#78 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

👷🏻‍♀️ HR initiative not getting adopted? Don’t fix the wrong thing 

🖼️ Using P.I.C. to diagnose the real performance problem 

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HR initiative not getting adopted? Don’t fix the wrong thing

Someone asked me the question above a few months ago, and I've been mulling it over ever since.

I don't want to write another “here are the 7 steps to designing a People programme” article. Plenty of frameworks already exist for designing programmes, building buy-in, managing change, driving adoption and measuring whether something worked. AI can give you a pretty decent how-to in seconds.

So I am going to tackle it from a different angle. 

When HR leaders ask me this question, I notice they tend to lean towards one of two parts of it:

1️⃣ We hear: “How do I approach each stage of programme management to increase adoption?” 

2️⃣ Or we hear: “Why isn't this shifting people's behaviour in a way that meaningfully aligns with business goals?”

The small distinction that challenges our comfort

The first question is much more comfortable. If people aren't adopting what we've built, we can look for the issue somewhere else: managers aren't engaging, employees don't understand it, leaders aren't role-modelling it, or perhaps we need to communicate more. In other words: Our solution is right, we just need people to do the ‘right’ thing.

The second question is less comfortable because it turns the question back on us. What if the solution we built is wrong? What if people aren't changing their behaviour because we've misunderstood the problem? Or, even worse 😖, what if we've spent months designing something the business doesn't actually need? Now we're not questioning other people's behaviour, we're questioning our own judgement.

I still remember when a career framework I'd built didn't land the way I intended. It was especially frustrating because I'd built something similar in my previous company and it had worked. I remember saying to my manager: “Leaders here just don't get it.” 😑 

And then came the reply that hurt like hell at the time: “JooBee, you can build the best HR solutions, but if people aren't adopting them, usually it's because you're not solving the right problem.”

Did I think he was right? Of course not. I thought he didn't get it either. 😅

It was a hard pill to swallow. But eventually, I understood what he was trying to tell me:

The 3Ds of delivering an HR project 

There are many, many frameworks for delivering a HR project/product. Over time, I've come to think about it in 3 very simple stages:

• Diagnose: What problem are we trying to solve?

• Design: What solution should we build to solve it?

• Deploy: How do we launch, embed and iterate it?

When an HR project doesn't lead to the business outcome we hoped for, the order matters. Our instinct is often to look at the last 2 (Design and Deploy) to figure out what's not working. But before doing more work on either, I would go all the way back to Diagnose.

Great execution cannot rescue the wrong diagnosis

Imagine you wake up one morning with a headache. You go to the doctor, and they prescribe you the world's best pair of glasses. The glasses are beautifully made. The prescription is precise. You receive excellent instructions for wearing them. You even get reminders from your doctor to wear them every single day.

But if your headache was caused by dehydration, better glasses design or adoption isn't going to fix it.

Because great Design and brilliant Deployment cannot compensate for getting the Diagnosis wrong.

Using P.I.C. to diagnose the real performance problem 

I use a simple framework called P.I.C. to Diagnose the problem we actually need to solve. Capturing the diagnosis this way also helps me organise how I communicate it to influence decisions.

P.I.C. is simple, but getting to a good P.I.C. is not. 😅  Your first answer is rarely the real problem, it takes iterative questioning to get underneath it. 

Recently, I worked with an HR leader preparing for a conversation with their founder. She came in wanting a performance framework for leaders who were underperforming. I've changed some of the details, but I want to show you the before and after and how much changed in just 30 minutes of questioning.

(BEFORE) Diagnosis = “Our leadership team isn't working together”

This was roughly where we started.

On the surface, this isn’t a bad diagnosis. And if we stopped here, we’d probably start considering solutions such as executive team coaching, a Team Charter session or working with the founder to set clearer expectations and delegate more effectively. 

BUT…. we were diagnosing the organisation almost entirely through a People lens 👀. 

Even the Impact was still a People problem: the founder is too involved. I still didn't know what this was stopping the business from achieving. So I asked them to park the People problems for a moment.

"Why is this important to solve now for the business?”

That opened up a very different conversation. The business needed to raise its next round in nine months. To do that, it needed significantly more revenue. There were major deals in the pipeline, but they weren't progressing quickly enough. 

So we kept digging.

• Who actually owns getting these deals over the line?

• Where are they getting stuck?

• What needs to happen between sales and the technical team to close them?

• And why isn't that happening?

Thirty minutes later, our P.I.C. looked very different.

(AFTER) Diagnosis = “We might not hit the revenue we need to raise our next round”

The P.I.C.ture (pun intended 😁) now looks very different

And therefore, so does the solution. 

With the first diagnosis, we might work with the founder to set clearer expectations and delegate more effectively or run a Team Charter to help the executive team work better together.

With the second, I wouldn’t start with the executive team at all. We have two leaders who urgently need to deliver the same revenue goal, but the way work, incentives and expectations are set up is pulling them apart. 

Suddenly, reward (which wasn’t even a consideration before) might be a priority. So might clearer ownership of deals and different expectations of the leaders involved. We can also see why the founder keeps getting pulled into the weeds. It may not simply be that he struggles to let go. He’s worried the revenue isn’t coming and that impacts business continuity.

Better diagnosis = better solution

When we diagnose well, we don’t reach for a generic People/HR solution and then try to ‘convince’ everyone to adopt it. We target the solution at the problem the business actually needs solved.

Look at those two diagnoses again.

Which one do you think will get immediate buy-in from the founder?

What do you need to STEP UP next?