Author Archives: Dave Arella

Nine Part System for Effective Business Execution

Posted on August 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

What we have here is a failure to execute!

The biggest management problem today is not creating visions, nor developing strategic or tactical plans.  The real problem is the failure to effectively execute.  Balls get dropped, deadlines are missed, deliveries are half-done, priorities constantly change, projects overrun budgets, and initiatives do not get satisfactorily accomplished.  It is easy to see why.

We have an overload of messages and communication to wade through.  Communication about execution is not face-to-face or even in real-time but more and more conducted remotely.  Coordination is more difficult as organizations become more decentralized and matrixed.  As the need for collaboration increases, personal accountability is increasingly diluted and unclear.  True employee engagement is in decline.  A return to 20th century command and control hierarchy will not work, as today’s workforce wants and expects more influence over decisions that affect their day-to-day work, not less.  The solution is to deploy new practices and systems that improve execution while simultaneously creating more commitment.

Nine Aspects of Effective Execution Support Systems

A comprehensive approach to deploying practices and systems to support execution involves nine distinct aspects that can be grouped into three categories: Set Up for Success, Follow Through, and Feedback.

Set up for Success

Set up for Success involves four aspects that assure teams as well as individual members are aligned and in agreement with the desired outcomes.  If the task or initiative is missing certain elements or is poorly structured at the start, execution will be hit or miss.

  1. Goals – Much has already been written about the importance of linking individual team member goals with those of the overall enterprise and department. This provides each member with a clear “line of sight” up to the broader organization goals.  If tracked by the system, senior managers can also “look down” the chain of command to see activity and status of how goals are being accomplished in real time.
  2. Clear Requests – This is an underrated management skill.  It involves identifying an individual performer, explaining the context for the request, and then making a clear request that includes a specific due date and deliverable.  Priorities do not deliver, only due dates matter.
  3. Employee Engagement – In the context of the modern workforce command and control practices will no longer assure employee engagement in outcomes.  And neither does “drive-by” task assignments where managers dole out assignments without any real dialog with the intended performers.  Hierarchy is out; managers and employees now operate on a near-level playing field.  Managers need to learn to make requests and then gain individual commitment from each performer through a more peer-to-peer dialog.
  4. Accountability – This is more than getting a clear plan of who will do what by when.  The key to accountability is achieving a negotiated commitment by the performer.   For example, performers are given the option to make counter-offers to requests with alternate due dates or alternate deliverables.  The dialog concludes with the performer saying “you can count on me”.

Follow Through

It is surprising in this day and age to see what poor tools, policies and procedures companies, managers and even employees have for tracking project and task follow through.  Email, still the most prevalent communication system, is ill-equipped to handle structured follow up.  Project management tools track outcomes, but are generally “overkill” for tracking ongoing activities.  The practice of delivering should be much more explicit.  Effective follow through involves three aspects.

  1. Dialog during delivery – Forging an agreement to deliver an outcome by a certain date is not the end of the conversation, it is the beginning.  Stuff happens along the way, priorities shift, new information surfaces, problems arise.  A threaded dialog, in the context of the task, enables all parties to keep in close touch along the way with status updates and adjustments.   Relying on unstructured email messages in your in/out box does not work; new systems are needed to manage and present these conversations along with workflow to show who has the responsibility for the next action.
  2. Real time visibility into progress – A Gantt chart shows the task start and predicted end dates, but it does not provide any real-time visibility into the progress of the project or task.  Weekly status review meetings are fine for general department or project updates, but there is no need to experience a week-long time delay for resolving critical issues and updates.  Systems that provide immediate notice to all concerned parties of progress and issues enable earlier identification and resolution of issues that impact delivery dates.
  3. Explicit delivery and assessment – In lieu of sliding in partially complete outcomes over a soft due date, managers and employees need to “crisp up” the final stage of task completion.  Having made a clear agreement to deliver a certain outcome by a certain date, the performer should conclude the task by making an explicit delivery (i.e. “I am delivering what I said I would deliver.”).  The manager-requester is then obliged to explicitly accept the delivery and offer an assessment of their satisfaction level with the outcome.  Waiting to provide feedback until the year-end performance review misses innumerable opportunities for management, employee and overall process improvement.

Feedback

No system is complete without feedback mechanisms that inform all participants and guide future performance improvements.  Organizational learning depends on feedback that is relevant and actionable.  All concerned parties need and expect to know “how are we doing” from a near term and long term historical organization and personal perspective.

  1. Scorecards/batting averages/metrics – Providing real time metrics indicating quantity and status of every commitment each individual is currently accountable for with the associated agreement for completion date enables better resource allocation.  Status and delivery statistics not only drive performance; they also drive trust.  The best systems provide measurement for performance of managers as well as team members (e.g. identifying managers who have a high rate of making requests and then canceling them may provide previously hidden opportunities for productivity gains).  Summary metrics that reflect a large number of specific delivery commitments (e.g. on time deliveries) can be incorporated into annual performance reviews.
  2. History to learn from – A historical record of “what went down” can benefit managers and employees by providing a comprehensive record of who-said-what-to-whom-and-when associated with a particular task/initiative.  By reviewing a series of past commitments, patterns of behavior emerge that can guide performance feedback with very specific, granular examples.  Moreover, organizing past deliveries in the context of whole projects can guide future improvements on a more macro scale.

