INSIGHT
succession planning
The Right Fit
How Well Do Your New Employees’ Behavioral Traits and
Characteristics Match An Organizational Learning Culture?

Terry Brueck President and CEO Mary Dailey-Fischer Principal Consultant

This is the final installment in a three-part series on Knowledge Management.

Identifying the experience, skills, and knowledge required for a particular position is relatively easy. That’s where most organizations focus all of their energy during the hiring process. What gets missed is how well the person’s behavioral traits and characteristics match up with the culture of the organization.

In parts one and two of our series on Knowledge Management, we explored the importance of capturing knowledge held by current employees and defined the characteristics of a learning organization. However, the importance of person-organization fit cannot be overlooked.

How To Find A Good Fit

When the person-organization fit is as solid as the person-job fit, good things happen. Through shared values with its employees, the learning organization builds a capable, sustainable workforce.

Over time, preferred organizational behaviors are reinforced by recognition and career development programs. Organizations that reinforce the importance and contributions of every employee promote knowledge sharing. When employees are selected, trained, and rewarded for disseminating and applying knowledge, these become priorities.

So how does an organization determine if potential employees are a good fit? The answer lies in using interviewing techniques designed to identify behavioral traits and characteristics that support knowledge retention. These traits include curiosity, openness to different points of view, a desire to learn, a preference for collaborative work, and a tendency to share information with others.

Behavioral interviewing involves asking questions about a person’s past experiences that relate to desirable traits or characteristics. There are three parts to every question: 1) Describe a situation, 2) Identify actions taken related to the situation, and 3) Define the outcomes.

A carefully written question can yield information on job requirements and organization fit. For example, to identify technical knowledge and experience – and knowledge sharing – the question might ask a candidate to, “describe a time when you had to teach someone (a specific skill). How did you go about it?”

To gather information on interpersonal skills, the interviewer could ask the candidate to, “Tell me about a time you were in conflict or disagreement with another team member. How did you resolve the situation?”

For learning and knowledge sharing, the question might be, “Tell me about the most recent experience you had learning something new at work. What was the situation, how did you learn, how have you applied your learning, and how have you shared that knowledge?”

Of course, no interviewing technique is foolproof. What’s important is incorporating the tools and techniques of knowledge management across the organization – including in the hiring process. This is one more step on the road to becoming a successful learning organization.

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FORESIGHT
second of a two-part series
Wastewater System Optimization
Advanced Control Software Replaces Operator's "Crystal Ball"

Dr. Bob Hill, P.E. Principal Consultant

This is the second in a two-part series. The first installment explored the objectives and benefits of implementing system-wide, real-time control of wastewater systems. Part two looks at control optimizing software in more detail.

Predicting The Future

One of the most difficult parts of optimizing wastewater system-wide performance is forecasting the process inputs. For collection systems, wastewater flow rates need to be forecast for each major catchment basin. Regression models, artificial neural networks, and time series approximations have been used successfully for dry weather diurnal variations. Accurate predictions of 24-48 hours are possible when sufficient data is available to calibrate the forecasting models.

The impact of infiltration and inflow, caused by inclement weather, is more difficult to predict. Even the most advanced weather forecasts can’t predict where, when, and how much rain will fall. But the use of radar to make accurate predictions of rainfall several hours into the future is possible – and useful.

Model Predictive Control

The most advanced real-time controllers use Model Predictive Control (MPC). MPC does not refer to a single specific control algorithm or strategy but rather a class of control methods that computes a sequence of manipulated variable adjustments to optimize the future behavior of a process. Originally developed to meet the specialized control needs of petroleum refineries and power plants, MPC technology can now be found in a wide range of applications including chemical processing, food processing, aerospace, pulp and paper, and wastewater collection and treatment.

The controller structures of the various MPC algorithms have a number of common elements including:

• A forecasting technique to predict process inputs over an appropriate time period – the prediction horizon
• Explicit use of a model to predict process performance at future time instants over the prediction horizon
• Calculation of a control sequence to meet objectives/minimize cost functions
• Use of a receding horizon where the MPC algorithm’s first output is utilized (sent to the control element or loop) and then another sequence is calculated at the next sampling interval

The various MPC algorithms differ in the models used to represent the process, the noises, and cost functions to be minimized, how constraints are implemented, and what optimization algorithms are utilized.

