The Pace of Change

One of the best ongoing online series on leadership and business is the New York Times fantastic 'Corner Office' interviews conducted by Adam Bryant. In each piece, Bryant talks with a company CEO about business philosophy, their thoughts around people management, and often, and of particular interest to HR and recruiting professionals, the hiring and interview process.

In the most recent installment, Bryant talked with Harry West, CEO of the innovation design firm Continuum, and while Mr. West had some interesting things to share about interviewing and hiring -  'I ask a few very basic questions. “What is it you want to do? What is it that you’re good at? What is it that you’re not good at? Tell me about what you’ve done.”, the most intriguing part of the Corner Office piece was an observation West made about change, and specifically the speed in which change can be effected inside an organization. 

Here's the passage from the Times article:

Pacing is really important in an organization. When you’re leading, you’re generally trying to lead change, and I think it was Roy Amara, who said about technology, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” And I think the same applies to change within an organization.

Let that sink in for a second, we overestimate the impact of a (technology) change in the short run, and underestimate it in the long run. I think with the relentless, powered by social networks, 24/7 news and information cycle that can often lead to even more hype and therefore expecations about new technologies, that managing expectations and understanding an organization's ability to navigate through any significant change is more important than ever. But don't take my word for it, check what CEO West has learned about the pace of change in his career:

And so I’ve learned that it’s critical to think carefully about the pace of change, and it’s something that I’ve learned the hard way. It’s important to manage that carefully, because it’s not just about the pace of change that certain people in the company can manage.

It’s about the pace of change that the company as a whole can manage. You can push and push and nothing seems to happen, and then suddenly it takes off and you’re sort of running to catch up.

Look, we all know that change management is critical in any major process, strategy, or technology program or implementation. But I think it is incredibly easy to fail to have the proper appreciation and empathy for those whose worlds our great ideas and plans are going to impact. In other words, it often isn't about your ability to handle change, ambiguity, or stress  - it's about everyone else's too.

Neither West, nor I are advocating standing still, or waiting for the perfect conditions to effect change, but an occasional reminder that the pace of change might be equally important as the nature of the change is a good one.

Telling People What to Do

There are some people that really like giving out orders, and some, (certainly fewer), that like being told what to do. But I suspect the majority of us fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. As leaders or parents or when acting in any role that puts us in a position of authority, we want to set some basic direction or ground rules, and then sit back happily and watch our charges carry out their duties and tasks without much meddling or the need for intervention and correction.Click image for larger size

Face it, how many times do you have to tell your kids to clean up their room or to stop texting at dinner before it gets really tedious? And in the workplace it can get very tiresome to have to keep reminding Peter to include the cover sheets on the TPS reports. I mean come on, when is he going to finally get it? Yep, constantly telling people what to do, and the flip side, hearing again and again what you need to do, (or what you need to stop doing), both are dreary, monotonous, and at times soul-crushing.

What's the solution? I really don't have one except to say that no matter what side of the ledger you find yourself on, the constant repetition can only mean two things. One, the message simply isn't getting across. Or two, the message is clearly understood, and the person that needs to make the change just doesn't have the same agenda as the order-giver. I suppose there is a third scenario, where there is a valid moral or ethical objection to compliance, but that one is kind of rare and usually can be debunked on closer examination. I have not yet acceded to my 11 year-olds 'moral' objections to going to bed.

Click image for larger sizeSo if you find yourself as a crossroads with someone or something that simply won't see things your way, perhaps taking a page from the worlds of marketing or advertising is the best way forward. Take a look at the images that accompany this post. They are taken from the Library of Congress archives of Works Progress Administration posters from the late 1930s and early 1940s. An era known formally as the Great Depression, and less formally as 'absolute crap'. 

Both of these posters, and many of the others in the archive, are attempts to 'tell people what to do' in a time where for most people, pretty much the last thing they wanted to hear was a lecture or an admonition from anyone. Mostly, they just wanted to find work, or hang on to the jobs they had, and find some way to feel better about things. And as the 40s started, the likelihood of entering into World War II was pretty high. Certainly, a country going pretty much straight from economic depression to World War II in short order pretty much created an environment of stress, worry, and real fear about both the present and the future.

So why are these WPA posters so cool and kind of instructive? Well, for one reason they are really cool to look at. They are extremely well designed and artistic, as the WPA had access to and the availability of many top notch designers and artists who had found the normal markets for their work pretty thin during the depression. And secondly, mainly due to the constraints of the medium, they are simple and direct. 'Be Careful', and 'Visit The Zoo'. That's it. That is the entire message. But the design of the posters makes us want to look at them a little longer, to maybe be a little more open to the message, and perhaps, just a tiny bit, be more receptive to the pitch, to being told what to do.