When looked at closely, execution actually depends on a number of identifiable and interrelated factors that address setup, follow-through, and feedback.  Setting goals and conducting weekly follow-up meetings only scratches the surface.  Managers need to develop a better understanding of the many aspects of effective execution.  Better tools that support these aspects are in the Beta and customer-testing phase.

 

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Posted in Accountability, Execution, HR Systems/Technology, Performance Management

5 Disruptive Practices That Boost Commitment

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

Talking is good; taking action together is better.  At the end of the day, what really matters and defines each of us on an individual, group and organization level is what was executed.  In any organization, all accomplishments are the result of individuals taking action together.  What a simplistic thing to say.

And yet, there exist many flaws in how we take action together.  People make vague requests.  Actual performers are unspecified.  Delivery dates are proposed without confirmation – if they are mentioned at all.  Agreements to deliver, when they are defined, shift and derail without a clear dialog between the person requesting or expecting an outcome and the performer(s).  Outcomes and deliveries are submitted willy-nilly.  Expressions of satisfaction, or not, with the delivery are absent.

Worse than these mechanical flaws, we are all familiar with the attendant interpersonal breakdowns.  Team members are silent about their cynicism toward the proposed requests.  Real engagement by employees is lacking.  People work on their favored assignments and leave other tasks to decay.  Low trust that deliveries will be met on time forces a need for backup systems and frequent check-ups by “management”.  Can we not recognize and acknowledge that the current model of working together is broken?

There is nothing in what I’ve just outlined that is unfamiliar to every reader.  We all have allowed (even colluded) in this “system” for a long time.  Isn’t it time to disrupt the existing system and try a new approach which provides results and benefits to all parties?  Let’s get back to basics and recreate our working relations around the golden rule:  “Say what you’re going to do, and do what you said”.

The core of this idea is making/remaking our work agreements personal.  Saying out loud, “I intend to accomplish the following by this date”, has powerful implications for both the speaker and the audience.

  • The speaker articulates their personal understanding of the desired outcome.
  • Accountability is taken on; the speaker has assumed ownership.
  • Giving voice creates commitment and in so doing discretionary effort is invoked to make good on the commitment.
  • Transparency builds trust.  Customer confidence is increased many fold.

The quality of the ensuing dialog between performer and customer moves from vague assumptions to clear agreements. Our word creates a bond with another person.  Personal honor and reputation are now at stake.

The following five simple, but profound, practices describe what such a system would actually look like:

(1)  Make requests and offers, not assignments. Clarify roles involved in this action – some one person is the performer and some one person will be recipient/customer for the delivery.  This practice is not limited to hierarchical roles; requests go down, up, and sideways throughout the organization.  This is the step that sets up the conversation for action between two people.  Others are/may be stakeholders and observers but let’s be clear on who is being asked, or who is offering, to deliver what to whom.  It’s personal!

(2)  Make clear agreements. Clarify expectations and negotiate commitments.  Say no if you mean no; unless you can say no, there is not the possibility of a committed yes.  This is the part about “saying what you’re going to do”.

(3)  Keep communications going between the requestor and the performer throughout the delivery stage.  Stuff happens along the way.  Agreements are not guarantees, but agreements must be honored.

(4)  Present the deliverable explicitly, i.e. the performer says “here is what I said I would deliver” or “this is why I could not deliver”.  This is the essence and evidence of accountability.

(5)  Last, but by no means least, the recipient/customer must acknowledge and assess the delivery.  Honesty and truth demand an assessment as to whether the delivery met the original expectations.  Answering the question – were you satisfied? – completes the cycle and assures closure.  This underutilized practice is the minimum quid pro quo to the effort of the performer and serves to represent the customer’s accountability to honor the agreement.  Moreover, these are often the “golden moments” when feedback can enhance both future performance and trust.

Summary

We have colluded to make task delivery conversations vague and impersonal.  Our common work practices are packed with inefficiencies that dilute personal accountability.  We need to get back to basic fundamentals by saying what you’ll do and doing what you say.

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Posted in Accountability, Commitment Based Management, Execution, Performance Management, Workplace norms

In the Social Cloud Who Gets the Job Done?

Posted on June 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

The power of social networks is all the rage.

The headlines promise to “harness the power of networks of people”.  One vendor offering “cutting edge social collaboration tools” promotes a next generation wiki in which an issue or problem is sent out to the larger group for everyone to contribute to and try to solve thereby attracting the collective intelligence and input from the larger group.

This is what “Social” solutions are all about – people connect, author, and post – large groups of people sharing ideas and resources in a common forum.

Broadcasting needs and gathering input from the large social group has value, but social networks do a poor job of coordinating work and actually taking (any) action.   At some point everyone has to get off the network and into the real world to accomplish something.

