Posts Tagged ‘Corporate America’

A Case for Bringing in New Blood

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Have you ever noticed that, when a new employee starts working for you, they’re highly motivated? They feel the need to make their mark on the company. They want to be impressive. They want to set a trajectory that will ensure their advancement. Sure, sometimes it’s just sycophantic nonsense, but in most cases they genuinely want to demonstrate their skills and their worth to the company.

This is a good thing. This is a really good thing. That drive to demonstrate worth will, in most cases, pay off for the company. But, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon?

Positive Reinforcement Does Wonders

The corporate environment can have a mind-numbing effect on even the most motivated, high-quality performer. Getting past the entrenched politics, the written and unwritten procedures and policies and the general corporate malaise is a challenge. And, while motivated employees like to make a positive difference for the company with their ideas, they don’t usually relish the idea of having to jump through so many hoops to make a positive change.

One way, then, to reward that new blood drive is to remove barriers. When you see a new employee who has a good idea, do what you can to fast-track the idea. Help her overcome the political barriers. Give her a head’s-up on how to grease certain wheels, or who to talk to about cutting red tape.

When the change does happen, reward him in other ways. Simple verbal praise is all right and important, but it isn’t enough. You need to offer other rewards, such as peer recognition. Ideally, an idea or innovation that makes or saves the company money ought to have a monetary reward.

Keep Staffed with Highly Motivated People

So, you understand how to take advantage of this new blood motivation on an individual level. But, how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep bringing in new blood?

It’s simple enough. You constantly evolve your staff by finding ways to always bring in new, motivated, intelligent personnel.

You have to be careful here, of course. You don’t want to lose motivated employees. If your bottom 10% are all still motivated and productive, they don’t deserve to be killed off and the company will be worse off without them.  This is what is sometimes problematic with the old GE / Six Sigma mentality of “killing off” 10% of your work force periodically.

You also need to watch out for the potential negative impact this has on productive employees. In some cases, it will have the unintended consequence of scaring the hell out of them. Employees will start to dread the regularly-scheduled new folks, and may begin to get paranoid and feel as though they have a target on their backs.

If you’re lavish with your rewards, this isn’t as much of a danger, of course.

A better option may be to occasionally find ways to bring in new staff and grow. This is especially true if you already have a dynamite, productive team. Find new roles, and find the budget. Of course, this works well with bigger organizations, and not so well with startups.

Finally, you need to realize that not every new employee has that “new car” shine. If you bring someone in who doesn’t seem interested in making her mark on your organization, cut them loose sooner, rather than later. Then, go out and find an employee who wants to make a difference.

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Posted in Corporate America | 18,702 Comments »

How to Spur Innovation at Your Organization

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Some organizations thrive on innovation. Younger companies, and companies that deal with bleeding-edge technologies or trends tend to make innovation a core value.

Chances are pretty good that’s not your organization. Most organizations struggle with innovation. They want to move forward with new ideas, new technologies and new platforms, but an institutional history or structure holds them back. Other companies tend to squash innovation like it’s an annoying little bug.

I’ve experienced this first hand. I’m the Director of New Media for a big company with an established past. As in, 110 years of an established past. Lucky for me, the company does have a real desire to innovate in the area of technology. They’ve just had a hard time of it up to this point.

So, here’s what I did for my organization. I’m not saying this approach will work for yours. Heck, it might even get you fired. But if your organization is going to stay competitive it’s going to have to innovate, and this process may help.

  1. Identify the problem. This was as much for my benefit as for the organization’s. We were able to get buy-in for innovative ideas at the highest levels of the company. That means when we hit organizational roadblocks down the road, we were able to go back to those executive sponsors and garner support.
  2. Create a mechanism for change. Rather than proposing specific innovations, we developed a group that would solely be responsible for incubating new and innovative technologies, tools and ideas. This group’s purpose is to identify possible technological innovations and bring them back to the specific business units. The group operates outside of the existing corporate bureaucracy, giving it a greater degree of autonomy than any departmental group might have had.
  3. Implement a change process. We didn’t leave the innovative group alone to rule the world, however. We gave them a specific roadmap. We included methodologies, such as interacting with vendors, beta testing of new technologies and involvement with conferences and trade shows, that they would use to identify new technologies.
  4. Determine the vector of change. We also gave our innovation group a specific list of technology types from which they could work. We suggested things like “Web Technologies,” “Cloud Computing” and “Delivery Platforms.” This helps to insure that the group doesn’t go rogue into bleeding-edge technological innovations when we’re struggle to even keep current.
  5. Develop an intake process. Identifying technology innovations isn’t enough, of course. We needed a way for our innovation group to bring new tech to our business units. We developed specific processes for the group to use, including reaching out proactively to various business units, and being proactive rather than reactive.

The end result has been that we’ve seen some especially useful and innovative technology implementations across the company since we started this process. Not every innovation to come out of the group has been implemented or even fully considered, but our business units now have a pool of innovations to choose from going forward.

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Posted in Corporate America, innovation | 10 Comments »

How to Keep your Freedom in Corporate America

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

If there’s one thing that big corporations tend to have it common it’s that they’re stifling. And I don’t mean just a little bit stifling, I mean a LOT stifling. Between meaningless management-speak and org charts that look like a work of string art, you can go mad if you don’t keep your wits about you.

What makes it worse is that corporations – or at least, the middle managers in corporations that determine the day-to-day life of a company – believe that this kind of processing, this kind of bureaucracy, is the right way to get things done.

So, what happens when you take someone who’s used to working autonomously and try to plug them into the corporate assembly line? Well, you get a mess. I’m living proof of that.

I’ve been an entrepreneur in the tech field for a long time. I took my startup and built it into a successful company in under five years. After I sold off the company, I was up for a challenge. I turned, in my naiveté, to the corporate world.

I was looking for something I could sink my teeth into. I was looking for something exciting that would challenge me. Little did I know I’d be challenged, not just in my creativity, but also in winding my way through the corporate bureaucracy in order to truly innovate.

I went from running my own new/small company, to selling it to a medium-sized company, to working for a monster-sized organization that’s over a century old. That means a century of bureaucracy, a century of entrenched systems, and a century of politics. Talk about culture shock.

The problem isn’t unique to my company, of course. In fact, my company has, at its heart, a desire to innovate and encourage creativity. Any company that’s been around that long presents some serious challenges in the way of bureaucracy.

But, I’m still here. I’m doing the work, day in and day out. How do I handle being the Director of New Media in a company that has so much entrenched bureaucracy, and doesn’t intrinsically foster freedom and initiative? – That’s easy. I change the company. Along the way, I use three guiding principles to help me maintain my freedom (and sanity) working within the bureaucracy:

1. I build on institutional strengths. It’s easy to see the limitations and the useless structures at work in a 110 year-old company. In fact, some days you can get so caught up in the restraints that you miss something: there’s a reason that company has been in business for 110 years. There is something there that’s kept them successful and in the market. Figure out what that is, and put it at the core of everything you do, and you’ll find your efforts will be rewarded even if they’re unconventional.

2.  When you get scolded for thinking outside the box, redefine the box. This isn’t always easy to do, of course. But you need to be able to demonstrate how innovation and creativity have paid off in other endeavors, especially ones internal to the company. Don’t think outside the box, make a bigger one.

3.  Produce demonstrable results. You can’t argue with success. If you want to be encouraged to be creative and free, then demonstrate that you’re able to produce results because of your creativity and freedom. For any given endeavor you want to propose, include some form of metric measure its success.

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Posted in Corporate America | 7 Comments »