Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 62, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 96 17:04:13 -0700
Subject: The Complacency Killer is Trust
Implementing change is a tricky business anywhere, any time. Maybe that's good. Maybe it's only the resistance to change that keeps us from throwing out good stuff with bad ... or from being whipsawed to the point of insanity. My concern, however, is that the resistance is usually not thoughtful. We are afraid of the unknown and often prefer the pains we know to the promises of paradise-to-be. The "management-of-change" answer to that problem is to find a burning platform, to make the current state devils so awful that our imaginations conjure-up glorious future state angels, and we eagerly jump into the re-engineering process. Our problem here at HP, however, is that we struggle every day to make this a good place to work, and we mostly succeed. Even tightness caused by some bad trends, the closing of a large division, and the reality-check of tepid third quarter results don't create within us the fear and anxiety needed to move us off our platforms. It's called "complacency." Harvard Business School professor John Kotter has just published a book entitled _Leading Change_ (Joan Davidson-Scheer, of Corporate Education, has negotiated a 15% discount for HP employees on this book. Call 800-545-7685 to order it). In the August 5, 1996 issue of _Fortune_ magazine, Kotter compressed a piece of his book into an article called, "Kill Complacency ... before it kills you...Create a sense of urgency before a real disaster strikes." Kotter talks about six general reasons that may account for complacency. How many of these apply to your work group here at HP? 1. No highly visible crisis exists, no danger of serious impact on our incomes or job security much less a threat to employment security. 2. We are spending money on expensive trappings. Buildings are being built, facilities are being remodeled, art is being purchased. How bad could things really be? 3. Standards that we measure against are low. All the articles say we're "the best." 4. People are focusing on internal or local goals rather than the overall enterprise. "My sales region made quota." "My division met its targets." "Why should I change?" 5. Our performance measures make it easy to look good. This is especially true if the performance measures are mostly focused on activities rather than results. "My job was to interview 25 candidates for the key programming openings. It's not my fault if the salaries we offered were so low that we couldn't hire anybody." 6. Whatever feedback we receive are from internal metrics, not from external customers. "Our help desk resolved 98% of the complaints (versus a target of 96%). Tough luck about those other customers who were really unhappy." I sense a common theme in Kotter's list: "I'm OK, you're not." Complacency is a mindset that says, "I'm doing my job, so let those that are goofing off feel the pain." There might also be some denial. "Yes, things overall could get tough, but if I just hunker-down and do my job well, I'll get through it all OK." Kotter offers "six ways to raise the heat" to boil off complacency: 1. "Create a crisis by allowing a financial loss to occur or an error to blow up." Yuk! I hate this idea. I hate manipulation of all sorts, and this advice sounds awful to me. It's a prescription for destroying credibility. On the other hand, if Kotter means that we shouldn't go to extraordinary efforts to "save" a situation so that a crisis is averted, that may be OK, but the phrase "create a crisis" shows a very divisive mindset. 2. "Eliminate obvious examples of excess like corporate jet fleets and gourmet dining rooms." First, egregious excess should be avoided or eliminated altogether for all sorts of other reasons, in good times as well as in bad. But the basic advice is right, and HP is doing things like that by eliminating things like marginal travel and conferences. The key is to be sure that everyone "walks the talk," that there aren't special rules for special people. It's harder to blame "others" when we're all in the same boat. 3. "Set targets like income, productivity, and cycle time so high that they can't be reached by doing business as usual." Yes, assuming that those stretch goals are needed to solve the evolving customer needs. Our famous 10 X reliability goal of the 1980's was a good example of that, and there is anecdotal evidence that the absence of such a goal has allowed our product reliability to slide a little in some places. Again, however, the stretch goal should have realistic justification and shouldn't be set in order to create an artificial crisis. 4. "Share more information about customer satisfaction and financial performance with employees." Right on! Securities Exchange Commission requirements on a company like ours keep us from being completely open about our financial performance, but, to the extent legally prudent, we should trust our employees with as frank assessments as we can possibly provide. 5. "Insist that people talk regularly to unsatisfied customers, unhappy suppliers, and disgruntled shareholders." Yep. And we should probably videotape those folks so we can widely circulate their comments. We who work on internal HP processes rarely get to see outside folks except in circumstances where everyone is on their good behavior. Maybe we should get external market research specialists to go find our fan-club-NOT and bring back some problems that will be painful to hear. 6. "Put more honest discussions of the firm's problems in company newspapers and management speeches. Stop senior management happy talk." Again for SEC reasons, our top managers have to follow prescribed scripts, but inside the company, within our departments, we can be much more realistic with our conversations. We need to trust people with the truth and then expect us all to act appropriately. It's not just a matter of "management" not trusting the "employees" with bad news; it's also "employees" who don't trust "management" to deal with the reality of the front lines. We have to eliminate "management happy talk," and we have to maintain environments in which employees can tell everyone what is really happening without fear of personal reprisals. Complacency can be eliminated only by credibility. Credibility is earned by truthful, complete communication. From that atmosphere of trust comes action that is appropriate. Complacency occurs when we think that the holes in the other side of the boat won't really sink us, too. Resentment and resistance occur when we think that someone sets fire to our platform and then jumps onto a waiting helicopter. Courageous change occurs when we all have worked openly together to put out the fire and having agreed that more drastic action is needed, we jump into the unknown ... hand-in-hand. Where in HP do you see complacency? Where are their gaps in credibility and trust? How can we work together to courageously embrace the changes that we are faced with every day? Regards, Joe