8

Hold People Accountable to Their Peers

When your mission is to guard the globe against epidemics, success is not measured in dollars and cents but rather in lives saved and deaths prevented. When your work issues are literally matters of life and death, there's no time for bureaucracy. Disease control scientists know that collaboration is essential when speedy innovation is an imperative for containing a potential global pandemic. In one thirty-day period in the early spring of 2003, the world witnessed the remarkable efficiency of the mass collaboration of society's community of scientists, but because they did their work so well, most of us barely noticed.

In late November 2002, scientists at Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), while routinely monitoring Internet media, observed reports of a possible flu outbreak in China and forwarded this information to the World Health Organization (WHO).¹ In early December, the WHO requested a report from Chinese authorities. The WHO was assured by the government that its investigation into the appearance of the virus indicated that the number of cases identified was completely consistent with the seasonal patterns observed in previous years.² However, in February 2003, the Chinese Ministry of Health reversed itself and reported to the WHO that 305 people had been stricken with a severe respiratory disease, and five of them had died.³ Over the next several weeks, the WHO tested several virus specimens in its laboratories and was able to conclusively rule out the influenza virus as the cause of the illness. By mid-March, WHO authorities were certain that they were dealing with an entirely new disease, which they named SARS (for severe acute respiratory syndrome), and they also knew that they needed to isolate the root cause to avoid a potential pandemic.

On March 17, 2003, the WHO initiated a global effort involving eleven research laboratories from countries around the world, which was called a “collaborative multicenter research project.”⁴ If the WHO was to prevent a pandemic, it was a given that the agency had to organize its efforts to leverage the collective intelligence of the world's best epidemiologists. In daily conference calls, scientists around the globe shared their observations and analyses, debated the results, and explored future avenues for their research. Through these daily calls, using the data that they were continually passing back and forth among all the laboratories, they were able to learn quickly from each other and aggregate their dispersed observations into a developing collective knowledge.

Within a matter of days, scientists at both Hong Kong University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States had separately identified the possible culprit of the new disease, and—after further research in labs in Germany, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong—the scientists were certain that the identified coronavirus was indeed the cause of SARS.⁵ After a mere thirty days from the start of the scientific collaboration, on April 16, 2003, the WHO was able to announce its crucial discovery to the world. The agency was then able to provide specific guidance for clinical treatment to health professionals and was also able to make recommendations to international travelers to prevent the spread of the disease.⁶ The quick work of this collaborative community was so successful that, on July 5, 2003, the WHO confidently declared that the SARS outbreak had been contained.

We are fortunate that the WHO did not have direct authority over the international community of scientists. Otherwise, we might have seen a research command center rather than a collaborative multicenter research project. If the SARS research effort had been organized into a centralized bureaucratic structure, it most likely would have taken months instead of weeks to find the root cause of the new disease. Politics invariably finds its way into centralized structures and distracts an organization from its core purpose by slowing down the pursuit of truth to manage perceptions. Centralized bureaucracies sometimes put their interests in looking good ahead of getting it right. That is exactly what happened when the Chinese government encountered the early cases of SARS. The government at first downplayed the seriousness of the public health threat and characterized the early instances as nothing more than the flu. The government finally came forward with the complete facts only after chatter on the Internet made spinning the story impossible. While the government was focused on managing perceptions, precious time was wasted—time that could have been better used pursuing the analysis of the cause of the new disease.

The SARS experience demonstrates how highly effective peer-to-peer communities can be when they have a clear and compelling mission. No centralized organization, or even a single individual, could have discovered the cause of SARS in only thirty days. Only a mass collaboration of self-organizing professionals can uncover the unknown with that kind of speed. In the SARS story, as typically happens in successful mass collaborative ventures, there were no individual heroes or self-promoting bosses taking the limelight. Perhaps that's why most of us barely remember the episode. Despite the absence of obvious heroes, solving SARS was truly a heroic effort—only this time the hero was a global team. Every one of the scientists in the collaboration is responsible for finding the cause of SARS. And the scientists are perfectly fine with that because they fully appreciate what most businesses will soon learn if they hope to succeed in the wiki world: A self-organizing team of collegial peers collaborating in a horizontal network usually works smarter and faster than traditional hierarchies and individual heroes.

OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITIES

The Digital Revolution and its technological innovations are creating entirely new ways of working together that only twenty years ago would have stretched the limits of believability. Who would have imagined that you could build a successful computer operating system by assembling a community of unsupervised volunteers, and that the product these freelancers put together would be so good that the historical leader of the information technology industry would abandon its own proprietary offerings to become part of the online community? Yet that is the incredible story of Linux and the emerging power of peer-based open source technology.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a graduate student at the University of Helsinki, came up with an innovative idea for creating a new computer operating system. Relying on the efforts of volunteer programmers around the world, Torvalds used the long established Unix language as a model for a state-of-the-art system that he dubbed Linux. Because Torvalds knew that computer programmers are a unique breed of people who love to interact and impress each other with their knowledge, he posted his initial source code for Linux on an online bulletin board and invited other programmers to build upon his work. A handful of programmers responded almost immediately with substantial changes, and it wasn't long before others joined the effort, spawning over time a virtual collaborative community of software engineers bonded by their pride as innovators in the creation of a truly first-class product. As interest in the software continued to grow, Torvalds decided to make the operating system commercially available under a general public license so that anyone could use it for free as long as each user agreed that any changes made to the program remain in the public domain and available to everyone.⁷

The growing popularity of this innovative approach to software development caught the attention of one traditional computer corporation, which recognized that it might be time to make a radical change from its old ways of thinking. IBM had been playing catch-up in the PC market by attempting, with much cost and little success, to build its own proprietary operating system to compete with Microsoft's dominant Windows application. However, despite IBM's best efforts, the brutal market reality was becoming quite clear to the company's executives: Big Blue was too late to the market to expect success in building its own commercial product, and sinking more money into this initiative was a guaranteed loser. Nevertheless, it was also clear that IBM's competitiveness in the computer services and solutions market was dependent upon its ability to provide affordable operating systems for those customers seeking alternatives. To solve its dilemma, IBM recognized that it would need to abandon its longstanding notions of proprietary ownership, take an unorthodox leap into the public domain of open source technology, and completely transform the way its programmers worked. IBM made a bold strategic move and joined the Linux community of volunteer programmers.

IBM's alliance with Linux is a win-win for both organizations. With the addition of a multitude of IBM software experts, Linux's programming efforts receive a boost valued at $100 million per year.⁸ For its part, at only 20 percent of the cost of a proprietary offering, Big Blue is able to develop and distribute an operating system that is compatible with its other product lines at no additional charge to its customers.⁹ But perhaps the greatest value for IBM from its venture into the world of open source technology is its discovery of the power of peer-to-peer collaborations. Because of its Linux experience, IBM has firsthand knowledge of how today's challenge of organizing the work of large numbers of people is less about bosses and work assignments and more about leveraging the self-organized efforts of an effective community of peers.

PEERS OVER SUPERVISORS

The SARS experience and the emergence of open source communities are two examples of the innovative architecture of a radically different organizational structure that is dramatically redefining the practice of management. In a post-digital world, the power that comes from being connected trumps the power of being in charge. The vanguard companies that fully appreciate this principle include many of the companies whose practices are highlighted in this book: Google, W.L. Gore & Associates, Morning Star, Valve, Whole Foods, Wikipedia, and Zappos. Each of these organizations has been consciously designed to maximize human interaction, encourage employee engagement, enable the dynamics of serendipity and emergence, and foster a culture of innovation. At the heart of this conscious design is a deliberate effort to eliminate the traditional sovereignty of the supervisor, and, in some instances, to do away with supervisors altogether. Every one of these companies understands that in fast-changing times, managing innovation works best when people are accountable to peers rather than supervisors.

The single greatest obstacle to innovation is the chain of command that defines the hierarchical organization. That's because, in traditional companies, too many people have the authority to kill good ideas or keep bad ideas alive. This was the primary insight and the fundamental organizing principle for Bill Gore, as we learned in Chapter 2, when he eschewed the traditional supervisor–subordinate relationship and built his lattice organization. Organizations that are built for innovation cannot afford the hindrances of the egos of a cadre of supervisors. If they are to keep pace with the speed of change, they cannot allow a good idea to be stopped by a single boss, or the value of a suggestion to be weighted by the position of the speaker, nor can they tolerate a glacial bureaucracy that fails to meet evolving customer expectations or is too slow to recognize that customer values have shifted. That's why it is so important to eliminate the sovereignty of the supervisors.

The basis for managerial power no longer comes from dominating the thinking or directing the work of others; rather, it now comes from integrating the best of everyone's ideas and building highly effective collaborative networks. In contrast to traditional hierarchies, which limit the interpersonal influence of the many through the ascription of authority, the power structures of wiki-world companies amplify the opportunities for the development of relationships across all the people within an organizational network. The more connections there are, the greater the opportunities for collaboration and innovation, which are the prime drivers for sustained success in fast-changing markets.

Each of the vanguard companies is designed to enable collaboration and innovation. Accordingly, each has embraced an organizational architecture where the workers are responsible for results, where colleagues are expected to collaborate with each other, and where everyone is clear that he works for the customer. In these leading-edge businesses, people are accountable to many colleagues rather than to a single supervisor.

