Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies

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Speed Lead “We all want our companies to be faster, simpler and easier to run —this refreshing blend of challenging ideas and practical tools shows us how.” Karl Kahofer, Group President Europe & Asia Pacific, Rubbermaid/IRWIN “Great management and leadership includes application of a lot of common sense. This book contains the sort of practical help and guidance that you can dip into and refresh your common sense quotient. Keep it close!” Christine Betts, Senior Director, Audience Marketing, Microsoft “A much needed new look at managing and leading in complex modern organisations. Practical tools you can implement to speed up your company.” Bob Morton, Head of People Development Competence Centre, Europe—MEA, Ciba Specialty Chemicals “SPEED is the key word for companies in the Asia Pacific Rim: China, Japan and Korea. Kevan’s remarkable new book comes from his long practical experience and is based on Creativity and Innovation, Simplicity, and Ease of applicability for managers of global companies. New tools and techniques from this book can be applied in many different countries without any cultural difference.” Professor Jae Ho Park, Founder of GRCIOP and Professor of IO Psychology at Yeungnam University, South Korea “Organizations are getting ever more complex. Globalization, technology and scale can lead to growth and success, but they also bring dysfunctional baggage. Kevan shows how to get off the organizational ‘hamster wheel’ and focus on what is important.” Geoff Armstrong, Director General, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Speed Lead Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects, and Teams in Complex Companies

KEVAN HALL

First published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2007 3–5 Spafield Street Clerkenwell, London EC1R 4QB, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7239 0360 Fax: +44 (0)20 7239 0370

100 City Hall Plaza, Suite 501 Boston MA 02108, USA Tel: (888) BREALEY Fax: (617) 523 3708 www.nicholasbrealey.com www.speedleading.com

© Greystones Trust 2007 The right of Kevan Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Speed Lead™ is a registered trade mark. ISBN-13: 978-1-85788-374-9 ISBN-10: 1-85788-374-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hall, Kevan. Speed lead : faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects, and teams in complex companies / Kevan Hall. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Industrial management. 2. Personnel management. I. Title. HD31.H234 2007 658.4.--dc22 2006024119 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers. Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell.

Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Unlearning traditional management skills The 4Cs It’s not what you know, it’s what you do PART I – COOPERATION THE OLD WAYS DON’T WORK

vii 1 2 3 7

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1 UNRAVELING THE SPAGHETTI When not to be a team Star groups and spaghetti teams How simple sums strangle spaghetti teams When technology starts to bite Speeding up the way you work together Even faster star groups Speeding up spaghetti teams How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

11 12 13 18 24 25 28 28 35 36

2 DISMAL MEETINGS—SURPRISINGLY USEFUL COFFEE BREAKS Creating meetings you want to attend Cut out star group topics, focus on spaghetti issues Better ways to run group topics Running far better meetings How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

39 42 42 44 55 64 65

PART II – LACK OF COMMUNICATION? YOU MUST BE JOKING!

3 SO MANY THINGS I JUST DON’T NEED TO KNOW Multitasking: Doing several things badly at the same time

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71 73

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Taking control of communication Planned spontaneous communication Accessibility: When being too helpful is a weakness How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

74 90 91 92 93

4 YOU’VE GOT ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD Be aware Avoid time zones when you can It’s always local time here Take all the time in the world It’s a relay race not a rowing team Win back your home and holiday time Share the pain How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

95 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 103 103

PART III – CONTROL: A FINGER ON THE PULSE, NOT A GRIP ON THE JUGULAR

105

5 BREAKING THE CHAINS OF COMMAND Central control is slow, expensive, and unpopular Finding the right balance How this this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

107 108 110 123 123

6 EXPECT MORE, LEAD A LOT LESS Avoid micromanagement Demand more self-management from your people Make “good enough” decisions Have more questions than answers How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

125 125 132 133 135 136 137

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PART IV – BUILDING COMMUNITY ACROSS DISTANCE AND DIFFERENCE

139

7 CONSTANT DISLOYALTY AND THE KEYS TO COMMUNITY Community makes cooperation faster But community also costs Building community in complex organizations Using the keys to build community How much community can you afford? Building local community Building a sense of corporate community Community is the key Human-scale organization design How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

141 141 143 144 149 159 163 167 169 170 171 171

8 LEAVE MY CULTURAL VALUES ALONE Share practices, not values National cultural differences at work The role of cross-cultural training Designing for speed, simplicity, and inclusiveness Applying this concept to the three groups How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Putting this chapter into practice in your organization

173 175 177 188 190 193 195 196

EPILOGUE: IF EVERYTHING SEEMS UNDER CONTROL, YOU’RE NOT GOING FAST ENOUGH 199 Take the Speed Test 202 205

INDEX

vii

To my family, particularly my wife Diane, who helped turn my ideas from corporate speak into human language, and my children Laura and Alan, who saw more of me than usual while I was home writing this book—I told you I was working. Also to John Madejski, Steve Coppell, and the players at Reading Football Club, who won promotion to the Premier League for the first time in 135 years on the weekend I finished writing this book.

Acknowledgments any people contributed to the contents of this book, particularly my principal colleagues at Global Integration, Tony Poots, Phil Stockbridge, Janet Davis, Tim Mitchell, John Bland, Rod Farnan, T.H. Ong, Martin O’Connor, and Dennis Moulton, and our central support team led by Sharon Knight, Kevin Nyland, and Caroline Blair. In particular, they taught me the impossibility of managing people who are smarter than you are. Thank you to our many clients and the thousands of participants on our training programs for all your ideas and stories and for constantly challenging us to make the ideas and tools practical. Thanks also to Nicholas Brealey, my publisher, and his people for helping me understand the different skills involved in the move from talking about something for 12 years to writing it down so it makes sense. It is harder than it sounds.

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Introduction meet some great people in my job: smart, keen, and selfmotivated. They are as well educated, trained, and focused as any in history. They are more diverse than ever before and equipped with startling levels of technology to help them do their jobs. They work for world-class companies but are frustrated that, as their companies grow, they become more complex: slower, harder, and more expensive to run, and less satisfying to work in. This book is about how to simplify the way we work together in complex companies to increase speed, make them easier and cheaper to operate, and provide a more satisfying place to work—speed, ease, and satisfaction. Talented people, globalization, and information technology have combined to create an unprecedented period of growth and much higher levels of integration inside large companies. Unfortunately, as companies become more complex they start to slow down. The fast, entrepreneurial spirit of the old days begins to erode. People have to cooperate with diverse colleagues in many locations, control different business lines and functions, coordinate complex activities, and cope with the sheer scale of the organization. Eventually this complexity starts to undermine what made the company successful in the first place:

I

❍ Activity slows down and people find it increasingly difficult to

make decisions and get things done. ❍ The organization becomes difficult, expensive, and time consuming to run. People spend more time and resources on sorting out internal complexity and less on customers and competition. ❍ The company becomes a messy and less satisfying place to work. The spirit people enjoyed in the early days is hard to maintain. 1

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As the internal world of an organization starts to slow down, the external world moves faster than ever. Every year we need to deliver better, faster, and at lower cost. If we don’t, our customers can usually find someone who will. In this book I introduce some challenging ideas and practical tools to simplify the way people work together in order to avoid the negative consequences of complexity. When you implement this approach, you should expect to see significant improvements in three main areas: ❍ Speed—up to 25% faster delivery by complex teams and projects.

At a strategic level, speed delivers faster innovation, quicker improvement activities, reduced time to market, and higher levels of delivery for the same resources. ❍ Ease—by making the organization easier to run you can reduce the time and expense of unnecessary cooperation, control, and communication by up to 20%. You can redirect these unproductive overheads and administration resources to things that build productivity. ❍ Satisfaction—improve the satisfaction of team members by 10– 20%. Greater job satisfaction correlates with higher motivation, increased performance, and a reduction in staff turnover.

Unlearning traditional management skills When my colleagues and I were working with talented people in many of the world’s most admired companies, we discovered to our surprise that the highlight of our remote and virtual teams training was in deciding where not to be a team. The most useful elements of our communications training were helping people communicate less. We found that managers were more successful when they gave up control to their people; and we found that there was sometimes too much investment in the wrong types of community and team spirit. We began by training people to cope better with complexity; we learnt that it was better to cut through it. 2

INTRODUCTION

Initially we resisted this learning. We had all developed our skills in world-class companies such as Procter & Gamble, Mars, and GE. We had learnt the importance of teamwork, communication, and control. We had all been successful managers, but had chosen to leave the large corporate world to escape its complexity and constraints and achieve more flexibility, challenge, and control over our own lives. We came to realize that the traditional line management skills that had made us successful early in our careers were holding us back in a more complex world. We learnt new skills ourselves and, by working with hundreds of real teams, we evolved different ways of working to reduce and cope with complexity.

The 4Cs The book is organized around 4Cs, all major sources of organizational delay, cost, and dissatisfaction: Cooperation, Communication, Control, and Community. In each of these areas I show why traditional ways of working have become too complex to cope. I propose some simpler methods and tools for working together to deliver results faster, without unnecessary costs, and with improved job satisfaction. COOPERATION

As organizations grow and work becomes more complex, there is more need to cooperate to get things done. In large companies, we have to cooperate with colleagues from other departments, locations, cultures, and time zones. We need to build trust and good working relationships with diverse groups of people whom we may never meet face to face. These increasingly complicated connections are a major source of confusion and delay. As a result, managers in complex organizations are spending over half of their time in meetings (either face to face 3

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or through technology) and on teamwork. They think half of this time is wasted. The top 25 companies in the Fortune 500 alone employ over 6.5 million people—more than the population of Denmark. The average company in this group has 250,000 employees, of which perhaps 20% experience high levels of meetings and teamwork. So if half the time is wasted, every day each of these companies employs around 12,500 managers to do nothing else but sit in unnecessary meetings and teams—and they hate it. There are two big opportunities to cut through the complexity and constraint caused by unnecessary cooperation: ❍ Teamworking has become a slow and expensive way to cooperate.

There are simpler, faster ways to work together that are less expensive to run and more satisfying for the people involved. I provide tools to help you diagnose which style of cooperation works for you. ❍ Meetings are a huge source of waste and frustration. Most writing and training focuses on how to make the traditional meeting process more efficient. I focus on how not to have meetings in the first place and, if you must have a meeting, how to replace “death by PowerPoint” with a much more engaging, fast, and participative approach. COMMUNICATION

The amount of communication in companies has rocketed in recent years. In general, the quality of communication has fallen at the same time. The perceived need to coordinate and the easy availability of communication technology mean that managers in complex organizations now receive over 130 incoming messages per day. This number is rising fast as new technologies become available. Expect the number of messages you receive to double in the next four years unless you take control of communication now. One example: Email is a great tool, but managers tell us that many emails are a complete waste of time. They delete about 25% of 4

INTRODUCTION

incoming emails without ever reading them. This means that each of our average top 25 Fortune companies is paying someone to write, send, store, and delete over 250 million pointless emails every year. One major technology company has estimated that 20% of all staff time is spent dealing with emails. If 25% are pointless, this means that 1,600 staff are permanently dedicated to unnecessary emails. There are three big opportunities for reducing the torrent of unnecessary communication and improving the quality of what remains: ❍ Disconnecting from the communication that people do not need

to be involved in. ❍ Focusing the content of communication on what the person

receiving it actually needs to know. Some good old-fashioned communication principles seem to have got lost in the age of “reply to all.” ❍ Learning to choose and use communications technology more effectively, to select or combine technologies to benefit from their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. CONTROL

As organizations grow, they tend to increase control. They create powerful central functions to coordinate activities. They implement rules and systems to maintain the feeling of control that they were used to in simpler times. Information and communication technologies mean that we can control to a higher level of precision, over greater distances, and much more quickly than we could in the past—but that does not mean we should. Overcontrol leads to micromanagement and a lack of empowerment and local responsiveness. When your head office is in a different country and time zone, it can quickly become out of touch with local priorities and realities. Managers tell us that control in their companies is increasing at the expense of flexibility, speed, and responsiveness. 5

SPEED LEAD

There are three important lessons about how to clarify and shorten the lines of control: ❍ To control things centrally we need to understand them centrally.

Complex (particularly global) organizations usually have greater operational understanding at the local level. We have developed tools to move control to where it should be to give the fastest and most effective results. ❍ Escalating decisions to the center always introduces delay and extra cost and is often a sign of insufficient confidence in local capability. ❍ People don’t like to be controlled and often resist it; they prefer and expect autonomy. COMMUNITY

In the past, a sense of community, trust, and team spirit was often a free by-product of being in the same location as our colleagues. In contrast, building community in organizations on multiple sites, and especially in global companies, is expensive and time consuming. It works best when we get face to face, so travel becomes a major expense. A study of 89 travel managers by Accenture for American Express in 2004 found an average air travel spend of just under $30 million each. This represents an average of 65,000 business trips a year for each of these companies. It takes no account of taxis, hotels, time, and other travel expenses. There are four important aspects to managing the ties of community: ❍ Trust is essential to cooperation, but complex organizational

structures often create tensions and divided loyalties that can work against the best interests of the company. ❍ Community is no longer a free by-product of location, you have to build it consciously, and there are simple principles and practical tools to help you do this. 6

INTRODUCTION

❍ Not all community is worth having—it is expensive and time

consuming to build, so you need to focus your investment. ❍ When it comes to designing a corporate culture to encourage speed and cooperation, there is a right answer.

It’s not what you know, it’s what you do A consistent theme throughout this book is the need for selective decentralization. There are powerful pressures toward centralization when global businesses are formed through growth, acquisition, or increased internal integration. These large organizations feel risky; we have to manage and rely on people we have never met from different cultures and in many locations. Our traditional attitudes to control and trust are undermined by the scale and complexity of the business. Hundreds of thousands of years of relying on face-to-face relationships and communication are swept away when we can only communicate through technology. Managers often compensate for their uncertainty by increasing control and caution. We need to find far simpler ways to manage people, projects, and teams in complex companies. The purpose of this book is to provide some of them. Oscar Wilde once wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It took us over 10 years of trial and error to reduce these tools to their essence. We believe that busy managers are more likely to remember and use easy, clear tools. You will see some new ideas and some traditional common-sense ideas repackaged for simple implementation in complex teams. All of the value is in the implementation—it’s not what you know that counts in management, it’s what you do. This book costs about the same as a day’s parking on your next business trip, the coffee break at your next meeting, or the cost of a 25-minute transatlantic mobile phone call. It could be the best investment you ever made—but only if you implement the ideas. Good luck! 7

Part I Cooperation The Old Ways Don’t Work

1 Unraveling the Spaghetti eople in complex organizations need to be able to cooperate with colleagues in different locations, functions, cultures, companies, and time zones. Cooperation extends outside the organization to include suppliers, contractors, consultants, customers, and even competitors. Whether it is long-term, face-to-face involvement with close colleagues or short-lived virtual collaboration with strangers you only meet online, the tool we use for all of these forms of cooperation is good old-fashioned teamwork. This chapter is about how our ingrained preference for teamwork is one of the biggest sources of constraint, waste, and delay in organizations today. Teamwork ties us up in large amounts of unnecessary cooperation and communication and undermines individual responsibility. I propose a much more selective use of teams and a faster, simpler, and more satisfying way of cooperating for most other tasks. Teams are only one tool for cooperation. They are not automatically good or bad—but they are an expensive, slow, and complex tool to use when your people are in several locations, cultures, and time zones and when your ability to meet one another face to face is limited. Most of the work we do in complex organizations does not in fact require teamwork—and this is great news. I offer a simpler alternative: star group working. I show you when to use teams and star groups, how to combine them, and how to speed up delivery in each of the two ways of working. By organizing more simply, we can liberate ourselves from the constraints of cooperation while still enjoying the benefits when we

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really need them. We can also focus our valuable “true team” resource on areas where teams are the right tool. By selecting the best ways of working for the tasks we need to achieve, we can also simplify the way we meet and the way we communicate—two other major time and speed stealers that I address in later chapters.

When not to be a team Leaders and team members, particularly high performers, can easily feel constrained or hemmed in by the need to keep everyone on the same page, build involvement, and develop team spirit in a collective environment. Progress is often limited to the speed of the most reluctant or least skilled team member. As a young manager the importance of teams was drummed into me: I received training and feedback on my team-building skills, I read books on team building, and I was even appraised against whether I was a team player. Teams were an article of faith—I do not remember ever realizing there was an alternative. But I was often frustrated at having to wait for others to catch up and at the need to coordinate with people who did not seem to add any value in the task. I received a lot of information and input that I just did not need. When I moved into training and development, I created more effective team-building training and more sophisticated tools for managing the inevitable delays and personality issues. As the complexity of my organization increased, I started to apply these principles to teams in many locations and different cultures. I found myself working harder and harder to keep diverse cultures on board and to coordinate more and more complex business objectives; I increased my travel and reduced my sleep, family time, and hobbies. I developed training for remote, virtual, cross-cultural, and matrixed teams and sold programs to great companies globally. From hundreds of conversations with smart managers around the world, I started to break through over 20 years of conditioning about team12

UNRAVELING THE SPAGHETTI

work to comprehend that the best learning came from understanding where not to be a team. As I developed this theme, I found that most managers struggled with the concept at first, but when realization came that there was a simpler way to work, their relief was enormous. We have all been trained to believe that teams get things done faster by delivering more than the sum of their parts, and sometimes this is true. In the best teams, people work together well, relationships are strong, we enjoy the social stimulation, and we get things done faster than we could have on our own. When we ask people to remember their best team experiences, about 40% recall being part of one of these “super teams.” Such teams are usually very successful at reaching their goals. What makes them memorable, though, is the way they feel—the spirit, fun, and relationships involved. However, teams do not always work. Have you ever been part of a team where there were relationship problems or unclear responsibilities? Have you ever felt that you could only get things done at the speed of the least capable member of the team? When we ask managers if they have ever been part of one of these slow teams, over 90% can recall examples. When they talk about these teams, you can see the energy draining from their faces. Sometimes personality issues or poor attention to ways of working can lead to dysfunctional teams, but a bigger problem is using teams when you do not really need teamwork.

Star groups and spaghetti teams We currently use the term “team” to describe any collection of people who are working together. However, the essence of a team is that it is interdependent. A team is a tool you should use when a complex task requires people with a range of skills and points of view to cooperate to get the work done over a period of time. Team members are tightly connected to each other by the need to achieve a specific objective. 13

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The tight pattern of connections and interdependences in a team looks like a plate of spaghetti. In “spaghetti teams”:

❍ Objectives cannot normally be completed without the coopera❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

tion of one or more other members of the team. Individual roles overlap and/or people may substitute for each other. People have complementary skills; they cannot complete the task individually but each is essential to the overall result. Communication on work issues with other members of the group is relatively frequent. People are normally dependent on information or service from others in the team to get their daily work done. Information is shared as a vital ingredient of achieving the team’s objectives.

Spaghetti teams are interdependent by definition. But it only makes sense to operate as a team where the team’s goals require interdependent working—otherwise each connection becomes a constraint and just slows things down. The manufacturing operations team of an electronics company has a quality problem caused by an unexpected change in the specification of a part from a supplier. They put together a team of people from manufacturing, logistics, purchasing, quality, and the supplier.

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UNRAVELING THE SPAGHETTI

● Each individual has different skills and perspectives. ● The solution is complex and will require close coordination between all members. ● They meet every day for the duration of the problem. ● This is the number one priority for each of them. ● Each of them relies on information from the others to do their job. ● At their meetings, there is a lot of discussion and interaction, and solutions evolve based on several inputs. This is a real team.

In contrast, a group is made up of a number of people with similar skills focusing on different elements of a larger task, or several people doing similar tasks collaborating. They are normally coordinated through a common line manager.

This simpler structure looks more like a star. In “star groups”: ❍ People usually work on objectives requiring individual work and ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

concentration. Individual roles do not overlap. People have unique skills. Communication on work issues with other members of the group is relatively infrequent. People can normally complete their daily work without information or service from others in the group. 15

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❍ Work may be passed on from one member of the group to another

once their part of the activity is finished. ❍ Information is shared for learning and interest. In star groups, people do broadly similar jobs and report to the same boss for organizational reasons. A well-run group is much simpler than a team to manage and to grow. The traditional sales “team” of a fast-moving consumer goods business sells to small retailers. Each salesperson has a similar role. Each individual has similar skills. They have their own accounts. They have their own sales territories that do not overlap. They have individual performance targets that do not require cooperation from their sales colleagues in the team. ● They have regular contact with their sales manager. ● They have infrequent contact with other salespeople in the team.

● ● ● ● ●

On a day-to-day basis, this is a classic star group—not a team.

The concept of spaghetti teams and star groups sounds simple, but it can have a revolutionary impact on the way people work together. It may take some time to overcome your learned attachment to teamwork. You will see some worked examples of using this idea on real teams later in the chapter. Before you read on, try to identify for your team where you really are a spaghetti team and where you are actually working as a star group. Use the definitions above to challenge your assumptions about how much teamworking is necessary.

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Where are you a spaghetti team?

Where are you a star group?

When you have done this exercise, go back to the entries in the “spaghetti team” box. Are these really issues that involve the whole of your team or do they concern just a smaller subset of the total team membership? Most complex “teams” spend a small part of their time working as a team, and the majority of their time working as a group. By using the simpler star group structure wherever possible, we can reduce complexity and increase speed of delivery. We can then focus our scarce and expensive spaghetti team time on areas where it will have the maximum benefit. Here is a simple test: If you go along to team meetings and sit through a series of presentations that are irrelevant and uninteresting, but you are happy to be there because in a minute you are going to make a really fascinating presentation to everyone else, then you are in a group! If it were truly a team the activities and perspectives of the other members would be essential and interesting, and you would need to know about them to perform your own tasks successfully. The good news is that star groups are much simpler to lead. If you are really leading a group, be happy, this is going to save you a great deal of time. “I used to spend a lot of time running around trying to get people to talk to each other. I was genuinely worried at the lack of team spirit and communication and convinced I must be doing something wrong. More frequent

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meetings and conference calls did not seem to help. I spent a lot of time on the road trying to ‘repair’ my team communication. “When I understood that I was managing a classic group, not a team, I realized that there was actually no real need for frequent day-to-day cooperation and communication. Instead of trying to build more contact between team members, I have been able to cut down our ‘team time,’ give more time to the valuable one-to-one conversations that people need, and focus our limited team time on issues where everyone needs to be involved. “I have also stopped feeling guilty about leading a group—it actually makes things a lot simpler.” Sales manager, FMCG

“I spent the last two years trying to manage a ‘team’ based in two locations 200 miles apart. I held team meetings weekly in each location. After realizing I was actually managing two separate groups, I have reorganized the way we cooperate and communicate. I worked out that I have saved six working weeks of driving time I used to spend moving from site to site—and people are more satisfied with the communication they receive.” Operations manager, back-office outsourcing, finance industry

How simple sums strangle spaghetti teams Sometimes you need to work as a star group and sometimes as a spaghetti team, depending on the tasks you have to achieve. Where you have a choice, choose the simplest structure and involve the smallest number of people you can in order to free people up to work more quickly and effectively. This is because simple sums can strangle spaghetti teams. As the teams grow, they face constraints caused by their size: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Airtime. The connections curve. Team overhead. Too many teams. 18

UNRAVELING THE SPAGHETTI

AIRTIME

In a conversation between two people, each should get 50% of the conversation—50% talking and 50% listening. I call this “airtime.” As the number of people involved in a conversation grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to get a reasonable amount of airtime. The more real cooperation and interdependence you require, the smaller the number of people you can afford to involve, particularly if you need true teamwork. In a spaghetti team as small as five people, if everyone has equal airtime, then each should be silent for 80% of the time. This becomes frustrating for participants and imposes a limit on effective communication. In practice, once there are more than three or four people involved in a face-to-face conversation, it either stops being a conversation and breaks into several smaller conversations or it becomes a series of monologues, a little bit of talking and a lot of listening. Once the group exceeds six to eight members it starts to become an audience. This is suitable for giving information but not for the type of interactive discussion needed for real team cooperation— teams require a reasonable availability of airtime to succeed. If you sit in meetings wondering “Is it my turn yet?” then you are suffering from this problem. Star group communication tends to be either the transmission of information from the manager to everyone (where an audience of 10+ is fine) or a series of one-to-one conversations (where the norm is 50% airtime each). “I was worried about involvement in my team discussions and one day I made a list of the names of the people at my meeting. Every time someone spoke, I made a mark against their name. It was a real surprise how much the meeting was dominated by a small number of people and how several members rarely said anything.” Marketing manager, FMCG

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THE CONNECTIONS CURVE

If we look at the pattern of connections in the star group, it is very simple. Each individual in the group is only connected to the leader. The other individuals are not connected to each other when they are working as a group—because they do not need to be. Communication between group members is less frequent as it is not required on a day-to-day basis for the performance of their work. The pattern is simple, clear, and easy to understand. There is little opportunity or need to be involved in discussions that are not personally relevant to you. This means that people’s satisfaction with the quality of communication they receive is usually high. It is difficult to leave anyone out of the communication or to miss a lack of participation by one individual. The pattern of connections in a spaghetti team of the same size is already much more complex. Everyone has to be connected to everyone else in order to do their work, so communication is more frequent. In this pattern, everyone needs an opportunity to contribute and frequent discussions take place on interface issues and areas where there are different opinions about the best actions. With such a lot of communication going on it is easier in teams for some people to be excluded or not fully involved. It can also be more difficult to hear quieter members of the team. The star group pattern looks as though it puts a lot of emphasis on the leader—eight connections in a hub-and-spoke pattern. However, if you look closely at the spaghetti team pattern you can see that the leader also has only eight links. The benefit in the group pattern is in the lower complexity and number of links for all the 20

UNRAVELING THE SPAGHETTI

other group members. Group working gives them much more freedom, focus, and time. As teams grow, you need to spend increasing amounts of effort on maintaining the connections and the relationships that make them work. If the conversations stray onto a topic of interest to only one of the team members and the leader, the other people are likely to be disengaged and wasting their time. When a team grows the number of connections grows rapidly. If you add one person to a group of eight, you create one more connection. If you add one more person to a team of eight, you create eight more connections. The number of connections involved in true spaghetti teamwork quickly becomes unmanageable. The star group pattern is easy to grow to a size limited only by the leader’s ability to manage—which will typically be eight to twelve people depending on the complexity of roles in the group, its members’ experience, and the amount of input they need on a regular basis. TEAM OVERHEAD

One of the key things that slows spaghetti teams down is the requirement to work on coordination, or what I call “team overhead” issues. People need to get to know one another and develop ways of working that suit the team members. They need to build consensus and buy in to decisions. They need to decide who does what and to adjust the speed of the team to different individuals’ rates of progress. 21

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If the work is truly interdependent, then you should move at a pace that everyone can match. In practice, this means that either you move at the pace of the slowest member, or that others compensate for this drag by doing more of the work. Neither of these constraints is desirable, although one may be necessary if you are a true team. When you lose individual accountability you may only see the impact of poor individual performance in a slowing of the overall team’s progress. It’s your high performers who are more likely to experience the negative consequences of spaghetti teamworking, as they are the ones who will be held back the most. In star group working, a reluctant or poor-performing member is much easier to identify—they don’t achieve their objectives. Individual accountability makes it much easier to manage performance issues. Some people prefer to work in teams with more diffused and collective responsibilities in order to avoid this clarity! Larger teams have to spend a significant amount of their time on issues of coordination and keeping up to date on what other team members are doing. In truly interdependent activities the whole team may stop, waiting for one element that has taken longer than planned. If you are spending increasing amounts of time on resolving team personality issues, coordination, or team meetings, it is worth stepping to one side and asking whether this time is well spent. It may be that you are already in fact a group or would be better off working as one. In smaller teams, there are fewer people to build agreed ways of working around so they take less time to develop. Peer pressure to perform is high. If there is one slow member in a team of five then the others are very aware of this and are reluctant to take on so much extra work themselves. Small teams can be very demanding of the performance of their members.

