Management
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (No, not the Bruce Willis Film “The Fifth Element”) was first published by Peter Senge (MIT) in 1990. For me it was one of those books that proved to be a “mile marker” in my life.
A mile marker is one of the people, events, experience, or moments of learning that when you look back have influenced, shaped, or directed you along your way. I can identify specific “markers” in my mid to late twenties that clearly lead me to the consulting/coaching business. My wife was putting together a scrap book of our early lives recently and made the comment that I must have had consulting/coaching skills as a young child based of the comments classmates had written. Mile markers are important to identify to understand our own growth, development and direction.
The Fifth Discipline was one of those books for me. I had been educated in the discipline of Project Management at the engineering school of the University of Michigan. Managing and running things was a scientific discipline that could be learned and applied to getting things done. But, right from the start I had always felt that the most productive thing I could do was to help people grow, develop, learn and help the teams function well together. I believed that if we could improve the people side of the business, the business would be successful. Here was a book that “scientifically” presented these principles in an organized form.
What are the five disciplines?
- Personal Mastery
- Mental Models
- Building Shared Vision
- Team Learning
- Systems Thinking (Fusing it all together)
For this discussion I want to focus on number five, Systems Thinking.
We tend to be aware of System Structures “out there” in the “real world”. Physical structures like a manufacturing plant are visible to us. We can see the raw materials and parts coming in one end of the plant with the finished product exiting the other end. We can see what happens when parts don’t show up on time. We can identify “bottle necks” in the system and work to alleviate the restriction. We can even see the systems that are not so physical such as cost and demand relationships. The Fed works with a “system” to determine interest rates as they try to manage (manipulate) the economic structure. But what we don’t really see or more importantly don’t believe is that our individual human behavior works in a system across our team and company. Until we can step back and see things in a systemic way, we will fail to change the behavior that is causing the bottle necks and disruptions to our peak performance.
One of the reasons we don’t see “the system” in our teams and companies is what Senge describes as “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”. That’s one of the reasons I like business simulations. They allow us to act out and see the system at work in a closely related time and space. That brings me to the rest of my blog title: Paper Planes and The Beer Game. But, that’s all the time and space I have for this post. Tune in to Paper Planes and Beer Games in the next post.
In my last post, I talk about getting the wrong person off the bus. In this post I want to share three patterns that I have seen through the years.
Self-Selection
One is the story in the previous People on the Bus post when a person for various reasons decides to self-select out. They quit, they retire, they take another job but it’s their decision. And then as soon as it happens, you immediately experience the relief and freshness in the organization that feels like everyone exhaling a deep breath and then saying, “let’s get to work” with a renewed energy.
Still in Place 1.0 to 2.0
Every organization I’m working with is going through some sort of transformation. Things in this world are changing rapidly and it requires continued renewal and reinvention to keep up with the changes. It’s very easy to keep dancing to the tune that got you here. Although I see this in many cases of varying degrees, I’m thinking of one individual who has been very successful in his career for nearly thirty years. He has run large chunks of an organization, has been rewarded with bonus, salary and promotions through a steady career of successes. However, while he is currently responsible for over one hundred people, technology advancements in recent years have rendered what they do redundant. The entire organization needs to stop what they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades and begin doing things differently to continue to add value to the company. He’s in charge of the transformation. But, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s also afraid that he won’t be valued in the new environment. He’s spent thirty years honing skills that have been rewarded and now he’s getting the message that those skills are no longer valued. If he actually transforms his organization into what they need to be, there won’t be a need for his job (how he’s done it for the last many years). He can’t (or is not willing) to reinvent himself therefore he is not transforming his organization. Something will break soon. The company can no longer afford to have this large group of people producing daily work that is no longer of value.
But what about the leaders in this situation you might ask? Why is his boss allowing this to go on? This gets tough. Here is a guy who has performed well for three decades. He may know more about the job (as it used to be) than anyone else. As recently as two years ago he had received nothing but the highest annual evaluations and a steady string of promotions. And, he’s a great guy! “What am I supposed to do, fire him?”, asks the boss. Maybe.
It has become obvious that he is now the wrong person on the bus. We don’t want to just put him off the bus standing by the curb. And we certainly don’t want to throw him under the bus. But we do need to get him on a different bus or maybe in a different seat on the bus if he wants to go to the new destination where the bus is now headed. Leaving him where he is will become increasingly detrimental to himself, his team and the company.
Steady but Slow Improvement
A third thing that makes it difficult to get the wrong people off the bus is that they actually get better. Slowly.
Realistic time frames can be one of the most effective ways for dealing with getting the wrong people off the bus. In most cases the leaders (and even the individual themselves) know what the new behavior and approach needs to be and how it should work. And in many cases, the leader does a really good job of identifying the six (or 5 or 8 or 10) changes that need to take place in order for the person to be successful and valued on the new bus ride. The problem happens when after setting these new behaviors and competencies as goals for individual growth; the person only gets better at one or maybe two of the areas of required growth. During their performance review a year later they’ve improved performance on one of the areas but still need improvement in the other five. Then another year later they’ve improved a little bit on another area of the list but only marginally. However, because she see’s improvement the leader is reluctant to take the steps to get them off the bus. But a year or more has gone by and they haven’t moved on from behavior 1.0 to rev 2.0. In the meantime things are changing so rapidly that they really need to be transforming from 2.0 to 3.0. What I have experienced is that it takes nearly six months of consistent new behavior to develop some level of competency and acceptance and another six months of consistent behavior for it to sink in as second nature. But, if a person is still working on a new behavior in a year without essentially conquering it, it’s not likely that they will accomplish the needed goal in a reasonable time frame. It’s now time to help them onto another bus.
I was reminded the other day that when I was in kindergarten, I invited a friend to come home with me on the bus. Now, we didn’t make official arrangements like checking with parents or getting permission, I just asked this friend to get on my bus as we were headed home after school. As an adult I can now imagine the turmoil that must have ensued when this five year old girl ended up on the wrong bus.
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t talks about the importance of getting the right people on the bus, and while I certainly understand the concept of having the right people on your team, the full magnitude of that concept never really hit me until I began thinking about how much angst and commotion must have occurred because I had the wrong person on the bus.
Jim Collins focuses on getting the right people on the bus but I think the harder part of leadership is getting the wrong people off the bus. My young friend and I were unaware of the great disturbance we had caused by enjoying our ride home and looking forward to playing together. It was the adults, the supervisors, the leaders that could easily see the chaos caused by our decision and their efforts were focused on getting the wrong person off this bus and back on the right bus.
Today when I was with a client, I was notified that a person in the company had decided to resign. While no one was really rejoicing, it was very obvious that there was a relief in the room and a sense of “finally, we can move on” because this had been one of those people who were on the wrong bus. Now, before you jump to conclusions I want you to know that he was a fine human being, with a long track record of great success in a highly visible (and paid) leadership position. This was not some sloth who everyone knew should depart. It’s just that the school bus was on a new route and he hadn’t adapted to the new route and scenery. He remained stuck in doing things the way they had always been done. He had not re-invented himself (new word for change) along with the company and the team as they were re-inventing themselves to cope with the new realities.
In my next post, I’ll talk about three patterns that I see of the wrong person on the bus.