When workers are accountable for results and to each other and are able to act on their own shared understanding, there's no finger-pointing or playing the blame game that's so typical in hierarchical bureaucracies. If people are accountable only for their individual tasks and to single supervisors, they can sit back and watch processes fall apart as long as their tasks are complete. However, when people are accountable for results and to each other, they all fail when a business process breaks down, and after-the-fact finger-pointing becomes meaningless. In the wiki world, self-organized work is more effective than assignments by supervisors because knowledge workers are far more motivated by their standing with their professional peers than they are by pleasing the bosses. As a result, they are more willing to assume responsibility to make sure everything works.

The most difficult adjustment for managers as they embrace the five disciplines of Wiki Management is coming to terms with their new role as the facilitators and catalysts of effective peer-to-peer collaboration. However, the vanguard companies are compelling examples of how organizations can become incredibly effective when the sovereignty of the supervisor is diminished.

TRANSPARENCY OVER CONTROL

A concern that many managers may have as they consider transitioning worker accountability from supervisors to peers is how they will be able to maintain the control they feel is necessary for the business to succeed. If people are primarily accountable to peers, are they not setting themselves up for complete chaos?

While it may appear counterintuitive, an important lesson we learn from the complexity sciences is that giving up control and embracing a little chaos at the beginning of projects often leads to a more effective state of control in the end. By building a shared understanding and then delegating the exercise of control to the workers who actually do the work, companies are not only more responsive to changing circumstances, but are actually more controlled at the same time. The degree of transparency needed to build an effective shared understanding provides collaborative organizations with a higher-order control system than is ever possible in bureaucratic hierarchies.

Transparency is the most effective control system because when everyone knows everything, there are no secrets. Companies with high levels of freedom of information and freedom of action have more resources available to them to ensure that the business remains under control. As a result, problems don't fester, innovation is not muted, and quality is continually improved. This explains why W.L. Gore & Associates, which has never had supervisors in its fifty-plus years, is so much better controlled than many of its command-and-control counterparts. The level of transparency needed to make Gore's consensus management work eliminates the hidden agendas and the institutional ignorance that plague organizations when secrets prevail. While Gore's processes are more chaotic at the start of projects, the thorough understanding needed to move a team of peers forward leads to greater employee engagement and more reliable results at the end of the work.

Traditional organizations have lots of secrets. With work subdivided among departments and directed by managers who are often engaged in some form of “turf battle,” it's not surprising that information does not flow freely and that many workers are unaware of what people do outside their own departments. Sometimes the secrets are intentional, such as when information is shared on a “need-to-know” basis or even deliberately withheld. More often than not, most corporate secrets are the unintentional consequences of the functional fragmentation of work. Whatever the reason, hierarchical organizations breed secrets. And that explains why they need elaborate control systems.

When secrets prevail, there is little or no shared understanding among either the managers or the workers to guide consistent delivery of customer value. Worse yet, without the transparency that naturally accompanies shared understanding, there could be plenty of opportunities for greedy or malicious employees to defraud the company. To protect themselves from the potential adverse consequences of bureaucratic secrets, hierarchical organizations promulgate a constant stream of rules and regulations and establish complex control structures based on checks and balances. These structures rely upon armies of supervisors and auditors to ensure that everyone is following the rules and that people are not using their secrets to inappropriately enrich themselves. The theory is that if everyone has someone watching over him, the risks associated with the inevitable secrets in bureaucracies will be mitigated and the business will be under control. The unfortunate irony, however, is that often the application of complex rules and regulations only slows things down, creates confusion, and actually weakens control.

The only way that managers, coping with the challenges of accelerating changes, can remain consistently in control is by moving away from centralized authority to decentralized transparency. This means that pertinent business knowledge needs to be freely shared among all the workers and that all related data and metrics have to be continually available to everyone. It also means that the individual workers need to be available to each other. Transparency isn't just about everybody knowing everything. It also means that everybody is available to everyone. Without both of these dimensions, true transparency is not possible.

When companies have the benefit of high-order transparency, managers don't have to depend upon the representations of other managers or auditors to ensure that the business is running smoothly. They can take comfort in the fact that when all workers have access to everything, if there's something they need to know, they'll find out sooner rather than later because when everyone is available to everybody, there are no secrets.

PRACTICES

The following are actual practices used by companies to hold people accountable to their peers. Given your role within your organization and the current state of your corporate culture, some practices may work better than others. Focus on two or three practices that would best work in your particular business circumstances.

Resetting the Managers

PRACTICE #40: KILL THE KILLER. The single greatest threat to the survival of many companies could very well come from their own managers. That certainly was on Bill Gore's mind when he founded W.L. Gore & Associates in 1958. In Chapter 2, we learned how Gore created a radically different approach to organizing the work of large numbers of people. In designing what he called a lattice organization, his guiding principle was that no one, not even Gore himself, should have the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive. Gore understood that innovative ideas usually challenge the status quo and often require organizations to venture into unfamiliar territory. Despite all the rhetoric about embracing change and venturing into new horizons, Gore knew that the vast majority of managers prefer the status quo and are very hesitant to disrupt the positional authority they hold in their existing operational models. That's why traditional managers much prefer incremental to disruptive change.

