Leader's Digest May 2007
From PLN
Leader's Digest May 2007
by Leslie Dillon
May 3, 2007
Organizational change: How transformational leadership makes it work
According to Price Waterhouse Coopers' publication Herding Cats: Human Change Management, about 75% of all organizational change initiatives fail. While most organizations say people are their most important assets, few act this way. Change projects usually devote most of their resources to technology and processes, but not staff. "Yet offering the right incentives to link corporate goals to individual career objectives is a critical success factor."
We all know people react differently to change, but did you know that they can be grouped into four broad categories?
- Originators: welcome dramatic change
- Conservers: prefer gradual change
- Pragmatists: prefer change that will address current problems
- Resisters: dislike all change
All of these types are necessary in a successful organization. Different people learn differently. So motivation and training should be more individualized. The standard practice, "taking employees off-site for intensive training," won't work. These courses try "to impart all the knowledge needed to all staff in one fell swoop, with little attempt to tailor it to a specific individual's job or learning style."
Hewlett Packard Education Services offers some guidelines for developing an effective organizational change plan.
- Set clear goals. Most organizations are not clear enough defining their goals and objectives.
- Assess your culture and your “change absorption” capacity. There are different types of change; gradual, radical, reactive, proactive and others.
- Identify and confirm where the drive or demand for change is coming from.
- Identify the gaps between your organizational goals and where you are today.
- Develop a change plan that is clear and allows organizations and individuals to understand where they fit.
- Establish metrics and incentives aligned with key success factors.
- Clarify and communicate your plan.
Finally, be sure you can answer two key questions you'll get from staff:
- What does this mean to me?
- Why are you telling me this now?
For further reading, see Why People Matter by Jenny Dugmore and Shirley Lacy, published by BSI (UK).
(Mark J. Dawson and Mark L. Jones, Herding Cats: Human Change Management; Hewlett Packard Education Services, HPES ME - Herding Cats – Organizational Change Management)
FAST strategy
Well-known independent management consultant John Hagel advocates implementing the FAST approach to strategy. FAST is an acronym for Focus, Accelerate, Strengthen and Tie it all together. This approach urges operating on two different time horizons: one takes a five- to ten-year view; the second is a more tactical six- to 12-month approach.
Focus is the key activity on the 5- to 10-year horizon. Senior managers must "develop a common view" on these two key questions:
- Five to ten years from now what will the markets we participate in look like?
- What kind of business will we need to have to continue to create value in these markets?"\
On the six- to 12-month horizon, the key requirements are: Accelerate (identify a few key operating initiatives) and Strengthen (identify major obstacles to moving faster; "de-bottleneck" and strenghten the organization so it can move faster). "Tieing it all together integrates these three streams of activities." The FAST approach favors incrementalism but recognizes that, without direction, it can lead to suboptimization. (John Hagel, Fast Strategy, Strategyworld.org., Apr. 28, 2007.)
Retired but still working
According to industry experts, the talent pool won't be reduced as much as predicted because aging workers are putting off traditional retirement and "pursuing new opportunities." This "re-careering" is due to several reasons:
- Boredom with retirement: 22 percent
- A need to be productive: 21 percent
- A need to have an intellectual challenge: 20 percent
- Insufficient savings: 13 percent
- A need for personal interaction: 13 percent
"While this won't cure the impending talent crunch, it will provide more opportunity for younger executives to learn from Baby Boomers before they retire completely." (Stacy Straczynski, "Retired but not out of the workforce," managesmarter, Apr. 20, 2007.)
Does print still matter?
Brian Kenney, editor of School Library Journal, gave this year's Lazerow Lecture at Dominican University's Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In his talk on the future of print, he noted that while print won't disappear just yet, the shift away from print "will be erratic, chaotic, likely to escalate in surprising ways, and, more than anything, be tremendously disruptive." This movement is user-driven and highly creative. Blogs are one of the mechanisms creating new content, and some blogs "contextualize" their content. The New York Times is moving into the 2.0 world by integrating the "user experience--and opinion--[which] radically changes the construct of the traditional newspaper." The "missing guest at this new party" is books. His research shows that people think books are too heavy, you can't carry many around, and they go out-of-date too fast. Kenny concluded by saying that librarians "just need the creativity, the courage, and the daring to continuously reinvent ourselves for this new world." Michael Stephens, "Does print still matter? Brian Kenney on the future of content in a 2.0 world," ALA TechSource blog, Apr. 30, 2007.)
