Synaptus

I have had discussions in the last week with managers at three different global companies. All mentioned that outsourcing was in their future in one way or another. Their companies are looking for Project Managers to support this outsourcing. I started to think about the skills of the project managers in their organizations. Technically competent, bottom line results oriented, masters of Microsoft Project and documentation.

We like to define the Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes that are best suited for people performing capabilities. Knowledge is the body of facts and information that a person acquires. Skills are the capacities that people develop through training and experience. Attitudes are beliefs and opinions that support or inhibit behavior.

Attitudes are important. I might not be a good candidate for an administrative support role in a doctor’s office. The attitudes that I have about what I like to work on would make coding insurance forms everyday feel tedious. I would not enjoy that job. Although I am capable of developing the knowledge and skills to do this job, there is no learning or training that can change my attitudes about what I want to do for work. There are people that probably would not enjoy studying organizational journals and management literature all the time or who do not enjoy going into new companies and facing new challenges every month or so. They could develop the knowledge and skills to do what I do, but they do not share my attitudes about what makes work fun.

I believe that the KSA’s for the project manager of today will be different from the KSA’s of the project manager needed where organizations have outsourced overseas. The biggest gap I see is that the attitudes needed to operate as an internal driver and administrator are different from the attitudes needed to facilitate the diversity that arises when organizations outsource. If these project managers fail, it will take a terrible toll on the organizations performance. We can train on the knowledge and develop the skills. However, we need to be selecting project managers that have an attitudes aligned to handle diversity and collaboration needed in an outsourced business model. Has your business thought about this? How is your business addressing this issue?

I am reading the American Management Associations most recent study, The Keys to Strategy Execution. You have to register to get a copy off of their website. As I read it I’ll post things that strike me as interesting, but you can get a copy off of their site by going to http://www.amanet.org/research/ and registering.

The study describes factors influencing execution of strategy, barriers to strategy execution, and improving strategy execution. One of the source surveys for the study found that

"the biggest impediment to successfully executing a business strategy was not change but simply doing things they way they’ve always been done."

I have studied and applied change management techniques to overcome resistance in many projects. But "simply doing things the way they’ve always been done" isn’t active resistance, it is simply the power of the past and habits.  Habits form over a long period of time. They are burned into the brains of the people in the organization. Simply communicating the benefits of a strategy to someone won’t suddenly change the wiring of their brain.

This is like fielding a ground ball. You can point out to someone who has a bad habit fielding a ground ball the right way to do it. You can explain to them why it is a better way. But without a lot of practice and feedback, they may not change their habit.

One researcher at MIT found that habits exist in the basal ganglia of the brain. Habits take a long time to create, and are not easily changed. Many of the techniques that are used for breaking habits aren’t very effective. For example, negative feedback that is disconnected over time from the event is very ineffective. While positive feedback, immediately after the event is very powerful. This explains why it is so hard to stop smoking or over eating.

Hal talks a lot about how habits affect project management over at Reforming Project Management.

"Habits die hard. To think that we can provide a shot in the arm misses the nature of being human. We are social beings. We are biological beings. The routines of social interaction are etched into our biology. The biologist Humberto Maturana describes this as structural coupling. Through repeated interactions with others we develop ingrained patterns or habits of response and engagement. These habits allow us to be effective with those around us."

Breaking habits, or forming new ones, requires three specific actions. First, you have to pay attention to the habit. Second, you have to establish some way to gather feedback on your ability to perform the new behavior. Finally, you have to practice the new habit over time.

What does this mean to changing how people dealing with other people inside of an organization to perform work? You can’t just describe the results of a new strategy to people and explain why its important. You have to define the new habits required and have mechanisms in place to ensure people pay attention to the new behavior. You have to provide feedback, hopefully immediately and positively, when the new behavior is performed. And, you have to deliberately practice the behavior over time.

If "simply doing things the way they’ve always been done" is the top impediment to executing strategy, what steps are you taking to change the habits in your organization?

I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Managers Lose Talent When They Neglect To Coach Their Staffs", that reminded how negligent organizations are for not teaching the leaders the difference between coaching and managing.  In my first book, "Stop Managing, Start Coaching", we discussed the need to turn all managers and leaders into Performance Coaches focused on driving business results through motivating, challenging and demanding excellence from everyone they directly and indirectly interact with.  As the article stated 70%  employees feel "not engaged" or "actively disengaged".  How tragic is that….

