The Value of Not Knowing... IF You Want a High-Performance Organization – Part 3

External Consultants

In this third of a series of three blogs we address uncertainty in organizations where external consultants are involved, and there are also some common conclusions drawn from all three blogs. This first blog in this series talked about strategic planning, while the second covered critical decisions in high-performance organizations.

I have to tell this story because I found the situation so peculiar, and highly illustrative of the often-strange behavior of external consultants with agendas.  (The points of this vignette could also be applicable to people inside organizations who have strong “going in positions” for a meeting, though this is an account is of an external consultant.) 

The Backdrop

I was collaborating with another consulting firm to design a senior management meeting for a global pharmaceutical company.  In the meeting they needed to decide the future direction of an internal process improvement program they were doing, which was a combination of Lean and Six Sigma disciplines.

I’d placed on the agenda an item in which the senior managers would chart out a course for the next three months, and make some decisions on the level of involvement they wanted the general workforce to have in the upcoming changes.

The Conflict

The other consultant, whose firm provided Lean Six Sigma training and implementation support, expressed his immediate discomfort with this agenda item.  He said, “We don’t know the answer to that question yet.  Why would we ask a question that we didn’t know the answer to, or that they didn’t know the answer to before the meeting started?”

A bit taken aback, I replied, “Well, because all the key players and disciplines are represented in the room, and they can talk about the topics, debate the pros and cons, and come to an agreement on which actions would be the best for the company.”

Then Bob, the other consultant shook his head, and asked, “But what if they don’t come to the right decision?”

“Bob,” I said, “it’s their company, and their resources, and they’ll need to be comfortable committing to whatever they think is do-able.  It will be the right decision for them, at least for now, and they can meet later and adjust if needed.  As outsiders we can certainly provide our points of view, but ultimately this is their decision to make, own, and implement.”

What was interesting to me was that Bob’s reaction and intent weren’t malicious in any way.  It’s just the way that he thought about the issue.

The Outcome

To his credit, Bob agreed to let the agenda item stay, and the group had 45-minute conversation on the topic.  Decisions were made, tasks assigned, and an implementation schedule developed.   After the meeting the group said this was one of the most productive meetings they’d had, and that it was much better than a series of one-on-one pre-selling and conversation meetings they’d had in the past. 

But are group meetings always necessary to address big problems?  No.  There are times when you bring in a consultant to fix a specific technical problem in which that consultant has a demonstrated expertise.  Maybe she knows all the quirks of a particular bioreactor and has a personal checklist of what do to when a certain error occurs.  Or maybe a person understands the ins and outs of the new healthcare legislation, and how it impacts the insurance industry. 

A key distinction and tips for moving forward

I think the distinction that Harvard researcher and author Ron Heifitz makes is extremely useful for determining when groups, vs. individuals need to be involved.  He talks about the difference between technical challenges (where there’s purely a technical problem to address, like fixing the bioreactor quirks mentioned above) and adaptive challenges (where the solution may have a technical component, but also involves changing people’s attitudes, values, and behaviors).  When the solution is unknown, and key players need to be brought together to collectively develop a path forward, it’s definitely time for the leader to convene people to get ideas, prioritize options, and come up with action plans to move forward.

So the bottom line for this thread of uncertainty is that organizations that outperform their competition tend to freely acknowledge that they don’t know everything about the future, or a particular situation before going into a meeting.  This helps keep them poised to develop the best possible solution they can collectively develop, which, over the long run, favors their organization over others for sustained, long-term, high performance. 

YouTube channel launched

Today I officially launched a YouTube channel dedicated to providing information on how to effectively engage employees for the purposes of:

• organizational growth,
• increased profits,
• enhancing employee skills,
• improving the quality of work life, and
• increasing employee retention by offering a more desirable place to work. 

You can access the channel at www.youtube.com/tomdevaneconsultant.  You can also subscribe on that landing page if you’d like to be informed of my future posts as soon they occur.

The first set of posts provides information on a method that engages groups of people to develop strategic goals and develop action plans to implement them.  It could be used by a corporation, a division or large department of a corporation, a government agency, an industry coalition, or community.  The method is a Search Conference, and I’ve worked it for over 15 years.  It’s been used in a wide variety of places that include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, the U. S. Forest Service, the FAA, and the government of South Africa.  Links to the first three videos, which are all under 15 minutes, are:

• Tapping into Collective Wisdom to Develop Strategic Goals 
• What is a Search Conference?
• Design Foundations that Make a Search Conference so Powerful

I selected this as an initial topic because several of my clients are currently interesting using a Search Conference in their strategic planning process.

As this is a new way for me to get information out to people, I’d love your feedback, and any topics you might like to see explored.  Please send me your comments at tomd@tomdevane.com,  I’m always looking for topics people are interested in so that I can maximize the value of the information I provide.

Engagement-based Change Management: 3 Pragmatic Approaches

The notion of managing change for large projects has been around for years.  With failure rates exceeding 70% for information technology and quality improvement programs over the past 15 years, leaders have long acknowledged the need to address the “people side” of change.   But unfortunately, many of the early change management efforts and their descendants were as logic-based and top-down directed as the technical efforts they sought to complement and implement effective change for (like SAP or Lean Six Sigma).

But recently there’s a new trend emerging that offers great promise in increasing the likelihood that people will perform well in an upcoming changed environment.  That’s the notion of engagement-based change.  Leaders are discovering -- or in some cases re-discovering if they’ve just gotten extremely busy and fell away from the practice --that by systematically engaging employees in various aspects of the change they can dramatically improve their odds of implementation success.

