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.

How to be successful in 2012 and beyond (II)

Pervasive belief in individualistic self-improvement, goal achievement, profligate consumption and bullshit opulence was the target of my previous post: the tongue-in-cheek rant “How to be successful in 2012 and beyond” . 

The satire was too subtle (or maybe too long) for some. For instance a friend commented on Facebook, "Hey Steve, it's not that I don't believe in what you say... but I've had one hell of a 2011, and none of it was planned. Happy New Year and very best for 2012, planned or not."

I replied, “ My (satirical) point precisely. I'd say you have had a very successful year "dancing in the moment".

The thing is that he and we all seem to have become so accustomed, so programmed to the mantra of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement that we tend not to see or value other forms of success.

This was highlighted for me in 2011 when as business development coach I “went back on the tools” a couple or three days per week to provide some flexible trades capacity in a client’s property maintenance business while we set it up for growth.

Not surprisingly the growth strategy includes niche-focusing, differentiating, and enhancing the value of his services, so to increase the price. 

Turns out that the first task was to rebuild his concept of the value of what he does.  His belief was that his service is manual work and therefore low status, low value, competing on price.

I can understand his belief. You don’t have to look far to see that success is widely regarded as not-doing manual work. It’s indicated by graduating from manual to administrative work. The further you are removed from the manual work into administrating it the higher the financial rewards and status. High paid people don’t get their hands dirty. This is I think grotesquely apparent in the differential between shop-floor and CEO remuneration.

I set out to convince him that despite the virtualisation of many aspects of contemporary life and the reification  of financial services, administration  and “knowledge work”, people still dwell in bricks and mortar. They depend on built-in utility equipment and services that suffer wear and tear. At the same time, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and renovate these things, or even to install them properly in the first place, are increasingly alien to most.

The value of that skill and knowledge becomes acutely apparent with hard times, natural disaster, and environmental degradation when maintenance and renovation become a favourable alternative to profligate consumption.

Another thing I discovered with working on the tools was that I quickly got fit. There’s something about sustained physical activity that can’t be achieved in a thrice weekly, intense, hour-long gym workout, no matter how hard you go.

It wasn’t only the physical health but also the mental health of directly creative activity and tangible product – such a contrast to sedentary intellectual work in a typically manipulative bureaucratic setting.

I mentioned my re-evaluation of manual work to a surgeon friend who replied that surgery is labour. This was confirmed when a paediatrician friend confirmed that surgeons have lower status in medical circles than other medical specialists because they are the plumbers, fitters, carpenters and decorators.  

To return to the opening topic: in contemporary life it seems that success has become such a narrow and distorted belief that it rules out pretty much all people and activity except being on target to become or being a Glossy-model-looking CEO in “knowledge work” living at peak-consumption. 

That has got to be sick. My successful business clients, in terms of profitability, health and contribution to society, have overcome that programming to find a much more fruitful concept of success. It’s about finding hope, joy, and peace in doing good things together: in collaborative enterprise. 

That’s practically the antithesis of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement.

How to be successful in 2012 and beyond.

According to many who (by the popular definition) are successful and according to the many popular analysts of success, achieving it is as “simple” as sticking to a regime like:

Step 1: (re)picture what success will look like in 10 years. Be sure to think Big, Hairy, and Audacious (Thank you Jim C) ; beyond your imagination of how to get there.

Step 2: decide up to three main 3-5yr thrusts that will take you towards that 10yr vision.

Step 3. set an goals for 2012 that will addresses the highest priority action within those 3-5 yr. thrusts

Step 4: set up to five actions for the first quarter

Step 5: Take action and monitor your progress and focus weekly, monthly quarterly and review your goals annually.

Interestingly, by this definition most people are not successful, arguably because in reality they don’t stick to the regime. This begs the questions: 1) Are most people therefore failures? 2) Are there grades of success? 

At dinner parties and other gatherings this summer we’ve played the game “Who’s the most successful?” That game is always on, but seldom explicitly. So we decided to put it on the table.

