Work Matters

Tag: organizational change

  • Politicians and Persuasion: When to Use Abstract Versus Specific Messages

    As I was reading research this morning for our scaling project, I came across a series of studies that has implications for both politicians and — perhaps organizational leaders — who wish to persuade others to like and support them.  The question tackled by these studies in paper by Hakkyun Kim and his colleagues in the Journal of Consumer Research was when "influencers" are better of using vague, abstract high level messages — ones that are more about "why" — versus concrete, specific, implementation oriented messages — ones that are "how" to get things done.

    Their general hypothesis was that, given the way that people "represent" events in their minds, vague and abstract messages fit with their attention and expectations when the event is far in the future, but as the event draws closer, they become more concerned about concrete details as the practicalities begin to loom. Here is part of their argument:

    For instance, a traveler preparing to leave for a vacation to Cancun the following morning is more likely to process information about speedy check-in for international flights – a low-level, concrete piece of information that is related to the feasibility of the vacation, as opposed to information about the quality of sunsets on the East Coast of Mexico – a high-level, abstract piece of information that is related to the desirability of the vacation. When processing information that does not match their mental representation, people are less likely to experience fluency, and thus may provide a less positive evaluation of the event.

    They used this kind of logic to design a series of laboratory experiments where subjects were exposed to vague versus concrete messages from hypothetical U.S. Senate candidates and asked them to evaluate how positively or negatively they viewed the candidate.  The key  manipulation was whether the election was far off (six months away) or looming soon (one week).  As predicted, abstract messages were more persuasive (and promoted more liking) when the election was six months away and concrete message were more persuasive when it was one week away.

    This study has some fun implications for the upcoming elections.  Let's watch Obama and Romney to see if they keep things vague and abstract until the final weeks of the campaign, but then turn specific in the final weeks.  But I think it also has some interesting implications for how leaders can persuade people in their organizations to join organizational change efforts.  The implication is that when the change is far off, it is not a good idea to talk about he nuts and bolts very much — a focus on abstract "why" questions is in order.  But as the change looms, specific details that help people predict and control what happens to them are crucial to keeping attitudes toward the change and leaders positive.  

    This is just a hypothesis based on this research. Laboratory subjects and the strangeness of political campaigns may not generalize to organizational settings, but it seems like a plausible hypothesis. Now I am going to start looking at some cases of organizational change to see if it actually seems to work. 

    Any reactions to the hypothesis or suggestions of cases to check out?

    P.S. Here is the reference: Kim, Hakkyun, Akshay R. Rao, and Angela Y. Lee (2009), "It's Time to Vote: The Effect of Matching Message Orientation and Temporal Frame on Political Persuasion," lead article, Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (April), 877-889.

  • My Main Focus for 2012: Still Scaling-Up Excellence

    I thought I would provide an update about what I am working on these days, and use it to get some ideas and advice from folks who read this blog.

    2011 was a year of learning and thinking for me, which was necessary because 2010 was simply wild.  I had open heart surgery in April, Good Boss, Bad Boss was published in September, as was the paperback version of The No Asshole Rule — both of which became New York Times bestsellers.   I spent 2011 doing a lot of talking, reading, and thinking about two future projects — they are moving along, but it is always a slow process.  I am lucky to have a job where I don't have to rush to get things out before I am proud of them.

    The first project remains in the early stages.  It follows from my focus on the intersection of humanity and performance in the workplace.  I would tell you more, but it is so ill-formed that I changed my mind about the exact focus several times last year and will likely do so several more times. The one thing I can say at this point is that, when I go back to all the stories people have told me about being a boss, working for bosses, and dealing with assholes, two themes come up over and over: 1. How crucial it is for people to feel as if they are treated with dignity and respect and  2. How important it is for people to be able to stand-up for themselves and others, to create conditions that enable dignity and respect, but to do so without being an asshole.   This first project may take years to reach fruition as my main focus now is on the second project — which fits with my other work on innovation and organizational change.

