The Journey to Calm

Posted on November 12, 2019November 12, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

Today, I welcome Justine Shaw, People & Culture Director at CPP Group, to reflect on the recently completed artwork – The Journey to Calm – that was created on a development programme she commissioned for her colleagues in Leeds. To find out more about the programme, please follow @corpartworks on Instagram or Twitter, and message us directly.

________

There is a piece of Artwork in my head office. Beautifully conceived and multi-layered in the experience, transient and thoughtful, taking the consumer on ‘The Journey to Calm’. You can interact, experience and note your reactions in the journal. This is art.

“Much is made of our modern lifestyle ‐ its fast‐paced, non‐stop, ever accessible nature. At times, we struggle to resist and to escape the constant threat of sensory overload. Through the introduction of visual prompts in the urban landscape this piece explores the need to take time out. To not be afraid of granting ourselves permission; to stop; to pause, to reflect, to fully re‐engage with the world around us”

The Project

The artwork was conceived and created by eight colleagues.

Surprised?

I think it’s fair to say, so are they. Our colleagues took part in an experimental project called Corporate Artworks, working with Jeremy Lewis (a coach) and Gary Winters (an artist) to explore art and innovation, to learn lessons for the corporate world from the artist’s creative toolbox and mindset; and to go on a journey of discovery over four modules.

At times it has been challenging, at times dramatic and at times a liberating experience. As I watched from the side-lines, I have seen transformational changes in thinking, changes in perspective, changes in the view of self and an increase in confidence.

There was no predetermined outcome or requirement for an outcome. What was produced supported by a conceptual document, is thought provoking, deep and meaningful. It is multi-layered and allows space for the individual experience.

Why Corporate Artworks?

How does this fit with the corporate world, why is this part of our culture?

Our culture is about open honest conversations, the ability to be your authentic self and to cut down the spaces for misunderstanding.
We work and collaborate together, to challenge and to understand our behaviours and the behaviours of those around us. Every interaction we have is an opportunity to have a positive impact on these around us.
Every time we make a request of each other is a touch point and a moment we make someone’s job mean more, make them appreciate their colleagues more and want to help more; or it can be a moment when people can feel underappreciated or not valued.
Our culture is about adapting not coping in a transformation business and a turbulent world. Part of this is understanding ourselves and knowing how to have a good day that brings out the best in us.

The outcomes

This journey allowed our people to develop, understand themselves and grow in ways they are just starting to understand. It has changed them and allowed them to see different perspectives, to consider innovation and creation in new ways. It has taken them on a journey. Let me share their words with you.

“It has been emotional. I have been so far out of my comfort zone … I’ve struggled, I’ve loved it, I’ve nearly quit and I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t understand my journey yet but … let go or be dragged.”

“It has stripped away layers so I could get back to me. I had lost me but this allowed me to Stop-Pause-Reflect. I’ve made big changes personally and professionally. The journey back to calm has reduced my anxiety.”

“I was listening but now I am hearing. The journey is important, it’s weird and fulfilling. We share so much and we are all not so different. It has been a leap of faith but I feel proud and connected.”

“I found a space for myself, I can rest, I can sit with uncertainty and if you look reinvention is everywhere.”

“I feel confident to be me, an introvert in workplaces that don’t work for introverts. I take time to think, to immerse and concentrate. I’m not scared to daydream because it’s productive. The personal impact is I now take time for myself.”

“I enjoyed it, working with different people. It’s been emotional, it’s been scary as you need to be vulnerable, and you are no longer the expert. I view things differently and I’m still moving forward and finding out about me. I now ask myself, what is the message?”

“Collaboration works, but it can be really hard to truly collaborate. You can’t control how somebody reacts to something. You have to give your all, be authentic and genuine in your intention and put it out there and not worry about the reaction. We helped each other. We worked through our uncomfortableness and practiced our creativity. We are all artists.”

“I thought I was the wrong person to be here because I don’t have a creative bone in my body. Then I thought about art and I thought. This is something that will follow you home, this is something that we can share, this is something that will never be the same, and this is something that will evolve. This is something. This has changed my thinking; art has got so many possibilities and I can see me in a lot of them. At work I look at things in a different way, through a different lens, through a different window. This journey really has been … something.”

Finally I asked what advice they would give their former selves just joining the programme:

Trust the process
You don’t know yet, how or when, but it will change you and help you at work
Let go or be dragged!

Justine Shaw, People & Culture Director, CPP Group

The A to Z of OD: V is for Vision & Values; W is for Weisbord

Posted on October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

In 1994, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras published Built to Last, an enduring business text – it was in its day the best-selling business book of all time – based on a long-running study of successful businesses. This book set out a framework that kickstarted a revolution for OD practitioners, CEOs, COOs, and HR folks in particular to attempt to emulate within their own workplaces what Collins and Porras called the ‘visionary organisation’.

And so we now have the all-pervading organisational culture of having ‘vision and values’. If your organisation doesn’t have a snappy vision and a set of three or five values plastered on posters in the staff canteen and on the back of toilet cubicle doors, then it’s really behind the times, right?

