Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker

There's an unnoticed population of employees in business today. Strangely enough, they're also the majority.

The diagram below illustrates the labels that organizations often use (knowingly or unknowingly) to classify their employees. The y-axis focuses on how a professional is measured on meeting the organizational performance criteria that fuel the business engine. The x-axis centers on how the professional fares on meeting the expectations of the human engine. In each of the four corners, we find the Stars, Sinners, Low Performers, and Saints. I'll go into more detail on the four corners of the diagram in my next post, but for now, I want to bring to your attention those falling in the middle of the diagram — the Stalwarts.

These solid citizens make up the majority of employees in most organizations. The odds are you may find yourself among the Stalwarts at some point in your career, no matter how high-revving your internal drive is. If so, you probably will find yourself questioning your significance.

That's because, despite the number of Stalwarts in an organization, these good, solid citizens of the organization go largely unnoticed. Few leaders think about the motivation, inclusion, and explicit career management of the solid performers. One Fortune 500 leader said, "I thought that it couldn't be true that so many workers are systematically ignored through no fault of their own (except for the fact that they may not be politically astute or they don't draw attention to themselves). But the more I reflected on my own company, the more I realized that I spend all my time worrying about the high performers and assume that everything is OK with everyone else."

So what exactly is the Stalwart temperament? Perhaps the defining characteristic of Stalwarts is their aversion to calling attention to themselves — even when they need to. They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease. The quickest way to identify Stalwarts is to list the people who make the fewest demands on the CEO's time. Such reserve is utterly alien to most Stars, who make sure that they squeak loudly enough to get the attention they want.

The other signature trait of Stalwarts is their deep loyalty to the organization. They are responsible and care deeply about the organization's values, and they generally steer clear of risk. Stalwarts are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization, and they let their own careers take a backseat to the company's well-being. They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine.

If you're an executive or leader who manages Stalwarts, it may be time to reexamine the way you perceive your Stalwart colleagues. Leaders often have several misconceptions about Stalwart employees, including the following:

Myth #1: Stars are smarter than Stalwarts. Stalwarts are not necessarily less intelligent than Stars. Achievement is a complicated blend of intelligence, motivation, and personality. Research confirms that insight; dozens of psychological studies have demonstrated that Stars and Stalwarts differ at least as much in temperament as intelligence.

Myth #2: Everybody is the same. Not every employee wants to give his all (or even his best) to the organization, leaving little time and energy for people and passions outside the workplace. Stalwarts place a high premium on work-life balance, and they highly value the time they spend with family and friends. In fact, many of the most productive Stalwarts are recovered Stars who, for a variety of personal reasons, have made a conscious decision to drop off the fast track.

Myth #3: Everybody wants the same thing out of work. Leaders often assume that all of their followers share their drive for power, status, and money. That's just not so. Many Stalwarts want to influence others in their jobs. Others value autonomy, creative opportunities, or the chance to develop unique expertise.

Myth #4: Everybody wants to be promoted. Not every employee wants to climb the ladder and rise to corporate prominence. The truth is that many Stalwarts seek recognition and stability rather than promotion. Stalwarts strive for advancement, but not at all costs.

Myth #5: Everybody wants to be a manager. Corporate career-planning practices typically operate on the assumption that people will feel rewarded and special if they are given even nominal management responsibilities. For that reason, we often ask Stalwarts to give up their technical competencies for managerial ones. In the process, we often turn terrific specialists into mediocre managers.

Stalwarts bring depth and stability to the companies they work for, slowly but surely improving both corporate performance and organizational resilience. They are always there as quiet yet powerful reminders to high performers obsessed with themselves or as examples to low performers terrified of failure. They will never garner the most revenue or the biggest clients, but they are also less likely to embarrass the company or flunk out. They know intuitively how to stay grounded even when their footing may be unsure. And while managers often take this amazing ability for granted, it brings real value to organizations day after day. In times of crisis, Stalwarts can be an organization's saving grace.

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
Thomas J. DeLong
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:54:03 GMT

Visual workflow – driving productivity in the office environment

Support functions, from HR and finance to product development, have to manage a complex mixture of repetitive, project and adhoc work. Teams must prepare updates and reports on a regular basis and must ensure that both internal and external customers are handled in a timely manner. They must also respond at any time to unexpected requests for action or information from across the organization – frequently urgent requests from senior managers who are unaware of the disruption they cause. On top of all this, staff may be asked to spend considerable time in meetings to discuss, review and plan their work.

