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A blog by Ryan Quinn, Robert Quinn, Shawn Quinn, and Amy Lemley

Archive for the ‘Leading Change’ Category

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Learn Your Way In: Hunger to Get Better, Persist through Experiences, and Watch Competencies Emerge

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

By Robert E. Quinn

I recently listened to a talk by Fred Keller, the CEO of Cascade Engineering, a company recognized for its positive approach to business. One of the unusual practices for which Cascade is known is  bringing in people who are on the welfare rolls and turning them into productive employees.

This idea originated in a casual conversation between Keller and another man, who agreed to champion the idea and work on it. They brought in 12 people who were on welfare. In a short time, however, they were all gone. There were many problems that made the idea impractical. The man was ready to give up on it.

But Fred Keller encouraged the man to reconsider. “We needed to discover how people on welfare feel and think,” he recalled. “We needed to understand them and their culture so we could support them effectively.” So the man kept trying. They ended up going into the literature, talking with the people, and working to understand the culture of poverty.  Over time, the company learned how to do what it did not know how to do. (more…)

Posted in Agility / Adaptation, Creating Opportunities, Innovation and Creativity, Leading Change, Learning | No Comments »

Access Your Sense of Awe: Finding Meaning in Your Work

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

By Robert E. Quinn

I remember a heart surgeon once telling me about his work. “Sometimes a person is dying,” he said quietly. “I take their heart into my hands, and when I am finished, they are alive.” He made this simple statement with awe and humility at how meaningful this experience was for him every time. 

It’s a feeling I know. It occurs when I do cultural surgery. I am regularly asked, for example, to help senior management teams. These are brilliant, successful people with years in business. Their salaries are often staggering. So what could they possibly need from me?

The invitation comes because they know they need to make a fundamental change that they don’t know how to make: to turn themselves into a team. They don’t know how to lure conflict to the surface and transform it into creative collaboration. Yet it’s critical to the organization’s health that they do so. Without a cohesive team, there is no synergy,

This condition is a “silent killer” because few organzations are ready to admit they’re not optimizing their potential. When a team is not cohesive, there is no synergy, which can cause a chronic condition that may indeed threaten the life of the organization. (more…)

Posted in High Performance, Leading Change, The Meaning of Work | No Comments »

Teaching and Leading Positively, Part 4: A Provocative Tool for Discussing Transformation

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

By Robert E. Quinn

This six-part series, “Teaching and Leading Positively,” explores the goals of teaching positive leadership: not merely to serve as an instructor conveying the theories or practices drawn for positive organizational scholarship, but to prompt lasting transformation in the way our students work and live. Serving as this kind of catalyst requires full engagement on our part. We must live from the positive leadership framework, allowing our students to learn by our example, each other’s, and their own.

Teaching people how to transform and how to stimulate transformation is very difficult. The life assumptions of normal people are tied to survival assumptions—not to flourishing.

When I teach I have to entice people to explore things that violate what they want to believe. So I am always hungry for conceptual tools that will help people think about transformation in new ways. This week one of my friends sent me the following passage by Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM:

Historically speaking, in most cultures the role of men has been to create, to make new things, to fix broken things, and to defend us from things which could hurt us. All of these are wonderful and necessary roles for the preservation of the human race.

However, most children saw their mother in a different way. She was not a creator, a fixer, or a defender, but rather a transformer. (more…)

Posted in Leadership Education and Development, Leading Change, Learning | No Comments »

Positive Leadership in Action: Prudential’s Jim Mallozzi Shows How It Works

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

By Amy Lemley

How would you unify more than 50,000 employees worldwide? Ask Jim Mallozzi, chairman and CEO of Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services.

The answer? Positive organizational scholarship (POS). As a senior VP in Prudential’s retirement division, Mallozzi became acquainted with the field eight years ago. That’s when he met Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship cofounders Kim Cameron and Bob Quinn (also a partner in Lift Consulting and my fellow Lift blogger). A colleague who was a University of Michigan Ross business school grad, introduced them, and Mallozzi was hooked.

In 2009, Mallozzi ascended to chairman and CEO of Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services. Positive leadership principles seemed like a natural place to turn for corporate transformation.

In 2011—at the height of a difficult time in the relocation sector—Brookfield Residential Property Services acquired his company. This move creating a change management opportunity in which positive leadership was equally relevant.

