At the crossroads of results

Good leaders create a culture of engagement and involvement where people step up to crucial, high-stakes conversations.

by Steve Willis

Ray feels stuck. For all the investments he has made in his plant, he has only seen meager returns, nothing near the leaps and bounds he expected to make. 

As plant manager, Ray is responsible for producing results through maximum utilization of all plant resources. He has a clear idea of what needs to happen in order to succeed, and a comprehensive strategy to achieve the desired results. And, over the last couple of years, he has made all the necessary investments to enhance critical plant capabilities: lean manufacturing, just in time inventory, Six Sigma quality controls. You name it, Ray and his team have adopted it. At first, the new programs pushed results higher, but very soon productivity and quality gains plateaued, dropping back down to pre-initiative levels. Leaps and bounds have quickly turned into hops and skips, rapidly approaching crawls and drags. 

Ray is not unlike many plant managers. They’re poised at the crossroads of results. They understand the outcomes expected of them, and yet like Ray, many of their best efforts, ideas, programs and strategies come up short. Why?

In a recent study of American workers, researcher Daniel Yankelovich found that 75 percent of employees indicated they were not being fully utilized. What does this really mean? It means workers have more creativity, innovation and effort to contribute than they currently do. In other words, a gap exists in discretionary effort. Consequently, many brilliant strategies suffer or outright fail as they rush headlong into this gap.

At VitalSmarts, a corporate training company, we’ve found those leaders who “mind the gap” can move individuals, teams, plants and organizations toward achieving the results they need and want. In essence, these leaders actively work to create an atmosphere where all ideas, plans and strategies are examined and tested instead of being openly accepted and silently shunned. They create a culture of engagement and involvement where people step up to these crucial, high stakes conversations, and where employees at all levels are as interested in exploring the opinions and perspectives of others as they are at expressing their own views.

The theory at work
At Lockheed Martin, the ability to “mind the gap” had a huge pay-off. In the summer of 1997, senior executives found themselves in a tight spot. They were competing for a $200 billion contract, the largest in the history of their industry. When the executives honestly assessed their company, they found it was characterized by infighting, political behavior, and silo-oriented attitudes — a mode of operation that tended to smother creative thinking, bog down decision making, and waste precious time and resources. Like Ray, they were stuck.

Desperate for change, the executives drove to the root of the problem. They understood that poor results are often an indicator of missed opportunities to shrink the gap of understanding that results from not holding crucial conversations about mission-critical strategies and performance. With this knowledge, they devised a systematic, purposeful effort to identify and change how people habitually faced these crucial conversations. They expected the change initiative to spur innovation and achieve rapid and measurable improvement in results.

In December 1999, executives measured their progress. In a survey administered that same month, improvements in targeted crucial conversations behaviors exceeded 13 percent. But more importantly, results improved markedly. Correlations between crucial conversation metrics and improvements in unit performance, efficiency, labor and rework costs returned statistically significant results representing about a 9 percent increase in productivity, or roughly $20 million in savings year over year.

While the numbers speak for themselves, changes in culture became even clearer as Lockheed Martin underwent a corporate assessment for the coveted Shingo Prize for manufacturing excellence. In the end, not only did the company win that prize, the company was applauded specifically for its breakthrough approaches to increasing employee involvement, management’s ability to lead and influence an organization toward measurably improved performance, and the ultimate reward of winning the $200 billion contract.

What Lockheed Martin’s experience illustrates is that the key to “minding the gap” is helping individuals step up to crucial conversations where the stakes are high and opinions vary. These conversations happen day in and day out. They occur in planning meetings, problem assessments, Six Sigma efforts, performance reviews, and everywhere else high-stakes issues and opposing views are present. Stepping up to and holding these conversations well is the way high-performing organizations shrink the gap of discretionary effort. They encourage innovation and learning, not simple compliance.

Skills you can use
To help you get unstuck and “mind the gap” of discretionary effort in your organization, implement the following crucial conversation skills:

Assume the best. Often, leaders make an incorrect assumption as to why people don’t contribute at a higher level. They assume that individuals fail to contribute, push back, or add their perspective because they simply don’t want to — simply, it’s a motivation problem. Making this assumption renders leaders ineffective because they lay the blame for the poor results at the feet of others instead of considering how circumstances, events, and their own leadership style contribute. To broaden your view, ask, “Why would a reasonable, rational and decent human being act this way?”

Help others feel safe. Many people believe that certain topics are destined to make other people defensive. Skilled folks realize people don’t become defensive until they feel unsafe. Try starting your next high-stakes conversation by assuring the other person of your positive intentions and your respect for them. When others feel respected and trust your motives, they let their guard down and begin to listen, even if the topic is unpleasant. Create safe forums to solicit candid feedback and honest opinions concerning strategies, plans, and initiatives.

Invite dialogue. After you create a safe environment, confidently share your views. Once you’ve done so, invite differing opinions. This means you actually encourage the other person to disagree with you. Those who are best at crucial conversations aren’t just out to make their point; they want to learn. If your goal is just to dump on others, they’ll resist you. If you are open to hearing other points of view, they’ll be more open to yours. Finally, if you can’t remember anything else in the heat of the moment, ask yourself, “Are we in silence or violence?” If so, do your best to return to healthy dialogue.

Make the invisible visible. During high-stakes conversations, pay attention to both what’s being said (content) as well as how it’s being said (conditions). Those who are masters at influence manage both content and conditions, but especially conditions. When conditions start to fail, they make what is often invisible to others visible — they point it out so that it can be addressed and corrected.

This article originally appeared in the 2005 ISA Business Expo issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2005.

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