Author: Ed Muzio

Un-Sexy, Boring Management Consulting May Be Your Organization’s Perfect Fix. Here’s How.

Post author By Ed Muzio
Post date July 17, 2023

I may have the least sexy area of expertise in the entire management consulting universe. While my peers and colleagues do great work in trendy areas like vision setting, leadership style discovery, Agile project management, innovation, DE&I, and the like, I’m sitting over here talking about what’s going on in meetings, whether graphs look forward, and how decisions get made day in and day out. Bo-ring.

And yet…

“We need to do a better job setting our strategic objectives this year,” a prospective client tells me.

Now, I don’t know how things work where you live, but in my world strategic planning is beautiful and alluring. What could be more compelling than helping a company’s leadership decide, together, what they want to get their entire organization to accomplish over the next one to five years? It’s unarguably crucial. It impacts everyone, and everything. It’s OMG-level important, and we consultants are positively dying to help companies do it. Many of us do a great job at it, too.

But…

In this case, with a few questions, I soon learn that “do a better job” isn’t really about the process or the objectives. What this client really needs is for something different to happen this year so that the beautiful objectives set by leaders actually get done this time around. That’s what hasn’t been happening.

Enter Mr. Boring with, “what do you do with your objectives after you create them? How do they get woven into the actual work and meetings in the organization? Do they appear in graphs?” Strategic planning is great, but no amount of objective setting automatically leads to objective delivery.

“Well, they get sent out and discussed, but then we tend not to work on them. Oh. Hmm. Yeah. Execution could use a look.”

Thus begins one conversation.

Or…

“We’re going to take time to reflect as a leadership team on our individual styles and values so that we show up as authentic and transparent,” claims another client proudly.

Whoa. Wshew. Be still my heart. There’s nothing more popular than working with leaders on how their individual preferences, unique approaches, and particular perspectives fuel their personal brands. Cross this with the call we’re all hearing for authenticity and transparency, and you’ve set up a hero’s journey of reflection, self-discovery, and personal development that rises to reality-TV levels of intensity. Again, it’s legitimately important, and several of my contemporaries do a great job helping senior leaders go there.

Except…

In this case I discover that the problem they’re solving for, “how we show up,” is based on feedback from an employee survey. At issue is the employees’ perception that decision-making by leadership happens in a vacuum, divorced from reality.

“Great,” says Captain Uncool. “Style is super important. But how have your team members and their subordinate teams agreed to build transparency into decision-making every day? How does leadership and management consistently ensure that people understand not just what has been decided, but why?” Deep personal reflection may not be the ticket.

“Hmm. I guess we mostly just tell people what to do next.” Thus begins another conversation.

Yeah, it’s true. I’m the weirdo management consultant who cares deeply about whether your charts are forward-looking and whether your group decision-making follows a rational process. I talk about organizational immune responses and systemically habituated behavioral patterns. I point out that most research on group problem solving doesn’t apply directly to management teams (because it was run on groups of strangers), and I pay attention to how much time staff meetings spend looking forward (versus talking about current status or history). It’s OK. Don’t try to console me. I’ve made peace with my oddity.

Here’s why…

There’s a whole bunch of interesting, shiny stuff you can work on in an organization, and it’s all potentially quite useful. But whatever you choose – vision-setting, transparency, accountability, agility, innovation, DE&I, or the like – one inconvenient fact remains: in real life, it all eventually gets forced through the keyhole of management habits and systematic behavior. If the people meeting at all levels to run the company regularly look at new and different information and decide whether to change things based on what it tells them – what I call Iterative Management® – any of those highly attractive efforts may have legs. But if the keyhole is too small – if management as a whole is more likely to filter out new information instead of seeking it, discourage messengers from bringing contrary news instead of rewarding them, and hold back change instead of enabling it, those beautiful and important initiatives will all fall equally flat. Everyone will be left with only frustration and the vague sense that “nothing ever really gets better around here. Which means, worst of all, the next initiative will have an even steeper hill to climb yet no greater chance of success.

[[RELATED VIDEO: FIVE KEY PRACTICES FOR ITERATIVE MANAGEMENT]]

Don’t get me wrong. The exciting, alluring stuff can have extremely high value. It’s worth a look, and can be especially powerful with external expert support. But please accept this as a friendly reminder: if you find yourself trying to do those things but getting consistently stuck, or if you’re trying to do those things as a force-fit solution for a more systemic problem, well then – take it from Mr. Boring – your best step might not be to just try harder. It might instead be hiding in the least sexy area of management consulting you can possibly imagine.

Want more? Visit the Group Harmonics Industry Intelligence Archive for ideas, whitepapers, and case studies about management culture and how it impacts so many facets of the organization.

Growth Human Resources Operations

Changing Culture Isn’t Easy – but it’s Not THAT Complicated

Post author By Ed Muzio
Post date July 10, 2023

Despite intense, often haughty agreement among HR and business executives about the importance of workplace culture, advocates enjoy surprisingly little commonality and precision in defining what it actually is. “Collections of values and practices,” “a definition of the proper way to behave,” and “underlying ways of interacting” represent but a few of the many gravitas-rich, specificity-poor phrases bandied about on the subject. From the discussion, heavy on form but light on substance, one might conclude that culture functions a bit like the weather: impacting everyone, influencing everything, and permeating the workplace ubiquitously and from a great height.

