People change slowly. They change because they have to, more often than
because they want to. And they change their behaviours before they
change their beliefs.
Nowhere is this more manifest than in business. And most large
organizations have a large number of people, and so, like oil tankers,
they change direction the slowest of all, and are the least agile and
manoeuvrable.
Change gurus and consultants have, over the years, pushed three ways to bring about change in organizations.  These are illustrated in the concentric circles at right.
The first way is by changing or imposing tools and technologies
that enable, or strait-jacket, employees. A software program that
requires you to complete credit check information on a new customer
before you can open up a customer ID and sell to that customer is one
example. New skills and competencies, both technical and 'soft' skills
like time management, can also be considered 'tools' of the trade. The
difference between a skill and a competency is that a competency is an
applied skill -- the competency to innovate, for example, is an
application of several skills, notably creative skills.
The second way is by changing or imposing work processes and methodologies.
The new regulations under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, have
imposed mandatory new processes on both managers and auditors of public
corporations.
The third way is by changing the culture
of the organization by using 'internal marketing', by leadership style,
through performance management and through reward and recognition
programs.
In the past generation, all three methods have been, and continue to
be, used in most organizations, particularly the larger ones which are
inherently harder to change. 'Core competency' development, which was
hot in the 1980s, has somewhat gone out of favour as the loyalty of
employees to employers, and employers' willingness to invest long-term
in employees, has waned. To most large enterprises, automation is a
more expedient way to use technology to achieve change, since to some
extent it bypasses change-resistant people entirely.
The rage of the 1990s was Business Process Reengineering, which
attempted to change organizations using the process lever. In
organizations where processes were defined and prescriptive, this was
generally a success. But, as Peter Drucker has pointed out, we now live
in a world where, for the first time, most employees know more about
how to do their own specialized job than their boss does, and almost
everyone's job is unique. When there is no longer any 'standard
process', any 'best practice' that applies across a large group of
employees' jobs, there is limited opportunity to apply this change
lever. One business guru has even predicted that the information age
will bring 'the death of processes'. What many organizations are doing,
instead, is suggesting,
rather than imposing, ways to improve productivity at the more granular
task level, rather than at the process level. Such bottom-up,
personalized productivity improvement programs are more focused and
effective than broad-brush process improvement programs, but are also
more expensive. They are generally only occurring, therefore, in the
small number of organizations still willing to make a significant
investment in their employees.
A more popular way of dealing with this 'problem' is to get rid of it
entirely, and to outsource or offshore processes entirely, so that they
become other organizations' -- suppliers' -- problems. Many
organizations have found that, in outsourcing, you ultimately get what
you pay for -- if you're lucky. Some organizations have already been
through several cycles of
outsourcing and then insourcing -- bringing functions and processes
that were being incompetently handled by outsourcers, back in to the
company, and then trying again with another outsourcer. Ironically, one
of the main victims of this revolving-door practice has been training
departments, so that many organizations have less capability today to
bring about organizational change either by improving processes and
productivity, or by teaching new competencies. When training is done by
outsiders, it is possible to teach skills, but nearly impossible to
teach competencies -- because teaching competencies requires a
knowledge of the context in
which the skills will be applied that outside teachers usually don't
have. That is why the apprenticeship and internship methods of teaching
competencies held sway for centuries -- because they provided that
context, they worked.
In North America at least, there has been in the last couple of decades
something of a cult of leadership, a belief that organizational leaders
can single-handedly achieve massive change by some alchemy of charisma,
management and example. This has been used to justify the huge salaries
such leaders are paid. But most studies have shown that business
leaders, like managers of sports franchises and political leaders,
'succeed' mainly because of good luck rather than good management --
they happen to come into power at a time when the market for the
company's product, and the economy, are both on the upswing, brief
periods when supply and demand happily coincide. And, like managers of
sports franchises and political leaders, they are also now prone to be
turfed out unceremoniously when their good fortune runs out. Charisma,
rewards, strategies and coercive performance reviews can be effective,
but their effect is notoriously short-lived. Ultimately, the success
and accomplishments of every company are the sum of the productive
efforts and energies of all of the employees of the company, nothing
more and nothing less. There is growing evidence that the contribution
of the average front-line worker is nearly as important as that of the
CEO who may make 100 times his salary.
