Recently, one of my colleagues voiced her frustration. A few months ago, she had just become part of a new team, with new leaders.
The new manager loosely defined these outcomes as demonstrations of “visible value” to the organization.
While all of this was on point from the leader’s perspective, it was important to understanding how this was interpreted from an employee perspective.
The situational context was that everyone was clamoring for attention from her new leaders. Demonstrating “visible value” (a catchy term) stuck in employees minds as a means of getting the attention. The implicit takeaway was that “if the tree fell in the forest and you didn’t see or hear it, it didn’t happen”.
Despite the positive intent behind the changes, this interpretation had a counter effect. Instead of galvanizing change, it created internal competition. Instead of doing, the team members concentrated on showing. Instead of out-performing (as a team), the colleagues began out-doing (each other). Instead of creating value, colleagues began focusing on generating visibility.
Many leaders and teams fall into this trap of unintended consequences. The danger is that noisy incompetence can often override boring dependability. The push to reward and recognizing based on showing value can come at a degradation of personal values.
Here is a lesson I learned from this example. We all know that change is hard. The higher the degrees of separation between the power base driving the change, and the down-the-line employees expected to execute the change, the more difficult it is to internalize and act on change.
Leaders seeking to drive transformation must communicate clearly and frequently on the how of change, not just the why and what.
Change that attempts to create visible value without a clear call to visible values is a recipe for disaster.
