Talking with clients, friends and colleagues, I noticed some patterns in what people want from employers and what effective organizations are doing. These top needs and actions are surprisingly simple: 1. Coordinate communications. Employees are hungry for information. One person told me “we are hearing nothing” from their leader. They want the truth about what is happening now and what is likely for the future for the organization. They want to hear from the top, and they also want their direct boss to understand it and be able to discuss it. For employees working remotely, they hate a dearth of information, but they also hate …
Self-Directed by Accident
Many managers are stretched thin due to a high number of direct reports, or have their own full time responsibilities as an individual contributor, or the responsibilities of the team are so diverse and specialized that the manager cant really understand what everyone does. When these situations arise there are complaints about absence of leadership, lack of team cohesion, and poor execution of management practices. Organizations often respond with manager training, yet the problems persist. Organizations structured this way are encouraging teams to figure out how to be self-directed, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But since it is …
Is Your Organizational Pyramid Out of Control?
As far back as 4,000 years ago Pharaohs sought to have larger pyramids. Many of todays leaders seek the same, but rather than stone, their pyramids are made of jobs and people. We frequently detect this when organizations are concerned about their compensation costs. Sometimes the compensation process is working well to align jobs to the external market data but the “position control” process is out of control. In these types of organizations it is often unclear how new jobs should be proposed, what the approval process is, or what the criteria is for approving new jobs. Decision makers are …
Organizational Programs in Bad Dirt
I recently had the chance to debrief on the failure of a promising corporate program. The program was a good idea and there was a ton of evidence that the organization needed it – an update on its compensation and performance management. After the pre-project meeting one of the long service people told me “we have tried this three other times and it never was fully implemented”. He was skeptical about another attempt. Ultimately the organization decided not to use consulting help but did pursue program re-design on their own. Months later I checked-in and found out that the project …
Accountability by Embarrassment
Accountability seems to increase with the chance for embarrassment. That is why scorecards work so well. It is a powerful concept for organizations that don’t want to be heavy handed in their consequences, either positive or negative, but still want to influence results through accountability. For example, one company created a scorecard comparing key people metrics for each unit in the organization. These are things that often don’t get the level of accountability they really need among leaders such as pay increase percentages, promotion rates, spans of control, external hire percentage, and ratio of payroll to revenue or total expense. …