Upside-Down Organizations

Powerful modeling or cynical gimmick?

An organization I know well uses a simple and powerful idea to make the point that its clients come first: an inverted organization chart. That’s right, clients and client-facing staff at the top, CEO at the bottom.

At first glance, this may not seem like a big deal. More like a gimmick or technique. But think about it. 

It changes everything.

Front-line staff really appear on the front line. Managers are depicted doing what they ought to be doing: supporting those who are closer than they are to the productive activities of the enterprise.

Why don’t more organizations do this? They may talk (a lot) about how customers come first and employees are their greatest asset, but they provide little real evidence of this alleged commitment.

In order for this to work, the words and deeds of leadership need to line up with what’s implied by the pictogram. This can be hard for people weaned on the idea that individual success is measured by how far and fast you move up in the organization.

Still, it shouldn’t be difficult to swap that metaphor for the one that says the more senior people carry the heavier burden.

One of the more challenging aspects of operating like this is what it means for how information is treated: information has to flow much more freely and transparently than is the norm in most places I know. After all, if front line employees are the most important ones in the organization, it stands to reason that they need to know everything about how the business is running.

Figuring out how to get comfortable with this level of transparency and then doing it consistently and well is perhaps the single characteristic that distinguishes organizations that successfully turn themselves upside-down from those that cynically adopt it as a gimmick.

Working from Home (Again!)

It’s about leadership, direction, and courage

So here’s the thing. Or at least one thing to follow up on the Marissa Mayer decision to call all her Yahoos! home.

I characterized her elimination of working from home as a failure of imagination in my previous post because Mayer seems to want to revert to an older way of getting the work done, rather than striking out in some bold new direction. Or any new direction.

More than new HR practices, Yahoo! needs a strategy and it needs leadership. These are the things that will move the company out of its funk.

Leadership isn’t bossing people around. Leadership isn’t telling people where to go or what to do.

Leadership is setting direction, with clarity. And with force, unapologetically, if the circumstances warrant. Leadership is doing the heavy lifting that clears the way and makes it possible for your people to move in the direction you’ve set.

Blogger Max Nisen writes about how this is all about culture change and saving a troubled company.

If that’s the case, then Mayer needs to say that. She needs to say exactly what she means. Repeatedly. If this is about building something new, she needs to say that in every piece of communication that is generated.

I read the leaked memo. It is brief and refers to the elimination of the remote work policy with a sprinkling of corporate cliches: “...contribute to the positive momentum...feel the energy and buzz...become the absolute best place to work...the best is yet to come…”.

Some have come to Mayer’s defense, suggesting she is a data fiend and makes no decision without a spreadsheet. The data reportedly show that people aren’t logged in (and working) nearly as much as they say they are.

Still others say she has made the rounds of some employees (presumably those working in the office) and has received an earful about how un-collaborative the work-from-homers are.

If she has undertaken a significant review of the data, if she has spoken to employees about the situation, then she has to say that. She can’t just make pronouncements and expect that everyone knows how rigorously she reached her surprising conclusions. 

Making pronouncements, even if you are the boss, is not how you build trust. And trust seems to be a big part of what’s lacking at Yahoo!

There is also a big people management issue here. Is it really too hard to manage people from a distance? Or is this just another failure of imagination? Make it part of every manager’s job to figure this out. In the right kind of supportive environment, left to their own devices, people will figure it out.

One idea worth considering is something Nancy Dixon calls the oscillation principle. Degrees of interdependency and task complexity are determining factors in the frequency of face-to-face contact. Most of the time remote or virtual interaction works just fine. And there are times when the situation demands being in a room together. Determine what those are on a case by case basis and act accordingly.

Or how about this: What if Mayer spent a month visiting her remote employees in THEIR places of work? The kitchens and attics and coffee shops. How much do you think she would learn? And what kind of a message would she send throughout the organization?

Yes, it’s hard. Leadership is hard. It takes courage. And that includes a willingness to get it wrong once in a while, admit it, and move on.

Working from Home (Not!)

What is it that Yahoo! is up to?

Last Friday, an internal company memo was leaked to the press, and since then the interwebs have been furiously debating the (de)merits of Marissa Mayer’s decision to tell all her employees (known as “Yahoos” -- I love that!) that as of June 1 working from home is no longer an option.

I know you all have been waiting breathlessly to learn what I think of the move, and to be honest, I can’t fully make up my mind.

Initially, I was struck dumb by the delicious irony of a Silicon Valley high tech giant doing something that appears so retrograde. 

However, there are few who know Yahoo! who don’t think some kind of a shake-up is necessary to wrest the company from its extended doldrums. We educated observers, from our privileged position, can argue over whether this was the right shake-up at the right time. And are we ever.

