Human Resources – Page 2

Diamonds in the Rough: Identifying Talent

It is not without irony when a leadership team complains about their talent. As the saying goes, “Leaders deserve the talent they hired.”

Looking into the Abyss – Not kidding!

Let me give you an idea how bad it can get. Here is a real-life scenario I was asked at address as a consultant not long ago: A global leadership team identified the need to diversify their management across a distributed, global division. Business results were lagging, bureaucracy stifling and fresh ideas nowhere to be seen let be implemented. Despite an outspoken commitment to Diversity and Inclusion, the ‘corporate immune system’ and ‘group-think’ resisted much needed change with repercussions for those questioning the status quo or thinking differently out loud. Data-driven paralysis by analysis was the daily mode of operation. – You get the picture.

The leadership team had tried filling open positions by hiring the usual ‘best and brightest’ with a focus on expert skills and solutions they would bring from their previous employer – it did not solve the problem. It was common practice to hire staff for their expertise, primarily; the term used was “to hit the ground running.”

As if the situation was not bad enough already, the brightest brains have left or where about to leave. They so drained the ‘leaky pipeline’ of talent even more. Since we know that “talent attracts talent” also the opposite appears quite likely. Thereby, the quality of leadership team overall weakens and entails the nasty downstream effects for the staff and the organization as a whole. Obviously the situation was home-grown, which added a sensitive political dimension the whole situation.
The blunt question stuck with me, does the top leaders actually know what talent they need? What are their criteria for ‘talent’ when they search, so you would recognize it when you see it? And, do they have the guts of hiring someone who actually looks at things and truly thinks differently, comes up with unorthodox solutions and possibly has a very different profession background, career path and experiences?
Let’s leave this ‘case study’ here and step back to look at the bigger picture.

Fighting the wrong battle?

Sadly, there were many hidden assumptions at work that never surfaced or articulated. For example, the steepest careers were made by employees sharing the same professional discipline as their leaders, so the assumption was that only a specific professional background would qualify a candidate. Another ironclad assumption was that talent is hard to find – after all we read about this “war for talent” raging out there, as Steven Hankin of McKinsey coined it so dramatically, right?

I respectfully disagree. While it makes sense to hire from the outside for certain purposes such as short-term for specific skills or experience for a project or long-term for the right mindset and development potential, for example, it makes little sense to me to neglect the talent you already have. My take was not that there is a lack of talent but a lack of being able to identifying talent.

Talent Mismanagement

It seems that talent acquisition and development have eroded from an an art form to a dry and rigid process that -obviously- doesn’t work all that well for this organization. Little attention was paid to talent identification and retention within the organization or mindset and cultural fit of candidates, for example.

Here are just some examples for common practices that inhibited internal talent to develop and grow – and eventually drove employees away:

Internal applicants for open positions were in practice only considered when the already did the job they applied for. How is this supposed to work? Where is the potential for existing staff to develop and seize opportunities?
We know little about new hires but we a know a lot about our existing employees. What may look like an advantage for the employee often plays out the other way: This knowledge can induce a bias and limit our employees getting opportunities when we may still see them as ‘corporate infants’ despite many years of tenure; like parents who can be blindsided of their kids growing up and being ready for the challenge that we tend more easily to entrust a stranger with.
Graduates fresh out of college were preferred over employees meeting the job requirements, for a trainee rotation program, for example. This was despite the fact that the company often had paid for the employees’ advanced degrees. These employees came with relevant work experience and existing networks within the organization which minimized on-boarding efforts. They already knew the company culture and what to expect. So these employees would not get the job despite their qualifications. – How crazy is that? I call this ‘talent mismanagement.’
Take an even closer look: These employees went back to school in parallel to their day job, family, etc. They had proven their tenacity and commitment to develop personally as well as for the company over years – and are denied a chance to apply their new skills. What a waste! No wonder the talent pipeline leaked!

Three ways to identify talent you already have

Traditionally, talent identification is seen as a top-down process where executives pick employees from their pool based on who they believe has potential. The selected ‘talent’ then receives training, development or career opportunities to prepare them for their future leadership role. This was the model applied leading up to the sad situation of the case study above. It favors a bias of group-think and appointing or hiring people like yourself instead of focusing to find the best person for the job.

What if we looked at and selected internal ‘talent’ differently? What if we leveled the playing field to allow any employee to prove themselves and then select talent based on merits?

Here are three proposals on how to identify talent you already have within your organization but overlooked in the past:

Look closely at your employees who went back to school or underwent a significant challenge on top of their core job to learn and develop themselves, such as the ones mentioned above that graduated with advanced degrees in parallel to their day work. This are tough cookies, self-starters, driven to self-improve and seeking career opportunities; ignore them and they will leave.
Read also: How to retain talent under the new workplace paradigm?
Build a School for Intrapreneurs: Lessons from a FORTUNE Global 500 company as a merit-based pipeline for leaders, talent and change agents. Our battle-hardened graduates have experienced resistance and found ways to form diverse teams and build supportive networks on their way to implementing their ideas.
Read also How to create innovation culture with diversity! and Innovation drives Diversity&Inclusion 2.0
Seed-fund ideas that meet desirable criteria for disruptive innovation for a proof-of-concept by introducing, for example, Angel Investing within the Company – Insights from an Internal Corporate Venture Capitalist. We have seen colleagues returning with more great ideas after their first one got funded. It works like releasing creative breaks and empowering employees to take charge.

Meaningful change is likely to meet resistance within the organization. It takes determination to change established talent management practices. It takes guts to walk the walk despite a general intellectual agreement.
Time will tell how the above case study plays out for this particular organization, i.e. if the recommendations made will be adopted – or if this consulting appointment degrades to just a feel-good exercise without consequences, since taking action requires real leadership.

Innovation drives Diversity&Inclusion 2.0

The traditional world of corporate Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is being disrupted by a new take on D&I and combining it with innovation and talent management. What some perceive as a threat to the D&I establishment may just be the next step of evolution that could invigorate and drive D&I to new heights.

Though not an entirely novel approach (see also How to create innovation culture with diversity!) the new thinking gains traction. As this could play out in different ways and only time will tell what worked, here are my thought on where we are heading.

Struggles of the Front Runner

Many traditional D&I programs, let’s call them “version 1.0” of D&I, struggle transitioning beyond a collection of affinity groups, tallying corporate demographics and competing for D&I awards to post on their webpage. In these traditional D&I programs ‘diversity’ is often understood to be reflected by more or less visible differences among individuals at the workplace while ‘inclusion’ translates to supporting defined sub-populations of employees through, for example, establishing affinity groups.

The United States is seen as the front runner of the D&I movement. D&I has been around in the U.S. corporate world for decades. For historic and demographic reasons it hones in on removing obstacles for minorities at the workplace supported also by strict legislature and execution; exercising Affirmative Action, for example.

This legacy in the U.S. lends itself to an inside focus on organizations that became the backbone of the traditional D&I programs. It comes down to the question ‘what can or should the organization do for specific groups of people’ defined by ethnicity, gender, age, sexual preference, faith, disability, war history and so on. Apparently, it still is work in progress as, for example, Silicon Valley just recently got on the public radar, which stirred up the debate afresh along the lines of D&I 1.0; see Google releases breakdown on the diversity of its workforce.

Stuck in the ‘Diversity Trap’?

The inside focus and minority messaging of D&I 1.0, however, can be limiting when D&I erodes to a process of ‘doing things right’ by pushing for quotas, ‘checking boxes’ and inflating variations of terminology perceived as ‘politically correct’. This can in fact be different from ‘doing the right thing’ for the company overall, its employees as well as the affinity groups and their constituency. It should not surprise that Affinity groups can be (and often get) stigmatized and perceived as self-serving and self-centered social networks without significant and measurable business impact.

Under this paradigm these D&I 1.0 programs struggle to get serious attention, support and funding from executives beyond operating on a minor level to ‘keep the lights on’ more for public image purposes than business drive. The fundamentals seem to get forgotten: in the end, a business exists to generate a profit, so less profitable activities are likely to be discontinued or divested. It’s a symbiosis and to say it bluntly: without healthy business there is no D&I program and no affinity groups. When this symbiosis get lopsided, D&I 1.0 gets stuck in the trap.

With more of a disruptive innovation focus but not totally unrelated, read: Shut down! Why Successful Innovations Die

D&I 2.0

“Diversity” is catching on beyond the United States in Europe, for example, where many countries do not have share a highly heterogeneous demographic composition, for example. Here, companies can start with a fresh approach jumping straight to D&I 2.0 – and many do! It reminds me of developing countries installing their first phone system by skipping the landlines and starting right away with mobile phones.

The 2.0 internal focus corresponds to hiring workers that truly think differently and have different backgrounds and life experiences some of which overlaps with D&I 1.0 affinity roots. In addition, there is also an external focus putting the staff to work with a clear business proposition and reaching even beyond the organization. So here a candidate would be hired or employee promoted for their different thinking (2.0) rather than more visible differences (1.0).

While need remains for affinity groups to tend to their members needs within the organization, the “new” D&I 2.0 opens to shift focus to go beyond the organization. It goes along the lines of a statement President John F. Kennedy became famous for and that I tweaked as follows: “Don’t ask what the COMPANY can do for you ask what you can do for the COMPANY AND ITS CUSTOMERS.”

D&I 2.0 gears towards actively contributing and driving new business results in measurable ways for the better of the employees as well as the organization and its customers. A visible indicator for D&I 2.0 affinity groups helping their constituency beyond company walls is affinity groups identifying and seizing business opportunities specific to their constituency. They translate the opportunity and shepherd it trough the processes of the organization to bring it to fruition. For example, affinity groups are uniquely positioned to extending and leveraging their reach to relating customer segments in order to identify ‘small elephant’ business opportunities; see How to grow innovation elephants in large organizations.

The D&I 2.0 approach demonstrates sustainable business value which is why D&I 2.0 sells much easier to executives. It makes a compelling business case that contributes to new business growth, the life blood of every company.

Challenging Transition

U.S. companies stuck in D&I 1.0 are hard pressed to keep up with the D&I 2.0 developments and overcome their inner struggle and resistance. With decades of legacy, D&I 1.0 programs in many organizations lack the vision and ability to make a compelling business case, to develop a sound strategy as well as capability and skill to implement it effectively. This is the requirement, however, to truly see eye-to-eye with senior executives and get their full support. This can become a serious disadvantage in the markets relating to products and customers but also in attracting talent.

In the end, the saying holds true that “talent attracts talent” and all organizations compete over talent to compete and succeed. Therefore, a D&I 2.0 program combines business focus and talent management while tying it back to the core of diversity and inclusion: Fostering diverse thinkers and leveling the playing field for all employees. This requires a level playing field that offers the same opportunities to all employees, which is the real challenge.

How do you level the playing field effectively in a large organization? How this will be implemented becomes the differentiating success factor for companies transitioning to D&I 2.0!

Here is a example 2.0-style for a level playing filed that has its roots in the D&I affinity group space yet opened up to include the entire workforce. It empowers and actively engages employees while leveraging diversity, inclusion and talent management for innovative solutions with profitable business outcomes. It may take a minute or two to see the connection between D&I, talent and disruptive innovation but it is at work right here in the School for Intrapreneurs: Lessons from a FORTUNE Global 500 company.

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Previous posts relating to innovation and employee affinity groups / employee resource groups (ERG) / business resource groups (BRG):

Xbox’s Hollywood Bust – when culture eats strategy for breakfast

Shut down

It’s not only successful innovations that can get shut down (see “Shut down! Why Successful Innovations Die“) but also those that don’t get a chance to take of in the first place: In the small print of Microsoft’s recent announcement to eliminate 18,000 jobs (mainly in the light of the Nokia acquisition) you could also find 200 jobs cut to end the Xbox Hollywood aspirations.

After a history of failures entering the hardware sector, Microsoft struck gold with its powerful Xbox gaming console series powered by popular games such as the epic HALO. Long forgotten seem the times of the “PocketPC” handheld to rival the PalmPilot or the “Zune” MP3 player to dwarf Apple’s iPod. (Let’s keep the Surface tablets with its awful Windows 8 mosaic tile interface out of the equation for now – even a recent promotion is just a sad parody.)

Without doubt, the Xbox is a success, Microsoft’s media flagship. It faces serious competition, so creative and disruptive solutions are needed to dominate the console market.

Beyond gaming

To expand on this solid Xbox console foundation and fend off competitors, the idea was to produce engaging and original video content. This added value would expand the Xbox platform to broaden Xbox attractiveness and deepen customer loyalty by appealing to its gamer audience in new ways. The gap between gaming and film converged over the past years when new game productions became sophisticated, quality productions with celebrity actors and voice overs, music by top Hollywood composers, high-end visual effects and not only budgets to rival studio movie productions but revenue exceeding blockbuster movies.

Inspired by, for example, Netflix’s success in producing original content such as “Orange” and “House of Cards,” this strategy looked very promising. Well equipped with CBS’ highly accomplished Nancy Tellem and ties to Steven Spielberg, the Microsoft Hollywood team of 200 was up to a great start – or so it seemed.

Two years in, however, the there was very little to show for, so Microsoft finally divested.

– What went wrong?

Culture Clash

A key inhibitor for the Hollywood team, so it turned out, was clashing organizational cultures between Microsoft and the quick-paced and decision-friendly media world Tellem was used to from CBS. Nanny Tellem learned the hard way that effectiveness of decision-making at the lower hierarchical levels and fast execution was not the strong suit of the established culture, red-tape processes and deep hierarchy of the Redmond software giant. Down four levels in hierarchy under the CEO, Microsoft’s convoluted processes diluted Tellem’s authority and effectiveness. It slowed down decisions to a point where the ambitious and energetic start-up became practically shackled and impotent to operate effectively in the media world.