<Groan>

The problem has been – as is so often the case with management theory – the solutions pedalled by OD consultants et al have been watered down, over-simplified and reduced to exactly what I describe above: snappy vision statements and a set of three or five values plastered on posters in the staff canteen and the back of toilet cubicle doors.

They have been forcibly created. They are not real. The organisational values are not necessarily the values shared by staff in their personal lives. Cynicism is rife.

Let’s go back to some of Collins and Porras’s ideas, which (when implemented well) do stand the test of time:

Core ideology

“Core ideology defines a company’s timeless character. It’s the glue that holds the enterprise together even when everything else is up for grabs … a consistent identity that transcends product or market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders.”

Core ideology comprises core values and core purpose.

Core values are the handful of beliefs, guiding principles or tenets that are absolutely non-negotiable within an organisation. Crucially, they must be discovered, not created. They are not aspirational, they are real; they are lived day-to-day. This is where many organisations have failed by implementing the idea of core values poorly because they created an aspirational list.

Core purpose is “like a guiding star on the horizon – forever pursued but never reached.” It is the deeply-held and unchanging raison d’être of an organisation. Like core values, it must be discovered, not formulated. It is likely (but not necessarily) the reason the organisation was formed in the first place. What is an organisation if not a group of people coming together to pursue an aim? It is that aim. Do you share your organisation’s core purpose? Ask yourself, “When telling your children and/or other loved ones what you do for a living, would you feel proud in describing your work in terms of this purpose?”

Envisioned future (aka “vision”)

A core ideology “resides in the background, ever-present and ‘in the woodwork’”. To bring it to the forefront of people’s minds, an envisioned future is “in the foreground, focusing people’s attention on a specific goal … [it] is bold, exciting and emotionally charged.”

There are two elements: the BHAG and a vivid description.

The BHAG (“Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal”) is the 10-30 year ambition, which should be tangible, and yet stretching and challenging. The ambition should be almost unreasonable, and yet inspiring. It should be punchy – no more than a phrase or sentence, and “… so exciting in its own right that it would continue to keep the organisation motivated even if the leaders who set the goal disappeared.”

A vivid description is a variety of ways to describe what achieving the BHAG would feel like. A common approach is to write a press release or news article that tells the story of how the BHAG was reached as if it had already been achieved. It inherently accesses the emotional connection to the vision as well as the rational connection. As such, it is aspirational: an exercise in storytelling, a rich description of a possible future, and inspiring and engaging link to the core purpose and values. Notice, it engages the heart as well as the head.

People within the organisation must truly believe that by pursuing the core purpose, living the core values and stretching their aim and performance to achieve the BHAG, then that vivid description is attainable. If the only statement of your envisioned future is your vision statement (i.e. BHAG) and your values are aspirational rather than real, then you’ve missed the point.

How can OD practitioners breathe some life back into these ideas and move on from the posters on the back of toilet cubicle doors? Joint diagnostic work can uncover the core purpose and values, as can other OD techniques such as the noble art of organisational loitering[1]. The BHAG is an exercise in vision and strategy formulation. The vivid description is an excellent opportunity to adopt some of the ideas within Future Search (read on…).

OD thought leader: Marvin Weisbord

Weisbord was an early OD consultant, heavily influenced by Kurt Lewin, working in partnership with Peter Block. He is most famous for basing his consultancy practice on action research, his ‘six-box’ approach to organisational diagnosis and the Future Search methodology and global practitioner network. I have discussed action research and joint diagnosis elsewhere in this series of articles, so I will focus here on Future Search.

Future Search is an approach to helping large groups of diverse people come together to envision a future and plan the changes needed to achieve it. It is based on achieving a common understanding of the issues and making a personal commitment to action. Future Search is run by Weisbord and his partner Sandra Janoff with a global network of volunteer facilitators, although the techniques are available to anyone who seeks to effect change.

“Future Search … has become a global learning laboratory to refine techniques, strategies, group methods, and theories of action responsive to the extreme speed-up of life nearly everywhere. It evolved as a means for getting everybody improving whole systems and grew from our conviction that people have widely shared values for mutual respect, dignity, community, cooperation, and effective action.”

There are two key components: principle-based meeting design and a facilitation philosophy.

Meeting design is all about getting the ‘whole system’ in the room, exploring all the different perspectives present before seeking common ground, focusing on the future rather than arguing over the past, and utilising self-managing subgroups.

The facilitation philosophy surrounds doing as little as possible so that the participants do more! The facilitator’s job is to manage the process and create the conditions for people to participate. I also outlined some of the future search facilitation philosophy here.