However, Gore was not a traditional manager, and he wanted to create a company that was designed to promote and enable disruptive innovation. To do that, he needed to kill the role that allows people to kill good ideas. He needed to kill the killer, and the only way that he could do that was to make sure that there were no bosses. Whether ideas lived or died would not be subject to the whims of a single supervisor; instead, the collective wisdom of accountable peers would ultimately decide what work the company did or didn't do.

W.L. Gore & Associates is not alone in embracing the practice of Kill the Killer. Morning Star, the Northern California tomato processor, and Valve, the Bellevue, Washington, video gaming company—we met both in Chapter 6—also have no supervisors and have successfully mastered the practice of bosslessness. While it may be difficult, even inconceivable, for traditional managers to comprehend, the sustained market success of Gore, Morning Star, and Valve are compelling evidence that it is possible to manage highly effective organizations without bosses.

However, managers who might contemplate emulating Gore's lattice organization need to follow two critical prerequisites to realize the full power of self-organization. The first is that all the different contributors on a project need to be together in the same place (see Practice #24). This means that product design, sales, marketing, and production staffs work together in cross-functional teams so that everyone continually understands how their contributions shape and reshape the underlying business processes of the company's value proposition. Bill Gore recognized the value of having everyone in the same room at the same time and the importance of having workers focused on collective processes rather than individual tasks.

Second, Gore noticed that things got awkward when the number of workers reached about 150 to 200 people. There seems to be a tipping point in the human scale where the effectiveness of peer pressure and the physical ability to self-organize begins to break down.¹⁰ When there are more than 200 people in the same location, the individuals don't feel as personally connected to each other and it becomes difficult even to know everyone's name. We can understand why, in the early factories of the Industrial Age, the owners resorted to hierarchical management to organize the work of large numbers of people. When the efforts of a sizable group of workers have to be brought together and there are so many people that they can't possibly all know each other, the corporate pioneers of mass production felt that authoritative bosses were necessary to get the job done. Bill Gore, however, did not want to resort to the employment of bosses when he noticed the tipping point. Instead, he put in place a simple practice to preserve his self-organizing management innovation that continues to this day. When a plant approaches 200 people, the group divides, and Gore opens another plant. The new plant may be a stone's throw from the original location, but each plant is completely autonomous to ensure the human scale necessary for self-organization to work.

When employing the practice of Kill the Killer, it's very important to make sure that you don't inadvertently kill the work. These two important prerequisites should not be overlooked because they can mean the difference between aimless chaos or extraordinary performance when companies decide to go bossless.

PRACTICE #41: THE 60:1 RULE. Designing a company without supervisors is not an option for most existing companies and usually works best when the lattice structure is built into the original design of the organization. Nevertheless, the problem of too many people having the authority to kill good ideas needs to be effectively handled if existing organizations want to sustain themselves in an increasingly innovative world. While business leaders may not be able to eliminate the supervisors, a commitment to innovation means they at least need to eliminate the sovereignty of their supervisors.

One of the most effective ways to eliminate supervisory sovereignty is to adopt a practice developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google when it grew to a point where it was no longer an intimate company where everyone knew each other.

When Google passed the tipping point of 150 people around the start of the new millennium, a layer of middle management began emerging in the growing organization as many of the new hires came from more traditionally structured companies.¹¹ When the company reached 400 people in 2001, Brin and Page became concerned that a steadily creeping bureaucracy would inevitably destroy the bottom-up style of management they cherished. Their response was to eliminate all the managers. However, somewhat to the founders' surprise, bosslessness wasn't well received by the Google staffers. When Page asked why, the staff members replied that they wanted someone they could learn from and who could referee disagreements when colleagues had reached an impasse.¹²

Realizing that they had to accommodate the needs of the staffers, Brin and Page devised an innovative win-win solution. If they couldn't eliminate the supervisors, they could at least diminish the influence of the supervisors. Their solution was to install the 60:1 Rule, which still works today. The typical supervisor at Google has approximately sixty direct reports. This ratio ensures that staffers have managers who can serve as both mentors and referees, while making it virtually impossible for those supervisors to micromanage their staffs because it's humanly impossible to closely monitor sixty people.

PRACTICE #42: THE 20% RULE. This is another practice that Google uses to eliminate the sovereignty of the supervisor. While most companies proclaim a commitment to innovation, few managers actually devote meaningful resources to weave innovation into the fabric of their management system. Innovation isn't a functional task that can be delegated to a department or a special assignment team; it's a different way of working that involves everyone in an organization. The leaders at Google understand what a commitment to innovation means, which is why they are ardent practitioners of the 20% Rule.

