Sailboat does 40 knots in 25 knot breeze. Why?

Collaboration is good if you’re not in a hurry. Yeah, right (Not). Surprisingly for many, collaboration is essential when you're in a hurry to win.

Take for example the speed of the New Zealand team in designing and proving its AC72 hydrofoil catamaran (a sail boat, but not as we know it Jim) for the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco. Amazingly, the cat can do more than 40 knots in less than 25 knots of breeze. But more amazing than that is the speed of their development programme.

It’s especially amazing to dyed-in-the-wool corporate managers like former Energy Company CEO and now corporate Chair, Keith Turner. (Keith Turner. Innovation the key for Team NZ. The New Zealand Herald, Thursday May 2, 2013)

To his conventional corporate eyes, it’s miraculous:

“The speed of learning that [NZ’s] team has generated in transforming an idea into world-leading practice is quite extraordinary”

“The culture of the team is outstanding”.

“I was also amazed to see a team assembled from all corners of the world, working on a common cause like there is no tomorrow. Designers from the world's leading experts coming together, not just for money but to participate in something truly great but with a tremendous sense of humility. That is a great lesson for corporate learning.”

To my eyes what he describes is the power of collaborative learning; failing fast and falling forward in unity. My question is how do they get to be like that; why do they behave so differently to common corporate practice?

Turner seems to pay attention to the “what” and make assumptions about the “why”. He notices that they “learn on each other’s shoulders” but is unclear about whether that’s because they are committed or that they are committed to collaborating: 

“The sailors, the designers, the weather men are so committed together they are leaning on each other's shoulders working out what they learned the day before, how they can change the design tonight and how they can make the boat go faster tomorrow.”

Awareness of the distinction between commitment and commitment to collaborating can be indicated by adding a comma to the first line of the above sentence:

“the [men] are so committed, together they are [learning]”  

 “the [men] are so committed together, they are [learning]”.

Though Turner notices that the pace at which the team “catapult their ideas forward” and attributes it to an “extraordinary learning culture”, he seems to attribute that culture to the usual suspects: commitment to purpose and “extraordinary leadership”: 

“The team has been able to catapult their ideas forward at such a pace, despite the multitude of cultures present, to innovate, to spring off each other's dumb questions and to learn so quickly that in three years they have gone from knowing virtually nothing about AC72s to being now one of the best in the world. What an extraordinary learning culture.”

“What extraordinary leadership to engender such culture. Grant Dalton lives with his heart on his sleeve. He's frank, he's unassuming and he's driven. He's intense. Dalton is very much a what you see is what you get and no frills. He has welded a world-performing team together in an incredibly short space of time to achieve extraordinary performance.”

Are commitment to purpose and extraordinary leadership sufficient to replicate such fast and effective learning? I don’t believe so. In order to replicate this exceptional learning organisation we need to go much deeper than simply describing purpose and leadership.

We must delve into questions like, where does this cultural ability to spring off others’ dumb questions come from, and how do we learn to do it? How is that ability related to the leader’s candour? What is it that bonds the team? Did the leader “weld” them together or is the bonding much less rigid, less orderly and less mechanical? Much softer, fuzzier and flexible, yet far more powerful?

To transform organisations to achieve like Team NZ it’s not enough to describe and understand the general effect and generalised causes. We must learn to perceive and behave in specifically different ways from the way we normally do in organisations. The difference is fundamental. Unless we begin to personally experience changed behaviour, even our understanding is unlikely to go beyond conventional corporate perspective such as Keith Turner’s – we won’t have a clue what it might feel like to be in Team NZ let alone how to do it ourselves.

The guys (and girls) in Team NZ have experienced something very different - effective collaboration. They’ll have a hard job communicating that experience to others unless those others get to experience something like it. Until then, there’s nothing much to productively talk about.

The problem is to devise and operate ways to enable people to experience deep collaboration when they have no practicable notion of what it is, having never knowingly experienced it; how to get them to risk attempting something that seems odd, uncomfortable and stupid then collaboratively fail fast and fall forward; how to get high achievers to risk failing in order to learn something that they can’t understand?

The best place to do that is on-the-job; opportunistically in the semi-structured messiness of business, dealing with actual business events. Some educational institutions are beginning to wrestle with this, against the flow of conventional market expectation and against their own institutional cultures, structures and practices. The University of Auckland, Graduate School of Business is one. Having spotted that there’s an international market for business people who can collaborate and generate collaboration, they’re building a practice orientated Master’s programme aimed at doing that.

If it’s going to work, building and delivering the programme itself will be an experiential case in learning to collaborate.. 

