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Creating an Innovative Organization:
Ten
Hints for Involving Frontline Workers
Part 2 of 4
Hint 3: Create an explicit mission and related performance
measures (or give people a real reason to be innovative).
We want people throughout the organization to be innovative, but toward
what end? An innovative organization needs a clear mission and a set of
performance goals. Otherwise, people within the organization can simply
pursue their own ends and rationalize their actions by claiming they
were only trying to follow the instructions to be innovative. To engage
everyone throughout the organization in the task of creating and
implementing new ways to achieve the organization's purposes, we need an
explicit statement of these goals. Innovative organizations need never
use the word innovative; but they do need explicit purposes.
Often, such purposes are made explicit through an inspiring mission and
operational goals. The mission provides the general statement of what
the organization is trying to do: it suggests an exciting vision of the
future, but this vision is necessarily vague. In contrast, the
operational goals are mundane: they state the explicit performance
targets to be achieved in the next year, quarter, or month. They provide
a measure, though not a comprehensive measure, of how well the
organization is doing in realizing its mission.
Mission and goals provide the necessary rationale for innovation. The
organization may be an air force base attempting to train pilots by
flying 17,000 sorties a year (Behn 1992). It may be a state welfare
department attempting to move welfare recipients from dependence to
independence by placing 50,000 of them in jobs over five years (Behn
1991b). Or it may be a city's vehicle maintenance shop attempting to put
a fleet of sanitation trucks on the road daily while keeping costs below
95 percent of the private sector's costs (Behn 1996). Regardless, the
explicit goal provides a basis for measuring performance, and the
overarching mission provides a means of checking to be sure that the
goal has not been obtained at the sacrifice of the organization's true
purpose.
At Homestead Air Force Base, the goal of flying 17,000 sorties gave the
maintenance and supply crews a clear rationale for being innovative (Behn
1992). Frontline mechanics understood that, by developing ways to repair
airplanes more quickly or by developing ways to maintain the planes so
they needed fewer repairs, they were helping to achieve the base's
mission. They were not asked to be innovative. Rather, they were asked
to make sure that planes were available to achieve the base's overall
sortie goal (as well as the sortie subgoals for subunits). They were
educated to understand how their work influenced the base's ability to
achieve those goals. Innovation was not the purpose. Training pilots and
flying sorties were the goals. But as people began to understand how
their individual tasks influenced the organization's ability to achieve
its goals, they began to develop new ways to accomplish those tasks.
That is, they began to become innovative.
Similarly, at the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare, the goal
of placing 50,000 welfare recipients in jobs over five years gave the
agency's Employment and Training (ET) workers a clear rationale for
being innovative (Behn 1991b). To find jobs for welfare recipients, they had to be inventive. Moreover, when a case-management system was
implemented, the department made clear to the local units that they--not
headquarters--would be figuring out how to make the new system work (Behn
1991b, 119, 112).
The mission of the Bureau of Motor Equipment (BME) within the Department
of Sanitation in New York City is clear: to ensure that the city's
sanitation crews have enough trucks each day to collect the city's
refuse (Behn 1996). Yet on any day in 1978, BME was providing only
three-quarters of the trucks needed. Thus, the bureau's leadership
created the obvious goal: to provide the number of trucks needed every
day. Then, it created a second goal: to keep maintenance costs below
those the private sector would charge. The mission and goals provided
the rationale not only for redesigning the maintenance process but also
for redesigning the vehicles so that they would need less maintenance.
By itself, innovation has no merit. The innovation takes on value only
to the extent that it helps to achieve important public purposes.
Similarly, innovative organizations are not inherently superior. They,
too, become valuable only to the extent that they focus their
innovations on achieving their purposes. Creating an innovative
organization requires a clear understanding of mission and goals so that
individual innovations can be examined to see whether and how much they
actually contribute to achieving the organization's purposes. Innovative
organizations are not trying to be innovative. Rather, they are trying
to achieve purposes.7
Hint 4: Broaden job categories (or don't let each individual
do only one narrow task).
The traditional, hierarchical organization is designed to minimize the
number of different functions that a frontline worker must perform.
Moreover, the assumption is that, if these functions are properly
defined, a frontline worker need know nothing more than precisely how to
perform his or her narrow function. As Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote,
"one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type
to execute the work" (1967, 38). In such an organization, management has
the sole responsibility for thinking:
The managers assume, for instance, the burden of
gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has
been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and
reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae which are immensely
helpful to the workmen in doing their daily work. (Taylor 1967, 36)
In an innovative organization, however, the responsibility for thinking
about how best to accomplish the organization's mission is spread
throughout the organization. It is difficult, however, to think
innovatively if you see only a small part of the picture. If you are
merely told to turn the bolt to the left three times or to fill out the
green form and the blue card completely but are not told why these
actions must be performed, you will hardly figure out that a plastic
fastener could replace the bolt or that a red form could replace both
the green form and the blue card.