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TOO MANY TEAMS

In the past, we tended to be part of simpler functional or geographical organizations and were members of a relatively small number of teams. As the need has grown to coordinate across business functions, product groups, and geographies, we have introduced more complex organizational structures (often based on a matrix). This need for increased coordination across more complex organizations means that today we can be part of many teams. In some teams we may be full members; in others we may have “dotted-line” responsibilities. Sometimes we are virtual team members for just a few days. Because of the many teams we are part of, we have limited time to develop a deep understanding of the best way of operating with each one. We are working with larger numbers of people and we know them less well. In this environment, we need simple and transparent ways to work together. We do not have time to build complex ways of working, team spirit, and sophisticated team dynamics with every one of these teams. SPAGHETTI TEAMS MUST BE SMALL TO BE EFFECTIVE

A “team” of eight or more people is not a real team because the number of connections and the reduced amount of airtime available mean that it cannot actually work in the interconnected way that defines a team—even if you intend it to and need it to. In larger teams people have all the same needs to get to know one another and build relationships in order to improve cooperation, but there are far more relationships to build and therefore much less time to build each of them. In reality, in larger teams small clusters of relationships tend to form among the people working most closely together on subsets of the overall task. Encourage this to happen. In complex teams, each connection means another journey to attend your team meetings, another person to involve in your conference calls, and another person to keep involved and motivated. In 23

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a good team, each connection brings a benefit, a fresh perspective, and energy to the team. In a bad team, each connection can become a shackle, holding back the whole team to the rate of progress of the least able or the least committed. Unless the connections really add value, they are merely a constraint, a cost, and a potential source of frustration and delay. Removing unnecessary connections is of great benefit to the team/group and to the individuals concerned. Even in a good team, you can still have too many people to be effective. Eventually the mathematics of cooperation will get in the way. If you are big—stop trying to act like a team.

When technology starts to bite Teams that work together across several locations spend more time collaborating through communication technology than they do face to face. These teams cannot afford to wait for physical meetings to make decisions and get things done. It is common for global “teams” actually to meet only once a year—though I would propose that if you can function for 12 months without meeting face to face, then you are in reality a group, not a team. Star groups find it relatively easy to communicate through technology. One-to-one conversations do not need a great deal of planning or sophisticated facilitation. When groups do need collective communication, it is often to transmit information to and from the center of the group. Telephone or web conferencing works well for this. But with teams, the need to cooperate through technology imposes a limit on size, whether we like it or not. Small spaghetti teams (four to six people) can work effectively through telephone, video, and web conferencing. Communication is often organized to achieve a specific goal rather than as regular conference calls and updates. Small teams can usually afford to meet face to face more frequently; it is less expensive and easier to arrange a small meeting, especially at short notice. 24

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In contrast, anyone who has been part of an audio conference of 15 people or more knows that there is very limited opportunity for interaction. Where interaction is required, the call often descends into chaos with everyone wanting their say. In a call of 15 people with equal airtime, you can expect to speak for no more than four minutes each hour. Large teams are very poor at communicating through technology. They often find a means to do this by limiting participation and using calls for transmission of information rather than cooperation and discussion—in other words, they have discovered the benefit of operating as a star group during the call. “I have learnt not to talk on our team conference calls—it just makes them last longer! I put my phone on mute and get on with my emails while listening. On the odd occasion if I do hear something I want to pursue, I can always call the individual concerned and discuss it later. In a team of 10, discussion on a conference call is usually a waste of everyone’s time. “Sometimes there are issues that we all feel strongly about, but it is very rare for us to be able to resolve those issues in a conference call. Usually we have to stop the discussion and put the subject on the agenda for the next face-to-face meeting, and this can delay resolution of the issue for months.” Applications engineer, motor industry

Speeding up the way you work together Our practical recommendations to speed up cooperation are: ❍ Select the right way of working for each of your tasks; prefer star

group working wherever possible. ❍ Where you need spaghetti teamwork, use teams of no more than six people. ❍ Where you have a larger organization, look for ways to break teams into smaller sub-teams or sub-groups. 25

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Whether you use spaghetti team or star group working, there are still opportunities to accelerate delivery. WHICH IS THE RIGHT PATTERN FOR ME?

Use the team and group definitions earlier in the chapter to analyze the way your team (or group) works and the task you have to perform. Identify clearly where you need to work as a star group, and where you really need to be a spaghetti team. The president of European, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) operations for a major telecoms equipment manufacturer has an EMEA board made up of six country heads and functional vice-presidents for human resources, R&D, finance, legal, supply chain, and marketing. Each of the country heads has a similar role and a specific geography that they focus on. For most day-to-day purposes, they are a group. The vice-presidents spend a large proportion of their time on running their own functional organizations—when they are doing this they are a star group. Some sub-teams coordinate more often: Marketing, finance, and the country heads coordinate closely on sales and on regional customers. There are many one-to-one conversations between the functional heads and country heads. They need to discuss the implications of decisions that have an impact on one another’s areas of responsibility. There are relatively few issues on which the whole team needs to coordinate and cooperate on a daily basis. The main areas where they need to operate as a spaghetti team include strategy development, senior management succession, and resource allocation. In my team we have consultants working around the world; they all operate from home but spend most of their time working with clients at their premises or in training centers or hotels. Each of the consultants has a similar background and skill set; they tend to work as individuals with their own clients. Our clients choose us to deliver a consistent consulting, training, and facilitation message worldwide.

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On a day-to-day basis in the delivery of our work, we are a pure star group. We focus most on the quality of one-to-one interactions. We have a limited amount of sub-group working, often driven by the needs of a client serviced by more than one consultant or the requirement to develop or update a product. We have identified three main areas where we need to be a spaghetti team, and when we are together we concentrate our time on these areas:

● Community—we need to know and trust one another to make it easy to pick up the phone and ask for support. We need to see the value in being part of a community for the business to endure and for the times we have to cooperate more closely. It is also useful to have someone you can share your triumphs and moans with. ● Learning—we want to be able to learn from one another and benefit from our skills and ideas. ● Product—our clients want to know that we can deliver a consistent message worldwide and we want to embed best practice into our programs. CLARITY BRINGS SPEED

Understanding clearly where you are a team and where you are a group helps do several things that speed up the way you work: ❍ It minimizes the number of people involved in any discussion to ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

those who really need to be involved. It simplifies decision making. It allows you to have far more focused meetings (see Chapter 2). It reduces the need for unnecessary communication (see Chapter 3). It allows you to focus your scarce face-to-face time on issues where you really need to work as a team.

Once you have decided which way of working you need, you can concentrate on even more efficient ways of operating within that style. 27

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Even faster star groups Star group working is inherently faster than teamworking, as we have already seen. To speed up group working even more, focus on four key areas: ❍ Alignment—because people are working on their own objectives,

it is essential for speed in groups to set clear, aligned objectives. Objectives should be mutually independent and there should be no gaps and overlaps, so that the sum of the individual objectives matches the outcome you want from the group as a whole. ❍ Clear individual roles and accountability—it is essential for individual roles to be well designed and clear. It needs to be evident who is doing what and who can make which decisions. ❍ Focus on the small amount of spaghetti—even classic star groups have some areas where they sometimes need to act more like a spaghetti team, even if this is only in creating a sense of community. If there is no feeling of connection, community, and trust, even the limited interactions required in classic group working become slower. I show how to achieve this in Chapter 6. ❍ One to ones—regular one-on-one communication is essential in star groups. The manager of a group needs to allocate time to regular individual conversations with group members on issues of performance and personal development.

Speeding up spaghetti teams If you want to speed up the performance of your spaghetti teams, the key principles are: ❍ Small is beautiful. ❍ Focus your face-to-face time on spaghetti issues. ❍ Manage community decay—clearer kick-offs and beginnings; raise

the heartbeat during the remote phases; faster learning and renewal. 28

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SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

As we have seen, for many reasons small is beautiful in complex teams. The ideal size for a spaghetti team is up to six people. If you are trying to build a larger team for organizational or resource reasons, then start by building a series of sub-teams and get them working well together. Only then can you link them into a bigger network if required. Team spirit is easier to build from the bottom up—don’t start by trying to build a team of 20, start with four sub-teams of 5 each. These sub-teams often suggest themselves based on common interests or shared objectives. Examples include: ❍ The geographical team—regional members of a larger global

team may work together more closely on region-specific projects. It is easier to work across limited time zones and with more similar cultures. ❍ The task team—sometimes the members of the cluster are obvious given the task. ❍ The learning/best-practice team—grouped around some key experts on specific subjects. Don’t create unnecessary work by developing artificial shared objectives just to improve team spirit—it may be that you are a group and you don’t really need it. FOCUS YOUR FACE-TO-FACE TIME ON SPAGHETTI ISSUES

Groups can perform much of what we traditionally think of as team activities. It is common for teams to meet to discuss issues of individual or sub-group interest, but this is a waste of team time. In complex teams, particularly those that work across several locations, the opportunity to get face to face is scarce and expensive. Face-to-face time is too valuable to waste on individual or sub-group issues. You need to prioritize your team time on matters of concern to the whole team. 29

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Chapter 2 looks at how to organize face-to-face team meetings to avoid group issues and get maximum benefit from team interactions. MANAGE COMMUNITY DECAY

In our work speeding up complex regional and global teams, we have developed a model that describes how motivation typically changes over the life of a team or project. We use this model to plan faster teams and to decide where we should prioritize our scarce face-to-face leadership time. Teams using this approach have consistently achieved a 25% or greater reduction in the time it takes them to deliver results. This improvement has been seen in major team activities taking many months, but also in short-term implementation projects of as little as 10 days.

The community decay curve has three phases: ❍ Phase 1: The kick-off. At the beginning motivation is usually

high. You need to engage team members and give them clear objectives and direction for the fastest possible start. ❍ Phase 2: Raising the heartbeat. This is the remote phase, when people are doing most of the work. Team members are in their own locations and communication is mainly through technology. Local issues often intrude, causing motivation to fall. 30

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❍ Phase 3: Positive endings. Here you need to finish the last 5% of

the activity, learn from your experiences, celebrate, and move on. Complex teams often handle this stage badly. Faster kick-offs Use a “kick-off ” event to launch a new project or to clarify the objectives for the team. The purpose of a kick-off is to align the team to the new purpose, provide clarity on objectives, build enthusiasm, define roles, answer questions, and set out the first steps you need to take. You may also need to build relationships and trust in a new team, or improve or repair an existing team after problems. A well-run kick-off meeting is the single biggest thing you can do to reduce the time it takes teams to deliver major activities and projects. Typical errors in planning kick-offs include: ❍ The objective is “team building” but the process used is “shut up

and listen to presentations.” You don’t build team spirit by watching PowerPoint® slides in a darkened room. ❍ Too much detail to take in all at once, with little chance to discuss and understand it. Information needs to be presented in smaller chunks and time provided to discuss and understand it. Managers often forget how long it has taken them to prepare and comprehend the issue and the path of thinking they followed to get there. Team members have to reach the same level of understanding of the plan. ❍ Moving straight into detail before the overall purpose is clear. Make sure people understand “why” before addressing “how.” ❍ Too much focus on content and process and too little on relationships and team dynamics. Prioritize your face-to-face time during the kick-off. If you only have one chance to get your team or project together during its life cycle, do it here where you will get the biggest payback. 31

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TEMPLATE FOR A KICK-OFF MEETING Here are recommendations for what should be included in a typical kick-off event: Introductions ❍ Arrive the evening before or allow time for people to meet before the meeting. ❍ Structure it so people do not just stand in cliques but circulate and get to know each other. Clarify purpose ❍ This is a good time to involve a senior sponsor or stakeholder to emphasize the importance of the task. ❍ Brief presentation on the “why?”—10 minutes. ❍ Discussion in small groups to test understanding and uncover concerns; post any concerns on a flipchart to make sure you come back to them during the event. ❍ Agree and publish a clear, written statement of the purpose of the team. ❍ Don’t forget to think about “what’s in it for them?”—why would team members want to be involved? Learning from the past ❍ Review learning from previous similar activities; invite someone to speak who has done something similar before. Roles and first steps ❍ Get participants working together to define the first steps or plan for the activity. ❍ Participants should leave the meeting knowing what their roles are and what to do next. ❍ Allow time for questions and clarification. Ways of working ❍ Discuss how people want to work together, whether there are any concerns, best practices, common mistakes made in the past, and so on. ❍ For significant projects, consider a personal style inventory or teambuilding activity.

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Action plan ❍ Produce a written action plan with names and dates. Process ❍ Use small group discussions to give everyone a sense of involvement. ❍ Change the groups constantly to ensure all group members have the chance to interact with one another. ❍ Plan regular breaks at no more than one-hour intervals, create informal discussion areas at breaks. ❍ Discourage external distractions (email and phone)—ideally plan the meeting off-site. ❍ Arrange an overnight stay—this allows time for reflection and building community in an informal atmosphere. Follow-up ❍ Maintain the momentum by linking in follow-up calls and meetings to the kick-off. ❍ Publish the team purpose and any agreements on ways of working, actions, and so on quickly after the event.

“Our kick-off meetings for IT projects used to concentrate on the project methodology and steps. We use a tried-and-tested project management methodology that worked really well. What we never made time to discuss were issues of how we work together and how we overcome some of the people barriers to progress. On reflection, these are the things that usually go wrong!” International project manager, insurance industry

Raising the heartbeat It is common in global and remote teams for there to be long periods where people are getting on with the work locally. During this period, star group working is the norm. In addition to the principles for speeding up group-mode working, if you need teamworking to be successful at specific times, you need to maintain team spirit even during this remote phase. 33

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To do this you have to find the correct balance between speed and community building and maintain the right level of communication and accessibility. I address these challenges in later chapters. Positive endings By the time you reach the end of complex team activities or projects you are normally short of time. Attention is moving to the next activity, and you have spent the budget. Investing time in celebration and learning seems like a waste. Our learning in regional and global teams is that this is the second most important time to try to get face to face with your team in its activity cycle: ❍ To provide a clear finishing point to the activities. In a fast-

moving environment, teams can find it difficult to finish the last 5% of an activity. When they have delivered the main benefits, priorities change and they can leave the last details unfinished. In some cases this may not matter, but sometimes it is important to complete the final parts of the activity. Having a clear end, ideally a face-to-face meeting of the team to present their success, can provide an important focus for the ending. In some cases, you may need to disband the team. In others, they move on to the next challenge. ❍ To celebrate and recognize success. Too often in remote teams, projects end with, at best, an email saying thanks. To maintain motivation and willingness to cooperate on future projects it is important to deliver recognition and celebrate success. If you cannot get face to face to do this, then anything is better than no celebration and recognition. You can use team mementos, local gifts or rewards, online or other forms of celebration. One team of web authors we worked with celebrated at an online karaoke site! ❍ To embed the learning into the way you work together in the future. Teams learn from every activity they do together. Unfortunately, they often don’t process and share the learning. In 34

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the rush to move on, they risk making the same mistakes in the next project. In our survey of 1,200 people working in remote and virtual teams, the biggest single problem that people identified was, “We are so busy with the content of what we do that we do not make time to discuss the process.” Make time (ideally face-to-face time) in your team to discuss what you have learnt about the process you use for managing activities; what you have learnt about working together; how you should adapt your ways of working because of this learning. If you keep embedding the learning about working together, you accelerate the rate at which the team starts and delivers objectives in the next activity. In the following chapters, I show how to take this thinking to the next step by redesigning your meetings and communications for maximum speed and simplicity.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Star groups typically deliver results faster than spaghetti teams. Choosing the simpler method of organization reduces the number of connections and constraints that people need to overcome to achieve results. Groups are also much easier and more cost effective to manage and find it easier to work together through communication technology. The increased time available for one-to-one conversations in groups tends to increase motivation and satisfaction with line management and enables managers to hold individuals more accountable for performance. Managers are relieved to find that they do not always have to battle to build team spirit. By keeping groups and teams as small as possible, we increase engagement and speed up resolution of team overhead and coordination issues. Small group discussion and decision making are easier to manage and much more enjoyable for participants. 35

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By using the community decay process, you can accelerate the beginning of projects and teams and gain over 25% faster delivery.

Putting this chapter into practice in your organization 1 Identify where you are a spaghetti team and where you are a star group, today and for the future. Mode

Where do you work in this mode today?

Where should you work in this mode for maximum speed?

Working as a spaghetti team where all members are involved Working in spaghetti team style with subteams (not involving everyone) Working as a star group

Review the answers for your “team”: ❍ Make sure you are not using a team structure for group activities. ❍ Move any activities you can out of the team box and into groups.

Challenge the benefit of having the full team involved. ❍ Identify specific opportunities for sub-teams to work together. ❍ Be clear and explicit with your team about which activities you

will manage as a team and which as a group—and why. 36

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❍ Align your meetings and other communication to this style of

working (see the next two chapters). 2 Apply the speed principles to each mode of working. Once you have selected where to be a team and where to be a group, focus on the speeding-up strategies for each mode of working. SPEED PRINCIPLES Spaghetti team ❍ Small is beautiful. ❍ Focus your face-to-face time on spaghetti issues. ❍ Manage community decay: —Clearer kick-offs and beginnings. —Maintain the heartbeat during the remote phases. —Faster learning and renewal. Star group ❍ Alignment. ❍ Clear individual roles and accountability. ❍ Focus on the small amount of spaghetti. ❍ One to ones.

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2 Dismal Meetings— Surprisingly Useful Coffee Breaks second major way we can speed up cooperation is to apply what we have learnt about star groups and spaghetti teams to how we work together in meetings. This will lead to fewer, better, and faster meetings and conference calls. This chapter shows how you can simply leave out many of the topics included in traditional meetings and conference calls with no negative impact on people’s ability to do their jobs. The remainder of what you do in meetings can be radically reengineered to improve participation and motivation. If you cannot make a meeting participative, this normally means there’s no real reason for the meeting.

A

Pearl is northeast region vice-president for sales. She has a team of sales people who sell to different industry sectors throughout the northeastern US states. They hold monthly, half-day, face-to-face area sales meetings where each salesperson presents their account activity, progress against targets, and forecast. Most people find the meetings boring because there is nothing much they can do with the information presented. There is no real overlap in their customers. Each individual review takes 10 minutes, but with a team of 12 and a few questions (nearly always asked by Pearl), the reviews take two and a half hours. Out of these 150 minutes, the salespeople are interested for 10— their own part of the review. Pearl presents the team with a 30-minute business update that shows how the overall organization is doing. She then usually asks an individual who has had a good idea to present to the group what they have learnt.

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Ramon, one of her experienced salespeople, has tried to point out that the meetings are not a good use of time, but Pearl is a firm believer in communication and team meetings are the cornerstone of the company’s widely admired communications process. Ramon knows it is important to be seen as a team player, so he does not feel he can push his views too strongly. The others think that, on balance, the meetings are worthwhile because in the break and in the bar afterwards they get some important things done: They network, share stories and problems, and swap ideas on new techniques. They agree that the meeting itself is a waste of time—but aren’t all meetings like that? Once a year they travel to a national sales conference where they listen in silence as the company directors present at them. Very little of what they hear is of interest, but in the breaks and evenings they make great new connections, get to play with new products, swap stories, and party until the early hours. They are already looking forward to next year. There are 700 people in the company’s national sales organization. They spend 4,200 days sitting in team meetings every year and a further 700 days at the national conference. The majority of this time is of little value to them or to the business.

In our research with managers in complex companies, they tell us that they spend between 30 and 50% of their time in formal meetings and audio conferences. When we ask them how much of that time they are contributing and feel they really need to be there, many tell us that this is less than 50%. Several studies in the US since the 1960s have found similar patterns. According to these studies, most people are attending up to 10 meetings a week, and in total this takes up about 30% of their time. Participants thought that 25% to 50% of their time in meetings was wasted. These studies also show a consistent trend toward more time spent in meetings and a related trend of increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of meetings. These studies exclude audio conferences, which are a relatively recent additional source of meetings. If we are conservative and assume we spend (only) 30% of our time in meetings and only 30% is wasted, then this means that 40

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around 10% of our management headcount is sitting in unnecessary meetings every day. It could easily be twice that amount. When I presented this to the head of national sales for a US insurance business, he was doodling and working out the figures for his organization. He stopped and stood up: “I can’t believe it—right now I have 70 salespeople sitting in meetings they don’t need to be in!” All the businesspeople I meet are under pressure on speed, cost, and headcount. To have 10 to 20% more time and capacity is an unimaginable luxury. However, we still find the time to go to unnecessary meetings. Poor-quality meetings are not just an issue for complex teams and organizations. Studies of meetings in single-site and national organizations over many years have shown high levels of dissatisfaction, the particular causes most often mentioned including: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Decisions not being made. Lack of preparation. Agendas missing or not followed. Not starting and finishing on time.

These are relatively simple issues; it would appear we could solve them very easily. For some reason, however, we seem unable to clean up our meetings. In my corporate career, I spent a lot of time in meetings and attended courses on how to run meetings and make better presentations. I developed training for my company using graphics and facilitation tools to streamline meetings. Looking back, I realize that all of the focus was on the person running the meeting or on the presenter. What I learnt is that usually the best meeting is the one that does not happen. I learnt that everyone is bored in meetings and that much of what we do there is unnecessary. The single most important skill in meeting management is knowing what to leave out. For the topics that remain, we need a fundamental shift away from focusing on the presenter or facilitator and toward focusing on 41

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the participants. If they are not involved in what is happening in the meeting, then they should not be there. Meetings slow things down and make them more complex in several ways: ❍ Unnecessary meetings use up resources that could be used to

carry out more important activities. They are costly and time consuming to organize and attend. ❍ Meetings encourage decision making by committee. Everyone feels the need to contribute and may have the same vote on what to do. This often leads to compromise, rarely a good business solution. ❍ Meetings can impose a delay on decision making. Participants are tempted to wait to raise problems at the next meeting instead of dealing with them immediately. ❍ People spend a significant amount of time, even in the best meetings, on issues that are not moving them forward or are not relevant to all attendees.

Creating meetings you want to attend The process to improve meetings is: ❍ Cut out star group topics, focus on spaghetti issues. ❍ Minimize the size. ❍ Design for participation.

Cut out star group topics, focus on spaghetti issues If we look at the example from the beginning of the chapter, what is Pearl doing in her sales meetings? Her agenda includes topics that form part of nearly every team meeting I ever attended in my corporate career: 42

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❍ Activity reviews—the classic group topic, relevant only to the

individual and their manager. On this agenda item alone, the other 10 people are usually disengaged for 100 minutes, which represents over 16 hours of wasted effort every month. Pearl could achieve the same objective by a series of one-to-one telephone calls—it would take her no more time and save the other group members 200 hours of boredom and frustration every year. ❍ Business update—giving information, another group-mode activity. Getting face to face to do this is not a good investment. Pearl could use net meeting or audio conference for this. If she wants a discussion about the business, she could circulate the information in advance by email and just take questions at the meeting. Alternatively she could run a quiz or competition based on the information she sent out. ❍ Best practice—there could be something useful to the team in the transfer of learning, but doing this at a meeting is an inefficient process. You have to make sure that people need the new idea and are likely to use it. I will propose a quicker process for managing best-practice reviews later in this chapter. ❍ Sales conference presentations—it is tempting when you only get the whole team together once a year to have each director of the business make a presentation. Everyone wants their chance to present to the salesforce, but this is classic group activity. The value of having the salespeople in the same place is to get them to interact, not for them to passively receive information. When I was finalizing this chapter, I ran a sales conference for a global team. I persuaded a nervous group of directors not to make product and corporate presentations to their salesforce. The directors were concerned that the salesforce would miss the information and be dissatisfied at its lack. After the conference they sought feedback from every salesperson who attended—the conference was a great success and none of the salespeople asked any questions about what had happened to the traditional presentations. The directors were a little unhappy not to be missed, but pleased because the conference was a success and they had saved a lot of time

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preparing and rehearsing presentations that nobody needed. They also valued the chance to listen to their salesforce rather than just tell them things.

The formal part of Pearl’s national conference spent most of the time concentrating on group activities. These activities put the salespeople in the role of audience; the expected response is “shut up and listen.” This is not engaging, not interesting, and not useful. How often have you been to a meeting, conference, or training session and afterwards said, “The meeting was poor, but it was worthwhile because we had some great discussions in the breaks and in the evening”? If that is true for you: ❍ What is it you do in the meetings that makes them so boring? ❍ If what you do in the breaks is so useful, why don’t you do that in

the meetings instead? In the breaks Pearl’s salespeople networked, shared stories and problems, played with products, swapped ideas on new techniques, and partied. These are all tremendously valuable. Building networks and relationships and sharing learning are very difficult to do remotely and make excellent use of face-to-face time. These are all spaghetti topics where everyone is involved and engaged. I am sure that in most organizations it is impossible to obtain a budget for getting your people together to network, relax, swap stories, and get to know each other, so you need to find ways to allow this to happen within your meetings. One of the best things you can do to speed up your meetings is to stop doing star group activities in physical meetings. Face-to-face time in complex teams is too valuable and expensive to spend on what are essentially a series of one-to-one conversations.

Better ways to run group topics The best way to speed up star group meetings is not to have them at all. But if you feel you really must have star group meetings, then 44

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there are far faster and more engaging ways to organize their content. Here are examples of how you can reengineer two of the biggest potential time stealers: activity reviews and best-practice sessions. FASTER ACTIVITY REVIEWS

There may be times when you choose to include group activities in your meeting for a specific objective, for example where it is important that a team has an overview of the business. This is often the case with management teams. Do you remember our EMEA management team from Chapter 1? They spent a lot of time on activity reviews. The president of EMEA operations holds two-weekly board meetings with his country and functional vice-presidents. At the meetings, each country head presents what is happening in their country. They each give a business overview, report performance against budget, and offer some information on what is unique about their market. The French VP has little interest in a long presentation on the evolution of the telecoms market in the UK over the last five years, but is eager to share his news on senior people changes in a major French customer that should help the sales effort there. The German country manager is keen to update the meeting on the new developments in his organizational structure, but is not really very interested in the French customer’s personnel changes. The country reviews are only really of interest to the president, the relevant country VP, and sometimes the finance VP. By the time the six major country VPs and four functional heads for human resources, finance, supply chain, and marketing have reviewed their operations, there are only a couple of hours of the meeting left for other issues. They rarely come to the end of the agenda, and they regularly delay items for discussion at the next meeting—the meetings become a bottleneck for some critical decisions. The meetings are not seen as particularly useful, but on balance people feel they are worth attending because they are the only real face-to-face time when everyone gets together and there is the opportunity in the breaks and over breakfast to do some offline work that is really necessary.

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When we asked participants what the real value of the meetings was, we were able to reengineer the meeting into spaghetti team and star group activities. The activity reviews are classic group issues. They are of little interest to other participants, unless there is a direct impact on their areas of operation. The team felt strongly that they needed to have an overview of the business, but that it was taking too long. We radically simplified the existing 45minute activity reviews into three slides and five minutes per person. The three slides were:

● A standard business overview. This keeps the team up to date with the overall direction and state of the business. Rather than let everyone interpret what this means (for the Germans an organization update, for the French a personnel change at a customer), the coverage of the overview was tightly defined and a standard format provided. This also reduced the time necessary for “What does this information mean?” discussions. ● A summary of the implications for other people around the table. The team really needed to know if a decision made in one location had implications for another country or function, for example where recruitment plans in Italy had an impact on human resources budgeting. ● A free slide to share something you are proud of. Management teams have little opportunity to share their successes and get recognition, so this was a real added-value activity for the team members, Sharing these three pieces of information typically takes less than 10 minutes per person. This one change saved 44 hours each month for the 10 VPs and the president. We will see later what they did with the time they saved. By settling on a format with three slides and five minutes to present, they were able to embed the approach into the design of the meeting and make sure they did not fall back into the bad old ways of sharing things that the others could not use.

With a little thought and creativity, you can find alternative ways to share information in more effective and less time-consuming ways.