The results of Future Search have been spectacular with ripple effects throughout the world: “Work on water quality in Bangladesh, for example, inspires conferences to improve the lot of battered women and street children in Iran, and leads eventually to the demobilization of child soldiers in the Southern Sudan. A participant in a future search on the strategic direction for the Women’s Sector in Northern Ireland follows by sponsoring one on integrated economic development in County Fermanagh. This leads to a future search for Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure that stimulates work in other government departments and in arts communities in other countries. Reports of future searches in communities such as the Helmholtzplatz Neighborhood in Inner City Berlin sparks community conferences in Nobosibirsk, Siberia and the Altai Region and the Russian Far East. Future searches have been run with the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Native Americans in the US and the Inuit in Canada. They have been run in business firms, cities, towns and provinces, schools and hospitals. From each future search flows a stream of actions once thought unattainable, such as widely-supported strategic plans, cooperation between public and private sectors, creating new avenues for funding, community health initiatives, parental involvement in schools, and so on.” (source: futuresearch.net).

Future Search principle-based meeting design and facilitation philosophy can be implemented in any meeting in any organisation and help make that meeting matter. The recommended reading below is an indispensable reference for the required facilitation skills and change approach for OD practitioners and, alongside Block’s Flawless Consulting, is the most thumbed book on my business bookshelf.

Recommended reading: Weisbord M and Janoff S, 2007, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings that Matter, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.

Next time in the A to Z of OD: X is for eXistential; Y is for Ybema

[1] I’m not sure where this phrase came from. It refers to the practice of hanging around organisations to understand their culture, and is indeed a noble art for OD practitioners.

The A to Z of OD: S is for Supervision

Posted on June 24, 2019June 24, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

In coaching and in certain regulated professions such as clinical practice and social care, the concept of supervision is well-established. However in OD consulting, it is in its infancy.

If you are an OD practitioner employed within an organisation, maybe you have a line manager who provides this role. However, many in-house OD practitioners are lone rangers reporting to a generalist HR Director who may not have the experience or deep understanding of OD as they do themselves.

Many external OD practitioners work for larger consulting firms and may well have line managers who provide a supervisory role. As with internal OD practitioners, this may not always be the case. Perhaps you are the OD/change expert in a larger firm that has a broader offer? Who do you turn to when you need professional guidance and support?

As professional OD practitioners – internal or external – our challenges are to consult flawlessly through the five stages of the consulting cycle, respect client confidentiality and boundaries and hold an appropriate ethical attitude. Supervision is there to help us solve dilemmas, support us through emotional challenges and provide fresh perspectives so we understand ourselves and our clients better and develop into the consultants we want to be.

If you feel like a lone-agent OD practitioner, how are you getting the support you need?

There are several ways you can get the support you need. You might join an OD networking or other peer support group, seek a mentor or hire a coach, or even hire a qualified consultancy supervisor. There are a few of us* out there.

OD thought leader: Ed Schein (b. 1928)

It would be hard to overestimate Ed Schein’s contribution to the field of OD. As former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, Schein won several awards for his work in organisational culture, individual motivation and career development and the process of consulting.

Culture

These days, it is commonly accepted that organisation’s culture is concerned with the shared meanings that members give to past and present organisational experiences. Ed Schein pioneered this thinking in the 1980s, suggesting culture is a layered model of symbolic artefacts, behavioural norms, espoused values and underlying tacit assumptions.

Motivation (‘career anchors’)

As part of his career anchors model, Schein argued there are three core factors (economic, social and self-actualising) that motivate individuals in organisations. Many OD practitioners – me included – believe organisations must make the complex assumption that motivation is a combination of economic, social and self-actualising factors. Managers’ behaviours, e.g. more participative management styles, communication, recognition/rewards and encouraging personal development, both symbolise and enact the organisational culture.

Implications for OD

OD is partly about good diagnosis of the current and desired culture and influencing the role of leaders to develop appropriate culture through symbolic means.

We can enhance organisational effectiveness whilst stimulating the self-actualising element of individual motivation by creating linkages between the organisation and the employee – a sense of belonging.

The benefit of observing organisations through their cultures is that the OD practitioner is attuned to the human side of the organisation, not just its functional subsystems. The key to successful organisation change is to view it as complementary: culture change and functional change in harmony.

Process consultation

Schein’s interpreted collaborative consulting as ‘process consultation’. For him, this is about helping others understand the importance of adherence to the social rules surrounding human relationships. His “ultimate dilemma … is how to produce change in the client system without people losing face”. Referring to Lewin’s ice cube theory of change, he sets out three elements that must be present during unfreezing, i.e. where motivation for change is created:

Disconfirmation (or lack of confirmation);
Creation of guilt or anxiety;
Provision of psychological safety.

One of the main reasons the unfreezing stage of change fails is that people resist change and hence pervert the change effort. There are many reasons people resist change: they don’t want to lose something of value; lack trust in management; hold a belief that change doesn’t make sense for the organisation; have a low tolerance for change; or exhibit passive resistance to change by complying with the change without real commitment.

OD practitioners must find ways to value resistance to change; a healthy tension during unfreezing helps to ensure the change plan is robust. This requires the OD practitioner to recognise resistance as trapped energy, and engage the resistors in dialogue – they may be sensitive to flaws in the plan, or be able to identify unintended consequences of the change. The OD practitioner must beware of low tolerance to change and not require people to change too much too quickly.

