Meet Mr Challenge Changer
What talent management and leadership should know about that employee who updates objectives
Corporate America offers some fascinating wildlife that you seldom see in the world of entrepreneurship and results-oriented work. In the Meet Mr Series, we meet some of these corporate creatures and their challenges for talent management. One costly creature in corporate America is Mr Challenge Changer. Mr Challenge Changer loves to update objectives to something entirely different, or swap an entire approach to a problem.
Initially, most employees think that Mr Challenge Changer is bringing innovation to the company. As time passes, it becomes clear that he's actually unsure of everything and he's using new ideas or technology to really hide his ignorance. He ultimately dreads cultivating the diligence to understand a problem and actually develop a solution.
But first, a fictional story. Because I'm creating a fictional stories as examples in this series, I'll call Mr Challenge Changer in my story Chase. As a reminder, our fictional company is ABCZ Healthcorp.
Story
Bright red letters appeared on the screen in all caps - TRANSFORM. "Healthcare is broken," Chase started as he looked across the room full of employees. "Right now, the largest healthcare companies actually coordinate together behind the scenes to pass on higher costs to all of us. They lobby our political leaders behind the scenes because their leadership wants to ensure that new competitors stay out of the field. They ensure that laws are passed that keep new and small competitors away from healthcare. They pretend that they don't like some laws, like the major healthcare transformation law a few years ago, while they secretly encourage its passing. That's why we've seen them grow so much. They have no interest in cheaper healthcare. They want more of your hard earned money. They also don't want a system that's better for you, they want a system that's better for them."
Chase grabbed a water bottle and drank some water then looked back at the screen. "We are here to transform that." He paused while looking around at the audience, "We are David taking on Goliath. Our vision is to reduce the cost of healthcare by over 90% in the next decade. We want the poorest person in our country to be able to afford healthcare, not through taxing other hard workers but through making healthcare more efficient. And we're going to start at the very beginning of healthcare - a normal doctor's visit." He paused again while looking around at the audience, "The average person spends $100 for a regular doctor visit and this doesn't include the medication. We want that cost to come down to $10."
Employees in the audience looked at each other and mumbled words with surprise while Chase smiled. "I know, imagine visiting the doctor for $10 or less. We're not talking about taxing the healthy to pay for the sick and we're not talking taxing the rich either. Unlike some political leaders, our solution doesn’t pass off the costs to others - it solves the problem. We're actually talking about more efficient healthcare. In our model, everyone wins."
Chase pointed to everyone in the audience, "Starting now, you will be the biggest part of all of this. All of you will work on tasks that meet this vision. We are going to become the most innovative and affordable healthcare company in human history."
Once the presentation finished, Josh felt excited as he returned to his desk. Like many of his colleagues, Josh felt the pain of expensive healthcare. Employers were laying off citizen workers and hiring them as contractors or finding legal routes to hire immigrants, as citizens of Josh’s country had to pay for expensive healthcare while he and other taxpayers were covering immigrants healthcare for free.
As the weeks passed, Josh worked on solutions for allowing more efficient doctor's visits. Unfortunately, he and his team came across major challenges where doctors were required by laws to run some diagnostic tests, even if these tests weren't needed.
Another challenge was that the healthcare providers themselves had to adjust costs on the basis of complying with state and federal laws. In addition to those compliance costs, the providers had cover other bureaucratic costs. One of the biggest costs involved potential lawsuits - doctors feared being sued for medical malpractice and both the insurance companies and the doctors were scared of these lawsuits. One conversation with a patient made this even more clear.
"I no longer use health insurance when I visit a doctor," one patient told Josh.
"Why?" Josh asked wanting to understand every detail of the problem to help ABCZ Healthcorp innovate.
"If I use health insurance to see a doctor, I have a co-pay of $25. Let me show you," the patient replied pulling out some billing papers. "This bill here is from 3 years ago when I paid $25 to see the doctor at her office for my strep throat. I then got this bill. You can see that according to this bill, the insurance paid 80% of this $300 bill, leaving me to pay $60. That was my plan at the time - I had to always pay a co-pay of $25 and then 20% after everything else until my maximum out of pocket was reached."
"But I don't see why you'd prefer to pay cash because the insurance saved you $240," Josh said pointing to the $300 charge on the bill.
"So the last time I had strep throat, I didn't have insurance. I asked the doctor for the cost of the strep charge. She said $25, plus another $25 to check blood pressure and fever. That’s $50 total! In other words, this bill from the insurance exceeds the cost of what I would pay in cash," the patient said shaking the paper. "I called the insurance company about where they got the $300 charge and they put me on hold for an hour and never answered."
