LEADING THOUGHTS

In search of the entrepreneur’s risk-taking mentality, a professor of corporate strategy undertakes intensive field test. . . at the casino. His lesson: lousy at Baccarat, lousy in the boardroom. Read the article

Organizations are hollowing out their middle manager ranks. Pity: these folks have a greater impact on company performance than almost any other part of the organization. Their influence stems from their role in project management: allocating resources, imposing deadlines. Not sexy stuff but critical for effective operations. Read the article

You’ve caught the reorganization bug and want to come up with a whole new org chart. Only trouble is, you can’t decide which comes first: people or structure? Do you focus on the employees you already have and then figure out how best to organize them? Or do you design the organization around your business strategy and the capabilities and competencies required to execute on your business strategy? Go to article

How do you manage a team across borders and time zones? Start by tearing up your old management rule book. Like to empower people? Be loosey goosey with processes? Think again. Go to article

You’ve been managing knowledge workers for a few years now and you’re still flummoxed about how to wring more productivity from these colleagues without wringing their necks. Do you get rid of the foosball table? Pay them extra to come into work on time? Spike their java with Red Bull?

How about starting by reducing the barriers that get in the way of productive interaction and collaboration with colleagues. Matson (McKinsey) and Prusak (Institute for Knowledge Management) advise organizations to look here for answers because knowledge workers spend a great deal of time interacting with other knowledge workers.

Matson’s and Prusak’s research shows that half of all interactions are constrained by one of five barriers.

1 and 2. Physical and technical barriers: geographic distance or lack of tools for locating the right people. Workaround — Communities of practice supported by online tools to help workers find colleagues with useful information.

3. Social/cultural barriers: rigid hierarchies that discourage sharing. Workaround — Organization-specific case studies discussed in small groups to promote a better understanding of company culture; incorporating knowledge sharing in performance reviews.

4. Contextual barriers: difficulty translating knowledge widely. Workaround — Rotate employees across teams and divisions; stage creative forums where specialists can learn about other specialists’ projects.

5. Time barriers: perceived lack of time to interact. Workaround — Identify employees that knowledge workers need to interact with and on what topics.

“Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers,” by Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak; McKinsey Quarterly (September 2010)

Organizational development and change management more than ever before are being linked to learning and talent development, according to a report recently published by the UK-based CIPD.

“It is clear that organizational development and design will become increasingly important as organizations seek to change, innovate and to link learning to organizational goals,” according to CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey report. But the report also noted that “practitioners are less involved in discussing the design, delivery and impact of learning with other managers. This alignment issue is a key one as L&TD seeks to build its reputation and impact.”

The survey found that for 46 percent of respondents, the major organizational change affecting learning and talent development in the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organizational development, and performance management to drive change. For 37 percent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

Other findings from the CIPD survey:

• As a result of the economic downturn, learning and talent development is becoming more focused on value and impact; in other words, doing more with less. “It will be particularly important for professionals to ensure that their L&TD activities are even more closely aligned with business strategy and to be able to assess the return on investment generated.”
• Almost 60 percent of organizations undertake talent management activities. Among these, half rate such activities as “effective” and only 3 percent consider them “very effective.” The three most effective activities to manage talent are coaching (39 percent), in-house development programmes (32 percent), and high-potential development schemes (31 percent).
• The three most common ways to evaluate talent management activities: feedback from line managers (42 percent); rretention of those identified as high-potential (35 percent); and  anecdotal observation of change (35 percent).
• In terms of leadership skills, the main gaps identified by employers were performance management (setting standards for performance and dealing with under-performance) and leading and managing change.
• Internships are growing in popularity, partly because employers want to provide a lifeline for talented young people. The results are encouraging. “The fact that a third of firms report higher productivity as a result of their internships is particularly encouraging, given that many interns are new to the workplace and are still in the process of learning new skills.”

About 86 percent of responding organizations (623) had headquarters in the UK and the remainder (101) were based outside the UK.

photo credit: Limmud

According to social network theory, people on average are only a few connections away from the information they seek. But in large organizations, this theory falls apart: some employees clearly have longer search paths than others in locating the knowledge they require. Is this simply because they have an inferior network?

Not really, say researchers from INSEAD and Apple University. Singh, Hansen, and Podolny suggest there are two dynamics at play. One, employees who belong to the periphery of an organization — women and those with lower tenure or poor connectedness to experts — have limited awareness of who knows what in an organization and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. Two, when these employees do seek information, they tend to contact colleagues like themselves who are also outliers.

The researchers say employees on the periphery need to cross social boundaries to discover “who knows what,” and that their managers have a role in making this happen.

