Molly Anderson is director of talent for Deloitte Services LP, specializing in innovative strategies to engage today's workforce. She designed and led the implementation of mass career customization within Deloitte and served as operations director for its highly acclaimed Women's Initiative. Molly is an expert on organizational effectiveness, large-scale change, human resources strategy and learning and development. Now, in The Corporate Lattice, Chief Talent Officer Cathleen Benko and Director of Talent Molly Anderson take the next step by addressing the broader corporate landscape.
Molly, how are you? Thank you for being on our show. I don’t encourage stalkers, but I do hope to encourage buyers for your book. Where are you? What project are you working on now?
I’m here in NYC, working on a pretty interesting project at Deloitte to transform how we develop leaders at Deloitte. It’s a $300 million center out in Texas that’s going to be a center for learning and development for us. It brings to life a lot of the principles from the book.
But maybe we’re’ getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe it might make sense to start with the idea of what this corporate lattice is. The simplest way to think about The Corporate Lattice is this: there’s been the model we call the corporate ladder and how we manage people. It’s the image that comes to mind: it’s hierarchical; it’s top down. And it’s built for a very different environment than we are in now. And what we’re seeing is the collapse of that model which has been being undermined for quite some time.
And we turned our attention to what’s taking its place. And we call that the corporate lattice.
My husband is a mathematician so it turns out a lattice is a mathematical concept that’s infinitely scalable with infinite possibilities. It’s much like a high-speed network, the antithesis of a hierarchical model.
When you apply that metaphor to a company there are 3 key areas:
- Careers and how they’re built.
- How the work is performed.
- How people can have a voice in the company.
The companies that are doing these things are having a very good ROI as opposed to those with a corporate ladder.
Will you go over those 3 areas again?
The first line is careers and they’re built. The classic career track was that careers were supposed to go up, up, up. The thinking was that if you were not going up, up, up, then there was a stigma attached. You need to work continuously full-time. That was the prevailing model. IN a corporate ladder, you could take for granted that success meant the same thing for most people. It was a very homogenous work force. Most of the workers were men, most of the family structures were dads were in the work force fulltime, moms were at home full-time.
There are many things today eating away at the structure. The corporate structure is flatter. 25% flatter than 25 years ago. Spans of control at the CEO level have tripled.
The changes in the workforce where most of are trying to blend our personal and professional lives, men and women, this idea of continuous employment isn’t fitting well with the Corporate Lattice.
The 2nd very related area is the Change in how work itself is structured. In a manufacturing economy a lot f , much of the work was very routinized, very repititive, very structured. In most of the developed economies over 3/4 of the economy is knowledge and service work. And that work tends to be a lot less routine, a lot less structured, more project type work.
Project work has grown 20-fold. People come together to work on a project and when that project is completed they go back to their other responsibilities in their work.
We see a lot of virtualization. A lot of globalization. Teams are often flung across the globe working in very dispersed locations. All kinds of new possibilities for where, when and even how the work will get done.
The third area is how does participation in organizations even happen in the workforce. We have technologies that make information very broadly available. We can look at ways to tap in to the ideas, the smarts of the people in the organization. We don’t have to be constrained by the hierarchy or the silos of influence in different organizational departments now.
We’re seeing big change from each these from what happened in the corporate ladder model.
Which one of these three does the most driving? Why?
They’re all incredibly powerful and make a contribution. We’re seeing a lot companies making progress in each of those 3 areas. And they’re starting to see the ROI that you mentioned at the top of the show.
A simple example is from Frontier Communications, one of the largest rural lecs in the country. They went through a union negotiation that resulted in offering some greater remote work options. Their CEO took an open-minded let’s see how it goes philosophy.
Now about 30% of these agents work remotely and those agents get 25% more work done. And the retention rate is double that of those who work in the offices.
Retention goes right to the bottom line. It costs a lot to get turn over. So, they saw that by changing to a lattice model they got benefits that went to the bottom line.
