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Diatribe 4: Big Boxes and Carbon Road Bikes
Despite giving voice to my own anger at the way big box retailers can contribute to shuttering the doors of locally-owned businesses (Wal-Mart is now selling carbon-framed road bikes with premium Shimano components; the outdoor athlete in me shudders to think about the impact on locally-owned bike shops), I have to say that I hold out hope for the 800-pound gorillas - the $351 billion in annual revenues, and all.
Though I took the Wal-Mart pledge and stand by it (mostly), I'm still curious (and attempt to be open-minded) about its espoused commitment to sustainable business practice and CSR.
Aside from the destructive reinforcing loop they've set in motion throughout their domain (low-wage workers purchasing low-priced goods manufactured overseas, thus putting themselves out of work), the company seems to be earnest in its efforts to reduce its carbon footprint (carbon bike frames notwithstanding), along with encouraging – and demanding – a modicum of sustainable business practice from its suppliers.
Wal-Mart is interesting (and, at the same time, loathsome) to me precisely because of the stranglehold it exerts on its suppliers. No single retailing entity can match its buying power. Yep, there’s a dark side to Wal-Mart’s not-so-invisible hand, which you’ve already pointed out…but where there’s dark, there’s also light: Wal-Mart gets what it wants – and if it wants garden hoes with certified wood shafts, then big daddy gets. If it wants to sell polo shirts made from organic cotton, well – if you don’t want to be our supplier, then pound sand.
For all the lip-service about participatory work systems and learning organizations, most corporations are steered from the top down. The CEO really is the supreme leader. Top leadership has to set the company on the sustainability path, and then reinforce it with words and deeds. Kinda like the Chinese government – which years ago I predicted could turn around their pollution problem pretty quickly by imprisoning the CEOs of the 10 top polluting companies each year.
Anyway, when Wal-Mart demands even a smidge more accountability from its staggering supply chain, the cumulative downstream effect can be significant.
Up until a few years ago, it took courageous and visionary leadership to launch transformative organizational change. The strategic competitive advantages of sustainable business development weren’t lost on leaders like Ray Anderson of Interface (publicly held) and Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia (privately held), but these guys were already convinced - from the inside out - that green was good.
These days, CEO’s don’t need unusual vision and courage to jump on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) bandwagon, because greening is coming from the outside-in.
David Brower put it quite well when he wrote, “there’s no business to be done on a dead planet.” The multinationals are starting to pay heed to the stark truth of those words.
"Sustainability" will be Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Hah!
The VC community is doling out money to new sustainable energy entrants hand over fist. Doesn’t really matter, though. Now that the sustainability game is officially underway, the firms that command the most investment and intellectual capital can and will start changing the way the game is played.
The game? Cutting costs through greater operating efficiencies using the lens of the carbon footprint and resource conservation, and winning/preserving revenues through green products and honest efforts to address the demands of increasingly discriminating consumers – that would be us – ‘cuz we’ll start voting with our wallets.
If we’ve got any money left to spend, that is. Or should I say, if we’re still around to spend it.
Diatribe 3: Balance Shmalance
Seeking balance in your personal or occupational life is admirable; achieving it is impossible. And for good reason. Balance is an elusive state of grace, a place of temporary respite from the vagaries of existence. So you might as well view the edge of balance as where the real action is, the place where learning and growth occur. As related to the Nine Seeds of A Sustainable Way, ask the following questions to keep your organization from hanging out too long in the comfort zone and moving toward learning, growth, and constructive disequilibrium:
Purpose Questions
- Where are you going?
- How do you plan to get there?
- Do you have a vision, and if so, how understandable is it?
- What would those furthest from formal leadership in your organization define as the purpose of your organization?
- Who are your most critical stakeholders?
- What’s in it for your customer?
Profit Questions
- How do you define success in your organization?
- What is your strategic intent…volume, differentiation, a blend of the two?
- What metrics are you seeking to influence…revenue, costs, market share, quality, customer satisfaction, etc.?
- How do you plan on maximizing your investment in physical and human resources?
- How will the societies and stakeholders in the regions in which you operate share in your success?
- How do you minimize your environmental footprint in your operations?
- How will you know when you’ve arrived at your destination?
Freedom Questions
- If you asked your employees whether they are free to work on projects that they are passionate about, what do you think the majority would say?
- How high are the walls within your organization?
- What do you do to insure the right human or physical resource gets to the right projects?
Well-Understood Limits Questions
- What are the physical, technical, monetary, and social constraints within which your organization must function?
