Managerial Leadership Style and Employee Commitment Presentation Your task in your group is to make a presentation and instruct the full class on one of th | Course Hero

Managerial Leadership Style and Employee Commitment Presentation Your task in your group is to make a presentation and instruct the full class on one of the following list of Commitments of Leadership from Kouzes and Posner’s book, The Leadership Challenge.Chapter 8: “Experiment & Take Risks” (See the attached PDF)The presentation should cover the major content of this chapter and your thoughts and ideas towards it. Please make a 15-page PPT slides for the presentation.*Note: Please do not copy. 8
EXPERIMENT AND
TAKE RISKS
“Leaders are not afraid to take risks and step outside their comfort zones.”
Chris Hintz, Cisco Systems
When Patricia Maryland came on board as president of Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, she found a hospital in distress. Sinai-Grace was the
one hospital remaining after a series of mergers, and all the “burning and
slashing” had left the staff feeling angry and distrustful. In addition, the hospital was still losing money. It was a hospital looking not only for new leadership but also a new identity.1
One of the first things Patricia noticed was that employees mostly related
to the way things had been done in the past. No one was speaking about the
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need to do things differently, and that was very troubling to her. As Patricia
explained, “Given the major challenges we face in this field, you have to think
outside the box when analyzing your situation and implementing change.”
Patricia began by talking with and listening to her staff, searching for
things they could begin to work on that would create momentum for improvement. An obvious challenge was the long waits patients experienced in
the emergency room. “When I arrived at Sinai-Grace, people in Emergency
had to wait an average of eight hours to be seen and admitted to a hospital
bed,” Patricia said. “This was clearly unacceptable.”
Another challenge was the way the hospital was perceived by the community. “It was a dirty hospital,” Patricia related. “People who lived within a
block of us were going to other hospitals. It was clear that the physical environment was a significant part of our image problem.”
Then there was the way patients saw the staff—and how the staff saw themselves. Staff would argue and talk inappropriately with patients. Attendance was
poor and morale was low. The staff didn’t wear uniforms—they were pretty
much wearing street clothes—which Patricia felt was very unprofessional.
These kinds of issues demanded immediate action, and because they had
existed for so long, they required experimenting with some fundamentally
new approaches. They turned out to be things that could be quickly addressed, enabling Patricia to win a few early victories in her efforts to improve
the quality of care, patient satisfaction, and staff morale.
To address the unacceptable ER wait times, Patricia challenged the longstanding tradition of how the department was organized. “One of the changes
we wanted to make was to create a separate area for chest pain patients so
they would be triaged immediately. Then our urgent care population was
moved to another area called Express Care.” In Express Care they built exam
rooms with walls, improving privacy and confidentiality. These simple
changes reduced wait time by more than 75 percent.
Building on this success was a $100,000 foundation grant to upgrade
hospital décor. Fresh paint, new carpets, and new furniture can do wonders.
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189
Patricia got the doctors to donate artwork, and the place started to look like
a contemporary medical center. “I really felt it was important to create an environment that was warm and embracing, allowing incoming patients to feel
some level of trust and comfort,” Patricia explained.
Patricia improved the staff ’s “décor” by challenging the practice of informal dress. “If you place your employees in uniforms,” she said, “that sets a
tone of professionalism, because if you look good, people get the first impression that you are very organized and care about what you’re doing.”
Patricia also challenged staff to take a look at the way they related to patients: “Imagine this patient were your mother or your father. How would
you work with them? How would you talk to them? How would you feel if
someone was cold, unfriendly, and treated you like an object rather than a
human being?”
These first few changes at Sinai-Grace Hospital started an outstanding
turnaround. Patricia got increasing buy-in from the staff because these early
visible successes demonstrated that things could be different. Customer service scores went up tremendously—from mostly ones and twos on a fivepoint scale to mostly fours and fives. Morale went up, and a new vitality and
enthusiasm emerged at Sinai-Grace. Today, the hospital is doing quite well financially. Most important, said Patricia, “The community has confidence in
Sinai-Grace, and they are feeling more comfortable about using the hospital
for their health care.”
