do it properly. Obviously, I'd love to help your organization with this type of work! 

The most important thing in the short run is to figure out how to make objectives "stick" within your organization. This means helping your senior leaders articulate the value of objectives, guiding mid-level managers to create and link goals for their functions and for their employees, helping employees set smart goals, and setting up methods of following progress (either in 1:1s or in various forms of group meetings).  The organization's chief executive is the most important person to help drive this change because people will mirror your focus and intensity.  If you ignore it or let up, I guarantee that objectives will fail in your organization and it will reduce your credibility for future initiatives. 

So how to have a fantastic launch?

Prior to organization-wide roll-out:

1. Test out your one pager with a cross-section of employees (grade levels, job functions, seniority with your organization) to get their perspective. Do they understand everything and is it energizing? If not, work on it until it does. 
2. Establish minimum expectations of key management practices to ensure objectives are met and people are developed.
3. Establish a calendar of key roll-out dates for your senior leaders and all people managers so people don't drag their feet or go off in wildly different directions. 
4. Practice your elevator pitch! As the senior leader you need to be able to concisely and passionately tell your team about the strategic vision, key objectives, and key strategic themes for the year. 
5. Get your senior team together to practice the presentation. The act of presenting this will help execs with their elevator pitches, clarity around strategy, passion for rolling this out to their teams, and is a great team building exercise.
6. Send a note to your organization inviting them to the presentation, sharing the key topics, and asking for questions. 

Day of Launch:

1. Secure an appropriate space with A/V, think about the logistics of transportation, and consider distributing copies of your one pager.
2. Keep the total presentation time to 60 minutes max (40 minutes presentation, 20 minutes Q&A or some other form of interaction, shared across senior staff) with socializing afterwards. 
   
3. During the Q&A session, you can make people comfortable asking questions by having your senior staff move around the room asking previously submitted questions and/or having the questions on the projection screen. 
4. Have a beer blast or some sort of social event afterwards so people can have fun, build relationships, and ask the execs questions or suggest ideas in an informal way. 

In my next post I am going to talk about some key processes you can use to further strengthen your culture and your organization's ability to execute.

Thoughts On Setting Organization Objectives

It's that time of year again when many of us set goals to enhance our lives. Unfortunately, there are a surprisingly large number of employers who simply do not set goals for their employees and I wanted to focus this entry on the implications for leaders and employees alike and offer some ideas for changing behavior in 2009.  

I've heard all sorts of fantastic excuses for not setting goals, like "we're too entrepreneurial to set goals" or "we're too busy to deal with some silly HR process". The last one was a doozy because the unit's leader clearly did not understand that properly set goals are a leader's best tool.

If people have measurable goals you can then objectively determine how they're doing against those goals, coach them, or change the goals if necessary. It allows you to map out how each area of your business will cooperate with each other, gives you an insightful perspective on how people spend their time and helps you focus your employee on the highest value work. It's the basis for a true performance review and essential input for a strategic talent review, succession planning, career development, and compensation and retention exercises. 

The benefits are equally shared with employees who'll feel a greater connection to the organization and their manager, see a future with your enterprise, and who will appreciate the host of positive cultural changes that will be ignited by an organization properly geared for execution.  Employee reaction to objectives will likely vary based on the organization culture, levels of trust with the manager, past experiences with similar processes, and the performance level of the employee. Higher performing employees are most likely to want objectives because they feel they'll end up higher in the performance curve and that should mean higher rewards and recognition.  If you have weak managers or a shaky culture I recommend moving cautiously and addressing these in parallel with an objectives process because they will lower or prevent success. 

So how to start?  

The process I describe below can work for any sized organization in most sectors, but assumes relatively good levels of trust and openness between the senior leaders of the organization, clarity on strategy, and a moderately healthy culture.  

First, set the proper context for your senior leadership team about why you're changing your management approach.  This will likely be a big change for people, or they may view it as your "next thing" and not take it seriously.  This will be a key leadership test for you, so prepare beforehand so that you can be concise, authentic, and engaging when you announce the change to the team.  Realize also that running your enterprise via objectives will change the culture of your organization and initially you'll have your hands full altering aspects of your organization to align with a performance oriented organization. Your day to day duties will also shift, likely from fire fighting and individual contributor work to coaching and mentoring.

Getting a group of senior leaders onboard with this concept will vary depending on each organization but in most cases I recommend using an outside facilitator.  Why? Most meetings are terribly structured and the conversation can go all over the place. This is not what you want when trying to introduce a new concept, especially one that truly will mean a different way of working. Any offsite process should be engaging, foster better trust and awareness amongst the senior team, and result in very clear documentation about next steps, owners, dates, etc.  Be clear with the group that your organization is moving forward with objectives and the process is designed to ensure its success by getting everyone on the same page and eliminating roadblocks as a management team.  Setting this context is important so people don't equate an opportunity to discuss the concepts with the opportunity to vote on whether the unit will actually use objectives. 