Even the best strategy cannot be executed when unaligned with organizational culture or, as Peter Drucker has put it so famously, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Culture is what most employees say and do routinely. It translates into a company’s processes, structures, systems, etc. This is why failing to understand or outright ignoring culture can be so disastrous for leaders. From my experience, the magic sauce is in aligning corporate culture and strategy with the passion of competent employees.

Learnings

Microsoft’s Hollywood adventure is just one more example how disruptive innovation struggles when measured and governed by processes of a mature and bureaucratic organization with matrix structure. With reigns held too close and not leaving room to experiment, innovation suffers, as this missed opportunity for Microsoft demonstrates.

“Hindsight is 20/20” people say and in all honesty, other factors may have contributed too, but looking at it from the outside, perhaps this train wreck could have been prevented had Tellem paid closer attention to the culture of her new employer and ‘how we do business around here.’

Cultural fit with conductive structures and processes downstream are serious business factors that often get overlooked and then backfire for the blind-sided executive. – Only perhaps there could have been a proper Hollywood ending.

After all, disruptive innovations is a delicate flower that needs some room to flourish – especially in mature organizations.

Want more?

Related posts on organizational culture include:

SOX for Snowden?

Quick Recap

Edward Snowden, a former member of the U.S. intelligence community, released classified government data to the public in 2013. He faces prosecution under the U.S. Espionage Act, remains on the run from the U.S. government and ended up seeking asylum in Moscow, Russia.

The 1.3 million documents he released are the largest known security breach in U.S. history. They also unveiled highly questionable if not outright illegal action by US intelligence agencies relating to widespread spying domestically and abroad.

Traitor or Patriot?

In the light of an exclusive interview with NBC News on May 28, 2014, the popular NBC “Today” show asked its viewers in a polarizing poll to decide for themselves whether Snowden was a “Traitor” or a “Patriot.” The morning before the interview aired, 53% of viewers saw Snowden as a “traitor”. The morning after, 61% found him a “patriot.” Though the responses do not necessarily reflect a representative sample of the U.S. population, let’s go with it for now, since an interesting majority swing took place in favor of Snowden’s action.

We are not going deeper into whether or not Snowden did the right thing or not. His disclosures spurred and continue to fuel a worldwide discussion on where the boundaries are for covert operations and government surveillance programs. It’s not a new question and comes down to the ancient question the Roman poet Juvenal famously raised: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or “Who guards the guards?”

Apparently, the continued decisions of U.S. secret courts approving intelligence programs of the disputed nature did not resonate with the viewers. If Snowden was tried under the U.S. Espionage Act, the public may never hear of Snowden again nor details of his prosecution with most certain conviction. The covered surveillance programs may continue without meaningful oversight.

It makes Secretary John Kerry’s strong request sound weak and questionable for Snowden to face U.S. authorities and trust the legal system. Continued messages from high-ranking politicians up to President Barack Obama himself depict Snowden as a “low-ranking analyst” and “high school drop-out.” – Doesn’t this makes you wonder how such an acclaimed ‘bum’ got access to such large amounts of sensitive government information in the first place and who else is granted ‘Top Secret” security clearance, which is shared by 1 million(!) Americans?

SOX for Government Employees and Contractors?

Countering illegal practices by companies let the U.S. Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002. While SOX overhauls regulatory standards for record keeping practices, it -perhaps- became more known to the public for protecting employees of publicly traded companies from discrimination who report violations of regulations by the company. Every major business now has a process in place to ensure SOX is enforced effectively.

However, SOX only covers publicly traded companies in order to protect shareholders from fraud. What about the public sector, namely the government? Shouldn’t there be a similar ruling that effectively protects government employees and contractors, such as Edward Snowden, when they witness and wish to report apparent illegal actions by government institutions?

Check and Balances? (source: en.wikipedia.com) — Where are the “Checks and Balances”?
(source: en.wikipedia.com)

Checks and Balances

Snowden claimed that he repeatedly approached his manager raising concerns and was told to shut up. Certainly, national security interests must be protected and safeguarded by the clandestine functions of government. But then, again, who guards the guards, when “national security” becomes an obscure blanket excuse without an effective system of checks and balances that the U.S. Constitution mandates and the United States are founded on?

The Snowden affair made painfully clear that the existing legal parameters for governmental “whistle blowers” are insufficient to non-existent. How else would the public have found out about the abuse of governmental power? Going public and risking prosecution, currently, appears to remain the only viable option to truly allow and push for effective checks and balances until legislation catches up with a SOX for future Snowdens in order to keep our democracy working for the people.

Google releases breakdown on the diversity of its workforce

Insightful diversity breakdown of the Google workforce. Would be interesting to know how its Silicon Valley neighbors compare.

Gigaom

After tip-toeing around the makeup of its workforce for a while, Google (s goog) released a blog post Wednesday afternoon that gave a breakdown of the company’s diversity in both gender and ethnicity.

Collected from data gathered in January of 2014, the employee base of Google is predominantly white and male (61 percent and 70 percent, respectively), with nearly a third of employees identifying as Asian.

But the overall numbers not entirely representative of the diversity in the company’s most important parts. For example, employees in leadership roles at Google are 72 percent White and 79 percent male:

But the biggest disparities, perhaps unsurprisingly, are in the company’s tech employees. Women don’t even make up a fifth of the company’s tech workforce — representing just 17 percent.

Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations and blog author, said that Google is actively trying to recruit more women and minorities for its staff:…

View original post 70 more words

Join me for the SAPA-CT Milestone Celebration Meeting at Yale University on Feb 22

“Bridging between US and China in Current Pharmaceutical World – Strategies, Innovation and Implementation”

Join me at 11:15am at the Sino-American Pharmaceutical Professionals Association‘s new Connecticut Chapter (SAPA-CT) Milestone Celebration Meeting held at Yale University (N107 The Anlyan Center, 300 Cedar St, New Haven, CT, 06511), 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Feb 22, 2014.

SAPA-CT, Boehringer Ingelheim, BMS, and Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Yale (ACSSY) will co-sponsor this event

Women in Life-Sciences: Pharma Think Tank at UCSF on Oct. 30, 2013

10x vs 10% – Are you still ready for breakthrough innovation?

Google co-founder and CEO, Larry Page, continues to have big expectations for his employees: come up with products and services that are 10 times better than their competitors, hence “10x” – that’s one order of magnitude!

10X vs. 10%

Many entrepreneurs and start-up companies, they seem to ‘shoot for the moon’! Far more than 90% of these ventures fail within just a few years. Few, such as Google, succeeded and grew to dominate internet giants. The question remains though if they can maintain the innovative pace of 10x when the innovation rate tends to sink closer to 10% in matured companies.

How big dreams changed the world

This challenge effects also other visionaries that changed the face of the world and transformed society in ways nobody has imagined, such as:

Apple building a micro-computer at times when mainframes ruled the digital world and only few could envision a demand for personal computing

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977; just a few years before the first IBM PC was sold. — *“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”* – Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 – just a few years before the first IBM PC sold.

eBay establishing a new online sales model that millions around the globe use every day

Google taking over the browser market through simplicity, by giving everyone control to use the most complex machine on Earth, the Internet
Microsoft cultivated software licensing to sell one piece of software millions of times over effortlessly at minimal cost.

Innovation downshift

As disruptive and transformative ventures grow and mature, the definition of what is perceived ‘innovate’ changes. Both momentum and focus shifts. With size companies struggle to continue innovating similar to their nimble start-up origins.

What happens? With size comes a downshift from disruptive to incremental change. Simplicity makes space for adding features. Adding features makes products more complex and ultimately less usable and appealing to the majority of customers.

Look at Microsoft’s Offices products, for example: Wouldn’t you wish they came out with a ‘light’ version with reduced feature complexity by let’s say 75%, so the software becomes easy to use again?

It also starts haunting Google, as their established products such as Search or Gmail need to be maintained. Additional “improvements” aka. features creep in over time. Perhaps you noticed yourself that recently Google search results seem to be less specific and all over the place while the experimentation-happy Gmail interface confuses with ever new features?

Even the most iconic and transformative companies experience the reduction of their innovative rate from 10X to an incremental 10% or so.

Technology S-curves

Funny thing is that -at least in technology- incremental improvement quickly becomes obsolete with the next disruptive jump. The current technology matures up along the S-curve (see graphics) and generates revenue, but the next disruptive technology emerges. Companies hold on as long as they can keeping revenue flowing by adding features or improvements of sorts to gain or maintain a marginal competitive advantage. Thus, incremental improvement and process optimization found their place here to minimize cost and maximize profit in a market where the product became a commodity, so the competition is based only on price.

The new technology does not yet make significant money in the beginning at the beginning of the next S-curve. The few early units produced are expensive, need refinement and are bought by enthusiasts and early adopters who are willing to pay a steep premium to get the product first. Nonetheless, development reached the point of “breakthrough,” becomes appealing to many and quickly takes over the market: the big jump onto the next S-curve gains momentum. Suddenly, the former technology is ‘out’ and revenue streams deflate quickly.

S-curve (http://www.carteblancheleeway.wordpress.com)

(source: http://www.carteblancheleeway.wordpress.com)

Large and matured organizations ride on an S-curve as long as possible. They focus top-down on optimizing operations. Little effort is made to address the underlying limitation of the current technology and seeking out risky new successors. Maturing companies tend to transform into a ‘machine’ that is supposed to run smoothly. A mind shift happens to avoid risk in order to produce output predictably and reliably at a specific quality level to keep operations running and margins profitable. Incremental process improvement becomes the new mantra and efficiency is the common interpretation of what now is considered ‘innovative’.

10X has turned into 10%. To keep up with the ambitious 10x goal, companies would have to constantly re-invent themselves to replicate their previous disruptive successes.

How Goliath helps David

Even our recent iconic ‘giants’ find themselves in a tighter spot today:

Google struggles to integrate a fragmented product landscape and maintain the ambitious 10X pace of innovation
Microsoft suffocates loaded with features that make products bulky and increasingly unusable while consistently failing to launch new technologies in the growing mobile segment successfully
Apple waters down their appealing simple user interface by adding features and clinging to defend their proprietary standards from outside innovations.

On top of it, all giants tend to face the stiffening wind of governmental scrutiny and regulation that influences market dynamics to protect the consumers from overpowering monopolies that jeopardize competition and innovation.

This is a fertile ground for the next wave of innovators, small Davids, to conquer markets from the Goliaths with fresh ideas, agility, and appealing simplicity. Where does your organization stand on the S-curve, riding the current curve with 10% or aiming high at the next with 10x?

Observing the down-shift

What can you observe when the down-shift happens? How do you know you are not on the transformative boat anymore? Here are just some examples:

Small Jobs – job descriptions appear that narrow down the field of each employee’s responsibility while limiting the scope by incentivizing employees to succeed within the given frame.
Safe Recruiting – practices shift to playing it safe by hiring specialists from a well-known school with a streamlined career path to fit the narrowly defined mold of the job description. They newbies are expected to replicate what they achieved elsewhere. To risk is taken to getting the ‘odd man out’ for the job, a person who took a more adventurous path in life and thinks completely different, as this may disrupt the process and jeopardize the routine output by shifting the focus away from operations.
Homogenized workforce – as a consequence of hiring ‘safely’, the workforce homogenized thereby lowering the innovative potential that comes with the diversity of thought and experience.
Visionaries leave – with the scope of business shifting, the visionary employees that drove innovation previously lose motivation when innovation and creativity slows. Now they are held to operate in a business space where they do pretty much the same thing as their competition. Naturally, these go-getters move on, as it is easy for them to find a challenging and more exciting new job in a more dynamic place. – This ‘leaky talent pipeline’ gets only worse and costly when the talent management focus shifts to talent acquisition and leaving talent retention behind.
Complexity creeps in – the temptation to constantly add features increases the complexity and starts a spiral that is hard to leave again (see also ‘Complexity’ is the 2015 challenge! – Are leaders prepared for ‘glocal’?)
Procedures for everything – operating procedures regulate every detail of the job. The new ‘red tape’ is not limited to the necessary minimum but rather by the possible maximum.
Short-term focus – work output becomes mediocre and focuses on short-term goals and sales targets; the next quarter’s numbers or annual results take priority over following the big dream.
Sanitized communications – broader communications within the company become ‘managed’, monitored, ‘sanitized.’ A constant stream of (incremental) success stories pushes aside an open discussion to target the bigger problems. Opportunities are missed for open dialogue and creative disruption that fuels the quantum leaps forward to outpace the competition. Peer to peer communication is monitored to remain ‘appropriate’ and can even be actively censored. Trust in management and subsequently also among employees erodes.

Management fear of being the first

The real problem is the shift of mindset in top management that quickly works its way down: not wanting to take the risk of being first, which includes avoiding the risk to fail while chasing to next big opportunity or technology. Instead, they sail the calmer waters among more predictable competition fighting for small advantages and holding on to the status quo opportunistically as long as they can. In some cases, the management even acknowledges the strategy shift from ‘leader’ to ‘fast follower’ despite whatever the company motto proudly promotes – and thereby accepting 10% and avoiding to leap ahead of their competition by bold and game-changing 10x moves.

Interestingly, these same managers still love to look over the fence to awe the iconic leaders but steer away to take charge and work to become the leader again themselves. The nagging question remains if they could actually pull it off getting into first place.

Outside-of-the-box thinking may still be encouraged in their organization but is not acted upon anymore. Internal creativity or ideation contests become more of an exercise to keep employees entertained and feeling engaged, but the ideas are hardly being funded and executed. Instead, company resources are concentrated to run the incremental machine predictably and reliably at 10% as long as its profitable, no matter what. – They simply have no resources to spare and dedicate to 10x!

