Adapt or Die
It is so late at night to write a post that I have to rub my eyes and read the article over and over again. Bear with me: BBVA, one of the largest banks in the Eurozone with significant presence in the US and Latin America, has just announced to its more than 2,000 executives that they will no longer be considered “executives”. No corporate titles. No status. No offices. No secrets. More freedom. Distributed decisions… WOW… is this happening in Mountain View, CA or in Madrid suburbs?
Not only the future but also the present of work is changing at an accelerated pace. Even in banking. And the biggest challenge we have, as educated professionals, is how to invent (or help others to invent and support) more desirable, healthy organizations. Organizations may devote significant energy to develop smart practices and deliver short-term results, sacrificing the generation of healthy corporate environments that are essential to secure sustainable success. As a result, employees may suffer the pain of internal competition, politics and strategic confusion that cause low morale, low productivity, high turnover, useless endless conflicts that lower employee engagement and diminish the capacity to attract new talent — making our job as recruiters more difficult!
Among other responsibilities, extraordinary leaders and managers seek employee’s intrinsic motivation in order to mitigate intertwined problems such as those described above. One of the collective jobs to be done by all of them is to build disciplined collaborative teams that will sustain long-term corporate performance. Sharing is key. Not doing so, organizations hurt themselves: research across many kinds of organizations finds that those with higher rates of helping have lower employee turnover, enjoy greater customer satisfaction and are more profitable. But be cautious: as Prof. Hansen (UC Berkeley, Apple) defends, the goal of collaboration is not collaboration per se; collaboration is expensive, but better results can be accomplished rolling out disciplined collaboration while preserving the benefits of decentralization.
Mutual helping is even more vital in an era of knowledge work, when positive business outcomes depends on creativity in often very complex, long term projects, such as the digitization of retail banking. Today, information is inexpensive, abundant and accessible and hoarding is futile, childish and counterproductive. As MIT’s Prof. Malone summarizes, “ In cultivating innovation and creativity, one of the most important functions of new-style managers will be to cultivate the cross-fertilization of ideas by creating the right kinds of infrastructures and incentives for information exchange “. And in this context, “Teaming”, a concept elaborated by HBS’s Prof. Edmondson, is a way of working that goes beyond traditional teamwork, with employees working on a team today, but in a few days they could be part of another. Or they could be working with multiple teams simultaneously, in distributed locations, with people from their organizations, providers, customers or the crowd. As any other skill, “Teaming” can be learnt.
I must confess I was not expecting that movement from such a large financial institution. When leaders impose their own artifacts, values and assumptions on a group, they hope the group will be successful; and if so, assumptions will be taken for granted, and a culture will emerge for future generations. Although too soon to know whether the announced measures go beyond a symbolic headline, it seems to me a step in the right direction… time will dictate its verdict.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 26, 2014.
