Working With Others

It’s hard to work and play well with others if expectations don’t get shared. If both were still alive, today would have been my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary! They were married for 52 years and I was around for 41 of those.

When two people are in a relationship that long there will always be ups and downs and good times and bad. The longevity of any relationship really depends on how well those in the relationship find ways to make it work. One of the things that I noticed when times a got a little rocky between them was that they would forget to share their expectations of each other openly. Instead they just assumed the other knew what those expectation were. A case in point was usually the holiday season. Each would have expectations about what a great holiday season might look like, yet each would never share those expectations with the other. As a result, both were disappointed more often than not.

How many times have you experienced a situation where your boss assumed you knew what was expected or you were a member of a team that just left a meeting assuming everyone knew the assignment – yet those expectations were never openly shared.

Why are we so afraid to share those expectations openly, when not sharing them usually results in hurt feelings?

There is a reason that the nickname for Minneapolis is “The City of Lakes. One of the perks about living where I do is that I am with two blocks of one of these lakes and briskly “walking the lake is a convenient way to get my daily exercise , and because the city keeps the walking path plowed all winter I can get out pretty much everyday , unless the wind chill factor in the winter is dangerously low , and that is an entirely different subject!

When spring comes to the Twin Cities, however, EVERYBODY seems to be out walking the lake. A common sight along the path is a parent pushing a stroller with a baby or toddler inside. Today there was a little boy , somewhere around 24 months old – struggling to extricate himself from the stroller. His parents did not help him , nor did they stop him. They just watched as parents do when their kids do something for the first time. Within a few seconds, this young toddler was bounding gleefully down the path stopping only to joyfully touch each new dandelion he came across. There was a sense of discovery and wonderment that, of course, his mother needed to capture on the digital camera she just happened to have in her tote.

This event reminded me of the employee a manager keeps confined to her cubicle. And casts a wary eye when the employee is not at their desk poised in front of the computer , working. How much creativity are we stifling by simply the way we organize office space and the way we expect employees to work. I’ve always said that we organize around a purpose and that every organization is perfectly organized to get the results it gets. I think this true of workspace and style as well. Any thoughts?

I’ve been around long enough to remember the promise that technology would simplify our lives.  If that is the case, why is it that every time I hear the words “we just updated our information systems technology or “we just installed a new phone system, I steel myself for unprecedented delays, massive inconveniences, and assorted indignities? I visited my doctor today to go over some routine test results only to have the appointment take way longer than it needed to because of the new system.  Instead of being able to look up my results online as promised, we had to resort to what my doctor referred to as 1980’s technology that involved calling the lab to fax the results to my clinic.  When I left, the waiting room was packed with people who had come to the clinic simply to make an appointment because the voice mail jail of the phone system kept telling the caller “we’re busy, so hang up and call later!  I wish I were kidding but I got this message earlier as well. [Apparently, some expert determined that it is better to have people call back rather than keep them in the queue listening to mind numbing music - or worse yet, a recorded message touting the customer service virtues of the organization. I'm not convinced.]

So what is it with information systems technology departments who seem  unable to implement a new system or even an upgrade without a major meltdown of the system, the staff, or the customers?  I honestly would like to know because I’m wondering if any new technology implementation project ever goes off without a hitch?

