An unexpected shift

The original working title of this piece was Where Dreams go to Die; a phrase I used regularly in my last five years on the job. I was surprised when this essay took on a life of its own and headed in a direction and to a conclusion I never expected. Some say the story writes itself…

Here’s how it started. I had a colleague in Singapore, transplanted from the UK. She thought she had died and gone to heaven and vowed to never return home. I had another colleague who was a regional President for Australasia. There were so many action spots in East Asia: Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong. Of all the places in the world to locate, he also chose Singapore. I have a family member; he moved to Singapore and from there was able to conveniently manage his U.S. affairs with minimal personal contact. We don’t even get a holiday card from him. Singapore was the Promised Land for these people. The weather was perfect, the social fabric was tight, the government sound. There was wealth, entertainment, culture in spades. And peace. The rules were strict and the cost of citizenship steep. But once you were in and you minded the rules, you were done.

What do you do after you win a gold medal at the Olympics? After you’ve been President of the United States? After you landed your dream job? What’s the point in struggling when all your needs are met? In retrospect the obvious answer is you reinvent yourself. But it’s not the only answer.

This was hard for me to understand. Since I was ten years old I was always hustling for a gig. I loved snow-days; not because I got a break from school but because it meant I could pick up few bucks shoveling. Summers brought lawn jobs, and spring break was a time to work and earn. I knew the value of a dollar and I wanted more. The hustle and grind psychology fit me like a glove – in an intensely competitive workplace with intensely ambitious peers the path forward (and upward) was open for anyone who could to outwork the competition.  Everyone I knew wanted a ticket on the elevator up. Those that weren’t competing came as a surprise to me and were relegated to a place of lower esteem in my mental hierarchy. I surrounded myself with like-minded upward-focused colleagues. As the years passed I kept pace, and then out-paced most of my peer group. If I couldn’t climb in situ I’d learn as much as I could and move on.

But different perspectives would intrude. In 1992 Clarke told me “Al, work is for chumps”, in 1997 Kenny told me “Al, I’m more focused on lifestyle development than career development”. I remembered these conversations for their dissonance but didn’t understand the message until many years later.

In 2014 I spent six months interviewing every person in my new department.  One of my standard questions was “what do you look like at the height of your professional powers?”. I had always taken for granted that “Roles of Increasing Responsibility” were the only viable career path. To my surprise nobody wanted to be CEO. In fact, very few wanted to be people leadership roles at all. Some aspired to become high-level individual contributors, but most people just wanted stability, predictability, and calm – they wanted confidence their hours would not change, and confidence in their long-term employment.

This really surprised me, and I (painfully) began to shift my perspective towards the motives, aspirations, and hopes of the majority. I listened and learned. Some folks were struggling to make ends meet and working multiple jobs. Some were students who prioritized education and needed the work to pay for it. Others had complicated lives outside of work caring for children, or elders, or the burden of chronic disease. Many folks had rich external lives – there were coaches, volunteers, musicians, athletes, community organizers. For all these people work was a means to an end and not an end unto itself. The majority needs a calm, reliable work schedule to keep everything in balance.

So here’s the lesson I learned – There is an important place at work for those colleagues who seek only stability in their professional life. These people are gold, and they carry the company on their backs. They aren’t competing with you, and they don’t want a hassle – they just want to work. I wish I had known this 25 years ago.  For the sake of everyone I hope you learn this faster and easier than I did.

My ask?

Identify these people in your organization now. Honor, respect, and protect them. Learn their story outside of work and support them as best you can. Give them a safe space to exercise their craft. Give them a lifeline of stable, predictable employment. You, Work, and the World will be better for it.

Green is the Engine of Neglect

“Are the metrics green?”

“Yes”

“Great, don’t worry about it – go fix something that’s red”

Start Rant:

You’ve heard me rant for years how good goals drive bad behavior. These damn color-coded KPI dashboards are a great example. Leaders see red and lose their minds; leaders see green and go back to sleep, assuming everything is fine. This sort of organization is always surprised when something bad happens. And something bad always happens: green is the engine of neglect.

Weak cultures interpret green dashboards as the goal and punish departments/leaders who allow KPIs to drift into the red. Worse yet are those organizations whose response to prolonged red KPIs is to simply increase the frequency and intensity of rhetoric without investing in solutions (read: process change).

We have all been in client meetings where one miss in five at-bats results in a KPI flipping from green to red. We have all watched sites receive brutal inspection reports from the Authorities, and then wonder how they landed in regulatory distress – all their inspection risk KPIs were solid green for years! It’s like people see green and stop thinking about what the metrics really tell us, focusing on the dashboard color only. Say it again, green is the engine of neglect.

End Rant, Begin Analysis:

Weak leaders often neglect the narrative behind a metric and either can’t ask the right question or can’t explain the process represented by the metric.

“Color compliance” is the culprit – Weak leaders rarely challenge and always incentivize green metrics. Color compliance implies the goal is not to get better; the goal is to stay green. Metrics must be revalidated frequently, trends must be questioned, and underlying nascent risk must be identified. If not, savvy teams will take the bait and learn to game the metrics without controlling the underlying process.