Patricia Maryland moved on to seek more ways to shake up the status quo
when she accepted the position of president at St. Vincent Hospitals and
Health Services in Indianapolis, one of Indiana’s largest hospitals and the flagship of the Ascension Health system, the nation’s largest network of Catholic
hospitals. There she continues to challenge herself and others to “think outside the box,” just as she did at Sinai-Grace. “We’ve decided, as an organization, that we will look for opportunities for improvement,” she says, “and we
will challenge the way we do things if we feel we have not been effective in
the past.”
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THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
To pursue your passions and fulfill your dreams, as Patricia Maryland
points out, you have to do the unorthodox. Every single personal best we have
heard and read speaks to the need to take risks with bold ideas. It’s clear why
this is the case. Nothing new and nothing great is achieved by doing things
the way you’ve always done them. You have to test unproven strategies. You
have to break out of the norms that box you in. You have to do the things you
think you cannot. You have to venture beyond the limitations you normally
place on yourselves. Getting extraordinary things done in organizations demands a willingness to experiment and take risks with innovative ideas.
Boldness is not necessarily about go-for-broke, giant-leap projects. More
often than not it’s about starting small and gaining momentum. Fresh paint,
new carpets, professional uniforms, and a new Express Care service are just as
important as grander schemes. In fact, these small, visible steps are more likely
to win early victories than are big-bang efforts, and they gain early supporters.
Of course, when you experiment, not everything works out as intended.
There are mistakes and false starts. They are part of the process of innovation.
What’s critical, therefore, is that leaders promote learning from these experiences.
To create a climate in which the norm is to Experiment and Take Risks,
it’s essential for leaders to
•
Generate small wins
•
Learn from experience
These essentials can help leaders transform challenge into an exploration,
uncertainty into a sense of adventure, fear into resolve, and risk into reward.
They are the keys to making progress that becomes unstoppable.
GENERATE SMALL WINS
If we’re talking about challenging the process, you should just pull out all the
stops and go for it, right? Wrong. There’s an old African proverb that advises,
“Never test the depth of the water with both feet.” Wise counsel whenever
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191
you’re trying something brand new. Leaders should dream big, but start small.
Dream big about crossing that enormous cosmos to find some new world, but
start small with a few short journeys to test your theories and your abilities.
Consider what Gary Jamieson told us about a project involving the introduction of a new source-control system across several sites and countries,
while he was with Scientific Atlanta (now part of Cisco Systems):
At the start of the project there was this general belief that it could never
be completed. It was important to prove to the team early in the project
that it could be achieved. In order to do so, I structured the project so that
key early milestones had significant and distinct deliverables that could
be seen as clear achievements under difficult circumstances. Making these
early milestones gave the team members confidence in their ability to deliver. I then ensured that intermediate milestones were announced as
small achievements within the larger project, and demonstrated the benefits of achieving the milestone. This helped to build not only excitement
but momentum.
Why not start big? Because, as leaders like Gary understand, if you think
of problems too broadly or too expansively they appear overwhelming. They
suffocate people’s capacity to even conceive of what might be done, let alone
begin doing something immediately. Imagine solving the global warming
problem, the international terrorism problem, or the homelessness problem.
Or imagine solving the problems of rising fuel costs, lack of affordable housing, shrinking pension funds, or rising college tuition. What can you do about
these big issues?
Leaders face this dilemma all the time. They want people to reach for big
heights, but not become fearful of falling. They want them to be challenged,
but not overwhelmed. They want them to be curious, but not lost. They like
to see people excited, but not stressed. Framing the challenge as something
too big can actually have the effect of dampening motivation to do some-
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THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
thing about it. Making a dent, let alone a difference, in
the major problems people face can seem to require
The most effec-
such overwhelming force that it’s a challenge to even set
tive change
out on the journey.
