Creating Star Performers
An international icon of telecommunications, AT&T, is being dismembered into 3 sections. Word has it that one section, AT&T Bell Labs, is to be sold off. Do I hear you say: Who cares?
Two light globes blink on. One highlights that here again we see that big in business is decreasingly beautiful or functional in our corporate jungle.
Large organisations are Jurassic dinosaurs, cumbersomely lumbering around oblivious to the need for, or incapable of responding to the need for, speed and flexibility in our rapidly changing jungle.
If these monoliths do not do whatever they must so they can behave like small organisations, which usually means dividing up into tight little autonomous units, they will go the way of the Brontosaurus.
Second illumination is that AT&T Bell Labs has been a hot source of leading edge technology and technology management for several decades.
Very bright minds have developed very bright and commercially successful telecommunications innovations, such as digital everything.
These guys have been so hot that Harvard Business School (HBS) conducted a close-up management case study on Bell Labs to determine how they so consistently got such a huge amount of winning creativity out of their team.
Bell Labs' star performers are some of the top guns in the world of intellectual capital or knowledge work. Their products are their ideas.
Continually coming up with exciting commercially exploitable iideas is heavy stuff. Ideas are easy; commercially exciting ideas are not.
In Australia, our businesses must increasingly focus on maximising our intellectual capital and exporting our knowledge. We must sell smarts not just parts.
We are not accustomed to doing this. In fact, we are not yet very comfortable even thinking we have any smarts. Anti-intellectualism still lies hidden under many a facade of humility or modesty. The healthiest commercial attitude must lie somewhere between the American If you've got it, flaunt it and the Aussie If you've got it, daunt it.
The shift is happening, but mostly with gritted teeth and a boot-print on our senior management backside. In other words, because we really have no choice.
Fortunately, unlike Japan and other exceeders at copydom, we do not have to get smart, because Australia is rampant with innovative and creative critters running around pretending we are not. We only have to do a 180° identity shift, recognise and love our smarts. Simple, really.
We quite prefer, however and thank you very much, to keep our attitudes just as they are. They feel perfectly comfy and cosy. Like attitude slippers. They may be unfashionable and tatty, but bygawd they have been there for you. Can't just toss them out when some foreign upstart says "change or die".
Well, change or die.
We are not accustomed to focusing on individual performance excellence (outside of the sporting world). We could use some helpful hints from other people's successes.
We can probably learn something useful about creating and maintaining star performers from the HBS study of Bell Labs' most respected knowledge workers.
Using a quite rigorous system of analysis, the HBS study (Kelley & Caplan, Harvard Business Review, August 93) identified nine key workplace practices that enhanced the productivity of Bell Lab's best knowledge workers.
A key point of interest in the process used by HBS for this study is that the nine points were identified by the knowledge workers most respected within Bell Labs - the most respected as selected by their colleagues, bosses, support staff, and themselves. Straight from the stars' mouth.
Here are their nine essential work strategies to enhance their intellectual productivity (their smarts). You will notice that many of them pertain more to attitudes than procedures; (change or die....). How many of these nine practices are part of your everyday workstyle?
- Taking initiative. Star performers accept responsibility far beyond
their job description. They willingly volunteer for additional activities
and always actively promote new iideas. Leading as well as following.
- Networking. Getting direct and immediate access to coworkers with technical
expertise is essential. Similarly, sharing your own knowledge with those
who need it is quid pro quo for networking. You never know who will trigger
the next spark of creative processing, or add the missing link in your thought
chain.
- Self Management. Regulating your own work commitments, time, performance
level, and career growth allows the greatest output. Senior management
must totally trust their star performers to organise their own workstyle.
- Teamwork Effectiveness. Assuming joint responsibility for work activities,
coordinating efforts, and accomplishing shared goals with coworkers increases
individual excellence within a team framework.
- Leadership. Formulating, stating, and building consensus on common goals
is part of the necessary leadership role of star performers. The team then
can effectively work to accomplish them.
- Followership. Helping the leader accomplish the organisation's goals
and thinking for yourself rather than relying solely on managerial direction
enables greater achievements by the team members. Using your initiative
to explore given goals means understanding that fine difference between
pushing the edges of the envelope and pushing the edges of the content
within the envelope.
- Perspective. A helpful perspective for star performers is seeing your
job in its larger context and taking on other viewpoints like those of the
customer, manager, and work team. This is the opposite of the loner beavering
away in their isolated workplace, oblivious to other world views. You must
be able to put your mind out there to see how others are experiencing
the world. This is particularly crucial for generating those ideas that
will be commercially valuable as well as innovative.
- Show and Tell. Star performers can present their iideas persuasively in
written or oral form. There's no point in having brilliant ideas if you
cannot communicate them effectively to anyone else. Yet how often do managers
create opportunities for colleagues to practice show-and-tell presentations?
How else can we overcome the pervading fear of public speaking and hone
our communication skills?
- Organisational savvy. Understanding and navigating the competing interests in an organisation, be they individual or group, is necessary to promote cooperation, address conflicts, and basically get things done. Many of our most workable and active organisational systems are covert - hidden or not shown on any organisational flow chart. Effective performance in your job relies upon knowing where the skills, knowledges, and necessary input can be gained within the organisation. For example, always ask the secretary first, before the boss - can save a lot of time and increase your smarts.
As the authors of the study suggested:
Managers need to improve the productivity of their knowledge professionals (but) changing the ways professionals work, not installing new computers, is the best way to leverage this intellectual capital.
For Australia, I guess we need to say: First, recognise and admire our intellectual capital. Then kick in the nine advantage-makers for capitalising on our smarts. We already have a bonus in that, unlike corporate America, corporate Australia excels at small business.
Wonder what price AT&T wants for Bell Labs...?
Business Directions 30 Sept 1995
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