Change Your Attitude or Die Like a Frog

No matter whether or not you've got a smart phone or tablet, whether or not you blog, tweet, are on LinkedIn or Facebook, if you ignore their effect on your management environment then you risk dying like the proverbial boiled frog. It dismissed as nonsense dire warnings of the consequences of the slow flame under its tub of water. 

The changes may be so slow that they’re hardly noticeable. Yet social and mobile internet technologies are steadily, inexorably freeing people from the mushroom farm - from being kept in the dark and fed on bullshit; freeing them to create, speak up, challenge, push back and rise up; freeing them to connect with anyone anywhere, to contribute and impact on merit rather than position; freeing them to expose bullying bosses whose power depends on concealed incompetence and hierarchical authority. On the web, no one knows whether you’re a dog or the senior vice president.

That’s why it’s imperative for managers and managed to learn fast how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership (for refugees from mathematics, that means: as authority increases, followership decreases). 

Carol Rozwell argues in The Boiled Leader – Digital Freedom at Work  (September 13, 2013) posted on Management Innovation Exchange’s Digital Freedom Challenge , that workers who aren't effective collaborators will surely be exposed. They are the people we avoid working with. Everyone in the peer group knows who they are, yet management takes no action. Frequently because those people are management.

You don’t have to join the twittering classes, plaster the details of your life all over Facebook, or push your profile on LinkedIn and blogs to survive. But you do need to change your attitude to fit a world that expects freedoms that you may intuitively see as threats to your authority.

The message for Managerial “Frogs” is abandon that authority or die. The good news is that the rewards for abandoning it are, productive, profitable, satisfying collaborative life.

Why good people behave badly in organisations

We behave badly because we’ve been trained to behave badly from about age 11 in industrial education processes for industrial work. We’re imprinted with that classroom model of authority, hierarchy, knowledge, expertise, compliance, manipulation, control and work, right from when we leave the nursery school for the conventional school classroom.

That imprint is then reinforced at every level of education and on into employment. No wonder we find it difficult to conceptualise, let alone be anything else. We perpetuate the model unthinkingly. There is a saying that education is what’s left after you forget all that you (explicitly) learned. Entrepreneurs typically leave formal education early.

That industrial concept of organisation is very sticky and there’s little reason to challenge or change it unless the world changes and innovation becomes the key to survival. Then it becomes imperative to access and maximise individual and collaborative potential that is unwittingly squandered, eroded and destroyed by industrial organisation and management.

To survive we need to dispel the climates of fear, cynicism and disengagement that so often prevail; break the cycle of bad behaviour that is so toxic for emotional and mental health and sabotages engagement and productivity.

We need to resolve our double lives: break the spell of industrial age thinking and open our work and institutional life to what we know from that life beyond work.

Since the industrial revolution, when work arguably became seriously separated from the rest of life, most working adults live second lives at church, school, or home.

The question isn’t so much whether we lead double lives but how can we translate our knowledge of that ‘other life’ into our work and institutional behaviour? That’s difficult because much of our organisational behaviour is driven by unconscious assumptions and reflex behaviours tacitly learned during ‘industrial’ schooling and tacitly confirmed by our experience since.

The roots of industrial age production and education are in the thinking and practices that became prominent in the 1940s through 60s and still dominate many business improvement books. Industrial organisations had many characteristics of machines. They were formed around machines. Machines have since replaced many of the jobs in those organisations.

The machine model of organisation, still appropriate in some contexts, is characterised by structures; job breakdowns; lines of communication, job delineation; objectification; linear causal thinking. There is a sense of un-emotional rigidity and inexorability about it. Performance failures are fixed by replacing parts (people) or in extreme, restructuring. The ‘system’ reigns supreme.

In the 70s a new image of organisation emerged: organisations as intelligent organisms with interdependent functions and organs, striving to survive, responding to stimuli, adapting to changing environment, evolving to fit niche environments, the fittest surviving.

