14. Translating Partnership Theory into Partnership Practice
We advocate a partnership culture as the surest path to a high-performance organization. Partnership works because it harnesses the natural motivation and enthusiasm that is characteristic of the overwhelming majority of workers. Other management modes dampen that motivation and enthusiasm. (Some come close to destroying them.) The partnership organization is effective precisely because it is based on the assumption that most workers are, by nature, motivated. Rather than a vicious circle (assume and expect the worst and you get the worst), a partnership philosophy generates a virtuous circle (assume and expect the best, and that’s what you get).
Does partnership always work? Nothing that we know of always works, and some conditions make partnership inappropriate.
First, there is the matter of individual differences. We have said throughout this book that there are some individual workers who cannot be treated as partners. They are naturally too lazy, hostile, or dishonest to participate in collaborative endeavors. It is self-defeating for management to try to do so because they will not respond positively; these workers, who are almost always a small number of individuals, must be dealt with separately: by dismissal from the company or by placing them in jobs that minimize their impact on co-workers and the organization.
It is an unfortunate reality that there are workers with whom it is impossible to establish a collaborative relationship. And, there are managers with whom this is impossible. In that case, the problem tends to be more one of philosophy: managers who simply do not accept the notions underlying partnership, the assumption, for example, that workers want to work or that they are reasonable in what they expect in their employment conditions. This problem can sometimes be overcome by training and counseling from experienced managers with a partnership approach, but sometimes it cannot. Organizations that have moved to a partnership culture have always had to deal with managers who could not (or would not) change, and they have usually had to remove them from managerial positions. Otherwise, they create cross-currents damaging to the establishment of a new culture.
We come now to senior management. The issue here is not whether senior management expresses agreement with the partnership concept and methods—if they don’t, it won’t happen—but whether they genuinely believe what they say. In many companies, senior management has initiated (or, more precisely, allowed to be initiated) programs that sound good but have little substantial follow-through. Genuinely believing in partnership means more than just words; it means taking the kinds of actions we have described throughout this book and sticking with them. Changing an organization’s culture in the direction of partnership should never be attempted in a superficial way, as with slogans instead of deeds or with isolated deeds that are unconnected to each other or the reality of what goes on in the daily lives of employees. These efforts, which usually soon disappear (called, derisively, “programs of the month”), do nothing but generate or reinforce workers’ skepticism about management and its intentions. If senior management, especially the CEO, does not genuinely commit to partnership by demonstrating its willingness to take serious action, forget it! (We return to this crucial matter of senior management commitment later in this chapter.)
We have not qualified the use of partnership by occupation or by national culture. There is no evidence that the approach does not work when it’s applied to certain types of work or in certain nations or ethnicities. Obviously, adaptations must be made, but the fundamental concepts are, to our knowledge, applicable everywhere. Is there an occupation where collaboration for the achievement of common ends is not desired? Is there a country where collaboration is not called for? We think not. It’s time to shelve the stereotypical portrayals that we apply to large groups of workers, stereotypes that can function, in part, to allow blame for problems to be placed on the “character” of workers or the cultures of countries instead of on the way workers are managed. As we have said, individual employees might have character issues, but for the majority, whatever they do and wherever they are, the proper injunction is, “Management, first heal thyself.”
Throughout this book, we have suggested specific best practices that can translate key partnership concepts into action, such as “rings of defense” to help avoid or minimize layoffs and group rewards that promote teamwork and share performance gains with workers. We didn’t make these up; they come from organizations that took serious action based on partnership ideas and researchers that carefully assessed these efforts. These are what the best organizations (in our terms) and research studies have taught us. In describing these actions, we also paid some attention to the methods by which ideas can be converted into action, especially in our discussion of the translation of “purposes and principles” into practices such as total quality management (TQM, discussed in Chapter 7, “Organization Purpose and Principles”) and the building of teamwork between interdependent units of a company (see Chapter 11, “Teamwork”). The current chapter gathers these strands into a more comprehensive statement of a process for advancing an organization toward a partnership culture.
It Starts at the Top
Many partnership organizations didn’t have to change to that form; they started that way with a visionary founder and CEO who strongly believed that this is the way people should be managed. Frederick Smith of Federal Express and Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines are good examples of this. But other organizations that have long operated with an entirely different management mode have consciously and deliberately undergone profound culture change to a partnership pattern. Good examples of these are Gordon Bethune’s massive culture change and turnaround of Continental Airlines and F. Kenneth Iverson’s similarly highly successful efforts at Nucor.
