Constructive change comes from within

Association Management; Washington; Sep 2002; John T Adams III; Francie Dalton;

WHEN MICHELLE SHANDS DECIDED HER ASSOCIATION MIGHT BENEFIT FROM AN EMPLOYEE attitude survey, she had no idea what changes were in store.

Shards, the human resources director for the Special Libraries Association, Washington, D.C., contacted a management consultant and began a multifaceted transition for SLA that has resulted in an organization that is flatter and smaller. It also includes clearly defined roles for each employee and measurable performance objectives.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Before all that could happen, Shands had to get buy-in for her idea to do the survey. Shands, with the support of now Acting Executive Director Lynn K. Smith, CAE, pushed forward.

"It was frustrating to have this sense that we were out of balance," Smith said recently. "We didn't like where we were on a variety of fronts, and were struggling to articulate with clarity where we wanted to go."

Team spirit was low, with departments operating in silos and management competing with each other for the attention-and favor-of the executive director. The result was a command-and-control environment where few employees took initiative beyond their narrow ranges of responsibility.

In addition to what Smith calls a "disjointed" feeling about how the organization was performing, SLA's long-time executive director had announced his retirement would begin in a year. "We felt it was important to capture `current state' information about the organization in preparation for the new CEO," she says, "so we started working immediately to get buy-in on the survey."

The survey, as proposed by management consultant Francie Dalton, Dalton Alliances, Inc., wasn't merely a questionnaire about how employees felt about working at SLA. Besides those kinds of inquiries, it also asked staff for their perceptions about SLA's strategic direction, specific work processes, and quality of management.

Also built in were mechanisms to assess the professionalism of workplace behavior, capture perceptions about staff competencies, and evaluate program efficiencies.

Once the survey results were in, the next step would be for Dalton and SLA staff to develop a plan that would address key concerns.

More than a survey

"We were buying into a program, not just getting survey results," says Smith, who at the time of the survey was deputy executive director. "It was a hard sell because we knew the results would be fairly harsh and that remediating the ills would take a long-term commitment."

Many managers were reluctant to ask their staff how they felt and even more reluctant to take on the job of working to make tough changes. Discussions continued from late summer into late fall 2000.

Significantly, the decision was made at the staff level, without involvement of the board of directors. Four months before the CEO's retirement date, Shands surveyed the staff to find out how they felt about doing the survey. All but one of SLA's 37 employees voted to move forward. The survey was a go.

More meetings and discussions followed as SLA staff worked to tailor the questionnaire to the association's needs. Then, with safeguards in place to preserve the anonymity of the respondents, the instrument went to the staff in May 2001.

The tabulated results presented to Smith and Shands weren't pretty.

* Across all topic areas in the 110-- question survey, 42 percent of the responses were negative or very negative.

* More than 65 percent of employees found fault with the quality of leadership in the organization.

* Nearly 60 percent were critical of fairness in the organization.

* The same proportion had concerns about work processes.

* More than half saw flaws in SLA's methods for making decisions.

* More than 40 percent gave negative responses about teamwork. And almost half the employees expressed negative views about human resources.

It wasn't all bad news. Many employees were happy with their jobs.

* More than half said management was approachable.

* Nearly two thirds said tasks were delegated well.

* Almost 70 percent gave positive responses about their jobs.

* And nearly 40 percent gave favorable ratings to human resources.

Drilling down into the finer details of the responses gave Smith and Shands even more reason to be glad they had led the survey project. For example, although the overall "quality of management" scores were low, employees gave high ratings for most of the questions in this category. However, responses to some questions, such as "use of power," were so low that they pulled down the whole category. Moreover, the write-in responses reflected much positive information:

* "This is a great place to work." (Repeated several times.)

* "Restructure products and services."

* "Flatten the organization."

AS MANY STAFF HAD SUGGESTED IN THE "COMMENTS" SECTION OF THE SURVEY, THE ORGANIZATION NEEDED TO BE REORGANIZED.

