6

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Effectiveness in Performance and Potential

Aligning Pivotal Interactions and Actions Through Culture and Capacity

Recall our observation from chapter 1 that between 2001 and 2003, organizations spanning a vast array of sizes, industries, and maturities simultaneously adopted a performance management system that required leaders to rate their employees so that 20 percent were rated top performers, 70 percent were rated middle performers, and 10 percent were rated bottom performers. The reason? Jack Welch’s book (Jack: Straight From the Gut) appeared on the best-seller lists in 2001. Welch credited GE’s success to its “20-70-10” system. CEOs, board members, or heads of a division said to their HR leaders, “This performance management system worked for GE. Why don’t we have one?” Few realized that the same performance management system was also applied at Enron! Would your organization be among such fad followers, or do you have a decision framework to systematically identify the unique culture, capacities, and programs and practices that best support your unique competitive strategy?

This chapter begins our exploration of the effectiveness anchor point in the HC BRidge framework. Where does your strategy require distinctive culture, talent capacity, and policies and practices that create a unique position in the talent market? Too often, decisions about talent and organization practices are made by simply following the leaders, adopting the same practices as financially successful competitors, or doing the same thing for every employee. As we shall see, talentship suggests a more distinctive and specific approach.

Effectiveness describes the relationship between talent and organization performance and the portfolio of policies and practices that create and support that performance. Effectiveness guides organizations to go beyond simply doing the same thing for everyone or the same thing that industry leaders are doing. Effectiveness is essential to strategy execution because it reveals where organizations can change the game by enacting programs and practices that uniquely reflect strategic pivot-points.

Figure 6-1 shows that in the HC BRidge framework, effectiveness looks for pivot-points in the interactions and actions and then in the collective culture (values, norms, etc.) and individual human capacity (capability, opportunity, and motivation) that enable those actions and interactions. Finally, effectiveness uncovers the programs and practices that create the needed culture and capacity. This chapter focuses on the actions and interactions and the culture and capacity anchor points, and chapter 7 takes up the policies and practices anchor point.

Before we delve into these specific linking elements, consider the role of effectiveness in the decision framework. Like impact and efficiency, effectiveness describes a pivot-point, which reveals the vital decisions and provides a script for new and much deeper talent and organization strategy discussions. Table 6-1 describes how effectiveness does this.

FIGURE 6-1

HC BRidge framework: Effectiveness

TABLE 6-1

Anchor point: Effectiveness

Definition	Pivot-points	Decisions to make	New talent and organization strategy discussions
•   Describes the relationship between organization and talent performance and the portfolio of policies and practices	•   Where specific improvements in the portfolio of policies and practices most enhance the performance of talent and organization	•   Where should you target policy and practice portfolio improvements so they have the biggest effect on talent and organization performance?	•   Where could your strategy enable distinctive policies and practices that give you a unique position in the talent market? •   What apparent and overlooked characteristics of your employees and culture could support or inhibit execution? •   Where do your policies and practices align (or misalign) with the strategy and with each other? •   What distinguishes effective and ineffective programs and practices in your strategic context?

Now let’s see how applying decision science principles to actions and interactions reveals even deeper strategic insights.

Actions and Interactions Reveal How to Play the Roles

Chapters 4 and 5 showed how impact analysis uncovers the pivotalness of different talent pools and structures (such as sweepers versus Mickey Mouse at Disney or coordination between internal teams and external suppliers at Boeing). Chapter 5 noted that there is a third level of analysis—the pivotalness of different behaviors within a talent pool. Here, we focus on this third level. We show how organizations can look within roles and organizational structures to find the actions and interactions that make those roles pivotal and aligned with strategic success.

As shown in figure 6-2, the interactions and actions element of HC BRidge focuses on the question, “How do individuals need to behave and cooperate?”

Actions are pivot-points that involve individuals behaving independently, and interactions are pivot-points where two or more individuals act cooperatively. Pivotal interactions occur between employees within the organization and also between employees and constituents outside the organization. Let’s continue with the Boeing/Airbus example to see how this works.