“We speculate that reliance on interpersonal networks remains crucial when a firm’s knowledge cannot be easily codified and stored in databases, when it changes
quickly (making it difficult to keep track of who knows what), and when it is distributed across people who are not official experts,” the researchers write in their working paper The World is Not Small for Everyone. “This calls for managers to recognize that formal IT systems are rarely substitutes for inter-personal networks. The implication is that managers need to help members on the periphery develop their networks.”

“The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations”, by Jasjit Singh, Morten T. Hansen, and Joel M. Podolny; INSEAD working paper 2009/49/ST/EFE

photo credit: Sambhu Sankar

Researchers at the Centre for Performance-Led HR (Lancaster U Management School) argue that organizational design is fast becoming a strategic capability, particularly for those organizations undergoing business model change. And where should that strategic capability reside? “For HR to be truly strategic,” they write in a white paper, “the function needs to develop the capability of influencing business model design at each level of analysis (industry value web, organisation value proposition, and component structure).”

In this video, the researchers make their case.

At the 0:38 mark, Paul Sparrow discusses what organizational design capabilities involve, and makes the distinction between org design and organizational development. He says HR is in the perfect position to marry the two.

At the 1:10 mark, Craig Marsh offers a series of questions that HR directors should ask of themselves around the need for leading the charge in org design.

At the 3:00 mark, he says HR directors need to think bigger, more broadly, and in a more integrated fashion.

Download the CPHR white paper, Integrated Organisation Design: The New Strategic Priority for HR Directors, here or send me an email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com.

Here is a nice six-minute story from Fabienne Munch, Director of Ideation at Herman Miller, about how she transformed and energized her 15-member team in the space of five months.

Stealing an idea from Google’s playbook, Munch gave members of her team $5,000 each to pursue an idea of their choice. There were three conditions: the project had to relate to Herman Miller’s mission; the staffers had to invite an outsider to participate; and they had to be open to the idea of pooling resources with their colleagues. At the five-minute mark, Munch talks about what happened next.

In the final two minutes, Munch talks about workplace trends that are informing how Herman Miller is designing work spaces.

In academic literature, contract workers often have a bad rap. According to the popular core-periphery model, workforces have a central core of ‘‘insider’’ permanent employees in whom the organization is willing to invest and a group of ‘‘outsider’’ contingent workers regarded as peripheral.

Given that organizations invest little in these contract external workers, researchers generally believe that these outsiders are less likely to internalize the organization’s values and are less productive.

According to researchers Lapalme, Stamper, Simard, and Tremblay (U Quebec at Montreal and Western Michigan University), most studies fail to account for how agency workers perceive themselves. Is it possible for “outsiders” to perceive themselves as “insiders”? If so, what are the conditions in which that would happen?

The researchers surveyed 191 agency workers from Canadian financial firms, assessing their perceptions regarding the level of support from both their supervisors and the client firms’ permanent workers, as well as the agency workers’ level of perceived insider status and emotional attachment to the client firm. Agency worker supervisors (within the client firm) assessed the agency workers’ level of interpersonal relations.

They report three findings:
1. Agency workers can indeed experience “perceived insider status.”
2. Those perceptions grow out of perceived support from supervisors and the client firms’ permanent workers.
3. Perceptions of insider status are linked to higher levels of emotional attachment and interpersonal relations, even among workers considered marginally tied to the organization.

“As our results suggest, it is not the ‘objective’ classification of externalized worker that is associated with worker attitude and behavior, but how the workers are treated by important organizational agents that leads them to feel like an ‘insider,’ creating greater likelihood of reciprocation of higher affective commitment and interpersonal facilitation even from externalized workers.”

Implication: Smart organizations should ensure that their permanent employees understand the importance of creating a supportive environment for contract workers. Of course, that may be a tough sell. For some permanent employees, the use of agency workers may be perceived as a threat, even if it may be beneficial.

Here is how to frame the message: “In some cases, the use of agency workers actually helps provide a certain degree of job security for permanent employees,” the authors write. “By using temporary workers to expand or shrink their workforce, organizations may shield their permanent employees from layoffs caused by numerous factors such as business cycle fluctuations or downsizing. Accordingly, managers would benefit from explaining why they have chosen to use agency workers, in order to reassure their permanent employees and ensure that they are more likely to support these colleagues.”

“Bringing the outside in: Can ‘external’ workers experience insider status?” by Marie-Eve Laplame, Christina L. Stamper, Gilles Simard, and Michel Tremblay; Journal of Organizational Behaviour (30, 919-940; 2009)

If you cannot find this paper in your local library, email me for a copy: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: The Other Dan