* "Develop a clear strategy for the association... reorganize the staff to support the new strategy... build a high-performance staff that is vision-driven."

* "Redefine which jobs are critical to fulfilling any mission and eliminate those which are not."

Fixing the problems

After she had read through the results, Smith says her thinking was on two levels: "One was, 'Oh, my God!' The other was, 'Wait a minute-these problems aren't insurmountable. There may be a lot of them, but we can fix them."'

After giving the survey results additional thought, Smith says, she recognized that the overall responses were "very solution-oriented. If you read through them, you could see they weren't just complaints."

After sharing the results with the staff, SLA got to work. "The staff were really interested in making things better. Some even asked how they could begin contributing right away," Shands adds. More quickly than anticipated, staff focus ceased to be on the negative results and instead turned toward specifics about how to improve the organization.

As expected, lots of discussions with staff followed, during which action plans were developed for implementing improvements. A real turning point came when Shands, the HR director, brought up the rather low ratings staff had assigned her department and invited suggestions.

"Michelle said the survey gave her insights she couldn't have got any other way on how she could be more successful on the job," Smith says. "She was willing to hear more and willing to change." Adds Dalton, "Michelle really set the standard for her colleagues on how to receive and respond to critical feedback."

By now, it was only six weeks before the new CEO was scheduled to arrive, and Smith and Shands were pushing to show some progress before then. They formed a task force composed of staff-elected delegates: two from each of the four hierarchical levels in the organization. "The emphasis," Smith says, "was on choosing delegates who wouldn't be intimidated by the hierarchical level of other delegates."

The task force developed performance criteria against which to analyze all of SLA's program areas. Included in the assessment was the degree of relevance each program area had to the organization's mission, how many members it reached, how important it was to members, how much public relations value it had, and how much cost or profit it generated. As a result of the analysis, some programs were slated for termination and others for emphasis.

"Although we already had a strategic plan in place," Smith says, "it lacked accountability measures for staff. In these discussions we came up with goals and objectives for every program and for every position.

"And we caught ourselves in a mistake," Smith concedes. "In our first staffing iteration, we tried to plug all our existing personnel into the new model. Then we realized what we were doing. I'm not going to say it was easy, but we did ultimately succeed in setting aside personal relationships and focused instead on objectively assessing authentic personnel needs."

The next phase called for Dalton to interview all staff to determine their specific work responsibilities. This process revealed numerous redundancies and inefficiencies. For example:

* Staff in two departments were doing the same work, but for different supervisors, because work products were not shared across departmental lines.

* Some staff would complete their work by unnecessarily labor-intensive means to avoid confrontations with difficult employees.

* Fees for various services weren't pegged to the market, resulting in unprofitable programs.

As many staff had suggested in the "comments" section of the survey, the organization needed to be reorganized. It needed to be flatter. And it needed fewer people to get the work done most effectively.

A new organization

In October 2001, Smith and the new CEO met with each of the five managing directors individually, making the following changes within their ranks:

Three positions were eliminated, with the affected employees receiving severance pay and outplacement assistance. One staff member was kept in the same job but moved to a different level. One was redeployed to another area.

Before the reorganization, SLA had four hierarchical levels below the top two executives: managing director, director, specialist, and associate. Now there are two: director and associate. Within the remaining levels, six individuals received promotions.

"Everything was tied back to the survey results and the analysis done by the task force," Smith says.

Smith says she had already noticed many positive changes only six months after the survey was completed.

"We still have some issues, but we're overcoming them, and we're doing it as a team. Silo-thinking has disappeared. We're collaborating with each other, which is something we rarely did before. Even staff meetings have changed," she says.

