Center for Learning & Organizational Change

The sweet little girl in the photo is my granddaughter, Lucy. Her smile that lights the world has been temporarily replaced with an explosion of concern. Lucy’s Mom just rocked her world by removing a basket of treats, disrupting her plans for a blissful experience with unlimited chocolate. Lucy’s expression captures what we all consider when confronted with unplanned change:  Wait! What just happened here? A minute ago, I had everything all figured out. Then, the senior woman in the house changed my plans. Now what? As we mature, we are socialized not to show a face like Lucy’s. But that doesn’t mean that change, even positive change, doesn’t bring the same confusion and disappointment.  We simply learn not to show it. 

People leading change often forget what William Bridges observed decades ago in his classic work Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change.  Bridges observes that it’s not change that’s so challenging, it’s transition. He defines change as the situation, i.e. the new decision, the new job, the new rules, the new plan. Transition is the psychological process we undergo to come to terms with the change. Change is external – open and apparent for everyone. Transition is internal. We don’t see the personal turmoil of transition, unless people like Lucy make it obvious. When we don’t see the turmoil, we forget that it’s there.  Or, we pretend it’s not there so we don’t have to deal with it.  The mistake of focusing only on the change and not the transition has derailed otherwise positive change or made it much harder than necessary.

Change is often presented as a contrast between a “bad” past and a “good” future. Thus, the rationale goes, we’ll eagerly make the sacrifices necessary once we understand the potential. What this contrast ignores is that the past was good for some people. They figured out the game. Things got easier. They learned how to succeed. Change takes away ideas and behaviors as comfortable as sweatpants on a Saturday morning. No number of business case presentations on the necessity for change will make people who prized the past feel better about what they may lose.

Keys to Successful Transition

If you haven’t picked up Managing Transitions in a while, or ever, it’s a rich guide filled with examples and ideas to help people navigate the badlands between where they are and where they are going. My key recommendations from this work are summarized below.

1. Plan for change and transition. Change is discreet, episodic and impersonal. It’s described in plans or timelines everyone follows. Transition is complex, emotional and personal.  It’s expressed in reactions to endings, losses or sacrifices.

2.  Recognize transition travels at the speed of each individual.  Transition progress is measured in the unique journeys of people. It doesn’t respond to quarter end deadlines or change milestones. Business case presentations, pep talks or threats won’t accelerate transitions. Helping people figure out how they can succeed in the new world, and some patience, will.

3.  Celebrate transition victories. It doesn’t matter if you thought “they” should have adjusted faster or with greater ease.  What matters is that your talented associates are learning to give up the personal success of the old to try out the promise of the new. Small steps are big deals. Treat them that way.

The good news is both change and transition are manageable. That’s good news, because the benefits of change are realized through transition. With support, understanding and patience, people will make the private conversions necessary to move from endings to beginnings. Just like with Lucy, it’s possible to see those smiles again.

Originally published at Great Moments – Susan Barrett Kelly

Rawn Shah has (another good) article on his Forbes.com blog, this time on How To Move Away from the Industrial Age Company Model. While he is focused on social business, his comments remind me of things I see in knowledge management and continuous improvement projects.

If Social Business is really transforming the way we do business why are most of the stories and cases out there focused on changes to a single business function like marketing, human resources, or customer service? Shouldn’t it act as a change across several of these functions, or for that matter will these functions go away or change so fundamentally that we can no longer tell them apart?

The larger issue that Rawn is talking about here is the model of companies as several interacting components in the traditional value-chain model. Among other things, this model works the same way it has for all of the 20th century: optimize the individual components and you will optimize the whole. Of course, this assumption wasn’t exactly true before, and it is becoming less true as the nature of companies change. (You can optimize one part of a chain and end up creating worse performance of the overall system.)

But what does this have to do with social business? It is the nature of social business activities to see more – see more of the business, the people, the customers. If you go this direction, you cannot help but see what is happening with your colleagues and customers outside the formal scope of your role.  The barriers are all artificial – invisible to the people on the ground.  And if you have the natural inclination to participate or you cannot see the “barriers” (because roles and positions aren’t pushed in social business), then it is likely that you will want to jump into the mix. Have enough people working in this way, and they will naturally discover interesting work that no one would predict from looking at their official job descriptions. Similar discussions show up in knowledge management circles. Social business opens up this world. Are businesses ready for it?