It's important to let the group hash out the concepts in an authentic, structured and participatory way. Adults learn by doing and your facilitator can help you develop exercises that allow the group to break into smaller teams to discuss, document, and present their perspectives about this change.  Example discussion topics include exploring how the organization is currently performing along key areas like people, process, and product; past ways of running the organization, the logic behind those approaches, and the results; fears, concerns, or expected challenges with using goals; and an analysis of the management tools employed by successful organizations.  

I mention authenticity because the tone you set and the nature of the exercises and discussion must allow honest dialogue and conflict.  This means the leader may need to take some "lumps" and be forthcoming about her/his shortcomings as a leader.  Cynicism is management's constant enemy so make sure you're doing everything you can to uncover the hidden objections, fears, and doubts and be realistic with your hopes for the offsite (ie, people are not going to change overnight). You're ready to move to the next step if you can objectively deal with those concerns and your people trust you, each other, and the process.  If not, then my suggestion is to work a bit more on those issues until your team feels like they're resolved. 

Assuming they are, validate that your organization's vision and mission still make sense. Next review and revise your strategic plans around customer, product/service, competitors, etc.  Boil these down into your top three or four strategic themes that you can reference later with employee communications. Now, with these things as a backdrop,  what are the three most important things for your organization to achieve in 2009? 

Have your senior team really work through how they'll jointly achieve the top three goals. This is more than each one simply achieving her goals; you need everyone to understand how the other players will insure that all parts of all three goals are achieved. This is more difficult than it sounds and will bring up a host of issues around priorities, roles, processes, etc. These are exactly the kinds of frank, open, vibrant discussions you want because the act of discussing it allows people to fully grasp the plan, connect emotionally to it, and understand how other things must change in order for the plan to work. 

The senior team should then review any additional functional goals they have for themselves and ensure everyone on the senior team agrees on resources, priorities, etc. The goal is for your senior team to see how everyone's primary and secondary objectives relate to each other. Model the right behaviors by offering thoughts, asking questions, and helping your people drill down on specifics in a very supportive and open way. 

Now try and get your core themes and top objectives onto one page. In my prior companies we typically had the following things in our one pager:

• Our Vision Statement
• Our Mission Statement
• Our Three To Five Core Strategic Focus Areas Identified
• Our Top Strategies Under Each Core Strategic Focus Area
• Our Top Objectives & Metrics Shown Under Each Focus Area (color code or circle your top three for visual impact)

This means that not every functional goal will make it to the main organizational page. Senior leaders can take the format and have a second page with objectives that are specific to their team. Ensure, however, that people understand the breadth and depth of objectives at both the enterprise and functional level. This is especially important so people's actions are aligned with the highest organizational goals. I've seen plenty of examples where people are myopic in their thinking or actions. The larger the organization the more you'll need to work against people "not knowing" or "caring" about the larger initiatives. 

I hope this has been helpful and of course I would welcome the opportunity to help you and your team improve your executional agility.  In my next posts I'm going to discuss rolling this out to the rest of the organization,  how to keep the momentum moving, and how to measure performance.

Crowd Sourcing / Knowledge Management

Google just announced that they are using crowd sourcing techniques to solicit ideas, opinions, and ratings of new mobile applications from their user base. Although they have a sizable development team they are wisely opening up their development and marketing process to systematically include their large user base. The users will solicit ideas for products or enhancements to products and then the entire community will vote on the best ideas. You're using the wisdom of the crowds to bubble up the best ideas which can then be acted on by the Google development team or a group of external developers can develop the idea first. Google can then purchase the technology, or simply offer it on their G1 mobile applications marketplace. Google wins in either case because (a) they're getting free labor; (b) they're tapping into and cultivating the passions of their user base; (c) they're getting free and highly accurate customer insight (at a scale they could never achieve via traditional approaches); and (d) they're getting the products that matter most according to their users. 

Knowledge management (commonly referred to as KM) is a way for any organization to put some structure into the way they create, apply, and share information amongst stakeholders. This can mean within the company, with key partners and, of course, customers.  

KM can be used as input for your training programs within your company because you can tap your experts to lead discussions and document the knowledge so it moves from an individual to the organization.  This allows a company to bring new hires up to speed quickly, survive retirements or terminations and is something that any sized organization can do. 

KM is also a fantastic way to deepen the relationships with your customers and to inspire and energize your employees. People want their work to matter and to make their organization successful and often the feedback cycle is limited to revenue numbers, reviewers' ratings, or limited customer testing. Expanding the process to include customers further up the idea supply chain allows a tight feedback loop for your employees, gives management a much clearer sense of desirable products and services, and can be done in person, online, or both.

Let's talk live about how I can help you tap into this powerful tool to boost your results.