High Reliability

We have talked at some length previously about a process that allows you to obtain and employ the best people for your organization, being that of using accurate pre-employment testing.  This is a long process dictated by one single factor: attrition; unless you are willing to nuke your entire workforce and start all over, which will certainly speed the process up considerably.  Other than having to explain to authorities about the sudden vaporization of several hundred people, who all work for you, you could cut out a couple of decades of waiting.  If however, that type of abrupt action seems a little excessive to you, you should probably substitute nuking folks with some hard work by you, your management staff, and your workforce in finding out exactly how well your operation is organized and understood.

There is so much about our organizations that we usually do not adequately understand.  It doesn’t make any difference how good your employees are, if the business is not focused correctly and strategically, it will never achieve all that it could, or should.

As you look at the concepts of High Quality, Reliability and Confidence as it applies to your organization, what feeling are you left with?  What keeps you awake at night contemplating on, “What’s Going to Happen Next?”

The most important thing you need to determine is your current state.  This is more than just some Ho Ho test that you apply mentally.  How well does your organization currently execute its mission?  How well do you understand how each process, sub-process, element of sub-processes, sub-elements of sub-processes work, and how it is suppose to work and inter-relate to each other?

Where do you want to be in ten years?  What are the strategies you need to get to a new desired end state?  Are your strategies adequate and understood by all your employees?  Does the structure of your organization enable you to achieve the desired end state?  Organizations are comprised of many systems.  What needs to change in relation to your overall strategy.  Are common values shared by all your employees, and do they equate to your overall goals?  Is the skill set of your employees adequate to meet your end state, and if not, what do you have to do to improve their capabilities?

Our discussion is really about transforming your organization.  It requires well understood and agreed upon strategies, specific and achievable objectives that can be measured, a defined target, and initiatives and deliverables that will move the organization along the continuum of growth and improvement.

Many of our organizations would not survive certain events if they were to happen; however, these events are all preventable in an organization that is well understood and focused.  Major events, which you have direct control over, could shut down your operation for an indeterminate period of time, could result in catastrophic loss, and the possibility of non-recovery and financial destruction.  Other types of events, of lesser significance, would imply a loss of control, loss of confidence of management and/or the customer, and so forth, and they could significantly impact your operational capability.  Our goal is to avoid these types of problems.  Some examples might include, massive destruction of facilities and capabilities that are unique and not amenable to rapid reconstitution, fire and other catastrophic losses, loss of life, loss of specific mission critical data, loss of environmental permits, EEO non-compliance, criminal investigation questioning your organization’s credibility, and so forth.

Sometimes the events don’t have to be huge proportionately to have significant consequences.  Take a restaurant that has a couple of patrons fall ill to salmonella poisoning.  It wasn’t 40 to 100 poor creatures that you sent to the hospital or the morgue, it was just two, but the damage can be unrecoverable when you lose the confidence of your customer base.  You can go from having the most popular place in the community, to a ghost town, just by word of mouth.  The sad part is it was all preventable, but some part of one or more processes broke down.

What about the accounting or financial firm that came under criminal investigation for embezzlement by one of the federal or state authorities?  I’m sure Grand Ma Smith feels comfortable leaving her 200 bazillion dollars under your watchful care, not to mention the several thousand other folks that want their money back within the next few Nano seconds.  When processes don’t function as expected (and this example was preventable after the first, wrongful, deliberate act by the bad guy or gal) things can go South in a hurry with little hope of recovering the confidence of your customer base.

Hazards exist that every company must contend with to support its mission.  Unwanted energy or threats, whether its human error, failure of a piece of equipment or facility, natural disaster, or the very sinister “Mr. Unknown”, who by the way is very good friends with “Mr. I Don’t Know,” either transmit or allow the unwanted flow of energy to the hazard potentially resulting in a system accident.

Processes have to be so well understood, that for every conceivable place that the threat can come in contact with the hazard, a barrier (brick wall, sensor, procedure, engineering control, accounting control, etc.) is in place to ensure that unwanted outcomes or unauthorized interaction does not occur.  And by the way, the barrier has to work to be effective.

One of the most important things to remember about work processes is this, “It probably is not happening as designed, in some part of the process.”  When you sit in your corner office feeling confident that you have this bad boy nailed, you will soon be visited by, “Mr. Guess What Happened.”  That’s right, work as done usually does not equal work as designed.  The only thing that will adequately determine if every aspect of your work is performing as expected and accurately being done, is Barrier Analysis.

