After the resignation of Durk Jager in 2000, A.G. Lafley took the helm of a struggling Procter & Gamble (P&G). Lafley’s long career in marketing had taught him how to glean insights by listening to P&G’s customers. Now he sought to do the same by listening to P&G’s employees.
Although senior managers were considering several new business initiatives at the time, P&G’s employees felt something different was needed. They wanted a renewed commitment to marketing, more time to listen to customers, the results of programs to determine rewards rather than the quantity of programs launched and more disciplined market planning. And in a little more than two years after taking over from Jager, Lafley restored P&G to profitability.
Lafley turned P&G around in part because he increased the cultural element I describe as voice. The expanded term for this element is knowledge flow. Since leaders who increase knowledge flow within their organizations benefit from it and those who don’t risk failure, you might ask what you can do to ensure that knowledge flow is maximized in your company. The following are several steps I recommend.
Hold ongoing knowledge-flow sessions. Leaders stimulate knowledge flow by regularly holding sessions with employees in which they share information about important issues facing the organization and near-term action plans they are considering. Key to its success is an environment in which participants feel safe to share their ideas and opinions.
Use your intranet to make information easily accessible. The benefit of making information widely available will far outweigh the risk of information leaking to external sources. Leaders will gain from having more knowledgeable employees who feel that leaders respect, value and trust them enough to make important information available to them.
Promote a culture of responsiveness. McKinsey Company has an informal rule that everyone should return telephone calls within twenty-four hours. It enables a person who needs knowledge to identify someone who might hold it, contact him and have a response within twenty-four hours.
Ask people to be inquisitive. Better-informed employees are more likely to identify critical pieces of information to solve business problems and spot opportunities. Leaders should ask employees to seek to understand their business, client attitudes and competitors’ actions so that they can bring informed dissent to the organization’s decision-making process.
Encourage external awareness. Leaders will benefit by encouraging employees to consider what external knowledge might be valuable and to seek it out. This practice will help protect the company from new offerings that change your industry’s paradigm..
Increase the diversity of participants. People with diverse knowledge, experiences, abilities, thinking styles and temperaments see things differently. Leaders can improve the creativity in a group’s problem identification and solution seeking by including people with diverse backgrounds.
Seek other views and reward those with the courage to speak up. Leaders must encourage employees to express their points of view, especially when they see things in a different light from leaders or the majority of their colleagues.
Promote a culture of experimentation. Great leaders have embraced experimentation as the way to find ideas that turn out to be the most effective in practice. By creating pilot projects to test new ideas, leaders benefit from the additional knowledge brought by experience.
Safeguard relational connections. It is important in all communications to be sensitive to the feelings of other people. Politely asking someone to do something is preferable to giving orders. Using a respectful tone is better than talking down to someone.