Michael Beer: Our research over the last 20 years has shown that there are six core silent barriers that block companies from high commitment and high performance. We call them the silent killers because, like blood pressure and hypertension and cholesterol, they can kill without knowing that they exist.
In organizations, everyone knows that silent killers exist, but the senior teams don't. The silence is up the line, not among people. If you ever had any experience in organizations, you know that people often talk around water coolers, behind closed doors, about what's going on the company and how it's managed and how it's not working properly and how things ought to be different, about the strategy, about the organization. Those messages never get up to the top in a candid direct way that they should.
The second thing that is necessary in high commitment is some learning and governance process. Just like strategic planning didn't used to exist in organizations, 25-30 years ago, I argue that for firms to create sustainable performance, they need a learning and governance system.
What is that? That is a capacity for leaders at every level to have an honest, collective and public conversation about the status of the organization. What its strengths are and what its barriers are. Revealed to the senior team, is the truth about how the system is currently working or not working. Unless you have such an institutionalized process in a firm, new leaders can take charge and ignore all the investments that have been made prior to them in keeping the performance going, in keeping commitment going. It's too easy for the firm to be up-ended by the silence about critical barriers.
Leadership and learning need to focus on changing and improving three core design elements in such a system.
One is the strategic performance management system. How does senior management convey its strategy? How does it create the appropriate sets of measures? Are those appropriate to just financial results? Or do they include other elements like the balance scorecard idea of my colleague Bob Kaplan? How do they follow up? How do they create strategic initiatives that are connected to the strategy? How do they monitor them? How do they create cross-organizational initiatives to enable the strategic intent to be carried out over time? How do they review this information? Do they focus on just financial information, do they focus on customers, do they focus on employees, do they focus on the contributions of the organization to a larger good? How are they brought in into a coherent system of examining how the firm is performing?
High commitment high performance organizations also continually adapt their organization design, how they organize and manage people based on strategic shifts. They don't hold on to one way of organizing because how you organize has to vary and change base on strategy. So, they are able to essentially manage evolutions and revolutions in the organization design. They actually avoid revolutions because they try to evolve the organization as necessary, and are able to do that through the learning process that I've discussed and gain commitment that way.
Finally, they have to have a set of human resource policies that essentially create the commitment, a kind of organization I've talked about.
Discuss
Karim Homaifar on June 19, 2009, 9:21 PM
This man speaks common sense. Beer reminds us of principals we know and learned, but lost sight of somewhere along the way. Interesting note: these six “silent killers” can all be applied to how we conduct our personal and family lives too. Open widows and fresh air promote health and growth. Stale, closed environments stunt initiative, creativity and self-esteem. That’s what I think Mr. Beer is saying. Businesses need to learn this.
How would they apply to governmental operations? Thinking back on some of the huge failures in recent American presidential administrations- they were ignored- with tragic results: a war with no end in sight and an economy in distress.
colin day on June 19, 2009, 11:39 PM
Ethical behavior in the top management? Isn’t that almost an oxymoron? I think Beers has great ideas, but if he expects executives to follow his model, he will probably be very disappointed. Karim (above) makes valid points too, but I doubt many head honchos take this type of thinking under any consideration. They see any questioning as a threat and a challenge or disespectful to their “authority”.
Back to Karim and his question about the government/big business relationship. Do you keep up with the news? Executives payed themselves millions of dollars in bonuses as they planned to lay off people. All this under the eye of the government and paid for by us. All the while claiming the unions were making them go broke. Why does some guy who sits at a desk talking on the phone all day make a milion a year and the guy in the factory doing the real WORK is about to get his medical benefits cut?
Luke Star on June 24, 2009, 8:16 AM
I think that anything that humanizes the business world should be coveted. There are hundreds of thousands of us who sit in cubicles, and our emails bark orders at us every other minute …. so one who discusses the need for authenticity (as Mr Beer does powerfully in this interview) is good in my books. I don’t think I’ve ever had an open conversation with any of my managers in the past few years about authenticity.
Pamela Smith on July 1, 2009, 4:03 PM
I agree with Karim that most of what Beers says is simply common sense. At the core of what he’s talking about, though, is simply more free-flowing and candid transmittal of information flowing to, from and within organizations and institutions.
I fear, though, that the reason that most of these ‘silent killers’ exist is not a symptom of poor organizational structure. Rather, it’s a problem that stems from human nature and the culture that characterizes corporate America.
The cut-throat, hierarchical nature of corporate America affect how its constituents share information with one another, particularly within the upper echelons. Until a more egalitarian system prevails and American executives become more down-to-earth, this type of system is no more than a publicity effort to gain trust from lower-level employees, as opposed to a real, sweeping change.
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