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Managing Your Mission-Critical Knowledge

When executives talk about “knowledge management” today, the conversation usually turns very quickly to the challenge of big data and analytics. That’s hardly surprising: Extraordinary amounts of rich, complicated data about customers, operations, and employees are now available to most managers, but that data is proving difficult to translate into useful knowledge. Surely, the thinking goes, if the right experts and the right tools are set loose on those megabytes, brilliant strategic insights will emerge.

Tantalizing as the promise of big data is, an undue focus on it may cause companies to neglect something even more important—the proper management of all their strategic knowledge assets: core competencies, areas of expertise, intellectual property, and deep pools of talent. We contend that in the absence of a clear understanding of the knowledge drivers of an organization’s success, the real value of big data will never materialize.

Yet few companies think explicitly about what knowledge they possess, which parts of it are key to future success, how critical knowledge assets should be managed, and which spheres of knowledge can usefully be combined. In this article we’ll describe in detail how to manage this process.

Map Your Knowledge Assets

The first step is to put boundaries around what you’re trying to do. Even if you tried to collect and inventory all the knowledge floating around your company—the classic knowledge-management approach—you wouldn’t get anything useful from the exercise (and you’d suffer badly from cognitive overload). Our goal is to help you understand which knowledge assets—alone or in new combinations—are key to your future growth. We would bet heavily that if your company has a knowledge-management system, it doesn’t adequately parse out your mission-critical knowledge.

Identifying and mapping strategic knowledge is iterative. In our work with organizations we generally start by assembling a multifunctional team—at the organizational, divisional, or business unit level—to articulate what the members consider to be key dimensions of the company’s competitive performance and the knowledge that underpins them. It can be useful to shape this conversation by giving individuals assignments in advance. Senior managers might be asked to outline the business model and high-level critical knowledge, such as areas of advanced expertise, intellectual property, and the relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors that make that model successful. Market researchers and sales managers might be asked to delineate the attributes of new products and services that customers will need in the near future. Technical and operations managers might describe organizational routines that support needed areas of expertise. And so on. (The right mix of people will depend on the business context and how clearly the senior team has thought through its future strategy.)

This step alone can be quite challenging the first time around. When we worked with a group of decision makers at ATLAS, the major particle physics experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), we interviewed many stakeholders to get a holistic view of the knowledge underpinning its success and then surveyed nearly 200 other members of the organization. Ultimately we mapped only a portion of the ATLAS knowledge base, but in the process we whittled down a list of 26 knowledge domains to the eight that were deemed most important to organizational outcomes.

Absent a clear understanding of your knowledge assets, big data’s value won’t materialize.

Your list of key assets should ultimately include some that are “hard,” such as technical proficiency, and some that are “soft,” such as a culture that supports intelligent risk taking. You may also have identified knowledge that you should possess but don’t or that you suspect needs shoring up. This, too, should be captured.

The next step is to map your assets on a simple grid along two dimensions: tacit versus explicit (unstructured versus structured) and proprietary versus widespread (undiffused versus diffused). The exhibit “What Kind of Knowledge Is This?” which includes a mapping grid, will help you figure out where to place your knowledge assets on your own map. (We owe a debt to Sidney G. Winter, Ikujiro Nonaka, and the late Max Boisot for their work on these dimensions. Had he lived, Boisot would have been a coauthor on this article.)

What Kind of Knowledge Is This?
You can plot your mission-critical knowledge on a map like the one below.

Use these categories to help place your assets along the y axis from bottom to top:
  • An expert can use the knowledge to perform tasks but cannot articulate it in a way that allows others to perform them.
  • Experts can perform tasks and discuss the knowledge involved with one another.
  • People can perform tasks by trial and error.
  • People can perform tasks using rules of thumb, but causal relationships aren’t clear.
  • It’s possible to identify and describe the relationship between variables involved in doing a task so that general principles become clear.
  • The relations among variables are so well known that the outcome of actions can be calculated and reliably delivered with precision. (Knowledge assets covered under patents or other forms of copyright protection generally fit here.)
Use these categories to help place your assets along the x axis from left to right:
  • Only one person in the organization has this knowledge.
  • A few people in the organization have this knowledge.
  • Many people in one part of the organization have this knowledge.
  • People throughout the organization have this knowledge.
  • Many people in the industry have this knowledge.
  • Many people both inside and outside the industry have this knowledge.

 

Unstructured versus structured.

Unstructured (tacit) knowledge involves deep, almost intuitive understanding that is hard to articulate; it’s generally rooted in great expertise. World-class, highly experienced engineers may intuit how to solve technical problems that nobody else can (and may be unable to explain their intuition). Rainmakers in a strategy consulting firm know in their bones how to steer a conversation or a discussion, develop a relationship, and close a deal, but they would have trouble telling colleagues why they made a particular move at a particular moment.

Structured (explicit or codified) knowledge is easier to communicate: A company that’s expert in the use of discovery-driven planning, for example, can bring people up to speed on that methodology quickly because it has given them recourse to a common language, rules of thumb, and conceptual frameworks. Some knowledge is so fully structured that it can be captured in patents, software, or other intellectual property.

Undiffused versus diffused.

To what extent is the knowledge spread through—or outside—the company? One division may have expertise in negotiating with officials of the Chinese government, for example, which another division totally lacks. That knowledge is obviously undiffused. But most companies have certain broadly shared competencies: Those in the consumer packaged goods industry tend to have companywide strength in developing and marketing new brands; and many employees in the defense industry know a lot about bidding on government contracts. Some knowledge, of course, is diffused far beyond the boundaries of the organization.

Interpret the Map

Simply mapping your knowledge assets and then discussing the map with your senior team can uncover important insights and ideas for value creation, as our experience with decision makers at Boeing and ATLAS demonstrate.

Global sourcing at Boeing.

Sourcing managers at Boeing were aware that their relationships with internationally dispersed customers, suppliers, and partners were changing. The whole ecosystem was sharing in the creation of new aircraft technologies and services and in the associated risks. Future success would depend on learning to manage this interdependence.

With that insight in mind, the managers mapped the critical knowledge assets in their global sourcing activities, which ultimately resulted in a research paper that one of us (Martin Ihrig) coauthored with Sherry Kennedy-Reid of Boeing. They saw that cost-related knowledge—performance metrics, IP strategy, and supply-base management—was well structured and widely diffused. However, knowledge about supplier capabilities, although codified, had not spread throughout the Boeing sourcing community. And other knowledge that was important to future value creation—how to leverage Boeing’s potent and technically sophisticated culture for effective communication and negotiation, determine Boeing’s business needs and global sourcing strategy, and, most important, assess the geopolitical influences on global sourcing decisions—was neither codified nor widely shared.

Taken together, these observations suggested that Boeing was placing greater emphasis on technical efficiencies, such as improving processes and productivity, than on strategic growth, such as creating research initiatives with suppliers or building a shared innovation platform. As Boeing’s business became progressively more intertwined with that of its ecosystem partners, the development of knowledge assets would need to change.

Insights from this mapping exercise enabled the team to recommend several initiatives aimed at developing and disseminating tacit knowledge, such as a program to help employees who had a deeper understanding of geopolitical influences to put some structure around their knowledge and pass it on to others in the company, and a program to identify the capabilities of key suppliers and determine how Boeing could work more strategically with them.

Advanced physics at CERN.

The experimental work done at ATLAS is carried out by thousands of visiting scientists from 177 organizations in 38 countries, working without a traditional top-down hierarchy. This extraordinary operation has had spectacular results, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, for which Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2013. Our mapping of ATLAS’s knowledge base was done in a research partnership with Agustí Canals, Markus Nordberg, and Max Boisot.

Our team had a surprising insight when a study of that map revealed that “overview of the ATLAS experiment” was one of the top eight knowledge domains. We hadn’t given much thought to that domain, but we quickly realized how central it was to a knowledge-development program like ATLAS. Changes in the overall direction of a project can’t easily be codified when the project is so complex. The direction is continually evolving, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, as the technical and scientific work advances; but individual researchers can’t adapt their work accordingly when they don’t know what that direction is. ATLAS requires that huge numbers of people, from many countries and cultures, understand what others are learning and how it affects the overall technical direction.

