HBR: Cracking the Code of Change

Beer and Nohria describe the different between two change theories: Theory E and Theory O. They note that, while each theory has been used successfully to create change, the best, most long lasting change uses a combination of the two theories. Theory E is top-down change with the focus on shareholder value. By contrast, Theory O is bottom up and focuses on other concerns, such as the employee culture and the productive capacity of the organization. Theory E tends to be a quicker process that relies heavily on outside consultants, while Theory O is a much more gradual process that depends on the employees to identify necessary change.  Beer and Nohria use two examples of company turnaround to explain these theories and then a third company to explain how the two theories could be merged.

I had a little difficulty understanding the significance of their proposed merging of the two theories, since, in my mind all three organizations didn't change that successfully. For one thing, all three companies were eventually sold and I don't think the authors were very clear as to why the third company (which used the combination of the two theories) was more successful than the first two. However, I think their concept is sound, not based on their explanation but just based on common sense.

In Myers Briggs Personality typing, there are two characteristics that align strongly with Theory E and Theory O. I think that Theory E is a "thinker" way to create change and Theory O is a "feeler" way to create change. Perhaps because I am so interested in Myers Briggs, I am more apt to put things in these categories, but it has helped me make sense of a lot of dynamics that I see. For example, the United States tends to have a more "thinker" culture and China tends to have a more "feeler" culture. Paradoxically, though, China tends to be governed top-down and the U.S. to be governed bottom-up (in theory at least). The paradox is that neither way of operating works very well without using some of the other approach to balance it out, so it makes sense that Theory E and Theory O must be used together. The challenge it so get people who operate according to those different paradigms to see that.

I think normally, I would try to explain this if I could, but I just came back from a meeting where I think I tried too hard to explain things, so I'm going to give it a break for now. If you want me to explain more, just let me know.

Social Justice

I think most social justice advocates would say that Theory O is the superior way to create change, seeing as it allows people at the bottom to create the change. On one level, I think that is a really wonderful idea... except that sometimes the people at the bottom really don't have the vision they need to make productive changes. So much of the time, our priority is our own welfare. When the system is democratically run, people tend to vote themselves more and more benefits and eventually the whole system can't afford itself. I think the higher education systems in the U.S. are a classic example of this. Of course, if the company has good leadership that encourages people to a broader view, that moment won't come for awhile and perhaps this process can be short circuited, but it takes a leader who isn't afraid of offending people or being accused of oppression on occasion. If the people at the bottom are willing to fight hard enough for their "rights," they can still sink that ship.

The other problem with the Theory O approach, though, is that it can create such a strong culture that people who are different become marginalized. Then everyone who is in the group or part of that culture congratulates themselves on creating such strong team spirit and unity without recognizing the way that they have eliminated diversity from their culture--of one sort or another. The classic fallacy in this case is to focus on one kind of diversity and completely overlook the way one is making one's environment inhospitable for other kinds of diversity.

Anyway, I think the drawbacks of Theory E are pretty obvious, especially from a social justice perspective, so I thought I would point out some of the drawbacks on the other side.

HBR: The Real Reason People Won't Change

In this article, Kegan and Laskow Lahey describe a concept they call competing commitments. Basically, when leadership (or anyone, I suppose) is trying to get change to happen, they encounter people who seem to be very on board and agreeable to that change and yet somehow don't change. According to the authors, these people are not liars or insincere. Instead, they have subconscious beliefs and commitments that they are holding on to that keep them from wanting to change. The authors recommend a process of self-reflection as a way to discover these hidden "competing commitments." They give several examples and describe this process of discovery.

This was an interesting article because someone I know sprang to mind immediately. I recently created a survey for the residents of Peter Hall (where all the foreign faculty at Sias live). After I created this survey, I got in trouble the director of housing on the foreign side. There is also a Chinese director--they work together. At any rate, she was angry with me for not consulting with her before I posted the survey. I did notify her about the survey, but I did not consult with her because as a representative of the teachers, I didn't think I needed her input or permission to conduct the survey. She didn't really argue with this idea but she said that it was really important to keep her in the loop.