In the 80s people became the focus in the notion of organisation as culture comprised of cultures. Values, attitudes, beliefs, rituals, artefacts, normalised and normative behaviours became the centre of attention.

The 90s saw a return to the machine metaphor but this time the machine is a computer and computer networks: a hi-tech version of the earlier industrial machine. “Process re-engineering” was all the rage. People were mysterious, unreliable repositories of knowledge which is best extracted, digitised, then stored and managed in computerised files and networked information systems. Restructuring resurges, sometime dressed as process re-engineering. People are nodes in networks.

In the new millennium the World Wide Web enabled an explosion in relationships, shaking knowledge structures. The notion of knowledge and organisations as webs of relationships takes form. Hierarchy dissolves in the web and industrial style surveillance and control is impossible (Contractor, 2002).

The image of organisation as a web of relationships begins to make sense. But still the sticky industrial structures and controlling behaviours persist. People see the seeming ambiguity, openness, absence of command structures, and reliance on relationships as risky.

Leaders must risk openness, admit not knowing, focus on the detail of interpersonal relationships, build trust in long term relationships for mutual learning and growth.

Most bosses would claim that they do this already. Ask their reports. Most reports would claim that they can be trusted with responsibility. Ask their managers. It’s time we all stopped blaming, shaming and justifying and collaborated to change -bosses first.

Start by seeking honest, open feedback about your own behaviour. Talk to people other than your direct reports. Then deliberately and openly attempt to change your behaviour. Invite observations of your progress. Then expect your reports to do the same. Help and encourage them. They will be sure that this is managerial suicide.

For more in this radical vein go to Steve Denning: Does asking smart questions make you a radical manager?

Contractor, N. S. 2002. New media and organising. In L. Lievrow & S. Livingstone (Eds.). The Handbook of New Media (pp. 203-205). London: Sage.

Tse, S. & Barnett, S. 2009. Recovery Oriented Services. In Chris Lloyd, Robert King, Frank Deane, and Kevin Gournay (Eds.). Clinical Management in Mental Health Services. Chapter 7, (pp. 94 -114). Blackwell: London.

Social media: hype or hope?

Call me slow but I’m kind of puzzled by the hype, especially in marketing circles, around “social media”. A provocative discussion “Does social media work, or is it just a time drain?” (in RESULTS.com group on LinkedIn) got me thinking.

To me FaceBook was like just another step along from email, group discussion forums, and Chat rooms: another way to “stay in touch”; a new place for conversation; a place to exchange ideas, think, express, be, grow, get to know, belong, hang-out; a place with Face; a place for community in a world of failing community, disconnection and alienation.

So it didn’t surprise me that people found it and began using it; that the more who found it, the more wanted to find it, intrigued, not wanting to miss out; that it became the place to be, to be seen - a global fashion phenomenon. Most seem to use it to talk to people they personally know; to make friends through people they know; to engage; to belong, be useful, known, valued; to be.

“Social media” is kind of like the new grapevine and village meeting place rolled into one – the new virtual market square of community “on speed”: community apparently offering new scope to be; for new beyond-the-village identity. No wonder people are flocking there.

But fundamentally we’re village people and the commerce of the market square is natural, integral to our community. So why the hype and hoopla? Seems to maybe come from folks who want to make a quid as experts on the new market square; to somehow claim it for their own.

For all that, it’s about people, relationships, and trust. The communication rules haven’t changed, though literacy is an advantage in what’s currently still mainly textual media. Old skills really, maybe needing a little reinterpretation and a lot of re-learning.

In my work I’ve found that people who for whatever reason aren’t confident at talking with others, prefer a textual medium. It gives them time to digest what’s been said, to compose a response. And the internet has an added power-levelling effect: as an English-as-second-language student once said of me, “When Steve enters the chat room he gives up his power.”

It levels the playing field and they get to try being themselves, to communicate with new others. Pretty soon they are demanding to speak, to know who they’re talking to, and be known; demanding order in the chaos of random conversation.

