14. becoming HERO-powered

Finding a financial advisor is sort of like dating. You have to get to know someone and see if he or she thinks like you.

But there’s only one financial institution that treats the relationship with financial advisors like dating: Canada’s Sun Life Financial. If you’re Canadian, you can go to www.sunlife.ca, tell them a little about yourself in a lively and cleverly designed Web application, and then check out the photos of some advisors whom you might find compatible. Just like on a dating site, you can check them out before you share your information.

This is a pretty wacky idea for a 145-year-old financial services company with more than fourteen thousand employees. But Sun Life isn’t what it used to be. And the changes came about because of a change in attitude among all three groups in the HERO Compact—HEROes, IT, and management.

To understand where the change came from, start with management. Sun Life has operations in twenty-four countries and sells everything from pension plans for big corporate clients to life insurance for individuals. Inevitably, the organization had become siloed around geographies and products. There was a lot of duplication of effort.

New executives came in and wanted to change that. The CEO wanted to leverage the company’s strength internationally, so geographies could learn from each other’s experiences. The CMO wanted to create more awareness of Sun Life as a financial brand. And the CIO wanted to find ways for IT to add value to the business and stimulate innovation.

These changes in strategy energized two HEROes in Canada. Bill McCollam, whom we mentioned briefly in chapter 13, was vice president of digital strategy in Sun Life’s marketing group. Tom Anger was in IT. Together, they gathered support for the idea that an international collaboration suite could get the management what it was looking for—innovation across geographies.

One outcome of this was IdeaShare, a three-month contest to get the best employee ideas around the globe. IdeaShare, much like Chubb’s Imaginatik system that we described in chapter 10, is designed to get employees generating and commenting on each others’ ideas. But the real challenge was getting Sun Life’s far-flung staffers to participate. As we described in chapter 11, a viral video led to robust participation and more than two hundred fifty new ideas. These included improvements in the way customers get authenticated when calling the company and a new push to enable more online communication and less paperwork in dealings with customers. Another outcome was broader awareness and participation in Sun Life’s internal collaboration tools, for which the usage is now growing at 10 percent per month.

What’s more important than the sharing application is the change in Sun Life. Management now believes that innovation and collaboration will make the company more competitive, while IT and marketing work together closely, especially Tom and Bill. So closely, in fact, that Tom’s technology responsibility has been moved, and he’s now part of the marketing department, working directly with Bill’s group.

What is it like to work in a HERO-powered business like Sun Life? I’ll let Bill and Tom tell you themselves:

Bill: “The mandate at my group was to bring business units together on behalf of the customer. We will be working together a lot more. We integrate the [management] news on the intranet with the collaboration environment; it’s not two distinct destinations. We Twitter jobs and use LinkedIn for recruiting. We are using these [social] tools internally and externally.”

Tom: “This was not a traditional project where you spend two years and hope it meets your needs. We need to be constantly agile and evolve. Not be afraid to try—fail fast and fail often. Get the applications out there, get feedback, further investigate how best to roll it out. There is no point when we are going to say we are done. Social media is the dialtone of the twenty-first century.”

is your company like Sun Life?

The changes at Sun Life took years to get going. Embracing HERO-powered innovation is hard, progress takes time, and the journey is never complete.

As you’ve read about Sun Life, Best Buy, IBM, and all the other model companies we’ve described, you’ve probably asked yourself two questions:

how do I know if my company is getting closer to the HERO-powered ideal?

Most people just try to get their jobs done. Most managers would like to serve customers and run things efficiently. This discipline of customer-focused innovation doesn’t come up every day, and it doesn’t affect every employee. But when it does come up, it can make a dramatic difference in how it feels to work somewhere, because innovation is in the air. For regular workers, it just provides hope that they may be able to contribute in innovative ways—and without getting tangled in bureaucracy.

It helps to have signposts that reveal just how far along the journey you’ve come. Whether you’re a worker with an idea, a manager, or an IT professional, here are some of the things that will tell you if the HERO-powered ideal is catching on with your company.

In the preceding chapters, we’ve delivered lots of advice on how companies can support HERO-powered innovation. But progress comes one step, one HERO, and one project at a time. That’s why it’s so important to build a HERO project or two, even if you’re at the very beginning of this corporate transformation.

what do I do if my company isn’t there yet?

Realistically, most companies are at the start of the journey toward empowering their HEROes. Don’t wait for your company to change. Create the change yourself. While the top management of a company can accelerate the HERO-powered transformation, change can come from anywhere. HEROes, managers, and IT staff can contribute best by creating small successes, then building on them.

HEROes should build on small successes

If you’re a creative staffer in touch with customers needs, you can still be a HERO, even if your company isn’t set up to reward it, yet. Managers are more likely to support you if you’re productive, so follow the advice here in addition to, not instead of, performing your regular job.

First, spend some time learning how mobile, video, cloud, and social technologies work. If using your work computer for these purposes is prohibited, use a home computer. Depending on your skills, learn by connecting on YouTube or Twitter, making or uploading videos, perusing iPhone apps, and finding or even coding creative Web services.

Second, don’t just identify customer problems, imagine solutions. What would you want if you were a customer? How can your sales, support, or marketing staff be more efficient? What solutions could you create?

Third, reach out to people who can help. While your peers may seem the most obvious, you may learn more from people in adjacent departments; salespeople can learn from support staff, for example, and marketing people from IT staff. If your company has collaboration systems, use them to pose questions or connect with people across departments. At this point, it’s a good idea to let your boss know what you’re imagining—depending on your relationship and the quality of your idea, he may help you, suggest productive directions, be indifferent, or even attempt to block your efforts, but it’s better to know up front.

