Profit Sharing

Chapter 4: What possible ‘defences’ exist against the harm of ‘Money Power’?

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , , ,

So I’ve:

  • set out Ford’s explanation of Dead vs. Live money (Chapter 1);
  • ‘shot at’ organisations that claim they get this –as in “see, here’s my purpose!” (Chapter 2);
  • explained why shareholders are probably the last people you’d want as guardians for an organisation’s successful longevity; and
  • put forward a logic as to why executives behave as they do (including the recent Mylan example to consider) (Chapter 3).

light-bulb…and at this point you may reasonably ask “so what can be done about this situation?”

Thankfully not everywhere is the same…and we can look around for ideas.

Ha-Joon Chang writes that “most rich countries outside the Anglo-American world have tried to reduce the influence of free-floating shareholders and maintain (or even create) a group of long-term stakeholders (including some shareholders) through various formal or informal means.”

These include:

  • government ownership (either direct or indirect) of a sizeable share to act as stable shareholders (examples in France, Germany, Korea);
  • differential voting rights for different classes of shares e.g. for founders and their families to retain significant control (Sweden);
  • formal representation by the workers on the company supervisory board (Germany);
  • minimising influence of floating shareholders through cross-shareholdings amongst friendly companies (Japan)

“Being heavily influenced, if not totally controlled, by longer-term stakeholders, companies in these countries do not as easily sack workers, squeeze suppliers, neglect investment and use profits for dividends and share buybacks…all this means that in the long run they may be more viable…

Running companies in the interests of floating shareholders is not only inequitable but also inefficient, not just for the national economy but also for the company itself.”

(Of course, I should reflect that there are lots of other ownership models ‘out there’, such as State Owned Enterprises, Mutuals and Co-operatives…and I have read many a good-news story about what can be achieved with the latter.

If you already have one of these ownership models, please stay as you are! What follows is aimed squarely at the Dead Money corporations).

Exploring the employee option:

proft-sharing-quoteI’m a big fan of the ‘employees as long-term owners’ method.

Now, many a ‘large corporate’ would respond that their people can buy shares in their company and, further, that they encourage this by administering some form of ‘employee share buying scheme’.

So how’s this different to share ownership through profit sharing (as in the Oktogonen Foundation)?

Well, if we consider a typical ‘employee share buying scheme’:

  • You are asking employees to put up their own money as risk, rather than rewarding them for their ‘blood, sweat and tears’;
  • Only a limited number of employees will buy shares (for a variety of reasons – the most obvious being their level of affluence and their attitude to risk);
  • The minority that do buy a small ‘side salad’ of shares have simply been added to the vast pool of floating shareholders…worried about short-term profits and dividends.

In contrast:

The power in ‘share ownership through profit sharing’ is that EVERYBODY in the organisation becomes an owner, and thereby connected with the same aim.

The power in setting up a foundation specifically for this purpose is that the employees as a GROUP obtain a significant voice, creating representation on the board.

The power in defining a long-term method of payment (say, at pensionable age) is that employees (past and present) care deeply about the LONG TERM success of the organisation…which will produce a genuine focus on the CUSTOMER (and society).

Now these words might cause the following reaction from existing shareholders and executives: “Whoa…I don’t like the sound of ‘worker power’ – this is Trade Unionism by the back door…and look at where that always ends up!”

Here’s why it is the exact opposite:

The birth, and historic basis, of the Trade Union movement was to protect the workers from the power of the owners. In response to Trade Union power, the owners would regularly claim that the employees were ‘biting the hand that feeds them’…and thus a hugely adversarial battle became the norm1 (usually with the customer, and consequently the organisation, suffering in the cross fire).

But, rather than employee ownership through profit sharing stoking the ‘worker – owner’ flames, it actually dissolves the problem! Everyone is pointing in the same direction.

Even better, a foundational base is set to enable the business to become so much more efficient and effective because all those commanding and controlling ‘management instruments of torture’ can be torn down – that would be incentives and Performance Management2 for a start!

….just think how easy it would become to engage with the workers – or should we call them ‘long term guardians’ now?

