‘Queen For A Day’1
What is the one thing you would change?
Why?
What is the one thing you wouldn’t change?
Why?
Would the rest of the organization agree with you?
This is the second issue of a new way of thinking for our newsletter. I wrote about it here.
Please do comment, email, call or even use carrier pigeon so we can continue the dialogue. I want to bring together the collective wisdom of the people following People First and share it.
Answers to last week’s question will be in your inbox at 8.00 am Friday, PST this week.
1
I am talking about being in charge of your business, not the country!
If I were King for a day! Yes, I want to be King, not simply the Queen! LOL (John, I know you are laughing now!)
One thing I would change is grading Associates on a bell curve. In today's world when organizations are running mean and lean, grade people on their contributions! If the blow, then grade them that way, but if you have 10 direct reports and all 10 are rock stars, grade them appropriately with documentation supporting their Rock Star Status! Gone are the old GE Welch days of "bell curve grading"!
One thing I would not change is the yearly pain in the backside reorganizations. Yes, I said I would NOT change them. This gives Leadership the ability to course correct after a justifiable period of trial and errors. Granted, it does make organizations less likely to reach an era of working as a well oiled machine, but allows for trialing out lots of wild ideas organizationally year after year. (Yes, you should detect a bit of sarcasm there!)
I posed this question to each employee in our 90+ organization as we prepared for pending M&A integration during which time were absorbing 170 additional IT staff across 8 locations in 5 states (and yes, I traveled to each location for these meetings to reinforce their importance).
This “Bottom Up” (rather than Top Down) approach to organizational design allowed for these very critical aspects of successful Change Management to flourish:
• Human beings resist change if they feel excluded from the planning of that change – this proved true in our re-org, as our post-merger employee engagement survey reported 98% satisfaction with the “new” organizational structure, twenty points higher than any previous survey, spanning 5 years.
• FYI, this remains applicable, even in circumstances when few of their ideas (proposed by first line staff) are actually incorporated – the key element is that they were involved in, rather than merely impacted by, the final design for teams and hierarchies.
• Most middle managers reported that they learned, in the King For A Day one-on-one sessions, important info about their employees they had never known nor heard during “normal” meetings, i.e., a different level of truth emerged. These Aha’s resulted in 4 promotions, a full career change for 2, and (perhaps most significant) a belief among the employees that they were being “heard.”
Emergent wisdom (of those most affected by executive decisions) is the single most influential factor in the perceived success of long-range organizational change.
As such, I advise anyone considering or currently planning their company’s Return to Work (post-Covid) structures and policies to do this one thing. And a great trick to open that conversation? "If you were King/Queen for a Day..."