What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page
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My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, when not chanting to each other in church seven times a day.
Yet, that silence needs the space in order to be heard. A while ago, they designed a garden, a sort of a maze, so that they could walk in a direction without bumping into each other. One of them, a friend for many years, goes from time to time to live completely on his own, for a week, in one of the nearby cottages, as if in a detox regime. When I asked him moons ago about ‘that need’ he looked at me puzzled: ‘wasn’t it obvious?’ When he is away, he walks down the valley every day for the communal Mass and back. When coming in, the other monks avoid him (during that week) to respect the space he has created for himself.
“There is something special about creating space”
There is something special about creating space. For me, leadership is mainly architecture: create the conditions, find the spaces, protect them, make them liveable. Architects also have maps, and compasses. The leader needs to provide maps (frameworks, such as the non negotiable behaviours) and navigation tools (a value system). But, above all, it’s about space.
Providing spaces for people to breath, to growth, to deliver something, to get better, to think critically, to interact, to collaborate, to travel together. This is all about space. Space is the psychological sister of place. Space may be only, or mainly, mental. As such, it is a precious asset. No wonder the word space has been often associated to the word sacred. As in sacred spaces. To provide space, to create and protect spaces for others, is something a good leader does. It’s a great deal of his servant-ship.
But we, sometimes, are not very good at this. We take over other people’s spaces by insisting on discussing, wanting to ‘go deeper’, being intolerant with leaving things open, dictating our own terms and providing unreasonable borders to their spaces.
At a threshold point of two people living together in one place, they may come to inhabit one single space. It requires a lot of maturity to live in one single space with others. Occupying one single place, is the easier part, space is not. Indeed, that single space may end up being too much to ask. It may be better to have separate spaces to respect, often overlap. Psychotherapists have known for many years that a temporary split, or making tangential connections for a while, may be the solution to some problems. Unbundle the spaces that have become blurred, that is.
Spaces could be rich and beautiful, or could also be toxic. In a relationship of spaces, if one is toxic, the whole may become contaminated. Also, the more personal, protected space one has, the more one can give. This is ‘the border diet’ of my old TEDx talk[1] – still relevant today!
Space is a good way to start a Leadership Development conversation. Much better than vision, charisma, determination or role modelling. The leader as architect is a much richer model. Architects of our own spaces, and providers and keepers of spaces for others.
Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…
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I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have always overstated the time needed to create cultural change. This is simply because we have been using outdated toolkits and methods.
We have treated cultural change as ‘a project’ and applied the mechanics of project management. It looks like this: Dozens (if not hundreds) of consultants land on the corporate shores, workshops multiply like mushrooms and a tsunami of communication comes from the top: ‘change is good, this is what you must do, do you get it? Cascade down the message’. Kind of. So it takes six months to figure out what to do, including a cultural assessment (of course), a couple more to present findings, another to launch and you start doing something at month 6. If you’re lucky. Then, you start with the top (of course) and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. You don’t see initial results until, say, year 2 and you need another couple of years to see more. See what? Well, good question, err, a different culture? How do you measure that? What do you mean? I told you, 20 senior managers workshop, 150 middle management and… Hold on, this is activity, not outcomes. Oh!
In traditional change management, you start with the top and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone.
The following is an example of non-workshopsterone-led fast cultural change: A new CEO said ´enough of meetings, I am not having them.´ 6 months later they had a 60% reduction in meetings, significant increase in direct communications, better fluid collaboration, the sky did not fall, business is booming. Guess what, employee engagement scores are up.
I am not bringing this case as an example of how cultural change should be done, but as a representation of a situation where culture change and culture re-shaping take place in a short period of time.
As I have repeated ad nauseam, organizational culture change is bottom up, behavioural based, peer-to-peer, using informal networks and with a particular kind of leadership that is movement-supportive (we call it Backstage Leadership™ ) I am of course defining Viral Change™, no apologies for the reference. Viral Change™ is orchestrated like a social movement, not as a management consulting programme.