Without the knowledge map, the leadership team at ATLAS would have predicted that scientific and technical knowledge were regarded as mission critical—indeed, most existing resources went to helping those domains make progress. But we found it extraordinary that the soft domains of project management and communication skills also emerged as central to ATLAS’s performance. Retrospectively, that made sense: A consensus on overall direction depends on the successful sharing of knowledge among specializations and between scientists as they cycle back to their home organizations and new people take their place. These important soft domains were much less developed and not well diffused; clearly, they needed more resources and attention.

Identify New Opportunities

Mapping knowledge assets and discussing their implications often leads directly to strategic insights, as it did at Boeing and ATLAS. But we also find it helpful to systematically explore what would happen if knowledge were moved around on the map or different spheres of it were combined. Here are some examples:

Selectively structure tacit knowledge (move it up on your map’s Y axis).

The proprietary knowledge assets in the lower left corner of your map are often the most important knowledge your company has—the deep-seated source of future strategic advantage. You need to think about which of them can and should become more structured so that (for example) your basic research will lead to the creation of bona fide intellectual property that can be developed into new products, licensed, or otherwise monetized. Structuring tacit knowledge often involves capturing expert employees’ insights with the ultimate goal of disseminating them to many more people in the company. In general, speeding up codification will increase the value of knowledge. But making the tacit explicit can also be dangerous. The more codified the knowledge is, the more easily it may be diffused and copied externally.

When you’re trying to decide what to structure further and what to keep tacit, it can be useful to distinguish between product and process. Suppose you’ve decided that your expertise in some technical domain can be codified into intellectual property. You may want to capture some of your process knowledge—whether it’s an engineer’s know-how or the conversational routines your marketing people use to tease out emerging customer needs—only informally. That way, even if a patent expires or codified knowledge is leaked, essential experience stays within the company.

Disseminate knowledge within the company (move it to the right on your map’s X axis).

Purposefully deciding which knowledge to diffuse internally can pay huge dividends. Very often one division is wrestling with a problem that another division has solved, and close study of the map will reveal the potential for productive sharing—as it would with the exemplary business unit’s expertise in negotiating with the Chinese. Productive sharing can also be done between functions: Korean chaebols (conglomerates) expend considerable money and effort to ensure that knowledge is transferred from company to company as well as from headquarters to subsidiaries.

The ease of knowledge sharing is directly proportional to the degree of knowledge codification, of course: A written document or spreadsheet is easier to share than tacit experience accumulated over many years. Some tacit knowledge can’t be codified but can be shared. One powerful way to do so internally is to run workshops that bring together people who have subject matter expertise with people facing a particular problem for which that expertise is relevant. Apprenticeship programs, too, have long been an effective way to transfer difficult-to-codify tacit knowledge.

Diffuse knowledge outside the company (move it farther right on your map’s X axis).

The most straightforward way to create value through knowledge dissemination is to sell or license your intellectual property. DuPont, for example, commercializes only a small fraction of the hundreds of patents it owns; the rest can be licensed, sold, or shared with other companies. Even companies without patents can often identify new markets for existing IP. This magazine is an example: Reprints of HBR articles have been sold to MBA and corporate learning programs for decades. A few years ago someone had the idea of collecting the best of those articles in “Must Read” collections for individual buyers, and a profitable business was born.

Some companies give away knowledge and still make a big profit.

Many companies are experimenting with less familiar ways of sharing knowledge across organizational boundaries. If suppliers, customers, and even competitors that work together on projects are creating value within your ecosystem, as at Boeing, this is worth considering. But you should keep in mind what knowledge must be protected; your map of assets will help you make those judgment calls.

Some companies even give away knowledge, ultimately making more money than they would if they kept it proprietary. In the early 1990s Adobe Systems saw an opportunity to develop a file-sharing format that would retain the text, fonts, images, and other graphics in a document no matter what operating system, hardware, or software was used to send and view it. Adobe was among the first to develop the idea behind the PDF. It then structured that knowledge in the form of the Adobe Acrobat PDF Writer and Adobe Reader. It shared the Reader on the internet, thereby creating demand for the Writer (at $300 and up), which was free from competition for years and remains one of Adobe’s leading products. Similarly, McKinsey shares selected insights through McKinsey Quarterly, generating demand for its proprietary problem-solving skills.

The recent decision of the business magnate and inventor Elon Musk to share Tesla Motors patents with anyone who wants to use them was also very astute. Clearly, Musk believes that Tesla (like Adobe) will make more money if more people build on the platform he has provided. His decision also recognizes that in order to thrive, Tesla (like Boeing) needs to create a strong ecosystem. It’s a vote of confidence in the company’s capacity to protect enough tacit knowledge to stay ahead of the competition. (Musk told a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, “You want to be innovating so fast that you invalidate your prior patents, in terms of what really matters. It’s the velocity of innovation that matters.”) This is one of the most interesting examples of open innovation that we’ve seen: Musk is betting not just that he can pull more partners into the world of electric cars but that he can pull the mainstream automobile industry into a more responsible position with respect to climate change.

Contextualize knowledge (move it down on your map’s Y axis).

Codified knowledge can be applied in less structured spaces in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s a matter of taking well-established routines and applying them to new businesses. This approach is central to the growth strategies of many companies. Procter & Gamble, for instance, uses world-class brand-building competencies when it moves into new markets and develops new products. Similarly, Goldman Sachs rapidly generates new investment banking offerings by applying its analytics capabilities to changes in financial market conditions.

Contextualization can also come from combining structured and unstructured knowledge. The people who originally tried to build knowledge-management systems for consulting firms quickly discovered that most consultants used codified information as a networking tool: They would notice who wrote an article on sourcing from Indonesia (for example) and then talk with that person directly, picking her brain for more-tacit insights. Indeed, many companies build competitive advantage on just such combinations.

To be applied in a new setting, codified knowledge must generally be contextualized. If Boeing USA comes up with a new production process and then ships the related knowledge to China in the form of supporting documents, Chinese engineers have to assimilate the knowledge and adapt it to their context.

Discover new knowledge (move it to the left on your map’s X axis).

The most challenging—and highest-potential—opportunities often come from spotting connections between disparate areas of expertise (sometimes inside the company, sometimes outside it). The analytic techniques that can turn big data into big knowledge are used partly in hopes of finding such unexpected connections.

In the pursuit of innovation, flashes of insight can come from many sources. Sometimes a new technology embedded in an existing product makes it possible to change your value proposition. That happened when Rolls-Royce’s jet engine sensors provided the company with new performance data, which in turn made it more profitable to sell power by the hour than to sell engines outright. Thinking about someone else’s business model can lead to strategic insights as well. After managers at CEMEX studied how FedEx, Domino’s, and ambulance squads operate, they decided to charge for delivering truckloads of ready-mix concrete within a specified time window rather than for cubic meters of the product. Changes in the external environment can create new opportunities. Subway went from an also-ran to a high-growth fast-food business when it capitalized on consumers’ growing interest in tasty, more-nutritious, low-calorie food. Your company may have developed valuable process expertise that you could sell through consulting to other companies even outside your industry. IBM has done that many times over.

It’s not easy to systematize this part of the knowledge-development process, which arises to some extent from intuition, tacit knowledge, and time spent studying the map. The ATLAS team’s insight about the importance of soft skills is an example. So is Boeing’s insight that becoming part of an interdependent ecosystem had major implications for what kinds of knowledge would have to be developed. A small publishing industry that is devoted to helping companies make innovative connections of this kind includes the book MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth, which one of us (Ian MacMillan) wrote with Rita McGrath; William Duggan’s Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement; and Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.

One thing we can assure you: Your competitors will have access to the same kinds of data and general industry knowledge that you do. So your future success depends on developing a new kind of expertise: the ability to leverage your proprietary knowledge strategically and to make useful connections between seemingly unrelated knowledge assets or tap fallow, undeveloped knowledge.

