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.

Mindful simplification

Today on Radio New Zealand National Sir Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics was asked “How do we recover from the recession?” Especially interesting to me was that he pointed to the blindness (astounding in hindsight) of banks and government advisors that got us into it. They were blind because they didn’t see the signals of impending “brutal audit”. Their KPIs effectively blinkered their vision.

I see this happening to one degree or another in pretty much every organisation I’ve owned, worked for or worked with.

I’m very critical of many KPI/performance measurement systems because they frequently erode collaboration, promote and perpetuate bad management behaviour, and blinker perception. On the other hand I’m also an enthusiast for intimacy with valid, relevant data.

I’m am enthusiast for simplification for focused action. On the other hand I’m also very critical of mindless compliance and groupthink that’s frequently the consequence of simplistic analysis, rules, procedures, and expectations.

Not surprisingly perhaps, some find it hard to figure “whose side I’m on”.

I’m an Edwards-Deming fan (kind of like being a member of a dead poets’ society). Deming’s lifelong passion was collaboration to achieve quality. Not in a fuzzy, feel-good sense but in a logical, objective sense: informed by valid, relevant data. A statistician, he understood how quality is determined by systems of thought, practice and organisation. Not individuals. He was very successful in Japan. His countrymen in USA have been very slow learners.

KPI systems are inevitably simplistic and biased: a selective abstract of reality based on a particular set of assumptions. So they inevitably distort or leave out potentially crucial aspects of complex reality.

The problem is how to collectively commit to a set of goals and performance measures yet remain mindful that that very commitment will blinker us to potentially crucial information.

This may not matter much in a predictable environment. But in an uncertain, fast-changing environment its a big issue. That’s because fast adaptation and innovation are triggered and driven by information from outside our normal frame of reference – our established KPIs.

Nimble organisations maintain clear purpose and operate simple strategies to achieve that, continually reviewing their KPIs for validity and relevance to that purpose. Statistically significant exceptions and failures are seized as opportunities for learning. Mindful, collaborative experimentation is a valued source of innovation.

The “secret” to leadership in uncertain times (2)

The secret to effective leadership in uncertain times is a relationship-based rather than performance-based climate: where you don’t rely primarily on an external system of rules to 'keep people in line' but on deeply shared purpose, generated and implemented through gutsy, open relationships between people; powered by the shared heartfelt desire to do good stuff together.

That’s the spirit of community and of high performance teams; where leadership is endemic, not restricted to 'a leader'; relationship is the driver; performance is an outcome; performance measurement provides data about the effectiveness of collaboration.

As writer Bob Gass puts it: effective teams share a “sense of belonging. Members extend trust to one another. Initially it's a risk because trust can be violated and you can get hurt. At the same time as each team member gives trust, each must conduct themselves in a way that earns the trust of others by holding themselves to a high standard.

When everyone gives freely and bonds of trust develop and are tested over time, they begin to have faith in one another. They believe that the people next to them will act with consistency, keep commitments, maintain confidences and support each other. The stronger their sense of belonging becomes, the greater their potential to work together.

All teams have disagreements. The mark of community is not the absence of conflict; it's the presence of a spirit of reconciliation. It’s not about people hiding their concerns to protect a false notion of unity. It’s about the ability to have a rough-and-tumble meeting with someone, but because we're committed to each other in shared purpose we can leave, slapping each other on the back, saying, 'I'm glad we're still on the same team'."

The leader’s role in a community like that is to lead by example (be 1st at):

• risking emotion and intimacy in leader/follower relationships;
  
• risking robust, open communication;
  
• risking walking into a meeting without already knowing the answer;
  
• risking sharing performance data;
  
• risking following;
  
• risking apologising;
  
• risking letting the team decide the performance standards and manage the accountabilities;
  
• risking performance appraisal by followers.

Tip: use the performance appraisal for feedback on the observed frequency of that risk-taking.

How to communicate more effectively

If this relationships and communication stuff really is a breakthrough key to future success in commerce, leadership, organisation, change and learning then you better get on to it.

Diary note: “find a communication course for my people to do”.

WRONG. Two reasons:

1. A course or three in communication won’t do it.

Most courses focus on understanding why and how to communicate. But understanding doesn’t affect behaviour. For instance, noticed that University Business Schools can’t actually do Business?

Communication’s similar. Understanding doesn’t change behaviour because the way we communicate is mainly determined by reflex and habit: unconscious norms and untested assumptions.

We can “put on a good show”, but when tired, under pressure or in familiar contexts we typically quickly revert to habit and reflex behaviour.

Another thing: we usually aren’t conscious of our communication behaviour. Others typically don’t want to upset us by telling us, unless they are upset themselves. That’s called a fight. Fights don’t fix communication behaviour. They make it worse.

2. It starts with you. Not them.

The only communication behaviour you can change is yours. You have to risk changing first. The leader risks first.

If you stop blaming, shaming and justifying; start communicating in ways least likely to provoke a defensive reaction, then you and those you relate to can begin to learn: new perspectives, insights, new shared purpose, new relationships, new organisation.

Try this:

1. Give 5-10 of the people you relate to (choose from above, below and along-side you in the hierarchy plus suppliers and customers) a chance to give you feedback, anonymous to begin with, on the way you communicate.

2. Ask them to identify three of your helpful communicating behaviours (strengths) and two corresponding unhelpful ones (weaknesses).

3. Pick a couple of strengths and one weakness and ask those 10 people to observe how often you do the helpful stuff and how often the unhelpful stuff.

4. Try to do the helpful stuff more often and the unhelpful stuff less often. Share your progress with your ten “coaches”.

5. When you’ve substantially improved (it may take 3 months or more) pick the next three.

6. Suggest to your 10 that they do the same, making you one of their ten.

This can turn into an administrative nightmare that outweighs the benefits, so consider an on-line feedback system to make regular (quarterly) feedback do-able.