Somehow I thought that being more than 700 miles away from work would mean that I wouldn’t be setting up computers for our Sister company’s new store. 20 hours later, many of which was spent on the phone between classes, I realize: “no, being more than 700 miles away from from work means that I will spend a lot of time on the phone walking people through how to get things connected and then, once the computers are online, spending hours in a secluded place carefully configuring as much as I can.” I am burnt out (and hungry).
Category: Work
-
Don’t Mind the Stains (or Evidences of Organizational Longevity)
I recently put on my white elastic banded socks and wore them all day. It wasn’t until that evening while visiting some friends that I removed my shoes and realized that I had worn the wrong socks. I have two pairs of white elastic banded socks. This pair was different from the other pair, and indeed all my other socks, in that they were heavily stained. While I was initially embarrassed over having worn stained socks I quickly remembered why they were stained: I had worn this very pair of socks a few years ago while playing football with some friends in muddy field on a wet Oregon day. The stains incurred were and are an ever present reminder of the fun game that was played and the victory that was achieved after much effort. I had kept the socks as something of a trophy from that game.
These stained socks serve as a reminder of my accomplishment. Other stains do not have such fond memories attached to them. Juice stains in the carpet, oil stains on a favorite shirt or blood stains on pants. In many ways each of these was simply part of my life’s course. Each also has a memory attached to them, some better than others, and though each has a story none of them elicit the pride of my mud stained socks.
Organizations also have stains. The longer they are around the more they will have. Some of the stains are like giant juice stains on the floor while others are small marks of personal accomplishment like my socks. Each has a story and reason behind it and these reasons have shaped the growth of that organization. Even if the stain is cleaned and is no longer visible, those who knew about the stain will still remember it was there.
Sometimes you can catch the host stealing glances at the now clean carpet patch, or you notice they avoid it by walking around a perceptively good patch of carpet. Organizationally this may take form as employees refusing to do something because a specific person is supposed to handle it, even if that person is on vacation. They may provide excuses such as “I don’t know if I am allowed to do that” or they may lie saying “I’ll take care of it” while they are secretly waiting for the absent person to come back and handle it. Sometimes they will blatantly refuse, “Oh, no I can’t. Carl has to do it.”
Policy formation can be greatly affected by minor stains like a pair of old pants that you can’t part with, but you never wear because they have a ketchup stain on the thigh. These can be an embarrassing moment the owner had with a customer, a mid-level manager who was publically humiliated by a superior or an employee who said the wrong thing to a customer and was severely disciplined. Each situation can cause new policies that forbid the wearing of the tarnished garment, but not the disposal of it because you never know when you have need a mostly useless policy.
Behavioral ethics can also be influenced by stains, or rather the threat of new stains. This happens when people are especially careful around certain individuals who sometimes have “accidents” that may cause a spill and subsequent stain. It may be a viscous manager who, upon offense, spreads your shame across the company, a co-worker who is known to spread gossip and rumors to any who will listen or even an accidental run-in that may cause some awkward questions to be asked. This careful avoidance of potential staining is very different from the careful attention given while wearing special clothing.
Not all stains remain hidden. Some are shown off and even publicly aired. These stains, much like the mud stained socks, are symbols of the organization’s victory, near death experiences and staying power. They are aired in defiance of their competition and their display are a challenge to their opponents. These stains can be more liberal customer return policies put in place after a viscous battle with a competitor, a special greeting among members in honor of a beloved leader or a signature service performed “because that’s way we’ve always done it”. These stains are not always metaphorical, like most of the other organizational stains, but are sometimes literal: burn marks from a fire that nearly destroyed a warehouse or cracks a building’s walls caused by a strong earthquake. Often these stains are glorified and incorporated into the organization’s myths.
The longer the organization has been around, the more stains it is bound to have. Not all stains are bad, in fact many can lead to improved moral and loyalty, but often these stains lead to the creation and sustaining of policies that don’t really make sense and can be damaging to the organization and those that associate with it.
-
Commitment to Intentions
Some months ago I was involved in a management retreat for work. The retreat’s primary agenda focused on a proposed reorganization of the company. The entire first day discussed the ramifications of the changes and what the company would like after it was complete. As we worked late into the night we started planning the timescale for the reorganization.
At the beginning of the timescale planning the question was asked, “Do we all agree to do it?” There was a long silence. No one wanted to commit to the process with so many unanswered questions. Slowly a new discussion emerged that was a rehash of an old discussion: We don’t know because we don’t have all our questions answered.
The discussion was prolonging the issue and allowing us to answer around the important question. Just when we seemed doomed to revisit the entire days meeting Hero raised his hand. He waited for the room to fall silent before speaking.
“I think we are asking the wrong question,” he said. Then he told the story.
As a young man he had decided to buy a house. At the time the housing market was ripe with small 2 bedroom houses. Hero didn’t have any need for a bigger house and in fact was quite contend with a small house. The Realtor took Hero to see various houses all of which had the same fatal flaw: they were old. Hero was not a very handyman when it came to fixing up houses. The Realtor pointed out that in order for Hero to sell the house again, at an increased value, work would need to be done.
Then one day the Realtor took Hero to a small house tucked down a short private street. The house, along with the two others on the street, had been built by the same construction company who had been renting the houses out. Their policy was only to rent for a couple of years then to quickly sell the house. The duplex on the corner had been sold previous, the larger house at the end was too expensive and was already being battled over, but the three bedroom house in the middle was just right.