Most of the employees at Google are allowed to devote 20 percent of their time to work on projects of their choosing. The workers are free to follow their passions without regard for their managers' opinions of the worthiness of their pet projects. Sergey Brin and Larry Page borrowed the practice from 3M, whose highly profitable innovation, Post-it Notes, might never have happened without the 20% Rule. 3M's executives had initially dismissed the idea for Post-It Notes. However, two 3M scientists used their “20 percent” time to follow their intuitions and successfully demonstrate the market value for what would become one of the company's most lucrative product lines.

Brin and Page were drawn to the practice because it wove an important dynamic from their graduate school days into Google's management system.¹³ Graduate students at Standford, in addition to their regular studies, are encouraged by their professors to pursue self-selected projects. This pursuit of their own passions is what led Brin and Page to create their innovative search engine. They wanted this same dynamic to be the lifeblood of their management model. In designing their organization, Brin and Page understood a powerful management lesson that eludes most traditional managers: Innovation happens in the intersection of time and passion. Unfortunately, most employees in traditionally managed companies suffer from severe shortages in both of these key ingredients.

Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who is now the CEO of Yahoo, credits the 20% Rule for delivering half of Google's new products.¹⁴ The practice encourages employees to push the envelope and to disrupt the traditional ways of doing things. Allowing workers to self-direct a significant chunk of their time to follow their passions is one of the ways Google sustains its innovative edge.

PRACTICE #43: ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNERS. This is a simple and powerful practice that can be used, either formally or informally, in any organization. All it requires is two people who are willing to support each other in achieving results. The practice of Accountability Partners is a co-mentoring process in which two people meet periodically, usually every four to six weeks, for a two-hour, one-on-one session. In these sessions, they take turns reviewing each other's progress on achieving key business and professional goals. For the first hour, one person reports on progress made since the previous session while the other serves as a coach, providing encouragement and assistance to his partner. During the second hour, they reverse roles and discuss the progress of the second person.

These sessions are powerful because they provide the opportunity for a cadence of candid accountability that drives both business results and professional growth. This opportunity works best when there is a high level of trust between the two partners, which is why individuals should be free to choose their own partners. In a safe atmosphere of mutual trust, the partners have the space to engage in crucial conversations to discuss what's working and not working, and to provide mutual guidance to drive real and lasting positive change.

Candidates for accountability partnerships can come from almost anywhere in the organization. The only exception is that one's direct supervisor is usually not a good candidate for this role. Supervisors are generally required to make formal judgments about their subordinates' performance that could interfere with the candor that makes accountability partnerships work.

Typically, accountability partners are peers, although there are times when it may be valuable to select a partner from a different organizational level. For example, a senior leader might select a junior person as an accountability partner as a way to better understand the impact of new technologies on the business or the unintended consequences of the executive's decisions. The junior person, in turn, has the opportunity for a powerful mentoring relationship. This pairing of senior and junior partners can work only if the two individuals completely trust each other, which means the senior person must make it safe for the junior person to be completely candid.

Perhaps the most important dynamic of this accountability relationship is that the high level of trust makes it possible for the two people to discuss their blind spots. These blind spots are the things that everybody knows about you except for you. In my own personal experience with this practice, especially as a senior leader, learning about my blind spots and having a mentor who could guide me through the changes I needed to make greatly improved my effectiveness as a leader.

PRACTICE #44: TEMPORARY LEADERS. In the hierarchical organization, career growth is about moving up the ladder to higher and higher positions of permanent leadership. Once a person is designated as the head of the department, he is usually in that role until he either moves up to a more senior role or moves out and leaves the organization.

At W.L. Gore & Associates, however, there is no hierarchy and no ladder, and leadership is generally a temporary role. Career growth is a function of one's continuing skills and experience rather than one's title.

At Gore, no leader ever appoints another leader. Instead, leaders are chosen by the members of self-organized work teams based on the needs of the project at the time. As a consequence, leadership is temporary and situational. In the early phases of a project, someone who is skilled in brainstorming and building consensus might emerge as the initial leader to guide the group in formulating its vision and strategy. Once the mission of the project is clear, a member who is an effective project manager might take the lead in constructing and monitoring the building of the group's deliverable. Still another member of the group who has excellent client relationships might be asked by the team to lead the marketing efforts of the new product. And, finally, when the new product is fully operational, the team that built it may disband and another team might assimilate the developed product into its mature-product mix.

As organizational structures shift from hierarchies to networks and transform themselves into highly effective self-organized arrangements, the notion of career ladders and the permanent leadership positions they spawn will become obsolete. In a fast-changing world, business and operating models are continually changing, and very little remains permanent. The self-organized dynamics of networked organizations such as Gore are a window into the future of leadership.