If frontline workers are going to understand the big picture, they need
bigger jobs. Narrow jobs inhibit innovative thinking. Taylor and other
advocates of scientific management designed narrow jobs in part to
prevent frontline workers from doing any thinking. Broadening the
operational responsibilities of frontline workers is necessary if they
are to achieve their innovative responsibilities. From her work with
private sector organizations, Kanter concluded:
The organizations producing more innovation have more
complex structures that link people in multiple ways and encourage them
to "do what needs to be done" within strategically guided limits
[mission and goals], rather than confining themselves to the letter of
their job. (1988, 172)
Hint 5: Move people around (or don't let workers think they
need learn only one job for life).
Moving frontline workers to different jobs is another way of helping
them understand the big picture. Even a worker with a broadly defined
job sees only a small part of the organization--and thus understands
only a small part of what the organization is trying to accomplish.
Thus, moving people into jobs with different responsibilities helps to
broaden their understanding of the overall purposes and functioning of
the organization.
By training, some people have well-defined (if not narrow) jobs. It is
quite possible to move someone from the position of transmission
mechanic to that of a sanitation truck driver. That, however, might
waste the talents of the transmission mechanic. Conversely, it would be
difficult to move the truck driver into the position of transmission
mechanic without years of training and apprenticeship. Indeed, even
moving the mechanic into the cab of the truck would require some
investment in training. Frontline workers with specialized skills should
not be moved all around the organization. This does not mean, however,
that the ability of transmission mechanics to be innovative would not be
helped by occasional rides in the cab of the truck.
There is obviously a trade-off between the benefits gained by moving
people into new jobs and the costs of training people for these jobs.
People who are highly trained to do specialized jobs cannot be moved
without great cost, but moving people into new positions not only
revitalizes them by giving them something new to do. It also helps give
workers the big picture that they need to contribute innovative ideas to
the organization. In the private sector, individuals moving up the
corporate hierarchy are given a wide variety of jobs in different parts
of the firm; this ensures that, if they are promoted to a position with
overall responsibilities, they will understand the big picture. Would
not frontline workers charged with being innovative be more effective if
they too understood that big picture?
Hint 6: Reward teams, not individuals (or find ways to beat
the formal performance-appraisal and promotion systems).
Successful innovations are rarely the work of a solitary individual. To
convert an innovative idea into a functioning innovation requires the
work of many people contributing to its implementation and adapting the
initial idea to fit the operational realities and organizational
environment. Certainly this is how many public sector innovations
actually come into being (Golden 1990). Moreover, as Katzenbach and
Smith wrote, "The team is a basic unit of performance for most
organizations" (1993, 27). Teams of mechanics, not individual mechanics,
repair and maintain airplanes and sanitation trucks. Teams of social
workers, not individual social workers, find jobs for welfare
recipients. Teams of people, not individual employees, actually produce
the organization's results.
Consequently, it makes little sense to create a system of rewards that
focuses entirely on individuals when teams, committees, or groups
actually do the thinking and the work. Innovative organizations are not
a collection of innovative individuals but of innovative teams.
Unfortunately, our public sector system of rewards has been designed not
to enhance performance but to prevent corruption. Therefore, it focuses
strictly on the individual. Public sector personnel systems ignore the
team. Fortunately, these systems also employ the kinds of rewards that
often matter least to people. Indeed, public sector personnel systems
usually offer only two kinds of rewards: pay increases and formal
promotions. For those people who have worked their way up Maslow's
hierarchy of needs (1943) beyond food, safety, and love, to esteem, the
formal rewards offered in the public sector are less important than the
informal recognition of peers.
If the only forms of rewards are pay and promotion, however, these also
become by default the only basis of esteem. This need not be the case..
Effective leaders create a wide variety of rewards, visible recognitions
for accomplishment that contribute to the individual's esteem. Such
forms of recognition are not artificially constrained by the personnel
system. They come in the form of plaques, parties, and praise. Effective
leaders use these forms of recognition to provide people with the public
credit that both reinforces self-esteem and inspires esteem from others.
