Blogging about Management

While thinking about last week’s discussion, I recalled a story I had read some time ago about an experiment involving monkeys. A scientist put four monkeys into a small cage with limited food for a week. Then, the scientist hung a bunch of bananas on top of the cage. One reached out for a banana immediately, but was hurt by a big pot of hot water that fell down on him. The other three monkeys were also burned by hot water when each climbed up to get the bananas. In the end, all the monkeys could do was sit at the bottom of the cage and stare up at the bananas.

A few days later, a new monkey, hungry for days, replaced one of the originals. When that monkey spotted the bananas hanging from the top of the cage and tried to climb up to retrieve them, it was stopped and warned by the other three who had been burned before by the water. A few days later, yet another monkey replaced one of the three originals, which was when the scientist noticed something interesting-the two originals and the one newcomer had banded together to prevent the latest addition from trying to grab the bananas. The experiment went on until none of the monkeys were physically hurt by hot water, which had also been removed. Even though the fresh bananas still hung from the top of the cage, none of the monkeys went anywhere near them.

Just as the monkeys established a culture of cooperation and communication among themselves, even though the threat of being splashed by hot water no longer existed, so too each organization develops its own way of incorporating certain values and behaviors into its own culture. The danger, though, is in establishing a culture that is so rigid that workers are unable to react accordingly to rapid changes from the outside environment. This situation is challenging for anyone who has worked in an organization his or her entire life, or for a newcomer who tries to change culture or restructure the organization from within. In the case study from last Thursday’s  discussion, Dr. Lopez’s leadership and management skills ultimately saved Hammond Community College from being forced to close. However, Dr. Lopez did not gain the support of faculty and staff, with more than half signing a petition expressing a lack of confidence in her leadership skills.

Obviously, this must have come as a shock to Dr. Lopez, who assumed that everything had been going well at the college. With 15 minutes before the faculty meeting, what should she do? Should she go in with a scowl on her face, slam down her papers on the desk and berate all of the faculty members who gave her a vote of no confidence? In the heat of the moment, this of course is a tempting choice. But sitting down and having a talk with her detractors after the meeting, once she and everyone else have cooled down, is a better starting point. This was the scenario that all five groups agreed upon last week. In doing so, Dr. Lopez needs not so much to identify her opponents and supporters as to understand why they feel the way they do. Assuming the letter was not confidential, it seems as if the faculty was unafraid of expressing their opinion to Dr. Lopez. Thus, Dr. Lopez should seize this opportunity and let faculty and staff candidly express to her why she does not command their confidence. Such a situation may be awkward for everyone involved, but Dr. Lopez should give faculty and staff the opportunity to speak frankly as she listens and, later, reflects on their assessment.

Just like the monkeys who did not question whether the pot of boiling water was still next to the bananas, Hammond’s faculty and staff resisted thinking about the positive changes Dr. Lopez, an outsider, brought to their school. In short, they were stuck in their old ways. In light of the letter she received from the faculty, Dr. Lopez should still question her own impressions of herself and consider how the feedback of those who work with her daily might make Hammond Community College an institute where everyone—including faculty, staff and students—has confidence in her ability to serve as president.

Due to school, these days I have been juggling with many readings, assignments and other school-related stuff. However, this has not prevented me to allocate a few minutes a day of reading Alex Ferguson’s auto bio–a book that has just come out. Alex Ferguson was the Manager of Manchester United Football Club (English football league). Ferguson was the manager of Manchester United for about 27 years in which he won 49 trophies. Because of all the trophies, his game style, great players he coached, and the transformation that the club undertook during his reign, he is regarded as one of the most successful football coach in British history and, arguably, the most successful football coach in the world. Whatever the case is, he is up there.

It is a real thrill to read his book. As I was reading this book, on the early pages of his book, I got caught on a line that reads “I decided right away that in order to build trust and loyalty with the players, I had to give it to them first.” I feel this line is loaded and would like to elaborate on this, which is also related to what we’ve seen in class.

Teams are something interesting to watch–for better or worse. Prof. Hackman (from the class reading “why teams fail”) reveals that working in teams doesn’t guarantee efficiency. They are as likely to under perform themselves, if they are not certain measures to be taken. Yet, putting the right pieces together can make teams amazing such as the case at hand.

One aspect in teams I want to point out is loyalty—which I think it is crucial for the development and efficiency of the team. Prof. HAckman does not elaborate much on this matter, but here are a few thoughts to build upon his material.

The dictionary tells us that loyalty means to be “faithful to one’s oath, commitments, or obligations. ” Loyalty is not only to be loyal to others but to ourselves as well. When Ferguson wrote this, it took me to a journey of self-reflection. Being loyal is to show one’s commitment not only for the well-being of the group but for the well-being of oneself. Ferguson showed his commitment not only to other aspect of the club but also to every single player, to the development of the player and the relationship between him and the player.