So... competing commitments. When the director said this to me, my thought was, "Well, you have a funny way of showing it." Pretty much all complaints that the director encounters are immediately referred to the front desk. ("Talk to the front desk.") What usually follows for many teachers is a lot of run around. They are asked to sign up for repairs or the front desk workers tell them that the problem is being worked on. Then, the problem does not improve and the repairmen don't come to make the repairs during the agreed upon time. When they finally show up, as often as not, the teacher is not at home and the repairmen go away again, and the process starts all over with the teacher needing to sign up again. If the teacher tries a few times (a process that usually takes more than a week), then they must track the director down. Her office is not near the front desk and her hours are limited to the time when teachers are the busiest (working hours: 9-5, 2 hours off for lunch). We also have a chat group that is on our mobile phone, in which many of the housing grievances are expressed, but this director has declined to be part of that group. Most teachers get tired and give up before they actually find time and attention to work through the whole process and the director is not very accessible.

If I had to speculate, I would say that the director's competing commitment is that she doesn't want to be flooded with complaints. There are a lot of complaints and she is trying to filter them out. Unfortunately, she misses a lot of important information in the process and ends up being behind in addressing issues. It could be a survival mechanism.  Kegan and Laskow Lahey note that sometimes competing commitments are valuable and cannot be given up. It is true that this particular director is Filipino. She spent a couple of years in the U.S. trying to get her citizenship (her husband is American), and during that time, two other foreign teachers held her position and it drove them both crazy. They were no more accessible than she was, and in some ways, less helpful. However, as she reprimanded me at length for not keeping her in the loop, I reflected on this dichotomy. Perhaps it would be helpful for her to be more aware of her competing commitment and perhaps let go of her prejudice against belonging to large chat groups--she wouldn't have to address every problem if she was just part of the group, but it would help her to keep her ear to the ground, so to speak.

In our last meeting, STRC (Sias Teachers Representative Committee) suggested she set up a chat group that she herself could monitor. It will be interesting to see what she does with that suggestion.

Social Justice

There is a lot going on here at Sias right now. I am part of several groups that are working for change on one level or another. I'm not in charge of any of them, but it is kind of interesting to listen to the different conversations that go on, because these groups tend to have competing interests. Just yesterday, my director from Kansas came to our campus and observed my class. I think I did all right because he also asked me to sign a letter of intent stating I was coming back next year.

Anyway, at our department meeting (the only one of the year), he described in detail the way that he was fighting for our rights in Kansas. He noted the general ignorance regarding our situation and the sort of passive efforts to disenfranchise us. For example, he has become a member of the faculty senate, and there was a movement to change the by laws so that the faculty senate members only represented the faculty who worked on campus. That is kind of a creepy suggestion from our perspective, even though to this point, our faculty hasn't had much knowledge or influence in the faculty senate. Still, as my director went on about equal pay and fair contracts, I wonder how disadvantaged we really are. Everyone in my department gets paid easily twice the salary of a Sias teacher, and they seem to scrape by. On principal, it seems fair that we should be paid the same salary as a Kansas instructor. The argument against is that our living expenses are lower, but that argument wouldn't fly in different parts of Kansas, as my director has pointed out, so why should it fly just because we are a little further removed?

On the other hand, the system in Kansas is not sustainable. They can't afford to pay their teachers there what they are paying them presently without the surplus from our campus in China. From a certain perspective, it is because the faculty senate has such a tight grip on things in Kansas that we exist and have to run such a lean machine here in China. The surplus money they make from our program is soaked up like a sponge by all of the "necessary" programs, services, and salaries in Kansas. So my director is perpetuating a broken system by trying to get us all to feel like we are being taken advantage of and to sign up for the union. I hope we do get a little raise, but I don't want the vision of "our rights" that he is trying to sell us. A system that can't afford itself is a system that doesn't exist, and I like working here.

When does advocacy become greed? It's an interesting question.

HBR: A Survival Guide for Leaders

Heifetz and Linsky lay out several steps leaders can take to protect themselves from the vagaries of leadership. As is typical of these articles, they lay their idea out in several steps:

• Managing your environment
• Operate in and above the fray
• Court the uncommitted
• Cook the conflict
• Place the work where it belongs
• Manage yourself
• Anchor yourself

Again, while I thought the article had some interesting ideas, the authors seemed to over-simplify. There wasn't enough description of each of these steps--only on brief example that one is assured will look different in different contexts. Still, I suppose there is something to learn. 