We discovered, as you might expect that personal notions of success seem strongly affected by life experience.

According to one summary circulating in the email, notions of success are broadly age related and a kind of cycle of life:



We found that politically, people seem to vote for government that they believe will assist them to achieve success on their terms and thus increase their chances of winning – or at least getting a good grade.

We found that people whose children are "successful”, but are “unsuccessful” themselves tended to measure their success in terms of their children’s material success if the kids are rich, or creative success if they’re artistic, or got “good jobs” if none of the above. Or it might be reproductive success if they’re producing lovely children.

Some argued that success is belonging, contributing and growing according to one’s strengths. (Liberal).

Others argued that success is to do God’s will to further his kingdom on earth. (Religious).

Success seems to vary between cultures. For instance a Chinese lad from Taiwan observed that in his community the “top dog”  has the biggest house and flashest car. He observed that in Kiwi culture the “top dog” cooks the BBQ. Maybe that’s why Kiwi’s are regarded as less commercially aggressive
.
Anyway, it quickly became clear that people tend to define success pretty much to suit themselves (or get very depressed). This can be a problem when a modern economy, especially  in the current recessionary climate, needs economic growth to prosper; needs people produce and buy more stuff: needs success to be materially measured.

We figured therefore that the best policy is to foster materially measured success by nationally standardising success measures along materialistic lines: to have National Success Standards; that these be administered by a dispassionate bureaucracy, preferably an already established one to avoid set-up costs.

In New Zealand, achievement standards are administered by the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA). NZQA administrators will likely be very pleased to acquire the increased span of control.

NZQA’s hold over NZ education is also an advantage because if we have National Success Standards and we want everyone to have equal opportunity to be successful (egalitarian) we must have widely available education for success.

Because we need a quick return on the education investment we can’t wait for kids to qualify in Success  and work their way into the corporate workforce. We must educate the existing workforce starting NOW.

So we must rapidly develop and deploy a programme of tertiary level courses in Success which would necessarily be night classes  at universities and polytechnics.

That way working people could study to qualify in Success while they continue to work during the day. Along the way they could  apply their learnings to their workplace  and families and whole workplaces and families could become successful!
  
If we act quick enough, 2012 can be a huge success for everyone! ;-)

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.

WANTED: Communication educators for management revolution

Being able to collaborate better than the competition is gold in today’s globally competitive market: the most valuable differentiator; the greatest competitive advantage a firm can have; hard to copy or replicate. But such collaboration is pretty well impossible for conventional firms to achieve because the essential behaviours and attitudes are culturally alien; beyond the experience of people in most modern workplaces; contrary to the assumptions and practices of management. To achieve collaboration requires the end of Management and the key to that is in transforming the way that people communicate at work.

As Garry Hamel says:
“Management was originally invented to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities.

In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures. Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”

If we accept that Garry Hamel is right, and I most certainly do, then the problem is how do we achieve that revolution; that transformation? The firm conclusion I’ve come to over a couple of decades of leading learning in Business Schools and coaching business owners for change and growth, is that a large part of the solution lies in transforming the way we manage and do education; transforming it from what it has determinedly become over the last couple of decades. That’s the opportunity for Communication educators: their mission, should they accept it.

As change leader for university business students and SME owners and managers I realised that deep learning and change was continually derailed by deep seated tacit assumptions about knowledge and how to behave in organisations; how to behave at work; how to organise work.

I realised that I and my students, colleagues and clients are deeply imbued with a picture or organisation that is imprinted, learned and reinforced through industrial-age, synchronised education where experts have authority over “children”, requiring compliance in prescribed, synchronised, trivial ‘work’.

What we learn most powerfully from that education: what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we were taught, is how to organise and behave at work.

