Change Your Attitude or Die Like a Frog

No matter whether or not you've got a smart phone or tablet, whether or not you blog, tweet, are on LinkedIn or Facebook, if you ignore their effect on your management environment then you risk dying like the proverbial boiled frog. It dismissed as nonsense dire warnings of the consequences of the slow flame under its tub of water. 

The changes may be so slow that they’re hardly noticeable. Yet social and mobile internet technologies are steadily, inexorably freeing people from the mushroom farm - from being kept in the dark and fed on bullshit; freeing them to create, speak up, challenge, push back and rise up; freeing them to connect with anyone anywhere, to contribute and impact on merit rather than position; freeing them to expose bullying bosses whose power depends on concealed incompetence and hierarchical authority. On the web, no one knows whether you’re a dog or the senior vice president.

That’s why it’s imperative for managers and managed to learn fast how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership (for refugees from mathematics, that means: as authority increases, followership decreases). 

Carol Rozwell argues in The Boiled Leader – Digital Freedom at Work  (September 13, 2013) posted on Management Innovation Exchange’s Digital Freedom Challenge , that workers who aren't effective collaborators will surely be exposed. They are the people we avoid working with. Everyone in the peer group knows who they are, yet management takes no action. Frequently because those people are management.

You don’t have to join the twittering classes, plaster the details of your life all over Facebook, or push your profile on LinkedIn and blogs to survive. But you do need to change your attitude to fit a world that expects freedoms that you may intuitively see as threats to your authority.

The message for Managerial “Frogs” is abandon that authority or die. The good news is that the rewards for abandoning it are, productive, profitable, satisfying collaborative life.

Success stops learning – fail fast, fall forward: celebrate failure

The key to competitive advantage in changing and deeply uncertain times is to discover new "right answers" and get them to market first. Previous answers won’t do. No one, not even the boss!, knows what the new answers are. We have to find out by experimenting together and learning fast from failures. 

That may make simple sense, but doing it is hard because failure is typically not allowed. We know that if we want to be successful we have to look successful; associate with winners not losers. Failing is losing. Success is winning.

Bosses and teachers are expected to know the answers. Subordinates and students are rewarded for doing what bosses and teachers want. To question the boss’s answer is not a good career move. With some bosses, it’s OK to question provided you already have a convincing alternative answer. Some bosses try to look like they know by pinching subordinates’ answers for their own and taking the credit. That’s how they got to be bosses. "Everyone knows" that’s how promotion works.

The result of this emphasis on success and knowing is that organisations and individuals stop learning; thinking happens in interminable closed loops; workforces become cynically compliant and/or aggressively self-serving.  

How do we break that deadly loop? The answer seems to be in the process of deliberately celebrating failure.

For instance, a Canadian Engineering NGO, Engineers Without Borders, is an organisation that seems to have broken the loop with a process called The Failure Report. Of course they didn’t get it right straight off. They failed plenty along the way. Basically it’s about open admission and shared reflection on failures.

What they learned* is:  

1. The Failure Report is a dynamic tool for learning but the real power is its ability to shift organizational cultures.
2. It is absolutely critical to have buy-in and support from the highest levels of management - the boss must risk reporting failure too.
3. Understand your organization's unique failure foundations – identify and actively remove the blockages to people speaking openly about failure.
4. Decouple ego from activity - maximise and acknowledge learning from failure so that ego can remain intact though failure
5. Tell stories but don’t paraphrase them into simple lessons for others - tell them in full and in context and leave discussion and interpretation to individuals and groups. (I just failed that by posting this list*)
6.  Go big or go home. No sugar-coating allowed - be dedicated to honesty and humility and deal with the elephants in the room.

*For the full story click here.

What’s changed in 12 months?

Maybe it’s now obvious that the economy isn’t going to simply  “bounce back”; maybe the pressure for enduring radical change is closer to tipping point.

Nevertheless, so long as our circumstances allow us to ignore or deny that - allow individuals and organisations to simply blame others for failures and claim credit for fortunate successes, nothing new is learned and nothing changed.

National politics is obviously dominated by that sort of behaviour. It’s less publicly obvious in business where executives, earning 50+ times their employee’s average wage, continue to take bonuses and repeat their sorcery for the next anxiously credulous company. 

The most likely place for transformational change to break out is on the fringes of markets and industries, in outlying parts of larger organisations and in smaller firms (SMEs).

However, though SMEs  don’t have the bureaucratic burden and organisational inertia of big firms, they are likely locked into their own historical co-dependent behaviours and relationships. Those behaviours and relationships developed around and out of the founders personality and skills coupled with complementary market opportunity. Through them the firm survived and grew – succeeded. That success, perversely, shuts out new learning and change. 