I think it is important to note that being a leader can be dangerous. I've also noticed that in American culture, especially, it is a place of constant attack. Leaders are made to be criticized. Chinese people don't think like this. They still have some respect for the position, although they may be cynical enough in their own way. Is it any wonder we struggle to have good leaders? This article reminded me of your president who was asked to leave Baylor and our erstwhile president at FHSU. What would you say were the steps in this article that the Baylor president neglected? I think the FHSU president failed to court the uncommitted or to place work where it belonged. At some point, people who didn't warm to her vision were discarded from her calculations and she began to work around them. She really couldn't afford to do that, so maybe she also let the power go to her head and didn't manage herself well enough. 

I am working on some "change initiatives" right now. Another way to put that is that I am part of several committees here at Sias, and I am working within at least two of them to try to get administrators to address some long-standing problems here at Sias. They are the kind of working and living conditions faculty would never put up with in the State, but actually, compared to a lot of Chinese universities, Sias treats its foreign faculty pretty well. A lot of people struggle with the fact that they don't work in an American environment, though, especially when they work for an American university. While they talk about how these things would never be excused in America, though, I sometimes wonder if that is the reason American universities have such budget troubles: their faculty are just so entitled. 

It's quite the tug of war, and I wonder where to put my weight. I don't just want to advocate for the issues that I think are important. I want to be fairly representing issues that others care more about. An example is air filters. If the faculty were perfectly honest, they would admit that they can afford to buy their own air filters on the salaries that FHSU gives them. We don't have rent or very high living expenses and we are making American salaries (although not high by American standards). A good quality air filter for our apartment costs about $150. We can afford it, but we shouldn't have to pay for it, the argument goes... and then it just become this huge power struggle and I think, "Well administration can't be blamed for not taking our requests seriously when we just try to get and get and get." A lot of faculty just assume that the administration is withholding from them on principal so that the only wise course of action is to take them for all they are worth--so little trust! 

And lack of trust is what brought down our former president, I think. She stopped trusting people to be able to help her. She dismissed the things they cared about. She made arrangements to exclude them from her plans. I wonder why the authors of these articles don't talk more about trust.

Social Justice

On the other side of the issue, I wonder when social advocacy in the name of social justice just becomes a matter of greed: a matter of taking "the man" for all we can get whether we need it or not because we are entitled to our "fair share"? I get weary of that side of the social justice issue. It makes the Chinese system of knowing your place and working to create a harmonious society seem rather attractive. 

I realize that this blog entry is late. The reason that it is late is that I and the leader of STRC (Sias Teachers' Representative Committee) have undertaken to survey the faculty on living conditions in Peter Hall (our place of residence). I got so caught up with launching it yesterday that I forgot to work on this post. I'm sorry. Here, in case you are curious, are the questions that we are asking the teachers:

1. Do you have a hot water heater? (mostly yes so far)
2. If you do not have a hot water heater, approximately how many days have you had hot water in the last three weeks? (average: 7 days)
3. Approximately how often do you eat in the dining room during the week? (average: 2 times a day)
4. In the last three weeks, how often have you come down to a meal only to leave again because the dining hall had run out of certain dishes? (average: 1-2 times a week)
5. How often in the last three weeks have you taken food from the dining room that you do not intend to eat immediately? (about half admit to taking food on occasion)
6. Have you ever had mold related issues in your apartment? (more than half) If yes, have they been resolved? How long did it take housing staff to resolve mold issues? (mostly resolved)
7. Do you have unresolved repair issues? How long have you had these issues? (nothing major)
8. Do your air conditioners work? (about half do)
9. Does your hall water dispenser work? (about half)
10. Please briefly name any other issues that you are aware of in your apartment. (Most add something)

I wrote the questions quite quickly, and I expect it isn't the best research protocol ever, but I am very interested in what the tallies will be when we get in all the results. There are some issues that appear bigger than they are because the few people who have them are so vocal. This way, maybe we can get a more exact picture of what is going on. I will try to update. 

HBR: Tipping Point Leadership

This article, by Kim and Mauborgne, describes the leadership style of William Bratton, known for his ability to dramatically improve police operations in the organizations that he worked in. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment, at least at the time the article was written, was the turn around of the New York City Police Department, which became much more efficient and effective in the first two years after Bratton became the chief of police.

