Tag Archives: organization

Trust and Networks

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At work today, my team and I went through training on something called the “Speed of Trust” which essentially argues that the more trust an organization has the less costs there are associated with doing business. Not only are things cheaper, but they happen faster. I was actually pleasantly surprised, I’m typically pretty skeptical of things like this as a rule because I feel that they compress extremely complicated ideas down to a single scale to be measured on. However, with the facilitator’s contribution of how the different types of powers interact with trust it became a lot more meaningful, even if there were so many platitudes provided by the author of the book during the videos that were shown.

I think that there’s one area that was definitely missing from this topic that was only moderately touched on – Networks. There are plenty of network theories that discuss the obvious cost savings and accumulation of social capital in better ways than was covered in this discussion.

Social Capital is a way of measuring how much influence you have in a network. Unfortunately, the only networks that were recognized in this method are the formal networks that are created simply by being an organization. There was no discussion of how people can create informal networks that can have more influence on the organization than the actual formal network structures. For instance, if I want to change the direction of some project and I’m struggling within the project itself, I may try to use my formal structure of going up through my manager over to one of the managers of the people on the team. However, this is typically considered poor form, another option would be to discuss the topic with someone else that is influential and spend some social capital and have the problem resolved informally. These networks can influence the structure of organizations because people that are managers may not be the thought leaders in the organizations. When striving for change in an organization it is crucial to expend social capital on the most influential people – titlewise or otherwise.

Furthermore, these networks can enable anyone to generate more powerful ideas. As you discuss issues or ideas with many different people in the organization and include their suggestions or comments around the idea/issue it’s possible to create significantly better ideas. Then whenever you’ve come to the point where you’d like to enact your idea, you’ve already built a coalition of support through your conversations and will have more successful ideas.

The Speed of Trust course was pretty useful to help determine how to address trust issues in an organization. It’s important to identify where and how things are going wrong. However, I think it’s important to keep in mind network theory to maximize the benefit of trust.

The Philosopher CEO

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In my group at work, we have been accused of having a group of philosophers and a group of doers. This is typically mentioned with some serious disgust. As if having a group of people thinking about how the business is run is a bad thing. I think part of it stems from the idea that this means that they aren’t doing anything productive or value added for the company. The perception is incorrect of course. The “philosophers” are actually a process improvement methodology team that provides course development, course training, mentoring for Lean Six Sigma certification, continual guidance for projects in flight and manages projects themselves. There are only two of them. That’s a tall order to be honest.

But the idea of a philosophy group really got me thinking. Would it be a bad thing to have a group that looks at the ethical, moral or sustainable behavior of the company? I lump sustainability in with the morality and ethical question, because in a lot of ways sustainability is not looking to be a social issue and is another way of looking at the ethics of recycling and energy usage. I’ve talked about morality and MBA’s specifically in my last post. Singling out the MBA crowd might not have been the fair as there is no reason why engineers couldn’t behave in unethical ways, there’s no requirement for engineers to take ethics courses.

Why does this matter? Well, we’ve seen a huge number of seemingly unethical choices coming out of companies. In some cases they may have been selected in a harmless way. For example the new MacBook Pros have a glued on battery, the choice may have been made to reduce the amount of time it takes to secure the battery. Putting a fast acting glue on the battery may have accomplished this, while screwing in the battery would take more time. This selection could have been made without the consideration of the repairability or replacability for components within the laptop. However, since this is Apple I’m talking about here, I find this unlikely. The next question would be, was this choice unethical? From a sustainability perspective it could be construed in that manner, which iFixit does do just that. The computer also lost its environmental certification by using the glue and some of the other design characteristics. This design also continues with Apple’s decisions to make it more difficult to upgrade or do anything with their product once you’ve bought. This increases the number of times you have to purchase their products and exasperates the throwaway culture of many other products.

Consumers are also starting to become more aware of the unethical behavior of companies. We’ve seen this with the recent banking scandals, we’ve seen this with the investigation into Foxconn and we’re likely to see it moving forward in other sectors. We’re starting to hear about more unethical behavior in the ag industries, in regard to their treatment of animals or in the case of Monsanto basically suing farmers when seeds of their crops land in their field. The increase in consumer awareness through the increased usage of social media and other social networking tools is going to significantly increase both information and disinformation about these topics.

It is likely that there will be an increase in the number of watch dog organizations in existence and more reliance on government agencies, like the Consumer Protection agency in the US now. The banks have argued for a long time that these regulations are unnecessary as they can regulate themselves. We do know that profit pressures can prevent ethical behavior and encourage unethical behavior. Perhaps it’s time that every organization has an Internal Affairs organization similar to what the police have. I do not believe that these organizations are perfect and can become corrupt (or have the appearance of being corrupt), but I think that they can be useful.

Penn State is going to have to set up an organization like this. I think for the University this was going to be required for them to even have a chance at ever regaining their credibility. The records for that group need to be wide open for everyone to view. I think this type of office needs to be in any publicly traded company. It will ensure greater transparency, allow watch dog groups and consumers to choose the actual ethical companies and these groups would be auditable. This could be a certification process similar to ISO9001 (a manufacturing document control quality system), where the members of the team are given ethics training in a wide range of topics including morality and then are expected to train the employees of the company, CEO included.

By creating organizations such as this, companies can greatly clarify how their behavior is ethical and moral. Once several large companies create agencies like this other companies will be shamed into doing it as well. Thus increasing the number of Philosopher CEOs out there.