High Touch for High Tech
Retention crisis spawns a new school of management consultants stressing respect and trust.

From: Business 2.0
By:Colleen O'Connor  February 01, 2000

When crisis came to LSI Logic, a maker of specialized computer chips, a call was put in immediately to an executive coach.

"We'd identified a body of employees who were highly susceptible to raiding," says Claire Raymond, manager of global learning and development at the Milpitas, Calif.-based publicly traded company. "They were being headhunted constantly." A talent pool of 28 top-notch programmers, marketers, and other employees had joined the company to work on a highly strategic software implementation team. That triggered the crisis.

"They become completely superskilled, and then they're worth their weight in gold," says executive coach Sharon Jordan-Evans. "LSI didn't want to have eight or 10 people stolen away before the project was even completed." So they hired her to solve the problem, and she created a program that gave each employee their own personal career coach who met with them weekly. 

"People really appreciated it," says Raymond. "I frequently heard things like, 'I've never worked anywhere where anyone paid this much attention to me, to see what I wanted to do next.'" Success is in the results. Two years later, only one of those 28 people has left the company, says Jordan-Evans.

Such innovation puts LSI Logic at the forefront of the latest management trend to sweep high-tech culture. Some call it "secular humanism." Others call it "high touch." Whatever the language, it's about paying attention to something other than the bottom line, while ultimately boosting profits.  

"High touch is about touching people, not literally, but getting in touch with them," says Richard Whiteley, a management consultant and co-author of best-selling Customer Centered Growth (Harper Perseus). "It's about being in communication, taking the time to say 'Nice job.' It's about the caring, human side of things."

Open-hands leadership
When it comes to perks, high-tech employees are demanding things that transcend financial gain. Things such as meaning and purpose in their work. Recognition and appreciation. Respect, honesty, authenticity, and communication. Ironically, the high-tech culture—which traditionally values science over spirituality—and the Internet culture in particular, is driving the emergence of values in the workplace.

 "The growth of computer networks, the Web, the knowledge explosion, and the access to information is forcing managers to be more open and more authentic, because they can't hide anymore," says Dr. Robert Rosen, CEO of the consulting firm Healthy Companies International, in Washington, D.C. "It's forcing their companies to be more transparent and open with information. The high-tech field is a catalyst for all these dynamics about openness and trust."

For his new book Global Literacies: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures (Simon&Schuster), Rosen analyzed global leadership with 1,000 surveys and 75 interviews with CEOs of large multinational corporations. He discovered that global workplaces are driven by three key forces: the knowledge explosion, the technology revolution, and speed.

"The high-tech field is forcing leaders to be more open and transparent," he says. "It's speeding up the way people interact, and forcing them to be more collaborative in the workplace."

What's happening in the high-tech culture, he believes, will revolutionize the global workplace of the 21st century.

"In an environment where everyone has access to information, it changes the power dynamics in the business. Information is power, so you have more powered workers. The high-tech fields are changing workplaces around the world because computers are changing the way power is distributed."

Geek training
Meanwhile, as the power balance shifts on a global scale, high-tech managers scramble to keep up. Increased collaboration in the workplace, for example, requires state-of-the-art interpersonal skills. So a new industry is emerging.

A flotilla of management consultants, from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, is busily teaching high touch to high techies. One psychologist is even organizing an international network of psychologists to provide "psychological consulting" for businesses. So far, Barbara Kauffman of Orange County, Calif., has a nucleus of 115 psychologists to help companies make the transition to a more humanistic style of management.

 New products include a newsletter called The Inner Edge that aims at creating sustainable business through the development of inner resources—its slick brochure touts "things like courage in the face of danger, calm in the face of chaos, brilliance in the face of challenges, and virtues like intuition, creativity, honesty and integrity."

There's also Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay (Berrett-Koehler) by consultants Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, whose clients include Microsoft, Intel, LSI Logic, and software maker Autodesk. The new book is a guide to 26 strategies designed to help managers win the battle for keeping talent.

In the high-tech culture, the humanistic trend is mainly a response to the crisis of retention. But a secondary motivation is equally important. Because the Internet Economy offers customers the world at their fingertips—anything, anywhere, anytime, at any price—customer expectations have skyrocketed.

"Now that power has shifted on the one hand to employees, and on the other to customers, the companies now have to do all those things that people talked about for years," says Ellen Glanz, principal of her own consulting firm, Glanz Associates, and president of the Human Resource Management Group in Boston. "What they once gave lip service to they now have to take seriously."

These days the ultimate perk is nothing less than total well-being: a job that feeds body, mind, and soul. According to studies conducted by Ian Mitroff, author of A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America (Jossey-Bass), employees say their leading choice for achieving the most meaning and purpose at work is "to realize my full potential as a person."

