The One Thing #3: Create a Bias for Action

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, traditional approaches to strategy are obsolete. The notion that a grand designer would be able to analyze the conditions facing the firm and design an effective strategy to move the organization forward is nothing but an illusion. Today more than ever, strategy has to involve people — both at a rational and an emotional level. Unless companies find ways to engage their people’s energies in developing new strategic ideas as well as putting these ideas into action, their strategy—however brilliant—will fail.

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that for strategy to be properly executed, the people in the organization must be emotionally committed to it. This is much more than simply understanding or agreeing with the strategy. Emotional commitment implies strong belief—even passion—in the strategy and a willingness to push for it relentlessly. But for anyone (i.e. employees) to buy into the strategy, somebody (i.e. top management) must first sell it to them.

All this is obvious enough. The problem is that most companies—despite agreeing with all of this—do not actually do it!

It is now well established in psychology that just because we know something (and agree with it) doesn’t mean we will do it. This “knowing-doing” gap is one of the biggest “diseases” in organizations. Take, for example, innovation. I have yet to see a company that doesn’t want to become more innovative. They all ask: “How can we make our people and organizations more innovative?” Yet, they all know what they have to do! When I ask them the same question, they quickly develop a huge laundry list of ideas on how to do it — allow experimentation, reward new ideas, do not punish mistakes and so on. The problem is not that they don’t know. The problem is that they don’t do what they already know they should do!

The main reason for this “disease” is the time constraint. We all have many important things that we want to do every day but we simply do not have the time to do everything. We therefore focus on urgent things. Promoting innovation or building commitment for our strategy may be important but, for most people, they are not urgent. We therefore put them aside until a crisis forces us to put them again high on our priority list.

Another major reason for this disease is attitudes — specifically the attitude that somebody else will do whatever we think is important. This is what psychologists call “social loafing” and you see manifestations of it in companies when people say: “We will do this.” For them, the word “we” means: “anybody but me”. In the end, nobody does anything.

There are other reasons why we fail to do many of the things that we already know we should do. But whatever the reasons, successful people and organizations are those that somehow find ways to overcome these obstacles and thus create a bias for action in their organizations. It is the strategic role of HR to create such a bias for action. And the only way of achieving it is by putting in place an Organizational Environment that encourages and promotes the “right” behaviors from our employees.

The organizational environment is made up of four key ingredients: The measurement and incentive systems of the firm; its culture, values and norms; its structure and processes; and its people, including their skills, mindsets and attitudes. It is the combination of these four elements that creates the firm’s organizational environment which, in turn, supports and promotes our strategy. A company that wants its strategy to be implemented properly must ask the question: “What organizational environment must I create internally to elicit the employee behavior that will support my chosen strategy?” Without first putting in place these four elements of the organizational environment, the strategy will almost certainly fail.

The same is true for any behavior we want from people — be it more innovation or more customer-centricity or more cooperation between silos. You do not get these behaviors because you ask for them. You get them because you created the right environment for them.

I cannot emphasize this point strong enough. Company after company send their executives on courses to help them change their attitudes and behaviors, to make them more innovative or more customer-oriented or whatever. What they forget is that training does not change people’s attitudes or behaviors. People will not change what they do because we tell them to. They will only change if we put in place the right incentives and the right culture and values—in short, the right Organizational Environment.

Needless to say, it is the strategic role of HR to put in place these four elements. They must first understand what the strategy of the firm is or what behaviors we want our employees to display daily; then decide what specific Organizational Environment will support this strategy or behaviors; and then set upon creating this environment. How? Simple enough: We know that small changes in the environment could have a big impact on how people behave. So the task is not a radical restructuring of the current Organizational Environment. Instead, HR must tweak the existing environment so as to make the “right” behaviors a little bit easier and the “wrong” behaviors a little bit more difficult. That would be enough to produce the radical change in behaviors that we want from people.