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.. 

Millennials less entrepreneurial than their olds. Why?

“The whiz-kid with an idea who vigorously taps out code while hyped up on energy drinks then launches a business to astronomical success is the exception, not the rule.” (David Yanofsky in Quartz)

New data from the Kauffman Foundation in the US shows that in 2012, 20-34 year olds were 30% less likely to start a new business than 35-65 year olds.



The gap’s been steadily widening since 1996, mostly due to increasing entrepreneurial activity by the olds but with a discernable decline amongst the youngsters. Especially in the closing years of the millennium.

There are many possible reasons including comparative lack of available capital amongst the youngsters, and olds needing to create jobs for themselves because they can’t get a job and can’t retire. But a third one, the effect of contemporary schooling on the youngsters, is potentially far more pernicious. 

Over the western world generally major education reforms were introduced in the late 1980s and early 90s.

In New Zealand the reforms were signalled by the 1990 major report on education “Tomorrow’s Schools”.  From that, the movement to de-professionalise teaching and heavily emphasise  qualifications got traction through the new Qualifications Authority (NZQA) that administered the atomisation of knowledge by the Unit Standards based assessment and qualification. New Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) administered the related institutionalisation of apprenticeships. 
 
By 2003, when I began a stint of teaching in a University Business School, the shocking effect of the reforms was well established.

As University teachers we were warned that secondary school graduates entering university could be expected to demand to know in detail, before they commenced a unit of learning, exactly what they were expected to know as a result, the process by which they would know it, and the reward structure for knowing.

I recall wondering how any of them would learn anything new, unexpected, or surprising with such restriction on insight, or risk.

Even so, I was dismayed and amazed at how risk averse my students were. They seemed to have been trained to expect surety of outcome for their efforts; unable to cope unless the expected result, the process and the reward were fully mapped out beforehand; schooled that such information was their right and anything less, bad teaching.

I refused to comply and pushed them to cope with uncertainty and risk by collaborating. I coached collaboration. The process was nerve wracking at times but the result was widespread joy at experiencing collaborative entrepreneurship. Graduates from that approach proved to be fast learners (effective in employment 3 x faster than conventionally taught grads) and natural leaders in changing contexts and emergent practice.

But my approach  was unusual. The conventional undergraduate teaching methods that predominated,  and still do, are effective  schooling for career corporate-managers and researchers, not entrepreneurs. Post graduate teaching methods are too; maybe that’s how MBAs came to be blamed for the 2008 GFC.

Little wonder perhaps, that entrepreneurship has declined amongst schooled youngsters.

Is Depression Costing Your Business? Probably!

The cost to UK business alone of poor mental health management is in the region of £25 billion per year (Centre for Mental Health, UK);

Depression is soon set to become the second most common cause of disability globally, after heart disease (World Health Organisation)

One in four adults will suffer from a mental health problem in a given year and the majority of these people will suffer depression (British Office of National Statistics)

(Global Business Magazine, February 2012)

And guess what? The most significant impact on workforce stress and depression is the way work is organised and managed! The latest findings on workplace depression suggest that the solution is to ensure that people

• Are able to see how their output makes a valuable contribution to the organisation.
• Are allowed as much variety as possible in the tasks they carry out, the speed at which they work, the way in which they work and even the place in which they work if possible.
• Receive regular performance feedback – repeated studies have shown that uncertainty about performance is a major stress factor.
• Are given ownership of their responsibilities.
• Are provided with suitable opportunities for learning and problem-solving

In short, workplaces that have [open] communication and that allow their employees greater flexibility and control have fewer instances of depression.

Hardly rocket science! But despite manager-talk, few organisations get anywhere near approaching such a climate. Most are so interpersonally dysfunctional (mad) that they could hardly be better designed and operated to intentionally produce depression and anxiety.

The secret is to transform the context: the members’ shared unconscious and conscious assumptions about the way the organisation functions.

So how do we do that? The best time to do it is when the organisation is in crisis. The current global economic climate offers many exceptional opportunities. However, most such opportunities are squandered with conventional restructure, cost cutting, and consequent reinforcement of what’s bad about the way we typically organise and communicate.