I would argue then that, particularly as it gets larger, the only way
in which an organization can effectively differentiate itself or
outperform its competition, is by helping its employees to work
smarter. And the best ways to do that are to equip those employees with
critical skills and competencies, and empower them to leverage those
skills and competencies to give back to the organization creative
solutions to its particular, and evolving problems. The power of many.
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What are those critical skills and competencies? The competencies
depend to some extent on the nature of the business -- They are
contextual. But the skills are usually quite transferable between
organizations and across different industries and sectors of human
endeavor. I'd propose the ten shown at the bottom of this mind-map as a
good starting point:
I'm going to be talking about this mind-map again next week when I
invite you to help me, just for fun, 'reinvent' the education system.
These eight skills and two competencies are critical life skills, not
just critical employee skills. The eight skills are what are often
called 'soft' skills because their direct application to everyday work
is different for each of us, and not always immediately apparent, even
to the learner. That's why, even if we can teach them to our young
people before they graduate, they must still be taught again, built on
and practiced, in the context of the employer organization. Ideally
they should be taught one-on-one, but at the very least they need to be
taught as workshops, where the learning is immediately applied to real
and current problems and challenges of the organization. Too often,
when they're taught at all, they're taught in the abstract by outside
'experts' flown in for the occasion, who are enjoyable to listen to but
who know little about the business or the culture of the organization
in which they're to be applied.
Any employee with these eight skills is of staggering value to any organization:
- The ability to learn, apply instinct, think through and ask questions until the problem is really understood;
- The ability to think critically and challenge the way things are done now;
- Self-reliance and self-discipline to think for oneself and think on one's feet;
- The ability to take notice of, to perceive what's going on
in the world and in the company and in individual co-workers' heads and
hearts, and apply it empathetically and logically to the problems of
the organization, not just in one's own little niche but holistically;
- The ability to think creatively, to use imagination and to
apply it with other skills to develop in oneself the competency of
innovation (process, product and technology innovation);
- The ability to truly collaborate, to develop shared
work-products better than what the team members could have produced
working independently, and to draw on the collective wisdom of others;
- The ability to competently assume responsibility (a hundred times harder and more important than assuming authority); and
- The ability to master narrative, to tell stories, because
that is far and away the most effective way to communicate, to teach,
and to persuade.
Add to these eight skills these two competencies and you have an
unbeatable combination, an employee, a human being of almost unlimited
potential and capability:
- The competency to make a living for oneself and for others,
by establishing an enterprise, either spun off from or as an integral
part of an existing organization; and
- The competency to create community, to find the right
people for a project and to bring them together so they work
effectively as a team.
As I'll tell you about more tomorrow, when I confide why my search for
a 'second career' is taking so much longer than I thought it would, the
only meaningful role I can see myself playing in large organizations
today is in organizing and teaching these essential skills and
competencies to everyone in the organization, and in suggesting how
those skills and competencies can be applied, as I explained in my recent article,
to solve the organization's problems creatively, and letting the
employees practice applying these new skills immediately and
continuously.
Forcing employees to use awkward tools, coercive and frustrating
technologies, and mandatory, inflexible processes (as so many
organizations are doing today) demeans these employees, turns off their
heads and their hearts, and drives a wedge between them and management.
And teaching (or requiring) skills that employees don't get a chance to
apply is not only a waste of time and money, but demoralizing as well.
Only by equipping employees with these essential 'tools', and offering
(not mandating) processes that can be used immediately to apply those
tools to creatively solve the organization's most important intractable
problems, can management bring out the best in their people, and truly
bring about change in the organization.
Invest effectively in developing Critical Skills and you'll reap
Creative Solutions. That's the best ROI you can get. It's a simple
business success formula. All it takes is managers with the vision, the
courage and the trust in the untapped capacity and desire to do good
work inherent in every employee, to capitalize on it.
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