ARTICLES
& REPORTS
Organizational
Innovation
About
Innovation Network
- O r g a n i z a t i o n a l _ I n n o v a t i o n -
Martin Raff
I was until the end of 1994, the Regional Director of the West Midlands Region of the Employment Service -- which is responsible for helping unemployed people find jobs and paying them the state unemployment allowance while they look for work. During this time I initiated and personally led a Deming-based transformation program involving all the Region's 5000 people. Most of the 5000 were the clerical officers who dealt with our unemployed customers.
The Region had traditionally been the worst performer in the Service -- relying on other Regions to make a greater than proportionate contribution towards the Service's national performance targets. It was an embarrassing position for a Regional Director. Also I had always disliked the command and control style of leadership (including mine) and the rigid hierarchical culture with it's treatment of the "boss as king" at all levels. I tried hard initially to get out of these two situations without success. None of the usual management methods such as: setting clear objectives; target based perform- ance discussions; team briefing; walking the talk; made any substantial difference. I now know that this is because transformational change needs to impact on the whole system, but I did not know that then.
But, a better understanding was on it's way! I visited the Nissan Motor manufacturing plant in Washington, County Durham, England to learn more, as I thought, about "communi-cations." I had heard Nissan was good at this. There I saw a way of working that completely changed my view of how an organization should run. The production line was organized into teams of around 10 people with a team leader. Each team had complete freedom to make any improvements they felt were needed to improve quality and productivity, provided they negotiated the change with their suppliers, the people before them on the line, or their customers down the line. They got daily control chart data and had all been trained in quality improvement tools and techniques. The team leader had responsibility for all aspects of management of the team, including hiring and decisions about time off etc. There were no other levels of boss between the team leader and the factory manager. And the commit- ment and energy of the teams was astonishing.
Nissan told me they based all this on the ideas of Deming, of whom I had not heard. But we immediately got the books and started our program. I appointed a Quality Manager and she was supported by 10 of our liveliest middle managers who trained as internal consultants. We nominated the top management group as the change leadership team. We appointed an external firm of Deming consultants who helped the leadership learn about Deming, helped us design our first change strategy and developed with us a tools and techniques training workshop which we could deliver ourselves.
We trained all 5000 people in the Deming principles and the basic quality improvement tools. We encouraged everyone to take responsibility for improving their own work processes -- either in work teams, office teams or by themselves. We emphasized the importance of data based improvement and the PDCA cycle. We contrasted this improvement process with those based on pet theories. "Where's your data?" or "That's a pet theory," became a regular comment in meetings -- especially when managers gave, as they had been used to do, their opinion without supporting evidence.
Giving the clerical officers the tools to analyze data was very empowering for them. It undermined the basis of the manager's autocratic power. He or she could no longer get away with, "Do it because I say so". Some managers took to this change readily and developed new ways of managing based on influencing and helping, but most resented what was happening. We had not foreseen this and had to do lot more work with the managers and it was not easy.
We got ideas from lots of other management thinkers -- Senge, Block, Covey, De Bono and more. And we discovered Real Time Strategic Change by Robert W. Jacobs (Berrett-Kohler) at Marriott Hotels in Washington D.C. This helped us learn about working with whole systems, and enabled us to involve everyone in a work group (up to 800 people) in strategic planning at large meetings. It changed top management's way of working and sped up the rate of culture change.
I had to change my own leadership style ... a difficult, tiring and painful process with lots of backsliding. I had to learn to listen, ask open questions, value the views of others -- even if they were opposed to mine, and to trust the judgments of others. I had to learn to genuinely welcome negative as well as positive feedback ... not easy for someone brought up in the command and control leadership style!
"Before the program, I had thought we had a shortage of talent."
As a result of all this, our performance improved -- during the fourth and fifth year of the program, we went from the bottom to the top of the performance league. In year 5 we were the only Region to exceed every performance target, some of them by a large measure. And, most satisfying of all for me, was the development of our people. Before the program I had thought we had a shortage of talent. But now, we had this amazing group of people who could achieve what was previously thought impossible. Visit- ors to the Region always commented on the breadth of knowledge and the enthusiasm of our people. They were especially astonished at what "mere" clerical officers could do.This alone made all the effort and difficulty of the program well worthwhile.
Martin Raff with VISTA Consulting can be reached at martin@vistaraff.win-uk.net phone and fax: +44-1789 840418.