A recent Fortune article by David Rock (http://bit.ly/IaJb0S) mentions that when the firm Management Research Group looked into data on 60,000 managers collected over 10 years across four continents, they found that only 0.77% of leaders and managers could be considered among the top 33% of performers as measured by their ability to focus both on work goals and the needs of other people. That is a truly horrifying number. And I believe it.
I’m really struck by how few organizations I’ve encountered even begin to explicitly value people skills, and it only seems to be getting worse, at a steadily increasing rate. Happily, I’ve begun to partner with the one organization I have found that truly values people skills and explicitly walks the talk. From the CEO down to the shop floor, the Barry-Wehmiller Companies live their people-centric guiding principle of leadership every day: “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.” Every single person I’ve met in this company is solidly thankful to be an employee there, and they line up to get into the powerful three-day Communication Skills Training course that is foundational to their organizational culture by exquisitely teaching skills of attending, listening, and “confrontation on bended knee”. That this company also nets 14%-21% return, year after year, in good economy and bad, only underscores how powerful the effect is of consciously, and conscientiously, focusing on the real individuals in the company, rather than some loose, ill-anchored idea of employees as a general group. At B-W, focusing on people is essential to profit, pure and simple. http://www1.barry-wehmiller.com/message
In addition, at the risk of sounding like a frothing evangelist, I’m also a fan because this company has acquired more than 40 other companies in recent decades and has kept every single one of those companies in their original city and with the entire original workforce. Their commitment to these individuals is that deep– they only buy a company if the believe that it has the potential to both enhance the portfolio AND to become fully aligned with their core cultural values. People come in with skepticism ranging from moderate resistance to raging disbelief. The stories of how they came to believe and enroll in the culture are legion, and heart-warming to an old OD warrior like me.
I’m hopeful that we may have swung so far away from people-orientation in our management culture in the U.S., in particular, that the pendulum may begin to swing back. Judging by the number of luminaries who are singing the praises and writing about the Barry-Wehmiller model, there is a glimmer of light on the horizon.
