The Coffee Pot Talk

Little did I know that a Coffee Pot Talk could become the linchpin of an organization’s transformation.

Back in 1979 I became the new marketing manager of the Microwave Semiconductor Division of Hewlett-Packard Company.  I was moving from the deep roots of the company as part of the Test and Measurement business and going to another and much newer group in a very different business.  I was also fully aware that I had this opportunity because things were something of a challenge in the department and there were no internal candidates considered ready for the job.

The core symptom was an employee turnover rate of 55% per year.  For HP, the typical rate was about 10%.  Recruiting was a struggle.  Morale was dismal, and it was quickly becoming clear why.  Much of what our people worked on, no matter how well done, was second-guessed and overruled by others.  That included a pattern of decision making within our own department.  It was hard to imagine how anyone went home at night with a belief that “I did something good today.”

The many issues were becoming a crisis.  Feedback from employees showed a clear need for action.   At a department staff meeting, we quickly decided we needed some special effort to fix things.  The division tradition was to hold an offsite management team meeting to work on important issues.  And just before we finalized that step, our International Sales Manager, Frank DiPietro, spoke up.  “The problems are right here in this building.  The people we need to solve them are right here in this building.  Let’s do the work here, and let’s get our department employees involved.”  We all sat in stunned silence for a moment, and of course, that was exactly right.

We quickly put together a team of interested employees and chartered them to identify the key issues and recommend solutions.  After a few weeks, they came back with their report.  The list included a chronic need for training, too many decision makers on every issue, chronic distrust from production on customer order management, and “poor communication”.

The recommended solution for poor communication was to hold a weekly coffee pot talk.  That’s where we would gather the 50 or so department employees at a center spot in the department and as department manager, I would tell everyone everything they needed to know that week.  It had been a tradition before my arrival, and it needed a restart.  That was the recommendation.

The phrase “poor communication” is a synonym and euphemism for “bad management”, and all of us knew it.  I was on the spot, I knew we were going to have a weekly coffee pot talk, and I knew I personally wasn’t up to the task as described.  I was too new and didn’t know enough.  I also had become very concerned that by tradition, the whole pattern of decision making seemed to abdicate too many decisions to me.  I was reluctant to say much of that.

I sat with the group that urged we start the coffee pot talks again.  I said OK but tell me how we can do it, share the responsibilities, and get more people involved.  Also, please suggest a way that we can be sure that we collect the important and relevant information to share.

In about a week, they had a beautiful and simple process.  Schedule the coffee pot talks the day after the department staff meeting.  At each staff meeting designate a staff member, on a rotating basis, to do the coffee pot talk.  Use the staff meeting discussion to collect the key things to share.  Great, and I like it!  As a staff, we added the step of asking the designated speaker to review what they had listed and then as a group we would77 add anything else that might be helpful.

The restart went very smoothly.  The staff managers were closer to the employees, and easily engaged individuals who were doing the things that were reported.  Each of our department managers spoke on behalf of our department, and this simple process seemed to join our department groups together gracefully.  I also began to realize it allowed me to inject supportive comments and share context on some of the issues.  It was just a better fit for everyone.  And that was just the core.

The coffee pot talk became a very effective tool on some of the other issues, and the best example was training.  We did create some extra formal training opportunities.  Yet we also knew there was more training going on than most realized.  At each week’s talk, we would welcome back everyone who had returned from a training event and ask them to say a few words about the experience.  We would mention anyone currently away at some training event.   We mentioned anyone scheduled to go to a training event in the next week.  My goodness, training was going on all the time!  Training ceased to be a concern and became a matter of pride.  There was more to the training program, including a vital self-initiated skills acquisition component … and that’s another story.

My 18 months with the Microwave Semiconductor Division was, for me, a time of high stress, constant contention, and a very different divisional culture from what I understood as the HP Way.  Yet in the last 6 months of that stint, turnover in our marketing department was zero.  Our employees felt supported, felt their work mattered, and that their effort was appreciated.  I am eternally grateful to my colleagues in that department for what I had the opportunity to learn, and for their patience and support to me in a difficult time.