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Members of an IT project team work on the implementation of SAP systems in their organization. Each individual has clearly defined areas of responsibility and they normally work independently. Because they are all part of the same project, they have a weekly project-update conference call. Although there are only eight members, their activities are detailed and technical. Updating the others takes at least 15 minutes. Most of the information is technically interesting but is not required for the others to do their jobs. Being engineers, they often have good ideas on how things could be improved and are regularly sidetracked into long technical conversations. The 2.5 hours per week that this conference call takes represents 7% of the total project resource. The group redesigned the activity review around a system of “interdependence traffic lights.” They identified areas where particular activities had an impact on other individuals in the group, and created a reporting format showing whether these areas were green (OK), amber (likely to cause a problem), or red (already causing a problem). It was rare for the interdependences to spread to the whole group, so clusters could form around specific amber or red issues in advance of the conference call. At the conference call itself, participants focus on the implications of red and amber traffic-light issues to the project as a whole. The group can choose to reallocate resources if required. This change reduced the project update to less than one hour.

Activity reviews are often the biggest single time stealer in meetings. Leaving them out, or radically reducing the time spent on them, can save 50% or more of the typical team meeting time or free up time to focus on real team issues. Many managers feel nervous about leaving out activity reviews from their regular meetings. I hear objections such as: ❍ I like people to listen to others’ activity reviews so they can get a

sense of who is busy and whether they are working as hard or effectively as others in the team. ❍ I need my people to have an overview of what is going on across the team. 47

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These are valid objections, but both are by-products of the activity review and achieved at great expense in wasted time. If there are performance management or coordination issues, these can probably be better handled in one-to-one discussions rather than having everyone else sit and listen. BETTER BEST-PRACTICE SESSIONS

The idea behind best-practice reviews is to transfer learning. Someone who believes they have learnt something of value to the others in the meeting will often propose that they offer their “bestpractice” learning. I describe the majority of best-practice reviews as “great solutions to problems I don’t have.” Even the term sets up resistance. “Best practice” suggests I have a better solution than the one you have developed, so be quiet and listen. Sometimes the best practice comes from outside the team or from a specialist function or head office, and these are even less welcome. I would rather they were called “transfer of screw-ups”—let me tell you about the many mistakes I made so you can avoid doing the same. People will only be receptive to learning if they have a need for it and an interest in it. If not, then best-practice reviews are largely a waste of time. A team of 12 people held regular best-practice reviews where human resources staff based from Canada to Chile presented their learning to colleagues doing similar jobs. Even at 15 minutes per presentation, this took three hours of their valuable face-to-face team meeting time and it frequently overran. People often struggled to think of something they wanted to share. Participants found little value in this, but the HR vice-president was keen to foster the transfer of learning. Teams like this get little opportunity to benefit from one another’s experiences. The team was convinced they needed to learn from each other but were frustrated that the process was so time consuming. We redesigned the meeting around “wants and offers” and asked each participant to make a flipchart with two columns. The first column was

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“wants”—areas where they were looking for ideas and learning to solve a problem they were facing. The second column was “offers”—areas where they thought they had a great idea to share with others. After this first stage, we observed that there were a lot more offers than wants—people were much more likely to offer a good idea than to ask for help. Next we asked people to walk around all the flipcharts and mark their initials against the “offers” they were interested in finding out more about. We also asked them to mark their initials against any “want” they thought they could help with. After the second stage, we noticed there was very little interest in most of the offers. Only three of them showed more than one person interested. However, several people thought they could help with other people’s problems! We asked the people who were interested in the three offers to form small teams to discuss them. Where there was only one person interested, we linked that individual with the person making the offer and asked them to have a one-to-one conversation. We captured the names of those offering to help with specific wants and published them after the meeting so people could take up the offers if they wished. Most of the smaller conversations happened outside the meeting, either in breaks or later on the telephone. After 30 minutes, the best-practice reviews were finished and during that period people had only been involved in conversations they had chosen to join because they had an interest or need. Including preparation time, this process took 45 minutes, instead of the three hours it used to occupy. People’s satisfaction with the quality and relevance of the discussions went up significantly.

A common objection to removing star group reviews from spaghetti team meetings is, “There is occasionally something there I would like to know more about.” When you strip out other topics, you do run the risk of missing occasional things that would have been useful to know. This is a risk you have to take, otherwise you waste far more time than this accidental knowledge is worth. By designing activities carefully, you can minimize the risk of this happening.

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MINIMIZE THE SIZE

Making meetings as small as possible reduces complexity and accelerates the speed at which you can develop meeting norms and shared expectations. The size of the meeting is defined around the expected outcome and should take into account the style of working required to deliver that outcome. Objective of meeting

Size of meeting

Way of working

Decision making, indepth discussion, and cooperation

Up to 6 people

Spaghetti team

To solve problems by bringing several perspectives to bear on an issue; coordinating complex activities

6–10 people

Star group

Information giving with questions and answers

More than 10 people

Extended group; consider other methods instead of face to face

DESIGN FOR PARTICIPATION

Once you have eliminated or radically simplified any star group activities in your meetings, you are left with only true “spaghetti team” topics to discuss. You then need to focus on getting the best use out of this time. Face-to-face conversations tend to be longer than conversations through technology on the same topic. This may be because the social cues given and received in a face-to-face conversation encourage people to contribute more and to respond in their turn. 50

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It is certainly easier to digress and move into discussing irrelevant topics, particularly if these are more interesting than the subject of the meeting. So where possible, simply moving the same topic from face to face to telephone may, by itself, speed up the discussion. I read about one CEO who tries to have all of his meetings standing up—he claims that this makes them short and focused. Perhaps you should redesign your meeting rooms using uncomfortable seating (as some fast-food restaurants are rumored to) to encourage faster turnover. The best use of face-to-face time is not in viewing presentations and consuming information—it is in participation and interaction. The reverse is also true: If the meeting is not participative, it is probably not necessary. Our EMEA management team used the four hours they saved by tightening up their activity review to focus on true team discussions with lots of interaction and participation.

● Spaghetti team working—they can give more focus to joint decisions such as discussing strategy, resource allocation, and senior talent development, all areas where they need to take a regional overview and act as a team driving the EMEA business forward. ● Small team working—one of the best parts of the old meeting was the breaks, where small groups of people with a common issue could get 20 minutes together to make progress or solve a problem. The team meetings now break into small clusters during the afternoon to allow members to focus on areas they are personally involved in without everyone else wasting time sitting and listening. The biggest benefits have been increased engagement, more time to focus on critical “team” discussions, and less frequent meetings.

If you decide to run a face-to-face meeting, it should be because you think that the spaghetti team style of interaction is necessary to 51

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achieve the outcome you need. If team interaction is not necessary, then a meeting is usually not necessary either. In the last chapter, I described a few areas where there is real benefit in my own organization working as a team: community, business direction, issues that involve all of us, and learning. Having realized this, the critical step is then only to do spaghetti team things when we are face to face. Our face-toface time is too valuable for activity reviews and matters only of interest to subsets of the group. What this means is that we spend the first day of our meetings on community. We do some form of activity together designed to give us time to reconnect, resolve individual issues, lobby each other, and unwind—there is no formal business agenda. On the morning of the second day, we review business direction and common issues. Usually we work on these in small sub-teams before the meeting so we are discussing a proposal rather than a blank piece of paper. By midday we are running out of issues where everyone needs to be involved, so we start to break into smaller working groups of three or four people working on particular projects. We spend most of the rest of the meeting in these sub-teams, with occasional reporting back if we need to make a significant decision.

An indication of how boring most meetings are comes from a survey of how people spend their time in meetings. In 2003 RoperASW and Tandberg sampled 625 business professionals in the US, UK, Norway, Germany, and Hong Kong. They asked them what else they were doing while participating in meetings. During face-to-face meetings: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

55% gave their full attention. 5% did other work. 3% checked or wrote emails. 1% surfed the web. 15% daydreamed.

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The figures were even worse during audio conferences: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

23% gave their full attention. 27% did other work. 25% checked or wrote emails. 13% surfed the web. 13% daydreamed. Worryingly, 8% were not fully dressed!

How poor are our meetings when only just over half of people can be bothered to pay attention? If this was a production environment, would we be content with 50% scrap and wastage? Even when people are physically present, a lot of them are mentally absent. Sometimes they are physically absent too! “It ended up costing me more to have better meetings,” a human resources VP in the UK complained about his transatlantic team meetings becoming more expensive as we refined their meeting process. “Before we focused on true team issues there were always a couple of people who could not make the meeting—there was always something that came up at the last minute, a business crisis or more important meeting. I guess looking back they were telling me that our meetings were not a good use of their time, even though we always had a long list of things to discuss. Now that everyone is engaged in every issue, it is amazing that everyone turns up for the meetings and seems to enjoy them—it’s costing me more but we really get things done.”

To create much more successful and interesting meetings you must design participation into your meetings from the very beginning. To get the maximum benefit from your time, design meetings to be interactive and participative. Presentations typically take up a large part of regular face-to-face meetings. Because they typically consist of individuals giving information to an audience, they tend to be more suitable to the star group mode of communication. There is little added value in bringing a group face to face to present information at them, and in many 53

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cases as much effort has been put into the appearance of the slides that are typically used as into their content. Online meetings would often be a quicker and cheaper alternative. In order to get the real value from team time, you may need to present some information to stimulate discussion and creativity. But this should be minimized and, as much as possible, done before the meeting. When my consultants design meetings we map out what we will be doing at each stage to drive the process forward: what we will say, what tools we will use, how long we will allow for group work, and so on. Then we go through the same exercise from the participants’ point of view, asking, “What will they be doing at this point?” It is easy, even for experienced facilitators, to focus too much on what you are doing and find that the participants have long periods where what their role is “shut up and listen.” Item

What will we be doing?

What will others be doing?

What outcome do we want? What process will we follow to reach this outcome?

With a little thought and creativity, meetings can be made much more stimulating at the same time as you make them more focused and efficient. If you find there is little role for participation in your meeting, then why not cancel it and send an email with an attachment of your presentation instead.

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TOP TIPS IN DESIGNING FOR PARTICIPATION ❍ Get people participating the way you want quickly. If you want active participation, get them doing something in the first three minutes. ❍ Get people involved in the generation and creation of materials and ideas rather than just presenting finished ideas and materials to them. Use Post-it® notes, wall charts, and other materials they can change and make their own. ❍ Engage all the senses. Use color and music. Encourage movement by getting people to walk around and post things on the walls. ❍ Make the room layout match the process of the meeting. U-shape or lecture-theater layout focuses the attention on the leader; smaller, round tables encourage more group interaction.

Running far better meetings It is not the purpose of this book to repeat all of the published advice on running better meetings. The people I train seem to be aware already how to run better meetings in theory, but they don’t get around to applying what they know in practice. Here, however, are some specific pieces of advice for improving complex team meetings, which are usually more diverse and more expensive than traditional meetings: ❍ Use outcomes not items. ❍ A regular meetings is a bad meeting. ❍ Solve the five most frustrating characteristics of meetings. USE OUTCOMES NOT ITEMS

Meetings are called for many reasons, including to: ❍ Make decisions. ❍ Inform people about decisions already made.

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❍ Get input into decisions that will be made later by others. ❍ Give information. ❍ Solve problems.

Many meetings take place without a purpose or an agenda. If there is no agenda, then how do you know you need a meeting? I prefer to state the purpose of a meeting by being clear about the outcome expected: Will we produce information, a decision, ideas? The alternative (and the norm) is to list issues with no idea of what is expected. Having clear outcomes helps you to prepare and creates shared expectations of the process you will use to get to that result. In diverse groups of people who may not meet very often, there may be different assumptions about what meetings are for and how things get done in them. Clarity helps overcome these potential misunderstandings. When we run complex team meetings, we always start with clarifying the expected outcomes for the meeting and agenda items. Once we have done this we ask, “What process will we follow to achieve these outcomes?” Usually, there is a mismatch between the process and the outcomes the client wants. A large multinational R&D organization was arranging a one-day meeting for 300 of its people. 200 of them would be flying in to the event and all would be staying overnight for an evening session. The purpose of the meeting was “promoting networking,” a good objective for a group of this size. When we asked what process they were thinking of using, they showed us a plan based around six 45-minute PowerPoint presentations from the company’s main board members. Leaving aside the fact that most of the information was of limited use to the R&D community and should really be sent round in an email, there was a clear mismatch between a planned outcome of “promoting networking” and a process of “shut up and listen to presentations.” When we pointed this out, we were told, “We thought about that, so in the evening we will do a team-building activity.” When we found out that the

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“team building” consisted of going to the theater and a formal dinner, we summarized the process as:

● Shut up and listen for six hours. ● Go to your room and send emails for one hour. ● Sit quietly in a darkened room all facing in the same direction for two hours. ● Sit with six colleagues, two of whom you can talk to, for one hour. ● Do some networking in the bar after all this has finished, if you have the stamina. The budget for the event was in excess of $250,000. Incidentally, the company discouraged people from going to the bar at the end of the day and the hotel charged any drinks directly to the individuals (there had been some problems the previous year). This meant that the only opportunity to actually network (the planned outcome of the meeting) was outside the agenda, in people’s personal time, discouraged, and at their own expense! Unfortunately it was too late for us to influence the design of the meeting, so we declined to take the job.

If the outcome is networking, the process must encourage small group discussions that continually form and reform. People need to circulate, learn one another’s roles and names, and find points of common interest. You need to make contact details available and give people freedom to cluster around areas of common interest. A “trade show” of the projects going on in R&D, with participants free to circulate and ask questions, would be a better format to use. It is common at these “shut up and listen” meetings for presenters to be disappointed at the level of participation and response they receive after their presentations. If you train people to shut up for 45 minutes (or six hours), you can expect them to fail to respond later. A trainer once told me, “If getting a response from your audience feels like pulling teeth, ask why your presentation feels like a dentist’s waiting room.” Match the process you use to the outcome you want. If the outcome you want is to make a decision, the process should include: 57

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❍ Sharing (or ideally pre-circulating) the information needed to

make the decision. ❍ Having an opportunity to discuss it and ask questions. ❍ Understanding the process you will use to make the decision: Will it be majority decision, a consensus, will the boss decide, or will you just make a recommendation to others? If the outcome you want is for people to be informed of something, asking them to sit and listen and then ask questions is a suitable process. However, it may still be better to do this by email. For each agenda item you should always ask: ❍ What is the outcome expected? ❍ What is the process you will follow to get there? ❍ (As a check) Will this process lead you to this outcome?

If you can answer these questions, you have a good chance of achieving the outcomes you plan. A REGULAR MEETING IS A BAD MEETING

We frequently receive calls from companies who are holding a global meeting and, usually at short notice, are looking for a speaker or someone to facilitate a team event. With dozens of people already booked to attend and significant travel and hotel expenses already incurred, they have not yet defined the outcomes of the meeting. Don’t arrange a meeting then think about what it is for. First make sure you have a compelling need to justify the meeting, only then start thinking about when to meet. In my first corporate job, I was part of an employee relations team on a large traditional manufacturing site. We held regular weekly meetings with the site trade unions. When I was researching the answer to a question one of the shop stewards had raised, I found the storage area for the minutes of this meeting. The meeting had been running regularly, every week, for over 25

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years. For all of this time “health and safety” had been item 1.1. Some weeks there was nothing much to discuss on health and safety and we had to think really hard to find something to talk about. Some weeks the agenda was not very full, but as the meeting was booked we had to find something to discuss.

If your meetings are regular, try missing one and see what happens. If you have standard agenda items at every meeting, try to get them off the agenda next time. I never did manage to get health and safety off the agenda; the shop stewards insisted it was so important that not discussing it showed we didn’t care about the subject. I suspect it is still item 1.1 on the agenda 20 years later. If you have a very busy and widely distributed team, you may have to fix regular meetings far in advance, otherwise it may be impossible to find dates that everyone can make at short notice. This is the case in my team, where consultants may have part of their diaries booked as much as 12 months ahead. The trick then is to fix as few dates as you can to ensure that there is always enough to discuss, and not to be afraid to cancel a meeting if there’s not enough value in running it. SOLVE THE FIVE MOST FRUSTRATING CHARACTERISTICS OF MEETINGS

Whenever we facilitate meetings, we find that the same types of issues frustrate participants: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

No agenda. Lack of preparation. Lack of clarity of purpose. Interruptions from mobile phones or emails. Irrelevant discussions.

We always find that participants know what the answers to these are, they can even tell us how to remove the frustrations, but somehow they don’t get round to doing it for themselves. 59

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We recommend you have someone in the group who can act as a facilitator; it does not have to always be the same person, and everyone can take a turn. It is genuinely difficult to act as a facilitator, keeping an eye on the process of the meeting, if you are also deeply involved in the content of the discussion. A facilitator who is external to the group is useful, but may not be practical if meetings are regular. When we act as facilitators, we always ask the participants of the meeting to define how they want to handle things. Externally imposed rules or meeting etiquette rarely work. The rules participants want to enforce must come from within the group; the rules that a group of Nordic engineers prefer to run their meeting by may be very different to the rules that a group of Latin American salespeople find comfortable. It is the process of discussion, making the issues explicit and raising awareness, that solves the problem, not the form of the rules themselves. We ask participants three questions: ❍ What frustrates you about this meeting? ❍ How do you want to handle it? ❍ What should the facilitator do to help?

Opposite are some rules we have seen used to handle some of the key frustrations. Remember that the particular ones you use will be up to you. Whether you can use the rules or enforce them will depend on your level of authority, the diversity of the team, and the kind of organization you work in. As you can see, the rules and the way groups handle them can differ. Only rules that the group members develop themselves really work in the long term. And only discussing this issue will allow you to develop ways to improve the conduct of your meetings.

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What frustrates you about this meeting?

How do you want to handle it?

What should the facilitator do to help?

No agenda

If no agenda is published seven days before the meeting, nobody needs to attend (Dutch FMCG company) Create agenda at the beginning of the meeting before anything else (Chicago publishing organization)

Cancel the meeting

Start all discussions based on the assumption that prereading has been done (German engineering company) Assume no preparation and present all relevant information at the meeting (UK advertising agency)

Don’t allow recap and review for those who have not prepared

Make sure it is clearly spelt out at the beginning of each agenda item (British bank)

Don’t let us start discussing an item until the purpose is clear, write the outcome on a flipchart

Lack of preparation

Lack of clarity of purpose or outcomes

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Create agenda with Post-it notes, monitor progress

Keep us to time

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What frustrates you about this meeting?

How do you want to handle it?

What should the facilitator do to help?

Interruptions from mobile phones

Switch the phones off (Swiss chemicals company) Accept that phones must be left on but switch them to silent/vibrate mode and leave the room when they ring (US mobile phone company)

Impose a fine or forfeit

Point out when we have strayed

(This is sometimes difficult for an external facilitator to spot as they do not always know what is relevant) Ask the group if it seems to be digressing

Irrelevant discussions

Remind us to leave the room, embarrass us if the phone rings loudly

Opposite are our recommendations for simpler meetings designed to deal with most of the spaghetti team issues of a typical ongoing team. Use this as a template to evolve an agenda that fits your needs.

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TEMPLATE FOR A FACE-TO-FACE TEAM MEETING Introductions and community time ❍ Even teams whose members know each other well need to get up to date. Allow time to meet and let off steam, particularly with remote teams. ❍ Use “good news” posters to allow people to tell their colleagues what is happening at work and in their personal lives (10 minutes). Agenda ❍ Review the agenda, be explicit about the outcome expected and the process to be used for each item. Business overview ❍ Brief communication of any business issues affecting the team as a whole: How are we doing? Not too much detail, just the essence of what you need to know or do differently (15 minutes maximum). Interdependences ❍ Don’t share activity reviews unless the others can do something with the information. If you need an activity review, consider circulating detail by email in advance or define clearly how information will be shared. ❍ Focus on issues that affect others at the meeting rather than one-to-one issues—don’t just tell everyone what you have been doing. ❍ Keep tight control of time in this session. Transfer of learning ❍ Pick a theme of interest to all the team, sales tips for example. ❍ Go quickly round the table: Give 30 seconds each for people to offer their best learning in this area since the last meeting (offers) or areas where they would like ideas (wants). If there are areas of common interest, set up more detailed conversations, perhaps after the meeting, between those involved. How the team is functioning ❍ The “niggles session”—what has got in the way of team effectiveness since the last meeting. ❍ You can also use a team “health check” or team dynamic questionnaire if needed here.

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Critical topics and decisions Review topics that have an impact on all team members, such as: ❍ Decisions you have to take as a team. ❍ Buy-in to new activities. ❍ Budget variances with implications for everyone. ❍ Major changes to objectives. Break into common-issue sub-teams ❍ Group work (report back if necessary) on topics of interest to subgroups within the team as a whole. ❍ Best-practice transfer in specific areas. ❍ Development work. Review the meeting ❍ Discuss whether the meeting was a good use of people’s time. ❍ Identify any areas where you need to improve at the next meeting. ❍ Publish actions.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? If we spend (just) 30% of our time in meetings and 30% is wasted, then this chapter can save managers up to 10% of their total headcount and their total time at work. In many companies, the potential saving is twice this. Faster meetings mean more time to spend on productive work and less cost tied up in unnecessary coordination and discussion. Unproductive meetings are a major source of dissatisfaction. Ending unnecessary meetings has a very positive effect on the motivation and satisfaction of attendees—they gain time and lose boredom and information they did not need to receive. Meetings in complex companies are expensive: A face-to-face meeting for a global team of 12 can easily cost over $50,000 in time, travel, and expense. These costly physical meetings are a tool best reserved for valuable interaction and participation, not passive receipt of information.

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Putting this chapter into practice in your organization Any quality-improvement activity should start with a measure. First, look at the time and cost you incur in meetings and conference calls. For you personally What percentage of your time do you spend in meetings and conference calls? What percentage of this time do you think you don’t really need to be there? What percentage of your total time does this wastage represent? How many days per year is this? How many attend a typical meeting? What is the total waste of time if all feel the same way as you do? What is the total waste for your company overall if this pattern is typical?

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Take the evaluation form opposite along to your regular meetings and conference calls for the next week. During the meetings, keep a record of your personal level of engagement, interest, and relevance in the meeting. Every few minutes check in and record your engagement level (high, medium, or low); consider why this was. When your level of engagement in the meeting changes, ask yourself why. Typically, we are most engaged in issues that have a personal relevance to us. Think how you can make this type of item more engaging in future. It may be that the whole topic is not relevant, or it may be that it is relevant but the process needs improving. Look around at the other participants: Is it just you who is engaged or bored or does it look like others are feeling the same? Why do you think some are engaged and some not? Finally, ask yourself whether you really needed to be part of the discussion or item you participated in. If you had not attended, would it have made a difference to you or to the organization? By the end of the week, you should have a good idea of how much of your time you spend in inappropriate meetings. You will also know where to focus your attention in reducing them. Follow the steps recommended in this chapter: 1 2 3 4

Cut out star group topics and focus on the spaghetti issues. Apply better ways to run group topics—if you really must. Minimize the size. Design for participation: —Use outcomes not items. —A regular meetings is a bad meeting —Solve the five most frustrating characteristics of meetings.

If you do these things, you should expect fewer, faster, more focused, and much more enjoyable meetings.

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Part II Lack of Communication? You Must Be Joking!

3 So Many Things I Just Don’t Need to Know or the first 20 years of my career, every training course ended with me duly writing down that I needed to improve communication. Nearly every business and team problem was put down to a lack of communication. Then I learnt that the problem was not too little communication but too much. People in complex organizations attend irrelevant meetings, listen to unproductive conference calls, and delete dozens of unnecessary emails every day. Communication consumes at least 70% of management time, and half of this is wasted. Communication technology has massively amplified our ability to miscommunicate and given us the ability to confuse far larger groups of people in more varied locations. Its immediacy also makes it too easy to fall into the trap of micro-management. This chapter shows you how to reduce the amount of unnecessary communication in your team or organization dramatically. By eliminating what you don’t need to know, you can win time to focus and improve the quality of the rest of your communication. You can learn to use communication technology as a tool, before it ends up using you. Now is the time to take control of your communication for three main reasons:

F

❍ Communication is a major time stealer—the average manager

now receives between 130 and 200 incoming messages a day. In some of the world’s best-known companies, internal surveys have 71

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shown that 20% or more of all staff time is spent just dealing with emails. ❍ Communication is a major corporate expense—telecom spending has become one of the top five expenses for most enterprises, with corporate wireless spending alone exceeding $35 billion in 2004. ❍ The use of existing technology is growing fast and new technology will increase the number of ways to communicate—30% of web users send as many instant messages as emails. Most corporate IT functions do not support instant messaging yet, but it is coming soon. If you think you get too many messages today, expect them to more than double over the next three to four years unless you do something about it now. Unfortunately, hidden in this mass of poor-quality communication is the essential information you need to make your organization work. You can’t just turn these tools off, you need to take control of them and use them more selectively. Bill is busy. He has a packed weekly routine of regular communication events. He must be important because his time is so tightly scheduled and in demand. In fact, he is so busy communicating and being involved it is hard for him to do anything else. Bill has two regular half-day meetings each week with his peers and his team of 10 people to review activity and issues. He is also part of three different teams who have 60-minute conference call updates every week. One of them is a global team and his boss is in a different time zone, so the weekly conference call with his boss and that team runs at 7 p.m. every Friday. They only meet face to face once a quarter, but with travel the meeting takes three days when they do. Bill prides himself on efficient email usage. He responds to every message within 24 hours and refuses to let the inbox fill up—he even allows some time on weekday evenings and Sunday nights to deal with emails so he arrives to a clearer mailbox in the mornings. In all he spends about 90 minutes a day on managing and responding to emails.

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He gets about 10 incoming calls a day on his fixed and mobile phones; often he gets a voicemail and calls back when he has a free minute. Many of his conversations end with a request for an email to confirm the discussion. His company has just invested in video and web-meeting technologies to reduce its significant travel costs. Bill is looking forward to being able to communicate more freely with his colleagues—he is sure this will be an improvement. He officially works 38 hours a week. Each week he is tied up in meetings for 16 hours and conference calls for 3 hours, He spends 7.5 hours on emails and 7 hours responding to telephone messages. Over 85% of his official work hours are spent communicating; in reality, he does a lot of this in his personal time. In large companies, there can be 10,000 Bills.

When people are all in one place, communication is spontaneous, regular, and easy. Once they are more than about 10 meters apart, spontaneous communication reduces rapidly. Once you are out of sight you are out of mind. In complex companies, communication is no longer natural and spontaneous. You need a reason to communicate, you need a plan, and you need to use technology.

Multitasking: Doing several things badly at the same time The culture of instant response to emails often leads to people being underconnected to the real world. Those on training courses are unable to focus on the learning because their mobile email device is telling them the latest share price or the menu for the cafeteria next week. Those in meetings are not participating in the topic because they are distracted by a text message from a colleague. Many people seem to see multitasking as a badge of honor. Sometimes it is necessary to do several things at once, but this always means doing several things not very well. You rarely do your best work if you are not concentrating on it. 73

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Responding to messages can give you a feeling of progress. You arrive at work in the morning, by the time you have dealt with your emails it is midday, you sit in on your regular conference calls, get up to date with the emails that arrived that day, and soon it is time to go home. You have been busy all day but it is entirely reactive. The technology gives an impression of urgency—people expect a quick response, but the topic might just not be a priority. You need to take control of communication, rather than letting it control your day.

Taking control of communication There are three steps to creating more focused communication in your team or organization: ❍ Say no to messages you don’t need. ❍ Focus your messages. ❍ Tame the technology.

I also address two specific challenges in communication in complex teams: ❍ Planned spontaneous communication. ❍ Accessibility—when being too helpful is a management

weakness. SAY NO TO MESSAGES YOU DON’T NEED

Research on communications frequency has shown that teams that communicate too little have performance problems—but so do teams that communicate too much. We asked participants on our training courses about just one of their sources of communication, their emails. The discussion was invariably a heated one:

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❍ They received an average of 75 emails a day. ❍ 25% were deleted without ever being read. ❍ 10% contained information that they really needed or should act

on. ❍ 65% were emails that “one day might come in useful.”