Successful cultural change is not top down, not workshopsterone-fuelled, not an information tsunami, certainly not long, painful, super-expensive and ending in a fiasco. Hold on! The example of the meeting-hater CEO was top down! Yes, the trigger was at the top but the Anti-Meeting Movement took place with no meetings (about not having meetings), no workshops and no communication plan. It was Homo Imitans in real life, viral and behavioural spread by massive social copying.
Can we say that the Emperor of the long, difficult, herculean, massively complicated, information tsunami, unpredictable organizational cultural change has clearly no clothes whatsoever? Yes, we can! Given the time this has been going on, he must be freezing.
[3]
Only behavioural change is real change
You can map new processes and re-arrange the organization chart. Install a new corporate software (ERP, CRM, etc.) and explain to people why this is good and necessary. Create a massive communication and training campaign and make sure that everybody has clearly understood where to go. Perhaps you’ve done this already and noticed that many people hang on to the old ways. That is because there is no change unless there is behavioural change. It is only when new behaviours have become the norm that you can say that real change has occurred. If you want a new culture, change behaviours. Cultures are not created by training.
If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].
A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.
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Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you look at this from the angle of productivity, employee engagement, or any other, the key is ‘Mobilizing People’. Actually, I propose to change the word ‘leaders’ to ‘mobilizers’. Mmm, I won’t win this one.
How do you create a social movement? Perhaps a good start is to look at – well, social movements. OK, you don’t see this as a ‘standard management practice’. I do. The answers to better management, exciting management, and new, innovative management in 2023 are at their best when distant from ‘management science’. Old toolkits are gone! Where are the new toolkits? They need to be reinvented.
Culture shaping (forming, changing, transforming, growing…) is the development and management of an internal social movement. Yes, a la ‘social movement’, as read in Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, and Political Marketing and very little, if not zero, in MBA curricula.
I could go on for hours on this topic. It’s one of my favourites, full of hope and expectations, but I said this is a Cheat Sheet, so I will have to send the Bullet Points Brigade.
1. (Re)frame the narrative. Acknowledge a spectrum of motives. Example: Take Obama to the White House (2008, 2012 movements), Fix health care, Decrease Inequality, better Human Rights and Justice, for example, were co-existing narratives. Not one. Corporate listen to the one, single, overriding, all-singing-the-same-song narrative. Have different frames, no one. ‘One only’ is a mistake.
2. Acknowledge the above differences, so accept also different, co-existing types of fellow travellers and frames. However, agree on non-negotiable behaviours. This is the universal bit. Don’t compromise with it. Get it wrong, no glue, no movement, all in different directions.
3. Define the tribes. Peer-to-peer, bottom-up, self-organizing- whatever you want to call it in the organization, is tribal. Influence is horizontal. I did not say teams, divisions, functions or Task Forces. I said, tribes. If you don’t know your tribe, hire an anthropologist. Or us.
4. Fix coexisting expectations. Get them in the open. Brief and debrief. Define the rules. Activism is to act. Clicktivism is to click and say ‘like’. Donate is to donate. Advocacy is to say ‘I endorse, this is good’. Corporations are notorious for mixing up concepts and pretending that they are all equal. Nope. If you like clicking and we are here all for acting, this is not your social movement, sorry.
5. Engage the hyper-connected. If you want to infect (behaviours, values, ways), you’d better find the nodes of high connectivity. It can be done. We do this in our organizational work. You miss the hyper-connected, but you have a bunch of passion, forget it. I know it is not much of a PC statement, but it’s true. (Please don’t ignore ‘passion’, but between a bunch of poorly connected passionate people and a group of highly connected and influent dispassionate, I choose the latter for the work and the former for the bar)
“Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected.”
6. Focus on grassroots. Organise grassroots. Learn about grassroots. Became a Grassroots Master. The Obama campaigns focused on ‘it’s all about you, guys, not the one with the speeches’. It is grassroots, or it isn’t. Many Corporate/Organizational development groups haven’t got a clue about grassroots. They think it has something to do with the gardens.
7. Practice Backstage Leadership™. The key type of leadership in social movement making/organizational culture shaping is Backstage Leadership™, not Front Running Leadership with PowerPoint. Backstage Leadership™ is the art of giving the stage to those with high capacity of multiplication and amplification, the hyper-connected from grassroots, very often a rather invisible and not very noisy bunch, as compared with the ones with the Communications Drums.