The best way to do it is to engage in widely inclusive strategic planning and execution along lines advocated by

· Denning(2010) The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21^st Century (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$18)

· Hamel (2011) Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment (Management Innovation Exchange Video)

· Kim and Mauborgne (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$11)

· Sinek(2010) How Great Leaders Inspire Action (TED Video)

· Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) Managing the unexpected: Resilient Performance in and Age of Uncertainty (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$18)

All write about strategy for organisational transformation.

These aren’t “tool boxes” for managers to apply to the managed. The transformation begins with managers’ open commitment to first transform their own behaviour, despite the perceived risks of loss of authority and chaos. Most managers fail at this first hurdle.

To succeed they’ll need the full support of their board of directors and accountability, with education and encouragement, to a coach skilled in such transformational process. That way they can learn experientially - the fastest most effective way - to lead the transformation process.

The benefits: market leadership, unimagined high levels of client and employee satisfaction, amazing technical innovation, reduced costs, higher profits.

The most powerful determinant of NZ business success today is all in the mind.

Manager or Leader: red-herring

Should bosses be managers or leaders? Is there a difference? Can leaders be managers? Can managers be leaders? Whatever, it’s irrelevant. The debate’s a red herring.

It was maybe relevant in industrial-age 20thcentury when the boss’s prerogative was simply to control workers either by inspiring (leading) or manipulating (managing) them; when leaders and top managers (executives) were the unquestioned priests of the church of Industrial Management.

It’s time to break the spell. It served the industrial age well but it’s an albatross round the neck of business in the post industrial age: where rates of change are exponentially increasing and high-wage economies and maybe ecological survival depend on people being radically creative, passionately engaged, deeply committed and highly collaborative; where everyone’s a marketer because everyone in the organisation vitally affects the customers’ experience.

This new world needs a fresh understanding of leadership that enables diverse personal strengths to flourish in rich, close, open collaboration; that enables each member to lead according to their strengths.

We need a new understanding that charismatic leadership is just one of many forms of leadership: that, for instance, an introverted analyst can lead precision and attention to fine detail; an independent egotistical salesperson can captain sales effort; a systematic, reliable process improver can lead quality assurance.

It’s time for the “leaders and drivers” to allow the rest to actively and vitally engage in leadership. Trouble is, everything in conventional experience tells us, leaders and led, that that’s courting disaster: inviting anarchy; presiding over descent from control into chaos.

Yet conventional leaders and managers who deliberately learn to allow other forms of leadership to flourish, experience almost miraculous results. The learning’s not easy. It feels risky: like managerial suicide. It’s counter intuitive. But with wise support and professional coaching it happens. Not overnight but typically over 2-3 years with early signs of success clearly evident in 12 months.

This change isn’t something that leaders and managers do to others. It’s fundamentally what leaders and managers do to and amongst themselves. It’s about the systematic changes they make to their interpersonal behaviour and expectations.

It’s about the changed responses that they receive in a spiral of change from mechanical co-operation to dynamic, interpersonal collaboration. It’s about organisation changing from “boxes and wires” structures to rich webs of interpersonal relationships between people with diverse talents and strengths and deeply shared purpose.

This is the new key to competitive success in the 21st century. Are you up for it?

Will you dismiss it as “crazy-idealistic” dreaming considering the sort of people you have to work with? OK. Carry on as usual. Maybe your market will stay locked in the 20th century. If it doesn’t, get ready to eat the dust from your competitors who make the change.

Also published on MPS Pegasus

How to Radically Change Business Teaching and Learning

Public education is failing to produce people skilled at collaborating in enterprise; at bringing their particular strengths and passions together to collaboratively, dramatically exceed the possibilities of their individual strengths and limitations. Conventional organisation, management and research have failed to produce new practice.

To get a feel for the problem, go to Fernando Reimers on HBR  and the  TED LinkedIn discussion, Our Education System is Failing . . . .  (more popular than WikiLeaks).

There is no shortage of ideas, research and recommendation on what should be done about it. There’re even maverick teachers creating and delivering programmes that can and do produce people who know their passions and strengths and naturally, actively collaborate instead of merely  (dysfunctionally) co-operate.

The barrier these mavericks face is to sustain and grow their innovations in organisations and  markets that have little concept of education other than as experienced: typically industrial age, conveyor belt, control focused, uniformity and standardisation by process and qualification.