I see connections to my process consulting work. Opening up a constraint in one location can cause it to move to another location. “Optimizing” an area that supports a key function might actually damage the key function. Examples: 1) Fire the paralegals (because they are an “expense”), forcing the lawyers do pick up the slack. Result: Fewer clients served – less income. 2) Getting a “deal” on raw materials from a new supplier, saving a few pennies. But the supplier is unreliable, forcing downtime and stock-outs. Or the materials aren’t as high quality, causing more rework, reducing capacity – less income.

Continuous improvement efforts are systemic views by their very nature. Companies that go “all in” on continuous improvement find that the improvement efforts must look at all parts of the business. If operations improves to the point of being able to supply anything that sales throws at it, then the obvious opportunity is to synchronize sales and operations, so that the whole can grow together. Just as with Rawn’s discussion of the impact of social business, organizations need to have the ability to look where ever they need to serve the customer.  And that doesn’t fit the standard reductionist (industrial) model.

[Photo: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (1 + 1 = 3)" by Mubina H]

 Sourced from: Knowledge Jolt with Jack

The behavior an organization truly expects shows up in what it rewards.

The awards dinner is designed to impress.  It’s the event of the year with no expense spared to create the ambiance of success. Laughter and chatter fill the room until the crowd is called to order. Associates and guests excitedly make their way to their seats. The CEO hosts this annual awards night every year as a way to publicly acknowledge another year of success and reward those who made it happen. This year, the CEO emphasizes the importance of teamwork and collaboration as organizational tools to improve results and lower costs.

The crowd’s anticipation level rises as the first award is announced. The Sales Officer from the X Region is announced as the winner of The CEO Award. This announcement is followed by stifled gasps, then polite applause. As the winner accepted hugs and steps to the stage, the CEO proudly reviews a list of achievements as the basis for the award: revenue growth across all lines, increases in share and units sold, glowing customer reviews. Others in the audience reviewed their lists, too. The angry phone calls and hostile emails about promises he made to the customer that they were threatened to keep. Meetings about cross unit selling that the Region X leader blew off.  The fire drills that took up the weekends of their team members with little follow up on what happened, much less expressions of gratitude. All agreed that the Region X Sales Officer got results. They had his shoe prints on their backs to show it.

The CEO happily moves on to the next award, newly created this year to emphasize the organization’s increased emphasis on the benefits of collaboration. The Breakthrough Innovation leader excitedly jumps up as her name is called. The CEO beams as he discusses the passion this person holds for innovation and the enthusiasm thrown into the job. Her peers agree, but for different reasons. They wonder if she’s ever met an idea she didn’t like. Her enthusiasm for possibilities has produced dozens of disconnected ad hoc teams, resourced from other responsibilities, pulled together for days to “explore possibilities”.  The position of Breakthrough Innovation was created without the “burden” of a P&L to tamper exploration, and her lack of tangible results show it. Some wonder if her performance is measured by the number of meetings she creates.

As the lovely evening closes, the CEO thanks the award winners as role models for the type of teamwork and collaboration the organization values. All agree that he’s right about that.

Could this describe your organization? Does it expect behaviors it does not reward? Does it know how to spot behavior that represents stated expectations?

Frustrated because efforts to encourage greater teamwork and collaboration aren’t working? 

Perhaps you’ve been to awards ceremonies like the one described above. Have you participated in change efforts where buzzwords were one thing and the behavior quite another? Thirty seven years ago, Steve Kerr wrote a classic article:  On The Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping for B, citing the frequent inconsistency between what gets said and what gets rewarded in many organizations.  If A gets rewarded, A gets done – regardless of the number of colorful posters extolling the virtues of B.  To get something different we must do something different.

For organizations that want to experience expected behaviors beyond vision statements or values lists, Morton Hansen describes the basic routes to get there in his book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results.  First, know what you want when you see it.  Then, choose associates who demonstrate these behaviors, especially in hire and promote decisions.  Finally, encourage change in associates already in your organization by recognizing the behavior you want.

Yeah, But…

Are your eyes rolling? Oh, if it were only that easy. It’s not easy, but it’s also not as hard as some might think. It’s certainly not as hard as rewarding A and hoping for B.  There are three ways to modify behavior to aspirations that organizations of all types, sizes and resources can effectively use.