FIGURE 6-2

HC BRidge framework: Interactions and actions

Pivotal Actions and Interactions at Boeing

Pivotal actions and interactions are found by identifying the vital role challenges where the quality of a response makes the biggest difference. Writers who describe the “service-value-profit chain” often describe such challenges as “moments of truth” because they epitomize the difference between good and great service. For example, in a retail clothing store, getting customers into the fitting rooms makes a big difference in how much they buy, so a moment of truth is when retail associates have the chance to guide the customer into the fitting room.

The pivotal role challenges for Boeing engineers changed dramatically with the 787. Historically, Boeing had followed a build-to-print model where engineers designed every component in detail and outside partners came in only at the last stage, fabricating the part to meet Boeing’s very detailed internal specifications. With the 787, partners were brought in four and a half years earlier to participate in the early design work and provide their manufacturing expertise. Recall from earlier chapters that Boeing’s strategic challenge was to reduce the risk of missing the target delivery date and cut the costs of development and manufacturing. Boeing reduced the risk by engaging its partners early, and it cut costs by having partners pay a portion of the development costs in exchange for a bigger share of the eventual profits.¹ Boeing worked with partners in countries as diverse as France, Italy, Japan, Korea, and China in part because countries where Boeing places significant production capacity also purchase more Boeing aircraft (Chinese airlines had already ordered sixty of the new jets as of January 2006). The job of an engineer used to be to do the design. Now the job includes facilitating and coordinating global partner relationships.

What are the pivotal aligned actions and interactions here? Boeing’s history of aircraft engineering likely makes traditional engineering actions and interactions flat sloped, albeit at a very high standard (like sweeping at Disney). Airbus is also very good at traditional engineering, so it is likely to be very difficult to create a competitive differentiator there. Instead, within the engineering job, the pivotal aligned actions and interactions increasingly will be found in the role challenges of coordination, integration, and facilitation across different cultures and boundaries.

The Yield Curve for Boeing Engineers

Figure 6-3 shows this example in terms of our yield curve metaphor. Notice that the top line, “engineering design,” is high because it is extremely important and valuable. Yet it is also flat because Boeing and other aircraft companies have honed the job of designer for decades; once an engineer is hired and fully experienced, the difference in value between a top designer and a medium-quality designer is not large among experienced engineers. It is not uncommon for organizations like Boeing, with a long history of engineering prowess, to have large manuals describing product or manufacturing process design and engineers who never need to use those manuals. The left side of the top line indicates the consequences of performance levels below the accepted standard of quality. If design goes bad, it is very, very bad for Boeing, which is why the line is flat for most of the range. Boeing has engineered out that risk.

FIGURE 6-3

Yield curves for aligned actions/interactions: Engineered design vs. engineering coordination

The lower line in the diagram, “engineering coordination,” is below design because coordination is important but perhaps not as fundamentally necessary as design. The bottom line is also much more steeply sloped because the variation in the performance of engineers on the actions and interactions affecting coordination is much higher than the variation in design and because differences in this performance are increasingly connected to Boeing’s strategic success. This is not to say engineers don’t care about coordination. But, because engineers have traditionally been hired, trained, rewarded, and managed to standards that mostly reflect their design performance, the opportunities for improvement in coordination are greater. As coordination has become more important, those differences imply greater changes in value, shown on the vertical axis in figure 6-3

A New Kind of Pivotal Engineer at Boeing

Imagine what might happen if Boeing engineers continued to work in the traditional ways when the success of the 787 requires that Boeing suppliers of key components must now do much more of the design and quality control than before. If Boeing were to unilaterally change engineering designs on the 787, it is likely suppliers would rebel or retaliate in other ways. Bad feelings and delays would likely result. In fact, several news stories had descriptions of just such problems.

Simply put, Boeing wins if its engineers perform better on the actions and interactions that avoid coordination gaffes with engineers from other countries. Improving the performance of Boeing’s engineers in this arena also enhances the aligned actions of engineers that work for Boeing’s partners. If supplier engineers are treated with respect and encouragement by their Boeing counterparts, they will be more likely to offer ideas to cut costs, size, etc., which translates into less weight, fewer parts, and lower costs.