Moreover, these informal and more significant forms of motivation are
not limited to individuals. Leaders can use plaques, parties, and praise
to recognize teams, too. Indeed, leaders can reinforce an individual's
ties to an innovative team simply by recognizing the performance of that
team, by tying individual self-esteem and the esteem of others directly
to the individual's membership on a high-performing team. Plaques,
parties, and praise that help celebrate the team's innovative
accomplishments reinforce the essential message that it is the work of
the team, not that of the individual, that really counts.8
At the Bureau of Motor Equipment, the union contracts contained a
variety of individual work standards, such as the amount of time it
should take a mechanic to fix a headlight. As the labor-management
committee moved beyond working conditions to issues of productivity, the
unions brought up the detested work standards. After much discussion,
labor and management agreed to ignore the work standards and simply not
collect the data.9 Instead, BME decided to focus on the total
productivity of each shop, comparing, for example, the average cost for
the radiator shop to repair a radiator with the equivalent private
sector cost. No longer was the focus on individual performance; now it
was the performance of an entire shop, a team of mechanics, that
mattered.
Innovative organizations need more than innovative individuals. They
need innovative teams. Unfortunately, much about modern public sector
organizations undermines an individual's willingness to be part of a
real team and to consider whatever responsibilities they have for
innovation to be part of a group effort. Consequently, as agency leaders
seek to provide rewards for successful innovations, they should focus
the recognition on teams.
Hint 7: Make the hierarchy as unimportant as possible (or at
least walk around without an entourage).
Effective teams have to be quite flat. Otherwise they are not real
teams; they are simply small units carrying out the orders from a
different boss. And to create an innovative organization (whether a
large agency or a small team), everyone in the organization needs to
feel responsible for helping to produce the organization's real results,
not for carrying out orders.
The formal hierarchy of most public sector organizations undercuts any
feeling of individual responsibility for the performance of the whole.
("That's the boss's job. That's why he's the boss. I just follow the
procedures manual.") Moreover, the formal hierarchy is intimidating.
("If I suggest this idea to the boss, I'll be lucky if she laughs at me.
She's more likely not to even recognize that my idea exists--or that I
do.")
At Homestead Air Force Base, the base commander, Col. William A. Gorton,
made it a point to mix with his frontline workers: "I'd sit around and
drink beer with the enlisted men and get to know them more. After a
couple of beers, you get to hear a lot of things." Indeed, once Gorton
established this rapport, "I had all kinds of people coming out of the
woodwork...everybody started confiding in me" (Behn 1992).
Innovative organizations depend, by definition, upon the ideas of
everyone from chief executive to frontline worker. Yet if the frontline
workers believe that the differences in hierarchical status reflect not
only differences in responsibilities but also differences in how their
ideas are judged, they will keep these ideas to themselves. No one wants
to be told that an idea is silly or to have an idea ignored. So rather
than risk embarrassment, frontline workers will simply keep their mouths
shut. If the leaders of an organization silence their frontline workers'
mouths, they also turn off these workers' minds.
Organizations have formal and informal hierarchies. The operational
issue is how much these hierarchies affect the behavior of the
individuals, particularly those on the lower rungs in the organization.
Does the hierarchy intimidate people from offering suggestions? Does it
prevent people from recommending solutions? If a team is to work
together to solve a problem, everyone must feel free to contribute;
every member of the team must feel that his or her contribution will be
valued.
The members of the team also need a "shared sense of accountability" (Katzenbach
and Smith 1993, 32). They will never feel that they are sharing
accountability if they perceive major differences in status. To be
innovative is to take responsibility for improving performance.
Hierarchical organizations create not only differentials in status but
also differentials in responsibility. To create an innovative
organization requires making these hierarchical differences as
unimportant as possible (Lawler 1988).
Hint 8: Break down functional units (or don't let the
procurement guys tell everyone "no").
Throughout government and often in business, the job of the oversight or
overhead units is to say "no." At least, that is how the budget office,
the procurement office, the finance office, and the personnel office
often define their roles: "People are always trying to pull a fast one,
and our job is to protect the integrity of the agency." Unfortunately,
in protecting the agency from charges of fraud, waste, or abuse, they
are often preventing that same agency from improving performance. Yet
the behavior of such overhead units is not irrational. They have never
been charged with improving performance; they have simply been charged
with administering a set of formal rules. Someone violating the rules
can get in trouble--often big trouble. If the agency's performance
improves or declines, it makes little difference to those in personnel
or procurement.
Creating an explicit mission and related performance measures (Hint 3)
is an important first step, but it is not enough. The people in the
overhead units will certainly salute the agency's overall mission and
goals, but they will only be truly loyal to their own rules and
regulations. After all, these are the concerns they must deal with every
day. Moreover, the people with whom they also deal every day are
similarly loyal to the same rules and regulations. The organization's
overall mission and goals may be posted on the wall or repeated in the
monthly newsletter, but they are not relevant to the overhead unit's
real work.
