Silicon Valley Alliances | The Global Epidemic of Disengaged Employees & Dysfunctional Organizations

The Global Epidemic of Disengaged Employees & Dysfunctional Organizations

Kimberly Wiefling

September 9, 2019

Long ago I was a new product development program manager at HP’s analytical products division in the heart of Silicon Valley. My first project was a critical product redesign with a demanding schedule, so I was dismayed to see this sign hanging at the desk of one of my team members: “15 Years ’til Retirement—Pace Yourself.” Rather than being passionately committed to our work together, this person was looking forward to escaping his job so that he could finally start enjoying his life. Gallup would describe him as “not engaged,” but to me he was yet another risk to our imperiled project.

What is employee engagement? It means that people are not merely wage slaves — they feel a positive emotional connection to their organization and will contribute discretionary effort to their work. Globally, nearly 90% of workers are either NOT engaged or are actively disengaged—actually working against their own organizations! In the US, where engagement is highest, it still averages a pathetic ~30%! Even in the world-famous Silicon Valley, the birthplace of chip innovations for which it was named, employee engagement is often “less than sub-optimal,” with people looking forward to their IPO so that they can quit the jobs they’ve been enduring as they “rest and vest.” Disengaged employees are like a huge hidden tax on each and every business.

I live just a short drive from companies like Tesla, eBay, Apple, Google, Cisco Systems, Adobe, and PayPal. Living and working in Silicon Valley has provided me with tremendous opportunities to witness up close how businesses start, grow and flourish, or falter and fail. Interestingly, the old Sun Microsystems sign is still visible on the back of the famous Facebook sign not far from my home, a living reminder of what can happen to companies that were once wildly successful.

SMART PEOPLE & GREAT TECHNOLOGY ARE NOT ENOUGH! Please don’t assume that failures are the result only of challenges like technology, products, markets, or strategy. I’m a physicist by education, and I made that mistake early in my career. To do so is to miss an incredibly important piece of the puzzle. Many threats that businesses face are completely and utterly human.

Coming from a technology background, I’ve relished the innovation feast that we enjoy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Organizations here are composed of smart, talented, diverse, and well-educated people. Nevertheless, they often struggle to achieve results due to what some of my techie friends call “the touchy-feely crap.” Having also worked abroad with people from about 50 different countries, in a wide range of industries including pharmaceuticals, concrete, plastics, and whiskey, I can tell you that the human challenges we face in Silicon Valley are shared globally. While products, technology, and market fit are certainly vital aspects of successful businesses, widespread workplace dysfunctionality strikes me as the greatest missed opportunity, because it’s entirely predictable and largely preventable.

According to one study published in MIT Sloan’s management journal¹ a while back, the most common causes for failure in the global teams that they studied (over 80% self-reported as failing!) are:

● Lack of trusting relationships

● Failure to overcome communication barriers (and this is NOT limited to language and culture!)

● Unclear goals

● Misalignment between individual and team priorities

Look at this list. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that teams build strong, trusting relationships and work together effectively towards clear, shared goals upon which all team members are aligned? This is entirely a failure of leadership! (Notice I didn’t say management. I’ve never met anyone who liked being managed!)

TOXIC TALENT & LACKLUSTER LEADERSHIP. Sure, there are other contributing factors, but let’s not be so quick to forgive this tragic absence of effective leadership in the global work environment. Even a brief peek into the inner workings of many organizations reveals that they are not teams, but merely groups of people. Their managers are not leaders, and their organizations are dysfunctional by design thanks to power poisoning and hierarchies that breed what have come to be known as “bossholes.” (Yup, there’s a whole new word for people who suck their employees’ will to live!) Their cynicism-inducing values may be posted on the wall, but unless they’ll fire their best engineer for violating those principles, they’re worthless—even a liability to a healthy organizational culture. The painful consequences of this dysfunction often include high turnover, low productivity, missed opportunities, delayed product launches, and less-than-delighted customers. One company’s customers even made up a tagline for them due to their unhelpful customer support practices, “Deny, Deflect, Defend.”

With only a fraction of workers truly committed to their work, many organizations achieve success through a combination of heroics, diving catches, miracles, and luck. Some of these accidental achievers ask me, “Kimberly, if our company is so screwed up, why are we successful?” Why, indeed! Lucky for them, most of their peers are equally mediocre.