A major lesson from these examples of partnership organizations is that action must begin with, and be sustained by, senior management. This chapter’s goal is to help interested senior managements implement partnership concepts and practices.
There are executives who, without reading this book or perhaps anything like it, naturally operate in a partnership mode. That’s the way they are. Take the following excerpt from an interview with Gordon Bethune in Human Capital: Strategies and News about the way he engineered the turnaround of Continental Airlines:
Continental Airlines was just three weeks away from failing to meet its payroll in 1994, losing about $55 million per month. After churning through 10 CEOs in 10 years, the airline only occasionally got passengers to the right place at the right time—maybe with their luggage.
This was a crummy place to work. The culture at Continental, after years of layoffs and wage freezes and wage cuts and broken promises, was one of backbiting, mistrust, fear, and loathing,” says Bethune. “People, to put it mildly, were not happy to come to work. They were surly to customers, surly to each other, and ashamed of their company. And you can’t have a good product without people who like coming to work. It just can’t be done.
HCSN: How important is company culture and morale to the turnaround of Continental Airlines?
Bethune: It’s everything. You can’t quantify it. I mean, how important is your liver? There isn’t going to be any success if you don’t have the right culture and morale. It just doesn’t work.
HCSN: When you came to Continental, you concluded the employees were basically a good group of people despite all the messes. Why?
Bethune: All you had to do was walk around. If you’ve been in this business, you could see there was nothing wrong with these people’s thinking; their tools were fine, we had our stuff. But if you’re running an airline, why would you run a late one? You can’t figure out what time of day it is? You don’t know how fast the planes fly? I mean, this is sixth-grade arithmetic we’re talking about here. The fact is, everybody kind of knew what to do, but nobody cared about doing it. If every time, for the last 10 years, no matter what you did you lost, then you quit trying.
HCSN: How were you able to gain employees’ trust?
Bethune: You have to earn and develop trust. It’s like dealing with abused children. They kind of like the way you talk and act, but every adult they ever met screwed them over—so they’re going to be a little hesitant until you just patiently, with consistent behavior, show them that you’re not just a new deal from the same old deck. It took time and some concrete changes around here for them to believe things really were different.
HCSN: In your book, From Worst to First, you talk about the importance of dealing with employees honestly, of communicating with them, of clarifying expectations and of removing a lot of rules and policies. What else?
Bethune: Most importantly, we showed them concrete examples of positive change for them. We became a no-smoking company the first week. We took the locks off the executive suite doors. We went casual on Fridays just to change our dress behavior. We started rewarding extra if we did our job better. When we did our job better quickly, their lives got better because when we were on time, they were on time. They started getting home to pick up their kids from school or whatever mattered to them.1
Bethune goes on to describe the other changes he introduced, such as a focus on customer satisfaction, monthly bonuses for on-time performance, and replacing the “authoritarian” employee manual with a set of guidelines that didn’t “box them into ridiculous procedures for every element of their work.” He also felt that he had to replace a number of middle managers.
Here’s Bethune’s comment on the source of his ideas: “Someone asked me... how come I know so much about people? I said, ‘I used to be one.’ So I think understanding your co-workers is kind of a prerequisite to success. You’re not going to make it without their help, so you have to learn how to talk to them and how to appreciate them.”
The Action Process
We discussed what partnership is and we come now to how it can be introduced and sustained. We don’t have a cookbook recipe; you can bring about culture change in many ways, and it is never a neat and entirely predictable process. Nevertheless, certain approaches seem to work better than others (a series of steps is described later in this chapter), and knowing what they are should help an organization take significant steps forward with minimum downside risks (when adapted to individual circumstances).
You might have one of four broad kinds of reactions to this book: this is nonsense; this is what we already do; this sounds interesting, let’s explore further; or this is exactly on the mark, let’s go! There can, of course, be all sorts of intermediate responses, such as, “We do some of this and the rest is nonsense or too radical.”
You probably don’t believe that what we’ve been saying is nonsense because if you do, you wouldn’t have gotten this far in the book. If you feel that this is what your organization already does, we ask you to hold on for a moment. You might be right, but you might not, or you might be only partially right. Some executives believe that they run their organizations as a collaborative endeavor with employees because they communicate frequently to them, they have suggestion programs, they have an “open door” policy, they call their employees “associates” or “team members,” and so on. But by using the diagnostic methods we suggest in this chapter, these executives might learn that the reality is different. The only reality that counts here is the employee’s reality, not senior management’s.