The good news is that sooner or later opportunities pop up to achieve deep, widespread change. One such opportunity may be in New Zealand high school Business education. There is an acknowledged need to produce graduates with the skills and behaviours to radically improve the effectiveness of New Zealand business enterprise. In response, the high school Business curriculum is in process of radical revision with radically different teaching an learning processes in mind.

The challenge is to spread the experience of the radically different ways of managing learning that bring this new curriculum to life. That’s not only about making room for teachers to experience new ways, then enact them. It’s also a matter of addressing  the typically conventional assessment models and other education management systems and processes designed to control teachers in much the same way as they are expected to control their students.
 
A collaboration of organisations and people passionate to achieve such a transformation was recently formed to tackle this set of problems in a radically different way.  It came together from concept to action over the first three months of 2011, with initial financial support and international research interest confirmed in mid March. It doesn’t even have public website yet and intentionally probably won’t for a while yet.

It's  a collaboration of Omnicom OCC Ltd with the Faculty of Creative Industries and Business of Unitec Institute of Technology, and Unitec Falkenstein Trust,  a Business education trust associated with Unitec but established by successful business entrepreneur Tony Falkenstein.

The collaboration’s first project, a pilot weekend-intensive workshop with follow-through coaching for a diverse range of invited participants, is booked for early May. Although the focus is initially local, the hope and plan, if the pilot is successful is to go national, and eventually international.

The intention is to generate transformative change by exposing seasoned (in this case, high school Business) teachers to the new experience and possibilities of a radically different way of managing learning; then to coach them in their efforts to collaboratively enact their new experience within their respective institutions.

The way that the process is organised and operated is crucial because the purpose is  to interrupt conventional behavioural loops: to achieve a transformation, not an intellectualised,  incremental modification in teacher and learner behaviour. One way of seeing the transformation is from control-centred management and experience of learning to learning managed and experienced collaboratively.

The teaching and learning model that initially influences the thinking and action in this teaching and learning transformation process was conceived and developed by Roger Putzel, St Michaels College, Vermont and subsequently further developed and operated in multiple  sites around the world including in New Zealand.

Putzel’s approach, called XB, was developed for transformative teaching and learning in Business related subject areas. So it seems an ideal platform to transform Business teachers,  Business teaching, Business students and the business of education for business.

But that’s not all. The same basic model can be applied to teaching and learning anything, anywhere: even in a commercially focused learning organisation. In fact it can be  easier to implement there than in institutional education . . . . . . .  

Measuring a “pound of flesh”

TEU’s Nigel Haworth is probably right to pejoratively call University of Auckland VC, Stuart McCutcheon a Managerialist.

In this latest stoush with the Tertiary Education union McCutcheon claims the rational high ground (NZ Herald). But to Haworth and many others he’s behaving like an industrial Shylock demanding his pound of flesh; his stance smacking of conventional managerial thinking and arrogance: underpinned by a particular set of unquestioned assumptions about how to measure and get better performance.

Of course in his mind McCutcheon is simply being rational; more rational than fellow academic Haworth, and denies wanting a “pound of flesh”. But to Harworth and the significant proportion of university employed academics in the union it clearly feels like that.

The thing is, there are far more productive measures of performance and satisfaction than those that demand or seem like they demand “pounds of flesh”.

Steve Denning commented in a recent communication:

“As I look back on my many years as a manager, I can see that one of the things that kept management grinding along on its death march was the measurement system. So long as the managers used a measurement system that kept tracking "things", it meant that "people" and "teams and "storytelling" inevitably got the short end of stick. 
 
So managers often talked a good game about people and teams, but at the end of the day, what really mattered was whether you made your numbers.”

Traditional management will keep grinding onwards unless and until we change the things we measure and crucially, the way that we measure them. 

We must pay attention to the people elements, not just the "things" or "outputs" that an organization produces. 

Steve’s doing a 5 part series in his Forbes blog on measuring what really matters. Part 4 on measuring time has links to the previous 3 parts. Part 5 is in the pipeline.