Weak leaders spend very little time understanding why a KPI is green and understanding what daily and direct interventions are necessary to keep it green. These interventions are necessary, and without them KPIs will spontaneously drift into yellow, then red. Say it again, green is the engine of neglect.

Effective leaders understand the mechanisms that maintain control in their operation. Effective leaders understand the origin and reasoning of why a metric is important. Effective leaders understand the ongoing validity of a KPI, the diagnostic value of the measurement, the algorithm that renders a KPI score, the process narrative behind the metric, and the natural drift towards red. Meet these conditions and the metrics will tend to themselves because you have intimate knowledge and involvement in your processes.

Here is your homework assignment: As a leader you must routinely challenge the KPI and the organizational behaviors around that KPI. Ask yourself and your teams,

1. How often, how recently, and in what specific way have you challenged the ongoing validity and utility of a given KPI?
2. What is your process for responding to sub-threshold KPI values and trends, and is your organization guilty of responding only to action-level values for a given KPI?
3. What behaviors and performance levels does your organization incentivize?

Follow-on questions for extra credit and discussion:

1. What keeps you up at night?
2. How do you identify, measure, and respond to emergent and evolving risk?
3. What threats can kill your business and what process do you have to neutralize those threats?
4. How do you respond to sustained green performance (i.e. sub-threshold trends)
5. How do you measure “Quality” and “Culture”?
6. What interval describes your view of sustained performance (hint: think in terms of generational spans – 20-30 years), and what actions are you taking to create a culture of sustained performance?

Say it again, Green is the Engine of Neglect. Don’t be that leader.

Let’s talk!

Local Problems, Global Solutions

Some opening thoughts…

1. Signal to noise processing is an important leadership function. Skilled leaders will connect the dots to establish relationships across disparate data sets. There is a lot of signal out there, but there’s even more noise. Most folks miss the signal amidst all the noise; this creates problems later.
2. Real-time course-correction is another important leadership function. Close attention to signal and tight filtering of noise makes course corrections minor and continuous. Imagine you could fix a problem so well you could be guaranteed it would never come back – you’d take that chance. That is a statement not a question.
3. A problem at one node in the network = a call to action at other nodes for similar vulnerability. A fix at one node does not decrease vulnerability at the other nodes – hence the operative phrase and the subject of this post: Local problems, global solutions.

Once upon a time I had Quality oversight for eight pharmaceutical plants around the world. These plants were interchangeable in theory because they:

1. Had common equipment
2. Made the same things
3. Were supposed to use the same procedures
4. Shared the same Management team

In practice this was not the case!

Our customers were smart and they often outsourced to multiple sites within our global network. These same customers said it felt like they were working with completely different companies as they moved product from one site to the next. One site would make mistake, then implement a local solution. It usually involved some training and a local SOP revision. Practice was organically divergent. Rarely would the solution involve a process change, and almost never would it involve a global communication. And then the exact same problem would occur a few months later at another plant on the other side of the world.

Customers often knew more about our global network than we did. Our sites were insular – they were only focused on the problems at the site and not the problems of other sites. Our support functions, Engineering, Quality, Project Management, were similarly insular. Senior leadership was focused on the aggregate performance of all the sites together rather than individual problems at sites. Site-specific issues were buried in the aggregation of data across the global network. Nobody was looking for a thread that bound sites together. This was a signal-to-noise problem for the Business Unit – the signal was overwhelmed by the noise, and the Management Team was unaware of any signal in the first place.

If we comm’d site-specific issues this across the network, and if we picked a global solution, we could avoid recurrence. Plenty of organizations do this well.

Consider “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” published by the American Alpine Club:

“ Since 1948, the American Alpine Club has documented the year’s most teachable climbing accidents, providing invaluable lessons to climbers. In Accidents in North American Climbing, each incident is thoroughly analyzed to help climbers avoid similar mistakes in the future. In the Know the Ropes and Essentials sections, professional guides and other experts offer in-depth instruction and copious illustration to help prevent avoidable accidents.”

There is a natural tendency to treat each incident as a unique occurrence resulting from unique circumstances. The outcome of this site-centric approach is predictable.

1. Increase in non-revenue generating activity at the sites – sites are buried under investigations and corrective actions focused on a rapid closure rather than actual Improvement. The pressure to release product and invoice the customer overwhelms common sense.
2. Customer service wobbles – Customers have line-of-sight to these issues since they often worked at multiple facilities. These smart savvy customers would ask why we didn’t anticipate this could happen at one site, even though it happened originally at a different site. Customers know more about your business than you do. Very embarrassing!
3. Recurrence – Companies end up solving the same problem repeatedly across the globe because our solutions were site-based, not global.

In my own experience despite thousands of (global) deviations, tens of thousands of corrective actions, and hundreds of thousands of trainings, our deviation (Error) rate was the same as it was five years ago. What a waste of time and talent.

Going forward, your site and global Leaders must:

• Learn to amplify the signal and suppress the noise.
• Respond to the signal early enough and often enough that you aren’t forced to make radical course-corrections.
• Find and fix the systemic vulnerability to prevent the problem from popping up again somewhere else.

Companies put so much effort into hitting the numbers, but very little effort into getting better. Getting better makes hitting the numbers easier. I suspect a cadre of well-networked mid-level engineers and managers can speak to this, and I’m keen to hear from you.