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Identifying a Better State for Your Organization

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: In this article I identify the start of the strategic process. The first element is to realize there is a better existence for your organization. Ultimately this leads to a vision of the future, but I will save that process for another article.

Identifying a Better State for Your Organization

A company where the workforce is fully engaged is more competitive and successful. Achieving it requires more than giving inspiring speeches or hiring a consultant for training. It requires an organized approach and a multifaceted set of activities applied consistently over time. Some actions included in a typical improvement program include:

This kind of program is not simple, nor is it cheap. It requires investment and fortitude. The elements must fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to produce a state of higher engagement. Many leaders become sold on the idea that a set of programs like the ones above will be sufficient to move groups from one state to a better one. However, there is a major problem here.

Groups that approach engagement of the workforce with this kind of program often struggle. Many end up in failure because of mechanical implementation and the expectation that if you do these things you will automatically succeed. In my experience, it does not work that way. The leader must establish the right environment before attempting improvement programs like those above. The first step involves laying a firm foundation.

Just as children use wooden blocks to build the base of a tower, leaders and their teams can use the concepts in this chapter to build a foundation for their business. Some teams will start with a different color or shape block and their placement of them will be designed to fit their needs. As the foundation takes shape, the unique pattern of blocks begins to mold the organization and build stake in the edifice. While design creativity allows a nearly infinite pattern, it is paramount to realize there are universal forces, like gravity, that must be considered. For example, if the "customer focus" block is omitted from your foundation, you will most likely fail. It is critical to have a solid foundation, whatever the shape, and the blocks need to hold together to support the remaining structure or it will topple over.

The ideas presented here are building blocks that will significantly enhance the performance of any organization. They are presented in a stepwise sequence for clarity of understanding. It is important to avoid thinking of this as a cookbook approach to leadership. You and your team need to own the process and the sequence.

Working on Many Levels

Think of the following analysis in different tiers or levels. First there is you. You can do all the steps referring to yourself. For example, in thinking about customer needs, you personally have a set of "customers". You are a customer of yourself but your spouse and family are also customers. Your boss is a customer and so are your employees.

Next there is your immediate group. Customers may be those who buy your products, but higher management will also be a customer, as will other groups that interface with you.

Finally, the organization itself should be going through the same steps. For the entire enterprise, the customers will include outside consumers, but also others, such as the Board of Directors and the Stockholders.

Understand the level you are working on when going through the following steps, or you can become frustrated and confused. I will give examples to illustrate the difference. It may seem cumbersome at first, but soon the process will flow smoothly.

Step One: Start with Yourself and Take Responsibility

Griping about poor performance and blaming outside conditions or other people is a typical, but flawed, attitude of many leaders. The leader feels like a martyr doing everything possible under horrible conditions. The source of highest frustration for any leader is the feeling that "I could make this organization shine if it were not for the poor environment established at higher levels" or "If only we were not in this awful recession, we could have a better environment around here." There are hundreds of reasons why external things are causing problems. This attitude is nearly universal except in the case of Level 5 Leaders described by Jim Collins in Good to Great.

There have been many true stories of high morale and empowerment in prison camps, where those in authority were beasts and the environment was stripped of all human dignity. It takes a special kind of leader to accomplish this, but it can be done. Stop blaming upper management or outside environmental issues and start making some positive changes in your own domain despite the challenging environment. Recognize things could be better and take personal responsibility for the current state. By focusing on your own behaviors and asking what can be done differently, a whole new approach emerges.

Note: the speed of doing the following steps is situational, depending on a number of factors. First, as a leader, are you new to the organization or are you a seasoned incumbent? If this is your first exposure, be cautious. Go slowly at first, and pick up speed as your knowledge increases. If you are a veteran at doing this kind of organizational work, you can move faster.

Another issue might be the level of urgency. If you have to make major changes over the next 18 months, it is quite different from being unable to meet the payroll next week. Be aggressive, but reasonable, in applying the following concepts.

Step Two: Analyze the Environment

Give yourself and your organization a thorough health checkup. For lasting change, exceptional leaders focus on their contribution to the current environment first. This process is difficult and extraordinary, which is why there are so few really great leaders. Chapter 3 has detailed information on using assessments.