Resetting the Meetings

PRACTICE #45: MILESTONE TIMELINES. This practice is very useful at the start of complex projects when large groups of people who are normally physically or geographically dispersed are brought together to coordinate their efforts. Milestone Timelines are usually the final activity in these collaboration sessions.

The leader prepares the meeting room by taping a row of blank flip chart pages across a large wall space. Each flip chart page represents a month, and the leader writes the name of the month at the top of each page in chronological order (i.e., March, April, May, etc.). The leader then asks the participants to identify key dates for the important milestones that need to be met to successfully deliver the project. The leader instructs the group that the milestones do not have to be identified in chronological order; rather, as individuals think of key tasks, they can record them on the calendar pages.

For example, if the group is working on a nine-month project to install a new customer service center that needs to be operational by the end of October, the first participant might identify the obvious activity of having the customer service center operational on October 31. The leader would then record at the bottom of the October page, “31—Customer Service Center Operational.” The next participant might identify the necessary recruitment activities for customer service representatives (CSRs), with job postings starting on June 1 and all staff hired and reporting for work on September 30. The facilitator would record at the top of the June page, “1—Job Postings for CSR Staff,” and at the bottom of the September page, “30—All CSRs Hired/Start Work.”

As the participants continue to identify activities, misalignments may begin to surface. For example, participants from the business area may be focused on a completion date of September 30 for the CSR manual so that it's ready for the CSR training scheduled for the month of October. The participants responsible for training might point out that a September 30 completion date for the training manual will not work because time will be needed to train the trainers if the October CSR training is to be effective. As a result, the completion date for the training manual might be modified to August 31 to provide sufficient time for training the trainers. The identification and recording of activities and the appropriate adjustments to the original dates of activities continue until all key activities are captured on the flip chart pages and everyone in the room is comfortable with the timeline.

The practice of Milestone Timelines is powerful because the timelines accomplish three things. First, the complete end-to-end process of activities that are critical to success are properly sequenced in time, thus facilitating the effective execution of on-time quality deliverables. Second, by focusing on the project as an integrated process rather than as a distribution of specific tasks, misalignments of tasks are identified before the work begins. How many times in command-and-control organizations do we see tasks for key initiatives distributed among functional departments without people understanding how their jobs interrelate with those of their colleagues in other departments? When this happens, the project is likely to run into difficulties in the later phases as different departments have differing understandings of the timing of activities in the project. Milestone Timelines eliminate eleventh-hour crises by front-ending the misalignments and fully resolving them at the start of the project. This saves companies both time and money.

The third and most powerful contribution of Milestone Timelines is the creation of a shared understanding among all the project participants. Each person has a clear picture of the whole process and fully understands the interrelationships among the activities and how his tasks fit into the overall project. By participating in the construction of the holistic timeline, witnessing the conversations as critical potential misalignments are identified and resolved, and visually seeing the entire project mapped on the calendar flip chart pages, all participants go back to their departments or locations working toward the same timeline. It is far more powerful for people in organizations to be working to timelines where they truly understand how their part fits into the whole project than to be working to due dates assigned by a boss.

When individuals work to shared timelines that they have helped create, they understand why they cannot be late with their tasks and the full ramifications that missed deadlines have on the project. On the other hand, if individuals are working merely to due dates, it's very easy to think that missing a deadline by a few days won't matter much. Yet those few days could mean the difference between the ultimate success and failure of the project.

PRACTICE #46: ON-THE-SPOT AGENDA. On-the-Spot Agenda meetings are especially useful for improving the working relationships between two departments that have a history of hostile turf battles. This meeting format was one we used at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program with remarkable success, often transforming functional feuds into collaborative partnerships. What's most interesting about this practice is that it breaks the most fundamental rule about how to run an effective meeting.

Conventional wisdom dictates that the best meetings are those where there is a clearly established agenda that is distributed in advance of the meeting. This way, the participants can review pertinent materials beforehand and come to the meetings fully prepared. When the participants are highly effective collaborators, this rule works very well.

But what happens when the participants are caught up in intense turf battles? Quite often, the early distribution of the agenda puts in play a set of dysfunctional dynamics that renders the scheduled meeting useless. First, there are the unofficial “meetings” before the meeting, where differing groups caucus among themselves so they can appear cooperative while guarding their turf, decide what information they will share and withhold, and figure out how to dominate their perceived opponent. While the feuding departments are fully prepared when the actual meeting occurs, little actually gets done because the most important issues are often avoided to limit internal political vulnerability.