Frequently, the pivotal role challenge for Boeing engineers will be to come up with solutions neither they nor their suppliers would develop on their own. For example, Boeing must work closely with Japanese engineers. There are many cases in other industries of such relationships proving rocky not because the engineers don’t have the engineering skill, but because the accepted work culture of American engineers is very different from that of Japanese engineers. If the American tendency toward informality and open debate offends Japanese sensibilities because they see it as disrespectful or aggressive, essential collaborative solutions are not likely to result. The pivotal interaction is for engineering specialists from Seattle and Japan to cooperate.

Chapter 2 noted that an important pillar of any decision science is optimization. More is not always better. Unlimited cooperation is not optimal for Boeing, and its talent strategy must reflect the limitations of cooperation and collaboration. Boeing must still work to retain the core knowledge that will distinguish it from competitors. Recall the many patents Boeing owns with regard to working with composite wing structures. Boeing’s engineers and designers may well need to work much more effectively with intellectual property experts to be sure they understand precisely what intellectual property is pivotal and how to build and protect it, all the while maintaining open and collaborative relationships with partners. A deep understanding of aligned actions and interactions is the key to uncovering these opportunities.

Uncharted Opportunities Beyond Traditional Job Descriptions

Finding unique and valuable opportunities in aligned actions and interactions often requires looking beyond the traditional job descriptions and structures. Organizations create jobs to combine common duties or tasks, as well as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics required to perform them. Job analysis reveals required tools and technologies, typical working conditions, and so on. Rewards, development, staffing, and a host of other HR practices are based on those job descriptions. Recent writers advocating more strategic HR still refer to “A positions” and “strategic job families.”² This is useful, but it still relies on the traditional idea of a job. Job descriptions typically reflect the current state, and they focus on how the typical individual spends his or her time, or on what elements of the job are most important on average. For example, the Position Analysis Questionnaire is one of the most extensively used and studied methods for analyzing jobs and uses the following scales: extent of use, importance to this job, amount of time, possibility of occurrence, and applicability.

Pivotalness Beyond Typical Tasks or Relationships

This traditional focus on what’s true today for collective job holders means the job definitions will often miss pivotal and emerging role challenges and aligned actions and interactions. They will often reflect task groupings that are quite logical descriptions of what individuals do, but they may miss essential combinations of actions across jobs that produce collectively pivotal talent pools. For example, at Disney, people in the jobs of sweeper and store clerk each have a part of their job that involves helping park guests in unexpected ways. There is no single job or position that contains all these actions. Rather, parts of the two jobs form the talent pool that defines customer interaction, though the sweepers and the clerks also have other important parts to their jobs. Job descriptions are not designed to reveal pivotalness, yet pivotalness is often the key to improved decisions.

The insight that Boeing’s engineers are pivotal not just for design but for global coordination is unique partly because it required thinking outside the traditional job description of an engineer. The traditional engineer job description would likely be based on the tasks that engineers do in many companies and industries. It might reveal that engineers interact with other engineers inside and outside the company, but because its validity is often based on reflecting what engineers do in many industries and on average, it typically won’t reveal that global coordination actions are pivotally aligned or the unique nature of those interactions that make them pivotal for Boeing.

Stable job descriptions are important because they support systems that must operate in the long term, such as setting average pay levels and designing basic training, selection, and staffing systems. Certainly, such job descriptions are useful for the broad decisions that must be made about how to group tasks and how to construct systems that maintain and support those tasks over time. Without a decision science, this often means that job descriptions are not changed even when their relationship to the strategy changes. Traditional engineering job descriptions focus on solving technical problems and applying technical knowledge. At Boeing such job descriptions could miss the fact that the company’s decision to pursue the 787 increased the pivotalness of actions affecting the global coordination of teams. The old DNA of the job of a design engineer wouldn’t reflect the new pivot-points.

We see this frequently with regard to sales jobs that were originally designed when the sales task involved in-depth and specific knowledge of one product. When the mission shifted from selling one product or service to selling solutions based on an integrated array of products and services, the old job description no longer reflected the new pivot-points. Yet many organizations continued to reward and track traditional behaviors designed to sell individual products (computers, financial services, insurance policies) even as the new pivot-point changed to understanding the customer’s complete needs and designing solutions to address them.