8. Track progress. Set indicators. But these are not the traditional KPIs. Before creating measurements, ask yourself a simple question: what do I want to measure? What do I want to see? Which is different from ‘what I can measure’, and ‘what everybody measures. In Viral Change™ for example, we measure the progression of behaviours and stories, quantity and quality.
9. Master a fantastic Storytelling System that has two opposite origins meeting in the middle: top-down from the formal leaders (yes, we have formal leaders, you have formal leaders as well) and bottom-up from the grassroots. In the job structure, make sure that whoever is in charge of Storytelling’, is ‘the best paid’. It pays off to pay him/her well. Storytelling is the glue of change.
10. Go back to number one and down again.
Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applicationshere[5].
Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.
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Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. By WMD, I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion.
Traditional management was established to work top-down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures in the informal networks of the organization.
Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for managers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is.
But, in the last years, we have come a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s, of course, at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, and sharing and establishing new ideas.
In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three-quarters of the game.
There are ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system.
If you feel that you are a bit behind in all these or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable.
Start by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at Viral Change™ do work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people. There are other peer-to-peer networks that are formed more in the traditional way of ‘communities of practices’.
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Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.
These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of: 1. Inner civil wars
Internal infighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers in us a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against senior people. 2. Employee disengagement
The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.
Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing, feeling and smelling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.
For more on Employee Engagement see August’s Issues of BackInAWeekorso[11]. 3. Dysfunctional leadership
For any functional or aligned, serious Leadership Team I meet in my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.
These 3 areas, the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership, are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.
If any of these sound familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.
PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the perhaps successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is how more successful could they be.
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Organizational Design
Your house is more than the sum of the number of bricks. Your organizational life is more than the sum of management activities and solutions.
Contact my team at The Chalfont Project[8] about creating smart organizational design and strategy or to find out more visit: Smart Organizational Design.[12]
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Leadership Accelerators
We prefer the term ‘practising leadership’ to ‘developing’ to emphasise the real-life essence of leadership. Busy-ness has taken over and leadership is now a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in business than individual and collective leadership capabilities. Find out more about our leadership interventions and workshops [13]
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So, I’m back. But in a different format. Rather than daily thoughts, I will now share with you a regular focus on key culture change and behavioural science themes. Future issues will cover:
Behavioural Change – ‘there is no change, unless there is behavioural change’.
Employee Engagement – ‘the corporate love affair with a thermometer: Employee Engagement surveys.
Company Culture – dispelling the myths
Organizational Design – looking at the future of work
I prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the collective leadership capabilities.
I call ‘Collective Leadership’ that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the collective leadership is far greater than the sum of the power of the individual leaders, and when the team exercises leadership as a single unit, not as a collection of individuals.
It’s important to remember that leadership is plural. There are forms and shapes. Very often it makes you think whether there is a strong connection between all the concepts under that one roof. For me, a key distinction is the one between the traditional top-down (hierarchical) leadership and what I have described, many years ago, as Backstage Leadership™, that is, the art of supporting other leaders and managers ‘from the back’, as opposed to the front-stage with the PowerPoints. Backstage Leadership™ , which needs to be learnt, is about obsessively creating the conditions for others to lead. Its leadership with an architect hat. It may be less visible but could be more powerful. And yes, leaders can wear more than one hat.
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For more thoughts on collective leadership, watch my recent webinar[19] where I am joined by leadership and change experts from The Chalfont Project, Marieke van Essen[20] and Mark Storm[20].
What people think and what people say are occasionally connected. Being aware of this may be lifesaving.
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‘Daily Thoughts’ is paused, to assess its value and its next ‘presentation of life’. Bear with us. In the meantime, we will post some short vignettes from Leandro Herrero’s book The Flipping Point.[21] Contact us if you need anything or if you wish to share any insights about how Daily Thoughts is of value to you. Thanks for being here. Don’t go away! The Chalfont Project team [email protected][22].
