Everybody Is Somewhere

Everybody Is Somewhere

By Cindy Dove

Put a five-stage ladder in front of most leaders and the first thing they look for is the bottom rung, to see whether they’re standing on it.

Nobody is at zero. Even in an organization where nothing has ever been written down, people have figured out how things really work there. They know who gets listened to, what gets let slide and what happens to the person who speaks up. All of it was learned, and none of it was designed. That’s where every organization starts, and it’s why there is no failing grade on this ladder. There is only where you are and the next rung.

Here is the ladder, using something nearly every organization says it cares about: how a new person is brought on board and set up to succeed.

Nothing exists. There’s no plan. A new hire is handed to whoever has time that day, and what they learn depends on who that turns out to be.

It exists in writing. Someone built a checklist, an orientation agenda, maybe a welcome packet. It lives in a binder or on a shared drive, and it’s a real step forward, even if most new hires never see it.

It’s said but not enforced. Leaders talk about it. It comes up in meetings and on the website. But when a department is short-staffed, the new hire is working on their own by day two, and nobody asks what happened to the plan.

It’s enforced but not lived where it counts. Now there’s accountability. The forms get signed and the training hours get logged, and HR can prove every new hire went through it. Yet ask the new person in their third week who they go to with a question, and they hesitate, because the people they work beside every day never bought in.

It runs without you in the room. A new hire gets the same experience on second shift as on day shift, and the same experience with their leader on vacation as with their leader standing there. Nobody has to check, because it’s simply how things are done.

In our coaching and development work, most of the organizations we see aren’t at the bottom of that ladder or the top. They’re in the middle, somewhere between written and enforced, and the middle is the most expensive place to stay.

At the bottom, at least you aren’t spending money on something that doesn’t work. In the middle, you are. Someone wrote the program, someone presents it, someone tracks it and someone follows up when it slips. That’s real time from real people, and it returns very little, because people learn what matters from what actually happens, not from what was written or said. An organization on the middle rungs is paying for a system and getting the results of not having one.

That’s why knowing where you stand matters so much. Leaders who believe they’re further up the ladder than they are keep pouring effort into the rung they’ve already reached with another policy, another reminder or another training. Leaders who see their real rung can put their effort where it will move them.

And most leaders know their rung faster than they expect. Read the five rungs again and you’ll probably notice you placed yourself before you reached the end of the list. You may not like the answer, but it rarely takes you long to find it.

* * *

A stage is not a judgment. It’s a starting line, and knowing where yours is turns out to be most of the work.

So here is my question for you. Think of one thing your organization says matters, whether it’s a value, a standard or the way new people are brought on board. Read the five rungs once more and put it on one. Go with your first instinct, because it’s usually right.

Try it with a second thing and a third, and you’ll probably land on different rungs. That’s normal, because most organizations are further along in some areas than in others. The harder question is which of those rungs tells you where your organization really stands.

Why Averaging Hides the Bill

By Wes Dove

Cindy asked which rung tells you where you really stand. It’s your lowest one. When we built out each of the five pillars, we gave every one of them the same ladder she just walked you through, and we gave each rung a name: Void, when nothing exists; Stated, when it exists in writing; Avoidance, when it’s said but not enforced; Disconnect, when it’s enforced but not lived where it counts; and In Motion, when it runs without you in the room. Inside each pillar, we look through four lenses, four separate things that can each sit on a different rung. With Values, those are Team, Culture, Leadership and Performance. Your stage isn’t the average of those four. It’s the lowest one.

I spent close to two decades with safety responsibility, and most organizations I worked with judged themselves by their lost-time case rate, total incident rate or OSHA recordable rate. Across a whole facility, those numbers often looked good. A few areas went years without an incident. But one area would have them every so often, and the facility-wide average smoothed it right over. On paper, we were safe. The people working in that one area would have told you otherwise. Smaller companies don’t get that luxury. When I worked with them, one recordable or one claim could push their incident rate or mod rate past what a general contractor or large industrial site would accept, and just like that, they couldn’t bid the work. In a large organization, that same injury might not even get noticed.

In the larger facilities, we pushed to track first aids and near misses, and in behavior-based safety, the behaviors themselves, which can happen thousands of times before anyone gets hurt. When we followed that data, the trend almost always showed up in one place well before it broke the average. By the time the average moved, someone had already paid for it.

In safety, this is exactly how averaging hides the bill, and people are the ones who pay it. The two most serious injuries of my career both came shortly after our proudest safety milestones: one after millions of hours without a lost-time incident, the other after our facility earned OSHA’s VPP Star recognition. One man never walked again. Another didn’t go home. Nothing in our headline numbers said either was coming.

The pillars work the same way. Each of the four lenses is like one of those areas, and the one sitting lowest is where your next bill is coming from, no matter how good the average looks.