“Just close your eyes and imagine…”

imagineI have often found myself in company presentations with management eulogising about the next ‘cost cutting’ initiative. A usual candidate is the travel and expenses budget (and the associated rules to be complied with)…and they always use the same logic:

“Imagine it as your own money!”

Ponder upon this for a minute: management ‘get’ that it isn’t our money, and that this will alter how we think about it…but they want us to play a game of ‘pretend’. Hmmm – they’re missing something there.

But what if THEY (management) altered their thinking such that it IS the employees’ money. They can dispense with those silly games, and potentially all those wasteful cost cutting initiatives. Imagine that!

“But it’s not their money!!”

Now, there may be a backlash of comments from shareholders with a view that the company would be giving away their money.

Some thoughts on this:

  • The organisation doesn’t need to raise capital to do this! It just needs to STOP the offering, and paying, of contingent rewards. There’s plenty of money right there;
  • For those shareholders that don’t realise this…there is loads of cost spent in administering the performance management/ incentives lark…and a great deal of harm caused that is unmeasurable! This is no longer required;
  • But, fundamentally, a long term ownership interest (Live Money) will change the way that employees think…for the good of the customer and therefore the organisation…and, as a result, to the benefit of those that invest.

A start to the journey

silver-bullet‘Necessary but not sufficient’: I’d like to be clear that, whilst profit sharing could be game changing, it’s not a silver bullet….but it is a hugely sound foundation from which the right type of business can be successfully built and sustained.

It can act as a catalyst for all those things that you’ve been saying, but not been able to do. Why? Well, because it fundamentally changes the employee – company relationship.

It brings Live Money onto the scene and, if done well, brings Service Power back to the fore.

(Note: I’ve written this whole serialised post because – after many years of pondering – I came to the conclusion that you can understand and passionately want to change your ‘culture’ BUT you won’t (meaningfully or sustainable) achieve this if you don’t address your ownership structure…and this relates to Money Power).

To close: A comment on the current ‘side show’

The current ‘large corporates’ hymn is all about diversity….and that this will ensure the future of an organisation – all those different people, with all those different perspectives and ideas! What’s not to like?!

Now, I’m all for diversity. I believe in respect, equality and fairness for all.

However, you can be as diverse as you like, but if you don’t change the system (of management and ownership) then you’ll simply get more of the same.

To repeat my regular John Seddon quote (I have it ringing in my head most days!):

“People’s behaviour is a product of their system. It is only by changing [the system] that we can expect a change in behaviour.”

Or, to a Deming pearl of wisdom: “A bad system will beat a good person every time”

Stop trying to change people and, instead, perform a paradigm3 shift so that they change for themselves.

I should add that the diversity thing will be so much easier to achieve when all employees want to collaborate together (profit sharing) rather than competing with each other for ratings, rankings and contingent rewards. i.e. If you really want diversity, and what it can offer, then change the system first.

Okay, so I’ve argued that employee ownership through long-term profit sharing is a bloody good way to go…but there’s a few people that I really need to convince first. That would be a) the existing shareholders and b) the CEO. And that is the subject of my next, and final, chapter 🙂

Update: Link forwards to Chapter 5

Footnotes:

1. Owners vs. Unions: As usual, Henry had something useful to say on the matter:

“Business does not exist to earn money for the capitalist or for the wage-earner. The narrow capitalist and the narrow trades unionist have exactly the same view of business – they differ only on who is to have the loot.” (Ford)

2. On the merit system (i.e the rating and rewarding of people’s performance): Here’s a nice Deming exchange in a Q & A part of one of his famous lectures:

Question from the audience: “What do you propose to replace the merit system with?”

Deming: “Replace it? What, you want something to destroy people better than that does?!

Replacement means another method to do the same thing. [Do] you know of anything more effective in the destruction of people?

Question rephrased: “But is there any way to change the merit system?”

Deming: “Change it? Abolish it! Look at what it’s done to us.”

3. Paradigm: I usually hate using the ‘p’ word – it seems so ‘management consultancy’ to me…but in this case it is spot on!