Kim Cameron and Emily Plews (MBA/SA ’10) interviewed Mallozzi for the April 2012 issue of Organizational Dynamics. In the article, Mallozzi talks about how he and his employees have implemented some of its core concepts. He listed three examples of initiatives that made a difference:

  • -The reflected best-self feedback process, which we became really good at.
  •  -The use of the competing values framework, which is how we demonstrated respect for each other in terms of what unique attributes each person brought to the table.
  •  -The development of an Everest goal, or what we aspired to be and what we stood for.

POS posted a video of an extraordinary Positive Links presentation in which Mallozzi quite candidly discusses where things stood at Prudential and how positive leadership came to permeate its culture.

The February 2012 session—which Mallozzi calls “a great adventure and a great honor”—is entitled “Saving Private Ryan: Hard-Fought Lessons in Creating a Positively Deviant Organization.” It’s an hour and 20 minutes long and well worth your time. Click play, sit back, and enjoy.

Posted in Collaboration / Teamwork / Breaking Down Silos, Communication, Crisis, Culture, Energizing the Workplace, Leading Change | No Comments »

Transcending “Normal”: Learning to Access the Power of Positive Organizing

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

By Robert E. Quinn

Highly functioning organizations are different from other organizations. They engage in a process called positive organizing. Positive organizing transcends normal assumptions. To understand it, internalize it, and practice it, people need someone who can elevate their feelings, thoughts, and actions so that they can collaborate in new ways. Here is a story that illustrates what positive organizing is, how it is facilitated, and how it can be taught.

The Transformative Process

Last week, Ryan Quinn and I were doing a session for a large group of organizational development practitioners. Ryan put up a slide that presented a mini case study:

Kurt Wright was a consultant for a company working on a $100 million, 60-month software development project for the government. There were 400 engineers working on the project. Thirty-eight months had already passed, and the project was 18 months behind schedule. A clause in the contract stated that if the project were 18 months behind at the 48-month milestone, the company would suffer a $30 million penalty. Managers and employees were frightened about losing $30 million because of the impact it would have on their company, their unit, and their jobs. Stress was beginning to escalate. (This story is paraphrased from Kurt Wright’s Breaking the Rules: Removing the Obstacles to Effortless High Performance (Boise, ID: CPM Publishing, 1998).

Ryan asked our group to suggest strategies on how to change this situation. The participants made many suggestions. Ryan then shared what Wright actually did. (more…)

Posted in Agility / Adaptation, Communication, Creating Opportunities, Crisis, Culture, General, Innovation and Creativity, Leading Change, Learning | No Comments »

And the Truth Shall Set You Free: Stop Overselling, Increase Transparency, and Boost Engagement

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

By Shawn Quinn

Have you ever oversold a job you were hiring for to try to get your favorite candidate to accept? Have you ever oversold aspects of yourself to try to get a position you were interviewing for?

The normal or natural approach is to do what is good for us in the short run. Not everyone makes these kinds of decisions all the time. But all of us fall into this kind of trap on a regular basis.

Gallup data on employee engagement suggest that only around 40% of people are actively engaged by the end of six months in a new job. The “oversell” is often to blame: The newness wears off. The job turns out to be less appealing than it seemed. The candidate must spend each workday pretending to be someone else.

Transparency—at the beginning of the hiring or application process—could make a difference in both situations. (more…)

Posted in Communication, Courage / Empowerment / Initiative, Culture, General, Leading Change | No Comments »

A Conflicted Country and the Strategy of the Third Path: How Do We Go From Here?

Friday, November 9th, 2012

By Robert E. Quinn

Tuesday was the Presidential election.  On Wednesday morning I went to the gym. Two women were there who are in their seventies. One was wearing an Obama shirt and looked very happy. The other said to me, “I grew up in World War II and I have always believed that God watched over America. Today I no longer believe that.” I saw what so many political analysts had pointed out the night before: This is a rapidly changing and deeply divided country.

While it is normal to be concerned about that conflict and the gridlock that is likely to follow the election, my attention is drawn to something else.

I believe a major event like an election is important because it generates new data. It more sharply exposes the emerging reality. When we encounter new data, nature offers us two choices: fight or flight. Today, for example, I heard one person calling for total resistance to the administration. That is the fight response. Other people claim they are going to move to another country. That is the flight response. While these are natural responses, they are not very productive ones. The first will increase the conflict. The second will preserve the existing conflict. Both are self-interested and neither pursues the collective good.