If you feel that the ideas and practices we have been espousing can be useful to your organization, you might be inclined to start implementing them right away. We suggest, however, that the first step is not implementation, but assessing just how ready the organization—especially senior management and, most especially, the CEO—is for partnership. This is greatly aided by data at the senior level that help those executives confront how they really feel about partnership concepts and policies. Later in this chapter, we explain how a “readiness” questionnaire can assist executives in getting their views “on the table” so that the basic decision—is this really for us?—can be made.
Here, then, is a process by which partnership can be considered and introduced into an organization. The recommended steps are largely designed to be applied to an organization that wants to change itself in its entirety (whether the organization is a total company or a relatively self-contained business unit). The process can be usefully applied to segments of organizations, such as individual departments, but often with less marked results because what goes on in those units is usually heavily influenced by the culture of the entire organization in which it exists and by its relationships with other units.
The recommended steps for introducing partnership are defined by these questions that each step addresses:
Step 1. What is our business goal?
Step 2. Are we ready for this?
Step 3. What, exactly, do we want?
Step 4. Where are we now?
Step 5. What are the major aspects of the organization that need to be changed to get us from where we are to where we want to be?
Step 6. How should the plan be communicated to the workforce?
Step 7. How do we decide on the specific changes that need to be made and how they should be implemented?
Step 8. How should managers be trained for the implementation of partnership?
Step 9. How do we assess how well we have done?
These steps are abstracted from our own experience and that of many other practitioners as to how this kind of culture change can most effectively be introduced. Although the steps appear neat and sequential, in practice considerable overlap will exist among them, and you might move back and forth as the situation dictates. Before we describe the steps, here are four principles that should govern their application:
• Don’t lose sight of the business goal. This chapter is largely devoted to process, in two senses: partnership itself is a process because it defines how people can best work together in a business organization; we now describe how that process can best be introduced and sustained (in other words, another process). In all this discussion about how things should be done, we might lose sight of why they are being done. The effort can disintegrate into “collaboration for the sake of collaboration,” which is a parody of the concept. Such process-infatuation is not too different from the way a bureaucrat overfocuses on the means (the procedures and rules) rather than the ends that the means are designed to accomplish.
Although having a clear business goal for the effort does not guarantee the success of partnership, neglecting this certainly ensures its failure. In a short time, the organization turns its attention to its business objectives, and the means familiar to it for achieving those, which will almost definitely not be partnership. Partnership then atrophies into a sideshow. The business goal must be an integral part of the way an organization defines partnership for itself and the way it will assess its value once introduced.
• Where partnership has worked best, the primary business goal has most frequently been improved products or services for the customer. Collaboration—up, down, and across—is fostered to better meet the needs of the customer and usually to delight the customer. This goal works wonders because it is in the direct service of the business, and employees can get really enthusiastic about achieving it.
• Introduce change using partnership principles. The use of the principles of partnership should not be limited to the goal of the effort (the partnership organization), but should also govern how that goal is reached. Inconsistency in ends and means opens the credibility of the entire effort to question: “Does management really believe this stuff?” Furthermore, change that is essentially positive and that affects many people is best achieved by working collaboratively. Just as people welcome partnership, they welcome the opportunity to participate in its development and implementation as long as they feel it is serious business and not just another exercise. The basic structure of the process that we will suggest is that senior management be primarily responsible for setting the overall objectives and rationale of the effort. That is a requirement of leadership, and employees want to know that the basic objectives come from the top. But the translation of that statement into detailed policies and practices and their implementation is the responsibility of task forces composed of individuals from throughout the organization. For most issues, “diagonal slices”—people selected across levels and functions—are the best way to form the task forces. To help ensure that they continue to receive the support and attention they need, members of senior management should chair most task forces.
If the organization is unionized, the union’s active participation should be sought. Labor-management cooperative efforts have almost always been run by a joint labor-management steering committee.