This environment makes it extremely difficult for managers and team leaders to measure and improve performance. Their teams may be working on multiple projects simultaneously. Without knowing who is doing what, it can be hard for leaders to help their teams prioritize tasks. Problems arise from this lack of transparency. For example, work may be unevenly allocated, with staff overwhelmed some days and under-occupied on others; or issues that threaten the delivery of important work may not become clear until it is too late to fix them. Most importantly, without a clear understanding of exactly how tasks are being completed, it is almost impossible to identify performance improvement opportunities. These issues drive poor utilization and productivity of staff simply because tasks are not effectively or efficiently managed. Contrast this with a manufacturing line, where basic measures of productivity (i.e., the rate of product being manufactured) are far more abundant and widely understood.

We have seen the support functions in a range of companies gain enormous benefit from a simple but extremely effective visual management system: the T-card board (Exhibit). Such boards are a familiar sight on factory floors and in maintenance workshops, where they are used to allocate tasks and to track progress. It is rare, however, to see them adopted in a whitecollar service environment.

Exhibit: A standard workflow board layout aids communication and simplifies cross-team reviews

Building and using the board

Typically, the T-Card board is set up to show a one or two-week schedule of work for a single team. Each team member has their own section on the board, with a limited number of slots per day. This limit is designed to keep the workload to a realistic volume, helping to minimize overtime and highlight capacity constraints. Regular tasks, including meetings and other project or administrative activities, are each recorded on a T-card in a standard format and allocated on the board by the team member at the beginning of each day.

Each morning, the whole team meets in front of the board for a performance discussion. Lasting 15 minutes, and with a tightly structured agenda, its aim is to discuss the jobs allocated for the day, review the completion status of the previous day’s activities and highlight any problems. Unresolved issues and key performance indicators are displayed next to the board for quick reference and provide a fact base for performance discussions.

During the day, team members tackle each of the tasks allocated to them and, when the task is finished, turn the relevant T-card over in its slot to show it as “complete.” This allows anyone to understand the current status of the team with a quick glance at the board. For example, if by mid-afternoon there are still a significant number of cards not showing the "complete" status, it is immediately apparent to team members and senior managers that work is not progressing as planned and remedial action can quickly be taken.

When requests for ad-hoc work come in, perhaps as the result of a telephone call or email from a customer, the team member receiving the request takes a blank T-card, fills in the details of the task and then places it in the next available slot on the board. Different colored T-cards highlight the different classes of work. For example, all ad-hoc work may be tracked on white cards, while regular tasks use green cards, and meetings orange ones.

The impact of the card

The introduction of T-card boards can have a rapid and profound effect on the way work is managed in support functions. Because each team member has only a finite number of slots in which to allocate tasks each day, the tradeoffs between competing tasks that may previously have been implicit, become explicit. Team members are able to give their customers much more reliable estimates for the delivery of work requests. At the same time, the daily reviews of upcoming tasks mean that teams more consistently prioritize work that is most important, rather than the customers who shout the loudest. A real-time visual record of task progress helps team leaders too. They can see at a glance if a team member is struggling to achieve what they need to do and can intervene as necessary, providing coaching and support to help them improve their performance. Or they can reallocate tasks if one team member becomes overloaded.

Furthermore, team leaders can use the board to streamline some activities. For example, a team leader can see all of the meetings their team plans to attend for the day (each shown on a color-coded card) and has the opportunity to reduce unnecessary meeting attendance – a common problem in officebased functions. At one large institution, the introduction of the T-card systems precipitated a 20 percent reduction in total meeting time within a month of its introduction. The company was able to reduce the number of ad-hoc meetings and standardize core customer and team meetings into a regular pattern with set agendas and attendees.

Most powerfully, a clearer understanding of the way work actually flows through a department provides the foundation for continuous improvement efforts. Often for the first time, team leaders and senior managers can see which teams are able to complete tasks most efficiently. This allows them to identify best-practices that they can communicate to others.

The workflow board also enables effective problem capture, allowing issues to be tackled in regular problem-solving sessions with team members and management. At one company, recording ad-hoc work requests on the T-card board made it immediately obvious that a large amount of work was coming from a small minority of customers, for example. Managers were able to interview these customers, discuss their requirements and see if more of that work could be scheduled in advance to reduce its disruptive effect.