I suggest participative change through process consultation is the most appropriate approach to ensure change targets are involved in setting the change agenda. Process consultation is also the best approach to overcome passive resistance, where people are only accepting change to save face; adopting anything other than process consultation models here “increases the risk that the client will feel humiliated and will lose face”.

Resistance can also be at play in the refreezing stage. Even when an individual has refrozen new concepts, these changes may violate the expectations of ‘significant others’ such as bosses, peers and team members. Schein suggests the initial change target may need to implement a programme of change for these others with them as targets. Ultimately a strategy for change should identify likely sources of resistance and ensure methods for dealing with it are consistent with the overall strategy.

The A to Z of OD: Q is for Questions

Posted on April 11, 2019April 11, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

Is consulting about offering your own solutions, or working collaboratively with clients to generate solutions jointly? The former involves telling, advising, recommending. The latter involves asking, diagnosing, exploring possibilities. I guess the answer depends on what sort of consulting you are offering. Perhaps you are an IT expert and there really is one best way of implementing a solution. More likely, you are engaged in collaborative consulting. OD is collaborative consulting. The A to Z of OD continues. Q is for Questions.

The Paradoxical nature of change

The paradox of change is that if you push too hard, it resists. If you let go, often it comes more easily. It’s the same with OD. If you seek tightly-defined solutions, elegant models, rigorous frameworks or SMART outcomes, people can become sceptical and resist.

OD is the planned approach to change, and yet it is equally invested in the process-centred journey as it is in the destination-focused goal. “What we need is better practice,” muses management guru Henry Mintzberg. “Not neater theory.” What he is saying is, “What we need is better questions, not neater solutions.”

Self as instrument of change

The practice of OD is the practice of asking questions. And it seems we’re in fashion: mansplaining is out, humble inquiry is in. It requires offering our vulnerability that we do not know the answers and that we might just find a path toward change by working together.

And by asking a question, the OD practitioner is intervening in the system – he is using himself as an instrument of change. OD scholar Ed Schein offers suggestions for some opening questions in his 2013 book Humble Inquiry:

“So…” (with an expectant look)

“What’s happening?”

“How are things going for you?”
(Note: not “Hi, how are you?”, which is likely to elicit a closed response, “Fine.”

“What brings you here?”

“Go on…” (or my personal favourite version of it, “Can you say more about that?”)

“Can you give me an example?”

The critical point here is to remain curious. To “seek first and then to be understood” as Dr Stephen Covey would have it. Yes, have an opinion, and yet at the same time hold it lightly. Explore everybody’s ideas equally, sincerely and with humility.

Some types of questions

There are good uses for open questions to explore issues, “What is keeping you awake at night?”, closed questions to focus, “So you are saying…, is that right?”, and choice questions, “on a scale from 1-10, how would you rate the current situation?”

There are several useful facilitative questions, used by people chairing or facilitating meetings to generate accountability in the other people present and move the conversation on, from, “What happened?”, to exploring root causes (why?) and possibilities, “How can we improve?”

There are also some very special types of questions, such as Nancy Kline’s incisive question, “If you know that you are [positive assumption, e.g. highly regarded by your client], what will you do differently?”, or the agreement frame from NLP, “I appreciate you want to [insert other person’s desire], how can we do that and [insert your own desire]?”, e.g. “I appreciate you want to dramatically increase sales; how can we do that through influence rather than pushing our clients too hard?”

Of course OD practitioners need to have insight too. There is a time to inquire and a time to advocate your opinion. Usually in that order.

OD thought leader: Robert E Quinn (b. 1946)

Robert E Quinn is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Business, specialising in HR management and organisational behaviour.

He believes organisational change cannot happen without deep individual change. He believes everyone in an organisation has the power to change the organisation. These ideas are set out in Deep Change, in which Quinn articulates a set of principles for personal transformation.

He suggests too many people are living their lives out as a version of ‘slow death’ for fear of rocking the boat. He suggest you choose deep change over slow death. This requires courage, sacrifice and hard work. It requires reflection and self-inquiry, looking inwards to ask yourself what you really, really want, what you believe, and how you will find the strength to begin to change. You might well need the support of a coach yourself. It is worth it. Avoid slow, creeping death and discover the new you through deep change. The new you can change your world.

Next time: R is for Reflective Practice.

The A to Z of OD: G is for Growth Mindset

Posted on July 10, 2018July 10, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

Many thanks to Francis Lake, who suggested The Tipping Point as a topic for this A to Z of OD. I’ve included it here under G for its author, social science research debunker, Malcolm Gladwell. But let’s start with bona fide social science researcher Carol Dweck and her best thinking about mindsets. G is for Growth Mindset.

The Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck has dedicated her lifelong research to mindsets, particularly in students. She noticed some students were resilient, rebounding quickly after setbacks, whereas others appeared to be devastated by even minor hiccoughs. She attributed this to their mindset – i.e. their belief systems – and coined the terms ‘fixed’ mindset and ‘growth’ mindset.

The Fixed Mindset: Many people view their own potential, talent or intellect as innate and fixed; “either you have it or you don’t.” They assume outcomes are fixed.

The Growth Mindset: Dweck’s research suggests that people who view their ability to grow, learn and develop through hard work, practice or progressive improvement tend to succeed more. They believe their ability is just a starting point that can grow. Growth can be nurtured, and outcomes are open-ended.

Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t – you’re right.” Carol Dweck might say, “If you believe you can, and then are prepared to put in the effort, then you can succeed.”

To put this in practical terms, people with a growth mindset choose lifelong learning. They make choices rather than decisions, they try things out, they fail, they learn from their mistakes, they do it again, they get it right, they grow, they practise until they make new habits, they succeed, they develop mastery of their chosen subject, they never stop learning.

Recent advances in neuroscience support the claim that practice makes permanent; our neural networks grow, strengthen and speed up our cognition. We become masters of what we repeatedly do and learn from.

Model I / Model II

Dweck’s research was with students. Chris Argyris proposed another mindset model, more directly appropriate for the workplace.

In Model I mindset, people try to seek unilateral control of situations, they try to win, and if they can’t win, they make sure they don’t lose; they try to act rationally and suppress negative feelings. It is a “win, don’t lose” mindset; the pie is fixed.

In Model II mindset, people seek to learn, seek to find win/win solutions with others by seeking valid information and joint commitment to action. It is a collaborative mindset; the pie can be bigger; the pie can grow.

I’m struck by the similarity of these two mindset concepts: (1) the fixed pie: “try to win, but if I can’t, then try to save face, it’s probably something I’m not good at anyway.” (2) the growth pie: “let’s work together to see what’s possible, we can achieve more together than working independently, we can learn”. (2) is an organisational learning model; it is a generative model; it is a model of true collaboration.

Noughts and Crosses

Here’s a gift for you – a group exercise / collaborative mindset icebreaker – that I have been using with groups for several years.

Pair up all participants
Invite each pair to play five games of noughts and crosses (that’s tic-tac-toe, if you’re Transatlanticly-inclined)
Rules: take turns to go first; three points for a win, one point each for a draw
Goal: maximise your points
Once everyone has completed five games, ask them to add up their points, and then add the two players’ points together to obtain a score for each pair
How many points did each pair of players achieve?
If it was not 15, what happened?

In my experience – I’ve asked hundreds of people to take part in this game – almost all pairs of players fail to get the maximum 15 points. This quick game demonstrates how locked into a “win, don’t lose” mindset we all are; how locked into a fixed mindset we all are.

In the training room, we can then explore the merits, strategies, skills and behaviours and, most crucially IMHO, the mindset needed to become more collaborative at work. Collaboration is one of the typical goals of many organisation development programmes. Collaboration is my speciality.

OD Thought leader: Malcolm Gladwell (1963 – )

“Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread like viruses.” Gladwell looked how epidemics spread an applied the thinking to social epidemics. To exemplify his ideas, he cites significantly reducing crime rates in New York, a huge uplift in sales of Hush Puppies and the number of teen suicides in Micronesia, among several others.

The Tipping Point is that point when critical mass is achieved in a social movement and it then starts to spread significantly more quickly than it did before.

Gladwell suggests there are three things needed to harness The Tipping Point. Get all three right and you can generate a tipping point for your social movement:

Law of the few (20% of people will do 80% of the work needed to gain momentum – the trick is about recognising who are the connectors, the mavens (information specialists) and the salesmen who will entice others to follow their lead)
Stickiness factor (how easy and sticky is the new idea?)
Context (if the environment is right, then more people will take on the idea).

In organisations, this social movement is – of course – the case for change. And so, generating a tipping point has become something of an ambition for many change agents and change leaders. The advice on how to do this usually surrounds making the new world more appealing, enticing early adopters and changing organisational systems and processes to make it harder not to change.

Gladwell went on to write Blink about the adaptive unconscious, and Outliers about the odd factors that come together to create success.

Next time: H is for Human

The A to Z of OD (Part II): B is for Behaviours

Posted on May 25, 2018May 25, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

This is the second part in a series of articles that will set out the A to Z of organisation development: the principles and practices, the tools and techniques and the past and present thought leaders that have shaped the field. Today, we look at B. B is for Behaviours: Organisational behaviours.

I still don’t know exactly what will be included under each letter. That is starting to emerge. If you have any thoughts on what you would like to see included, get in touch and we’ll discover where this goes!

Many people have already commented via LinkedIn or by contacting me directly on what they would like to see included. Big thanks to all – you’ll get a namecheck when your ideas come up in the alphabet! In fact, if you want to guest blog a topic or thought leader, then let me know.