Numerous commercially-available collection system modeling programs are commonly used for design purposes. Several of these products have the ability to perform dynamic (time varying) simulations and are suitable for real-time control work. Because the model may need to be employed hundreds or thousands of times for each control period, skeletonized or simplified configurations are normally used to decrease required computational time. Some of the more advanced packages have applications to help perform the skeletonization.

What’s Right For Your Situation?

Not every utility needs an MPC controller for its wastewater system. While simple rule-based systems can adequately meet the objectives in some cases, the potential benefits of real-time, system-wide control are too great to ignore. A quick audit of your utility’s wastewater system operation can determine which approach makes more sense. Is it time to replace your ‘crystal ball?’

System-wide control utilizes specialized software to collect key information from a variety of sources throughout the collection system.

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Q & A INTERVIEW
Strengths-Based Management
What Makes Great Leaders, Managers Great?

Marcus Buckingham believes that great managers are able to identify a person’s unique talents and then leverage those talents for individual success. In contrast, great leaders find what is shared among all members of a group and capitalize on it for organizational success. They are optimists who rally people to a better future. Buckingham is the co-author of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, bestsellers that have established strengths-based management as a practical alternative for forward-thinking organizations. This Q&A is an edited composite of multiple interviews and presentations given by Marcus Buckingham in 2005. (Thank-you to Harvard Business School Publishing and www.marcusbuckingham.com for the original material.)

Your latest book is titled, One Thing You Need to Know. Can the insights of strengths-based management be boiled down to just one thing?

Because the world is so complex, I believe it is valuable to distill information down to controlling insights that guide action. This is the premise behind the concept of ‘just one thing.’ To become a controlling insight, it has to pass three tests. The insight must be generalizable. It must apply across a broad range of situations. It also needs to be transformative, powerful enough to elevate performance from merely good to truly great. And third, the insight needs to be actionable. It must point to precise actions to be taken, with specific effects.

What is the chief responsibility of a manager?

A person’s manager influences how long the person stays at an organization and how effectively the person performs. That’s a pretty important role. A manager is a catalyst for performance, speeding up talent, and making that talent work harder. We define talent as a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior. Being responsible or competitive or able to have empathy are all talents.

What is the one thing we need to know about great managers?

Great managers find out what is unique about every person and they capitalize on it. Great managers recognize that each person has unique talents and motivations, and they seek to understand and leverage this uniqueness. They build their teams to maximize the unique talents and contributions of each person on their team. In doing so, they are proponents of “individualization” where they treat each person differently based on that person’s talents and motivations. Great managers may standardize the outcomes, but they individualize how each person goes about achieving those outcomes. Average managers play checkers while great managers play chess. In checkers, all of the pieces move in the same homogenous way, but in chess each piece moves differently. Great managers understand the differences in each piece and coordinate the team to take advantage of individual strengths.

What do great managers focus on with their people?

At most companies, managers review their people by focusing primarily on a person’s weaknesses or “opportunities,” and development emphasizes addressing shortcomings. A typical one-hour performance discussion might spend two minutes focused on what a person does well and 58 minutes on what needs to be improved. In most instances, this is not development; it is damage control, and it is not a formula for greatness or winning. In contrast, great managers spend 80 percent of their time working to grow an employee’s greatest strengths, coaching them to improve their performance in their areas of strength, not weakness.

Investing to develop a person’s talent is how breakthrough performance can be achieved. This means not that great managers ignore shortcomings, but that they focus on the talent and work around the shortcomings. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, including changing people’s jobs, allowing them to spend most of their time where their talent fits best; partnering an employee with another individual with complementary talents; or helping the person get “just a little bit better” to avoid glaring weakness.

Even with this approach, there will be non-performers. Once training has been provided to help develop skills, if there is no change in performance, then the individual simply lacks the necessary talent. Great managers recognize this as a casting error. Instead of investing further to try and fix the person, they focus instead on fixing the problem.