The impact

The introduction of a visual performance management system in the white-collar environment often creates significant concern among staff. They fear that it may add an administrative burden or reduce the autonomy that they see as an important part of their professional roles. Sometimes managers resist the idea too, expecting systems of this type to be automated and embedded into IT solutions. It can help to explain clearly to front-line staff and team leaders that the workflow system aims to improve the efficiency of the team, improve customer service and allow more time to be spent on true value-adding activities. Ultimately, however, it will take a leap of faith to pilot the system and see it in action.

In our experience, demonstration is usually compelling, and attitudes among staff typically change within a few weeks of the introduction of a workflow management approach. The ability to physically move tasks and reassign, track and complete them, together with the regular interactions at team performance discussions, help to bring the work to life. The simplicity of the Tcard system also means teams can fine-tune and improve it to meet their specific needs. By contrast, an IT-based solution can be harder to evolve and less interactive. Once comfortable with the operation of the card-based workflow system, some companies explore the potential use of IT solutions to automate the production of KPIs and simulate the interactions using virtual T-card

* * *

Workflow management systems can be a core part of the "journey to lean" for business support functions, providing a solid basis on which to track and improve performance. The clear, visual representation of work is something that workers and team leaders find useful and satisfying too. Such a simple, powerful approach has been confined to the workshop for far too long■

About the author: Simon Middleton is a consultant at the Production Systems Design Center in the McKinsey London Office

 

 

What Do You Want to Say You’ve Done?

Several years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues about a project he was thinking about taking on. We were both solidly in the middle of our careers, but his evaluation of the possible project surprised me. He said, "There are a limited number of things that I'll be able to say I've done in my career, and I'm just not convinced that this should be one of them."

What struck me about this conversation is that it took a backward-looking perspective. That is, my colleague projected himself to the end of his career and looked backward over his contribution.

By contrast, most of us tend to be forward-looking. We make decisions based on how we think that particular decision might influence the next stage. This strategy can be seen clearly in politics, where politicians often make decisions based on what will help them get re-elected.

Research on regret has made a similar distinction. Psychologist Tom Gilovich and his colleagues have compared the regrets of college students to those of people in their 70s and 80s. College students asked about what they regret almost always talk about actions they took that did not go well: asking someone out and getting turned down, getting drunk, or failing a test. In contrast, older people generally regret actions that they did not take: not learning to dance, not asking out an attractive person, not taking advantage of an opportunity, etc. The backward-looking perspective highlights missed opportunities and things left unsaid.

Throughout your career, there will be many potentially pivotal moments — times when you make decisions that might shape the next several years of your life. In these moments, there is a tendency to be risk-averse. People shy away from opportunities that might go wrong for fear that they will regret failing.

A second line of research, though, suggests that you should not be too afraid of failure. Psychologist Dan Gilbert and his colleagues have done work exploring how people's lives are affected by negative events. For example, he asked a number of assistant professors who were being evaluated for tenure how they would feel six months after the decision. Unsurprisingly, people predicted that they would be happier if they got tenure than if they did not.

The surprising part comes from a follow-up survey six months after the tenure decision. Professors didn't report feeling any happier if they had received tenure than if they had been denied tenure. That is, the many other facets of their lives that influence happiness (family, friends, health, etc.) had such a strong influence on their overall life satisfaction, that even what appeared to be a devastating blow to their careers did not have a huge effect on their life satisfaction.

The outcome of this experiment suggests that it is worthwhile to take a backward perspective on key career decisions. The specter of failure looms large when there is potential risk in a particular course of action. When looking forward, the risk of failure seems important. But even significant failures are unlikely to derail your career, and what seems like a catastrophe may have little impact on your overall life satisfaction.

Instead, base your career decisions (at least in part) on what hope to say when you look back on your life. You may not always succeed, but are unlikely to look back with regret on those decisions that gave you the opportunity to reach your aspirations. And statistically you are much more likely to look back with regret on the roads not taken.

John Lennon famously wrote, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." It is easy to get caught up in small projects and the day-to-day minutia of business. At least once a year, though, it is important to take stock of how you are progressing on your larger goals. If you find that you have not accomplished anything in the past year that you will look back on with pride, think about what you can do in the coming year to get you a step closer to doing what you want to have done.

Finally, encourage your colleagues to take the same approach. Every company has lofty goals. An organization that consistently looks back on the present from the desired future has an excellent chance of achieving those goals.

What Do You Want to Say You've Done?
Art Markman
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:56:26 GMT