The social life of libraries
An article in the current issue of Duke University Libraries looks into social networking sites and discovers 17 Facebook groups named after Duke's new Bostock Library. The Duke libraries are starting to experiment with some social software tools, including Connotea, a free online reference management tool for academics. When users find references, they save links to them on Connotea and add keywords describing them. References can also be shared with colleagues. Also being explored is Elgg, an open source social software tool that allows online collaboration between students and faculty. Each user has a dashboard where he/she can create and subscribe to blogs, share files and much more. Most of Elgg's users are schools and universities in Europe. (Paolo Mangiafico, "The social life of libraries," Duke University Libraries, Spring/Summer 2007.)
Quick takes
36% of online Americans use Wikipedia
In case you haven't already seen it, a Pew Internet and American Life report reveals that 36% of American adult internet users consult Wikipedia. On a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia. It's particularly popular with the well-educated and with college-age students. Wikipedia's popularity stems from the sheer extent and currency of its content and from the fact that the huge number of links give it very high Google rankings. "In fact, Wikipedia has become the #1 external site visited after Google's search page, receiving over half of its traffic from the search engine." (Pew Internet and American Life, Wikipedia Users, Apr. 24, 2007 via ResourceShelf, Apr. 25, 2007.).)
Netflix @ your library
Exeter (RI) Public Library has subscribed to Netflix. When a title is checked out, patrons can request that the library get it from Netflix. Patrons place a paper or email request, and if the title isn't available, the library goes into its Netflix account and orders it. The patron is notified when the movie arrives and can check out the DVD for a week. (Shifted Librarian, Apr. 22, 2007.)
Free online course on outcomes & evaluation
Shaping Outcomes, an online course on outcomes-based planning and evaluation, will be available free to museum and library professionals this summer and fall. The instructor-mediated course, which will help participants improve program designs and evaluations, was developed through a cooperative agreement between the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). (ResourceShelf, Apr. 30, 2007.)
May 11, 2007
Harvard Business Review
As usual, the May issue of Harvard Business Review has some excellent articles that library managers can benefit from reading. Here are brief summaries of a few of them. Several of this month's articles are freely available.
Service with a very big smile
The bigger employees’ smiles, the happier their customers! Researchers tracked 173 customer-employee encounters in coffee shops, scoring the employees’ “smile strength” at various points in the transaction. The bigger the employee’s smile, the more likely customers were to view that person as competent and the encounter as satisfying.
But requiring employees to smile can backfire! Forcing workers to act friendly when they don’t feel friendly can lead to job burnout and depression. Forced smiles also look phony, and customers know a fake when they see one.
Managers need to create an environment that encourages genuine smiles, and, the researchers suggest, “hire happy people.” ("Service with a very big smile," Harvard Business Review, May 2007. Free! Just click on the link.)
Why employees are afraid to speak
In a word--self-preservation. And they’re just as afraid to share innovative ideas as to blow the whistle. The authors interviewed over 200 people to identify the factors that cause employees to bring ideas to their bosses--or withhold them.
"What they were most reticent to talk about were not problems but rather creative ideas for improving products, processes, or performance." Employees were inhibited from speaking out by broad, often vague perceptions about the work environment. Making employees feel safe enough to contribute fully requires deep cultural change that alters how they understand the costs vs. the benefits of speaking up. Leaders "must explicitly invite and acknowledge others’ ideas (this does not mean they must always implement them)."
(James R. Detert and Amy C. Edmondson, "Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak," Harvard Business Review, May 2007. Free! Just click on the link.)
Inner work life: Understanding the subtext of business performance
Managers know that employees have good days and bad days--but how do those swings affect performance? People perform better when their workday includes more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work) and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders and their organization. And managers’ behavior dramatically affects employees’ inner work lives.
The single most important differentiator between employees’ best days and their worst days “was their sense of being able to make progress in their work... Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and their managers appropriately recognized that work.” (Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “Inner work life: Understanding the subtext of business performance,” Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2007. Full text is available from HBR for $6.00 or on EBSCOhost's Business Source Premier.)
The authentic leader
The best leaders are not the "follow me over the hill" type. Instead, they lead from the heart as well as the head, and their leadership style springs from their fundamental character and values. Harvard Business School professor Bill George discusses his new book True North, co-written with Peter Sims. Key concepts include:
- Leadership style can be broken down into takers and givers. Takers are often charismatic personalities who end up making decisions to enrich their own coffers and careers. Givers, on the other hand, create value and empower employees to become leaders.
- The life of a leader can be lonely. Seek continuing help from mentors and truthful advisers.
- Authentic leadership can be taught through a series of five steps that lead to self-awareness.
These five steps include:
- Knowing your "authentic self," i.e., learning to be self-aware.
- Focusing on the values and principles that matter to you.
- Discovering what motivates you.
- Building a support team.