Josh started to see a pattern emerge. Health insurance companies, healthcare providers and the bureaucrats enjoyed billing for random fees and charges that they would write up in beautiful documentation. But when they were asked about the details of the charges, they would struggle to explain why. As Josh and his team dug into the data, it became clear to all of them: a doctor's visit costing $10 was a fantasy.
There was no way that this could be done while covering all the costs, most of which had nothing to do with the visit itself or even solving the healthcare issue, no matter how basic the issue was. Over a few months, Josh and his team reported to their leadership that they couldn't reduce these costs - every interaction between a patient and doctor became a point of charge for insurance companies and bureaucrats. The system didn't want cheaper prices.
Two months later, Chase held another meeting that all employees had to attend. This time a picture of the popular social network TikGram appeared on the slide. TikGram had overtaken all the major social media platforms with three billion users.
All the employees looked at each other in anticipation of what Chase would say after they had spent the last half year working on trying to reduce the cost of a doctor's visit to $10 with no success. "TikGram!" Chase started. "We all love it because it allows us to share our lives with everyone we love." Chase paused while looking across the room. "As you all know, ABCZ Healthcorp has come very far and you've all worked hard the past six months. I am so proud of all of you. I know that you have all put your heart and soul into what you've done."
Chase pointed to the TikGram picture, "I am so excited to share with you that we've decided to become the TikGram of healthcare." Josh looked at Chase with confusion, as it was unclear how being like TikGram would help with healthcare. "We've decided that the best way that we can impact healthcare is to create a social network of patients and doctors. Imagine being on a TikGram-like platform as a patient and on that platform, you can find the doctor that you need. The experience would be amazing - you could see pictures of the office, as well as the staff. We think that helping people connect to doctors would vastly improve healthcare."
Josh raised his hand and Chase allowed him to speak, "How would this help reduce the cost of a doctor's visit?" Josh asked.
"That's a great question," Chase started replying, "And we know how excited we've all been about doing this. When we first set out to reduce the cost of a doctor's visit, we wanted to improve the lives of everyone - we wanted healthcare to be affordable to even the poorest person in our country without it costing someone else a charge. That was a great challenge. We met some obstacles, but we believe that by creating a social network where patients can create profiles with their health details and search for doctors will add value to the healthcare market. Imagine being a patient and putting in all your information from where you live to all your health details. From there, you can search for a directory of doctors in your area."
"How is that any different than Google maps?" one employee yelled which caused other employees to laugh.
"Great question - I love how we all interact here," Chase replied. "Google maps doesn't allow people to enter all their health details. Sure, you can find a local doctor, but do you really feel that the doctor cares about their patient?" Chase paused while drinking some of his water, "When you go to a person's Instagram profile, you really feel who they are as a person. I feel that patients will be able to use our social network to really feel doctors through their profile. This will allow people to choose better doctors who really care for them. Don't think of it as reducing cost for patients because it won't, but think of it as adding value to patients in that they find doctors who care about them."
"How are we going to make money money off this healthcare social network," an employee interrupted without raising his hand.
"Thank you for the question and I know you all feel excited about this idea, so please raise your hand so that everyone can get a chance to ask questions," Chase said pointing at the employee. "Right now, every investor on the planet wants to throw money at social media. We need to adopt the view of who cares about the money now, as we can worry about that problem later. Leadership and I expect that we'll get a $1 billion or more in capital from investors because social media is the hot thing. That should give us anywhere from five to ten years to figure out how we're going to make money. Bottom line: let's not let money stand in the way of our vision to bring a healthcare social media site to everyone."
Over the next few months, Josh could sense frustration from his colleagues. Everyone had done work on solutions for reducing the costs of a doctor visit, but now those objectives were faded scratches on whiteboards throughout the office. No one planned anything related to the social media idea, as Josh kept hearing everyone say "Assuming we're even going to do this."
Two of his team left for other companies within the first month of the vision change and Josh found himself surfing the internet for random information. He would try to force himself to feel excitement about work, but he couldn't. The whole company and office suddenly felt old. When the director raised concern about the team missing their deadline on developing the social media site, Josh excused it as they had lost a few team members and had spent more of their time training new team members. After that conversation, Josh updated his resume and started receiving invites from various recruiters.