It’s my hope that beyond the hype and hoopla, with winnowing of wheat from the chaff, the new social media will help release and connect diverse talent; help release entrepreneurial spirit from the psychic prison (Gareth Morgan. 1986. Images of Organization) of conventional organisation.

PS I’m a mature extrovert: a Rational Inventor (Myers Briggs); an Influencer (EDISC)

The "secret" to leadership in uncertain times (3)

In uncertain times like these, anxiety and uncertainty abound because what we thought were the answers, what we thought was logical and reliable, has failed. People we trusted to know clearly don’t know. Things we thought were sensible clearly don’t make sense any more.

The climate of uncertainty is ripe for the soothsayers, snake-oil salesmen and quack doctors who are out in force - this time let loose in the virtual communication space of the internet as well as in the usual success-secret shelves of the bookstore.

As the cacophony of chatter and advice in virtual communication space reaches a seeming white-noise crescendo, it all seems to me increasingly unlikely to yield transformation. All manner of self-proclaimed, self-promoting experts are in there looking to make a killing in the confusion: peddling their various solution lists; tools and levers without engines; re-packaged, re-positioned versions of failed recipes of the last 30 years.

I find it difficult to find anything new, any significant discussion even. The twittering social networking phenomenon looks to me increasingly hysterical: like a throng mesmerised in a Matrix-Reloaded-like stream of often uncritically repeated information, misnamed “knowledge”.

My experience is that the knowledge that enables and feeds collaboration exists only between people in relationship – as interactively generated shared-meaning. At its best, in a high performing team, it is dynamic, changing, growing through the robustly shared experiences of diverse team members - in an open, supportive communication climate where people have learnt to trust each other enough to tell, listen to and face the brutal facts as they see them.

An effective leader helps the team learn new things by reflecting on practice in the light of new perspectives; encourages the team members to discover new perspectives, bring them to the team and use them to make new, rich sense together of what they’re doing.

There is no band aid – no quick fix. The healing process is richly systemic. The result is the miracle of a “team on fire”: doing good things together.

It’s like Irish singer Bono says (quoted by writer Bob Gass): "I would be terrified to be on my own as a solo singer… I surround myself with… a band, a family of very spunky kids, and a wife who's smarter than anyone… you're only as good as the arguments you get. So maybe the reason why the band hasn't split up is that people might get this: even though I'm only one quarter of U2, I'm more than I could be if I was one whole of something else."

Do we really want to know?

I'm thinking on what role the virtual networking explosion of the last several years might have in transformation to the post global-economic-&-financial-crisis (call it GEFC) world.

The social networking phenomenon seems in many ways to be superficial and egotistical: Look at me: I am; I have friends; I am respected, recommended.

It seems kind of desperate in its extreme with individuals’ networks too big to sustain significant depth: almost like a web of shorthand relationships; more about connection than deep change or collaboration.

In New Zealand the TXT phenomenon is huge amongst young people who continually TXT each other. With an iPhone they can be constantly connected to their virtual world.

I wonder if this phenomenon will wither or flourish with GEFC. Wither with a realisation that depth is essential to productive relationships, or flourish with increased need to talk; to relate in crisis.

I ‘m reflecting on why I began this blog; why I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn: what am I trying to achieve? Am I and others fundamentally seeking connectedness in a deeply disconnected world?

Maybe we can discover new organisational modes, themes, tunes, rhythms and harmonies in the possibility-rich, apparent-noise of transmission and interconnection.

Through my sometime association with Computer Clubhouse in New Zealand (http://www.clubhouse274.org.nz/ ) I can appreciate how connectedness is fundamental to community and individual health and creativity: opportunity for empathy, relationship, learning, growth and innovation.

Problem is, I have way more information coming at me than I can productively utilise; way more opportunity to connect than I can respond to, let alone develop into productive relationships.

I have to decide which to attend to; which to pursue; to somehow achieve a balance of confirming and disconfirming influence so that I am challenged but not destroyed; to leave room for serendipity rather than attempt to control it all myself. . . . . . . . . . . I also need silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .