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?

Can you get knowledge off the web?

It’s really cool living the communication media revolution: no packaged answers. Experimenting is everything. Good for entrepreneurs. Not so good for causal thinkers (the rest).

Information’s free - heaps of it. Some enlightened universities even publish their courses free on the web. So, indeed, why physically attend a university to get knowledge when information’s free online?

Because information isn’t knowledge, that’s why. It’s just “stuff” until a person or people make sense of it for and between themselves. The most effective way to communicate knowledge; to transfer it between people, is interactively. (The universities spent a fortune on failed “distance learning” over the last decade or so to begin to realise that.)

An organisation’s knowledge exists in the web of relationships between its people not in the nodes ( the hard drives and experts). It is evident in interpersonal behaviour. It exists as organisational knowledge only in as much as it is communicated.

Learning is a complex interactive process. Rich interaction produces deep (behaviour changing) learning. Rich organisational knowledge exists and develops in rich interrelationships.

So what can we learn over the internet? What organisational knowledge can exist in the internet? Answer: it depends on the richness and depth of interrelationship.

I don’t know about you but for me nothing beats real person 2 person communication on that score. And whatever virtual communication medium best approximates P2P is the next best thing.

So until the internet can fully reproduce a meeting virtually, I’ll go to university, fly to conferences, visit my clients, go home to my wife and kids, go to church, go out to the pub, the theatre and to parties.

In between those real meetings I’ll maintain conversation by phone, Skype, email, blog, LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, whatever. But I’ll go easy on it and try to make my communication relevant and meaningful to my connections or they’ll get sick of my intrusions and I’ll get sick of theirs.

How am I doing? How are you doing? How rich is your personal and organisational communication? Are you leading learning?

The secret of successful execution

The secret is effective interpersonal communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coaching from within

Reflecting further on my encounter with Tom Peters, with fellow Results.com coaches today . . . . Tom is like a super coach to the Results organisation – he can do what I can’t do because I am effectively part of the Results organisation. He’s not. He’s Tom Peters! He’s his own person. He’s also an excellent speaker, fluent in his discipline, wise and well read!

He communicated what I had tried to communicate for almost 2 years but I failed mostly because, although I’m a leading coach, I can’t coach an organisation from within. The relational assumptions and dynamics won’t allow it.

After Tom’s address, a Results.com (NZ) Partner commented that I seemed to be getting better at expressing myself. No doubt there’s truth in that but equally at least, having heard Tom, the Partner was now more able to listen to me. We had a new shared experience and language to communicate with.

I am delighted. I feel like the windows have been thrown open and the light is flooding in.

Next step: collaborate to implement the insights, starting today, with the advantage of new shared experience and language.