I think it can be really easy to forget that once the message keeps repeating it often gets tuned out or just blends into the white noise.  But making it interesting, making it compelling, making it into art - well if you can do that you might have a chance at being heard.

Now if I can just photoshop 'Clean your room' on the Zoo poster and show it to the kid.

Have a Great Weekend!

Motivating the Team: When Metaphors Aren't Enough

Sports coaches are famous, perhaps notorious for breaking out the same kinds of tired, hackneyed, and over used motivational tactics and speeches to try and inspire confidence, encourage effort, and bind their team's together in a 'We are all in this together' or an 'It's us against the world' mindset.

Ever since the 'Win one for the Gipper' locker room speech achieved widespread notoriety in the classic movie 'Knute Rockne - All American', coaches of all sports and levels have continued to conjure slogans, phrases, sometimes even symbols, (make sure you touch the 'lucky poster' as you exit the locker room), to try and rev up the team prior to games, and other times, to continue to instill a philosophy, work ethic, or personality on the team that will serve as a season-long rallying cry.

One quote and it's corresponding message of 'stick to the task, even if we don't see immediate progress, eventually it will work out', is this one, from social reformer Jacob Riis:

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

This motivational quote, and variations of it, has been adopted by numerous sports teams over the years, most famously the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, as a means to achieve commitment and buy-in to the 'system', to tenacity, and to belief in a common cause as a means to eventually achieve success. Keep 'pounding the the rock' so to speak, and in time, we will become champs.

One new coach in the NBA, the Toronto Raptors' Dwane Casey, a believer in the 'pounding the rock' approach, has taken things one step further. In addition to preaching the Jacob Riis mantra to the players, he has actually had a 1,300-pound boulder placed in the team's locker room, a gigantic and visual reminder to the team of the philosophy and work ethic he is seeking to inspire.

From the Yahoo! Sports piece:

The boulder, purchased at a quarry in Thornhill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, is there to remind the players every time they walk on the court. They’re supposed to touch it as they pass by and will leave every huddle with a call to “Pound the Rock!” 

I get the idea of placing an actual rock that all the players have to see and at least tacitly acknowledge each day. After all, talk is cheap and day after day of any coach or leader espousing a rallying cry is eventually going to begin to lose impact on the team, and get tuned out by the players it seeks to motivate. But I wonder if these kinds of motivational tactics, (placing a boulder in the locker room, putting up posters everywhere with the tam slogan), are any more effective.

And in one well-reported case from a few years back, one NFL team had it's 'Keep Chopping Wood' motivational display backfire on them.

Do these props, posters, and motivational displays have any more effectiveness that simply the words and actions of a good leader? Does your organization have any of these kinds of props?

I know someone out there has a Successories poster in their office!

Have a Great Weekend!

Measuring Happiness at Work - A Drop in the Bucket?

This week while in conversation with a colleague about how organizations attempt to quantify and track measures like employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and even employee happiness I was reminded and shared with the group this little story from the Chief Happiness Officer blog about how one organization was taking a check or a read on employee happiness in the simplest way I have ever heard.

For benefit of those of you who did not follow the link to read the account, it describes a process that a UK Social Media Agency had 'deployed' that was insanely simple. At the end of each day as staff left the office they encountered a display of three large buckets. One bucket was full of tennis balls. The other two buckets were marked 'H' for 'Happy', and 'U' for 'Unhappy', respectively.

As staff exited for the evening, they grabbed a tennis ball from the full bucket and placed it into either the 'Happy' bucket or the 'Unhappy' bucket. The next morning a member of staff tallied the previous days' results, posted them on the company intranet, and re-set the bucket voting system for the new day.

The organization tracked the results and trends over time, and were able to take the temperature of the organization to some extent each day. While the tennis ball happiness voting system is a crude and kind of imprecise measurement of what has come to be known as a more complex and nuanced concept, it did provide a near real-time feedback loop for company leaders to get a feel for the mood of the team.

In a small, self-contained company, this kind of low-tech system can be successful. In larger and more geographically spread organizations it would be a bit more of a challenge. But with the advent of powerful mobile technologies, this kind of happiness voting system could easily be created as a Web App or iPhone App that all staff in the organization could access no matter where they lived and worked.