• Avoid assuming that people naturally resist change. This assumption about resistance to change is another in a pessimistic outlook about people at work that we discuss throughout this book (such as the view that people are naturally lazy). People resist changes that they see as harmful to them or the organization, and they gladly welcome changes that they see as helpful. When was the last time anyone saw a worker turn down a salary increase? Or be upset because his new manager treated him more respectfully than his previous manager? Or complain about management adjusting the work pace to allow workers to turn out higher quality work? Those are changes, and if workers naturally resisted change, they would resist those changes, too. The notion that people have a difficult time with change is often a way to explain “psychologically” why workers don’t want to do something that management wants them to. They don’t want to do those things because they consider them harmful! Does a worker resist a new technology that will replace him because he “resists change?” Is he upset about a transfer to a less interesting job because he resists change? He resists getting hurt.
The belief that people naturally resist change causes managers to act in counterproductive ways, such as developing plans secretly and springing them on workers at the last minute; not listening to the genuine and specific concerns that people have about changes (after all, why listen, if they’re “just resisting change”?); needlessly overselling changes to workers; and, not doing the necessary planning to buffer the ill effects that change might bring (“they’ll complain whatever we do”). Because of these behaviors, people do, indeed, act as if they resist change. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy at work again: employees’ behavior reflects the way they are treated. Therefore, our advice is to largely ignore the assumption of “natural resistance” and, as we have said, assume that most employees will welcome the changes that partnership will bring. Proceed with its development and introduction in ways consistent with that belief.
• Maintain continual senior management attention and involvement. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of visible senior management commitment to the change process. The change must emanate from the top and be continually sustained by it. Everyone in an organization wants to know what the top wants, especially in an effort as untraditional and innovative as the introduction of a culture of genuine partnership. The forces that tend to militate against partnership—the inevitable frustrations of the workplace and the tendencies of organizations to pull people and units apart as they focus on their own objectives—make essential reinforcement of the importance of partnership from those in power. That support must be communicated in word, but especially in deed, including the way rewards and recognition are distributed. If recognition is given irrespective of people’s performance as partners, the partnership values will begin to appear hollow.
Here are the suggested key steps to begin and sustain the transformation of a company to a partnership culture.
Step 1. What Is Our Business Goal?
The primary reason that partnership is introduced in an organization must be the achievement of specific business objectives. It can’t be just that “things will be better this way” or “employees will be happier” or “we should emulate those successful Japanese companies.” As we mentioned earlier, among the most successful partnership efforts that we have observed have been those where improved products and services for the customer has been the primary goal. But whatever it is, the business objective must be an integral part of the way the organization thinks about partnership and the way it will evaluate its effects.
Step 2. Are We Ready for This?
The decision to move to a partnership culture to achieve business objectives should be deliberate and thoughtful, with full understanding that culture change is a long and demanding process; the biggest pitfall is the temptation to do it superficially—that is, avoid grappling with basic issues and changes and transform the effort instead into a “program” with catchy slogans, slick communications, and committees upon committees. All those are quite unrelated to the mainstream of the business and what goes on in the daily work lives of employees.
In this early step, senior management requires two things: a good understanding of what partnership is and what it does, and a good understanding of themselves. The former is achieved through reading, discussions with experts in the field, and visits with managers and employees in organizations that operate with a partnership culture. Visits to those organizations to see partnership in action—including its performance impacts—are especially useful because the greatest effect on executives’ thinking comes from observable facts—seeing something actually working—and those facts explained and verified by other executives they respect and trust.
Self-diagnosis should follow immediately; for this, we suggest using a diagnostic questionnaire to assess readiness (such as “The Readiness Questionnaire” provided free of charge on our website at www.sirota.com/enthusiastic-employee). The questionnaire should be completed by all top management personnel, usually the chairman, the president, and their direct reports. It is critical, of course, that these people be asked to complete the questionnaires as they genuinely feel, not what they believe is the socially acceptable answer or what their bosses want them to say. Individual answers must be kept completely confidential, so it is best that the completed questionnaires be sent to an outside party or some other trusted source for scoring. The method for scoring the Readiness Questionnaire can also be found on our website at www.sirota.com/enthusiastic-employee.
Senior management needs to thoroughly and critically review the results of this self-diagnosis. This is best done in an offsite setting where full and frank discussion is possible and encouraged. The questionnaire results are not precise measures of readiness but stimulate the discussion required to make a thoughtful decision about whether and in what respects to go forward.
Step 3. What, Exactly, Do We Want?