That unconscious imprinting, which begins at around year 7 at school when children leave the ‘learning nest’ environment of pre-school and primer years, is reinforced and ingrained right through University. It’s a major reason why we unthinkingly perpetuate the mechanistic bureaucratic, hierarchical systems in which people are cooperating, synchronised machine parts; organisations are structures; and processes are engineered sequences. This is absurd when we increasingly need people to be highly engaged collaborative agents for change and innovation, dynamically linked through rich, diverse interrelationships in pursuit of shared aspirations and goals.

To be a successful entrepreneur it apparently pays to leave the industrial education process early. Many successful entrepreneurs did: before the imprinting process was complete; likely because they didn’t fit that process.

In the academic world, Business Schools have long been criticised for perpetuating outmoded, ineffective organisational behaviours, assumptions and practices. It’s only recently however, most noticeably post 2008 crash, that the more popular literature, The Wall Street Journal for example, has pronounced the “End of Management” and begun to seriously criticise and question the underpinning assumptions and the revered Harvard MBA model of business education has come in for public scrutiny and even some scorn.

Steve Denning, an author whom I stumbled across a couple of years ago and have since  become a big fan of, even participating in the editorial process of his latest book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Oct 2010), puts it well in his draft article on The Death and Reinvention of Management. Here I summarise some of the main points with excerpts from that draft:

What are we to make of a rash of recent books suggesting that management as we know it today is seriously problematic? According to Matthew Stewart, management is “a myth”. Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School tells us that management has “failed”. According to Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, we are looking at “the end of management”, while CEO Jo Owen has written about “the death of management”.

“[In the USA] ROA is 25% of what it was in 1965; life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years, only one in five workers are passionate about their work. Moreover established firms are not creating new jobs: Friedman, T. “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts” New York Times, April 3, 2010”

“This is why business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. Among the most important changes proposed are five basic shifts, in terms of the firm’s goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in), the role of managers (a shift from control to enablement), the mode of coordination (from bureaucracy to dynamic linking),  the values being practiced (a shift from value to values) and communications (a shift from command to conversation).”

“Individually, none of these shifts is new. Each shift has been pursued individually in some organizations for some years. However what we have learned is that when one of these shifts is pursued on its own, without the others, it tends to be unsustainable because it runs into conflicts with the attitudes and practices of traditional management.”

“When the five shifts are undertaken simultaneously, the result is sustainable change that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.”

“The challenge for managers today is that in trying to elicit the energies, imagination, and creativity of their workers, they need to communicate predominantly through the language of social norms, against a history in organizations of relationships dominated by hierarchy and to a lesser extent by market pricing.”

“. . . . . management in the 21st Century requires a shift in the mode of communication from command to conversation, with adult-to-adult interactions, human being to human being, using stories, metaphors and open-ended questions. Authentic leadership storytelling has an important role to play, particularly in dealing with social media.”

So, on the one hand we have a dawning realisation that high collaboration is crucial to competitive advantage, but on the other a generally weak experience and scarce knowledge of what it is, could be, and how to get it; and organisational settings that militate against that learning. Ironically, education institutions are among the organisations where this problem is most chronic.

But here’s the thing: Communication educators, researchers and practitioners as a profession are potentially among the best equipped to lead this transformation because they presumably know of what collaboration is, can be, and how to get it. That’s because, by my understanding at least, Communication is about what happens between individuals: the shared meaning that they create.

That’s the key to the transformation. Communication educators, this is your opportunity. Your mission, should you accept it, is to focus on enabling people to experience collaboration through changing the detail of their communication behaviour; changing the way they communicate with each other; the way that they generate shared meaning; the way they produce and implement organisational knowledge.

So that’s the opportunity. That’s the challenge. Now let’s consider the organisational and pedagogical detail of how you might go about that: how you can be and produce organisational Recovery Support Workers in the recovery of organisations, currently so dysfunctional that they are effectively insane, to competitive advantage (see previous blog: "How to Fix a Mental Organisation" ).

I’m not talking about a Communication course or even a Communication programme. I’m talking about the pedagogical foundations of all courses and programmes including Communication programmes. I’m talking course process, not content. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to Communication professionals.