20 yrs Advice and Advisors Changed Nothing Much.

There’s no shortage of advice and advisors for Kiwi SME owners: plenty of “should do this” and “should do that”; “should use TOC” or “should do a one-page-plan; “shouldn’t be satisfied with the 3Bs (boat, BMW & batch)”; and “should be aiming to be global magnates”. And why should they do these things? Because NZ needs them to create wealth, that’s why. But 20 years of advice, advisor, mentors, consultants, coaches or whatever hasn’t done the trick. Why? 

At least part of the reason is that SME owners don’t have the time or patience for advice unless it’s immediately, practicably useful. Regardless of how justified, well meaning or authoritative it is, or how virtuous or good, it’s unlikely to have the prescribed effect unless it pops up at the right moment coming from the right person. 

Advice works when, for some reason, the owner is unusually receptive and keen to change, and when it comes from or through someone that the owner trusts to produce the change. It’s an opportunistic, entrepreneurial process. Not a corporate planning exercise.

Trouble is most advisors aren’t business experienced entrepreneurs. They’re more likely ex-corporate executives or experts who, though they think they understand the SME owner, have never experienced actually having their own tender parts on the line; have always spent someone else’s money with only a salary and bonuses at risk. 

And that’s not all. 50% of current SME owners are 55-70 yr old baby-boomers whose success in business is largely due to an exceptional coincidence of market opportunity and technical and entrepreneurial talent. Over 90% of SME start-ups disappear within 3 years. Only about 2% grow to be more that a job for the owner. 

That 2% aren’t successful because they went to university. More likely they left school early. They’re not successful because they read endless business books or adopted every new TQM, Zero Defect, Process Re-Engineering or whatever Management fad that raged virus-like through the corporate world.

They’re successful because of who they are, what they’re naturally good at, what they happened to do, and when they happened to do it. Why would they be keen to change, especially when the advice comes from a stranger claiming to have the answer?

A current example from my experience is a substantial client whom we met through a long trusted agent/advisor of his who is also a trusted business friend of ours. The introduction coincided with the client facing unexpected demand for a new product he’d developed. 

In conversation we learn that although 70 next birthday, he’s tired of being the general and operations manager - at the centre of everything – because he wants to focus on what he loves and is good at – developing new products and processes. He has a list of possible projects. 

I ask him, “In the best of all possible worlds, how many of these projects would you like to take to fruition.” “All of them,” he says.  “What’s stopping you?” I ask. He’s silent for a moment then replies, “No one asked me that before. My bank manager, accountant, solicitor and friends all ask “What would you want to that for (at your age)?”” “Look”, I say, “there isn’t much you don’t know about your industry and we personally know very little. So we're not proposing to teach you to suck eggs. But we do have the skills, knowledge, direct experience and network to help you remove the barriers to achieving your goal; to profitably exit what you don’t like, profitably get into what you do. It’ll take 3-4 years and involve a lot of change, including you.” 

To cut the story short, we’re eight months into the project on his condition: that we complete it in 2 years not 3-4. 

We aren’t “doing TOC” with him per se, or “one-page-plan” or any other “tool” or programme. But we are using those and many other approaches and techniques in a rolling-wave project to achieve his goals. In the process we're engaging with him and his people experientially so that in two years that knowledge and skill will be “built into” the organisation(s). The bits he then sells for a high price will be a great buy for new owners who likely are or want to be global magnates. He can keep the other highly profitable bits he likes. 

The thing is we met him at that right time and through connections he trusts. Notice also that like him we are also baby boomers and like him we are also SME experienced entrepreneurs. Unlike him we have high-level specialist business skills and knowledge that he knows he lacks. He trusts us and we trust him too.

What’s changed in 12 months?

Maybe it’s now obvious that the economy isn’t going to simply  “bounce back”; maybe the pressure for enduring radical change is closer to tipping point.

Nevertheless, so long as our circumstances allow us to ignore or deny that - allow individuals and organisations to simply blame others for failures and claim credit for fortunate successes, nothing new is learned and nothing changed.

National politics is obviously dominated by that sort of behaviour. It’s less publicly obvious in business where executives, earning 50+ times their employee’s average wage, continue to take bonuses and repeat their sorcery for the next anxiously credulous company. 

The most likely place for transformational change to break out is on the fringes of markets and industries, in outlying parts of larger organisations and in smaller firms (SMEs).

