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.

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Personality And The Fate Of Organizations: My Review

Samuel Culbert recommends getting rid of performance reviews and replacing them with performance previews. I wholeheartedly concur with eliminating performance reviews, but frankly I’m still chewing on the idea of how to replace the system.

Whatever you want to call it, I like his suggestion for three simple questions bosses and subordinates should be asking each other. With these three questions “you affirm the positive, you own your annoyance, and you tell the person what you lack that you believe would be useful” (p.180):

1. What are you getting from me that you like and find helpful? If relevant, comment on the bigger picture: how we are organized and how people and units interact.

2. What are you getting from me (and/or the system) that impedes your effectiveness and would like to have stopped?

3. What are you not getting from me (and/or the system) that you think would enhance your effectiveness, and tell me, specific to you, why do you need it at this time?

It does not have to be this exact wording, but you get the picture. I think you need to give some thought to how to make a conversation like this systematic (e.g. how often to discuss, how to document, how to follow-up). He does not give any specific suggestions, and I don’t have any, but I am confident that you can figure that part out on your own.

The key will be to really care, to really listen, and to really change your behavior based upon what you learn. If you don’t do anything different to become more helpful to your employees, then don’t bother asking again.

They will know it was all just more of the same bullshit.

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I want to work for Vineet Nayar!

I loved Nayar’s book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down.”  It is one of the best management/leadership books I’ve read recently.

In this book, Nayar tells the story of how he transformed an already successful company, HCLT, into one of the fastest growing IT service partners in the world. The personal story Nayar shares is compelling, insightful, and at times funny and brutally honest. Have your highlighter handy when you read this because it is packed full of wisdom and quotable passages.

The transformation of HCLT is an excellent example of the logic of the service-profit chain. Nayar’s employees grew the company by impressing the socks off their customers. Nayar and his leadership team partnered with employees to create the systems that made everyone in the organization, including management, accountable to the value zone – the place where value is truly created for customers. Nayar was wise enough to acknowledge that the value zone is not in the executive suite.

One of the most interesting changes they made was in the performance evaluation system for managers. They opened it up so that “any employee could choose to do a 360-degree evaluation of any of the managers they believed had an influence – positive or negative – on their ability to do their job.” (p. 120). They also allowed anyone who had given feedback to a manager to see the results of that manager’s evaluation. By making radical changes to this important system, managers changed their behavior and focused more on their span of influence instead of their zone of control.

Nayar didn’t want satisfaction and engagement from employees, he wanted passion.

Is satisfaction really a useful indicator of anything? Satisfaction is very different from passion. Doesn’t satisfaction actually imply a complacent acceptance of how things already are? If I am satisfied, will I be interested in changing or improving anything? And what about engagement? Is that any better? I suppose that if an employee is engaged, that is better than being disengaged. But isn’t it just another, slightly more active form of satisfaction? (p. 152).

Think they got passion by simply exhorting their employees? Nope. They created systems to both identify the main drivers of passion in employees and to embed those passions into the organizational structure. Employees loved it.

The transformation of HCLT occurred because the systems they put in place successfully transferred the responsibility for change from the CEO to employees:

The CEO can no longer be the one who scribbles strategy on a paper napkin over dinner. He or she cannot be the one who stands in front of a crowd to motivate it with fabulous oratory. The CEO will not be the one who thinks of the best and brightest ideas. The role of the CEO is to enable people to excel, help them discover their own wisdom, engage themselves entirely in their work, and accept responsibility for making change. (pp, 163-164).

That’s brilliant. I loved this book, and I think you will too.

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Leadership Metanoia

Are some people more likely to be engaged at work than others?

Yes, according to recent research. An important new study with the best evidence yet that employee engagement might indeed facilitate performance also suggests that value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluation (CSE) might be engagement enhancers.

Core self-evaluation is a personality trait that represents an individual’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and locus of control. Employees with a positive CSE had previously been shown to perform better, deal with adverse conditions, and just be more satisfied at work then those with a negative CSE.

This new link between CSE and engagement is significant because it’s the only suggested cause of engagement that a company or supervisor cannot directly control. Personality is relatively stable – we can’t change people’s personality at work so we shouldn’t even try.

The obvious suggestion from this new research on engagement is that we should try to hire people with a positive CSE. That’s easier said than done because the most common selection tool is an interview, and according to Robert Hogan, narcissists and psychopaths excel at interviews. Unfortunately, I find that most people do not even know how to recognize personality and distinguish it from other psychological states like attitudes, emotions, moods, and values. That is a big problem.

I like to listen for internal locus of control (LOC) and healthy self-esteem.