The aim is to radically change the learning context, which is the organisational experience, from individualistic to collaborative. Remember that student’s individualistic and content-based assumptions about achievement and learning will be deeply engrained and largely unconscious. They will find the transformation process deeply disturbing, at least initially. Expect them to project their anxiety, confusion, anger, and blame on to you. This anxiety and confusion is a necessary precursor to the transformation you aim to achieve.

Expect to feel and behave similarly yourself as you learn to collaborate deeply with your colleagues. You aren’t just going to do this to your students. You’re doing it to yourself too. Denning’s five shifts have to occur simultaneously at both levels.

So if you’re highly averse to conflict and have a history of conflict avoidance, maybe don’t try this approach. Whatever, you need a well informed process plan and supporting supervision; you need to collaborate. That will be a learning experience for you too.

Because students (and employees) typically adopt a highly instrumental approach to their work (that’s the way they’ve been trained) you must radically redesign the tasks and measures to specifically reward collaborative behaviour (as mutually assessed by team members). The effect of this is to motivate teams to move beyond the usual fake-team division of tasks.



Because students (and employees) will tend to revert to accustomed child, instead of adult behaviour, wanting to be spoon fed processed information, remove yourself from the direct teaching (management) process and ban trivialised information.



I predict that you will find, as I did, that students (and employees, and you) will be amazed at the quality they (and you) can achieve together and that they become natural collaborators without realising how different they are from conventional graduates. Issues such as racial bigotry, dependence of trivialised information (PowerPoint), passive/aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, boredom, laziness and shallow instrumentality, melt away and behaviour actually changes (real, deep learning). Students achieve real insight.

You will find that when your graduates enter employment their employers credit them with exceptional “intuition”, marvel at how rapidly they become project leaders and how engaged their project teams are. They seem to adapt to and flourish in their workplaces three times faster that A grade honours graduates in their fields: in 6-8 months they are achieving what conventionally taught graduates take two years to achieve. When they enter a new situation they don’t look to the boss for a clear set of instructions. They assume that they’re to figure that out through collaboration.

It’s those radically different fundamental assumptions about communication that make these people so valuable. Yes they need subject specific knowledge, but it’s organisationally useless unless it can be productively, collaboratively shared.

As Noshir Contractor posited in The New Handbook of Organisational Communication (2001), knowledge doesn’t exist in the nodes; it exists in the web. In other words, organisational knowledge exists only between individuals as shared understanding. The most crucial skills are in generating a rich and productive shared understanding in the messy dynamics of interpersonal communication relationships.

That’s your opportunity and your challenge. You can do it.

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.

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?

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?

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 .

Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

New Zealand business managers and educators have got to transform their thinking and practice or NZ can say goodbye to “high” living standards: already down to 23^rd in the OECD and in imminent danger of being overtaken by Czechoslovakia.

That was the main message I took from National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey’s lunchtime address last Tuesday to the national conference of New Zealand Applied Business educators. They’re tertiary (but not university) educators on undergraduate Applied Business diploma and Applied Business degree programmes. I sneaked in on the coattails of my wife Sandra Barnett, an innovator and author in Applied Business education (Communication).

Bagrey confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

He didn’t have new answers except to say that boiled down, it’s the responsibility of individuals to generate and implement new ways. He didn’t have any special advice for business educators.

I agree with Bagrey that the solution lies with individuals, though I add: individuals in collaboration not isolation, generating and learning new ways together.

I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually the answers have been there for more than 20 years (e.g. Drucker and Senge), effectively ignored: except perhaps in Business student essays and Management band-aids, quick fixes, and fads.

Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

And another thing: get long-term (2 yr) outside help from experienced change execution specialists. Be sure that they too are accountable for progress.

Goals for Change

Sign of the times?: Missed achieving the quarterly goals again. Individuals’ performance on supporting actions weak again?

The goal’s good – revenue; profit; prospects in sales pipeline. The supporting priority actions are logical.

So what’s wrong? Lack of focus? Lack of accountability? Lack of leadership? Unrealistic goals? Lack of buy-in?