However, though SMEs  don’t have the bureaucratic burden and organisational inertia of big firms, they are likely locked into their own historical co-dependent behaviours and relationships. Those behaviours and relationships developed around and out of the founders personality and skills coupled with complementary market opportunity. Through them the firm survived and grew – succeeded. That success, perversely, shuts out new learning and change. 

An army of conventional mentors, coaches, consultants, and educators won’t change that because they’re locked into their own conventional histories. To have transformative effect they must first transform themselves and their organisations. But they have the very same impediments that their clients have. How then do we break this single loop control circuit?

I’m writing about this in a series of posts in another blog http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog  

Business Exit Ltd is a collaboration of mature business people who, for one reason or another, have been fortunate to experience transformative change and to experience leading it too. Our passion is to collaboratively exercise and develop our unusual experiential knowledge and wisdom, for good. 

Although we are mature (old dogs), we are keen and effective learners, putting the lie to assumptions about change being the preserve of youth. To the contrary, we observe that young, educated people these days are strongly risk (change) averse.

We are interested to hear other’s stories as well as share our own.

How to be successful in 2012 and beyond (II)

Pervasive belief in individualistic self-improvement, goal achievement, profligate consumption and bullshit opulence was the target of my previous post: the tongue-in-cheek rant “How to be successful in 2012 and beyond” . 

The satire was too subtle (or maybe too long) for some. For instance a friend commented on Facebook, "Hey Steve, it's not that I don't believe in what you say... but I've had one hell of a 2011, and none of it was planned. Happy New Year and very best for 2012, planned or not."

I replied, “ My (satirical) point precisely. I'd say you have had a very successful year "dancing in the moment".

The thing is that he and we all seem to have become so accustomed, so programmed to the mantra of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement that we tend not to see or value other forms of success.

This was highlighted for me in 2011 when as business development coach I “went back on the tools” a couple or three days per week to provide some flexible trades capacity in a client’s property maintenance business while we set it up for growth.

Not surprisingly the growth strategy includes niche-focusing, differentiating, and enhancing the value of his services, so to increase the price. 

Turns out that the first task was to rebuild his concept of the value of what he does.  His belief was that his service is manual work and therefore low status, low value, competing on price.

I can understand his belief. You don’t have to look far to see that success is widely regarded as not-doing manual work. It’s indicated by graduating from manual to administrative work. The further you are removed from the manual work into administrating it the higher the financial rewards and status. High paid people don’t get their hands dirty. This is I think grotesquely apparent in the differential between shop-floor and CEO remuneration.

I set out to convince him that despite the virtualisation of many aspects of contemporary life and the reification  of financial services, administration  and “knowledge work”, people still dwell in bricks and mortar. They depend on built-in utility equipment and services that suffer wear and tear. At the same time, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and renovate these things, or even to install them properly in the first place, are increasingly alien to most.

The value of that skill and knowledge becomes acutely apparent with hard times, natural disaster, and environmental degradation when maintenance and renovation become a favourable alternative to profligate consumption.

Another thing I discovered with working on the tools was that I quickly got fit. There’s something about sustained physical activity that can’t be achieved in a thrice weekly, intense, hour-long gym workout, no matter how hard you go.

It wasn’t only the physical health but also the mental health of directly creative activity and tangible product – such a contrast to sedentary intellectual work in a typically manipulative bureaucratic setting.

I mentioned my re-evaluation of manual work to a surgeon friend who replied that surgery is labour. This was confirmed when a paediatrician friend confirmed that surgeons have lower status in medical circles than other medical specialists because they are the plumbers, fitters, carpenters and decorators.  

To return to the opening topic: in contemporary life it seems that success has become such a narrow and distorted belief that it rules out pretty much all people and activity except being on target to become or being a Glossy-model-looking CEO in “knowledge work” living at peak-consumption. 

That has got to be sick. My successful business clients, in terms of profitability, health and contribution to society, have overcome that programming to find a much more fruitful concept of success. It’s about finding hope, joy, and peace in doing good things together: in collaborative enterprise. 

That’s practically the antithesis of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement.

What is & what produces organisational health?

The GFC highlighted that what we measure, for organisational health, determines what we get. As Colin Price, Director, McKinsey & Company, puts it in his Dec 14 2010 blog on MIX: “Focusing exclusively on performance  simply does not produce long-term shareholder value,  sustainable competitive advantage, or an ability to achieve the mandates of the organization in the public sector.”

Price proposes instead that organisational health is: “the ability to get aligned, to execute at a world-class level, and to renew.”  I’ll go for that. Those are the abilities I want, but I’m still left with the problem of what to do to produce that kind of health. 