- How are those constraints communicated to employees?
- How judiciously are those constraints upheld?
- What are you currently doing to leverage those constraints to improve your organization’s effectiveness?
- How will you know when you’ve arrived at your destination?
Feedback and Learning Orientation Questions
- What do you currently do to seek stakeholder feedback? Please describe the formal and informal feedback structures in place.
- What do you currently do to invite employee feedback – formally and informally?
- What are the current communication norms in your organization. What are the ideal communication norms within your organization?
- Describe the way in which you develop your employees.
- Do you have a structure by which employees create personal development plans (apart from performance review course corrections) to build their capacity within and outside the organization?
- Do you use a competency model to define the behavioral success factors for each class of job in your organization?
- What are the most critical behavioral competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) for the success of your organization? Which of those is the least developed?
- How do you ensure that your organization learns from its experiences?
- What mechanisms or practices are in place to archive and share valuable knowledge amongst your group?
- How “transparent” is your organization? Do you share everything you know with all?
- To what extent do you view leaders as servants to their employees’ growth and development?
Innovation Questions
- To what degree is experimentation encouraged in your organization?
- What happens when someone makes a mistake – even a big mistake – in your organization.
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how entrepreneurial is the behavior of your average employee (10 is high, or extremely entrepreneurial).
- Do you use brainstorming in your meetings? If so, do people monitor or critique other member’s or their own thinking…or does “anything go.”
- How do you encourage people to “think outside of the box?”
- Is Innovation formally rewarded in the compensation structure of your organization?
Diversity Questions
- What is the gender mix of your group – percentage male vs. female.
- What is the diversity of race, creed, and color in your group?
- How many different nationalities are represented in your group?
- Do you have an idea of the diversity of thinking styles and decision-making styles in your group? Do you have a good mix of people who are conceptual, structural, social, and analytical?
- With respect to the above questions, how diverse is your organization’s leadership team?
- Do just a few assertive members of your group dominate conversations, or is everyone heard from?
- To what extent do you encourage people to work through their natural strengths, points of view, and distinctive personality traits?
- What is the breadth of specialization in your group. Is every job extremely specialized? Or do jobs tend to be generalist in nature?
- How well differentiated are the tasks within your organization. Do your job descriptions match what people actually do?
Interdependence Questions
- Describe the synergies that exist in your organization – areas in which the parts are greater than the whole.
- Please describe the extent to which people spontaneously collaborate. Please describe one instance of this behavior.
- How well do your team members know one another’s lives outside of work?
- What are your team practices and rituals to bring the group together to build mutual respect, appreciation, and esprit de corps. Do you do enough of this?
- To what extent do people in your organization reach out to people in other divisions, and partner with internal stakeholders, customers, or members of the community?
Adaptability Questions
- Describe how your organization responded to an unexpected challenge or major change. What did you do well? What would you do differently next time?
- What would happen if the leaders of your group decided to leave en masse – how quickly would your organization recover?
- How well do individuals and/or teams in your group course-correct when it’s evident they have erred in their ways?
- In what way is CHANGE framed and discussed within the context of your organization?
- How well do you personally manage change?
- Do you have recovery, or contingency plans? Are they robust enough?
- Have you ever used scenario planning or “what if” analysis in both the financial AND social domains of your organization?
- What are the leverage points in your organization – the most important variables that, if slightly changed, will make a huge difference to your overall success?
Diatribe 2 : Short-Termism and Fixes That Fail
One of the most hazardous consulting traps is being called in to address symptoms rather than underlying causes. When the consultant colludes with the client request and addresses symptom only, the consultant is contributing to the system archetype of a “fix that fails.” Although most organizational consultants are taught that the presenting problem is rarely the real problem, how many consultants work that principal?
What are the reasons for a client’s desire to fix the issue right away? Looming deadlines, , fear of getting too deep into the issue (surfacing additional problems), legitimate organizational needs ( Project A needs to be completed before Project B can begin), mandates from bosses, limited planning horizons, limited implementation horizons, limited budget.
Tempis fidgets, as the old saw goes. The speed at which our corporate brethren are asked to plan and execute strain the boundaries of the possible, and do so at the expense of mental, emotional, and physical health, much less team, divisional, and organizational efficiency. The natural environment and the organization's stakeholders invetably suffer as well.
