Written by UT Center for Industrial Services’ Workforce Development Consultant Tim Waldo Originally published on May 4, 2023 on The Optimized People Development System Blog
How do you move a team? An organization? Not so much in the physical sense but in the sense of motivation. How do you move people toward change? Setting the vision for their team is one of the more important tasks leaders have. Theirs is the challenge of identifying those key aspects or that most influential of things that will have a positive, lasting impact and ultimately help the team achieve its goals. Sometimes the best options for exerting the forces necessary for that movement are not so obvious, even to the people deeply entrenched within the organization’s systems.
The Lever
Leverage points, for leaders, are those opportunities that can exert force against the norms. A very powerful lever was identified at the world’s largest aluminum company in 1987.
In The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg recounts The Ballad of Paul O’Neal. It’s the story of when O’Neal, an unconventional choice for the role, took over as CEO of Alcoa and informed shareholders that to turn the ailing company around; he intended to focus on one key aspect – safety – not profits, not investments, not acquisitions, or growth. The goal was zero safety issues across the whole company. Duhigg describes the reaction of the shareholders (and his own reaction) as something of a stampede for the exits. Most thought O’Neal had lost his mind.
The lever he chose was of common interest for everyone concerned with the organization. Ultimately, O’Neal’s safety program leveraged this common bond to improve morale and engagement, increase innovation, and drive quality.
Even before accepting the job, O’Neal searched for something that would “transform the company.” Safety was not the big, shiny lever. Nor was it the most widely accepted lever. It was, however, the company-wide habit that influenced a host of other habits across the organization. Change this one thing, and several other dominoes would fall. And fall they did. Profits hit record highs, net income rose, and market capitalization soared.
O’Neal’s reasoning fits easily into Duhigg’s observation that “Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers” (p. 101).
The Fulcrum
If O’Neal surmised that the keystone habit of safety was the lever, he also understood that systems thinking was the fulcrum on which it operated. Their system was broken. It wasn’t living up to anyone’s expectations. Remarkably, as the force exerted by the new focus on safety rippled through the organization, feedback loops began to send different signals and internal connections began to alter and improve.
Changing this one keystone habit did, in fact transform Alcoa, moving it to a much stronger position foundationally and fiscally. The complex collection of systems known as the Alcoa Corporation began to move toward its shared vision.
Systems thinking urges us to consider the far-reaching impacts that levers might have if and when they are pulled. Peter Senge said, “Vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there” (p. 12).
Paul O’Neal helped his team gain an understanding of the forces they had to master to reach their vision. He did this by identifying a less obvious point of leverage that had the greatest potential to impact the whole system.
The search for those less obvious, impactful levers is not always easy. Leaders have to learn to look deeper and wider. It isn’t enough to be a visionary leader. It requires learning to see relationships, understand connections, and to follow the important system patterns where some powerful levers of influence quietly wait to be discovered.
References
Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Random House, NY.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday, NY.
The University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services (UT CIS) proudly serves as the One Stop Operator for the East Tennessee American Job Centers. If you are interested in seeing more blog posts from Tim Waldo, check out his Optimized People Development System blog