First namecheck goes to Inji Duducu, for suggesting Assumptions, as in, “What assumptions drive the culture?” Good question Inji. The assumptions manifest as a set of behaviours that in turn define the culture, as we will see when we explore B. B is for Behaviours.

B is for Behaviours

The way an organisation operates can be seen by people inside (staff, managers, etc.) and outside (customers, commentators and other stakeholders). The way the organisation behaves represents an unwritten set of assumptions that are tacitly and commonly understood by those people. The behaviours represent their collective experience: past, present and, without intervention, future. These behaviours, good and bad, define the culture of the organisation.

Oftentimes, organisations write down their values and discuss them in external publications such as financial statements and investor briefings. They may also be discussed internally in objective-setting, performance appraisals and personal development planning. In an ideal world, the behaviours and the values marry up! In the real world, there are usually gaps between what is espoused in vague, aspirational values statements on posters around the workplace and what happens day-to-day in work routines, meetings and customer interactions.

Surfacing implicit, often undiscussable assumptions that inhibit performance is a key goal of organisation development. We do that to encourage discussion, reformulation and articulation of behaviours that bring the values to life day-to-day. If you think this sounds hard, well it is. Institutionalised defensive thinking and behaviour (see OD thought leader: Chris Argyris) mean that not only are unhelpful assumptions undiscussable, but the fact they are undiscussable is itself undiscussable.

A word of caution though: OD practitioners are not trying to change people. Rather, our goal is to invite people to choose their own more positive behaviours that align with the values of the organisations with which they choose to associate themselves.

OD thought leader: Peter Block

Peter Block (b. 1940) is an author and consultant whose focus is on empowerment, accountability and collaboration. He believes that people working within organisations who are trying to change or improve a situation, but who do not have direct control over that situation, are acting as consultants. Let’s face it, that is pretty much everybody working in any organisation. The problem is that many people working in organisations behave as if they believe they need to control other people to get things done. The paradox is that you can achieve the results you want without having to control other people around you. You do this by focusing on relationships as well as tasks, agreeing (or ‘contracting’) to do things jointly and always being authentic. This approach establishes collaborative working relationships, solves problems so that they stay solved and ensures your expertise (whatever subject that expertise is in) gets used.

Block’s best-selling book, Flawless Consulting, sets out practical tips on how to complete each stage of influencing others to get your expertise used, pay attention to the relationship as well as the task at each stage, and hence ‘consult’ flawlessly. It is, without any exaggeration, the bible of consulting. And that applies whether you consider yourself a consultant or not.

Don’t take my word for it, Barry Posner, Professor of Leadership at the Levey School of Business in Santa Clara, California puts it succinctly, “The first question to ask any consultants: Have you read Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting? If they say no, don’t hire them.”

Next time: C is for Culture; C is for Change

Robots versus humans: the battle for leading the future of work

Posted on January 16, 2018January 16, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

Book review: Conquering Digital Overload, edited by Peter Thomson, author of Future Work and Director of Wisework, the leading authority on the Future of Work

Conquering Digital Overload is a fascinating inquiry into the stress caused by digital technology on businesses and society at large and provides some practical tips for leaders to navigate the new digital landscape. It suggests we are drowning in the new ‘always on’ technology that pervades modern life and that for governments and businesses, this is not simply an ICT issue, but rather an issue that goes to the core of what it means to be a leader.

With useful research findings on the effects of digital technology, the book examines the impact it has on every facet of our lives, surfaces the anxiety and stress caused by digital overload and highlights the effects on core activities that were once the preserve of human leaders – providing support, focusing on results, seeking different perspectives and solving problems. Thomson and his 15 co-authors explain how the digital revolution is stripping away the need for expert human leadership. When the internet can provide knowledge and empower groups of people to find their voice, they ask, what is the need for human leaders? They go on to suggest expert human leadership is needed to prevent the tyranny of crowds making populist and yet poor decisions. And to preserve the health and wellbeing of organisations.

We can’t expect governments to regulate effectively. And so – if not you, then who will navigate the complexity of leading an artificially intelligent workforce?

Jeremy J Lewis

Committed to making a difference in developing leaders

January 16, 2018

Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance… but it is a good place to start

Posted on January 10, 2018January 10, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

We are told that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance, especially when making personal financial investments. That’s why, in organisations, we write business cases to prove to ourselves we will get a return on investment. How does this apply to transformational change, when it’s not just finances, but relationships between people that need to change? We are told that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance… but it is a good place to start.

Past – Present – Future … where do you tend to start?

“I want to change the culture,” is something I hear a lot from potential clients. They have an idea of what is NOT working and a vague notion that “empowerment”, more accountability” or “better collaboration” are the ways to change things. They then immediately set about defining what the future will look like and writing their business case. If this sounds familiar, chances are you are already on the path to failure. That is because you have over-rationalised it and are trying to make a purely financial case for investment.