The innovative dynamic that makes on-the-spot meetings work is the elimination of the early distribution of the agenda. This, in turn, eliminates the meetings before the meeting and defuses the internal politicking. Instead, the participants of the two departments schedule a meeting for a specific time frame (e.g., two hours) and agree that defining the agenda will be the first order of business when the session begins. The rules for setting the agenda are similar to those used in Deep Dives (Practice #37) and are as follows:

• The leaders of the two departments serve as the meeting facilitators and do not propose agenda items.
• Agenda topics and the expected amount of time needed to handle each topic are proposed by the staff members and are recorded on a flip chart by one of the meeting facilitators.
• After all topics are proposed, the participants collectively designate each of the topics as either “A” or “B” items. A items are those that need to be discussed that day; B items can wait for the next time the group gets together, if necessary. Each of the A items is assigned a specific time slot, and any remaining time is assigned to selected items from the B list.
• The discussion of the content of each topic is led by the staff member who proposed the topic. The two department leaders manage the timing of the meeting to make sure that the group adheres to its schedule. While the department managers may participate in the discussions, neither serves as the leader of any of the topical discussions.

By following these simple rules, two groups that have not worked well together begin discussing their most important issues. As they move to effective solutions, hardened barriers often start to break down, and a workable level of cooperation takes hold. When this practice is highly successful, departmental wars are supplanted by genuine collaboration.

Resetting the Measures

PRACTICE #47: TRUE COLORS. Sometimes the most effective measures aren't numbers. There are times when colors are better conveyers of the most important information. When Alan Mulally became the CEO of Ford, one of his first actions was to install the weekly Business Plan Review (BPR) discipline that had worked so well during his time at Boeing. In these sessions, each member of the leadership team presents a concise color-coded update of his progress toward meeting key company goals. Projects that are on track or ahead of schedule are colored green, yellow indicates the initiative has potential issues or concerns, and red denotes those programs that are behind schedule or off plan.¹⁵

Color-coded status reports provide a level of transparency that is sometimes absent from the usual numerical reports, and processing these visual updates as a team instills a discipline of peer accountability that is often lacking in leadership teams. The cadence of frequently gathering the whole team in one place to review all key initiatives helps to create a shared understanding about the most important issues of the business. But more important, as happened in the case of Ford, it provides critical opportunities for the team members to synchronize their activities to help create extraordinary performance.

When implementing the practice of True Colors, the leader needs to maintain an environment where it is safe to candidly report the actual status of key activities. There's no value in status meetings where everyone reports that all is well—even when things are not—because people are more concerned with maintaining an image than dealing with reality. When members of a team have a process where it is safe to tell the truth about the actual state of their projects, they provide themselves with the opportunities to assist each other to more quickly resolve critical issues when they occur. The primary purpose of peer accountability is not to create more pressure for individual performance but rather to identify opportunities for the team to leverage its collective strength. The practice of True Colors is a very effective way to provide those opportunities.

PRACTICE #48: AUTONOMOUS PEER INPUT. As a way to promote teamwork, many companies encourage supervisors to canvass people within and outside their departments as they prepare performance reviews for their subordinates. However, this input is usually filtered by supervisors who ultimately decide whether or not to include the observations in the written performance reviews. Thus, if two departments don't get along, a supervisor might easily dismiss the negative observations of peers in the other department, even though customers would be better served if the staff in the two departments found better ways to work together.

A key dimension of holding people accountable to their peers is allowing for direct and unfiltered peer input. The practice of Autonomous Peer Input helps diminish the sovereignty of the supervisor by eliminating the boss's ability to filter or censor the input of key internal partners. As part of the annual review process, the performance evaluation tool is modified to include a section where key peers rate the performance and provide feedback for the employee review. This input cannot be filtered or edited by the employee's supervisor.

The practice of Autonomous Peer Input sends a clear signal across the organization that pleasing the boss is not the only pathway to success in the company. In collaborative networks, people have to build relationships and coordinate effectively with others to meet their common goals. The relationship with a worker's supervisor is just one—and not necessarily the most important—of those relationships. While this practice may appear to place an additional burden on employees who have to learn how to balance the needs of both their supervisors and peers, promoting a culture of peer accountability provides a better foundation for building the level of collaboration companies need to effectively manage in today's hyper-connected wiki world.

PRACTICE #49: upward evaluations. In organizations that have supervisors, an important aspect of the discipline of peer accountability is the adoption of processes to hold supervisors and subordinates mutually accountable to each other. While almost all traditional companies have formal performance evaluation systems in which compensation adjustments for subordinates are based on supervisor ratings, few businesses have formal processes where the subordinates rate the supervisors. And for those who do gather subordinate feedback, the ratings are usually part of a 360-degree process that is treated as confidential personal development input and is not factored into the supervisors' compensation adjustments. This sends a clear signal that, while 360-degree evaluations are nice things for organizations to do, they really don't count. The practice of Upward Evaluations radically departs from these established norms by explicitly holding supervisors accountable to their subordinates in a way that influences what bosses are paid.