Could have been any or all of those. Or it could be that the world’s changed and the assumptions that used to apply, the relationships that used to work, the habits that used to be effective aren’t/don’t any more.

The reflex response is typically to increase the focus and accountability; increase “buy-in” by consultation; do it harder! WRONG.

If your firm’s past the 1st flush of pioneer passion and settled into routine with a dollop of cynicism born of frustrated aspirations and broken promises, and on top of that the world has changed, doing it harder won’t work.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it: you have to change the way you do it; do things in new, unfamiliar ways that feel as strange as a new golf swing. How do you achieve that when you don’t have a clue what those new ways feel like!? Even understanding those new ways won’t do it. You have to know them (deeply)

You need to experience new ways of behaving; to surface and examine assumptions; to develop and experience new ways of interrelating and repeat them until they are new habits.

It’s not buy-in you need, its engagement.You need a change-project: NOT simply a sequence of agreed tasks with time/quality/cost KPIs. You need a project where the learning is achieved by the whole team; to together develop and practice new ways of achieving those same simple goals.

You need a project with scope that’s wide enough to provide real, strength-fitting action for each team member and a compelling shared purpose that increases your capability to adapt to change and achieve your simple goals at the same time.

If it feels strange then you’re probably on the right track. Most managers, including project managers have never experienced an organisational change project. That’s OK. Don’t pretend. Bullshit kills learning.

A Tasteful Fable of Leading Change

Thanks to the leadership of Penfolds employee Max Schubert, Penfolds Grange survived for me and my wine-aficionado friends to taste the 20 year old 1989 vintage last week, along with seven other reputable 6-11 yr old South Australian reds.

Even though 1989 wasn’t an exceptional year for Grange, and this bottle had been cellared roughly, the wine had all the colour and fruit of its youth plus the richness and subtlety of advancing age. The younger (1998-99) worthy competitors in the line-up had, comparatively prematurely, lost their youthful qualities.

What do they do at Grange, I wonder, that gives their wine such outstanding, durable qualities?

Clearly there is more to it than a recipe; more than process control; more than operations management. There is a long established culture of leadership that survived the machinations of Management.

Grange was born of the vision, passion, skill, and persistence of an employee of Penfolds wines: winemaker Max Schubert. A bottle of his original vintage sold at auction in 2004 for just over A$50,000. However back in the 50’s, when Aussies thought wine was port or sherry, this powerful still wine was panned by the wine critics and in 1957 Penfolds management forbid Schubert from producing it.

But Schubert persisted in secret through 1959 and as the initial vintages aged, their true value came to be appreciated. In 1960 the management instructed Schubert to re-start production, oblivious to the fact that he had not missed a vintage.

Unlike most expensive Old World wines, which are from single vineyards or even blocks within vineyards, Grange is made from grapes harvested over a wide area. Yet despite the vagaries of grape sourcing and vintage variation due to growing conditions, there is arguably a consistent and recognisable "Penfolds Grange" style and quality.

The renowned Penfolds Grange brand is the result of Max Shubert’s passionate, visionary and persistent leadership as an employee.

This story brings to my mind Peter Senge’s comments in The Dance of Change (p. 15):

“In business today, the word “leader” has become synonymous for top manager. . . . Those who are not in top management positions . . . . . . don’t become leaders until they reach a senior management position of authority.”

Senge’s links this view of leadership to change-failure. He prefers to view leadership as:

“the capacity of a human community to shape its future, and specifically to sustain the significant processes of change required to do so.”

Max Shubert was clearly a leader in the Penfolds community.

Reference for history of Penfolds Grange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penfolds_Grange 22-08-2009

Got culture?

How does your culture smell? Honestly. Is your culture able to change? Do you have the radical transparency needed to change: to produce high performing sales teams, production teams, design teams, management teams . . . . . . .  or are you still stuck in the age of bullsh*t; still demanding engagement.