This is not a five minute drill.  Depending on the complexity of the operation and its inter-relationship with other processes, it could take an extended time.  However, with a properly motivated and trained workforce, you can get there much quicker, and at least you can sleep a little better at night.  High Reliability is something your organization develops and is a value embodied by every employee if you expect to achieve that level of High Quality, Reliability and Confidence in your operations.

How Do You Know What Is Important?

We have reviewed a couple of examples and several aspects of values that must be embodied by every employee, if an organization truly desires to be successful.  We are entering a phase now that truly benefits from collaboration with professionals who have been trained in organizational behavior.  If you think about it long enough, almost anyone can come up with a list of values and behaviors that they feel are important to their operational activities; however, without the correct focus and analysis to determine which of them is truly the "big hitters", you may not maximize the benefit of this most important exercise. 

From your list, which two of them are the most important to your success?  From the experience I've had in this area, almost every client responds with, "They are all important!"  Although this is true to a degree, with aggressive collaboration and discussion, the interested parties soon realize that there are two that rise to the top as being paramount values or behaviors that every employee has to unconsciously perform in order for the organization to maximize perfection from their collective outputs.  The client almost always discovers, that after the operation was reviewed by an outside professional, there were important attributes that were not on "the list."  It is important to understand that certain behaviors bring more to the table than others.  The  most important question is, "Do you want a  mixed bag of behaviors or everyone on the same sheet of music?"  If it is the latter, then the "pain" of going through this extensive exercise with your entire management  staff cannot be short changed.

After everyone has agreed on the most important two, then we extend the exercise to the next three, and then the next five.  You now have the ten most important values and behaviors that predetermine your future success, quality of outputs, and continued relationship with your customer base.

The organizational behaviorist will then work in collaboration with an industrial psychologist to structure test instruments that will differentiate between candidates that "have it" versus those that "do not."  Obviously, you are only interested in employing folks that fit the mold of what you want your organization's performance to be at an end state.  You already know the frustration associated with who you currently have in your employee base and the problems resulting from that population.  It is now time to take control and reshape your future.

The test instruments identified by the professionals will satisfy all legal requirements for pre-employment testing.  They are all Level 1 test instruments, are void of disparate treatment and disparate impact concerns, are valid and reliable, and completely job related.  The administration of these test instruments will be tailored specifically to your organization, and can be administered on-line from the convenience of your office or the applicant's home; the results are clear, understandable, and easy to interpret concerning a candidate's viability for further consideration.

You now have the big picture, and a menu for success, for one of the most important decisions an employer makes.  If you are interested in hiring the best, training them once, retaining your employee base for decades, and running the best operation possible, then this is the only way to adequately achieve this goal.

I wish each of you the best as you lead your organizations to their greatest potential.

Crystallizing the Thought - Part Two

Our second journey will be as an in- or out-patient at a hospital.  Almost all of us can associate with some type of hospital experience, either as a patient or in support of someone in our families who was a patient.  Many good and rigorous changes have occurred in hospitals around the country as their processes have been re-engineered over the last several decades.  Let's talk in a general sense about some of the activities you might encounter as a patient being processed for some type of surgery.

In most circumstances you have to do go to the facility and complete several pre-admission activities that gather information about you.  At each stage of the process, the staff confirms who they are talking to before they start drawing samples for laboratory analysis, taking x-rays, if needed, evaluating your current health and associated risk for the type of surgery you are scheduled to undertake, reviewing a multitude of documents that inform you of the risks of the procedure, securing your authorization, obtaining copies of your Will, medical instructions, emergency contact information, current medications, and so forth.

On the day of the procedure, you are first greeted by a receptionist that confirms your procedure time, who you are, what procedure you are having, the names of individuals who are in the waiting room with you, that you have completed all the pre-admission requirements, attaches an identification bracelet to your arm, and the like.  Once completed, off you eventually go for further preparation.

At this next stage, the nurse will once again confirm who you are, compare your bracelet to the paperwork, and confirm from you what procedure you are to undertake.  They might start inter-venous solutions.  They will talk to you about where you will go from there, possibly to a pre-surgery holding area.  Once you get to the holding area the process starts all over again.

Once its time for you to go to surgery, another team arrives, and guess what, they ask all the same questions again and then take you to another holding area where you get to answer all the same questions one more time.  In this area you may get visited by the anesthesiologist to see if you have any questions and so forth, and you guessed it, he or she will check your charts, your arm band, ask you what you are having done, if you have any questions, etc.  Then the big moment arrives and here comes another team to take you to surgery.  Your not done, they ask all the same questions before they wheel you to the scheduled operating room.

Upon arrival at the surgery suite, the surgery team helps you onto the table, and one last time, with you anyway, ask you all the same questions and perform all the same confirmations.  After your off in happy land, the surgery team and doctors collectively discuss what is to be done, confirm that they have the correct person, that all the necessary supplies are ready and available, and begin the procedure.

After surgery you go to recovery, where all these confirmations occur between teams delivering and those receiving, obviously without much help from you.  In recovery you are stabilized and eventually returned to a room for some duration, all the while under the care and control of one or more teams of professionals.

Every medication you receive has a multitude of checks and balances to ensure that it is correct, that it is administered correctly, and that confirmation of who the medicine is given to is made before it is administered.  Normally this is done between a minimum of two of the staff through visual and verbal confirmation.

I have only struck the high notes on this process, but I think you can see there are many moving parts and a great many areas in which barriers (both engineered and administrative) have been instituted in order to preclude a threat (human or other) from initiating a hazard (unwanted event) from occurring.

Now lets go back to values and behaviors that a hospital would be interested in having each employee totally embrace.  Such things as quality, stability, integrity, good reputation, enthusiasm for the job, taking individual responsibility, being rule-oriented, paying attention to detail, being calm, being supportive, having high performance expectations, having a clear guiding philosophy, achievement orientation, being team-oriented, being people-oriented, decisiveness, being highly organized, and so forth, are critical to the success of this organization.

Hospitals strive for these attributes in their employees and professional staff.  Your health and well being depend on it.  Most of these institutions are very large and employ great numbers of people.  It is not uncommon for several thousand people to work for just one hospital.  Much rigor is employed to ensure that all its employees meet high technical and educational standards, but it takes special pre-employment testing to ensure they have the personality that will exhibit the behaviors that you are desiring, such as attention to detail that was mentioned previously.

Without improving the selection process prior to actual employment of a candidate, neither the restaurant nor the hospital will have much assurance that this human will perform as expected.  In an ideal world, all 2000 of the hospital's employees would excel at every needed behavior, but what if five percent didn't totally "get it?"  What do you think your chances would be of encountering one of the 100 who didn't totally "get it" in one of the processes we just discussed in the surgery example?  And what could be the possible consequences?  What about the restaurant?  From you experiences being a patron, how many of the employees "get it?"

In my next blog we will begin the process of trying to determine our core and supporting values that are so essential to the success of our respective organizations.

Crystallizing the Thought - Part One

Before we move too far in believing we fully understand the behaviors and values that are important to our organization, let's consider two examples.

The first is one that almost everyone can relate to, being that of a restaurant.  Whether you operate one or not, most of us patronize one or more a week.  What we will not consider in this short journey will be physical characteristics such as parking availability, overall attractiveness of the facility, and so forth.  What we will concentrate on are those things that require humans to behave a certain way and values that humans identify with.

As we enter the building, how are we greeted?  I would bet your experience has been much like mine; the variations about equal the number of visits, whether it is to the same establishment or not.  What would you like to see as a customer, and how would you really like to be treated?  Do you value the fact that the receptionist really is glad to see you?  How immediately and how friendly are you dispositioned?  Does the person behind the counter really look like they are glad to be there and that they really understand how to manage the seating within the restaurant.  If you have to wait, is it for the amount of time that you were told, and if not, were you updated or just left hanging?

When you were told that your table was ready, were you escorted by someone that made you feel welcome, or did you look around trying to figure out whom to follow where?  When you arrived at your table, was it clean and orderly, or was it still wet and half-cleaned, or not cleaned at all?  How about around the table?  If it wasn't perfect, how did it make you feel, especially about the food you were about to eat?

How did the wait staff perform?  Did you feel like you were their most important customer, or where you lost to the masses?  Was the service timely?  Were they able to answer your questions?  Did you ever run out of something to drink, or if your meal came with such things as chips and dip, did it run out before your meal arrived?  Most importantly, did you get what you ordered, just like you expected?  How was the quality of the food?  If you had eaten at this establishment and had ordered this meal before, was it exactly like the time before?  When your meal was complete, what was the overall experience that you took with you, communicated to others, and that formed your future frame of reference?

If you operate a restaurant, would you be afraid to have the guests see the kitchen?  Have you personally visited the restrooms?  The one comment I hear more often than not from folks that eat out is, "The restrooms were awful!"  If they are not clean, how do you think they feel about the remainder of your facility that they haven't seen, like the kitchen for example?

This little journey through a restaurant is familiar to all of us, whether the experience was good or bad. The behaviors and values that were exhibited, or not, would include such things as:  friendliness, attention to detail, quality, consistency, adaptability, being quick to take advantage of opportunities, taking individual responsibility, being rule-oriented, being team-oriented, being people-oriented, tolerance, decisiveness, being highly organized, having a clear guiding philosophy, being results-oriented, having high performance expectations, being supportive, being calm, enthusiasm for the job, having a good reputation, an emphasis on quality, respect, and so forth.

As you look at each of these behaviors or values, you can easily place them in several places in the example we just walked through.  It is difficult to determine whether a human has these positive traits just from an employment interview, and almost impossible to fully train.  We will discuss this more in detail later.

Organizational Awakening

On those rare occasions that you actually have a few minutes to sit in your office and think about your organization, is your experience usually one of despair and frustration?  Do your thoughts center around problems with quality concerning the outputs of your organization?  Are you often frustrated with the lack of confidence you have in your employees or with their reliability?  If any of these are your reality, there is some comfort in the fact that you are in the majority.  Of course this is of little solace, since your main objective is to try and figure out the fix instead of joining a support group, sit in a circle, and bare your troubles to the world.


There is not a business or management text book sitting on your shelf that is not packed with solutions ranging from theory to application. The problem is not usually solved from the reading of this material; it obviously needs the energy of your being and soul in deciding which of them is really the long-term solution(s) and your commitment, for a good portion of the remainder of your life, implementing and perfecting them into an already developed organization, that is usually resistant to change.  Excursions to the book store allow you to witness rows and shelves of every imaginable topic on leadership and business management, from operational management, heavily ladened with mathematical applications, all the way down to the three minute pep talk on how to be a better people person.  I take nothing away from most of these materials; they each have powerful messages, truth and information.  Most of them are highly specific and exhaustive in their address of  important components; lessons we can all learn about successful operations.  But before you decided to move into the specifics, concentrating on the foundation is where the real awakening in your organization occurs, or a more playful analogy might be, The Ah Ha Light Comes On!

Managing people in changing organizations is part of what is currently being done by supervisors, managers, and executives.  People, as human assets, are the glue that holds all of the other assets, such as financial and physical ones, together and guides their use to better achieve results.  How effectively people at all levels contribute to organizational results is part of the challenge, and designing recruitment, hiring, and retention systems to ensure that human talent is used effectively and efficiently to accomplish organizational goals is critical to sustain and to provide for reliable organizational success.  Successful organizations must work continually to create a culture that emphasizes effectiveness and productivity.

 

The full engagement of employees is a crucial contributor and indisputable link to effective organizational contributions, but more importantly, that engagement must be complementary to the organization’s value system in order to realize, and fully benefit from, sustained success.  Obtaining full engagement from employees is directly and proportionately related to how employees are selected in the hiring process; in other words, the organization obtaining the correct match between a prospective employee’s overall attributes and capabilities (knowledge, skills, and abilities) with the job’s technical and performance requirements (job description and requirements) and obtaining harmony with the employee’s personality and belief system to the organization’s value system.  If you want to hit on all eight cylinders, the key is within this concept.

The real starting point for this process is your organization's value system.  It is the heart and soul of your business and drives the behaviors of your employees.  If you were to make a list of the characteristics or behaviors that would describe the organizational culture you would like to see, what would those be?  And more importantly, how important is each as a contributor to organizational success?  This is not an easy task, and it is one that without due diligence, the foundation to all the work to come, from our future discussions, will not produce the maximum reward that you so earnestly desire.  Do not think in terms of what your employees are currently doing or not doing.  Think about what is important to your customer base, both internally and externally, about what quality and consistency really mean to your profit margin and how they apply to your operational components, about employee ownership and responsibility for what they do, about results and achievement, about decision making, and so forth.  The list is not endless.  Typically, you should be able to identify 35 to 40 of these behaviors or characteristics that are really the meat and potatoes of what you do and what you need to maximize your long-term efforts.

My next message will address the first of many phases of what you will need to do with this very, precious and valuable list.