Values vs. Money

Last night I attended a HRINZ event entitled ‘How successful managers think’ presented by Peter Withers from the University of Auckland Business School. Peter talked about the skills managers needed to perform in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. The key theme was that business leaders needed to have a holistic view of the world whereby decisions are made with consideration for their far-reaching implications. This means operating with a global mindset rather than a New Zealand-centric view.

The presentation was interesting and informative on a number of different levels. However, I found the notion of NZ leaders taking on practices the rest of the world uses challenging. Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean we should. I don't disagree that, as a country, we should be competitive. But I do think we should do it without compromising our values.

Peter told the story of a NZ water bottler who was offered a distribution deal with Whole Foods stores in the US. It involved distributing their product across 400 stores in the States. The catch was that the bottle label had to be changed to show nutritional information. Like this:

Energy……..0

Fat………….0

Sugar………0

Etc.

The water bottler turned down the deal because he didn’t want to change the label. He missed out on becoming a multi-millionaire as a result. Stupid right?

But isn’t it also stupid to put a nutritional label on a bottle of water that has no ‘nutritional’ details? I say again, just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it should be done.

Perhaps an extreme example, but who remembers the debacle of American Financial Institutions paying massive increases to their executives? And then they went under. People still made money of this.

I acknowledge that people suffered greatly from the demise of the Financials, water bottle labels are perhaps not an apt comparison and improving our business practices are important to the well-being of all New Zealanders. But where do you draw the line between values and money?

Apparently the rest of the world describes kiwis (NZers) as really nice people. We’re nice, and naïve and that’s pretty much it. It would be nice to be considered nice and rich but, if I had to choose, I’d rather be known as a good person than a rich person. Maybe the secret to our niceness is that we have really strong values. Is that a bad thing when you see all the troubles of the world on the news every night?

Money or values? Which would you choose?

Practical ways to become lean

In last weeks blog I talked about creating a lean office and how lean is not just the realm of manufacturing. This week I’m going to share some practical ideas for making your office lean. It’s really all about continuous improvement and its useful to have a few tools to encourage this.

The first tool is visual management. All the other tools fall out of this one really. This is about displaying your results in an easily readable and public way. The best way to do this is as a team. For example, as an HR team or a customer services team. What are the KPIs (key performance indicators) you have for your team? Can you measure these each week or month? Keep a track of them on a graph and put it up where everyone can see it. Now, what is your goal? For example, if you measure something like turnover or time to hire (these are very HRey examples but you'll have your own), you might want to reduce them. How do you do that? That's where some problem solving tools come in.

Keeping track of your KPIs and identifying where you want to be will help you identify gaps . These gaps trigger a problem solving process that generate ideas. You could use a variety of problem solving techniques. My favorite is brainstorming. You get a bunch of people together, who have some knowledge of the problem, and throw ideas up on a board or sheet of paper. No idea is a bad idea. When it works really well you can get some great innovations.

And that brings me to another tool to encourage innovation. Because it’s all about continuous improvement and innovation is really the cornerstone of that. To encourage it, publicize and celebrate it. If people are working in teams get them to present each month an innovation that their team has successfully implemented. This could be quite informal, you don’t necessarily need power point, but it gets people talking about it and highlights innovation as something important. An innovation is simply something done differently, so it doesn’t have to be big. But all the little things add up.

Speaking of little things adding up, integral to these tools is consistency. It’s all small steps to continual improvement but continual is really the key word. Lean is about continually fine-tuning your processes so that you are doing it faster, cheaper and to higher quality. Everything changes so quickly nowadays that no one can afford to improve as a one-off. 

I hope that you find these useful and I’d be interested in hearing your ideas for making business lean.

A lean office

‘Lean’ is often considered the realm of manufacturing. I believe it also has application in an office environment. To recap, ‘lean’ is a manufacturing method pioneered by the Japanese and picked up by the American automobile industry in the 1950s after they begun to loose market share to Japan in quite a significant way. ‘Lean’ involves using less of everything: materials, people, time, effort etc. The idea is that everything you do has to add value to the end customer. In a manufacturing context, this is the value added through the production process. For example, goods sitting around as work in progress (WIP) are a waste. The resources used to store the product are seen as an unnecessary cost to the customer. 

