Techniques on how to best spread excellence throughout an organization. Includes several examples of companies improving excellence such as JetBlue and P&G. Somewhat repetitive and very academic.
Contents:
- SCALING MANTRAS
- BUDDHISM VS CATHOLICISM
- HOT CAUSES, COOL SOLUTIONS
- THE ISSUE WITH MORE
- PEOPLE
- BAD BEHAVIORS
- OTHER TACTICS
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My Notes
To master the black art of scaling organizations is to act as if they are fighting a ground war, not just an air war. It requires grinding it out and pressing everyone to make a small change after another in what they believe, feel, or do.
When big organizations scale well, they focus on moving a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward a thousand feet.
The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon, their advantage is stamina. Grit is a hallmark of every scaling effort.
SCALING MANTRAS
- Spread a Mindset, Not Just a Footprint - Sustaining and constantly improving an organization's mindset is like being in a high-maintenance relationship. Constant vigilance is required because it's easy to ruin everything.
- Engage All the Senses - Bolster the mindset you want to spread with supportive sights, sounds, smells, and other subtle cues that people may barely notice, if at all.
- Link Short-Term Realities to Long-Term Dreams - Senior executives need the rare ability to make sure that the short-term stuff gets done and done well, while simultaneously never losing sight of the big picture. Hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later.
- Accelerate Accountability - Design a system where the tug of responsibility is constant and embraced by everyone, and where slackers and energy suckers have no place to hide. Putting people close together physically is just one way to build an organization filled with people who can't escape relentless pressures to do the right thing. Create extreme transparency, social pressures, and tough policies with accountability.
- Fear the Clusterf**k - when these three elements collide, you have a clusterf**k: a) Illusion that they're scaling up without supporting facts, b) Impatience of rolling something out before it, your leadership, and your people are ready, and c) Incompetence of not having the requisite knowledge and skill about what they're spreading.
- Scaling Requires Both Addition and Subtraction - Remove unnecessary friction from outdated rules, red tape, services, etc. "What got us here but won't get us there" mentality.
- Slow Down to Scale Faster, and Better, Down the Road - Learn when and how to shift gears from fast to slow ways of thinking.
BUDDHISM VS CATHOLICISM
What is your goal? Is it more like Catholicism, where the aim is to replicate perordained design beliefs and practices? Or is it more like Buddhism, where an underlying mindset guides why people do certain things-but the specifics of what they do can vary wildly from person to person and place to place?
You need to manage the tension between replicating tried-and-true practices and modifying them (or inventing new ones) to fit local conditions.
Catholicism tends to work best in the manufacturing industry.
The best leaders and teams find the right balance between replication (Catholicism) and customizaiton (Buddhism), as if they are working with Lego bricks.
Three questions to ask yourself:
- Do you suffer from delusions of uniqueness? We tend to convince ourselves that proven rules and technologies don't apply to us, that you're unique.
- Do you have a successful template to use as a prototype? Start with a complete model or template that works elsewhere and watch for signs that certain aspects of the model aren't working and need to be rebuilt, replaced, or removed. Try to avoid rolling out an unproven mishmash of best practices.
- Will bolstering Buddhism generate crucial understanding, commitmet, and innovation? Implementing a local translation of a mindset magnifies the feeling that "I own it and it owns me." Buddhism works well if you need to experiment with different solutions to figure out what works if there isn't a proven model elsewhere.
Outsourcing work can be tempting but it's hard to maintain the purity of an original model.
To spread your footprint faster and further, it is sometimes worth sacrificing short-term excellence.
Guardrail Strategy: specify as few constraints as you possibly can, the most important, and then let people steer between and around them as they see fit. The challenge should be to strip away as many unecessary constraints as possible.
HOT CAUSES, COOL SOLUTIONS
Hot causes trigger attention, emotional energy, and commitment. Communicate hot causes by creating and sharing stories, symbols, language - the beliefs and emotions that flow from a mindset.
Cool causes change people's behaviors
Strategies for starting, sustaining, and accelerating a virtuous cycle:
- Name the Problem - The right name creates a compact summary that helps people understand a challenge, explain it to others, and guides them to cool solutions.
