1 | Leadership
The Secret to Success: Implementation
In my experience, the distinction between Baldrige Award winners and average organizations is not in the creativity of their ideas or the innovation of their processes, but in how they execute them. World-class organizations implement, totally and relentlessly. Average organizations don’t.
Earlier this month, more than 400 creative people gathered in New York to tackle the issue of making ideas happen. Fast Company reported its favorite insights from the 2011 99% Conference (article available here):
One-third of our movies have taken about 7 years to make. Rigorous persistence and uncompromising creative standards are perhaps the most notable features of Pixar’s creative process. As one of the company’s founders put it: “Quality is the best business plan.”
If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.
Be a sprinter, not a marathon runner. The key to productivity is to recognize the power of renewal and have a finish line. According to Stephen Schwartz, president and CEI of The Energy Project, “We’ve lost our finish lines.”
If you’re not creating waves, then you’re not pushing enough. Pursuing ideas with obvious conclusions won’t create the change we need to see in the world, said Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas.
Make heroes out of failures. Pay attention to the learnings. Reframing key failures as discoveries will help foster an environment of risk taking.
The “OK Plateau” is the point when we turn on autopilot and stop getting better at a certain thing. It is possible to continue to improve at most…
26May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedComing Together with Baldrige
I’ve written several times about the obscene amounts of money being made by senior leaders while the wages of average workers have been relatively stagnant for years. The current recession combined with Republican leadership at the federal and state levels have further widened the gap between the rich and the middle class. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka summarized the problem in a speech recently at the national Press Club in which he decried the assault on Social Security and Medicare:
“Why is our national conversation in such a destructive place? Not because we are impoverished. We have never been richer. The American economy has never produced as much wealth as it does today. But we feel poor because the wealth in our society has flowed to a handful among us, and they and the politicians who pander to the worst instincts of the wealthy would rather break promises to our parents and grandparents and deny our children a future than pay their fair share of taxes.”
What does this have to do with Baldrige? In my opinion, everything. One of the core values of the Baldrige model is valuing workforce members: “Valuing the people in your workforce means committing to their engagement, satisfaction, development, and well-being.” Another core value, societal responsibility, promote societal well-being and benefit, which it defines as “leadership and support—within the limits of an organization’s resources—of the environmental, social, and economic systems in the organization’s…
23May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Values Clash with the Bottom Line
The Baldrige Criteria ask: How do senior leaders’ actions reflect a commitment to the organization’s values?
For too many senior leaders, their organizations’ values are secondary to their organization’s financial performance. In those cases, the values are meaningless and the senior leaders who tout them are hypocrites.
A recent example is 3M. On its web site, 3M states that its values include “respect our social and physical environment around the world” and “earn the admiration of all those associated with 3M worldwide.” Since it only has six values, tarnishing two suggests that 3M’s senior leaders are not committed to their company’s values.
The tarnishing took place when 3M contributed $100,000 to MN Forward, a group that supported Republican Tom Emmer in last year’s race for governor of Minnesota. Emmer was staunchly anti-gay, opposed legislation to combat school bullying, introduced an amendment to eliminate Minnesota’s minimum wage when he was a state representative, and even sponsored a constitutional amendment to allow Minnesota voters to opt out of federal laws. Based on the gubernatorial election results, one could argue that at least half of Minnesotans opposed his positions. Yet 3M supported him.
Asked why at today’s annual meeting, CEO George Buckley said that 3M doesn’t take social issues into account when deciding which candidates to support and that it backed Emmer because of his pro-business stance.
So there you go: 3M’s values are secondary to its financial performance.
And its senior leaders’ actions…
10May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Model: How do you govern and fulfill your societal responsibilities?
Item 1.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about your organization’s governance system, legal and ethical behavior, and societal responsibilities. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Management and fiscal accountability
- Transparency in operations and in the selection and disclosure polices for board members
- Independent internal and external audits
- Protecting stakeholder and stockholder interests, as appropriate
- Evaluating the performance of senior leaders and the board
- Using senior leader and board member reviews to develop and improve performance of these leaders and of the leadership system
- Preparing for and addressing any adverse impacts on society of your products and operations
- Promoting and ensuring ethical behavior in all interactions
- Contributing to the well-being of your environmental, social, and economic systems
- Actively supporting and strengthening your key communities
Best practices to consider:
- Key measures are identified for evaluating the performance and improvement of leaders and of the leadership system.
