Do Something About Value Orientation

As we continue our discussion on values, a critical review of ethical decision making is warranted.  In addition to its benefits for self-understanding, awareness of your own level of values maturity also has important practical implications for ethical decision making.  By and large, the American public rates the honesty, integrity, and concern for moral values of American business executives as abysmal.  A large majority of the public indicates that they think executives are dishonest, overly profit-oriented, and willing to step on other people to get what they want (Andrews, 1989; Harris & Sutton, 1995; Lozano, 1996).

As we continue to discuss the importance of understanding a candidate’s value system prior to employment consideration, we have to integrate the value system of the organization.  Values have to be driven and maintained from the top of the organization and then supported by employees who share a congruent belief system. 

As we make moral and ethical choices, the following standards could be used to test our own principles:

·         Front Page Test: Would I be embarrassed if my decision became a headline in the local newspaper?  Would I feel comfortable describing my actions or decisions to a customer or stockholder?

·         Golden Rule Test: Would I be willing to be treated in the same manner?

·         Dignity and Liberty Test: Are the dignity and liberty of others preserved by this decision?  Is the basic humanity of the affected parties enhanced?  Are their opportunities expanded or curtailed?

·         Equal Treatment Test: Are the rights, welfare, and betterment of minorities and lower status people given full consideration?  Does this decision benefit those with privilege but without merit?

·         Personal Gain Test: Is an opportunity for personal gain clouding my judgment?  Would I make the same decision if the outcome did not benefit me in any way?

·         Congruence Test: Is this decision or action consistent with my espoused personal principles?  Does it violate the spirit of any organizational policies or laws?

·         Procedural Justice Test:  Can the procedures used to make this decision stand up to scrutiny by those affected?

·         Cost-Benefit Test: Does a benefit for some cause unacceptable harm to others?  How critical is the benefit?  Can the harmful effects be mitigated?

·         Good Night’s Sleep Test:  Whether or not anyone else knows about my action, will it produce a good night’s sleep?

Few of us watch the news without total disdain from the countless examples of zero leadership, deceit, self-centeredness, and so forth exhibited from our businesses, governmental processes, and citizenship.  The importance of value orientation cannot be over emphasized.  Your personal life, your family, your relationships within the community, and your allegiance to the collective whole depend on it.

Stop, think, and help fix the bigger picture.

Why Are Values So Important?

Values are among the most stable and enduring characteristics of individuals.  Much of what we are is a product of the basic values we have developed throughout our lives.  Values are important, and we all proclaim to possess them; however, unless a person’s values are challenged, the values being held remain largely undetected.  In other words, until people encounter a contradiction or a threat to their basic values, they seldom articulate their values or seek to clarify them.

Rokeach (1973) argued that the total number of values people possess is relatively small and that all individuals possess the same values, but in different degrees.  For example, everyone values peace, but some make it a higher priority than others.  Two general types of values were identified by Rokeach, instrumental values and terminal values.

Instrumental values prescribe desirable standards of conduct or methods for attaining an end.  Two types of instrumental values related to morality and competence.  Violating moral values (for example, behaving wrongly) causes feelings of guilt, while violating competence values (for example, behaving incapably) brings about feelings of shame.  Of course the real question remains concerning evaluating those we have social and personal relations with, what end of the emotional spectrum does each identify with for each of the values that are important to your organization (for example, I behave badly but may only experience minor feelings of guilt, which is not much of a self-motivated deterrent to unacceptable behavior)?

The experiences of life also cement our values.  Kohlberg (1969) identified that people progress from one level of maturity to another, and as they do, their value priorities change.  Individuals who have progressed to more mature levels of values development possess a qualitatively different set of instrumental values than individuals who are at less mature levels.  Kohlberg’s model is the best known and most widely researched approach to values maturity.  It focuses on the kind of reasoning used to reach a decision about an issue that has value or moral connotations.   The model consists of three major levels: (1) a preconventional level (self-centered) where moral value resides in external factors, and consequences, not persons or relationships; (2) conventional level (conformity) where moral value resides in duty, maintaining social contracts, and keeping commitments; and (3) postconvential (principled) where moral value resides in commitment to freely selected standards, rights, and duties.  An individual’s stage of development using this model ranges from the extremes of right is determined by avoiding punishment and not breaking an authority’s rules to right is guided by internal, universal ethical principles – when laws violate principles, the laws are ignored.  The middle ground encompasses the thought that right is being concerned about others’ feelings and maintaining trust by keeping expectations and commitments – the Golden Rule is relevant.

One of the problems of interviewing potential employees about organizational values is that people can usually tell you what you want to hear, or basically give you the more socially acceptable answer.  Although values are stable and enduring, unless behaviors are observed over time or more rigid psychological testing is utilized, an individual’s value orientation is difficult to determine.