Surely the people responsible for such wasteful misery would recognize their toxic—and sometimes “talk-sick”—impact on their colleagues and change their behavior, right? Unfortunately, often no one feels responsible for this needless suffering. When I work with individual employees they say, “Sure, Kimberly, we want to make the changes you’re suggesting, but it’s our managers who are really the cause of these problems.” And when I challenge managers on these workplace issues they often point to their executives as the real cause of their difficulties. Executives then point to the CEO, who—heartbroken to think that they might be to blame for this tragic loss of opportunity—confides that the chairman, board, investors, shareholders, or other outside influences are at the root of these problems. Or sometimes they blame their people, to which I respond, “OK, suppose I discover that YOU are somehow contributing to the dysfunction. How do you want me to tell you?” Their response determines whether I agree to work with them or light my hair on fire and run screaming for the door.

MANAGE COWS, LEAD PEOPLE! What’s preventing business leaders all over our world from adopting what is clearly common sense, not to mention in the long-term best interests of customers, shareholders, and employees? It’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies with higher employee engagement scores also enjoy better customer satisfaction scores, higher quality, lower employee absenteeism and turnover, and increased profitability. Only a cynic—or someone who’s never worked in a dysfunctional organization (which is pretty much someone who’s never worked)—will be asking if this is causation or correlation. And the research is very clear that the biggest contributor to a lack of engagement is a person’s direct manager. So why aren’t effective managers, admired leaders, engaged employees, and healthy organizational cultures as common as blades of grass?! They could be! It’s been known for decades how to do better. There’s nothing standing between us and highly engaged, motivated and productive teams, except perhaps the discipline to spend time on what matters most.

Let’s all get busy doing the real work of management—leading! Could we do something more strategic first thing in the morning other than checking email? Might we find better ways to spend our time besides meaningless meetings where the only thing that we decide is to meet again? If so, we’d have an excellent opportunity to dramatically improve business results and even—dare I say—enjoy our work. Start with a purpose beyond profit and a mission that matters. Implement commonsense people leadership and business management approaches proven to deliver results predictably and repeatedly. These actions have the power to truly engage employees, inviting and inspiring people to be strongly committed to shared goals that would be impossible for any individual, but are inevitable for a true team.

S.T.O.P! But don’t just rush off and start doing things willy-nilly! Replace the all too common, adrenaline-soaked rush to solution with enough planning to optimize your results.

● Stop

● Think

● Organize

● Plan

At the very least, this means spending a few minutes considering:

● Big WHY – What’s your purpose?

● Big WHO – Who are the stakeholders involved or impacted? (Often this involves a complex universe of conflicting interests that seem truly impossible to satisfy.)

● Big WHAT – What exactly would “success” look like through the eyes of your key stakeholders?

● MEASURES – What would be the measures of success through the eyes of your stakeholders?

● THEN, and ONLY THEN, create your Big HOW!—a draft plan filed with plenty of experiments, prototypes, and other opportunities to learn, adjust, and pivot.

● Finally, Execute with Excellence – take necessary risks, learn from mistakes, and fail forward.

Unfortunately, given a choice about how much time to spend planning before diving into any challenge, most humans will choose . . . wait for it . . . ZERO! Yup, no time spent planning. Just start doing things! After all, no code is written while planning, no products ship, no revenue is booked. But an optimal amount of planning more than doubles your chances of success in complex tasks, and can improve results for even a seemingly simple one. (Ever go to the grocery store without a list and discover you’ve forgotten a vital item upon returning home?)

CROSSING THE GAPING KNOWING-DOING GAP. Look, I don’t expect reading this to change you. If knowing how to do something were enough we’d all be rich and thin. There’s always some reason why well-intentioned, educated, experienced professionals are doing the opposite of what they know makes sense. Frequently it’s because they are really busy and can’t possibly do what needs to be done until someone ELSE changes first—usually their boss, or someone in a different department. A well-researched book called The Knowing-Doing Gap was written about this by two professors who noticed that their colleagues at the Stanford Graduate School of Business didn’t follow their own teaching when they themselves led companies. What is the source of the gap between knowing and doing?

● Learned Helplessness – “It’s not my fault!” and “They are doing it to me” thinking.

● Fear of Failure – If you’re not allowed to fail you must be very careful what you start.

● Aversion to Planning – As I’ve mentioned, given a choice, people prefer not to plan.

● Instinct for Competition – A win-lose frame is the first assumption many people make in any situation involving another person, even when win-win can yield more benefits to them.

Knowing HOW, by itself, changes NOTHING! Over 70% of business failures have been attributed to an inability to execute. Doing what has been proven effective by decades of experience beats a great theory any day.

TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR BUILDING AN ENGAGING WORKPLACE. Peter Drucker reportedly said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” An organization’s culture is as invisible as the air that we breathe and as inescapable as gravity. But sick, twisted, dysfunctional organizations didn’t spring unbidden from the earth, and they weren’t deposited by alien lifeforms. WE create our workplace cultures. The upside of this scary proposition is that we also have the power to change them for the better. The difference between someone occupying a management position and being a truly effective leader is that real leaders have the discipline to do what’s required, whether they feel like it or not—no excuses! How we feel is a poor guide to what we must do to succeed.

If we acknowledge the dark side of organizations, and our own contributions to it, we can create a future where individuals, teams and organizations generate great results by design rather than by chance. Investors might be happy with a 10% success rate for the companies they invest in, but do you want to accept those odds?

You may be asking yourself, “Could it really be that simple?” Simple, yes. Easy, no. Using these approaches, you can make what seems impossible merely difficult, then possible, and enable your team to achieve together what no one could do alone. (Email me if you’d like a one-page overview of this commonsense methodology.)

WHAT’S AT STAKE? PLANETARY TRANSFORMATION! Businesses were not created to exploit workers and generate fortunes for their owners. They exist to solve problems—and to do so profitably so that they can continue to solve these problems year after year. In the same way, global businesses solve global problems and bring people together across borders and boundaries of every kind to work together in ways that elude governments. With so much at stake, this is no time to pace yourself! With so much to gain, not only for your people but for Our World, we need to KEEP GOING! And when we do fail, let’s fail for new and more exciting reasons!

Reference:

Vijay Govindarajan and Anil K. Gupta, “Building an Effective Global Business Team,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2001, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/building-an-effective-global-business-team/.

Author: Kimberly Wiefling

Kimberly Wiefling helps people achieve what seems impossible, but is merely difficult. She’s the founder of Wiefling Consulting, and co-founder of Silicon Valley Alliances. She wrote a project management book which has been popular globally for over a decade, “Scrappy Project Management – The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces”, which was also published in Japanese by Nikkei Business Press. And she’s the executive editor of a series of Scrappy Guides, most recently Scrappy Women in Business and Scrappy Campaigning. Her expertise includes leadership and team effectiveness, project management, and organizational effectiveness. Kimberly is most enthusiastic about engaging with anyone committed to solving global problems profitably and making a positive difference on Planet Earth.

Email: kimberly@siliconvalleyalliances.com

Websites: SiliconValleyAlliances.com KimberlyWiefling.com Wiefling.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scrappykimberlywiefling/

Are You Leaving China Now?

Kimberly Wiefling

June 1, 2019

So many of our clients are affected by the section 301 tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration on China. As of June 10, add Mexico to that list. Manufacturers are experiencing significant increases in costs due to 10-25% duty on imported parts and finished products. They are asking me if now is the time to leave China for other low-cost manufacturing locations. I always give the typical management consulting answer: “it depends,” because it does.

The first question I ask is why do you want to leave China? Is it simply because of the tariffs that are likely to be only temporary – at most for the next two years? Have you found, verified, and tested a new factory in another low-cost country such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand? Are you trying to run from IP theft, because if you are, there are no guarantees in other countries that it won’t happen again. Have you considered the market growth rates for potential customers in China?

There is a lot to consider if you have an established manufacturer or supplier in China and decide to leave.

Productivity Rates and Capacity

You might find that labor costs are 20-30% cheaper in Vietnam or Indonesia, but are you also tracking quality issues and productivity rates at the factories there? The learning curve for establishing new production may be longer than you would expect, especially if you are used to China’s manufacturing might and capability. Other countries aren’t nearly as sophisticated. In a recent comparison of athletic footwear manufacturing in China vs. Vietnam, the company found that labor rates in Vietnam were 30% cheaper, but productivity was nearly 20% less and quality was a very significant issue with much higher rework rates than in China.

With many companies now attempting to find alternative manufacturing countries, some places in Vietnam and Thailand are overwhelmed with requests and refusing to take orders from new customers. Keep in mind that infrastructure in most countries, such as roads, warehousing, airports, and harbors isn’t anywhere close to what China has built over the past 25 years. Remember too, that if you move to a new country, your supply chain will also need to move. Rebuilding your sources and supply chains in a new country could take months or years.

IP Theft in Other Countries

If you are looking to run away from IP theft problems in China, beware of what you are running toward. IP theft isn’t an isolated problem just in China. Many countries throughout the world have weak IP laws that won’t protect you. Counterfeit products come from countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, and more recently Africa. And if you haven’t registered your own Trademark in China, take note. Many Chinese companies will register your trademark and then use it after you leave the country, and there really isn’t much you can do about it.