- Name the Enemy - Hot causes can be amped up by pointing to an outside enemy, but can also backfire when can't best your enemy.
- Do It Where All Can See - Persuade people to take public actions that demonstrate a commitment to a mindset.
- Breach Assumptions - Example: a CEO sitting where you'd expect the receptionist to be stationed.
- Create Gateway Experiences and On-Ramps - Think of gateways as security blankets that people can hold on to while you transition.
- New Rituals, Better Rituals - Can serve as on-ramps for creating or reinforcing a mindset - especially when they are visible and done by all.
- Lean on People Who Can't Leave Well Enough Alone - Pick people who will jump at the chance to live the new mindset and sidelining or firing those who don't.
THE ISSUE WITH MORE
Cognitive Load: The sheer volume and complexity often overwhelms the "working memory" of the individuals who do it, whigh produces blind spots and bad decisions and saps their willpower. Volume and complexity usually increases as an organization grows.
As teams get bigger, individual performance suffers. Employees in bigger teams give each other less support and help because it's harder to maintain so many social relationships and to corrdinate with more people. For most tasks the best size is four to six.
Five tactics for building better operating systems (i.e. hierarchies):
- Subtraction as a Way of Life - Ruthlessly spotting and removing crummy or useless rules, tools, and fools that clog up the works and cloud people's minds.
Sometimes it's necessary to inject a big dose of complexity to get through certain phases, and then cart it away when it is no longer needed. Example: scafolding that workers use to construct or repair buildings, although once essential, it eventually must be removed.
Advice from P&G CER A.G. Lafley, "keep things Seasame Street Simple."
- Make People Squirm - If you aren't upsetting people, you aren't pushing hard enough. Stephen King quote: "It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own."
- Bring on the Load Busters: Subtraction by Addition - Add simple additions (objects, activities, and technologies) that cut cognitive load, by turning attention to what really matters most and away from what matters least.
- Divide and Conquer.
- Bolster Collective Brainpower: Increase Cognitive Capacity Instead of Adding More People - Stick with savvy insiders and stable teams and blending people who have worked together before. The longer the memembers stay together as an intact group, the better they do (e.g. string quartets, basketball teams). If you're forming a new team or fixing an old one, try to bring in at least two or three people who have worked together effectively before.
Groups with a higher percentage of women have a greater "collective intelligence," performing better on cognitively demanding tasks. Also try to enlist people who are usually treated as bystanders or passive recipients. And give them plenty of breaks when working as a group.
The Goldilocks Theory of Bureaucracy: scaling requires injecting just enough structure, hierarchy, and process at the right time. Knowing when to add more complexity, when it is "just right," and when to wait a bit longer. Example: An offensive lineman's job is to protect the quarterback from oncoming defensive linemen. If the offensive lineman attempts to do this by holding his ground, the defensive lineman will easily run around him and crush the quarterback. So instead, offensive linemen are taught to lose the battle slowly or to give ground grudgingly. To allow the defensive lineman to advance, but just a little at a time. Organizations work the same way with specialization and organizational structure as they complicate things and make people feel like they are moving away from common knowledge and quality communication.
When people in an organization have just a bit too much process and a few too many rules, people feel stymied and frustrated, "like they are walking in mud." Running a little hot works because, as an organization expands and ages, it marches forward with an "operating system" that is just barely complex enough, but no more.
PEOPLE
It's a combination of bringing in the right talent and having people accountable and who hold each other accountable.
People can feel more constrained and accountable when they are self-managed. The pressures to conform and perform are harder to escape because each worker is beholden to every other team member rather than to a single manager or boss. A feeling of "I own the place and the place owns me."
Focus more on encouraging cooperation and information sharing among existing employees, on developing technologies and procedures that enable exemplary work, and on using training and mentoring to develop their own stars vs. just hiring star talent.
Seven means to create accountability with your people:
- Squelch Free Riding - Savvy leaders stock their tool kit with every incentive they can find, borrow, and invent, and blend them to spor collective action and squelch free riding. They do this often through hiring, firing, and promotion practices.