1. Describe it.  Words like “Teamwork” and “Collaboration” conjure up all kinds of behaviors for people.  The characters rewarded from the last post are good examples. The Region X leader might legitimately feel his role is to lead the team.  He leads, you follow. Know people who think like that? The Breakthrough Innovation leader thinks she collaborates because she brings people together for everything. Don’t assume people understand of expected behavior through labels alone. Be explicit.  Hansen offers an example.  In German software maker SAP, the leaders didn’t just state they expected “collaboration” and hoped everyone would know what they meant. They stated an expectation that “leaders would ensure the appropriate involvement of others across roles, departments and locations to accomplish goals.”  It’s clear, has room for adaption yet specific enough to spot it when it happens (or doesn’t).

2. Measure it. The gift of stating expectations in observable behavior means that people know it when they see it. When that happens, measurement is possible. In rewarding behavior change, how you measure is as important as what you measure. To really understand how someone is changing his or her behavior, ask peers and subordinates. Tools like Survey Monkey make this type of anonymous feedback easier than ever.  Hansen cites an unnamed investment bank that asks associates to rank their peers on a scale of helpfulness, and the list of the top ranked is provided to the senior team.   What a powerful idea! Can you imagine the behavior change in some organizations if rating and ranking of behavior came from the bottom up as well as the top down?

3. Reward it. This is the most obvious and brings us back full circle. Think of rewards, including incentives, promotions, and honors, as spotlights. They illuminate behaviors the organization wants and brings its intentions to life. Rewards also take the most discipline. It’s tough to tell Region Leader X that he’s not getting the award because of his behavior.  It’s difficult to deny the enthusiasm and effort of the Breakthrough Innovation Leader because her focus is misdirected.  Resist the temptation to dodge disappointment. Disappointment is temporary, your message is lasting.

These three steps look simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy. Easy is doing what you always do and expecting something different. While Hansen’s three steps for changing behavior of incumbents might not ultimately be enough, it’s hard to imagine a change plan without them. And, it’s a place to start. Sometimes, that’s the hardest place to find.

References

Kerr, S. (1975). On the Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping For B.  Academy of Management Journal, vol. 18. No. 4, pp. 769-783.

Hansen, M.T. (2009). Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results. Boston: Harvard Business Press

Related articles

• Making the Jump from Good to Great – 3 ways to get started (leaderchat.org)
• Leaders Who Don’t Support Collaboration Should be Replaced (jmorganmarketing.com)

Originally published as a two-part series at Great Moments – Susan Barrett Kelly

I have read several pieces recently that talk about a shift from “traditional” forms of doing work or being organized to a “networked” form.  Two of these are the 2012 State of Community Management report from The Community Roundtable and Anne Marie McEwan’s discussion of the Learning Workplace. Go read the pieces to see if you see similar things in your mind.

Both of these contain the models that caught my eye.  Maybe it was because I saw both of these in proximity to one another that it sparked a thought for me. The Community Roundtable has their Community Maturity Model, and Anne Marie McEwan has the Smart Work Framework. I have seen other pictures and discussions of how people and communities work together, and this idea of moving from single-actors and highly structured through a transition and into life in the network is very interesting to me.  Even some of the discussions of Tribal behavior suggests that the highest level of interaction are those where the entire tribe is working together for higher purpose, rather than just for themselves.  In the context of this reading, I hear “network” again.

Where else do you see networks as a stage of maturity or a step in progress of development? What comes after “network” or “hyper-network?”

[I found the Anne Marie McEwan piece via Harold Jarche.]

 Sourced from: Knowledge Jolt with Jack

Remember playground pick up games? Can the enthusiasm of creating games, rounding up players and adapting on the fly become a model for collaboration in organizations? 

The ability to collaborate is an organizational requirement for the 21^st century business. More wins happen in the white space working between organizational structures than within dedicated units and teams.  Resources and intellectual capital often span borders. This distributed capital combined with the speed of change and intensity of competition requires organizations to break the chains of reporting relationships and work across as well as up and down. There simply isn’t enough time to re-organize the boxes every time an opportunity arises. As Amy Edmonson writes in her article “Teamwork on the Fly” in the April issue of Harvard Business Review, organizations need to play more like pick up teams and less like carefully managed professional teams.