In another example, from the pharmaceutical industry, the sales role traditionally had a pivotal aligned action based on how much time the salesperson spent with physicians in positions to make large purchases. Today television ads that describe an array of symptoms end with “Ask your doctor about …” Often it’s difficult to tell what the product actually cures! Such ads get patients to ask their doctor about specific pharmaceutical products in part because doctors have less and less time to spend with salespeople. At the same time, the Internet makes it possible for physicians to bypass the salesperson completely. The new strategically pivotal aligned action for salespeople may now be to ensure that physicians have a large stock of samples when patients inquire about a certain drug or to be certain that the company Web site is easily accessed by the staff in the doctor’s office or hospital, not just by the doctor.

The book The New American Workplace notes that increasing flexibility and agility requires something more than a traditional job description:

The traditional notion of “a job” is changing, if not disappearing. Until recently, organizations depended upon formal job descriptions as a way to manage and control the behavior of workers … American businesses are decreasingly using jobs and job descriptions as the basic molecules of the way they organize and manage tasks; instead, they use flexible work assignment descriptions, such as the titles of the projects an individual is working on, the deliverables of those projects, and how the individual’s contributions to those will be measured. These dynamic descriptions change on an irregular basis as projects are completed and employees are given new responsibilities and assignments.³

For example, a 2006 article in Fortune notes that organizations with increasingly “broken business models” are opting for radical flexibility: “The most extreme example of meeting chaos with chaos is probably Semco, the celebrated Brazilian outfit where there are virtually no job titles, a few executives trade the CEO role every six months, and workers set their own hours and choose their managers by vote.”⁴ In times of fluid and flexible role descriptions, the logic of impact and effectiveness are essential to avoid chaos.

The Implications for Future Work Analysis

One implication of effectiveness is that organizations must become more adept at identifying how to conceive and manage these new roles, which will be constantly changing and not easily captured in traditional job descriptions. This requires more than a flexible work analysis system. It requires a system that uses a decision science to construct the new roles based on a clear, logical connection to strategy. The principles of aligning talent and organization to strategic pivot-points, and identifying the vital aligned actions and interactions, provide an economic logic to guide flexible work definitions so that they are strategically meaningful. Thus, a maturing talent decision science will undoubtedly mean more pressure for flexibility in traditional job descriptions. Organizations must be constantly vigilant to the need to change their conception of pivotal roles to reflect new alignments with emerging strategic and organizational processes, resources, and differentiators.

Does talentship require organizations to completely abandon their job-based structures and systems in favor of completely new systems that focus on actions, interactions, roles, and talent pools? No. Organizations can improve their decisions without dismantling job-based systems that work well for the majority of tasks. No one has done the scientific study, but we suspect that this issue will follow the familiar 80-20 rule in which 20 percent of decisions drive 80 percent of the significant value. For example, 80 percent of sales are often driven by 20 percent of product inventory. Still, organizations manage all their inventory. They pay more attention to the vital 20 percent, but they don’t ignore the rest. We suspect that this rule may reveal that some minority of jobs (perhaps 20 percent) will require significant changes in the traditional job system to capture and exploit their pivotalness, but organizations that consistently recognize the 20 percent first and apply a more decision-based and flexible approach will compete better.

Just as with inventory, organizations must still manage all their jobs, not just the 20 percent where pivotalness requires profound changes. You can’t pay, train, and staff only the pivotal aligned actions. Talentship calls for organizations to be more systematically vigilant for opportunities to operate in the white space between traditional job descriptions; it also reveals when the traditional job descriptions are adequate. The difference is that without a well-developed decision science, jobs where change is pivotal remain unexamined and unchanged, or jobs go through costly changes when there is no strategic reason.

In practice, organizations in the early stages of using the HC BRidge framework often discover a good deal of low-hanging fruit, where significant talent decision improvements can be made, even within the existing job structure. This first step often involves looking for aligned actions and interactions within existing job structures, defining as “pivotal jobs” those that contain the aligned actions/interactions, and defining as “pivotal talent pools” combinations of existing jobs.