The weather, of course, isn’t something you change. You can accept it, enjoy it, brace for it, or shelter from it – but you can’t do much else. Sadly, that’s how many employees, managers, and even leaders think about company culture – as something to be recognized, handled, and possibly complained about – and that’s about it. Real discussions about how to change it happen only in the stratosphere, and only in the most vague and buzzwordy terms.

Edgar Schein of MIT Sloan, often credited with inventing the term, gave us a significantly less nebulous and more actionable definition of organizational culture. He called it

A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems… that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (1)

In other words, “we” in the organization – whether us personally or the “we” before we got here – faced challenges in the past and found ways to overcome them. Having thus helped us succeed, the behaviors underlying those solutions became embedded into a set of unconscious assumptions about the way we work and the way the world works with us, all of which we model to each other in our daily interactions.

Taking this a step further, combining Schein’s work with the cultural framework research of Fons Trompenaars (2), a picture emerges of culture in this moment as the observable manifestation of those underlying assumptions, processed through the creation first of norms defining what is good and what is bad, and then of values regarding what is right and what is wrong. The result takes the form of observable and measurable artifacts – things that happen in real life as a result of that underlying structure, adopted long ago perhaps by accident and now driving current behavior in a tangible way. A bulls-eye type diagram showing an arrow flowing outward from assumptions, to norms, to values, to artifacts

Imagine Company A, a business with a culture of “highly effective meetings.” How did that come to be? Perhaps some time ago it was discovered in the organization that results were improved (survival guaranteed) when meetings were well structured. By carrying that assumption forward, the team created a set of norms suggesting that it is good to use group time wisely, and bad to waste it. This led to values around how to run a meeting, with employees being rewarded for having crisp agendas or chastised for calling people together with no plan. Ultimately, this led up to a clear artifact: if you walk the halls and insert yourself into various meetings, you will notice that every single one employs a detailed, written agenda.

This allows us to think of culture less like weather descending upon us as we walk down the street, and more like our own habits driving our behavior. Do we swing our arms as we walk? Smoke a cigarette? Our habits do influence us in ways difficult to immediately control. But, we also work on them, and can change them.

Actually, we’re always working on and changing them. As today’s team members work on today’s problems, their solutions can’t help but become tomorrow’s culture. So there’s no magic needed to “get people to work on the culture” – they’re already doing that. All that’s needed to make an improvement is to pay attention to what people are actually doing.

A bullseye-type diagram with an arrow flowing inward from artifacts, to values, to norms, to assumptions

Imagine Company B, culturally the opposite of Company A when it comes to meetings. Here, most employees languish in unstructured meetings consuming too much time. Trying to change that culture by adjusting peoples’ assumptions is futile: no doubt people already complain of the problem in the abstract and to little avail. Imagine instead giving a few teams of coworkers a template for crafting better meeting agendas and having them agree to try the new approach out for five meetings. Even with no requirement beyond meeting #5, if the template helps, the teams will naturally keep using it. And at least some members will bring it over to other meetings they attend. Before long, the template is considered the right one to use, then a fundamentally good thing, and finally the whole idea of using agendas has faded into a background assumption. (“Of course we use the template in this meeting – why wouldn’t we?”) Company B’s culture around meetings now looks a lot more like Company A’s.

In culture change, artifacts or behaviors come first. The same people who can’t identify or won’t budge on their core assumptions will readily welcome a new tool or technique that makes life easier. If this replaces an older approach, the cycle has begun, and today’s solution starts embedding itself into the shared behavioral patterns that become tomorrow’s culture.

Culture, and culture change, need be neither nebulous nor far-removed. As you walk across the street, you can’t change the weather but you can change your habits. At work, you can’t change assumptions but you can change your actions. If you or your team is feeling the need for shared behavioral change, you can quit worrying about the highfalutin language of culture and just start doing some useful things. Choose well and culture may just take care of itself.

—
This article was excerpted from “Culture: How to Define it and How to Change it,” a Group Harmonics Industry Intelligence whitepaper. Visit the archive for the full version, as well as other whitepapers and case studies about changing management culture and norms.

(Originally published on LinkedIn.)

References:

Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership
Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture

Growth Human Resources Operations

Execution, Accountability, & Alignment: Symptoms to Understand, not Problems to Solve

Post author By Ed Muzio
Post date July 3, 2023

Leaders and managers face constant pressure to produce complex output with overtaxed resources under unpredictable circumstances. It’s easy to say that to stay profitable an organization must stay nimble, but the impact of overload, uncertainty, change, and even rapid growth across a diversified workforce isn’t straightforward. Failure modes in execution, accountability, and alignment threaten to crater results, exhaust employees, and throw off extra expenses:

Execution failures range from the inability to adjust activity in light of new information to systematic, often accidental discouragement of innovation. When silos or missed commitments impede collaboration and sequester resources in the wrong places, overall performance suffers.
Accountability gaps often take the form of unclear plans, or status updates so heavily polished as to obscure what’s really going on. Either way, the diminished trust and defensiveness between teammates that follows can only damage both commitment and results.
Alignment problems between individuals or groups force people into a futile arms race as peers advocate for themselves and fight each other for resources and attention. Poorly defining expectations and actively avoiding negative news only compound the problem.