Why The Effort Is Worth It

Organizations that figure out how to collaborate are well rewarded. In Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results, Morton Hansen (2009) suggests attractive results. Hansen identifies three categories of collaboration benefits: innovation, better sales and better operations. His research suggests organizations that effectively work in the white space realize improved profit growth and asset efficiency, with a resulting healthy boost to return on equity.

What Gets In The Way

The reasons for building collaboration as an organizational competency are inherently obvious, which is why so many try. My guess is that more try than truly succeed. Hansen documents challenges to collaboration that perhaps you have experienced.  Incentive and performance systems that reward based solely upon unit and personal results contribute to organizational hoarding of people and ideas. Knowledge management systems are weak, so people don’t know how to connect with experience and expertise elsewhere. Support mechanisms are not in place to transfer resources across boundaries. These infrastructure challenges are real and must be changed to improve collaboration.

Just Get Better

While the infrastructure barriers to long-term collaboration must be removed for sustained success, those barriers should not excuse failure to get better at working in white space.  Edmonson (2012) shows the way.  Use the pick up team model for flexible, temporary organizations to capture unique opportunities. You don’t need to change infrastructure to play by pick up rules. 

The Pick Up Game Rules

Define the Game. Edmonson calls this “scoping.”  Before organizing the team, define the game. What’s the opportunity? Why do we think we can win? Where are the boundaries? What are we willing to commit? How do we keep score? Some organizations throw smart people together and ask them to “figure it out.” This not only wastes time, but also adds more chaos to an inherently messy proposition. Even in pick up games, the game and the rules are defined before teams are chosen.

Design the Team and Its Support.  Edmonson thinks of this as “scaffolding.” It’s the temporary design that supports the project, but is flexible enough to change as the work changes. What resources does it require? What roles? What knowledge management tools does the team need, at least to start? How are team members switched in and out? Don’t over think this. Unlike intact teams; pick up teams stay together only long enough to win.  But the more of the basic scaffolding the team doesn’t have to figure out, the quicker it can focus on the opportunity.

Pick the Players. Pick up players are talented volunteers. According to Edmonson, the best players are those confident enough to experiment, speak up, listen, reflect and integrate. A team is doomed when parts of the organization are asked to offer a team member as a “tax” and the most expendable member is offered.  The right talent is vital for pick up games, where speed, creativity and collaboration wins.

Practice Some Plays. Pick up games are more chaotic. People have to build trust and mutual understanding in the midst of the “fuzzy front end” of an opportunity. Make it easier by encouraging the team to develop assumptions about how it will work together. What are the interdependent relationships between the team and the rest of the organization? How does the team manage hand offs and communication? How does the team connect to learn? The best way to accelerate pick up team functioning is to experiment, observe, evaluate and adapt practices. Experiment early and deliberately rather than late and accidentally.

Have a Coach.  Pick up teams can be burdened with organizational drama. The right coach is vital to keep the effort focused and members motivated. According to Edmondson, a pick up team leader has the special role of emphasizing purpose, which can get lost in the commotion of white space projects. He or she also needs to provide the emotional support needed for members to freely and quickly test, try and share. Part of the emotional support is to reframe failure from something to be avoided to something that produces progress.

Embrace Messiness. Innovation comes from the creative destruction of boundaries and barriers replaced with something better. Expect the inconvenience of broken processes and the emotional dust ups of destruction. These are the price for a better solution that the old structure could not deliver.

The next prize for your organization may be in the white space. Practice collaboration by playing by pick up game rules. Encourage people to get better at working across and around instead of the comfort zone of up and down. Find the energy from a good short-term game that can help your organization win in the long season.

Resources

Edmondson, A. G. (2012). Teamwork on the Fly. Harvard Business Review, April, 2012. pp. 72- 79.

Hansen, M. T. (2009). Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and reap Big Results. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Originally published at Great Moments – Susan Barrett Kelly

In cognitive design we place primary emphasis on using features and functions to create thoughts and feelings.  Objects and artifacts are interesting only in so far as the mental states they create.  It is all about think-and-feel especially in domains where having psychological impact is the primary objective as in education, healthcare, communication, improving knowledge worker productivity, entertainment and many other areas.