“Begin as you mean to end,” my wife tells me all the time. This bit of homespun wisdom has embedded in it the thing about Mayer’s edict that is giving me fits. Does she really mean to chain people to desks and cubicles as the way forward? And if she doesn’t, why is she doing something now she knows she’ll wind up undoing later?

Maybe that’s not her point. Regardless, what we all can agree on is the shock value of the new policy. From that perspective, the announcement is an unqualified success.

Sometime in the very near future I can imagine Mayer saying to her 11,500 employees -- at least the ones who show up back at the office -- something like, “Now that I have your attention, here’s what comes next...” And it’s that “what comes next” part that will determine success or failure.

____________________

Is this the beginning of the end for working remotely? I can’t imagine that to be the case. I understand and have frequently benefitted from the connectedness that is now possible in our virtual world. I marvel at the facility with which I can instantaneously link myself to almost any other human being in any part of the planet, and how easy it is to learn about anything I can imagine.

And yet. 

My own work presents me with a dilemma. There, I thrive on the essential power of “physically being together,” to borrow one of the several tortured expressions from the newly-famous Yahoo! document. Interaction is more robust in a face to face setting. So much of the breakthrough progress I see with my clients comes as a direct result of being in the same room together, breathing the same air, being in contact with each other.

And so I’m split.

What I find so disappointing about the whole thing is the apparent lack of imagination. If the idea is to remake the culture, wasn’t there a similarly bold shock that could have been sent to the system, one that would have signaled a confident, positive step into the future? You can probably guess that I see this as neither confident nor positive.

Could Mayer have done it differently? I think so, but don’t have any good ideas yet. I’m going to sit with it for a while and see what I come up with. What about you? What have you got?

A Sure-Fire Way to Create Resistance

What happens when good intentions go off the rails.

A mid-sized department (about 50 people) with global responsibilities for a several million dollar portfolio got together to plan their activities for the coming year. The starting point for this conversation was a set of five goals that had been set by the top leadership of the organization. The idea was to create cascading goals throughout the institution, based on these superordinate five.

The people in this department were to create strategies and work plans based on what they knew about their business and what they had been learning from each other during the previous two days of conversation.

So far so good.

I was surprised by the intensity of the resistance I saw in all the groups trying to complete their plans. Both substance and format were being subjected to withering criticism almost immediately. Even the department head, unfailingly positive in most situations, saw the futility in what they were doing. And that was after she spent the better part of the weekend trying to do something with the sow’s ear she had been given by her senior management.

Her comment to me: “We just have to do it.”

The issue was that the goals provided by the top were not connected to the work of this department and they couldn’t be made to connect in any meaningful way.

What really made this so unreasonable was that the organization’s leadership went far beyond specifying a direction for business activity and instead prescribed tasks and targets that were meant to be applicable across the enterprise.

Talk about an exercise in futility.

So, rather than engendering commitment and alignment, which I’m sure was the intent, leadership created the exact opposite effect, resulting in an enormous waste of resources and loss of goodwill.

I found this to be an object lesson in how not to win support for a new idea: no input was sought from those who would be responsible for the doing; the process was too directive with no recourse when obstacles were hit; and there was no flexibility in making it work, only one way to do it.

Nearly all the energy that day was spent on resisting, breeding cynicism, and finally meager compliance. I’m the last one to run from resistance; I’ve learned to expect it whenever something new is happening. But, I also think you shouldn’t be doing things that pretty much guarantee extra doses of it.

What do you think?

Leadership and B-School

A provocative call to transform the MBA.

Here’s a terrific piece from The Economist on an emerging view of leadership and leadership development. Sure, you can criticize it as too academic and too idealistic, but many of our best ideas start in the academy before they find their way into the world.

A couple of really interesting aspects leapt out at me:

• Business leaders who cultivate the courage to say “I don’t know.” In other words, leadership ought to start from a place of not knowing, from a lack of knowledge. Wasn’t it Socrates who said “The more I learn the less I know?” Leadership can come from having a couple of really good questions you need the answer to.
• The power of moral humility. This follows immediately from realizing you don’t know. Reflecting, then critiquing oneself as much as others.

Regular visitors to this blog won’t be surprised to read that all these things bring me to the notion of self-awareness. All leadership emanates from this.

As the world continues to shrink, holism and empathy will take the place of fragmentation and selfishness:

“Business schools could become more like the agora of ancient Athens, a place where commerce had its place alongside the academy, where philosophers discussed the meaning of the good life and how best to achieve it; a place of dialogue where citizens collectively addressed the limits of their knowledge.”

What do you think?