    My Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I have been reading about, talking about and studying "scaling" for several years now — the challenge of spreading and sustaining actions and mindsets across organizations and networks of people — of spreading excellence or goodness from the few to the many.  This was my primary focus last year and will continue to be in 2012.  Huggy and I are now making serious progress on a book that digs into the topic.

    Every book has a life of its own. This one took awhile to get moving, but it is now dominating our lives.  We seem to be in constant conversation with managers and executives from all kinds of industries about the topic (e.g., in recent weeks we've talked to executives from high tech firms, banks, and the hotel industry; administrators who run prisons; leaders of a big beer company; and school administrators — this week we are swimming in founders of start-ups), we are teaching a fun and somewhat crazy class with 60 MBA and engineers on scaling-up excellence this term (I will blog more about this in the coming weeks), and the text for the book is now pouring out of our computers slowly but steadily.

    Last year, HBR provided summaries of projects that a host of of business and management leaders would be taking on in 2011 — including me.  The perspective Huggy and I are developing has become more refined and our ideas are now much sharper.  But the  "agenda" piece I wrote about a year ago still captures what we are trying to do pretty well. 

    I said our goal was to finish the book in 2011. That didn't happen, but I am optimistic it will this year as we are moving along at a healthy clip. I repeat that description of our project completely (along with comments from the earlier version of this post, published here last year).  We would love any additional comments, suggestions, examples, or other ideas you have:

    My Stanford Business School colleague Hayagreeva Rao and I are absorbed by why behavior spreads—within and between organizations, across networks of people, and in the marketplace. We've been reviewing academic research and theory on everything from the psychology of influence to social movements to how and why insects and fish swarm.

    We are also doing case studies. We're documenting Mozilla's methods for spreading Firefox (its open-source web browser); the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's "100,000 Lives" campaign (an apparently successful effort to eliminate 100,000 preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals); the spread of microbrewing in the United States; an organizational change and efficiency movement within Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer); and the scaling of employee engagement at JetBlue Airways. And we're examining case studies by others, including the failure of the Segway to scale and the challenges faced by Starbucks as a result of scaling too fast and too far.

    Our goal is to write a book in 2011 that provides useful principles for managers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to scale constructive behavior. Because we are in the messy middle, I can't tell how the story will end. But we believe we're making progress, and we're excited about a few lines of thought.

    The first is the link between beliefs and behavior. A truism of organizational change is that if you change people's minds, their behavior will follow. Psychological research on attitude change shows this is a half-truth (albeit a useful one); there is a lot of evidence that if you get people to change their actions, their hearts and minds will follow.

    The second theme is "hot emotions and cool solutions." As Rao shows in his research on social movements, a hallmark of ideas that scale is that leaders first create "hot" emotions to fire up attention, motivation, and often righteous anger. Then they provide "cool," rational solutions for people to implement. In the 100,000 Lives campaign, for example, hot emotions were stirred up by a heart-wrenching speech at the kickoff conference. The patient-safety activist Sorrel King described how her 18-month-old daughter, Josie, had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital as the result of a series of preventable medical errors. Her speech set the stage for IHI staffers to press hospitals to implement six sets of simple, evidence-based practices that would prevent deaths.

    The third is what we call the ergonomics of scaling—the notion that when behaviors scale, it is partly because they've been made easy, with the bother of engaging in them removed. In developing Firefox in the early days, Mozilla's 15 or so employees were able to compete against monstrous Microsoft (and produce a browser with fewer bugs than Internet Explorer) by dividing up the chores and using a technology that made it easy for more than 10,000 emotionally committed volunteers to do "bug catching" in the code. Mozilla now has more than 500 employees, but it is still minuscule compared with Microsoft, and those bug catchers are still hard at work every night.

    Again, we would love to hear your ideas:  Cases we should dig into, research on scaling and organizational change we should know about, and methods you've used in your organization to scale good behavior and descale bad. We would love to hear it all.