Start by analyzing yourself as a leader. What is working and which areas need improvement? Identify your customers and assess their satisfaction with your leadership. Think about your strengths and weaknesses and write them down as a guide for improvement. What opportunities do you have to improve performance? What things may be holding you back, and how can you overcome these? Once this kind of grounding is complete, you can analyze the situation for your group.

Initial Group Analysis

Working at the group level, do some brainstorming with a diagonal slice of stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, management, and peers. Determine what is working for your team, what is not working, and what can be done to change things. Be willing to hear things that are difficult to swallow. You may want to bring in a professional facilitator to help, but avoid the common mistake of hiring an outside consultant to go into the organization, do an analysis, and submit a report. The roles of the leader and facilitator are different. Do not delegate leadership activities to the facilitator.

As a leader, you and your entire team own the process. Be present and visible during the deliberations. A facilitator can help with the mechanical process, as with the SWOT analysis below, but must never appear to own the process. To get the real data, you must be involved in the acquisition yourself. Hear the issues and problems directly from the people impacted. Hiring an outside consultant to do this "dirty work" will start the process off on the wrong foot.

During these deliberations it is essential to suspend judgment, blame, analysis of cause, fear of retribution, and other conditions that could prevent the truth from surfacing. This may be tricky because if the current environment is one of fear and low trust, people will not feel safe opening up. Often it is necessary to have input given on anonymous surveys, or use some other means to get the true data.

SWOT Overview

After the health checkup, do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) to understand the context of your business. This is one of many areas where an outside consultant can help facilitate the process. A person skilled in the analysis phase can lead groups through this critical step efficiently and objectively, preventing myopic thinking. A good consultant will not allow the team to delude themselves during the analysis phase. For example, if you claim your product is more appealing to men than product X, the consultant would ask what data you have to substantiate that statement. If you don't have it, you cannot claim the advantage until it has been measured.

The SWOT analysis starts with a thorough understanding of your customers. Who are they, and what needs do your products or services satisfy? Identify both internal and external customers. Where are they, and how do you communicate with them? What do they think about your products or services versus those of your competitors? Answer these questions, not only from your point of view, but more importantly, with data about how the customers really think. Often your internal view does not represent reality through the customer's eyes.

For example, a wholesale plumbing supply house was losing business, so they did an internal assessment of customer needs. They polled all the store clerks and management, generating the following four most important customer needs: lower prices, cleaner showrooms, more parking spaces, and better telephone skills for order takers. These seemed logical, so the owner developed a plan to address each deficiency.

Before plunging ahead (excuse the pun), he called in a research consultant to ask 20 typical customers about their plumbing supply needs. The consultant reported back that the plumbers mostly worked on contract at big job sites. They needed all the parts required for a job on hand before they could start work. Missing a single part among hundreds ordered could mean shutting down the entire job and losing income. With that background and a few more questions, the top three customer needs surfaced as: order accuracy, all parts delivered on time, and fast response if problems arose. Contrast the two lists. The internal customer needs assessment was wrong. The lesson is simple: never trust your own insight about customer needs. Always find a way to test your assumptions.

A second example demonstrates that often customers cannot articulate their own needs accurately. A very prestigious hotel in New York City ran a customer satisfaction program. Every hotel employee was taught to listen for customer input about needs and satisfaction. The maids and bellhops started picking up comments among the guests that the wait for an elevator was frustrating and long, since there were only two elevators in the hotel.