Achieving that health requires us to see our organisations in a revolutionary new way: not as bureaucratic hierarchical machines but as communities of collaborating people. Seen in that light, the fundamental purpose of all the policies, procedures, systems, processes is to enable, to free people to collaborate better.

Thus organisational health has its roots in the health of the interrelationships between the people that comprise the organisation.  So what are healthy interrelationships and how do you get them?

Some useful perspectives can be drawn from the field of population health: the qualities of interrelationships that produce community wellness and productivity, and conversely illness and dysfunction are fairly well known and are evident, for instance, in the recovery approach to mental illness.

To achieve the kind of organisational health that Price proposes we have to revolutionise the way we see and manage our organisations: the purpose, nature and content of our organisational communication and interrelationships. That requires concerted, deliberate action to change the detail of the way we communicate with each other  at work. 

For more on this see How to Fix a Mental Organisation (December 2009) and my more recent blogs (December 2010).

Communication compulsory in only 50% of NZ undergraduate Business degrees when employers want skilled communicators

Research by Sandra Barnett & Susan O'Rourke, published in the December 2010 issue of the Communication Journal of New Zealand, shows that although employers want graduates skilled in communication, business communication is compulsory in only 50% of Business degrees from major NZ tertiary education institutions. On top of that, it's very difficult for employers to gauge what graduates may have gained from any communication courses that they did complete.

In contrast to USA & Europe, New Zealand undergraduate business education grew largely out of the accountancy field. As a result most Bachelors of Commerce have not included business communication. It has long been included in the NZ Diploma of Business but focused on skills seen as appropriate to the relatively narrow requirements of the accounting profession rather than to business in the wider sense.

With recent writers in the business management field calling for a transformation in management and organisational communication (see Stephen Denning, The death & reinvention of management. Nov 2010) it seems clear that a transformation in communication education is overdue.

Further indication of the importance of sophisticated communication skill is in the December 2010 McKinsey Quarterly.  In “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday” McKinsey report research showing that firms are experiencing measurable benefits in increased speed of access to knowledge, effectiveness of marketing, reduced communication costs and increased customer satisfaction.

I issued a challenge to communication educators at the December 2010 annual conference of the New Zealand Communication Association, to transform the way they organise and do communication education. Actually I challenge them to transform the way that business education generally is organised and done. Read my challenge here: Wanted: communication educators for management revolution.

How to be understood

Rule # 1: expect to be misunderstood. Mostly, we assume that understanding is normal. Wrong. Ask any spouse, sibling, parent, or lover. 

Successful service-sales and service-delivery people for instance, have woken up to this through competitive pressure, grinding experience, and objective analysis. Then by deliberate, focused action they have changed their assumptions and their behaviour.

They know the cost and risk of misunderstanding is high. They manage that risk by specialising and standardising their processes; by building durable interpersonal customer-relationships for learning and forgiveness; and continually seeking to delight the customer.  It becomes second nature – tacit.

But put those same sales and service people in a changed environment, even slightly different, and they can easily come unstuck. That now-tacit knowledge that has served them so proudly may well not work in the new environment.

This has been highlighted for me in my health service business development work. The New Zealand health services sector is in turmoil: yet another major government policy driven re-organisation; around the sixth in eight years.

This time it’s to vertically and horizontally merge and integrate health services. This when competition has been king and professional collaboration suspected as feather bedding; fear and loathing have become strong undercurrents in relationships between health professionals and their managers, between managers and between the managers of different organisations.

Competitors have become entrenched in their niches, adapted and fine tuned to the bureaucratic motivations and behaviour of their health sector customers, while the health professionals immersed themselves in their consumer relationships. 

Suddenly these competitors have to merge and join up.  Can they communicate to achieve that productively and innovatively? Fat chance! Misunderstanding reaches new heights: evidence, real and imagined, of defamation, misinformation and skulduggery is everywhere in an environment of fear and loathing. Even longstanding trusting relationships are suspect.

Mergers and join-ups that do occur are suspected as, and at least some are, driven by self interest and political gain, and as a result are slow to be productive in the essentially collaborative, professional, vocational world of health service.

So what can be done? Answer: expect to be misunderstood and take the time and trouble to find shared understanding in shared metaphor (stories) and experience; shared purpose; joint projects. Trust is found in action not argument.

Share your perspectives and reflections on that joint action by sharing stories. Be more than two dimensional “role holders.” Share stories about yourselves.
Remember you are dating with marriage in mind. The time to invest in the durability, mutual productivity, and enjoyment of that potential relationship is at the outset. Sacrifice “task” progress to build shared understanding.

