What Are the Barriers in Your Organization?
Most people in today’s organizations regularly encounter organizational barriers that are extremely difficult to overcome or eliminate. The truth is that most organizations do everything possible to hold on to their rules, policies, procedures, processes, and systems as long as possible. Only when such organizational devices are shown to be obviously faulty, obsolete, or failing are they changed — and even then with great resistance.
You can avoid the malpractice of communicating a willingness to eliminate organizational barriers while making it unnecessarily difficult to actually implement such change by taking the issue seriously. Organizational barriers are one of the most dangerous and destructive occurrences in modern management. Get rid of the rules, polices, procedures, processes, and systems that frustrate and impede your people from getting their jobs done and achieving organizational objectives. Eliminate a barrier today.
Best Reputations?
Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Google, UPS and 3M are the most reputable companies in the U.S. These results are based on “The Annual RQ 2005 study conducted by Harris Interactive® [that]measures the corporate reputations of the most visible companies in the United States. According to this year’s Reputation Quotient® (RQSM) survey, for the seventh consecutive year, Johnson & Johnson ranks No. 1 with an RQ score of 80.56. Coca Cola ranks second (79.69), and new to the 60 companies measured in this latest study, Google ranks third, with an RQ score of 79.52, UPS ranks fourth with a score of 79.4 and 3M ranks fifth with a score of 78.8.” The second five companies in the top ten are Sony, Microsoft, General Mills, FedEx and Intel.
According Harris Interactive’s Website, “In the nominations phase, Harris Interactive conducted 6,977 interviews throughout the U.S. using a combined online and telephone methodology. The online respondents were randomly selected from the Harris Interactive online panel of multimillion members. All respondents were asked to nominate two companies that they feel have the best reputations overall and two companies that they feel have the worst reputations overall. Nominations were open-ended and all responses were tallied, placing subsidiaries and brand names within the parent company. By totaling the mentions for best and worst companies provided during the nominations phase, Harris Interactive identified the list of 60 most visible companies in the U.S to be measured in the ratings phase. In the ratings phase, 19,564 respondents were randomly selected to complete a detailed rating of one or two companies with which they were “very or somewhat familiar.” All interviews were conducted online. Respondents rated companies on 20 attributes in six key dimensions which comprise the Harris-Fombrun Reputation QuotientSM (RQ) including, products and services, financial performance, workplace environment, social responsibility, vision and leadership, and emotional appeal.”
Reputations in the top companies are built upon the practice of timeless and universal management principles such as sharing ideas at every level, fostering a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, treating employees as your most valuable asset, valuing the contributions of each individual, creating an environment where people feel free to raise concerns, establishing a foundation of respect and trust, enabling people to tap into their full potential, listening to all viewpoints, constantly challenging assumptions and biases, and accepting responsibility for your actions. Malpractice of these principles in the top companies is relatively low compared to companies with lesser reputations.
Management Malpractice is a Reality You Don’t Have to Accept
Management malpractice happens everyday in every organization on the face of the earth. Of course it does, we all know that, but you don’t have to accept it. Unfortunately, management malpractice has become accepted as “standard operating procedure” in far too many organizations today. People actually expect their leaders and managers to demean, manipulate, deceive, oppress, abuse and injure them — it’s just the way organizations are, they say. In fact, when leaders and managers don’t malpractice management, their employees are surprised. People are becoming increasingly distrustful and cynical about their organizations because too many of their leaders and managers either unconsciously allow or openly foster management malpractice in their organizations and because not enough of their co-workers are willing or able to stand up against it. We need a revolution—a workers revolution that includes both employees and employers—to stop this growing epidemic of management malpractice before it destroys us and our organizations. Some of you have already started. Share your stories with us — stories of how one person or a small group of people are turning the tide against management malpractice in organizations. If you have done something in your organization to reduce or curtail management malpractice, please share it with us — people in organizations everywhere need to know about it.
Meaningful Work Opportunities?
In many organizations, too many in fact, if you complain that your work is not satisfying, challenging, or fulfilling, you are branded a whiner, a spoiled brat, a high-maintenance employee, a non–team player, or an obstacle to greater performance and results.
Organizations and their leaders must change if they expect to retain talent, create value, raise performance, and improve bottom-line results. Financial necessity will outweigh the misery of staying in a hated job for only so long. There is plenty of meaningful work for everyone. If organizations can learn how to help their employees discover their true talents and provide the sort of work that ignites their passion, the companies will be repaid with the kind of productivity and dynamic creativity that comes from having the best people in the position best for them. Giving people the opportunity to apply their core talents in the creation of value is the essence of meaningful work—and organizations need to do a better job of giving people that opportunity, again and again and again.