Business Darwinism

These businesses undergo a cycle of breaking through by successful disruption in a narrow or completely new segment, then continued growth to a size where the organization slows down to an incremental pace and somewhat stagnating innovation. It may then get driven out of business by the next disruptor or pro-actively break up into more competitive fragments that allow for agility and risk-taking once again to become leaders in their more closely defined space of business. This closes the cycle they are to go through next. There is a strong parallel between evolution and Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

Keeping this cycle in mind, it becomes easier to see why management undergoes the mind shift to predictable and incremental improvement during the massive growth phase of the company in the center of the S-curve. It is also the time when the disruptive innovators have jumped ship to join the next generation of cutting-edge innovators and risk-taking disrupters that prepare to take the leap working on the next S-curve.

Which way to turn?

The question is where you want to be: the true risk-taker or the incremental improver? Understanding the trajectory and current location of your company helps to make the right decision for you. It can save you from frustration and be banging your head against corporate walls and be wasting your energy in a dinosaur organization that is just not ready anymore for your ‘big ideas’ and quick moves outside its production-house comfort zone.

This leaves some of us thinking which way to turn. If you are looking for predictability, longer-term employment (an illusion these days one way or another) and good night sleep, this is the place you will feel comfortable in.

Otherwise, dare to follow the risk-taking visionaries like Elon Musk (the brain behind PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors; see his recent great interview) to move on.

And then there is ‘intrapreneuring’ as a third direction that tries to change the company from within. (See ‘The Rise of the Intrapreneur‘)

To say it with the words of Niccolo Machiavelli, the wise and sober realist: “All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”

Shoot for the moon (or Mars, if you are Elon Musk), change the world no matter what and enjoy what you do!

Why virtual teams fail, and how to make them work (part 1)

Turning back?

In times where many companies push their employees to work from home and employees request this new freedom, YAHOO’s announcement surprised putting away with it all and returning to the old 9-to-5 office hours. (WSJ, March 5, 2013)

Senior leaders like YAHOO’s new CEO, Marissa Meyer, have doubts if remote working models work – or they struggle how to make it work effectively.

Executive paragigm: Cutting cost vs. increasing productivity

When organizations move to remote work models such as “working-from-home” or variations of it, their primary objective is either

Saving fix cost by reducing their office space footprint or
Increasing the productivity of their workforce.

They cannot have both because once hard decisions have to be made, the other side falls short – and hard decision will have to be made on the way.

If the chosen approach is to increase productivity, the implementation focuses on how to enable employees to become significantly more productive in a sustainable way, even if it incurs cost lower than the productivity gains.

Open spaces for collaboration

Sadly, however, cost cutting tends to rank top on the list for large and mature organizations, which can ultimately sacrifice productivity. Reducing office space “footprint” aims to cut cost from entertaining the real-estate and work environment including everything from utilities, to furniture, to site security, to property taxes, etc.

In practice, individual (‘closed’) offices are replaced by open office environments with the goal to have more employees working in less, shared space. Setting up colorful open office environments with cubicle clusters or zones for different work purposes is often sold as boosters for creativity and innovation, which somewhat obscures the true motives.

These office setups typically mimic the environment and agility of entrepreneurial start-up companies. They suggest increased collaboration by enabling those spontaneous and valuable ‘water cooler’ talks that randomly bring together a diverse mix of employees to exchange their ideas and collaborate on a spur, which then leads to new products and creative solutions. Some offices spaces even seem inspired by “Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory” (with less edible elements): nice to look at and tempting to get close but caution is advised before taking big bites…

Why not to focus on cutting cost

While architecture and interior design can very well affect creativity and collaboration, there are many reasons why this approach tends to fall short:

The goal of cost-cutting is to have more people sharing less space, so the open office environment works best when not all employees work there at the same time, which becomes the end-game of cutting cost. The approach consequently requires some employees to work remotely, typically from home as ‘tele-commuters’, which effectively leads to creating virtual teams.
Thus, not all employees are physically present at the same time to start off with, which defeats the idea of spontaneous meetings around the water-cooler or pulling teams together spontaneously as needed.
Size does matter: start-ups take their energy and agility from everyone collaborating in the same space at the same time, which is the opposite scenario of large companies trying to reduce this footprint and, subsequently, ending up moving towards remote working models.
The start-up model does not scale for large, mature companies. This is one of the reasons why large companies often break the monolithic organization at some point to form more agile hence competitive entities. A lesson learned perhaps from Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.”
Since cost cutting has priority, typically, the workforce was trimmed down, so the remaining staff carries more work on less shoulders. Not only does this leave less time for the remaining office staff to hang out next to the water-cooler for a random chat, but there is less staff to meet and hang out with in the first place.
Little to no attention is given on how to make the remaining workforce more productive to manage the increased workload and invest accordingly, as here these ‘hard decisions’ come in and cost cutting is given priority.

Now, this does not mean there are no more water-cooler talks – they do happen and can be extremely valuable. But they happen less frequent and with a smaller pool of people you could possible bump into randomly. Since this “water-cooler innovation” model does not scale under the cost-saving paradigm, it effectively reduces the innovation potential resulting from random meetings overall.

What does your workplace look like, does this sound familiar at all?

Paying the price for cutting cost: Virtual Teams

Under a cost-cutting paradigm, the need for working remotely leads to the formation of more virtual teams throughout the organization. We already find 66% of virtual teams in Global 500 Enterprises include members from at least three time zones and 48% including external business partners (Harvard Business Review study of Project Management Best Practices in Global 500 Enterprises).

When ‘cost-cutting’ has priority, the performance of virtual teams still comes second. Faced with the increasing need to enable communication for a distributed workforce, for ‘cost-cutting’ organizations here comes the next challenge: how to facilitate collaboration and information flow on a budget?
This is one of the hardest decisions management is confronted with.

With tight budgets in mind, the focus turns to ‘enabling technology’ and often leads to implementing a better phone or teleconferencing system. However, cost-saving and -consequently- company-wide standards lead to compromises and mediocre features due to (what else could it be?) cost saving considerations.

What is the cost of ‘rich’ communication?

Face-to-face communication remains the ‘gold standard’ (more about the why follows in part 2 of this blog post.)
Typically, information-rich channels such as latest ‘tele-presence’ systems are disregarded for their ‘expensive’ price tag. They allow communicating in the broadest possible (virtual) way peer-to-peer.

If they are purchased at all, they often remain restricted for privileged use by executives; so there is an implied business case for rich communication channels.

Unfortunately, these are far less frequently shared with their staff lower in the organizational hierarchy. Regular employees and middle management are often enough left alone with more limiting conferencing systems and other technology to figure out how to make ‘virtual teams’ work.

Interestingly, I have never heard serious consideration given to quantify the opportunity cost, i.e. what the costs are of not implementing a tele-communication system that gets as close to face-to-face conversations as possible. It would be interesting to find out if the actual cost to buy a more expensive system is offset by the gains for its users and businesses across the organization, don’t you think?

Though this would be coming from the less popular approach to increase productivity…

Composing effective teams

Also the mix of the team members should be considered and lots more can be said about this aspect alone, so let’s just pick a few that that tend to be less on people’s minds:

For example, generational differences translate into different work styles and preferences than can strengthen or weaken a team. As an example: “Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?“

Another soft factor that remains stubbornly neglected is the team composition of introverts and extroverts complementing each other for better results. Extroverts seem favored by hiring managers over introverts, but extroverts don’t necessarily make good team mates as recent UCLA studies show:

Introverts are often perceived anxious or neurotic, which feeds into the stigma of volatility and negativity that can drag on the team, when in fact they tend to work very hard so not to let their team mates down.

In contrast, extroverts appear to be the better team players yet in their core personality its all about being in the center of attention. Extroverts are good at building relationships and getting themselves noticed; this self-presentation may leave a good first impression but the self-centric core proves rather disruptive in collaborative situations, so the researchers concluded.

Also little attention is given to whom needs to work together and should be closer connected or even collocated; this approach of looking at network and workflow is usually sacrificed by enforcing cost control top-down. Established departmental silos and cost centers effectively become barriers for collaboration rather than by following the internal workflow and connections throughout the lower levels of the hierarchical pyramid that often remain hidden from the executive view down from the pyramid’s tip.

Why to Invest in communication and collaboration

A study on communications ROI by Towers Watson finds a 47% higher total returns to shareholders by companies that are highly effective communicators. (Capitalizing on Effective Communications, ROI Study, 2010)

Even more reason to focus on enabling collaboration and productivity – and to invest into enabling communication and relating technology accordingly.

Let’s leave the misery of why virtual teams fail here – check back soon for part 2 on How to make virtual teams work!

Job description for an Executive Sponsor

Job description for an Executive Sponsor
Executive sponsorship is an important prerequisite for the success of employee groups. The challenge is finding a great sponsor, so what should you look for? What would a job description for an executive sponsor look like? ‑ Here are some practical ideas that have worked.

Why executive sponsorship is critical

Employee groups consist of volunteers with good intentions. They work, typically, in addition to their day job and after hours driven by the desire to address a need close to their heart. Together with colleagues, they seize opportunities to complement the organization’s objectives and goals and to improve the workplace. In most cases, employee groups are not an integral part of the organization: they don’t show up in organizational charts and have no formal authority.

For most group members, this voluntary work is ‘on top’ of the regular job and not reflected in their professional goals or performance evaluation. What makes a difference is having a strong ally: the executive sponsor.

From the organization’s perspective, some governance is needed to:

Prevent the employee group left to operate in a void or detach from the rest of the organization
Align the goals of the group with the needs and strategy of the company in a complementing and synergistic way
Ensure the group’s practices comply with company policies and other regulations.

The leaders of employee groups owe their members to:

Focus the group’s work to make a meaningful impact on the organization (instead of wasting resources and the member’s time on projects or activities that do not create value, are meaningless or even harmful to the organization)
Get funds, active support, and political backing in the organization.

Both, the organization and the employee group benefits from the connection with an executive sponsor.

What to look for in an executive sponsor?

No silver bullet

When you are looking for an executive sponsor, what are you looking for? What are the relevant criteria? – Executive sponsorship is a role, just like any other job, so what would a job description for an executive sponsor look like?

Bear in mind that there is no one right answer for the working relationship with an executive sponsor. The sponsor role and level of involvement varies and depends on many factors. It also shifts over time with the changing maturity of the group and its leadership, for example, or levels of involvement and autonomy of the group. A new group may turn to the sponsor for help with forming, direction, and funding where a mature group may seek business insights, refined success metrics, and leadership development opportunities.

Criteria for an Executive Sponsor

A perfect sponsor effectively leverages their personal brand, relationships, resources to enhance the visibility and credibility of the group. Look to ‘recruit’ a well-known leader, who is well-connected within the leadership team and respected throughout the organization. In an earlier post, we briefly touched on “How to attract an executive sponsor?”

Ideally, the sponsor is a top-level executive ‑ you hit the jackpot if you can get the CEO!

Overall, the group’s expectations of the sponsor’s role usually include that the sponsor:

Serves as a champion of the group
Gives strategic direction to align with the organization’s business strategy
Helps to identify measurable success criteria that support business goals
Provides advice and counsel to guide the group’s development
Connects to a broad network of relationships
Liaises with the executive team and accepts accountability
Helps actively to identify and overcome obstacles and resistance within the organization
Supports the group through communication and visibility.

The stronger your sponsor, the stronger the group! A strong sponsor

Shares valuable business knowledge
Demonstrates leadership, and is
Genuinely willing to help others.

A good sponsor encourages people to focus on how to engage others and improve communication, enhances the members’ leadership qualities and developing partnerships while helping to overcome barriers.

The sponsor you do NOT want

On the other end of the spectrum, there are also people you should avoid as executive sponsors for the group. This category includes people who:

Provide lip-service over taking action
Use the group for selfish reasons; for example, by claiming and promoting achievements of group members as their own
Do not see the potential and value that the group can add to the organization and its businesses
Do not make enough time to work with the group
Are ineffective or unwilling to support and protect the group from opposing forces.

Finally, if you have the choice, avoid the temptation to have a group of executives ‘share’ responsibility and ‘champion’ the group collectively. This tends to dilute accountability and action while increasing communication and coordination overhead.

There is much truth in the saying: ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’

One of us?

Often enough, sponsors are chosen or step up because they originate from the group’s affinity core, i.e. they are of the same ethnicity that ethic-focused group represents, a female for a women’s group, a gay or lesbian for an LGBT group, and so on ‑ you get the picture. I advocate against this practice for two reasons, in particular: First, with an ‘outsider’ you achieve more diversity and mutual learning experiences in the group as well as for the sponsor. Secondly, the group becomes more believable as a business driver that attracts a broader membership base instead of risking to be perceived as an ‘insider club’ limited to members with a certain ‘diversity ticket’.

For the same reasons, you may also consider rotating sponsors every few years.

Quid pro quo

What you want is an involved and effective executive sponsor. Now, this sponsor role comes with additional work, responsibility, and risks for the senior leader’s reputation and career. Therefore, this ‘job opening’ must be compelling enough to attract a senior executive to step forward and sign up.

It is important to offer a value proposition that makes clear what is in it for the executive sponsor to make this symbiosis work. It is quite similar as discussed in “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) for the group members.

Know your sponsor

Sponsors are humans too, so here are some thoughts on how to approach them: Get to know your sponsor first, just as you would prepare and approach to meet any other very important customer or external business partner. Find out their goals, interests, beliefs, priorities, constraints of the political and economic environment, and personal work-style. What exactly is the sponsor’s interest in your group?

Clarify your expectations mutually. Once you know your sponsor and built rapport, it becomes easy to offer what is important to them and helping the sponsor to achieve their goals too.