Groups, be they composed entirely of internal or mixed with internal and external personnel, can generate enormous power and innovative ideas, but groups can also diffuse responsibility and accountability for acting on those ideas; the larger the group, the more diffuse.  Information sharing is much different than taking responsibility or even accountability.  The real lever for taking action is not the one-to-many, but rather the one-to-one relationships.

Consider the oft-quoted, but anonymous story about the four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

“There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.  Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.  Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.  Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.  Everybody thought Anybody would do it but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.  It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.”

Taking action comes down to two people – one person delivering an outcome and another receiving and acknowledging the outcome.  This one-to-one commitment-building process begins with either a request by a customer or an offer by a provider.  The leader makes a request of the team member, the CEO makes a request of a VP, the Marketing Director makes a request of the Engineering Director, a salesperson makes an offer to a client, etc.

It is this universal pattern that gets things done, and the next generation of productivity tools will focus on enhancing these one-on-one conversations for action so the vision of the group is made true by the actions of its members.

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Posted in Commitment Based Management, Execution, Managed Conversations

Eight Game Changing Ideas – Reflections on Games People Play at Work

Posted on April 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

Assigning and managing work tasks involves some well-worn “games people play”.  If you look closely, you discover these games can interfere with efficiently accomplishing the task-activity.  Here are 8 ways to use simple task management to change the games, increase commitment and boost performance.

The term “game changer” is in vogue and there is a great buzz surrounding this idiom.  What does this term mean and what situation, term, idea or person qualifies as being a real game-changer?  For this article I will use the term literally by describing the Old game and the New game.  Anyone can debate the significance of what constitutes a change, but I will be as definitive as possible about what game is being changed.

The context for these ideas revolves around the “games people play” with each other about getting stuff done in an enterprise:

—  how tasks are assigned and collaborated upon,

—  how customers and vendors work with each other,

—  how project managers relate to their team, and

—  how leaders lead and followers follow.

The eight ideas expressed below are not fluffy industry speak, like “build more trust”, or “increase accountability”, or “pay for performance”, etc.  I often encourage these approaches as well, but the concepts listed below are all executable.  They relate to specific behaviors and tools that can be tangibly implemented and observed.  One can tell at a glance whether the parties are playing the old game or a new one.

Each can be individually implemented, or can be co-jointly applied to good advantage as complementary behaviors in an entirely new game.

1.  Ask, Don’t Tell

  • Old Game: The project manager assigns tasks to a team member(s) along with desired delivery dates.  The performer(s) is expected to hit the assigned dates or face consequences.
  • New Game: The project manager describes a task and ASKS the intended performer(s) if and when the task can be successfully delivered.

To accomplish a task, one party (the customer or manager) makes a request of another instead of assigning a task.  Putting a person’s name next to a task does not equal real commitment to fulfillment. Making a request presumes a more egalitarian relationship between the requester and the performer (i.e. not a command-and-control management style).

2.  Performers negotiate delivery dates

  • Old Game: Delivery date is entered in the project plan or specified by the requester as the date they need it done by.
  • New Game: The performer responds to the request by clearly stating if and when the requested task can be delivered.  Counter-offers are commonplace.

The performer engages in a negotiated agreement (including the ability to decline or counter-offer).  The ability to say NO enables a performer to make a committed YES. Moving from task assignments to a two-way agreement that is explicit and public encourages added discretionary effort by the performer to deliver on time.

3.  Response required

  • Old Game: Manager says “I sent out the request, but have yet to receive any response.”  Staff person replies: “I received the new task email from my boss, but I do not want to do it so I will delay or not respond and see if he brings it up again.”
  • New Game: Performer provides an explicit agreement, negotiates an alternative, or declines the request, and each party knows exactly where the negotiation stands and who has the ball for the next action.

The intended performer provides an explicit response to a work request or task.  No more unanswered emails.

4.  Track dialogs in context

  • Old Game: The twists and turns, shifting priorities, and new information encountered along the way that ultimately affects task delivery is lost in a myriad of emails, chats, text messages, and voice mails.
  • New Game:  Every comment and stage of the dialog is captured and available for immediate reference and future review.  Each party contributes and creates a comprehensive record of events, activities, issues, and deliverables.

The real performance lever is the quality of the dialog between the requester and the performer. This is where relationships are built and maintained. The complete dialog thread, in context of who said what to whom, provides new insights into execution details.  As the task or project progresses there is a defined and viewable documentation which can be analyzed and used to learn and mentor the individual as well as the team.

5.  Close the loop

  • Old Game: Performers “slide in” partial deliveries in a haphazard fashion and managers do not formally accept or evaluate their satisfaction with the outcome.
  • New Game: Performers explicitly assert they have a made a delivery in response to a specific request, and managers explicitly accept, acknowledge and assess the result.

Deliveries should be made explicitly and actually accepted and acknowledged by the requester. How satisfied was the requesting manager/customer with the outcome and the deliverable?

6.  Track commitments

  • Old Game: “I have a general idea of the promises I have made, but I regularly forget something along the way.  I do not maintain or update a comprehensive list of all my commitments”.
  • New Game: “I do not lose track of my commitments to others, and therefore my reputation is backed up by hard data.  I know exactly where I stand with all my commitments”.

