Cultivating Organizational Learning: Fixing the System: A Case Study
By Nigel Paine
It is not just obviously toxic workplaces that damage organizational learning. Here is a brief example from a Professional Services Company that illustrates my point perfectly. It is about a talented female executive on track to make Partner. She had an outstanding performance review and was encouraged to expect partner status in a couple of years if she maintained her progress and trajectory.
She was asked by her manager at the time if she would help out with some routine projects that could not be properly resourced due to attrition and a restructuring. She agreed to help the team and had a year of routine, unexciting work. When she came up for her annual review, the Partner announced that she would not be putting her forward for a bonus this year as: “she had not completed any exceptional work or brought in exceptional revenues”. Furthermore, she was told that her Partner trajectory had been put back a year and would now depend on performance the following year.
The executive pointed out that she had been asked to take on this more routine role for a year to help out the firm and had agreed to sacrifice some more interesting projects to help out the team as she had been asked to do. The Partner replied that, given the portfolio of work, there was no possibility of considering her for a bonus. When asked why no one had told her that helping out would be a career limiting decision, the Partner was brusque: she should have been aware of this and the rules on who would be put forward for bonuses were very clear. In effect, the Partner’s hands were tied.
The result is that a high-flying and really engaged member of staff is considering her options outside the firm and could well leave within the next year. This is an extraordinary turn round. No one could accuse the company of toxic behaviour. Everyone held to the letter of the law. Nothing was outside the rules or broke any company codes. But the insensitivity, and lack of concern for a budding star in the company, will probably mean that she never returns to that high watermark of motivation that she had achieved in previous years.
When you penalise staff who share their expertise; step in and take on assignments for the team rather than purely for their career, you breach any nascent organizational learning links and connections. If the young executive stays, she will probably not put herself out for anyone else or feel that helping her colleagues is anything other than career-limiting.
There are so many ways around this dilemma, but they are very rarely employed. This illustrates just how easy it is to follow a series of logical steps that are fine, in themselves, but add up to something that is clearly the opposite of the intention: and an unintended consequence.
We start with a team crisis that needs a remedy. One obvious way forward is to persuade a member of staff to step out of her current role and take on the team issue and fix it. All well and good, but this process clashes with two other company cultural imperatives. The first is that staff bonuses can only be given for exceptional work that breaks new ground. The second is that any lapses in performance slow down the pathway to partner. There is nothing wrong with any of those outcomes when taken individually. It is only when they are locked inflexibly together that unintended consequences emerge, and the process impacts negatively on the individual’s career. It also is not a good look for the organization either. It appears to encourage cynical and self-serving behaviours.
Changing the unwanted outcome should not focus simply on the individual or seek to attribute blame. Arguing that “it is all the Partner’s fault” misses the point. It is much more productive to keep a watchful eye on these systemic problems and address them because they inevitably lead to preventable poor outcomes. There are several possible ways forward:
Be upfront about the consequences of taking a back-seat for a year. If it will be career limiting, then make that explicit. This, however, is living with a systemic issue and not fully dealing with it. Very few people would be prepared to take that back seat for the team if the consequences are so career limiting. The second and third solutions are more systemic; they will fix the challenge rather than ‘get round’ it.
If someone is prepared to share their expertise for a year, this should be highly commended and rewarded. The executive could have been awarded a ‘mentoring break’ which is recognised internally as exceptional performance and a boost to company unity and success. You could also build this process into the company DNA by agreeing that no one can make Partner unless, and until, they have offered to share their knowledge and volunteered to take a mentoring break.
The sacrifice should be recognised and rewarded at bonus time rather than penalised, and steps could be taken to reposition the individual on an accelerated fast track after the ‘mentoring break’. So rather than being hindered in her quest for partner status, she should have been accelerated along that trajectory for doing good work in building the culture of the company and maintaining its performance.
There will always be times when the needs of the organization come before individual aspiration and performance. It is unlikely that a cultural climate that frowns on generosity and a selfless disposition can thrive in today’s challenging environment. Organizational learning will not simply happen spontaneously. It must be nurtured and set out as a non-negotiable aspiration. That Professional Services Company missed a huge trick, and the sad fact is, that they may never realise that.