A value proposition that addresses the (financial) bottom line is powerful and convincing. It also enables the sponsor to communicate the benefits with the leadership team in a (business) language that everyone understands. It takes business acumen, though, to specify and articulate the financial impact. If this is not your strong suit, you need to find other compelling upsides or values that the group can bring to the business and that is close to a sponsor’s heart.

Do and Don’t: How to work with the executive sponsor

Here is some practical advice on working with an executive sponsor.

On the Do side, preparation and focus are key. Remember, this is a business meeting. The executive’s time is valuable, so be respectful of it and do not waste it. You want the sponsor to remain approachable and willing to meet with you in the future whenever you need to see them urgently.

Schedule appointments regularly (monthly, for example, if the sponsor agrees) with an agenda of topics to discuss
Provide background information on meeting topics ahead of time and come well prepared
Be on time and keep meetings on schedule
Present any problems with a proposed solution
Inform of issues in the workplace that affect the group and propose what the sponsor can to mitigate or resolve the issues
Be honest with your sponsor – do not sugarcoat, blame others, or cover-up mistakes
Give your sponsor a heads-up also before taking more public and visible action so they will not get caught by surprise – if there is bad news, share it with the sponsor first
Discuss key goals and ask them for guidance, advice or assistance – allow your sponsor to help you and the group
Reserve your requests for sponsor appearances and events to where it counts most. For example, as a speaker at a ‘headline’ event to draw a crowd, attract new members, and demonstrate the group’s value for the business. Ask if the sponsor is willing to recruit other executives or respected business partners and customers as guest speakers or participants.
The sponsor could host a luncheon or dinner for the group’s leadership once or twice a year to meet everyone in person, discuss, and recognize achievements of the group and individual members.

As for the Don’ts, try to avoid these pitfalls:

Don’t come with a hidden personal agenda – it’s strictly about the group
Don’t bother the sponsor with petty day-to-day issues – focus on the meaningful impact on the business and the group
Don’t ask for general funding or support – be specific and have data and facts ready to support your case
Don’t be afraid to ask for guidance and advice – but also don’t come just to commiserate.

Beyond the job description

Don’t underestimate the importance of the right chemistry between the group leader(s) and the exec sponsor; it is crucial to establish and foster a trustful, constructive, and pleasant work relationship.

For an employee group, executive sponsorship is more than the group’s endorsement by senior management: a strong sponsor becomes the lifeline when times get rough.

So when you go out to ‘hire’ your executive sponsor, also hire for the right attitude.

How to create innovation culture with diversity!

The MIT – an institution of success

As an example, let’s look at one of the most innovative institutions in the world: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) located in Cambridge, Boston. Since success can be defined many ways and comparing academia with industry can be iffy. Given the MIT’s extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit, however, here is a metrics that business can easily relate to: the MIT’s living alumni formed over 25,000 companies that employ 3.3 million people with revenues close to 2 trillion dollars. This resembles the 11th highest GDP in the world – compared to countries, the MIT ranks among France and Italy! – Not a bad track record for a single institution that fames 50 Nobel laureates! For comparison, France has 57 and Italy 20 Nobel laureates.

So much for a success metrics on a social, economic and personnel scale… There is no doubt the MIT is successful in many ways and quite different from the other 2,500 or so graduate schools in the U.S.

What does the MIT do differently?

What can we extract, learn and apply to our own organization to become more successful? What is it exactly that makes the MIT different and so successful?

The MIT is not a traditional university that seeks knowledge for knowledge sake. ‑ Believe it or not, this has been the mindset of many scholars and scientists since centuries and still is being lived today and taught to be carried forward. This engrained mindset became a way of thinking and approaching challenges for graduates – in the commercial workplace! Now, the workplace is different from academia as it typically must generate profit to sustain. (Let’s not consider the recent bail-outs an incentive to build business models around.)

The downside of this traditional ‘curiosity-only’ based approach is that one can easily fall in love with working towards perfection, diverting on interesting tangents or ending up with a product of academic beauty but falling short of commercial potential – ingenious, but useless. It’s like making the proverbial ever better mousetrap that hardly anyone will ever buy… (Well, in all honesty, I have seen some really cool new mousetraps just recently, but that’s a different story that I am happy to share upon request… anyway, you get the point)

Innovation is novelty plus application

That’s where the MIT is different: it backs up new ideas for tangible application with solid science. This approach is consistent with the MIT’s internal definition of innovation that also meets the commercial needs of companies outside this alma mater and comes down to this: Innovation is novelty plus its application.

A good idea alone is not enough – no matter how ingenious it is. It must be applied help solving a real-world problem effectively. Where the success metrics of traditional universities counts published articles, hence the classic ‘publish or perish’, the MIT focuses on practical and hands-on application as in ‘demo or die’! It brings together ivory tower and workbench in a most symbiotic and practical way. Less talking, more doing – and commercial success tends to follow naturally.

Do it like the MIT?

So, how can your organization become more like the MIT and making its innovation potential actionable in a reliable, robust and repeatable process?

Besides seeking knowledge for tangible application, the power of the MIT lays in its ability to bring together experts from many disciplines for cross-pollination. They work together and they learn from and with another by looking at problems from many different angles. Not surprisingly, the break-through solutions developed by these teams found on hands-on experimentation: demo or die! This often proves more creative and powerful than traditional and less diverse teams or organizations that tend to focus on incremental improvements. – Let’s take a closer look:

Does diversity matter?

First of all, what is ‘Diversity’? Diversity in organizations is often understood bluntly or interpreted narrowly as the goal to meet a certain quota of easily observable attributes like color or gender leading towards a more mixed and ‘colorful’ workforce. Voila! – Mission accomplished? Not really!

Imagine this more theoretical but possible case, where different looking staffers grew up together and shared similar experiences for a longer period like, let’s say, in an orphanage, a boarding school or an academy. The optical impression of this diverse workforce then is an illusion as they are anything but diverse except for their physical appearance.
(I am not elaborating on the likelihood of this example or the need for a customer-facing organization to reflect their customers and partners in the marketplace, since I want to make a different point here.)

Why diversity matters

What counts within an organization for innovation to go beyond incremental improvement is the diversity of thought, expertise and experience for a simple reason: Locking up your subject matter experts in a room to have them come up with innovative ideas over and over is not a recipe for success.

Sitting inside a box of conformity, homogeneity and consensus does not make good ingredients for breakthrough ideas and innovation – that is why we need to enable experts, in particular, to think ‘outside-the-box’ by mixing up teams by inducing meaningful diversity.

Innovation happens at the crossroads

Since break-through ideas tend to emerge at the crossroads of disciplines and experiences, closed and less diverse groups of experts simply cannot come up with them easily – if at all!

In fact, working with non-experts or experts from very different disciplines or lines of work not only opens up your experts’ network but also forces them into a different thought processes for this fresh and different perspective we are all looking for. Many managers initially regard this as sand in their well-oiled machine that only delays or complicates getting the work done – and therefore avoid mixing in heterogeneous expertise. Nonetheless, experts thinking out of their box of expertise emerges from combining different disciplines – related or completely unrelated fields of research and application.

Outsiders or even laymen ask questions that experts would not dare to ask their peers so not to appear incompetent, inefficient, insulting or insane! Research even shows that experts tend to trust other experts too much whom they worked with closely over extended periods: They don’t question each other’s judgment and assumptions anymore – which may just be what is needed to innovate!

Why experts don’t research enough

Experts do not research enough. – Does this sound counter-intuitive to you?
Interestingly, scientific data suggests that experts research less within and on the fringes of their own field of expertise. A high level of expertise can therefore become a liability and lead to blind-spots for experts. – Why is that? Established experts in their field tend to focus rather on what they already know, assume knowing what there is to know about the subject matter and stop questioning their own knowledge. This leads to a pattern seeking to reinforce the own knowledge, thinking and point of view rather than challenging it!

What experts should do instead is exploring more what they don’t now, seeking out challenges of ideas, experiences and findings by experts of other disciplines. This cross-pollination is more likely to lead to the next breakthrough.

By the way, on the other end of the expert spectrum, the naïve laymen researches too little too, because they don’t understand the basics and don’t know what to look for or what is important. It is the ‘amateurs’ with a general understanding of the subject that research most, since they feel they need to get a deeper and broader scoop while knowing what to look for and what could be relevant.

Establish a ‘meritocracy’

A key ingredient of the MIT is championing a meritocracy, i.e. honor and progression of talented and able individuals based on their achievements rather than their status, tenure or other privileges in the organization. This levels the playing field and motivates by focusing everyone on the only thing that really counts: performance.

Sure, many companies and organizations claim to have a ‘performance culture’ or claim to ‘pay by performance’ as the primary incentive for their employees. This ‘performance culture’ often looks better on paper than in reality (except for small pockets of jobs like freelancing sales staff, who only receive a margin or commission for a successful transaction, but a low or none fixed salary otherwise).

For staff without commission incentive, how much of the compensation actually does tie to performance directly? Odds are you can get along just fine in a day job even without exceeding expectations in performance reviews.

It is difficult to compare a company with an academic institution (like the MIT) directly in a meaningful way, since students are typically in for the glory of pushing limits to try out and create things together with other brilliant minds that exceed most people’s wildest dreams. However, it is fair to say that the MIT’s meritocracy and entrepreneurial framework sets up a winning concept with commercial success and material pay-off to follow rather naturally. – Check out the MIT’s fabulous Entrepreneurship Center (http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/) to find more on entrepreneurship at the MIT.

The lesson here is not to focus on monetary rewards alone or as the first tool at hand but to become flexible and cater to what is important to inspire your staff to greatness. Foster an environment of healthy competition, transparency, high ethical standards and consider catering to individual preferences and needs beyond handing out money broadly like watering flowers. While money is indeed most important to one, others may prefer a few days off, handwritten note by an executive or individual office decoration, for example.

Open Innovation

Another aspect to consider is that research is costly and resources are limited. Cross-pollination can be a cost effective alternative.

Open innovation, however, works differently and is for genuine out-of-the-box thinkers. It is a powerful approach especially if you don’t have the resources or time to conduct the needed research yourself. The basic idea is that other people or organizations may already have a viable solution or approach to your problem. You don’t find and make these connections though if you don’t leave your ivory tower! Open innovation refers to looking for existing solutions beyond your usual area of expertise and even outside your industry and adapt or configure them to your problem at hand.

Sure, there are also options other than buying or licensing solutions, such as joint ventures, spin-offs or ‘skunkworks’ projects to invent outside the company. What model fits best depends on the organization, its environment and other constraints.

Classic examples of Open Innovation – and there are many, many more!

Car makers looked into making car brakes more effective by preventing wheels from blocking while braking, so the vehicle maintains maneuverable safely to prevent a collision.
They found an existing solution, anti-locking brakes (ABS), in another industry that faced the same problem earlier and with a higher urgency – the aerospace industry: Airplanes are heavier than cars, land at high speed with a need to stop fast and controlled before the end of a run-way. This includes safely braking and steering airplane wheels on the ground without blocking tires burning up or incapacitating the plane’s maneuverability.
Here is another one: with increasing concern for air travel safety, airport security organizations were frantically looking for ways to screen passengers for hidden metal objects fast and effectively. Given time pressure they looked into existing solutions in other industries.
But who had already developed experience and equipment to scan metallic objects in organic bodies? Where would you start looking?
Well, they found their solution in the lumber industry which may come surprising. It makes good sense though when you take a closer look: the saws for slicing trees in saw mills get damaged when tree trunks contain metal objects like bullets, nails, spikes, etc. So, saw mills needed to detect these objects in the tree trunks before cutting the wood. They introduced stationary metal detectors (magnetometers) that encircle a tree trunk while the trunk is being pushed through the machine and scanned inch by inch. Perhaps you even remember that the very first metal detectors for humans at airports had a round shape? Well, now you know why!

Bottom line

Innovation and Diversity are a dynamic duo! Both go hand in hand to wipe out blind-spots created by using the ‘usual suspects’, i.e. relying on the same team of experts over and over again.

In a nutshell, for organizations to thrive, diversity of thought and continuous innovation need an environment to flourish in and become embedded in the organizational culture:

Innovation is novelty and its application.
Bring ‘thought diversity’ into expert teams.
Incentivize by establishing a ‘meritocracy’.
Use open innovation to speed up research.

Links on innovation in the OrgChanger.com blog:

Measure your company culture in real-time!

It is difficult if not impossible to assess organizational culture directly. Instead, managers favor surveys to measuring organizational climate as a first step. However, surveys fall short in many ways and can lead to skewed results as input to managerial decision-making. Better than surveys is observing employee behavior with a meaningful metrics.

What is your organizational culture?

No matter where you work, you are a part of it: the organizational culture. Culture is understood to comprise shared beliefs, values, norms, traditions but also myths of employees about interpersonal relationships, behaviors and activities of the organization.

A (favorable) strong culture indicates alignment to organizational values and goals – some call it the organization’s personality. This is the internal glue for collaboration and outstanding results as an organization. In a strong culture, ‘can do’ stories share ‘how things are being done around here’ that inspire and motivate employees to action and ‘organizational citizenship behavior’. A strong culture supports employee satisfaction and retention as well as innovation and productivity. (See also: How to create innovation culture with diversity!)

In contrast, misalignment of values and goals in an unfavorable weak culture has an eroding effect. They easily lead to extensive rules and bureaucracy that rely on exercising control. Working in this place is not much fun. Don’t expect anyone to go the extra mile!

Unfortunately, organizational culture is a slippery and complex subject, which makes it hard to grasp – and hard to measure directly. It is easier to feel than to express.
– Try it! How does the culture of your organization feel in your gut? How about putting it in words?

How to measure culture?

A common approach is to measure a company’s organizational climate by looking at the culture’s outcomes or consequences rather than trying to grasp culture directly. Thereby, the climate is used as surrogate marker for the underlying culture, since outcomes are easier to observe and to measure.