How Engaged is Your Workforce?
Don’t miss Human Capital Institute’s (HCI) Webcast on the topic, February 14, 2006 at noon ET
From HCI’s website: “Employee engagement is a hot topic in the executive suite, and rightly so. In our competitive marketplace, it’s the people that make the difference and an engaged workforce represents a real competitive advantage. In our first webcast, we will look at employee engagement in depth. We’ll explain how engagement is different from satisfaction, commitment and other commonly used concepts typically measured by employee surveys. We’ll also explore the relationship between engagement and corporate strategy, and how well-designed survey programs can provide the insight needed to drive strategy forward. Finally, we’ll address critical implementation and action planning issues - discussing what it takes to make an engagement survey program a viable part of your corporate-wide scorecard. All participants will receive the presentation handout for this and subsequent webcasts in the series.”
High levels of active employee engagement are impossible when management malpractices permeate the organization. Taking steps to measure employee engagement in your organization will help to expose and prevent management malpractice at all levels of the organization. We endorse HCI’s efforts to help organizations measure, track and improve employee engagement, because we believe such efforts can help reduce the growing epidemic of management malpractice in organizations throughout the world.
Valuing Employee Contributions
Contributions from employees are valued differently by different employees and leaders throughout the organization, depending on the employee’s or leader’s particular experience, preferences, and biases.
You can avoid the malpractice of falsely ensuring employees that their contributions will be valued equitably and fittingly throughout the organization by never misvaluing the contributions of another employee. By paying attention and being mindful of the contributions of other employees, managers, and departments in your organization, you will find it easier to accurately and appropriately value them. Failing to properly value employee contributions, even when it involves people outside your direct supervision, can destroy morale and trust faster than you realize. And don’t excuse your failing by claiming ignorance. Assessing employee contribution is the responsibility of everyone in the organization, so learn how to do it better, faster, and cheaper. The payoff in terms of increased contributions and value creation will be enormous for you and your organization.
How’s Your Accountability?
Organizations and their leaders rarely accept full and complete responsibility for their actions. They usually accept responsibility for successes while avoiding responsibility for mistakes unless knowledge and criticism of such mistakes is likely to become public or widespread among key stakeholder groups.
You can avoid the malpractice of asking others to take responsibility for their actions when you or your organization fail to do so by continually reviewing and modifying your own behavior. Everyone fails to take full responsibility for his or her actions from time to time. Admit it. Make admitting your failure to take responsibility part of your culture, but never let such admissions become acceptable reasons or excuses for a pattern of poor performance. Taking responsibility for your actions is a learned behavior that can only be improved through constant practice, and practice requires an environment where mistakes can easily be admitted, addressed, and corrected.
Are You Being Honest With Yourself?
Unethical behavior occurs every day in every organization, particularly at the top; leaders seem to be able to get away with it more easily. Corporate executives frequently shade the truth about operations when communicating externally, manipulate information to serve their own purposes, intimidate direct reports, take additional time off when they feel like it, and show favoritism to certain employees and groups.
You can avoid the malpractice of asking others to adhere to a standard of ethical behavior that you are unwilling or unable to adhere to yourself by deciding to be an example of ethical behavior in all you do. When senior executives decide to lead by example, as well as take specific steps to prevent poor ethical behavior, they accomplish the two most important things they can do to promote ethical behavior in their organizations. Finally, be willing to walk away from an opportunity, a deal, or a business endeavor that compromises you and your ethics. Walk the talk. You’ll feel better about yourself and your job in the long run.
Valuing Diversity
Organizations and their management teams define diversity too narrowly by tolerating, rather than embracing, government guidelines about inclusion of gender, racial, and sexual diversity in the workplace; focusing on the avoidance of legal risks, rather than the benefits of diversity; and doing the minimum necessary, rather than the maximum, to promote diversity. In the end, they promote uniformity rather than diversity, and understand only those customers who are most like their employees.
You can avoid the malpractice of pretending to value diversity while promoting uniformity by educating yourself about the true benefits of genuine diversity. This will allow you to adopt the right mindset for fostering diversity and realize that a widened perspective increases innovation, strengthens teams, improves performance, and motivates employees. Of course, you must continue to comply with all affirmative action and workplace diversity laws, regulations, and guidelines, but do more than that—go the second, third, and fourth mile by actively promoting diversity for the sake of diversity, because diversity produces greater results than does uniformity. Diversity truly does have the power to create greater value. Try it.