We need to design and engineer products, services and even organizations so that they are optimized for how individual and group minds really work. While this statement is a given for regular readers of the Cognitive Design blog, is it far from broadly accepted.

So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that demonstrate the value created by think-and-feel. Take for example, the recent study reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that shows we place more value on experiential purchases than we do material purchases. More specifically, they found experiences such as vacations hold more value than products such as clothes.  Experiences are easier to integrate with our identities and can be savored and shared more flexibility than possessions. They require active participation and naturally tend to be more transformative than objects.

Importantly, the researchers:

“show that the tendency to cling more closely to cherished experiential memories is connected to the greater satisfaction people derive from experiences than possessions”

This reveals the primary importance of cognitive design.

 Sourced from: Cognitive Design

Tony Schwartz has a great, short piece on the HBR blogs, The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time. It was posted two weeks ago and has over 500 comments plus it’s been retweeted and discussed in many other places. If you have some time to focus, peruse the comments along with the article. Good conversation.

Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

I have written on this topic many, many times. It’s a favorite element of both my personal effectiveness and project management lines of thinking. The short form is that multitasking saps individuals and organizations of effectiveness AND energy. And it is a vicious cycle, tied up with task prioritization, deadlines, work overload, work-life balance, and many other familiar topics around human performance.

As a reminder, what we are talking about here is task switching. I am not particularly interested in aspects of walking and chewing gum, or driving while talking on the phone.

Multitasking in the business context means working on multiple tasks “at once.” Or as we know, having a big pile of work and being forced to SWITCH between them without ever getting them done. Throw on top of it the problem of interruptions and too-many-meetings, and you get a great ball of nothing-gets-done.

How to make this happen? If you are a solo practitioner, the general direction has to do with removing the opportunity to pull yourself in multiple direction. Use the Pomodoro Technique to focus in blocks. Use something like Personal Kanban to explicitly create a means to limit the work-in-process. Use Getting Things Done or similar approaches to manage context and help your brain.

If you manage a group or a portfolio, you need both standards of behavior (to help reduce distractions, eliminate useless meetings, and deal with email overload) and new ways of approaching work (to help reduce active tasks and keep clear prioritization. For project organizations, I really believe in Critical Chain Project Management from the Theory of Constraints approach to business. For smaller groups and even in combination with other project management approaches, I really like the Kanban approach to dealing with knowledge work.

 Sourced from: Knowledge Jolt with Jack

A recent CIO Magazine article on “collaboration” had me scratching my head as to how it was talking about collaboration. And then I re-read Luis Suarez’ recent article on Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver and realized my problem.

Here is the CIO piece: IT Must Provide Enterprise Collaboration Tools Employees Will Use

Businesses are under pressure to enable collaboration beyond the corporate firewall as workers increasingly need to connect with remote colleagues as well as business partners, suppliers and consultants. The challenge to IT departments is that many employees are turning to email and consumer-grade file-sharing services to get their work done and exposing the enterprise to risk in the process.

Let’s put this in big, bold letters. Exchanging files and data is NOT COLLABORATION. It’s simply exchanging files and data. In fact, I would argue that most collaboration has nothing to do with these things.

The problem – as always – is that people are confusing the tools for the behavior. The behavior we want to see is people working together to get things done (“collaboration”). What does the CIO piece talk about? It talks about the importance of intellectual property and records management. It talks about the fact that people need to share information with business partners outside the walls of their own organization. And that most people share that information via email and other “unsecured” routes because internal tools aren’t doing the job. The quotes are all from vendors who provide “cloud solutions” to exchanging files.

Collaboration has to do with people working together, developing a common understanding of their situation, and devising the appropriate strategies and tactics to move forward. And social business goes even further to considering how people are at the center of what we do in business, and how can we enable the conversations that have to happen to get things done. Both of these operate under an assumption that more and more of our work is our work, not my work or your work. We work together to make things happen. Focusing on email or file-exchange is like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because that is where the light is (see Streetlight effect).

Luis Suarez’ piece goes even further. How can the idea of social business take root, if business continues to focus on making a buck? Instead, business should worry about serving its customers and creating an environment where its people can thrive. If it cannot “make a buck” doing those things, then what is the point of trying to become a “social business.” And why would knowledge workers want to work in an environment where roadblocks get thrown up at every turn. No wonder it is easier for people to talk about collaboration-as-sharing-files.

p.s. Please go have a read on Luis’ piece. The comments alone are great – both agreeing and disagreeing with his arguments.