Someone with a healthy self-esteem can speak in a matter-of-fact way about both their strengths and weaknesses. They don’t embellish their strengths and don’t feel threatened to admit a weakness. They believe their strengths far exceed their weaknesses, and they pursue a strategy of exposing themselves to situations where they can excel and avoiding situations where they know they can’t contribute significant value.

Individuals with an internal LOC have a characteristic tendency to assume responsibility for the things that happen to them. Individuals with a more external LOC will always find something or someone else to blame when things go wrong. People with an internal LOC can see the systemic causes of their behavior, but they assume responsibility for taking action to change those causes so they don’t experience the same failure over and over again.  They don’t dump on their leaders (this sucks and so do you!); instead, they partner with them to fix the crappy system that was the main cause of the problem.

Do your best to hire, retain, and promote employees with a positive CSE. Learn what they value at work, and never expect them to behave in ways that would violate those values. Demonstrate your respect and care for them as individuals through interdependent relationships and supportive management practices.

This is a reasonable path to employee engagement. If you find yourself making excuses or blaming employees for their lack of engagement, take an honest look in the mirror at your own personality.

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A few days ago I blogged about how recent research suggests that value congruence – the extent to which employees can behave at work consistent with their own self-image – might enhance employee engagement. Employees are just not likely to fully invest their head, hands, and hearts in work they don’t find meaningful.

But employees also need to believe their work is manageable. This recent research also showed a link between perceived organizational support and engagement.

Individuals feel safe in organizational contexts perceived to be trustworthy, secure, predictable, and clear in terms of behavioral consequences….Individuals with trusting interpersonal relationships in supportive organizational environments are able to take risks, expose their real selves, and try and perhaps fail without fearing the consequences (Kahn, 1990)…Thus, supportive management and interpersonal relationships foster feelings of psychological safety that increases willingness to engage fully in work roles. (Rich, et al. 2010, p. 621).

Just to be clear, let me show you some of the questions the researchers asked employees in order to measure perceived organizational commitment:

• The organization takes pride in my accomplishments
• The organization really cares about my well-being
• The organization values my contributions to its well-being
• The organization strongly considers my goals and values
• The organization shows little concern for me (reverse scored)

Employees need support at work if they are expected to deliver the performance and citizenship that result from engagement. If employees believe they work for folks that don’t value their contributions or care about their well-being, they won’t feel safe enough to fully engage in their work.

I think this is ultimately a supervisory issue. If the organization is sincerely trying to provide this support to employees but discovers that individual supervisors are not fully “engaged” in the effort, those supervisors need to be developed or replaced. If you as a supervisor work for an organization that does not sincerely care about you or your direct reports, you should do your best to stop that “shit from rolling downhill” and provide those you have been given the privilege to supervise with as much support as you can.

As I’ve said a number of times, there is no substitute for caring. We now have some credible evidence for a link between caring, engagement, and employee performance.

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Fairness Matters

I blogged recently about new credible evidence that employee engagement might indeed affect employee performance. This is the best evidence we have so far that employee engagement produces tangible results, which is important because the hype surrounding engagement far exceeds the evidence. This new research also gave us a very specific definition of engagement, a new and better measure of engagement, and an evidence-based suggestion for three things that might enhance employee engagement.

One of the things this new research suggests enhances engagement is value congruence. Value congruence is the extent to which the individual can behave at work consistent with their own self-image. It’s very difficult to experience meaningfulness in our work if we are expected to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the highest values we espouse to ourselves and others.

When individuals find that their role expectations pull for behaviors that they feel are inappropriate for their preferred self-images, they feel devalued, taken advantage of, and less willing to give themselves to their work roles. (Rich, et al., 2010, p. 621).

This is where leadership integrity comes in. Leaders with integrity in the eyes of their employees speak and act in ways consistent with what employees value. The leader’s personal behavior reflects values congruent with employee values. As leaders inspire others to enact their best selves and stretch for higher and higher levels of performance, they never expect values to be compromised, and they never accept compromise in their own behavior or in the behavior of others they have been given the privilege to lead.

Find a disengaged employee and I’ll bet you will also find a leader lacking integrity.

Model the way for your employees by being open and clear about your values.  Then behave at work consistent with your values, and help your employees behave consistent with their values. Try not to hire and never promote people that are either void of or unwilling to make a public commitment to meaningful personal values. Partner with your employees to continuously improve the crappy systems that rob people of their pride of workmanship.

Don’t expect the engagement that flows from meaningful work to magically appear in others until you have the wisdom and courage to first do the right thing yourself.