The “one day might come in useful” emails were a mixture of emails from distribution lists (where individuals receive regular updates on a particular topic or team), copies of emails to other people, project and meeting activity updates, and so on. In each case, participants could think of few instances when these emails were necessary for them to do their jobs. When we challenged people to get themselves off these distribution lists, their answers included: ❍ “One day there might be something useful there.” ❍ “I am expected to be up to date on this stuff.” ❍ “I can always go back and look if I want to check something (but

I never actually do so).” Most reported a sense of guilt if they had not checked and read their emails. Step one of improving communication is to disconnect yourself from this kind of message. They take up a lot of your time and they contain information you don’t need to receive. Depending on your level of seniority, you may be able to influence the email culture of your company, your team, or just yourself. Here is what you can do. At the level of the company At an organizational level, make someone responsible for managing email. An organization of 10,000 people receiving 75 emails each per day generates 170 million emails per year. To put this in perspective, if you printed each email on a single sheet of paper (excluding 75

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attachments) the pile would stretch 50% higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. Despite this, it is usually impossible to work out who is responsible for the email culture of the organization. IT is concerned with volume and storage, legal and HR are concerned about abuse and appropriate use of the content. Who is responsible for the quality of communication and the wasted time? The answer for most companies is “everybody is”—which means that nobody actually does anything. But if a resource is consuming 20% of your people time, it is definitely worth managing. At the level of the team You can reduce unnecessary communication by applying the concept of spaghetti team and star group working. Make sure you are not communicating star group content unnecessarily to other group members. The test should be: Do they need to receive this? Group distribution lists where you routinely communicate individual information “for interest” are often wasteful. Group pattern communication usually takes the form of a hub and spoke, with a number of one-to-one connections, usually to the boss in the center. This pattern works well with one-to-one telephone conversations and emails. If you are managing a group and feel the need to share information more widely than a one-to-one conversation, make sure there is benefit to the other participants. Larger group interactions through audio conference and so on tend to be more about presenting information to an audience rather than detailed interaction. “I was a bit worried about just deleting activity information that the team told me was useful. I got people to store their individual updates on our intranet site, then tracked how many times other team members accessed the information. After three months, it was clear that nobody was viewing the material so I felt comfortable that we could safely stop generating it.” Marketing manager, telecommunications

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FIVE-STEP PLAN FOR SAYING NO TO MESSAGES YOU DON’T NEED Disconnect from time wasters ❍ Go back through your deleted mails and see which ones you routinely delete without opening. Make sure you unsubscribe from these distribution lists and block any senders you don’t want to hear from again. ❍ Do the same for emails you file to read later, but never do. If you dare not unsubscribe or block these, then set your system to auto-file them somewhere where you can delete them later without having to read them or feel guilty. ❍ If you don’t already have one, use a spam filter. Don’t respond asking to unsubscribe from obvious spam lists, it just confirms that you exist and you are likely to get even more emails. If it doesn’t lead to an action you don’t need it ❍ If you receive a lot of information that “may be useful one day,” consider withdrawing from these distribution lists. ❍ The key question is whether the information that might be there one day is important enough for you to read these emails for ever, just in case. If not, treat it as a time waster and add to your auto-file list. If the email wasn’t sent directly to you, you probably don’t need it ❍ Carbon copies (Cc) form an epidemic in themselves, copies of emails sent to everyone who might possibly be interested. Agree the expectation in your team that you will only respond to emails directed to you. ❍ Set your email system to automatically file Ccs sent to you. If it makes you feel better, you can read them later; you will probably find that you don’t. ❍ Braver readers may auto-delete all Ccs. Disable “reply to all” ❍ This may not be technically possible for your email system, but if it is, it helps a lot. If not, just don’t use reply to all. ❍ Without “reply to all” we have to think and be selective about who we send our messages to. That sounds like a good idea. Don’t overestimate the importance of most emails, including yours Two practical things you can do to reduce the number of emails you receive are:

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❍ Send out fewer emails yourself. If 50% of the mail you receive is of no practical benefit, then it is quite likely that 50% of what you send out is of similar benefit to others. Start by being more selective about what you communicate. ❍ Respond to fewer of the emails you receive. Disconnecting from these emails is a risk—one day there may indeed be something worthwhile in the pile of junk emails. However, it is a risk worth taking. If the email is urgent people will normally follow up, if not you will have saved yourself the time in receiving, processing, reading, and storing 50 emails a day, over 11,000 a year. Imagine the time it takes you to process 11,000 emails, even if you just scan to see what they are about then delete them.

Working with large teams through technology forces you to act as a group and to limit communication to giving information and asking questions. Smaller teams can conduct reasonable audio conferences in team mode. Take some time as a team to agree some rules on how to use emails, particularly distribution lists, carbon copies (Cc), and “reply to all.” A senior manager in one of our clients has set his system to send an automatic response to Ccs sent to him. It reads: “I am not your filing system. If you want me to know or do something, please send a message to me directly. All Cc emails are deleted automatically.” It has certainly reduced the number of Ccs in his department. “Our administrator often sends out meeting requests for our team of 12 people: ‘Can anyone make the 23rd or 27th?’ 10 people answer, replying to everyone on the distribution list: ‘24th for me.’ The other 3 answer ‘27th.’ I counted it up the other day: By the time we settled on a date we had generated between us over 400 emails including copies. “More worryingly: An announcement about a local event at our Palo Alto site was mistakenly sent to a distribution list of all employees worldwide, over

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30,000 people. Several dozen people, quite rightly objecting to this tying up the email servers and wasting time, chose to object—by replying to all. One senior manager even responded to one of these objections by replying to all ‘I agree.’ The email system ground to a halt for most of the day before well over a million emails worked their way round.” Angie takes two weeks’ vacation. She gets 60 emails a day and refuses to take a laptop with her when she’s on holiday. When she returns home, she downloads the emails from when she was away. She notices that after a couple of days the number of emails she received declined quite quickly—maybe if she did not send so many emails she would not get so many back. She files the emails from her boss to read later. She deletes the other 450 emails without reading them. When she gets back to the office, three of her colleagues send follow-up emails on issues that still need action. The other 447 emails seem to have magically resolved themselves. This is a common experience for managers who have been out of email contact for several days. If the emails were not urgent, necessary, or would resolve themselves for the two weeks you were on vacation, why are they so essential for the rest of the year?

FOCUS YOUR MESSAGES

As technology makes it easier and faster for us to communicate, there is a risk that we just respond without thinking and spend little time planning our communication. The increased frequency and speed of communication comes at the risk of a lack of focus—on the message and on who needs to receive it. Just because a technology is available and easy, does not mean that it is helpful. As a management trainee, one of my first jobs was to produce the minutes of regular meetings. My boss’s secretary typed up the minutes with a carbon copy for our files. We sent the original copy round to participants with a distribution list clipped to the top. When you read the minutes, you put them in the internal mail to the next person on the distribution list. The system seemed to work.

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Then we acquired an early photocopier. Now my job was to copy the minutes, one set for each person attending. The copier was always breaking down and jamming; it seemed to take ages to make the 12 copies, but at least everyone now got their personal copy, which they filed. Then we got email. Now we produced the minutes via wordprocessing software and distributed them electronically. Because the process was easier, we sent copies to the attendees and to their bosses. We also copied anyone else who had expressed an interest, and their bosses, and our colleagues discussing similar issues on different sites. Several of the attendees forwarded copies to their staff. Because people knew it was easier to change the minutes, there were a lot of small corrections and comments that they would never have bothered about before. I suspect that the only people who actually read the minutes were still the people who attended. The technology made it simple, so we abused it. The massively increased distribution of information had no effect at all on the quality of the meetings, or on what we achieved.

The key questions in focusing your communication are: ❍ What do you plan to achieve from the communication? ❍ Who needs to receive this communication?

When you plan communication your focus should be on the audience—communication is about what the recipient understands, rather than what you think you have sent. When was the last time you planned a telephone call rather than just picked up the phone and called? When deciding to communicate, start by being clear about what you want the recipient of the communication to know, do, or feel as a result. If you are not clear about this, then it is probably not worth continuing. If you are clear about the purpose then you can move on and consider who needs to get the message to deliver this purpose. Who really needs this communication in order to take an action or do their job better? If information does not produce action, then challenge whether it is worthwhile. 80

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Set yourself a target of asking the two questions above before you pick up the phone or send or respond to an email for one day only. You will send fewer messages and the quality of the ones you do send will increase significantly. If you receive unfocused messages or copies, you may also want to give suitable feedback to the sender. TAME THE TECHNOLOGY

There are two main aspects to taming communication technology: ❍ Choosing the right technology for the right task. ❍ Using the tools effectively.

Choosing the right technology for the right task Simply using the right kind of technology may help reduce the amount of time you spend on communication and focus its content. For example, telephone conversations are normally shorter than face-to-face conversations. Phone calls tend to focus more on the issues, whereas the social aspects of face-to-face chats can lead you into more wide-ranging discussions. When communicating remotely, the absence of these social aspects can make you feel more distant and less engaged, but they do have the effect of making communication more focused and to the point. Providing you are able to maintain enough community and sense of connection in the team (see Chapter 7), you can afford for your communication through technology to be more task oriented. Communication studies have shown that even in a typical faceto-face conversation, only a small part of the total meaning of the message comes from the words alone: ❍ Less than 10% of the meaning comes from the words themselves. ❍ Another 10 to 20% comes from the tone of voice and other verbal

clues. ❍ 70% or more comes from nonverbal signals like body language. 81

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A “low-bandwidth” communication technology only allows you to send text—you do not have the benefit (or distraction) of nonverbal and body-language clues. A “high-bandwidth” communication technology allows you to communicate all the other clues about meaning. The most high-bandwidth method of communication is face to face, where you can see body language and other nonverbal signs. You can choose the best communication technology to use by thinking about the level of bandwidth you need for the task. You would not expect to fly to a meeting to look at a piece of text or data and you would not expect to get sensitive news by text message— though this sometimes happens. A news announcement in 2003 read: “Up to 2,500 workers at personal injury claims firm The Accident Group in the UK have been made redundant—many of them learning of their fate by text message.” Using the wrong technology for the wrong task can cause delay and inefficiency—for example using video conferencing for looking at detailed proposals, or persisting in unsuccessful email exchanges when you would make progress faster by picking up the phone.

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Face-to-face communication may be better for many tasks, but when you work together remotely it is a scarce resource. You need a range of other options. If you compare the technologies you use regularly on the bandwidth scale you get a list like in the diagram opposite (you may find the order slightly different depending on how you use these tools in your team). You can easily add any other technologies you use to this scale by comparison. But high bandwidth is not necessarily good and low bandwidth is not necessarily bad—it depends what you are using the tool to do. What are the tools good and bad for? In our training programs, we experimented with using different technologies for a range of tasks. We also discussed with thousands of managers working for leading multinational organizations what they thought were the best uses for the various technologies. Below is what they told us.

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As you can see, the strengths of the low-bandwidth technologies are the weaknesses of the high-bandwidth ones and vice versa. What we have is a set of technologies that can be complementary if we use them correctly. Four key tests that you have made the right choices There are four questions you should ask to see if you have chosen the right technologies for the right communication tasks: ❍ Am I using my high-bandwidth, face-to-face time for the right

things? Am I traveling to build relationships, deal with sensitive issues, and show respect to people and things that are critical to the success of my job, or am I attending meetings to look at lots of data and information with little chance to interact or move issues forward? As your face-to-face time is the scarcest resource, start by making sure you are using it effectively. One of my favorite meeting experiences is when the finance director projects a spreadsheet packed with figures onto the wall. It is impossible to read any of them. He opens his presentation with, “I know you cannot read this, but I think the pattern is clear.” How are you supposed to take in all this information?

❍ Am I using my low-bandwidth, text-based technologies for the

right things? Am I trying to build relationships or solve conflict through email (or hiding behind it)? In many organizations, email in particular can become a shield behind which people say things they would not say to someone face to face or put off actually dealing with a problem. When dealing with more sensitive issues, why not pick up the phone? Review your last two weeks’ emails to see if you are handling high-bandwidth issues through inappropriate lowbandwidth channels.

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I have one client whose email culture expects a response in minutes. If you are away from emails for a day, you may have received three or four followup emails already. People there never think to pick up the telephone. If you call them you get a voicemail. They respond to your voicemail by email almost immediately, so it is clear they use the answerphone as a screening mechanism to avoid voice communication.

❍ Am I combining technologies effectively?

By combining the technologies and playing to their strengths, you can improve the effectiveness of your overall communication and use your scarce high-bandwidth time more effectively. For example, send out detailed information by email and use meeting time solely to discuss particular problems or challenges that you can only address face to face. ❍ Do I escalate issues effectively?

By moving from low- to high-bandwidth approaches as issues become more or less sensitive or likely to cause conflict, you can speed up their resolution. The more there is conflict or opportunity for misunderstanding, the more you need to use higher bandwidth. The salesforce of a North American company communicates mainly by email. They had a problem with “email tennis,” where issues were not being resolved but emails were flying back and forth. They came up with the following escalation rule: “When there are three colors on the email it must be escalated to at least a telephone call, as it is now unlikely to be solved by email alone.” What this means is they send the original email in normal black text. If someone disagrees with a colleague’s email, they respond in blue. If the original sender wants to respond and still disagrees, they make their comments in red text. After that they use the phone. This prevents endless games of email tennis and hiding behind text.

In general, if you are not being successful with low-bandwidth technologies such as email then move up the scale until what you are 85

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using starts to work—try a telephone call and, if necessary, a meeting. Once there has been some high-bandwidth contact, particularly a face-to-face meeting, it is possible to return to lower-bandwidth means to maintain the relationship. “Once you have met someone even the emails are better,” our participants have often said, because they can envisage the tone of voice, style, and intent. USING THE TOOLS EFFECTIVELY

Having chosen the right tools for communicating, you now need to make sure that you are using them effectively. In order to do this you need to know: ❍ What the tools are for. ❍ How the technology works. ❍ How you can best communicate.

What the tools are for New technologies often arrive as status symbols for senior managers or gadget lovers in IT. They become aspirational and move into widespread use. We rarely ask: “What is this technology good and bad for, how does it fit into our communication strategy, and how can we use it most effectively?” ❍ Do always-on hand-held email devices improve overall

communication or reduce the whole organization’s level of concentration? ❍ Do you provide mobile phones so you can always contact others, or so they can always contact you? ❍ Does instant messaging help or hinder? All of these technologies may be great for you and they may meet a critical business need, or they may be an expensive distraction. 86

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Unless you are clear about what you need to achieve and the best tool to use, you may not know which is the case. In my organization we rely heavily on mobile phones. They allow us to keep in contact with colleagues and clients wherever we are in the world. We also believe that, when we are working with clients, we should be 100% focused on them, not distracted by other concerns. As a result, we rarely give out our mobile numbers. To us mobile phones give us the flexibility to communicate out, not to be instantly contactable. We are disciplined in checking messages and clear with our clients about response times. Our clients see us as responsive and appreciate our focus on them when we are working.

How the technology works When you introduce new communication tools there is often a technology barrier—for example, older video-conference technologies were artificial and hard to use, or you may not know how to make web conferences work the first time. This reluctance to learn new technologies may slow down the introduction of useful tools for years. If you think a technology is important, then introduce it in a disciplined way: ❍ Communicate its availability and what it is for. ❍ Train people in how to use it. ❍ Create (or mandate) opportunities to start using it.

People rarely know the capabilities of the communications technology they already have. Do you know how to set up a conference call on your mobile phone, auto-file emails, or run a poll on NetMeeting? Our experience when we challenge managers in leading companies is that they have invested in all of these technologies but are only able to use the most basic of their functions. Once you have trained people in the functions they need (and they are unlikely to need all of the functions), you then have to force them 87

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to use the technology in order to overcome the initial barrier of unfamiliarity. Once people have participated in a web conference or mobile conference call, they are much more likely to use that tool again. This lack of training and discipline in the introduction of technology is a large factor behind the lag in productivity from IT investments in general. Most people use spreadsheets for analysis, wordprocessing software for letters and reports, and graphics software for presentations, but very few have ever received any training in them. Get trained in what you already have before you introduce anything new. I worked for an organization that promotes job rotation and I held management roles in HR, finance, and operations. When you move around a lot, you develop a toolkit of things that seem to work wherever you go. One technique that was always effective for me in a new department was to do a systems audit and check that people were trained in the key systems. This was always unpopular, and people complained, “We have been using these systems for years.” Invariably, when I forced through some advanced training in the tools people found faster ways of doing their jobs and discovered functions they never knew existed. In one instance, we were able to cancel a planned $100,000 upgrade to a planning system when we found that the existing one could do what we wanted already!

How you can best communicate Once you have solved the technology issues, then what remains are the process issues—how you use the tools to communicate more effectively. It takes many years for common agreement to emerge on how to use new technologies. Email has been around for over 20 years, but there is still not a commonly accepted etiquette for how to use it. Some conventions are emerging such as the use of capitals to mean shouting, but there is no common understanding of when to copy emails, how quickly to expect a response, whether to use it for urgent issues, and so on. Unless you manage the process actively, it will take 88

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at least 20 years for accepted etiquettes to evolve for the new technologies being introduced today. You need to get into the habit of asking process questions. In Chapter 2 I looked at ways of developing process rules to improve meetings—the principle for communicating through technology is the same. After a conference call or web meeting, review how it went, what the problems were, what you should do differently next time. If you conduct regular reviews, you develop your own process rules naturally. Here are suggestions for which technologies to use for a range of common communication tasks. If you are not able to implement these due to budgetary or other constraints, then choose the next nearest technology and/or frequency you can use.

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Planned spontaneous communication When people sit close together, they communicate spontaneously— they look up, catch the next person’s eye, and chat. Once they are out of eye contact, this spontaneous communication fades quickly. If you have to pick up the phone or compose an email, it virtually disappears. You lose the many small social interactions and pieces of communication that build a community and oil the wheels of cooperation. These are the “water-cooler moments,” those short, informal faceto-face interactions that are so common in teams based in the same location. There is a risk that you only call your remote colleagues when you either need something or have a problem. If this happens, then every piece of communication is at best neutral and often negative. When every communication is neutral or negative, communication becomes something to avoid. People dread calls from their remote colleagues and fall back even more on local relationships and priorities. Because spontaneous communication is less likely in remote organizations but is so important, you cannot leave it to chance— you need to plan for it. While planned spontaneous communication may seem a contradiction in terms, it is an important technique. When a new person joins our team, we give them a list of all the other people in the team with their contact details. We tell the new person we expect them to make contact with each of the people on the list each week. We explain that we want them to feel guilty if they haven’t spoken to their colleagues for about seven to ten days. After a week, we ask the new person who they have spoken to. Usually they have only spoken to the people they actually met in the first week. Their reason is always the same: “The existing guys seem really busy and I don’t feel like I have a reason to call.” We ask them every week until they are making regular contact with a number of their colleagues. It doesn’t have to be everyone, because once they are established some people prefer more connection than others—what is important is that they build a social contact network early.

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Each week all the members of my team try to talk, often at the end of the week to ask how the time has gone. It is nice to share your jokes, your successes, and your stories with someone who lives the same kind of life you do. There is no business objective to the call, but often people will say “Oh, while I have you on the phone…” and something important just pops out. Often these are things that individuals would not have called you specifically to discuss but once the communication channels are open, they flow naturally. This keeps the drumbeat of communication going and means that not every communication is a request for information, support, or extra work.

Try planning some spontaneous contact with your colleagues.

Accessibility: When being too helpful is a weakness When we ask people who work in complex teams what they expect from their manager, they always expect them to be accessible. At the same time, many of the managers we meet feel guilty that they cannot get face to face with their people as often as they would like. When they do travel, they pay a high price in time and travel costs. Others feel at the mercy of their mobile phones and email from early in the morning to late at night. However, accessibility does not mean being available 24/7. The reality is that most people quite like you to leave them alone to do their jobs—provided they can reach you when they really need you. We define “accessibility” by the team members’ needs, not the team leader’s. Despite this, we regularly meet managers who demotivate their teams by being too involved and interfering too often. You may experience cultural differences in how much people expect you to be involved. In more hierarchical cultures, managers may anticipate being involved more often and feel offended if you do not keep them informed. In cultures with flatter hierarchies, it may be seen as weak to keep escalating decisions and asking for support. Different individuals may also need more or less of your time depending on their experience levels, motivation, and personality. 91

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You may take over a team and face expectations that your predecessor set and you are not aware of. Whatever your situation, it is essential to make these expectations explicit on both sides. Bob, who you will meet in Chapter 4, works all hours and is constantly accessible to his team. He has accepted an unreasonable system of work with crazy working hours and failed to develop local capability to make decisions. He is probably a control freak or works for one; or he may have a lazy or incompetent team. Either way, he is not a role model I want to emulate.

Accessibility needs to be reasonable for the manager too. If there is a real crisis we all expect to be involved, but if the everyday performance of the work requires this level of communication then it is not sustainable or healthy. The only way to find out what people’s expectations are is to ask them. Make the time to discuss what your team expect from you in terms of accessibility, otherwise they will continue to evaluate you against a hidden assumption based on their experiences, their culture, and their previous bosses. With your team, discuss how often you will meet, what information you expect to provide each other with, and what “accessible” means. Don’t forget to clarify what accessible means to you too. Are you happy for people to call you in the evening or at home; how quickly should people expect a response to urgent emails? This should be a win–win for leaders. When they try this exercise, many find that they are working hard to be present more often than their teams need or want them to be. We always advise leaders: “Don’t overestimate the value of your presence.”

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Reducing the amount of unnecessary communication enables you to save time and expense—you can focus on moving activities forward 92

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rather than carrying unproductive overhead. Essential communication can get through more quickly when it is not lost in the mass of trivia. Reduced quantity and increased quality of communication improve clarity, job satisfaction, and involvement.

Putting this chapter into practice in your organization 1 Start with a measure of where you are now (see overleaf). 2 Say no to messages you don’t need: ❍ At the organizational level. ❍ At the level of the team. ❍ As an individual:

—Disconnect from time wasters. —If it does not lead to an action you don’t need it. —If they didn’t send it directly to you, you probably don’t need it. —Disable “reply to all.” —Don’t overestimate the importance of most emails, including yours. 3 Focus your message: ❍ What do we plan to achieve from the communication? ❍ Who needs to receive this communication?

4 Tame the technology: Choose the right technology for the right task ❍ Use the bandwidth scale as a guide to the technologies’ relative strengths and weaknesses. ❍ Ask the four key questions. ❍ Develop an integrated communication plan based on the technologies you have available. 93

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Use the tools effectively ❍ Clarify what the tools are for. ❍ Train people to use the technologies. ❍ Develop process rules in how to best communicate through them. 5 Plan your spontaneous communication. 6 Build shared expectations on accessibility. How many do you receive/ attend/send per day?

How much How much is time do you this per year? spend per week on this?

Emails Phone calls Meetings Video conferences Web conferences Instant messages Other face-toface communication Other TOTAL

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How much is this for all the people in your organization?

4 You’ve Got All the Time in the World n global teams, working across time zones introduces an additional barrier to communication and cooperation, one more source of complexity and potential confusion and delay. But one thing you can be sure about when working across time zones is that they are not going to disappear. This chapter is about using time zones to create a positive source of speed advantage for complex companies, without subjecting your people or yourself to a 24-hour working day. I identify the specific challenges and opportunities at a team and personal level that can come from working across time zones. The principles for untangling time zones are:

I

❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Be aware. Avoid time zones when you can. It’s always local time here. Take all the time in the world. It’s a relay race not a rowing team. Win back your home and holiday time. Share the pain.

Be aware It is unforgivable in a global team not to be aware of the local time zones of the people you are working with. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for their time and personal lives. 95

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You may have to deal with a boss or colleague in another time zone who persists in calling you at inconvenient times for nonurgent reasons. The phone rings in the middle of the night, you blearily answer, and a cheery voice asks, “How are you this afternoon?” When you ask the other person if they realize it is 2 a.m. where you are, they say, “No, sorry, but anyway, about this meeting we are having next year.” When this happens to me, I usually ask for their home number and offer to call them back in a few hours (when it is 2 a.m. their time). When they protest, I explain that if it is not worth their attention at 2 a.m. it is not worth mine!

Working across time zones can force a team into a greater use of asynchronous communication—leaving emails and messages rather than having an interactive discussion. The separation in time and the limited availability of discussion mean that there is relatively little opportunity for teams separated by large differences in time zones to really work as a team. A good way of making time zones visible is to have a world clock on your computer or wall so people don’t lose sight of the reality. This awareness and visibility help prevent misunderstanding. If someone does not respond quickly to your emails and phonecalls, for example, it may be they are asleep rather than uncooperative.

Avoid time zones when you can To minimize the impact of time zones on your team, organize wherever possible at a local or regional level where time zones can be eliminated or minimized. Take the opportunity to concentrate on star group working. Focus your team time on the handover periods (see below) and on subteams in the different locations. Where possible, people the subteams with members in the same region or in time zones where there is at least some overlap. 96

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You can also get rid of time zones through shift working. The data backup location for a UK-based back-office team supporting investment banking is in Singapore. The team in Singapore works a night shift to be available during the core working day in the UK. This eliminates the time-zone problem and some people in Singapore prefer the flexibility of working nights.

There will always be some people who choose to work different hours, but the chances are that the majority of people do not appreciate or want this flexibility. If you choose this pattern of work, you won’t be able to attract them to work with you.

It’s always local time here In researching this chapter, I found several articles on individuals managing across time zones. These stories typically focused on someone who took calls and emails and was available from early in the morning to late at night. The articles portrayed these people as macho modern-day corporate heroes, doing whatever is necessary to deliver the job. The typical story reads something like this: Bob (who you may remember being mentioned in Chapter 3) gets up at 5.30 a.m. in Chicago to check his overnight emails from Moscow and London. After resolving any emergencies he leaves for his morning run. By 7.30 a.m. he is back to wake his partner with a cup of coffee and get the kids off to school. By now at his office, at 8.30 a.m. Bob chairs his first problem-solving conference call with his operation on the West Coast. Meetings and calls continue until 6 p.m., when he leaves for dinner. In the evenings, Bob typically checks emails and dials in three times a week to conference calls in Asia. His Thursday call to Beijing is at 10 p.m. Chicago time. Just before he goes to bed he makes one more check on his emails to make sure nobody needs him urgently and only then falls asleep after a another day of being indispensable.

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People like this are managers who do not know how to delegate, working for companies that have designed ridiculous systems of work. From a corporate perspective, the company is highly vulnerable. If Bob falls under a bus, it has not developed the capability to operate without him. From an individual point of view, the demands are not sustainable in the long term: Bob is likely to burn out soon. I am not talking about the occasional emergency where any committed manager would do what it takes to solve the problem. If your routine requires you to be available 24/7 or you have a crisis every day, this does not mean you are a good manager, it means your system of work is not properly organized. In Chapter 5 you will learn practical tools to help you analyze the reasons for your colleagues calling you outside acceptable hours and systematically improve your people’s capability to solve issues themselves. If there is a critical capability missing in one of your regions, consider adding resource to make it available—if it is critical, it cannot depend on you always being awake and available. If you do it locally, the people concerned are always in the correct time zone. If something is an emergency that only you have the skills or authority to solve, then you may be stuck with being accessible. On the other hand, this may be a sign that you have not trained your people properly and are too much of a control freak to delegate responsibility!

Take all the time in the world The biggest opportunity for speeding up delivery through time zones is the possibility of continuous 24-hour working. In a global team, you literally have all the time in the world. An Indian company provides IT support to companies in California. The Americans report a problem at 5 p.m. on Monday. That is early morning 98

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Tuesday in Bangalore, so the Indian software engineers have up to 15 hours to solve the problem before California needs to be up and running again. The same Indian company realizes that there is unused computer capacity in California during a time zone that is nighttime in California but daytime in India. It leases unused computer capacity in California rather than buying its own capacity locally.