"Most people do not list money as the most important thing about their jobs," writes Mitroff, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. "Beyond a certain threshold higher needs kick in. The desire for 'self-actualization,' as psychologist Abraham Maslow calls it, becomes paramount."

High tech, high price
This is particularly true in the high-tech culture. "Many are younger people, intensely committed to their own learning and self-development," says Rosen of Healthy Companies. "Many grew up in good times, and they're financially secure, so they're freed up to look at higher-order psychological needs like self-development."

As an assistant professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and also a consultant to many high-tech companies, Rosen has crafted an intricate psychological profile of the people in this industry. Because they grew up in a culture that is more egalitarian and empowered than ever before, they expect to be treated with respect. They also demand explanations, responsibility, and access to information—if they don't get it at one company, then they'll leave for another.

"High-tech people have different kinds of psychological mind-sets, so they have to be managed very differently," he says. "The management of high-tech people is a very challenging task."

Some are better at it than others. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, is considered a master. "He's a great role model," says Whiteley. "He really cares about the people and the policies they initiate."

Chambers makes no secret of his high-touch technique. "If you take my top 100 managers in Cisco, I know what motivates most all of them and I know what's important to them," he has said (see "The Art of the Deal," Oct. '99, p106). "We try to align the goals of the company with the goals of the individual and make that work all the way through our organization. I've practiced it at the top so that it should cascade all the way through the company."

Chambers, who exudes a powerful blend of soft-spoken Southern charm and shrewd business prowess, epitomizes the new management mind-set. "The traditional thinking was that the needs of the employees were pitted against the needs of the organization," says Glanz. "But now the stronger companies are figuring out how to align those interests."

But not all companies are prepared to confront the difficult issues—everything from how they manage to what they value. "Some senior managers have gotten to where they are based on managing a certain way," says Glanz, who consultants for many high-tech companies in Boston. "Some are willing to look at the new realities, and some aren't."

Dr. Soul
In Silicon Valley, consultant Jean Hollands, CEO of the Growth&Leadership Center, sees the same patterns. She has so many high-tech clients, from Intel to Sun Microsystems, that she's dubbed "Dr. Soul of Silicon Valley."

"It's so much easier to be a successful leader if you understand people and yourself. But sometimes there's the bull-headed guy who says 'Don't bring me into this.' The other day a CEO said to me about team-building, 'I'll pay for the training, but don't involve me in it. Don't bother me with it.'"

But companies that devalue interpersonal skills create more problems for themselves, according to consultants. "Research shows that 50 percent of workers' satisfaction is the relationship with their boss," says Jordan-Evans. "It's about psychological well-being."

An employee can have a great gym at the workplace and a fat personal-growth fund, she says, but they'll walk if they don't like the boss. "This puts a heavy burden on the boss, and I think the challenge is even greater in high tech. The war for talent is tougher here than anywhere else. I coach a lot of engineers, and the primary reason they need a coach is that technically they're wonderful, but interpersonally they don't have a clue. Yet they're put in management roles trying to retain the best of the best."

If these managers fumble the interpersonal aspect, they're endangering the company with retention problems. "It's the same responsibility for bosses in other fields, but they're doing it in a much more competitive situation and with potentially fewer of the innate skills," she says.

One of the more successful players is Sabrina Horn, founder of The Horn Group, a Silicon Valley public relations firm that specializes in high-tech clients. She was listed last May in Working Woman magazine as best employer for her benefits package, which includes a four-week paid sabbatical for employees; setting up a $1,000 trust fund for every child of an employee; and establishing a personal development fund that can be spent as the employee sees fit.

One employee is using her personal development fund to get her MBA. Another just returned, refreshed and revitalized, from a sabbatical spent in France. "The holistic approach is so huge for us," says Horn. "We're a service company and our product is our people. This means making a greater investment in things that make them successful, and retain them."

According to surveys, she says, her type of business has a 48 percent annual turnover. "We had 28 percent last year. That's still high, but it's lower than most. I'll take that to the bank any day."

Playing for Keeps
Keeping tabs on employee happiness is a key retention strategy, according to consultants Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, authors of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay (Berrett-Koehler). Their book aims to help managers win the war. Included are the following suggestions. * Ask employees: What keeps you? What might lure you away? Asking has many positive side effects—people feel cared about, valued, and important, which can lead to stronger loyalty to the organization.

• Enrich: Energize jobs by supporting the employee's growth and challenge.
  
• Family: Support employees' lives outside the job.
  
• Goals: Expand options. Smart managers address career paths outside the simple vertical moves.
  
• Passion: Encourage this positive emotion by helping employees discover what they love to do—then helping them find the opportunity to do it.
  
• Truth: Trust employees to hear the truth about themselves and the company.
  
• Values: Savvy managers learn how their employees' values align with company values.
  
• Wellness: Promote employees' health and fitness on all levels—physical, emotional, and mental. —CO

Colleen O'Connor (coconnor@wenet.net) is a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and People