My observation is that more and more organizations realize the business benefits of creating an environment where people can work and play well with others. However, when I get a call from an organization to enlist my help, I sometimes have to be a code-breaker.  While organizations more often these days can be brutally honest and say, “we have a manager that is an abject disaster, or “the members of this department hate each others guts, or “the senior management team is like a dysfunctional family, or “we are doing well, but we want to be proactive to take our performance to the next level, there are others who are more circumspect in describing the issue. When someone is direct with me – it is very refreshing , and we can begin to look at possibilities of how we might partner.   However, when the person on the other end of the phone speaks in code, getting to the root of the issue depends solely on how quickly and accurately, I can break the code.
In going through some old files, I found my notes from a conference call with the senior human resources officer for a large multi-national publicly-traded company that shall remain nameless to protect the innocent , namely me , but for purposes of this story I’ll call Workworld. In the spirit of full disclosure, this is not a company for which I did any work. However, here is the coded conversation.
The human resources person began by saying that Workworld currently has a product management training program that has great content because it came from the leading textbook on product management, but has not had the impact that was intended. She continued to say that Workworld was seeking someone to revamp the curriculum, and that I came highly recommended.  When I ask why the existing program has not been as effective as it could have been, I am told the following:  “There have been ˜infrastructure problems‘ in the product management area.  The product managers come from a variety of backgrounds in the company, have a range of performance issues, and need to develop their skill sets to a level commensurate with the expectations of their job requirements.  The senior vice-president of product management has insisted on an urgent timeline for this group to transition from being a transaction based business to one that has more of a strategic focus with an emphasis on driving financial results, and he has the budget and the accountability to make it happen.  He wants a curriculum that includes pre-work, an evaluative component, and competency certification.  [Editorial comment , Notice the use of "buzz words in bold type.]
Here is one possible way to decode the conversation:  This senior human resources officer has absolutely no power or voice in the decision of who Workworld will hire to design the training program. I am a name on their list but not necessarily highly recommended.  I am simply the next in a string of consultants who have already told Workworld they were not available.  The new Senior Vice President of Product Development is a high-powered MBA who finds dialing a phone beneath him (or he never learned how) and so he has asked the human resources officer to screen consultants. Moreover, someone created the training program without involving the product managers in the design, used an academic text for the content, and now has no agreement among the managers on how the training applies to day-to-day operations.  The “infrastructure problems may refer to the fact that historically the product management area has been the place where the company dumps marginal performers so they can’t do any harm to the real business.  Now times have changed, as well as the management, and Workworld now wants this area to make money for the company.  Unfortunately, the current staff , through no fault of their own – is not qualified to do this.  The new senior vice-president has been given the dollars and authority to fix the problem, but he does not have the chutzpa to fire poor performers or transition employees who should have never been put in this position in the first place to new roles.  So he wants a consultant to come in, develop a demanding training program, evaluate who can cut it and who cannot, be the taskmaster that he isn’t and get rid of the dead wood.  And this work needs to be done right away because this guy is toast if he can’t show results by next week.
Now, the reader might detect a certain amount of cynicism in the manner in which I have recast the situation.  However, one of my previous clients who was working for Workworld and had hoped to reach me prior to the call from the VP of Human Resources corroborated much of my intuition about this company , including that I was one of multiple consultants that they called.  The point of this story is this.  There are many excellent places to work out there that consciously work at doing what is necessary to build those excellent work places.  What these organizations have in common is leadership that has the ability and willingness to speak honestly about what is working well and what is still missing that needs to be present to be a great place to work and they take the appropriate action.  When they bring someone in from the outside, they are equally honest, they speak clearly in a manner that needs no decoding, and they welcome the partnership and perspective that an outside person brings.  And from the perspective of consultants such as myself, they are the organizations with whom we love to work.

I often work with emerging companies , organizations that have survived the initial growing pains of a start-up, have sustained profitability, and now are considering what’s the next level of development.  There are several questions that these companies must address as they consider what continued success will look like:

1.    What are the specific business results that you want to attain and by when , and is everyone in the company committed to those results and clear on what it will take to achieve them?
2.    How do you expand the business without losing sight of the things that worked well up to this point , like great customer support or high levels of responsiveness?
3.    Do you have a strong pipeline of developing leaders who can take the business to the next step?
4.    What changes in the organization’s structure are necessary to sustain growth?

What I find is that companies tend to do is focus on question 4 before they’ve addressed question 1.  Without a commitment to a set of results on the part of the key members of the organization, answering the remaining questions will not have a context.  For example, the result some seek is to be able to take the business to a point where it becomes an attractive acquisition for a larger entity; others may want to focus only on sustainable growth rates.  Clarity and commitment around results then makes it easier to answer the remaining questions.

Finally, remember that intended results drive decisions about the appropriate organization structure; in other words, we organize around a purpose.  And every organization is perfectly organized to get the results it gets!

When I’ve taught courses in Organization Design and Behavior I often say that it is best to organize around a purpose and that all organizations are perfectly organized to get the results that they get.

One common way that businesses organize is by function. In other words, in functionally organized businesses you will find departments for each of the basic business functions of marketing, finance, operations, human resources, sales, and so on. However, most of these businesses realize that no one function alone adds value to the customer. So one approach is to form cross-functional business teams (i.e., teams with members from each relevant functional area) to manage a customer group, a brand, or a product line. A lot of my team development work focuses on helping these cross-functional teams at all levels of an organization.

The reality is that our business schools do not help people work cross-functionally by the very way that the schools themselves are organized. Most business schools have departments of marketing, finance, accounting, operations, human resources, management, etc., that mirror the silo structure of the functionally organized business. Unlike businesses that try to work cross-functionally, faculties tend to stay in their department silos and so students progress through these business programs without any practical experience in learning how to work across functional boundaries. Remember what I said about organizations being perfectly organized to get the results that they get. Well, business schools are simply organized to turn out functional experts who have little or no practical training in understanding how to get work done through and with others across organizational boundaries.

I began The Drozdal Company 15 years ago. In reflecting on the many things that have happened since then, for some reason, I also recalled my very first job out of high school.

I was within days of my high school graduation. I had a college admissions letter in hand along with a tuition scholarship. And I needed a summer job to help defray those extra expenses that I knew would be there. At the end of this school day, I happened to run into the principal. He told me that one of the members of his Rotary Club who worked for the water utility in town expressed a need for a graduating senior to help them with a “filing project. He asked me if I were interested, I said yes, went to the job interview and got hired on the spot for the princely sum of $2.85 per hour for forty hours a week for the duration of the summer.

