There is a fascinating passage in Vineet Nayar’s new book entitled “Employees First, Customers Second,” where he describes how a good change in policy produced both a positive change in employee behavior and an unintended consequence. I think it is an excellent example of the powerful effects systems have on employee behavior.
As part of an effort to create a corporate culture of transparency and trust, Nayar (the CEO of HCLT) created a program called U&I. It was an online forum where anyone in the company could post a question and everyone would be able to see the question, the questioner, and the answer. It was big success. “Simply by allowing questions to be asked, we had improved the likelihood that answers would emerge – from someone, somewhere.” (p. 78). Employees were also encouraged to send the CEO direct e-mails with questions or suggestions.
The programs produced the intended effect of making the culture more open and trusting. But several years into his organizational transformation, Nayar realized that much of the e-mail he was getting from employees was asking him to provide answers or solutions to problems.
I realized that employees were asking me such questions for two reasons. First, it was simply a habit, an unthinking response, typical of any command-and-control organization in which employees automatically look upward for answers. Second, perhaps they didn’t want to take complete responsibility for the answer or for the outcome. They wanted me – the CEO – and my office to take some or all of the responsibility. Perhaps they wanted to be able to say, “Well, Vineet said it was OK. Don’t blame me.” Very possibly, I was to blame. Maybe I had led them to believe that I did want to make all the decisions, and thus perhaps I was the cause of their behavior….I saw that in our desire to be transparent and make the CEO accessible and open, we had actually enhanced the perception of the all-knowing CEO and his all-powerful office; we had unintentionally reinforced the idea that the CEO would take responsibility for everything. (pp. 145-146).
He attempted to fix this by creating a new section in U&I called My Problems. Here Nayar would post questions that he was struggling with and invite employees to respond with answers.
This conversation, by focusing on “my problems and your answers,” started to shift the responsibility of actions that could create change away from me to other people throughout the organization. It became a dialogue rather than a monologue. (p. 149).
Any new policy you implement or systemic change you make will always produce both intended and unintended consequences. Don’t become so enthralled by the intended consequences of your positive changes that you neglect developing a system to anticipate the unintended consequences. Assume the unintended consequences will emerge, proactively search them out, try to understand why they occurred, and then plan more change to improve your system.
Systems are powerful drivers of behavior at work.
Related Posts:
Personality And The Fate Of Organizations: My Review
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