 Sourced from: Knowledge Jolt with Jack

As the economy wakes from its long winter, expect the “Talent Wars” to heat up. Organizations feel increasingly confident about creating competitive advantage through talent and seek the “superstars” to take them to the next level. Star employees who waited out the economic storm in other organizations are anxious to take the leap. It’s a win- win, right?  Stars get the opportunity to cash in on their accomplishments and re-create their success in new organizations. The new organization gets a market advantage due to the brilliance and capability of their new star.   While it sounds good, raiding stars is often a lose- lose for both the star and the new organization. Why? A single star can’t take critical elements that created their success with them.

The Case to Chase Stars

Knowledge intensive industries, such as finance, law, technology, etc. carry an   assumption that the performance rests within the talent of the individual.  Those who believe knowledge work is fungible view talent as a plug in. If the law is the law, the best lawyer will get the best results.  If code is code, the best engineer will get the breakthroughs.  Because individual attributes are portable, the organization that lands the best knowledge-based talent gets the success that they bring with them. Thus, the case is made to chase stars.  Bring your bag of tricks and come work your magic for us.

The Portability Argument

Research out of Harvard University disputes the notion that talent portability is a quick fix to build organizational capability. Boris Groysberg, Linda Eling- Lee and Ashish Nanda found a near perfect subject for examining the portability of star success: stock research analysts.  The quintessential knowledge workers, research analysts analyze companies in particular industries and make subsequent investment recommendations.  This word requires individual talent and insight, deep knowledge of a particular industry; lots of industry contacts, and a quality reputation built on reliability. All of those attributes travel with the individual, so success should be portable. Groysberg, Eling-Lee and Nanda followed star stock analysts who changed employers, presumably reflecting an attempt by the raiding organization to build an advantage. But it didn’t work. Star analysts that switched institutions had a decline in performance that lasted almost five years. The new organization captured the individual talent, but not the structure that built their success.

What Else Goes Into the Success Mix?

Of course, high performing knowledge workers add value to their organizations. But how?  The best outcome comes from the combination of skilled individual talent and organizational capabilities.  Here’s what high talent knowledge workers can’t take with them when they leave:

1. Knowledge of the “unwritten rules”. This is all of the “how to get work done” knowledge that rests in the organizational white space. Firm insiders accumulate tacit knowledge they utilize for success. What are we really good at? How do I find the best resources? Who is an expert? Groysberg, Eling-Lee and Nanda argue that this accumulation of organizational tacit knowledge explains why improved performance of experts is related to tenure.
2.  Their colleagues. No one gets results alone, not even superstars. When stars switch firms, they lose their internal social network along with the information, support and advice it provides. They lose the collective wisdom of shared experience and the complimentary skills that filled their gaps.
3. Organizational capabilities.  High status organizations have more to offer stars. They have more resources, more opportunities, more visibility and typically, a higher talent level of colleagues. Stars find it difficult to reproduce results when they move to an organization with less industry status.

So What?

Organizations and people successfully match for all kinds of reasons. It’s wise for organizations to seek the best possible talent for openings, just as it is for people to seek the best fit. Everyone deserves to be in the place where they can shine. The danger is falling into the delusion that a single individual, even a superstar, is a hero whose placement alone will provide competitive advantage. Too much of anyone’s success is embedded in organizational and relationship context to expect him or her to readily duplicate old results in a new place.

For individuals, be realistic about what you can or cannot duplicate from your current success.  If you decide a move makes sense, expect to put considerable time into learning how your new organization works, building new relationships and understanding the organization’s capabilities.  Enter with an open mind and show some humility. Regardless of your stellar resume, you will need the grace of others to succeed.

For organizations, hire talent not heroes. It’s unfair to expect anyone to immediately replicate his or her old results in a new place.  Be prepared to invest time, energy and resources to maximize the potential of new hires, even superstars. Above all, attend to current employees during the transition period.  (Perhaps if current employees were attended to all the time, you wouldn’t have to chase stars – but that’s a different post.) Your new stars’ ultimate success will rest on his or her ability to give their best and get the best from others, so start those relationships right.

Success is an amalgamation of individual talent, organizational knowledge, collegial support and institutional capabilities. Remember that removing one element diminishes all.