The hotel manager hired an architectural firm to come up with a solution. Could the elevators be staged differently or made faster in some way to provide greater customer satisfaction? After long study the manager was depressed to learn that their only solution was to install a third elevator at a cost of $1.8 million. However, this manager was very perceptive and creative. She came up with a solution for under $4,000. She simply had full-length mirrors installed next to the existing elevators on each floor. Guests would ring for the elevator and amuse themselves by checking their makeup or straightening their ties. As a result, they were less sensitive to the seconds ticking by and didn't notice any delay. The manager was solving a need by understanding her customers on a deeper level. It reminds me of the cosmetics executive who said, "In the Department Store we sell cosmetics, but the customer is buying hope." Only when the customer needs are fully understood can you assess the context of your existing business and begin to document the strengths and weaknesses of your group.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Identify areas where you have a competitive advantage over your competition. Scan all areas of the business, from research and new product development through collecting receivables and ongoing customer support. Take each area and identify where your group is strong or weak relative to others. To do this, you will need good data on the competition. This can be achieved by survey of customers, benchmarking or research. Many times, sales people on the front lines with the competition are a wealth of data. Most likely, your company has done a SWOT analysis for the whole company. The data from that should be included in your analysis because your group is part of the organization.

It is also important to include potential competition in this analysis, even if another firm is not currently operating in the market. Your network of suppliers is often a source of information on changes to the competitive landscape

Opportunities

The opportunities represent a creative approach to growing your business. Lay out everything you are doing and imagine what more could be done. Some of these ideas will be logical extensions of your current business, like selling milk through schools, as well as in the stores. Others might include ways of using excess capacity in a completely different market, like using an underutilized cereal press to make dog food. Use a creative brainstorming approach, where you go after as many ideas as possible, suspending all judgment to get ideas flowing. Opportunities are nearly infinite, so it is important to eventually channel these into a finite set of possibilities that make sense to do now.

Threats

Finally, document the threats that exist for every organization. It is easy to become defensive or go into denial in this phase. A good facilitator will ask probing questions and prevent missing a potentially debilitating threat. It is okay, even desirable, to act a little paranoid in this phase. If you have a successful business, there is a target on your back, and someone is aiming to reduce or eliminate your market share. To be successful in the long run, you must meet threats with countermeasures before they materialize. It is much easier to prevent would-be competitors from entering your market than to stop them once they have interfaced with your customers.

At this point, you have looked at yourself as a leader, the needs of the organization as a whole, and the role of your group. Note that the analysis between your local group and the larger organization often takes an iterative form. You lay out the issues at each level and see how they fit together. Ultimately, you have a deeper view of the issues, the problems, the need for change, and the opportunities at all levels.

This is a data-gathering process only. It will be tempting to make instant fixes to problems as they are described. Don't do it, even though that may frustrate some people. Explain that the assessment is vital background work for what is to come. Resolution of problems needs to happen in the context of a whole new way of looking at things: a new vision. If you attempt to fix things on the spot, you run the risk of putting Band-Aids on cancerous tumors. Everyone involved will need some patience, and you need to explain the process up front to allow this. Having done this assessment, you can now chart your course in the proper context.

But what if your Boss does not believe in all this?

It is frustrating for eager young professionals if their superiors place little faith in processes like these. Also, individual contributors with no formal supervisory control wonder how they can make a difference.

Do not press to organize the group above you unless your boss is genuinely enthusiastic about doing so. If that person is not interested in this approach, trying to pressure him into creating a trusting environment will backfire. This work must come from the heart.

The art of remedial training of one's boss is fraught with peril, so proceed with caution! Remember the old adage: "Never wrestle a pig - you get covered with mud and the pig loves it." That does not stop you from getting the benefits of a trusting environment in areas you control. You will be leading by example and demonstrating the caliber of your leadership to those above.

Every job has a leadership mode in some areas, even if there is no supervisory authority over people. If there is no group reporting to you, just document your beliefs about conduct in your current setting. Establishing a set of values, a vision, and congruent behaviors for your job will set you apart from those without that kind of grounding. You will be demonstrating leadership potential. It is important to start with yourself and not try to fix the rest of the world. As you conduct yourself in ways consistent with your personal framework, you will be rapidly propelled to a more formal leadership position.

As you improve your own areas of control, it may be possible, with the help of peers, to gently nudge your superior toward an environment of higher trust. The easiest way is to demonstrate the improved performance and atmosphere brought about by clarified values and vision in a few areas. Suggest the larger organization could benefit as well. Do not expect an overnight change in the boss. Instead, do the best you can with what you have. Understand this is a process, and patiently integrate it where the environment is accepting.

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Article Tags: culture, Leadership, Organization, success, Trust



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