United Airlines has been in a financial and operating crisis for years, many cancelled flights with made up excuses, combative customer service a "not our problem" attitude. They haven't brought their employees or customers into the problem to help create a permanent solution, and therefore won't achieve one. They have a crisis, but not a Crisis Mentality!
jetBlue had a spike crisis, with many cancellations and people sitting on planes for long hours. They openly acknowledged it, the CEO said publicly he was "mortified", they changed operating procedures, issued a passengers' bill of rights, and inundated their customers with apologies and compensation. Within a week most of their previously happy, but subsequently very disgruntled, passengers were back in the fold. jetBlue will be stronger for taking a crisis situation and turning it into a Positive Crisis.
Whether you’re the incumbent CEO who finally understands the need to create constructive change or the new CEO brought in because the incumbent couldn’t or wouldn’t step up, creating a crisis mentality is paramount. Simply presenting your new round of speeches and proclamations—no matter how clear, intelligent, direct and charismatic you may be—is a waste of time. They must buy into the fact that it’s a new day, that radical change is mandatory, and that their livelihoods are at stake.
Bandura, widely acknowledged as the reigning guru of human behavior theory, states in “Social Learning Theory” that “Behavior is, in fact, extensively regulated by its consequences.” Think through that; it may seem obvious but is usually ignored by management wishing to make a change in attitude, in behavior.
Organizations are simply clusters of individuals. When have individuals been willing to embrace change and influence others to change when they were relatively satisfied with the status quo? Change is difficult. Change is contra-cultural. Change is against human nature. Very few people want to get out of their comfortable, conforming habits without the push/pull of a compelling crisis.
If you expect this change of ingrained habits and attitudes just because you want them and because you’ll succeed if they happen, you’re on the wrong track. Why should anyone go through the personal trauma associated with change for your benefit? The individuals can either continue to do the job as always or go through the chaos and disruption of change to make you look good. In the Federal Government a meaningful cliché demonstrates this phenomenon: “I’ll be here tomorrow when he’s gone.”
There is, however, good news. Even if only part of the company falls in step, that’s all it takes. Robert Cialdini, author of “Influence, Science and Practice” on individual and organizational behavior, says that “social proof” can be a powerful motivator.
Social proof is most influential under…the condition of uncertainty. When people are unsure, when the situation is ambiguous, they are more likely to attend to the actions of others and to accept those actions as correct…People are more inclined to follow the lead of similar others.
To achieve meaningful success, the organization and most of its centers of influence (meaning individual people) must be willing to accept change and even help lead it. The organization’s leader and the peer leaders must operate in parallel. You must have their attention. Otherwise you’ll never achieve significant and constructive change.
Would accounting standards and increased oversight have occurred without the Enron crisis? Would the venture capital investment philosophy have changed to a conservative, rational one without the tech market meltdown?
The same inertia that led up to these disasters and near-disasters is inherent in all organizations. Consider Paradyne. This company created the modem business in the eighties by inventing and marketing the 2400-baud and up modems. Then a major legal battle with the FTC over business practices drove the company into an acquisition by AT&T.
Several years later, when AT&T decided to sell Paradyne, virtually every technology company in the U.S. attended the presentations. But the controlled auction was a disaster. Everyone either walked or offered bids that made bottom fishing look like an aerial sport.
Paradyne was technology driven, yet the engineering team had been numbed by bureaucracy. The worst was the engineering cost report. Each month’s version was several inches thick, consumed at least a quarter of the department’s energy, and was worse than useless. It didn’t take a genius to determine that the largest line item in the cost report should have been “filling out the cost report.”
A small group of engineers were assembled in a publicized meeting. They presented ideas for streamlining the report, which amounted to eliminating some of the most ridiculous features for a reduction of perhaps 30 percent, changing it from a monthly 12” to 9” stack. “I have a better idea. We’re throwing this report out completely. We’re tearing it out by the roots. It’s gone!” The room was quiet. I detected some bemused but positive shock.
No one should travel blind; being aware of engineering costs in some detail is clearly a good thing. But we needed to change the culture; to create a buzz of excitement; to instill the thought that “no one would completely throw out all cost reporting unless there was a crisis; we’d better get with it”. There was too much comfort, feel-good-ness, and sense of accomplishment with respect to processes like filling out reports, this one in particular.
Actually for an interim period, there was little risk. Since external expenditures were minimal, the total cost of engineering was calculable simply by the number of people. How much was being spent on which project was not a current concern. All the development targets were in disarray and had to be restructured. Later we created a simplified approach for planning and projecting costs built on fundamental common sense.
Meanwhile, we traveled for several months without the bureaucratic albatross…and engineers actually spent their time doing engineering and development rather than filling out reports on the projects they weren’t doing. In one action, the mentality of the entire department changed from slow-moving bureaucracy to individuals semi-jogging to their work stations. The rapid abolishment of the cost report added lots of fuel to the cultural crisis fire!
Drastic measures aren’t always the answer. Simple solutions that capture attention and make people think outside of their norms can be implemented without a single announcement. The general level of housekeeping was awful at the defense company Northern Ordnance. Housekeeping itself isn’t going to make or break a company but in this case it was integral to an environment of sloppy operational practices.
The results were production delays, high levels of scrap, low levels of quality, wholesale expediting, you name it. All these things fed each other and in aggregate were all-consuming. Because there were literally hundreds of meaningful sloppy practices, attacking them head-on would have taken years.
Previous management had initiated short-lived campaigns, tacked posters to the walls and made stupid speeches. The posters themselves, now oil-stained and dirty, were part of the clutter problem. These programs were not only useless but counter-productive. The organization resisted and pushed back in literally thousands of ways. We needed wholesale change driven from within. We needed a mini-revolution from the bottom up.
All employees walked down the main corridor once or twice a day for commissary meals. A specific bay along their path was selected and, with no fanfare or announcement, converted to a model of how it should appear. It was cleaned, the queues of production materials were now orderly and small, paperwork was virtually eliminated, and the MRP screens were highly functional and organized. There were no announcements, no speeches, no posters. The 4,000 employees, however, mentally compared it to their own workplaces. They soon recognized the consequences of their previous sloppy practices, and a competition began systemically to see whose area could look the best, both in appearance and in manufacturing practices.
Soon hundreds of fundamental changes occurred. The “crisis” was one of personal pride, of not functioning in the best manner and environment each individual could create. Then our customers, who had also become oblivious to the garbage, commented on the improvements and bolstered the new environment. The process was self-propagating. The culture of constructive change had been planted.
Create a crisis. Do it quietly or with fanfare; but light that fire!
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