Enabling People to Tap Into Their Full Potential
Organizations rarely create optimal working environments where the right people have the right jobs at the right time, making it almost impossible for people to reach their highest professional and creative levels.
You can help people reach their full potential by engaging in more work environment innovation. Treating diverse employees as interchangeable resources causes organizations to forgo enormous opportunities for gains in productivity and performance. Organizations must find better ways to match people and jobs or fall behind in the race for talent. According to McKinsey Quarterly, “A new era in human-capital management is approaching. Value increasingly comes from boosting the productivity of individual workers and from greater workforce innovation. Meanwhile, the technological infrastructure needed to map out human capital is rapidly falling into place. By achieving the most productive possible combination of workers and work, companies can find a lasting source of competitive advantage.” Begin enabling your people to reach their full potential now, because soon there will be no more excuses for not having the right people in the right jobs at the right time.
Why Is There So Much Management Malpractice?
Why does management malpractice occur so often in today’s organizations? Here are five reasons why it has become so prevalent:
First, people in organizations are, at times, biased, egotistical, narrow-minded, thoughtless, dogmatic, insensitive or otherwise flawed. Okay, so we’re all prone to malpractice management even though we all suffer from it. Yes, which is why it’s going to take a widespread revolution to stop this growing epidemic of management malpractice—it happened to me, so I might as well do it to others.
Second, management is malpracticed because it’s easier, cheaper and faster to malpractice management than it is to well-practice management, especially during times of crisis and extreme change. Tyrannical, authoritarian, command and control approaches to management are always easier, cheaper and faster in the short term but they destroy freedom, creativity, motivation and organizational cultures in the long term. Vigilantly practicing great management principles takes time, effort and commitment; but the pay-off is huge—take a look at the results delivered by Fortune’s most admired companies. Why are they so admired? Because great organizations don’t persist in malpracticing management. When malpractices do creep in, as they always do, they are quickly addressed and eliminated.
Third, because of the heightened stress and strain associated with today’s business environment–extreme complexity, radical change and savvy competition–managers and leaders too often lose their focus on fundamental principles and core values because urgency overshadows importance, hard drives out soft and information obscures interpretation. In other words they get distracted, sidetracked and diverted from one of the things that matters most—i.e., the ongoing motivation, performance, creativity, satisfaction and well-being of their people. A crisis comes along and all of the so-called great management principles and excellent organizational values get thrown out the window or are temporarily ignored in favor of hard-edged, results-at-any-cost management—whatever it takes to get the crisis resolved is a common excuse for management malpractice.
Fourth, people in organizations are continually growing, developing, and, to one degree or another, striving to become more effective, complete and balanced as managers and leaders. Consequently, most managers and leaders are still incomplete and unbalanced in their discharge of management responsibilities—e.g., heart, mind and body are often out of balance or fail to function as a complete whole, either there’s too much rational analysis at the expense of heart-felt empathy or vice versa or there’s too much talk and not enough action or vice versa or too much preoccupation with the short-term at the expense of the long-term or vice versa and so on. Becoming more complete and balanced as a manager or leader is vital to seeing, exposing and preventing management malpractice. Organizational cultures either hasten or hinder managerial and leadership development.
Five, managers and leaders in most organizations don’t take the time or make it a priority to really listen to their employees, discuss management principles that are frequently malpracticed, or develop the managerial talents of their direct reports. They let urgent matters overshadow more important matters.
Well-Being At Work?
In a recent Gallup survey of employee engagement, based on nationally representative samples of about 1,000 employed adults aged 18 and older, employees were asked to identify, in their own words, “the single most important factor in maintaining a sense of comfort and well-being at work.” The most common responses were:
open communication
respect
positive relationships with coworkers/getting along with everyone
teamwork
trust
It’s no surprise that these responses correlate to some of the most frequently malpracticed management principles. These commonly malpracticed principles are as follows:
Failing to create an environment where people feel free to raise concerns
Failing to listen to all viewpoints
Failing to respect others and their individuality
Failing to value the contributions of each employee
Failing to provide employees with meaningful work opportunities
Failing to appreciate or represent the diversity of the world
Failing to create a foundation of trust
Is it any wonder that 70% of U.S. employees, 80% of European employees, and 90% of Japanese employees are disengaged at work? No! There’s far too much management malpractice in today’s organizations to allow for the fostering of open communication, respect, positive relationships with coworkers, teamwork and trust. If we expect to turn around this negative trend toward higher and higher levels of disengaged employees, we need to stop the growing epidemic of management malpractice.