Everyone has a customer right? So whether you are in manufacturing or not, whatever you are producing, whether it be a good or a service is going to be bought and consumed by an end customer. So is what YOU do adding value to the end customer?

If you are working in an office environment, think more broadly about how you add value to the customer. Start with identifying your customer. This would be the customer of the business you are working for. If you don’t have direct impact/involvement with the customer either trace backwards (or forwards) between your role and theirs. This means identifying the people you have involvement with within the business. How do you add value to them? How do you help them to do their jobs better, faster and with less cost?

Next identify what you do in your day-to-day work that does not add value to yourself or anyone else. This means identifying business costs that could be reduced, things that could be done to higher quality or done faster. Ask yourself, if this the best possible way I could do this?

Really great examples of common office practices that could be done better are filing and stationary. Do you have filing cabinets sitting in your office that you haven’t opened in the last 6-12 months? Yes? Get rid of it! If you haven’t looked at it in that long you’re probably not going to. If you work in an office with 60 odd other people and if even half of them get rid of all the crap they’re not actually using imagine how much space you’d have. Space costs money; is the use of that space adding value to the customer? Stationary is the other one. How much space does your stationary collection take up? Do you stock up on stuff just in case there is a run on staplers? Inventory systems used in manufacturing environments can also be used for things like stationary cupboards. For example, you only have one stapler in the cupboard, when that goes you buy one more stapler. There are stationary suppliers now that come in and automatically replenish your cupboard when it gets past minimum levels. You use less space as a result.

These are really only two examples of the potential of ‘lean’ practices in an office environment. Other ways to save time, money and improve quality can be identified with other ‘lean’ techniques such as process flow mapping, problem solving and 5S (sort & discard, shine and inspect, signpost and order, simplify and standardise, sustain), and visual management, just to name a few. The key is to continually identify opportunities for improvement. The way I see it is that you work towards making yourself redundant. This can be quite a challenging idea for people. The right mindset is needed. Rather than, what work fills in your 9 to 5 day? What work adds value to your customer? 

Learning from experience

I didn’t do my blog last week like I was supposed to. It wasn’t because I didn’t have time, because I had lots of time! I just couldn’t be bothered. It sounds awful really. But you know that old saying “give a busy person something to do and it gets done”? Well the reality is that I’m not busy, quite the opposite really and I’m not getting very far on very much.

I let my discipline slip last week by not doing the one thing I needed to accomplish – my blog. I am usually a very results-orientated and focused person and I have not lost that. But the way I see myself and the way I like to act has been challenged over the last few weeks. For those who do not know, I am between jobs, and am now on week 4 of unemployment. I’ve put a positive spin on it, I’ve been reading a lot, catching up with friends, and cleaning the house. But I have this overriding feeling that I have not accomplished anything.

Without some great thing to accomplish I’m a bit at a loss. I guess I derive a sense of self-worth from what I achieve. But this experience, right now, is not necessarily a bad thing. Every experience is something to learn from, particularly when things go wrong, or not so right. I’m not quite sure what I’m learning yet, maybe patience, resilience, strength?

Learning from experience requires reflection; this is how you know what to do differently next time. I know I will be getting back on the regular blogging wagon this week, maybe accomplish some thing, however small.  So to end my rather reflective blog I’ll leave you with a rather yogi-ish quote:

If you are depressed, you are living in the past.

If you are anxious you are living in the future.

If you are at peace, you are living in the present

Lao Tzu

A review of Drive by Daniel Pink

I love reading books and thinking “oh wow that’s awesome, someone else thinks the way that I do, but it’s articulated really well and it’s a best seller!” Those were my thoughts while reading Daniel Pink’s Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. It is structured in three parts, so it’s only fitting that I discuss each of these parts in turn.

The first part discusses why the carrot and stick approach does not work for most jobs. Pink makes a distinction between algorithmic and heuristic work. Algorithmic tasks are those that are repetitive and don’t have much deviation on a day-to-day basis. Heuristic tasks are those that require creativity and innovation. To put this into my own context, it’s like the difference between Taylorised manufacturing work and, well, the type of work that I do – learning and development. The argument is that the carrot and stick approach does have some application to algorithmic work, but with a warning to be careful about when and how this applied (read the book if you’d like more information on this). However, financial reward for heuristic work can stifle creativity and thus performance. It reminds me of a paper I took at University, which I think was called something to do with reward and motivation. The key message I got from my lecturer was “make sure people are paid appropriately and then forget about it”. There are other things that motivate people to perform, as discussed in the second section.

The second part of the book presents autonomy, mastery and purpose as key elements in motivating the heuristic workforce. Lately, I seem to be coming across several arguments for three elements that impact individual performance. Daniel Pink discusses autonomy, mastery and purpose; Peter Boxall (UoA Business School Professor and my Masters supervisor) uses ability, motivation and opportunity; in Leading through Values: Linking company culture to business strategy, Michael Henderson, Dougal Thompson and Shar Henderson use the terms head, heart and hands. To use a term I picked up on a trip to Vietnam a few years ago they’re ‘same, same, but different’, meaning that they are essentially the same thing but told in different ways.

But back to the three elements in Drive, I found the concept of mastery interesting because I had not encountered this before. I think that the idea of flow, presented as part of mastery, where we are in a perfect balance between challenge and capability, is an interesting idea from an L&D perspective and requires further examination. The concept of autonomy formed part of my Masters thesis, so this was not really new. But it’s nice to know that the elements of control and decision-making capability as motivational factors are more widely discussed. Lastly, purpose, I guess that is where everyone talks about vision and values being important for business. But it’s not often put in the context of an interrelated and interdependent factor. There are a number of practical applications from this book that are tied together in the last part.

In the third part, each chapter is neatly summarized and there are practical exercises for implementing the ideas presented. There is also a reading list for anyone interested in cultivating the ideas further. With my reading list starting to get a little low now, I think this is a good place to start.

Overall, this is an easy read. I hope that, if you read this book, it encourages you to rethink the way you reward and recognize. I’ve had carrots dangled in front of me before but I think they’ve just stressed me out more than anything. Furthermore, financial reward is usually tied to a performance review process. If you perform this way then you will receive X increase. If you believe what Pink argues, then this could stifle creativity. Should we be doing things differently?

A review of The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

One of the great things about being unemployed is catching up on all the books that I’ve been meaning to read. This week I was able to finish reading The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. This book focuses on “the seven principles that fuel success and performance at work”, that quote is from the cover and nicely sums it up (as a cover quote should).

Amongst the seven principles is one called ‘falling upwards’ which particularly resonated with me while I was sitting on the couch, looking at the dreary weather outside and feeling at a complete loss as to what to do with myself. Being unemployed after a few years of very intense activity is a bit of a shock. It’s easy to feel helpless and directionless and I’ve certainly experienced a bit of that this week. But I refuse to wallow for long and it was an opportune time to be reading this book.  The principle of ‘falling upwards’ talks about seeing moments where everything seems to be falling apart (or down) as opportunities for change and re-invigoration. It’s about shifting your language and your attitude to focus on the positive.

The book is based around the idea that success does not necessarily lead to happiness but that happiness does lead to success. I remember getting that vibe from reading The Secret some time ago, but then I did leave The Secret sitting on my bedside table for about 2 years only half read. The Secret has now been moved to my bookshelf but I still have not finished it, I think because it was a bit airy-fairy for me. One of the things that I enjoyed about The Happiness Advantage was that much of what Achor talks about is referenced to scientific studies rather than just anecdotal stories. I think this gives much more credence to a book that could easily fall into the self-help category. Instead this book is a helpful tool for development.

It reminds me of another book that I use quite often for leadership development called True North by Bill George (I may have mentioned it before). I think that The Happiness Advantage has useful applications for leadership development as well. Particularly towards the end of the book the role of leaders in creating a positive and high performing atmosphere is discussed, also the role of social support networks in individual performance, something Bill George examines too.

The idea of applying a happy mindset to your life and work and reaping positive results seems like a common sense approach, but as Achor himself argues, common sense is not commonly applied. The Happiness Advantage offers practical tips for making your life and the lives of those around you happier. Increased performance should come about as part of this happiness. It’s not just warm and fluffy for the sake of it; there are obvious practical implications. I, for one, read this book and marked a number of pages where Achor talked about activities used to raise self-awareness around attitudes at work. I mean to integrate these at some point (hopefully soon) in leadership development design and apply a few of them myself.