What about other organizations? One is from the federal government, the Patent and Trademark office. They looked at all three of these areas. So their patent examiners working remotely and they have to change their management practices, their performance needed to be results driven not face-time driven and all kinds of things to make the change comprehensive. Just one year into their efforts they had 4 out 10 working remotely they had reduced their real estate expenses by millions of dollars, 10% increase in productivity. And they had dealt with their biggest challenge: turnover. 3/4’f of their staff said that this remote working option was what kept them there.
This change can feel uncomfortable to managers. It definitely takes some getting used to. There’s a learning curve. Yo have to be clear on what results you’re looking for. You have to invest in helping managers learn these virtual work skills.
People have to learn to get very, very, clear about the results they were looking for and not be a clock-watcher.
Part of moving from ladder to lattice is unlearning the ladder habits and instead learning the lattice habits.
Again, I love your book. And I really began to love it at Page 7 where you started sharing the ROI for those companies who’ve embraced a corporate lattice.
You have an extensive background in organizational effectiveness. You designed and led the implementation of Mass Career Customization across Deloitte’s forty-three-thousand-person organization. You led directed Deloitte’s highly acclaimed Women’s Initiative, leading programs to advance women through leadership development, innovation, community building, and marketplace eminence.
When did you notice and how did you notice the glaring differences in corporate performance between companies that offer a ladder vs companies that offer a lattice? Was there an epiphany?
I wish I could say we were smart enough to have figured this out all at once. It was very much a journey we went on. A journey to change ourselves, a journey where we started talking to a lot of our clients who were seeing the same things and sharing our learnings.
There were 2 or 3 epiphany moments along the way. It did begin in our Women’s Initiative. Deloitte has had a very long standing commitment to the advancement of women. We were one of the very first to have a women’s initiative in. Our leaders take it very seriously. We have an external council of luminaries to hold our feet to the fire and make sure we’re making this change. We found that there was more we wanted to do...We hadn’t closed the gender gap, women were leaving faster than men.
We thought we needed to look at innovation. How were we going to get that breakthrough? A huge thing we were hearing from our women was about flexibility. We inventoried our flexibility program and found 69 programs that we had created. And yet if we looked at the participation in these programs it had only been on the rise when we were creating the programs.
We stepped back and did some root cause analysis. That drove our first epiphany. Flexibility is not just a women’s issue, it’s an everybody issue. It’s coming up in all kinds of places. It’s a corporate bottom-line issue. It effects men and women, it effects the generations at the workplace.
Women are half the workforce now. The typical woman has a non-linear career, does take a career break to raise a family.
Women are very vocal about their need for flexible work schedules.
When we looked at men it turns out that men want it too. But there was this stigma about speaking up about it. They had the same desires. The men in dual career couples reported more conflict over work-life balance than the women in dual-career couples. Today, 3/4’s of men are in dual career couples. The men are sharing a lot more in housework and childcare now.
When we looked at boomers in our organizations they were saying I’d like to stay in the workforce longer and I have to stay in the workforce given current economic realities, but I’d really like to have more workplace flexibility:
" I missed my kids soccer games, I don’t want to miss my grandkids’s soccer games."
Everywhere we looked we realized workforce flexibility as a hot issue. We refer to women as the canaries in the corporate coal mine. They have been very vocal on this topic. But across the organization people are putting flexibility at the top of the list.
The 2nd epiphany was to recognize that to get to the root cause of this challenge and really turn the corner on it, it wasn’t about band-aid solutions, we needed to look at changing our model. We started looking at flexible work arrangements in our own company. Lots of people said they were working and some said they had issues of this kind or the other around this arrangement.
But the thing we kept hearing across the organization was that I’m in a career no-man’s land. My future is nebulous. The flexible work arrangements were a good step forward but people who exercised them were considered an exception to the norm, to those corporate ladder norms of continuous full time employment and were being written off from a career perspective.
