Posts tagged as:

Employees

Leading Authentically with Transparency: An interview/podcast with Paul Levy

by cv harquail on April 27, 2009

Here’s a neat podcast interview with Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose leadership approach to the need for dramatic cost-cutting we considered in the post Finding a leadership opportunity in alternatives to layoffs. 200904261309.jpg

This podcast interview offers a few additional insights, in part because the interviewer Catherine Bell asks some smart questions. It’s worth a listen, just to get a sense of the ‘man behind the leadership legend’.

Here are a few top notes from the interview:

"It’s striking to me that this (process) is considered unusual, because to me it’s so commonsensical."

  • Using his transparent and highly participative process, Levy and the BIDMC employees were able to reduce a predicted 600 layoffs down to under 150 layoffs. Pretty good especially for the 450+ who still have jobs at the Medical Center.
  • Levy is a little surprised that he hasn’t been contacted by many other leaders who might want to try this model — just one or two so far.
  • Levy also hasn’t seen many other organizations use a transparent approach for reducing the actual number of layoffs. He thinks this is odd- "You want to engage people in the kids of changes…. people on the front lines … often have suggestions about how to run things more efficiently & effectively– why wouldn’t you want to listen to them?

Asked if he’s experienced any downside to this transparency, Levy says (I paraphrase) that to splay out the problem for the world to see, copy, pass along, etc. could feel difficult. … Who wants to broadcast the extent of their financial troubles and what they’re doing to fix them? However, it’s also not competitively interesting information that others could use to steal business from BIDMC. In fact, hospitals probably have a lot to learn from one another.

The data has to be public to help employees acknowledge the problem as well as to help generate solutions. A leader needs to use transparency with data to establish creative tension between an audacious goal and where you are now. The creative tension established by that gap helps the organization focus on the problem and also track progress.

Transparency is central to all leadership situations at BIDMC Levy is currently using a similarly transparent approach for the Medical Center’s process for eliminating preventable harm to patients, and Levy started with this transparency collective problem solving when he faced a turnaround situation when he first arrived at BIDMC. Levy argues that transparency is not just for big problems, but is also important for day-to-day operations.

An under-celebrated insight?

Transparency has been successful because:

"Everything we’ve done, has been framed along the underlying values of the people in the organization and the major mission of the organization. … For the most part, people say thank you for being so open."

The key with transparency, according to Levy:

  • Give good news plus bad news
  • Be sincere open and honest.

Transparency in 11 Words! It’s as simple as that. (The interview, originally on the Harvard site but impossible to find there, can be accessed here on BNet. )

If you're interested in this issue, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Or, use the blue box (upper right) to get an emailed update. Join the conversation below...

{ 0 comments }

Tyson Foods lacks faith in its own identity.

by cv harquail on August 9, 2008

When organizations are being authentic, they approach their problems by drawing on their identity.

An organization that wants to be authentic must regularly find ways to translate its beliefs about ‘who we are’ into actions that demonstrate ‘who we are’. When an organization has faith in its own identity, it will strive to demonstrate this identity in its behaviors. But if the organization’s identity claims are not reflected in its behavior, you start to wonder just how much the organization believes in these claims.

tyson

There is a fascinating situation occurring right now at Tyson Foods that really illustrates this point.  Tyson, an organization that claims to be “faith friendly ” can’t seem to connect its behavior with its self-definition.

The situation in Shelbyville

1. The Shelbyville (Tennessee) Times-Gazette ran a story (8.01.08) that made public a months’ old contract agreement where “(W)orkers at Tyson Foods’ poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day, but will instead take the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in the fall.”

2. In response to the flak generated by this article, Tyson Foods issued a press release (8.04.08) Labor Day Still Recognized at Tyson Foods; Union Contract Provision only at Shelbyville, TN Plant in which they denied responsibility for the decision and emphasized that the consequences of the decision were local and minimal. This response satisfied no one.

3. The squawking online continued, consumers threatened to boycott Tyson’s products, and Tyson’s received hundreds of e-mails from angered customers who who opposed this “accommodation to Muslims”.

4. Then, less than a week later (8.08.08), Tyson’s announced that it had reached a revised agreement, that : “for this year and this year only, employees could have both the Labor Day holiday and the Muslim holiday.”  Labor Day Reinstated as Paid Holiday at Shelbyville, TN. It looks like Tyson’s pressured the union to renegotiate the contract so that it could get out of this public-relations mess.

What’s surprising about this situation?

Tyson’s claimed identity as faith-friendly was never mentioned.

Based on what I know about Tyson’s, the only part of the story that did not surprise me was the very first step — the accommodation of their Muslim employees’ religious holiday. I thought this would be a great opportunity to write about supporting an organization’s faith friendly identity through organizational design — specifically, through labor relations practices.  As it turns out, what’s going on with Tyson’s is the opposite of what I would have expected — leading me to conclude that Tyson’s lacks faith in its identity.

How important is faith friendliness to Tyson’s organizational identity?

When I first saw this story in the New York Times  (all disclaimers apply), I was not surprised that Tyson’s had found a way for its Muslim employees to have their holy day as a vacation day.  I think of Tyson’s as a faith friendly organization, because I’m one of the 35,000 moms who requested a copy of Tyson’s Giving Thanks at Mealtime booklet of blessings, one of their public expressions of faith friendliness.