Keep track of commitments you have made to others and those that others have made to you.  A promise-keeper builds trust and reputation.

7.  History matters

  • Old Game: After the task is completed it falls off the Gantt chart without any memory of how it turned out or what transpired along the way.
  • New Game: A detailed record of all requests, tasks, and deliverables is preserved for mid and post project analysis and review.  Everyone has something to learn from.

Keep an historical record of past conversations and deliveries.  What approaches, policies and best business practices are deployed to capture past experiences and learn how to do it better next time? Break the cycle of past miscues and wasted efforts.

8.  Report performance metrics

  • Old Game: Managers write the annual performance review based on their general impressions and recent memory (e.g. last six weeks) of the employee’s performance.  Employees have no shared record of specific achievements and contributions they have made throughout the year.
  • New Game: Managers and employees have a detailed shared record of all the specific requests and deliverables including specific on-time delivery metrics.

Real metrics about personal and organization performance drive extraordinary improvements. No more performance reviews based only on limited memory of recent events.

The games people play at work no longer serve anyone well.  Forward thinking organizations looking to establish more effective and more powerful work norms will find that paying closer attention to the actual interactions between people will bring big dividends by improving commitment and productivity.  

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Posted in Execution, Managed Conversations, Performance Management, Workplace norms

Trust Bestowed or Earned – Which Comes First?

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 2 comments

In an earlier article I commented extensively on Stephen Covey’s book entitled “The Speed of Trust – The One Thing That Changes Everything”.  This article presumes the reader already has a strong appreciation for the importance of trust in improving work relations between people and its multiplicative effect on overall organization performance.  This article offers some insights into the actual practice, even the mechanics, of building trust.

When thinking about the trust-building process, I was immediately confronted with a chicken-and-egg problem: does one party earn the trust of another party first, or does one party start by bestowing trust on the other before it is earned.  I learned a lot about this dynamic from my dog, Zelda.

Zelda is black Labrador and, like most labs, she always wants to be where we are.  Wherever we are in the house she will lay down as near as possible.  In fact, most of the time she lays down exactly under foot, directly in your way, and then proceeds to fall happily asleep.  As I would get up to move past or around her I would have to step very close to her body.  Despite the very real risk of being stepped on accidentally, she would lie there completely still and serene.  It struck me that she was completely confident that I would not hurt her; she had bestowed a high degree of trust in me, and she had done so before I earned it.

We can debate about whether dogs are instinctively trained to trust humans or whether she was bestowing “blind trust”, but what was more interesting was seeing how I behaved in response to receiving this gift.  Seeing, and feeling, the trust she had placed in my behavior, I felt an extraordinary responsibility to be careful to not step on her.  It was very important that I not betray her trust.  I wanted to validate her trust and “earn” what was already given.  It struck me that this is the opposite of our common conception that trust needs to be earned first.

In addition to earning trust, one party can ask for trust, i.e. the performer saying, in effect, “trust me”.  This was the case the first time my son asked to borrow the car keys.  I notice, however, that while my teenager son is constantly pushing the boundaries of our established trust level, he does not ask me for a new level of trust that would be way beyond my comfort zone or the parameters of our existing trust level(s).  We are engaged in the process of building trust.

More precisely it is a reinforcing cycle – a cycle of action and reaction that either builds, maintains or diminishes trust.  The acts of bestowing and earning trust are present in virtually all human interactions.   The result of this cycle of behavior with Zelda is that she and I have an amazing degree of trust in each other.  The actual cycle mechanics are that each person implicitly attempts to match the level of trust either bestowed or asked by the other; i.e. one expects to be trusted to the level of what they have earned in previous interactions, and one bestows trust only up to the level of what they expect the other party can earn.  It goes without saying the cycle is not always smooth and forward.  The cycle with my son is not linear; he is granted more trust the older he gets, but, as with most teenagers, there are also setbacks where trust is damaged and requires rebuilding.

We do not typically bestow trust way beyond what we think is justified based on our expectations of the other person’s response, and, conversely, we do not expect to be granted trust way beyond what we think the other person can accept.  The one who initiates the trust-building cycle limits the strength and dynamism of the cycle by trying to anticipate and match the expected response from the other (i.e. they limit their level of trust based on pre-judgments of the other).

Imagine if this were not the case.  Imagine if the cycle started from within without regard for pre-judgments about in-kind responses, such as Zelda bestowing way more trust in me before I had earned it.  I propose that people who bestow more trust than is “warranted”, or who ask for more trust than they have previously “earned”, build higher levels of trust very much faster.

This is not the same as blind trust.  It would be naïve to overlook the risk associated with such behavior.  In fact, risk is the special ingredient that propels and energizes the whole cycle.  Trust need not be blind.  Having bestowed a great trust does not mean you can not follow up and stay deeply involved in the execution by the other party.  Asking for frequent progress reports may still be appropriate, but the quality and mood of the dialog is entirely different.  Conversely, asking for more trust does not mean you perform in isolation from the stakeholder.  Having taken on more trust, you are obliged to be even more communicative about progress and concerns.