Here we find a handle on whether the employees are happy at work and feel valued, if they enjoy their work environment and trust their colleagues, if they go the ‘extra mile’ for their team – or if they are frustrated, disengaged or even act hostile against coworkers or the organization.
Factors to establish a metrics offer themselves relating to –for example- communication, accountability, behavioral standards, rewards, trust, and commitment.

Organizational climate’s primary driver is daily leadership that influences the expectations as well as the behavior of all individuals in the organization. The leadership also determines the organizational structure, another key to an organization’s effectiveness. Both enable the organization to reach its goals, but also reflect priorities and heavily affect how employees communicate, collaborate and interact with each other.

Many factors obscure the clear picture including rapidly growing workforce and geographic separation but also the way we actually measure organizational culture.

Yet another survey?

Many companies invest in surfacing climate data to ‘feel the pulse’ of their staff and to confirm positive effects or apply corrective action to adverse findings.

The most common way to measure climate is a climate survey and repeated to compare changes over time. Despite our daily information overload, many companies typically use surveys to collect data from as many employees as possible to paint a representative picture of the company.

Surveys seem the first tool in the managerial arsenal. They appear attractive, seem simple and powerful. Survey results are seen as straightforward, clear, quantifiable and reflecting the ‘truth’ since the workforce was asked directly.

‑ But are surveys truly the best tool available or even an proper tool at all as a starting point?

What is wrong with surveys?

Unfortunately, surveys are far from ideal for several reasons.

The first issue we face is that there is no common standard for measuring the ‘climate’. Every organization or consultant comes up with a different scale. If an organization introduces its own scale and applies their metrics consistently, it can build a database over time. The data, however, only compares directly against other client organizations or industries that were measured similarly, i.e. sharing the same scale, at a premium for this proprietary benchmarking.

Even worse, results hardly compare because surveys ask questions relying on language. A slight nuance in phrasing of a question may change the meaning and influence the responses. After all, words are ambiguous and open for interpretation – and even more so in a multi-cultural society and multi-lingual. For consistency and easy processing, they typically come with a fixed set of response options such as multiple choice, which can limit the responders’ options and influence what they respond.

Often overlooked, the real workload comes after the survey closed in the analysis, when you start slicing the data to combine questions, sub-populations or start exploratory analyses in an afterthought with all the shiny data you find in your hands that seem to open endless opportunity for finding answers. This is where you easily run out of time or budget – and where it becomes tempting to cut corners just to finish up and deliver results while sacrificing depth and consistency.

Surveys tend to be inherently skewed – Why?

When was the last time you enjoyed taking a survey?

Our email in-boxes are full of customer service surveys for a recent purchase or some service call over the phone or online. The whole world seems wanting to improve their services – and sends us a survey.

However, surveys are far from ideal for several reasons including these (and many more):

Fatigue – There is no shortage of surveys these days. Coming back to our information overload and time constraints, many people just don’t want to fill out another questionnaire or find time for it in the first place. ‑ Did you ever give random responses or skipped questions just to get it over?
Privacy – Some other questions you may not feel comfortable answering in the first place because they invade your privacy by collecting data with questionable benefit to you.
Anonymity – in the computer age, anonymity is hard to find. Even in an otherwise anonymous survey, the combination of responses can identify individuals under certain circumstances feeding privacy concerns.
Past – Surveys measure the past. Even the most credible survey questions inquire about past behavior at best, which is the most solid data you can get out of a survey. The results may be good for forensics but hardly reflect the current situation.
Diversity – a diverse workforce can come with communication barriers of language or cultural background that leads to misunderstanding. Geographic idiosyncrasies can induce further bias in distributed organizations.
Delay – surveys take time to prepare, to conduct and to analyze. Don’t expect to get the results anytime soon, especially because you cannot control when your responders choose to respond. You have to adjust to their schedule, so getting survey results removes you far from ‘real-time’.
Precision – in surveys, you can easily measure everything to a dot and even farther right of the decimal point. Some give you the tendency to ask and measure too much just because we can or we feel the results (and our work) look more credible this way. Often it is an illusion that a higher level of precision adds to clarity when it adds to inertia instead by a flood of obscure information irrelevant to the decision you want to make.

The list goes on… you got the point. The question remains what is a better approach to measure organizational climate?

Why it is better to measure behavior

A survey measures our intent – not our behavior. Unarguably, behavior is a much stronger indicator than intent. It comes down to whether we observe people putting their money where their mouth is or if we get only the lip service that a survey represents. – Think of it as the litmus test you remember from chemistry class: It shows you the truth and reveals whether your assumptions hold true!

Let us look at the benefits of measuring behavior using the same list again:

Fatigue – As human beings we can refuse to respond to a survey ‑ but we cannot stop behavior as such. Even if we refuse to respond, this is our observable behavior and becomes measurable. For example, if large parts of the surveyed staff do not respond to the survey, this tells you something about the organizational and what is important to the staff.
Privacy and Anonymity – Usually, your observable behavior as an employee is not a privacy concern, since you are out in the open and visible to your co-workers anyway. Again, you cannot not show behavior once you agreed to go to work, there is nowhere to hide.
(Let’s not derail by focusing on or encouraging questionable, unethical or even illegal intrusion of privacy at the workplace or outside.)
Past – Our observable behavior is now, it is the present. You can’t get better real-time data!
Diversity – For observations, it does not matter if your workforce is diverse or understands the questions you ask. There are no communication barriers when it comes to observing behavior. Actually, quite the opposite holds true: the employee behavior can help you to better identify communication barriers or other issues that a survey would not reveal!
Delay – observing behavior also takes time but it is mostly the time to identify what you want to observe for what reason as well as observing it and then summarizing the results. There is no polishing questions and response options. You get to results faster because you are on your schedule and do not have to wait for responses trickling in.
Precision – key is to measure only as much as needed, i.e. to establishing necessary and actionable facts. Forget the fluff and focus on the one or two most important aspects needed for effective decision-making.

How to measure behavior?

Now, measuring behavior is not always easy. It requires thinking through the cause-and-effect dependencies. – A well-known example of how not to do it is the questionable relation of using the price of butter in Bangladesh to predict the stock market in the USA…

What the right metrics is depends on what you want to find out. What is the underlying business problem you are trying to solve? Many roads can lead to Rome, so to speak, but the basic idea is to keep your target simple. Choose a target that is meaningful, robust and easy to observe.

Clarity helps. As much as we crave being informed and gather data this approach is not helpful, since it tends to produce clutter. Instead, focus on measuring the minimum you need as the basis for making a sound decision. Don’t fall for the nice-to-have and garnish data you could have in addition.

How precise do you need the results really to be? – As an example, you may be concerned about low meeting attendance. Does it make a difference for your decision-making if you find out that in three consecutive meetings “63.26%, 58.18% and 69.4% of the invitees did not show up” versus “on average, 2/3 don’t attend”? – Let me guess, “2/3” does just fine to decide slimming down who is invited in the future or to change the purpose of the meeting, right?

The key is to stick to clearly observable behavior. Some solid behavioral data may already exist within the organization. – For example, a long tenure and low turnover may reflect that employees prefer to stay with organization, while many internal job applications reflect dissatisfaction with their current position or department.

Bottom line

Next time you think of running a survey consider taking a close look at employee behavior first!

References

Butter in Bangladesh Predicts the Stock Market: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2007/09/20/butter-in-bangladesh-predicts-the-stock-market.aspx

Next-generation ERG learn from U.S. Army recruitment!

What do Generation Y (GenY) oriented Employee Resource Groups (ERG) share with the military? – More than you expect! A constant supply of active members is the life-blood for any ERG to put plans into action and prevent established activists from burning out. The U.S. Army faces a similar challenge every year: how to attract and recruit the youngest adult generation? Next-generation ERGs listen up: Let the U.S. Army work for you and learn some practical lessons!

The U.S. Army brand

Everyone knows the U.S. Army. This American icon has been around for well over 230 years!

The ‘U.S. Army’ is more than a well-known military force. We recognize it as a brand. Just like ‘Coca-Cola’ or ‘IBM’ portray and advertise a certain company image to sell its product, the U.S. Army needs to constantly appeal with a unique value proposition for new recruits to enlist. The ‘product’ offered if what the recruit expect to get out of it along the lines of ‘what is in it for me’ (WIIFM).

From this commercial perspective, it seems only natural that the U.S. Army hires world-class advertisement agencies to help meeting recruitment targets. Marketing and advertisement gained importance especially since the U.S. Army turned into an all-volunteer force in 1973. This is similar to a voluntary ERG membership.

Aiming at a moving target

We distinguish four generations at the workplace today. Each comes with different motivations and characteristics. The collective personality or zeitgeist influences each generation’s behavior and values. These need to be considered to adapt and effectively connect with each generation in its own way to maximize their potential and productivity for the better of the organization overall.

You can easily find this spectrum of generations reflected in the historic recruitment campaigns of the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army ‘brand’ changes over time and adapts to appeal and attract fresh recruits.

Let’s take a look at these recruiting campaigns for the four generations before we move on to extract the practical benefits for ERGs today:

1. Veterans, Silent or Traditional Generation (born 1922 to 1945)

I admit, in practice this campaign hardly affects today’s ERG anymore since most of this age group has already left the workforce by now.

Nonetheless, using the ‘propaganda’ flavor in this message proved very successful in both WWI and WWII.

‘Uncle Sam’ captures the essence of a generation of disciplined conformers with much respect for authority and an ingrained understanding that duty to the country is an obligation.

2. Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964)

The U.S. Army became an all-volunteer force in 1973, which changed the recruiting game entirely. Not being able to rely on a general draft anymore, the U.S. Army needed a new approach to attract a steady stream of voluntary recruits.

This coincided with an upcoming new generation of the younger Baby Boomers generally characterized as full of optimism and thirst for social engagement. To tackle the new challenge of effective marketing, the U.S. Army brought in a professional advertisement agency.

The first ads to the “Today’s Army wants to join you” campaign (1971 to 1980) suggest membership in a nice group of people sharing many similarities.

Also, women were now encouraged to enlist. It’s all about optimism, getting together and being involved!

This was a gutsy and somewhat liberal first step to attract a volunteer force. Though thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ it did not work out all that smoothly as indicated by changes following quickly.

"Join the People who Joined the Army" — All serious in 1973

This ad (1973 to 1976) is like a pendulum swinging back to the opposite extreme!

Tone and focus changed dramatically in this newer version of “Join the People” emphasizing the seriousness and commitment of being a soldier while also highlighting personal benefits.

The message is clear: No more playing around here, responsibility and duty is back, no more football on the beach!

Finally, the U.S. Army settled on a more balanced campaign.

Here is an example for “This Is the Army” campaign ads. The headlines read “In Europe You’re on Duty 24 Hours a Day, but the Rest of the Time Is Your Own” or “Back home, I wouldn’t mind doing the work I’m doing here” influenced also by a loss of military reputation after the Vietnam war.

One campaign or another, the U.S. Army missed its recruitment goal by more than 17.000 in 1979. This announced a new generation, GenX, coming with a different background and values that required the U.S. Army to re-think and find a new approach.

3. Generation X (born 1965 to 1980)

Birthrates cut into the recruitment pool. In addition, the smaller Generation X turns out to be tough to target.

This generation came with an inherent distrust of authority originating from geopolitical change as well as changes in western society and family structures. Despite GenX’s dominant drive for independence and self-reliance, this generation is also looking for structure and direction in life.

6 Be all you can be ad — Personal growth

“Be All You Can Be” (1980 to 2001) emphasizes a personal challenge and an opportunity for self-development, i.e. taking charge of your fate to become a better individual. Note that the “we” is gone, it’s all about “me” for GenX.

The benefits offered by the U.S. Army included significant education support. (The U.S. military remains the largest ‘education organization’ in the U.S. in terms of funding tuition, in particular.)

Self-reliant GenX

The succeeding “Army of One” campaign (2001 to 2006) hits the true core of the independent GenX by underlining the single person in their message.

However, the campaign was also short-lived because a focus on the independent individual appeared contrary to the idea of teamwork that any military organization relies on and cannot work without.

Facing demographic decline, recruiting advertisement reached out into Spanish-speaking ‘markets’ (in a campaign known as “Yo Soy el Army”) to tap into the increasing Hispanic population.

Image result for image top gun free online — Top Gun (1986) movie

The U.S. Army made more use of TV advertisement to reach GenX, a generation brought up in front of a TV.

Perhaps the boldest recruitment stunt was the 1986 smash movie “Top Gun” – sponsored by the Pentagon in need of a major image boost. And it worked! Think about it: Tom Cruise is a self-reliant ace who has a problem with accepting authority – a poster-boy Gen-Xer. In the end, he became a valuable team player for the greater good meeting the military’s needs and got the girl.

4. Generation Y or Millennials (born 1981 to 2001)

The ongoing “Army Strong” campaign builds on a proposition of lifelong strength through training, teamwork, shared values and personal experience. – What a change from the previous focus on independence for GenX!

“Army Strong” also suggests contemporary leadership, personal empowerment and strength building that found on shared values.
(Read more on managing Generation Y at Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?)

Here, ‘strength’ is meant literally: The U.S. Army overhauled the fitness training to ‘toughen up’ this generation. Weakened by a more tranquil lifestyle (such as video-gaming), GenY-ers often lack experience with physical confrontation that is unavoidable and crucial for effective warriors.

Perhaps confusing for older generations, “Army Strong” caters to GenY’s interest in making a difference not only in their lives but also for their extended communities. Work is less central in this generation while individuality and leisure value high.

The campaign milks the social ties deliberately addressing not only recruits but also the people who love and support them, i.e. the people who influence the recruits’ decisions such as family and friends as well as the broader public.