Leaders have two hats. Hat one is the hierarchical one, the one that is usually the reason to be hired or promoted. It comes with a position in the top down structure. Hat two is the one I have described as Backstage Leadership. Hat two uses the power of Hat one to create the conditions for peer-to-peer and informal networks to work, without dictating what to do, without interfering. Hat two recognises that leadership is distributed across the organisation and beyond the boxes of the organisation chart, the one populated by Hat ones.
Many long, complex and expensive reorganization projects by Big Consulting Groups make companies fully prepared for the past.
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Find out more about the range of books written by Leandro Herrero: Books[23]
Human behaviour laws are unfair. Positive or negative consequences are disproportionate to the causes. Get used to it as leader.
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An old patient was concerned about her hair. A nurse came in at 7 am to put colour in her hair. ‘Nurses are saints’, she said. All nurses? That’s unfair. (A real example from one of our Viral Change programmes).
We have a reasonable level of trust between us. We help each other. But I have just let you down. Just once. Trust goes out of the window. This is unfair. How can trust be so vulnerable. (Because it is).
The doctor was hesitant, perhaps confused, maybe she had a bad day, but she missed a vital sign. Doctors don’t really know what is going on. There is a big problem in this hospital. You can see how everybody is so stressed. That is unfair.
Twelve nurses in the hospital ward were kind, attentive and considerate. One was terrible, uncaring, dismissive, awful. The nursing staff in this ward have an attitude problems. (All? But have just said…) That is unfair.
Again and again human behaviours and human emotions are not linear. We love unconditionally with very little objectivity. We hate deeply for perhaps a small feature.
These are non linear maths. We are stuck with them. This maths maybe needed to (be seen as running) run a brilliant organization out of a small set of positive behaviours or a dysfunctional organization out of a few bad apples. With these stats,’a few bad apples’ has no meaning. ‘Few’ is all you need to create havoc. In traditional, linear (organizational) maths, a few bad apples is just ‘a small proportion’ not to worry too much about. In our day to day non linear world, those few bad apples need to be identified and addressed. There may be more than one way, but leaving it to the comfort of ‘it is a small number’ is a bad idea.
Camino is a collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts, started years ago as a way of talking to myself. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.
Is leadership so elusive or only in the hands of academics?
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A publication I once received around the Mighty Davos meeting portrays the views of five expert academics on the topic of leadership for the future, probably all attending that-type-of-business-conclave. Here are their five vignettes:
1.’The leaders who fare best at predicting the future are the ones who recognize that the future is unpredictable’.
2. ‘Heightened uncertainty puts a premium on good judgement’.
3. ‘Leaders must be able to build organizations that are agile and can routinely innovate’.
4. ‘One key skill that all responsible leaders need to have today is a deep understanding of the key global trends driving change’.
5. ‘The path to leadership is both an inner and outer journey’.
OK! Now, try to (a) disagree with any of these; (b) take the advice as an operational yardstick; (c) combinations…
Can we unpack it a bit please?
The leaders who fare best at predicting the future are the ones who recognize that the future is unpredictable. Please explain. So what do they predict? That the future is unpredictable, or a particularly unpredictable future?
Premium on good judgement? You bet. Bad judgement sounds like a bad idea, leaders or no leaders.
Building organizations that are agile and can routinely innovate? Yep. But, is there anything else? I heard that in the last decade.
One key skill that all responsible leaders need to have today is a deep understanding of the key global trends driving change. Sure. If you don’t, you should not be paid, let alone be a ‘responsible leader’. The irresponsible ones presumably don’t care.
The path to leadership is both an inner and outer journey. I could not agree more, but, what does it have to do with leadership, that it does not for all of us as plain vanilla human beings?
Is leadership so elusive? Or only in the hands of academics?
It is frustrating that people who are portrayed as ‘leaders and experts on leadership’, generate platitudes of such a magnitude which I would not tolerate from junior consultants applying for a job with us.
You could say that I have taken lines out of context. And I have. But I have also red the rest of that context and it does not add much to the position. It may well be that the journalist has edited them. That I could imagine. And I hope this is the case.