- Inject Pride and Righteous Anger - People think and worry less about their selfish desires and concerns when people have pride and aggresiveness towards outsiders who deride and can undermine a group.
- Bring in Guilt-Prone Leaders - When leaders are prone to feel guilty, they are especially likely to display concern for others and to put the greater good ahead of their personal goals and glory.
- "I'll Be Watching You": Use Subtle Cues to Prime Accountability - If people are given subtle reminders that others might be watching, they are prone to do the right thing.
- Create the Right "Gene Pool" - A company becomes the people it hires. Rotate "high-potentials" through diverse and increasingly challenging jobs.
- Use Other Organizations as Your HR Department - Try to get other organizations to screen and train talent. Example: Commerical airlines hire pilots trained by the U.S. military.
- Hire People Prewired to Fit Your Mindset.
Work on connecting people or groups who have pockets of excellence to share their ideas and experience with each other and others.
Use a core team to keep the right information, guidance, and motivation flowing in the network and find and groom dedicated helpers so that they aren't burdened with every detail of the "connect and cascade" process.
To spread excellence, you need to have some excellence to spread. Watch out for the "absence of excellence problem," when you have to scale something despite little evidence that it works.
Start with a diverse group to link more "nodes" in the organization's network: to the varied departments, locations, and functions. And to informal friendships, groups, and affiliations.
You need master multipliers - people who have deep knowledge and enthusiasm about what they spread. They are adept at finding others to help them fuel the connect-and-cascade process. They also need patience and self-control to allow people to learn froum their own mistakes.
Bring on energizers instead of de-energizers. Positive energy is contagious and a crucial emotion for spreading excellence in social networks. Some de-energizers are so valuable to the organization that they're worth keeping around. Leave them on the payroll but keep interactions with them as infrequent and brief as possible. But don't let them hold key leadership positions.
Gamification - a promising approach for making work more fun and creating stronger bonds among people.
Seven tools for creating networks to spread excellence (once is not enough and one is not enough):
- The Top-Down Approach - The right behavior rolling down a hierarchy.
- Broadcast Your Message Out to One and All - Ground war tactics: personal e-mails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions.
- Surround Them: Have the Many Teach the Few - Take one person, or small team, and embed them among large numbers of people who already eat, live, and breathe the mindset you want to embrace.
- One on One: The Power of Pairs - try to match "socially similar" people or units.
- From the Few to the Many - a group of determined people band together and labor to slowly spread their mindset, and associated actions and skills, throughout an organization or other network.
The "Trojan Horse effect": hiring and putting experienced and talented employess in each business unit (at least 2).
- Brokers: Bridging Disconnected Islands - "structual holes" are white space between disconnected "nodes" in a network and brokers "fill" these holes and transfer information, expertise, ideas, and influence between those who have it and those who need it. Five key elements include: a) Being curious about strangers and their ideas, b) Living and breathing the mindset but isn't obnoxious about it, c) Has strong opinions, weakly held - does not cling to them irrationally, d) Listens and learns - asks more questions and makes fewer statements and e) Convenes, introduces, and connects.
- Create Crossroads Where People Can Connect - When people share the same rhythms, connections among them form faster and stay stronger. Example: having regular stand-up meetings. But it's not the meeting that matters, it's the rhythm.
Some of the most savvy connectors are skilled at astking and acting on questions that uncover weak or missing links - but wield little formal authority and don't have powerful carrots and sticks at their disposal.
Use two litmus tests to expose weak or missing connections: 1) Ask diverse members of the team, department, or organization about key aspects af their strategy, operations, policies, philosophy, and pressing porblems they face. If they give you inconsistent and clashing answers it's a sign of trouble, and 2) Is there more direct evidence that people are having a lot of one-on-one interactions, or conversely, that there is little if any interaction?
BAD BEHAVIORS
Destructive behaviors pack a bigger wallop than constructive behaviors. To clear the way for spreading and sustaining something good, they've got to take out the bad and keep it out.
Two causes of bad behavior:
- Ambiguity - unsure whether events are bad enough to warrant intervention.
- "Diffusion of Responsibility" - with so many others around, surely someone else will do the right thing (or has done so already).