Reference

Groysberg, B., Lee, L.E.  , Nanda, A. (2008). Can They Take It With Them? The Portability of Star Knowledge Workers’ Performance. Management Science, July 2008. Vol. 54, no. 7. Pp. 1213-1230.

Related articles

• There is no “War for Talent” (colleensharen.wordpress.com)

Originally published at Great Moments – Susan Barrett Kelly

“Never try to change culture. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.” – Peter Drucker 

It’s hard to find an organizational mission statement that doesn’t include some reference to people.  People are our most important asset. Our most important customers are our people.  Yet, reliable surveys like Gallup show that employees frequently don’t feel the love.  Organizational leaders grumble that talent management practices don’t deliver results. Why do these stubborn gaps persist through good and bad economic times?

Many variables go into the employer/employee relationship- far too many to cover in a single blog post. My focus will be on just one:  Context is everything in people practices. “One size fits all” strategies – the kind many in global organizations find attractive because they are easier to manage – are frequently trumped by culture.

Examine talent retention strategies as an example. Assume that the organizations that discuss people as their most important asset really mean their strongest performing people are their most important asset. It’s not unfair.  The twin goals of 1) retain and optimize top performers and 2) replace poor performers with better performers are at the heart of many talent management strategies.

Research shows that turnover and performance follow a “U” shaped relationship. Most voluntary turnover occurs at the twin peaks of high performers and low performers. Voluntary turnover is lowest among average performers- at the bottom of the “U”. Why?  High performers are more attractive to alternative employers and, as a result, have more options. Low performers are often more doubtful about their ability to succeed in their organization, and are often more dissatisfied with their job.  The “U” shaped turnover pattern relates to well known talent management strategies, e.g. forced ranking and pay for performance schemes.

What’s the Problem?

Talent management solutions focused on retaining top performers and upgrading poor performers have mixed results, particularly in global organizations.   Interesting research recently out of Cornell University helps to explain why.  Most talent research is based on the 5% of the global workforce in the U.S. and, as a result, has a Western bias. Sturman, Shao and Katz offer that the bias in turnover and retention research misses the cultural context so often at the root of “stay or go” decisions by employees. While they agree that the principal of the “U” shaped relationship between performance and retention is generally true across cultures, the details are very different.  Think of it this way: a global organization wants to keep the top performer in New York and the top performer in Mumbai.  But the cultural factors that influence the “stay or go” decision of each are quite different.

Beyond the Carrot and the Stick

Sturman, Shao and Katz examined data from a large multi national corporation to show how culture can trump intent of global talent management solutions based on North American cultural values. A few examples follow:

Pay for Performance compensation schemes that over- reward high performers and takes away rewards from low performers works best in individualist, performance-oriented cultures, like the U.S.  It works far less well to retain high performers or encourage turnover in low performers in collectivist cultures, like India, with a strong orientation that group effort gets results so rewards should be shared.

Senority is a critical factor in cultures with a high power difference orientation, frequently found in emerging markets Brazil and Russia. High or low performers with significant seniority may be more reluctant to change employers because in doing so they surrender the authority and deference provided by tenure. Seniority is less a factor in turnover decisions in cultures with low power difference orientations, often found in Canada and the U.S.

Voluntary turnover is discouraged in cultures where uncertainty avoidance is valued, such as the Nordic countries and Singapore. High performing employees find it difficult to gain a return on movement and lower performing employees are more difficult to identify, so the overall performance- turnover relationship becomes weaker.

Why Does This Matter?

We tend to think that what’s true for us is true for everyone. In organizations, it’s easier to think what works here will work everywhere. And, if we just explain it often enough, “they” will get it.

We can agree on many things that work across cultures. One is that people truly are an organization’s most important asset. It’s difficult to have that promise come to life when practices fail to recognize that people do not exist in isolation from their culture. It comes to work with them. Human resources and talent management practices flexible enough to compliment cultures, instead of work against them, have a far greater chance for success.

Reference

Sturman, M.C., Shao, L., Katz, J.H. (2012). The Effect of Culture on the Curvilinear Relationship Between Performance and Turnover.  Journal of Applied Psychology, Jan, 2012. Vol. 97, pg 46-62.

Originally published at Great Moments – Susan Barrett Kelly