Managers must learn to act as Performance Coaches. By having Performance Coaches focused on four critical areas, you can eliminate this apathy and create a business driven culture.  The four areas of focus are: Leading, Confronting, Developing, and Mentoring.  Let’s take a second to discuss each of these areas. 

Leading is the key and if you go to our link at http://www.synaptus.com/SignUp.php you can get a free copy of our Pragmatic Leadership Workbook.

Confronting is the most overlooked aspect of becoming a successful Performance Coach.   Dealing with conflict in a constructive and collaborative manner is critical to the success of any team, department or organization.  Using Conflict Resolution Methodology for dealing with behavioral conflict, as well as, using a Collaborative methodology for dealing with conflict of need or resources is essential in driving collaborative communication.

Developing is the responsibility of both the employee and the Performance Coach.  The Performance Coach needs to confront the performance gaps that exist.  By providing a framework for identifying success inhibitors, and development stretch assignments that allow for the employee to develop the appropriate knowledge, skills, and attitude to have great success.

Mentoring is the responsibility of all Performance Coaches.  The most successful arrangement are those that are informal.  Mentoring is about teaching individuals the internal systems, "rules", and land mines that exist inside the organization.

Organizations must change their view of coaching, the business impact and ROI is significant and critical to the success of the business.  Without coaching organizations will continue to suffer from low morale, low productivity and a revolving door of talent.

Choose coaching!!   

I read a very interesting article in the Boston Globe over the weekend about what the workforce is going to look like as the baby boomers start to retire. Over the next 5 years the 45-54 year workforce is projected to drop by 10%, and that number will continue to decrease. 60% of employers surveyed already feel it is difficult recruiting competent workers. With the Gen Xers focused on self, and the companies focused on short term profits, how are we going to remain competitive? What are the kinds innovative talent management processes, systems and tools that must be embraced.

The most shocking new is that at some companies 30-40% of their workforce could retire over the next 10 years. We already know that there is a war on talent, but how devastating can this be to our economy let alone the potential dramatic impact on our competitiveness. Organizations have such a tendency to be short term focused, and only a small percentage of companies are even looking at this issue. We already know that the baby boomers (me included) haven’t saved enough for retirement. I am really curious what your thoughts are on how we can maintain our competitive edge and manage the balance between profitability and talent management.

Thanks, Nat (nat.boughton@synaptus.com)

Gemba Panta Rei has an article that is relevant to, People or Process, a recent post on this blog. I think this highlights the benefit of looking at process or environment first when you have a people issue.

"in Japan the first response to a high rate of absenteeism is to conduct root cause analysis into the behavior of absenteeism, leading to kaizen. In Europe the management would replace the worker who had an attendance problem with another workers. Problem not solved, but deferred."

If its a flawed process, or if you have a flawed understanding of competencies necessary to perform the job, switching people out does not solve the problem. Combining a quality process with a clear understanding of the innate competencies and values required to be successful in the job is a powerful combination. Much more powerful than either applied independently.

I’ve been engaged in a conversation with Gary Farush over at ComplexWork regarding whether performance issues can be addressed by people or process. We agreed that sometimes its people and sometimes its process. Gary contends that people tend to get blamed first, and that by not addressing the process issues they tend to recreate the same problems.

This is probably true. People don’t do bad work because they want too. They tend to act in they way that makes the most sense to them. So, when expected results aren’t being delivered, you should look at these five process/organizational environment issues before you start blaming the people.

1. Inertia or Momentum: "That’s the way we’ve always done it"

2. Conflicting Priorities: Compensation or rewards are in conflict with specific objectives. Or a person is being pulled in multiple directions by various levels of management.

3. Bad Inputs from Upstream in the Process: The person is having to deal with poor requirements or bad inputs from upstream.

4. Lack of Tools, Knowledge, or Understanding: A person can’t perform their job satisfactorily if they aren’t made capable through enabling technologies, training, or expectations.

5. Management Inattention: The work itself is not being managed. This can actually manifest itself as any of the prior four points.