4. So…what if you don’t (yet) want Live Money: If you don’t want to do the profit sharing thing (even though you’ll be seriously missing out) then STILL GET RID OF THE INCENTIVES!

Back to that ‘Profit Sharing’ Nirvana

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , , ,

cakeMy last post set out why profit sharing beats incentives by a country mile but I also laid out a note of caution on one aspect, short-termism:

I wrote that “A key consideration for anyone designing a profit share method is to avoid short-termism. Alternative thinking on how to achieve this might be to consider payment in shares that can’t be sold for a certain period, or payments into a person’s pension scheme, or [some other way of thinking outside the box]”

I have been keeping my eye open for a ‘for profit’ organisation out there that has been demonstrably successful in operating a profit sharing method that fits, and doing so for a reasonable (i.e. proven) period of time…and I believe that I have found such a thing! A Swedish bank called Handelsbanken.

Here’s the story:

At the end of the 1960s Handelsbanken was in crisis so it searched around for a radical thinker to lead them. They found Jan Wallander – an economist who had metaphorically ‘put his money where his mouth is’ by leaving academia and becoming a director of a rival Swedish Bank…and he was doing rather well whilst challenging conventional wisdom.

WallanderHe took on the role of Handelsbanken’s CEO in 1970 and got stuck in to doing things quite differently! As an example, he was particularly scathing about budgets:

“either a budget will prove roughly right and then it will be trite, or it will be disastrously wrong and in that case it will be dangerous. My conclusion is thus: Scrap it!”

As a result of this, Handelsbanken have now been operating very successfully without budgets for over forty years! (There’s an important ‘Beyond Budgeting’ post coming soon)

….but getting back to the profit-sharing subject:

Jan Wallander believed in a profit-sharing system that:

  • is intended as a reward for everyone’s collective efforts and competitive success (i.e. as against other banks); and conversely
  • should not be an incentive for individuals to pursue financial targets.

“beating the competition…is a far more powerful weapon than financial incentives. Why do people need cash incentives to fulfill their work obligations to colleagues and customers? It is recognition of effort that is important. Managers will only strive to achieve ambitious goals if they know that their ‘best efforts’ will be recognised and not punished if they fail to get all the way.”

Wallander set out an overall goal for the organisation (within its banking purpose): attaining a better return on equity than its (listed) banking competitors. This is rather interesting:

  • it doesn’t tolerate for any ‘resting on their laurels’ in easy market conditions; and conversely
  • it reasonably accommodates what might seem disappointing results (in absolute terms) when the market is tough.

Starting in 1973, the bank has allocated part of its profits to a profit-sharing scheme for employees. The main condition for an allocation to be made is that the ‘return on equity being better than the competition’ goal is achieved for that year.

The funds are paid to a profit-sharing foundation called Oktogonen (which was set up by the bank’s trade union club). In turn, the Oktogonen Foundation places 90% of these funds in Handelsbanken shares, thus giving the employees owner representation on the bank’s board.

The Oktogonen Foundation has become the bank’s largest shareholder, with over 10% of voting power.

Okay, so there’s a big fat fund of money…but how do the employees get at it?

This is the long-term bit, mixed with a healthy dose of equality.

Every year that the bank makes a profit allocation into the foundation (which, as it happens, has been achieved every year since its inception) then each current employee is allocated an equal share of units (i.e. salary level is not relevant to this allocation).

The value of each unit then goes up and down with the value of the foundation’s investments i.e. mainly the price of Handelsbanken’s shares.

Current and past employees can cash up their units from the age of 60 i.e. they cannot access any money until this point. This gives the Oktogonen Foundation the character of a pension fund.

This 2013 financial report shows that, if an employee had worked full time at the bank since the start of the scheme in 1973 (i.e. a 40 year working life), their fund units would be worth SKr 14,000,000…which is US$1.7 million at today’s exchange rate!!!! …that would be my pension pot sorted.