The manufacturing IP, tools, and molds you leave behind will likely be used to continue the manufacturing of your products when you leave. It’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve your tools and molds from a Chinese manufacturing site, even if you think they rightfully belong to you. Don’t think that just because you have shut down production of your product, that the Chinese factory is simply going to “forget” how to make your product. The will probably continue to produce it and sell it in domestic and international markets.

Labor Contracts and Permits to Leave

You may also be required to file for a permit from the Chinese government to close your manufacturing operations. This could take a number of months and also require you to pay out all of your Chinese employees’ contracts before you go. This is likely to be much more costly and lengthier than you had predicted. Sure, you could turn off the lights, lock the doors, get on a plane and simply abandon your Chinese operations. But don’t expect to ever come back to China. You are likely to not be granted a visa or you might be detained when trying to visit China in the future.

Retaliation

Your Chinese manufacturer or supplier may be angry that you are leaving and try to retaliate. They might slow production or the fulfillment of orders, or simply refuse to ship at all, especially if there is a balance due on your account.

I worked as an Expert Witness on one case where a contract manufacturer of toys shipped several container loads for the holiday season to a wholesaler in the U.S. When the U.S. importer announced they were reshoring manufacturing to America in January, the manufacturer refused to release the containers from the Port of Long Beach.

Before You Jump

Before you leave China, be sure you have identified all of the risks of a new location as well as those of leaving your current manufacturing site. Better yet, consider opening a second factory in a new location, without closing the old one, aka: “China Plus One.” Be sure to get advice from a global supply chain consultant or a law firm with offices in the U.S., China and your new location.

The New Energy Future

Nathalie Udo

July 6, 2016

Savvy utility leaders know that there is no stopping the transition to new energy, especially after world leaders committed to a 100% renewable energy future in Paris last December. Couple this with the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution, and you are watching disruptive innovation tear through the grid edge.

In June I attended the Grid Edge World Forum in San Jose, Calif., to see how these changes are affecting the energy grid industry and what solutions are emerging to deal with it. For both new and old energy business models, success depends on making the right decisions at the right time. The IoT generates a plethora of data, which creates opportunities for improvements and efficiencies. But getting instant and actionable information from all that data is not an easy thing to do!

On day one of the forum, Jeroen Scheer of Alliander summarized the industry situation nicely. Driven by the market transition, he is transforming Alliander from a old-fashioned utility company into a data-driven energy company. In his words, “That’s the only way utilities can survive.”

Scheer also pointed out the challenges utilities are facing in this transformation. As with any other industry experiencing seismic changes, energy executives face a small army of software providers saying they can do “whatever you want,” which, as we all know, they cannot. Do not for a second think you can do it yourself. The road is littered with the corpses of companies who tried and failed. But do also not expect to hand it off to an outsourced contractor and receive a perfect product in return. Transforming your company will require active partnership with the right solution provider so together you can create a roadmap to success.

So how to pick a good partner? That is a blog by itself, but here are three solution providers that stood out to me during Grid Edge.

In Internet years, Itron is the dinosaur of the group, but one not to underestimate. Its new OpenWay Riva solution offers an IoT platform for edge devices to deliver distributed intelligence over Cisco networks. Itron was one of the recipients of the Greentech Media’s 2016 Grid Edge Awards during the Forum.

With a new $20M investment round announced in May this year, AutoGrid Systems is focusing on creating a smarter energy Internet. Core to their solution is their integration with Schneider Electric’s Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS). It will be interesting to see if and how the recent investments propel AutoGrid forward. AutoGrid was also one of the recipients of the 2016 Grid Edge Awards.

Since I favor agility, flexibility and speed, for me, Energyworx was the RockStar of the Grid Edge World Forum (to borrow metering.com’s nomenclature). They ingest enormous amounts of data from a flexible range of IoT and other sources, and then use Machine Learning to turn this data into key energy and grid insights with exceptional speed. Their services are powered by Google Cloud Platform, and operate on a true Software as a Service (SAAS) model. What stood out to me was their pricing. In addition to being one of the lowest in the industry, it is a real pay-as-you-go model. More importantly, users benefit from common features requested by the wider customer community at no additional cost.

These are exciting times in the energy grid world!

How to Future Proof your Business

Nathalie Udo

June 2, 2016

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be part of the Future & Insights panel at the Better Business 2016 Conference focused on Better Business, Self-Regulation and Impact.

We discussed questions like what new business challenges and opportunities are waiting on the horizon, and what disruptive forces will overtake the business models and technologies currently shaping the marketplace. In today’s blog, I’ll focus on the first question.