Companies invest tens of millions of dollars to develop knowledge but pay scant attention to whether it contributes to future competitive advantage. The process we’ve outlined here is meant to prevent that lapse. Once you’ve mapped your mission-critical knowledge assets, the challenge is to be disciplined about which of them to develop and exploit, keeping future growth front and center. (Remember, strategy always includes deciding what not to do.) If your company thoughtfully manages its knowledge portfolio, it will achieve a distinct competitive advantage.

By Martin Ihrig and Ian MacMillan. A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review.
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Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration

Ask any leader whether his or her organization values collaboration, and you’ll get a resounding yes. Ask whether the firm’s strategies to increase collaboration have been successful, and you’ll probably receive a different answer.

“No change seems to stick or to produce what we expected,” an executive at a large pharmaceutical company recently told me. Most of the dozens of leaders I’ve interviewed on the subject report similar feelings of frustration: So much hope and effort, so little to show for it.

One problem is that leaders think about collaboration too narrowly: as a value to cultivate but not a skill to teach. Businesses have tried increasing it through various methods, from open offices to naming it an official corporate goal. While many of these approaches yield progress—mainly by creating opportunities for collaboration or demonstrating institutional support for it—they all try to influence employees through superficial or heavy-handed means, and research has shown that none of them reliably delivers truly robust collaboration.

What’s needed is a psychological approach. When I analyzed sustained collaborations in a wide range of industries, I found that they were marked by common mental attitudes: widespread respect for colleagues’ contributions, openness to experimenting with others’ ideas, and sensitivity to how one’s actions may affect both colleagues’ work and the mission’s outcome. Yet these attitudes are rare. Instead, most people display the opposite mentality, distrusting others and obsessing about their own status. The task for leaders is to encourage an outward focus in everyone, challenging the tendency we all have to fixate on ourselves—what we’d like to say and achieve—instead of what we can learn from others.

Daunting as it may sound, some organizations have cracked this code. In studying them I’ve identified six training techniques that enable both leaders and employees to work well together, learn from one another, and overcome the psychological barriers that get in the way of doing both. They all help people connect more fully and consistently. They impress upon employees that there’s a time to listen and explore others’ ideas, a time to express their own, and a time to critique ideas and select the ones to pursue—and that conflating those discussions undermines collaboration.

1. Teach People to Listen, Not Talk

The business world prizes good self-presentation. Employees think a lot about how to make the right impression—how to frame their arguments in discussions with bosses, get their points across in meetings, persuade or coerce their reports to do what they want. (Many also spend serious money on speaking coaches, media trainers, and the like.) This is understandable, given the competitive nature of our workplaces, but it has a cost. My research suggests that all too often when others are talking, we’re getting ready to speak instead of listening. That tendency only gets worse as we climb the corporate ladder.

We fail to listen because we’re anxious about our own performance, convinced that our ideas are better than others’, or both. As a result we get into conflicts that could be avoided, miss opportunities to advance the conversation, alienate the people who haven’t been heard, and diminish our teams’ effectiveness.

When we really listen, on the other hand, our egos and our self-involvement subside, giving everybody the space to understand the situation—and one another—and to focus on the mission. Listening can be improved by these practices:

Ask expansive questions.

This is one of the behaviors encouraged at the animation studio Pixar. People stepping into managerial roles are required to take, among other courses, a 90-minute lunchtime class on the art of listening, which is held in a conference room decorated with posters of movie characters reminding participants to “Stay curious” and “Build on others’ ideas.”

In the class, participants discuss the qualities of great listeners they’ve known (such as generosity in acknowledging the points of others) and practice “active listening.” That means suppressing the urge to interrupt or dominate a conversation, make it about yourself, or solve your conversation partners’ problems, and instead concentrating on the implications of their words. In one exercise participants practice asking their partners open-ended “what” and “how” questions—which prompt people to provide more information, reflect on their situations, and feel more heard—rather than yes-or-no questions, which can kill conversations. For instance, instead of saying to someone “Did you try asking others who’ve worked on similar projects for advice?” participants are coached to ask “In what ways have you reached out to others for advice?”

Focus on the listener, not on yourself.

In another exercise, two coaches act out conversations to illustrate the difference between active listening and not really listening. One coach might say: “I’ve been so sick, and our calendar is so full, and I have this trip planned to see my family. There’s so much to do and I just don’t know how I’m going to pull it all off.” In the not-listening interaction, the other coach responds, “At least you get to go to Europe” or “I’m going to Croatia in two weeks, and I’m really excited.” In the active-listening version, she says, “That sounds really stressful—like you’ll feel guilty for leaving work and guilty if you don’t visit your family.” The coaches then ask the class to share their reactions and try the more effective approach in pairs.

Engage in “self-checks.”

The American roofing-systems unit of Webasto, a global automotive-equipment manufacturer, has developed a good approach to raising employees’ awareness. When Philipp Schramm became its CFO, in 2013, the unit’s financial performance was in a downward spiral. But that was not its only problem. “Something was dysfunctional,” recalls Schramm. “There was no working together, no trust, no respect.” So in 2016 he introduced the Listen Like a Leader course, which features various exercises, some of which are similar to Pixar’s.

Several times throughout the course participants engage in self-checks, in which they critique their own tendencies. People work in small groups and take turns sharing stories about times they’ve failed to listen to others and then reflect on common trends in all the stories.

The self-checks are reinforced by another exercise in which people pair up for multiple rounds of role-playing intended to help participants experience not being heard. One employee is told to describe an issue at work to the other. The listener is instructed to be inattentive during the first round, to parrot the speaker (repeat his or her statements) during the second, and to paraphrase the speaker (restate the message without acknowledging the speaker’s feelings or perspective) during the third. Employees play both roles in each round. The idea is to demonstrate that hearing someone’s words is not enough; you also need to take in the speaker’s tone, body language, emotions, and perspective, and the energy in the conversation. At the end they discuss what that kind of listening can accomplish and how one feels when truly listened to.

Become comfortable with silence.

This doesn’t mean just not speaking; it means communicating attentiveness and respect while you’re silent. And it’s a challenge for those who are in love with the sound of their own voices. Such people dominate discussions and don’t give others who are less vocal or who simply need more time to think an opportunity to talk.

In another exercise at Webasto, people sit in on a conversation simply to listen. They’re instructed to avoid negative nonverbal behavior—such as rolling their eyes when they disagree with someone. The course motto “I am the message!” serves as a reminder to use positive body language when interacting with colleagues.

In successful collaborations, judgment gives way to curiosity.

After taking the Listen Like a Leader class, employees have reported better interactions with their colleagues. Jeff Beatty, a program manager, reflected: “I thought leading was steamrolling people who got in your way—it was about aggressiveness and forcefulness. After going through the class, I can’t believe that my wife has put up with me for 30 years.”

2. Train People to Practice Empathy

Think about the last time you were in a conflict with a colleague. Chances are, you started feeling that the other person was either uncaring or not very bright, my research suggests. Being receptive to the views of someone we disagree with is no easy task, but when we approach the situation with a desire to understand our differences, we get a better outcome.

In successful collaborations, each person assumes that everyone else involved, regardless of background or title, is smart, caring, and fully invested. That mindset makes participants want to understand why others have differing views, which allows them to have constructive conversations. Judgment gives way to curiosity, and people come to see that other perspectives are as valuable as theirs. A couple of approaches can help here.

Expand others’ thinking.

At Pixar an exercise called “leading from the inside out” has participants present a relevant challenge to their collaborators on a project. Then their teammates ask questions but are instructed not to use them as a means of touting their own ideas. Instead, they’re supposed to help the presenter think through the problem differently, without offering judgment about the presenter’s perceptions or approach or those of other questioners. If a presenter describes the challenge of getting a team member to speak up more often in brainstorming meetings, for instance, the questioners could ask, “How has his behavior changed?” or “Are there other contexts where this person is more talkative?” If questioners try to sneak in their ideas or opinions, a coach will ask them to rephrase their questions. “We realize that, though simple, these techniques are hard to implement on a regular basis,” Jamie Woolf, Pixar’s leadership development manager, who serves as one of the two main coaches, told me. “So, when someone is, consciously or not, trying to promote his or her point of view, we intervene so that we give the person an opportunity to apply the technique correctly and others the opportunity to learn.”