- Senior leaders and board members use formal processes for reviewing their performance and that of the leadership system and use the results of those reviews, which are typically annual, to improve personal and organizational performance.
- Key processes, measures, and goals for achieving and surpassing regulatory and legal requirements and for promoting ethical behavior are identified, implemented, and systematically improved.
- Societal well-being is an integral part of the strategic planning process and of senior leadership team reviews.
- Long-range strategies focus the organization on identifying its key communities, determining areas…
Save Money — and the Environment
A national chain of convenience stores reduced annual mileage at one of its distribution centers by 300,000. The question is: Are the chain’s savings considered cost-cutting to improve the bottom line or emission-cutting to improve its green performance?
The answer is: Yes.
Such initiatives mark the intersection of sustainability and business, according to Dhiraj Rajaram in this HRB blog. He notes that the chain has 25 distribution centers across the U.S., which means it can cut millions of miles of transportation costs and emissions by optimizing its transportation routes.
The CEO of an analytics firm, Rajaram has noticed “a surge in interest among Fortune 500 companies for analytical models that help determine the impact of going green on their bottom line.” One-hundred-thirty of the Fortune 500 have officers at the level of vice president or higher who are focused on sustainability.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how “you contribute to the well-being of your environmental, social, and economic systems.” Rajaram suggests five ways to address the well-being of your environmental and economic systems by analyzing the impact of going green on your company’s financial performance:
- Take a close look at your supply chain. Collect baseline measurements of the environmental impact of operations.
- Establish short-term goals. Select an initial project where you can realize a quick impact by improving performance on the metrics you’ve collected.
- Expand the initiative. If the project succeeds, expand it to other areas.
- Communicate your vision. Share your goals and progress…
Enemies of Innovation
I don’t drink coffee, but I am intrigued by the new coffee machines that brew a cup from coffee capsules. It sounds like a very profitable razor/razor-blade model: If you can convince people that the coffee machine is the way to go, the company will make a boatload of money on the capsules. I didn’t realize that the idea, first introduced by Nestle with the Nespresso, has been around for more than twenty years.
In “Innovation’s Hidden Enemies” (HBR, April 22, 2011), Alessandro Di Fiore describes what Nestle did to popularize the Nespresso. “As we all know,” he writes, “organizations and cultures rebel against innovations, especially when they are first conceived.” Nespresso became Nestle’s fastest growing new business in the 2000s because its leaders tackled three hidden enemies to innovation:
- Market research. At first, the company marketed the Nespresso to offices, but the Nespresso team believed that the product would appeal to households. The market research didn’t support its belief, suggesting “a perceived consumer value of just 25 Swiss centimes versus a company-wide threshold requirement of 40 centimes.” Failure to reach such a threshold usually dooms a project, but the team made its case to senior leadership, which took a risk by backing the effort.
- Incumbent business model. Nestle has a mass-market distribution system, which is the opposite of the Nespresso’s single dose capsules. The dichotomy of the two approaches compelled Nestle’s CEO to create a separate unit, Nestle Coffee Specialties,…
Servant Leadership Boosts Employee Engagement
On his blog, Bret Simmons talks about a new study of 191 financial services teams and 999 total participants recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study showed that employee engagement soared when employees believed that their teams were safe places for individual risk taking, which is a result of servant leadership.
The study examined both transformational leadership and servant leadership. A transformational leader offers a compelling agenda of high performance and change and a clear structure to help team members pursue it. This promotes cognition-based trust, which, according to Simmons, is “is trust based on the belief that the leader is competent, responsible, reliable, and dependable.”
A servant leader genuinely cares and is concerned about each team member and gives each person the opportunity and responsibility to act in the team’s best interests. This promotes affect-based trust, “which is trust based on the emotional bond to the leader.”
Cognition-based trust predicts team potency, while affect-based trust predicted team psychological safety. While both significantly improved team performance, “the size of the effect of team psychological safety was almost double the size of the effect of team potency,” Simmons wrote.
The study concluded: “Engaging in the behaviors associated with servant leadership and transformational leadership is important for a leader to cultivate and maintain team members’ confidence in his or her agenda and competencies as a leader (cognition-based trust) and to gain their faith that he or she will act in…
30Mar2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
