Is a Business Exit Consultant Worth the Time & Money?

“Is the money, time and distraction of an Exit Planning Consultant really necessary? And does it really add any value at the end of the day?” 

Aaron Toresen, Managing Director, LINK(NZ) poses those questions and  answers them in his LINK Business email Newsletter 14 May 2013.  

In answer, he baldly claims: 

“The truthful answer is only occasionally. More often than not the whole "Exit Planning" nonsense is no more than fee generation by well meaning but ultimately misguided advisers.” 

“Almost every business consultant, coach, or mentor has screeds of information, manuals and guides that they will happily take a business owner through, on an hourly rate, to prepare them for the sale of their business. The more complex and esoteric the adviser can make the process, the better. Often these advisers have never sold a business or indeed owned one, but nevertheless confidently march their clients through various business plans, strategic plans, checklists and milestones . . . . . .”

It turns out these claims are mainly a straw man for then claiming that his firm can prepare a business for sale in within 2 or 3 months.

What he doesn't say is whether those businesses sold for their full value to the exiting owner. The truth is, very probably not. 90% of businesses sell for less than half what they’re worth to the exiting owner. 

A broker’s main interest is typically efficiency of effort to achieve increased turnover, not selling price. Most brokers want you to sell within four months for whatever the business will fetch. They want you to be grateful that they found you someone who's willing to pay to take your place in the hamster wheel.  90% of the time that’s what business owners do. Brokers typically depend on it. 

However, he is right about most business consultants, coaches and mentors. That’s why, if you really do want to sell for an earnings multiple of 4-6 you need to be particular about your choice of help (and your broker). 

You’ll need to establish a profitable growth curve and extract yourself from the centre of operations. Unless you've already achieved that, it’ll be impossible to achieve in 2 or 3 months, even with Aaron Toreson's personal help.  

The project will take at least two years with business-savvy, trustworthy people helping you lead it. They’ll be educated, experienced business owners with wisdom, passion and expertise to share. They'll quickly, deeply understand you and your business, empathise with your situation and work comfortably within the messy reality of your business.  

The project isn't so much about planning as it is about acting strategically;  about changing the way your business is organised and operated; so that you have time to work on it instead of only in it. 

By the time you complete the project you may have changed your mind about selling because the business will be a profitable pleasure to own. 

So don't sell yourself short. You and the nation need you to realise the full value in your business and for it to continue to flourish for it's new owner. 

Take care in selecting your strategic change support and your broker. 

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.

Who do you think you are?

Who you think you are is affected  by the context you’re in and it affects the behaviour of those around you. Who you think you are at work is affected by your assumptions about what your work role means and the cultural dynamics of the organisation.

This was highlighted for me recently by a client’s story:

For as long as I’ve known him my client’s been disappointed with the performance of his sales manager. The sales manager hasn’t achieved the potential indicated by his personality profile and successes outside work. He’s good but not great.

Yet recently he showed brilliance, but not in the usual work context. He and my client were at a supplier’s international conference. My client, unable to cope himself with all the relationship building opportunity and expectation, totally delegated half of that to his sales manager.

The sales manager’s performance in that context was vastly improved from normal. Had my client not known the sales manager’s underlying personality profile, he’d have been worried that his sales manager was on drugs of some kind.

My analysis: that goes to show what’s possible if you can change the organisational context. Next step is to raise the experience to consciousness and deliberately seek to change the local (internal) context to enable that brilliant performance back home.

I recommended my client tell his sales manager how amazingly effective he had been in that outside setting. Then ask him how they could together work to change their behaviours and assumptions to enable the sales manager to tap that previously hidden strength.

He’s done that. The sales manager was surprised and pleased to have been caught being brilliant. They are deliberately working to change their relationship and the organisational dynamics. My client is taking the lead by being accountable to his sales manager for changing his own behaviour.

