Why employees’ ideas go nowhere and what needs to change.

If you are going to be a competitive powerhouse, you have to innovate.  As Gary Kunkle showed, companies that show consistently strong growth get 90% of their ideas from employees.  Other companies don’t seem to realize that their employees have just as many ideas, they just don’t bring them forward.  When you get it right, you can implement lots of ideas.  At NUMMI they implemented over 10,000 ideas per year from about 3,000 workers.

Why do employees hold back their ideas? Fear is one reason.  Lots of actions in a company can create the fear factor.  The obvious one is the tyrant-boss.  Other actions can have surprisingly long impacts.  A layoff years ago can continue to worry remaining employees and they will think about the risk, not the benefit in suggesting change.

"Ideas in Limbo"

However, the biggest reason employees hold back on ideas is not the fear factor.  Writing for the Harvard Business Review, James Detert and Ethan Burris point out that the biggest reason employees don’t bring ideas forward is the concern that managers won’t do anything with them.1

Detert and Burris suggest it’s a “why bother” attitude.  But there’s more to it than that.  An original idea is a precious asset.  There’s a lot of emotion baked into seeing a solution to a problem in a new way, and then proposing your solution.   It’s your baby and you’re better off withholding it than having it undervalued and rejected.  Once an idea is on the table, it’s worth is determined by what happens next, and that depends upon the manager.  If nothing happens, that’s not good.  By doing nothing with an idea, managers can avoid taking a risk.  They too, are influenced by the prevailing culture around risk-taking and will avoid situations where the benefit does not significantly out-weigh the risk.

In the end, an idea that gets implemented will succeed or fail based on its merits as a good solution.  If it’s a product change, the customer will decide.  If it’s an intermediate process change, the effectiveness and efficiency of the new process will decide.  Wouldn’t it be better to let the merits of an idea determine its fate rather than leaving it up to a management structure that flawed, risk-averse, and biased?

The Rebel-Gatetm methodology we promote does just that.  It allows ideas to move forward without a management review.  At the same time it brings a strong element of control and impels a desire among all employee to husband resources.  Rebel-Gate is an ingenious solution to this 'ideas'  problem.  If you're interested in finding out more contact us.

¹ Detert, Fames R., Burris, Ethan R. "Can Your Employees Really Speak Freely." Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb. 2016: 81-87. Print.

Client Fulfillment

As a consultant you are constantly selling yourself and your value.  When you’re done with a client work session, you want your client to feel fulfilled.  In fact, you want to be sure your client feels fulfilled.  This is how we do it. (Thanks to authors Vern Harnish and Gino Wickman for the inspiration and insight.)

The method described below follows the Peak/End rule.  The Peak/End rule is a great sales insight and is fully describe in my book The Peak Interview:  “When people assess an experience that has a clear beginning and end, they attend to two things above all: how it felt at the peak, and whether it improved or worsened at the end. It is important to recognize that everything else isn’t forgotten, it just isn’t used in how the brain judges the quality of the experience.”

The work we do with clients involves a team.  The team usually consists of the President/CEO and his or her management direct reports.  Typically we spend the whole day with the team.  The first time we do this is we spend a little time talking about being open and honest.  

Then we ask them to rate their existing meetings on a scale of one to ten, with ten be best. 

They each privately write down their rating of their normal meetings.  We then go around the table (we never start with the CEO/President) and ask them to read what they wrote.  The average score usually is between four and six.

Then we say we want them to have a ‘Rated 10™’ day today.  We start every day with this stated desire from then on.   We explain that at the end of the day we will go around the table as ask them for their rating of the day.  They are not rating us. They are rating themselves.  After all, they are the ones doing the work.  We say we want them to have a Rated “Ten” Day, and that mean they each need to bring their ten-game to the table.  “Do great work today,” we tell them.

Next, we explain in detail what we intend to do during the session today.  Then, we go around the table and get the expectations from each team member.  These we capture on a flip chart, one page for each participant.  These are posted on the walls.  If a team member has an expectation we don’t expect to deliver, we address it immediately, saying that we don’t think that will be done today and the team member agrees that we can remove it from the expectation list.  Getting this right takes a bit of practice but it is essential that you’re able to deliver against every expectation.  

At the end of the day we go around the table leaving the CEO/President for last, and go down the list of each participant’s expectations getting a “yes” from each person that the expectation was met.  Sometimes there’s a discussion around the expectation and it does happen (although rarely)  that we have to go back and spend a few minutes revisiting a part of the work to get it right. 

Then we ask them to write down how they rate the meeting.  We remind them that they are rating themselves for the work they’ve done today.   You can also ask them to capture what they liked best, and one key insight they will use immediately going forward.  

Then we go around the table asking them to tell us the rating they wrote down.  For any rating less than a ‘ten’ ask why they didn’t give a ten and what would have caused them to rate it at a ten.  By the time you get to the last person, the CEO/President, you’re likely to get at least an eight.  Average the score.  It is usually between eight and ten.  Contrast that with how they rated their average meeting and challenge them to do better work when you next meet.  End the meeting.

By going over expectations and rating the meeting you create a Peak End moment.  You leave the client with the feeling of fulfillment.  The chances of you continuing to work with them is high.  