Here’s what that looks like with Values. Picture an organization where people treat each other the way the values say they should, the culture holds up under pressure, and the leaders at the top live them too. Team, Culture and Leadership all sit high on the ladder. But when review time comes, nobody is evaluated or rewarded on those values. The person who cut corners to hit the number gets the raise, and the person who did it the right way watches. Average those four lenses together, and it looks like a strong Values score. It isn’t. The people who live the values best are learning that the values don’t count, and they’re the ones who’ll quietly leave first. That turnover will get blamed on pay or the market, not on a Performance lens nobody ever looked at on its own.

Your organization isn’t as strong as its average. It’s exactly as strong as its weakest measure. I know that’s uncomfortable to hear, and the discomfort is the point. Averaging is how a real problem becomes invisible on a good-looking report. Nobody works on a weakness that a strong average has covered up, and the people living inside that weakness pay for it every day.

So here’s my challenge for you. Take any scorecard you already run, whether it’s safety, quality, customer satisfaction or engagement. Instead of looking at the average, find the lowest number on it. Then ask what you’d do differently if that number were the only one anyone reported.

Whether We’re With You or Not

By Cindy Dove

When someone hands you something for free, it’s natural to look for the catch. Most of us have downloaded a free guide and then spent months unsubscribing from the emails that followed it. So before we go any further, I want to tell you what you’re getting, what it costs and what it doesn’t.

Everything from here forward gives you something to measure in your own organization with what you already have. You won’t need new software or a new line in the budget to get started, just an honest look at how things really work and the people who already work with you. Many leaders choose to have us come in and walk through it with their teams, and we’re glad to do that, but you can start on your own today.

The tools that go with it are free. There’s a printable for each of the five pillars, built to be used in a team meeting, on a clipboard or at a kitchen table. There’s also the POS Assessment, twenty-five questions that take about four minutes and show you which pillar to work on first. Because communication isn’t a sixth pillar but the mechanism every pillar runs through, five of those questions read how far what you set actually travels, whether it’s reaching your people or stopping before it gets to them. Each pillar also has its own assessment that shows you where you stand on the five stages. Everybody is somewhere on that ladder, and your stage is set by your lowest lens, not your average. You’ll find all of it at posframework.com.

If you want your results emailed to you, that’s the only reason we’ll ask for your email address. You won’t be added to a mailing list or signed up for a newsletter, and nobody from our office will call to follow up. What you find is yours to use however you choose.

You may wonder why we’d give it away. The answer is in where it came from. It was built from what Wes and I have helped other organizations accomplish through our training. Their leaders did the hard work and their people made it stick, and the results stayed with them long after we were gone.

That last part matters more than anything else we’ll share with you. The best thing we can ever see in a client is a standard that holds the same way whether their leader is in the room or not. That’s what In Motion looks like. If that’s the test for an organization, it should be our test too.

So here is what we want you to know. If you use every tool and never speak to us once, you’ll still have everything you need to do the work. It was built to be modeled by any organization, whether we are with them or not. And if you do reach out to us someday, I want it to be because you wanted to, not because we left you with half of what you needed.

* * *

A system that only works with its authors in the room is not a system. It is a service, and we built this to be the other thing.

So here is my question for you. If you had to guess which of the five pillars your organization is weakest in, which one would it be? Before you go further, download the printable for that one pillar. Use it or don’t. It’s yours either way.

Of course, a printable sitting in your downloads folder doesn’t change anything on its own. What turns something you’ve learned into something you do is a different question, and it’s the one that comes next.

Find Your Lowest Lens

By Wes Dove

We started this process with Cindy taking you onto a cabinet plant floor where they measured the air, and we learned that leadership was never intangible; it was a line item filed somewhere else. Then we watched good behavior hit the same wall every time, because it had no baseline, and we broke one unmeasurable word into five measurable pillars. Cindy showed you that everybody is somewhere on the ladder, and I showed you why the lowest lens, not the average, tells you where that is. And Cindy made sure you know that all of this was built for you to use, whether we’re with you or not.

Along the way, we asked you to do a few things. You guessed which pillar your organization is weakest in. You put something your organization says matters on a rung. You found the lowest number on a scorecard you already run. If you did those, you’re holding something most organizations never have: a starting point. That’s exactly what we said was missing when good behavior kept hitting the same wall.

I’ve mentioned the HR manager who never let me use the intangible excuse. There’s one more thing he required that stuck with me. Any time I went through training, he expected me to walk out with something I could put into action right away and to show him what it returned. That’s why every lesson Cindy and I build closes the same way, and this one is no different.

Alright, now what?

1. What immediate action step can you take right now?
2. What result are you hoping to achieve by taking it?
3. How will that action and that result yield a tangible return on investment in your current role?
4. How will it make a positive impact on the team you lead and your organization’s overall culture?
5. List three additional things you can work to implement moving forward.

Take-aways aren’t worth much if we never turn them into put-in-plays. Answer the first question by hand today, and send that answer to someone willing to hold you to it.

Next, we’ll start where every organization has to start: Direction. When nobody can say where this is going, it costs more than most leaders realize.