The Restructure Ritual

I found out from my hairdresser why corporates  continually restructure: it’s a ritual!
I saw the writing on the wall while I was lying back having my shampoo and colour. Kerastase, Paris offers range of rituals. Here’re just a few:

• Reconstructing Ritual (for after restructure)
• Strengthening Ritual
• Rejuvenating Ritual
• Clarifying Ritual
• Replenishing Ritual

Judging by the ecstasy  on the faces of the photographed models, these rituals are stunningly effective therapy for people who are at their wits end trying to make something great of hard-to-manage, unruly, dull, lifeless, worn out human assets.
There’s comfort in rituals and they buy time. They’re what you do when you have to do something but can’t think what else to do. They are time honoured practices, their origins typically forgotten, that bring kudos to the priestly caste who administer them: high managers and hairdressers.
Some corporate rituals involve brutal sacrifice for purification and to appease the gods.
The metaphor has many more possibilities which I leave to you to explore. For the moment I simply reaffirm two long-known things: you can learn a lot from your hairdresser, and organisational life is rich in unquestioned rituals that look like action, bring short term gratification and superficial improvement but fail to address the underlying issues.
Despite overwhelming evidence that restructuring almost never achieves improved ROI, corporates keep on doing it.
Let’s face it,  long term success depends on the quality of our interrelationships, but ritual clearly helps us feel better about things without having to actually fundamentally relate any differently.
It’s time to question ritual and make detailed, deliberate changes in the way we interrelate and what we interrelate about.

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.

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?

Slow motion serendipity

Several weeks ago in Poetry at Work I contemplated  the  jolting transition from profoundly poetic to harshly prosaic.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

That abstract painting  uncannily resolved, unfolded in time since: change and challenge in photographic clarity. Doors closing and doors opening in slow motion serendipity; results crystallised in retrospect.

Therein lies a riddle clear to some, resolved for others in weeks to come.

Truth is some dammed work-waters can drown even a buoyant psyche. 

Salvation lies in the deep tidal flows that despite our plans and protestations lead us resurgent to unexpected places.  .  .  .  .  .

Will 2010 Be As You Like It?

‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” says Bill Shakespeare’s character Jacques in As You Like It, Act II Sc vii,

To what story, what climax, what denouement have you renewed your commitment, passion and determination this year?

The evidence is clear that if you set your goal then commit to it by focusing on completing specific actions towards that goal, then you have a very high probability of achieving it. It gets messier if you can’t do it on your own; if you need others to commit and focus on it too.

How can you get those others to want what you want? How can you get them to “buy into” it; to play your game, run your race, act in your theatre; accept your rules and judgement?

Typically you cast yourself as the master puppeteer: as lord of the dance; you pull the strings. A lot depends on your skill and alacrity at manipulating strings: at management.

No wonder then that managers have such a major influence on businesses: by some reports over 70% of employee behaviour is determined by the actions of managers (I wonder who determines managers’ behaviour).

So if your marionettes are not responding as planned, do you become an even better puppeteer: do you contrive with the latest tools, systems and processes to increase control by adding more ‘invisible’ strings?

Or do you seek to breathe life into your marionettes; into their wooden minds, hearts and limbs; risk letting them influence the dance, the narrative, and the score? Do you risk letting them be the stars?

Will they want to stay with your small show? Will they perform like you? Will they covet your role?

Do they understand the play? Does it speak to them? Do they relate emotionally to their roles and to each other. Are the roles shallow, 2 dimensional or are they ‘character’ roles.

Does the play have a universal quality that appeals on multiple levels to different players and its audience? Or is it a cheap circus that abuses its talent?

What are you playing at?

Poetry at Work.

Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled, disturbed, even annoyed by mercurially agitated warm humid breezes. Mind in neutral, senses wired for sudden shifts, body and boat commune, response-merged pursuing purpose.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

Life and purpose renewed

I just returned from our regular Christmas pilgrimage to the New Zealand bush: dating back to the late 1970s when a group of friends purchased 150 acres (60 ha) of rugged bush country on the Tutaetoko river near Opotiki. We call the place St Jude’s. How we arrived at that name is another story but coincidentally perhaps St Jude is traditionally the patron saint of lost or impossible causes.

In many ways, St Jude’s bush camp is an unlikely cause; a collaboration for recovery: respite, reflection, reconnection, recreation, rejuvenation and inspiration; therapeutic activity, friendship and durable relationship spanning life’s changes; a materially very simple environment cut off by high-ridge, river and rugged terrain from electricity and mobile phone; the moist musk fragrance and entrancing sounds of New Zealand bush unfiltered, unframed, unmitigated; an antidote to the disconnection of contemporary life and work.

