Bring down silos to fight complacency

A management-driven hierarchy creates communication challenges, which can systematically lead to complacency among employees, says a new book

People never admit to being complacent. No one will tell you that strategic complacency is a good thing. But the world is filled with it, and even the most competent people often don't see it. The system in which they have been raised and in which they operate makes them blind to complacency. From the top of an organization, it can seem so obvious that a big strategic problem or opportunity exists. So a CEO or his or her executives cannot imagine that others do not see the challenge and feel a sense of urgency to deal with it. But they often don't, and for reasons that are very understandable. For example:

* Your company's market share is crashing, and a turnaround will require some significant changes in marketing strategy, the sales organization, and customer service. This is hardly a secret: the Wall Street Journal seems to run an article on some aspect of the situation daily. So top management cannot help but see the proverbial burning platform. Executives with a huge sense of urgency often assume that the same must be true for everyone in the company. But in fact that's far from correct among the many employees who live in a world in which they rush from meeting to meeting dealing with short-term issues and crises, where there is little if any discussion about the WSJ, and where most people don't even read the WSJ.

* The research group has developed a new technology that offers a big new product opportunity - with the potential to generate growth that could move the firm into first place in its older, B2B industry. But exploiting that research will require five or six significant initiatives in manufacturing - a fact which should be obvious to any manager who thinks about the subject. The CEO thinks a great deal about the subject. Most of middle management within manufacturing has heard about the new technology, some of them more than others. But the pressures on them from their management-driven hierarchy are to get the product out each day and to solve the fifty different problems that threaten to keep the required volume of quality products from rolling out the door each week. For every two-hour meeting top management has on the topic of the new technology -the opportunity it offers, the resources needed to exploit it, and the kinds of initiatives needed in manufacturing - the typical factory manager may spend two minutes dealing with the subject. Those who spend more do it in informal worry sessions. The workers on the floormight spend two seconds.

* Large military unit in Alabama to undergo a fundamental transformation, which will require a major reorganization. The buzz about this problem has been raging throughout the Pentagon and Washington, DC, for months. How is it possible for someone not to hear the buzz? The answer: it is very possible for lots of people outside the in-the-clouds other world called the US capital. And as for those within the specific Army unit who do hear the buzz, they have learned that noise in Washington is usually about transitory politics, not enduring reality, so they mostly ignore it. And 'noise' it is, since information does not flow easily to people nearly a thousand miles away and many levels below in the bureaucracy.

When confronted with clear evidence that strategic complacency or false urgency is rampant, we often explain it in terms of that frustrating tendency for people to resist change. This could be a part of the problem, but the bigger issue is systemic. That is, a management-driven hierarchy systematically creates competitive complacency, and, when the pressures are great, false urgency. Silos limit access to information about the big picture, and certainly any big-picture opportunities or threats. Narrow job parameters send the message that as long as you are doing your little job today, you are fine.

Managerial processes tend to focus people's attention inward - on the budget, the plan, the staff, and the metrics. This inward focus means a lower probability of seeing external strategic opportunities or threats. Multiple levels in a hierarchy create communication challenges, so even if a few people at the top have a strong sense of urgency about a Big Opportunity, that information rarely reaches the bottom clearly, without distortion, and with the volume required. Managerial processes, often so metrically focused and analytical, cut off an emotional attachment to anything - and with that, the needed energy and passion. A well-functioning left-side machine really doesn't need or want emotion. Feelings, the thinking goes, are not easily managed and can muck up the stable reliability of the system more than help.

ACCELERATE
AUTHOR: John P Kotter
PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Publishing
PRICE: Rs 895
ISBN: 9781625271747

About the author

* John P Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. Kotter is widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on leadership and change

* Professor Kotter's MIT and Harvard education laid the foundation for his life-long passion for educating and motivating. He became a member of the Harvard Business School faculty in 1972. By 1980, at the age of 33, Kotter was given tenure and a full Professorship - the youngest person ever to have received that award at the business school

* He co-founded of Kotter International, a leadership organisation that helps global 5000 company leaders develop the practical skills and implementation methodologies required to lead change in a complex, large-scale business environment

* Kotter has authored 18 books to date, including Our Iceberg is Melting, A Sense of Urgency, The Heart of Change, and Leading Change, which Time magazine selected in 2011 as one of the 25 most influential business management books ever written. His books have been printed in over 150 foreign language editions

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster Moving World. Copyright 2014 John P. Kotter. All rights reserved.