The “can do” attitude; driving the vessel to nowhere…

I am writing this to highlight some dangers behind a very popular and well intended motto and frame of mind; the “can do” attitude. Many people have probably realized my theory, but the majority of people may find it useful to reflect on this thought.

With the popularity of can-do attitude as an attribute for success in today’s corporate (and otherwise) world, we tend to miss on opportunities because this attitude really narrows our chances for spotting the better ones. I will explain this and give a few examples as I go.

While the essence of this quality is to have “the ability and willingness to do whatever is necessary for success”, the focus of people is shifting to demonstrate that they can do almost anything that is thrown at them. This state of mind is seeping through organizational layers and badly staining influential people; decision makers and leaders. The victim of this obsessive focus on “can do” is the “necessary for success” part of the deal.

Companies small and large will get engulfed in this short sightedness and try to become everything for everyone. They are stretched too thin and can barely achieve their potential in identifying their real value and focusing on that.

An Engineer will be driven by a can-do attitude and end up developing more than is needed to prove their can-do-ness. Or, at the negative side of the spectrum of delivery, they will be driven by their capacities rather than by the need at hand and end up delivering something that is inferior to the customer need. And usually the issue here is that the customer on the receiving end of the falsely projected can-do-ness is unwilling or unable to clearly think or articulate their needs.

Drilling into another level with this dilemma, a keen interest from the "engineer's" side in exploring the customer's real needs more so than projecting or proving their own capabilities, holds the key to the solution. In this case the customer is encouraged to think and articulate their needs by the engineer who is now free from the can-do constrained state of mind.

More gravely, nations will be obsessed with the idea of can-do industrialization (for instance) so they will dump their agricultural edge, ruin the environment, torment their culture and demographic identity for generations, and still miss the target of growth and prosperity.

I am found of the motto “everything is doable given unlimited time and resources”. It immediately makes you pause and take a step back to examine your priorities (rather than your abilities or willingness to prove those) and to make sure that you are heading in the right direction. Come to think about it, this non-macho perspective is a lot more empowering than the classic run; it is driven by humility and clear vision rather than ego and self proclamation.

If you want to have a can-do culture, make sure it is clear to everyone that identifying necessities, and setting priorities, are indeed part of this misleading “can-do” abbreviation.

Taking this a step further, I would identify the can-do more accurately into “the ability and willingness to do whatever is necessary for success as long as it is ethical, legal, and environmentally friendly”. But this is a subject for another discussion.

Just a thought…

Reflections on Change Management

Introduction:

Drivers of organizational change simmer down to impact the organization in three main areas, needless to say that these areas of impact are also the play field of the organization where it can instigate change or react to it. For example a change in market demand may result in actions being taken to update technology or develop new people skills. So these elements can be either triggers, action domains, or both:

1) Product (Market forces)

2) People (Human resources)

3) Systems (Technology and Processes)

Not all organizations are the same in the face of change

The drivers for change are not the same for every organization. There are many factors that actually help determine that. Advanced analysis tools (and exercises) do exist to help measure the organization’s internal and external aptitude such as the SWOT and PEST analysis approaches for internal and external analysis respectively. These should be used to determine the best path for each organization individually. I am addressing organizational value orientation here to provide a general direction on its required agility levels.

The level of innovation provided by an organization has an impact on its agility requirements; where does change mostly apply?

For this purpose I would like to classify organizations into two main categories;

conventional and inventive. If these are the black and whites of organizations, then the grey would be a “niche” organization and the ultimate (although unattainable for practical reasons) is the absolutely “agile” organization.

For any organization, these are not mutually exclusive attributes. But generally speaking every organization will have an orientation that represents the collective outcome of its activities.

A purely 100% inventive organization would not have the means to survive without being able to add real marketable value frequently enough to keep it afloat. Also a purely conventional organization would not stay for long without some innovation to keep its products beneficial and marketable and stay ahead of the competition.

That having been said, the ensuing division of organizations into inventive and conventional should be interpreted according to the context of its application. It can be interpreted that an organization in its totality is that of an innovative (inventive) nature, or you can look and find areas of both natures within the same organization. In this case you would have sub-organizational structures of different natures.

Organizational Agility Requirements

Conventional Organizations

This is an organization that is providing a conventional products or services to the market. This product or service is already known to the public. This organization must have some sort of value added in the value chain in order to make money out of its operations.

How are conventional organizations affected by change? What are the drivers of change versus the enablers (the edge)?

The drivers of change in a conventional organization would mostly be coming from the product (market) side.

Niche Organizations

A niche organization offers specialized products or services to a limited market. It is not inventing anything; however, it is using some sort of a rare expertise, technology, or even taste in providing its own value to the market. Or it is offering a very ordinary product or service to a very limited clientele.

This type of organization is very similar to conventional organizations in terms of their positioning with change dynamics. However, it is also very susceptible to internal factors (human resources and systems) changes because of its specialization and the potential cost involved with change in these areas.

Inventive Organizations

How are Inventive organizations affected by change? What are the drivers of change versus the enablers (the edge)?

The drivers of change in the inventive arena would be coming more from the internal edge (people and systems) of the organization. There are two reasons for this; the innovation represents a fresh product introduction to the market and others are to follow and try to add value, secondly, the main asset of innovative (inventive) organizations is in its people (hence the term “human capital” is mostly used in innovative environments)

Agile Organizations

Agile organizations are the best suited to deal with change. Their existence is very limited because these organizations are developed with agility as their core value. This is a very difficult model to grasp because it deprives the decision makers of developing an area of expertise on the innovative scale; being conventional or inventive enough to add value under very dynamic circumstances.

Leadership, management, and the pay equilibrium, how can Egypt snap out of a productivity ditch?

Observing the work environment in Egypt and the US has been a very enriching experience for my humble self. I cannot help it but note that there are fundamental issues damaging the work force productivity in the Egyptian market. And by market here, I am only referring to the private sector. As the issues I am addressing here have completely different shapes and consequences in the public sectors in Egypt.

Bottom line is that pay bands for managers and employees are too disparate in Egypt. This creates a must-cross barrier for every person in the work force just to be able to get a decent income. So, every employee’s target is to become a manager as soon as humanly possible. Along the way, a lot of targets and milestones are overlooked and/or used just to get to the ultimate destination without exerting the due effort to excel for the sake of these milestones success in itself.

Now, come to think about it, how is it possible that everyone in an organization can become a manager? What type of frustrations the work force goes through because of this unrealistic goal? What is the value (for the organization and the individual) of lost opportunities because of this frustration, and lack of focus on mastering day to day employee tasks? These are questions to be considered by the architects and decision makers of our work force.

On the other hand, my experience in the US has been very different from this. The manager has duties and responsibilities that are directly related to orchestrating and developing his work team. It is a “role” that does not make him/her significantly any more pay worthy than the rest of the team. As a matter of fact, in some cases the pay of the manager can be less than that of one on his team, if that team member had the experience and qualifications that would make them eligible for such a compensation scheme.

This balanced environment allows people to work more in their comfort zone. So an employee is not compelled to go over the top and try to become a manager unless he/she has the skills of, and passion for, leading people. They are fairly compensated regardless of their “managerial” status or rank; based on their experience and qualifications for the job at hand.

That being said, and back to our questions for our work force architects, the answer to them is to relate the pay to the qualification, reduce the gap between pay bands, and treat managerial “positions” more as roles and less as status. Our work force would have much more motivation to excel at what they do and focus on their day to day achievements, and we end up with more leaders and less “status managers” and “wannabes”.