Truly great managers do not see people merely as a means to an end; they see people as the end. Great managers are personally motivated by being able to identify people’s talents and then more fully develop them.

Let’s talk about the difference between great managers and great leaders. What is the chief responsibility of a great leader?

A leader’s chief responsibility is to rally people to a better future. Rallying people requires that leaders have innate optimism. Great leaders are not unrealistic; in fact they are grounded in reality. However, they are spurred on by a core belief that things can be better in the future than they are today. They are able to create a vision of this future and rally others to support it. In addition, great leaders have egos in that they believe they are the ones to make this better future come true. By the way, I think egos get bad press. Ego does not mean arrogance; it is self-assurance and self-confidence. Great leaders know how to channel their egos, not to benefit themselves but to build their enterprise.

What is the ‘one thing’ we need to know about great leaders?

While great managers find what is unique and leverage it, great leaders find what is shared. The most relevant characteristic that is shared by all people is a fear of an unknown future. That’s why people turn to rituals and gurus to help deal them deal with the unknown. But leaders deal in the unknown every day. They have to turn legitimate anxiety into confidence. How do they do this? By providing clarity.

Followers are begging for clear answers to four key questions and great leaders provide those answers. The first question is, ‘Who do we serve?’ If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please. The second question followers have is, ‘What is our core strength?’ Followers want to know what the advantages are and why their team will win. They want clear and specific reasons.

The third question they ask is, ‘What is our core score?’ They may not ask it in those words but what employees are looking for is one key metric to use in measuring progress. Leaders need to decide the one specific measure to use in keeping score. For example, the British prison system used to measure itself by the number of escapees. That was their core score. Now their measurement has changed and they judge performance based on the number of offenders who return to prison after they have been released. That’s very different.

The fourth key question is, ‘What actions can we take today?’ They simply want to know what to do. Great leaders provide a few very specific, unambiguous actions that can be taken immediately. Most importantly, great leaders do not necessarily have the right answers to these questions – in many cases there are no ‘right answers’ – but they provide answers that are clear, specific, and vivid. Their followers know exactly who they serve, how they will win, how to keep score to know if they are winning, and what they can do today.

Marcus Buckingham Researcher, author, and speaker Marcus Buckingham spent 17 years with The Gallup Organization, researching the world’s best managers, leaders, and workplaces. He has transformed that experience into a series of best-selling books on the subject. By combining Gallup’s research findings with real-world examples and a healthy dose of British humor, Buckingham challenges conventional wisdom to show the link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and employee turnover. A native of the United Kingdom, Buckingham graduated from Cambridge University in 1987 with a master’s degree in Social and Political Science. He resides in Beverly Hills, California.

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CUSTOMER STORY
Leveraging Talent
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Employs Strengths-based Management To Integrate Field Operations

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities is reaping the rewards of training (top right), teamwork (right, bottom, upper left), and the strengths of its people. The combined Field Operations Division is led by talented people like manager Angela Lee and 2004 Division Employee of the Year Orantes Gleaton (center right), and zone manager Tony Dubois (far left).

Integration is never easy when it involves human beings. Be it school districts, corporations, or the combining of two departments within an organization, mergers seldom result in real harmony.

For one public utility in North Carolina, the process of integrating two separate field units into a single, sustainable, successful field operations team is working. The success of departmental integration at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities (CMU) is primarily a result of the utility’s focus on managing individual strengths. By placing the right people in the right roles, CMU has laid the groundwork for long-term success.

The Challenge

CMU is the largest public water and wastewater utility in the Carolinas, serving more than 700,000 customers. The utility employs 802 people in the following operational areas: water supply and treatment, water distribution, environmental management, wastewater collection, engineering, customer service, and administration.

CMU’s infrastructure includes 223,559 water connections, 3,450 miles of water mains, 196,906 sewer connections, and 3,369 miles of wastewater mains. The utility is under the same type of operational pressures as other large water and wastewater utilities. CMU’s service area continues to grow, and it is a real challenge to maintain high levels of service. The pressure to stay competitive – to avoid raising rates – is constant.

The pursuit of more efficient service delivery is not new to CMU. For years they have led the industry in testing new approaches to running the business. Simultaneously optimizing business processes, organization, and technology within field operations was a new and innovative approach the utility wanted to try.