The guy/woman you find so frustrating may not be a linear analytical, task oriented, conventional high achiever like you. He/she may think in pictures, think laterally to solve puzzles and make sense of seeming confusion; thinking that’s likely not crucial in the production environment that you have excelled in, but is crucial in a fast changing environment.

In step with Management.

Left, right, left, right, left. Is good management Left or Right?

Neither ‘of course’. Management is apolitical! Right? Management objectively, dispassionately maximises value for shareholders.

In a recently broadcast video clip from a few years back, BP’s CEO, addressing what looks like an MBA seminar, says “BP has spent too much time saving the world and it’s time to get back to maximising value to shareholders.” 

A super lucky survivor of the BP’s recent deep-sea rig explosion and fire (he jumped 100’ from the rig into the oil covered burning sea because the life boats had already gone) reported that despite clear evidence that the rubber blow-out seal had been seriously damaged, with consequent serious risk of blow-out and fire, Management decided not to stop and fix it. There was pressure to  be ready for BP officials due to visit  the rig to celebrate the success and recognise the project’s safety record! It’s like a re-run of the Challenger disaster but massively more destructive.

The survivor reported  officials were on the rig when it blew up. Maybe it was the officials who broke strict protocol and abandoned ship (and many crew including the captain) before accounting for everyone.

Managers are in charge, right? They have authority to hire and fire right? Who’s anatomy’s on the line if things go wrong? The manager’s, right? Who makes the decisions? Managers, right? Who’s job is it to know and be right? Managers’, right? If you’re wrong or you don’t know you’re not fit to be a manager right? Right! Yeah, right.

These assumptions are endemic in many (perhaps most) organisations despite espousals and ‘systems’ to the contrary. They are made by both managers and managed alike. These assumptions persist despite overwhelming evidence that they are not only unproductive but are destructive except perhaps in large scale replication where people are  no more than substitute machine parts. 

Are these characteristics and attributes of capital “M” for Management hallmarks of  the (political) Right? Are the critics of Management lackeys of the Left?

For instance, those who question the wisdom of Management are typically assumed to be questioning established authority; to be ‘bolshie’ – politically Left.

Management tends to favour maintaining established values and hierarchy:  characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Those who advocate and live collaboration, sharing, and collective responsibility are typically regarded as  politically Left.

Management practice generally  promotes individual responsibility and reward; characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Even Christianity seems somehow to be identified with the political Right even though Christianity questions authority and promotes sharing community, at the same time as it promotes traditional values and individual responsibility.

It seems to me that good management and Christianity are neither Left nor Right and may actually have a lot in common.

Much of contemporary popular management literature effectively plagiarises Biblical wisdom. Take for instance vision and purpose led business; discovering and playing to individuals’ strengths; discovering the engaging, innovating power of doing good things together; selling goods and services and optimising supply chains through genuine, mutually serving relationships and collaboration; individuals’ responsibility to maximise the value of their talents.

The sooner we remove the blinkers of political stereotyping and get seriously down to the work of turning the Word or words into living reality, the better.

How many environmental and economic catastrophes does it take for interrelational behaviour-change to be explicit in every organisation’s top five strategic priorities? When will specific interpersonal behaviour-change figure in everyone’s KPIs?

Pretty damn soon I hope.

Is your firm “mental”? Probably.

Have you ever noticed how dysfunctional relationships between the people in organisations commonly are?

Have you noticed the apparently endemic scheming, manipulating, back-biting, bullying, blaming and shaming, personality clashes and communication breakdowns? Have you ever felt angry or depressed about that? No? Then maybe you work in an exceptional organisation, or in splendid isolation, or you are on “happy pills”.

After “quite a few” years in corporate, institutional and business life I’ve come to the view that the average firm is “mental”; meaning it is dysfunctional: a psychologically unhealthy place to be.

Dysfunctionality isn’t OK but it is normal, so it’s what’s expected and tolerated. We can effectively deny it’s an issue until the competition pays attention to it and begins to overcome it. Then, if we are to survive, we too must seek to become a “high functioning organisation”.

Several years ago I got to work with academics and practitioners in the mental health sector and became acquainted with the Recovery Approach to individual and community mental health. Out of that interaction I co-wrote chapter 7 in Clinical Management in Mental Health Services. December 2008. Blackwell: London.

There Samson Tse and I outlined for mental health practitioners how they could relate and apply their clinical knowledge and methodology, the Recovery Approach, to their dysfunctional mental health service organisations.