Assuming the decision is made to proceed, the next step, preferably at the same offsite meeting, is to formulate an initial draft of a statement as to what the organization wants to do and why, providing specific examples of the action steps that might be undertaken. It is best to integrate this with the organization’s “purposes and principles” or vision statement (see Chapter 7), if one exists, and it should include the business rationale for partnership. Tying it publicly to business goals will make the statement—in fact, the entire process—more credible in employees’ eyes, and credibility is further enhanced by being specific and avoiding platitudes. Being specific is also a good discipline for executives planning a cultural transformation of this scope: it makes the effort real—that is, this is what we are going to be living with. The statement, for example, might include items such as,“We will pay a wage and provide benefits that are fully competitive” and, “We will organize into self-managing teams that will be delegated the authority they require to get the jobs done effectively.” Credibility is further enhanced by including limits on what the organization is prepared to do, such as, “We cannot guarantee lifetime employment” (but stating what it will do, such as handling workforce surpluses, to the extent possible, with normal attrition and with the retraining and redeployment of workers).
It is critical that the statement be developed by senior management and, when eventually made final and released, be identified to the workforce as the product of senior management’s thinking and intentions.
At this stage, the statement will be in draft form and will be finalized in Step 5 and distributed in Step 6.
Step 4. Where Are We Now?
Having decided on the basic direction, it is now necessary to get a good reading on the condition of the organization in relation to the partnership goals set forth in the statement. It is not sufficient to depend on senior management’s views of this. Senior managers might think that they know where an organization stands, but they are often incorrect and the bias can be either positive or negative.
The best way to find out where an organization stands is a combination of subjective measures, such as an attitude survey, and objective measures. Regarding compensation, for example, you would learn from the survey how employees see their pay and from objective measures how their salaries actually compare to those in other relevant companies. On certain issues, it is impossible to obtain data other than through an attitude survey, for example, how employees feel about the respect with which they are treated. It could be argued that the employee survey measures are the most important; if, for example, the salary survey shows that the company pays competitively, but large percentages of employees disagree, does it really matter what the salary survey data show? Recall that our surveys do not confirm the widely held view that workers will always be unhappy with their pay. When they are unhappy but the salary survey data say they shouldn’t be, it is likely that the criteria employees are using to judge the fairness of their pay differ from those used in the salary survey. Employees might be comparing their pay to that of workers in a different set of companies (perhaps nationwide instead of locally). At the least, a discrepancy should cause management to investigate why it exists rather than, as is usually the case, rely solely on the objective information to measure where the organization stands and then “educate” employees as to why they are wrong.
We have been referring to organization-wide results. But a survey should be conducted so that information is generated not just on employee views overall, but for various units, occupations, and levels as well. This provides a veritable X-ray of the organization: not only what the views are but where they reside. This enables greater precision in the development and application of action. It may be, for example, that blue-collar workers feel much less respect is shown them than is true of professional workers; or employees in particular departments might report much less cooperation with other departments than is true elsewhere in the company. Thus divided, the data at a later stage of the process can provide individual managers with an assessment of how their own employees score on the various dimensions of partnership, which is extremely useful information for self-analysis and for the training and coaching of managers. The use of the survey questionnaire for individual manager feedback is discussed more fully later in this chapter.
The survey instrument, developed to provide direction at the beginning of the process, is also a means—in conjunction with objective data—to assess later on the impact of the actions taken.
Step 5. What Are the Major Aspects of the Organization That Need to Be Changed to Get It from Where It Is to Where It Wants to Be?
Having at least tentatively determined the kind of partnership the company wants and where the organization stands now, senior managers are ready to be much more definitive about the major changes they believe need to be introduced and the ordering of their introduction. These four principles can help guide those decisions:
• View partnership as a total system. As we have said, many elements of a partnership culture are interdependent: changing one element without considering the others can reduce the impact of a change and even have negative consequences. Management must be especially cautious about changing the nonfinancial aspects of its relationship with workers without first attending to equity deficiencies, if found (such as pay and job security), or at least declaring its serious intention of so doing. There is no way that the value of, say, informal recognition or greater job authority can be substantial or long-lasting if people feel mistreated on the basic equity issues. And don’t expect increased collaboration if one of its consequences is increased productivity that results in surplus workers and the danger of layoffs. Order of implementation, then, is not simply a matter of which elements are more important, but also which are more basic—that is, which, when implemented, are more likely to facilitate the resolution of other issues.