Some thoughts on this:

  • you can see that everyone working for the bank is ‘joined together’ (working as a system), aiming in the exact same direction over the long term…yet they also need to do so with speed so as to release the yearly profit allocations. This harnesses together the desires for efficiency and effectiveness;
  • it removes the need for the whole ‘setting personal objectives – arbitrary targets – judgemental scoring – giving of contingent rewards’ commotion….and the people can use this huge amount of freed-up time and wasted energy to work towards purpose. A bye-product is that people can now ‘get on’ as adults rather than as Parent – child;
  • it removes the batch behaviours associated with annual bonus payments:
    • there isn’t a period before year end where some people ‘hang on’ to get their payment when they’ve already checked out for something/ somewhere else; and
    • there isn’t an exodus of people out the door in the months after the bonus cheque has been cashed…causing a renewed batch of recruitment.

… people leave as and when they want to, which makes for transparency and a clear flow, making the balancing of capacity much easier;

  • it binds the employees and the shareholders together. They now have the same long term interest of building and sustaining a business for the future. Conversely, it will likely dissuade short term investors attracted merely by share price volatility…which isn’t in the best interest of organisational success.

What about some likely criticisms?

Here are four likely retorts to the idea of long-term profit sharing instead of short-term incentives:

1. “But what about ‘poor performers’?”

This is usually the first criticism of the profit-sharing method and rests on the belief* that some people will always ‘work harder’** than others and why should ‘slackers’ benefit at the expense of ‘grafters’.

* it is interesting that most people working in a command-and-control environment appear to have this belief about themselves as compared to others. A bit like everyone thinking that they are a ‘better-than-average’ driver 🙂

** I am only covering the ‘effort’ question here. The ability/ scarcity of resource question is covered within the differing levels of salary that people receive.

Incentive schemes are not the answer to supposed ‘poor performance’ – they are frequently used as a substitute for good management and, as such, are an abdication of management’s responsibilities.

Alfie Kohn writes that “In order to solve problems in the workplace, we must know what caused them….holding out a carrot – ‘Do better and here’s what you’ll get’ – is a pseudo solution; it fails to address the issues that are actually responsible for holding back the organisations and the people who work there.

Incentive schemes are frequently used as a substitute for giving workers what they need to do a good job…much less effort is required to dangle a bonus in front of employees and wait for the results…[however] there is evidence that pay-for-performance plans tend to displace careful management…a compensation system is no substitute for careful management.”

But it’s not just management, it’s also about peers! Here’s Handelsbanken’s response to the ‘poor performers’ fear:

“In a team based organisation driven by peer pressure, free riders are exposed very quickly and replaced by people more willing to commit themselves to real performance challenges.” (Source Book: ‘Beyond Budgeting’)

i.e. rather than gifting ‘free riders’ with easy money, the profit sharing method exposes and deals with them!

On advocating the removal of the ‘incentive-performance management’ system, Deming was once asked by a member of his audience “but what will we do instead?” His response was “Try leadership”.

…it has clearly worked rather well for Handelsbanken!

2. “How do we get people to leave? Won’t people hang around forever?!”

This view fits alongside the concern about ‘poor performers’. Consider though that the supposed ‘poor performance’ may very well evaporate…and we now have hugely experienced AND motivated people.

‘But they will be dinosaurs, unable to change’ I might hear someone reply. Really? Do you think that you couldn’t change even if you wanted to? Consider that “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed” (Scholtes). It’s back to that environment again!

Perhaps those ‘resistant to change’ are suffering from ‘change fatigue’: namely, being tired of their huge knowledge being ignored as the next overly simplistic ‘silver bullet’ change programme is done to them.

An organisation with high employee turn-over allows (and often forces) years of highly skilled knowledge to regularly ‘walk out the door’, only for the learning to start again, almost from scratch by the ‘next batch’. If the experienced workers stay, just think of where they could ‘kick on’ to if they so desired.

…but don’t worry, we haven’t engineered a prison! People can and will leave as they wish…and retain the profit-sharing units already assigned to them.

3. “People like getting a lump sum each year to pay for, say, their holidays”

Yes, I can see this (I do too)…but I would happily trade in the pain of the annual performance process (including the dysfunctional behaviours it causes) and the resultant lump sum payment if it meant that I got a real kick out of work because of the amazing environment that I worked in, with people who are equally energised, and who are ‘all running in the same direction’ and helping each other do so.