With this approach, ideas get full attention and consideration. Creative solutions are generated, and team members feel that they’ve been truly heard.

Look for the unspoken.

An advertising and publicity firm I studied uses a similar approach but also trains participants to pay attention to what people are not saying. If a member of the creative team presents an idea for how to shape an ad campaign to the client’s needs, for instance, the colleagues listening are tasked with trying to understand his or her state of mind. During one session I observed, a colleague said to a presenter, “I noticed your voice was somewhat tentative, as if you were feeling uncertain about your idea. What are some of the strengths and weaknesses you see in it?”

When team members focus on conveying empathy more than on sharing their opinions, I’ve found, everyone feels more satisfied with the discussion. Showing empathy also makes others more likely to ask you for your point of view. Collaboration proceeds more smoothly.

While listening and empathizing allow others more space in a collaboration, you also need the courage to have tough conversations and offer your views frankly. The next three techniques focus on getting people there.

3. Make People More Comfortable with Feedback

Good collaboration involves giving and receiving feedback well—and from a position of influence rather than one of authority. The following methods can help.

Discuss feedback aversion openly.

One of Pixar’s classes trains new managers to provide feedback more often and effectively and also to get better at absorbing it. Coaches first explain that aversion to feedback is common. As givers of it, we want to avoid hurting others. (Even when we know our feedback can be helpful, my research has found, we choose not to provide it.) As recipients, we feel tension between the desire to improve and the desire to be accepted for who we are. The ensuing open discussion of reservations and challenges around feedback helps participants feel less alone.

Make feedback about others’ behavior direct, specific, and applicable.

At Pixar and other organizations, employees are asked to follow three rules for feedback: Be straightforward in both how you address a person and what you say about him or her; identify the particular behavior that worked (or didn’t); and describe the impact of the behavior on you and others. These practices help counteract a common problem: People’s feedback is too general. In an exercise Pixar designed to overcome it, participants are asked to think of a time when they might have offered positive feedback but didn’t, and then write down what they could have said, following the three rules. Next they practice delivering that feedback to a classmate and reflect on the experience. (In another exercise they do the same with critical feedback.) Recipients are asked to talk about their experience getting the feedback.

Give feedback on feedback.

In this exercise a volunteer reads a piece of feedback that he or she has drafted to the group. The other participants are then asked to identify ways to improve it. If the volunteer says, “You keep missing deadlines,” for instance, the colleagues might suggest more specificity—perhaps “You missed three deadlines in the past month.”

This practice is important because even when we overcome our aversion to giving feedback, we tend not to be specific or direct. As Pixar’s Woolf told me, “Often leaders come to see me right before an important meeting they’re about to have and say, ‘Can I rehearse a bit more? I’m afraid of backpedaling and sugarcoating.’ After some rehearsing they’re able to walk into meetings with greater confidence and more clarity on how they’ll say what they want to say.”

Add a “plus” to others’ ideas.

Whenever a Pixar employee comments on a colleague’s idea or work during a brainstorming session, he or she must offer a “plus”—a suggestion for an improvement that doesn’t include judgment or harsh language. Pixar employees told me that this approach draws on three principles of improv comedy: First, accept all offers—that is, embrace the idea instead of rejecting it. Second, to ensure that you’re building on someone’s idea, say “Yes, and…” rather than “Yes, but…” Third, make your teammate look good by enhancing the scene or project he or she has started.

Provide live coaching.

Though tactics like plussing are well understood at Pixar, it isn’t always easy for employees at the company to put them into practice. For this reason, coaches there attend brainstorming meetings to reinforce good approaches and point out lapses. If a comment or a question doesn’t show “collaborative spirit,” the coach will ask that it be rephrased. Live coaching can be difficult—people are sometimes visibly annoyed by the interruptions—but coaches have learned to pay attention to the personalities in the room and adapt accordingly. For example, rather than asking a director to reframe a comment, a Pixar coach might ask him or her to describe the interaction that just occurred: what worked and what didn’t. “In the moment the feedback may not feel good,” Woolf told me. “As with medicine, it often takes a while for people to see the benefits. But they come to realize that feedback is a gift and is key to their personal development.”

4. Teach People to Lead and Follow

A lot of attention is paid, in the literature and in the practice of management, to what makes a truly effective leader. There has been much less consideration of how to follow, though that, too, is an important skill. In interviews at American Express, I learned that the company’s best collaborators—those known for adding value to interactions and solving problems in ways that left everyone better off—are adept at both leading and following, moving smoothly between the two as appropriate. That is, they’re good at flexing.

During the 17-day campaign to find and rescue a group of boys and their soccer coach from a rapidly flooding cave in Thailand in 2018, more and more people arrived on the scene to help: hydraulic engineers, geologists, divers, SEAL teams, NASA experts, doctors, and local politicians. Only through flexing were these collaborators able to contribute all they could and get the most out of those around them. At one point, for example, an inexperienced engineer proposed an unorthodox plan to use large tubes on the mountain above the cave to divert some of the rainwater that was making diving unsafe. Rather than dismissing the idea, senior engineers flexed, giving it the consideration it deserved. After testing revealed the idea’s promise, it was implemented, and the water stopped rising.

Because flexing requires ceding control to others, many of us find it difficult. A few simple exercises can make people more likely to flex:

Increase self-awareness.

In some of my classes, I ask students to rate themselves relative to their classmates in three areas: their ability to make good decisions, their ability to get along well with others, and their honesty. Then I ask them to compute their average across the three. Most people’s average is higher than 50% and typically in the 70th or 80th percentile, which demonstrates to the students how self-perceptions are often inflated. After all, it’s impossible for a majority of respondents to merit better-than-average ratings across all three desirable dimensions. Unfortunately, our overly optimistic self-perceptions drive our decisions about whether to allow others to have control. So it helps to build self-awareness using this kind of exercise.

Learn to delegate.

This isn’t important just for leaders; it’s also critical for people working on collaborations where multiple experts come together, such as the Thai cave rescue, and on cross-functional team projects. In a training session to help new Pixar managers delegate, participants discuss why it’s so difficult to pass the torch to others and the main reasons we tend to micromanage: It’s hard to let go of control, and we feel responsible for the outcome and are aware that the task needs to get done “right.” So we focus on the short-term results rather than the long-term goal of developing others through delegation. We favor getting the job done—fast—over the reasons for delegating (allowing others to feel engaged and to grow, and allowing ourselves more time and probably higher productivity in the long run). The coaches talk about cases of delegation gone wrong—whose central lesson is the need for trust—and present a four-quadrant chart, the “skill-will model,” which explains how to tailor delegation to the abilities and motivation of those being handed control.

5. Speak with Clarity and Avoid Abstractions

In any collaboration there are times for open discussion of ideas and times when someone, regardless of whether he or she is a leader, needs to cut through the confusion and clearly articulate the path forward. When we communicate with others, psychological research shows, we are often too indirect and abstract. Our words would carry more weight if we were more concrete and provided vivid images of goals. And our statements would also be judged more truthful.

Communication classes both at Pixar and at a large pharmaceutical company I studied included this role-playing exercise: Participants were instructed to think about something they needed to tell a team member and then ask themselves, “What am I trying to accomplish?” They were given time to practice their message. After they delivered it, the person playing the teammate told them whether they in fact had conveyed it with clarity and purpose. And if the teammate couldn’t understand why the conversation was happening, the participant was prompted to ask why and then to reframe the statement to be clearer and more specific and include a purpose. Take a statement like “The project led by our marketing colleagues needs more resources and attention to get to the finish line.” That might be revised as “The project that our marketing colleagues John and Ashley are leading needs an additional $5,000 and two more members to be completed by the end of the month. I believe two of us should volunteer to help, since meeting the deadline is important to maintaining a good relationship with our client.”

6. Train People to Have Win-Win Interactions

I often ask students to work in pairs to think through how to divide an orange. Each partner is told, without the other’s knowledge, a reason for wanting the fruit: One needs to make juice, and the other needs the peel for a muffin recipe. If they fail to explore each other’s interests, as most pairs do, the partners may end up fighting over the orange. Or they may decide to cut it in half, giving each side an equal if smaller-than-ideal share. Some people even quit when they can’t get the whole orange.

