The Performance Improvement Blog

Harry Levinson 1922-2012

For many managers, motivation and manipulation mean one and the same thing; but employees know the difference. –Harry Levinson

We lost one of the giants in the study of organizational learning and performance this week. Harry Levinson died at the age of 90 after a long and productive career making organizational leaders aware of the importance of psychological dynamics to their employees and themselves. Every leader and manager should take heed of Levinson's thought-provoking theories and practice.

Levinson made us aware of the psychological contract between employer and employee. This is the implicit understanding of what is expected and how they will act toward one another. Acting contrary to this contract causes a great deal of stress for both and can be detrimental to the working relationship and productivity of employees.

Levinson was one of the first to speak about the impact of organizational culture on worker performance. In his article for Organizational & Social Dynamics titled “Organizational Immersion and Diagnosis: The Work of Harry Levinson”, Michael A. Diamond writes:

For Levinson, the informal and affectionate bonds between workers and their foremen (supervisors) helped to explain effective, physically safe and emotional[ly] healthy, management performance in the workplace. The study [of Kansas Power and Light Company] also pre-dated much of the popular enthusiasm several decades later with organizational culture.

Regarding Levinson’s notions about performance review, Diamond writes:

…he emphasized the human compassion inherent in and necessary for providing subordinates with unambiguous, direct, and honest feedback in performance evaluation.

Regarding Levinson’s thoughts about mentoring, Diamond writes:

Executives and their management must become better mentors, he argued, and to do so they must become more knowledgeable about what motivates their employees.

Levinson had some strong words for organizational consultants. He believed that they should do assessments (diagnosis) before recommending interventions. He didn’t seem to have much patience for consultants who are ready with a solution prior to fully understanding the problem. This belief became the cornerstone of Levinson’s advice to consultants and clients. In an interview that Diamond conducted with the consultant’s consultant, Levinson is quoted as saying:  

Clients and consultants prefer the `quick fix' approach to organizations. This approach assumes the consultant somehow magically knows what the client and client system require without organizational assessment and diagnosis. Moreover, it is this impatience and short sightedness that has led to the acceleration and popularity of more prescriptive approaches that promise more than they can possibly deliver. These approaches include executive coaching as practiced by many non-psychoanalytic consultants. Furthermore, these practices tend to focus on a part of or member of the system rather than the system as a whole and that contradicts the spirit of organizational diagnosis. One can imagine how this sort of orientation would leave consultants vulnerable to counterproductive collusions with the executive client…

Levinson blamed the psychological dynamics of leaders, more than business and economic factors, for the failure of large companies. In an article for the journal, American Psychologist, titled: “Why the behemoths fell: Psychological roots of corporate failure”, Levinson writes:

The failure of many American corporations to adapt to changed economic circumstances has become a major social concern. Many reasons have been alleged for those catastrophes. These allegations describe the ostensible reasons, but they do not explain adequately. The explanations are fundamentally psychological, significantly having to do with individual and organizational narcissism, unconscious recapitulation of family dynamics in the organization, exacerbating dependency, psychologically illogical organization structure and compensation schemes, inadequate management of change, and inability to recognize and manage cognitive complexity. To deal more effectively with such problems calls for greater psychological sophistication among boards of directors and senior executives.

That article was published in 1994. I wonder what Levinson would say today about captains of industry who are leading companies that are “too big to fail”. What would he say about the demise of some giant financial services companies over the past few years?

Much of what Levinson theorized and applied in his consulting has now become mainstream thinking among organizational psychologists and consultants. However, at the same time, much work still needs to be done to create psychologically safe cultures for employees and employers.

 

Does Employee Engagement Predict Market Value?

Evidence suggests that highly engaged employees are, as the Madison Performance Group would say, “brand ambassadors,” who contribute to selling the products and services of a company. Madison implies a causal link between employee engagement and market value, profit, and ROI. Their reasoning is that engaged employees speak positively about the products and services of their companies which increases sales. This thinking is represented in very concise form by the elegant infographic brought to my attention by a TLNT blog post and shown below.