When I recently began working with an NGO in the mental health sector this piece of work once again became prominent for me. So much so perhaps that when I was recently asked “What is your profession?” I replied, “Organisational Therapist”! The ensuing conversation inspired my previous blog post “What to do about bullying.”

Check out the Recovery Approach. You may find, as I have, that although it’s designed as a treatment for people who are ill, it’s broadly speaking an interpersonal-relationship and community-based way to keep people well and foster creativity, collaboration and engagement in shared purpose. That’s what contemporary organisations need to compete by continuous innovation in the world today.

Sugar Party Hangover

I’ve had it with the barrage of packaged advice from business gurus, icons and stars – axioms and aphorisms on how to be successful: summary lists that pretend to make simple the complexities of human collaboration. It clearly sells business books, newspapers, seminars and fills the e-waves. But to little tangible effect that I’ve seen.

It’s not that the advice is bad. It’s more the way it’s communicated and consumed like candy for sugar hungry kid’s at a party: a lolly scramble, a sugar rush, a burst of high excitement, energy and frantic bonhomie, then back to normal.

The main learning’s how to scramble to win the most lollies; that the most lollies equals the most fun.

This was highlighted for me over the last couple of weeks beginning with a whole day of Jack Daly, the sales phenomenon extraordinaire (see my last week’s blog ). Then there was my colleague Stephen Lynch’s RESULTS.com Business Growth Tip summarising New York Times 4th April “Corner Office” interview with John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay .

For me the key learning to be had from Jack Daly and John Donahoe isn’t in how they made themselves successful but in how others enabled them to be successful and how they in turn enabled others.

For instance, half of jack Daly’s seminar was about how to create a climate in which others can excel.

The main theme of John Donahoe’s reflection and the key to his leadership is what he communicates and the way he communicates it so that others can learn, and how he learned to do that.

He says that feedback from six monthly performance reviews was powerfully effective in his formation and development. He espouses and practices candid communication. He enables people to discover and play to their strengths and passions.

Jack and John didn’t make themselves, overnight. They didn’t just swallow the magic lollies that their audiences crave. Sure, they had a big hand in their own development but they were hugely fortunate to have wise others who guided, enabled and facilitated that slow learning process.

John Donahoe recalls that every six months or so he’d get a rigorous performance review (in latter years 20 pages thick) that included everything he could possibly do better. He came to regard the feedback as liberating; a gift, and wasn’t afraid of it.

He found that a third of the feedback would be no surprise: for his long-term attention and change - still an issue the next year and the year after.

A third of it would be insight into his blind spots for himself and others – new awareness of areas for change .

A third of it he would ignore ignore and keep doing what he wanted to do.

From that experience he learned to “try to do the same for the people around me, and give them open, objective feedback offered in a constructive way.”

The focus here is on manager/leader communication behaviour. There is no magic pill. These guys learned to communicate the hard way. Yet how many firms who heard Tom Peters’ fervent exhortation six months ago in Auckland to implement communication training, if nothing else, have done that? I’ll wager <3%. The audience craved sugar pills.

Got culture?

How does your culture smell? Honestly. Is your culture able to change? Do you have the radical transparency needed to change: to produce high performing sales teams, production teams, design teams, management teams . . . . . . .  or are you still stuck in the age of bullsh*t; still demanding engagement.

Last week I spent a day at a seminar by the super sales guy Jack Daly: story teller, successful ironman, richman, golfer, husband, grandfather, not-gardener.   Jack super energetically dealt with “how to sell more” then  he (just as energetically but more seriously) got down to “how to get others to sell more”. His focus was “culture”.

Jack quoted John Kotter’s (Corporate Culture and Performance. 1992) 10 yr study of 12 firms  showing the massive difference in revenue, stock price, net income and job growth that attention to culture produces.

As Jack observes culture normally gets overlooked in the usual business rush because it’s not urgent. I’d add that it’s also because managers and the managed are typically blind to culture and anyway, culture change is too slow to achieve inside an annual plan.

Every organisation has a culture. Even a new organisation has one. It came with the people who joined the organisation.  Culture is unconscious reflex assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.  Culture is self-sealing. What we see and experience tends to confirm what we already “know”: our assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.

How hard is it to change culture? Consider changing the culture of Samoa for instance. Well the early Christian missionaries did it. It took a magnetic, compelling vision; the right people in the right place; and their collective purpose and conviction (strong organisational culture): their passion to make a particular difference.

The aftermath of a crisis is a great opportunity to initiate a culture change. The window doesn’t last long (see The emperor has no clothes). It’s not long before people shut up because they “know what’s good for them”(see Learning for change feels risky).  If you don’t have a crisis, then create one to engender a sense of urgency (John Kotter. A Sense of Urgency. 2008).