Print ad for "Army Strong" — GenY pride and social values

Consequently, the U.S. Army presents itself more as a responsible and somewhat selfless social service in advertisements by highlighting how soldiers serve their communities and for their nation beyond executing force during a conflict.

The U.S. Army adapts its spectrum of communication channels to keep up with GenY, a generation for which technology serves as an extension of their personality and their physical selves. Constantly online and connectedness with an appealing adventurous fun-factor, the U.S. Army is present across the entire landscape of noteworthy social media these days – it even entertains its own video game to warm up GenY.

Targets on the demographic curve

Next-generation ERGs and the U.S. Army both aim to attract a specific demographic: The U.S. Army targets 17 to 24-year-old recruits, looking at the lower end, while ERGs typically look for the older end, i.e. young adults with professional training, perhaps a college degree and some work experience.

Thus, the U.S. Army’s target demographic starts just a few years younger than the typical employees entering the (civilian) workforce, so the U.S. Army operates a bit ahead of the age curve that becomes relevant for ERG membership recruitment.

Let the U.S. Army do your research!

Using this time difference to their advantage, next-generation ERGs, in particular, benefit from the U.S. Army doing the heavy lifting with regard to generational research. With the U.S. Army’s advertisement contract worth more than $200 million each year (or $2,500+ per recruit) don’t fool yourself: an ERG will never have funds anywhere close to hire a top-notch advertisement agency for attracting new members … unless you are perhaps the guys who invented Google or so… J

From a next-generation-ERG’s perspective, here is what you can reap:

Target Characteristics

Using its marketing dollars, the U.S. Army identifies the characteristics of your future demographics for you – for free! Look at how the U.S. Army is targeting today. It gives you a clear picture of what the characteristics are of your next ERG generation tomorrow.

The U.S. Army shares its findings publicly. This includes a sharp outline of the specific characteristics of the youngest employees that enter your workplace now or it in the near future. So, keep an eye on the U.S. Army’s next recruiting campaign and time is on your side!

Trial-and-Error without getting hurt

It gets even better. The U.S. Army provides you with field test results on whether their findings hold true in practice: The U.S. Army’s annual recruitment figures serve as a success criterion for the recruiting campaign. These figures are available in the public domain and found easily online within seconds.

The early warning signal

If the actual Army recruitment figure exceeds or falls short of the target figure (somewhere around 80.000 recruits each year), you get an idea what worked and what did not. The latter reflects not only that the campaign lost effectiveness but may also indicate that the next generation has arrived with a changed set of values and characteristics. – Use this as a free early‑warning system for your ERG!

Note that over the past five years the U.S. Army’s number of “accessions” (=recruits) exceeded the “mission” (=target value); note though that the “mission” bar was lowered in 2009 and 2010.

When the U.S. Army misses its recruitment target in the future, the next campaign is just around the corner. A significant change in the core message targets the next generation. So, here comes your next lesson and opportunity for the ERGs!

Back to the Future?

If the U.S. Army is not for you, don’t worry. Choose any military branch of your liking – they all face the same challenge. You don’t need to love the military to learn from it, and the lessons are valuable.

As a general yet effective approach to strategic innovation, keep an eye on industries and organizations that face similar challenges earlier than you do. Learn from them and prepare your business and ERG for the change.

Starting an ERG as a strategic innovation engine! (part 3 of 3)

An alternative and sustainable way to tap deep into your employees’ creative potential and turning it into solid business value is by forming an employee resource group (ERG). A well-crafted ERG serves as a powerful and strategic innovation engine for your organization!

Losing the innovative edge?
It is the large companies that seem to struggle with innovation most. When companies grow they tend to become less innovative. When this happens we see great talent turning into under-performing employees. – Why is that and is there a way out?

Stuck in mental models of the past?
Remember the heavy dinosaurs that finally got stuck in the pre-history tar pits and starved, too heavy to move themselves out of the calamity? Mental models are the tar pits that companies grow to get stuck in – unless they find a way to shed (mental) weight and think nimble again to survive.

The mental models often originate from days past when the business started and flourished with initial success. The models worked when the company grew back then but models out-date easily over time. At some point the company began to work harder to standardize its processes to ensure the output is delivered reliably and predictably and costs are driven down: the focus shifted from innovation to efficiency. Specialized and refined business functions create increasingly complex and bureaucratic processes, ‘standard operating procedures’ rule the course of action. Things don’t move fast here anymore. Improvement ideas from employee on the floor hardly make it to the top executives and starve somewhere in between, probably in the famous ‘idea box’…

> For more general insight on complexity as a leadership challenge, read this: ‘Complexity’ is the 2015 challenge! – Are leaders prepared for ‘glocal’?

This focus on incremental efficiency also traps R&D departments to a point where true creativity and innovation get stifled, the innovative output drops. In short, the larger a company the less it innovates. Sounds familiar?

Many companies chose the dangerous and seemingly easy way out in buying new ideas from the outside through acquisitions and hiring ‘new talent’. The danger lays in applying this practice too broadly and becoming reliant on this practice, i.e. getting trapped in a vicious and reinforcing cycle. This practice also alienates and frustrates the more seasoned employees who feel underutilized and –quite rightly so see their career opportunities dwindling. Soon enough the sour side of the hire-for-innovation practice for employees becomes transparent also to the newer employees and drives them away in frustration. This organization just found the perfect recipe to turn top talent into poor performers!

Don’t waste your human capital
Bringing in fresh brains to an organization may justify mergers, acquisitions or hiring at times – but not as a strategy for continuous innovation and without also at least trying to tap into the innovative capacity that lays dormant within the organization.

Don’t write your staff off easily by following blindly the common yet wrong assumption that an employee loses the creative spirit after a few years and that new hires would be more innovative than whom we already have working for us. Haven’t we hired the best and brightest consistently in the past? Well, then this logic doesn’t add up, right?

Ask yourself: have you lost your innovative edge? Will you personally be more innovative once you change to another employer? – I don’t think so either. The good news is that even if you don’t believe it, changes are that managers and human resource experts of your new employer do, at least the ones who follow the outdated mental model! – But then, how long can you expect to last there before you get written off? It’s like getting on a train to nowhere.

Derailing the train to nowhere
But seriously, the seasoned employees’ intimate knowledge of the organization and its people can hold enormous potential for innovation not only under financial considerations but also as a morale booster for staff. Getting personally involved more and engaging them in driving change again actively leads the way to measurable and favorable results for the organization. These employees are the people who know your business, your markets, your customers and where to find resources and short-cuts if needed to get things done! Remember the “Radar” character in M*A*S*H who creatively procured whatever his unit needed by knowing how to play ‘the system’ and navigate the cliffs of bureaucracy on unconventional routes?

So, how can you motivate and (re-)activate your employees to come forward with brilliant ideas and getting them implemented to boost the organization’s profitability? How can you spread new hope and direct the enthusiasm to practical and meaningful outcomes for the company and the individual employee alike?

Facing organizational barriers
There is no shortage of good ideas in the heads of employees. Too few of them, however, actually get picked up and implemented since organizational barriers have many dimensions the need to be overcome first. Here are some examples:

A vertical barrier effectively disconnects employees from the executive level which hold the (financial and other) resources to make things happen. Penetrating this barrier means to connect the people within the organization closely and effectively again. > Readers of my previous post What does take to keep innovating? (part 1) will recognize that an executive champion is needed who brings together the technical and business champions. If you feel intrapreneurial and consider becoming an executive champion, check this out: How to become the strategic innovation leader? (part 2)

The horizontal barrier separates business functions and operating units that evolved to become silos or manager’s ‘fiefdoms’ of sub-optimized local productivity often with lesser concern to the overall performance of the organization. What you are up against here is often enough beyond specialized deep expertise but also defensive egos and managerial status thinking that led to a comfortable and change-adverse local equilibrium. As an intrapreneur you bring a much needed yet disruptive element to the organization. Since you are rocking the boat you can get caught up in ‘politics’ easily. Functional managers and their staff may perceive you as throwing a wrench into their well-oiled and fine-tuned machine that could jeopardize not only their unit’s efficiency but also their personal incentives for keeping operations running smoothly. > For more insight on the tension field of management vs. leadership check out Leadership vs Management? What is wrong with middle management?

Another barrier relates to the perceived value that your work creates for the organization, so let’s call it the value barrier: When you start acting intrapreneurial, you may be seen as someone wasting resources, incurring additional cost or generating questionable value (if any value at all) in the eyes of executives and other managers.

Therefore it is of critical importance to clearly demonstrate the business value your work adds to the organization. Based on an unambiguous success metrics the value proposition needs to be communicated clearly and frequently especially to executive management to gain their buy-in and active support.

These and possibly more barriers are a tough challenge. Now, I assume you are not the almighty ‘Vice President of Really Cool Stuff’ (that would be my favorite future job title!) but hold a somewhat lower rank. Perhaps you got stuck in the wrong department (the one without the Really Cool Stuff).

So, where do you start to innovate and ‘rescue’ your organization from a looming train-wreck scenario?

Breaking down barriers by innovating from within using ERGs

A vehicle I tried out quite successfully over the past years was forming an employee resource group (ERG). This grassroots approach has the power to crash right through the vertical, horizontal and value barriers while driving change effectively and sustainably through the organization as a strategic innovation engine.

> A previous post discusses the business model behind the ERG approach in more detail: Build ERGs as an innovative business resource!

Here are the first steps on the way to founding an ERG:

Identify a business need and build a business case, i.e. a clear value proposition aimed at executive management convincing them of the need and benefits of forming an ERG within the limits of company policies. Attracting an influential executive sponsor to gain buy-in is a key requirement for instituting an ERG successfully. The sponsor serves as a political and resourceful ally, an experienced advisor and advocate but also ensures strategic alignment of the ERG’s activities with the broader goals of the company.Since executives value their time more than yours, keep it short and to the point. Think executive summary style and offer details separately for those who chose to dig deeper and to demonstrate that you thought this whole thing through. If your organization already has a distinguished officer or departments with a vested interest in employee engagement for example then connect, collaborate and leverage your joint forces. > More on how to build a case study for an ERG at: Q&A – Case study for founding a business-focused ERG

Get organized! Seek voluntary members and reach out to future constituency of the ERG. Active members are needed as the driving force and source of ideas that the ERG turns into business projects aimed to innovate and energize the organization.
The first ERG I founded was “NxGen”, which stands for the “Next Generation at the Workplace”. The NxGen ERG has a generational orientation but is open to all employees regardless of their age or workplace generation. Nonetheless, from the start mostly the youngest employees (Generation Y) drove NxGen. In many cases they did not know of each other as the GenY-ers were spread thin across the various business functions of the company.The GenY-ers, in particular, found a forum in the NxGen ERG to get to know each other in the first place. We then focused on goals based on shared values or needs to build a strong support network within the company. At all times we kept the ERG open and inclusive to interested employees join from other workplace generations.

The ERG offers its members a safe environment to discuss issues and ideas. It also serves as an informal forum to find coaches and mentors for personal development or specific projects and initiatives. Active ERG membership allows less experienced employees to quickly acquire new skills and test them in real-life by running a project hands-on even in areas outside of their job description or business function to address needs close to their heart with tangible business value. Here, the ERG serves as a very practical leadership development pipeline and safe ground for experimentation within the organization.

> More on the virtues of Generation Y as I experience it in NxGen under: Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?

Get active by launching business-focused projects. Again, you are targeting management and executives in particular to build credibility and thereby become more effective over time.Start with feasible projects of high visibility and short duration that address a significant business need with a clear and quantifiable success metrics. For each project seek executive sponsorship at the highest level you can attain from the business area that the project affects. Make sure to communicate your successes broadly and frequently to kick-start the ERG. Stick to a clear, specific and unambiguous metrics for your success; if you can tie it to a monetary ROI the better, as this is the language of business. > More on establishing a success metric under: Driving the ROI – where to start your projects metrics?

Showcasing and celebrating your successes as an ERG motivates the already active members, keeps attracting new members and builds credibility among executives to keep the ERG wheels turning as a strategic innovation engine for your organization.

On a personal note
The example of the NxGen ERG is very real. NxGen was nationally recognized as best-practices ERG within 5 months (!) of its founding and became a valued and frequent sounding board for C-level executives within one year. The ERG has no funds of its own yet runs projects and initiatives nationally and internationally that already shifted the company culture and opened it more for change.

References and additional reading

Do managers miss the sweet-spot of remote working?

Stumbling in the dark?

Organizations often find themselves struggling with a dilemma: The need for employees working remotely, often from home, is at rise for many business reasons that include cost savings and the competition over attracting and retaining top talent.

On the other hand, many managers have a hard time allowing their staff to work outside their proximity and direct supervision. Their reasons often include the fear of change introducing the unknown but also a certain cluelessness of how to effectively manage a remote workforce and moving beyond their personal comfort zone.

These conflicting drivers open a tension field that organizations tend to struggle with. – Does this sound familiar to you?

No silver bullet
Unfortunately, there is no ‘silver bullet’, i.e. a one-size-fits-all solution that works for everyone and in every environment. Too much depends on the nature of the work, necessary interactions and communication between team members as well as the jobs and personalities involved. It takes a close look at the individual organization to craft a remote working program that fits an organization, maximizes collaboration at a measurable performance level.

Common ground for remote working
However, we can learn from others how to establish a basis for a fruitful remote working program in your organization (if you don’t have one yet). Research offers tangible results such as the “MTI Report 09-14: Facilitating Telecommuting: Exploring the role of Telecommuting Intensity and Differences Between Telecommuters and Non-Telecommuters”. The study compares telecommuters and non-telecommuters and it came up with the following findings. (Note that I use telecommute, telework and remote working synonymously throughout this article.)

Telecommuters show increased commitment to their organization and experience more work-life satisfaction over the non-telecommuters group. No differences between both groups though on job satisfaction and turnover intent, i.e. how likely employees are to leave the company.