As organizations become more sophisticated, however, talentship will eventually reveal profound differences between the way actions and interactions are grouped in the job structure versus what is needed to exploit strategic opportunities. The right response will be to break through the job description inertia. As hard as it is, organizations will sometimes have to redefine the “sweeper” job to be “customer ambassadors who sweep” or the “engineering design” job to be “global coordinators who design.” That will mean difficult changes in all the systems that affect those jobs. It will mean teaching the organization to think very differently about the contribution of people who were formerly considered just sweepers or designers. Indeed, the fact that such changes are difficult is often why they are so unique and protectable!

Culture and Capacity

The next part of the HC BRidge framework is the culture and capacity linking element, which translates pivotal actions and interactions into the individual and collective culture and capacity required to make them possible. Again, the key is to take the pivot-points at one level and translate them into pivot-points at the next level. This linking element describes what collective and individual characteristics employees must have, as shown in figure 6-4.

FIGURE 6-4

HC BRidge framework: Culture and capacity

Decades of behavioral science suggest that the capacity to act is a function of three essential elements. They go by various names, but we will use COM to stand for capability, opportunity, and motivation. Capability asks, “Does someone have the ability?” Opportunity asks, “Does someone get the chance?” And motivation asks, “Does someone have the desire?” Any one or all of the COM elements can produce a high yield of aligned actions, but the high-yield COM elements are not always the same, nor is it always important to improve all of them. In the same way, if any one of the elements goes to zero, then the level of the other two doesn’t affect overall capacity. Thus, the challenge is to create an environment where these COM elements are in balance and at high levels.

Capability, opportunity, and motivation are individual factors. At the organization or group level, the parallel concept is culture. Culture has many meanings and is often associated with groups, teams, organizations, and even nations. Schein described culture as “taken-for-granted, shared, tacit ways of perceiving, thinking, and reacting,” noting that culture is “one of the most powerful and stable forces operating in organizations.”⁵ Here we use the word culture to mean the pattern of values, beliefs, and norms shared by a group that new members learn as the accepted way the group relates. Culture evolves over time, and it manifests itself when more than one person interacts. Thus, in the HC BRidge framework, culture is an organizational counterpart to the capacity of the individual.

Culture and Capacity Applied to Boeing

Considering the significant changes in the pivot-points for engineers and designers that we described earlier, what are the COM and culture challenges that Boeing faces? Boeing’s challenge is to nurture world-class technical professionals who meet a very high standard as engineers or designers and who can create and nurture the emerging global relationships that make or break Boeing’s productivity and innovation.

Aircraft design is important at Boeing, but for Boeing’s engineers, the more pivotal capability is different. If Boeing can successfully create a unique capability to work with an extended base of external partners, it will be a formidable competitive advantage. For Boeing, success in creating the COM necessary to manage an extended partner base is as important, and perhaps more pivotal, than the COM to do aircraft engineering.

In terms of culture Boeing’s values, norms, and assumptions have been honed through decades of building planes in-house with arm’s-length partner relationships. The new cultural pivot-point is different. Boeing must think more deeply and precisely about the broad concept of culture. It is not enough simply to create a culture of globalization or one that is boundaryless. It is important that Boeing develops and holds its leaders accountable for very specific norms and values that include listening and encouraging partners to provide their best ideas and then respecting and using those ideas effectively and quickly.

Boeing engineers and designers must be measured on capabilities such as knowledge of the norms of specific international partners, opportunities such as the chance to work as employees of partner companies, and motivations such as a passion for like individual engineering achievement and for new motivations like a passion for being the invisible glue that holds together diverse teams inside and outside the company’s boundary.