Are Your Employees Happy?
In an article from the Gallup Management Journal, At Work, Feeling Good Matters, authors Jerry Krueger and Emily Killham write “Happy employees are better equipped to handle workplace relationships, stress, and change.”
“For centuries,” the authors argue, “philosophers and social thinkers have postulated that the highest goal of human existence is to be happy. And many great thinkers have suggested that human happiness includes elements such as self-respect, material well-being, good health, meaningful work, and supportive families and communities. Until recently, research on happiness and well-being has mainly been the bailiwick of psychologists and social scientists. But thanks to the pioneering work of researchers such as Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, economists are becoming increasingly interested in the question of happiness and how it affects business performance. Kahneman states, ‘Business is more about emotions than most businesspeople care to admit.’ Other research on happiness in the workplace suggests that worker well-being plays a major role in organizational performance. The results of the GMJ Employee Engagement Index survey show a strong relationship between worker happiness and workplace engagement. Happy and engaged employees are much more likely to have a positive relationship with their boss, are better equipped to handle new challenges and changes, feel they are more valued by their employers, handle stress more effectively, and are much more satisfied with their lives.”
Organizations that understand the importance of employee happiness at work and also recognize management malpractice as the single greatest obstacle to employee happiness at work can better help their managers and leaders to identify, expose and prevent management malpractice at all levels, thus creating a work environment that allows employees to find greater happiness. When organizations pursue such a course of action, employee fulfillment, productivity and engagement improve.
Increased Dissatisfaction and Workloads
According to a recent survey of more than 2000 workers and managers conducted by CareerBuilder.com between Nov. 15 and Dec. 6, 2005, “Forty-seven percent of workers surveyed said they are dissatisfied with their compensation considering the effort they put into their jobs, similar to results of last year’s survey. Sixty-one percent of workers said their workloads have increased in the past six months, increasing their stress and dissatisfaction with the balance of work and other aspects of life. Twenty-nine percent of workers in the West expect to leave their current jobs in 2006, according to the survey, followed by 28 percent in the Northeast and Midwest and 27 percent in the South.”
CareerBuilder.com claims to be the largest online job site in the U.S., and is jointly owned by newspaper companies Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Tribune Co. (NYSE: TRB) and Knight Ridder Inc. (NYSE: KRI).
Worker dissatisfaction, work overloads and low productivity result primarily from poor management. Poor management that is regularly ignored, accepted, condoned, or tolerated in any way constitutes management malpractice. What are you going to do about management malpractice in your organization in 2006? Inaction is acceptance.
Report Deserves Consideration in 2006
This report by Mike McLoughlin and the related Conference Board survey and news articles deserve repeating as we begin 2006.
Conference Board reports significant increase in worker dissatisfaction. Is the New Way to Work a solution?
“The decline in job satisfaction is widespread among workers of all ages and across all income brackets.” This is the opening line to a major report on worker satisfaction in the American workforce.[1] This report has been picked up by all the major news organizations.[2]
To me this indicates the time is ripe for “a new way to work.”
How would a new way to work impact worker satisfaction? The Conference Board found that the number one challenge for companies is to keep their workers “engaged and motivated.” The big question is: How? Traditional approaches such as wage and benefit incentives do not seem to be making a difference.
Thus, a new approach is called for that is not driven by economic incentives alone. This approach needs to be informed by a higher purpose than simply increased productivity. The companies need to connect their workforces to a vision of how their work is adding value to the global village in which they live.
This is what the new way to work is all about. It is about more than simply getting a job done, it is about WHY that job is important to be done and WHY it is important to do that job well.
Workers are intelligent enough to know that doing their jobs well so that company stock price increases, shareholders grow wealthy and CEO’s get fat bonuses, is not really as significant as doing their jobs well so that communities benefit, children can live in safety, the environment is wisely cared for and local and global problems can be solved to the benefit of all humanity. These are the incentives that will motivate a 21st Century workforce.
The sooner Corporate America wakes up to this reality the better!
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[1] Conference Board. “.” http://www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressDetail.cfm?press_ID=2582 (Accessed on: 2 March 2005).
[2] AP. “CNN.com – U.S. workers ‘less happy at work’ – Mar 1, 2005.” http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/03/01/us.dissatisfaction.ap/index.html (Accessed on: 1 March 2005).