Pratical Application of The Service Profit Chain
As you may know, I have been blogging on this site for quite a few years now.
Now I decided it’s time for a change. For the rest of the year, I will be producing short 5-10 minute video blogs. Here is the first one that explains what this will all be about.
If you have ideas, suggestions or feedback in whatever form, please let do me know.
Introducing a new videoblog format from Mike Hohnen on Vimeo.
Next week, we will start by exploring the knowing-doing gap.
Sounds nuts, I know, but according to research by psychologist Gary Klein, it’s a great way to improve the actual outcome of your projects.
But before we go into details, there is an additional benefit that fits in with this month’s theme of improving how our top management teams function.
You see if you perform what Klein calls a pre-mortem on your projects, you are also providing a psychologically safe space for your team to voice disagreement or worries without being labelled as negative spoilsports or even worse being seen as disloyal.
So how do you do it? You make a plan for the project in your usual way, or maybe it is just a plan how you are going to execute the day with your team. When everyone is happy that we now have a plan, you announce:
“I am sorry to tell you but it has turned out that project (X) was an unprecedented disaster. Please give me your ideas as what could have happened to derail the project so badly.”
This is a very different question from asking: “So what could go wrong?” When we ask the ‘what could go wrong’ question, voicing your doubts on the team can be much trickier and often decidedly outside the psychological safety zone.
Now, everyone gets out a pad of paper and brainstorms with themselves 3-5 ways that this project could have been totally derailed, or that this day that we planned so carefully ended up a total disaster.
On a whiteboard or a flip-chart, draw a 2×2 as shown below:
Now ask each person to read out their ideas as to why this day/ project went wrong. As they do, note the item in the appropriate square.
Now you have an overview of what problems we might encounter, sorted in a practical way. Discuss how to create proactive solutions where you can see the need and make a backup plan for the issues that you can see could happen under a certain set of circumstances.
You have now achieved two things:
1) You have proactively identified a number of issues that you would probably not have discovered until it was too late.
2) More importantly, you have provided a safe space where it is possible to actually discuss the proverbial elephant in the room. Instead of a messy feedback session loaded with blame and critique, you have made it possible to voice doubts in a constructive way regardless of hierarchies or departmental boundaries.
The method is called ‘prospective hindsight’ and according to Author Karl Weick, it can improve people’s ability to predict the reasons for future outcomes by 30%.
After the reset, then what? We reset the management team and cleared the air using the workshop framework I described in my previous blog post.
Now, the question is what is the one thing we could start doing immediately, that would help us grow stronger as a team. In my view, the obvious answer is to learn how to we deal with setbacks and mistakes. The crucial move is from holding people responsible to everyone taking responsibility.
This may sound theoretical but is not, we can learn how to do that by one simple shift in our behaviour as a team. We need to develop and integrate the practice of the After Action Review, not in the form of the occasional event when something has gone wrong but as a natural part of how we finish ‘things’. The job is not complete until we have not done an after action review.
But nor is the week, the month or the year for that matter. We need to develop a different approach, a culture of not rushing into the next ‘thing’ before we have finished digesting what we just accomplished.
The format of the After Action Review can vary and if you google the term, you will see many more or less complex versions. My favourite fast and dirty is to grab a flip chart, napkin or whatever I can find to write on, I draw this:
Then I ask the team “So what went well (today, this project, or whatever we are wrapping up)?” That goes in the square labelled ‘Preserve’. Here we list things we are happy with, things that went well or even beyond our expectations. Practices worth learning from.
What do we need to get better at or develop in the future? Here we list things that did not go according to plan or turned out different than what we expected. We are not trying to place blame, only to identify what needs to change next time. Think of more as a feedforward than a feedback. Whatever comes up goes into the square ‘Develop’.
What did we do that we wish we had not done? I.e. what should we stop doing in the future? This is a great place for the individual mea culpa. I screwed up and I will try not to do it again, or maybe we all screwed up. What counts is the conversation about how are we going to avoid that in the future. Those items go the square marked ‘Eliminate’.
And finally, I ask what are we happy that we avoided today. Maybe last time we promised each other to keep tempers down even when things get tricky and today we manage to do that, yea! And that goes onto the last of the four squares.
This process can take 10-15 minutes at the end of a shift or it can take a full morning at the end of a larger project. When doing it this way, we create a relatively safe space for everyone to voice their views and opinions. It helps us clear up any friction or misunderstanding that might have arisen during the heat of the action.
Once we develop the habit of doing this as a regular practice, we have also taken the first step toward a more open and honest feedback culture. A culture with a focus on fixing things and learning from our mistakes. It’s a shift away from problem focus and towards to a solution focus. It is a goodbye to the drama triangles.
You can try it out very quickly at the end of your next management team meeting as: “So let’s just do a quick review of how we hold meeting with each other…”, you grab the flip chart, draw the model and ask the question. Easy, you are off to a new start.
Harvard professor Dr. Robert Kegan says:
“Let’s be blunt: In the ordinary organization, nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for — namely, hiding their weaknesses, looking good, covering their rear ends, managing other people’s favorable impression of them. This is the single biggest waste of a company’s resources.”
And the way I look at it is that the better they are at that second job, the more dysfunctional the management teams become…
So what to do about it? How to stop the madness?
Again, according to Kegan, it requires a different mindset, a culture that goes something like this:
“We hired you because we thought you were good, not because we thought you were perfect. We are all here to get better, and the only way we will get better is to make mistakes, reveal our limitations, and support each other to overcome them.”
And that, says Kegan, is the starting point. That is the basic foundation of how to create what he and co-author Dr. Lisa Lahey have labelled the DDO a Deliberately Developmental Organization in their book: An everyone culture.
In that culture, we would not need to spend time on our second job at all but would use the time more productively to develop ourselves each other and the organisation. This is not as utopian as you might think, but it definitely requires a hard ‘ RESET’ of how the team interacts with each other.
A good place to start might be to go off-site for 2-3 days and agree on a new set of ground rules for collaboration development and growth. There are various ways to do that. One of my favourite frameworks is using Peter Blocks six conversations as the agenda for the retreat.
In my experience, it is well worthwhile to have a person who is not part of the team facilitate these conversations. So that each team member can participate freely without having another job to as well.
On the first evening, I also like to add a Life Map exercise in addition to the Six Conversations. After dinner, each participant takes 15-20 minutes to reflect on the path they have come along in life. They draw that as a graph or map using a template (you can have a copy by simply entering your email below). Once everyone has completed the Life Map, they take turns sharing their story using the life map as the guide. This ALWAYS produces a much better understanding of why each of us is who we are. And ultimately that contributes to higher levels of trust in the group.
Here is a link to a short introduction to Peter Block’s six conversations framework. And if you would like a more comprehensive explanation, read the book: Community The Structure of Belonging By Peter Block
“When we create something that is separate from something else, we create limits to our ability to see the interrelationships”
– Gregory Bateson.
For all practical purposes, organisations need organising in a way that makes it clear who does what. Departments, division or whatever. But what we don’t always realise is that doing so comes at a price. Each entity is technically a holon; an entity on its own and part of something else and with that comes to ‘drives’, a power drive to realise itself and a ‘love’ drive toward unity with the bigger whole – What author Adam Kahane describes as a polarity of power and love in his book of the same name.
A polarity that is not well managed tends to tip to one side and become dysfunctional and ultimately self-destructive.
And therein lies the problem of the dysfunctional management teams. It is built into the system, no one pays attention to the need for a balancing of the polarities. On the contrary, in most organisations, there is a built-in bias to feed the power polarity. Heads of department, division etc. are held responsible as opposed to encouraging taking responsibility.
Success as the head of a holon often produces career benefits, personal bonuses but rarely is there a bonus for valuing the common good over own interests. The focus from the CEO is nearly always on optimising each section in the hope that by doing so we will have the best total sum. They may talk about unity and one-team and all that but the way they design meeting agendas, reporting remuneration and bonus systems contradicts the nice intentions.
Only very rarely do I see a CEO (or management team for that matter) where there is a focus on balancing this polarity, which means that there is a more balanced focus on driving unity, wholeness, and interdependencies while toning down the hard boundaries.
Holding managers strictly responsible for their units ( holon’s) performance they will automatically react by insisting on very clear boundaries. This is my department, that is your department. How else can I take responsibility for what is not under my control? But that thinking completely overlooks the reality that all the departments are interrelated and that my success or failure is closely linked to your success failure. In fact, success is not entirely under their control at all.
The only way out of the rigid boundaries is to foster a culture where individual managers take responsibility, which is a totally different story, and where the management team holds themselves collectively responsible for the overall performance.
“Categorising your peers as either stupid or evil is a failure of empathy.”
– Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership by Peter Hawkins
The key driver of unity is obviously relationships. The better the personal relationship we have on the top management team, the easier it becomes to balance the polarity and think outside own personal interests and gains. But relationships, as we all know, don’ t emerge out of thin air, they require a serious effort, and maybe more than anything else they require an attitude from all concerned that: I will do whatever it takes to makes these relationships work.
Collaboration is a habit of mind, solidified by routine and predicated on openness, generosity, rigour and patience. It requires precise and fearless communication, without status, awe or intimidation. It’s hard because it allows no passengers.
– Heffernan (2013) “A bigger Prize”
If you are an eager student of leadership you will probably also have noticed that the polarity of power and Love is also the polarity of Management and Leadership.
It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the weekly management meeting. As they filter through the door, they look as if they are attending a funeral. They take their usual seats, open up their laptops and locate the agenda, not that they need to, they know it by heart, it’s always the same 5 items and the CEO starts out with item 1 and every one goes through the usual motions. The 5 people on the management team have been together for the past 3 years. They know the routine by heart. In fact, they know it so well they can almost predict how each of them will answer the questions from the CEO.
If you ask them individually, they all dread these meetings, they just want them to be over and done with. The CEO especially is frustrated. This is his team and they are so far from what we would consider a team as you can be. They are just a group that convenes to share some information that could probably have been just as easily shared on an intranet.
So some people would argue to change the meeting format, make it livelier, sit in bean bag chairs and use lots of post-its etc. But that is not the core problem. When the meetings play out like this, it is just a symptom of something much more serious going on. The core problem here is relationships, the top management team at best don’t have healthy relationships with each other. In the worst cases I have seen, I would even characterize them as toxic and dysfunctional.
Furthermore, the problem here is not so much that they have boring meetings that they all dread, that is their problem you could say. No, the real problem is that if they have rotten relationships with each other, it filters down throughout the organisations and contributes to the dreaded silo thinking. Invariably, employees take sides with their team leader and the relationships across departments suffer accordingly.
Not the best scenario when we are trying to create end-to-end seamless and breath-taking customer experiences.
Company culture starts with the culture in our management team; that sets the tone. That culture is primarily defined by the relationships in that group. If you really want to create a strong culture, you will need to invest time and effort in improving the relationships on your management team. Until you do, not much will change.
What is your experience of top management cultures and how they influence the rest of the system? Leave your comments below or contact me, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