I promise you, I don’t want to make fun of the academics or anybody else for that matter. Not a good use of my time. Just want to find meaningful conversations on leadership style, and it has been a long, long time since I have had a good aha!
Maybe it’s just me who does not get it. I don’t get this Davos stuff.
A heroic culture is a sick culture. If the company can only be run on heroic mode, call the doctor. But heroes, individually, are welcome.
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We all know, and have, some heroes in our organizations. People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk the extra several miles, and, more importantly, grab crisis’ and deal with them, whether asked or not.
There is also another feel and look of some heroes: works very long hours, puts the company above anything else, pulls out resources and brings people along, usually also in the same long hours. Life-work balance? What’s that?
Other heroes solve unprecedented situations, ‘kill’ themselves in the process, grab the crisis, particularly the Friday afternoon ones, save a lot of money for the company and turn up on the front page of the Company Magazine shaking hands with the CEO.
The super-hero, senor executive type, is adrenaline driven, jumps ahead usually to solve something drastic (‘Mary, get me on the 4:50 pm United flight to Munich’) and may or may not bring others with him. There is a type of senior hero, the Flying Saviour, who is particularly dangerous. I’ve known (and suffered) a few in my life. They cause havoc. They will be nothing without a good crisis. So they are very good at creating one.
Do you want a company formed by, or run by heroes? Do you want a culture of adrenaline excess, no weekends, long hours, dreadful mental health and always solving crisis? Do you want a culture where people say ‘I start at 8am with meetings and I have one after another until 6pm’? Said not as an anecdote but pretty much as the norm? A company of people extraordinarily busy? Where Busy-ness has supplanted busi-ness?
In fact, my original definition of a hero, how I started above – ‘People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk the extra several miles, and, more importantly, grab crisis’ and deal with them, whether asked or not’ – runs pretty close to a definition of accountability. And you want that. You want these kind of people. But we are sometimes calling ‘heroes’ to people who have full accountability. How bad is that?
Do your homework distinguishing between ‘heroes’ and ‘heroes’. Welcome the individual, heroic and occasional contributions. But if ‘heroics’ take over day to day life, if there is no way to run the company other than in hero mode, you have a problem. Call the doctor.
Dr Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide, and our team of Senior Organization Architects can deliver both dynamic and provocative speaking engagements[32], and are guaranteed to motivate, inspire and inform your audience.
Over the years Dr Herrero and our team of experts have created bespoke keynote interventions, workshops and masterclasses for both large industry conferences and C-Suite level corporate events, covering a wide-ranging and hugely varied number of topics.
What To Expect
We will work closely with you to fully understand the audience profile, business issues and specific event objectives to ensure we create a tailormade, immersive and personal experience.
To find out more or to discuss further contact us.[8]
Monochrome cultures (and their Royal Courts)
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Possibility is perhaps the most beautiful word in management. There are organizations in which possibilities seem exhausted, work is an extrapolation from day to day, people do their jobs, perhaps well, but there are no expectations of going outside the borders of the job.
I call these cultures ‘monochrome’. In monochrome companies, all the colours of life have been filtered and have been harmonised, so all is rather predictable. Some of those monochrome cultures actually dwell in technicolour brands for the outside world, but the possibilities of colour have been suppressed inside. They also tend to have lots of process junkies, who need treatment, no management.
It’s hard to change a monochromic environment. People seem to wear psychological sunglasses. Any suggestions of revising default positions (in management, leadership practices, culture change) are met with defence, as if a flotilla of Vikings had been spotted on the horizon.
Change in monochrome cultures almost never takes place at the core of the business. The only hope is to open some windows in the periphery so that the sun and the colours can get in. ‘Core people’ are usually very busy refining their defences, particularly in central corporate functions, the modern corporate Royal Court (or the Vatican’s Curia) which self-declared roles are protection and filtering of disruptive contaminations.
For years, middle management in organizations has been demonised as the culprit for all information blocks and defence building. My experience is that those who demonise that layer (usually named as ‘they’) have a lot more to answer for themselves. By suppressing possibilities, distributing sunglasses, and closing the doors and windows (and only some people have the keys) The Protectors bring a predictable monochromic future.