Upward Evaluations is a practice we created when I became the chief executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield FEP in early 2002. Believing strongly in the five disciplines of Wiki Management, I wanted to install a process where I would be transparently accountable to all 150 people in the FEP director's office who directly or indirectly reported to me. Because FEP was part of a larger organization that remained very traditional in its management processes, I did not have the liberty to modify or replace the corporate performance evaluation tool. However, because part of the tool provided for the measurement of individual goals, I could propose as one of my performance metrics an evaluation of my effectiveness by the 150 people in the FEP director's office.

To implement this practice, I gathered a diverse committee of about a dozen managers and staff, requesting that they design a tool to measure my effectiveness as a leader. Rather than suggesting the attributes that should be rated, I asked the committee to select the dimensions of my performance that were most important to them. In designing the tool, I specified only two requirements. The first was that no one completing the tool should have to write even one letter on the form—all they would need to do was to circle numbers on a five-point scale. This step protected the anonymity of those completing the forms. The second requirement was that the average rating for each attribute would be calculated using median rather than mean scores. This method was important because, as we extended this practice to other managers, we protected supervisors from retaliation by poor performers who might be on probation. Thus, theoretically in my case, if ten poor performers rated an attribute “1” and the remaining 140 provided a rating of “4,” the official score based on the median would be 4.0 as compared to the mean average of 3.8.

The committee was very receptive to the request and designed a survey instrument with forty attributes. We agreed that the committee would be responsible for the distribution, collection, and collation of the evaluations. We also agreed that at no time would I ever see the individual completed forms. I would see only the aggregate median scores for each of the attributes, which I would receive in an e-mail that would be sent to all 150 staff members in the FEP director's office, as well as to my supervisor. According to an agreement I had reached with my supervisor, the results on the evaluation would account for 10 percent of my overall performance evaluation.

The Upward Evaluation is a transparent process that counts. While some managers may be skeptical of a practice that broadly communicates their strengths and weaknesses, my own experience in using this practice is that the results didn't broadcast anything that the staff didn't already know. In fact, I came to see that one of the great benefits of this practice was that it let me know what everyone knew about me but me. Becoming aware of my blind spots provided the opportunity to make important changes, but perhaps the greatest benefit of this practice was that I never lost sight of the fact that the people who reported either directly or indirectly to me were not my employees. They were some of my most important customers.

PRACTICE #50: 20 KEY PEOPLE. Of the many different practitioners of Wiki Management we have met in this book, perhaps none is more impressive than W.L. Gore & Associates. The lattice organization that Bill Gore installed when he founded the company—to make sure no one would ever have the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive—continues to this day. You may wonder how a company with 9,500 employees and no bosses can achieve the enviable accomplishment of delivering more than fifty years of innovative growth without a single annual loss. The answer is a very simple and powerful practice: 20 Key People.

When Bill Gore decided that he would radically depart from common management practice and build a business without bosses, his biggest practical challenge was coming up with a way to ensure that the workers in his new company would devote their time to projects that made a difference and that they would be incentivized to do more rather than less work. His solution was a very simple and elegant performance evaluation approach that continues to this day. Everyone at Gore is evaluated by at least twenty people and everyone evaluates at least twenty people.¹⁶

Once a year, every associate is asked to rate his list of peers in a forced ranking from highest to lowest based on the evaluator's overall judgment of each worker's contribution to the company.¹⁷ Gore doesn't tell the associates what criteria to use or prescribe a corporate-wide evaluation tool. According to Terri Kelly, Gore's CEO, “You get a lot of negative behavior when you have narrow metrics that really don't represent the complexities of the business. Instead, we ask our associates to view performance holistically, versus focusing on specific variables.”¹⁸

When the rankings are completed, a cross-functional committee collates the input and compiles the overall rankings, which are then used to set compensation for the next year. At Gore, peer accountability isn't a slogan or a good intention. It's the most important factor in determining what people are paid.

CHAPTER SUMMARY: KEY POINTS

• Today's challenge of organizing the work of large numbers of people is less about bosses and work assignments and more about leveraging the self-organized efforts of an effective community of peers.
• In contrast to traditional hierarchies, which limit the interpersonal influence of the many through the ascription of authority, the power structures of wiki-world companies amplify the opportunities for the development of relationships across all the people within an organizational network. The more connections there are, the greater the opportunities for collaboration and innovation, which are the prime drivers for sustained success in fast-changing markets.
• Self-organized work is more effective than assignments by supervisors because knowledge workers are far more motivated by their standing with their professional peers than they are by pleasing the bosses.
• Transparency isn't just about everybody knowing everything. It also means that everybody is available to everyone. Without both of these dimensions, true transparency is not possible.
• The problem of too many people having the authority to kill good ideas needs to be effectively handled if existing organizations want to sustain themselves in an increasingly innovative world. While business leaders may not be able to eliminate the supervisors, a commitment to innovation means they will at least need to eliminate the sovereignty of their supervisors.