When we communicate, we are often too indirect and abstract.

Only a few pairs arrive at the optimal solution, in which one person gets the peel, the other gets the juice, and both are satisfied. How did they get there? By investigating each other’s needs.

This approach is the key to win-win interactions. In the successful collaborative projects I examined, people were open about their personal interests and how they thought they could contribute to solving the problem. Such transparency allows participants to explore everyone’s vision of winning and, ultimately, get more-favorable results.

Many organizations I’ve studied teach leaders and employees to find win-win solutions through exercises in which each participant has information that others lack—as is true in most real-world collaborations—and all are asked to try to reach the best deal possible for everyone. Afterward, the instructors suggest techniques that could have helped the parties discover one another’s interests better—such as asking questions and listening carefully—and produce more-successful deals. Sometimes the conversations are videotaped and shown to participants after they’ve had the chance to guess how much of the airtime they got in discussions.

By balancing talking (to express your own concerns and needs) with asking questions and letting others know what your understanding of their needs is, you can devise solutions that create more value. With a win-win mindset, collaborators are able to find opportunities in differences.

CONCLUSION

Because the six techniques are mutually supportive and even interdependent, it’s ideal for employees to learn and regularly use them all. It’s difficult to have win-win interactions if you spend most of your time talking, and it’s tough to learn about others’ interests if you don’t approach interactions with empathy. And conversations won’t be productive if you only listen and don’t offer your views—a balance is required.

The techniques also create a positive dynamic: Teammates with whom they’re practiced start feeling more respected and in turn are more likely to show others respect. And respect, my research shows, fuels enthusiasm, fosters openness to sharing information and learning from one another, and motivates people to embrace new opportunities for working together.

But this dynamic must be set in motion by those in charge. Many leaders—even ones steeped in enlightened management theory—fail to consistently treat others with respect or to do what it takes to earn it from others.

Leaders who are frustrated by a lack of collaboration can start by asking themselves a simple question: What have they done to encourage it today? It is only by regularly owning their own mistakes, listening actively and supportively to people’s ideas, and being respectful but direct when challenging others’ views and behavior that they can encourage lasting collaboration. By training people to employ the six techniques, leaders can make creative, productive teamwork a way of life.

 

By Francesca Gino From the HBR November–December 2019 Issue
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The 5 Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell

True leadership isn’t a matter of having a certain job or title. In fact, being chosen for a position is only the first of the five levels every effective leader achieves. To become more than “the boss” people follow only because they are required to, you have to master the ability to invest in people and inspire them. To grow further in your role, you must achieve results and build a team that produces. You need to help people to develop their skills to become leaders in their own right. And if you have the skill and dedication, you can reach the pinnacle of leadership-where experience will allow you to extend your influence beyond your immediate reach and time for the benefit of others.

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How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek presents a simple but powerful model for how leaders inspire action, starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.

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Learning to Lead at Toyota

By Steven Spear

Toyota is one of the world’s most storied companies, drawing the attention of journalists, researchers, and executives seeking to benchmark its famous production system. For good reason: Toyota has repeatedly outperformed its competitors in quality, reliability, productivity, cost reduction, sales and market share growth, and market capitalization.

By the end of last year it was on the verge of replacing DaimlerChrysler as the third-largest North American car company in terms of production, not just sales. In terms of global market share, it has recently overtaken Ford to become the second-largest carmaker. Its net income and market capitalization by the end of 2003 exceeded those of all its competitors. But those very achievements beg a question: If Toyota has been so widely studied and copied, why have so few companies been able to match its performance?

In our 1999 HBR article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” H. Kent Bowen and I argued that part of the problem is that most outsiders have focused on Toyota’s tools and tactics—kanban pull systems, cords, production cells, and the like—and not on its basic set of operating principles. In our article, we identified four such principles, or rules, which together ensure that regular work is tightly coupled with learning how to do the work better. These principles lead to ongoing improvements in reliability, flexibility, safety, and efficiency, and, hence, market share and profitability.

As we explained in the article, Toyota’s real achievement is not merely the creation and use of the tools themselves; it is in making all its work a series of nested, ongoing experiments, be the work as routine as installing seats in cars or as complex, idiosyncratic, and large scale as designing and launching a new model or factory. We argued that Toyota’s much-noted commitment to standardization is not for the purpose of control or even for capturing a best practice, per se. Rather, standardization—or more precisely, the explicit specification of how work is going to be done before it is performed—is coupled with testing work as it is being done. The end result is that gaps between what is expected and what actually occurs become immediately evident. Not only are problems contained, prevented from propagating and compromising someone else’s work, but the gaps between expectations and reality are investigated; a deeper understanding of the product, process, and people is gained; and that understanding is incorporated into a new specification, which becomes a temporary “best practice” until a new problem is discovered. (See, at right, the sidebar “The Power of Principles.”)

The Power of Principles

The insight that Toyota applies underlying principles rather than specific tools and processes explains why the company continues to outperform its competitors. Many companies have tried to imitate Toyota’s tools as opposed to its principles; as a result, many have ended up with rigid, inflexible production systems that worked well in the short term but didn’t stand the test of time. Recognizing that TPS is about applying principles rather than tools enables companies that in no way resemble

Toyota to tap into its sources of success. Alcoa, a company whose large-scale processes—refining, smelting, and so on—bear little resemblance to Toyota’s discrete-parts fabrication and assembly operations, has based its Alcoa Business System (ABS) on the TPS rules. Alcoa claims that ABS saved the company $1.1 billion from 1998 to 2000, while improving safety, productivity, and quality.

In another example, pilot projects applying the rules at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and other health care organizations have led to huge improvements in medication administration, nursing, and other critical processes, delivering better quality care to patients, relieving workers of nonproductive burdens, as well as providing costs savings and operating efficiencies.

It is one thing to realize that the Toyota Production System (TPS) is a system of nested experiments through which operations are constantly improved. It is another to have an organization in which employees and managers at all levels in all functions are able to live those principles and teach others to apply them. Decoding the DNA of Toyota doesn’t mean that you can replicate it.

So how exactly does a company replicate it? In the following pages, I try to answer that question by describing how a talented young American, hired for an upper-level position at one of Toyota’s U.S. plants, was initiated into the TPS. His training was hardly what he might have expected given his achievements. With several degrees from top-tier universities, he had already managed large plants for one of Toyota’s North American competitors. But rather than undergo a brief period of cursory walk-throughs, orientations, and introductions that an incoming fast-track executive might expect, he learned TPS the long, hard way—by practicing it, which is how Toyota trains any new employee regardless of rank or function. It would take more than three months before he even arrived at the plant in which he was to be a manager.

Our American hotshot, whom we’ll call Bob Dallis, arrived at the company thinking that he already knew the basics of TPS—having borrowed ideas from Toyota to improve operations in his previous job—and would simply be fine-tuning his knowledge to improve operations at his new assignment. He came out of his training realizing that improving actual operations was not his job—it was the job of the workers themselves. His role was to help them understand that responsibility and enable them to carry it out. His training taught him how to construct work as experiments, which would yield continuous learning and improvements, and to teach others to do the same.

The Program

Dallis arrived at Toyota’s Kentucky headquarters early one wintry morning in January 2002. He was greeted by Mike Takahashi (not his real name), a senior manager of the Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC), a group responsible for developing Toyota’s and supplier plants’ competency in TPS. As such, Takahashi was responsible for Dallis’s orientation into the company. Once the introductory formalities had been completed, Takahashi ushered Dallis to his car and proceeded to drive not to the plant where Dallis was to eventually work but to another Toyota engine plant where Dallis would begin his integration into the company. That integration was to involve 12 intensive weeks in the U.S. engine plant and ten days working and making observations in Toyota and Toyota supplier plants in Japan. The content of Dallis’s training—as with that of any other Toyota manager—would depend on what, in Takahashi’s judgment, Dallis most needed.

Back to Basics.