I very often see the disconnect between a technicolour company for the outside world, with their CEOs going on TV preaching innovative disruption, values and high purpose, and their monochrome cultures inside where process junkies remain addicted and untreated. This dichotomy has always been a bit of mystery to me. Similar to the one seen in many ‘commercial’ and ‘sales and marketing’ organizations, supposedly full of experts in these disciplines, that, however, can’t market or sell a thing inside to employees.
The process of infiltrating monochrome cultures is a fantastic challenge. When the tapestry of colours gets it, it is a real joy. But winters are longing for spring. Bring in people at all levels, including C-level, who can spell possibilities. Tell the Global Functions Courtiers that there are no Vikings after all. Stop blaming the middle, look up a little bit instead. And, if you are up to it, start some insurrections inside.
Above all, avoid monochrome cultures. Black, or pink, or indigo, but one colour. You’ll suddenly see possibilities coming in. Instead of those Vikings.
There is no change unless there is behavioural change. From supporting your business as you adjust to the ‘new normal’ through our Feed Forward 90-day programme to driving large scale cultural and behavioural change that is sustainable for the long term through Viral Change™ – we are your organization architects.
Feed Forward from The Chalfont Project, will help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department.
Using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ we have developed Feed Forward. Why? Because post Covid-19 to combat the organizational impact of the pandemic, we’ll need a behavioural counter-epidemic inside the company. This can be done but requires a real social movement, not the traditional ‘change programme’.
Viral Change ™: model, method and way of life, all in one
Viral Change™[4] uses the power of a small set of well-defined non-negotiable behaviours, spread by small groups of highly connected individuals within the organization. Their peer-to-peer influence – more powerful than hierarchical one – creates new norms, new ways of doing, new cultures. When groups start doing things the new way, other groups follow. Stories of success spread. Stories are memorable, behaviours are contagious… bullet points are not. There are great similarities between biological infection and idea infection. For proof, just look at any social phenomenon around you!
Viral Change™[4] is a way to understand the organization as an organism instead of a machine. It is a method to create large scale change to meet specific business objectives. It is also a day-to-day way of life in the organization in a permanent state of readiness. If you want to master any of these, we’ll be there to guide and work with you.
Contact us[8] today to find out more about Viral Change™.
12 simple rules of social change, organizational (culture) or societal (2/2)
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Continuing my revised 12 laws of social change at a scale.[37] Very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the one inside organizations, cultural change and transformation.
Yesterday, I launched the first 6 laws:
Cater for many motivations, but establish non negotiable behaviours
Create a compelling narrative that explains ‘the cause’ and ‘success’
Segment, segment and segment. Then segment again. One single monolithic, top down message works in North Korea only (but many corporations don’t get it)
Above all, engage the hyper connected
Fix role assumptions, expectations, labels. Activists, advocates, volunteers…These tribes are very different
Passion per se is overrated. It’s hard work first!
Here are the rest:
It’s grassroots, or it isn’t. These ‘nice words’ (a grassroots movement) won’t generate a bottom-up system per se. The greatest force of influence is peer-to-peer, but it needs to be orchestrated; it needs to be organized. ‘People-like-me’ plus organization (platform) is the change dynamite equivalent.
Leadership is needed. Big discovery! But not any thing leadership. There are at least 2 types. The top-down leadership needs to support, endorse and provide resources. That’s their first hat. Their second hat is Backstage Leadership™, the art of supporting the distributed peer-to-peer network in an invisible (backstage) way.
‘Readiness’ is a red herring. No revolution started when everybody could be ready for it. In fact, most likely, not many people may have been ready. Don’t wait for full alignment, full endorsement and full support unless, that is, if you have a second and third life in mind. If you work on this one, go, go, go; people will get ready then.
Build in a tracking process, but be careful what you measure, it may be irrelevant. Be clear what you want to see, then figure out how you can capture and extract meaning.
Master bottom-up storytelling at scale. Impactful, even game changing stories are often small and prosaic, but an indication that progress is being made. Make sure they are not hidden, a kind of precious secret. Get them out. Big heroic stories are overrated. They don’t speak to ‘people like me’.
