“I’d climb in the car as it went down the assembly line and I’d introduce myself. Then I’d ask for ideas.”
— A Ford Motor Co. executive describing his efforts to improve Ford’s products.
Picture this: You’re at a conference, meeting in a hotel ballroom with a couple hundred uneager businesspeople, and this is the opening speaker’s opening sentence: “I’m not going to tell you anything today that you haven’t heard before, I promise.”
It was that little dangler at the end that got me, the “promise.” I slid glances left and right. No reaction. When I asked around later, almost no one had heard the remark, and one who had shrugged and said, “There isn’t anything new.”
Because I’ve probably told that story before, I won’t throw stones; I mention it to point out how difficult it is to write about new management ideas.
So you can imagine my simultaneous delight and suspicion when Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School opined that an Indian IT services company, HCL Technologies, might be “the beginnings of a new model of management.”
That got me doing some research and, ultimately, speaking with the company’s leader, Vineet Nayar.
Evolve Management
For instance, he once shook up his employees by saying: “Right now, we are poodles. Is that what you want to be?” Poodles. You have to love that kind of guy.
Nayar told me, “Everything else in our lives has evolved; management has not.” What he’s doing to evolve his management is a new model that starts with “Employee first. Customer second.”
He argues, “The scarce resource is not customers, but great employees.” OK, so that philosophy is not altogether new — there was a book in 1992 called “The Customer Comes Second,” by Hal F. Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters that made a similar point.
But, having made the employee-first assertion, Nayar then says his goal is: “Management is as accountable to the employee as the employee is to management.” That takes Nayar to a new logic and to a new management model.
Post Employee Evaluations
For instance, HCL Technologies doesn’t just do 360-degree performance evaluations; Nayar posted his evaluations on the company’s intranet, and urged other managers to do so.
And the company doesn’t just have an employee grievance committee; it has a resolution system where anyone can open a “ticket” with any department’s “service desk,” and management is expected to respond — and respond quickly.
You can open a ticket on any topic, from a malfunction in a restroom to the suspicion that your raise was chintzy. Only the employee who opened the ticket can close it. And the service desks are evaluated on how efficiently they resolve the employee concerns.
Thus, accountability has been reversed, and the employees have evidence to support the assertion that management really does believe “employee first.”
Further, to put meat into the second half of the equation, “customer second,” Nayar once announced that the company was walking away from some accounts, amounting to $35 million in revenue.
Nayar summed up the effects of this new management model: “We are the fastest-growing IT services company out of India and among the best-performing stocks.”
Which brings us to an interesting question: Can an unhappy employee make a customer happy? No.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