We needed to reset the norm. The ladder norms needed to get overturned for us to make headway on this workplace flexibility. That’s when we recognize this paradigm shift was going on and that if we did understand this shift very consciously so that we could very deliberately design change for it so that we could get beyond where we were. So then we needed to innovate.
And that’s what we did.
We rolled out these mass career customization programs changes throughout the 43,000 person organization. As we did that work, and as we saw the results, we saw that careers are connected to work that’s connected to participation.
That was the 3rd epiphany, is you need to really get at this larger model shift, so when you redesign work you create different options for where and when work gets done that then that gives people different career choices.
And when you get people working remotely they still have needs to connect with the community to learn and grow, so that when you start to introduce social media, the social networking you start to create possibilities where that can start to happen. And that’s where you start to turnover those corporate ladder career norms.
My friend, Erika Andersen, coined a favorite phrase of mine. That phrase is reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future. What was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future with writing The Corporate Lattice?
One of the biggest thing we’re hoping to do is help people make sense of and benefit from this shift from a corporate ladder to a corporate lattice. There’s significant benefits for individuals to understand this shift, too.
Our motivation is to help everyone understand that change so you can be more deliberate about taking advantage of that change.
How will you know you are making progress? What’s some Key Performance Indicators you’ll turn to for signs of progress?
Numbers are our friends and we focus on performance indicators. You can derive measures from each of those areas. Some will be unique to your organization.
For us at Deloitte it was the career life satisfaction measure.
In the work area of some companies they look at their real estate. Do we have a lot of empty offices?
In social media you can look at how many people are participating and how frequently.
One of the most important things to look at is the overall progress at employee engagement. At heart it’s a very simple concept:
- How much discretionary effort do they bring forth every day.
- Are they willing to go the extra mile to get the work done?
A lot of the work in service and knowledge industries is discretionary.
It makes a lot of sense why this word, engagement, has risen to the top in discussions by management.
We assumed that success meant the same thing. When workforce was homogenous that was a reasonable assumption. There wasn’t a lot of open dialogue.
But, now we have a heterogenous workforce. All different kinds of elements. Different things are important to different people. For some people, it’s about meaning. For some, it’s compensation.
We need to tailor and personalize that relationship.
Engagement is what drives a lot of that ROI. ...All kinds of benefits are being driven to the bottom line out of that engagement number.
That’s one of the most important indicators for companies to keep their eye on.
Who should read your book? Or maybe, is there any business leader, manager, employee, student who should not read your book?
It’s absolutely true that this topic is a broad one.
If you look at the leaders who are trying to set strategy and build a future organization, they need to read it.
If you’re looking at managers, they have to realize they have to manage differently.
If you look at individuals, we need to manage this effectively for ourselves at work.
You profile some very big corporations and their move towards a corporate lattice for growth. NASA, Cisco, Microsoft, Intuit, ATT, Sprint, US Army.... Were you surprised to find so many multinational corporations and governmental agencies already leading the way?
It was very striking to us the wide range of organizations that are moving to this lattice model. The sense of movement shines through. It shines through all the data and statistics. It really shines through when you talk to the companies.
We’ve moved out of the theory stage. And there are some practical, best-practices, steps out there that can give us confidence that this thing can work.
When you talk with these companies, you really get this sense of how it is playing out.
This is where we’re headed and you can get there fast or we can get there slow.
I was surprised by so many profiles of big corporations embracing this disruption to their command and control, top--down hierarchy. I see them being very resistant to this type of change to their power, decision-making, perks, careers. What am I missing here?
In many companies, the change has been fairly uneven. You’ll see a manager of a department or an unit, but not the whole organization. You really do see a few companies getting out ahead of the pack.
One of the ones we share in the book is Cisco. When the dot-com boom went bust it hit them hard. Necessity is a very powerful motivator and you have to credit visionary leadership.
And John Chambers was able to envision a very different company that drive different results. He started to recognize that if they used a traditional Command and Control then they would be limited to the opportunities he could see. But if he could push it down and span the silos...then they would be able to pursue and explore more opportunities...opportunities with adjacent technologies.