If you are organized, you can take advantage of time zones to deliver faster, at lower cost (using cheaper labor sometimes, or at least avoiding overtime payments). You can also provide a 24-hour service to customers and colleagues.

It’s a relay race not a rowing team It may be more useful to think of teams that operate across major differences in time zones as running a relay race rather than being in a team sport like rowing, where everyone is tightly interdependent at all times. There are periods of independence within the region and periods of greater interdependence and possible cooperation in the handover or overlap periods. Manufacturing operations often employ a shift system to keep the same production machinery working 24 hours a day. Manufacturing focuses on two key things to make the handover between shifts seamless: ❍ Shared processes. If a shared methodology, specification, and way

of operating the equipment have not been established, then a lot of time is wasted adjusting the process at the start of every shift. A shared process enables a fast handover. ❍ Communication at the shift handover. There is usually a formal handover process for the shift manager and the operator of every machine. Some critical functions such as shift management and maintenance are expected to stay on into the first hour of the next shift to provide continuity. 99

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This focus on consistent process and communication in handover is critical to teams that work across time zones. If you must organize worldwide, then consider “sunrise” teams where the work follows the sun and work is handed from one region to another rather than requiring all time zones to communicate at the same time. The challenge of asynchronous communication is that it can cause delay. If you send an email and get a response, you may still need to request more information or clarification. If you do this across time zones your second email may require another 24 hours before you get a response. It is better to use the phone or some immediate text tool such as instant messaging for handover discussions.

Win back your home and holiday time Discuss and agree in your team what norms you expect on accessibility out of normal hours. Try to avoid the temptation to be macho—nobody really likes to be called at home and during holidays, even if it has become accepted practice. In my team we travel a lot. When I am away from home and spending the evening in a hotel, I am happy to take calls—it beats reading a book in my room. My team members can see my diary and feel free to call me then, even if it is just for a social catch-up. When we are at home, though, none of us wants to be interrupted in the evening unless it is urgent. It’s not something we really planned; it just emerged as good practice.

Some technologies allow you to signal availability, for example instant messaging enables you to show whether you are online and available. These can be useful for teams working across time zones to signal who can be contacted when.

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Share the pain While handover across time zones from A to B, B to C, and then C to A again can be arranged without much out-of-hours inconvenience, there is no good time for an audio conference in a global team—someone always suffers. I was trying to schedule a call recently with a team based in Singapore, London, and San Diego. 5 p.m. in London is midnight in Singapore and 9 a.m. in San Diego. 9 a.m. in Singapore is 2 a.m. in London and 6 p.m. in San Diego. Whatever I do, one location will be participating in the middle of the night.

Many companies take the decision to schedule conference calls at the time that is convenient to most people, some choose times that are most convenient for the senior people. Some people never even consider other time zones and schedule the calls for a time that only suits them. One West Coast US-based software development team scheduled a routine weekly call for 4 p.m. Friday, the end of their week. For their UK colleagues it was midnight on Friday, and their Asian colleagues had to dial in at 7 a.m. on Saturday. This was a weekly call and supposed to be mandatory—there were many urgent reasons for people being unable to attend!

If you really cannot avoid conference calls across time zones: ❍ Be aware you are doing it and apologize—the worst thing is if

you impose on people’s free time without even knowing it. ❍ Keep the calls short. ❍ Share the pain—it may be most practical to schedule the calls for the convenience of the many, but if occasionally you take a turn rotating the call so it is more convenient for others, they will appreciate it a great deal and you will learn how it feels to participate in the middle of the night. It is common for people to challenge the 101

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need for such inconvenient meetings once they have felt the pain themselves. If it is not worth interrupting your evening or weekend, you can be sure your colleagues feel the same way. Don’t forget that similar “time zone” effects can occur because of different weekends and vacation periods. The weekend may mean Saturday and Sunday in Christian countries, Friday and Saturday or sometimes Thursday and Friday in Muslim cultures, or Friday and Saturday in Israel. It is possible for teams that include the Middle East region to have only Monday to Wednesday where everyone is working. (And if you are a manager of this region, someone is working somewhere every day.) Anyone who has tried to organize meetings for a global team knows that there is a national holiday somewhere nearly every week of the year. I was asked to organize a large global team meeting in May 2005. This is what I found: Date Holidays 1 Labor Day in China, Korea, India, Mexico, Germany, France, and many others 2 May Day in UK, Greek Orthodox Easter Monday 3 Constitution Day in Japan and Poland 4 National holiday in Japan 5 Children’s Day in Japan and Korea, Cinco de Mayo in Mexico 6 Martyr’s Day in Syria and Lebanon 8 VE Day in France 11 Remembrance Day in Israel Independence Day in Israel 14 15 Buddha’s Birthday in Korea 16 Whit Monday in Germany and France 19 Atatürk Remembrance Day in Turkey 22 Buddha’s Birthday in Malaysia and Thailand 26 Corpus Christi in Brazil 27 Lag B’Omer in Israel 30 Memorial Day in US, Spring Bank Holiday in UK

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If you try to coordinate activity in France in August, from over Thanksgiving to the year end in the US, or during the mooseshooting season in Finland, you may limit attendance at your calls and meetings. If you are running a global team, you need to build awareness and understanding of these limitations. If you are aware of them and try to be flexible, you will earn the right to occasionally ask your people to put themselves out and attend inconvenient meetings and calls. If you do it all the time without realizing, you will just cause resentment.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Organizing to respect the limitations of time zones and to take advantage of the opportunities of 24-hour working can improve speed, ease, and satisfaction. The ability to have work continue 24 hours a day can give you a major speed advantage over traditional 8-hour operations. By concentrating on handovers and running at a local or regional level, you can minimize the difficulties and complexities that time zones can cause. And by eliminating unpopular and inconvenient late-night conference calls and interruptions, you can win back some of your and others’ personal time and significantly improve job satisfaction.

Putting this chapter into practice in your organization 1 Be aware—invest in a time-zone clock for your computer or wall. 2 Avoid time zones where you can—organize locally or perform teamwork activities at overlap times. 3 It’s always local time here—do it locally. 4 Take all the time in the world—exploit the benefits of having 24/7 resources. 103

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5 It’s a relay race not a rowing team—focus on the handovers from one time zone to another. Minimize work that requires simultaneous global working. 6 Win back your home and holiday time. 7 Share the pain—rotate the time of inconvenient calls.

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Part III Control A Finger on the Pulse, Not a Grip on the Jugular

5 Breaking the Chains of Command ompanies need control to make sure they are efficient, legal, and predictable. Too much control, however, particularly from the center, can slow things down and undermine local responsibility. This chapter is about moving control away from the center of the organization and establishing local capability in order to get work done more quickly. If control is really important, why would you choose to exercise it late and far away from the action? It is also about breaking the damaging cycle of micromanagement and lack of empowerment caused by conventional line management techniques. Traditional companies took their ideas about control from the military. As early industrialists brought in unskilled labor and introduced mass production, they developed systems where work was broken down into small steps, closely controlled and supervised. Supervisors and overseers literally watched over the work of their people. They called it the “chain of command” for a reason— it was designed to stop people escaping and making their own decisions. As organizations grew, they became more sophisticated, with central staffs and functional specialists to cope with the complexity. All of these functions developed controls and rules to make sure people carried out their instructions. In larger organizations, it was no longer possible to manage through relationships, and rules and controls came to replace trust.

C

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Central control is slow, expensive, and unpopular This attitude of control has been carried from a simpler past into a present where organizations and employees are much more skilled, complex, and diverse. This attitude is now causing unnecessary delay, cost, and dissatisfaction for three key reasons: ❍ To control work centrally you need to understand it centrally,

and the world is a very complex place. Unfortunately, there is nobody smart enough in any company to understand all business issues, all technical issues, and all local operational and cultural issues around the world. If you try to control things in detail from the center of your complex company, you need a large, diverse, and experienced central staff and a big travel budget. If you do not have better knowledge at the center, you are likely to make poor control decisions there. ❍ Escalating decisions to the center always introduces delay and extra cost. It takes time to make the call or, worse, fill in the form. Problems escalated to the center are often a high priority locally but a low priority centrally, so they may join a long queue of requests. Local decisions are faster decisions. An expert staff may develop more detailed and better thought-through proposals, but sometimes simple and fast are better. “We have a €35 million operation in Mexico that needs to run more locally. The managers are in the habit of involving head office in operational decisions and will sometimes shut down operations while they wait for a decision. With the difference in time zones, this means I have to be available all of the time. If I am not, then production can stop for hours at a time. “Quicker local decisions and empowerment would save us up to two weeks per year of unwanted shutdowns and improve customer supply performance. This is about €1,000,000 per year.” Operations manager, chemicals industry

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❍ People prefer and expect autonomy. They have become more

educated, more diverse, and more skilled. The nature of today’s work relies more on knowledge than the ability to follow a process mindlessly. The people we need to do this work expect more involvement and autonomy. As part of our research, we asked over 2,500 managers of international teams from many leading global organizations to choose whether they personally preferred control from the center or local autonomy (see graph).

Around the world, most people preferred autonomy. The highest score for control was 50% in Spain. The US and Switzerland were relatively higher on control than many other counties. At the other end of the scale, nearly 90% of Chinese and Canadian respondents preferred local autonomy to central control. This should be the win–win of managing complex global organizations: more educated and skilled people wanting more empowerment and being willing to accept higher levels of self-management and autonomy. However, you will be unable to deliver this win–win if you continue to micromanage and control your staff. We asked managers of remote teams about their attitudes to remote management: 109

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We asked managers

They responded

“How do your people feel when you are remote from them?”

They thought that their people felt isolated; that their manager did not have time for them; that they were forgotten and sometimes lonely.

“How do you feel when your manager is remote from you?”

Fantastic—nobody looking over our shoulder, we are free to get on with our jobs.

What can you learn from this? Again, don’t overestimate the value of your presence. Most people like you to leave them alone to get on with their jobs, provided you are accessible when they need you. In this book I focus on speeding up people, projects, and teams—but finding the right balance of control and autonomy at a company level is also one of the big strategic challenges. Do you centralize or decentralize? The decisions you make in this area filter right through from strategy to organizational structure to team behaviors. Globalization and information technology have driven far higher levels of integration within complex companies in the last 10 years. This has often coincided with tough trading conditions and in some cases a lack of trust or confidence in local capability. We now face a legacy of centralization, which is slowing companies down and making them difficult to run. I believe that we need to readdress the balance and that management skill and confidence in our people are essential to enabling us to find the right balance for our new, far more complex environment.

Finding the right balance I propose four simple principles for finding and maintaining that balance: 110

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❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Focus on waterline controls. Control close to the action. Constantly build local capability. Have fewer rules, more responsibility.

FOCUS ON WATERLINE CONTROLS

People who have managed in a close, face-to-face environment become used to managing with a high level of control, often exercised informally by walking around. When these managers become responsible for activities in remote locations, they can feel uncomfortable with their lower level of knowledge and involvement in what is happening locally. Many managers compensate for this feeling of being out of control by either increasing their travel to remote locations, or introducing tighter control or reporting processes. In our training, we encourage teams to focus on essential controls and to be explicit about the level of control they really need. We use the metaphor of a waterline in working with teams to get them to diagnose the balance of control and autonomy that is right for them. The waterline is the line marked on the side of a ship, which shows where the water will come to when the ship is carrying its normal cargo. If there is a hole in the ship above the waterline, it is important to fix it but, provided the captain is confident in his crew, he can be reasonably relaxed that the hole will not sink the ship. If there is a hole below the waterline, however, this is considerably more

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important. The captain needs to make sure his crew fixes this—a mistake here will sink the ship. The waterline represents a clear point at which risk increases. To continue the analogy: If the crew is new and inexperienced, the cargo is particularly heavy, or the weather becomes much rougher, then the waterline, the point at which a mistake is critical, may need to be higher. Start by clearly defining the waterline issues for your team. What will “sink the ship” if it goes wrong? What information does the captain need to have to steer and navigate effectively? In complex teams, you need to move your waterline depending on levels of experience and economic conditions. It is even more important to lower the waterline when you can than to raise it when you must. Many companies introduce more control systems when times are tough but forget to relax them again when business improves or people get more skilled. Control becomes a ratchet that tightens but never releases, and over time too much control strangles the organization. Get into the habit of having an explicit discussion with your people of where your waterline is. The head of an international consulting team sat watching television reports about a highly contagious disease reported in several Asian countries. Governments were introducing tough travel restrictions to stop the spread of the epidemic. His business depended on people flying to seminars from around the Asia region. It was clear there would be a major impact on his organization, but there was no precedent to help him plan. He called a waterline discussion with his team. They decided to freeze some discretionary spending, adopt a tough stance on short-notice cancellations, set up more regular cash reforecasts, and increase their sales focus on domestic organizations. After three months, the business climate had stabilized. One of the team requested a second waterline discussion. At this call, the team decided to release the control measures back to where they had been before the crisis.

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We asked managers to identify what they saw as the positive characteristics of control, what they thought it helped them to do. They identified the values of common direction, predictability, standardization, shared learning, and clarity. The positives of autonomy included flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, fun, and speed. Which areas in your team require this style?

Do you have the right balance of control and autonomy in these areas?

Control: common direction, predictability, standardization, shared learning, clarity Autonomy: flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, fun, speed

You must match the level of control you apply to what you are trying to achieve. Use control where you want predictability and standardization and prefer autonomy when you desire flexibility and creativity. It seems obvious to state that the level of control appropriate for an internal audit function may be completely inappropriate for a new product development group. But take a look at the organizational charts for these two functions in your business. Are they structured in a similar way; do they have the same number of reporting levels and similar grading structures; are they subject to the same capital and expense and HR procedures? In most organizations they will be very similar despite the different working styles and people you would expect in these areas. You may be in an environment where certain controls are imposed on you by regulation or legislation. You may not be able to 113

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do much about these, but do make sure that you are not taking basic regulations and making them more complicated or tighter when you translate them into internal policies. CONTROL CLOSE TO THE ACTION

Giving autonomy does not mean that there is no control; it just means that the people close to the work are exercising control. Once you have decided what needs to be controlled, the second principle is to control it as close to the action as possible. If you have something so important it needs to be controlled, why would you want to delay the control and move it to a point distant from the action? A separation of those doing the control from those doing the work simply leads to a lower level of responsibility in the people doing the work. If you control remotely, sometimes all you achieve is delayed checking: Was the process followed, were the approvals gained correctly? These activities are the equivalent of rework and inspection in manufacturing—they are waste created by a fear that people did not do the job correctly the first time. In an FMCG manufacturing operation at the beginning of the 1980s quality inspection was carried out at the end of the production line. The product was tested and measured and the company scrapped any nonconforming items. Because quality control happened at the end of the production process, problems could exist for up to an hour before they were noticed. In the mid-1980s, statistical process control and other quality techniques moved the responsibility for monitoring to the production operators on the line. By giving them the information, the skills, and the responsibility to control quality immediately and locally, the typical time to spot a problem reduced to less than 10 minutes.

Consider what you can control locally in your team and make sure people have the information and skills they need to exercise this control effectively and immediately. 114

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Existing control mechanisms in your team

How can you control this closer to the point of the work?

What information do people need to have to know immediately whether they are doing a good job?

Look carefully at the remaining types of controls you think you need to manage centrally. Most of these will be for overall coordination of the business (financial reporting and so on), or stem from a lack of trust of your people, or from regulation by outside organizations or laws (which usually assume and institutionalize distrust). If you cannot identify a compelling reason for central control to be necessary, then speed up the responsiveness of your team by preferring local control wherever possible. CONSTANTLY BUILD LOCAL CAPABILITY In manufacturing, I learnt that my job was to build a process capable of reliably making a product to meet a specification. There would be some small variability in the precise dimensions of the products, but all of them would fall

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within acceptable tolerances. When a product went outside these tolerances this was a “nonconforming event” and my job as a manufacturing manager was to get the process back in control (solve the problem), but then to improve the capability of the process so that it could not happen again.

If we apply the same thinking to management, then a manager’s job is to build the capability of their people to solve the everyday problems they come across in their jobs. If they are unable to do this and need to involve you as their manager, first you need to help them to solve the problem. The second and critical step is to build the capability into the individual or the team to deal with this issue if it happens again—so next time they will not need to delay their response to involve you. If your people need to involve you in something it means that you have failed to give them the information, skills, confidence, or authority to deal with it themselves. If you take this idea to its natural but challenging conclusion, every time they call you it is a management failure. This is a tough definition of the role of management, but it is a practical and effective tool in pushing for higher levels of local autonomy. Start by keeping a record of why your team involves you, using the worksheet opposite: ❍ Make a note of the reasons your people call you for support or a

decision. ❍ Analyze the calls to understand the reasons people could not

solve the problems for themselves. ❍ Categorize the calls: — People may be calling you for legitimate organizational reasons, for example if you need to give specific authority for something under your corporate spending guidelines. However, if your company has set up a system that requires people to escalate too often it may have too high a level of control built into it as an assumption. As a manager you may need to challenge this and the analysis will give you some data to do so. 116

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BUILDING LOCAL CAPABILITY WORKSHEET Issue escalated to you

Reason individual could not solve this

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Action to equip them with the knowledge, skills, attitude, or judgment to solve this in the future

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— People may be calling you because they lack the knowledge, skills, attitude, or judgment to solve a problem themselves. In this case, your job is to overcome this weakness so that they can solve it themselves next time. ❍ Develop the capability in team members to solve these issues for themselves. ❍ Once you have provided training, support documents, or coaching, then push back at future calls. Ask: “Have you read the process?” “What have you tried already?” “What did you learn about this in the training?” If people are unable to solve the problem for themselves after receiving the training and knowledge, then it is usually an attitude problem (see opposite). ❍ Keep the worksheet close to your telephone. If the calls start again or new issues begin to cause escalations, you will notice it more quickly. Use this approach to evolve the capability of your team continuously. You should position this clearly to the team as a positive exercise for developing their skills and autonomy. If a manager never offers help and support, they can become very unpopular. However, if you are always the first person everyone calls with a problem, perhaps you are being too helpful to allow your people to develop. This approach is a powerful way of setting expectations about local capability. “I was very successful in my technical career and a recognized expert in the development of the IT systems in the business. I had so much experience I could easily answer almost any question that came up. As a reward for being good at solving technical problems, I was promoted to management. I tried hard to give my people the same level of service that had made me successful as a technical expert, but I found I had an everlasting line of people asking me for solutions to their problems. My people learnt it was easier to ask me than to work something out themselves. I became the bottleneck rather than the fount of all wisdom. It was really hard for me to coach people to find the right answer rather than tell them, especially as I could have given them the answer so quickly. Nevertheless, it was the only way for me to develop my team.”

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Lack of

Example

Solution

Knowledge

People do not understand company policies or guidelines People do not know who in the organization to contact about problems People do not know how to do certain required tasks

Provide reference documents

Organize training or learning materials

Skills

People do not have the Provide training, skills to do the job you coaching, or feedback expect from them

Attitude

People lack confidence Provide coaching to take decisions support, make your expectations clear People are unwilling to Offer coaching, make take decisions your expectations clear, push responsibility back to them, take disciplinary action if necessary People make bad Discuss the incident, decisions that then go get them to analyze the wrong and cause other reasons for the bad problems decision People want to discuss Be prepared to discuss their ideas with you but not decide for them before they decide

Judgment

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Many managers find it difficult to let people make their own decisions. Those who have begun their careers as experts or technical specialists have become successful by providing answers to problems. When they become managers, it is easy to continue with this pattern, answering questions and giving solutions to problems. If you always do this, however, the people who work for you never develop the capability to make decisions for themselves. You breed a culture of dependence. People are much more likely to implement and commit to their own decisions than those imposed on them by others. If you can support people in developing their decisions, you find that they implement these decisions more quickly and more effectively. For example, if they doubt their own judgment, discuss what else they could have done in a particular situation, or create some other similar scenarios to discuss and let them exercise their judgment more often. Make sure people are clear about who is expected to make what kinds of decisions. It is possible but more difficult to use this approach upwards in the hierarchy. “My problem is not my people calling me, it’s my boss. He’s a bit disorganized and often forgets to ask me for information until the last minute. Nearly every request is urgent and it completely throws out my time and resource planning.”

Collecting and analyzing the reasons your boss calls may give you some evidence to go back and structure a discussion about this. You are the best person to judge whether this is likely to be helpful. A more risky approach is to buy a desk sign similar to the one I once saw at one of my client companies and liked a lot. It said: “Lack of organization on your part does not equal urgency on my part.” Unfortunately when it’s your boss, sometimes it does!

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HAVE FEWER RULES, MORE RESPONSIBILITY

As organizations grow, they seem inevitably to move from a system based on relationships to one based on more formal rules and controls. People usually develop rules because someone made a mistake in the past or they fear they will make a mistake in the future. In one UK company, someone once stayed in a hotel that was too expensive. Now there is a strict rule about how much the company will pay for hotel rooms. The rule applies to everyone. People do not need to think about what hotel they need because there is a rule, in fact it becomes an entitlement. People who used to stay in cheaper hotels now move up to the “standard.” In some locations inexpensive hotels are easy to find and more than acceptable, in others they are impossible, so people find creative ways to hide the bill in other expenditure. Instead of staying at airport hotels because they charge $50 above the maximum, people stay further away, but the taxi bill from the airport to the new hotel and back is $75. They spend all their effort on following or avoiding the rule, none on what is the right thing to do. Mistake

Rule

Someone Set amount stayed in too for hotel expensive a rooms hotel

Intended Unintended Alternative consequences consequences way to manage this Stop people Becomes an Encourage spending entitlement people to treat more than the not a company limit maximum money as if it Other costs were their own (taxis) go up Senior Becomes managers about beating role model the rule not the behavior being Deal with responsible individual mistakes individually

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Rules often have unintended consequences. Over time, a company’s rulebook becomes a fossil record of all the mistakes people made in the past. Then people undermine responsibility and judgment by using this fossilized set of mistakes to decide how they will act in the future! If you have an issue with an individual, if they made a mistake, were incompetent or dishonest, then deal with this as an individual problem. Developing a rule that assumes everyone in your company will make the same mistake or is equally incompetent or dishonest makes no sense. Rules depersonalize power. In many cultures, people feel uncomfortable with the personal exercise of power and prefer to have an impersonal rule to make the decision by. Unfortunately, rules do not exercise judgment or discretion. Because of this, rules do not work very well in complex and fast-changing environments. Instead, you need an attitude of responsibility, where people try to do what is best for the company as a whole—this actually gives you more control. People naturally behave according to their attitudes and do not try to find a way around them. An unusual and highly innovative US multinational refuses to have rules for how people behave. A new employee working on the production line asked if there was a rule stopping him drinking coffee at his workstation; the answer was, “There are no rules.” When he took a coffee into the factory, his neighbor stopped the production line and asked him what he was doing. He replied, “I was told there was no rule against it.” “So what happens if you spill the coffee on the product?” his colleague asked. The production operators had a brief discussion on what was reasonable and agreed that they should not bring coffee within a couple of meters of the production line. Work restarted with a shared understanding of what was reasonable. No managers were involved.

If we build the attitude that the rule is more important than the responsibility, people will follow rules blindly, even when their actions defeat the point.

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A call center in the telecommunications industry identified speed of call handling as a key objective. Operators had a target to finish their customer service calls within 90 seconds. In order to meet their targets and earn their bonuses they would hang up on customers in 85 seconds, even if they had not solved the problem. They met their target but customer complaints increased hugely.

If your business is unchanging, if the past is an accurate guide to the future, and the need for standardization is higher than the need for flexibility and creativity, then rules are fine. But where people are involved, where service and the needs of the customer are important, rules struggle to cope.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Moving control away from the center of the organization and establishing local capability gets things done more quickly by cutting out the delays and inefficiencies caused by escalating problems for approval. Faster local control reduces the costs of mistakes and the time taken to discover them. It also lessens the need for additional overhead for checking at the center, in the same way that the quality revolution on the shop floor improved quality and reduced the need for inspection. People prefer autonomy, and the ability to control their own actions increases job satisfaction and motivation.

Putting this chapter into practice in your organization 1 Have a waterline discussion to identify the essential controls in your team or organization. Agree what these are and make them explicit. 2 Schedule regular waterline updates to make sure the level of control changes as the environment changes. Remember, it is even 123

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more important to lower the waterline when you can than to raise it when you must. Identify the specific areas in your organization that require either control or autonomy—be prepared to manage these differently. Move your control mechanisms and information as close to the action as possible. Make sure your people have the information and skills needed to control their activities themselves. Track and analyze why people escalate issues to you. Use this information to drive continuous improvements to your team’s capability. Categorize whether the reason for involving you is lack of knowledge, skills, attitude, or judgment. Put actions in place to fill any gaps. Identify key rules and the behaviors they drive. Replace them where possible with clear responsibilities and feedback. Don’t solve individual issues by recourse to rules that apply to everyone.

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6 Expect More, Lead a Lot Less o move toward local control and increased autonomy, managers need to make some changes to the way they behave. The management techniques and assumptions developed for a simpler past can mean it is hard for them to achieve these changes. This chapter is about practical ways to make autonomy a reality in your organization. It is also about expecting more from your people. People have talked about autonomy for decades, but at the same time they have tended to increase control in organizations. If you want the speed advantages, efficiency savings, and improved motivation that local autonomy can offer, you must manage in a way that makes local autonomy a reality. This will require a change in the way you manage people. In particular, you need to develop four new sets of expectations in the way you manage and are managed:

T

❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Avoid micromanagement. Demand more self-management from your people. Make “good enough” decisions. Have more questions than answers.

Avoid micromanagement Many traditional high-control organizations have a big problem with any manager who does not know in detail what is happening in their area of responsibility. They expect managers to have their finger on the pulse, the facts at their fingertips. It is unacceptable for a 125

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manager in this environment to admit that they do not know the details of what is happening on a day-to-day basis. This is a highly damaging assumption: It means that managers must be continually interfering in the detail of what their team is doing. It forces them to spend time reviewing activity and works against empowerment and autonomy. A US technology company has a new quality director; he used to be a plant manager in the US where he has worked for the whole of his career so far. The quality manager in Indonesia has been working in the Indonesian plant since it was set up and has seen four quality directors come and go. She is a popular and valued local resource. She has been trying to solve a difficult local quality problem, which should not have arisen and will be very embarrassing for her local colleagues if it becomes public at HQ. As a result, the new quality director did not know about the problem in the Indonesian plant before a colleague in a meeting told him about it. This colleague had just visited the site and assumed he would already know about the issue. The quality director is embarrassed to admit he does not know about the problem and feels he has no alternative but to get involved personally. He tries calling as soon as he finds out about the problem (10 a.m. Thursday; 9 p.m. in Jakarta), but only manages to reach the Indonesian manager’s voicemail. He does not want to raise the issue in a message but stresses how important it is for her to ring straight back. He has still not heard anything by the end of the day. That evening he finds a flight from JFK at 8.45 a.m. Friday, via London, that will reach Jakarta at 5.15 p.m. Saturday, and leaves a message with his secretary to send a fax first thing Friday morning (which is Friday evening in Jakarta) organizing a full briefing on Sunday morning and regular updates from the local quality people. He is surprised when there is nobody to meet him at the airport and furious when nobody turns up for the Sunday meeting; in fact the office is locked. First thing Monday he returns to the plant, tells the quality manager how disappointed he is with her responsiveness, and asks her to arrange a full briefing. He attends a number of problem-solving meetings with senior managers at the plant over the next few days, puts a full recovery plan in place, and returns to the US.

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The next week he revises the reporting guidelines to make them more comprehensive and invites all quality managers to a review meeting to clarify the new reporting requirements. He is keen to ensure that he is never again underinformed. The new reporting guidelines look very detailed. He also requests home telephone numbers so that nobody can use the excuse of being out of contact again. The quality director makes it very clear that the first obligation of his managers is to the quality function, even if this is uncomfortable for local colleagues. His raised voice and habit of pounding the table with his fist when angry leave his team in no doubt that he means what he says. To be on the safe side, the quality managers now feel the need to communicate anything significant to their new boss and make sure he is involved in all important decisions. This gives the quality director serious misgivings about the quality of the people in the team he has inherited. They seem to call him on the smallest issues and decisions. He responds by increasing his travel schedule to keep closer to the various local operations. Meanwhile at home, his family is becoming unhappy, saying he never traveled so much before he took this job...

