Joe Mechlinski and Doug Beigel, CEO of COLA, a nonprofit organization in Columbia, Maryland that offers training, accreditation and consultation to medical labs, discuss one of the biggest challenges business leaders face: successfully initiating change. Beigel reveals how he continually “resets” his organization to keep pace in his rapidly-changing industry.
Joe: Harvard Business School professor Dr. John Kotter says that seventy percent of organizational change initiatives fail. I think the failure rate is so high not because people are unwilling to commit to change, but because they are unwilling to un-commit… to their need to be right, or to past commitments they once thought were musts. They don’t understand that they have the ability to hit the proverbial reset button and begin anew. Reset done right leads to a zero percent failure rate. It doesn’t matter whether your company is downsizing, expanding, restructuring, launching a new product or service, or transforming your entire culture in preparation for growth – you can start off on the right foot by hitting reset. You start by accepting and acknowledging the past and your employees’ and customers’ points of view.
Doug, one assumption people make is that reset is bad. At COLA, you went about reset with an emphasis on the positive. Tell us about that.
Doug: As CEO, you have to surrender to the fact that you’re not always right, and you’re probably not right in many ways. You have to be ready to aggressively go after what may be right. You have to see this as a continual experiment toward meeting the mission. I had to learn how to look at the issues confronting me and the organization as opportunities, not threats.
When we talked about transformational change in the past, the focus had fallen on the aspects of the organization that were bad. But eventually we realized that the focus should not be on how bad we were, but on how much better we could be.
Joe: You’ve had to face many business and cultural challenges. How do you deal with that as CEO?
Doug: My premise is that every CEO has to inspire people and communicate why they’re all there. What does the mission mean? It’s up to the CEO to paint that picture. You can see it when companies don’t do that. Things other than mission fulfillment start happening. To me, it’s not Pollyanna-ish to say that the most important asset in a company is its people.
CEO’s can elect either to mobilize their people power for the good, or they can just allow the business to move forward and not use it. Even if you don’t use that power, it still exists, and it can then be negative. You might talk to people throughout the organization and hear, “Yeah, we get together and talk about how this company doesn’t really care about us.” Boy, that’s power too, but it’s negative. Instead, wouldn’t it be great to have people gather around the water cooler and talk about how they can make things better for themselves and our customers? That’s not easy, and it’s not for the weak of heart.
Joe: Reset – what exactly does that mean to you? How did you put it in practice?
Doug: It means that you take a snapshot of your situation by talking to your folks, or better yet, by offering a survey. As CEO you should know all your resources and whether they’re moving in the right direction. Wherever you see disconnects or gaps forming, that’s where the opportunities for reset are. So reset means vulnerability. It’s saying, “Okay, we chose to do an independent, anonymous survey to get to the truth. Let it fly.”
But before that, we decided that whatever we uncover in that process, we must commit to dealing with it throughout the organization. We’re actually going to do something with these results. We’re going to be transparent and send all the survey results out to the team, no matter what.
Joe: People were candid in your survey. They talked about you, the board and other executives. Having the stomach to put that out there....
Doug: Oh, yeah. One of the comments was “fire the CEO.” Look, you want to take it personally to some extent, but you don’t want to be so engaged that you can’t see the opportunity. It took me ten reads to see all the abundance in their responses.
Instead of people hiding and not saying what’s really happening on the shop floor or in their customer interactions, they said what they felt. Isn’t that wonderful? As I read the responses, I thought, how can these folks be present with our customers if they’re feeling this bad? Suddenly I could see all the wonderful opportunities presented to us by having this knowledge. You have to surrender to the idea that any input is good input.
I can just imagine other CEOs reading this and thinking, “Oh gosh, you’re gutting the organization!” No, you are resetting. You are moving the organization from the negative side to the positive side. It’s an energy transfer from “Let’s just stay here in our own muck and mire” to “Our team is going to align and move forward.” It’s not pretty. This is intense.
Then we told our people, “Here are the results of the satisfaction survey. You guys all read it. Great! Now, let’s go make changes.” Everybody in the organization formed up in teams with one leadership team member on each. Their job was to pick from a list of issues that were of greatest concern to people on the employee satisfaction surveys and come up with a way to remedy that – but it had to tie back to our mission. Employee evaluations. Flexible work weeks. Four-day work weeks. Even the titles of our projects were opportunities for these teams to impact our culture. Some doubted that any of the recommendations would be approved, but others were getting inspired by the opportunity to have an impact.
No longer were they a single voice making a comment in an employee satisfaction survey. Now they were part of a change agent group tasked with understanding what the comments meant and bringing them to life in a way that improved our ability to meet mission. Even the initial naysayers couldn’t stand on the sidelines too long because their peers expected them to complete work product and present it to the group. Powerful stuff. We’re at the stage where I decide which ones to approve, and I’ll probably be approving nine of the ten.
Joe: How about some final advice to the CEO who wants to institute change by hitting reset?
Doug: Don’t go down this path if you assume your employees have no value. They have tremendous value. They interact with your customers every day. Capture their voice; their passion. It’s untapped energy if you don’t use your people power. It’s like having an asset that’s always been underutilized. Once you ignite it, you’re going to get at least twice the value.
Stay on message. Within days you’ll start seeing a change in the conversation. The organization won’t be conscious of it, but you’ll see it as CEO. Have the attitude that this will succeed no matter what. Things will come up that will feel harmful on their face, but those are opportunities to move the organization forward.
Listen to the people; spend time together exploring concepts. They may have perceived you as not being present before. Well, now you are present. Grab that low hanging fruit.
Remember that reset is a journey with no end. This is about resetting in perpetuity. Reset, reset, reset. Even though we’re at the end of some of the employee groups and I’m in the approval process, my role is to encourage them to continue participating. There are so many opportunities to be better at what we do. My job is to continue to listen, continue to show people how committed we are to them and to our mission, and then create ways to keep everyone moving forward.