Bob Dallis’s first assignment at the U.S. engine plant was to help a small group of 19 engine-assembly workers improve labor productivity, operational availability of machines and equipment, and ergonomic safety.1 For the first six weeks, Takahashi engaged Dallis in cycles of observing and changing individuals’ work processes, thereby focusing on productivity and safety. Working with the group’s leaders, team leaders, and team members, Dallis would document, for instance, how different tasks were carried out, who did what tasks under what circumstances, and how information, material, and services were communicated. He would make changes to try to solve the problems he had observed and then evaluate those changes.

Dallis was not left to his own devices, despite his previous experience and accomplishments. Meetings with Takahashi bracketed his workweek. On Mondays, Dallis would explain the following: how he thought the assembly process worked, based on his previous week’s observations and experiences; what he thought the line’s problems were; what changes he and the others had implemented or had in mind to solve those problems; and the expected impact of his recommendations. On Fridays, Takahashi reviewed what Dallis had done, comparing actual outcomes with the plans and expectations they had discussed on Monday.

In the first six weeks, 25 changes were implemented to individual tasks. For instance, a number of parts racks were reconfigured to present materials to the operators more comfortably, and a handle on a machine was repositioned to reduce wrist strain and improve ergonomic safety. Dallis and the rest of the group also made 75 recommendations for redistributing their work. These were more substantial changes that required a reconfiguration of the work area. For instance, changing the place where a particular part was installed required relocating material stores and moving the light curtains, along with their attendant wiring and computer coding. These changes were made with the help of technical specialists from the maintenance and engineering departments while the plant was closed over the weekend, after Dallis’s fifth week.

Dallis and Takahashi spent Dallis’s sixth week studying the group’s assembly line to see if the 75 changes actually had the desired effects. They discovered that worker productivity and ergonomic safety had improved significantly, as shown in the exhibit “The U.S. Engine Plant Assembly Line—Before and After.” Unfortunately, the changes had also reduced the operational availability of the machines. This is not to say that the changes that improved productivity and ergonomics made the machines malfunction more often. Rather, before the changes were made, there was enough slack in the work so that if a machine faulted, there was often no consequence or inconvenience to anyone. But with Dallis’s changes, the group was able to use 15 people instead of 19 to accomplish the same amount of work. It was also able to reduce the time required for each task and improve workload balance. With a much tighter system, previously inconsequential machine problems now had significant effects.

After Dallis had improved the human tasks in the assembly line, Takahashi had him switch to studying how the machines worked. This     took another six weeks, with Takahashi and Dallis again meeting on Mondays and Fridays. Takahashi had Dallis, holder of two master’s degrees in engineering, watch individual machines until they faulted so that he could investigate causes directly. This took some time. Although work-method failures occurred nearly twice a minute, machine failures were far less frequent and were often hidden inside the machine.

But as Dallis observed the machines and the people working around them, he began to see that a number of failures seemed to be caused by people’s interactions with the machines. For instance, Dallis noticed that as one worker loaded gears in a jig that he then put into the machine, he would often inadvertently trip the trigger switch before the jig was fully aligned, causing the apparatus to fault. To solve that problem, Dallis had the maintenance department relocate the switch. Dallis also observed another operator push a pallet into a machine. After investigating several mechanical failures, he realized that the pallet sometimes rode up onto a bumper in the machine. By replacing the machine’s bumper with one that had a different cross-section profile, he was able to eliminate this particular cause of failure. Direct observation of the devices, root-cause analysis of each fault, and immediate reconfiguration to remove suspected causes raised operational availability to 90%, a substantial improvement though still below the 95% target that Takahashi had set for Dallis.

The Master Class

After 12 weeks at the U.S. engine plant, Takahashi judged that Dallis had made progress in observing people and machines and in structuring countermeasures as experiments to be tested. However, Takahashi was concerned that Dallis still took too much of the burden on himself for making changes and that the rate at which he was able to test and refine improvements was too slow. He decided it was time to show Dallis how Toyota practiced improvements on its home turf. He and Dallis flew to Japan, and Dallis’s first three days there were spent working at Toyota’s famous Kamigo engine plant—where Taiichi Ohno, one of the main architects of TPS, had developed many of his major innovations. On the morning of their arrival, Takahashi unleashed the first of several surprises: Dallis was to work alongside an employee in a production cell and was to make 50 improvements—actual changes in how work was done—during his time there. This worked out to be one change every 22 minutes, not the one per day he had been averaging in his first five weeks of training.

The initial objective set for Dallis was to reduce the “overburden” on the worker—walking, reaching, and other efforts that didn’t add value to the product and tired or otherwise impeded the worker and lengthened cycle times. Dallis’s workmate could not speak English, and no translator was provided, so the two had to learn to communicate through the physical environment and through models, drawings, and role-playing. Afterward, Dallis speculated that the logic of starting with “overburden” was to get buy-in from the worker who was being asked to do his regular job while being interrupted by a non-Japanese-speaking stranger. There is also semantic significance in the phrasing: Focusing on “overburden” emphasizes the impact of the work design on the person. By contrast, focusing on “waste” suggests that the person is the problem.

Dallis applied the approach he had learned at the U.S. engine plant. On day one, he spent the first three hours observing his new workmate, and by the shift’s end proudly reported that he had seven ideas, four of which he and his workmate had implemented. Then Takahashi unleashed his next surprise: He told Dallis that two Japanese team leaders who were going through the same training—people with jobs far less senior than the one for which Dallis was being prepared—had generated 28 and 31 change ideas, respectively, within the same amount of time. Somewhat humbled, Dallis picked up the pace, looking for more opportunities to make improvements and trying even more “quick and dirty” methods of testing ideas: bolting rather than welding things, taping rather than bolting, and holding rather than taping—anything to speed up the rate of feedback. By 11 am on the second day, he and his coworker had built the list to 25 ideas. Takahashi would visit the machine shop while they were working, ask what Dallis was concentrating on, and then follow up with very specific queries about the change idea. “Before I could give a speculative answer,” recalled Dallis, “he sent me to look or try for myself.”

Dallis found that his ability to identify and resolve problems grew with practice, and by the morning of the third day, he had moved from examining the details of individual work routines to looking at problems with how the production cell as a whole was laid out and the effects on workers’ physical movements: “There were two machines, with gauges and parts racks. A tool change took eight steps on one and 24 on the other. Was there a better layout that would reduce the number of steps and time? We figured out how to simulate the change before getting involved with heavy machinery to move the equipment for real,” Dallis said. By the time the three days were up, he had identified 50 problems with quality checks, tool changes, and other work in his machine shop—35 of which had been fixed on the spot. (The effects of these changes are summarized in the exhibit “The Kamigo Report Card.”)

Takahashi had Dallis conclude his shop-floor training by presenting his work to the plant manager, the machine shop manager, and the shop’s group leaders. Along the way, Dallis had been keeping a careful log of the changes and their effects. The log listed operations in the shop, the individual problems Dallis had observed, the countermeasure for each problem, the effect of the change, and the first- and second-shift workers’ reactions to the countermeasure. (For a snapshot of the log, see the exhibit “Excerpts from Dallis’s Log.”) Photographs and diagrams complemented the descriptions. “During the presentations,” Dallis reported, “the plant’s general manager, the machine shop’s manager, and its group leaders were engaged in what [I and the other] ‘lowly’ team leaders said. Two-thirds [of the audience] actively took notes during the team leaders’ presentations, asking pointed questions throughout.”

After Dallis made his presentation, Takahashi spent the remaining week showing him how Toyota group leaders—people responsible for a few assembly or machining teams, each with three to seven members—managed and presented their improvement projects. In one case, a group leader was exploring ways of reducing machine changeover times and establishing a more even production pace for an injection-molding process. In another, a group leader was looking for ways to reduce downtime in a machining operation. In all the presentations, the group leaders explained the problems they were addressing, the processes they used to develop countermeasures, and the effect these countermeasures had on performance. Dallis quickly realized that people at all levels, even those subordinate to the one for which he was being developed, were expected to structure work and improvements as experiments.

Lessons Learned

Although Takahashi at no point told Dallis exactly what he was supposed to learn from his experience, the methodology of the training just described is so consistent and specific that it reveals at least four fundamental principles underlying the system. Together with the rules we described in our 1999 article, the following lessons may help explain why Toyota has remained the world’s preeminent manufacturer.