  • Adopting The No Asshole Rule: Don’t Bother If The Words Are Hollow

    I just got off the phone with executives from an unnamed large company who are thinking about implementing a "no jerk rule." I am, of course, a big fan of this idea. And there are organizations that have such rules and the implement them effectively, such as Baird, the financial services firm.

    But I think they were a bit taken aback by how vehement I was about the dangers of just plastering the words everywhere, and not following it with the real work of implementing The No Asshole Rule (and, of course, this applies to any other norm in the organization… we wrote a lot about this in The Knowing-Doing Gap).  I wanted to know if the reward and prestige systems already supported the rule, and if not, how they were going to change things.  I wanted to know if the senior executives already modeled the right behavior, and if not, was something being done to make sure they changed their behavior.  I wanted to know if there were known assholes in visible positions, and if there were, was something going to be done to change their behavior or send them packing –to signal that the words were not hollow. 

    As with all norms, the espoused beliefs don't mean much unless they are backed by what people do — especially during the little moments.  Google is an interesting case in point.  Although they are imperfect like every human organization, it remains a civilized place because, as one senior executive explained to me years ago, "it isn't efficient to be an asshole here."  That is a sign to me that the norm is working, and all the strategy and product stuff aside, it is impressive they seem to have sustained this norm despite their size and the relentless performance pressures.  

    To return to the dangers of hollow rhetoric: It is especially destructive when it comes to the no jerk or or no asshole rule.  When organizations say it, but don't do it, when it does not constrain and describe how people act — and no serious efforts are being made to begin implementing the norm — the result is that double-whammy:  Leaders are seen as both assholes and hypocrites.  

  • Is GM’s Culture Really Changing, Or Is It Just More Hot Air?

    The BP fiasco has made many of us even more cynical about the difference between what executives and their spin doctors say about their management styles and organizational cultures versus what is actually happening.  With that caveat in mind, I was still heartened by a story in the Financial Times a couple days back about the cultural changes that CEO Ed Whitacre is apparently implementing at General Motors (note you can read it for free but have to register).  I was sent this article by Alison Beard, an editor I am working with at Harvard Business Review on article for the September issue, which presents and develops some of the ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss about how the best bosses serve as "human shields" and take steps to protect their people from intrusions, misguided procedures, and idiots and idiocy of any stripe that undermines their performance and dignity.

    I have been extremely critical of GM here as both the public record and my own more haphazard but extended experience with the company convinced me that they had — at least before they went bankrupt — some of the most dysfunctional and inefficient programs, group dynamics, and leadership styles I have ever seen.  I am not surprised they went bankrupt, I am only surprised that it took so long.  You can see my rant about their "No we can't" mindset where I argued that their core competence was justifying why they couldn't do the right things and Mat May's amazing story about the dysfunctional power dynamics at GM and how he confronted GM executives with them.

    At least on the surface, a lot seems to be changing at GM.  The story in the Financial Times listed numerous encouraging things that new CEO Ed Whitacre is doing that strike me as reasonable antidotes to the old GM diseases.  Whether or not these are enough to change what the thousands of other people at GM for the better is another matter.  But there are encouraging signs other than the 1.2 billion dollars that GM made last quarter. A few quotes from the article are intriguing:

    1. The new CEO has little appetite for the PowerPoint presentations that
    have long been a staple of internal GM meetings. He has delegated many
    decisions and honed in on aspects of the old GM’s bureaucratic way of
    doing things that he sees as ripe for the cull. At one meeting in April,
    he questioned the number of websites GM ran – nearly 3,000, two-thirds
    of which were internal and many of which were not updated regularly.
    “Why on earth do we need this many?” a colleague recalls him asking.
    Many have since been closed.

    2. Mr Girsky has chopped the number of regular reports compiled by GM’s
    research group from 94 to four. He may dispense with some of these too,
    after deliberately not e-mailing them to the usual 150 recipients and
    finding that only a handful missed them. If executives give forecasts or
    dates of something they plan to do, Mr Whitacre makes clear they will
    be held accountable. “Everything is a bit more immediate,” says one
    executive.