All of these causes can be identified, managed, and the impact on your business reduced. There is also a very issue though that certain jobs require specific skills and innate competencies. Skills can be trained. Innate competencies are part of how people are wired.  When you have addressed the five problems above and performance doesn’t improve, match the competencies of the people to those best suited for that job. Also, it is probably smart to ensure when hiring that you getting people with the best set of innate competencies for the job.

BPMG.org points to an article on SearchCIO.com that talks about the rise of relationship management skills over technical skills in IT organizations. This is driven by the automation and outsourcing of IT capabilities. The IT employee of the near future will be more likely to be handing customer service requests and managing vendor relationships than plugging in hardware, installing or configuring software, or writing code.

“Morello said IT organizations will become increasingly automated and outsourced. As a result, IT employees will be asked to fill multiple roles, rather than just focus on a single job. And one of their most important roles will be managing "points of interface" with other parts of the business. “

“IT employees will need to speak the same language as business stakeholders. This means less demand for specialists (IT employees with a deep understanding of specific technology) and generalists (IT employees who have a broad set of relatively shallow technology skills). IT will still need technical skills, but the most valuable technical employees will know how they can apply those skills to different situations in different parts of the business.“

So project management, collaboration, and customer service will be the key capabilities of IT. And new capabilities to create a common business framework to focus and align a distributed organization will be necessary. How many of your key employees are being hired or developed with these skills in mind? What framework are you putting in place today to create a common understanding of what the business actually does?

I have had an interesting experience the last few days. I have been going through all my old business cards to try to reconnect to people whom I have met with over the last decade. My goal is to expand my network of people I have met with in the past and introduce them to the blog. The interesting thing is how many of the people no longer work at the business they worked at in the past. My sample is about 300 business cards that I held onto and is not a very controlled study. These are only people that I spoke with and sent an email to after meeting them.

A brief survey says that only business owners are still at the companies they were at 10 years ago.  Over 70% of people are not with companies they were with five years ago. About 50% are not with the companies they were with over 2 years ago. I don’t know how this matches up to national averages.  But I bet it is representative of the huge amount of employee turnover faced by most companies. In many businesses the knowledge lives within the people. Sales people and customer service people have relationships with customers. Working consultants have practical knowledge about how products "actually" work at the customer. Internal management and employees have the knowledge of how things got the way they are. All of this is critical to the success of the business and the costs of turnover are much higher than just the cost of hiring and training a new person.

What are the steps to managing this cost? Maybe we should reduce the ability of people to hold value away from the business. But this reduces their sense of contribution, reducing performance and driving up turnover. Maybe we should capture knowledge in large databases. But even knowledge management practitioners realize that capturing the knowledge is very difficult and that getting people to go out and find the knowledge to reuse is impractical. Another way is to encourage people to talk about their knowledge with their co-workers. Build out the knowledge in the business. Increase the sense of contribution of knowledge workers and increase productivity by sharing learned experiences throughout the business. What are some ways to manage the relationship between employee retention and knowledge? What have you seen that works to address this problem?

David Anderson over at Agile Management has a series of posts about HR Myths. David blogs on software development, management, constraints, and agility. I come from a technology development and implementation background so I may be biased. But, I believe that the software industry is one where the impact of knowledge-based work, the transitional worker, outsourcing, speed, and unique customer requirements have all coincided over the last 10 years. Since many other jobs will begin to fall into this space over the next decade, I think it is critical to learn from what has worked in the software industry. Here are some HR policies that David has identified that make working in software development more difficult.

In HR Myths #1: Merit Based Pay, David discusses why it doesn’t make sense not to hire top quartile performers, something pay bands make difficult.

"We don’t care about productivity look at our cost control"

Top performers may be 10-20 time more productive than mediocre performers. Yet "companies which claim to be meritocracies, in fact, are not. They pay people in a very narrow band. In my example, you can be sure that everyone on that Level 56 grade is being paid between $27,000 and $28,500 despite the fact that some of them will be 10 times more productive than others."

Focus on "productivity first, investment second and cost last. Cost first generates mediocrity and mediocrity results in very poor performance from a software engineering organization"

In HR Myths #2: Divide and Conquer, David discusses how HR departments practice of negotiating pay down at hiring time, restricting the ability to reward performance after hire, and then hiding how much everyone makes to avoid conflict, may be counter productive.