Culture and Capacity Beyond Boeing’s Organizational Boundary

Earlier we emphasized that the talent resource often lies in the potential value of those outside the organization. One of the most pivotal talent pools for Boeing lies completely outside its organizational boundary. A good example is a Mitsubishi-employed engineer in Japan. From the Los Angeles Times, we learn:

Toyohiro Nagase has quietly led a strengths/weaknesses analysis technique team of more than 100 Mitsubishi engineers at Boeing’s famed design center in Everett, Washington, to fashion the blueprint for the 787’s wing. He first worked with Boeing in the late 1970s on the 767 when Mitsubishi was given a contract to make a small section of the fuselage. A decade later, he was named leader of a group that spent a year in the United States learning from Boeing engineers how to make part of the fuselage for the 777. “Working with Boeing is nothing new to me,” said Nagase, 52, who has spent about one quarter of his career with Boeing in Seattle. “Our responsibilities have been growing, and this is the first time they’ve asked us to do the wing box.”⁶

Certainly, Nagase must be a good engineer, but his more pivotal role will be to bring his understanding of Boeing to create productive and efficient working relationships between Boeing and Mitsubishi analysis teams. Having spent a quarter of his career with Boeing, he has the unique capability and motivation to provide precisely this kind of social glue. With the 787 project, he was given the opportunity.

Think how much more precisely Boeing’s leaders could chart the future of the company on the “soft” human capital elements by analyzing them with this level of precision. While the Nagase story is inspiring, in many organizations such stories are merely isolated examples with no common language or framework to interpret them or to reliably replicate them. It’s like having stories about great investments or great marketing campaigns without portfolio theory or customer segmentation theory to tie them together and isolate the important considerations. By understanding how COM and culture support aligned actions and interactions that are pivotal to strategic resources and processes, such stories become teaching tools that help leaders incorporate the talent decision framework into their mental models.

Integrating and Balancing COM and Culture

Capability, opportunity, motivation, and culture must work together and be in balance. If any one of them goes to zero, then human capacity will go to zero. Lacking a systematic decision framework, many business leaders get in the habit of thinking of only one of the elements as the way to fix problems they see in actions and interactions. Typically, they seize on capability building (such as training) or motivation building (such as stronger monetary incentives) to the exclusion of culture and opportunity. Yet opportunity and culture can be powerful when leaders have a framework to understand where they are pivotal.

The other lesson from HC BRidge is to align culture and capacity with the actions and interactions that support the strategic pivot-points. Too often, organizations assert general beliefs in COM elements such as “lifelong learning”; “engaged alignment”; “performance-based motivation”; or cultural elements such as “innovativeness,” “speed,” or “customer focus.” As we have seen, these are all valuable but not in the same way in all roles. For example, retail organizations such as Limited Brands, Nordstrom, and Wal-Mart prize information about customers. The insights that associates on the store floor should gather, however, are very different from the insights that market researchers gather in the merchandising organization. Store associates don’t need the capacity to figure out which fashions will be popular next year or what color will be in, but they do need the capacity and culture to pay careful attention to the way customers shop, what store processes seem to lead them to buy more, and what seems to cause them to stay in the store longer.

Understanding the aligned action and interaction pivot-points allows a much deeper analysis of precisely what sort of culture and capacity are most vital and where they make the biggest difference. Organizations that compete effectively will find more opportunities to create unique relationships between capacity, culture, and their strategy pivot-points, avoiding today’s tendency to treat them more generically.

Competencies in HC BRidge

Today organizations frequently organize their talent systems around competencies. The word competencies has no single accepted definition. It is used to mean everything from broad individual traits to specific skills and a well-defined set of capabilities with behaviors and behavioral standards associated with them. Sometimes competencies are developed as very unique to the business model of organizations or the specific requirements for a given role, and sometimes they are general traits or behaviors that apply to a broad class of roles. Thus, competencies often incorporate elements of capability, motivation, and aligned actions in HC BRidge.

Even when competencies are derived from a careful analysis of the tasks people do and the roles they are expected to play, competency systems often reflect either generic traits or focus on skills and knowledge, ignoring opportunity, motivation, and behavior. Such systems often add significant value to organizations, but as the talent decision science matures, it requires careful distinctions between the linking elements of culture, capacity, actions, and interactions. It also requires a search for pivot-points and their logical connections up and down the model. Competency models like this are often useful organizing frameworks but not decision frameworks.