You wrote that Lattice Organizations instill a 21-st century attitude towards transparency? What is the 21st century attitude towards transparency and how does a lattice organization instill that attitude?
At the heart it’s the recognition that transparency is a part of organization life. How am I going to deal with that reality?
If you acknowledge that reality you can not only manage your risk but start tapping into some of its benefits.
How does that play out in reality?
The story of Thompson-Reuters stood out for me. They created an online portal for their employees called the pain portal. And employees could share what causes pain in their day.
It got a really high volume of comments. They put owners on it solving the problems. They created productivity, they created satisfaction. They created something more enduring . They created trust. Employees felt like thy had voice and made a difference. They created trust in their leadership.
The new kind of risk on the scene is that if you don’t create this mechanisms for transparency that your employees can turn to share what’s happening within your 4 walls.
I’m summarizing broadly but a corporate lattice seems to represent a huge shift in power and decision-making dynamics, even brand recognition, from the corporate to the personal. And personal brands like Frank Eliason when he started tweeting on behalf of Comcast customer service and Scott Monty who handles Ford’s social media program add lustre and credibility to the corporate brand.
How comfortable will corporate brands need to become with personal brands possibly eclipsing corporate brands?
This is a fascinating and evolving area. You’re seeing more connectivity between corporate and personal brands.
When you make a decision to work at a company you are seen as associated with that corporate brand. And the companies now see they are associated with those personal brands of the people they hire.
Those reputations are getting linked with each other. Everyone’s thinking more deliberately about this area.
A lot of companies will save the resumes of people over time and compare the resumes.
I think there are increasing sophistication. Individuals need to up their game. As individuals you have decisions to make about which corporate brands you want to be associated with.
Let’s talk about social media, digital technology. Is corporate lattice possible without this technology?
One of the things you can see about the Lattice is you can take small steps toward a larger future. There are definitely things you can do. A lot of the value comes when a company can move beyond those first steps and connect these things together.
How much more can you accomplish when you have that pain portal or that communication within your company. Getting up the learning curve of how to get this thing done is a really smart thing to do.
Yet, 74% of employees who participated in a the Deloitte Workplace and Ethics Survey think company reputations can be damaged by activity on social networking sites. And without social networking within a company a corporate lattice is impossible and its huge upside networking with customers and partners is lost. Where’s the disconnect? Are employees afraid of transparency or their executives?
These sites are very accessible. Employees are giving employers an honest assessment.
If the companies are out there participating...if companies and individuals are out building a reputation what that really means is that if somebody does say something about you you know how to go about answering, responding. You’re right at the front edge. That’s being very pro-active. That’s being smart, having policies in place and experts in place.
I regularly talk on this show with guests about the failure of our educational system to educate, really, beyond memorizing the answers to standardized tests. And in your book you talk about the skill gap between the skills companies need now and in the future vs the skills, mostly rote memory skills good for performing rote tasks, being developed in our education system.
I’m not an expert on the educational system. We do say quite a bit about the future. One of the things that stands out is the volatility in the future.
The DOE has a statistic out that in the early part of this century 60% of the jobs will require skills that only 20% of the population has.
The big thing is making our learners agile, learning how to learn, creating adaptability and flexibility in the face of change. Those are becoming really critical meta-skills to adapt as this change unfolds.
Readers are leaders, says Jim Rohn. You’re a leader. What are you reading? Books, sites, personal brands...
One of the books I’m reading that is very interesting and very powerful on this is The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. They take an interesting look at flows of knowledge across organizations and networks and you can tap into this to take advantage of the knowledge within your organization.
Where are you speaking publicly?
A great place to go for media and speaking engagements is the website at The Corporate Lattice. We’re updating that pretty frequently.
Where can we follow you on the web?
We have a Facebook fan page for the book. You can find the link at the main website.
My last thoughts: Buy the book, read it, share it, start now to create a corporate lattice for your company. And grow revenues and earnings. Hire some people. Fix this economy.
Thanks, Molly!