The inherent unkindness of organisations

In his May 27 blog Word-of-Mouth Starts with Kindness Zane Safrit states unequivocally that

“Kindness is inherent in all of us. Unfortunately, we encounter too many obstacles, of our individual and collective making.”

I think I agree with Zane though I’d put it like this: The attribute most ignored, even denied in organisations is our passionate desire to do good things together.

Most people just LOVE to do good things together. They’ll even do it for free if the vision is “good” enough and process “together” enough.

That love is kind of like the Higgs Boson of community: the force that gives substance to community; that brings community into being.

Community materialises out of interpersonal space through communication relationships. The quality of community is dependent on the quality of communication.

Viewed that way the obstacles to achieving good things together are the bad communication habits and the associated assumptions that we first learned at school, developed at university, and now typically unconsciously perpetuate at work as managers and subordinates:

Success is essentially individualistic and competitive; collaboration is a burden; the manager knows the right answers; communication is from the manager; work is tasks; knowledge is information and information is power; and individuals are to blame for their own success and failure.

In truth, vital community and vital business depend on kindness, thoughtfulness, helpfulness, openness, and forgiveness; and on collaboration to generate good data, to interpret it into information, to comprehend it into knowledge and to practice it wisely and imaginatively.

So the challenge is to unlearn the communication habits and the assumptions about organisation that first imprinted us at school where industrial-mode education determines that we are organised in rows, facing and obediently receiving our training from the authority at the front who demands that we produce our ‘own work’ to the specified nature and standard.

Then, as managers and subordinates we perpetuate that model of unkindness and wonder why our organisations lack community (call it lack of engagement if you like). . . . . . . . . .

It’s no secret: mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work!

In his May 28 Business Growth Tip , RESULTS.com COO Stephen Lynch says that he’s “become a bit jaded” with the many business books he reads. “Gimmicky book titles that promise much but deliver no actionable value, empty platitudes presented as if they were profound and original ideas, the so-called “secrets” of celebrity leaders. . . . . . . ”

I’m with Stephen. To me the popular literature on business, leadership, and management seems to pander to the gullible market for success-magic. It has little effect on actual organisational behaviour; on business execution; on actually doing things differently to get a different result.

The academic literature isn’t helpful either: typically descriptive with narrow causal analysis, it may be fine for increasing understanding (amongst academics at least) but if there was any direct link between understanding and changed behaviour then university Business Schools would rule the business world.

Even the best of the popular Business Management literature seems to bang away monotonously at the KPI mantra –repackaged management-by-objectives (MBO).

Mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work! There is no short list of steps that will actually change your business. That’s because change is opportunistic: the opportunities are in the chaotic, ambiguous reality that surges and flows around and under the apparently orderly surface of conventional business practice. That’s the world of interpersonal communication.

In a recent professional coaching conversation we discovered, once we got beneath the stock answers and platitudes, that the keys to business coaching success are in insight and transformation (discontinuous shifts in perception and behaviour). These phenomena are serendipitous, not the product of hard-grind managerial planning and control systems.

That’s not to dismiss planning and control. It’s to say that if business success lies in change then the key is in whatever enables us to swim gracefully and purposefully in comparative chaos and ambiguity.

And that’s where the management literature, popular or otherwise, doesn’t seem to go. It’s stuck in a simplistic model of science: of laws and formulae, of controlled, deductive, causal reasoning. That’s not sufficient in the dynamic, complex world of interpersonal relationships that are at the heart of business and change. It’s interpersonally that people actually make new sense of chaos and ambiguity.

But how often in “Business” books do you see any mention of interpersonal communication strategy? Seldom, I reckon. There’s plenty of attention to ‘positioned’ communication in sales and marketing, but scant attention to interpersonal communication at home except perhaps in putting policies-and-procedures-in-place.

Here are a few tips: pay attention to the verbatim detail of communication behaviour. Reflect together on the detail of what people said compared to what they thought. Learn to communicate assertively. It’s an art that's not normal in Management. Assertive communication behaviours can be learned but the process is slow and determined and you'll need all the help you can get from your work-mates.

The secret of successful execution

The secret is effective interpersonal communication.

It bugs me that hardly any firms deliberately develop specific interpersonal communication skills and climate. It’s as if the notion of Communication is missing from collective management consciousness (except perhaps as ‘clear communication’).