• Do something visible fairly quickly. Despite management’s best intentions, the early stages of the change process are probably going to be met with some skepticism by many employees because they will probably have had prior experience with programs that sounded terrific but went nowhere. It is therefore helpful if, after proper consideration of the way the different elements of partnership relate to each other, one or two significant and highly visible actions be decided upon and introduced. These are, in effect, expressions of management’s good faith. The diagnostic survey data can provide important clues as to what these steps might be. For example, one company learned from its survey that the “executive floor” was a major obstacle to performance and timely decision making because it made interaction between employees and the senior leaders of their units difficult. (In truth, management didn’t need the survey to uncover this complaint; they had heard it for years. The survey brought it to the surface and made it difficult to avoid.) It was decided to relocate the managers to offices near their employees, which was a heartily welcomed change by most of the managers themselves. It is a good illustration of an action that is important, visible, consistent with the partnership concept, and relatively easy to quickly implement.
Another category of important changes where implementation can be started fairly quickly are those concerned with inter-unit relationships. Most surveys reveal damaging conflicts between specific units that lend themselves to the type of partnership-building intervention described in Chapter 11.
• Give the development and introduction of most of the changes the time they deserve. Some changes can be introduced quickly, but most require considerable time to investigate and implement. Take self-managed work teams, for example. That is a fundamental structural change that must be thought through carefully and that involves not just creating the teams themselves but also supporting actions, such as the training of managers and employees to prepare them for it. Self-managed teams, and other such major initiatives, are often best introduced on an experimental basis in one or two areas of an organization; that way, they can be carefully observed and modified as needed to get them right for the business and the people in it. Although the introduction of a new culture is an undertaking that never really ends, a large organization should consider three to four years as the approximate amount of time it needs to achieve what most everyone will come to see as a genuinely participative culture.
• Modify the action plan over time. The initial plan of action is just that: initial. It is meant to be a dynamic plan that will be added to, subtracted from, and otherwise modified as the effort proceeds. Some changes will be a result of oversights during the planning phase, but others will be caused by changing business conditions or new, creative insights that are gained with experience. The evolutionary nature of the plan needs to be communicated early to employees with encouragement, and mechanisms, for their participation in suggesting how the plan can continually improve.
Working with these principles, the initial statement of purpose, business goals and possible actions, and the measures of where the organization currently stands, senior management identifies the changes it wants to see undertaken or, at least, investigated for feasibility. At this stage, the individual actions should not be too detailed. Here are verbatim excerpts of this kind of action plan from one company. The major business goal of the effort in this company, which is a large financial-services company with many clerical employees, was “to dramatically improve customer service.”
Actions to Achieve Partnership—Initial Plan
1. Job security. Assure employees that no layoffs will occur as a result of actions taken through this program; develop a system to minimize layoffs for any reason (explore rings of defense).
2. Compensation. Investigate and correct pay inequities where they exist in specific departments; study the impact of placing all employees on salary.
3. Start organizing by customer. Investigate setting up teams, where feasible and on an experimental basis, to service specific groups of customers (by product and by industry); organize measurements around these teams; consider team-based bonuses (but prevent inequities to rest of company); train managers in team and participative management and team members in working cooperatively with each other; learn from the teams the obstacles in the way of providing the best possible service to customers.
4. Team building. Initiate team-building program between staff and line departments, especially between (departments named).
5. Formal communication. Initiate regular communication of business results (including customer service and satisfaction measurements) to entire workforce.
6. Operating committee [senior management] visits with employees. Develop schedule and method for all O.C. members to visit and interact informally with employees at all of the company’s facilities.
7. Dress code. Institute informal dress code (with exceptions, as appropriate, such as for customer meetings).
8. Status distinctions. Eliminate reserved parking spaces for executives—make it first come, first served for all employees; eliminate separate dining facilities for officers.
9. Physical working conditions. Correct problems in departments (department names).
10. Recognition. Investigate means for giving special recognition for outstanding individual and team performance.
The two changes that senior management wanted started immediately were the elimination of status distinctions and the introduction of an informal dress code. These were what they felt would be important and visible changes that would build early credibility with the workforce.
It is our experience that Steps 1 through 5 of the action process we have recommended can be accomplished in about three offsite senior management meetings of two to three days each. Obviously, a lot of supporting staff work is required, such as preparing educational materials, obtaining speakers, preparing visits to other companies, and conducting and analyzing the survey.