EMA has been helping Charlotte-Mecklenburg facilitate organizational change in its field maintenance divisions. CMU realized a 20 percent productivity improvement during a six month pilot – which equates to a cost avoidance of more than $3 million annually.

This organization integration has been built on the principles of strengths-based management, a practical approach to performance improvement that is predicated on identifying the strengths of individual employees and placing them in work roles that fit those strengths.

The result is a more ‘engaged’ workforce, greater productivity, a more efficient operation, and improved employee morale.

Engagement: The Untapped Edge

For employees to thrive long-term – at CMU or anywhere else – they have to do work that fits their strengths. In Charlotte, this transition took place in two steps. The first placed the right people in the right roles. The second helped independent workers adjust to being part of a team.

Without these steps, employees would not be truly ‘engaged,’ the ideal situation where individuals are happy and productive, spending most of their time on the job doing the work they do best.

A 2004 Gallup Survey of 3 million US employees showed 70% were not engaged.

The Gallup Organization has been measuring employee productivity for 30 years. Based on surveys of three million employees and 200,000 managers, the majority of workers are clearly not engaged in their work. In America, less than 30 percent hit the mark. The numbers are worse in Canada, Germany, France, and Japan. Gallup cites the cost of disengaged employees as $3,400 for every $10,000 in salary, a $250 billion annual drag on the U.S. economy.

Marcus Buckingham, who raised awareness of strengths-based management in his books – First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths – believes organizations understand the importance of making people feel competent at work but don’t do a very good job of it. Managers tend to focus on weaknesses rather than strengths. Yet managing individual strengths is the untapped edge that can build a truly sustainable workforce.

Gallup has found that three conditions exist in highly-engaged, productive work teams: confidence, competence, and focus. The employee ‘sweet spot’ is at the intersection of these three. Only engaged workers create customer satisfaction and profit. The question for CMU (or any organization) is how to move more workers into their sweet spot?

CMU’s Five Steps Forward

There are five major steps to building a strengths-based organization that CMU has employed in the integration of its water and sewer crew divisions. These are as follows:

1. Define talents
Every person brings unique strengths to the workplace; the key is figuring out what those strengths are and then putting people in roles that fit.

To do that, it’s essential to understand the difference between talents, skills, and knowledge. Talent is an individual’s recurring thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that can be applied productively. Skills are the ‘how to’ aspect of work that is transferable, teachable in steps, and can be learned by practice. Knowledge is the factual, experiential stuff.

For some reason, our culture clings to the idea that talents are rare and special and that there are some roles at the bottom of the food chain that require no talent. It’s a myth. Without discounting the importance of experience, determination, and intelligence, none of these matters as much as talent.

“Our folks had some talents and skills we didn’t even know they had,” said CMU Zone Manager Kelly Dixon. “We just had to nourish those talents. We had one guy out in the field with computer skills that we didn’t even know he had, and that’s one of the qualifications we were looking for in the planner-scheduler role.”

CMU utilized the online StrengthsFinder Assessment, created by Gallup, to determine the talents of its people. The assessment divides talents into four categories to identify an individual’s strongest inclinations, tendencies, and patterns. Most employees were skeptical of the process at the outset.

“They didn’t know what this was all about,” Dixon said. “We thought we knew our guys, but we really only knew what they did at their jobs.”

By determining what talents its best employees had, the utility was able to establish what talents it needed for the revised, post-integration roles. That’s what CMU went looking for in job interviews.

“We’re trying to look at people a little differently when they come in now,” said Zone Manager Mike Britt. “You don’t just look at their application and see what their history is. We try to ask them some unique questions and figure out what their talents are.”

Open-ended questions work best but the interviewer must really listen to the answers. Interviewers look for clues to discover when the prospect has experienced rapid learning and great job satisfaction in the past. These patterns reveal an individual’s talents.

2. Study the best performers
Once the star performers in the organization had been identified and studied, CMU learned that many of their other people had the same talents.