So how do you get people to want to move in a new
processes are
direction, break old mind-sets, or change existing be-
incremental, not
havior patterns in order to tackle big problems and at-
one giant leap.
tempt extraordinary performance? The answer:
step-by-step through the generation of small wins. The
most effective change processes are incremental, not one giant leap. Each step
forward creates a psychological “win” that propels people to continue in that
direction. A “win” generates excitement, energy, and commitment.
Progress Step-by-Step
Leaders know they have to break down big problems into small, doable actions. They also know that you have to try a lot of little things when initiating something new before you get it right. Not every innovation works, and
the best way to ensure success is to experiment with a lot of ideas, not just
one or two big ones. Successful leaders help others to see how breaking the
journey down into measurable milestones can move them forward. Which is
exactly what Venkat Dokiparthi experienced at a large enterprise software
company when he was asked to lead a technical development team in India.
We needed to do a task to improve a certain part of the product, and I
asked the team to come up with a proposal for how to go about it. After
several weeks with no response, they finally told me that it was “beyond
their scope.” Then I realized that I needed to break down the task and make
it simple for them to feel successful.
So I divided the task into a ten-week program and asked them to try
the first week’s assignment. The task for that week was now so clear to them,
and so much within their capabilities, that they actually implemented it
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193
within three days. So I encouraged them to start on the following week’s assignment. They showed considerable progress and in fact completed the
entire implementation process in six weeks! Initiating incremental steps
and encouraging small wins has really been the key for success of this task.
A small wins approach fits especially well with the nature of work in the
information society. The pace is fast and fragmented. Today’s manager typically spends an average of three minutes of uninterrupted time on any single event and around twelve minutes on a “work sphere” before switching to
something else.2 That means a manager could be switching from project
to project forty or more times a day. It’s enough to make any leader dizzy.
This kind of work pattern requires leaders to act on their dreams in brief
bursts. The beauty of a small win is that it’s compact, it’s simple, and it can
catch the attention of people who have only a few minutes to listen to an idea
or read a proposal.
We can learn something about taking it step-by-step from how successful coaches help young players become successful. Incremental progress was
exactly what Institute for Women’s Leadership founder Rayona Sharpnack
had in mind when she was coaching her eight-year-old daughter’s softball
team. Rayona certainly knew the game: she was the first player-manager in
the 1980s of the most profitable franchise of the International Women’s Professional Softball League. Before that, she set a Junior Olympic record by
throwing a softball 189 feet. On one of the first days of practice for her
daughter’s team, she had everyone try to do some batting. As she explains,
I take a really soft, spongy ball, and I toss it to the first girl. She’s standing
maybe 10 feet away, I’m throwing baby tosses, and she screams and hides
her head. So I say, “Hey, no problem, Suzy. Go to the back of the line. That’s
fine. Betsy, you step up.” Next girl in line, she does the same thing—buries
her head and screams. So I’m realizing that this is going to be a really long
practice if we don’t do something different.
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THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
I go out to my car where I have my handy whiteboard markers in my
briefcase. I take the bag of practice balls and draw four smiley faces—red,
black, blue, and green—on each ball. When you look at a ball, all you see
is one smiley face. I go back out and call the girls back over: “Okay. We’re
going to play a different game this time,” I say. “This time, your job is to
name the color of the smiley face. That’s all you have to do.”
So little Suzy stands up, and I toss a ball by her. She watches it all the
way and goes, “Red.” Next girl, Betsy, gets up there. Betsy goes, “Green.”
They’re all just chirping with excitement because they can identify the
color of the smiley face, so I say, “Okay. Now I want you to do the same
thing, only this time I want you to hold the bat on your shoulder when the
ball goes by.” Same level of success. Excitement builds. The third time
through, I ask them to touch the smiley face with the bat.
We beat our opponents 27 to 1 in the first game.3
Rayona took something that was initially frightening and gradually overcame the team’s fear and the lack of skill. She coached the girls in increments on
how to focus on the task and then to execute. If we could all approach new and
challenging tasks this way, we could enjoy the same success as Rayona’s team.