The Monday after graduation I showed up at the “Water Works as it was known around town, clean shaven and wearing a coat and tie. (My Mother and Father believed there was a right way to show up for your first day of work.) I was told to report to Mr. S. He was in his sixties and looked remarkably like an emaciated Boris Karloff. His gray hair was slicked straight back with the aid of a little dab of Brylcream and his eyes were sunken into his skull. He wore a white shirt, the collar of which was way too large for his thin neck. He smoked Pall Malls , Kurt Vonnegut’s cigarette of choice , all the time. He would inhale by wrapping his lips around the cigarette and sucking as hard as he could the way others would use a straw to get every last bit of that chocolate malt at Zwicker’s soda fountain.

He said, “Come with me, young man to the Kasbah in an affected way that sounded like Tallulah Bankhead with a bad Russian accent , and he laughed nervously in a way that sounded like a sputtering machine gun.

He took me downstairs to a place called the “vault which was to become my hangout for the next eight weeks. It turned out to be a large windowless room in the basement of the Water Works building where all the files were to be stored. What seemed like hundreds of five-drawer file cabinets lined the walls and about six rows of floor to ceiling steel shelves stretched from one end of the room to the other.

My new boss explained my mission. “We just moved into this building six months ago. When we moved in we told the guys to just dump the files in the vault and that we’d organize everything later. Well, now is later. Your job is to go through all these files and organize things so we can find what we need when we need it. The hours are 8:30 to 5. You get 45 minutes for lunch and two 15 minute breaks , one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And by the way, you might want to wear old clothes because it’s really dusty down here. Then he left.

There I stood in the middle of the vault. It was at that moment when I had a realization: I hate clutter and I hate messes, and here I stood in the middle of the mother of all messes! Somebody had stuffed the file cabinets to overflowing so that you could hardly shut the drawers. The rows of shelves were mostly empty except for a few randomly scattered file boxes. However, in the open spaces of the vault, the movers had just stacked the boxes without rhyme or reason and in some cases just dumped individual files in heaps. I felt like the walls were closing in. Then I had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. I had absolutely no clue about what I was asked to organize. I pulled up a chair and started to wonder if maybe painting fire hydrants for the Public Works Department might have been a better option for the summer.

Then Ray showed up. He was looking for a file he knew he would never find. His main motivation was to escape the boring accounting work and his ledger sheets. Mostly he wanted to escape his boss Mr. S.. Ray was a writer. He wrote children’s books and as soon as his first one was published he was history. Of course, he had been telling everyone of this plan for most of the twenty-five years he was with the company.

“Hi, said Ray. “You must be the kid Mr. S. was talking about. I just came down to find a work order. You look like you just lost your best friend.

I explained to Ray that Mr. S. had just brought me down here, ordered me to organize the files, but never really told me what he expected.

“You need to know that when he is rushed he’s not good at directions! Besides that he’s a moron! Maybe I can help.

Ray then explained that the files consisted of four types of documents: purchase orders, work orders, invoices for the work orders, and correspondence related to each job. Each job required a work order for the labor, a purchase order for the parts, and an invoice for billing the parts and labor. What linked everything together was the job number. I then learned that the company I worked for, was the parent company of about thirty smaller utilities. So the key was to organize the files by company and then by work order. In just fifteen short minutes Ray had taught me what I needed to know – most managers forget this step because they think it is micro-managing – and he had given me hope.

He was also my link to the rest of the employees in the accounting department. There was a lunch room on the top floor of the building and he made sure I was always invited to eat with the guys.

Over the next eight weeks, I managed to organize those files. I also learned some things that have stayed with me ever since that hot summer of 1968: First, I can work alone when needed , that knowledge certainly helped me when I had to write my doctoral dissertation. Second, for what ever reason, people tell me their stories. During that summer I learned more about the frailties of the human condition than I had up to that point in my life simply by listening to the stories of Ray, his co-workers, and even Mr. S. Finally, I learned that no matter how big of mess you are in, there will always be a way out. The way out often requires patience and the ability to measure progress only from the perspective of months, years, or even decades later and that sometimes one’s boss is not very helpful but others are.

So what was your first job and what learnings have stuck with you?

My best friend from high school is a nuclear engineer. We have one of those relationships where, after not seeing each other for a couple of years, we can pick up the conversation trail from where we left off. The last time we had dinner, I asked Paul, what exactly does a nuclear engineer do? He said, very simply, I get to play with really expensive toys! After I told him what I really do , help people learn how to get work done through and with others – he said, “Ugh! You are the guy we engineers can’t stand. We want to play with our really expensive toys and you want us to talk with each other.

Yes, I do! The cornerstone of great working relationships is not about talking with each other. It is about building mutual understanding. Mutual understanding exists when each person in a relationship understands the other and is understood. It requires us to speak and listen for understanding. And here’s the key , mutual understanding just means understanding each other’s point of view. It does not mean agreement. When we fail to take time to understand each other we begin to make assumptions and we all know what happens when we work on assumptions alone!