The Performance Improvement Blog

Control, Trust, and the Future of Workplaces

Why do employees have to suffer in cheerless, hard-driving, demeaning workplaces? Where is it written that organizations have to be autocratic, bureaucratic, silos of competition? What makes founders of new companies and captains of industry hold onto the reigns of control as if the people they’ve hired are incompetent fools?

I understand the need to feel in control.  And I understand the fear of not succeeding and the fear that others will. These are human traits that some leaders are able to manage effectively but many others are not. Many leaders have great difficulty believing that their job is to make the people around them successful and great difficulty trusting the people they have hired.

Simon Terry writes in the ebook, Changing the World of Work. One Human at a Time:  

Trust is your first design choice. The answer to the trust question will shape all the subsequent choices that you make in the design of your organization and its future path in the market. Trust will determine your ability to leverage new ways of working and the future of work in your organization. Most importantly, trust determines whether you can ask your people to help.

If you don’t trust the people around you, then you have no choice but to create or maintain a traditional, hierarchical, top-down structure. That’s how you keep control over people you don’t trust.

However, if you do trust the people around you, then you have options for the structure of your organization. You can align that structure with your values and your strategic goals. There are examples of companies that are doing this effectively. For the most part, their designs are emergent; growing out of the values and beliefs of their leaders.

One useful theory for categorizing these organizational structures is Robert Quinn’s Competing Values Framework which posits four types of culture that influence structure:

• Clan culture (internal focus and flexible)
• Adhocracy culture (external focus and flexible)
• Market culture (external focus and controlled)
• Hierarchy culture (internal focus and controlled)

Another structure that is attracting much interest of late is holacracy, especially since the Zappos CEO has made it public that this is what he intends for his organization.  This structure is similar to Quinn’s “adhocracy”, an environment in which people self-organize in teams around purpose. In theory, hierarchy is absent in this type of organization.

The point is that you have options depending on the values and goals of your organization. You can create an environment in which employees feel respected and valued and feel joy in coming to work each day. This isn’t easy because of our natural tendency to want to feel in control and, for some, the difficulty in trusting others. But if you want to get the most out of our organization, you need to work at overcoming these fears. 

Organization Culture Change

In the online course that I teach for ASTD on Developing an Organizational Learning Culture, one of the questions I hear most often is, “How can I change the culture in my company when there is little support from management and our unions resist any change that might affect the work rules?” This question has no easy answer.  It took decades to create the culture that currently exists in many of these organizations and any significant change is going to take time, effort and perseverance.  

Culture is the deeply held beliefs (true and false), assumptions, values and principles that are expressed through the symbols, artifacts, and behaviors of an organization. Culture is how an organization does its work.  Culture only becomes problematic and in need of change when it is not aligned with the goals of the organization. It is then that an organization needs to make visible this lack of alignment (e.g., a survey) and confront the behaviors that are preventing the company from being successful.

In the book Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations: Aligning Culture and Strategy, the authors argue that although culture change is difficult, it must be done if companies want to improve performance. The authors write:

But can something as complicated as corporate culture actually be managed? The task is daunting – but doing nothing is not an attractive option! Organizational culture guru Edgar Schein said it best: “Either you manage the culture, or it manages you.” Managing culture change is certainly not easy, but there are plenty of real-life examples of global companies who have succeeded.

Some think culture change must be comprehensive across the whole organization and led by the CEO. Some think the change must be more targeted at organizational leverage points. In an article by Jon Katzenbach, Rutger von Post, and James Thomas, titled, “The Critical Few: Components of a Truly Effective Culture,” the authors write:

We have found, through numerous cultural interventions with a wide range of organizations, from HP and Bell Canada to major enterprises in India, Australia, and the Middle East, that companies that eschew all-encompassing culture change initiatives and instead focus on three specific elements—critical behaviors, existing cultural traits, and critical informal leaders—have the most success. We call these “the critical few.”

…In our experience, a sharp focus on the critical few reduces complexity and begets more positive, informal, and lasting cultural impact on performance—and it does so much faster than top-down messaging and formal programmatic attempts.

I don’t think there is one right answer that fits all organizations. Some, both large and small, because of the commitment of their leaders and the strength of their management teams could succeed in changing their culture with a whole-organization initiative. Other companies, because of strong resistance to change from groups throughout the organization, are better off taking “the critical few” approach. 

Connected Learning

Connected learning, a concept that has come out of research on K-12 education, has application to employee learning. Edudemic has defined "connected learning" in this way:

Connected learning brings together all of the various experiences, interests, technology, academics, people and communities that learners are a part of in order to make all of these scenarios and experiences learning opportunities.

An infographic explains the concept further: 

This describes what many of us have been talking about in terms of a learning culture and what Halelly Azulay calls “Employee Development on a Shoestring.” It’s using all of the resources of an organization and the wider community to help employees be successful.  It’s about learning, but it’s also about employees connecting with the people who can help them achieve their performance goals.

In “connected learning” you are not confined by the classroom. You start with what employees need to learn and then consider the best way to achieve their learning objectives. Let’s take management development as an example. And let’s say that one of the abilities that new managers need to develop is conducting effective performance reviews with employees.  This learning might be achieved by the manager-in-training observing a few performance review sessions conducted by other managers (in-person or on YouTube) followed by learning-from-action, or it might be achieved by circulating a question on Facebook or Linkedin asking for advice about performance reviews, or it might be achieved by assigning employees the task of creating a performance review guide, or it might be achieved by some combination of these different methods. The point is to take advantage of the rich learning opportunities that are available in any organization and weave learning into the fabric of organizational life.

Are Companies Ready to Train Liberal Arts Grads?

According to Robert W. Goldfarb, columnist for the New York Times, companies should give opportunities to more college graduates who come to them without the needed technical skills. He writes:

…employers should consider accepting some responsibility for introducing young people into the work force. This could be the perfect time for companies to start pilot projects that enroll unskilled but promising people in corporate training programs.

Goldfarb is implying that companies know how to train employees and, therefore, they are equipped to turn liberal arts graduates into high-demand workers. He suggests that corporate training programs can effectively develop skill sets such as “…six-sigma analysis, supply-chain procedures, customer service, inventory control, quality assurance and Internet marketing.” While I appreciate the intent of Goldfarb’s message, I’m afraid that he is attributing much more capability to corporations than is warranted.

The reality is that employee training in most companies is not very effective. The best estimates are that only 15% to 20% of learners apply newly acquired knowledge and skills in the workplace. It’s not that instruction is poor; it’s that organizations put up barriers to learning and application of learning. Employee development is not encouraged, not supported, and not expected either from old or new hires. Professional trainers that are good at delivering instruction are not successful ensuring application of that learning.

These organizations think of training and development of employees as something that happens in events (workshops, seminars, online courses, etc.) when, in fact, most learning occurs in other ways. Hallely Azulay uses the 70-20-10 rule: 70% of employee learning happens on-the-job; 20% happens from interaction with colleagues and friends; and only 10% is from formal training programs. If companies want to develop liberal arts grads into productive technical workers, they must be intentional about the learning that occurs the other 90% of the time and ensure that learning is applied in the workplace.

With work changing so fast, the most important thing for employees to learn is how to learn. In the face of a steady stream of new knowledge and skills, employees can't rely on what they already know. They need to know how to constantly acquire new knowledge and skills. Liberal arts graduates tend to have this ability more so than graduates with technical degrees. If companies want to take advantage of this talent, they will need to learn how to do a better job of developing these employees.

So, while I agree with Goldfarb that liberal arts degree graduates have something to contribute to most organizations, I don’t think we can rely on companies to prepare them for the jobs that need to be filled.