In this example, the root cause of the quality director’s actions was his embarrassment at not knowing what was going on—but why does he have to know this kind of detail? His unease was made worse by his lack of knowledge of time zones; he could not expect a response when the people in Indonesia were asleep. In an attempt to recover the feeling of control he was used to in his previous manufacturing roles, he has disempowered his staff and created a rulebased culture. People respond by escalating everything to be on the safe side. This makes him doubt the ability of his team and he has created a vicious circle of control, loss of trust, and more control. Many managers of complex teams find themselves trapped in the middle of old assumptions and new realities about control. Their senior managers learnt to manage in a high-control environment and expect their people to know what is going on. They begin to discover that this is unrealistic in highly distributed teams, but are trapped by their bosses’ insistence that they need to know. 127

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Trust is essential to releasing control and I spend more time on this issue in Chapter 7. Trust makes you more relaxed that matters are being handled competently at a local level; it also means you are more likely to hear embarrassing news early. It is easier to trust skilled and competent people, so make sure your team is trained and well equipped in their areas of responsibility. Use the approach outlined in Chapter 5 for continually building the capability of your team to keep this competence up to date. It is also important to create clear, shared expectations about what level of information and control you expect from your people, and what your boss expects from you. Use an individual service level agreement (opposite) to initiate a conversation on expectations about how you will work with your people and with your boss. Start by each team member completing the tool separately to see if your expectations differ—if they do, take time to negotiate mutually satisfactory and explicitly agreed expectations. If you think that any of the team’s expectations are unreasonable, this gives you the chance to discuss them and explore their consequences. DON’T BE DRAGGED INTO THE DETAIL I was visiting the HQ of the business where I was head of operations when I found a monitoring screen had been installed near to the coffee break area. On the screen you could see if any of the key operations processes were currently operating or not running. The general manager glanced at the screen and asked me, “Why is process D shut down at the moment?” I looked at him, trying to think of an acceptable answer that was not, “I have absolutely no idea.” Then he said, “I don’t really need to know the answer to that, do I? In fact, I don’t suppose you need to know either. Why are both of us talking about doing the job of the operations supervisor for that process? I’m sure he will let you know if we need to do something.” We got into a good discussion about the trap of having too much information leading you into managing the wrong things. Soon after, I learnt he had asked for the screen to be removed.

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Category

My expectations Your expectations What we agreed

Communication issues, frequency and media Frequency of face-to-face contact Reporting and information needs How and when to review progress on objectives What I expect to be informed about immediately

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Just because you have the information, it does not mean it is the right thing to use it to take control. MANAGE THE TOUCH POINTS

When thinking about this chapter I was watching a television program on speed dating where people have 60-second “dates.” In this time they have to impress a potential partner enough that they want to meet again. When the buzzer sounds, everyone moves on to the next date. I was struck by the similarity of this to the life of some managers, particularly those with multisite responsibilities. They have a few, fast touch points with their people where they need to make an impression, clarify direction, and leave people feeling good. In widely dispersed organizations, people have relatively little face-to-face time and tend only to contact their colleagues when they have a problem or require something. You need to balance this with touch points that increase motivation and positive feelings. Analyze the last few touch points with your people. What was the purpose What impact do you of the contact? think it had on their motivation?

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How could you manage this differently in the future to increase motivation?

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KEEP YOUR UNDERWEAR BENEATH YOUR TROUSERS

The people least likely to enjoy increased autonomy in teams are the managers. Em-power-ment means giving away power—the manager’s power. We train our managers to believe in empowerment and they profess strong support for it; the reality is that many actually feel less involved and less valued when their people do things for themselves. Managers must feel the personal value from better results, the development of their people, and more free time, otherwise they will continue to interfere. In many organizations the “superman” manager who flies in at the slightest problem and solves it in a high-profile way is more valued than the manager who quietly builds local capability and does not have the problems in the first place. If you reward this behavior, you will see it repeated. Superman behavior is damaging to empowerment. It takes power and confidence away from local people and breeds a tendency to refer problems upwards. Next time you are tempted to pull your underwear over your trousers and fly to the rescue, resist. If you are managed by someone like this, ask yourself what you have done to earn the right to be left alone. Do you make sure the manager is well informed, have you built trust, can they be confident of “no surprises” from you? It is always a two-way relationship. AVOID TECHNO-MICROMANAGEMENT It is 2,000 years ago. The UK “country manager” or governor for Ancient Rome Inc. has to make a decision. He knows it will take weeks to get a response from head office by courier. He has a time span of control of several weeks. Any decision he has to make faster than this must be taken locally. Today the country manager in the UK for an Italian multinational has a time span of control measured in seconds. His boss can reach him by mobile phone or mobile email device at any time.

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Who is more empowered? Communication technology is essential in complex teams, but there is a risk of using it to continue to micromanage, instead of encouraging autonomy and local empowerment. Before you pick up your phone, particularly to check on or respond to a problem, consider the impact your call will have on local autonomy.

Demand more self-management from your people During a remote management exercise on one of our training programs, we ask remote team members to tell us what they expect from a good manager. The list typically includes: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Builds good relationships and teams. Sets the vision. Communicates objectives. Clarifies roles and responsibilities. Keeps us informed. Motivates us. Helps us develop our skills and careers. Is accessible when necessary. Empowers us. Resolves conflicts. Removes organizational barriers.

I always challenge this list: “Is this what you really want? It sounds like your mother, not your manager.” If your manager does all this for you, what is left for you to do? In today’s much leaner organizations managers type their own letters and do their own filing, book their own travel and do their own research on the internet. Many also perform a technical or specialist role in their companies. There are relatively few “pure” people managers. When managers are busy with urgent personal work, it is easy to neglect the important (but usually not urgent) peoplemanagement topics. Nevertheless, expectations of managers have 132

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not reflected the reduced time available for management itself; if anything, people expect more from their managers. You can’t have it both ways as a team member: If you want empowerment and autonomy, you have to take more responsibility for self-direction and self-development. As a manager, expect to push back against these expectations with your experienced people. My direct reports are seasoned managers who have all managed complex teams and organizations. Sometimes they ring me to moan about their colleagues; perhaps one of them has not been as cooperative as they wanted or has done something that irritated them. It’s as if they want me to solve their relationship problems. I always ask, “Have you spoken to the individual about it?” If not, I ask why. If it is not important enough for them to address directly, it’s certainly not important enough for me to raise it on their behalf. If they cannot resolve it themselves then I may get involved, but I’m surprised if such experienced people cannot sort matters out between them.

If you are being managed by a busy manager, you may need to handle your own information and contact needs. Don’t just sit there and hope they remember you.

Make “good enough” decisions With so much management information available it is easy to disappear into the detail of your operations. Just because you can analyze your cost and process performance to 0.001 of a cent does not mean it’s a good use of your time to do so. The easy availability of information to you, your boss, and monitoring functions tends to increase unnecessary control. A month after I started a new job in operations I got my first budget report: a 30-page analysis of my area of responsibility. I had no idea what it meant. I had measures for spend on stationery, labor, scrap, petrol, laundry, and

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anything else you can imagine. I spent half a day going through it with a qualified accountant; he did not know what a lot of it meant. I discovered that nearly all of my discretionary spend was scrap or labor. Within labor, the number of people was fixed, unless I fired or hired someone. The pay rates were outside my control for all practical purposes. In fact, all I could influence in the short term were scrap, the number of external contractors I used, and the amount of overtime I authorized. I asked finance to give me a one-page report showing:

❍ Scrap by product and line. ❍ Overtime. ❍ Number and cost of contractors. They could not provide me with this easily, so eventually I took the 30-page report, highlighted the three sets of numbers that mattered, and threw the rest away. I spent as much of my management time as possible working on improving these three areas and ignored or delegated the rest.

The use of spreadsheets to analyze data has become widespread; it is hard to imagine making decisions without data and analysis. However, there comes a point where looking for more information and analysis becomes an excuse for not making decisions. At the point at which further analysis does not fundamentally change the decision, it has become a useless source of delay. In one meeting with a senior manager notorious for asking long, detailed questions (often designed to destroy an idea), I was delighted with the response of a top business school professor. He asked, “What would you do differently in this decision if you knew the answer to that question?” When the manager could not answer, he continued, “Then let’s not bother asking it.”

Ask “What would you do differently if you knew the answer to that?” on a regular basis.

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Have more questions than answers The key management skill for building local capability and autonomy is coaching. Coaching means different things to different people. We have experimented with coaching and the form that works best in complex teams is nondirective coaching, a technique based on asking people questions to help them work out the solutions for themselves. Coaching is not a technique you can use with people who do not already have some knowledge and experience. If you ask questions and people genuinely do not know the answer, the technique cannot work. However, there is a point in people’s development where they do know what to do, but they still involve you in decisions and questions. There can be several reasons for this: They may lack confidence, they may have had a previous boss who wanted to be involved more than you do, or they may be lazy. Whatever the reason for the reluctance, coaching is a tool for moving people toward self-reliance; the goal is that they only need to call you when they require legitimate support. Nondirective coaching based on questions works better in complex teams for two main reasons. First, because individuals come up with their own solutions: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

They are more committed to those solutions. The solutions tend to be suitable for their culture. The solutions are practical for the local environment. They learn they can do it for themselves next time.

Secondly, the coach does not need to be the expert—the individual already is—which has the following consequences: ❍ The coach does not need to be the expert in local conditions and

cultures. ❍ The coach can add value for people who have a technical or other

specialty that they don’t share. ❍ The coach does not end up owning the problem. 135

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When we train experienced managers to use nondirective coaching, nearly all of them find it very difficult to ask questions and not jump into giving answers. Managers are promoted for being good at solving problems, particularly in technical environments, but if all they do is solve problems for their people, those reporting to them will never grow and develop the capability themselves. I once watched one of my shift managers coach an operator who came to report a fault on his machine. When the operator explained the problem, the shift manager asked, “What have you done so far?” The operator said that he had just noticed the problem. The manager asked what he thought he should do next and the operator said, “I will find the maintenance guy and see if we can fix it, if not I will call out the control engineer from the other site.” The manager asked, “What can you be doing in the meantime until the maintenance guy arrives?” The operator suggested he could help on another production line. The operator proposed all of the actions and the ownership was clear throughout. A few days later, I watched a different shift manager dealing with a similar issue. When the operator reported the problem the shift manager suggested, “Have you checked the optical sensors?” The operator went away and soon returned to say, “It’s not the sensors.” At this the shift manager went out to look for himself. A few minutes after this, I saw the shift manager working on the machine—the operator had gone for a coffee! The shift manager had taken responsibility for the problem rather than helping the operator think it through for himself. The difference? The first shift manager had discovered coaching.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Making autonomy a reality in your organization and expecting more from your people enables them to make their own decisions faster.

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By resisting the urge to micromanage, managers save their own time and build the capability of their local teams. Demanding more from your people allows them to develop and extend their capabilities. It also makes poor performance more visible. Coaching is a powerful tool to deliver improvements in performance and skills. More responsive, capable, and confident local people increase their managers’ confidence and create a virtuous cycle of trust and further empowerment. Personal development also boosts job satisfaction.

Putting this chapter into practice in your organization Challenge four key assumptions about how to manage control. 1 Avoid micromanagement: ❍ Clarify expectations with your boss and subordinates—use service level agreements to help structure the discussions. ❍ Don’t be dragged into detail by the wrong kind of information. ❍ Focus on improving the short touch points with your people— plan them to improve motivation. ❍ Keep your underwear underneath your trousers—before you fly in and get involved, consider the impact of your intervention on autonomy and motivation. ❍ Avoid techno-micromanagement—think before you call: Will getting involved make control revert to you? Is this what you want? 2 Demand more self-management from your people: ❍ Make sure your people have realistic expectations about what you will and won’t do. Be explicit about your expectations of them. ❍ Communicate that you expect experienced people to solve their own problems—push back. Use coaching as a key tool. 137

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3 Make good enough decisions: ❍ Review the information you receive and create focused measures, looking at the ones that really matter. ❍ Stop asking for information you do not need. ❍ Ask: “What would you do differently if you knew the answer to that?” 4 Have more questions than answers—learn to be a coach.

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Part IV Building Community Across Distance and Difference

7 Constant Disloyalty and the Keys to Community sense of shared community and trust is essential to cooperation. However, there are powerful pressures in complex companies that can undermine the mutual trust and confidence needed to build real community.

A

Community makes cooperation faster In the past, a sense of shared community in companies was an, apparently free, by-product of the fact that people worked in the same location. They tended to be from the same culture, speak the same language, and have many opportunities to interact, build trust, and become both work colleagues and friends. In multisite businesses, in contrast, it is expensive and difficult to build community and managers often feel the lack of team spirit or a sense of identity. In this chapter I suggest that trying to win back this sense of “deep community” in today’s complex organizations is unrealistic and often too expensive to be worthwhile. I show how traditional reward and measurement systems and matrix organizational structures often cause problems with loyalty and community. I introduce some practical tools for identifying the true “keys to community” that you can use in your organization to build the depth of mutual interest you need to get things done. Several researchers have proven the value of community, social capital, and trust. Cohen and Prusak in their book In Good Company 141

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looked at social capital, which they defined as “the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviors that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible.” Other researchers have correlated social capital with cooperation, better health, lower crime, lower transaction costs, higher participation in politics and social activities, higher economic prosperity, lower administration costs, and the ability to grow larger and more efficient organizations. Anyone who has experienced an organization or team that does not have a sense of mutual trust and confidence knows how difficult it is to achieve anything worthwhile. The major benefits of high trust in organizations fall into three main areas: ❍ It reduces barriers and transaction costs—if you have to prove or

check trustworthiness before working together, you incur unnecessary cost and delay. ❍ It speeds up cooperation—shared practices and ways of working mean you can cooperate more quickly and with confidence that your colleagues will respond in the same way. ❍ It produces an environment attractive to good people—and open to learning, change, empowerment, and risk taking. No wonder that the existence of social capital correlates with improved performance at all levels, from the economic performance of different regions of the world, to the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions and the performance of teams. Firms that employ 100 or more employees represent less than 0.5% of all the registered firms in the US. Even though the larger firms contribute far more in terms of sales and employment, this may be a measure of how difficult it is to construct a functioning work community above this size.

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But community also costs Building a deep and enduring sense of community and trust does not happen quickly. It takes time and it requires a lot of face-to-face contact. “I was struggling to get my boss to agree to a budget to bring my remote team together. They had not met for 12 months and I felt they needed some ‘team time’ to keep relationships strong. My boss thought this was a poor reason when budgets were tight. “Spending the day with him and eight colleagues based in the central office, I noticed that we spent the first 15 minutes of the day on social conversation, and that they had three 10-minute coffee breaks and a 45-minute lunchtime social conversation. During our meeting we frequently got sidetracked into gossip or other largely irrelevant but interesting discussions; I estimated this at 30 minutes at least. At the end of the day, I pointed out that we had spent two hours, or 25% of our total time that day, on social and community issues. “I guess it was just easier to see the cost of the travel and expense needed to allow this social contact to happen in my team.” Global account manager, chemical industry

So far in this book I have been focusing on saving time, simplifying the way we work together, and reducing costs. This will lead to fewer meetings, less teamwork, and more focused communication. However, you run a risk in reducing interaction that you start to lose the sense of community and identity that holds your organization together. Now you need to think about putting back some of the time you have saved into ensuring this does not happen. You can do this through building community at the right level. When managers pride themselves on being hard nosed and practical, their eyes often glaze over when we talk about community. Their reaction is that this is the “soft stuff.” Ask any experienced manager which is easier, the supposed “hard” technical or financial challenges or the supposed “soft” people issues, and they will tell you that people issues are the real hard stuff. They enable you to deliver all of the other practical benefits. 143

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Building community in complex organizations Given the choice, people naturally tend to form a community with those who are physically close to them and socially similar. But global organizations expect their people to cooperate with tens of thousands of colleagues from a wide range of cultural and social backgrounds, working thousands of miles apart. For the whole of human history, community was based on place. Now suddenly we are supposed to feel a sense of community and trust with colleagues from other cultures, other locations, and through email, just because they work for the same company! It is surprising that it works at all, although it clearly does. “I arrived at work this morning to find an email from a colleague in Milan. I had not heard of him before, but from his email address and signature it looks like he is in technical development. He had an urgent question about how we are using a new product in our market. I spent some time answering his query and dropped him a mail with my mobile phone details in case he needed more information overnight. After I sent the email I stopped and thought how strange it was, we are expected to cooperate with someone in another country who we have never met, just because we have similar email addresses!” Product development manager, office equipment company, Japan

There is a social dimension to work. People value the relationships and the people they meet. Work colleagues often become close friends. If we do not provide a social element to our workplaces and teams, they become sterile and unsatisfactory places to work. Unfortunately, certain factors get in the way of building community in complex companies. DIVIDED LOYALTIES

One of the key challenges in building community is the dilemma of divided loyalties. Matrix organizational structures and traditional measurement and reporting systems make this much harder to resolve. 144

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Ichiro has worked in an IT customer support function in Japan for eight years. His department has been reorganized so he is now part of a global IT function responsible for a major systems integration and standardization project. It is clear that he is supposed to spend his time working on the IT projects defined by head office. Every day he has questions or requests for support from people in Japan who knew him in his old support role. Each individual request is easy for Ichiro to answer and only requires a few minutes, but taken together he is spending a lot of time on local support. His global boss has identified that Ichiro is spending time on local issues and he wants it to stop. Ichiro finds it difficult to turn down a colleague (and often friend) who has a problem. When senior managers from other functions locally get involved to request his help, it becomes impossible to refuse. How can he solve this dilemma without damaging relationships with his boss or his local colleagues?

People naturally feel more loyalty to their local colleagues, the people they have lunch with, socialize with, and know well. At the same time, they now have to balance this with loyalty to remote colleagues in virtual teams and in other countries. As part of our research with over 2,500 participants from many leading global organizations, we asked managers of international teams whether their primary loyalty and obligation was to their local colleagues or their remote (normally central) colleagues. Most people felt pulled in both directions.

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In Spain, Sweden, and France, most people preferred loyalty to the center. In the UK, Ireland, and China, the majority of people preferred loyalty to their local colleagues. As these participants were part of international teams, we can expect that loyalty is even more local in the mass of people who work in mainly local jobs. A matrix, with different reporting lines to geography, product group, functions, and so on, does not resolve divided loyalties, it simply creates a structure for making them a day-to-day problem. It institutionalizes divided loyalties and makes them something that has to be continually managed. Eunan is marketing manager for medical devices in Ireland. He has a solidline (direct) report into the global head of the marketing function in the US; he also has a dotted line to the Irish general manager for local issues and a dotted line to the medical devices product line organization. He has priorities from each of these three organizations and sometimes they conflict. The right thing to do for the product group and marketing function may not always be the best thing for the Irish profit and loss account in the short term. Eunan has no plans to leave Ireland, so his relationships with the Irish general manager and his local colleagues are very important to his future career. The head of marketing and the Irish general manager have a difficult relationship and sometimes seem to be working against each other. How can Eunan balance these demands?

It is important that a matrix structure does not create a competition for loyalty that pulls an individual in two. It should be possible to proud to be Irish, to be proud to be a marketing professional, and to be proud to be part of a product organization. In a successful matrix, these interests are aligned. Conflicting and unresolved loyalties can cause delay and confusion. In the absence of alignment, people may resolve the dilemma by choosing a solution that reflects their personal preferences but is not in the best interests of the overall organization.

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WHAT DRIVES LOYALTY AT WORK?

We asked people to identify what factors pull their loyalty toward the local context and what pulls it toward the central or corporate context. We use the term center rather than global or corporate or HQ because each individual can have a different definition of their center depending on their role. For some the center is a regional office; for others it is the country, the region, or the global HQ. The dilemma of divided loyalties happens at all these levels. Factors typically attracting loyalty to the local When we ask people what pulls their loyalties toward their local context, they usually find it easy to come up with several factors: ❍ Relationships and social networks—these are just easier to

❍

❍

❍ ❍

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form with people in the same location, and where you have a shared language and culture. Informal communication reinforces this. Shared history and experiences—this may be at the corporate level (all organizations were local before they were global) or at an individual level where people share the experiences, education, and humor that make relationship development easier. Career development—most people do not plan to move to other countries and locations but see their next career development move as being within their local context. Local reporting—many people have local objectives, line management, work content, and reporting. Most jobs are local. Legal structures—differences in local labor laws, accounting conventions, regulation, and commercial legislation can mean that local requirements have to be followed. Local customers—most customers are not global and do not care that your policies are global. They just want local solutions to the local problems they are experiencing.

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❍ Immediacy—local needs tend to be more immediate, short term,

and urgent (especially if a local customer is in your office) as distinct from important but longer-term global initiatives. Factors typically attracting loyalty to the center People usually find this list more difficult to come up with. The factors they identify that attract their loyalty to the center often include: ❍ Strategy—if the strategy is global, people learn to “talk the talk” ❍ ❍

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and think more about objectives that are not solely local. Vision and values—many large organizations use shared “vision and values” campaigns to create a sense of alignment and identity. Large projects—for some managers their first exposure to global working is where they become involved in very visible and highprofile corporate projects. Professional or technical interest—often the global projects are the most professionally challenging, best funded, or technically interesting. Senior management—because senior managers tend to be aligned behind the global messages, people below them need to supply information and activity that supports their message. Global customers—although most customers are local, the global ones are often large and tend to generate a disproportionate amount of the profit (and the pain).

Some factors may pull an individual to the local or to the center depending on the role they are carrying out. Factors that typically vary depending on individuals’ roles ❍ Line management—if your boss is local, your loyalty tends to be

local. It is also likely that the other line management factors of objective setting, appraisal, performance management, and so on will reinforce that local priority. 148

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❍ Key measures—people will focus on what you measure and

reward. If your key performance measures and the profit and loss you are accountable for are local, then expect a local focus. ❍ Rewards—in local roles, these are determined locally; in global roles, they are determined globally. ❍ Career development—whether this is local or global depends on where you see your next career move coming from. These factors are some of the “keys to community,” the practical factors that attract loyalty and community in complex organizations.

Using the keys to build community The principle of building a sense of community at the right level is simple: Align the keys to community to your objectives. The more you need to attract loyalty to your complex team, the more you need to build relationships, social contacts, and a shared culture. The more you need loyalty, the more you want to take control of line management processes, rewards, and career development. However, the more you need to build community, the more time and expense it will take. What we learnt from many discussions around this dilemma is that loyalty is naturally local. If you do not do anything to attract loyalty to the center, then the default is local loyalty for most people. “I worked for a local Dutch company for 10 years; we were acquired by a global company based in the US. All my history, my friends, and my customers are local. I get paid on local results and never even met anyone from the new HQ directly. Now I get an email from HR telling me that I need to ‘think global.’ What does that mean?” Communications manager, PR agency

The local community has all of the advantages: People are in the same place and socially more similar; they have many opportunities to interact and to get to know their colleagues well. Local issues and 149

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WHERE ARE THE KEYS TO COMMUNITY PULLING YOUR TEAM? Keys to community

Does this pull you toward the local?

Personal relationships Social contacts Culture and language History Career Reporting lines Communication Legal or regulatory Work content Profit and loss Performance measures Customers Immediacy Strategy Vision and values Professional interest Your manager Pay and reward Your objectives Other

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customers are immediate, urgent, and compelling. Most of the natural, human factors that encourage community to grow are local. While strategy and vision can attract people intellectually, the heart is local. As with any business investment, you need to understand where to invest for the best return. The three key questions you have to answer in order to apply this to your team or organization are: ❍ What are you trying to achieve through community? ❍ Where do you want the focus of loyalty and community to be? ❍ How much community do you need? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACHIEVE THROUGH COMMUNITY?

In order to make a business decision to foster community you need to be clear about why you need it—what will it help you to do and how valuable is this to you? A sense of community, trust, and loyalty can help you in some very tangible areas that are relatively easy to measure: It can speed up cooperation, improve staff retention, and enable quicker delivery of projects and other objectives. It also has a big impact on intangibles like morale, team spirit, and mood that companies try to measure through their climate or opinion surveys. Before you decide how much (or whether) to invest in community, take some time to consider: ❍ What is the purpose of your community? ❍ What business goals do you expect it to help you with? WHERE DO YOU WANT THE FOCUS OF LOYALTY AND COMMUNITY TO BE?

In deciding where you want the focus of loyalty and community to be in your organization, prefer simplicity and clarity. This proves 151

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easier to achieve at the top and bottom of the organization than in the middle. How do you want different groups in your organization to respond to the dilemma of divided loyalties? If it were my company: ❍ I would want my most senior managers to feel their loyalty clearly

to the center. ❍ I would want my local people to feel a sense of pride and identification with the overall organization, but for practical and cost reasons I would want them to have most of their loyalty to the local context. ❍ I would accept that the reality for middle managers between these groups is that there is likely to be a conflict between the two, and train and equip them to deal with it. I think of these three groups as having distinctly different community needs (see diagram).

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The global group When I first became interested in how to build a core group of global managers, I went to visit some of the oil companies who seemed to me to have been doing this for longer than most. When I asked what the secret was, I got a great answer from one French HR director: “There is no secret, it is very simple. First, you recruit people around the world in proportion to your business. If 10% of your business is in Nigeria, then 10% of your managers should be Nigerian. “Second, mix them up, move them around, put them in project teams with other cultures, move them to other countries, move other managers in and out of Nigeria. If you never expose them to the world, how will they become global managers? “Third, if you just do these two things, then in no more than 50 years you will develop a truly global management group.”

I always use this story with companies who are being self-critical that their management development processes are not flooding the organization with experienced global managers after 10 years of trying. It takes time. Even in large companies, the global group is likely to be hundreds rather than thousands of people. Its members should have a clear loyalty to the overall corporation rather than to any local context. This means that the center must control their “keys to community.” Their reward, development, career, and identity need to be aligned with the interests of the overall corporation. These global groups take time to develop, but there are ways to accelerate the process: ❍ Bring in the right variety or diversity of people. ❍ Connect them together and mix them up, give them many oppor-

tunities to work together. ❍ Work directly on creating a common corporate culture for them. ❍ Align their community keys to the center. 153

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In the past, creating an international management group involved a lot of expatriation. This has become very expensive—sending one person on a typical expatriate posting for three years costs over $1.3 million. Today there are more short-term assignments, virtual working, and business travel. It is important for the global group to have regular opportunities to interact and be visible to each other. A sense of community and shared values with other global group members is essential. This focus on the needs and interests of the overall organization may conflict with the group’s loyalty to local operations. In this case, you would normally want the global group to choose the center over the local. In many organizations job rotation and other development moves for this group will shift them around too quickly to gain strong local bonds. In global oil companies in the 1960s and 1970s, it was common to move managers to other countries for several years. These managers were usually from one of the company’s dominant home cultures. On arrival in a local

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operation these people were often seen as “company spies,” there to keep an eye on local operations, carry the corporate culture, and take up key monitoring roles such as head of finance. Some of these managers came to associate more closely with the needs of local operations, even to the extent of supporting the local against the center. In less politically correct times, this was known as “going native.” It was normally a sign that it was time to move them to another location or out of the organization.

The locally loyal The locally loyal make up 80 to 90% of all the employees in even the most global organizations. They are your manufacturing, operations, local sales, and retail staff. They are the people who serve the 80 to 90% of your customers who are purely local. It is easy for senior managers in complex organizations to forget that, for many of their employees and customers, life is a lot more straightforward and locally focused.