- Because no one else is helping, people may worry that other witnesses will disapprove if they jump in and do what they believe is right.
Make sure each person feels personally obligated to reverse or repair problems, no matter what others around them do or don't do and make sure that everyone knows and agrees on what bad behavior looks like so that bad behavior doesn't become "normalized."
If incentives are vivid enough and strong enough that, eventually, just about everyone's behavior flips to the bad side because misguided incentives encourage people to take the easy way out rather than to do the right thing.
Eight methods to use for "breaking bad":
- Nip it in the Bud - Take personal responsibility for dismissing weak employees rather than handing this dirty work off to other managers.
- Get Rid of the Bad Apples - Put all these bad apples in one barrel, or team, move them to a corner where they won't infect others, and recruit a no-nonsense coach to guide them.
- Plumbing Before Poetry - fix the tactical before you enforce the strategy.
- Adequacy Before Excellence - Drive out bad behavior before you work on spreading something marvelous. Customer loyalty has more to do with how well companies keep their basic, even vanilla promises than with how well they dazzle customers.
- Use the Cool Kids (and Adults) to Define and Squelch Bad Behavior - Recruit the most admired and connected people in your organization, teach them what "bad" looks like, and encourage them to stop being perpetrators.
- Kill the Thrill - Bad behavior is often driven by peer pressure, not by what management does. Forms of bad behavior are often ways to garner prestige from colleagues. Finanical incentives are often unneccssary, instead find ways to reduce such thrills, and replace them with more constructive ones.
- Time Shifting: From Current to Future Selves - Get people to think about the person they hope to be, not just the person they are now by making ambitious goals more vivid and emotionally compelling.
- Focus on the Best Times, the Worst Times, and the End - "Peak-end rule": no matter how good or bad an experience is, or how long it lasts, judgments about it are shaped disproportionally by the best and worst moments and if it ended well or badly. You want to try to remove and reduce as many bad experiences as possible, but remember not all junctures are created equal.
Five feelings that signal that bad behavior already exists:
- Fear of taking responsibility - You can drive out fear by creating "psychological safety" and encouraging people to be noisy and mindful errer makers. You need to own your mistakes and, whether or not they are responsible for making an error, focus on what can be learned rather than on who ought to be humiliated and stigmitized.
- Fear of being ostracized - Embarrassment and exclusion are best applied in small doses and with proper percautions.
- Anonymity - No one is watching you very closely, so you can do whatever you want.
- Feelings of injustice - When people feel as if they are getting a raw deal from their boss or employer they give less in return.
- Helplessness - When someone can find some way to direct a team's attention toward the people affected by what it does (and away from members' own needs and wants), they will take greater responsibility for doing the right thing.
OTHER TACTICS
Implement a "scaling premortem": When your team is on the verge of making and implementing a big decision, call a meeting and ask each member to imagine that it is a year later. Split them into two groups and have one group imagine that the effort was an unmitigated disaster and have the other pretend it was a roaring success. Have each member work independently and generate reasons, or write a story as to why the succeess or failure occurred (e.g. writing your own press release). Be as detailed as possible and identify causes that you wouldn't usually mention. Have each person read their story outloud and correlate the reasons. Use the reasons from both groups to strengthn your scaling plan.
Ask the question: "If you were advising another company in this same situation as us, what would you suggest?"
Seven lessons for scaling:
- Start with yourself, where you are right now, and with what you have and can get right now.
- Creating enthusiasm is great, but you have to live and breath it or it won't stick.
- Mindsets are double-edged swords, you need them, but you should never stop asking whether the time is ripe to cast them aside.
- Scaling flows more quickly and easily when people operate under a small number of ironclad constraints that they can rarely, if ever, crash through. When options are limited, people generate more, rather than less, varied solutions because their attention is less scattered.
- If a team has leadership and performance problems, don't start by blaming the leader or hunting for bad apples to reform or remove. Consider its size first.
- Hire people whom you respect and who bring new thinking to the organization; whether you like them should be secondary.
- Excellence spreads and persists when accountability pressures permaete a workplace-when that feeling of ownership for problems and solutions pervades each handoff, each meeting, and each interaction with the people whom an organization serves.