These issues are serious; their impact potentially catastrophic. So, it’s no surprise to find providers offering solutions promising to overcome each one, tempting overtasked HR and business executives to fight the evil they see. Have accountability problems? Work on goal-setting and planning. Struggling cross-functionally? Ramp up communication and internal advocacy. In this way, every obstacle can supposedly be overcome by an equally specific solution.

Or not. A CHRO or VP of Operations can literally spend an entire career defining problems, researching solutions, auditioning providers, and implementing program after program – all without ever addressing the underlying cause of… well, anything. Along the way, things may improve incrementally – but not permanently, not in proportion to the time and effort invested, and never in a way that does any good for the next problem in line. That’s because the obvious issue often is not be the actual problem at all. Execution, accountability, and alignment aren’t independent challenges to conquer, but related outcomes of the way the organization has collectively decided to work.

Humans construct organizations to produce complex output. The building you live in, the automobile parked outside, the assortment of processed foods in your pantry, and the mobile device in your pocket have one thing in common: none could have been created by a sole actor. The organizing of people and the coordinating of output is central to most of what humanity has produced. Along the way, over the last century or so, we have evolved a set of unspoken assumptions about how best to construct those organizations. These norms are invisible, comfortable and so commonplace as to feel intuitive; they’re generally left unquestioned. Unfortunately, they’re also mostly wrong – at least relative to reality today.

The standard North American management model goes something like this: Begin with a long-range goal, create “the plan” to achieve it, assign resources for each section of “the plan” to a manager who will stitch together subordinate employees’ work in support of his or her piece of the pie, and meet regularly to check that everything is more or less progressing. Typically, the only opportunity to substantively adjust “the plan” and change resource assignments is a presentation-heavy, multi-level, labor intensive review process of heavily curated meetings scheduled no more than twice per year.

Making and occasionally revisiting a long-range plan is certainly useful. But for a moment, hold in mind two ideas simultaneously: First, the North American management model’s reliance on holding to a stable version of “the plan” and its resource allocations. Second, the fact that in today’s world much of the basis for “the plan” will probably change weekly, not semiannually. Now, consider again the issues of execution, alignment, and accountability. You’ll find it nearly impossible not to notice three things:

Execution Failures arise as soon as reality diverges from “the plan.” Work groups can’t pivot quickly enough, innovation is discouraged, and silos begin competing for ever-scarcer resources as teams try to overcome by brute force the discrepancy between plan and reality.
Accountability Gaps appear shortly thereafter. Increased workload adds to role confusion and data overload, meetings get longer and more verbose, pressure increases to explain away problematic results, scrutiny ramps up all around, and trust falters.
Alignment Issues naturally follow. Individuals begin advocating for themselves and bickering over the competing needs, team meetings become more ceremonial than practical, and even the most basic definitions of who-is-doing-what end up mired in confusion and debate.

Tackling these as individual obstacles won’t solve the problem causing them any more than taking an aspirin will repair a broken arm. What’s needed, in engineering parlance, is a “root cause fix.” In this case, that means a changed set of operational parameters for how the organization works.

This isn’t hypothetical. Around 10-20% of organizations have already evolved new practices. Their management teams meet regularly to look forward at the likely outcomes of the present course, not backward at what’s been done so far. Their executives and managers make data-based decisions and execute synchronized adjustments based on what’s ahead and how it differs from what’s planned, not what’s already happened and who is at fault. And bringers of bad news aren’t simply tolerated, they’re actively encouraged, because the sooner an early warning appears, the more time there is to respond.

Plans still exist in this scenario, of course – as a framework. But the daily job of management at all levels isn’t to hold the organization to the plan, but to shepherd the organization to its goal(s). This could reasonably be called the opposite of standard North American management. At Group Harmonics, we simply call it Iterative Management®. The closer any organization gets to this standard, the better its chances of exhibiting agility and coordinated execution in the face of constant change.

Defining this type of management and then developing innovative ways to shift culture by changing embedded assumptions has been the focus of much of my professional career. And it’s been said that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. In this case, I’d amend that to “recognizing the problem you actually have.” If your organization is facing challenges in execution, accountability, or alignment, whether all the time or only when change is afoot, that indeed is a problem worth solving. But in my experience, you’ll be much better served in both the short and long run if you solve it by finding the cause instead of attacking the symptom. Do so and you’ll solve today’s problem more permanently, prevent a few of tomorrow’s problems, and end up with an organization more capable than you ever thought possible.

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This article was excerpted from Execution, Accountability, and Alignment: Correcting Causes, Not Symptoms, a Group Harmonics Industry Intelligence whitepaper. Visit the archive for the full version, as well as other whitepapers and case studies about changing management culture and norms.

(Originally published on LinkedIn.)

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