Lesson 1

There’s no substitute for direct observation.

Throughout Dallis’s training, he was required to watch employees work and machines operate. He was asked not to “figure out” why a machine had failed, as if he were a detective solving a crime already committed, but to sit and wait until he could directly observe its failure—to wait for it to tell him what he needed to know.

Dallis was asked not to figure out why a machine had failed but to sit and wait until he could directly observe its failure—to wait for it to tell him what he needed to know.

One of the group leader presentations at Kamigo described this principle in action. In a project to improve machine maintenance, it became clear to the group that machine problems were evident only when failures occurred. In response, the shop’s group leaders had removed opaque covers from several machines so that operators and team leaders could hear and see the inner workings of the devices, thus improving their ability to assess and anticipate problems with the machines. This is a very different approach from the indirect observation on which most companies rely—reports, interviews, surveys, narratives, aggregate data, and statistics. Not that these indirect approaches are wrong or useless. They have their own value, and there may be a loss of perspective (the big picture) when one relies solely on direct observation. But direct observation is essential, and no combination of indirect methods, however clever, can possibly take its place.

Dallis’s previous experience managing plants might have prepared him to look at operations of greater scale and scope, but had Takahashi given him a project with greater scope, Dallas might not have learned to observe with such precision. Dallis’s first six weeks at the U.S. engine plant meant that he had up to 23,824 opportunities to observe complete work cycles. Because his work was limited to a 19-person line, he could view more than a thousand work cycles per person. That gave him deep insight into the line’s productivity and safety.

Lesson 2

Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments.

In the scientific method, experiments are used to test a hypothesis, and the results are used to refine or reject the hypothesis. Dallis’s problem solving was structured so that he embedded explicit and testable assumptions in his analysis of the work. Throughout his training, therefore, he had to explain gaps between predicted and actual results. In his meetings with Takahashi at the U.S. engine plant, for example, he was required to propose hypotheses on Monday and the results of his experiments on Friday. In Japan, he had to present his changes as tests of causal relationships, stating the problem he saw, the root cause he suspected, the change he had made, and the countermeasure’s actual effect on performance.

Of course, many people trying to improve a process have some idea of what the problems are and how to fix them. The difference with TPS—and this is key—is that it seeks to fully understand both the problem and the solution. For example, any manager might say, “Maybe the parts rack should be closer to the assembler’s hand. If we move it here, I’ll bet it’ll shave a few seconds off the cycle.” Were he to try this and find that it saved six seconds, he would probably be quite pleased and consider the problem solved.

But in the eyes of a Toyota manager like Takahashi, such a result would indicate that the manager didn’t fully understand the work that he was trying to improve. Why hadn’t he been more specific about how far he was going to move the rack? And how many seconds did he expect to save? Four? If the actual savings is six seconds, that’s cause for celebration—but also for additional inquiry. Why was there a two-second difference? With the explicit precision encouraged by Takahashi, the discrepancy would prompt a deeper investigation into how a process worked and, perhaps more important, how a particular person studied and improved the process.

Lesson 3

Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible.

At Toyota, the focus is on many quick, simple experiments rather than on a few lengthy, complex ones. This became particularly evident when Dallis went to Japan. Whereas in the United States he made 25 changes in six weeks (before the weekend blitz during which 75 were completed), in Japan he had to make 50 changes in 2½ shifts, which meant an average of one change every 22 minutes. This encouraged Dallis to learn from making small incremental changes rather than large system-design changes. He would observe work actually being done, quickly see where struggles were occurring, then rapidly test his understanding by implementing a countermeasure, thereby accelerating the rate at which he discovered “contingencies” or “interferences” in the process. This is precisely the way Toyota workers practice process improvement. They cannot “practice” making a change, because a change can be made only once. But they can practice the process of observing and testing many times.

To ensure that Dallis received the practice he needed and that he internalized his understanding of it, Takahashi structured Dallis’s training so that the complexity of his experiments increased gradually. When Dallis started at the U.S. engine plant, he conducted “single factor” experiments, changing small, individual work elements rather than taking a system perspective. What’s more, his efforts there started with individual work methods, progressing to more complex and subtle machine problems only when he had developed his observation and problem-solving skills over the six weeks. Thus, he moved from problems that were easier to observe to those that were harder. If each learning cycle is kept small and bounded, then the learner can make mistakes and the consequences will not be severe. This approach increases the learner’s willingness to take risks and learn by doing. Dallis’s training at Kamigo mirrored this progression: He began, once again, with work-method issues of “overburden” before moving on to machines.2

Lesson 4

Managers should coach, not fix.

Dallis’s training not only gave him insight into how Toyota delivers continuous improvement but also helped him understand the unique relationships between Toyota’s managers and workers. Dallis himself had been rewarded by his previous employer for being a problem solver, albeit one with a more participative and inclusive approach than most. What he saw at Toyota, by contrast, was workers and low-level managers constantly solving problems. Indeed, the more senior the manager, the less likely he was to be solving problems himself.

Toyota managers act as enablers. Throughout Dallis’s training, Takahashi—one of Toyota’s most senior operational managers—positioned himself as a teacher and coach, not as a technological specialist. He put Dallis through experiences without explicitly stating what or how he was to learn. Even when specific skills were imparted, these were purely to assist Dallis’s observation and experimentation. For instance, Takahashi showed Dallis how to observe an individual worker in order to spot instances of stress, wasted effort, and so on, and he explicitly advised Dallis on how to develop prototypes. But at no point did he suggest actual process improvements. Rather, he directed Dallis on how to find opportunities for those improvements (as in, study this person or that machine, looking for various types of stress, strain, or faults) and on how to develop and test possible countermeasures.

Takahashi also gave Dallis the resources he needed to act quickly. For example, at Kamigo, Dallis had the help of a maintenance worker to move equipment, create fixtures, relocate wires and pipes, and provide other skilled trade work so that he could test as many ideas as possible. Takahashi and the shop manager also came to the cell of the machining operation to review Dallis’s ideas; they gave him tips on piloting his changes before asking support workers to make parts or relocate equipment. When Dallis wanted to rotate some gauges that tested parts, the shop manager showed him how to quickly and inexpensively make cardboard prototypes to test location, orientation, size, and so on.

The result of this unusual manager–worker relationship is a high degree of sophisticated problem solving at all levels of the organization. Dallis noted, “As a former engine-plant person, I saw a line [at Kamigo] that was 15 years old but that had the capacity to build 90 different engine types. It was amazing that they solved so many problems with such simple equipment. Behind the changes was some pretty deep thinking.” The basic company philosophy is that any operating system can be improved if enough people at every level are looking and experimenting closely enough. (After all, if only the big shots were expected to make changes, all that “little” stuff would get overlooked.) The fact that Dallis, after just three months at the U.S. engine plant, was able to empower others to implement 50 improvements at Kamigo, one of Toyota’s top plants, offers insight into why Toyota stays ahead of its competitors.3

“I saw a line [at Kamigo] that was 15 years old but that had the capacity to build 90 different engine types.”

Back to America

To see if Dallis had learned the right lessons from his training, Takahashi sent him back to the U.S. engine plant where his instruction had begun. As we have seen, Dallis had already helped make substantial improvements in the assembly line’s labor productivity and ergonomic safety before going to Japan. But he hadn’t been able to raise operational availability to 95%. Now, upon Dallis’s return to that plant, Takahashi had him attempt this goal again. However, there was a marked departure from Dallis’s earlier approach, in which he primarily saw himself as a problem solver.

With Takahashi’s help, Dallis worked with the line’s group leader and assistant manager in order to develop the problem-solving skills of the line’s team members and team leaders. The point was for the team to learn to solve little problems simultaneously so that the line could recover quickly when problems occurred. For instance, the team realized that it had difficulties in keeping track of what work needed to be done and in identifying problems as they occurred. It therefore had to improve its “visual management” of the work—what was going well, what was going wrong, and what needed to be done. Dallis sat down with the group leader and assistant manager and set out a schedule for identifying specific problems and allocating responsibility for them across the team. As the team members observed and developed countermeasures, Dallis would drop by much as Takahashi had done, asking them specific questions that would oblige them to observe their allotted problems more closely as they happened. To its delight, the group hit its mark ahead of schedule and raised operational availability to 99%.