It is interesting to see that Ferguson is the one that initiates the contact with the player first and not all the way around. I find that very interesting because in a team and in life, taking the initiative to anything in life is eventually rewarding. In this case, players are human beings as well, and having Ferguson (as the boss) initiating the relationship and shows care to his players, players responded with the same actions. Since teams are formed by people, it is important to keep that human aspect in the back of our minds. This also show us that regardless of the structure, both parties (the leader and the leading need each other) People are reciprocal and appreciative towards those who help them—although this may not always apply, it is, more often than not, true. In a team, when you help others, you are indirectly helping yourself anyways, creating a win-win situation.
Moreover, having a sense of loyalty in the team is an important asset because it keeps the team members focused and bounded towards thesame goal. Ferguson also mentions “trust.” Trust is like the fuel needed to keep on going. The fuel that tells you to continue on regardless of adversities. When you have loyalty and trust mixed together towards the right goal, amazing things are likely to happened as Ferguson showed us for the past 27 years. Any thoughts on this to further develop it?

Andres

One of the many stories that frames the character of my current organization is the struggle to eliminate the Workfare Employment Program (WEP). This campaign dates back to the founding of my organization called, Community Voices Heard (CVH). CVH is a nonprofit that was founded in 1994, by a small group of mothers on welfare fighting the city for a voice.

Their primary reform campaign was WEP. This workfare program, spearheaded by Mayor Rudolph Guliani, abused workers who are required to work for nothing in order to receive benefits [and still does today]. The story of these mothers is the spirit of the organization. My work actually does not involve this project as CVH has grown, and today several other projects are in progress. Despite my lack of involvement in today’s WEP campaign, the story of mothers on welfare taking the streets to protest informs the work of every staffer.

– CK

Two qualities make this case important for me. 1) The cultural frames’ strong impact on individual behavior and 2) the amorphous quality of culture that varies depending on the organization. Lehurutshe failed to respond in time, but as we discussed in class he may have made the right decision for him. Despite what we may think about his dishonesty, Lehurutshe was clearly not a good fit for his former company’s culture. My takeaway from this case is that culture naturally selects for the “right fit” in many cases. Popular examples are the finance industry, public sector work, and technology companies. The personality types that are drawn to each industry serve many companies and individuals alike. The matching in this natural selection allows each industry to fulfill its mission with precisely the right personnel in each organization.

– CK

Hi all,

I want to share something that is related to what we are seeing in class this semester. I recently got admitted into a program called Lincoln Center Student Advisory Council. The program is composed of about 15 graduate students—although we have 2 undergrads amongst us—most of us are in our twenties and are pursuing advanced degrees.

As you may imagine, Lincoln Center is a well-known cultural institution. It has thousands of performing art events throughout the year, events in all forms such as dance, theater, opera, music concerts etc. Unfortunately, for the past decade or so, Lincoln Center has been losing its appeal towards younger generations—college students and young professionals etc. Unlike people of my generation, older generations have been able to develop a better appreciation for these arts. For this reason, Lincoln Center has brought this group of students together to brainstorm ideas and design strategies on how to attract younger people.

Please keep reading, there is a purpose of why I am sharing this.

Recently, we received a survey in regards to the structure of our council. This question really made me think of our class indeed! We have been learning about organizations’ structure, team dynamics, leadership etc. The options were:

Collective (1 vote per person on every major issue)

Committees (Everyone signs up and advances their mini-group’s work)

Hierarchical (Select chair and tell me what to do)

Other

Now let me describe the scenario in which this council will operate. As far as we know, the environment will be unpredictable and fast as students in NYC, like everybody else, are usually rushed, busy; they usually have some sort of responsibilities and so on. For this reason, I picked Committees because in an unpredictable and fast changing environment, different committees will focus on different responsibilities of the marketing process–in this case Adhocracy comes to mind. I argue, these committees have to be autonomous enough. This autonomy will create creativity and allow the flexibility necessary to deal with unpredictable cases while ensuring communication among us. Committees should not be too autonomous because too much decentralization may trigger extreme division among committees. A proper decentralization should avoid some sort of machine bureaucracy and centralization in the vertical sense. Hierarchical will create a fixed, top-down approach and will lead to the same questions and answers in a changing scenario–not suitable.  I did not advocate for collective because we are a team of 15 folks. According to the article by the title of “Why teams fail,” Prof. Hackman from Harvard University said that “as team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up… It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble.” I understand that as the team gets bigger, there is more opinions on the table and can create confusion. But honestly, I do not understand what “link” mean in this context, somebody?

Do you agree or disagree with me? Please share your opinions.