Playing from a Stacked Deck

Let’s start with looking at what challenges and opportunities the current global business environment is facing:

Increased consumption – There are more than 7 billion people on Earth right now. By 2040 that number is expected to be more than 9 billion. More importantly, the number of people classified middle class will increase from 1 billion today to 3 billion by 2050. They will have the societal expectations to buy things commonly associated with a middle-class life. A huge new market is on the horizon, and people will expect goods and services to be available to that market.

Constraint resources – Already there are not enough resources to fulfill our consumption demand. Two examples:
1. Even in today’s world 1 in 10 people don’t have access to safe drinking water. Since fresh water is a finite resource this number is expected to rise, especially as groundwater resources are depleted due to overuse and contamination. Meanwhile, most of the developed world flushes its toilets with drinking water. But even water-rich countries are starting to feel the pinch, as evidenced by the current extreme drought in the western US, and the water use restrictions prompted by the shortfall.
2. Our second example is less visible, but just as dramatic. You are probably reading this on your phone, computer or tablet. Those devices contain rare earth elements, another finite resource. The expectation is that by 2020—less than four years from now— there will be 11.6 billion mobile-connected devices. You can imagine the amount of raw materials needed to create these—materials that are increasingly scarce and expensive to extract.
  Already constrained resources coupled with increased consumption will stretch the planet’s capacity to the limit without a dramatic change in approach.

Shifting weather patterns – Records broken during extreme weather used to be unusual. Today, it seems almost expected. Shifting weather patterns are already affecting our food supply, impacting corporate supply chains, and even altering our daily lives.
Rapid technology changes – According to professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Previous industrial revolutions brought us mechanical locomotion, mass production, and the wonders of the digital era. Today we are merging physical, digital, and biological worlds. The opportunities are limitless: contact lenses that tell you when to take your insulin. Self-driving cars that know your schedule as well as your destination. Biological implants that allow people to control artificial limbs or restore lost sight or vision. Genetic medicine that corrects diseases or dysfunctions at a molecular level. 3-D printing, nanotech, quantum computing. These dramatic and rapid changes in our technological capabilities will have profound impacts on our societies and our environment.
Informed customer and workers – Information travels at the speed of light and people today have access to a tremendous amount of data. This combined with the increasing lack of trust in institutions means that your customers and employees (current and future) look to each other for feedback, not just to you. Case in point: who in today’s world buys a product on Amazon without looking at the reviews?

Sustainability as Risk Management

Let me share an image I got from Sylvia Earle, National Geographic explorer-in-residence: Imagine you are an astronaut on a mission in space. Before departure you would learn everything you could about the systems that keep you alive during your journey in the hostile environment beyond Earth’s atmosphere. While flying through space, you would take care of your air, water, food, and temperature control as if your life depends on it, because it so clearly does.

We seem to forget that we are all aboard a great, blue spacecraft called Earth, hurtling through an otherwise inhospitable universe, so we better take care of it as if our lives depend on it.

If the sustainability of our planet isn’t a sufficient reason, the sustainability of your organization might be. When people hear the word “sustainability”, they think “green” and “environment”, but we are talking about the sustainability of your business as well. The challenges and opportunities I mentioned above affect every business. Thinking about sustainability is a risk management strategy. How will you manage the increased threats to your supply chain, the depletion of natural resources, and the demands of conscientious customers and employees?

A Competitive Edge in a Crowded Market

The upside is tremendous. Organizations that care about the social, economic, environmental and ethical aspects of their business can expect a substantial increase in their market share. A recent Nielsen study found that 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact.

Changing the processes and activities within your organization and value chain to become more socially and environmentally friendly reduces overall operational costs in the long run. It also increases employee engagement, which will be key to survival in a world where the “war on talent” is increasing.

All this requires a change in mindset, innovation, and new business models. We will look at that in the next blog. For now just remember: Sustainability is better business.

Marketing’s Challenge: Monetizing Value

Kimberly Wiefling

April 17, 2016

In just over the space of a week, Tesla Motors recently booked orders for over 325,000 of its Model 3 sedan, a vehicle not expected to be delivered until late 2017. And for these advance orders, customers were willing to pay a reservation fee of $1000 to be in line for a delivered model. What was the reason for such an iPhone-like frenzy of demand?

Some may point to Silicon Valley’s fascination with all things new, especially technologically advanced products like the all-electric cars Tesla offers. But this demand was nationwide. Others may point to significantly low price point, $35,000 for the base model, significantly below Tesla’s previous models. So sure, a low price for an electric vehicle was a factor. Yet, in reality, Tesla was only tapping into one of the key drivers of marketing success: Value for customers. Read more ›

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Transforming Managers into Global Leaders

Productivity Rates and Capacity

IP Theft in Other Countries

Labor Contracts and Permits to Leave

Retaliation

Before You Jump