Recalibrate all the time. Stay in beta. Don’t aim at perfection, or you’ll be perfectly dead soon.
There is no change unless there is behavioural change. From supporting your business as you adjust to the ‘new normal’ through our Feed Forward 90-day programme to driving large scale cultural and behavioural change that is sustainable for the long term through Viral Change™ – we are your organization architects.
Feed Forward from The Chalfont Project, will help you create sustainable behavioural and cultural change across your organization/team/department.
Using the Five Disciplines of Viral Change™ we have developed Feed Forward. Why? Because post Covid-19 to combat the organizational impact of the pandemic, we’ll need a behavioural counter-epidemic inside the company. This can be done but requires a real social movement, not the traditional ‘change programme’.
Viral Change ™: model, method and way of life, all in one
Viral Change™[4] uses the power of a small set of well-defined non-negotiable behaviours, spread by small groups of highly connected individuals within the organization. Their peer-to-peer influence – more powerful than hierarchical one – creates new norms, new ways of doing, new cultures. When groups start doing things the new way, other groups follow. Stories of success spread. Stories are memorable, behaviours are contagious… bullet points are not. There are great similarities between biological infection and idea infection. For proof, just look at any social phenomenon around you!
Viral Change™[4] is a way to understand the organization as an organism instead of a machine. It is a method to create large scale change to meet specific business objectives. It is also a day-to-day way of life in the organization in a permanent state of readiness. If you want to master any of these, we’ll be there to guide and work with you.
Contact us[8] today to find out more about Viral Change™.
But what do they think? What do they want us to do? Why don’t they just tell us?
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In my consulting work, it is incredibly frequent to see people stuck with a question: ‘but what do they want us to do?’. Or, ‘we need to know what they want so we can do it’. Or, ‘should they not tell us what our role (mission, remit) is, first?’ They are the execs on the top floor. Or the exec suite. Or the ones with the closed office door.
This is particularly frequent for groups and corporate functions often sitting at the crossroads between other functions or Business Unit. I have in my mind Internal and External Communications, Branding units, Franchise structures, Project team structures etc. They all seem to need clarification of frontiers, a declaration of borders, even better if that comes with Border Police and a Manual: this is mine, this is yours, do not trespass. Not unreasonable. Perhaps. In the 19th Century.
There is a hidden, or not that hidden, assumption that there are people (execs at the top) who seem to know the answer, but they don’t tell you. If they just did, once and for all! Of course, in the absence of they telling you, a possible path is to guess. Here, the game of guessing, and second guessing, comes in, one of the most futile exercises in organizational life, big organization or small organization.
In my experience, nine out of ten of the cases when they don’t tell you, is because they haven’t got a clue, not that they want to keep it secret from you. I am saying this as a partial compliment, not a criticism. Of course if they knew, but decided not to tell you, they will be simply deceiving you. Frankly, this is not my experience. The partial compliment comes from the fact that, at least, they have not made it up so that ‘they have an answer for everything’.
A good working hypothesis is this: there is no magic answer on the 10th floor. If we are stuck with this, they are also stuck. So, there are two options.
One. Wait. Wait for the magic to come down, and put up with it if you don’t like it. You may finally have tremendous clarity, a clarity that you may regret.
Two. ‘Occupy the street’. Take accountability, take the space, figure it out yourselves. Chances are, they will very much welcome this. To the surprise of many of my clients, this is generally the case.
The reason why the above partial compliment was only partial, instead of full one, is this. They should be more open and honest and say: you figure it out.
The Chalfont Project – Your Organization Architects
If you want to build a remarkable organization, and are perhaps ready to challenge your status quo, we are your organizational architects. If you need the best leadership, if you want a collaborative environment, mastering change, and instilling radical management innovation we promise you’ll have them. Work with us. We won’t tell you things just because you want to hear them.
The unsaid and unsayable are at the deeper layers of culture
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When trying to understand a culture, there will be plenty of visible things to look at, to hear and to sense. Leaders with high social skills will capture them and will try to make sense of them. To some extent, crucial as this is, it is the easy part. To go to the deeper layers of the culture, the underground of thoughts, the tapestry of beliefs and emotions on the hidden side, you need to hear the unsaid and the unsayable. ‘Hearing’ is the skill. It’s a sensory ability that can be developed by critical thinking and critical questioning.