The authors note four barriers to such success and four strategies that Bratton uses time and again to combat those barriers. Challenges leaders face in such situations include an "addiction to the status quo, limited resources, demotivated employees, and opposition from powerful vested interests." Bratton met these challenges through overcoming the cognitive hurdle, the resource hurdle, the motivational hurdle and the political hurdle. The authors present these four steps as a winning formula that any leader can adopt because Bratton successfully used them in more than one context.

I'm not sure I agree. I don't see how it follows that just because Bratton was able to replicate his success, it was not linked, in some way to his unique personality. I'm not saying that there isn't something to be emulated there. Merely, it's not, as I see it, a winning formula.

One thing that struck me about Kim and Mauborgne's description of Bratton's process is that he must be a very intelligent, capable kind of person, someone for whom excellence is a personal practice, not just a public policy. He had to instill confidence in his direct reports, which means being fair and honest, having such integrity that there was nothing of note to hide about his own dealings. Few people, especially in his position, have that kind of integrity. He often seemed to lead by setting the example, which meant having strict self-discipline, and he could not set that example without having an excellent understanding of the social and political influences that shape police forces generally and an excellent understanding of human nature, an unusual kind of intelligence. To reduce that ability to a four-step process is simplistic and even glib.

The authors also don't give much attention to the resources that Bratton had at his disposal. Again, not every chief of police can count on the support of the mayor against the courts. Bratton came in with some level of confidence from his people, both those under him and those he had to negotiate with. He is, as so many of them seem to be, a white male.

I was struck by Bratton's practice of having his upper management travel by subway in order to help them understand the reality of the problem. I think that is a really effective way to get people on board with reform, but it's not as easily done as said. For example, I work in a program that is based in China. All of the upper leadership for my program live in Kansas and have never done more than visit China. They flatter themselves that their few weeks at Sias, in the constant company of handlers, attending meetings to listen to faculty talk and being wined and dined by Chinese administrators, has created an understanding of the situation here. They are proud of that dinner where they ate something odd and the three words of Chinese that they can use (with an atrocious accent). If challenged, they might, in theory, agree that they don't actually have a very deep understanding of China, but it is enough (they believe) to make intelligent decisions about this program...

And they make mediocre and wasteful decisions about this program. Those of us who teach here have enough autonomy that if we want to do a good job, we can avoid most of that wastefulness in our own work, but there is no synergy between different departments and a general ignorance of how students fair once they leave our classrooms. And some faculty really don't do a good job at all. We occasionally see the result of these problems (in graduates who can't speak English for example) and shake our heads. Those who can't quite stomach it leave and the rest of us console ourselves that at least students get something out of our class.

I have suggested, on occasion, that upper management should spend at least a semester in China teaching Chinese students before they are allowed to make decisions about the program, but such suggestions are not taken that seriously. The people with power are not willing to put aside their work and lives in Kansas for such an uncomfortable learning experience, and where is the Bratton who can make them? Usually, such a person is lacking. Those in leadership comfortably read an article in Harvard Business Review, confident in their understanding of the "formula" but missing vital ingredients in their leadership that the article never mentions... and their administration limps along.

Social Justice

This week, the Leadership Council that I am a part of was asked to make a list of things that the president and new provost at FHSU can do for us. This request was met with cautious optimism. Apparently, this process of airing grievances proved fruitful for the business department when Dr. Martin (our former president) conducted it. I and the other comp teacher in the council couldn't get any suggestions from our own department though. Last time we wrote out lengthy document and nothing ever came of it. The way my colleague who works in the business department describes it, Dr. Martin saw the business department as the place for growth in the program and that's why it got all of that attention. Is it inevitable that we lead out of our personal biases and values? I know that my vision for the program is greater collaboration between the American and Chinese sides. We had another administrator who was working to expand TESOL/English programs at other universities in China. When we foster one vision, does another die? Is it possible, as a leader, to be fair to everyone?

It will be interesting to see where the present administration takes our suggestions. Maybe they'll shock my socks off and give us an administrator with real power who has actually worked here in China (but I'm not holding my breath). Anyway, there were many requests made by the Leadership Council and the students barely came into it. I don't know if they had to--after all, we faculty like to think that if you help us, we'll help the students, but I wish these conversations went deeper than they do. There's a lot of discussion about pollution and FHSU's obligation to provide air filters and raises.

(I don't know how closely the above comments relate to social justice, but I think power differences influence the way change happens so much. For what it's worth, that theme runs through much of this blog entry.)