- Trying to forge "an integrated life" that augments work with such things as family, friends, community service, exercise, church and whatever else matters in your life.
(Bill George, "The authentic leader," Harvard Business School Working Knowledge podcast, May 2, 2007 and book review on Amazon.com.)
Managing organizational change in the library
At a session on organizational change at the recent LOEX conference, facilitators Wendy Holliday (University of Southern Utah) and Kristen Bullard (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) used a conflicting values assessment tool to evaluate their organizational cultures. This Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (free here!) measures organizations according to four quadrants or characteristics:
- Clan Culture: very friendly place like an extended family where teamwork, participation and consensus are the dominant modes of decision-making.
- Adhocracy Culture: places an emphasis on entrepreneurship and creativity. People are encouraged to stick their necks out and take risks. The organization encourages individual initiative and freedom.
- Market Culture: the focus is on results and getting the job done. Leaders are drivers, tough and demanding. The organizational style is hard-driving competitiveness.
- Hierarchy Culture: formal and structured, this culture emphasizes procedures and managers are good organizers who focus on efficiency.
Members of each organization responded to the questions twice: first assessing the organization's culture and second saying what they would like the culture to be. Both organizations leaned heavily toward the clan or adhocracy culture.
The real value of this tool isn't the picture of the current culture or the preferred culture; instead, it's the conversation that takes place about the organization's culture. "So the value is not in where the lines get drawn, but in the conversation about why the lines are drawn." (Texas Forums, May 6, 2007.)
How to kill innovation
There are six kinds of innovation. One of them is bottom-up innovation, where fresh ideas bubble up from the shop floor or front-line troops. It happens in companies like Toyota, where they encourage and empower employees to come up with better ways of doing things. Amazon gives a prize to people whose ideas were well thought out, even if they fail to encourage people to share their ideas. The person who came up with the idea must have implemented it without asking permission, emphasizing that ideas require action.
The reason more organizations don't adopt this approach may lie in an obscure creativity study called "Strategy for Creation," in which two Japanese researchers found that only 5% of the people in most organizations are idea creators, 10% are idea supporters and promoters and a full 85% are idea killers. What squelches ideas most often is the corporate culture itself. But the biggest obstacle may be the stigma of failure and the punishment that too often results from failure. "In organizations where failure is punished, innovation is inevitably the casualty, for what is the process of innovation but the process of taking risk?" (Innovation Weekly, May 9, 2007, from Real Innovation.)
Google burrows into state government data
Public sector data is "authoritative, often unique, sometimes comprehensive, and open to many uses as public domain content." But "accessibility has never been one of its strengths." Google is moving to change that with its search engine and the free Sitemap protocol. Google is partnering with Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia "to begin opening up previously hard-to-find public information."
Google wants to connect “citizens with their government by offering the public better access to public sector information and services,” said Google’s chairman and CEO, Eric Schmidt.
This effort began last year. Google's talking points promoting the initiative are here. The presentation tailored to California is here. For a list of agencies from each state already contributing data to the new Google initiative, see the appendix at the end of the NewsBreak article. (Barbara Quint, "Google burrows into state government data," Information Today NewsBreaks, May 7, 2007.)
May 16, 2007
Key to managing your star performers: Think team
A study by two Harvard Business School professors of “star” knowledge workers shows that while a star’s past performance indicates future performance, the quality of colleagues in his or her organization has a significant impact on quality of performance.
“Stars need to recognize that despite their talent, knowledge, experience, and reputation, who they work with really matters for sustaining top performance.”
Managers need to understand that their star performers aren’t “self-contained silos.” Top-quality knowledge workers need “collaboration and flows of information among a network of top performers.” Losing the ties to other top performing colleagues can be detrimental to performance.
(Martha Lagace, “Key to managing stars: Think team," HBS Working Knowledge, May 14, 2007, based on Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee’s forthcoming article, "The effects of colleague quality on top performance: The case of security analysts," in Journal of Organizational Behavior.)
Emotional intelligence on the front line
Managers need to focus on the interactions that are important to customers--and on how their frontline staff handle those interactions.
“Many consumer-facing businesses perform poorly on the front line.” What’s missing is “the spark between the customer and frontline staff--the spark that helps transform wary or skeptical people into strong and committed brand followers. That spark and the emotionally driven behavior that creates it explain how great customer service companies earn trust and loyalty during ‘moments of truth’: those few interactions (for instance, a lost credit card, a canceled flight, a damaged piece of clothing or investment advice) when customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome.” Superb handling of these moments requires a response that puts the customer’s emotional needs ahead of the company’s.
One study showed that after a positive “moment of truth” at a bank, over 85% of the customers surveyed bought additional products; but when things “turned sour”, 70% reduced their commitment.