Who you think you are can turn innovative, curious, dynamic and effective people into comparatively conventional, apathetic, dull and ineffective drones; turn considerate, reflective and humane people into insensitive, bullying manipulators (and vice versa). (For more on bullying see What to do about workplace bullying)

You are just as susceptible to those affects as those around you. Reading about and understanding that effect won’t immunise you. If you’re the boss and your people are behaving badly or unproductively then the change starts with you deliberately changing the way you behave.

That’s probably going to be difficult because who you think you are is deeply engrained. (For more on that see Why good people behave badly in organisations). The good news is that it’s difficult for everyone so you don’t have to become a saint overnight to steal the march on the competition.

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.

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.

Are you crazy?!

You’re a senior executive under pressure. You sense things are getting out of your control. Things are going wrong unexpectedly despite all your strategic planning, focused KPI’s, and reporting systems.  Solutions that worked in the past no longer seem reliable.

But you can’t admit it because you’re an executive and executives know what to do. You anxiously  work longer and harder  but the stress and anxiety begins to erode your resilience. You can’t sleep. You can’t relax without a drink.

What do you do. You can’t admit that you’re ‘losing it’. That would be managerial suicide. If you go to your GP and get diagnosed with stress disorder you’ll be uninsurable. It’s like you’ve caught the modern equivalent of leprosy.

So you try to fix yourself: self medicate, read self-help books; look cheerful; stay positive; fight harder; focus. You have no option because if you can’t fix it you’re done for. You career is stuffed.

Conservative estimates have 20% of the population, executives included, suffering such health damaging stress and the related physical and mental effects. Realistically the figure’s around 50%.

If you’re one of those 50%, what can you do? Where can you go? The good news is that you can get well without a psychiatrist. If you take action before you crash you can recover quickly and fully.

There’s no single fix. You need to tackle the problem from several different angles. Quite likely you need skilled confidential advice and coaching. Maybe you have a good friend you can confide in. Many high achievers don’t have friends that good.

The Recovery approach to wellness is a practical, holistic, proven effective way to not just cope but to quickly be even more effective than you have ever been before. 

News: Executive Depression on Increase - Corin Dann interviews Challenge Trust CEO, Clive Plucknett on NZI Business Breakfast TV (click this link)

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.

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen – says a mathematician acquaintance.

Trouble is, 99.8% of the time we don’t see, don’t recognise, don’t make room for miracles, little or big – too driven by managerial accountability systems, individualistic endeavour, and social mis/disconnection (despite ‘social media’).

Stressed out we anxiously push, drive, and control to achieve success. The greater our responsibility and desire to succeed the more we stress and the fewer miracles we experience.

The thing about miracles is that we can’t make them happen, least of all by ourselves.

I’m excited that I seem to be developing ‘miracle-sight’: I’m seeing the recent tipping point; peripety; watershed in my work life as the product of a of complex continuum of interacting stories, events and relationships that I could never have achieved myself; a miracle, out of a web of miracles that I would doubtlessly have confounded by engineered efforts.

My story seems to turn on a long-planned 10-day wilderness adventure with old (in every sense) friends in the pristine coastal forest near West Cape, Fiordland, New Zealand.

In a brief hour from nearly-nowhere we fly: a flimsy shuddering noisy spec thwacking across the grand diorama of massive monoliths; skimming stag-lined razor ridges rising rapidly to meet us, then cutting straight to gut-dropping, sphincter clenching precipices.

When the mountain fortress opens to coastal plain we yaw and swing along the unnamed gorge finally slewing and settling on our Google-Earth-familiar gravel bank; the storm-surged, crashing cove’s tide stained red-amber by the tannin-rich river.

Abruptly abandoned by the clattering chopper, the noisy silence of our ancient new world’s a rough cut from one life to another.

The prospect and consummation of this adventure are lever and fulcrum into a new narrative phase where past work-life loose ends and abandoned threads seem touched with new meaning, new possibilities, and an excitement of renewed hope.

Chapter end; new chapter; watershed; new terrain; new horizon; new life in a new organisational setting, renewed purpose anchored in deeply held values, ruled by passion for service over personal success.

