The VA: Blame or Engagement

Buried

The biggest passive-aggressive tar-pat known to humanity!  That’s what Robert McDonald will face if Congress approves his appointment to the Veteran’s Administration.  I wish him and his P&G private sector background all the best; but I plead with him to listen and learn before he trusts those private sector instincts.

I started my career in the mid-70’s as an analyst in the central resource allocation agency in the Government of Canada.  One of our jobs was to instill and constantly upgrade the quality of management in the government.  Often we were led by “fresh thinking from the private sector.”  Almost as often we were let down.  The reality is that “public accountability ain’t private accountability.” 

Mr. McDonald knows that he will find a VA that is broken because of: insufficient resources; outdated infrastructure - primarily IT; and management controls that are a labyrinth embedded in concrete.

Hopefully Mr. McDonald doesn’t turn his sights on the employees.  There has already been bloodletting beyond Shinseki; managers have been fired and bonuses have been rescinded.  These actions may have been justified but the blame should end – it will not bring the open and trusting culture that is needed at this time.

In my experience employees don’t come to work saying, “I really want to screw up today.”  Most employees want to do a good job.  Even beating the tune of customer centricity is a needless act of management arrogance.  Employees want to serve customers; it’s the organizations that don’t let them.

I don’t have first hand knowledge of the VA but I’ve consulted to enough mega organizations to know that they develop lives of their own.  Lives that are often based in careerism, managing upward, and risk avoidance.  These cultures extract a heavy toll in human capital and customer service with their insatiable demands for reports and blind obedience to anachronistic controls.

Mr. McDonald needs the front line employees; they know the answers to the front line customer issues.  Engaging the front line will keep him out of the tar pit.

The Rot of Low Hanging Fruit

Be Careful

We hear it all the time in #changemanagement: “show progress; get quick wins; pick the low hanging fruit!”  Really?

Many years ago I presented this established wisdom to a client and they went ballistic.  The point was simple.  There should never be quick wins.  By definition this means there are easy fixes in plain sight.  Fixes that do not require a change in strategy or business plans.  All that is required is that someone takes action that is obvious.

This idea has stuck with me.  I see evidence of it all the time.  When I go to restaurants I see clip boards with checklists to be sure that windows are cleaned regularly.  Why is there a checklist?  Why should windows be dirty?  Isn’t it everyone’s responsibility to clean a window when it’s needed?

I just finished a major project to improve workflow – to get rid of non-value added transactions.  We found lots of low hanging fruit.  In one case there was a whole cottage industry built to comply with a process control that had long since lost its purpose.  Not respecting the control would have absolutely no impact. 

Seriously, there were dozens of people occupied in the work across many silos.  Although a lot of the paper flow had been automated the final approvals and plans were printed and filed along with an electronic copy for back-up.  Everyone knew the work was a waste of time – but it went on endlessly, and still goes on.

When this and other examples were brought to the senior team the answers were always the same: “Change is difficult because decision authority is fragmented, or it just isn’t worth the hassle to clean up the mess.”

I thought this was interesting.  Today’s managers talk endlessly about simplification and the need to effectively use scarce resources; yet when given the opportunity for quick wins the prize is often seen as not worth the effort.  In a cost-benefit sense this may be true, but what about the mindset it leaves behind?  What about the employees who learn to accept organizational dysfunction, put their heads down, and trudge on?

So, if you're a manager and you find low hanging fruit, remember the low hanging fruit isn’t your real problem – disaffected employees is!

Technology & It’s Disempowering Power

I don’t regard myself as a troglodyte, but more often than not I am now the oldest person in the room.  That means I see value through the eye of experience before the lens of progress.

I’m getting disturbed by technology, not as a 19^th century Luddite destroying the advance of machines, but as a humanitarian who wonders about the impact of technology on people in organizations and their ability to serve their clients and society.  Technology is becoming a barrier to humans working for humans.

It is clear to me, and everyone else who has been conscious for the last ½ century, that technology has advanced the human condition.  But trees don’t grow to the sky; have we hit the point of diminishing returns.  Let me explain.

I travel way too much, so many of my metaphors come from the traveler’s world.  A week ago I phoned my friends at the American Airlines Executive Platinum desk.  They’re the best.  They’re the most experienced agents trained to serve the airlines most experienced travelers.

Here’s what happened.  My wife and I were travelling to Canada from the US on the AA reward program.  We had the opportunity to move our travel up one day.  There is no change fee for me on this transaction so I called the Platinum desk.  Everything was ok, except because I was traveling to Canada and the exchange rate on the dollar had changed it was costing me 20 cents extra per ticket to cover landing fees.  Yep, 40 cents for both tickets – and the agent could not over-ride the system – she had to get approval from the rate desk.  This was a total disempowerment of her ability to act in the interest of her client and her company.

I see this all the time in organizations when I’m working on the inside as a consultant or on the outside as a customer.  Technology has taken away the flexibility for employees to act on good judgment.  The organizations need for consistency, efficiency, and low risk has emasculated the human’s need for empowerment, effectiveness, and respect.  What does that tell you about our basic belief about the value of people at work?

At what point does this emasculation lead to gutted enthusiasm?  Is disempowerment by technology a reason for such low employee engagement in today’s organizations?  When do people simply become automatons struggling to serve high order bits and bytes?