After accepting a position at a new company, he drove to office that morning to put in his notice. As he opened his email to type his resignation, he noticed a new email from Chase to the company. Chase's email was brief but read:
Team,
I have absolutely loved all the work that all of you have done to create our social media site for healthcare. While I think that we are onto a brilliant new innovation with our social media site, I am excited to announce that we have purchased a company that provides wheelchairs for disabled workers. We'll be putting our social media site on hold for a while and focus on energy on selling wheelchairs to patients directly, then getting those wheelchairs back from the patients after they die and selling them again. We expect that we'll be able to make a very strong return since the cost of getting a wheelchair back from a dead patient isn't as expensive as the company we've purchased thinks.
I am excited about the direction our company is headed. Upward and onward!
Josh smiled and realized he had made the right decision.
What the Research Shows
Most in leadership and talent management immediately recognize that Chase has no idea what he's doing. He diminishes the details of ideas, but those details end up costing him and his company effort and time. In addition, he's alienating his employees because he wastes their energy and effort on constantly changing the challenge.
While this story shows an example of where this change occurs on a vision level, this can be just as costly on smaller challenges.
One of my friends planned to add an office room to his house. Since his wife was an architect, he had her design the plans and work with construction contractors. After a month of work, the cost and challenges became more apparent. He decided instead of the construction project that he would purchase a shed for their backyard. They would move various furniture from other rooms into the shed and turn an existing room into their office.
His wife felt infuriated. I remember him telling our group that he had no idea why she was so angry. It was clear to all of us: he passed all the costs on to her (research, design, etc) and when he didn't like the financial and time costs, he changed the vision.
This is precisely what Mr Challenge Changer does and you'll notice that he passes the costs onto other employees.
As I've researched this because this character is quite common among corporate creatures, I've found the following in my research:
When a company changes its objectives (or vision), all employees report that they struggle with completing work or wanting to complete work. A big reason is that they feel as if their past work has no value because of the objective change. Changing challenges frequently demoralizes employees. I cannot stress this enough to leadership: if you're unsure about a vision, don't start it. You should only start a vision that you're willing to complete start to finish. Otherwise, you will demoralize your employees.
Sometimes companies must change objectives because this change is required. When this occurs, in my research I’ve found that four out of five employees do not feel as if leadership is focused. Leadership changing constantly feels like a capricious monkey bouncing all over the room. Talent management must ensure that leadership is fully transparent about why they changed the objectives or vision. This includes even small challenges, since every change results in an energy shift. I’ll also note that exceptional talent leaders may push back on leadership if they’re changing the vision too frequently.
I cannot stress this enough: the cost of changing a vision, objectives or even small challenges can extremely high.
Don't confuse rampant financialization of markets with long term success of companies that change rapidly from vision to vision. The long run is the weighing machine and many people will be surprised who actually makes it out of this era of financialization.
Clear and consistent vision matter more now than ever.
Costs
The first cost to Mr Challenge Changer that talent management will pay is that he creates confusion.
When we create a vision for our company, we actually create a plan of action. We have specific actions that must be done in order for us to meet our vision.
For an example, if our company choose to sell potato chips to various convenience stores, then we know that we'll have to source the potato chips, transport them, and find willing convenient stores that will buy them as minimum activities. Our vision dictates the actions that we'll take. However, if we change our vision to creating screwdrivers, all the work we did to sell potato chips was wasted. Employees who may have felt good about the progress they made on on their work will feel as if they accomplished nothing. Leadership may see a drop in morale because this change has negative effects, one of which is confusion.
The second cost to Mr Challenge Changer is that he's creating an environment that leads to a lack of perseverance. People who work under Mr Challenge Changer tend to learn a lack of persistence because he chases the newest idea or the most recent technology. In reality, every choice you make will carry costs.
This will always be true. Running into a new idea or technology does not eliminate costs; it simply means you'll pay the costs in other ways. Mr Challenge Changer doesn't understand this. The unfortunate reality for leadership and talent management is that your employees will learn to give up quickly - the opposite of what you want them to learn!
Finally, the highest cost to Mr Challenge Changer is that no company has ever succeeded in the long run with this attitude. While there are companies that get featured in the media from time to time as companies that changed their vision, they often don't exist later or stop being competitive in their industry altogether.
Also, media often miss the nuance that exists between a company that adapts its vision based on customer changes and feedback versus a company that changes their vision entirely. If a protein powder company updates its ingredients in their products because of customer demand, that is adapting to change. If a protein powder company decides it's better to sell solar cells, that's a vision change that will often result in failure.
The Meet Mr Series
For more in the Meet Mr Series of posts, check out Executive Decisions’ regular Series page. Some highlighted posts from this series:
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