HOW SLA DID IT ONE STEP AT A TIME
Once results of the Special Libraries Association survey were tabulated, the real work started. The staff needed to receive the data and then work to identify problem areas and develop solutions. Here is how we did it, step by step.
Step 1. The employees got the full survey results at an all-staff meeting. Each employee received a copy; nothing was held back.
Step 2. Hierarchically segmented groups met to discuss which survey topics they wanted to work on first. In many organizations, the different hierarchical levels prioritize topics differently, so that the various levels aren't all working on the same things. At SLA, all hierarchical levels wanted to improve interpersonal skills, how they treated one another.
Step 3. A series of workshops on interpersonal skills was held for the staff. Because trust among the hierarchical levels was not high at this early stage, these workshops were delivered in hierarchically segmented groups.
Step 4. At the same time, each hierarchical level elected two representatives to serve on a task force charged with achieving four outcomes:
1. To establish the criteria by which the association's programs would be vetted.
2. To determine how the program areas should be changed to better meet member needs and whether any programs should be dropped. (During this process, the staff trimmed SLAs 11 major program areas to seven. Among the seven programs kept were education, public relations, membership development and publications. The staff evaluated these programs against 13 critical factors, including past member survey results, how they contributed to the profession's image, and whether they made money or needed to make money. The criteria were ranked in importance, with member interests at the top of the list.)
3. To establish the criteria by which all initiatives within the seven program areas would be approved. Any existing or newly suggested activities within all program areas would be vetted against these criteria, ensuring that all resources were deployed in alignment with strategic priorities (see figure).
4. To learn how to establish measurable goals and objectives.
Step 5. Interviews were conducted with each employee to update job descriptions, identify redundancies that could be eliminated, and begin the process of establishing measurable goals and objectives for the organization. Ultimately, this step resulted in the elimination of some jobs, the addition of others, and dramatic changes in still others. Two of the four hierarchical levels-managing directors and specialists-were eliminated, changing the reporting relationships for many SLA employees. Three employees were outplaced. Six employees were promoted. Salaries were adjusted to market levels for all employees.
Step 6. Individual meetings were held with each of the 14 directors to develop measurable goals and objectives. This work was then presented by each director in meetings attended by all directors to
* invite changes in targeted outcomes;
* identify critical collaborations among the directors; and
* ensure that each director knew the functional responsibilities and contributions of every other director.
Each director received a copy of all the final goals and objectives. In addition, this step identified outcomes for which all directors shared responsibility.
Step 7. While Step 6 was under way, workshops on collaborative work environments were conducted. It is significant that during these workshops, there was full agreement among all hierarchies about the behaviors that evidence collaboration, and all SLA associates agreed to adopt those behaviors.
As a result of the work SLA has done, it is no longer possible to cloak a lack of productivity behind a facade of power, tenure, personality, or work style. Expected work outcomes are clear, and the volume of work is such that there isn't tolerance at any level for power plays or departmental isolation. SLA is now a results-oriented organization that has clarified the value and contribution of each employee.
Francie Dalton is founder and president of Dalton Alliances, Inc., Columbia, Maryland, a business consulting firm specializing in communication, management, and behavioral sciences. E-mail: fmdalton@da/tonalliances. com.

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"Information on program area progress and difficulties is shared with everyone and is substantively discussed," Smith explains. "More people are working together and working smarter. The mailroom and information technology are working together on e-commerce. That never would have happened before. Then, there were few processes in place. Now the main process involves measurable performance objectives that commit each staff person to work together with other staff, communicate, and share accountability."

And there have been other changes as well, Smith explains. "Our new CEO left only months after arriving, but it's been a seamless transition. Our business decisions are sound and process-oriented, not emotional or self-serving."

Meanwhile, working with Dalton as part of the ongoing transformation, the organization continues to change. Staff are engaged in every step of the process, and are demonstrating a sense of personal responsibility for the health and overall effectiveness of SLA.

"Smith and Shands get high marks on two fronts," says Dalton. "First for having the courage to undertake what they knew would be an uphill battle and, second, for demonstrating strong leadership throughout every step of a very difficult process."

"Sometimes," Smith says, "you have to stir the pot."