Last week I spent a day at a seminar by the super sales guy Jack Daly: story teller, successful ironman, richman, golfer, husband, grandfather, not-gardener.   Jack super energetically dealt with “how to sell more” then  he (just as energetically but more seriously) got down to “how to get others to sell more”. His focus was “culture”.

Jack quoted John Kotter’s (Corporate Culture and Performance. 1992) 10 yr study of 12 firms  showing the massive difference in revenue, stock price, net income and job growth that attention to culture produces.

As Jack observes culture normally gets overlooked in the usual business rush because it’s not urgent. I’d add that it’s also because managers and the managed are typically blind to culture and anyway, culture change is too slow to achieve inside an annual plan.

Every organisation has a culture. Even a new organisation has one. It came with the people who joined the organisation.  Culture is unconscious reflex assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.  Culture is self-sealing. What we see and experience tends to confirm what we already “know”: our assumptions, beliefs and attitudes.

How hard is it to change culture? Consider changing the culture of Samoa for instance. Well the early Christian missionaries did it. It took a magnetic, compelling vision; the right people in the right place; and their collective purpose and conviction (strong organisational culture): their passion to make a particular difference.

The aftermath of a crisis is a great opportunity to initiate a culture change. The window doesn’t last long (see The emperor has no clothes). It’s not long before people shut up because they “know what’s good for them”(see Learning for change feels risky).  If you don’t have a crisis, then create one to engender a sense of urgency (John Kotter. A Sense of Urgency. 2008).

You can’t demand engagement, only court it.

A tweet and email from my RESULTS.com colleague Stephen Lynch about a 26 June article in Forbes on employee engagement triggered this post. The story’s about Douglas Conant turning Campbell Soup Co around by engaging the employees!

Successfully turning the organisation around is news in itself, but it’s the way he did it that grabs me. He did it by seeking engagement, not alignment! Maybe this means that “engagement” is superseding “alignment”. Alleluia!

To me it’s no surprise that Conant’s engagement-focused leadership achieved amazing results. What particularly interests me is that he apparently had to get rid of 300 out of 350 Campbell’s managers to do it. I wonder why?

My guess is that that was the quickest way to interrupt the established patterns of communication: to create room for changed organisational communication. That would generate enough organisational uncertainty and anxiety for the long-believed unspeakable to be spoken and heard; for people to discover that their opinions matter and for them to experience, perhaps for the 1^st time ever, the spirit of doing good things together– to experience release from the psychic prison of defensive manipulation.

But what’s the difference between Conant’s approach and conventional restructuring, which almost always fails to improve productivity? Was he just a lucky bastard? Or is there magic in this engagement thing?

I reckon there’s much more to it than luck. I reckon that Conant somehow had the sense to break the Managerial spell to free employees to begin to figure out together how to do Campbell Soup Co better. I reckon he had faith that Campbell’s employees could do great things together if only they could get a chance to begin to really experience collaboration.

That contrasts with most restructures which are effectively exercises in defensive manipulation based on the assumption that, if allowed, employees will hijack any freedom for their selfish, ignorant, if not downright destructive purposes. Managers know this from hard-won experience of trying to get inevitably reluctant employees to do what managers want (know best). Result: “plus la change” (more of the same).

Actual organisational change begins in crisis so if there is no crisis, create one. Then it’s not so much what you do with the crisis, but the way that you do it.

Conant restructured, but the way that he did it was inspired. Effectively his purpose in restructuring and in the attendant uncertainty was to enable new communication, new interrelationships, and attendant insight. In short: engagement. You can’t demand engagement - only court it.

Marcus Buckingham gave “engagement” wings with the Gallup research that defined it and identified 12 reliable indicators and drivers of it. That led Buckingham on to his work in strengths-focused education and management: the complete opposite of conventional weakness-focused education and management.

To gauge whether your organisation is engaging or not ask your employees to rate these 12 statements (1, low – 5, high). If the mean score is better than 4 you’re getting close.

