Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

‘Internal franchisees’: You heard it here first

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In the 1990s it was called empowerment. In the 2000s "intrapreneur" was the term for a workaday grunt who nevertheless acted like an owner without an ownership stake in the company.

And if author Martin O'Neil has his way, in the 2010s the term will be "internal franchisees," which he defines as people who "take personal ownership of the company's success as their own."

You can have O'Neil's book about "How Your Business Will Prosper When Your Employees Act Like Owners." I'd rather read a book on "Why On Earth Owners Would Think They Can Get Employees to Act Like Owners Without Offering Either a Piece of the Action or a Modicum of Job Security in Return."

***

At the frigid pro-labor demonstration in Madison last month, we took a break to warm up in a coffee shop just around the corner from the Capitol building. Paying the good-natured barrista for my coffee, I cheerfully theorized, "I bet all these demonstrations are great for you guys."

"Yeah, it's been going on for two weeks," she said. "But the owners see most of the money. For us, it's mostly just an extra pain."

Is she wrong to say that?

Or am I wrong for blithely expecting her—especially in the context of a union demonstration—to put on the Stepford Wife show, "Oh, yes, sir, we're all just so happy to have all these customers all the time!" when what it means for her is a few extra dollars a day in tips, and a ton of extra work?

***

If owners want employees to act like owners, they'd better find a way to make them feel like owners. How? That's up to the owners.

Management types who think “people hate change”: Give ’em Shel, Holtz!

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I've been reading Shel Holtz since I was the editor of his weekly Technology Corner column for The Ragan Report, back in the mid-1990s. The best thing he's ever written, as far as I'm concerned, he wrote last Sunday, on his blog. He had me at his headline: "People like change; just not your company's change."

"I’ve always been amused by the assuredness with which people throw out the old chestnut that 'people resist change,'" Holtz wrote. "People do nothing of the sort. They change their hairstyles, their cars, their homes, their fashions, their jobs and all kinds of other aspects of their lives with frequency and glee. People love change."

As far as organizational change, Shel points out: No, employees don't like it when it costs them overtime pay or throws them into weeks and months of uncertainty about their livelihoods or bores the hell out of them because it has nothing to do with the actual work they do every day or honestly strikes them, in their studied opinion (employees have those, you know) as stupid or unnecessary.

Yes, Shel concludes, it's hard to get a whole workforce to change the way it operates. But that's because doing so requires talking everybody into your fancy idea, making them see how they fit in and convincing them it's as good for them as it is for you.

That's hard to do. Hard as hell to do. But it's not hard because employees hate change. It's hard because employees aren't robots.

Oh, and one more thing—and this is from me, not from Shel, but I'm sure he won't disagree with it—employees already know that change is the only constant. They've had effervescent loved ones get cancer and die. They've watched their young gorgeous faces turn fat and gray in the bathroom mirror. They're dealing with all new judges on American Idol. And when a CEO or an HR conehead tries to tell them about the nature of change, they realize that they are working for thoughtless, self-seeking jerks.

And they think to themselves, "Some things never change."