All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

A good friend told me, “I was terminated with 20 minutes left in the day, on a Thursday. They had said I would be severed sometime during the month but they had led me to believe it would be closer to the end of the month. Nice treatment after 24 1/2 years …”

Another company bought his employer a few years before. He had known the day was coming, and he never once expressed resentment over his coming layoff. Elimination of redundant staff is one of the realities of a merger or acquisition. Yes, it’s painful, but there’s no foul — business is out to make good business decisions.

Why was it was managed so badly?

Consider the Portuguese man-of-war. As we learned in high school, although it looks like one animal, it’s actually a colony of independent coelenterates, each of which feeds and reproduces separately.

We’re colonies, too. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, a body is just a gene’s way of making more genes. Even that is a simplification. An unknown proportion of our internal constituents began as independent critters. Mitochondria, for example, the organelles that make oxygen the key to metabolism instead of a toxic gas, started out as free-living bacteria.

Even though each of us is a colony, we manage to act as a purposeful organism – so much so that we harm individual colony members with callous disregard. (Example: Every time someone goes on a diet they starve or kill billions of fat cells – and just think of how many are destroyed during liposuction!)

Liposuction creates personal change. How about business change?

IS projects have always been about business change, and an increasing number of companies recognize that all IS projects are really business change projects that inject significant new technology into the equation.

Most business changes both create and eliminate jobs within the enterprise. Whatever your role in IS, at some point in your career you’ll help eliminate the jobs of innocent employees who did their jobs competently but whose roles are no longer needed because of the business change you helped the company achieve.

Companies are getting better at managing business change. They’ve learned to redesign processes, integrating technology into the new process design. They’ve learned to train employees in the new processes and technology rather than assuming everything will be self-evident. Most have learned to communicate the reason for a change, not just “here’s your new job – now go do it.” Some have even learned that redesigning the organizational chart comes after redesigning processes and technology, not before.

Sadly, though, many companies still see employees as nothing more than adipose cells … hence the phrase, “Getting rid of the fat.” And if you raise your hand to protest a layoff you risk being branded as soft – the business equivalent of “bleeding heart liberal.”

So here’s some advice: If you have an opportunity to influence how your business will manage a change that requires layoffs, don’t get all righteous about what is ethical, compassionate, or the right thing to do. In business, ethics is a personal matter, and ethical businesses get that way through leaders who act ethically, not through preaching.

Instead, be practical.

Point out that the long-term goal of business change is growth, and the cost of laying off one group of employees and then recruiting a different group is far higher than the cost of retraining the employees you have.

Suggest that when “trimming the fat” the company should use a sharp knife, not a sledgehammer. If valuable employees who support change find opportunities while non-performers and change resistors find themselves on the outside, most employees will quietly applaud when they no longer have to cover for their non-producing peers.

Most important of all, point out that every time the company treats departing employees like the cast-off byproducts of cosmetic surgery, the morale of every remaining employee plummets, and employees who might otherwise support change will become sullen and passive resistors of it, something every bit as poisonous as some colonists in a Portuguese man-of-war.

That’s bad for profits, and even worse when the next big change comes around.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Several columns ago, I responded to a reader’s request for instructions on how to speak in ManagementSpeak.

I should have taken my own advice in a subsequent column. Taking business as a whole, I said, IS has a reputation for failed projects, unreliable networks, unhelpful help desks, and a derogatory attitude about end-users. My suggestion that IS won’t be invited to play in the strategy game until it gets the basics right created quite a ruckus.

Without exception, readers from outside of IS endorsed my position. Those from within IS were (ahem) less receptive. So here’s the ManagementSpeak version of the message:

“We own these problems. If you’re running IS it’s time to form a clear picture of how the rest of the company perceives you and develop a plan of action for fixing your image.”

OK, that wasn’t really ManagementSpeak. So sue me.

Imagine for a moment that I’m wrong and IS’s defenders are right — the reasons for IS’s non-delivery are unrealistic expectations by the CEO, lack of cooperation on the part of business leaders, and end-users who can’t find their lips with both hands and a mirror.

Here’s what the CEO would hear if any CIO was dumb enough to present this explanation: “It wasn’t me. It was somebody else who looked like me. And besides, they made me do it! IT’S NOT MY FAULT!!!”

That will work well.

The politics between IS and everyone else makes many companies look like Yugoslavia. All of the explanations IS’s defenders provide are exercises in affixing blame. While fun, worrying about which group started it all is, in the end, unproductive because it started when the Roman Empire fell, everyone who started it is dead, and blaming someone else just makes sure nobody fixes the problem.

If you want IS’s reputation to improve, take personal responsibility for it. If you work on or manage the Help Desk, don’t complain that end-users bypass your services. Figure out why they don’t call you (hint: Ask them) and do something about it.

If you manage application development and your project success rate is low, don’t just complain about how you can’t get what you need from business participants. Work with your company’s business leaders to figure out how you can either get the participation you need or cancel the projects where you can’t.

And don’t stop there. In fact, don’t start there. Take a hard look at where your projects are derailing, focus on the problems IS causes, and fix those first. You’ll be far more convincing when you talk about how to fix business-side issues when you start the conversation by saying, “Here’s how we in IS have been causing problems and here’s what we’re doing about it.”

If you manage the networks, keep track of what fails and fix repeating problems, one at a time. Make sure every network technician repeats the same mantra: “Downtime is abnormal.” Don’t accept OS limitations as an excuse. In a lot of data centers, gripes outnumber suggestions ten-to-one or more. Yes, it’s harder to keep NT servers running, but complaining won’t stabilize them. Make sure you’ve exhausted the possibilities for improving server reliability, then ask your friends in other companies what they do. Or, make a persuasive case for converting them to another OS that includes recognition of all conversion costs.

Then there’s attitude. Twenty years ago I heard one of my experienced colleagues describe end-users as “just parasites on the system.”

Think attitudes have changed? They have. Lots of places they’ve become worse. How are you going to fix bad attitudes? The one-word answer is “leadership”. (For the longer answer … watch this space.)

When IS starts to lose its credibility with the rest of the business, IS employees develop a siege mentality, trust disintegrates, and a downward spiral starts. The worst thing that can happen is for the company’s business leaders to take ownership of the problem, too, because once they do, they’ll have taken responsibility for technology leadership, leaving IS as nothing more than a passive order-processing department.

Sound appealing?

Comments