This discussion would not be complete without mentioning the preeminent importance of outcomes.  The trust cycle ultimately depends on whether the performer earned the trust they were given or asked for.  As Stephen Covey says, the performer’s pattern of meeting commitments is the “Big Kahuna” for building trust.  The point of this article is to suggest that managers who bestow trust on performers before it is earned can accelerate the cycle.

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Posted in Commitment Based Management, Performance Management, Trust

Priorities Don’t Deliver – The Only Thing That Matters Is Agreeing On A Delivery Date

Posted on February 4, 2011 | 3 comments

When someone delegates a task to someone else it’s common business practice for the requester to assign a priority (high, medium, low) to the task.  It’s done all the time, in email messages, task assignments, yearly goals, etc.  The priority is a signal from the boss that the “top” priorities are most important to him/her, and they are expected to be done ahead of others.

This practice has less value than we think.  Assigning priorities to task assignments does not drive better outcomes – i.e. does not assure that the right things get done at the right time.

What good is it to have low priority items that we know will never get done? They’re cluttering some list, but, if truth were told, they’ll never get done.  We’ve made a record of them, but we just don’t have the courage to delete them.  On the other hand, what good is it to have numerous high priority items, with more being added each week?  Before you have completed the list, another “top priority” item is added.  In the end, you can only work on one at a time.

In the final analysis, priorities don’t really drive delivery very much.  Due Date is the only thing that drives delivery.

So, when you want to get something done, don’t specify the priority, ASK the intended performer for a delivery date.  And I do mean ASK.

This practice is so much different than ASSIGNING a priority and a due date.  The actual conversation should be a REQUEST not an assignment.  You are ASKING a performer to execute some outcome and ASKING when they can commit to deliver it.  Delivery date is the only thing that really matters.  A high priority item that won’t be delivered when needed is useless.  And just adding a low priority item to a long list of tasks that will never get delivered is also useless.  Juggling several “high priority” items should not be left to the performer’s discretion.

Instead, make a clear REQUEST, and ASK your performer when they can deliver.  Sure, in making the request it’s good to communicate about the relative importance of the task, but just assigning a priority has only limited value in the decision-making of the performer as to what to do next.  In response to the REQUEST, the performer looks at what’s already on their plate, considers a series of factors (e.g. urgency, intuition, personal interest, political value, career advancement, difficulty of accomplishment, etc.) and responds with a proposed delivery date.  If their response is not soon enough, some negotiation of delivery date may be appropriate.  But in the end there is an AGREEMENT about a delivery date.  This is all that matters.

This practice seems so obvious, but it is surprisingly rare.  Instead, we persist in assigning work and giving out priorities.  It kind-of works, but it is very inefficient.  Let’s have better conversations and make clear agreements.  Requesters should drop the notion (or at least rely a lot less on it) of assigning their priority to the request, with the implicit assumption that high priority items get done first.  Instead, both parties would be better served by focusing on obtaining an agreed due date (regardless of what priority the requester or the performer may have in mind).

Next generation task management systems will focus on forging agreements around delivery dates, not on assigning priorities.

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Posted in Execution, Organization Development, Performance Management, Workplace norms

Email Is Flawed For Managing Work – Transformation Is Coming

Posted on January 3, 2011 | 1 comment

My co-author on this article, Francois Koutchouk, has a long background in designing and implementing groupware technologies.  We were discussing recent trends in the use, and abuse, of email and perhaps seeing the signs that herald the decline of email as it is currently used.  Our particular concern was the widespread and entrenched reliance on email as a flawed work management tool.

Getting things done

The heart of most business processes and team collaboration is a series of work request transactions and the means to keep track of their progress (or lack thereof).

Simplicity and ubiquity make email an acceptable tool to initiate requests.  But email is not adequate for tracking the dialog that follows.  Email does not support many key aspects of successful work requests including:

  • Formalize an agreement by the recipient to perform, complete, and deliver on a request
  • Negotiate the priority or completion date of a request
  • Track which party has the ball for the next action
  • Expose dependencies (dependent tasks)
  • Share work-in-progress beyond the immediate participants
  • Capture a historical record of the dialog in the context of the request and the project to which the request relates
  • Establish credibility and therefore the trust between the requester and performer based on previous performance
  • Distinguish work that is required to move the business forward from all types of messages, comments, and random information.

The technical reason is simple: email does not provide a structured repository nor workflow features.  Email is therefore woefully inadequate as a tool for handling business processes.

Most knowledge workers acknowledge this conundrum while facing daily onslaughts of emails, irrelevant cc-ed messages, lengthy reply-to threads and  late-night Blackberry messages as the deadline is nearing.

How much longer will we persist with this obviously flawed tool for managing critical business relationships and processes?

Getting out of your inbox

Let’s use the example of a successful sales rep.  Throughout the sales cycle, she needs to coordinate with a variety of individuals within her company:

  • Engineering and Product Management to answer technical questions from the client,
  • Procurement and Legal to fine tune contracts,
  • Accounting and Finance for payments and invoicing,
  • Supply Chain, Production, and Manufacturing for delivery status,
  • Senior management for account management, and
  • She may also have to coordinate with third parties, such as resellers, shippers, add-on components purchased from suppliers, etc.