What do you think? Does the simple, tennis ball 'Happy or Unhappy' poll provide meaningful information for an organization? Could you see yourself setting up three buckets like this in your office? What do you think the results would be?

How would you vote today? 

Have a great weekend!

The NBA, where a 30% pay cut was the better option

So the National Basketball Association, henceforth referred to as the 'NBA', 'The League', or 'The Association', fresh off by most accounts was a very successful season, one that started with the LeBron James 'Decision' drama last summer, followed by a compelling regular season that saw several young players raise their play to superstar status, and capped off by a dramatic Championship series were the aforementioned James' Miami Heat team was defeated by a rag-tag, inspirational band of tattooed milliionaires from Dallas, has managed to follow up on its recent success and buzz by failing to forge a new labor agreement between the owners and players, resulting in a classic 1930's style Lockout1.

The lockout has effectively stopped almost all league business, imposed a ban on teams having any contact with their players, and has even resulted in the scrubbing of the NBA's and associated team websites from player photos, bios, and really most signs that people actually play the games2.

Since in a lockout situation the owners no longer have to pay the players, one might think the teams could settle in for a protracted impasse, since player salaries make up the majority of team expenses. But even though the lockout is but a few days old, some teams are already making decisions that seem primarily intended to reduce non-player labor costs. Case in point - the Los Angeles Lakers decision to decline to renew the contract of long-time Assistant General Manager Ronnie Lester3.  

From the ESPN Los Angeles piece on Lester's departure from the Lakers:

Barring a last-minute change of heart, Lester's 24-year run with the Lakers will end when his contract expires this month. By then, at least 20 other Lakers staffers, including almost all of the scouts who work under Lester in the basketball operations department, will have already packed their belongings and headed home. They've been told little by the team, except that employees whose contracts expire on or after June 30 would not have their contracts renewed, and their jobs may or may not open up again down the line.

So on the surface it seems like a sad, but kind of straightforward deal. The League is in what appears will be a lengthy labor dispute, the upcoming season is perhaps already in danger of being delayed, if not totally canceled, and teams like the Lakers are taking quick and aggressive steps to reign in labor costs that are still in their control.  Makes sense right, and really isn't all that noteworthy a story. 

That is until we catch one more little tidbit about the Lester employment situation with the Lakers, buried about 2/3 the way into the piece:

Lester wasn't fired or laid off. By all accounts, he's still greatly respected within the organization and around the league. Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak considers him both a friend and one of the best assistant GMs in the league. He just didn't protect himself well enough last summer when the Lakers gave him the option of signing a one-year contract for the same pay as before, or a three-year deal at a 30 percent pay cut.

Now it gets more interesting. Apparently this time last year, the Lakers offered Lester a choice - re-up for one year at his current salary, or take a 30% hit but get the security of a three-year deal. Twelve months ago the lockout might have seemed a possible but unlikely outcome given the apparent irrationality of a collection of mostly billionaires (the owners) and millionaires (the players) being unable to agree on a fair division of a massive pot of revenues4. But even as far back as last summer even the most optimistic observers of the NBA scene were expecting a labor problem, and a likely lockout. 

As an executive on the inside, Lester had to know that the lockout was likely, and he must have also suspected that in the event of a lockout, front office personnel might be in a tenuous situation. But knowing that, and presented with a three-year, 30% pay cut option, he elected to re-up for the single year, maintain his salary level, and leave himself exposed to the contract non-renewal it appears he is facing this month.

Tough call, even when not staring an impending business crisis in the face. But it is a good question to ponder, even if a theoretical one.

If your employer offered you a three-year guarantee with a 30% pay cut, would you take the deal? 

Or would you roll the dice like Ronnie Lester did, maintain your salary for the time being, and take your chances?

Notes:

1. That sentence was over 100 words in length. Ridiculous. Get an editor.

2. It is really kind of jarring. Take a look at NBA.com if you don't believe me. The front page of the Knicks team site features a tribute to the team's dancers and the 'Knicks Now' section is mainly about some recent community outreach efforts by the club featuring team executives.

3. Lester's best season of his NBA playing career was 1981-1982, when he averaged 11 points per game for a pretty bad Chicago Bulls team. The second leading scorer on that team was Reggie Theus, possibly more well known to readers as the star of Saturday morning classic 'Hang Time'.

4. There is quite a difference in opinion how profitable (or not), the NBA is, and whether or not the players or owners are mainly responsible for the current labor crisis. Some good background can be found on the FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times site.