Leveraging Pandemic “A-ha's!”

Originally published on HR.com: https://bit.ly/3luOKJC

By Beverly Kaye, Connie Bentley, and Linda Rogers

Just getting it isn't doing it

Pandemic (adj.): pervasive, prevalent, rampant, universal, global.

By definition, our current social, health, and workplace crises are clearly pandemic. And, while far from over, business leaders from all these sectors are already asking, “What are we learning?” A valid question to be sure, but perhaps a more relevant and useful one is, “What will we do with what we’re learning from the ‘pandemic ahas’ of the last several months?” “A-ha's” like:

• “The workarounds we’ve had to create work better than the existing procedures.”
•  “We thought we needed face to face meetings, but we just need better communication.”
•  “Working from home stresses me less, and I’m just as productive.”
•  “Being out of sight of my manager greatly increased my morale and productivity.”
•  “I realize my manager doesn’t trust me to work from home.”
•  “I’m more valuable to the company than I – or the company – knew.”
•  “Management had no idea how many things were not working here.”

These are just a few examples, and you probably have some of your own. While we have coined them “pandemic A-ha's,” perhaps a better description would be “blinding flashes of the obvious.” They describe points in time when a bulb lights up and causes someone to say, “Wow! That’s interesting” or “I never noticed that before.” They are significant insights that can shed new light on old thinking, uncover dormant issues and raise thorny questions that could cause leaders to explore and exploit or to expel – a debilitating behavior that creates “organizational inertia.”

Change Begins with Choice

Insights like the ones above have implications, and each presents its consequences and choices. For example: 

•  The sales rep who realizes she is more valuable than she or her company realized might seek to clarify her value with her manager or take her insight and her talent to a competitor, or she waits for the next recruiter to call.
•  The product manager who now sees how redundancies slow down the development process might be energized, or traumatized, or demobilized at the thought of fixing them.
• The systems analyst who can now see the value of workarounds might champion changes, resist bucking the system, or simply complain about the status quo.

So, whether insights advance or inhibit an organization’s progress depends mostly on how comfortable employees are pointing them out, how willing leaders are to hear them, and how motivated both are to act on them.

How many times have you heard someone say, “Don’t tell me you get it? Tell me what you’ll do about it”? Good leaders know there is a difference and a distance between the two. And not making that journey often has a high price -- talent turnover, low employee engagement, and reduced productivity, to name just a few. So, to help our clients make the journey from only “getting” pandemic a-has to actually doing something about them, we borrowed from the recent Covid-19 crisis and took a scientific approach to the problem.

What Would a Doctor Do?

When facing an illness or disease, doctors ask questions – What is it? What are the symptoms? Is it caused by a virus? A vitamin deficiency? An immune system disorder? How can we fight it or immunize against it? When talking further about a pandemic, they use words like transmission, community spread, rate of infection, herd immunity -- just a few of the terms that have recently invaded our language like a band of linguistic marauders. But they may provide a useful model for understanding why some organizations explore and exploit pandemic “a-ha's” while others fall victim to organizational inertia.

Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion states,

“A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.”

This law means that things cannot start, stop, or change direction all by themselves (Newton’s Laws of Motion/ Live Science, Sep 27, 2017.)

 We believe the same is true of organizations. While we know that organizational inertia is not caused by a virus or a vitamin deficiency, we know that its cause is the same as for any other kind of inertia – resistance. Translating inertia into a business context, we define it as “the tendency for organizations and their individuals to resist change until a greater force overcomes their resistance.” Further, we believe leaders and employees together can exert that more significant force. They can overcome the resistance that keeps them from turning “a-ha's” into advances.

Scarce Skill or Weak Will

We believe this resistance usually traces back to two possible conditions -- scarce skill or weak will. Skill is “an ability or competency.” “Will” is defined as “desire, willingness, motivation.” Will is the fuel that powers the skill. Skill without the will remains motionless, and will without skill is meaningless. But, if you can only have one, choose will.

 There’s probably a good reason for the old saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s away.” Without requisite skills, an organization slows down, but without a will, it will be paralyzed. If an organization lacks the skills required to move from insight to action, leaders can rent, buy, or build them. OD professionals and corporate recruiters are not in short supply and spend their careers helping organizations find or improve ability and competency. But if an organization lacks the will -- the motivation to act -- all the consultants in the world won’t compensate. Bottom line: Weak will cause more inertia than scarce skills.

 So, what keeps skillful from being willful? Barring inherent psychological conditions, which we are neither trained nor inclined to tackle, we believe the cause is often an opposing force within the organization itself – its culture.

Insight Out

An organization’s culture protects it against invasive values and behaviors. It ensures that its members align with the purpose of the enterprise. It sets expectations for how people should behave and work. In practice, it determines how most of its individuals will function in certain circumstances. But culture can also dictate unwritten but commonly understood penalties for non-compliance. A culture that is too strong or even inadvertently punitive can inhibit employee motivation to examine or pursue new ideas and practices. A culture that kicks into action too often or too powerfully, or exerts too strong a force on its members, can keep insight out. We call this condition “cultural overkill.”

 If left unchecked, cultural overkill is a leading cause of organizational inertia. It can keep leaders and organizations from taking action on the valuable insights that invariably arise during times of crisis. But the good news is that, like human illness, organizational inertia exhibits recognizable symptoms. And a well-trained leader will diagnose and respond to them before the condition causes irreparable harm.

Where Does It Hurt?

In the medical world, symptoms are physical or mental conditions that indicate the presence of an illness. We believe the symptoms of organizational inertia resemble those of many physical disorders, as this above checklist shows. Use it to highlight and prioritize those you will address quickly.

Inertia Checklist

What symptoms of organizational inertia have you or others demonstrated? Indicate all that apply (Y/N) and feel free to add more.

 Not to overdo the medical analogy, but it is probably safe to say that any leader whose organization presents with more than two or three of these symptoms would do well to examine the situation further and determine if treatment for organizational inertia is indicated. If so, the next question is, “How can we treat it?”

Take-Two Aspirations

The term “aspiration” is defined as “ambition, aim or goal – each implying a strong desire for advancement.” The most direct way to avoid or treat organizational inertia is for leaders to adopt and promote two simple aspirations – Explore and Exploit.

Exploring employees’ career goals, work-life needs, and interests, and helping them explore their current and future roles in the organization’s vision, purpose, and plan will encourage their motivation, comfort, and willingness to identify opportunities for improvement and to take action.

Exploiting employee “a-ha's,” championing the improvement effort, facilitating an improvement strategy and plan, and involving them in the process will create an atmosphere where employees feel free and safe to take action for the greater good.

 While turning pandemic “a-ha's” into systemic advancements is not a simple task, it is eminently doable when leaders create a culture that encourages, supports, and rewards answers to the question, “What will we do with what we’re learning?”