It’s with Challenge Trust. There’s hope in that name.

Opposing views:




Top: View from the river mouth, tide out, over the shingle-bank across our cove during a gale at sea.

Bottom: View on a brighter, calm day, half tide on the flow, from a promontory at mid-right in the top photo across our cove towards the shingle-bank. Our base-camp (not visible) is centre right amongst the larger trees behind the foreshore scrub. The beach is about 300m long.

The hidden cost of employee commitment.

The cost, especially in economic upturn, is the loss of your best employees: the ones you didn’t make redundant; those that stuck with you despite your anxious, distracted, terse, unreasonableness and slim rewards; those who’ve been quietly observing you and deciding that given opportunity, they’ll leave.

You’re not a bad person. You want to be successful in a successful enterprise. You dream of commanding the committed engaged effort of your people. You actively seek out and use a variety of managerial strategies, tools and methods to get 'buy-in' and thus engineer commitment and engagement.

But in the end you can’t control everything and when you don't deliver on your end of the bargain the integrity of your strategy is clearly compromised. Resulting shock waves of betrayal and disappointment can reflect, refract and reverberate through your organisation and your supply chain reinforcing endemic cynicism in your upstream and downstream markets.

That damaging compromise has its roots in your ‘knowing’ that despite all the bullshit to the contrary, employees can’t be trusted to comply with managers’ designs and demands unless managers get and maintain ‘buy-in’. So you get and maintain buy-in by manipulative management communication processes: by strategically 'positioning' your message to engineer willing compliance.

What most managers either don’t know or don’t really believe is that most ‘reports’ actually want to be committed to and engaged in worthwhile enterprise with other engaged committed people.

The best are so keen to taste the fruit of engagement that, full of hope and despite previous disappointment and betrayals they will risk going to extraordinary lengths to get it. They will buy in: they will ignore selfish, manipulative manager behaviour; go the extra mile; live the espoused values; believe the vision; accentuate the positive; create; collaborate and invest emotion and time.

But in time (usually between 18-30 months) through the course of events and economic (mis)fortune, it becomes increasingly apparent to them that despite the hoopla, what rules in practice is individual self interest and that's what's rewarded. Individual self interest is best served through filtering and limiting communication, through manipulative communication and cultivated dependency.

Cynicism grows, resentment spreads, engagement wanes and from those who gave, more is taken: their satisfactions, hopes, spark, power, and pride eroded; accelerated when they are blamed for their predicament.

Separation follows. Angry, sad, and disappointed they take their knowledge and their potential with them leaving those who precipitated it: kings over their small domains of the cynical and still-hopeful.

The good news for those little kings is that they have another chance to deeply believe that their best bet individually and collectively is to stop manipulating and get out of the way of people who desperately want to be committed to and fully engaged in doing good things together.

If you’re one of those kings, how can you ensure that you will behave differently this time? Clue, you can’t do it on your own. Ask some of those committed ‘serfs’ to help you. Do you have the balls to do that?

How to fix a “mental” organisation.

It’s not that hard to understand how to transform a "mental" organisation (see Is your firm “mental”? Probably) into an engaged, innovative, exciting, satisfying one. But the evidence shows that it’s clearly hard to actually do it. Harder even than changing a golf swing.

That’s because its usually a manager who’s “fixing” the managed. Trying to “get buy-in”: to argue, sweet talk, trick or command the managed to change their “swing”: their dysfunctional habits. It doesn’t work! That manager behaviour is perhaps the main barrier to recovery. Recovery isn’t a “fix”. It’s a way of life (for managers particularly).

Leading edge practitioners and their fortunate patients in the field of mental health – recovery from psychiatric dysfunction - know this and have developed an effective approach to achieving recovery.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to “do recovery”. It’s “common sense”. Communities and ordinary people can do it. In deed, they are the ones who do it. Perhaps the biggest impediment to recovery in the mental health field is the “mental” organisations that practitioners and patients are obliged to inhabit and deal with and the pervasive “industrial” management assumptions and habits that “drive” those organisations.