The Leadership Role

The key question in my new little monograph CompeteAbility, is how to you get the best answer to the "How do we...? questions you ask when you want to be the best:

How do we create a solution that does the job for the customer better than the competition?”
How do we have the strongest possible relationship with the customer?
How do we package the solution better than the competition?
How do we market the solution better than the competition?
How do we price the solution better than the competition?
How do we sell the solution better than the competition?
How do we service the solution better than the competition?
How do we get the customer to feel kinship with us through the solution?
How do we give the customer identity through the solution?
How do we create meaning for the customer through the solution?

The answer, it turns out, is the same for all of the companies who enjoy long term success.  The degree to which you answer these questions well, depends upon your people.  The leader's job is to get the best out of your people, to awaken the possibilities in your people. Go for shiny eyes..  See this one minute snippet from this TED TALK.

(I recommend you watch this entire 20 minute video, it is terrific.)

High Innovation, the elegance of simplicity:

Colgate Palmolive in Brazil had a quality control problem in their toothpaste factory.  Tubes of toothpaste are inserted into individual boxes, and these individual boxes are then packaged together into a larger carton.  Unfortunately, every so often something would happen and an individual box would get sealed without its companion tube of toothpaste.  The problem wouldn’t be discovered until a

store clerk went to stock the shelves.

Solving the problem at the point of insertion proved to be extremely costly and management asked engineering to find an alternate solution.  One idea was to put an Xray detector on the line that would enable them to see an empty box and grab it before it got packed.  Another idea discussed was to but an inline scale into the process and weigh the boxes to identify the lighter box.  There was a lot of discussion around how you would calculate the box-weight when the product is moving vs standing still.

While all this was taking place in the management and engineering offices, an older worker on the factory floor solved the problem by placing a fan next to the line.

Thank you Pat C. for this story.

In the 'war for talent'...who's the enemy?

Yesterday U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said, “To start, we must always tap into our greatest resource: our people. Winning the war for talent is imperative if our country is to out-compete and lead the rest of the world.”*

The phrase ‘war for talent’ is provocative.  If there is a talent in the workforce that matters most it is leadership.  Time and time again, what determines if you have the right people, is the leadership that makes the people you have into the right people.

When an executive steps into a new job, he or she generally must take the team that’s already in place and make that team successful.  When David Marquet took over as captain of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe, it was the worst performing sub in the US Navy.   Unusual for the navy, but because the boat had such a wretched performance record, Captain Marquet had been given license to change out as much of this poorly performing crew as he wanted.  

He changed nobody.  Marquet knew the difference between a ‘manager’ and a ‘leader’.  Many submarine commanders are more managers than leaders.  In part, that may be because what’s of paramount importance aboard a submarine is control. Marquet knew it was possible that the crew performed badly as a result of being managed badly.  Perhaps, all the Santa Fe needed was leadership and control.

A year later, the Santa Fe was the best performing submarine in the navy.  What was remarkable about this turnaround was where you found the leadership and control.  On the Santa Fe, leadership and control could be found in abundance in every job and at every rank.  And it was intelligent control, not dogmatic control.  This worst crew in the navy, even in the isolation of a submarine, innovated many changes that ultimately were adopted by the entire fleet. 

If there’s a ‘war for talent’, it’s the talent of leadership. 

* "U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker Lays Out a Path Forward for American Competitiveness in Remarks to Minnesota Business Partnership." U.S. Department of Commerce. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Sept. 2015. <http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDOC/bulletins/1195cb2>.

Good news, things were once even worse!

Modern Survey just released their Spring 2015 employee engagement survey results: ”Modern Survey’s latest engagement numbers are out and the good news is that engagement is still high. The percentage of engaged employees hit a seven-year high in the fall of 2014.”

Here are the numbers:

Positively Engaged	Percent of Total	Negatively Engaged	Percent of Total
Fully Engaged	14%	Disengaged	23%
Moderately Engaged	29%	Under Engaged	35%

The only good news here is that it’s been worse. When you recognize that a fully engaged employee is 240% more productive, more innovative and delivers highest quality work as compared to all other employees, having only 14% of your workforce doing that is appalling.

This isn't good news, it's a continuation of terrible news.

We know of organizations where the workforce is at, or near 100% fully engaged. There’s a difference in how these organizations operate. They typically do not have an engagement program or engagement initiatives. Those programs and initiatives are typically top-down activities delivered under a command-and-control environment.

 One of the best examples of a 100% engagement environment was in what you’d normally believe is a natural command-and-control organization - a US Navy nuclear fast attack submarine. Captain David Marquet took over command of the Santa Fe when it was the worst submarine in the fleet. In less than a year, using the existing crew, he turned it into the best. Actually, it would be much more correct to say the entire crew turned it into the best submarine in the fleet. Captain Marquet allowed his crew to be fully engaged.   He said, "Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative."  His approach is perhaps revealed in this quote about empowerment from his book:

 “The problem with empowerment programs is that they contain an inherent contradiction between the message and the method. While the message is ‘empowerment’ the method--it takes me to empower you--fundamentally disempowers employees. .. I didn’t understand why empowerment was needed. It seemed to me that humans are born in a state of action and natural empowerment...Empowerment programs appeared to be a reaction to the fact that we had actively disempowered people....I felt my power cam from within, and attempts to empower me felt like manipulation.”1

1 Marquet, L. David. Turn the Ship Around!: How to Create Leadership at Every Level. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group, 2012. Print.

What was Michelangelo trying to communicate?

In 1990 an American physician published an article "An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy"  in which he suggest that the Creator portion of the painting represents the human brain.   Since then other experts have pointed to other possible anatomical depictions in Michelangelo's paintings.  Why did he do this?