“There were a lot of surprises,” Britt admitted. “One of our planner-schedulers is a great example. He used to work in right-of-way maintenance, mowing the grass, that sort of thing. Now he’s doing all kinds of different work. He’s fired up. He comes to work every day. He doesn’t even take a vacation. He’s got a real good attitude, and he doesn’t have any boundaries now. He’ll just jump right in if something needs doing.”

3. Teach the talent language
CMU’s third step was to conduct multiple manager training sessions on strengths-based performance management. By identifying individual learning styles and triggers, managers bring out the best in their people. Rather than focusing on improving weak performers – a futile pursuit – managers now work much more closely with top performers, helping them build on their strengths.

4. Build an organization talent profile
Managers need to develop a sound understanding of the talents already in their organization if they are to figure out what’s lacking. Once individual strengths are known, employees can be moved to the right roles. From this foundation of strength, people are hired based on how their talents match the organization’s needs.

“We’ve been asking more questions in the interviews,” Dixon explained. “Now we’re bringing them in after they’ve done the strengths survey. We’re going a little deeper.”

5. Study links between talent and performance
The final step to building a strengths-based organization is to collect baseline data that will be used to build a performance management plan for every leadership team member. CMU is crafting a scorecard for each employee, their impact on business results, the customer, and the culture. The scorecard clearly illustrates to employees what success looks like and the organization’s values are reinforced.

Engaged employees drastically impact the company in a positive way (and vice versa).

It’s crucial to invest sufficient time and money in the hiring process to avoid unnecessary turnover. Gallup has calculated the cost of employee turnover as 1.77 times salary for employees earning $40,000 annually and 2.44 times salary for $80,000 per year employees. For an organization of 1,000 employees, a 5 percent decrease in employee turnover results in annual savings of $3.5 to $9.7 million. Disengaged employees cost their employers a fortune in lost revenue, higher turnover, lost workdays, and lower productivity.

The greatest growth potential for an individual and an organization is in advancing strengths. By helping employees grow and not promoting them out of their strengths, employers are more likely to retain their best people and grow the organization.

From Theory To Results

In a strengths-based organization, the final piece of the puzzle is great leadership (see Q&A with Marcus Buckingham on page 4). Leadership is the intangible that takes the strengths-based approach from theory to practice to the bottom line. Great leaders build confidence in the sustainability of their organization, rally people to a better future, and bring clarity to the workplace.

Once behavioral changes kick in – as they have at CMU – productivity improves and change is sustainable. Results are measurable in terms of customer metrics, lower turnover rates, increased productivity, greater profitability, enhanced worker safety, and improved morale.

CMU has employed six specific strategic changes to its business practices that are driving productivity improvements. Cost avoidance in the pilot resulted from the following strategies:

• Crew skill mix (25%) – After analyzing the size and technical skills of the water and wastewater crews, CMU optimized the skill mix for maximum efficiency. This resulted in combined water/wastewater crews that were smaller and more effective.
• Headquarters consolidation (10%) – The integrated water and sewer Field Operations Division now works out of four decentralized, geographically-based zone headquarters. As a result, crews are working much more closely with towns in areas that may have been underserved previously, creating better working relationships and improving service levels. “We’re already reaping the benefits,” Britt said. “We’re getting there a whole lot quicker. We’re saving time, wear and tear on the equipment, and the cost of gas driving 30 or 40 extra miles all the time.”
• Cross training of water and wastewater personnel (25%) – Some water staff were concerned about safety issues associated with working around wastewater. Additional training, immunizations and the provision of new suits and gloves served to ease the apprehension. “It’s worked out just fine,” said Britt, one of the skeptics.
• Increased team leader responsibility (10%) – Each team leader is now responsible for overseeing 4-5 crews. By giving team leaders more responsibility and implementing the planner-scheduler position, much of the pressure on supervisors has been relieved. “I pretty much did it all before,” Britt explained. “It was really tough as a one-person job. It was overwhelming. Now there are four people handling it and doing very well.”
• Crew size (15%) – The number of workers employed on a particular crew now depends on the scope of the specific job. Efficiency has been improved, and the number of customer complaints is declining.
• Enhanced communication (15%) – CMU has realized that effective communication is vital in this major change initiative. Increased training, accountability, and the zone concept have helped employees see how important their role is within the whole team. Because of this awareness, as well as a focus on evaluation and recalibration, communication has improved – yet remains an ongoing challenge. “That’s a mountain we are still trying to climb,” Dixon says. “Folks have to communicate across the zones. Folks have information but they may not know how to share it. We’ve done some training in that area, and we’re doing more. It’s the most important thing, no question.”