To make competencies a more precise definition of position requirements, some organizations have extended the competency model into a performance model, incorporating information about specific role responsibilities and challenges, including both general and role-specific technical competencies. Another innovation is integration around common competency definitions, platforms, or architectures, applied throughout the organization, that have greater ability to develop future talent through transitions between roles, using a common framework.

Thus, competency models run the gamut from general organizing frameworks to more job- or role-specific performance models. Whatever their sophistication, they can be more useful if their information is embedded in a decision framework like HC BRidge that logically connects competencies to specific strategy pivot-points and creates synergy among policies and practices. At a minimum the application of any framework should consider the appropriate weighting of the competencies, based on the pivot-points. In a more mature environment, the performance models themselves would reflect the specific pivot-points within the role, given the strategic context.

Engagement and Alignment in HC BRidge

Organizations are appropriately concerned with whether employees are engaged and aligned with strategic organizational goals. While alignment and engagement are defined in many different ways, in most cases the definition of alignment is the degree to which employees understand how their individual behaviors contribute to the broader organizational goals and which of their actions are most vital to those goals. In HC BRidge actions and interactions describe the elements of alignment. Capability elements of capacity and culture include whether individuals know and understand which of their actions and interactions are pivotal, which are important, and the difference between the pivotal ones and the important ones.

Engagement usually refers to how satisfied or motivated employees are in their work or how much they view the organization’s goals as important personal goals for themselves. This concept is a component of motivation in the HC BRidge framework. Too often, alignment and engagement are defined based on broad and generic strategy statements, such as “provide the best customer service” or “lead the industry in innovation.” Such statements are useful, and it is useful to know whether employees understand the organization’s broad mission and are motivated to achieve it. This definition of alignment, however, regarding which specific actions and interactions contribute most.

For Boeing engineers, both traditional design and global collaboration are important to achieving the broad strategic goal of a successful launch of the 787. Engagement on both is valuable. But, as we have seen, a deeper understanding of the relative value of these actions is needed for engineers to engage properly with the right aligned actions and interactions.

Integrating Interactions and Actions with Capacity and Culture at Williams-Sonoma

The opportunities that are revealed by a deep analysis of actions/interactions and capacity/culture were illustrated in 1999, when we worked with John Bronson, then the senior vice president of HR at Williams-Sonoma, on the talent implications of the company’s new Internet strategy.⁷ At that time the Internet was booming, and virtually every company was trying to find a way onto the Net. San Francisco–based Williams-Sonoma, already famous for its insightful merchandising and deep understanding of retail customers of home and kitchen goods, was considering an Internet channel in addition to its stores and catalog.

Like so many other companies, Williams-Sonoma was competing in the labor market for the best programmers and Web designers. It was a hot market and not an easy one in which to compete. Moreover, Williams-Sonoma couldn’t offer the kinds of groundbreaking projects that were the hallmark of other Silicon Valley companies, such as Cisco and Sun Microsystems. It couldn’t offer the kind of astronomical potential stock price growth of start-up companies. It couldn’t offer salaries, campuses, and perquisites that other companies could offer, because the profit margins in multiple-location retailing didn’t approach those of software and technology companies, who were lavishing everything from concierge services to on-site automobile detailing on their technical professionals.

Needless to say, a traditional approach to HR investments that emphasized working harder at recruitment and sourcing was not the answer. The company would just be chasing the same group of technical Web professionals as everyone else, with some decided disadvantages in its market position. The talentship process encouraged Bronson and his colleagues to consider Williams-Sonoma’s strategic pivot-points, align their talent and organization around those pivot-points, think beyond simple position descriptions, and determine the implications for investments.

Williams-Sonoma’s position in the retail market was enviable. Patrick Connolly, then executive vice president of the catalog group and now chief marketing officer, told InformationWeek magazine, “We have 19 million names in our customer purchasing-history database, and 75 percent of our customers say they use the Internet. We don’t have to spend 40 percent or 60 percent of our revenue to build a brand and bring traffic to our site.”⁸ What had created such a formidable and loyal group of potential Internet customers? It was Williams-Sonoma’s traditional attention to detail, its innovations in product design and merchandising (e.g., searching the world for the very best kitchen knives), its commitment to lead its customers by directing their attention to new innovations and discoveries, and its fundamental core values built around a certain image, look, and feel running through its stores and catalogs.