A lot has been written about the powerful business benefits of what having an engaged workforce can provide.  A Gallup organization research study reports that disengaged workers cost the economy over $300 billion per year.  A 2010 report from McKinsey & Company, their global research study of successful organizational transformations listed co-creation, collaboration, and employee engagement as key indicators.  And most people can look back on their work or personal lives and recall how much more effective colleagues were when they were engaged, vs when they were not engaged.

So just how do we get employees to become so engaged with their work that they become more creative, productive, and even choose to spend more of their discretionary time at work?

Tactics for engaging employees are limited only by a leader’s imagination.  Here are three starter approaches for leaders who might benefit from some concrete examples.  Click on any of the three following blog entries on this page for a more detailed description of the approach and specific situations where it might be used.

• Engagement Approach #1 – Provide more contribution opportunities
• Engagement Approach #2 – Provide opportunities for major chunks of important work (custom design)
• Engagement Approach #3 -- Provide opportunities for major chunks of important work (use existing proven templates)

The above three approaches provide some solid, proven ways to increase engagement for purposes of upcoming large-scale changes.  Best wishes in all your change efforts!

Engagement Approach #1

One proven approach to employee engagement is to deliberately include more people in a conversation about an important decision than have been involved in the past.  Leaders I interviewed for the book Integrating Lean Six Sigma and High-Performance Organizations (Wiley & Sons, 2004) referred to this as “widening the circle of involvement.”  They do this gradually, testing the success of the tactic, and learning from previous attempts as they continually widen the circle of involvement.  After becoming comfortable with the process, they then teach it to their direct reports and then encourage them to widen their circles of involvement.

This strategy may be executed on a one-on-one basis initially, or a leader may start out by convening a group.  As time goes on the leader will work his or her way up to engaging one or more groups of people  -- typically no more than 12 per group so there can be meaningful conversations where all feel comfortable to participate -- to have a conversation.  Here are some keys to success for this approach

• The topic needs to be something that the invited employee(s) would not typically contribute to.  For example, in a strategic context, this may be a conversation about strategically entering into a new geographic area, and the implications of doing so.
• It needs to be clear that in this engagement type of event the employee(s) is providing input for the senior decision maker.  The decision maker may or may not adopt 100% of the employee’s recommendation, but the employee will have the opportunity to have a voice that was heard in the decision, which they previously did not have.  (It’s very important to state this up front, or future skepticism and maybe even animosity will result if employees are asked about an issue, and then the senior manager does not incorporate that idea.)
• The leader needs to acknowledge the value of the employee input, irrespective of the outcome.  If the input was used, the leader should say how the employee input shaped the final decision.   If the input was not used, then the leader should provide reasons why.  (In addition to closing the loop with the employee’s suggestion, this helps build employees’ capability for strategic thinking, and educates them on the choice principles in play at the organization.)
• Visual public displays are useful for representing the process and employees’ input.  Maps, images, pictures on the walls for all to see all contribute to people having a positive experience with the engagement process.

Here are some examples of topics leaders may open up to employees where there was previously no employee input.  For a large information technology implementation, employees might be asked about the planned timing of an upcoming implementation.  (Years ago a major candy manufacturer implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system right before Halloween.  This system had problems, people weren’t adequately trained, and the company lost a lot of money as a result.  If a wider circle of employees had been asked, this obvious poor timing could have been avoided.)

For a Lean Six Sigma implementation geared toward improving quality, a senior leader might convene all the Black Belts (improvement experts) and ask for their input on what a process should look like for sharing each of their independent key learnings with the group.

Engagement Approach #2 takes the practice of Engagement one step further.

Engagement Approach #2

Here’s an engagement approach for leaders who want to give employees a genuine feeling of contributing.  This approach can pay huge future dividends as employees will often “go the extra mile” and spend their precious discretionary time if they feel they’ve achieved something and it’s been valued.

Here’s the approach.

Turn over an entire “chunk” of a decision or important piece of work to employees and design an agenda where they can accomplish their task.  While Engagement Approach # 1 focused in getting employee input and carefully considering it, this Tip #2 actually turns over responsibility for decisions or significant work to a group that’s typically not in involved.  In this case the senior leader would accept the work products that the group came up with. 

A question that sometimes arises is “What if the group comes up with something that really makes no sense for the organization?”  Well, the leader can actually control this by providing some shaping inputs before the group process, such as some key places for the group to gather information, guidelines or a checklist for successful completion of the task, and boundary conditions about what’s on the table and what’s not on the table for consideration.  And of course, as a last resort, the leader would have veto power, but this should be used extremely rarely and only when accompanied by a detailed explanation of the veto.  If this type of engagement is done well, then this situation hardly, if ever, comes up.

Here are some examples of different project types, and how this engagement tactic would be set up:

• Strategic planning: A specially convened cross-disciplinary team, comprised of multiple organizational levels, would explore options for developing a new product line that could be sold to the company’s existing customer base.
• Information technology implementations: Groups of users would convene with a few people from IT early in the system development life cycle (as early as the development of functional requirements) to develop test cases, business scenarios, system test plans, and guidelines for upcoming training.
• Lean Six Sigma:  A group of Black Belts and Master Black Belts would convene a group to determine a hard set of criteria that would determine if an improvement opportunity should be addressed using the tools of Six Sigma, Lean, or simple process mapping techniques.

 In Engagement Approach #3 we present how a leader or change agent might use pre-existing templates and agendas to quickly engage employees for high-quality outcomes.