In Is your firm “mental”? Probably and Organisational Therapy I observe that organisations are normally “mental” and point out how the Recovery Approach to treating psychiatric dysfunction can be adapted to treating “mental” organisations.

In It’s OK we’re not OK . . . . I address the 1st of the 14 facilitating environmental factors for recovery : “promoting accurate and positive portrayals of [interpersonal dysfunction]”:

I outline some simple group activities that initiate recovery process. The activities facilitate participants’ surfacing, recognising and discussing different interactive styles and the consequences of different styles, and then productively portraying them to transform interpersonal and organisational dysfunction into engagement, innovation and satisfaction.

Surprisingly perhaps, that simple set of activities (that teams intrinsically enjoy) actually address all the remaining 13 environmental factors too. Here they are again:

Focusing on strengths

Using language of hope and possibility

Developing and pursuing individually defined . . . . goals

Offering a range of “wellness strategies”, options for treatment, rehabilitation and support

Supporting risk-taking even when failure is a possibility

Actively involving [customers], family members, and other natural support in interventions planning and implementation

Providing individually-tailored services taking one’s culture and interests into consideration

Encouraging users participation in advocacy activities

Helping to develop connections with community

Systematically addressing illness-related factors that impede recovery

Promoting valued [organisational &] social roles, and interests

Enabling participation in meaningful activities

Building supportive relationships

Here’s the thing: that simple set of activities is just a beginning. The key to success is in the ongoing execution of the plan: rhythmic daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually meeting to share change stories, acknowledge contribution and celebrate success, identify blockages then review and agree who will do what tomorrow and through the week, month, quarter, and year to continue the progress; and review and agree how individual and team contribution and progress will be measured .

What to do about workplace bullying

The other day a prospective business-owner client asked me what to do about workplace bullying. My advice: act immediately to change the culture and isolate the bully. Bullies kill engagement, big time. They cost you heaps in diverted energy and focus and unnecessary staff turnover. They drive their victims, potentially your most promising people out, or mad, or both. Though they may seem competent and nice as pie they are typically operating well beyond their competence and their influence is effectively evil.  You can’t fix a bully. They have to go. Here’s a strategy that works:

Start MBWA (Managing By Walking About)immediately .

Bullies thrive in bureaucratic hierarchies where they can control the flow of information both upward and downward. Bureaucratic hierarchies aren’t the preserve of large organisations. They are common in organisations of all sizes and kinds. Open up communication and loosen up the hierarchy by establishing direct, focused conversation with a range of individuals at different levels in the organisation. Share your knowledge with them. They’ll return the trust.

Establish purposeful responsibility.

Bullies manipulate roles and expectations to their personal advantage, typically to obscure their own incompetence. To counter that, execute a strategy to clarify the organisation’s values, purpose and long term goals. Within that framework, work with individuals and teams to clarify responsibilities, accountabilities  and action priorities. Make them widely known (including yours).

Establish a widespread habit of regular, frequent meetings to openly discuss individual and team progress and blockages in executing those priorities. People thrive on shared purposeful responsibility plus frequent open discussion of progress foils a bully’s manipulative strategy. Expect the bully to resist and attempt to subvert this regular, open reflection and review process.

Isolate the bully.

Regular, frequent open review of progress on personal and team accountabilities will isolate the bully’s performance and break the bully’s hold on information flow. Better informed, other team members will become more bold, convincing and successful in their arguments and actions. The bully will become clearly and contrastingly less competent and isolated.

You may be surprised who the bully turns out to be. After all they’ve been making a career of ingratiating themselves with you: agreeing with you, bolstering your ego and maybe even dealing with a few of your tough HR issues, while creating an engagement-killing climate of fear and favour to isolate and silence their critics. Bullies are experts at hiding their incompetence and bad behaviour. Victim’s attempts to draw attention to the bullying  will likely be cast by the bully as whinging justification for poor performance.