The Future is unwritten

I’m not going to bore you with facts and figures about the failure of change programmes. You’ll know yourself that organisations often choose to invest in tangible things that can be measured in financial terms. Thing like restructuring, new systems and business processes. They tend to spend less effort investing in building truly collaborative way of working, innovating and problem-solving. Because these are hard to do. Also, writing business cases forces you down that path. It is often a logical place to start, but it is not the whole story.

Let the Future remain unwritten for a little longer

In my experience, organisations that over rely on these rational aspects of change tend to achieve limited success, smaller business benefits and alienate their people. Those organisations that consider the softer, relationship-orientated, people aspects of change achieve better results. Sometimes. A major issue, even when culture is properly considered, is that those seeking the change only look forwards to envision a brighter future.

Opportunities lie in the Past as well as the Future

This is, I fear, only half the story. By looking at how your organisation got to where it is today, you will understand what aspects of your current culture are already working well and need preserving. Reflect on the journey taken to get to where you are today, the successes, the failures, what has been learned (and what has not). This will give you a better understanding of what makes your organisation tick, and what might be holding it back.

Now is all there is

By achieving a deeper understanding of the Past, you allow yourself, collectively with your people, to let it go. You will become more intently focused on the Present. I believe the Present is really all that truly exists. Looking to the Past helps us understand the Present. Looking to the future tries to hi-Jack the Present and force it into something it is not ready to be.

Be right here, right now with your people and allow your Future Intention to emerge collectively from collaborative sense-making and reflecting on learnings from the Past. Pay attention to the Present to make your Future Intention a reality. There are a few simple, practical techniques and ways of working that can be applied every day to do this. The result is transformational. The result is the culture change you are seeking.

Jeremy J Lewis, committed to making a difference in embedding sustainable change

The trade-off between interpersonal tension and task tension

Posted on May 16, 2017May 16, 2017 by Jeremy Lewis

The trade-off between interpersonal tension and task tension is not that well understood in organisations. And yet it is a fundamental equation that can help improve productivity, the quality of work relationship and outcomes.

Interpersonal tension is a sad thing. It occurs when people simply don’t get along. This could be a personality clash or residual tension from previous encounters. Oftentimes, people simply avoid others they don’t get along with, and that’s fine if it doesn’t impact your work outcomes. But what if your job requires you to work with someone with whom you have interpersonal tension? I’m not talking about a saboteur who actively tries to stop you doing your job – that would require escalation to a more senior manager or the involvement of HR. no, I’m talking more about the persistent naysayer who you just don’t get along with well enough to be able to focus on the task at hand.

Task tension is a happy thing. According to taskmanagementguide.com, task tension can be described as a positive feeling that a person or a group feels when they have an interesting work to be done. Task tension includes feelings of zeal and enthusiasm that encourage people to intensively research the task, seek for ways to complete it, build their collaboration around these aims, and overcome many interpersonal problems for the sake of common goals.

Chart: the trade-off between interpersonal tension and task tension

The chart shows that, over time, interpersonal tension decreases as interest in the task increases. The challenge is to work on techniques that overcome interpersonal tension quickly so that teams can focus on the task. This moves the interpersonal tension line from A to B, and hence saves time, increasing productivity.

And so, the workplace challenge is first to ensure there is a stream of interesting team-based collaborative work available so that task tension has a fighting chance of overcoming interpersonal tension.

And then, the workplace goal is for task tension to overcome interpersonal tension as quickly as possible.

This requires:

Self-awareness of our own behaviours and how those impact others (“Knowing me…”)
The ability to ‘let it go’ and work with others as you find them (“Knowing you…”)
So that you can get on with the task at hand (“Aha!”).

Knowing me, Knowing you, Aha!

It is important to bring people together to reflect on their own behavioural style, recognise that of others with whom they work and begin to understand how to collaborate. It helps team members and their leaders play to their strengths, overcome their weaknesses and work collaboratively together for the benefit of the organisation. This is of fundamental importance in today’s complex workplace.

And so, I have three questions for you:

Do you have the reflective practice in place to be able to do this?
Do you have the right behavioural insights to facilitate the discussion?
Do you have the right facilitator to bring people together in a way that values differences, seeks common ground and builds collaboration without the session falling apart?

I can’t help you find a stream of interesting, team-based, collaborative work. But if you’re searching for your “Aha!” moment, I believe I can help with expert facilitation supported by leading edge psychometrics.

Jeremy Lewis

Committed to making a difference in building collaborative teams that get the job done

Take Alan’s advice: a three-step approach to become a trusted business adviser

Posted on January 20, 2017January 20, 2017 by Jeremy Lewis

First published on LinkedIn July 13, 2016

To paraphrase Alan Partridge, “Lynn’s not my wife. She’s my accountant. Hard-worker, but there’s no affection.”

The work of corporate support functions has changed. This applies to accounting, human resources, learning and development, legal services, risk, IT, corporate strategy and planning, financial and systems analysis, project and change managers and more. In fact for anyone who has professional experience, limited direct authority over the use of their expertise and the desire to have some impact at an organisational level.