To meet the prospect’s expectations and delivery timetable there will be a flurry of emails, most of which are at risk of becoming the proverbial messages-in-a-bottle unless she follows up rigorously (assuming she remembers to follow up – since there is no automatic reminder that something hasn’t been handled).  A single breakdown in communications may delay or compromise the deal and business relationship.

Clearly, email is an inadequate tool for managing this work by substituting a low quantity of results-based communications with a high quantity of inefficient messages. The solution may be to move all those disjointed communications and touch-points out of the traditional email system.

One alternate approach is to use project management software such as Microsoft Project or other cloud-based equivalent solutions.  These tools track task assignments, due dates and dependencies, but they are fundamentally single-user applications that do not capture the dialog between the parties regarding negotiation of delivery commitments and changes in status during delivery.  And because these tools require a heavy investment in learning new skills and methods they are best left to project management professionals handling complex tasks, such as building a new hospital wing or managing an ERP installation.

Another approach is to use custom-built software, such as a Lotus Notes application, or a Force.com version thereof, that enforces a predetermined workflow process.  Such an approach works well, tends to be simple to use, but is only appropriate for repeatable business processes – when the workflow is well known, does not change often, and involves the same series of steps and actors.  As such these tools are best used for a yearly contract renewal or provisioning of new customers.

From Talk to Action

Despite our collective understanding that email is flawed as a workflow management tool, we are firmly entrenched in its use.  What is needed is a generic solution that mirrors the simplicity and flexibility of email but adds better workflow tracking and management reporting features.  Knowledge workers will need to be incented out of email rather than forced out.  Adoption of alternate tools must be based on getting better performance from co-workers, not being told to use yet another new software system.  Requests may still initiate out of email, but the conversation that follows must be managed in a shared on-line space accessible to all, including third parties.

Performers negotiate and make explicit delivery commitments that reinforce productive behavior and focus on results.  Tracking the request through to delivery moves the initiative along, from talk to action.  Trust builds between actors (requesters and performers), commitments are met, goals are accomplished, moods improve and email inboxes thin out.

The principles of managing work requests called “commitment based management” are 50 years old, fine-tuned by social scientists such as Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd, as well as thoroughly described in academic journals.  Previous attempts to automate these principles, however, have failed to translate into workable software, despite valiant efforts from Action Technologies, Elf Technologies, and others.  The key to widespread use and acceptance will be solutions where ease-of-use trumps complexity, essential to entice hardened email addicts to a new way of working.

The End of Email?

We can glimpse the future of corporate email by looking at the younger generation of home users: Facebook, Tweet/texting and less and less Google email in that order.

Business emails may dissolve similarly into three entities:

  • Commitment-based messaging to handle business processes and task-based collaboration
  • Instant messaging (chat, SMS, private Tweet) for time-sensitive notifications
  • Cloud-based email for one-to-one conversations, casual discussions and whatever materials blur the line between the private and public life of a worker

Ultimately expenses-to-perceived value will drive the decline of email:

  • High licensing and administrative costs of private email systems (Outlook, Lotus Notes, and their respective server infrastructure)
  • High administrative costs to protect against viruses, spam and phishing
  • Trailing support of many organizations for personal communication devices into the workplace (iPhone, iPad, SMS) leads to compliance liability
  • Increased stress of workers unable to handle their inbox – magnified by round-the-clock mobile accessibility
  • Email inefficiency as a tool to get actions from requests; therefore a flawed means of achieving measurable business results

Email is not going away anytime soon, but the forces of change are mounting and a new communication paradigm is budding.  Work management conversations need to be tracked in a new non-email solution.

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Posted in Execution, HR Systems/Technology, Managed Conversations, Workplace norms

Performance Management Does Not Equal Performance Improvement – Improving Systems Requires More Than Paving The Cow Path

Posted on December 6, 2010 | 1 comment

Performance management systems have been around for over three decades.  As an HR manager at a high tech company in 1984, I was responsible for administering the annual “performance review period”.  The annual review was supposed to be a time for setting goals and providing developmental feedback.  It also insured that every manager had at least one performance-related conversation with each employee each year.  It was also seen as a way to either justify the planned salary increase or, in cases where there were problems, to begin a documentation trail to move an employee out of the company without legal ramifications.  The real action regarding evaluating each employee’s performance took place in the rating and ranking session that all the managers participated in during which compensation increases were decided.  Once this two-day meeting was completed, HR had to hound the managers to get all their reviews written.  Since the salary increase was already determined in the rating/ranking meeting, the performance review document was often written so as to support the proposed salary increase.  Performance strengths and developmental goals for the next period were included in the document that went into the employee file.  Managers understood that this annual process was “necessary”, but no one, not even the HR folks, really believed that the annual performance review actually led to improved employee or departmental performance.

The basic process has evolved very little since then with the exception of two changes: there is a somewhat greater emphasis on setting goals, and the tools for actually writing the review document have changed.  Enhancements have been directed primarily at speeding up the process, not improving it.