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Of course, you want people with local roles to be proud of the overall organization. You need them to buy in to corporate practices and initiatives. However, in reality there is limited business benefit in trying to create a deep common culture among manufacturing sites or retail stores around the world. It is expensive to create and maintain and may alienate your local customers or staff who are looking for local solutions to local problems. Provided that the local sites cooperate and work from common plans, this may be enough. I make some recommendations about developing a common global corporate culture in Chapter 8. In the search for simplicity and effectiveness, align most of the keys to community for this group to the local context. Adding in global dimensions and complexity may just increase cost and introduce delay. In some organizations, there is a tendency for international roles to spread too far through the organization in a process I call “global job creep.” Robert is CEO of an organization that has grown through acquisition. The individual company heads tend to take a narrow, “country-only” view of the business, which makes Robert and his finance people the only ones thinking globally. Robert wants a more integrated management team, so he creates a regional functional organization. Jan, who was a country manager, becomes head of global marketing. Jan is frustrated. The marketing people in the countries still think locally. The information she needs to do her job is fragmented. She reorganizes marketing, and has directors and senior executives doing regional or global jobs. Each of these senior executives holds team meetings with their regional direct reports but, incredibly, these people persist in thinking locally. Soon even some first-line managers have international responsibilities and complexity has been driven too far into the organization. It is two years before a rapidly rising travel budget and lack of focus on local operations lead to another reorganization, pushing regional responsibilities back up to a higher level in the organization.

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The more we can preserve local simplicity, the faster and more cost effective we make our local operations. The matrixed middle In the largest multinationals these are the few thousand managers who sit between the global group and the locally loyal. They have a difficult role in reconciling these conflicting loyalties. They are also likely to have a foot in both camps themselves and be pulled in different directions. For these people you need to make specific choices about where you want their loyalty to lie, depending on their role. The key is to align the community keys properly. If your manager is local, your bonus scheme is local, and your next job move is local, but the new strategy says “Don’t forget to think global,” good luck! In a sense, the matrix organization frees senior managers to think one dimensionally. Managers at the top of the matrix may be able to

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focus either on the country, the function, or the product group. The managers in the middle can receive conflicting instructions from the different “legs” of their matrix. They need the information, skills, and authority to manage the tradeoffs. Otherwise, they are in a situation that they cannot resolve and will have to escalate everything back to their bosses. A common problem in the early stage of developing a matrixed middle is for the strategy to support more central working and global projects, but for the local measurement and accounting structures to remain. There is often a mismatch between the strategy and the reality of what is rewarded and measured. Alicia is responsible for the country profit and loss account of her organization in Brazil. Her boss is the head of Latin America and he manages her closely against the P&L targets for Brazil. Alicia is responsible for launching a new product in Brazil as part of a global product rollout. This is unlikely to be a big product for Brazil in general, but some important global accounts have insisted that the product be available worldwide so the infrastructure has to be in place everywhere. Global R&D and marketing are putting a lot of pressure on Alicia to make sure she delivers the launch on time. She knows this is a highly visible priority. The impact of this on her local profit and loss account is negative, particularly over the next 12 months. The revenues from the new product are low initially and most of the costs are incurred at launch. The product may never be economic from Brazil’s point of view, even though it is important to the group as a whole. Alicia’s bonus scheme is 100% based on her local P&L. What should she do?

When objectives, measures, and rewards are misaligned, this can place great pressure on individuals caught in the middle. In order to do the right thing for the overall organization, Alicia will have to upset her boss and may personally lose money—this is not a sustainable situation. The people in the matrixed middle also need to develop new skills: 158

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❍ They need to be able to manage activities without traditional line

management authority. ❍ They need the skills to cooperate remotely with colleagues from other locations, cultures, and time zones. ❍ They need to be skilled at managing the complexity of a matrix environment: multiple bosses, conflicting priorities, and positive escalation. Loyalty in the matrixed middle will change over time. There will be constant pressures in both directions. Sometimes the organization will need more centralized decisions, sometimes more local. The matrixed middle needs to reconcile these pressures on a daily basis for the overall good of the organization. It is important to realize that there is no fixed answer to preferring the global or the local, the function or the business line. All of these are important and need to be held in a positive balance. Use the keys to community exercise to identify the pressures on your matrixed middle people. Is the balance right for the strategy? Are local loyalties getting in the way of the delivery of global objectives, or vice versa? In particular, check that compensation and reporting arrangements are driving the behavior you really want. If the community keys are not clearly aligned and consistent, this will introduce delay, confusion, and extra cost. It is unlikely, in this complex middle ground, that you can achieve perfect clarity, so you need to equip people to manage the tradeoffs quickly.

How much community can you afford? You need to decide how much time, effort, and investment you are willing and able to put into building a sense of community. In some cases, a strong community may be essential to success. In others, you may decide that you cannot control the community keys or it is not worth the cost, and that you will live with the consequences. 159

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Keys to community

Do you have How much will it Is it worthwhile control over this cost you to relative to the key? engage this key? benefits?

Relationships Social contacts Culture/language History Career Reporting lines Communication Legal/regulatory Work content Profit and loss Performance Customers Immediacy Strategy Vision and values Professional Your manager Pay and reward Your objectives Other

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The three questions you can ask to work out what is realistic are: ❍ Which of the keys to community do you have control over? ❍ How much will it cost you to do this? ❍ Is it worthwhile relative to the benefits you expect to gain?

In extreme virtual team situations you may have very few of these keys available to you, but even a small number of keys can be enough to complete the job. Sirikit runs a series of short-term IT implementation projects. A typical project lasts 15 days and brings in resources from local IT functions in a number of local sites. She has no formal reporting relationship with the local people and cannot influence objectives, rewards, or careers. She identified only three major keys she could engage:

● Job interest—the projects introduce variety in people’s everyday work. ● Professional development—her projects often involve new technologies that IT people are keen to learn about. ● Relationships—she works hard to engage people, keep them informed and feeling valued. Sirikit finds, by focusing on these, that she has no problem building sufficient interest and focus to deliver her projects. In fact, she suspects it is easier for her to motivate people than for the line managers, who have lots of other things to worry about.

Remember: Failing to invest in community does not mean that no community will form, it will just form locally. People need and expect to fulfill their community needs. If you do not meet this expectation in your teams and organizations, people will fulfill it themselves somewhere else—and loyalty may flow outside the organization. Do not underestimate the power of the community keys. Bonds of relationships and social contact can even outweigh financial controls and strategic direction. 161

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A large British supplier of outsourced IT services has grown by taking on basic billing services for customers and running them more efficiently. A condition of getting the work is often that the outsource company offers jobs to the inhouse people who used to do the work for the client. These people are transferred over to become employees of the outsource company, but carry on working on their existing site. The new company found that people who were now nominally its employees were more loyal to the customer (who they often had a long history with and a closer relationship) than they were to their new company. This took the form of working overtime but not declaring it, as they did not want their old colleagues to pay more for their work.

This is a particular challenge for home-based salespeople. Their primary community may be their customers rather then their colleagues. If loyalty follows then salespeople may drift into meeting the needs of those customers at the expense of doing the right thing for their company. There is an assumption in traditional organizations that people will get their social contact and stimulation from the group of people they work with. This assumption may not be realistic in a constantly changing, “virtual teams” environment. One reasonable choice is to separate the working group from the community group. Some consulting organizations have already developed the concept of host managers and activity managers. In the structure opposite, the Thai “host manager” is responsible for traditional line management functions: for developing a pool of staff who are paid, trained, and motivated by the Thai operation. The activity manager, who could be based anywhere, is responsible for leading a project or client team and picks up resources from the relevant local host organizations. The job of the activity manager is to get the work done. At the end of the project, people return to their local organizations. This structure does not solve divided loyalties and you can imagine the tensions between host managers and activity managers. What is does do, however, is make the roles very clear and focused 162

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on either the community or the activity. This can be helpful, particularly in a project-driven organization. If you have limited funds to invest in building community, prioritize as follows: ❍ Build a strong community in your global group. ❍ Invest in the skills and processes of your matrixed middle. ❍ Build a sense of identity in your locally loyal, but be realistic

about how far you can go, or need to go.

Building local community Building community locally is relatively simple. Local communities have all the advantages of proximity and similarity, and all you really need to do is provide opportunities for them to happen. However, changes in company practices in the last 20 years have suppressed the development of community. My first job was at a large telecoms manufacturing site in London. When I joined the company 4,500 people were working at the site, there were restaurants, a social club, sports clubs, and a fire safety and medical department;

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it was like a small town. Company pensioners from the area were even encouraged to come for lunch one day a week. I was part of an induction program with other people my age. Very quickly, I met colleagues in a range of different contexts. I met people in the social club that I would never have met in my normal work. I made friends as well as workmates. Looking back, the system created networks and patterns of interaction across levels, functions, and departments. Twenty years later, I visited the same site, now part of a large multinational. Manufacturing had ended and there were only 600 people at the site in one modern building. There was no focus for community and by 6 p.m. the site was deserted; after work everyone went straight home. Communication was poor. There was only one group who seemed to have maintained a network—the smokers. The only way you could meet people from other departments or floors in the building was to join them in the rain for a cigarette and a gossip.

Social activities, open days, and events can help build local loyalties. Give people a reason and an opportunity to interact and they will. BUILDING COMMUNITY IN STAR GROUPS

Star groups don’t need a deep sense of community to get things done. So long as the relationship between individuals and their boss is good, the group will work. Because there is relatively little contact between members when they are working as a group, they can get by with a relatively shallow connection with their colleagues. I meet many managers who believe that teams are the answer to everything. They often come on our programs with an objective to “improve team spirit.” They are genuinely worried that their people are not talking regularly and becoming best friends. When they learn that they are actually managing a group it is a huge relief—they can focus on the one-to-one relationships instead. Groups perform best if they come from a corporate culture that does have enough of a sense of overall community (see below).

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BUILDING COMMUNITY IN SPAGHETTI TEAMS

In spaghetti teams that will work together for some time it is worth trying to create a sense of team spirit and community. You have to pay particular attention to building relationships and trust in complex organizations because: ❍ Distance and the absence of communication can increase distrust. ❍ People do not typically know one another as well as in close teams

and do not have as much informal time together. ❍ Cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings. ❍ Local objectives and issues can work to undermine remote cooperation. Here are some key principles for building team spirit in complex teams: ❍ Get face to face as soon as possible—everyone will have had the

experience that once you have met someone, even the emails get better. If you have the opportunity to meet or videoconference, do it early. Research on how much people trust documents has shown that they are more likely to trust even text information if there is a photograph of a real person included, so just sending a photo may help. If you only have one opportunity to meet with colleagues on a team, do it at the start where it will have the most impact. ❍ Communicate early and frequently—make personal contact, even if you can only do it by telephone, keep in touch, and open the channels of communication. The longer you leave this, the more the opportunity for barriers and misunderstanding to arise. ❍ Manage the early interactions to build trust—make extra efforts to deliver things on time and communicate the reasons for any delays, and so on. ❍ Clarify mutual expectations—be explicit about how you will work together and what you will deliver to one another, and discuss any areas where these expectations are not shared. 165

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❍ Do what you say you are going to do—the best way to build trust

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is to be trustworthy yourself and assume the same in others. If people do not respond in the way you expect, ask them why. There may be good reasons and you have made it clear that you have noticed. Check that different objectives and processes are not getting in the way. Try to understand the world from the other person’s perspective and tell them about the world from your point of view. Often a clearer understanding of one another’s objectives and constraints can suggest areas where you can cooperate more effectively. Don’t be too soft—begin by cooperating and assuming trust, but if it is not reciprocated, tell the person that you think this and try to develop a more mutually beneficial situation. Market your successes—make time to sell your team to the organization. Don’t overdo it but be aware that remote teams sometimes suffer from a lack of visibility in their activities and may need a little more marketing to the organization. Have fun—do some nonwork activity together to create another point of connection and another shared interest. Allow unstructured time together—it is tempting when people are not together very often to fill the day from early to late. Remember to allow time for the community stuff to happen. Create different subteams all the time—give everyone on the team a reason to work with everyone else. If the same people always work together this can cause cliques. Address poor performance—one poor performer in a team can have an impact on all the people around them. Manage poor performers actively or they can have a major effect on team spirit. Remember that the community will change when a new person joins the team—pay attention to getting them to meet everyone else and feel part of the team.

In highly dispersed or short-lived teams, it may be impractical to build more than a basic sense of cooperation. Be realistic about what you can achieve here. 166

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An international consulting company wanted to build a greater sense of community in order to encourage cross-selling of products and increased coordination of potentially big deals across several international locations. They proposed extensive social contact, teambuilding, and open days to build the network. When I asked specifically what they wanted to achieve, the only real benefits they could identify came from encouraging a discrete group of account managers to talk to each other and be aware of one another’s services. I recommended much more targeted community building for this group, with a face-to-face meeting to encourage information sharing and some social and networking opportunities built in. The rest was “nice to have,” but a much lower priority at a much higher cost.

Building a sense of corporate community Even in classic “groups,” such as traditional sales organizations, there is a need for a generalized sense of community to provide belonging and identification. The national sales organization of an FMCG company has been dealing with this issue for many years. The salespeople have little contact with one another on day-to-day activities; each individual has their own territory and objectives. Every year the company holds a big national conference, which is famous for three things. First, the company invests heavily in building confidence, enthusiasm, and pride. Senior managers attend to tell the salesforce how important they are. Marketing and R&D announce new products to a great fanfare. Second, they celebrate success and motivate people for the next year; they announce new incentives and recognize last year’s top performers. Third, they party. Sales conferences are famous for late nights, long discussions, and (sometimes dubious) relationship building. It often goes too far; in fact, the company advises senior managers to leave before 9 p.m. to avoid being dragged into anything unsuitable!

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Sales organizations have learnt the importance of community building. The salesforce may have only one day of face-to-face time to build the community that a single-site team can build all year, so it is all compressed. The shared experience provides a fund of stories for the rest of the year. You need to extend this thinking beyond the salesforce and into your complex teams. The purpose of having an overall sense of identity for an organization is to build pride and identification with that organization’s goals and to make it easier to cooperate with strangers inside the company. Unless you have “enough” of a sense of community, you can introduce barriers to cooperation that can be fatal. There is a problem to be faced in building community at this generalized level—it is hard to quantify the benefits and create a business case. Because I believe in it, I can choose to invest a whole day at each of our three team meetings per year on “pure” community. We choose activities that give a structure to our day but are not too busy. We spend time together in small sub-groups that change and interact so that people get time together and a chance to relax and talk. We end the day early and have a stress-free evening over dinner and at the bar. This is one of the most valuable parts of our culture. It helps to sustain the community over the rest of the year when we rarely meet.

I know it can be difficult in larger organizations to get agreement to this. In most companies it would be tricky to ask for some time and budget to “just relax, reconnect, and get to know one another better.” It is much easier to obtain funds to get people together and sit them in front of irrelevant PowerPoint presentations all day. It may be you have to use this as an excuse and allow time in the evening of a normal meeting to connect and do the important community building.

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Community is the key Working from home is a trend that makes it even harder to build community. Several studies of home-based working have looked at the advantages and disadvantages from the point of view of the employer and the employee.

From an employer’s point of view, there are productivity and cost savings from not providing office space and having fewer interruptions to the working day. People with suitable roles working from home are more productive and cost less to employ. Employers worry most about control and commitment: Are people working hard, are they committed to the organization, or are they in the garden enjoying the nice weather? From the employees’ point of view, they love the freedom and flexibility. People like being able to manage their own time. Consistently, though, they worry about losing the social aspects of work and their visibility in the organization—classic community issues. 169

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Remember, if you choose not to build community in your team or organization this does not mean that people will not have a sense of community, it just won’t be to you. They may build community with local colleagues, with customers, or just with their neighbors at home. How much community you need and can afford is up to you.

Human-scale organization design Complex organizations are often very large. One practical step you can take to help build community is to design the departments and teams within your organization on a more human scale. It is hard to build a true community of 60,000 people who never meet. To accelerate the formation of community, design your teams and organizations around the following principles: ❍ People will naturally form communities with others close to them ❍

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and similar to them—provide social opportunities on local sites. Locate critical groups who really need to work together in an interconnected team (for example multidisciplinary R&D) in as few locations as possible, ideally in one place. Keep teams small—four to six people will get to know each other quickly if they share an objective. Keep sites or departments small. Some organizations adopt a site limit of 150 people, as above this size they tend to become more impersonal. The figure seems to come from traditional clans and villages, who found that this was about the maximum size for a community to be self-regulating. Create opportunities to mix with people outside your normal work. Smoking groups cut across organizational boundaries but are bad for their members’ health. Social, hobby, or sporting groups should be encouraged. Create opportunities for people to network—use company events, training, and visits explicitly to allow them to get to know one another. 170

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Above all, if you want to build real community, provide face-to-face time together.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? Building the right level of community helps complex organizations cooperate more quickly. By creating trust, you can reduce the barriers and potential costs of cooperation and communication. Understanding that community is different in complex companies can help you stop investing in unnecessary community and focus your time and effort on where it really adds value. Working with colleagues you feel loyalty to increases satisfaction and enables you to take risks and manage change with confidence.

Putting this into practice in your organization 1 Identify the factors that are pulling loyalties in your organization in different directions. 2 Create a map of the current community keys for your team. 3 Be clear about the purpose and benefits of your community. 4 Identify which of the keys to community you can control and can afford to apply in your team. 5 Consider where you want the focus of loyalty to lie. 6 Identify how much community you need to be effective: Are you a group, a team, or do you just need a generalized sense of identity? 7 Align the keys to community with your strategy. 8 If your team is in the matrixed middle, make sure they have the information, skills, and authority to be successful in this environment. 9 Keep teams and groups small wherever possible. 10 Provide time and space for community building whenever you get face to face. 171

8 Leave My Cultural Values Alone ompanies with a strong, shared culture have a speed advantage. Their people can cooperate more quickly based on a clear, common idea of “how we do things around here.” To this end, many companies invest heavily in building shared “corporate values.” At the same time, organizations want to attract, motivate, and retain a diverse workforce and to understand and appeal to a varied customer base. Diversity and cross-cultural training helps companies to understand, value, and reconcile these differences. Values are deeply held, set at a very young age, and extremely difficult to change. Companies have no right to expect me to change my personal values—what they can expect is that, irrespective of my culture, I will adopt shared practices that make the organization work more effectively. International organizations can choose a “right” cultural profile and set of practices that are more likely to lead to fast, successful cooperation. While this may sound politically incorrect, I demonstrate in this chapter how having one clear, shared set of practices is more inclusive, not less. To gain the benefits of cultural diversity and minimize the potential sources of complexity and delay, you need to be able to balance three pressures:

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❍ Diversity—the variety of people you need in your organization.

This may include gender, ethnicity, age, culture, sexual orientation, or other forms of variety, depending on where you are in the world and the current makeup of your business. Inside a team, the benefits of diversity include increased creativity and richer decision 173

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making through access to multiple points of view. The costs of diversity can, however, include increased time to make decisions and delay due to misunderstandings or different ways of working. ❍ Inclusiveness—the debate in major companies, particularly in the US, has moved beyond diversity (bringing in variety) toward a greater focus on inclusiveness, creating an environment where everyone can contribute and be successful. This can involve broad activities to develop a corporate culture that values differences. It also includes the introduction of specific policies and practices designed to attract, motivate, and retain people with different needs, wants, and working preferences. ❍ Coherence—companies are full of mechanisms designed to mold people’s behaviors to what the business thinks it needs. You may recruit against a specification of the kind of people you want; you train, appraise, and develop people to fit in. This gives you the benefit of coherence, the way you do things is clear and easier to understand, but it can drive out diversity. People may decide to leave because they do not fit the culture or, more subtly, the culture may shape them until you drive out the very diversity you worked so hard to recruit. A British office equipment company identified that, though its products were reliable, they were not very beautiful. It decided it needed some “Latin flair and passion” in design. After an expensive recruitment campaign and a lot of persuasion, the company recruited Alberto from an organization in the south of Italy to join the design team in the south of England. Alberto had plenty of flair and passion. His enthusiasm and new ideas were welcome, but the British saw his emotionally charged presentations as “over the top.” His colleagues really liked him, so they gave well-meaning advice: “You will find you fit in better if you calm down a bit,” “I thought you went too far there, don’t get so worked up.” Alberto is smart. After his first appraisal identified “greater self-control” as a development need, he started to adapt his behavior to fit in. After a couple of years of feedback and training, his diversity the company had worked so hard to recruit had been molded to behave like the British around him.

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In this chapter, I recommend some ways to balance the needs for diversity and inclusiveness with the requirement for a coherent, shared corporate culture. I look specifically at how you can balance these three pressures in building a common culture across national cultural boundaries. I specialize in managing cross-cultural diversity; I do not pretend to be expert in managing other forms of diversity, but I expect that at least some of the principles are applicable there too.

Share practices, not values Great companies often focus on what they call “corporate values.” However, there are difficulties with operating at the level of true values: ❍ Values change very slowly, if at all. They are the underlying prin-

ciples of what you think is good and bad, right and wrong. People develop values when they are very young and their families and national cultures have a great influence on them. ❍ Corporate values are shaped by the personality of the company’s founders, national origin, and specific history. If you try to export the values developed in your home culture, you risk alienating cultures that do not share these values. ❍ Values are personal. In business, you can rarely know for sure whether people share your attitudes and values, you can only observe what they actually do. A Dutch multinational developed a set of corporate values based on its highly successful business in the Netherlands. Two of its principles, based on Dutch values of directness and honesty, were “clear, direct communication” and “challenge openly.” As the business grew by acquisition, the senior managers were frustrated by what they saw as the indirectness and lack of challenge they received from their people in Indonesia. Equally, the Indonesians were appalled by what

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they viewed as the rudeness and disrespect of the people who arrived in Jakarta from head office. Even younger managers would openly argue with senior Indonesian colleagues in meetings. Despite the fact that the Dutch company had bought the Indonesian company primarily for the quality of its people and their relationships in their industry, many of the best people left.

If you specify your values too clearly, they may be hard to apply in different cultures. If they are too abstract and can be interpreted completely differently around the world, they may become meaningless. If you insist on people sharing the same values, you are likely to dilute or drive out the variety and diversity that you set out to recruit. To create inclusiveness and coherence without driving out diversity, it is more useful to think about sharing ways of working or practices instead of values. People are much more able and willing to adopt common practices than common values. Around the world there are common practices and what appear to be common expressions of culture. The same products, music, and youth fashion may appear in cultures as different as the US and Japan. This does not necessarily mean, however, that underlying values are getting more alike. Values are very resistant to change.

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We surveyed over 70 of what corporations call “value statements” on the internet. The six values below appear over 50% of the time: Quality Integrity Focus on customers Recruit the best and respect them Work well together in teams Create innovation

90% 72% 68% 62% 52% 52%

With the exception of integrity, the rest are practices, not values. In all cases they are hard to argue against in principle, but irrelevant until they are turned into behaviors. An Indian subsidiary of a Canadian multinational took its values seriously. One of the key values was “integrity.” An Indian manager was surprised when he was challenged for giving a job to one of his, suitably qualified, relatives, commenting, “How can a person have integrity if they do not look after their family?”

I recommend sharing practices that help speed up complex teams and organizations. By sharing practices you increase the coherence of your teams, you can preserve more diversity because you are not attempting to change values, and an explicit shared set of practices is also more inclusive.

National cultural differences at work There is a great deal of research into what drives cultural differences at work, of which the most systematic is that done (separately) by Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars. They and other researchers have identified a number of dimensions or value differences that underlie various business behaviors.

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In Global Integration’s work with international managers, we concentrate on five areas that, in our experience, have the biggest practical impact on work behaviors. These are: ❍ Preference for getting things done through rules or through ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

relationships. How people handle status. How people organize time. The relative importance of individuals and groups. Communication.

There is of course a great deal of variety within a culture, so the observations below are generalizations. You will find exceptions in every culture but, on average, the preferences between national cultures are measurably different. In our cross-cultural training programs, I am always careful not to recommend one cultural style as correct or better. Cultures are different and what you observe about another culture is as much a reflection of your culture as it is of theirs. If you see another culture as overemotional, it probably just means you are repressed! Any cultural style brings both benefits and costs. I occasionally meet people who object to the idea of generalizing in this area. They believe that we are all individuals and that it is somehow discriminatory to categorize people in any way. I agree that we must avoid stereotyping, but it is clear from extensive research and personal experience that we can generalize in broad terms across cultures. Some cultures (on average) do express their emotions more openly; others do have a more flexible idea of time. This does not mean this is true for every individual in those cultures, just that there are measurable differences between populations on average. If you are philosophically averse to this argument despite the evidence, then I am unlikely to change your mind. If we cannot generalize then we must treat every individual as unique and different. It is then hard to say anything meaningful about diversity except “Everyone is different, be nice, good luck.”

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In each of the five areas that have the most impact, I identify the key differences and recommend which preferences and which practices are likely to lead to faster, simpler ways of working in international organizations and teams. PREFERENCE FOR GETTING THINGS DONE THROUGH RULES OR THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

In some cultures, such as the US or Germany, if people want to get something done, their preference is to set up a rule, a system, or a process to do it. These cultures use processes, written documents, contracts, and rules extensively in business. Others, faced with exactly the same challenge, prefer to approach it though relationships, networks, and the people they know. This is more common in most Latin, Asian, and Arab cultures. The problem for relationship-oriented cultures in complex and virtual teamworking is that relationship building takes time. As organizations grow, it is difficult to build and maintain so many relationships. If a team or organization has a settled membership and time to get to know one another, then a relationship-oriented style is excellent for speed. However, if teams constantly form and reform, and each time people have to build a deep relationship before they can cooperate, they may be unable to cooperate fast enough. When people are working together in short-lived virtual teams they may never build a close relationship, but that may not matter, provided they can cooperate. Too many rules can lead to bureaucracy and mindless compliance. Too much reliance on relationships can lead to nepotism and reluctance to take tough decisions. If you want speed, simplicity, and clarity and to provide an inclusive working environment that people from around the world can understand and access equally, then you do need clear rules. Most successful multinationals display a relative preference for getting things done through rules over relationships. It seems counter-intuitive that rules could be more socially inclusive than relationships. Relationships just sound so much nicer! 179

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However, everyone can access rules equally (provided they are clear and explicit). If you tell someone how your meetings run, what the dress code is, and how the culture works, they will be able to be effective and fit in much more quickly. This explicit, open style of culture enables you to bring in people from diverse cultures and get them working together quickly. A US-based multinational recruited a new French managing director from outside the company to run its local French business. He quickly brought in two of his close friends to head up major departments in the business. One of them did not seem particularly well qualified, but was clearly a close confidant and ally from the past. He was not recruited through the usual process but simply appeared one day. The three of them became involved in all major decisions and it was not always clear how those decisions were reached—it appeared that a lot was decided over private lunches. An English HR manager based at the same site in France was uncomfortable with the way recruitment processes had not been followed and with the impact this clique was having on morale locally. When he went to discuss this with the director, he was met with a furious response—“How dare you tell me how to run my business?”—and was told he was not welcome in the office. The French MD believed that his strong relationships were the way to run the business. It appears that the US head office did not agree. The following day the French director was suspended and he subsequently left the company.

If people need to be a part of the home culture or power clique to understand the hidden nuances and networks of how things really get done, then it is difficult for them to participate on equal terms. It takes a long time to be effective in this type of culture because your effectiveness comes from your relationships. It can also be harder to manage change when it threatens those relationships. Implicit in the preference for a more explicit, rule-based culture is the recommendation that you use a diverse group of people to establish the rules in the first place. Otherwise, the rules may merely be a reflection of a monocultural point of view. 180

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There is nowhere in the world where a good relationship does not help and I am not arguing for a completely mechanical corporate culture of rules and systems. However, a relative preference for rules over relationships is likely to make it easier for you to cooperate more quickly, more simply, and more cost effectively. The practices that support a more explicit, rule-based culture include those in the diagram above. However, don’t go too far so that the point becomes the rule rather than the intent behind it (see Chapter 6). Are there any barriers to a rule-based culture in your team or organization? HOW PEOPLE HANDLE STATUS

In some cultures status tends to come from what a person does. Personal achievement gives status and status mobility is relatively high—you can gain or lose status more easily. In these cultures the hierarchy tends to be flatter (with fewer levels) and it is easier to challenge your boss openly. This cultural style is more common in Australia, the Nordic region, and the Netherlands. 181

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Other cultures determine status by who a person is. Age, family, or social class may define your status and there is less regard for your personal achievements. In these cultures status mobility is lower, the hierarchy tends to be steeper, and the boss is a powerful figure who is more difficult to challenge. This pattern is more evident in Asian and Latin cultures. An Australian multinational acquired a long-established Italian company. Part of the appeal was the founder, who had great connections within the Italian establishment and was essential to the success of the company. However, he was also used to managing his operation without interference. He was resistant to new ideas from outside and convinced that the wider organization could learn more from Italy than the other way around. While this man was essential to the company’s success in the past, he is now starting to get in the way of further development. He is well respected in Italy, but younger managers have begun to leave the organization as it falls behind in modern management and marketing practices.