On a side note, the latter two findings are quite different from my own professional studies and experience, where employees working remotely reported a 57% increase in work-life balance. Increasing workplace flexibility including remote working, i.e. giving the employee more control over their schedule and location, became a driver also for employee attraction and retention.
– What are your experiences? Do you see remote work influencing job satisfaction and employee retention? Please comment.

Interestingly, the study explored also ‘personalities’ and found that more extroverts tend to be telecommuters, so people with a higher drive for social interaction and communication rather than the quiet ones.

This appears conclusive in the light of the simple finding that (a) telecommuting in many companies is not implemented consequently but rather as an “idiosyncratic deal” between individual supervisors and employees. (b) These supervisors prefer granting permission to telecommute to high-performers. This can explain a pre-selection of extroverts over introverts, who may not show up on the supervisor’s radar as much and therefore tend to receive less remote working opportunities.

Generally, teleworkers commute from farther away. They find commuting more stressful and want to avoid rush-hour traffic.
Less surprising, telecommuters were interrupted more by family members given their physical presence at their off-site work location.

This seems to suggest that working-from-home could be less effective than working in the office given more family interruptions. My own observations are quite different and based on a controlled pilot project which showed that the workers in the office feel distracted by their colleagues stopping by randomly; the workers preferred working from home when they needed focus and want to avoid distractions calling this their most productive work time.
Disruptions occur at home as well as in the office. It is the employee’s responsibility and best interest to ensure a professional work environment at their home-office so not to jeopardize their work results. Consequently, also performance needs to be measured by results and not physical presence. This levels the playing field and allows for fair comparison between all workers independent of their working location and distractions.

In the triangle of telecommuters, supervisors and Human Resources (HR) practices the telecommuters generally view the organization differently from non-telecommuters. Most telecommuters perceive technology training is available to them and that the organizational reward system as well as their supervisors was supporting telecommuting. Telecommuters also believe that there is an underlying business requirement that drives working remotely.

Once again we see that a level playing field is viewed as an important success factor for effective teleworking. Technology serves as enabler that makes teleworking possible in the first place and connects coworkers across remote locations. Offering remote working not only becomes a business necessity but also addresses increased expectations of the modern work force to telework powered by ever improving communication and collaboration technology.
Now, the telecommuters in the study seem to understand the changed business environment that pushes organizations to open up to flexible work arrangements for competitive reasons including cost savings as well as employee productivity and retention – the supervisors ‑apparently‑ did not ‘get it’.

For most of us the times are over where workers came to the factory or office only because the resources needed to accomplishing the work were concentrated in a specific location and could not be distributed (think early typewriters, heavy production equipment, incoming mail and so on). For a growing services industry these limitations no longer exist – yet this out-dated paradigm remained present in the minds of many. People tend to have a certain picture in mind what work ‘looks like’ and where it has to happen which comes down to an office with everyone present from 9am to 5pm.

From the supervisors’ perspective things look different than for telecommuters. Over 50% of the supervisors of telecommuter believe “that employees have to be high performers”. This view is shared by only 37% of the non-telecommuting supervisors.
This brings us to a most critical component and success factor for making remote working work…

Management attitudes – the make or break
The MTI study phrases this barrier kindly as “challenges and obstacles emanating from attitudes of individuals in the organization”. The obstacles to implementing an effective telecommuting model often originate from management itself or even the Human Resources department tasked to make a policy. The reasons for resistance can be multifold and include a lack of better knowledge, fear of change such as losing perceived control, lazy avoidance to probe outdated beliefs or taking a one-size-fits-all approach without evaluating the specific environment.

I even experienced the paradox of managers believing they can work from home just as effective as from their office desk and making use of this flexibility at their convenience while not trusting that their staff could be similarly effective or was trustworthy enough just as much. They see remote working being a ‘perk’ for their staff reserved for ‘top performers’ who deserve it – a double standard is being applied which is often enough based on murky or questionable criteria (if at all). These managers show a sense of entitlement while ignoring that (as the MTI study confirms) remote working increases employee satisfaction and commitment which tends to increase also performance; as an example, performance increased by 30% in the department I manage.

Some managers fear they may lose ‘control’ and that their staff may abuse the newly acquired freedom to control their schedule and work location. This ‘control’ is often based on the deceptive perception that staff works ‘better’ and is ‘under control’ when confined to an office location and ‘eye-balled’ by the supervisor.

More effective is the consistent application of measurable and pre-defined goals that demonstrate unambiguously, transparently and quantifiable whether an employee met the goal or not – independent from their schedule or work location. In practice, managing-by-performance showed more effective to distinguish effective performers from under-performers than a manager looking around the office space and hoping the staff is performing just by their mere presence.

What it takes to make remote working work
Implementing remote working is not exactly rocket science but takes an honest and diligent approach based on trust and clear expectations. From a practical perspective, a viable model includes:

Put away with the ‘telecommuting-is-a-perk’ attitude
Closely look at which jobs have remote working potential together with the affected employee
Identify the employee’s team, i.e. the people who need to cooperate closely even across departmental boundaries (organizational, geographic, etc.)
Include employees to model how remote working could work in their team, try it out and be flexible to improve the model
Strictly rate all employees by their performance based on measurable and tangible results that are clearly defined
Apply transparent standards for all employees consistently
Treat remote and non-remote workers similarly including equal opportunities treatment and rewards
Provide effective communication technology and adequate training
Address manager concerns and prepare management with adequate training and guidance.

It is true that managing a remote working environment provides new challenges. They include in particular:

Strictly managing-by-performance by setting clear expectations and exercising transparency.
Overcoming ‘old thinking’. Questioning ones habits and beliefs to approach with an open-mind new or different ways of working. Include your staff to come up with ideas on how to make it work.
Diversifying and mastering the spectrum of communication channels. Choosing and using the media preferred by the staff to communicate effectively and efficiently with employees.

If this includes peer-to-peer video, instant messaging or texting (SMS) then learn to master these technologies. Limit face-time for confidential or sensitive topics that should better not be communicated electronically; don’t abuse face-time for routine communication.

Most of all, mutual trust is the key component in the critical relationship between manager and employee. This can be the hardest to build. For managers, taking some temporary measures can prove helpful to establish a trustful working relationship with their staff; for example, start with documenting and reviewing weekly performance plans together with the employee until the manager develops more trust and is comfortable with exercising less timely supervision.

In general, if an organization lacks trust then remote working will hardly be implemented effectively, consistently or to its full potential – but then, remote working may not be the biggest problem this organization faces…

Build ERGs as an innovative business resource!

The proposed business model for ERGs forms a foundation for continued innovation, strategic alignment and measurable results. It turns an ERG into a true and sustainable business resource for its members as well as the hosting organization.

Summary – The increasing diversity of employees at the workplace led to employees gathering along affinity dimensions like birds-of-a-feather to form networking groups within organizations. The next step goes beyond affinity and establishes employee resource groups (ERGs) strategically as a business resource and powerful driver for measurable business impact and strategic innovation bottom-up.

Limited to social?

Employee resource groups (ERGs) emerge for various reasons. They tend to start with a social underpinning that naturally unites and organizes like-minded employees. ERGs come in different flavors mostly along the traditional lines of diversity characteristics such as ethnicity, skin color, age, gender, physical (dis)ability, sexual orientation, military veterans, etc.

For ERGs, a ‘social stickiness’ is important and can be the key integrating factor of employee populations within organizations. It may also influence the choices of ERG goals and activities to a large extent. This may result, however, in possibly limiting the ERG and its members to be seen as a ‘social club’ of sorts by others. Management, in particular, may not see the direct (or even indirect) positive business impact that an ERG can have.

This is where ERGs can fall short: when they fail to tie a strong business-focused bond that ensures continued support by leadership that in return ensures the ERG can sustain and proper for the better of its members as well as the hosting organization.

Becoming a business resource

From a management perspective, ERGs can provide social ties within the workforce that are mostly seen as favorable ‑ at least as long as it does not affect the employee performance; whether perceived or real.

Better off is the ERG that demonstrates an unambiguous contribution to the bottom line. A clear business value proposition sets a solid foundation that makes it easy to communicate with and convince executives securing their continued support. The company benefits from positive business outcomes as a direct result of the ERG activities, while it engages employees broader and deeper. This uses more of the employees’ true potential to ‘maximize the human capital’ as an important element also of employee engagement, development and retention.

This approach serves not only the company but has advantages also for its employees and the ERG in return. The ERG members benefit directly in many ways such as by interesting work outside the immediate scope of their job, by developing new skills and by increasing their visibility within the organization and continued ‘employability’, i.e. their personal market value as an employee.

So what is the key to success, how do you ‘build’ an innovation-driven and business-focused ERG?

A ‘business model’ for ERGs

My proposal is to establish the ERG as a self-propelling and sustainable system, an ongoing process that continues functioning quite independently from changes in the ERG leadership and consistently delivers innovations. Individual leaders are important for operations and make valuable contributions, but the ERG must be able to continue functioning even if key players become unavailable and replaced.

The following dimensions are generic and apply to any organization. Here, we use them to describe a general business model for the ERG:

1. Strategy

2. People

3. Processes

4. Organization

5. Metrics/Rewards.

Dimensions of a business model — The five dimensions of an ERG business model

To illustrate the model and making it more tangible I use a generic example. It is based on NxGen (for Next Generation at the Workplace), a generational-oriented and business-focused ERG that I founded. NxGen was recognized in early 2010 as a best-practices approach by the National Affinity Leadership Congress (NALC).

1. Strategy

The strategy brings to the point the ERG’s goal and objectives. A well-thought-out value proposition is a foundation for the ERG.

For example, NxGen is a forum to develop leadership skills, networking and problem-solving that aims to open up cross-functional/cross-disciplinary opportunities for its active members through strategic business projects with measurable results. As a goal, NxGen aims to become a sounding board for management as a valued business resource.

2. People practices

People, active volunteers, are the life-blood of every ERG. Staffing and selection are crucial and continued activities to induce fresh ideas and prevent burn-out of established ERG members. What you are looking for are active volunteers who are passionate and energetic. You want members who become active change agents, role models, within the organization. Value a diverse set of backgrounds and capabilities that can complement another.

Rather than trying to recruit new members, focus on how to attract new members to engage and actively participate (in contrast to the ones signing up to receive email updates or a periodic newsletter, which is a passive form of membership). NxGen membership is open to all employees.

There is a broad range of benefits for active ERG members that can include (but are definitely not limited to):

Insight and work in other business functions and departments
Members lead a relevant project possibly in another business function
Experiment and learn in a safe and nurturing environment
Develop and apply skills like leadership, consulting, problem-solving
Build an open and supportive network with members coaching each other
Increased visibility within the organization
Potential to open new career opportunities
Making a measurable change in the organization here and now.

At NxGen, we see that younger employees (primarily Generation Y also called Millennial, born after 1980) tend to drive the ERG activities most. The explanations I offer is that GenY’ers, in particular, enter the workplace as well-educated professionals, optimistic and motivated to make a difference. GenY was brought up to believe they can achieve anything and are interested to explore lateral career moves. They are used to collaborating in teams to overcome obstacles and network while leveraging technology effectively to this end. At the workplace, GenY typically is not (yet) part of the decision-making bodies due to their junior positions ‑ but they do want to be heard (and should be listed to given their increasing numbers in the demographic shift of the population that has reached the workforce).

3. Processes

The ERG acts through business-relevant projects. At NxGen, the member ‘grass-roots’ identify otherwise un-addressed or under-served business needs that the ERG chooses to pursue. Based on a clear value proposition (return-on-investment, ROI) for the organization the ERG seeks executive sponsorship for each project. The executive sponsor ensures strategic alignment with the organization’s goal, expertise in the functional area, political support and funding for the project (since the ERG has no funds of its own).

The project scope often lays outside of the immediate job description of the ERG-appointed project leader allowing for broader hands-on learning opportunities. Applying professional project management methods to all projects ensures the projects deliver the specified deliverables.

The ERG core team steers and administrates the ERG project portfolio which is documented in an annual business plan and shared publicly. As resources are limited, not all imaginable projects can be conducted at once but are staged. Projects can build upon and leverage each other while making use of synergies whenever possible.

In the beginning, it might be challenging to find meaningful projects that make the best use of the ERG’s resources and capabilities with favorable business impact. It takes time and persistence to develop a trustful relationship with executive management and to gain credibility as an ERG to attracts more complex and important projects from management in return.
NxGen works and communicates openly, it acts transparently and leverages (social) media to inform and connect with its members and non-members displaying operations and result of the ERG’s work.

4. Organization

The NxGen ERG operates within a general framework set by a company’s office to ensure all ERGs abide the company policies. This office also provides an organizational home for ERGs within the company. It generally coordinates and supports the different activities across ERGs and ensures each ERG has a distinguished executive sponsor to connect the ERG with senior management.

A charter defines the basic roles and processes of the NxGen ERG in more detail and is posted publicly. A core team of active members guides the ERG activities and ensures ERG operability. The core team is lead by the ERG’s elected chair and co-chair(s); it further comprises the project leaders, distinguished role-holders, and liaisons to key functions in the organization. The core team members support and advise each other. The ERG provides a safe and social environment that relies on trust among the members to connect, to build relationships, to network and to run projects.

NxGen actively reaches out to other ERGs, innovative groups within the organization but also other operating units and companies to cooperate, share, benchmark and collaborate on common goals.

5. Metrics and rewards system

How do you measure success, i.e. the effectiveness of an ERG? An annual business plan covers the portfolio of ERG projects. It serves as an instrument to measure the ERG performance across all ERG activities that the ERG chair is held accountable for.