An army of conventional mentors, coaches, consultants, and educators won’t change that because they’re locked into their own conventional histories. To have transformative effect they must first transform themselves and their organisations. But they have the very same impediments that their clients have. How then do we break this single loop control circuit?

I’m writing about this in a series of posts in another blog http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog  

Business Exit Ltd is a collaboration of mature business people who, for one reason or another, have been fortunate to experience transformative change and to experience leading it too. Our passion is to collaboratively exercise and develop our unusual experiential knowledge and wisdom, for good. 

Although we are mature (old dogs), we are keen and effective learners, putting the lie to assumptions about change being the preserve of youth. To the contrary, we observe that young, educated people these days are strongly risk (change) averse.

We are interested to hear other’s stories as well as share our own.

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

In step with Management.

Left, right, left, right, left. Is good management Left or Right?

Neither ‘of course’. Management is apolitical! Right? Management objectively, dispassionately maximises value for shareholders.

In a recently broadcast video clip from a few years back, BP’s CEO, addressing what looks like an MBA seminar, says “BP has spent too much time saving the world and it’s time to get back to maximising value to shareholders.” 

A super lucky survivor of the BP’s recent deep-sea rig explosion and fire (he jumped 100’ from the rig into the oil covered burning sea because the life boats had already gone) reported that despite clear evidence that the rubber blow-out seal had been seriously damaged, with consequent serious risk of blow-out and fire, Management decided not to stop and fix it. There was pressure to  be ready for BP officials due to visit  the rig to celebrate the success and recognise the project’s safety record! It’s like a re-run of the Challenger disaster but massively more destructive.

The survivor reported  officials were on the rig when it blew up. Maybe it was the officials who broke strict protocol and abandoned ship (and many crew including the captain) before accounting for everyone.

Managers are in charge, right? They have authority to hire and fire right? Who’s anatomy’s on the line if things go wrong? The manager’s, right? Who makes the decisions? Managers, right? Who’s job is it to know and be right? Managers’, right? If you’re wrong or you don’t know you’re not fit to be a manager right? Right! Yeah, right.

These assumptions are endemic in many (perhaps most) organisations despite espousals and ‘systems’ to the contrary. They are made by both managers and managed alike. These assumptions persist despite overwhelming evidence that they are not only unproductive but are destructive except perhaps in large scale replication where people are  no more than substitute machine parts. 

Are these characteristics and attributes of capital “M” for Management hallmarks of  the (political) Right? Are the critics of Management lackeys of the Left?

For instance, those who question the wisdom of Management are typically assumed to be questioning established authority; to be ‘bolshie’ – politically Left.

Management tends to favour maintaining established values and hierarchy:  characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Those who advocate and live collaboration, sharing, and collective responsibility are typically regarded as  politically Left.

Management practice generally  promotes individual responsibility and reward; characteristics typically regarded as politically Right.

Even Christianity seems somehow to be identified with the political Right even though Christianity questions authority and promotes sharing community, at the same time as it promotes traditional values and individual responsibility.

It seems to me that good management and Christianity are neither Left nor Right and may actually have a lot in common.

Much of contemporary popular management literature effectively plagiarises Biblical wisdom. Take for instance vision and purpose led business; discovering and playing to individuals’ strengths; discovering the engaging, innovating power of doing good things together; selling goods and services and optimising supply chains through genuine, mutually serving relationships and collaboration; individuals’ responsibility to maximise the value of their talents.

The sooner we remove the blinkers of political stereotyping and get seriously down to the work of turning the Word or words into living reality, the better.

How many environmental and economic catastrophes does it take for interrelational behaviour-change to be explicit in every organisation’s top five strategic priorities? When will specific interpersonal behaviour-change figure in everyone’s KPIs?

Pretty damn soon I hope.

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?

What are you racing for? Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you racing for? Why?

Wonky-shots and staplers of the mind

Henry my architect friend, in exploring my iPhone camera, inadvertently captures two partially obscured, wonky images of himself. Then ‘working with what he got’ he abstracts the images with provocative effect.

It occurs to me that his using these “accidental” images is thinking entrepreneurially: trying out new things for unexpected effect. Then taking the effect to another level by imaginatively working with what he’s got.

This is so different to what's taught and assessed in schools: beginning with the specified result figure out causative chain that produced it; understand, document, standardise and learn it then organise a linear process to reliably replicate it.

The latter approach (linear causal thinking) is the world of the stapler, the folder and the file. For more on that try Your Stapler is Making Assumptions: about how the objects and designs around us represent and determine our logic.

