The sharpest tool in the shed

Sitting in on a strategy workshop later today, always fascinating. In my experience, the most commonly overlooked element of strategy is … capacity: both the capacity that you can train in or build and the capacity you have to buy in.

D-Day and its sequel presents an illustration. The strategy was about landing so many divisions in so many days and then to roll up the German Army in France and force an unconditional surrender. Since the biggest hurdle was perceived to be getting the divisions ashore through Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” of prepared defences, all the capacity-building was focussed on that. Despite all the challenges faced, that part of the plan went well. D+1 was a little different.

What hadn’t been thought about was the nature of the Norman countryside, with its massive hedgerows. And of course this was a failure of “scanning the competitive environment”. But the upshot was that no capacity had been developed in the area of hedgerow fighting. Instead of securing towns like Caen on D-Day itself, progress became completely bogged down as each field had to be taken one at a time, at immense cost in time and casualties. Soldiers and platoons had no preparation for what the plan was asking of them.

Fortunately, the capacity – of the “walks in the door” variety – had come along anyway. Tankers who were taxi-drivers and mechanics in civilian life and used to tinkering and improvising started doing just that. They devised field upgrades for tanks that could penetrate hedgerows in short order and allow the armour to tackle the prepared German positions which until then had been decimating the infantry assaults. Absent that accidental capacity and the Allies might never have broken out of the hedgerow country.

So yes, you can get lucky. But plans and strategies which skate over the capacity issues tend to join the majority: on the “fail” heap. So how do you address capacity issues when you are doing strategy? Anyone who has attempted this will likely tell you that the biggest problem is actually working out what capacity you already have (let alone coming up with an appropriate plan to build more).

You need a sharper tool than simply brainstorming “(impressions of) our capacity” on a whiteboard.

I am sure people who know me wonder why I am so wedded to the Birkman Method as an organisational tool, when I generally have such wide and inclusive tastes. Aren’t there lots of other tools out there?

Yes there are, but Birkman is the sharpest tool in the shed by several (hedgerow) country miles. Here’s why I think that and why this is the answer to a strategist’s prayers:

1. Accurate and insightful. I had someone shout out loud on a phone call the other day. I thought he had been stung by a bee; it was actually a shout of recognition
2. Objective and non-judgemental. We aren’t putting value-judgements in here, we are looking at things which could be “most-needed” in one setting and “least-needed” in another. It is about understanding difference, not grading people.
3. Empirically-based. Virtually every other tool you have seen or tried is derived from a theoretical construct, which is then tested to see if it has something useful to say in the real world. Roger Birkman started with observation of actual behaviours and looked for a way of predicting which people would produce which behaviours.
4. Calibrated. Apples are always apples. You would be surprised by the extent to which this is not so for most tools. You and I might both be an “x” according to a particular tool, but that doesn’t mean “x” is the same for both of us.
5. Social. Dr Birkman did his work in a deliberately social and organisational setting. The original name of the Birkman Method was “A Test of Social Comprehension”. The Birkman tells you how a person will behave in your organisation.

So what? Learn to use the Birkman and you have the following capabilities, in ascending order of importance to the organisational strategist:

• Powerful individual coaching and mentoring that not only addresses what the inidvidual could be best at but also how they will need to negotiate the different perspectives and expectations around them in the organisation.
• Team performance coaching; says it all really – why is this manager having problems with this person, why does Team A deliver less despite its talented people than Team B with its apparently less able players, and so on.
• Accurate recruitment, both stand-alone and against benchmarks. You need some specific capacity in a specific role. Birkman doesn’t do “skills” – that is what validated track record is for – but in standalone recruiting it allows you to know ahead of time whether the underlying wiring is there and what the challenges would be if you appointed this person. In roles where you have large numbers of people doing the same job you can enhance this with benchmarking to identify the characteristics that discriminate between the averagely good and the star performer and hire against those factors.
• Organisational Capacity Mapping. This is the holy grail for strategists and OD specialists alike, and yet so many people never get beyond the first or second bullet points above. You can look at data for a division or the whole organisation at start identifying potential capacity issues that relate directly to execution of your strategy in under 3 seconds, straight out of the box, no expensive BI tools required. I love this tool for many reasons, but this is the heart of the matter.

Tired of cutting with a blunt knife? We have Birkman Certification running in Singapore in July and October (see www.elaura.com for details), for other options go to www.birkman.com

The higher, the simpler

Granted myself a day off today, after what has been a rather hectic 5 or 6 weeks.  Made a large pot of green tea, read John Adair’s Inspirational Leadership in a single sitting (Socratic dialogue lives; profundity without density) and then walked about 12 km through the jungle to Bukit Timah in the noon-day sun. As Dilbert’s friend Wally once said, “It turns out I am insane, but apparently I am one of the happy kind…”

Lots of very interesting encounters to process in the last few weeks, but here is the one of the emerging themes: the closer to the top of any organisation you get, the less technical the real issues are. Or, put another way: the higher you go, the simpler it gets.

Simpler, not simplistic. Fred in Customer Relations may be deciding between 3 IT vendors and their competing platforms, and doing so on the basis of immensely detailed technical specs; Carol the CEO meanwhile is deciding between black and white. The difference is that Fred’s decision – by no means insignificant – has at best a 3-5 year horizon. Carol’s decision will affect the destiny of the company for the next 25 years. And behind Carol’s seemingly simple choice lie multiverses – diverse possible futures, at least half of which will collapse and disappear when she makes her call. Think Lou Gerstner calling IBM back to its core: Servers and Services. Goodbye Printers and Laptops (and, of course, hello Lexmark and Lenovo).

This is hardly a new thought, but the aspect of this simplicity that has been striking me most forcibly is that it means that problems at the top of an organisation often reduce to one thing: unrecognised, unacknowledged differences of perspective and perception.

Down where Fred dwells, there will be “wars of religion” – open source versus proprietary, off the shelf versus customised or bespoke – and so on. Many of these disagreements will also be ultimately driven by differences of perception, but there is room for people to be right or wrong about technical issues. Up where Carol operates, where vision of credible and possible futures is pretty much all there is to work with, perception is pretty much everything; and unrecognised, uncategorised differences of perception will impact not just a single issue or question, but the whole landscape. When Carol calls “black” and two of her three C-level reports agree with her, is that because she has understood and found wanting the reasons the third person had for keeping “white” in play? Or are they – unknowingly – seeing the future from such different perspectives, that what each means by “black” or “white” is quite different.

A couple of concrete examples, slightly disguised. Global player in its field, formed by a series of well-spaced mergers and acquisitions over the last 25 years. Scratch this organisation anywhere and find that the sum of the whole is much less than the sum of its parts (in other words, the merged organisation underperforms pretty much any of the original constituent organisations); and yet in every one of those areas it has long-time industry experts enough and to spare. They don’t need smarter people or more technical know-how; how could they, they wrote all the reference books. So what? Well, they might need some objective help to understand just how differently they (and their original organisations) were and are seeing the world.

Other end of the scale. Entrepreneurial team of 5 (still the top of the organisation; the mountain is just a lot lower). All have huge track record in their field (in fact the leader comes from a dynasty in that field, and definitely brings more than just his genes to the part; he has done it all). All except for one member of the team, that is. This person is the lightning rod for all disagreements, and guess what – comes from an entirely different business background. The team mostly see the issue as how to get this fifth person onboard with the vision and plan; impartial external advisers see the real issue as how to get these industry experts to listen to the one person who sees what they don’t, and could therefore save them all from the impending train wreck when their lopsided perception takes them off the rails.

All of which means that finding an objective means by which  to synchronise or calibrate perception, and differences of perspective, is potentially priceless at the upper echelons of any enterprise.

Thank you, Dr Birkman…

Soft stuff needs hard data too

One of the challenges in the HR stack is that of getting to play at the top table and on the same terms as the guardians of the “hard data” – manufacturing / operations, sales and marketing and especially finance. Obviously it is possible, but there do seem to be a lot more COOs and CFOs (and even CIO / CTOs) than CPOs (Chief People Officer: you see, there isn’t even a term for it… “our most valuable resource” fails to register again.)

A large part of the problem is that Finance, Sales and Operations have numbers and projections; HR has programmes. There are figures – nett hiring etc – but in the absence of qualitative data that sounds more like adjustments in the organisation’s overheads than anything else.

And that is why HR needs to be able to measure, track and manage talent flow (and talent gaps) throughout the organisation. The talent pipeline is just as real (and just as impactful in the long-term) as the sales pipeline, but unlike sales or cash-flow, traditionally lacking in any consistent standard of measurement.

If you are doing this already, please share your experience and especially what tools and measures you are using. A great deal of my personal enthusiasm for Birkman as an Operating System for Talent is that it equips any HR Director, straight out of the box, with valid, accurate, objective and stable data on precisely these things – have we got the talent we need and in the places we need it, and what does the pipeline look like: have we secured our future, or are we facing a talent crisis 6-9 months out? And that is the kind of hard-edged, practical data that earns you a place to play at the top table.

Language, concealment and #Birkman

Been taking a slow but very thought-provoking wander through Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary (London, 2009), a book largely about the profound differences between the left and right sides of our brains – and what those differences mean for everything from the structure of ourselves to the structure of society. Here is just one snippet:

…language … is the perfect medium for concealing, rather than revealing, meaning.         (2009:106)

This comes in a section arguing that language is not a pre-requisite either of communication (think of all the non-verbal ways both we and animals communicate) nor (perhaps more surprising) of complex thought. (We may choose to think in words about the process of thought, but actual thought is often pictorial, visceral, etc.)

So language lends itself to concealing meaning as much as to revealing it. Why would we want to conceal meaning?

“To deceive, in order to gain unfair advantage”, is one obvious answer. There are others, which help explain why language does get used in precisely this way so much of the time, without any necessarily nefarious intent.

“I am very conscious of your self-esteem and your feelings, so even though there is a pretty black and white issue in which you are at fault, I need to find a way of breaking this to you in a way that preserves your dignity.”

“My expectation of myself is that I should be a team-player, so that even though the demand you have just made of me is totally unreasonable and is definitely not meeting my need for being valued, I will say ‘sure, no problem’ even though, in my heart of hearts, I mean quite the opposite.”

“Although I believe it is very important to take account of how people are feeling, I have a strong need to come up with objective solutions to emotional problems; so although I am saying ‘there, there’ and ‘you poor thing’ I am actually going to really flip out in a moment if we can’t move on from how you feel to what practical steps we can take.”

And those are just three of my own quirks, all described in terms a Birkman user may well recognise (high Esteem Need, low /high Advantage and high/high reversed Empathy). None of those are attempts to deceive for unreasonable advantage; but they are precisely the uses of language to conceal that all of us are surrounded by – and contribute to – every day.

Benchmarking Talent is not Dolly the Sheep

I talk (tweet/blog/rant/bore) a fair amount about the value of benchmarking star performance in specific roles and then using the resulting profile in recruitment. I don’t recommend this for all recruitment, only where there is a significant number of people who all perform identical roles. Often this means customer facing roles such as customer service, account manager, etc, but it can also apply to backroom admin or technical jobs. If you have a statistically significant sample for us to work from, we should be able to tell if there are characteristics which discriminate consistently between your star performers and the merely averagely good; if there are, you can use those in recruitment.

It occurred to me the other day that this might sound as though I believe in human cloning, or at least that my ideal call centre would comprise entirely of balding thirty-year old men called Clarence and who all wear black-rimmed glasses and keep their pencil behind their right ear. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My experience of workgroups with unusually high numbers of high-performing people is that they look to the casual observer – and even to the workgroup members themselves – as very diverse. Ask them and they will say, “oh yes, Sue is our extrovert and Fred is the quiet one and Bill goes wave-boarding and Nancy is studying astrophysics in her spare time.” Even if we ask them, what do you think you all have in common, they may be unable to answer – simply because whatever the “magic ingredient” is, it is so much part of their whole world view that they have no idea it isn’t shared by everybody on the planet. Could be obsessive attention to detail, could be absolute determination to leave every customer feeling that their most pressing problem has been solved – whatever.  So in my experience, a truly star workgroup has usually been a very diverse group of people with just one or two very specific characteristics in common – not a flock of Dolly the Sheeps. For example, take the accounting firm where two thirds of the accounting partners and staff were most highly motivated not by a love of working with numbers but by a love of making a difference for other people. How proactive do you think they were in coming up with ideas to improve their clients’ businesses? (Answer: very). Or the local council call centre with very high scores on empathy for others and practical action. Do you think they were happy to send people off down a bureacratic rabbit hole? (Answer: no).

And all this is why we use the Birkman Method, rather than any other tool. Firstly, it allows direct comparison between individuals (which, you may be surprised to know, most profiling tools are not designed or calibrated for); and secondly it provides the most finegrained data we know of, with a wealth of individual and independent scales. This isn’t “are you one of these or one of those”; rather it allows us to ask intelligently of individuals, what makes you unique; and of clusters of individuals (e.g. star performers) what do you diverse people have in common that your colleagues don’t have?

So benchmarking, done right is powerful stuff. And no hint of “Hello Dolly!”

#FLAsia2010 Special 3: A few non-negotiables for franchisees

If you are a Franchisor or, indeed, an intending Franchisee, there are a few things you need to know about franchisees. The promise of franchising is sometimes stated such that it sounds like “anyone can be a success as a [insert product or service here] franchisee!” It just ain’t so…

A particular franchise may have special requirements, but here are some pretty universal ones:

a) a funadamental belief that there is one right way of doing things and that is the way we do it. The person who is happy to be situational or to keep returning to the blank sheet of paper or run a different business on Wednesday from the one they ran on Monday may be all kinds of things – but a successful franchisee won’t be one of them. Business format franchising is a “one right way”  business model, and if your prospective franchisee can’t handle that, stay clear.

b) High energy levels. Real franchises don’t promise great returns for no work; they promise predictable returns for hard work. The franchisee who needs lots of down time for reflection and recovery will struggle to make a success of the business.

c) Attention to detail. Big picture players need not apply; the big picture has already been dealt with by the franchisor. What a franchisee needs is to execute the plan with fanatical attention to detail.

d) Attention to the numbers. Many people run their businesses by instinct. This doesn’t work for franchises: a proper franchise model includes clear financial performance indicators and the franchisee needs to pay constant attention to actual performance against these standards; only by reacting at the first sign of divergence in the numbers can the franchisee and their business succeed.

e) Attention to people. Franchisees mostly have to manage staff; they all have to delight and satisfy customers. Unless you have a franchise that services autonomous robots, you have better find franchisees who pay attention to people issues, and not just executing tasks.

That may seem a daunting list, but it shouldn’t. Franchising isn’t for everybody; it is for a sizeable part of the population, whom we have just described. And the good news is that this isn’t down to guesswork; all the factors I have described are objectively measurable. If you don’t know how, we do: contact John Ong on john@consultft.com or tweet me @jonmkiwi

#FLAsia2010 Special 2: Ideas require Imagination; Execution requires Capacity

Something I learnt very quickly when I first start working in the Franchise and Licensing Field was that ideas – even brilliant ideas – are essentially worth nothing. This was hard to communicate sometimes to inventors and innovators who thought they had the next world changing idea in their heads and who assumed that step two was to start collecting the royalties. But an idea with no execution is essentially dead air.

This doesn’t just affect inventors: any business can come up with a world-beating strategy; not every business can turn their world-beating strategy into a well-beaten world. For Franchisors (and many others), the fundamental issue which determines their ability to execute is not – and this may surprise you – management style or ability to focus, but rather organisational capacity. If you don’t have the right people in place to support the training and support of your growing network, your network will grow so far and then stall. If you don’t recruit the right kind of Franchisees – those who have the capacity to execute your Franchise System relentlessly – then however successful you are in growing your network numerically, your brand will eventually collapse under the weight of failure to deliver.

The answer I often hear to this is something like “Oh, we have a fantastic Franchise Manager, she/he is our secret weapon…” That is great as far as it goes; but if your Franchise Manager left you tomorrow (perhaps someone else has noticed how fantastic they are), would you know how to replace them? In other words, can you write on a sheet of A4 the specification that makes them so successful, so that you could replace them – or multiply them – at need? If not, then you are far from secure.

Ditto your Franchisees, although here you are more likely to have some sort of profile against which you recruit. (If your profile is purely financial, once again I think you are in danger). But if you got lucky the first three times you sold a franchise, that doesn’t mean your luck will hold.

Building organisational capacity should be a highly intentional activity. We know what we are looking for and why, and we know when we have found it. Intentional capacity building allows for intentional execution of strategies and ideas. If you don’t already have access to a toolset that allows you to do this, time to get one.

(And yes: equipping organisations with just such a toolset is precisely what we do. Contact John Ong at john@consultft.com or tweet me @jonmkiwi )

25 yards of Team Building, please: changing how organisations buy assessments

Talking to a friend and colleague from the US last week, he commented on the way large organisations buy assessments. Actually, the give away was the term “assessment buyers”… like “media buyer” or “office-supplies buyer”. Essentially the mindset seems to be almost along the lines of, “senior management expects us to use assessments, we buy x assessments per y personnel, check the box on the quarterly return, job done.”

Someone somewhere in the organisation is trying to accomplish something worthwhile with those assessments – better recruitment, better management of talent, building a team sorting out a workplace problem, whatever. They get to use whatever the assessment buyer buys (or specifies) for them. Fair enough, as far as it goes; that is how things work in a large organisation.

But here is the huge lost opportunity: a) why on earth is the assessment buyer treating the assessment of the company’s most valuable asset as it they were buying pencils and ignoring b) the opportunity to build over time a valuable map of the organisation’s talent and strengths? What do I mean?

Piecemeal assessment means that even if a great tool has been deployed to solve an important problem, that is the end of the story. A one-off purchase for a one-time return. Next time some or all of those people are involved in a situation where assessment needs to be used, either the same tool will be deployed again, or a new one; but either way, there will have been little if any value carried forward from the previous episode (except, usually, some increase in the employee cynicism triggered whenever there is a lack of joined up thinking: “here we go again”).

The positive alternative is to seek out and deploy a tool or suite of complementary tools which can be used across all situations (recruitment, appraisal, promotion, career development, coaching etc), and to keep coming back to the data collected already, both in the sense of “deploying once and using often per employee”; and in terms of watching trends over time, planning change programmes, post M&A integration, strategy, whatever. You won’t have a picture of your whole organisation the first time you deploy your selected tool or suite of tools for a 15-person team-building event; but you might be surprised how quickly you start seeing a map of your whole organisation come together, with key cultural or behavioural themes emerging. To senior management (remember them? we mentioned them in the first paragraph) that kind of data is solid gold. The mid-level manager achieves their immediate goal – but the whole organisation benefits as well.

Can you do this with every tool that is out there? Sadly not. Here is a short checklist of assessment properties you need to be looking for:

• Stability of data over time for the individual (if the same person completing the assessment next week will come out significantly differently to how they did last week, forget it). 3-5 years plus should be a minimum if you intend to use this to build a picture of the organisation .
• The tool needs to allow for accurate comparison between individuals. This may seem obvious, but very many of the well-known tools don’t do this.
• Ideally, use a tool primarily designed for, and proven through, use in organisations. A tool developed for a PhD thesis, using a group of undergrad students as the survey sample, may not tell you something useful in an organisation setting.
• Choose empirically-based assessments (i.e. based on research that establishes a relationship between actual behaviours and how people show up in the assessment) over theory-driven assessments (i.e. tools that categorise people according to a theoretical model) – unless you are prepared to stake your success on the particular theoretical construct involved.
• Look for a report establishing reliability and validity for the instrument and check that it compares well to alternatives. And always ask yourself if you are seeing a great tool – or just great marketing.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni)

Not sure why I missed this one – it has been out there since 2002 – until a friend mentioned it in conversation. Saw a copy at Kinokuniya in Ngee An City (and that is what I call a seriously big bookstore) and read it in a single sitting this weekend. Simple, sane and true. Wonderful book, and I have taken it straight on board.

Except… MBTI? Best profiling tool? We mustn’t confuse ubiquity with quality. Specifically you cannot with confidence synchronise one person’s MBTI outputs against another person’s, so two people who have described themselves in ways that produced very different MBTI profiles might be more similar than you would realise – and vice versa. In trying to diagnose the roots of team dysfunction, this actually matters quite a lot. At best it is a tool for self reflection – and I would argue, deeply flawed even in that context.

Looking for a tool to use in concert with Patrick’s analysis? Talk to a Birkman Consultant. For a simple example (one score among nearly 100 available) see this Article by Dr Birkman http://tinyurl.com/33qv5qs and see how much resonance this has with the 5 Dysfunctions.