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Leadership Development: The Foundation

“Study Abroad” is the title of my most recent entry at The Student Branding Blog. I recorded the video in Getxo, Spain, where I am spending the first three weeks in June teaching international management through the University Studies Abroad Consortium (USAC). From Getxo I fly directly to London where I will live and teach International Organizational Behavior through my own College of Business for four weeks. Seven weeks is a long time to be away from home, but I am making the most of the experience.

If you have never lived or traveled extensively outside of your home country, you don’t know what you are missing. People are often orders of magnitude different in other countries, and I find that fascinating. You owe it to yourself to experience life beyond your borders. You really can’t appreciate how rich your own life is until you experience how people in other countries live their lives.

There is no substitute for performance. Your fundamental responsibility at work is to be really good at your given duties. You can’t suggest ways to improve the process unless and until you begin to master that process. And your ability to perform is one of the most important things people want to know about you when they evaluate your trustworthiness.

The most important thing they want to know is your intentions toward them. Because we simply don’t trust people that we think don’t have our best intentions at heart, there is no substitute for caring. If you can’t build trust, you can’t lead, and if you don’t care about your followers, they will never trust you.

But caring is a luxury for those that can’t perform. When I first started teaching, I was basically thrown into the classroom. I honestly didn’t care too much about my students because I just wanted to survive the semester. It was only as I began to master my new job that I developed the capacity to care about those I had been given the privilege to serve.

Leaders, master your jobs, then help your people move up the learning curves at work and master their jobs. Without performance mastery, they will have little capacity to care about what they do, who they do it with, and who they do it for. As they become purposeful performers that care, the work they do will become more meaningful to them and they will become more satisfied with and committed to you and your organization.

You will reap the benefits of better task performance, less withdrawal behaviors (e.g. tardiness, absenteeism, turnover) and more interpersonal citizenship. Don’t just tell them to get better and to care – help them develop the capacity to make it a continuously developing reality.

Leadership is caring about how well your people perform and being really good at helping them perform better.

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The Stepford Organization

If I owned or managed a business, I would try very hard to ensure all of my new hires were digital citizens.  Digital citizens “get” the web and its new relational technologies and techniques because they actually use them.  They blog, tweet, bookmark, and connect on Facebook and LinkedIn. They speak the native digital tongue because they are immersed in the flow of these new relational processes.

Digital tourists, on the other hand, speak with an accent. They have passed through, taken pretty pictures, and have a few fun stories to tell, but they have no idea how the natives live and eat on a daily basis.

Digital dummies have never even applied for a passport. They behave as if the radical changes enabled by these new web technologies will never matter to them.

Business is becoming increasingly social and relational. All across the value chain, social media technologies are providing more effective ways to relate to customers, employees, and suppliers.

People are going to be talking about you and your business online, so you better get used to it. If you are smart, you will be listening, responding, and learning. And if you are really smart, you will enable everyone in your organization to be a digital ambassador for your company.

Hire digital citizens. Be a remarkable leader and give them something positive to say about you, your products, and services as they interact and spread their influence with others online. Encourage them to engage in social media and provide systems to take what they hear and use it to improve or even change what you do. Impressed and connected employees, customers, and suppliers are gold to your business.

This is a tremendous opportunity. Don’t miss it.

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Bret L. Simmons: Cause, Effect, Time, and Space from Bret Simmons on Vimeo.

When we play as children, problems are never far away from their solutions – as long, at least, as we confine our play to one group of toys. Years later, as managers, we tend to believe that the world works the same way. If there is a problem on the manufacturing line, we look for a cure in manufacturing. If salespeople can’t meet targets, we think we need new sales incentives or promotions. If there is inadequate food, the solution must be more food…. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality. The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space. (p. 63)

Whenever I talk about systems thinking, I am usually thinking about the idea that cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. This is the next systems thinking principle from Peter Senge’s classic book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization.”

Because we’ve been conditioned to treat problems like snapshots, most of us search for proximal causes when effects hit our radar screen. And thanks to the power of the fundamental attribution error, we usually blame the person nearest the fire when flames erupt. Very convenient, but not very effective.

The real leverage lies in fixing systems, not in blaming people.  As Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer correctly point out, “the law of crappy systems trumps the law of crappy people.”

Unless you find and address the root causes of your problems, you will be forced to deal with the manifestations of those causes over and over again. Yet because the root causes are often distal, it’s very difficult to see how seemingly unrelated effects were driven by the same underlying systemic factors. Difficult indeed, but absolutely essential.

A lot is made of leadership and “the vision thing.” I think that is overrated. The most important big picture view the effective leader needs to have the ability to comprehend is the one in the rear-view mirror.

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