This case reminds me a lot of the Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project and the type of structures explained by Mintzberg, by the way!

In essence, the mission is to reach out students who don’t know what Lincoln Center offers or have a misconception of it. In other words, educate them and attract them. Our next challenge is how we will design our group structure. I’ve shared this with you because I was told I should as it is actually very relevant to class. I would like to know what you have to say based on what we have read in class. Any suggestions or disagreements are welcomed! I look forward for some candid and insightful discussions. 🙂

Thanks everybody,

Andres

1. The Hard Side of Change Management

   by Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson

   The Idea in Brief

    Two out of every three transformation programs fail. Why? Companies overemphasize the soft side of change: leadership style, corporate culture, employee motivation. Though these elements are critical for success, change projects can’t get off the ground unless companies address harder elements first.

   The essential hard elements? Think of them as DICE:

   • Duration: time between milestone reviews—the shorter, the better

    

   • Integrity: project teams’ skill

    

   • Commitment: senior executives’ and line managers’ dedication to the program

    

   • Effort: the extra work employees must do to adopt new processes—the less, the better

    

   By assessing each DICE element before you launch a major change initiative, you can identify potential problem areas and make the necessary adjustments (such as reconfiguring a project team’s composition or reallocating resources) to ensure the program’s success. You can also use DICE after launching a project—to make midcourse corrections if the initiative veers off track.

   DICE helps companies lay the foundation for successful change. Using the DICE assessment technique, one global beverage company executed a multiproject organization-wide change program that generated hundreds of millions of dollars, breathed new life into its once-stagnant brands, and cracked open new markets.

   The Idea in Practice

   Conducting a DICE Assessment

   Your project has the greatest chance of success if the following hard elements are in place:

   Duration

   A long project reviewed frequently stands a far better chance of succeeding than a short project reviewed infrequently. Problems can be identified at the first sign of trouble, allowing for prompt corrective actions. Review complex projects every two weeks; more straightforward initiatives, every six to eight weeks.

   Integrity

   A change program’s success hinges on a high-integrity, high-quality project team. To identify team candidates with the right portfolio of skills, solicit names from key colleagues, including top performers in functions other than your own. Recruit people who have problem-solving skills, are results oriented, and are methodical but tolerate ambiguity. Look also for organizational savvy, willingness to accept responsibility for decisions, and a disdain for the limelight.

   Commitment

   If employees don’t see company leaders supporting a change initiative, they won’t change. Visibly endorse the initiative—no amount of public support is too much. When you feel you’re “talking up” a change effort at least three times more than you need to, you’ve hit it right.

   Also continually communicate why the change is needed and what it means for employees. Ensure that all messages about the change are consistent and clear. Reach out to managers and employees through one-on-one conversations to win them over.

   Effort

   If adopting a change burdens employees with too much additional effort, they’ll resist. Calculate how much work employees will have to do beyond their existing responsibilities to implement the change. Ensure that no one’s workload increases more than 10%. If necessary, remove nonessential regular work from employees with key roles in the transformation project. Use temporary workers or outsource some processes to accommodate additional workload.

   Using the DICE Framework

   Conducting a DICE assessment fosters successful change by sparking valuable senior leadership debate about project strategy It also improves change effectiveness by enabling companies to manage large portfolios of projects.

   Example:

   A manufacturing company planned 40 projects as part of a profitability-improvement program. After conducting a DICE assessment for each project, leaders and project owners identified the five most important projects and asked, “How can we ensure these projects’ success?” They moved people around on teams, reconfigured some projects, and identified initiatives senior managers should pay more attention to—setting up their most crucial projects for resounding success.

   When French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” he could have been penning an epigram about change management. For over three decades, academics, managers, and consultants, realizing that transforming organizations is difficult, have dissected the subject. They’ve sung the praises of leaders who communicate vision and walk the talk in order to make change efforts succeed. They’ve sanctified the importance of changing organizational culture and employees’ attitudes. They’ve teased out the tensions between top-down transformation efforts and participatory approaches to change. And they’ve exhorted companies to launch campaigns that appeal to people’s hearts and minds. Still, studies show that in most organizations, two out of three transformation initiatives fail. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

   Managing change is tough, but part of the problem is that there is little agreement on what factors most influence transformation initiatives. Ask five executives to name the one factor critical for the success of these programs, and you’ll probably get five different answers. That’s because each manager looks at an initiative from his or her viewpoint and, based on personal experience, focuses on different success factors. The experts, too, offer different perspectives. A recent search on Amazon.com for books on “change and management” turned up 6,153 titles, each with a distinct take on the topic. Those ideas have a lot to offer, but taken together, they force companies to tackle many priorities simultaneously, which spreads resources and skills thin. Moreover, executives use different approaches in different parts of the organization, which compounds the turmoil that usually accompanies change.