What are the rewards for active ERG members? Besides the benefits listed in the above section ‘People’, accountability and success for individual members derive from their projects or their input to other ERG activities that all have clear objectives and a success metrics attached. Driving the change and making a difference is a reward in itself.

NxGen and individual members received several awards and recognition for their work inside and outside the company which the ERG celebrates in public. Some members list their ERG involvement and experience proudly on their résumé which is an indicator that the ERG’s value proposition is effective for its members, i.e. the members value the ERG membership, projects, recognition and awards as means of their ‘employability’.

Building the ERG as an innovation incubator

The business model positions the ERG clearly as a powerful business resource for the organization but it can be even more. The ERG can serve as an ‘innovation incubator’ by combining an attractive system with creative space in an effective governance framework. The processes create measurable value for the individual and the organization that can significantly contribute to process innovation and also drives product innovation.

In an empowering bottom-up movement, the ERG directly connects its active members from any level of hierarchy with the decision-makers high up. This bears the potential to cut right through established or perceived boundaries such as hierarchy, bureaucracy, and red-tape or functional silos that may severely limit the effectiveness and innovative effectiveness of other units that were created top-down within the organization.

Herein lays the deeper potential of ERGs as a true business resource and going beyond possible self-inflicted limitation to social affinity. ERGs can well be the means that contribute to driving the future success of an organization for an organization that understands and value how ERGs open opportunities to tap into its workforce and unleashes hidden potential.

Additional reading

How strategic innovation works: “What does it take to keep innovating? (part 1 of 3)”
How to become the strategic innovation leader? (part 2 of 3)
Starting an ERG as a strategic innovation engine! (part 3 of 3)

Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?

GenY for managers: look beyond the labels! Understand the drivers and grasp opportunities that Generation Y brings to your workplace!

It’s a long list to describe Generation Y with a commonly unfavorable preconception. This youngest generation at the work place (born after 1980, also called Millennials) is said to be: lazy, impatient, needy, entitled, taking up too much of my time, expecting work to be fun, seeking instant gratifications, hop from company to company, want promotions right away, give their opinion all the time and so on. But is it really that easy to characterize a new generation?

Generational clash has changed
Clashes between generations were always present to some degree: Young people want to prove themselves, probe the boundaries and seek opportunity. The older are in power, hold the wealth, make the decisions and are typically reluctant to change and letting go of their well-established and comfortable status quo.

However, something significant has changed: Where in the past three generations used to live at the same time, we now see that four generations are working together simultaneously. A conflict that used to predominate the homes is now also present in the workplace (as a result of several factors that include demographic change, geo-economical impact, longer life expectancy and increasing retirement age).

While in our personal lives we may be able to avoid or by-pass some areas of generational friction these same ways may not be possible in the workplace. Here you have to get along and collaborate with your co-workers. This is challenging not only for the multi-generational workforce but also for the managers facing the new need to mitigate generational conflicts, integrate the staff, and provide a constructive and collaborative work environment.

Why managers struggle with the mysterious Generation Y
For managers it is important to take a close look at GenY, since GenY outnumbers the significantly smaller GenX (born 1965 to 1980) and is the largest workforce generation. The Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) retire from the regular workforce leaving a gap. Nonetheless, given the typical career progression, higher management positions are still firmly held by Baby Boomers or their preceding Pre-Boomer generation (born before 1946) – the generations farthest apart from GenY.

Ignoring the differences between generations or addressing them in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ manner backfires. It also misses to leverage particular traits of the young generation that become critical for an organization to sustain in the face of change coming at ever faster pace and with increasing complexity (see my earlier blog: ‘Complexity’ is the 2015 challenge! – Are leaders prepared for ‘glocal’?).

It is Generation Y that people seem to have the hardest time wrapping their heads around. Simply pigeon-holing GenY does not do them justice and doesn’t help understanding and managing them either.

‘Kids’ entering the workplace?
It is even a common misconception that GenY have not yet arrived at the workplace and that they are ‘kids’ just coming out of school or college. If you consider the demographics, however, the early GenY’ers are 30 years old now, so they are hardly ‘kids’ anymore. They come well educated and already gained some experience at the workplace for several years now. They are not ‘out there’ anymore but ‘in here’ now!

Instant gratification and fast promotions?
It is true that GenY seeks fun (who doesn’t?) and grew up with high-end video games in which the players typically rack up points in fast progression opening up new levels or challenges to continue the game. But that’s only one side of the coin. It also forms a mindset to figure things out, address challenges with optimism in a playful way, master technology, compete in ever-changing surrounding as well as hooking up with a network of friends to play and succeed together – don’t be fooled, these are the critical basic skills in the world we live and do business in!

Entitled?
Look at GenY’s parents that determined the up-bringing: The generation of Baby Boomer parents indulged in perks and benefits like only few before them; the succeeding GenX only saw these goodies going away when they started entering the workforce. Fortunes were racked up or inherited by Baby Boomers.

GenY kids often grew up in a world of abundance; nothing was too good for them or out of reach – and sponsored freely by the parents with enough cash in their pockets to offer their kids any imaginable aspect of a ‘better life’.

Instead of flipping burgers during summer holidays to earn their own money, many GenY kids had spare time on their hand to learn and have fun while ‘helicopter parents’ took (and continue to) care for their well-being and even professional advancement as adults. Who would say ‘No’ if you are young and your parents offered to pay for your car, your shopping dreams or set you up for a prosperous and promising career?

This way many Baby Boomer parents did their part to breed a generational culture of entitlement or at least high expectations while reinforcing the message “You can do anything and succeed!” – It does not seem fair to hold this upbringing against their kids.
(Instead, it provokes the questions why Baby Boomers, in particular, seem to have such a hard time letting go to let their kids live their own lives without excessive parental hand-holding? – But that is a topic for another time…)

GenY is prepared, assertive and speaks up. They know what they want and how to get it. Don’t underestimate them as customers either, since GenY is a serious economic power and probably even more so than any previous young generation in history!

Lazy, impatient and needy?
Let me share with you my first-hand experience with GenY at the workplace. I gain my insight as the founder and chair of a generation-oriented employee resource group (ERG) which gives me ample opportunities to work closely with GenY’ers on various projects. It made me probe my own biases and assumptions based on practical work experience (which, by the way, I don’t always see reflected in articles written about GenY).

What I learned is quite different from most preconceptions: The GenY’ers work hard and with ambition, they are not a bit lazy.

When we coin GenY ‘needy’ or ‘taking up too much of my time’ we are actually ignoring that they want to contribute to a meaningful cause in the most effective way. What they are asking is to understand the ‘why’ before going to work. This questions and challenges the status quo in a constructive manner – which is good! If we cannot answer their question satisfactory or insist that we already know the best way ‘how-to’ then it is us (the non-GenY’ers) standing in the way of innovation and change. As a general truth it is not their questions that can be compromising but rather our answers.

Some tasks require not only book-smarts but also experience (including managing people) that many GenY’ers cannot have made at this time in their careers. Therefore, they can be over-confident and over-estimate their abilities and effectiveness; support them and offer them learning experiences as a reality-check and growth opportunity.

Empower GenY to put their specific inherent qualities to best use given that they tend to be natural networkers and solvers of complex problems, they user modern technology effectively and approach different ethnicities and cultures with an embracing ‘color-blindness’. – Are these not exactly the qualities that we need in the world we live and work in today and tomorrow?

If you plan to start an ERG that addresses generational differences, you can find great research for free: Next-generation ERG learn from U.S. Army recruitment!

Engagement and empowerment drives loyalty
A short while back I wrote in this forum about How to retain talent under the new workplace paradigm? It comes down to approaching the workforce differently by offering flexible career paths, support staff to remain employable and accommodate benefits to their needs instead of hiding behind archaic one-size-fits-all models.

As managers we need to consider GenY’s particular needs and expectations to attract, engage and retain them. We need to leverage their unique talents and skills for the better of the company while helping them to development and grow. Empowerment includes guidance and creating opportunities for GenY to make mistakes, learn and get active ‘their way’ in areas that wakes their interest and that are meaningful to them as well as to your organization. – Then relax, sit back and see beautiful surprises unfold!

Leverage employee resource groups (ERG) as an opportunity
Some managers may ask on how to get started, what could be a first step to engage and leverage GenY? One way of doing it is by founding an inclusive ERG to focus and organize your emerging workforce.

As an example, I founded the Next Generation at the Workplace (coined ‘NxGen’) ERG that has already changed the company’s perception of employee engagement, increased ERG credibility and raised the business value seen in ERGs among managers. Our NxGen approach is to address opportunities in business-relevant projects with measurable results for the business (such as return-of-investment, ROI). Our projects often focus on relevant topics are outside our immediate field of work but are always sponsored by an executive to ensure governance and strategic alignment. These projects provide an excellent and safe training ground for up-and-coming leaders. NxGen supports the organization directly through the project’s immediate deliverables as well as indirectly by establishing a free and hands-on management development program that comes with networking, coaching, and skill development already built-in. Everyone wins!

No matter if you have a dedicated ERG or not, don’t discount GenY based on labels. Dig deeper to find the treasures that this generation has to offer. Your organization’s future relies on them!

* * *

Additional information
NxGen was nationally recognized as a ‘cutting-edge’ approach to employee resource groups by the Network and Affinity Leadership Congress 2010 (NALC), a national conference focused on training ERG leaders to align with the business goals of their organizations.

Please leave a comment and, if you are interested in ERG topics, feel free to join our ERG Leaders group on LinkedIn.com to discuss, share and learn!

How to retain talent under the new workplace paradigm?

The paradigm of work has changed – how does it affect employees and what can be done to retain them?

How to retain talent under the new workplace paradigm?

Most of us grew up with a clear understanding of how ‘work’ and ‘careers’ works: As an employee you could generally rely on job security and a pension guarantee for your loyalty and obedience to the employer. Practically, the organization ‘owned’ a human asset in a voluntary symbiosis that would end with retirement.
– This paradigm changed fundamentally and even more so in our turbulent and globalized economy. Since my current work focuses on employee retention and engagement, let’s see what has changed and how it affects employee retention.

The ‘old deal’ is gone!
When it comes to employment today, employees understand that they stand alone (though this awakening may have come only recently to the more established generations). Organizations now hire people for their specific skills only as long as they need them and then move on to hire someone else for the next task.

This may well be the reason talent acquisition is often valued higher than talent retention. However, this approach also comes with losses through attrition and may not make best use of the added value that an individual can give the organization over time with through learning, personal growth, developing networks and gaining experience.

One way or another, the old paradigm no longer holds true. And the GenY streaming into the working world have not even experienced it to start with, so don’t expect them to respect and live the outdated rules!

One-dimensional career paths are out!
Under the old paradigm career paths were fixed and oriented ‘upward’ following a pre-defined and linear course of advancement in the position line-up. Deviations from the laid-out career model were rare exceptions.
More likely, an employee had to leave the organization to break out of the scheme when seeking growth in a new or different dimension of interest, to apply newly acquired or dormant skills or to make ends meet along their personal needs. There was not much room to move sideways out of the fixed career track slot into a career up through a choice of other avenues.

While the fixed model made it easy for HR and management, it neglected the potential of the individual employee who can evolve and grow, who may change interests and who may seek new challenges outside their immediate or next-up job description.

Retention is more than offering money!
Employers who wish to retain their precious talent need to offer more than a paycheck and blanket perks ‑ but this does not mean necessarily that they have to spend more money. A competitive salary is expected, of course, but not the #1 driver. Key drivers for the new workforce are career opportunities and customized benefits – money follows.

What today’s workforce is looking for are choices: flexible career paths that broaden the options and offer development opportunities instead of narrowing them down. They want to take control and influence where they are heading in a multi-dimensional space of opportunities and receive recognition for their achievements – empower them! Set clear goals and allow employees to experiment and learn on the way – don’t micro-manage them!

It becomes crucial for every employee to be ‘employable’ meaning to stay attractive for the current employer as well as the next employer under the new paradigm.

When it comes to benefits the time is over for one-size-fits-all perks! Consider non-monetary benefits that cater to the individual’s needs, preferences and independence: Non-monetary benefits may range from education opportunities over a free trip with family or friends as an incentive to flexibility along the work schedule and venue including remote working options.

This flexibility and consideration of an individual’s lifestyle is becoming even more important with GenY, who entertain closer social ties to families and friends than GenX. Networking and leveraging personal connections come naturally to GenY and extend seamlessly also in their professional world.

Shared values and inclusion
Employees increasingly chose employers by the values they share and reflect what they believe in.

Does your employer talk-the-talk or also walk-the-walk? Management tends to rely on communication channels to communicate to their employees that derived from marketing. These channels were originally developed to promote products to consumers through messages broadcasted one-way in a propaganda-like fashion. This practice was extended using new social media but still following the traditions of the old paradigm and without making use of the potential associated with the ‘social’ aspect, which is the power-engine behind the new media boom.

Give it a reality-check! – If your company has a Twitter account, for example, does your company account have only followers but follows nobody else? Here we are back to broadcasting!
If your company follows others, does it genuinely connect and communicate with its employees as well as with people outside the company? Does it engages in open discussions and learns from it?
How many managers and companies truly use social media tools to their full breadth as a two-way street of communication?

Transparency for talent retention
Retention does not have to be ‘rocket science’ even when the work paradigm changed.
What it takes is a degree of honesty and respect from an organization to treat employees fair and help them to stay ‘employable’. Authentic and open communication goes both ways and forms the basis for building trust, employee inclusion and engagement that result in employee satisfaction, innovative creativity and retention.

There is no need to fear transparency and open communication for an organization; failing to do so though is harmful to the organization’s reputation with word spreading fast and employees avoiding workplaces that do not live up to high standards and authenticity.

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“Bridging between US and China in Current Pharmaceutical World – Strategies, Innovation and Implementation”

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Business Darwinism

Which way to turn?

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