Let me begin with “What is design?”  The most straightforward definition I could find reads like this – Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or initiate change in man-made things.  Design is in everything.  Your shirt, the logo on your shirt, the TV shows you watch, your TV, the chairs you sit in, your computer, your job, and how you do your job are all designed.  Simply put, design is in and all around us all the time.

Now, let’s explore what makes great design as it pertains to my work at Root.

First and foremost, I design for my client – their objectives and how we can make them clear, focused, and actionable.

Second, I design for me – what I’m passionate about and how to infuse that signature into the work I do.  You can’t do your best work if you don’t feel connected to it.

Third, I design for the end-user.  This may be the trickiest but most important group.  Ultimately, all the work I do will one day be used by somebody.  What do they care about?  No matter who they are, people don’t want to be lectured to.  It’s ineffective.  People don’t want to be taught – they want to be engaged.  In my experience, the only sure-fire way to engage an audience is to be sure that whatever you are designing for them has some sort of experience of themselves in it.  Think about it!  I guarantee the last movie or book that you enjoyed had a character that you related to on a personal level.

And finally, great design simplifies.  I love my iPhone.  Why?  It takes a whole bunch of tasks I once did separately and puts them all into one place – phone calls, email, TV, music, etc.  Oh, and it also fits into my pocket.  How’s that for simplification?

So what is great design?

For me, great design aligns and layers client, end-user, and designer sensibilities into a simplified and consistent experience, but ultimately delivers the objectives and results set by the client in a way that drives change.  And without solid design, I feel strongly that companies couldn’t do that as quickly or effectively in a way that resonates with their people.

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A military unit participates in the same intentional cycle.  Officers brief the unit on a particular mission and proposed tactics.  The unit sets out to complete the mission’s objectives.  Once their objectives are complete, they debrief the mission.

Both sports teams and military units rely heavily on cycles of briefing, executing, and debriefing to facilitate the growth of their players and soldiers.  What would it look like for these groups to lose that discipline and/or time to complete these cycles?  In my opinion, they would see an absence of emerging leaders.

Organizations that nurture leadership tirelessly take advantage of learning cycles for people to grow and internalize key contributions.  If people within an organization aren’t expected to grow, then that organization is not fit to grow.

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Last week, we hosted a webinar where Berry Carpenter, Petco’s Director of Training and Talent Management, shared their phenomenal story – metrics and all.

Petco identified their managers as critical “change agents” who could quickly mobilize and engage their 1,000+ stores to support a new retail strategy.  Managers who experienced the Root Compass Manager Development Program gained new insights and skills that enabled them to shift from “policing” their teams to developing their people to deliver on the new strategy.

The results?

Better-focused and more capable managers who generated higher levels of associate engagement (+7%), lower turnover (-35%), higher customer satisfaction (+5 points), and improved business performance.  This is a clear case of managers moving metrics.

If you’re looking for better business outcomes, think about your managers.  If they’re spending most of their time tackling long task lists and just “policing” or checking their teams, you have a huge opportunity.  Well-trained managers can spark a whole chain of positive outcomes and be a huge source of competitive advantage.

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So many teams seem to drift to a place where the culture of the team is soft on the difficult issues and hard on the people, even though they all acknowledge they would prefer to be tough on the issues and respectful of the people.  If there is a single factor that most contributes to the erosion of trust and the avoidance of difficult issues, it’s the “absence of the assumption of positive intent” of others.

In a recent strategic alignment session, a CEO took a moment to be vulnerable.  He shared with his team the role he believed he played in creating an unsafe environment for critical conversations.  He explained that he had a habit of telling himself a story, one that usually focused on another member’s intent, objective, and motive without ever really engaging the other member.  Many of these assumptions or stories involved the presumption or assumption of a negative motive.  He said, “The conversations I have and the language I use with myself set the tone and the stage for my attitude and my conversations with others.  I need to stop this habit of telling myself a story and assume positive intent.”