   In recent years, many change management gurus have focused on soft issues, such as culture, leadership, and motivation. Such elements are important for success, but managing these aspects alone isn’t sufficient to implement transformation projects. Soft factors don’t directly influence the outcomes of many change programs. For instance, visionary leadership is often vital for transformation projects, but not always. The same can be said about communication with employees. Moreover, it isn’t easy to change attitudes or relationships; they’re deeply ingrained in organizations and people. And although changes in, say, culture or motivation levels can be indirectly gauged through surveys and interviews, it’s tough to get reliable data on soft factors.

   What’s missing, we believe, is a focus on the not-so-fashionable aspects of change management: the hard factors. These factors bear three distinct characteristics. First, companies are able to measure them in direct or indirect ways. Second, companies can easily communicate their importance, both within and outside organizations. Third, and perhaps most important, businesses are capable of influencing those elements quickly. Some of the hard factors that affect a transformation initiative are the time necessary to complete it, the number of people required to execute it, and the financial results that intended actions are expected to achieve. Our research shows that change projects fail to get off the ground when companies neglect the hard factors. That doesn’t mean that executives can ignore the soft elements; that would be a grave mistake. However, if companies don’t pay attention to the hard issues first, transformation programs will break down before the soft elements come into play.

   That’s a lesson we learned when we identified the common denominators of change. In 1992, we started with the contrarian hypothesis that organizations handle transformations in remarkably similar ways. We researched projects in a number of industries and countries to identify those common elements. Our initial 225-company study revealed a consistent correlation between the outcomes (success or failure) of change programs and four hard factors: project duration, particularly the time between project reviews; performance integrity, or the capabilities of project teams; the commitment of both senior executives and the staff whom the change will affect the most; and the additional effort that employees must make to cope with the change. We called these variables the DICE factors because we could load them in favor of projects’ success.

   We completed our study in 1994, and in the 11 years since then, the Boston Consulting Group has used those four factors to predict the outcomes, and guide the execution, of more than 1,000 change management initiatives worldwide. Not only has the correlation held, but no other factors (or combination of factors) have predicted outcomes as well.

   The Four Key Factors

   If you think about it, the different ways in which organizations combine the four factors create a continuum—from projects that are set up to succeed to those that are set up to fail. At one extreme, a short project led by a skilled, motivated, and cohesive team, championed by top management and implemented in a department that is receptive to the change and has to put in very little additional effort, is bound to succeed. At the other extreme, a long, drawn-out project executed by an inexpert, unenthusiastic, and disjointed team, without any top-level sponsors and targeted at a function that dislikes the change and has to do a lot of extra work, will fail. Businesses can easily identify change programs at either end of the spectrum, but most initiatives occupy the middle ground where the likelihood of success or failure is difficult to assess. Executives must study the four DICE factors carefully to figure out if their change programs will fly—or die.

   The Four Factors

   These factors determine the outcome of any transformation initiative.

   D. The duration of time until the change program is completed if it has a short life span; if not short, the amount of time between reviews of milestones.

   I. The project team’s performance integrity; that is, its ability to complete the initiative on time. That depends on members’ skills and traits relative to the project’s requirements.

   C. The commitment to change that top management (C1) and employees affected by the change (C2) display.

   E. The effort over and above the usual work that the change initiative demands of employees.

   Duration.

   Companies make the mistake of worrying mostly about the time it will take to implement change programs. They assume that the longer an initiative carries on, the more likely it is to fail—the early impetus will peter out, windows of opportunity will close, objectives will be forgotten, key supporters will leave or lose their enthusiasm, and problems will accumulate. However, contrary to popular perception, our studies show that a long project that is reviewed frequently is more likely to succeed than a short project that isn’t reviewed frequently. Thus, the time between reviews is more critical for success than a project’s life span.

   ROLL THE DICE 🙂  zk

The article “Performance Management at the Wheel” the reading for class 10/24/13 was very interesting. I think the research was very straight forward and as to five performance management activites associated behaviors like, performance development, providing feedback, employee development, year-end appraisals and empowerment. These five developmental areas have a major part in my yearly evaluation at my current job.

I have often times wondered why my manager insisted on my input during my evaluations and this study makes me understand that he is using technique from the reading to 1) set expectations as to how I should be developing in my career, and in doing so 2) the manager will offer feedback as to how he can help me in my future career goals. This has always been a major part and I often times wonder why is he so interested in my career progress.   3) This eventually leads to the end of the year and there is no surprise about my final evaluation, because we had both focused on ways of development and growth following the coaching. This will make me be more thrusting and be willing to accept his constructive feedback and be a more engaging employee at the firm.

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