The Brutal Facts - Part 2

I know I've drawn a number of posts from Jim Collins' Good to Great, however I think it is one of the most thought provoking books I've read in a long time. I want to revisit the concept he calls Confronting the Brutal Facts. Collins posits that one of the key characteristics of the organizations that were able to make the leap from Good to Great was that they were able to confront the brutal facts.

Back in March, I wrote a post about how companies seem filled with people who want things spun rather than being willing to face the brutal facts. At that time I was working as a quality analyst and had contact with some peers in other organizations who were able to validate my perceptions based on their own experiences.

I'm now an internal auditor for the same company, which brings this whole issue home again. Yet I now begin to recognize the critical nature of the duality inherent in what Collins calls the Stockdale paradox. The Stockdale paradox is based on the story of Admiral Jim Stockdale. Stockdale was captured in the Vietnam War, and was tortured numerous times during his incarceration. He never deluded himself with false hope, yet he retained a faith that he would survive. That faith, coupled with the stark acceptance of reality allowed him to survive the horror in which he found himself. It also allowed him to lead others in a way that enabled them to survive as well.

So what does that have to do with auditing? I think a key characteristic needed to be a successful auditor is to face the realities I find as I audit. But I also have to retain the faith that all the problems will be overcome and we will make this a truly great organization.

I will confront the Brutal Facts so that I can help build the company to be all it can be.

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Our People are our Greatest Asset

I've been writing and rewriting a post on this topic for months now.

I guess the problem is that I'm horribly conflicted about the concept. I fully believe that the people in an organization are the most important asset it has. But I think most corporations may approach this concept from entirely the wrong direction.

Jim Collins proposes, in Good to Great, that rather than figuring out strategy first, an organization should make sure it has the right people. In his analogy of 'Getting the right people on the Bus" he posits that the Level 5 leader will say:

“Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

This seems intuitively wrong, but I really think it's right. The right people are going to be the right people regardless. They will adapt as needs and the business environment evolve. I don't want someone who is amazing at leading in a bullish economy when the economy goes bear.

But very few organizations recruit this way, and they hamstring themselves right at the start.

I know I've recommended it before, but you really should read Good to Great.

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Fire-Fighting isn't Good Business

Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not a post about our noble emergency service workers. I view them with nothing less than awe. These people would risk their lives to save mine, and they don't even know me.

This post is about business in North America. Talking with a number of associates from different industries, and looking at the literature out there I've come to realize that many organizations spend most of their effort in putting out fires. That is to say that they only have time to fix the things that are critically broken. There is never time to build or grow as an organization.

When organizations engage in change efforts, they are often radical change efforts. "We are redefining ourselves." "We are going to shake up the company."

A post by Tom Vander-Well titled The Mantra of Mediocrity got me thinking about this in the context of Call Quality.

I've seen the Fire-Fighting approach to Call Quality:

"Agents aren't branding! We must fix this. We'll start doing monitors that only listen to the opening and make sure the agents brand. Anyone who doesn't will receive a Zero Score."

I've also seen the radical change approach:

"Our CSAT has dropped 5 percentage points. We need to completely redesign our Quality Guideline!"

The Fire-Fighting approach 'Over-Solves' the immediate symptom and rarely improves actual Call Quality. Unfortunately, most radical change efforts fail as well. The amount of resources and energy to lead a radical change effort are immense and generally not available as they are devoted to fighting fires.

Instead of Fire-Fighting or radical change, we need to consider true continuous improvement. I'm especially enamoured of Jim Collins' Flywheel concept. The idea that we continuously give that flywheel small pushes, speeding up the wheel to incredible speeds and ultimately making that Breakthrough.

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