To this point, the program has pretty much been the province of the senior management group. It is now appropriate to vet the ideas in meetings with other management levels, usually the next one or two levels down. The products of senior management’s thinking are presented to the managers—the action steps tentatively decided upon and the process by which the effort will be introduced—and their reactions are obtained. At this time, it’s especially important to address how the effort is likely to affect the managers themselves (for example, the nature of their jobs under a team approach and the training they will receive for it). Some might feel some resentment at some of the changes, such as the loss of the status symbols that, as a manager in one of the meetings put it, “I’ve worked all these years to achieve.” Their role in the process, such as serving on the task forces that will turn the broad partnership plan into specific actions, also needs to be described.
It is essential that the strong commitment to partnership of senior management be affirmed in these meetings. Equally important is that, at that time, the managers have an opportunity to voice their concerns, suggestions, and what they foresee their needs will be to make the program work in their areas. Senior management needs to listen and, as appropriate, act on what they hear. They will not act on suggestions that would significantly weaken the effort (such as maintaining status distinctions), but the bulk of what will be suggested will be useful, and the plan should be modified accordingly.
Step 6. How Should the Plan Be Communicated?
The plan should be fully communicated to all employees and, in that communication, a balance must be struck between management’s high hopes for the partnership approach and realism about the time and hard work that will be required for its success. In their eagerness to get employees “on board,” organizations tend to overplay in their communications the benefits of this kind of effort; they treat it as a sort of miracle drug and understate what is required over an extended period of time to make it happen and the possible snags along the way. There is no need to convince most employees that partnership is a good idea; the convincing they need is of management’s sincerity, and that will be accomplished only through action. The purposes of the communication are to let people know the rationale for a culture of partnership, especially the impact expected on the success of the business and the job satisfaction of employees; what its major components are; the involvement that will be required from employees throughout the organization to make it work; and its limitations and potential pitfalls. That is, management must convey its excitement for the partnership approach, but do so in a way that is informative and realistic. Conviction and credibility—not salesmanship—are the keys. After employees are informed, they don’t have to be sold on anything except that management means it.
The plan should be communicated both through the organization’s formal media as a message from the CEO and in small group meetings of managers with their employees. To accomplish the latter, it is first necessary to meet with managers up and down the line to fully brief them on what is being planned and why, to answer their questions and concerns, and to prepare them for their meetings with employees.
Step 7. How Do We Decide on the Specific Changes That Need to Be Made and How They Should Be Implemented?
After senior management develops the basic plan, its translation into specific implementable action steps should, as we have said, in most cases be the province of task forces composed of representatives from throughout the organization. The “diagonal slice” method is useful for selecting taskforce members: the members are chosen from across levels and across functions. We strongly suggest that a senior management member lead each of the task forces. Employees will not resent that type of leadership structure; on the contrary, it is an additional signal of the seriousness with which the organization is undertaking the effort. If a senior management member does not have a management style or point of view that’s appropriate for this kind of leadership role, he should not, of course, be chosen for it.
The major exceptions to the taskforce approach are those instances in which the issues are best discussed and decided upon by management, usually senior management. Pay is a good example of that. Unless there is a union and a formal bargaining process, it is inappropriate and awkward for employees to be involved in decisions about the company’s salary structure. They might be queried about their views of pay—for example, why they believe their pay is not competitive when a salary survey indicates that it is, or how they might view group-based variable pay—but the recommendation about what to do should reside with management. The benefits package is another example. Here, too, however, useful information can be gained from employees regarding benefit preferences and trade-offs.
After being fully oriented about its mission, each task force is responsible for the following:
• Defining the assigned issue thoroughly
• Learning all it needs to know about the issue, including the way other organizations deal with it
• Developing a recommended action plan
• Delineating responsibilities, resources needed, timetables, and so on for implementing the plan
• Suggesting how the effectiveness of what is being proposed can be assessed
The task force and implementation effort should be coordinated by an organization-wide steering committee that, on average, will probably meet about once a month and to which the task forces will regularly report their progress. The committee will suggest modifications in the individual taskforce plans and will approve, or seek approval for, the actions that are finally decided upon. The steering committee also serves as the mechanism for airing and doing something about the concerns and suggestions emanating from the workforce as the change process proceeds. A senior executive should chair the steering committee.
By this point, you might feel that we demand a lot of senior management’s time. You’re right; a lot is required of them. If this was “just another program,” little of their time would be taken—probably just to approve the overall objectives and plan; hear an occasional, formal progress report; and give an occasional speech. In other words, it wouldn’t be serious business. Here, we are talking about a fundamental change in the culture of an organization. If that level of seriousness is not present, the organization should reconsider whether it wants to go forward.