Considering the aligned actions and interactions within the job of Web designer and programmer at Williams-Sonoma, it became clear that the company actually needed technical professionals who could effectively work with the skilled designers and copywriters that had made the look of the stores and catalog such a success. Designers and copywriters who mastered the art of creating typography, images, and sentences that project the company’s unique image in its catalogs would now ensure that its Web pages projected the same brand image. As for the internal organization, many creative people working in the catalog and store areas told us they were interested in moving to the Web. They viewed it as a fascinating way to extend their capabilities.

In terms of the market for technical professionals outside the organization, our interviews with Williams-Sonoma’s technical workers revealed some crucial information. Such individuals are often assumed to be motivated primarily by money and the opportunity to improve their technical skills. Yet among Williams-Sonoma’s technical professionals, the reasons they joined and stayed with the organization went well beyond money and technical skills. They said things like, “I can produce Web pages anywhere, but this is one of the best places to learn about merchandising or about the logic of retailing.” Qualities for which Williams-Sonoma is recognized—image, products, and sophisticated retail skills—were significant and unique attractors for a certain subgroup of the technical population. One technical person said, “If I were working for Cisco, I’d be doing really interesting technical work, but it is all embedded in the programs that run routers. Here my work shows up on the Web page that my parents use, and I feel great when I see a person at a mall with that green bag and know that I had something to do with their purchase.”⁹

By identifying its unique strategic pivot-points based on product authority, merchandising, design, and a compelling look and feel, Williams-Sonoma realized that the talent pivot-point for its technical Web professionals was in their actions and interactions related to high-level imagery and coordination with the core processes of retailing, merchandising, and design. Not only did that help the company better target the right population of technical professionals, but it also gave the organization a unique position in the labor market as one of the few places where Web technicians could develop skills in retailing, merchandising, and design. Williams-Sonoma needed Web professionals with technical skills, to be sure, but the key pivot-point beyond the standard technical skills was the capability, opportunity, and motivation to create a Web channel that was culturally and strategically integrated with the company’s brand.

When the organization is aligned with the key strategic pivot-points, the actions and interactions of many roles come together. Not only are technical Web professionals better matched to the organization’s value proposition, but other roles complement them. The merchants and designers at Williams-Sonoma now have Web professionals they can work with to extend and refine their vision about the brand. Leaders of the catalog and store channels can work with technical Web professionals who also have a passion and an understanding of the importance of Williams-Sonoma’s consistent look and feel. One tangible example in 1999 was the fact that text on the Web site was created as graphics, not as font-based text, as was typical of most sites. Why did the design treat text as a graphical element? Because it was the only way to guarantee that the text would appear precisely the same on virtually every computer screen, guaranteeing that every Web customer would have the same visual experience.

Conclusion

In this chapter we’ve focused on two effectiveness components: actions/interactions and culture/capacity. We’ve seen how talentship and HC BRidge reveal insights deep within traditional job descriptions to identify more precisely the employee behaviors that make the difference and the necessary individual and collective characteristics that make those behaviors possible. This kind of deep analysis is the key to avoid being shackled by traditional job descriptions, confusing work behaviors that are flat sloped with those that are steeply sloped, or relying too heavily on only one element of human capacity or culture that has been successful in the past.

Clearly, this kind of deep understanding improves decisions about the programs and policies that will make it all happen. This is especially important in fast-changing and mass-customized employment environments. The dilemma has been recognized by researchers, who have noted the need to make employment deals fit increasingly specific work behaviors and subpopulations. Denise Rousseau coined the term i-deals to describe idiosyncratic employment arrangements for those with the most strategic value to the firm.¹⁰ This chapter has shown how to identify the specific aligned actions and interactions that describe that strategic value. In chapter 7 we will take up the question of how to construct equally specific and strategically relevant practices that create the deals.