The pace is easy but the essence of life and relationship strong and obvious in the activity of provisioning, cooking, hospitality, construction and adventure. Firewood must be collected and cut and fires tended to produce hot water and food. Food safety, fresh water and waste management are everyday issues. Provisioning, cooking and eating are communal in the the high-gabled, open-walled, wharenui style communal shelter: rustic corrugated-iron roof and fireplace and crucially, long table.

The river rules: its course changing with each winter’s rain; its soothing chuckling waters made turbid torrents by summer-storms cutting camp from road and storm winds wreaking havoc amongst poorly pitched tents; overseen by the deep-gullied bush that dispassionately disorients and injures unwary adventurers.

But, in the shelter, on warm breathless nights, open-laughing faces glow by unflickered candle light and the coals of the cooking fire. Beyond, in soft darkness, campfire-lit figures reflect, intimately cocooned by the benign brooding milky-way come down to the ridge-tops.

Good Bastards & the Spirit of Christmas

The Christmas message of joy in discovering new life and new hope came together surprisingly for me last week in a business meeting of diverse minds, perspectives and strengths in a common purpose.

I opportunistically (for that is my way) introduced my friends and clients at Challenge Trust (Mental Health Service providers) to my friends and former colleagues at The Social & Community Health Section of the University of Auckland (UoA) School of Population Health (SoPH). My hope and expectation was of new and exciting collaboration.

My role with Challenge Trust is about achieving business growth & development. My connection with SoPH stems from collaborating with them as a faculty member of UoA Business School when it had a division on the same Tamaki campus as SoPH. That collaboration grew out of a sense that the issues in social and community health are congruent with those in businesses and institutions and a passion to do something with that.

The meeting confirmed the expected and discovered unexpected potential for new, exciting collaboration and relationships in common purpose and passion: to make social and business communities healthy and therefore sustainably more productive places to live and work.

We got to talking about Challenge Trust’s dramatically successful model for recovery that they apply to themselves and their professional interrelationships as well as to their clients and their client communities. Their model has six essential elements that must be addressed together:

1. Clinical Health

2. Emotional Health

3. Spiritual/Cultural Health

4. Environmental Health

5. Physical Health

6. Economic Health

We got to talking about how organisations are inherently fundamentally dysfunctional and how through a recovery approach they can become “high functioning”. We got to talking about how individual and organisational recovery relates to resilience and “human resource” sustainability.

This brought to my mind a story that I told them to illustrate how a firm without specific knowledge of Recovery, but seeking to sustainably engage it’s employees and delight its customers, had begun to implement what in many ways amounts to the Recovery model:

A labour hire firm were seeking to identify an inspiring, engaging common purpose or goal; one that would profitably differentiate them from their competition. They tried typical business goals like being the preferred supplier to the top/largest/best operators in the construction industry with decade-spanning interpersonal customer relationships. But it didn’t catch on. Too much bicycle, not enough frog?

So back to the drawing board they went and realised that what they would really like to be is “Good Bastards who do business with Good Bastards”. A good bastard is NZ vernacular for a rugged individual with a good heart, who looks out for his mates and, all said and done, loves them, has their welfare at heart and would do anything for them.

They then imagined what a firm of good bastards would be proud to look like in 10 years if it was a raging success. They decided that they would be proud to be in the news for having flown an A320 full of their people (150) into a disaster zone for a week long recovery mission where their people volunteered their time and the firm paid the rest of the costs. That would require them to be a successful business, largish and most importantly be a community of really good bastards. This big hairy audacious goal (Jim Collins) caught on fast.

Building the capability to respond at the drop of a hat to such a disaster clearly required long term action that started right away. So they began by collaborating with their banker’s employees to clean up three local beaches and have a BBQ together.

To begin recognising good bastard behaviour they implemented a quarterly Good Bastard Award for clients and one for employees.

They decided that good bastards are safe bastards: they look out for their workmates; an important behaviour in construction site safety. So they began a programme of sponsored safety promotion events on client sites and included aspects of safety and safety awareness in their quarterly surveys of employees and clients.

This firm is The Labour Exchange and to me that’s the spirit of Christmas in action in business.

The meeting of minds and purpose where I told that story is also the spirit of Christmas in action: joy in discovering new life and new hope.

