Bob Knowling's Change Manual

That was the next high-impact event: to make some personnel decisions within 30 days. Most lethargic organizations study things and study things and study things. It's the proverbial aim, aim, aim, aim. And never pull the trigger.

But it's not that hard to form an assessment of people within 30 days. In fact, I could tell within two weeks who the players were simply by immersing myself in the organization. I very quickly announced to my boss that I would not be attending very many meetings and I did not want to be part of conference calls. I told him, I'm putting on my combat fatigues and going to the line.

I had a constant dialog with each of my direct reports, and I touched base every day on the service call. Of course, from the service call there were follow-up coaching opportunities. Because the folks who get it, get it quick. For those who don't, you have to say, "On the service call, you didn't know your numbers, you had no idea where your organization stood, you're in the process today of disappointing 52% of your customers, and you have no contingency plan. Let's talk about how you run your business."

That's how I immersed myself in the organization: I touched people. And I immediately got a good sense of each person's work ethic. I could see who was strong in terms of leadership and direction. I could see if anybody had a plan. Unfortunately, few had a plan or an operating model. That's why the results were where they were.

After you'd made your assessment, what did you do?

Within 30 days, I made one varsity cut. After I fired him, I immediately met with his direct reports. You have to deal with the survivors when someone leaves. What I didn't do is to try to convince them that the firing was just. I didn't even deal with the firing. That's the open wound, so why go dig in it?

Instead, I wanted them to understand their emotions, and to get them focused on my expectations for the management team. At the end I wanted them to understand the accountability model: if we have shared expectations, then I'm not going to stand over them making sure they perform every day. My job is to make sure that they're enabled. If there's a capability problem, I'm going to work with them on their skills. If there's a problem of barriers or inadequate resources, I'm the resource granter. My job is to be the cheerleader, the developer, the coach.

Now you've got their attention. But you're dealing with an organization of 20,000 people. How did you roll out the program?

As part of my 60-day program, I decided to delayer the organization. Phone companies historically have lots of layers: you go through six levels before you get to a corporate officer. I figured we needed to have three layers of management between the technician who meets the customer and me.

Delayering was traumatic for us. When you start to delayer, you're immediately fighting an HR system that says, "You can't do that." Then you get the other departments looking over the fence, saying, "Can you believe what this idiot's doing?" All that noise makes the next department wonder, "If he's doing it there, are we next?"

The delayering was also a watershed because when you've finished, when the music stops, there are not enough chairs for everyone who's there. That's good. If you leave it to the old system, they'll take away a layer, but there will still be the same number of seats as when they started.

After the delayering, I needed to launch an organized change process. Again, I didn't announce anything. But I decided to do something called "Focus Customer." The name was critical, because it told the organization that the first thing we needed to fix was our customer performance. We'd worry about the cost structure second.

I brought the top 106 people in my organization together for three or four days to talk about our biggest business issues. No theory, no academic stuff. We didn't deal with fictitious models or case studies; we dealt with real work that they face every day. Where are our three biggest problems? They then had eight to ten weeks after the meeting to take on a significant change process, lead it, engage their people, and produce results -- just like we'd practiced. I've got to tell you, it scared the bejeezus out of some of my people.

Do you consider fear a positive or negative force for change?

I don't think it's positive or negative. Fear is part of change. Once people have figured out that something very different is happening, fear permeates the organization. You can cut it with a knife. I've come to the conclusion that you cannot un-fear an organization. But I do address it. You have to tell people that if they allow fear to paralyze them, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy: it will be their undoing because they're immobilized; they can't make decisions.