Whereas in 1984 the manager would be expected to compose a one or two page personal appraisal report using a word processor (the newer programs at the time had spell checking), today managers can “write” the review with a few clicks of their mouse.  Today’s performance management software lets managers click to select the characteristic (e.g. “exhibits teamwork”) they want to include from a predefined list (sometimes called “coaching tips”), click to decide how strongly or weakly worded they want to make the point, and voila, a politically correct, legally correct, and spell-checked paragraph has been “written”.  Several more clicks and in less than 10 minutes the reviewing manager is done with the (too often dreaded) annual review process for that employee.

I recently viewed the product tour for an industry-leading performance management system.  In touting its system application sophistication the vendor boasted… “With the click of a button…the document can be automatically personalized…”  Does anyone else see the oxymoron here….”automatically personalized”?

This is the same old practice packaged with enhanced electronic aids.  The increasing speed and automation of this approach actually serves to reduce the value of the employee performance review process.  We’ve just paved the cow path and upped the speed limit!  Is this really the direction we want to be going?

I will mention here three initial concerns I have with this development:

(1)  Speeding up the writing process reduces the effectiveness of the intended communication to the employee. The process of writing is actually a process of thinking.  Managers who take the time to compose their own original paragraphs are likely to be much more specific and grounded in their feedback than any generalized “coaching tip”.  Additionally, the act of the writing is also indirectly helping the manager to prepare his/her script for the upcoming meeting with the employee. [Note: Some performance management systems enable sending the document to the employee and obtaining their electronic signature, thus allowing the manager to actually skip the meeting or personal communication altogether.]

(2) Automating the document sets the wrong mood for the actual meeting with the employee to discuss their performance. Automating the document implicitly suggests that the review process is “automatic”, mechanistic, and mostly quantitative.  Automated writing suggests that template writing is better.  The quicker the manager and employee get through this annual process the quicker they can get back to the “real work”—as if employee development were not part of the job.

(3)  This performance management system is often confused with a performance improvement system. Traditional performance management systems have the right lever for improving performance: the one-to-one communication between manager and employee.  Conversely, they have a totally inadequate and warped implementation of the practice in terms of frequency of occurrence and quality of this conversation.  Performance improvement conversations do benefit from periodic goal setting and review, but the real driver is at the more granular level of making and keeping commitments on a week-by-week, month-after-month basis.  Every task request a manager makes is an opportunity to forge an effective agreement for a specific and defined performance level.  Each request begins a dialog that should have an explicit delivery and assessment at the end.  Each dialog is an opportunity to enhance performance and build trust.

A new breed of software tools is coming to the market based on the concept of performance improvement.  The annual employee review document will persist, but the new tools will focus on the frequency and quality of the one-to-one ongoing dialog between managers and their staff.  The real lever for boosting personal and enterprise-wide performance is elevating and illuminating these closed-loop conversations.  These new software applications will offer the first fundamental advancement in performance management practice in over three decades.

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Posted in Commitment Based Management, HR Systems/Technology, Organization Development, Performance Management

Something Invisible is Killing the Animals – What Microbiology can teach us about the health of enterprises

Posted on November 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

In the middle 1800’s Louis Pasteur and Agostino Bassi proposed the radical idea that something invisible was killing the animals.  Their insights and later developments are known today as germ theory.  Their hypothesis was highly controversial, but their carefully designed experiments gradually gained converts and lifted a shroud that led to numerous breakthroughs.  This work, coupled with advancements in the technology of the microscope, was the foundation of Microbiology.

I propose we are on the verge of a similar breakthrough in the “biology” of enterprises.  Similar to animal cells, information exchange is the smallest component of an action that results in a new outcome.  The interpersonal exchange is the dialog that takes place between a requester and a performer.  Like cells in our bodies, how well these conversations are functioning (i.e. how well they are crafted, nurtured, tracked, and evaluated) has a direct relationship on how well the whole organism-enterprise performs.

By deconstructing, we can readily see that all initiatives are the result of a network of requester-performer conversations.  But there is no technology today, analogous to the microscope, which really enables us to “see” these in-progress conversations.  We know these conversations are going on, but there is no effective means to evaluate their “health” and impact on the enterprise.  In fact, something invisible may be “killing” the enterprise.

New technology, however, is coming.  We are at the beginning of finally being able to “see” these conversations in progress and to begin intervening to strengthen them.

First of all, let’s be clear about what can currently be seen and what is lacking. Today knowledge workers use emails, wiki’s, task management software tools, and shared documents to initiate, track, and review work initiatives and related workflow.  On reflection, however, these tools reveal only fragments of a complete conversation – the skin and bones, as it were.  Moreover, they omit some of the most important parts of the actual dialog between the person who made a request and the intended performer.

The thread of an email comes closest to revealing a complete conversation, but even this is a small fraction of the whole.  Email threads can show who is talking to whom and can provide a glimpse into the content.  On the other hand, emails are not action-oriented, and there is nothing in an email thread that speaks to the “status” or quality of the conversation.  Moreover, each email is an isolated bit of data; there is no technology that enables observation of patterns across emails.

