XBS Learns to Grow

People issues are at the core of our change strategy -- why we have to learn. Ultimately, this strategy is all about creating an organization of 15,000 effective businesspeople, where everybody thinks about the future, everybody amazes customers, everybody manages the bottom line. It's the ultimate accountability strategy.

Think about it. There are other companies in the outsourcing business who can offer equipment, supplies, and people. Our only differentiator is the kind of community we are. It comes down to three questions: If you were a customer, who would you rather work with -- someone who's doing business like it was done 15 years ago, or someone who's using cutting-edge thinking? If you were a talented person looking for a job, where would you rather work? And if you were president of the company, would you rather try to achieve success with a small group of top managers doing all the thinking, or with all 15,000 people contributing to the business?

It's self-evident. That's why we've got to create an organization where everyone has a lot of knowledge of the business.

What does it take to have an organization with that kind of knowledge?

You start by changing how you think about the organization. We've grown up in an old-fashioned corporation that's organized functionally. People think of that kind of a company as a machine. That's how they talk about it: "We're a well-oiled machine." It's mechanistic, reductionistic language. It tells people they're just cogs in the machine.

I think of our organization as a dynamic, living system, like an environment. You can't treat a natural system like a machine. All you can do is create experiences that disturb a natural system, and then it decides how to respond.

My job is to disturb the system. I give people new ways to think. It's more a matter of offering people different perspectives and influencing their thinking than trying to drive them.

It sounds strangely indirect. Why not adopt a more top-down approach?

In 1993 when I got this job, my assignment was to create an empowerment strategy. It turns out you can't "empower" anyone. This is not the freeing of the slaves.

I've heard two different definitions of empowerment, and neither one makes any sense. One is "pushing decision making down to the lowest level." My question is, would you want to be told that you're at the lowest level and about to be pushed down on? I wouldn't. The other is that empowerment is some sort of fairy dust. You sprinkle it on folks and they suddenly know exactly what to do.

The only thing that makes sense to me is to think of empowerment as an outcome of organizational conditions. You create an environment for learning, with empowerment as an outcome. When you start to think like that, you go from an empowerment strategy to a change strategy to where we are now -- it's just our business strategy.

What are the core principles of the change program?

Let's be clear: it's never been a "program." And unlike most other companies, we've never had a big change team. We just had some things we wanted to try.

We knew the first piece of our change strategy -- to create a shared vision. But I never thought of it as a written vision statement. To me, a vision is an ongoing conversation. It's the way we think, individually and collectively, about the community we're creating. It's the principles of the people in the organization. What's important to us. How we want to be with each other. It's never frozen, it's never set. It's energy -- or spirit.

So how did you go about creating a shared vision?

We did "visioning exercises" and learned how to have conversations with each other. We got a group of 120 people together and did a composite mind map of their visions. Then we held a learning conference in Orlando, where we had a visioning exercise with 400 people. Our vision became a living thing, not a plastic card to carry in your pocket. Ask the people who participated, "What's a shared vision?" They'll tell you, "A shared vision is the way we talked with each other when we got together in Orlando."

What came after creating a shared vision?

Trust. To me, trust is one of the essentials for learning. Wherever you have a trusting environment, you have a much more productive, much more humane organization. Lots of our people attended sessions on Principle-Centered Leadership, based on Stephen Covey's ideas. I was attracted to Covey's organization because it didn't just talk about trust, it gave people a way to do trust.

Covey's idea is that people have emotional bank accounts. You create trust through deposits. I think when we started we were probably running a deficit. We simply hadn't done much for the people in the organization to build trust, to make deposits in an emotional account.