Regardless of Alan’s view, the traditional role of hard-working expert represents only half the story. You must be able to have that expertise listened to and used. To do this, you require a commercial ‘business-like’ mindset, a collaborative partnering approach and the skills to develop trusted adviser relationships. Dare I say it, to develop a certain affection?

The most effective way for professionals in corporate functions to gain respect, lead change and add value to their organisations is to develop these skills. I have helped the corporate functions of B2B and B2C private service sector clients and clients in the Health sector do this. Whilst each of the organisations I’ve worked with is unique, with its own unique set of circumstances, they often share similar challenges, i.e. how to:

Find the time to cut down on doing the work in order to build relationships?
Get business managers to take accountability for its finances, people, IT investment, etc?
Prevent the professionals from ‘going native’?

“Knowing me, Alan Partridge; knowing you, my trusted business adviser; Aha!”

You start by adopting a new professional mindset (‘Knowing me’), and go on to develop deeper relationships (‘Knowing you’) and then consistently apply these fundamentals in your role (‘Aha!’).

Knowing me

Professionals are increasingly anxious within organisations. Two examples of the risks corporate functions face from their customer-facing colleagues are continual downsizing of the ‘back office’ and the democratisation of information through technology. Professionals in corporate functions must continually demonstrate their worth to the organisation. And be seen to do so.

Unfortunately, professionals have an unconscious tendency to pay more attention to their own discipline than the direct strategic goals of the organisations they work for. We call this ‘basic-assumption’ mentality. In this mode, the corporate function’s directs its behaviour at meeting the unconscious needs of its members by reducing anxiety. However, professionals have been trained to use their basic-assumption mentality in a sophisticated way that supports the organisation’s strategic objectives. This sounds confusing, so let me give a few examples[1]

Finance

Chartered accountant firms require their junior staff to be dependent on senior staff while they are training. This approach delivers a qualified accountant who insists on being independent and behaves hierarchically to juniors. They review all their subordinates’ work and hold on to decision-making. This is the basic assumption of dependency, which is sensibly deployed to manage risk. Remember the partners of the accounting firm are personally liable and stand to lose their all their worldly possessions if things go wrong.

There is a high risk of this behaviour degenerating into an insistence for freedom for its own sake. This leads to a lack of accountability to the organisation. It can lead to a culture of subordination and hierarchical power requiring unquestioning obedience from juniors (and business managers).

Human Resources

The HR professional deploys collaboration with management as the best way to deliver change. We call this the basic assumption of pairing. Pairing is a psychological coping strategy where a helpless person assumes two other people will come together to create a messiah baby to save their world.

If overplayed, such a collaborative approach can lead to colluding with the business, whilst simultaneously refusing to examine whether HR interventions help or support the organisation’s strategic objectives. This can lead to a culture of ‘soft’ HR outputs without the requisite action required to make the change. For example, creating future-oriented organisational vision and values statements that end up merely as posters on the office wall.

Information Technology

IT professionals have the capacity for sophisticated use of the fight/flight basic assumption mentality. They sell their proposed technology solutions to clients whilst defending against alternative solutions with doomsday premonitions of catastrophic outcomes if they are not heeded.

Frustratingly often, IT projects do not deliver the purported benefits. When that happens, the fight/flight mentality degenerates into denial of responsibility, assertion that the IT professional is still right and that the business managers need to change to exploit the technology in full. Projecting responsibility in this way disables the professional/client relationship from productively devising a course of action to resolve issues. This can lead to a culture of paranoia and aggressive competitiveness. It can also lead to a preoccupation with the ‘enemy within’ as well as perceived external enemies. And it can lead to the promulgation of complex and bewildering rules to control these dangers.

Professionals really need to look at themselves and recognise the approach they are prone to taking. Only then can they choose a new professional role and identity.

Knowing you

When professionals have gained a deeper understanding of themselves, they can choose a productive professional identity (i.e. one of collaborative business partner). They are then better placed to notice what drives and motivates the business managers they are seeking to partner. Developing relationships is probably the most important single thing a professional can do. In this way they can avoid the dual risks of (a) being treated like a ‘pair of hands’ to do the tasks their business colleagues cannot or do not want to do and (b) being treated like a specialist expert who sits outside the workgroup and can only comment from the sidelines. Importantly, avoiding these risks actually saves time.

Not only can professionals avoid these risks, but they can transcend them to become a trusted business adviser. They do this by sitting within the workgroup and operating collaboratively (read: high support and high challenge). This allows them the opportunity to help the business take accountability.

It also allows them to develop into the strategic partner that not only turns data into insight, but also brings perspective and commerciality. This enables them to retain their professional integrity without going ‘native’.

Aha!

These skills are neither magical nor mysterious, but come about by mastering the basics of ‘knowing me, knowing you’ and practising the skills needed to deepen relationships.

I often run business simulations and action learning sets with clients so they can practise and reflect on their progress in developing their collaborative partnering skills.

And so the penny finally drops. As Jim Rohn once said, “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practised every day”.

And I agree.

And even, I suspect, would Alan Partridge.