1. The company claims throughout its corporate publications that it is striving to be faith friendly.

I wondered whether I was mistaken to think of faith friendliness an important part of Tyson Foods’ identity.  When I surfed over to their corporate website, there was faith friendliness as one of the (only three) elements of Tyson’s corporate, public description of “Who we are”.

Who we are:

  • We strive to be a company of diverse people
    working together to produce food.
  • We strive to be honorable people.
  • We strive to be a faith-friendly company.

Tyson’s corporate sustainability statement elaborates on their identity, in the discussions of the people and ethics that compose “who we are”, particularly the statement “we work hard to respect and honor traditions”.  Maybe that’s just the standard boilerplate…  but no, there’s more: Tyson’s discussion of “Who we Are” also describes the growth of their Chaplaincy program.  Chaplaincy program?

2. The company has designed a system to support its faith friendly identity.

Tyson Foods chaplaincy program employs over 125 part-time chaplains, working at Tyson’s 280+ plants and offices, including the Shelbyville plant. Nearly all the chaplains are Christians, although at one time at least one was an imam. This “unique benefit” has been in place since 2000, and has drawn the attention of organizations promoting spirituality in the workplace as well as  news organizations.

The Director of Chaplaincy Services  is even charged with the task of supporting management and advising management, “consult with senior management on matters relating to chaplaincy, religion in the workplace, ethics, etc. … and provide guidance on crisis response to management.”

Yes, but …

By establishing and growing a company wide program to support their employees with non-/multidimensional chaplains, Tyson’s seems to have designed in an organizational system to support their identity of being “faith friendly”. If you only saw the claim about striving to be faith friendly or had heard only about the chaplaincy program, you might even think that Tyson’s was on the leading edge of organizations trying to embrace the challenges of spirituality in the workplace.

But, when you read either the first press release or the second press release  you start to wonder:

Just how much faith does Tyson’s have in its faith friendly identity?

If Tyson’s really believed that it was faith friendly, Tyson’s would have seized this opportunity to demonstrate how much it respected the religious beliefs of all of its employees. Tyson’s would have looked for ways to demonstrate that it was working hard “to respect and honor the traditions, values and contributions” of Tyson employees.

It’s a strong signal of Tyson’s inauthenticity that Tyson’s does not seem to know how to translate faith friendliness into behaviors.  But it’s even more damning, if you will, that Tyson’s never even mentions the idea of faith friendliness in the context of this situation.

How would you expect a faith friendly organization to approach this problem?

If striving to be faith friendly is authentically part of Tyson’s organizational identity, then the concept of “faith friendliness’ — what it actually means to be faith friendly– should inspire how Tyson approaches this situation.

What might this look like?  Tyson’s could say “this issue of religious holidays for our employees is important to us as a faith-friendly organization.”  And, Tyson’s could ask itself “what might be  a faith friendly way to resolve this problem?”  But it doesn’t look as though Tyson’s did either of these things.

At the very least, I would expect an organization that claimed to be faith friendly to return to this belief and use it to help understand a crisis situation like this one. I’d expect the organization to release a statement that read something like: “As a faith-friendly organization, we recognize the importance of religion in our employees lives and we do our best to accommodate employees of any religious or spiritual persuasion in a fair way.  Therefore…”   And this is absolutely not how Tyson’s responded.

Is Tyson’s being authentic or not?  My preliminary conclusion is that either

1. Tyson’s has an extremely limited view — a parochial view, if you will — of what it means to be faith friendly,

– OR –

2. Being faith friendly really isn’t part of Tyson’s core identity.

What do you think? Weigh in by clicking the comment link (at the very bottom right of this post) and sharing your opinion.

Here is Steven Greenhouse’s article… notice the additional specifics missed in the Times-Gazette report.

Technorati Tags: ,,,, ,,,,
,,,


					
{ 0 comments }

				

			


			


			


Authentic or Not?: A Men’s Organization with a woman member

June 5, 2008

				


 Recently, I told you about an organizational situation that raises some interesting questions about whether the organization is being authentic. The organization, a Men’s Chorus, has up to 249 male members and 1 woman member, my neighbor Joan Garry.


I proposed that this organization is either very special or very inauthentic” how else could the [...]


				

Read the full article →
			


			


Can an employee be “too authentic”?

February 28, 2008

				


“The guy was too authentic to do his job!” 


The employee in question worked for an organization that created “lifestyle” products for the action sports market. He worked as an editor and was responsible for updating the organization’s website every morning.

The organization positioned itself as having authentic insight into the action sports community, [...]


				

Read the full article →
			


			


			


			


You don’t have to ‘live the brand’ to give the brand

February 22, 2008

				


“Living the Brand”, an internally-focused branding strategy  heralded by marketing gurus , is being touted in the March 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. HBR features a case discussion about how to achieve organizational authenticity   at the fictional Hunsk motorcycles. Marty, Hunsk’s new marketing manager, is intent on reinvigorating Hunsk’s [...]


				

Read the full article →