What needs to be seen-understood-evaluated is the quality (“health”) of the dialog.  Dialog assessment quality addresses questions such as:

  • Was the original request clear and understood by the intended performer?
  • Did the performer actually agree to deliver what was requested on the agreed upon date?
  • Is the delivery going to be made on time?  If not, what intervened along the way to force a change in the delivery?
  • Was a final delivery made, and when, and was it actually responsive to the original request?

The above are the critical factors that really matter in terms of performance; this is execution in-progress.  Multiplied a thousand times, the quality of these conversations obviously determines the success of the enterprise.

So now that we understand what we’re looking for, I submit that software technology can play a role similar to the microscope.  There are two main challenges, and software technology offers value for each.

The first challenge is the need to capture a complete conversation that has enough information with which the enterprise-requestor-implementer can assess the quality of the dialog.  Email threads are insufficient; an additional technology is needed that mandates and captures more data and that includes the full closed-loop with a beginning, middle, and end.  Once the conversation has begun, the two parties need to progress along a guided path that eventually leads to some closure and assessment.  All work requests-initiatives do naturally progress and, one way or another, the parties move forward with each other.  Some outcome is achieved.  But, left to their own devices, individuals will not generally follow the discipline needed to capture all the information needed to assess the conversation.  Here is where carefully designed technology can play a role to enforce some discipline into the conversation that captures the data needed for assessment.

The second challenge is the need to expose these complete conversations for viewing.  Once a conversation can be “seen” it can be determined if it was optimal and beneficial to the enterprise-customer.  We will be seeing, for the first time, execution-in-progress. If the whole conversation pattern can be seen, the requester-implementer can intervene to mend, repair, inoculate, or vaccinate the whole body of the enterprise’s performance.  A complete conversation database can be used to display both individual performance parameters and enterprise-wide trends at a granular level previously unavailable.

As in microbiology, many small interactions, nearly invisible, can determine the essential culture and effectiveness of the enterprise.  New technologies are coming that will enable truly transformative observations about enterprise performance that may be as important as microbiology has been to improving human health.

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Posted in Execution, HR Systems/Technology, Performance Management

“Who Will Do What By When” – a Book Review

Posted on October 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

The title of this book says it all.  Getting work done with others requires the response to this simple question.  Obvious, right?  But as this entertaining book points out, in the real work world it’s not at all that simple.

Tom and Birgit Hanson wrote this book in 2005 with the subtitle “How to Improve Performance, Accountability and Trust with Integrity”.  Rendered in a personal parable about very believable characters in familiar work settings, the authors lay out a system of practices that are at the heart of really answering the question – Who will do what by when.

The authors remind us that our common work norms are not reliable in squarely addressing the WWDWBW question.  First of all, judgments and interpretations about other people’s motives and abilities often create some blindness on the part of managers.  Secondly, the discipline of clearly defining a task and obtaining an agreement and commitment from the intended performer is often glossed over.  And third, even though most would agree that making and keeping promises is key to your reputation and the success of your organization, the practice of really making “promises” is rare.

The system they outline is at once common sense and familiar, but also rare in actual business practice.  It involves the manager making a clear request and obtaining a clear response from the performer of agreement or a counter offer along with a promise to perform by a certain date.  Clarity up front is key.  Closing the loop is equally important.  If the promise is not going to be fulfilled the performer is obliged to re-negotiate a new deadline before the due date.  As the authors note “No one fulfills all their promises, but you can honor all your promises.”  After a delivery has been made, the manager is obliged to provide a clear acknowledgement (e.g. a simple thank you) or a well-considered “complaint”.  The authors also provide several helpful suggestions on how to structure and deliver complaints so that outcomes are improved and relationships are enhanced going forward.

One of the aspects of the book that I most appreciated was bringing the word “integrity” into our every-day work lexicon.  Integrity in business is not always about the big decisions, big deals, and fraud.  It’s also important to notice the smaller behaviors that help to either build or erode one’s personal integrity.  The authors hold up a mirror to self-evaluate and disclose our own lapses of integrity in our business dealings.  Integrity (doing what you say you are going to do) is a personal “tool” that helps you get things done.  Even “small things”, like habitually coming late to meetings, are noticed by your colleagues and erode your integrity which does translate into real dollar costs of doing business.

Conversely, the authors provide a road map for building up and maintaining one’s integrity, and they provide a glimpse of the substantial positive, bottom line effects.  They offer a specific list of “Integrity Tools”.  It’s a simple idea they call “operating with integrity” which is a “system [that relies on] a series of familiar actions, such as request, promise, and acknowledgement, applied in a more rigorous, clearly defined way.  We call the actions Integrity Tools because they help build, maintain and restore integrity to any interpersonal situation … Integrity is the foundation of interpersonal excellence [that] determines the reliability, speed, and bandwidth of your team’s performance.”

The practices promoted by their system improve work norms and behaviors, but sustaining the changes only comes with practice.  Doing it repeatedly is different than speaking about it.  Software systems (e.g. 4 Spires) can reinforce and instantiate the “integrity operating system”.

Finally, as the authors advise…”if you only remember to say the title of this book several minutes before the end of your meetings, the book will have been a great investment!”

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Posted in Commitment Based Management, Execution, Performance Management, Workplace norms