Beyond the natural choice of fight or flight is the third path: creative contribution. Creative contribution reflects a proactive choice to transcend the naturally structured “either/or” logic of the left brain. (more…)

Posted in Agility / Adaptation, Collaboration / Teamwork / Breaking Down Silos, Conflict, Creating Opportunities, Culture, Diversity / Leveraging Difference, General, Leading Change | No Comments »

The Anabolic Organization: Living Shared Values Promotes Growth in Good Times and Bad

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

I interviewed the CEO of a small research company about the importance of living a set of common values and creating a culture in which people could flourish. Living those values is most important in times of crisis, he told me.

At one point, he recalled, the money ran out and he had to lay people off. The employees who remained became full of fear. Living the values in such a crisis is essential, this CEO explained, because only then can people trust what you say.

Then he made a statement I thought was quite interesting. “Fear to me is misdirected energy,” he said. “It is just negative energy that should be channeled to something positive.” (more…)

Posted in Agility / Adaptation, Courage / Empowerment / Initiative, General, Leading Change | No Comments »

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: When Employees Help Each Other, Organizational Commitment Grows

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

By Amy Lemley

Here’s a study finding that may surprise you: Organizations that establish employee support programs engender greater commitment when they provide a chance for workers to contribute time or money to help their colleagues.

In Shawn’s blog entry two days ago, he shared how his cousin’s firefighter colleagues have taken all his shifts while he and his wife spend their days with their son, who is in a hospital four hours from home after being injured in a car accident. Not only are they protecting his job, but they have also arranged for the pay to go to him.

Because their organization approved this, the study findings would suggest, these firefighters are likely to be more committed to the fire company. The study also found that they probably feel grateful for the chance to make a difference, further engendering their commitment.

Typically, organizations believe workers place value in employee assistance programs for what they can get from them. But this study, says coauthor Jane Dutton, saw benefits far beyond “What’s in it for me?”:

-Individuals defined themselves more positively.

-Organizational commitment grew.

-Organizational citizenship was enhanced.

With Dutton, lead author Adam Grant (author of the study I discussed in my last entry), and Brent Russo surveyed about 300 managers and employees of Borders bookstores. Published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2008, their paper “Giving Commitment: Employee Support Programs and the Prosocial Sensemaking Process” examined the company’s employee assistance program, which is specifically designed to help co-workers who are struggling.

This opportunity engenders goodwill by giving employees the chance to make a difference, whether with confidential financial help or via something more public like bereavement baskets for colleagues who have lost loved ones.

One staff member reported feeling like a “better person” because he or she could make a difference. Said another, “It made me feel good to know that the money I give out of my paycheck goes to help someone within this company.”

Knowing the company allows for giving has heightened employee commitment. “How attached do I feel to the company?” an employee asked. “Very attached.”

Companies that have added the employee-giving component include Southwest Airlines, Domino’s Pizza, the Limited, and First Engineering Corporation. Will yours be among them?

Dutton has a few suggestions managers can follow to promote success:

-Introduce the employee support program.

-Make it simple for employees to give as well as receive.

-Communicate ways employees can give (e.g., financial donations, peer-to-peer support).

-Actively support the program by modeling participation, not relying on the program’s existence to promote itself.

-Subtly highlight the company’s own contributions to the programs (e.g., matching donations).

 Chances are, the change in your organization will be palpable: individuals will be more fulfilled, the work force as a whole will make an increased commitment to your organization, and your organization will enjoy an enhanced sense of citizenship). It’s what you might call a win-win-win.

Posted in Creating Opportunities, Energizing the Workplace, General, Leading Change, Social Responsibility and Virtue, The Meaning of Work | No Comments »

Leading Change: Is “What’s In It for Me?” the Right Question to Ask?

Monday, September 24th, 2012

By Shawn E. Quinn

When I talk to executives who are trying to effect some kind of change in their people, they often work from one of the basic processes for leading change. Typically, they’ll start by looking for the burning platform and trying to think through what the benefit is for each person whom the change will affect. 

But is “What’s in it for me?” the right question to ask during the change process? Some PhD students a colleague of mine was supervising challenged that assumption with a simple but telling experiment. 

Doctoral candidate Adam Grant learned the University of Michigan Health System hospital was always trying to make sure all people using the bathrooms were regularly washing their hands to reduce the spread of germs.  Grant and his colleague David Hofmann got to thinking about motivation, and a study was born. In half the bathrooms, signs were posted that read, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases.”  In the other half, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.” 

At the end of the study period, Grant and Hofmann went back to see how much hand gel (soap) had been used in each bathroom.  Had the signage increased hand gel use? (more…)

Posted in Creating Opportunities, Culture, Energizing the Workplace, General, Leading Change | No Comments »

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