    3. He regularly lunches in the RenCen’s food court, clearing his tray
    afterwards    .

    Comment: GM top brass have traditionally been treated like royalty — this is not trivial.   The best book on GM culture is very old  — One a Clear Day You Can See General Motors — and is about a guy who got busted a giant drug deal he got involved in to save his new company, John DoLorean –who in some ways was the Elon Musk of is era.

    4. At all levels, Mr Whitacre asks managers to take more risks. When
    subordinates request money for a new initiative, his response is
    typically to ask whether the amount is within their existing budgets. If
    so, they are told that the decision whether to spend it is theirs. “You
    don’t have to wait for that monthly meeting,” says Ed Welburn, GM’s
    design chief, citing a recent decision to change the rear-seat design of
    a new Cadillac model.      (But there is also bad news here.  The article says that "He has also made it clear that the flip side of extra responsibility is
    accountability, with few second chances."     When people are terrified of losing their jobs, they avoid risky behavior… if he is creating… or perhaps revising… a culture of fear, he needs to accept that there will be failures… see Diego's great post on this point).

    5. Mr Welburn, one of the handful of executives still in the same job they
    held two years ago, recalls that prior to the new regime, “half of our
    people were spending all of their time preparing presentations, instead
    of designing great cars”.

    This last quote — which is very consistent with my experience at the old GM — suggests that indeed some heads needed to roll. Perhaps Mr. Whitacre can now introduce some stability and psychological safety– Jack Welch, for example, was known as "Neutron Jack' early in his career because he did so many layoffs and got GE out of so many businesses, but after that phase, he developed a series of programs to engage employees and to make them feel safer, while still improving performance, notably Work-out. 

    So, what do you think?  Is there real hope for GM?   Is this just PR?  If you were advising Mr. Whitacre, what would you tell him?

    I am rooting for him and GM, as returning this company to greatness would help so many people's lives in so many ways, especially in Midwestern United States.

  • When is the change going to be over?

    An executive my wife knows reported one of her people recently asked her this question.  The last couple years have been tough on all of of us, and especially tough on people who had assumed that the future would be an imitation of the past.  Of course, the answer is that the change will never be over. More so than ever, a boss's job is to prepare his or her people by developing expectations that there will be constant change, while (as I wrote in HBR), providing as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible.

    I wonder, what else can a boss do to help people anticipate, cope with, and flourish in the face of change?

  • Reducing Interruptions and Saving Lives: New Study on Drug Treatment Errors

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    I have written here and other places on Amy Edmondson's wonderful research on how, when nurses feel as if they have psychological safety, they openly talk about and try to correct drug treatment errors, but when they work in a climate of fear, they are afraid to even admit when they have made mistakes — which led to a rather bizarre finding in Amy's early research that in nursing units where people felt safe, even compelled,to talk about and learn from mistakes, they reported ten times more errors than in a nursing unit where the supervisor slammed nurses who admitted or where "caught" making mistakes. 

    This morning's San Francisco Chronicle reports an equally fascinating study on reducing drug treatment errors. This one focuses on the evils of interruptions, which as  research by Gloria Mark shows, slows and undermines performance, and creates great job stress. As the article reports "A UCSF program to improve accuracy in administering drugs – with
    particular emphasis on reducing interruptions that often lead to
    mistakes – resulted in a nearly 88 percent drop in errors over 36
    months at the nine Bay Area hospitals, according to results being
    released today."  The cool thing about the article is that the nurses at different hospitals invented different local methods for reducing interruptions, to the vest you see pictured above to covering windows so colleagues couldn't see them (and thus run in and interrupt them), to developing quiet zones, or quiet times during drug administration.  Note that drug treatment errors are huge problem, resulting in over 400,000 preventable injuries per year and 3.5 billion in costs. So a 88% reduction is huge.

    This research is also fascinating to me because it shows how, so often, when people say they are too busy, don't have enough money, or their will be resistance to change that these are excuses, or worse yet, negative self-fulfilling prophecies.  In particular, I think that people — especially managers — often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine.  I am looking forward to digging into this research further.