If organizational or personal values are important to the strategic management of your organization, then much thought should be employed to determining who works for you and who doesn’t.  All too often we are disappointed in some aspect of our business performance, when the real root of the problem has more to do with choices of who you put on your team and who you don’t.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has become a very popular topic that, unfortunately, suffers from the problem that almost all trendy concepts encounter.  Its meaning and measurement have become very confusing and ambiguous.  One way to clarify this problem is to differentiate between emotional intelligence and emotional competence.

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to diagnose, understand, and manage emotional cues.  Emotional competence refers to the noncognitive capabilities and skills, including social skills, which affect human functioning.  These noncognitive skills and abilities are, in fact, among the most important factors in explaining why some people succeed as leaders and managers and others do not.

Emotionally intelligent people are able to get in touch with and accurately diagnose their own internal feelings.  Emotionally intelligent people are able to regulate and control their emotions.  Emotionally intelligent people are also able to accurately diagnose and empathize with the feelings of others.

In a worldwide study of what companies were looking for in hiring new employees, 67 percent of the most desired attributes were emotional intelligence competencies (Goleman et al., 2002).

What is Self-Awareness?

It is impossible to accurately select the few best or most central aspects of self-awareness because the alternatives are just too numerous.  However, for the purposes of this discussion we will focus on five of the most critical areas of self-awareness that have been found to be key in developing successful management.  They are: emotional intelligence, personal values, cognitive style, orientation toward change, and core self-evaluation.

Research on the concept of emotional intelligence, the ability to manage one ’s self and to manage relationships with others, has been identified as among the most important factors in accounting for success in leaders and managers (Boyatzis, Goleman & Rhee, 2000).  In particular, self-awareness has been identified as a crucial aspect of emotional intelligence, and it is more powerful than IQ in predicting success in life (Goleman, 1995).  Emotional intelligence identifies the extent to which people are able to recognize and control their own emotions, as well as to recognize and respond appropriately to the emotions of others.

Personal values are included here because they are “the core of the dynamics of behavior, and play so large a part in unifying personality” (Allport, Gordon &Vernon, 1931).  That is, all other attitudes, orientations, and behaviors arise out of an individuals’ values.  Values identify an individual’s basic standards about what is good and bad, worthwhile and worthless, desirable and undesirable, true and false, moral and immoral.

A third area of self-awareness is cognitive style, which refers to the manner in which individuals gather and process information.  Researchers have found that individual differences in cognitive style influence perception, learning, problem solving, decision making, communication, and creativity (Cools & Van den Broeck, 2007; Hayes & Allinson, 1994; Kirton, 2003).  Cognitive style identifies individual thought processes, perceptions, and methods for acquiring and storing information.  It determines not only what kind of information is received by an individual, but how that individual interprets, judges, and responds to the information. 

Orientation towards change focuses on the methods people use to cope with change in their environment.  Two important dimensions, locus of control and intolerance of ambiguity, are important considerations for evaluating your ability to cope with change.  Orientation towards change identifies the adaptability of individuals.  It includes the extent to which individuals are tolerant of ambiguous, uncertain conditions, and the extent to which they are inclined to accept personal responsibility for their actions under changing conditions.

Core self-evaluation is a recently developed construct that captures the essential aspects of personality, and it identifies the general personality orientation that guides behavior.  It uncovers levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional stability, and self-control that have important effects on individuals’ happiness as well as managerial effectiveness.

My next discussion will concern itself with the first of these five areas, emotional intelligence.

 

Why Are You Pushing My Buttons?

How can we then improve our ability to evaluate ourselves for the purpose of self-improvement?  One approach has to do understanding the concept of “button pushing”.  In other words this concept refers to the point at which an individual becomes defensive or protective when encountering information about themselves that is inconsistent with their self-concept or when encountering pressure to alter their behavior.  When individuals are threatened, when they encounter uncomfortable information, or when uncertainty is created, they tend to become rigid (Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981; Weick, 1993).  They hunker down, protect themselves, and become risk averse.  They tend to redouble their efforts to protect what is comfortable and familiar.

In light of this defensiveness, then, how can increased self-knowledge and personal change ever occur?  There are two approaches.  The first has to do with information that is verifiable, predictable, and controllable is less likely to cross into defensive or protective actions.  If an individual can test the validity of the discrepant information, if the information is not unexpected, and if there is some control over what, when, and how much information is revealed, the feedback is more likely to be heard and accepted.

A second answer lies in the role other people can play in helping insight to occur.  It is almost impossible to increase skill in self-awareness unless we interact with and disclose ourselves to others.  Unless one is willing to open up to others, to discuss aspects of the self that seem ambiguous or unknown, little growth can ever occur.

Self-disclosure, therefore, is a key to improvement in self-awareness.  Harris (1981) points out:

Our self-reflection in a mirror does not tell us what we are like; only our reflection in other people.  We are essentially social creatures, and our personality resides in association, not in isolation.

From a theological perspective the same could be said.  Our self-reflection against the Creator tells us our true weaknesses and gives us an opportunity to assimilate the better.

In my next discussion I will explore important areas of self-awareness.

The Mystery of Self-Awareness

Students of human behavior have long known that knowledge of oneself – self-awareness, self-insight, self-understanding – is essential to one’s productive personal and interpersonal functioning, and in understanding and empathizing with other people.  My goal in discussing this topic is to help you understand the importance of self-awareness if you are to be a successful manager and leader of either your business or your family.

Erich Fromm (1939) was one of the first behavioral scientists to observe the close connection between one’s self-concept and one’s feelings about others: “Hatred against oneself is inseparable from hatred against others.”  Carl Rogers (1961) later proposed that self-awareness and self-acceptance are prerequisites for psychological health, personal growth, and the ability to know and accept others.  In fact, Rogers suggested that the basic human need is for self-regard, which he found to be more powerful in his clinical cases than physiological needs; however, self-knowledge may inhibit personal improvement rather than facilitate it.  The reason is that individuals frequently evade personal growth and new self-knowledge.  They resist acquiring additional information in order to protect their self-esteem or self-respect.  If they acquire new knowledge about themselves there is always the possibility that it will be negative or that it will lead to feelings of inferiority, weakness, evilness, or shame.  So they avoid new knowledge.  Therefore, we avoid personal growth, then, because we fear finding out that we are not all that we would like to be.  If there is a better way to be, our current state must therefore be inadequate or inferior.  The realization that one is not totally adequate or knowledgeable is difficult for many people to accept.  This resistance is the “denying of our best side, of our talents, of our finest impulses, of our highest potentialities, of our creativeness” (Maslow, 1962).  Freud (1956) asserted that to be completely honest with oneself is the best effort an individual can make, because complete honesty requires a continual search for more information about the self and a desire for self-improvement.  The results of that search are usually uncomfortable.

Seeking knowledge of the self, therefore, seems to be an enigma.  It is a prerequisite for and motivator of growth and improvement, but it may also inhibit growth and improvement.  It may lead to stagnation because of fear of knowing more.  How, then, can improvement be accomplished?  The answer to this question has several components, to which we will begin to dissect in my next blog.

The Importance of Competent Managers

I often lecture on the topic of management and have often been quoted saying that 80% of those in management and leadership positions are in the wrong seat on the bus.  To be more specific a certain percentage shouldn’t be on the bus at all, but rather ejected as it moves down the road.  Their character flaws and general lack of knowledge for operations under their control significantly hamper the successful progress of an organization and the development of the people who are a part of that organization; in other words they suck all the oxygen out of the air and deplete all other forms of energy thereby hindering the better employees from maximizing their potential.   In general, we universally lack competent leaders in our families and the countless organizations that are a direct and indirect part of our lives.

Dr. Bob Moorehead of Seattle’s Overlake Christian Church, described it this way:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints.  We spend more but have less; we buy ore but enjoy it less.  We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences but less time.  We have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment; more experts but more problems; more medicine but less wellness.  We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little drive too fast, get too angry too quickly, stay up too late, get too tired read too seldom, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.  We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.  We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.  We have learned how to make a living but not a life; we’ve added years to life but not life to years.  We’ve been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor.  We’ve conquered outer space but not inner space.  We’ve done larger things but not better things.  We’ve cleaned up the air but polluted the soul.  We’ve split the atom but not our prejudice.  We write more but learn less.  We plan more but accomplish less.  We’ve learned to rush but not to wait.  We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever but have less communication.  These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men and short character; steep profits and shallow relationships.  These are the times of world peace but domestic warfare; more leisure but less fun; more kinds of food but less nutrition.  These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, of fancier houses but broken homes.  These are the days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throw-away morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer to quiet to kill.  It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stockroom.

After reading Dr. Moorehead’s assessment of the current state of human life, most of us would agree that he was spot on, and in fact, his points are at the heart of the deficiencies of people in general and more specifically are the contributing factors to the ruling majority: incompetent managers.  Despite all this change in our environment, there is something that has remained, and continues to remain relatively constant.  With minor variations and stylistic differences, what has not changed in several thousand years are the basic skills that lie at the heart of effective, satisfying, growth-producing human relationships.  Freedom, dignity, trust, love, and honesty in relationships have always been among the goals of human beings, and these same basic human skills still like at the heart of effective human interaction.  This series will discuss skills that help us become more competent as managers and leaders in our families, businesses, churches, and communities.  These skills include managing conflict, motivating employees, communicating supportively, gaining power and influence, building effective teams, leading positive change, empowering and delegating, solving problems creatively, managing stress and developing self-awareness.

In my next blog I will discuss the first topic of this series, developing self-awareness.

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.