Best wishes for Christmas: peace & goodwill, new life and new hope.

Steve

Bicycle or Frog? Kiss . . . . .

Did the pricess kiss a frog to get her prince, or was it a bicycle?

To borrow Alistair Mant’s bicycle/frog analogy: we continue to treat organisations as if they are bicycles when these days they are more likely frogs.

You can take a bicycle apart, lay out and polish all the bits, modify and replace them, and when you put it back together and oil it, you have a bicycle. If you do that to a frog, when you put it back together you don’t have a frog. There’s something missing: life. A bicycle is a machine. A frog is a living thing.

Ever come out of a management team meeting feeling disappointed, flat; not excited, but can’t quite put your finger on why. Sure the usual personalities were there, the usual predictable behaviours and perspectives, but you know you can rise above that if there’s something really worth doing together, everyone’s working to their strengths, and the results are blowing you and your clients away.

It’s not that you were intentionally being negative or difficult. You actually wanted to be energised and inspired; to energise and inspire. But the usually effective process of reviewing progress and performance against the various KPIs, reviewing priorities then agreeing who, what and when for the next period somehow lacked life.

Ever felt like that? I have.

Maybe you’re tired and depressed by energy sapping stuff happening in the rest of your life. Maybe some wandering virus is having a go at you. Maybe you lost your sense of purpose. Maybe its just been a long hard year. Whatever, life seems to have gone out of work. It seems mechanical; a job.

Work’s like this for about 55% of the workforce (Marcus Buckingham): The Disengaged. They’d much rather be in high performing teams (if they could imagine what it’d be like). They and/or their managers may even be into the paraphernalia, tactics and techniques of “high performing teams”: but it’s just not sparking.

There’s a good chance that’s because the paraphernalia is little more than a set of managerial tools used mechanically and dutifully in the belief that tools magically transform disengaged workers into engaged ones; even into high performing teams.

I won’t work. Partly because “everyone knows” that these tools are just more management bullshit: for over a century managers have been using systems and structures to get things done as expected; "to control people and play on their fears; systems and processes that suppress rather than reveal and ignite the emotions that energise and inspire" (Steve Denning, see below); that achieve machine like predictability and reliability.

With a frog approach we would use those same tools differently. As the saying goes: it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. So instead of using the tools to increase predictability and mechanical reliability we could use them to delightfully surprise ourselves and our clients: to energise and inspire continual, iterative learning to delight; with each delight revealing new possibilities. Kiss the frog to get a transformation.

If you want the real oil on achieving such a radically different approach to management; such delightfully inspiring and energising workplaces and people, be sure to grab a copy of Steve Denning’s new book when it comes out around November 2010. I’ve had a peek. It’s good! Radical, with it’s roots in his previous work.

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 .

It’s OK we’re not OK . . . . . . .

What a relief it’s OK that we’re not OK: to discover, experience and learn that we are deeply different from each other and that that’s OK; that it’s good that we perceive, interpret and react “the world” fundamentally differently; that mobilising those differences to achieve something good together, something we couldn’t do on our own, is deeply satisfying and miraculously effective.

I see this relief when a team realises that we are each ‘slack’ (de-energised) about some aspects of our work and ‘keen’ (energised) about other aspects; that that’s not only OK but excellent provided we recognise and get clear about those differences then make room where we can, for them to flourish and complement each other.

It’s not a competition to excel at everything, not a race to be the most OK, but a quest to learn together to continually delight others and ourselves by what we accomplish together.

This realisation can be powerfully achieved when team member’s together disclose their personality profiles and openly discuss how their attributes relate to the roles they play in the team.

I’ve found that a good way to kick-off this process is for the team to map members’ personality profiles on a big sheet of paper between them on a table. (Extended DISC profiles work very well).

Then share stories of personal attributes at play in their respective role behaviours, in what they enjoy and want to develop about those roles, and what they get nagged and badgered about. Relate this new awareness to the purpose, responsibilities and performance measures of their roles.

Next discuss what they could begin to change in their roles and behaviours to mitigate dysfunction within the team (Patrick Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” are a useful framework here).

Finally agree a plan, beginning with who will do what tomorrow and through the week, month, quarter, and year. Be sure to also agree how progress and change will be measured and to commit to a meeting rhythm for review and sharing change-stories.

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.

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.