This wouldn’t concern me if humans were only mechanical, but they’re not.  The essence of humanity is emotion.  Human gratification comes from giving.  Employees get gratification by giving to customers – and we’re taking this away from them as their emotions are eroded by electrons.

Innovation is heralded today as the panacea for success.  Really?  In a world where many people are asked not to think how can Innovation flower?  Where will employees find fresh thinking at work when they’re asked to hang up their coat and minds at the door?

Employee Engagement->Innovation->Customer Loyalty: Case Study

Leverage Innovation

Organization transformation is a business full of: principles, tools, models, approaches, frameworks and perspectives.  It’s a mind-boggling and mind-numbing stew of overlapping and contradictory ideologies.  Just defining a word like “innovation” will call forth passionate debate.

When I get tossed in these storms of righteousness I struggle back to a few “truisms” that I’ve learned along the way, like:

… nothing happens in organization transformation unless the executive team is “open and trusting.”  If you can’t fix this problem then you can’t fix the organization!

I discovered another truism when I spent 26 months in Korea working the transformation of a 30,000-employee public company.  A decade ago I came to the understanding that organizational change had to be driven from the outside-in.  Successful change is customer driven change.

As I worked with this idea of “customer driven change” I found collateral benefits.  I found that when employees leverage customers, the employees become engaged in their organizations.  A short line of sight between employees and their customers not only generates effective change, but it does it by solving the biggest malaise in organization’s today – the disengagement of employees.

So it became clear to me that organizational transformation should be based in engaging employees to solve customer issues.  Trite, but true!

My practical problem was that HR programs aimed at solving employee engagement didn’t always solve customer issues; and marketing programs aimed at customer loyalty didn’t always engage employees.  A link was missing.

Then in mid-2010 we got a request from the CEO of Korea Telecom to help him engage his people to change the organization.  KT’s market was shifting, yet the employees tended to abide by traditional hierarchical and deferential rules.  How could we connect employees to their changing customer base?  The answer was “innovation.”

Innovation has some glorious characteristics that go beyond the customary Employee Engagement and Customer Loyalty programs.

1. Innovation needs to be framed within the context of a “customer value proposition,”
2. Innovation draws on the energy and passion derived from creativity which is innate in all humans, irrespective of culture, and
3. Innovation has a discipline that leads to commercialization.

Thus another truism: organization transformation is based on the virtuous value chain of:

Employee Engagement->Innovation->Customer Loyalty

This understanding was fundamental to our success in Korea – and that success has been documented in the public domain.  Here are two references.

The first reference is a case study at the London Business School.  The study was prepared about a year and a half into our 26-month engagement.  The connection to LBS was through Gary Hamel who led our project.  The case study has a strategic focus on the large issues of transformation.

 KT-Transforming to an Agile Organization

The second reference is written by my client and best friend in Korea, Misook Lim who now heads the Innovative Management Center at Korea Telecom.  Misook has just published this article.  It comes about a year after the first reference.  This article focuses on the practical working level and implementation of the strategic context provided in the first reference.

Pervasive Innovation at KT

I’m not a fan of the common wisdom that: “70% of change efforts fail.”  The virtuous value chain and the dedication of my Korean colleagues have proven it wrong.

Employee Engagement – Maybe The Job Is Bad

Employee Engagement - 60's Style

Employee engagement ain’t coming back.  Somehow we have this nostalgia that employees used to be highly engaged.  I have trouble with that hypothesis based on my experience and observations.

Sure, our surveys of employee engagement continue to show declines, but what’s the benchmark and what are we measuring.  I’d say that disgruntled and disengaged employees surrounded my whole career as a corporate employee and manager.  The majority of these people hung in because they had to, not because they wanted to. 

I will admit that today we face a “social media generation” with aspirations that we haven’t seen since the SIXTIES.  Sure, today’s group is more self-important and less altruistic than their colleagues of half a century ago; but both reject inherited authority and want to be included.

A major difference that I see today is that jobs are less engaging than they were fifty years ago.  I see that the vast majority of our for-profit corporations are transactional behemoths.  The purpose of most jobs is: efficiency, consistency, and low risk.  Exactly what recruits are not looking for.

At least when I entered the workplace there was enough looseness that I could constantly define my job to keep me interested.  Maybe that’s the point about employee engagement today.  Maybe the jobs don’t provide room.

Let’s think about Daniel Pink for a moment and his claim that people want three things in their work (beyond basic hygiene): Purpose, Mastery, Autonomy.  Take a look at the jobs in your company – at all levels.  You’ll often find that:

• Purpose: is set within the clear context of profit, which is engaging for shareholders, but not the people who work for them; and even if a transcending mission statement is elaborated it is rarely role modeled.
• Mastery: is often seen as digging deep into the rules that govern a silo; not understanding the much more engaging relationships and flows that are horizontal.
• Autonomy: is seen as working within tight controls, not offering the gifts of innovation and creativity that are housed within all of us as humans.

On the other hand, maybe there is room in even the most boring job but employees don’t have the skills to make the job interesting.  They don’t know how to inject: purpose, mastery, and autonomy into their work.  For help they should turn to Shawn Acor and The Happiness Advantage.  Shawn gives principles and rules on how to change our mindset from “success = happiness” to “happiness = success.”

One thing I have concluded is that neither management nor HR is going to solve the Employee Engagement riddle.  That will only come from inside employees.  The role of the organization in facilitating this is to make the shortest line of sight possible between employees and what they really care about at work – their customers.