I would introduce a couple of caveats to this picture. First, Madison’s business is “employee engagement and sales incentive marketing” so they have a self-serving interest in portraying a causal link between programs that increase engagement and bottom-line results. The other caveat is that although it makes sense, we should be very cautious in assuming a one-way causal link between happy employees and financial performance. It could be that high quality products and strong sales cause employee engagement, not the other way around. Or it could be that a third factor, such as reputation in the marketplace causes both high employee engagement (e.g., company attracts enthusiastic job applicants) and increased sales.  Prius owners probably recycle more than non-Prius owners; that doesn’t mean that buying a Prius causes people to recycle, or that recycling causes people to buy a Prius.

In any case, the infographic is a useful tool for having a conversation in your organization about workplace culture. Anyway you draw it, studies support the notion that employee engagement is probably a significant contributing factor to company performance.  My point is simply: don’t assume that if you energize workers you will energize sales, but also don’t assume that you can have a successful company over the long run without high levels of employee engagement.

Organizational Learning Tools

What are the tools of organizational learning? As I’ve stated in a previous blog post, a high performing organization needs a comprehensive approach to learning and a set of tools to facilitate learning. A training program, or an educational event, or even a CEO’s speech about the importance of learning is not enough. Continuous learning requires continuous learning interventions that encourage and facilitate knowledge acquisition and application to the workplace. An online leadership course is nice but it will have little to no effect if not integrated with a long-term learning and performance improvement plan and an organization-wide culture of learning.

One way to think about organizational learning is to consider who are the learners (hint: everyone) and what kinds of tools would help them learn.  Learners are: 1) individual employees/members/volunteers; 2) work teams; 3) the enterprise as a whole (company, nonprofit, government agency); and 4) the communities in which the organization lives and interacts. Types of tools that can be used for learning are: 1) assessments of level of functioning; 2) models of organizational systems; and 3) solutions to deficiencies in individual, team, organization, and community performance.

These categories of learners and tools translate into a four by three matrix of learners and learning tools. In the left-hand column are the targets of learning interventions and in the row across the top are the types of tools for learning. A true learning culture is constantly considering what tools to apply in order to enhance learning in every cell of this matrix. I’ve inserted examples of tools in the matrix below.

Learners	Assessments	Models	Solutions
Individuals	Interview questions to Identify causes of performance problems	Chart of the learning process in organizations	How to have a learning conversation between manager and learner
Teams	Survey of team readiness for high-performance	Table of characteristics of high-performing teams	How to apply action-learning to teams
Whole organization	Survey of employee engagement	Chart of process for achieving strategic goals	How to overcome barriers to organizational learning
Community	Survey of community's capacity to support organization	Chart of community pressures on organization	How to engage external community in mutual learning and change

 

Each tool in this matrix is intended to be used in a reflective environment. To ensure learning from each tool, participants must be willing to collect information and feedback and then have conversations with others about what the data mean to the organization and what can be learned from this data. It’s the feedback and reflection that results in learning, not simply the application of a tool. For example, assessing team readiness for high-performance isn’t useful unless the team looks at that assessment data, reflects on its meaning, and intentionally learns from the information. 

 

Ethical Leadership and Organizational Success

Dov Seidman argues that principled leadership is a determining factor in developing and sustaining a successful organization. In the new edition of his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, he reports the findings from his company’s survey of 36,280 employees in 18 countries. In an interview with Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business, Seidman is quoted as saying:

We found that all the companies fit into one of three general categories. Companies in the first group, called “blind obedience,” rely on coercion, formal authority, policing, and top-down command-and-control leadership. The second group, “informed acquiescence” organizations, have clear-cut rules and policies, well-established procedures, and performance-based rewards and punishments — the standards of high-quality 20^th-century management. The third group, organizations with “self-governance,” are the most farsighted organizations, best positioned to thrive in an interdependent world. People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Seidman suggests that "self-governance" organizations are the most successful over the long term. While I think the most they can really say, given the method of the research, is that employees who report that their companies are ethical and trusting and supportive of individual initiative are more likely to report that their companies are successful, I think the findings are thought-provoking.  