If you want to create a more inclusive, fast, and transparent corporate culture, then a meritocracy, where personal achievement is valued and rewarded, is likely to be a better choice. You need mobility and the ability to challenge and change more than you need the stability of a traditional hierarchy. Remember, I am talking about relative preferences here. Any style can be overdone. The risk of an extreme meritocracy is that you are only as good as your last appraisal and people can feel insecure under constant measurement or as if their past efforts are no longer recognized. Nevertheless, the demands of global working drive organizations to a more explicit, merit-based status system. The practices that support this kind of culture include those in the diagram opposite. Are there any barriers to this in your team or organization?

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HOW PEOPLE ORGANIZE TIME

In some cultures, such as Switzerland, Germany, and the US, time is linear and fixed. It is tightly organized and controlled and people show strict attention to deadlines, timetables, and plans. In others, such as Arab and some Latin cultures, time is more flexible. Priorities change regularly and flexibility may be valued more than punctuality. In flexible-time cultures, time can be contextual, and people respond to changing priorities, the importance of relationships, and other developments. In order for this view of time to succeed globally, everyone would need to share this understanding of the context. In large, complex organizations, this is too messy and imprecise. You need an objective yardstick for describing when things need to be done, particularly where complex activities in different countries have to be coordinated or are interdependent. It is easier to manage to end deadlines than to try to coordinate all the details and timings along the way. As far as possible, enable a 183

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culture to organize the way it works best—provided that it delivers critical elements at the right time to its international colleagues. Every few years the Olympic Games or another major sporting event is awarded to a country with a flexible view of time; the latest example was Greece in 2004. As the Games approached, commentators from countries with a more linear view of time concluded that the facilities could not possibly be finished on time. The deadline was clear: The opening ceremony would appear on live television around the world on 13 August. But at the end of July the Olympic Stadium was still not complete. In a flurry of activity at the close of the project, the facilities were nevertheless finalized and the Games were a great success. Linear cultures would probably have been unable to arrange the resources to complete something like this at the last moment, but when a deadline is important, flexible cultures usually find a way to deliver.

Most successful multinationals adopt a linear, fixed approach to deadlines and commitments where activities have to be coordinated internationally. The practices that support a linear, fixed approach to time include those in the diagram opposite. Are there any barriers to this in your team or organization? THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS

Around the world individuals work in groups and groups are made up of individuals, but the underlying focus of the culture can be very different. In individualistic cultures such as the UK and the US, the individual is king. Personal objectives and individual pay for performance are normal and personal mobility tends to be higher. In collectivist cultures such as Japan, the group is more important. Group success, social control, and the maintenance of group harmony may be more important than the needs of the individual. The collective model, based on sustained relationships and shared group norms, is very hard to globalize. It gives major benefits 184

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in local operations but is very difficult to apply to virtual teams and global projects. The individual is usually the basic building block of virtual teams; the whole group is rarely included. Dave is a North American project manager who relies on resources from his Japanese colleagues to complete a global project. He gets variable quality from his colleagues in Japan, but finds it hard to establish why. He understands from a colleague he knows well in Tokyo that the local team may have an individual performance issue. In Japan, it is normal for such issues to be handled within the team and they are reluctant to single out or blame any particular individual. This may work fine in Japan for the team as a whole, but Dave needs support from a particular person on this team. He needs to know who specifically to talk to, particularly as the deadline is approaching. What should he do?

It is easier to connect a variety of individuals together and get them cooperating globally than it is to build an inclusive group feeling worldwide. Major corporations tend to put the focus on individuals in the global working context. 185

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The practices that support an individualistic approach include those in the diagram above. Are there any barriers to this in your team or organization? COMMUNICATION

Communication is an enormous topic in itself and there are many cultural differences within this one area. For the purposes of this section, I will focus on just two: language and levels of directness. In the area of language, the outcomes of research are clear: Organizations that adopt a common global language do better than organizations that do not. Whatever language you choose—and English is currently the most popular in major multinationals— stick to it and enforce it. A common language, particularly among your middle and senior management populations, is one less barrier to communication. Even if people are using the same language, they experience cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal communication. One dif186

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ference that has a significant impact on global cooperation is levels of directness. In some cultures, such as Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany, people usually say exactly what they mean, clarity is valued, and they tend to come directly to the point. In others, such as the UK and Japan, indirectness is valued; it is polite to give only hints of what you mean and not to disagree openly. A polite person communicates by going “around the houses” before getting to the real point. A UK-based multinational group holds its meetings in English. The representatives of the German operating company are very clear about their wishes and priorities and they usually have the feeling that the British are agreeing with them. Every idea is “interesting,” but despite the encouraging words, nothing seems to happen. Sometimes it is evident from a raised eyebrow, or a joke that the Germans do not really catch, that they are missing something in the communication. The first time they realize the British have not agreed is when nothing happens after the meeting. The Germans are very frustrated and feel they cannot trust the British to be honest. The British see the Germans as rather rude; they much prefer to give subtle feedback about their disagreement rather than being confrontational.

In global teams, indirect communication is very confusing. Particularly when people are speaking a second or a third language, they may misunderstand what is being said. Good “international English” communication tends to be more direct and explicit in the search for clarity and shared understanding. Successful global teams and organizations practice clear, relatively direct communication. The practices that support clear direct communication include those in the diagram opposite. Are there any barriers to this in your team or organization?

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The role of cross-cultural training Even when you consciously try to design a common culture for speed, cross-cultural understanding and skills have an important role to play: ❍ Comprehending the differences can help to minimize misunder-

standings. If you are aware that your British colleague is trying to be polite by being indirect, rather than attempting to mislead you, you are more likely to be able to accept and overcome this difference. ❍ Respecting the differences can help you to learn new ways of working that may be helpful. Working with colleagues from cultures with a more flexible view of time, for example, may help you develop creative ways to reach critical deadlines. ❍ Managing the differences can help get things done in diverse groups and where you are working with cultures you do not have 188

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EVALUATE YOUR TEAM OR ORGANIZATION AGAINST THE PRACTICES PROFILE Yes No Rule oriented Diverse groups of employees develop explicit processes Clear guidelines for working together in projects and teams Explicit decision processes Rules help people fit in quicker, e.g., dress codes Published standards and expectations Merit based Transparent and published recruitment and selection processes Clear development and promotion processes open to everyone Regular, objective performance feedback and appraisal systems Fair processes for moving people who are no longer performing Fixed time Clear, transparent process for setting deadlines Clarity and accountability for meeting important deadlines Published project plans and progress reports Proactive communication if deadlines are threatened Individualistic Individual management by objectives and rewards Recognition, visibility, and feedback at individual level Clear personal accountabilities Personal mobility Direct Clear, direct style in internal and external communication Honest and open senior management communication Willingness to confront lack of clarity Clarity of decisions

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the power to change. You may be able to design a common culture within the organization, but when you are selling to a major customer you may have to adapt to their culture to be successful. An Asian chemical additives company had tried for years to get people from its major US customer to build relationships through golf days and other corporate events. It believed strongly in selling through relationships. This worked well in its home market, but the Americans never seemed to turn up. We explained that the US company had strict internal rules prohibiting people from accepting gifts or significant hospitality from suppliers. The Asians had no choice but to change their approach to selling to match the way the customer wanted to buy.

Designing for speed, simplicity, and inclusiveness The cultural preference for: ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍ ❍

Getting things done though rules and processes Status based on merit and mobility A structured and linear view of time A focus on individuals Direct, clear communication

is one found more often in the US, Australia, and northwestern Europe. This profile also closely resembles my own cultural pattern (with the exception of direct communication), which I would naturally be predisposed to prefer. It is not possible to be totally free of cultural bias on this, but my observations are based on what I have seen as successful in a large number of global teams and organizations over the last 20 years. For a significant part of this time I have been training international teams and running cross-cultural programs. I am aware that making a cultural recommendation like the one in this section is potentially controversial. It may be politically incorrect in theory, but it seems to work in practice. 190

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Two-thirds of the Fortune Global 500 companies come from countries with a national cultural profile similar to the one I recommend. The US contributes 35% of the Global 500; northwest Europe and the Nordic region produce a further 31%. Latin Europe (Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France) contributes only 10%. These differences cannot be explained by the size of these countries’ populations or economies alone. The national cultures that produce the most successful global companies share certain cultural characteristics that lead to a relatively impersonal style of working. This may be easier for them to implement globally and make it possible to cooperate across cultures more quickly. If you look at communication style on the internet, where social and cultural cues are less evident and there is no external moderator to impose a culture, you can see that online collaboration tends to be more direct and less hierarchical. When you only have text to communicate with, you have to be more explicit, so perhaps this cultural style is also easier to transmit through technology. This global working profile can bring significant benefits when dealing with global customers and suppliers with similar cultures. It can, however, make global companies seem impersonal and inflexible relative to their local competitors. In the competition for local customers and the best local talent, this can be expensive. For this reason I recommend that you do not apply these common cultural practices to the “locally loyal” parts of your organization. The most successful culture that does not resemble our recommended cultural profile, but still creates global companies, is Japan (representing 15% of Fortune Global 500 companies). Japanese culture is traditionally more collective, more relationship oriented, more hierarchical, and more indirect. Nevertheless, when Japanese organizations work outside Japan they seem to learn to move in the direction of the profile I have proposed. They tend to be more rule oriented, less hierarchical, and a little more individualistic and direct (though this changes slowly in some organizations).

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In the early stages of globalization, many Japanese companies found it difficult to attract and trust western managers. They were used to long-standing networks of deep relationships and loyalty at home, and experienced challenges in working with and trusting overseas managers who were relative strangers and who seemed to move jobs for any better offer. As a result, they struggled to give real autonomy to overseas managers and often had “shadow” Japanese management structures that sat alongside the overseas managers and made the real decisions. Talented overseas managers became frustrated at the lack of real responsibility and realized that they would never make it to the top of these organizations. Soon it was difficult for the companies to attract and retain talent. Some learnt to trust and integrate their overseas managers better; others are still suffering from a lack of quality overseas management.

I must stress that this does not mean that cultures close to my profile can just export all aspects of the way they do things unchanged around the world. Within this profile, the objective is to produce a set of practices that are clear, simple, and accessible to a range of cultures. I am not recommending what is sometimes called “cocacolonialism,” but the development of transparent and explicit approaches to how people work together in complex organizations. Some years ago, I was asked by the human resources department of a USbased multinational to speak to one of their regional vice-presidents about a need for training in working across cultures. He was an American expatriate, head of IT, working in Brussels. I phoned him and explained that HR had asked me to call. He seemed surprised. “I have no idea why they asked you to talk to me; we don’t have any problems working across cultures. We used to have, but in the last 12 months we seem to have overcome them.” “Great,” I replied. “I would love to know how you did that, what’s your secret?” There was silence on the phone for a while. “Come to think of it, my department heads are now all American. Maybe we should talk.”

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Applying this concept to the three groups The three groups identified in previous chapters—the global group, the matrixed middle, and the locally loyal—tend to have different cultural profiles. THE GLOBAL GROUP

The global group is relatively small and tightly interconnected. At this senior level of the organization you are likely to have powerful individuals; personality will probably be more of a factor than national culture. At the very top the rules change. The group in close contact with the chief executive often finds that relationships and hierarchy become much more important than they were lower down the organization. I was surprised when I joined the senior management group. Up to then in my career it was always fairly rational and clear how success was defined— it was about results and completing objectives. These things are still important, but even more important seem to be your relationships with the core group of people who really run the business. It’s not a particularly political place to work, but it is clear that maintaining a small number of specific relationships and trust are key to getting things done. It is also interesting how similar the senior people are, particularly those who have worked together for a long time. They have similar hobbies, dress alike, most of them are even around the same height!

You still need a diversity of individuals and styles at the top, but you would expect them to evolve a similar culture and a common way of working together across the group. Because of the amount of contact they have, they may even develop truly similar values. Encourage this to happen by maximizing the amount of time this group spends together.

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THE LOCALLY LOYAL

The locally loyal mix with other cultures less often. In general, here you should be more adaptable to local cultural differences. This will allow you to attract local talent and to understand and serve your local markets better. Adopting regional or global practices will only add complexity and delay in areas where there is little mixing between cultures. “Our customers demand flexibility and personal service; they see contracts and formal agreements as unnecessary, even insulting. In any case, the local legal situation here means that commercial cases can take six years to come to court. Despite this, our HQ insists on detailed contracts before we can really begin a business relationship. To be honest we have to ‘tick the boxes,’ but it actually gets in the way of achieving sales.” Commercial manager, healthcare, India

Because the locally loyal are less mobile, there will be a tendency for local cultures to persist. You can avoid a lot of cultural complexity by choosing to perform activities at a local level. Many global organizations still opt to have common “corporate values” for the locally loyal, in the interests of creating a group identity. This can help build pride and a sense of identification with the overall organization. You should be realistic, however, as to how much these programs will influence values in an environment where there is little contact beyond the home culture. THE MATRIXED MIDDLE

The matrixed middle is more complex. Here people are cooperating with different cultures more regularly. They need the ability to understand, respect, and bridge cultural differences in the way they work together. In the matrixed middle the development of explicit ways of working is important. People have to operate in short-lived teams that 194

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form and reform. The corporate culture needs to be understandable, clear, and easily accessible. By generating a common set of expectations about how they will work together, you can accelerate the formation of regional and virtual teams. “There are many cultural differences in our new team but I am used to it. We have some good, shared team processes; everyone knows how we handle a project kick-off and what we expect out of meetings. Many of the people here have worked on these kinds of teams before so, although I never worked with them personally, we seem to share a lot already. It is not normal in my home culture to focus so much on deadlines, but with such a variety of people and different priorities, it seems to work OK.” Program manager, telecommunications, Egypt

Inclusiveness here means having a system of work that everyone can participate in quickly and with equal opportunity. Matrixed middle managers need specific training in reconciling cultural differences. Encourage them to mix with other cultures early in their careers through job rotation and project working. Develop clear project and team or group-working methodologies to create common expectations on ways of operating.

How will this increase speed, ease, and satisfaction? A set of shared cultural practices can speed up the formation and delivery of cross-cultural teams and organizations. By making practices clear and explicit, you render them equally open to everyone. Equality of access is essential to inclusion and to the search to attract and retain the best talent. By working flexibly with local cultural practices where possible, you can speed up local delivery and improve local employee and customer satisfaction. By reducing cultural misunderstandings, you can reduce the costs of cooperation and make it easier and more satisfying for people to work together. 195

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Putting this chapter into practice in your organization Many people don’t have the ability to reshape their overall corporate cultures. Nevertheless, there are things that everyone can do at the level of their team or department to help build a more integrated and transparent culture. 1 Discuss your practices. Throughout this book I have recommended clear, simple working practices for cooperation, meetings, control, community, and communication. Use these as a basis for discussions in your team about the way you work together. Don’t be afraid to evolve whatever practices work best for your particular mix of cultures, experience, and needs. 2 Be explicit. The more diverse your team, the more you need to be explicit about your practices. In a monocultural team it is usually unnecessary to specify a dress code, for example. However, in an international group, what does “smart casual” mean? It may seem crazy or even insulting to specify how people need to dress, but if I don’t understand what you mean by “smart casual” I may feel uncomfortable and embarrassed if I get it wrong. 3 Prefer the profile that works best. In developing work practices, learn from successful organizations and prefer practices that tend toward: ❍ Getting things done though rules and processes. ❍ Status based on merit and mobility. ❍ A structured and linear view of time. ❍ A focus on individuals. ❍ Direct, clear communication. Use the profiling tool to see how your organization compares. 4 Induct people to your culture. A discussion on team and corporate culture should be a specific part of your induction process. The challenge is to make it practical and clear. Many corporate 196

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cultural inductions consist of a presentation about the corporate values—and new employees are usually skeptical until they see those values applied in action. Instead of this, show how decisions and real activities in the business are shaped into shared practices and ways of doing things. Foster real discussion and examples of “how we do things around here.” You may also want to encourage the pairing of a new person with an experienced member of the team as a “culture buddy” to explain how things really work.

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Epilogue If Everything Seems Under Control, You’re Not Going Fast Enough peed Lead presents a systematic process for making your organization faster, easier, and more cost effective to run, and more satisfying to work in. Speed is an attitude; it is not about being superficial or trivial. If you can do things fast, then it is likely that your processes are working well and that your people are motivated and aligned. Speed is also an indicator that other things are working effectively behind the scenes. Your attitude to speed influences everything you do. One of my hobbies is rally driving. I received some coaching from a past champion driver who pushed me to improve my gear change speed by 100th of a second. When I said I was doing it as fast as I could, he pushed again: “There are over 700 gear changes in an average rally, 100th of a second on each is 7 seconds, that is the difference between first and third!” Compare this with another story.

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“I joined a new company in the auto industry and was surprised during the induction training that people were often late back for the sessions, the lunch break was longer than I had been used to, and we finished the day quite early. It was a lot more relaxed than my previous company. “On the third day the strategy director was asked what was the biggest challenge facing the company. He answered, ‘Time to market.’ “I was worried. If we cannot run an induction training course on time, then what chance do we have of developing a new car quickly?”

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Get the attitude right and the practices will follow. Traditional management techniques have led complex companies to a slower, more centralized, and more tightly connected style of operating. The simpler ways of managing people, projects, and teams proposed in this book will help you: ❍ Drive out waste caused by unnecessary cooperation and

communication. ❍ Distribute control and build local capability. ❍ Create a community that supports your objectives.

The alternative is to continue using traditional management techniques and hope that somehow the outcomes will change. I recommend that you start by implementing the suggestions on star groups and spaghetti teams in Chapters 1 and 2. This way of thinking about cooperation is fundamental to simplifying the way people work together in complex companies. Operating as a team tends to drive other behaviors in meetings and communication, so it is hard to simplify these until you have simplified the basic building block of cooperation. It is tempting to take the benefits of simplifying cooperation, communication, and control—and to stop there. The community section is harder to implement, but if you merely simplify the first three elements you may find that you undermine your community. A lot of community building happens as an accidental by-product of badly run meetings and conference calls. If you eliminate these (and I recommend that you do), you must add back some time for networking and community building. It will not take anything like as long, but it is essential. When I worked in manufacturing it was drummed into me that any improvement activity should start with a measure. On the next pages you will find a short “Speed Test” you can use in your organization to quantify the opportunities for improvement. When I use this with clients, it normally has the effect of shocking them into action when they see the scale of the problem. The survey is also 200

EPILOGUE

available free on our website, where you will be able to see how your results compare with others in our benchmarking database. Go to www.speedleading.com/survey.html. As soon as you put this book down you will start to forget the good resolutions you have made. It is the natural way your brain works—only a small part of any learning stays with you unless you reinforce it. Improvement is not about what you know but about what you do. Take one action based on your learning in the next two weeks—when it works you will be motivated to do more. The approach in this book is practical and simple to implement. Try it. You should expect to see: ❍ Faster delivery. ❍ Easier operation and lower costs. ❍ More satisfied people.

Finally, if you think you are fast enough already, remember that the search for speed does not end. In the words of Mario Andretti, possibly the greatest racing driver of all time: “If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough.”

Good luck…

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TAKE THE SPEED TEST Over the past five years Do you think your company has become (please tick one):

❐ Slower at getting things done. ❐ About the same speed at getting things done. ❐ Faster at getting things done. In terms of the costs of managing people (costs of meetings, travel, cooperation, communication, etc.), do you think your company has become:

❐ More expensive to run. ❐ About the same cost to run. ❐ Less expensive to run. Has your company become:

❐ Less satisfying to work in. ❐ About as satisfying to work in. ❐ More satisfying to work in. COOPERATION Teams How many people are there in the team you most often work in? How many “teams” are you a part of? Meetings What percentage of your time do you spend in meetings? (Include conference calls and web conferences) What percent of this time in meetings are you engaged, involved, and really need to be there?

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On a scale of 1 to 10, how good a use of your time are the typical meetings you attend? (10 = excellent use of your time) Communication Emails (just one example) How many emails per day do you receive on average? Of these, what percentage do you: ❍ Delete or file without reading? ❍ Really need to receive in order to take an action or do your job? How would you describe the rest of the emails you receive?

How many people are there in your overall company? Control In your company, do you think there is (please tick one):

❐ Too little central control. ❐ About the right level of central control. ❐ Too much central control. In what direction is your company currently moving:

❐ Away from central control. ❐ Not really changing. ❐ Toward more central control. To see how you compare with other teams and companies, enter your results at www.speedleading.com/survey.html and receive your free Speed Test Report. © Greystones Trust 2006. All rights reserved. You may photocopy this questionnaire for use in your organization but not for commercial use without prior written permission.

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SPEED LEAD

Free updates To help keep you up to date Speed Lead would like to send you occasional tips, reminders, ideas, and new developments in this area. To enable us to do this all you have to do is register your email address at: http://www.speedleading.com/contact_us.html

Tell us about your best and worst experiences I would like to hear about your experiences: ❍ Your examples of the worst emails, most pointless meetings, or

most counter-productive rules you have seen. ❍ How you have used the principles in the book to improve your team or organization. I will publish the “best” experiences on our website and through our updates service. Please send them to me at: [email protected] To find out more about how we can help you speed up your complex company through consulting, training, and facilitation, look at our services website for my contact details: www.global-integration.com

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Index

A accessibility, 91–2, 98, 100 activity cycle, 34–5 reviews, 45–7 agendas, 56–8 airtime, 19, 23 audio conferences, 39–40, 53, 76, 78, 101 autonomy, 6, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114–15, 116–20, 124, 125–38

B best-practice sessions, 45, 48–9

C carbon copies, 77–8 coaching, 135–6, 137–8 communication, 2, 3, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 20–21, 24–5, 27, 35, 69–104, 95, 96, 143, 165, 171, 178, 186–8, 190–92, 200 focusing, 79–81 high-bandwidth, 82–6 low-bandwidth, 82–6

communication technology, 1, 7, 24–5, 71–94, 110, 132 choosing, 81–6 using effectively, 86–90 community, 2, 3, 6–7, 81, 90, 139–97, 200 corporate, 167–9 decay curve, 30–31, 36 keys to, 141, 149–59 local, 163–7 complexity, cutting through, 2, 17 control, 2, 3, 5–6, 7, 105–38, 200 controls, waterline, 111–14, 123–4 cooperation, 1, 3–4, 7, 9–67, 90, 95, 142, 151, 165–6, 171, 200 coordination, 21–23 corporate community, 167–9 cross-cultural training, 188–90 cultural diversity, 91, 144, 165, 173–97

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D

H

decentralization, 7, 107–24 designing organizations, 7, 170–71 distribution lists, 78 diversity, cultural, 91, 144, 165, 173–97

high-bandwidth communication, 82–6 home-based working, 169

I

E ease, 1, 2, 35, 64, 93, 103, 123, 136–7, 171, 195, 199, 201 emails, 4–5, 72, 74–81, 84–5, 86, 88–9, 91, 96, 100 carbon copies, 77–8 distribution lists, 78 reply to all, 77–8 escalation, 85, 117–8, 124 expectations, 92, 128, 137, 165, 195

inclusiveness, 190–92, 195 individuals, relative importance of, 178, 184–6, 190–92 instant messaging, 86, 100

K keys to community, 141, 149–59 kick-off events, 31–3

L

flexibility, 3, 5, 113

local community, 163–7 locally loyal, 155–7, 194 low-bandwidth communication, 82–6 loyalty, 144–59

G

M

global group, 153–5, 193 groups, relative importance of, 178, 184–6

matrix structures, 146, 157–9 matrixed middle, 157–9, 194–5 meetings, 3–4, 24–5, 27, 30, 35, 39–67, 84, 143, 200 participation in, 53–5 micromanagement, 5, 71, 107, 109, 125–32, 137

F

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INDEX

mobile phones, 86–7, 91 multitasking, 73–4

O organizations, designing, 7, 170–71

P participation in meetings, 53–5 practices, shared, 173–97

R relationships, 3, 7, 21, 23–4, 84, 86, 107, 147, 165, 178, 179–81 reply to all, 77–8 responsibility, 122–3, 124 rules, 121–3, 124, 127, 178, 179–81, 190–92

S satisfaction, 1, 2, 3, 35, 64, 93, 103, 123, 136–7, 171, 195, 199, 201 self-management, 132–3, 137 service level agreements, 128–9 shift working, 97–100 simplifying ways of working, 1, 2, 3, 7, 11–37, 143, 190–92, 200

spaghetti teams, 13–26, 28–35, 36, 39, 42–4, 76, 165–7, 200 speed, 1, 2, 5–6, 7, 17, 25–35, 36, 41, 44, 64, 79, 93, 95, 103, 110, 113, 123, 136–7, 171, 190–92, 195, 199, 201 Speed Test, 200, 202–3 star groups, 11, 13–18, 19–21, 22, 25–6, 28, 33, 36, 39, 42–8, 76, 96, 164, 200 status, 178, 181–3, 190–92

T team dysfunctional, 13 overhead, 21–2 size, 29, 170 spirit, 2, 6, 23, 33, 35, 151, 164, 165 training, 2, 12 when not to be one, 2, 12–13 teams, spaghetti, 13–26, 28–35, 36, 39, 42–4, 76, 165–7, 200 teamwork, 4, 11–37, 143 technology, communication, 1, 7, 24–5, 71–94, 110, 132 choosing, 81–6 using effectively, 86–90 time zones, 3, 5, 11, 95–104, 127 time, view of, 178, 183–4, 190–92 touch points, 130 training, cross-cultural,188–90 training, team, 2, 12 207

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travel, 6, 84, 91, 111 trust, 6, 7, 107, 115, 127–8, 137, 141–71

V values, 148, 173–97

W waterline controls, 111–14, 123–4

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GLOBAL INTEGRATION Global Integration specializes in speeding up complex and international companies. We have consulted with over 200 of the world s leading companies over the last 12 years and trained over 35,000 people in more than 40 countries. We asked our clients why they chose us and continue to work with us. They identified four main reasons: ❊ We are specialists we focus 100% on these issues and nothing else. ❊ We provide real business benefits faster delivery, lower costs, and increased job satisfaction. ❊ We are highly credible our consultants are very experienced, practical line managers who have worked in complex companies. ❊ We can deliver globally we regularly provide programs around the world. THE SPEED LEAD PROGRAM Work with an experienced coach or facilitator to implement the key concepts in this book fast. See more at: http://www.global-integration.com/what_we_do/ THE INTERNATIONAL CURRICULUM A series of training programs developed to make international companies faster, easier to run, and more satisfying to work in: ❊ ❊ ❊ ❊

Remote and Virtual Teams Tools for Cross-Cultural Success Skills for the Matrix Practical Global Leadership

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SPEAKING AND TRAINING You can book Kevan Hall or one of his colleagues to deliver a keynote speech, work with your senior managers, or provide an implementation program based on the tools and techniques in Speed Lead. For details, contact us at: [email protected] Telephone: Europe and rest of the world USA

+44 (0)118 932 8912 +1 (415) 848 2995

www.global-integration.com ASSOCIATES If you would like to become a certified Speed Lead coach and facilitator, please check the careers section of the Global Integration website. This opportunity is open to both in-company consultants and external specialists.

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