(Marc Beaujean, Jonathan Davidson, and Stacey Madge, “The ‘moment of truth’ in customer service,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2006, No. 1, and “Emotional intelligence on the front line,” The McKinsey Quarterly Chart Focus Newsletter, May 2007.)
Marketing your library from the patrons' point of view
People don’t automatically assume that libraries are intrinsically good. So how do we get patrons (and non-patrons) to take advantage of some of our services some of the time?
Jill Stover at Virginia Commonwealth University believes we need to communicate with our customers in terms of things they care about. In other words, what are the benefits to them of using the library? “Patrons probably don’t care about your interlibrary loan service, but they do care about getting that tough-to-find book in time to finish their report. Saving time and writing top-notch reports is a benefit; offering interlibrary loan is a service or feature.” In marketing our services, it’s important to focus on the benefits instead of the features.
An Initial Benefit Statement (IBS) tells customers why they should care. In sales it’s used as an opener in sales presentations and sales calls. Developing an IBS is useful because it forces us to think from the patron’s point of view.
Here’s how to create an IBS:
- Think about a service you offer. List the reasons your patrons should care about the service. Ask patrons who use the service why they use it.
- Develop a statement that briefly explains the most important benefits, such as, “Gives you the ability to,” “Saves you [time, stress, hassle],” “Increases your [productivity, profits, marketability],” etc. You know you’re on the wrong track if your IBS says things like, “Our library features…,” “We provide access to…,” “We house X number of…,” you get the idea. A good IBS emphasizes the you (customer); a bad IBS emphasizes the we/us (librarians/libraries).
- Use your competitive advantage. E.g., “Devise sound business plans and save money with Great Local Library--the only local organization to provide you free one-to-one research assistance with highly-trained information professionals who use the latest market research tools.”
(Jill Stover, Library Marketing--Outside the Book, May 15, 2007.)
Where the book business is humming
Print media are booming in the developing world. In Ukraine Bertelsmann is seeing rapid expansion for its Family Leisure book club. Bertelsmann is Ukraine’s biggest bookseller, with 12% of the market and profit margins that are triple the 4% average for other Bertelsmann units, like Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild. Bertelsmann has also become the biggest book publisher in the Czech Republic and is seeing big successes in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere.
These book clubs are “part of a broader trend...in the developing world.” Newspapers are thriving in India, and in Argentina the number of books published has more than doubled since 2002.
In the U.S., book clubs serve older customers. But almost half the Family Leisure Club’s 2 million members (Ukraine’s population is 47 million) are under 30. “The secret: The Bertelsmann club recruits hot young Ukrainian authors and serves as their exclusive distributor.”
Keeping prices low is also critical. The average income in Ukraine is less than $8,000 a year. Family Leisure titles sell for under $5.
(”Where the Book Business is Humming," Business Week, May 14, 2007.)
Change and the bunker mentality
Instead of becoming old hands at change, employees are becoming “change-weary.” Employers need to take note of that weariness and address it head-on because the success of any organizational change “ultimately lies with the employees.” They can “make or break an initiative.” In fact, employee resistance was ranked as the major obstacle to change initiatives in a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.
Leadership assessment research has found that executives at the vice president level and above are lacking in the skills necessary to oversee major shifts.
One factor that helps employees accept change is seeing the boss “demonstrate a genuine caring for staffers.” Executives need to acknowledge the discomfort that comes with change, even as they make the case for its necessity. But if they don’t share with their “staff the decision-making process, industry dynamics and business needs, they’ve missed a valuable opportunity. Providing such context...can be a factor in helping employees appreciate the bigger picture.”
Effective leaders can create an energy that can be contagious. Organizations need to get “those people out and about as much as possible, so they can carry the message to forums large and small.”
Organizations should also involve employees who are seen as opinion leaders by their peers. “Get these potential evangelists involved in visible projects.”
(Patricia Kitchen, “Change and the bunker mentality,” Newsday.com, May 13, 2007.)
Enhancing the catalog
The Danbury (CT) Library has added LibraryThing for Libraries to their catalog.
LibraryThing adds 3 pieces of data to your records:
- Other editions and translations
- Similar books
- Tags and Tag Browser
(Read more about it at Thingology Blog, May 14, 2007.)
Observation is the key to successful product innovation
When developing new products, Electrolux sends out teams of observers, including designers and representatives from the marketing, manufacturing and finance departments. They’ve found that the insights they get from this process are far better than using just focus groups because focus groups can only tell you things they are fully aware of and able to articulate. This approach is used for all types of business innovation at Electrolux, not just developing new products. (Innovation, May 15, 2007 from CEO Forum May 2007,)
