Telling versus Doing

I was thinking earlier this week about a time years ago when I had a manager significantly change my performance review after that first meeting, when the he gave me my review. I was working at General Electric and it was a crazy year. The business was exploding as radiology was making a technological transformation. Every imaging technology was going digital. And then there was the introduction of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). It was having a sensational impact on healthcare’s ability to image the body. Our sales guys had the easiest job on earth. Pick up the phone and take orders. The demand for digital imaging equipment was amazing. I worked in the service business and led a team of people who did everything after the order was filled. Among my goals for the year was a pretty unusual one: to get my overtime down to 100% or less. Yes, you read it right. Management was concerned. The previous year, I had averaged 97 hours per week including holidays and vacation weeks. If you do the math, I was working 14 hours a day, seven days a week. For a whole year. They were concerned that I would burn out. As we were doing my review, my boss was being pretty harsh (IMHO of course). My overtime was still over 100% and in his eyes, I had failed to do most of what he had expected of me. As we went through each goal, he gave me his perspective on what I had accomplished. I waited for him to finish and then I told him, with some small measure of passion, how, contrary to his opinion, I felt I had knocked each goal out of the park! Goal after goal, we went through the same routine. He finally said to me, "Either I am completely uninformed in what you have been doing this year or you are delusional." Now to be fair, this was before email was really a "thing," so it wasn’t like I could simply CC him on stuff and he would be aware of it. I was pretty frustrated. During that conversation, I created a concept that I still use today: the Do-Tell ratio. I told him there were only so many hours in the day, and I was confronted every day with a choice to make. I could either DO something worthy of telling or TELL about something worthy I had done. I decided that with the mountain of things that needed Doing, I would not spend much, if any, time on Telling, but instead focus on the Do. I asked him to please not finalize my review just then, but to ask around about what others thought. About two weeks later, he asked me to stop by to finalize my review. He brought out his notepad and flipped through about five pages of notes he had taken. He had gone to my team, my customers, the sales folks, engineering, and others. He told me several things. First, he apologized for not having had good insight into all that I had done that year. Next, he made that my primary development goal for the next year – I needed to keep him better informed. He liked my notion of the Do-Tell ratio but he spent the better part of an hour explaining that simply Doing without Telling was a problem. I share this story for a couple of reasons. One, because, collectively, our team finds ourselves in a similar situation. We have been on a journey that has demanded so much Do. We have Done a lot without a lot of Tell. Getting to [Symphony] Release 6 has required more Do than any of us realized. Telling was not a high a priority and some around us are wondering what we have been Doing. So we are taking specific actions to increase the Tell. We hired a Ministry Service Center Communicator to help us get the word out to all the people that need to hear more from us. We are formalizing new governance committees to guide and direct our Services and we are helping those committees communicate. This marks a starting point for us communicating more effectively and frequently. Our Clients need to know what we have Done, what we are Doing, and what we plan to Do. The Year of the Client, 2015, is about building the relationship; building the trust that we are not only hearing our Clients, but that we are Doing something about what we have heard. As we enter the next period, we, along with our partners are tending to the myriad things that need attention. This year however, we will be doing far more Telling. [inlinead] [Note: if you liked this article, please use the buttons on the left side of the screen to share it across your LinkedIn groups – and contribute to this discussion by posting your thoughts in the comment section, below. Thank you for being part of SSON's community - Barbara Hodge] About Lee Coulter: Lee Coulter has had an impressive career, and is broadly considered one of the leading Shared Services practitioners in North America today. Now in his 8th industry, Lee was previously Senior Vice President of Global Shared Services at Kraft Foods and a leader of Kraft’s corporate wide "Organize for Growth" transformation initiative. In this role he implemented shared services in nine global functions, delivering support across more than 70 countries and completing major outsourcing transformation "mega-deals" in IT, HR, and facilities management. He created and led the Shared Services Center of Excellence and the Outsourcing Center of Excellence at Kraft. While there, he also received Chairman Roger Deromedi¹s CEO Award for his efforts. Prior to joining Kraft, Lee served as Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AON Corporation, where he implemented ITIL and shared services, reduced costs by more than 35%, and integrated legacy infrastructure from a long acquisition strategy, finally outsourcing IT to CSC. Lee spent 15 years with GE in a multitude of roles culminating in VP of GE’s outsourcing business. He also spearheaded the Company’s global Y2K initiative and served as a technical and operating executive in its Healthcare Services business, including as an expatriate in China. He received the President¹s Award from GE CEO Jeff Immelt. Lee holds a BS in Electronics Engineering from DeVry University and has completed all course work for a BS in Electrical Engineering and a Masters Degree in Biomedical Engineering at California State University at Long Beach. When not leading MSC, Lee can be found in his workshop, making sculptures out of wood and stone. He will be writing a weekly column for SSON's website in which he will share (nearly) everything that comes across his desk these days. More from Lee next week...

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