As a team, they identified several behavioral ground rules and actions that they committed to take to create a safe haven for critical conversations:

1. Be mindful to assume positive intent.
2. In the face of conflicting data or concern, go directly and quickly to the individual…without judgment.
3. Use dialogue versus lecture for collaborative problem solving.
4. Have no predetermined outcomes; be completely transparent on agenda.
5. Pursue a deeper level of understanding rather than quick, superficial judgments.
6. Listen and be present in the dialogue.
7. Make it OK to ask for help and be vulnerable.
8. Allow no backlash – either for vulnerability or positions taken.

The practice of creating explicit behavioral ground rules like these can act as a behavioral contracting process between team members.  This way, they can actively hold each other accountable and, at the same time, rigorously support each other in ensuring that these behaviors embody the way they work together.

Interestingly, this team has adopted the novel and innovative practice of holding up a yellow card or red card (like a referee for soccer) to make it also safe to call out an individual or the team practice when it violates a new behavioral ground rule.

As a result of these new practices, the organization is getting clearer and experiencing more conviction on the strategy and on the behaviors and culture that will enable the company to successfully execute on that strategy.

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Regardless of the term, they want their workers to love the company, believing that that love will have a positive impact on how employees treat their customers. In return, then, the customer will reward them with the ultimate prize – their loyalty.

I witness leaders of organizations who are trying to create the perfect reward and recognition systems or to calculate the right bonus formula and healthcare package.  All of these things are important, but they don’t create the strongest bond, one that will translate into both employee and customer loyalty.  Employees don’t emotionally engage because they are offered the best bonus package, and the cheapest price does not create a loyal customer.

My experience tells me that it’s not about the money; money can’t buy you love from your employees. Employees can truly love their organizations only when they:

• Are committed and take pride in the organization’s vision.
• Understand the business strategy that supports the vision.
• Know exactly how they contribute to the success of the business and strategy.
• Share common values with their company.

What other factors have you seen that create love between an employee and company?

Change is hard.  Strategic change is even harder – particularly when the strategy lacks clarity, alignment, and senior leader confidence.  One of the more frightening statistics on strategic change comes from a recent Booz & Company study that discovered that more than 53% of senior executives don’t have the confidence that their strategy sets them up to win in the marketplace.

Ironically, one of the universal truth’s we’ve uncovered in our 20+ years of helping organizations is that there are three great lies being told at the executive level:
1) We have a strategy,
2) We are aligned on that strategy, and
3) We have data to support that strategy

At the core of these three lies is the reality that most senior teams bandy about familiar strategic words, but those words don’t mean the same thing to each leader.

To compound the fact that most leaders are not clear or aligned on the strategies they create, their managers equally struggle to interpret that strategy so they can translate it to their people.  Set in that context, it’s no wonder that individual contributors have no idea what they can do to contribute to new strategies or connect their role to murky directives to successfully support and execute on the strategy.

So why does this happen in organization after organization?  There are two root causes:

1) Strategy execution through people requires well-defined processes to implement change, which are usually not present.
2) The methods and approaches that unlock human energy are not the common tools of choice.

In reality, the most common approach to execute a strategy has little to do with process.  It’s typically a cross of “sunshine pump” (churning out only good news) and increased demands for more accountability (get on board or get out).  As a matter a fact, we polled a group of senior executives and asked why they didn’t see strategy execution through people as a process.  They said there are several contributing factors:

• Ambivalence about who should own the process.
• The realization that a different set of skills is necessary to do it well.
• A general belief that people should “just do it” and a process isn’t necessary.

All three contribute to the reality that 60 to 90% of our strategies don’t get executed.

Unless people bring the best of themselves with excitement, ownership, advocacy, creativity, resilience, and persistence, the “immune mechanisms” for organizational change kick in and “this effort shall too pass” without realizing the dreams and aspirations for the future.

There is a better way

Rather than focusing on helping just a few people see the future, it’s far more critical to engage the energy of an entire company.  This new approach centers on democratizing strategic information.  The real level for success is bringing strategic ideas and issues to life in a language that makes sense for all employees of an organization.  Engagement is not one-dimensional.  It’s found in sports, friendship, books, music – all facets of life, really.  It can be effortless, natural, and magnetic.  It’s learning to tap people across an organization in the same compelling and sustained way so they have no choice but to feel captivated, drawn in, and connected.