Step 8. How Should Managers Be Trained for the Implementation of Partnership?
In addition to the preparation managers receive in the basic tenets of partnership and how to communicate the implementation plan to their employees (in Step 6), they require training in the implications of a partnership culture for their own behavior. In this book, we have recommended policies and practices at the broad organization level, such as policies concerning job security and formal recognition programs. But we have also discussed in detail matters relating to individual managers, such as how to treat employees respectfully and provide day-to-day recognition for good performance. These should help any manager that seeks to improve the morale and performance of his employees, but they are especially useful for managers working in a partnership organization or an organization seeking to become one. Because the culture and policies of an organization have a profound impact on employees, it is often difficult for individual managers to have as much positive effect as they would like when working in a non-partnership environment. However, the reverse is also true: a partnership culture will obviously not have nearly the desired impact on employees whose managers do not behave in conformity with partnership principles.
A number of manager-training methods are available. One that is particularly relevant and effective for our purposes is behavior modeling, where managers learn in part by observing and then emulating models of good managerial behavior.2 Training must, of course, be adapted to the circumstances and objectives of the organizations in which it is applied and to the needs of individual managers. The adaptation can be governed in large measure by what the attitude survey results reveal about the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s managers and their readiness for partnership. Broad issues might pertain to all managers, but there are invariably differences between managers that are revealed by dividing the survey data into an organization’s units. The survey data thus provide direction for the training that is needed and, when employee attitudes are reported to a manager, they can be a powerful driver of change because they confront the manager with a mirror image of his behavior—the mirror being the views of his employees. The combination of individual survey data feedback with behavior modeling training therefore offers a particularly useful tool for bringing managerial behavior into line with an organization’s partnership culture.3
Step 9. How Do We Assess How Well We Have Done?
In addition to its complexity, culture change is a long journey because it is never done perfectly, even after a careful experimental introduction. We are dealing with human beings, and they never fail to surprise. A manager of a self-managing team might, under pressure from his boss who is concerned about serious and immediate business issues, revert to his prior autocratic style. A crucial support function can turn out to be uncooperative with the team. A new pay system introduced to reward team performance might provoke questions about the validity of the measurements being used. These kinds of things happen in the real world, and the organization must regularly ask, “How are we doing?” and be prepared to act on what it has learned. Regular meetings need to be scheduled with employees—meetings that are devoted to surfacing and dealing with these issues. We also advise that employees be surveyed periodically to obtain a quantitative measure of their views that can be tracked over time and reviewed in conjunction with performance results. After all, a major purpose of partnership is to enhance the employee morale that underlies performance; that should be measured as systematically as the performance. If the company has indeed made significant changes and has made them well, the impact will readily be seen in well-designed surveys. Poorly conceived or implemented changes show up as no change, or a decrement, in attitudes. This is true both at the organization-wide and individual-manager levels.
It’s ironic that among the most satisfying aspects of organization life—as of life in general—are those where improvements can be achieved only by hard work. This is especially true of attempts to change relationships: how people treat one another in their pursuit of earning a living. We refer both to the way differential power is used, which are the “vertical” relationships, and the “lateral” relationships among individuals and groups of relatively equal power. A key theme of this book is that the overwhelming majority of people in organizations act in simple pursuit of equitable treatment, a sense of achievement (for themselves and their organization), and camaraderie. They don’t want to do either the organization or their colleagues harm, but it often appears that way or, at the least, it appears that they don’t care whether the organization or their colleagues succeed or the organization improves. That occurs because of what happens to people when they join organizations, a combination of the daily on-the-job frustrations that cause them to act in ways not in their better nature, the way management treats them as sources of problems, costs, and resistance rather than as assets, and the behavior of the tiny, often highly visible minority of employees that really don’t care, or even do harm, and so reinforce management’s pessimistic view of people at work.
Partnership organizations emerge when senior leadership—in most cases, it has been the CEO—has the foresight to see what should and can be and not just what is. This requires not only insight into human nature (especially that people want to do good for a good organization) and not just eloquence in communicating the partnership philosophy, but also perseverance, hard work and consistency over a period of years to translate the philosophy into specific policies and daily management practices—the kinds that we have described throughout this book. And, it requires seeing and treating employees as genuine allies in achieving change.