"In almost all companies it is directly against company rules to discuss what you - the knowledge worker - are paid with your colleagues. Why? Simply put, it is a divide and conquer strategy by Human Resources. They believe that by enforcing silence with a threat of summary dismissal, they will save the company money and reduce complaints from disgruntled employees. In a few companies, it is also illegal to discuss your pay scale grade with other employees. This is the ultimate in Big Brother style control because it theoretically prevents employees from learning that someone doing the same work is on a higher grade than them. HR believes that this enforced silence reduces complaints, saves the business money and makes employees happier."

HR Myths #3: Performance Buckets

"The first fallacy is the concept of an equal distribution of performance across a team - someone has to get a 1 and someone has to get a 5. The idea is based on the statistical bell curve normal distribution. However, when your statistical sample is (for example) less than 20 then any statistician will tell you - you do not have a basis for a normal distribution.

The second fallacy is that all teams perform equally and that someone from every team deserves a 1 and that equally someone from every team deserves 5."

In HR Myths #4: Tribal Markings, David discusses how companies make temporary workers feel inferior and how it can impact group performance.

"Why do HR departments insist on issuing different colored badges to contingent contract labor and vendors on long term contracts? It’s clearly tribal. It clearly marks the individual as somehow less worthy. Why? The assumption is that temporary staff are less trustworthy. Hmmm. This feels that it belongs in medieval Japan’s early Edo period where Samurai without a master - ronin - were treated with suspicion."

In HR Myths #5: Pay for Performance, where David discusses the issues associated with pay for performance that can lead to reduced organizational performance.

"Pay for Performance can lead to dysfunctional behavior encouraging individuals to look out for themselves and discouraging team working that enables higher productivity from the whole team."

Read all the entries if you have the time. The issues facing technology development are people issues, not technical issues. Equitable compensation, temporary workers, and uniquely skilled workers are issues increasingly faced outside of the technology sector. It sure makes sense to learn from the really smart people in an industry that has begun to figure this out. It isn’t true that life is different in technology so those lessons don’t apply to us. We can apply the lessons throughout most organizations. Which of these myths are impacting the performance of your organization?

I think the conversation theory post may have been a little dry. It all sounds so theoretical. It’s so far out there you may be wondering how can it be applied in business. So here’s a a couple specific examples.

We had a client that had five IT departments, one to support each line of business. Each group believed that their business was so unique that they had to have their own support groups. The CIO of the company thought that there was probably a lot in common between them, he was just struggling to get everyone on the same page. Everytime they tried it would break down in a defensive battle. With some of the executives from the operations group, we helped facilitate the development of a common semantic model of the businesses. We started with some clearly common concepts and worked our way through the business. At the end of the effort, management reached an agreement that about 80% of the business models were the same. Working towards developing a common background of understanding, instead of defending a previously established set of concepts, led to a breakthrough for the business. We talked about what we talked about, and common understanding became explicit, rather than each person defending how their view of the world was correct. Combining common technology and functions saved the company millions of dollars a year. The added organizational agility and synergy probably contributed to the massive growth the company experienced over the next two years.

A software development group was struggling to get what product management was promising to the customer in a timely fashion. There was a lot of conflict and frustration. Customer commitments were consistently missed. Working with key people in development and product management, we worked our way through how work was coordinated, how commitments were made, and how understanding was established between the customer, product management, and development. We identified the key points that were leading to waste, quality problems, and rework. Then we talked about the conversations that were leading to those breakdowns. The rate of work through the organization doubled in just over four weeks. We didn’t change any people or technology, we didn’t cut any scope. We spent time talking about what they talked about to make the conversations more productive.

These are not isolated circumstances. This is how people interact. When people from different backgrounds or with different roles get together, they participate in a way to justify their groups norms. When these norms get in the way of successfully moving work through the organization, these problems tend to go unexplored. Because talking about what we talk about is considered threatening, too touchy-feely or too theoretical. I believe there are huge returns for addressing this situation. Look around your organization, do you think the returns are there if there was a way to address it? What would it take for you to start talking about the conversations in your organization?