Try a Lot of Little Things
When Philip Diehl was appointed director of the U.S. Mint, he didn’t spend
his early days at this multibillion dollar organization making big promises
and bold declarations; he chose the small wins path. “I didn’t rush the
changes at the Mint,” says Diehl. “I started small, with a few initiatives here
and there. Then as the envelope was pushed or as roadblocks appeared, problems were tackled as they cropped up, and progress continued. Big changes
have been made over the past six years, but they’ve been made incrementally.
You do big things by doing lots of small things.”4
Consider the Mint’s 50 State Quarters Program, one of the most successful
consumer-product launches ever. It’s a long-term project that is designed to
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195
rejuvenate the public’s interest in coins and in coin collecting. The program
honors each state with its own special quarter. The public gets involved,
through the governor’s office in each state, in the design process. Every ten
weeks for ten years a new state quarter gets put into circulation, released in
the order in which each state joined the Union. One step, or quarter, at a time.5
The U.S. Mint continues its small wins approach to
growth and improvement with the almost monthly in-
You do big
things by doing
a lot of small
things.
troduction of limited edition and commemorative
coins, from the Bison Nickel and Buffalo Quarter to the
“Granite Lady” honoring the San Francisco Old Mint.
It’s incremental innovations like these that keep the collector coming back. Diehl’s point that “You do big
things by doing a lot of small things” ought to be the
mantra of leaders engaged in transforming change. We
heard it over and over in the personal-best cases we collected.
Take the turnaround at the car dealerships within the Whites Group in
London, which chairman Lindsay Levin told us could be credited to an organizational culture that supported experimentation and incremental improvement. Volunteers were recruited to get started on doing anything that
they thought would make the customer experience more delightful. Many of
the early projects addressed in-house headaches—such as redoing the kitchen
and cleaning up the workshop—and not necessarily things that would have
an immediate impact on customers. With these small wins, the teams escalated up the learning curve and rapidly moved on to projects that would directly benefit the customer.
Parking, for instance, had been a problem for customers and staff alike.
A team at Camberley completely reorganized the parking lot and managed
to create twenty new spaces. Flowerbeds had to be moved, concrete dividers
had to be torn up, and the whole area repainted. It may sound simple, but it
was a major achievement, not least because it was a problem that had been
talked about for years and no one had done anything about it. This experi-
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THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
ence became a model showing people what could be done, as well as reinforcement that learning was taking place. This success so uplifted people’s
spirits that the “Camberley parking lot” became a showcase for how teams
could make a difference in their own locations.
Models like the Camberley parking lot are limited experiments in accomplishing change. They’re laboratories for trying, failing, and learning. They’re
also great visual aids for teaching people about what success looks like.
They’re tangible showcases for change. By showcasing some “little thing” you’ve
experimented with you give people a tangible sense of what success looks like.
You also boost morale and confidence. People see that it’s possible to do something about what might otherwise be perceived as an intractable problem.
Whatever you call your experiments—model sites, pilot studies, demonstration projects, laboratory tests, field experiments, market trials—all are
methods about trying lots of little things in the service of something much
bigger. These are the tactics that continually generate lots of possibilities for
small wins. And all those possibilities can add up to big results.
Small Wins Produce Results
Small wins produce results for a simple reason: it’s hard to argue against success. The fact that small wins work isn’t news to scholars of technological innovation. An extensive study involving five DuPont plants documented that
minor technical changes (for example, introduction of forklift trucks)—
rather than major changes (for example, introduction of new chemical processing technologies)—accounted for over two-thirds of the reductions in
production costs over a thirty-year period.6 The minor technical changes were
small improvements, made by people familiar with current operations. Less
time, skill, effort, and expense were required to produce them than to implement the major changes. Much of the improvement was really part of the
process of learning by doing.
The scientific community has always understood that major breakthroughs are likely to be the result of the work of hundreds of researchers, as
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countless contributions finally begin to add up to a solution. Taking the sum
total, all the “littl…
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