Putting It All Together

By combining the principles of strengths-based management with specific operational strategies, the utility is reaping rewards that will continue for years to come. CMU, and the individuals who work there, are finding that ‘sweet spot.’

Integration of the water and wastewater crew divisions began in 2005. During 2006, strengths of high-performing employees are being profiled to establish more clearly how talents and roles match. Individual performance scorecards are under construction for CMU’s leadership team. In the field, zone managers are using the strengths assessment to determine field crew composition and there are plans in place to assess all field staff by the end of 2007.

Integration of the two division cultures and adapting to the rapid pace of change – an ongoing process – remain CMU’s greatest challenges, along with establishing a new skills-based pay structure that compensates cross-trained employees.

“The two divisions were very different when we started optimizing,” said Britt, who came from the water side. “Now it’s a team environment, and it’s really working well.”

“What I’m seeing now,” he said, “is accountability. Some guys are wondering out loud if all this change is ever going to end. I don’t think it’s going to stop. We’re running things like a business now and change is constant.”

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e-FLUENT
Emergency Management
NIMS Compliance Offers Cities Real Opportunities to Improve

Judith Cascio Vice President and Principal Consultant

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear what happens when government’s response to disaster lacks coordination. It also reinforced the importance of implementing the National Incident Management System (NIMS) as quickly as possible. Now it’s up to America’s cities to make that happen.

The Federal Government will no longer provide Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants – and other Federal preparedness funding – to municipalities that fail to comply with the NIMS implementation timeline. Fortunately, by taking advantage of the information technology and tools required to comply, municipal governments can realize more efficient, effective management – even when there is no emergency.

EMA, through its partnership with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, is helping a number of U.S. cities achieve compliance and leverage the tools and technology for daily use.

Sharing Information Saves Lives

The roots of NIMS can be traced to California wildfire response planning in the 1970s. It is the nation’s first standardized management plan that successfully creates a common framework for incident management, and a unified chain of command for federal, state, and local lines of government during incident response.

There has never been a greater need to protect the nation’s infrastructure. The threat of terrorism, natural disaster, and pandemic disease, coupled with aging municipal assets and growing citizen demands, has made NIMS a high priority. The goal is to facilitate interoperability and mutual aid between emergency response organizations. If multiple agencies can’t communicate during a crisis, recovery will be ineffective. As a result, the public and private sectors are collaborating like never before in the assessment, preparedness, prevention, detection, response, and recovery from natural and man-made events.

EMA has played a key role in a major test project ongoing in Honolulu, HI, aimed at evacuation planning and critical infrastructure protection. Working jointly with the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA), the Oahu Civil Defense Agency, and DHS, the pilot is designed to break down the communication and information-sharing barriers between multiple stakeholders within a defined geographic region. By sharing information on compatible platforms, organizations ranging from emergency management to the local power company can respond more effectively.

EMA has conducted tabletop exercises for a number of government entities across the country, including the City and County of Honolulu; Orange County, FL; the City and County of Denver/Front Range, CO; and the Cities of Seattle, WA; Oceanside, CA; and Warren, MI. EMA is also implementing a number of 311 one-call resolution systems that will optimize operational units and equip field personnel with mobile computing capability to provide immediate access in an emergency.

To make the investment in emergency management pay off, cities must learn to use information technology, internal and external practices, and people year-round.

Information management, analysis, transfer, and communication are vital to the deployment and operation of NIMS. Joint emergency response exercises have demonstrated that 50+ agencies can successfully plan and respond through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), mapping, spatial technology, and information management. GIS is an essential tool used by Incident Commanders (ICs), command staff, and support personnel to effectively manage resources and forge a coordinated response.

As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, the time to figure out the ground rules for emergency response is not when disaster is on the doorstep. The time to put the technology and protocols in place is now.

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