CASE STUDY:
P&G Improves Coaching — By Listening
Edward Klein
Lisa Owens
The managers in Research & Development (R&D) at Procter & Gamble (P&G) are highly trained professionals. They are selected from the nation’s best engineering and science programs. Like physicians (see box, Doctors and Problem Solving), they too are excellent problem solvers. And like doctors, they work under heavy time pressures and deadlines which often leads to not listening enough to their direct reports, customers and colleagues. This article will describe one technique —the small discussion group —as an intervention to address this issue. The intervention was delivered through one of the R&D University programs.
In the R&D University College program for middle managers and technical leaders (scientists and engineers) several blocks of time were set aside for participants to practice the skill of listening. This strategy should yield improvements in managerial coaching skills, with a secondary benefit of strengthening informal networks among small group members. The authors chose to use the small discussion group as the instructional strategy for this performance improvement work. We named it L.E.A.D. Groups, an acronym for Leaders Effect (cause) A Difference.
Doctors and Problem Solving
Doctors are considered excellent problem solvers, yet it is estimated that misdiagnosis occurs in 15 to 20 percent of all cases. Mistakes are rarely due to technical factors, like the laboratory mixing up the blood specimen of one patient and reporting another patient’s result. Rather most errors arise because of mistakes in thinking. Physicians under time pressure use pattern recognition (putting together things they have seen before) to make a diagnosis. Doctors often are correct in these rapid judgments. But at times they are wrong. When time is an issue, a variety of errors creep in. Doctors will stereotype a new patient (neurotic young woman) and make an attribution error (assigning her to the wrong category). The physician may then make an anchoring error (fixing tightly on one diagnosis, or premature closure) because of an inability to consider a different diagnosis. In addition doctors, on average, interpret the patient within the first minute of the usual brief, six-minute, interaction (Groopman, 2007). Interpreting the patient so soon in the interview sends a message about not listening enough and quickly drawing conclusions. It appears that there are two critical factors leading to misdiagnosis: time pressure and not listening enough to the patient.
Background on R&D University
In keeping with the experience of 1600 corporate universities (Meister, 1998), a P&G planning team designed an overall R&D University. A total of five Colleges make up the R&D University, one college for each level (band) in the company, starting with incoming scientists and managers at Band 1 up to directors and top technologists at Band 5. A goal for these colleges was to increase levels of marketable innovation, in large part, by increasing networking across business silos to encourage cross-fertilization of thinking. Each one-week College focused on innovation and the R&D core competencies. The six R&D core competencies are:
- Application of technology to business
- Comprehensive consumer understanding
- Holistic innovation
- Business understanding
- Proficient project management
- Valuing diversity for innovation
We started in the middle with Band 3, a group of R&D leaders who coach and/or manage 85 percent of all R&D employees. The R&D senior leaders were frustrated with the level of coaching, mentoring and technical skills that the Band 3 people were providing to their people. Internal survey data suggested the need for greater skill in the area of coaching for Band 3 people —both on the managerial track and the technology track. R&D University was an ideal setting for such an intervention because the College placed Technologists (Principle Scientists and Engineers) and Managers (Section Heads) together in their week-long residential College on “Leading Innovation Programs”. Participants were selected for this College by about 25 VPs (with or without HR assistance) from a pool of 800 Band 3s resulting in four classes a year of about 50 participants per class. Although all Band 3s would eventually be tapped to attend, VPs were told to nominate one Principal Scientist and two Section Heads with an eye on providing a demographically diverse selection consistent with the makeup of their organization.
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