What ‘got me going again’ was a client who having ‘done’ the soft ‘HR’ stuff: resolving toxic relationships in admin; management agreeing to design jobs and ‘organisational structure’ around their best people rather than expecting the reverse; and management agreeing a recruitment and succession plan and budget, decided that the next step is to focus on; get hard-nosed about; kick butt on KPIs (performance).

There seems to me to be a yawning gap in that sequence: a gap, which pervades management thinking, between the intention and actually achieving high performance. The gap is effective communication; communication that achieves purpose.

Plenty of attention seems to be paid to communicating numbers: accounts, sales, production. Enlightened managers even pay attention to identifying shared values, determining responsibilities and accountabilities (KPIs) and reviewing performance (Verne Harnish). Enlightened salespeople pay attention to building interpersonal communication relationships with current and prospective customers (Neil Rackham).

But typically the actual, specific interpersonal communication behaviours, patterns, attitudes and beliefs inherent in those activities receive little if any deliberate, specific attention. It’s as if there’s a widespread unconscious assumption that effective communication somehow magically happens if you get the right people with the right values, clear about the right responsibilities and accountabilities and they meet with the right frequency and the right task focus.

Well, clearly it typically doesn’t magically happen except perhaps for some people who fortunately are ‘naturally’ effective communicators just like some are naturally effective entrepreneurs. Just as entrepreneurship can be understood and learned (Jim Collins) so too can effective communication (What do they hear?) but where and how can we learn it?

Though Jim assumes that Entrepreneurship is learned in the many university business school courses and programmes, I disagree. At university business schools people typically learn to analyse and describe business, not to do it. The one thing that Business Schools typically don’t have and can’t teach is business sense and that’s at the core of entrepreneurship. It’s similar for communication.

Communication is learned by guided (coached) reflection on actual shared communication experience – on the job, in the role. Not in a ‘learning’ institution. Modern universities disable and discourage effective communication simply by the way they are organised (administrative bureaucracy). It takes a special organisational climate to enable reflective practice: one that’s rare in our X type Management dominated world (Telco allergy).

Get an experienced communication coach to work with you to enable you to learn together to communicate more effectively.

What do they hear?

I gotta wonder what others heard when Tom Peters spoke to NZ SME owners at an Auckland seminar on Thur 19 Feb 2009 and to a conference of Results.com (NZ) partners, coaches, administrators and BDMs the next day.

If Voxy (American Business Guru Tom Peters Offers Hope to Kiwi Companies During Visit on Voxy) and the NZ Herald (Tom Peters Top tips: To pull through the recession) are a good indication then what seemed to me to be Tom's key message seems to have been lost in the panic. It's all the usual managerial stuff.

Tom's emphasis on interrelationships between people seems to have been lost in translation and selective listening.

My take on what he said is that interpersonal communication and relationships are the key: upstream and downstream of the business and particularly inside it. For instance, he emphasised several times that he would be very disappointed if there was as a single firm in the room (350 people) that didn’t, as a result of his seminar, implement a programme to develop listening and talking skills and behaviours of its people. (I'd put money on no more than a hand-full doing anything more than a token action).

That’s how fundamental he thinks effective communication is to business survival and growth. He even ventured that business strategy isn’t the prime issue - communication and relationships are: if the relationships and communication are effective then effective strategy will emerge and be implemented; that learning and change will happen and that ability to learn, change and innovate is the crucial competitive advantage in this economic climate.

In other words, the interrelationships within and around the owner and his firm are perhaps his greatest asset. . But the interrelationships probably receive the least direct attention, certainly aren’t on the balance sheet, and probably aren’t measured! (If Tom's right, then maybe it'd be a different story if the owner is a woman)

As Tom said, effective communication can be learned and interrelationships made more effective.

Trouble is that the usual managerial actions to send the people to a course on “Effective Presentations” and/or “Handling Difficult People” won’t do it. Making it a KPI won’t do it. Making it someone else’s responsibility won’t do it.

It’s a slow process that begins by the boss by changing his/her behaviour. They have to work with others to do it. They have to learn to communicate better to do it. They have to learn new communication habits. They have to be personal, emotional, and intimate: messy qualities and behaviours typically avoided in “business”.

There are some “obvious” things that can be done to begin to improve the quality of communication like revisit your BHAG (Jim Collins) and building emotion and passion into those Rockefeller habits (Verne Harnish). They can recruit communicators. They can create opportunities for themselves and their people to be ‘real’.

They can pay attention to the little thoughtful things that Tom demonstrated achieve apparently miraculous effect. And there are many other important, focused strategies they can implement to develop and get the best return on their relational asset.

Will they get it? I reckon that some will, with some excellent coaching.