Fourth, build a plan. Use the Effort-Value Evaluation in chapter 2, not just to determine what class of project you’re considering, but what sorts of challenges you may face. Your plan should include details on what resources you’ll need, what allies are working with you, what sort of value you can produce, and how you can measure that value.

If your project affects customers or employees, you’ll generally need some management approval—but you’ll have to balance the need to get approvals higher up in the organization with the ability to get started. Depending on your level of daring, sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.

And don’t stop at one project. If you succeed, you owe it to yourself and your company to find ways to extend that success. Successful HEROes often create new job descriptions and end up running groups dedicated to new kinds of solutions.

managers should encourage HERO efforts as visibly as possible

If you run a group or a department, how can you start the journey of becoming a HERO-powered business? You may be asking, “Why aren’t my staff more creative problem solvers?” The answer, most likely, is that they don’t get rewarded for taking risks. Here are some suggestions on how to change things.

First, start by hiring energetic and creative people. Hire for attitude as well as skills. Look for people who can build Web sites or shoot videos, or who have extensive social technology skills, perhaps from college or hobbies. These people are the most likely to be able to come up with customer-facing groundswell ideas.

Second, encourage people in any way possible. Creative use of technology is a spark; fan it into a flame. At General Mills, the marketing leadership holds monthly meetings of its department and highlights creative strategies used by other brands and industries; exposing your staff to new technologies and strategies is a best practice. Help potential HEROes by identifying them, encouraging their ideas, and recommending positive directions for change. Recognize innovative technology solutions with awards and public attaboys.

Third, participate yourself. You reached your position because you solve problems and find creative solutions. Once in a management position, don’t lose your involvement. Contribute to the ideas, provide guidance on the kinds of ideas you can support, read the comments and rankings of others—even if it hurts.

Finally, help take concepts from idea to project to completion. You can do this by identifying other managers who can contribute, connecting HEROes with others who have similar interests, and running interference with other departments that may have problems. And if you want your HEROes to keep producing, don’t take credit for their ideas. (Managers we spoke with during the research for this book were delighted to give credit to others who generated or contributed to HERO projects.)

Throughout all this activity, it’s a good idea for managers in customer-facing departments to find sympathetic IT staff who are willing to provide advice and support, rather than those more likely to shut down projects.

As long as we’re talking about management, here’s a word for senior managers and CEOs: wondering why your people aren’t more innovative? As we saw from so many managers in chapter 9, you have to learn to tolerate some failures to make innovation happen. The body language that senior managers project, especially during difficult economic times, has a lot of influence on HEROes’ willingness to innovate. So does the way you support collaboration and innovation systems within your company.

IT staff must find ways to support HERO projects

How does an IT professional start down the path to a HERO-powered business? By taking one giant step toward the real customers of your company and the colleagues that serve them. Focusing on internal customers is fine to a point, but supporting HERO projects means understanding what customers need. This can be a tough transition for a highly technical person more comfortable with code books and procedures than handshakes and relationships. Here are some ways to do it better.

First, upgrade your customer skills by talking to people who work with customers every day. Go ahead, make that call to a marketing colleague, accept that brown bag lunch describing the new social strategy, stop by the desk of a technical liaison in the customer service organization. It starts with personal relationships with colleagues, but it doesn’t need to stop there. Take an accounting class or attend a marketing seminar. It’s all accessible to a curious technical person.

Second, focus more on making things better for customers and employees and perhaps less on trying to bulletproof and lock down systems. Take a little more risk so that HERO employees ask for your support rather than keeping things from you. In the words of Malcolm Harkins, chief information security officer at Intel, “Run toward the risk so you can shape it.” That means knowing what’s going on and finding ways to improve it.

Third, stake your claim as the company’s technology expert. You’re probably more enthusiastic about Android phones and HD video cameras than your average salesperson or product development manager. Showcase your talent and ideas. Wear your geek cloak with pride. Be the expert on all things groundswell. Bring your own experiences and experiment with radically new solutions to old problems.

Finally, don’t be afraid that blue-collar IT jobs are disappearing. Be focused on happy customers and empowered HEROes, not applying software patches or testing maintenance fixes on old applications. If your job feels like a dead end in a world moving to the cloud, then make a change. Learn a new skill. Take a night class. Up your game so you become the technology expert in your HERO-powered business.

the journey is worth it

HEROes face great challenges in any company, and yet thousands have succeeded. You don’t have to work for Sun Life to be a successful HERO.

They do it because it’s impossible for any empowered, resourceful businessperson to see customers—or coworkers—in need and not ask, “Could we serve them better?”

They do it because, immersed in the same technologies as consumers, they wonder how those tools might be used in their jobs.

They do it because doing the same job as yesterday, with the same tools as yesterday, coloring only within the lines, is boring. And because they worry that that sort of complacency will leave them vulnerable to the whims of their own empowered customers.

They even do it because their company encourages HERO activity, provides the tools for it, and recognizes the ability HEROes have to inspire their colleagues.

Empowering more people in your organization is a force for good. It attracts smart people. It makes creative problem solving everybody’s job. And it makes your company a more upbeat, enjoyable, and creative place to be.

Give yourself and your workers a chance to turn powerful technologies into machines that generate happy customers who talk about you. In the twenty-first century, this may be the only sustainable advantage you’ve got.