Dallis had returned to America with an altered focus. He had realized from the way Takahashi had managed his training, and from what he’d seen of others’ training, that the efforts of a senior manager like himself should be aimed not at making direct improvements but at producing a cadre of excellent group leaders who learn through continuous experimentation. The target of 95% operational availability at the U.S. engine plant was the same, but he now knew whose target it really was, and it wasn’t his. At this point, Takahashi finally released Dallis from his training to take on his full-time managerial responsibilities.

For anyone trying to understand how the Toyota Production System really works, there is probably no substitute for the kind of total immersion that Dallis received. TPS is a system you have to live to fully understand, let alone improve. Besides, anyone like Dallis coming into Toyota from the outside, regardless of his or her experience, is coming into an organization with a long history of making improvements and modifications at a pace few organizations have ever approached. No one can expect to assimilate—let alone recreate—such a strong and distinct culture in just a few weeks or even a few months. Nevertheless, any company that develops and implements a training program such as the one Dallis participated in is sure to reap enormous dividends. The organization that applies the rules in designing its operations and that trains its managers to apply those rules will have made a good start at replicating the DNA of the Toyota Production System.

1. Operational availability equals machine run time/machine use time. For instance, if a machine requires eight minutes of process time to grind a surface, but, because of jams and other interruptions, ten minutes are actually spent from start to finish, then operational availability would be 80%. Ideally, operationally availability would be 100%—that is, the machine always runs when it is needed.

2. The incremental approach was also helpful to Takahashi, who used it to teach Dallis. He directly observed Dallis’s work by creating short learning cycles with rapid feedback so that he could continually reassess Dallis’s knowledge and skills, both to provide feedback in order to help him learn and to design the next learning increment.

3. According to Takahashi, the expectation was that group leaders at Kamigo—managers who supervised several operating shops or cells—would spend 70% of their time doing process improvement work. This time would often be shared among three to four teams, implying that team leaders—people managing one shop or cell—were expected to spend a minimum of 20% of their time on improvement work.

A version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Steven Spear is a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
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An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan

In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone—not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means going beyond consigning “people development” to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

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The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management

The Idea in Brief

In 1995, John Kotter published research that revealed only 30 percent of change programs are successful. Fast forward to 2008. A recent McKinsey & Company survey of business executives indicates that the percent of change programs that are a success today is… still 30%. The field of ‘change management’, it would seem, hasn’t changed a thing.

Digging deeper into why change programs fail reveals that the vast majority stumble on precisely the thing they are trying to transform: employee attitudes and management behavior. Conventional change management prescribes addressing these behavioral and attitudinal changes by putting in place four basic conditions:

  • a compelling story,
  • role modeling,
  • reinforcement systems, and
  • the skills required for change

These prescriptions are well grounded in psychological research and make good common sense – which, we believe, is precisely where things fall apart. The inconvenient truth of human nature is that people are irrational in a number
of predictable ways. The prescription is right, but rational managers who attempt to put the four conditions in place by applying their “common sense” intuition typically misdirect time and energy, create messages that miss the mark, and
experience frustrating unintended consequences.

In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (and often unconscious) nature of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.

 

In the same way that the field of economics has been transformed by an understanding of uniquely human social, cognitive and emotional biases, so too the practice of change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of the irrational (and often unconscious) nature of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act.

 

The Idea in Practice

a) Creating a compelling story

#1: What motivates you doesn’t motivate (most of) your employees. Research confirms that there are at least five sources of meaning for humans at work: impact on society, the customer, the company/shareholder, the working team, and “me” personally. What’s more, workforces are evenly split as to which of these is a primary motivator. “Telling five stories at once” is the key to unleashing maximum energy for change.

#2: You’re better off letting them write their own story. Research indicates that when employees choose for themselves (versus “being told”), they are more committed to the outcome by a factor of almost five to one. Time communicating the message should be dramatically rebalanced towards listening versus telling.

#3: It takes both “+” and “–” to create real energy. Deficit-based approaches (“solve the problem”) to change can create unproductive fatigue and resistance. Constructionist-based approaches (“capture the opportunity”) generate more excitement and enthusiasm, but lead to risk-averse solutions. By moving beyond this dichotomy and pursuing both approaches simultaneously, managers can neutralize these downsides and maximize impact in mobilizing the organization.

b) Role modeling

#4: Your leaders believe they already “are the change.” Most executives have the will and skill to role model, but don’t actually know “what” they should change due to their self-serving biases (if they didn’t think what they were doing was right, they wouldn’t be doing it). Smart use of concrete 360-degree behavioral feedback can break through this barrier.

#5: Influence leaders aren’t that influential. It is not enough to invest in a few rather than in many as a way of catalyzing desired changes, no matter how appealing the idea is. New research shows social “contagions” depend less on the persuasiveness of “early adopters” and more on how receptive the “society” is to the idea. While influence leaders are important, we warn against overinvesting in them – your effort is better spent elsewhere.

c) Reinforcing mechanisms

#6: Money is the most expensive way to motivate people. A change program’s objectives should be linked to employee compensation to avoid sending mixed messages. Little upside is gained, however, due to a number of practical considerations. There is a better, and less costly, way. Small, unexpected rewards have disproportionate effects on employees’ motivation during change programs.

#7: A fair process is as important as a fair outcome. Employees will go against their own self-interest if the situation violates other notions they have about fairness and justice. Careful attention should be paid to achieve a fair process and fair outcomes in making changes to company structures, processes, systems and incentives.

d) Capability building

#8: Employees are what they think. Behaviors drive performance. Mindsets (the thoughts, feelings and beliefs held by employees) drive behaviors. Capability building should focus on technical skills as well as shifting underlying mindsets that enable the technical skills to be used to their fullest.

#9: Good intentions aren’t enough. Even with good intentions, it is unlikely employees will apply new skills and mindsets unless the barriers to practice are lowered. The odds can be improved by using “field and forum” approaches linked to trainees’ day-to-day accountabilities reinforced by quantifiable, outcome-based hurdles along the way.

Show me the money!

Where we have tested these inconvenient truths in practice versus more rational, conventional approaches to influencing behavior we have found they achieve significant positive results. For example, in 18-month longitudinal studies using control and experimental group methodologies we achieved a 19 percent lift in profit per banker versus 8 percent and a 65 percent reduction in call center customer churn versus 35 percent with conventional approaches alone.

Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Taiichi Ohno: “Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Caterina Fake: “So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Henry Ford: “Coming together is the beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Peter Drucker: “Accept the fact that we will have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Theo Gold: “You cannot become stronger without resistance”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Peter Drucker: “Accept the fact that we will have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Robert Collier: “Success is the sum of small efforts – repeated day in and day out.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         George Halas: “Nobody who ever gave his best, regretted it”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Albert Einstein: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Jeff Daly: "Two monologues do not make a dialogue"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Marissa Mayer: “Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Sam Walton: “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Wade Boggs: “A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events, and outcomes. It is a catalyst, and it sparks extraordinary results”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Bill Copeland: “The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Albert Einstein: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         John Wooden: “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.  If you think about that, you’ll do things differently”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Caterina Fake: “So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Theo Gold: “You cannot become stronger without resistance”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Steve Jobs: “Innovation is saying no to a thousand things”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Marissa Mayer: “Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Jack Welch: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Steve Jobs: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Taiichi Ohno: “Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Buddha: “The mind is everything. What you think you become”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Mahatma Gandhi: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do is in harmony”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         George Halas: “Nobody who ever gave his best, regretted it”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Stephen Covey: “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Morihei Ueshiba: "Life Is Growth. If We Stop Growing, Technically And Spiritually, We Are As Good As Dead"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         John Wooden: “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Theo Gold: “You cannot become stronger without resistance”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Jack Welch: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Bill Copeland: “The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Jack Welch: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Winston Churchill: “Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Albert Einstein: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Dale Carnegie: "If you want to be a good conversationalist, be a good listener. To be interesting, be interested"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Socrates: “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Wade Boggs: “A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events, and outcomes. It is a catalyst, and it sparks extraordinary results”