This brings to mind the quote “Pay people well and fairly…then put money out of their minds.” (Alfie Kohn)…though I might fondly look ahead every once in a while to that pension pot!

4. “What happens if the organisation goes bust?!”

Yep, you’d lose your investment (or at least be at the back of the creditors’ line)…so you would be very keen to constantly:

  • stay alert: look ahead to see external change coming (rather than ‘sit back and wait’);
  • know what’s happening: keep close to your customers and how their needs are changing…and be sure to deliver value to them;
  • innovate: think differently, look at what others are doing, try things out (experiment), pivot in new directions;
  • collaborate and roll-in meaningful change that demonstrably works for the whole system;
  • seek out, recognise, and directly attend to obvious waste and failure demand.

i.e. constantly improve your capability of meeting your customer’s purpose….just what your shareholders and profit-share foundation unit holders (incl. past employees) would want of you!

…and finally, that’s not the whole story:

Cleary, it wasn’t just a superb profit-sharing scheme that has led to Handelsbanken’s success…but it is seen as an enabler and a foundation for the necessary environment to stimulate and secure long term success. Jan Wallander did lots of things differently – probably the greatest being that he was also a firm believer in empowering people through decentralisation.

There is a clear relationship between decentralisation2 – empowerment – intrinsic motivation – purpose – systemic collaboration – continuous improvement – profit sharing.

Notes:

1. Handelsbanken reference material: The history of Handelsbanken

2. On Decentralization: “What is commonly understood by decentralization originates in the conventional command-and-control paradigm, defined as Decentralization 1.0.

To cope with the world’s exploding complexity, some vanguard companies have evolved to a higher level of organization by adopting a new kind of decentralization originating in the enabling-and-autonomy paradigm – hence the term Decentralization 2.0. This refers to organizations consisting of autonomous groups facilitated by an enabling support organization. To keep these high-trust, spirit-driven organizations together, a new kind of deep leadership is practiced by them.” (Decentralization 2.0)

3. The Oktogonen Foundation: For a very clear explanation, scroll right down to Appendix A at the bottom of the ‘Written evidence from Handelsbanken to the UK Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards’. (Parliament UK)

Profit sharing vs. Incentives

giantknave Brain Farts , , ,

sharing-is-caringSo I was in a meeting. A colleague spoke up and said that she felt that incentives weren’t a good thing, that they caused much damage and that it would be better to remove their use and replace them with something better.

This was followed by the usual conversation that ‘bad’ objective setting is clearly the actual problem…and implied that the (obvious and only) answer was to continually strive to set ‘good’ objectives (incl. targets and linked incentives).

Finally, it led to a discussion as to how different organisations handle the issue of pay. Two particular comments made of interest to me were that:

  • “most organisations have incentive schemes”, with the implication that therefore this must be right; and
  • some organisations use a ‘profit sharing’ concept and, “really, this is incentives just by a different name… isn’t it?”.

Now, there are (what I believe to be) some important points that I’d like to put out there regarding each of these two comments. Here goes…

Part 1 – The problem being the quality of the objectives

To run a ‘performance related’ incentive scheme, an organisation needs to do four things:

  • set out meaningful (?) personal objectives (which are ‘cascaded’ down from above, hopefully derived from some customer related purpose);
  • set criteria from which to measure a person’s performance against these objectives (i.e. targets);
  • judge a person’s performance against these criteria; and
  • lay out a financial methodology to convert this judgement of performance into a (contingent) monetary reward.

I have already written posts that are highly relevant to each of these points. In particular:

and perhaps most importantly:

  • I have written about the science showing the harm caused by using extrinsic motivators in The chasm and Money as pay. I used the analogy of Don’t feed the animals.
  • …and on the related matter of purpose (from which those cascaded personal objectives theoretically originate), I have written about why this shouldn’t be seen simply as ‘to make profit’. I wrote about this in Oxygen isn’t what life is about

I hope that this gives you plenty of thought to explain my contention that, in Ackoff’s words, we shouldn’t be “trying to make a wrong thing righter”.