And this needs to be part of a process.  Most organizations spend little time assessing how well they’re executing their strategy through their people.  And they’re not thinking about each level of the organization in a different way.  Treating those roles and levels in unique ways is part of the process.  You have to think about how you’ll create a line of sight – a common view of the strategy from the individual role to the marketplace – for each level and how you’ll connect those roles to the goals.  Then, look at the capabilities you currently have in the organization to reach those goals and where you may have voids.  Most important, realize that this will not happen overnight.  Think about how you’re going to measure the success of these efforts and how you’ll make adjustments based on the results.

Change is part of a big lifecycle.  It’s a process.  It takes time.  Planning for change and viewing it as a process will deliver those first steps of success and be a critical ingredient to ensure sustained execution.

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• Own the whole. Leaders need to spend more time working on the business vs. in the business; they focus too much of their time making decisions about what’s best for their function vs. what’s best for the business as a whole and how their function supports the business strategy.
• Creating a shared view. Leaders need to help the organization have a common view of where the business is, where it needs to go, and how every person in the organization is going to help meet strategy goals.
• Walk the walk and talk the talk. If leaders aren’t being the models for the behaviors that will get the business where it needs to go, the organization can never be successful.

In this short video, Rich Berens provides additional detail on each of these areas and talks about the outcomes that leaders can expect to see if they add these principles to their leadership toolbox.

Early on in my career, I was part of a large organization which felt a responsibility to pressure their leaders to donate to a specific charity. This was met with a decent amount of behind-the-scenes complaining and resistance. Even though many of the leaders could afford it, it didn’t sit well to be told where and what to give, or to give just so our organization “looks good.” In my experience, people don’t want to give to look good, and they don’t want to give out of guilt. People want to give to help create joy, to make a difference, and to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

At Root, one of our six values includes giving. And yet, we aren’t a large corporate sponsor of any effort. We look to give our talents, our time, and our money to making a difference as individuals and in small groups/teams committed to specific efforts. Root supports our people in this regard and it is so cool to see the creativity and results our people can generate when empowered to lead a giving effort they are personally invested in. In the past year alone, our small team of 125 people raised over $30,000 for various needs in their communities and in the world. Some of these were very specific and local and some were connected to broader and well-known causes globally.

One specific example of this concept was highlighted in a recent conversation with a colleague. He said to me he “gives for joy and gives water.” I must admit that I love to “give for joy,” but water wasn’t at the top of my list. And yet as I listened to the first-hand experiences of my colleague and what he was passionate about doing, I found that I couldn’t wait to give for the benefit of clean water around the world. How did that change in me happen? Well… he made this personal for me. He gave me the many reasons that he was so passionate about this concept, including:

• Diseases from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.
• Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren’t strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery, and other illnesses.

My colleague had relatives raising money to drill water wells. He knew the people who would be drilling them and the specific impact they were making in Africa and in an orphanage in Haiti. I decided right then that I wanted to be connected to this and I wanted to give. His daughter Caryn Wooster took the photo shown here inside the Montrouis orphanage in Haiti after they drilled their first water well. Look at the joy!

I want to be a part of that. I want to help create that for more children in the world. Water just went onto my personal list, and because of the efforts of our colleague it went onto Root’s list too. We decided to make a donation to water.org in honor of our clients and prospective clients as a holiday gift this year. For more information on creating positive change through clean water, check out the websites: www.charitywater.org and www.water.org.

The giving value at Root is an important part of our culture. It enables individuals and teams in our organization to focus effort and passion in charitable areas that mean the most to them personally. But the giving piece is just one part of our overall people-focused culture at Root. We personally have seen the benefit for our organization of a people-oriented business culture, and studies support how building and sustaining strong people-based cultures can translate into stronger organizational performance and more engaged employees.

What’s on your list for giving this holiday season? Whatever it is, I’m guessing it is personal and meaningful to you. Consider sharing the story of what you care about with others and you never know what might happen from the connection. After all, giving is very personal and water just went on my personal list.

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