Consequently, the people who work in budget, procurement, finance, and
personnel must be made an integral part of the teams that are charged
with producing the organization's results. They may still be
responsible, for example, for procurement. Indeed, they may still be
responsible for ensuring that the team follows all the procurement
rules. Now, however, they have a dual responsibility, for they are also
responsible for using the procurement rules in ways that will help the
team improve performance. If they are truly members of the team, they
will know that they cannot get away with a simple "no." If they cannot
answer with an unequivocal "yes," they will feel compelled to respond
either "yes, if..." or at least "no, but..."
Homestead Air Force Base was divided into four functional units (Behn
1992). The air squadrons actually flew the planes that trained the
pilots and achieved the base's sortie goals. The three other functional
units--maintenance, supply, and support--neither flew planes nor trained
pilots though their work was obviously critical to achieving the base's
mission and goals. Those in maintenance were a little removed from the
daily concerns of flying sorties, those in supply were more removed, and
those in support still further removed.
The leadership at Homestead broke down the barriers between these four
units by visibly identifying each person in every maintenance unit,
supply unit, and support unit with a specific squadron. Because workers'
rewards were tied to the success of their team, they understood that
their most explicit responsibility was to help their squadron achieve
its sortie goal.
Functional units do not carry out the mission of the organization; they
carry out functions. It takes the work of many different functional
specialists to achieve the organization's purpose. If left in their own
functional unit, they will never see the big picture; they will only see
their own narrow specialty. They will certainly never be in a position
to work with other functional specialists to create innovative ways to
help the organization achieve its mission.
Dedicated innovators will get around the boundaries between functional
units. By creating a skunk works or practicing Jesuit management (It is
better to ask forgiveness than permission), they will figure out how to
beat the system.
But the truly innovative organization is not the product of a lone skunk
works or a few cross-functional mavericks. The innovative organization
engages everyone, regardless of their primary functional responsibility,
in thinking about the work of the entire organization. To get everyone
thinking and behaving innovatively requires that they see their job from
the perspective of the entire organization. This is why the leaders of
innovative organizations have to break up the functional units into ones
that focus on the real product of the organization, whether that be
sorties or jobs for welfare recipients.
Hint 9: Give everyone all the information needed to do the job
(or don't let the overhead units hoard the critical data).
Information is power. Indeed, one of the best ways that the overhead and
oversight units of an organization obtain, keep, and use power is to
control the organization's information. These units collect, organize,
analyze, and dispense information whenever they find it convenient or
useful.
But innovative organizations require information. People need
information to understand the organization's performance and to judge
how innovative changes will affect that performance. Such information
may be easily available because it is well publicized, common knowledge,
or attainable from multiple sources. People also need the information
necessary to manage the implementation of their innovations, to figure
out how best to arrange the technical aspects to meet the formal
requirements of some overhead system. This information may not be as
available, because it is the type of information that overhead units
hoard for the power it gives them in allowing them to justify a "no."
Innovative organizations are designing not only the conceptual framework
for doing something differently. They are also designing, implementing,
and adjusting the details. These processes of design, implementation,
and readjustment require access to detailed and immediate information.
Hint 10: Tell everyone what innovations are working (or have
frontline workers report their successes to their colleagues).
How will frontline workers discover that innovation is going on? How
will they learn about the innovations that might help them do their jobs
better? How will they know that innovation is possible? How will they
come to understand that innovation is truly expected of them? One
solution is to have their peers, the real innovators, tell them.
In attempting to encourage teams in local welfare offices to experiment
with new ways to find jobs for welfare recipients, the Massachusetts
Department of Welfare followed precisely this strategy. The agency held
all sorts of meetings--from monthly meetings of the directors of the 50
local welfare offices, to large annual conferences attended by all their
frontline workers. A standard on the agenda of these meetings was the
case-management panel--a team presentation from a local welfare office
with each member explaining different tasks that had to be accomplished
to get a specific welfare recipient a specific job. The former welfare
recipient was also there to describe the process from her perspective (Behn
1991b, 106-7).
Such presentations serve several purposes. Obviously, they can provide
for technology transfer, giving other middle managers and frontline
workers new information about how to do their jobs better. Such panels
can do even more; they can help create an innovative organization. When
frontline workers explain how they took an innovative approach to
accomplishing the agency's purpose, they dramatize better than any memo
or speech from the agency's director that innovation really is possible.
Moreover, as different panels of frontline workers make their
presentations at different meetings, their colleagues also begin to
sense that innovation is more than merely possible. They begin to
comprehend that it ought to be the norm.
Frontline workers may have been told numerous times that they were
supposed to be innovative, but who demonstrated that the organization
had produced innovations that worked? Who demonstrated that frontline
workers were actually the ones producing these innovations? Having the
inventive and resourceful frontline workers explain their innovations is
the most effective way to deliver the message that the organization can
produce innovations that work.
State and Local
Government Review
©1995.