The issue is NOT with poorly set personal objectives, criteria, judgements and financials methodology. You can fiddle with these all day long but you won’t remove the fundamental flaw within.

Part 2 – Is Profit sharing the same as incentives?

Firstly, what do I mean by profit sharing as opposed to incentives? Here are definitions for each:

Definition of Profit sharing: All employees share in the success of the organisation.

“Employees receive a variable amount each year (or some other increment of time) where this variable reflects the pre-tax prosperity of the company.” (Scholtes)

Note that such profit sharing can be carried out in a myriad of ways. Some of these are:

  • Same percentage of salary per employee (this is probably the most common method)
  • Same absolute amount per employee i.e. shared equally, from the Contact Centre Agent through to the General Manager. Promoters of this method argue that:
    • People’s salary already caters for the market rate of their skills and experience;
    • We shouldn’t be implying that some people contribute more to a company’s prosperity than others…indeed some would argue that the most important people are the front line staff and they spend much of their time protecting the customer from the decisions made by command and control managers!
  • The use of some seniority factor: i.e. profit share based around tenure – promoters of this method suggest it encourage long-term thinking*
  • some hybrid of the above

* Note: A key consideration for anyone designing a profit share method is to avoid short-termism. Alternative thinking on how to achieve this might be to consider payment in shares that can’t be sold for a certain period, or payments into a person’s pension scheme, or [some other way of thinking outside the box]

Definition of Incentives: Extrinsic motivators – the offering of something (usually money) on a contingent basis in order to control how someone acts. ‘Do this to get that’.

At work, such incentives link to the idea of ‘paying for performance/ merit’ i.e. the setting of a challenge and then the judgement as to whether/ how well it has been met and the subsequent release of the contingent reward.

A comparison:

So, with these two definitions, I can now explain, via the following table, why profit sharing (however done) and incentives are very different:

Comparison: Incentives: Profit Sharing:

Purpose

 Optimising the parts of the system, at the expense of the whole: ‘Meet personal objectives’ usurps overall purpose, with departments, and people within, pulling in competing directions.

Personal objectives create:

  • silo’d thinking and competition;
  • barriers to collaboration

Effort: massive time and effort spent in cascading, wording and ‘agreeing’ objectives

Static: Once ‘locked in’ each year, people are constrained by this thinking.

 Optimising the system: Encourages collaboration since everyone (horizontally and vertically) is joined together towards the same purpose.

Encourage people to think about the ‘customer’ and their horizontal flow of value.

Effort: Little effort required. The purpose remains as ‘True North’

Dynamic: People can continually move in new innovative directions towards the one purpose, liberated from personal objectives.
Targets Required as ‘criteria’ for the objectives.

People are only truly interested in their own targets.

 Not required.

People are now interested in measures (NOT targets) in how the system works and whether it is improving.
Judgement Required to ‘score’ people against.

Much time and emotional effort to run the judgement process, and deal with the de-motivating fall out…

…which occurs due to the impossibility of making a fair judgement.

 Not required. 

Can now move to coaching conversations that are divorced from judgements and rewards…likely leading to open-ness, learning and self-development
Motivation Extrinsic People collaborating towards a combined purpose which they now believe in, leading to/ enabling intrinsic motivation

…and for anyone who holds that incentives must be right because everyone else seems to be doing it, you might be interested in my earlier post on Benchmarking.

To end with some thoughts for the way forward:

After very skilfully dealing with the subject of pay and performance in his book ‘The Leaders Handbook’, Scholtes puts forward (what I consider to be) some very useful guidelines when it comes to pay:

  • Employee compensation should be a completely separate process from the employee feedback system;
  • performance issues are one thing. Pay issues are another. Keep them separate. Don’t try to solve performance problems with pay solutions;
  • There should be no merit pay, because it is virtually impossible to differentiate on the basis of merit; (Note: My post titled Outstanding discusses this)
  • All employees should benefit from the success of the company through profit sharing;
  • The greatest sources of motivation are intrinsic. Pay cannot motivate, but pay that is perceived to be unfair can de-motivate.