Primary Steps in Implementing Stratified Systems (Requisite Organization) Theory

Speaker A My name is John Fielder and I'm president of Southern California Edison. I've been in this role for about six months, but I've been with the company for almost 36 years and I first met Katie who introduced me to Stratified Systems Theory when I was working in our It organization and I was our Chief Information officer. And so we worked to implement a lot of the ideas in that organization and an It organization, it's kind of an experimental type organization to begin with and so we were able to actually take a lot of the ideas and actually implement them and it paid off. And I've stayed reasonably close to it in other roles I've had and it seems to make a lot of sense. And it's not something that we advertise as a big consultant theory or as kind of a how to book, but the concepts we just implement as part of our normal processes. One of the things that we started out really focused on was trying to get clarity of roles. And it's amazing how important that really is as you're designing work and trying to get things done. It's just to try and be clear about who's doing what and how it relates to other activities that go on in the organization. So before we ever got to trying to get the levels right or so forth, we just went through a large exercise of trying to get clear about what the work is and then tried to use some of the work that they did in the Stratified systems theory to see what work fit at different levels and what the relationship was and the differences were between the work at different levels. And we spent quite a bit of time trying to do that. And once we thought we got that right, the toughest part of this whole thing, and I have always thought this was underplayed in a lot of the theory, was trying to find the right people to put in the boxes. I mean, it was work to get the boxes right and to get the roles defined, but then to find somebody that you thought had the kind of capabilities to do different levels of work and then also make an assessment of their potential to grow into different levels of work. That always seemed to be the toughest part. And I wish we could say we didn't make mistakes, but we did make some mistakes on selecting people. And if you get the wrong people in the right roles, it doesn't work as well as the boxes look when you put it on paper, and also from an accountability point of view too, it is it's very hard. To. When people just aren't up to the role, you start making accommodations and have to make adjustments to the structure in order to accommodate their deficiencies. The good news is that it became fairly evident over time that they weren't up to a roll and then you had to go through and deal with it and try something else. So the other thing that I think we focused a lot on was putting some of the systems in place to do performance assessment, which had there's a lot of different performance assessments around. But the stuff we picked up from Stratified Systems, I think we put in place in a way that really let us focus on performance and coaching and follow up to improvement. And that's paid a lot of dividends. And we've actually kind of adopted for the entire corporation some of the basic principles that we used whenever that was 15 years ago, 15 years ago in our It organization, information technology organization. I noticed that we had a consultant here recently who was peddling a concept called Leadership Pipeline. And it was almost stratified systems theory in spades because it was basically trying to design roles so that you had the right level of work at each level and explain what each level of work differentiated was differentiated by. The next level, and then how you move people through and when you're in certain levels, what kind of work you need to do, and then you get promoted into a different level job and how the work is different. And you have to make sure that they do different work. And it was very similar. It was a different label on it. Now they probably charge a lot more too, I think. One other thing that we picked up from Stratified Systems and have called it different things, but it's fundamentally the coaching and mentoring activities and it's become company wide now. We actually have kind of institutionalized the mentoring program with some varying degrees of success. I think when we get away from the basic model that says where the mentor is M plus one, and that's who's really keeping an eye on your promotions and your development activities for future levels, that seems to work pretty well. What doesn't work, and what we've tried and abandoned is to try and have a mentor from outside the organization structure is asking too much when they don't see somebody work in their day to day environment and don't have any specific accountability for their performance. So I think we learned quite a bit from Stratified Systems about coaching and mentoring selection. We implemented some of the selection processes that we learned about in terms of who has the accountability to do the selection and who reviews the selection. Same thing with terminations and so forth. That whole accountability structure seemed to make a lot of sense and we still use a lot of that close nick.