Quick fixes don’t benefit anyone in the long run, and just barely in the short run. Think of the futility of patching a leaky pipe with bubblegum. Why gum? You're in a rush, you're preoccupied with bigger issues, and your boss (read:spouse) is on your case. Gum might temporarily solve your problem, but for how long? When the gum blows (inevitably at the least opportune moment), so will your strategy. Your gum fix has placed you squarely in a vicious circle.
So you hire a pipe expert because you have neither the time nor inclination to do the job yourself – even if you’re capable of doing the job. You ask for the pipe to be replaced, and the expert complies. Pipe replaced and problem solved, right? Wrong. You still don’t understand why the pipe burst in the first place. Your lack of knowing hasn’t cured the vicious circle; it’s just increased the delay.
Why do pipes burst? No preventative maintenance, high water pressure, frozen water lines, dumping corrosives down the sink, an ignorance of the useful life of plumbing pipes. Because pipes don’t burst every day, you’ve probably decided that you’ll deal with the issue when the problem surfaces. You’re planning on moving next year anyway, so chances are that you’ll never have to deal with the issue again – at least not in this house.
Can you see the pattern, and the resulting negative impact on people (your family or a future family, relationships, etc.), property (your pipes, your flooring), and environment (odor, mold, etc.)?
Because many of the corporations that hire consultants have long, if unsteady lives, quick-fix failures will haunt the future organization – and with short-term tenure the norm amongst key personnel, the failure will occur on somebody else’s watch.
HR groups are as guilty of the fixes that fail trap as any other department; perhaps more so due to the marginal position they often occupy at the fringes of organizations. HR groups are quick to please the power centers when requests are made by the "higher ups," and HR leads often act without questioning the request, asking for more time to address root cause, or without plain pushing back. Thus the fixes that fail trap is perpetuated. No wonder then that many HR groups are seen as marginal.
Maybe it’s
that everyone wants quick results: the financial markets, the
shareholders, and the company brass. What we sacrifice in the
long run for short term results is the key to our harried lives
and failed fixes both inside and outside of our organizations.
Short-termism is the root cause of a host of organizational issues -- take your pick. But do it fast.
Diatribe 1 : Affective Interventions
I meet many OD consultants who are inclined to address conflict
or dysfunctional group dynamics with feeling-based interventions.
To my way of thinking, the last thing in the world I'd want to
do is to share my feelings with people whom I distrust. Bring
me to the table to co-create a vision and reasonable compromises
however, and I'll eventually find a way of working with folks,
regardless of my like/dislike for them -- and I don't have to
like people in order to work effectively with them.
Mistrust and lack of agreement of vision is probably closer to
the root. Better to build trust by co-creating an action plan
of sorts -- which will flush out competing views, positions --
at the same time, build trust through the effort of creating common
vision. Feelings-based interventions take time, with no guarantee
of effectiveness. Meanwhile, by addressing collective vision and
desired results, you're talking turkey -- and it'll be quite obvious
who's on the bus, and who isn't.
Having worked for Outward Bound Professional once upon a time,
I can't count how many times I received calls asking to use adventure-based
training and development (ABTD), or "team building" to resolve
conflict. I'd often refuse. Team building is often looked to as
a solution of last resort, simply because nothing else has worked.
Guess what -- most likely, neither will team building.
Root cause in these situations is often tied to inexperienced,
or just plain weak management. Here's the causal chain: 1)lack
of role clarity, 2)caused by a weak vision, 3)which is caused
by weak or tentative management, which 4) creates distrust. Management
often needs the help, not the :dysfunctional group." I like to
go straight to the source, without exhausting the enormous amount
of resources required to create a team development workshop. By
going to the source, the client reaps greater return on investment
-- and potentially a faster payback period.
I realize there is conflict that is so deep-seated and seemingly
intractable -- everything's been tried -- responsibility charting,
creating strict interaction agreements based on a compelling vision,
shadow coaching for management, etc. Could simply be that it's
time for someone has to go -- even highly skilled professionals.
So when to use team building? It's important to remember that
team development is most effective with group sizes of 8 to 12.
That's because the deepest learning occurs on an personal level,
through interpersonal interactions. Use team building to strengthen
an already strong team, accelerate group development, "unfreeze"
a system, unleash creativity, compel greater capacity, and develop
or invigorate an appreciation for the strengths of team members.
When team building is used with an 8 to 15 person system, you
can create an metaphor to replicate workplace conditions -- or
you can let the experience speak for itself. Either way, a period
of individual and group reflection is absolutely necessary to
engage the "wheel of learning."
So -- save the affective for the effective. Use concrete interventions
for the conflicted.
That's it for now --
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