M E M O
From: David E. Edell, President
Date: April 7, 2003
Re: Six Bs for Building Employee Competence
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Results-Based Leadership: An interview with Dave Ulrich
Part 2 of 2
Copyright MCB UP Limited (MCB) 2002
republished by permission - EmeraldThe six Bs for building employee competence:
(1) Buy. Acquire new talent by recruiting individuals from outside the firm or from other departments or divisions within the firm.
(2) Build. Train or develop talent through education, formal job training, job rotation, job assignments, and action learning.
(3) Benchmark. Visit organizations that excel in work processes targeted for improvement.
(4) Borrow. Partner with consultants, vendors, customers, or suppliers outside the firm to garner new ideas.
(5) Bounce. Remove low-performing or under-performing individuals.
(6) Bind. Retain the most talented employees.
Results-based leaders focus on promoting six organizational capabilities:
Leadership. Do we have the ability to build the next generation of leadership in what we do? A shared mindset. Do we have a strong culture and firm identity in the mind of our employees and customers?
Boundarylessness. Do we have the ability to collaborate in teams and work across organizational units?
Learning and knowledge management. Do we have the ability to generate and generalize ideas with impact?
Accountability. Do we have the ability to be disciplined and deliver what we promise?
Speed. Can we act with agility? Do we have the capacity to change and adapt quickly?
William Finnie: You talk about collaboration or boundarylessness as one of the six key capabilities for an organization to achieve superior results. How do you implement boundarylessness?
Dave Ulrich: It is surprisingly easy to describe the two-dimensional process. To look at the first dimension you start with a four by four matrix. First, every firm has four boundaries:
(1) Vertical. How do we share things from the top to the bottom?
(2) Horizontal. How do we move things from department to department or function to function?
(3) External. How do we move things from the supplier to the firm to the customer?
(4) Global. How do we move things across the country and around the world?
The second dimension is what we have that crosses those boundaries. Again, there are four components of work.
(1) Information. Do we share information from the top to the bottom? Does the front-line employee have sufficient economic literacy? Do we share information horizontally?
(2) Competence. Do we move skills horizontally? Do we move skills from inside out?
(3) Authority. This is the one that most participative management firms start with. They say, we'll push authority, responsibility, and accountability down from the top to the bottom.
(4) Rewards. Do we provide the right incentives?
Empowerment or boundarylessness is really easy. Take those four levers across all four boundaries. I'll give you a quick illustration of why this is a fairly simple concept. One of the things firms often move vertically from top to bottom is authority. They push decision making down to the front line. Too often, however, they keep information, competence and rewards at the top.
Stewart Early: Accountability - the ability to have discipline, to reengineer work processes, and to create employee ownership - is another important capability that is a focus of resultsbased leadership. How do you build accountability?
Ulrich: A book the consultant Norm Smallwood and I just finished presents four steps in building accountability based on work by Steve Kerr, General Electric's chief learning officer:
(1) A clear strategy. If we don't know where we're headed, we'll never have accountability.
(2) Measurement. If you don't measure it, the strategy isn't going to happen.
(3) Consequences. These are the incentives, either positive or negative, for meeting those measures.
(4) Feedback. As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan say in their new book, Execution, "follow-up is essential".
The way I like to explain this is with the following story. I try to get my teenage son to clean his room. First, we have to agree this is worth doing (establishing a clear strategy). That's not always going to happen because cleaning his room is not high on his priority list. Then we have to measure cleanliness, and our definitions of clean are radically different. Third, there must be consequences. So he looks at me and says, "Dad, you're out of town for the next ten days, how will you know if it's clean?" So there's no consequence if he cleans or doesn't clean. Fourth is feedback. Do I follow up?
If an organization's strategy is ambiguous, it will never have good accountability. Measurement requires identifying the specific behaviors and outcomes the strategy implies. Third, what will the consequences be? If you make or miss a set of measures, will a good or bad thing happen? In the absence of consequences, there is just no reason to work hard to deliver the strategy. Fourth, we need candor and feedback, which enable us to learn and build a successful cycle.
Early: How do companies build a results based-leadership brand?
Ulrich: Norm Smallwood and I suggest that there are four steps in building result-based leaders:
(1) Believe that leadership matters. If we pay attention to the quality of leadership, good things will happen.
(2) Develop a leadership brand. What is our theory of an effective leader? How do we measure effective leadership? What attributes and results are we seeking?
(3) Assess leaders and find their gaps. Given that a leader needs both attributes and results, how would we assess leaders and their ability to do both of those things?
(4) Invest in leadership. Where do we invest in order to build better leaders (formal training, assignments, etc.)?
Early: How much value does coaching have as a way of building results-based leadership capability?
Ulrich: Coaching is one of the obvious ways to invest in building leaders. It works because it starts with an analysis of a potential leader's predisposition. A coach will find out that I'm a predisposed introvert. That's my nature. But a coach will say, "Dave, when you teach, you need to be an extrovert, and here are the behaviors of extroversion. You stand in front of the desk, not behind the desk. You ask people questions, don't just lecture. You look people in the eye." A coach will then help the leader demonstrate those behaviors and deliver better results. Good coaches will help leaders learn behaviors they can exhibit that will lead to the better results.
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Dave Ulrich is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan where he is a member of the core faculty of the Michigan Executive Program. He is currently on leave. His research and writing focuses on how to create an organization that continually adds value to customers, a process that involves studying how organizations change, build capabilities, learn, remove boundaries and leverage human resource activities. He helped lead major change initiatives at General Electric, which are detailed in The GE Work-out (with Steve Kerr and Ron Ashkenas) and The Boundaryless Organization (with Ron Ashkenas, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr).
Ulrich's other books include Results-Based Leadership with Jack Zenger and Norm Smallwood and Delivering Results: A New Mandate for Human Resource Professionals. Strategy & Leadership contributing editors William Finnie, a managing director of Grace Advisors, Inc. in St Louis, MO (WCF@GraceAdvisors.com) and Stewart Early, principal of Stewart Early & Associates, LLC in Bethlehem, PA (searly@worldnet.att. net) interviewed him.
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