All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Thanksgiving is coming right up. As modern, change-embracing trend-setters, I know you and your fellow members of the KJR community will be taking advantage of convection ovens to cook your birds faster than your parents achieved with their quaint conventional roasting technologies.

No? You don’t use a convection oven? Me neither. But if you’re like me, you’ll warm up your leftovers in the microwave.

Microwave ovens were hugely successful. Convection ovens weren’t. Recognizing why will make you and your teams more successful in rolling out the incipient changes you’re championing.

When microwaves first appeared on the scene (the ovens, that is, not the 300 MHz to 300 GHz electromagnetic radiation, which after all appeared on the scene shortly after the universe got started) … where was I?

Oh, yes, when microwave ovens appeared on the scene, Americans had already embraced convenience foods, whose principle attractions were (1) they were packaged as single portions so everyone could eat what they were in the mood for; (2) they needed far less effort to prepare (none) than the equivalent meal made from a recipe (between some and a lot); and (3) they were ready to eat far more quickly than the equivalent meal made from scratch.

Convenience foods might not have been as tasty as home-cooked meals, but they were palatable enough that the convenience outweighed the difference for many households on many evenings.

The microwave made convenience foods even more convenient, along with the salutary speed they brought to defrosting frozen food and the ease with which they warm coffee that’s become lukewarm.

Speaking of which, excuse me a moment …

Thanks.

Compare microwaves to convection ovens. Convection ovens are for cooks, not for folks heating prepared meals. For cooks they speed up baking and roasting by maybe 25%. That’s nice but not transformational. And it added enough uncertainty that cooks couldn’t rely on the conversion charts that came with the convection oven.

They also couldn’t rely on their experience … their feel for conventional cooking, refined over a lifetime of kitchen endeavor.

Convection cooking either meant abandoning recipes collected and practiced over years, decades, even generations in favor of those in a convection oven cookbook. Or else it meant subjecting every recipe to trial and error to get the convection time and temperature right.

And oh, by the way, the cook doesn’t have the luxury of serving a few burned or undercooked meals to the family while getting the hang of the new appliance.

This meant cooks, faced with a convection oven, had to start over. I, faced with a microwave and a frozen burrito, did not.

One more bit of information: Convection ovens haven’t been a dismal failure. They’ve been a dismal failure in the home marketplace, but as I learned while researching this article, they’re quite popular in commercial kitchens.

This makes perfect sense. When you’re running a restaurant, cutting baking and roasting cycle time by 25% or more means delivering meals to customers that much faster, which in turn means turning over tables by roughly the same amount.

Which, following the logic chain to its unavoidable conclusion, means that comparing otherwise identical restaurants, one using convection ovens has 25% more capacity than a competitor that uses conventional ones, with no loss of meal quality.

Of course restaurants learned to use convection ovens. They couldn’t afford not to. And their chefs were (and are) developing new recipes all the time. Developing them for convection ovens took no more effort than developing them for conventional ones.

To summarize:

> A major cultural change had preconditioned the home-kitchen marketplace, plowing the metaphorical field for microwave ovens. Convection ovens had no such advantage.

> Convection ovens made competent cooks less competent. Microwaves might have encouraged laziness and less discerning palates, but their only impact on home cooks was to make convenience foods even more convenient, thereby letting them off the hook for even more meals.

> In commercial situations, convection ovens offered direct financial benefit, with few or no serious negatives for the chefs.

Ask your change teams: Are their plans consistent with business culture? Will they make change targets’ lives better in some easily explained way? Enough better to offset their short-term loss of competence, if it’s going to have that effect?

Because when it comes to making change happen, business benefit might be the goal.

But it has little impact on success.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Sometimes you should document.

Last week I suggested that if you’re being backstabbed, scapegoated or otherwise hung out to dry, documentation won’t help you.

Several members of the KJR community pointed out that if you think you might ever file a formal complaint … if, for example, you might involve the EEOC or if things might end up on court for one reason or another … then good documentation is essential.

As long as we’re on the subject of your relationship with your employer going sideways, let’s take a few minutes to talk about your next exit interview.

Here’s what the exit interview’s point is supposed to be: Freed from concerns of reprisals, departing employees are supposedly more likely to provide honest information about their employment experience than those they’re leaving behind.

And so, exit interviews should help HR pinpoint both problem managers and more systemic issues, and in either case to recommend corrective courses of action.

Here’s what actually doesn’t happen, according to “Making Exit Interviews Count” (Everett Spain and Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business Review, April 2016):

“… many companies don’t even conduct these interviews. Some collect exit interview data but don’t analyze it. Some analyze it but don’t share it with the senior line leaders who can act on it. Only a few collect, analyze, and share the data and follow up with action.

Imagine an HR staff member — call her Mary Mencheslaus — charged with conducting exit interviews. Mary is interviewing Wendy Whyme, a five-year employee who tendered her resignation two weeks prior. Whyme explains why she resigned: Gary Gaslight, a top-performing sales rep who employs the unfortunate tactic of taking prospects to strip bars and requiring the whole sales team to come along. Whyme is the third departing employee in as many months to tell the same story.

Mencheslaus documents the interview, writes a summary for Gaslight’s personnel file, and meets with Gaslight’s manager, Fred Foghat, to explain the situation. Foghat explains the consequences of killing golden geese and suggests to Mencheslaus that dropping the whole matter would be best for all concerned.

Mencheslaus next meets with her manager, Sam Sansvertebrae, to inform him of the situation. Sansvertebrae explains that Gaslight, because he’s such a strong rainmaker, is untouchable, that there’s no point in pursuing the matter further, and that Mencheslaus should remove her remarks from Gaslight’s file and drop the issue immediately.

Mencheslaus, being a highly principled individual, refuses and escalates to the head of HR. Shortly thereafter she finds herself looking for her next employment opportunity.

Meanwhile, Foghat lets Gaslight know about his meeting with HR, suggesting he tone things down a bit until it all blows over. In response, Gaslight spreads the word among his personal network that Whyme is bad news and a troublemaker.

If you think the above tale of woe or something similar doesn’t play out, over and over again, throughout the halls of business organizations all over the map … this is just my opinion mind you … you aren’t being paid for your charming naiveté.

Who flubbed the situation, and how?

Whyme‘s mistake wasn’t trusting HR’s discretion. Mencheslaus didn’t mention any names in her documentation or her meeting with Sansvertebrae. Whyme’s mistake was thinking she had any upside for responding honestly and completely in her exit interview.

As a five-year employee she had to understand the company’s management culture well enough to know nobody would care. And she had to know that if anyone reprimanded Gaslight or otherwise called for him to change his stripes, that he would figure out she was a likely informant; and that he was vindictive enough and sufficiently well connected that she was putting her career at risk.

Did Mencheslaus make a mistake? You bet she did. She also had to understand the company’s and HR’s management culture, also Sansvertebrae’s management style. Whatever other actions she took, she should have consulted him before taking any other action. Then, if she decided to escalate in spite of its utterly predictable futility, she’d also have been smart enough to keep personal copies of her documentation regarding the entire sorry episode before doing so, just in case one of Gaslight’s victims decided to take the company to court.

Anyone else? Of course. I hope everyone in the KJR community is savvy enough to recognize that the CEO and board of directors are the source of every aspect of the company culture.

That includes the culture of plausible deniability that’s carefully designed to insulate everyone above Foghat and Sansvertebrae in the management hierarchy from the reality of How We Do Things Around Here.

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