Openly confront the bully.

When you have plenty of solid evidence of the bully’s incompetence and lies,  personally confront the bully.  Be  ready for  angry denial and counter attack.  They will attempt to bypass you and ingratiate themselves with a higher authority. The bully will be very reluctant to admit their bad behaviour and incompetence even to themselves, even though it is by now widely and openly known.

If the bully doesn’t leave on his/her own accord then you already have clear justification and support to dismiss them for unsatisfactory performance in their specific role.

What are you racing for? Why?

Last weekend we had perhaps the best Coastal Classic Yacht Race ever: fine, 20-28 knots SW; we averaged 7.3 knots peaking at 12.2 surfing the following sea towards the Hen and Chicks, dropping to zero at Cape Brett around midnight.

12.2 knots (22.5 km/hr) may seem kind of slow. But for a 29’ (8.8m) Wagstaff designed, GRP skinned timber sloop High Spirits, that’s a cracking pace with her gear loaded to the max: her gennaker sheet so tight it’s plinking at the winch like ukulele string; the helmsman pumping for 1.5 minute rides on following waves.

After dark, still doing 8 knots, cans of Red Bull keep us awake and slugs of Old Brown sherry straight from the bottle stave off the pre-dawn cold; the coastal skyline silhouetted by sickle moon in cloudless sky.

16 hrs 22 minutes without sleep to cover that 118 nm, finishing mid-fleet (16th) in Division 4; equivalent to 6th amongst our peers in Division 5.

At 4am, anchored and snacked, we fall asleep on the sails below in our full wet weather gear and boots, waking at 7 to thaw out in the morning sun.

Did we achieve our goal? Damn right we did. We pushed little High Spirits to her limits; adapting rapidly to the unexpected, without injury other than bruises, without damage other than a few near shredded lines, to achieve a respectable result amongst her peers.

Best of all, we were in it together relishing the feel of that little boat straining and surging in the stiff breeze, and silently slipping in light airs, finally savouring completion and sweet reunion with shore-crew partners and friends at beautiful Russell in the Bay of Islands.

Sailing & shore crews enjoy sunset BBQ at an early settler cottage Russell, Bay of Islands NZ

It was a race for friendship, courage, for companionship, collaboration and community; a race to live: a race against complacency, predictability, and the ordinary.

What are you racing for? Why?

Will provincial values count in the new virtual community?

In provincial New Zealand markets, provincial brand still carries weight . Will the new social media erode or reinforce that differentiator?

I’m a country boy – New Zealand “cow cocky” stock: breaking in the land. Genuine folk – what you saw was what you got. It had to be that way, struggling together; #8 wire, good-enough, ingenuity and resourcefulness.

That’s the roots of provincial New Zealand; still relevant in provincial commerce today where folks have probably become more suspicious and wary of increasingly individualistic “big-city” folks.

For example, a provincial professional firm (my client) recently negotiated to acquire a business in Wellington. Although the capital city of New Zealand, Wellington has many characteristics of a provincial town. Being clearly provincial contributed to my client winning preferred purchaser status and to acceptance by existing staff.

Here’s a prediction: the new social media will magnify the “provincial” brand differentiators because despite the apparent anonymity of the web the new social media, like village community anywhere, lives on genuineness and authenticity: deep interpersonal connection and reputation.

I reckon my provincial clients can do well in this new environment, and they are. Although it may become virtual, “local” will still be the web of relationships between people who are well known to, in continual contact with, and of value to each other, one way or another.

Bad news for the fakes, cons, bullies and manipulators. So watch out for identity theft. Your identity, in the broadest, deepest sense may be even more valuable than now. What will your identity be? Who are you and what will you be?

Brings to mind Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes who’s in a rush to catch the next boat to Paris:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare. Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78–82

Polonius has in mind something much more Elizabethan than the New Age self-knowledge that the phrase now suggests. (Macrone, Michael. "To thine own self be true." Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Cader Company, 1990. eNotes.com. 2007. 19 Sep, 2009)