Seidman says that  “shared purpose and common values” are the keys to business success. Relying on rules and regulations (i.e., “blind obedience” and “informed acquiescence”) to ensure that people do the right thing doesn’t work. I see this in companies like Enron, BP, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase. They are in (past tense in Enron’s case) heavily regulated industries yet they ran into trouble when they, seemingly, were more intent on working around the rules than in doing the right thing. The rules and regulations, rather than encouraging the right behavior, had the opposite effect. Seidman says:

In a blind obedience system, there is a great deal of misconduct, compounded by the fact that it’s invisible; no one talks about it. In an informed acquiescence system, there is less misconduct, but people still tolerate it. In a self-governance system, when there is misconduct, people talk about it and consciously set up practices to address it.

In a live interview with Art Kleiner for the Carnegie Council, Seidman says managers tell their direct reports, “Just get it done, I don’t care how…Instead, we need an ethic of human endeavor that allows us to manifest our values and create value from values.” In other words, we need leaders who have a strong sense of right and wrong and are willing to let that ethic guide their words and their actions and organizations need to be willing to stand by these leaders. 

 

Tools of a Learning Organization

The Adidas Blog asks the question, “What should a true learning organisation look like?” In response to this question, Harold Jarche writes that a learning organization has "shared power." In a learning organization, individuals control their own learning and they share this learning with others.  The organization supports learning and sharing of that learning by creating spaces and networks for conversation. Learning is a constant that is an essential part of working.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about David Garvin and Amy Edmonson of Harvard University Business School and their three building blocks of a learning organization: 1) environment; 2) work processes; and 3) leadership. I explain these building blocks in this way:

I interpret “environment” to mean organizational culture. This includes the values, basic assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms of the organization. These aspects of culture must be aligned with continuous learning about and from the work of the organization. “Processes” are the routine ways in which the work gets done. Work and learning must be part of the same process. And by “leadership” they mean what top level leaders do to support, encourage, and remove barriers to learning and performance improvement. All three of these “building blocks” must be in place for an organization to be a truly learning organization.

So the question becomes, “How do we make work and learning part of the same process?” One way is to help people develop new knowledge in the course of their work when faced with a new task or a new challenge, whether that is operating a new tool or becoming an effective leader. This is done by making information accessible and by making the tools to create knowledge from that information accessible, too. We can teach people how to fish, but if they don’t have the rod, reel, and hook to catch the fish and the techniques and technology to find the fish, knowing how is useless. If we are going to democratize learning in organizations, we need to teach everyone how to learn and how to use tools to discover useful information. We need to make learning tools accessible to all employees when and where they need them.

One example of a learning tool is "Inspire", developed by RealTime Performance. This is how RealTime describes this product:

Employees are able to quickly and easily identify strengths and weaknesses, create relevant and useful development plans and engage in meaningful discussion with their manager about leadership development.

At the core of this solution is a dynamic resource library of on-the-job activities, books, articles, blogs, videos, classroom-based learning and e-learning. Each activity or resource is mapped to a leadership competency or behavior.

This wiki-like tool makes leadership development information timely and relevant. It’s a tool for organizing information for easy access and application.

A learning organization also needs tools that people can use to discover information about themselves, about teams, about the organization as a whole, and about the wider community in which the organization exists. The tools could be surveys that collect new information about groups of employees, models of the dynamics of organizational behavior, or methods for solving the organization’s most pressing problems. Some learning comes from applying these tools, but most learning comes from the reflective conversations about information that is generated.

Therefore, while the building blocks of a learning organization are environment, work processes,  and leadership, a learning organization is also using tools to continually produce new information that becomes the focus of networked conversations.