The inherent unkindness of organisations

In his May 27 blog Word-of-Mouth Starts with Kindness Zane Safrit states unequivocally that

“Kindness is inherent in all of us. Unfortunately, we encounter too many obstacles, of our individual and collective making.”

I think I agree with Zane though I’d put it like this: The attribute most ignored, even denied in organisations is our passionate desire to do good things together.

Most people just LOVE to do good things together. They’ll even do it for free if the vision is “good” enough and process “together” enough.

That love is kind of like the Higgs Boson of community: the force that gives substance to community; that brings community into being.

Community materialises out of interpersonal space through communication relationships. The quality of community is dependent on the quality of communication.

Viewed that way the obstacles to achieving good things together are the bad communication habits and the associated assumptions that we first learned at school, developed at university, and now typically unconsciously perpetuate at work as managers and subordinates:

Success is essentially individualistic and competitive; collaboration is a burden; the manager knows the right answers; communication is from the manager; work is tasks; knowledge is information and information is power; and individuals are to blame for their own success and failure.

In truth, vital community and vital business depend on kindness, thoughtfulness, helpfulness, openness, and forgiveness; and on collaboration to generate good data, to interpret it into information, to comprehend it into knowledge and to practice it wisely and imaginatively.

So the challenge is to unlearn the communication habits and the assumptions about organisation that first imprinted us at school where industrial-mode education determines that we are organised in rows, facing and obediently receiving our training from the authority at the front who demands that we produce our ‘own work’ to the specified nature and standard.

Then, as managers and subordinates we perpetuate that model of unkindness and wonder why our organisations lack community (call it lack of engagement if you like). . . . . . . . . .

It’s no secret: mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work!

In his May 28 Business Growth Tip , RESULTS.com COO Stephen Lynch says that he’s “become a bit jaded” with the many business books he reads. “Gimmicky book titles that promise much but deliver no actionable value, empty platitudes presented as if they were profound and original ideas, the so-called “secrets” of celebrity leaders. . . . . . . ”

I’m with Stephen. To me the popular literature on business, leadership, and management seems to pander to the gullible market for success-magic. It has little effect on actual organisational behaviour; on business execution; on actually doing things differently to get a different result.

The academic literature isn’t helpful either: typically descriptive with narrow causal analysis, it may be fine for increasing understanding (amongst academics at least) but if there was any direct link between understanding and changed behaviour then university Business Schools would rule the business world.

Even the best of the popular Business Management literature seems to bang away monotonously at the KPI mantra –repackaged management-by-objectives (MBO).

Mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work! There is no short list of steps that will actually change your business. That’s because change is opportunistic: the opportunities are in the chaotic, ambiguous reality that surges and flows around and under the apparently orderly surface of conventional business practice. That’s the world of interpersonal communication.

In a recent professional coaching conversation we discovered, once we got beneath the stock answers and platitudes, that the keys to business coaching success are in insight and transformation (discontinuous shifts in perception and behaviour). These phenomena are serendipitous, not the product of hard-grind managerial planning and control systems.

That’s not to dismiss planning and control. It’s to say that if business success lies in change then the key is in whatever enables us to swim gracefully and purposefully in comparative chaos and ambiguity.

And that’s where the management literature, popular or otherwise, doesn’t seem to go. It’s stuck in a simplistic model of science: of laws and formulae, of controlled, deductive, causal reasoning. That’s not sufficient in the dynamic, complex world of interpersonal relationships that are at the heart of business and change. It’s interpersonally that people actually make new sense of chaos and ambiguity.

But how often in “Business” books do you see any mention of interpersonal communication strategy? Seldom, I reckon. There’s plenty of attention to ‘positioned’ communication in sales and marketing, but scant attention to interpersonal communication at home except perhaps in putting policies-and-procedures-in-place.

Here are a few tips: pay attention to the verbatim detail of communication behaviour. Reflect together on the detail of what people said compared to what they thought. Learn to communicate assertively. It’s an art that's not normal in Management. Assertive communication behaviours can be learned but the process is slow and determined and you'll need all the help you can get from your work-mates.