There was just one catch. In order to get inside the house to see it Hero would have to put in an offer to buy the house. The Realtor explained that this was not too unusual of a request because it was currently being rented out. The solution was simple: the Realtor would include a clause that the offer was contingent on Hero’s inspection of the inside. He could, for any reason, back out if he didn’t like what he saw on the inside.
The offer was written and accepted in short order. Hero and the Realtor inspected the inside.
“I like it,” Hero told the Realtor. “What do we do now?”
“You buy it,” the Realtor replied.
“What if the inspection comes back bad?” Hero asked.
“I’ll put in the contingencies for things like that,” the Realtor assured. “What I need to know now is, barring any major unforeseen issues, do you want to buy this house?”
Hero thought for several minutes then turned to the Realtor and said, “Yes”. A month later he owned the house and has happily owned it since.
Back at the retreat, Hero looked across the room. “I think the question we should be asking is the same question my realtor asked me: Barring any major unforeseen issues, is this course of the action the one we want to take?”
One by one, each member of the Company’s management stated “yes” in agreement with the plan. I pondered on the difference between the questions; they were small differences but had a profound difference. The first was asking for blind commitment, asking if we would all back, no matter what came, the plan that was presented. The second is a question of intention, asking if we are commitment, short of major problems, to see the plan through. The second question is much easier to answer than the first.
There is an additional benefit to commitment to intentions. By committing the group to its intentions Hero had in a single moment committed the Company to an end goal, not the process that would take it there, another subtle difference. Often in these meetings we decide that something needed to be done and how we would do it. Our commitment was usually to the process, not the end result. So when the process was complete and we didn’t get what we wanted we were left hanging, not sure what to do not. Being committed to the end goal meant that no matter what we were traveling until we got our desired results, or discovered they were unachievable, and we wouldn’t stop until we got there.
Finally, committing the management team to its intentions, not the process, did much too safe guard the pride and honor of the team. Instead of having attached their name to the process, which may or may not have been the best course, they had attached their names to a carefully analyzed, examined and thought out end goal. Even if the proscribe process as outlined in the retreat were to utterly fail, the team still wouldn’t have failed. Though the process could have been flawed, the goal itself was solid.
Postmortem: The Company’s reorganization continued, not entirely as planned, but well enough. In hind sight, out commitment to intentions that Hero had gathered proved invaluable when tough decision needed to be made.
In class we had been talking about barriers to communications and I was reminded by this story. Communications in that retreat and sometimes during the reorganization process began to crumble as the road got harder and, more particularly, when it wasn’t clear where we were headed. Having a clear understanding of the Fathers’ intentions help everyone to back up during high stress times to remind ourselves why we were doing all this work.
-
The great Customer Service ‘Come to Jesus’ Meeting
In my communications class we were talking about barriers to effective communications. One of the most prevalent barriers to communications that my work experienced early in its life was being too nice. I remembered a classic Customer Service ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting.
The problem was that we had good Customer Service staff. They were really good, so good in fact that they handled much work that belonged to other people. We found that they did other’s work so well that the others couldn’t do their own work, partly out of laziness and partly out of inexperience.
In the ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting we changed that we discussed the difference of being helpful and being really helpful. The difference in longevity. To be helpful, to do things for other people that they can handle themselves on a permanent basis, helps that person for a time. The downside is that they then become dependent and are indeed handicapped by the help. Without the continued effort and knowledge that is gained by experience over time you lose the ability to handle new events and even old events that should be routine. In life this can be seen by observing teenagers and young adults whose parents have coddled them their whole like. Then when they leave their parents they are incapable of handling real-life events (e.g. working for an employer, dealing with a parking ticket, having to be a real friend).
Instead of a helpful staff, we wanted a really helpful staff. To be really helpful is to teach people how to do things and then after a reasonable amount of training to stop helping the, thus making them do when they should have learned to do. To work with an old analogy: you need to teach a man to fish, but if you keep feeding him while he is learning then he has little incentive to become good at fishing. There was a marked difference after the ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting in the performance of the other workers. For a time, a painful time, the Customer Service staff helped train and explain how to do things and why they needed to be done but eventually they stopped assisting with the work and expected it to be done.
Over time performance was dramatically in almost every department. Further, people become smarter because they were able to gain experience through continued effort and thus expand their skill set. Over time, a painful time, we as an organization became stronger and more agile.
-
Linguistics in Culture
Take one: In my Eastern European Studies class we were recently talking about how myths, legends and superstitions impact the local. A girl in my group commented that already Slovakia has already started to check their language after only 16 years away from the Czech Republic. Previously we had identified that language was a key factors in establishing identity.
Add in two: In my Communications class we talked about how cultures are formed in organizations.
Blend them together: Cultures, in and out of organizations, often form their own languages, or at least their own sayings and lingo. This language helps to strengthen the bond of the culture and creates a sense of belonging.
Take a step back: I recently called our corporate office about an issue with our order processing. During the conversation I blurted out an acronym we use to describe the order process. The corporate guy didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. I said it again thinking I misspoke. I hadn’t. We had in our short four years of existence created a unique diction that even our corporate office didn’t understand. Result: Cultures develop their own unique diction to protect their unique identity, identify outsiders and insiders, feel special and communicate quickly about things important to the culture.