In most of the business contexts that I work in, the stapler reigns. Especially amongst the educated. In contrast the entrepreneurs probably succeeded at being ejected from school: avoiding being conventionally schooled. 

No wonder it’s so difficult to get employees to think like businesspeople: way more fundamental than “getting buy-in”. It’s about food for thought: a diet of wonky-shots instead of staplers for the mind.

That prompts a little spur-of-the-moment poem:

Staple diet.

I feel so much better

When I’ve followed to the letter

The procedures that I learned

At school

 

When the information

Is properly tabulated

The pages neatly stapled

And filed

 

When I’ve aligned my goals

With my grandest aspirations

Stapled them in A3 to

The wall

 

Then all I need’s a job

With the incumbent tasks prescribed

And a clear secure route to

The top.

Social media: hype or hope?

Call me slow but I’m kind of puzzled by the hype, especially in marketing circles, around “social media”. A provocative discussion “Does social media work, or is it just a time drain?” (in RESULTS.com group on LinkedIn) got me thinking.

To me FaceBook was like just another step along from email, group discussion forums, and Chat rooms: another way to “stay in touch”; a new place for conversation; a place to exchange ideas, think, express, be, grow, get to know, belong, hang-out; a place with Face; a place for community in a world of failing community, disconnection and alienation.

So it didn’t surprise me that people found it and began using it; that the more who found it, the more wanted to find it, intrigued, not wanting to miss out; that it became the place to be, to be seen - a global fashion phenomenon. Most seem to use it to talk to people they personally know; to make friends through people they know; to engage; to belong, be useful, known, valued; to be.

“Social media” is kind of like the new grapevine and village meeting place rolled into one – the new virtual market square of community “on speed”: community apparently offering new scope to be; for new beyond-the-village identity. No wonder people are flocking there.

But fundamentally we’re village people and the commerce of the market square is natural, integral to our community. So why the hype and hoopla? Seems to maybe come from folks who want to make a quid as experts on the new market square; to somehow claim it for their own.

For all that, it’s about people, relationships, and trust. The communication rules haven’t changed, though literacy is an advantage in what’s currently still mainly textual media. Old skills really, maybe needing a little reinterpretation and a lot of re-learning.

In my work I’ve found that people who for whatever reason aren’t confident at talking with others, prefer a textual medium. It gives them time to digest what’s been said, to compose a response. And the internet has an added power-levelling effect: as an English-as-second-language student once said of me, “When Steve enters the chat room he gives up his power.”

It levels the playing field and they get to try being themselves, to communicate with new others. Pretty soon they are demanding to speak, to know who they’re talking to, and be known; demanding order in the chaos of random conversation.

It’s my hope that beyond the hype and hoopla, with winnowing of wheat from the chaff, the new social media will help release and connect diverse talent; help release entrepreneurial spirit from the psychic prison (Gareth Morgan. 1986. Images of Organization) of conventional organisation.

PS I’m a mature extrovert: a Rational Inventor (Myers Briggs); an Influencer (EDISC)

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).

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.

Making mistakes

I was fortunate to see Leonard Cohen perform in Auckland earlier this year - a welcome antidote to the market obsession with Youth. Baby boomers filled the stadium.

A line from his song/poem "Anthem" stuck with me, hauntingly appropriate to these times: "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

These times, more than ever, require experimenting: to abandon the quest for the “right answer”; to abandon the pretence of knowing; to risk listening to those we usually ignore; risk voicing ideas and observations that may seem 'odd' or challenging; to risk new action that may fail.

More than ever we need to learn to communicate in ways least likely to trigger defence; that enable collaboration.

In my recent past I taught Project Management and Communication in The University of Auckland. I risked abandoning lecturing completely. I set up the class (of 80) as its own organisation to plan a major (real) change project in the University Business School. To do that they had to find out together (learn) about project management and communication – a learning project - to simultaneously manage the project to plan the main change project; three simultaneous projects.

We defined the main product of this organisation to be 1st time mistakes. Members were rewarded for making these mistakes. We set ambitious targets for 1st time mistakes produced.

My primary role in this process was to coach the members to communicate more effectively by shared reflection on their communication behaviour in their project teams and organisational roles.

The result was 'miraculous'. They blew their own socks off. They discovered a myriad of talents in their midst. It was a revelation for those Business students: explicitly experiencing collaboration and real (deep) learning for the 1st time in their formal organisational lives.

The Business School managers tried to shut it down – too risky – but the result was a triumph for stakeholder engagement.

Most of us have never experienced collaboration explicitly like that in our education or in our working lives. Will we risk it? What's the alternative?