I hear X,Y and Z. What is it that I am not hearing? Why is that absent? Does it mean irrelevance, or, on the contrary, so relevant that it can be disturbing and that’s why it remains in the safe place of the unsaid. Is it not said perhaps because it is unsayable?
A superficial concept of ‘being open’ is often heard: ‘we’ve been very open’, often means we have been very vocal and have ventilated issues. If some were uncomfortable, the fact that they have been ‘in the open’ makes us feel full of ‘openness’ and ‘candour’. This is good in itself, but perhaps it may not go far enough, to reach the land of the unsaid and unsayable. Talkative and openness are two things.
As a good leader you could push the envelope a bit and explore the unsaid. You could have some hypothesis of the unsaid and create safe, transitory places to free them. I use short Scenario Sessions with my clients where, as scenario, we allow ourselves to imagine uncomfortable worlds in which the unsaid is given permission to be said.
If ‘what am I hearing’ and ‘how I am I heard’ are key critical leadership questions (The Leader with Seven Faces[38]), ‘what am I not hearing’ and ‘is it possibly unsaid’, elevate the leader’s social skills to an even higher level.
There will always be some unsaid and unsayable. There will be natural defences that are healthy. Only a superficial and naïve concept of ‘openness’ will insist on completely depleting the stock of the unsaid. The question is how much, as leader, I am exercising my senses.
Visit The Chalfont Project[35] or Viral Change™[2] to find out how we can impact your organizational change and transformation needs, whether at a team level or across the organization – Contact us now [8] or call on: 01895 549158.
Lose control, to gain more control: Starting the Control Diet
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I said in yesterday’s Daily Thought[39] that we needed to grab the (management) Paradox of Control. The more we lose control, the more we have of it. If we don’t have to worry about controlling, we have maximum control.
How to start that journey? The way to think about changing your control levels for the better is simple: start by thinking, what can I do to have less control? What kind of changes – perhaps structural, perhaps people-related – would I have to make in order to distribute control? If I want to lose control, I will have to trust other people in the organization who will be sharing the control. What would prevent me from doing so? Is it the people I have? That may be part of the problem, but the problem could also be me.
Starting on this road entails, first of all, mapping the areas where control could be devolved, perhaps at some risk, and then taking some of those risks. Here are some ideas:
Push down decision making. Review decision points and delegate one to a lower level every month until you have lost most of the control. Remember, this should be the goal. You’ll need to change a few things so that it is possible.
Allocate budgetary responsibilities to groups or teams. In some product development organizations, budget is still very centralised so project teams are merely administrators. To push down budgetary responsibilities and ‘lose some control’ to the project leader, for example, could make those teams far more accountable and perhaps more business focused.
Suppress monthly reports. Cascading monthly reports down the hierarchical lines may be a waste. Ask everybody to post highlights of their progress online (intranet, team room, social network, etc.) and to do so in real time.
Overall, start a personal goal (and record your achievements): lose control of something every month, for 6 months.
Losing control is disruptive and powerful. It can spread virally by devolving and sharing accountabilities. But it needs to start somewhere… That is you.
Now, dear leader, to cheer you up, imagine…
Imagine an organization with very ‘distributed’ accountabilities and less centralised control. Imagine what the behaviours in that organization look like. Imagine a culture where people are asking themselves what they could control less and where those people have a plan to decrease their levels of control, instead of one to gain more. Imagine how this can spread. Imagine what the consequences are for trust and accountability across the organization. Imagine the kind of behaviour that will be visible. What will need to change? What are the benefits? Imagine the barriers (individual or institutional) that can appear. Imagine how you will deal with them.
After stretching your imagination, have a plan. Start your Control Diet. The more you lose, the richer you will be.
PS. If you genuinely can’t lose control because the people you have, either because you don’t trust them or because they don’t have the skills, then, the problem you have is bigger than a Control one. You’d better see a doctor.
TODAY – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm[40] and I will discuss collective leadership in the post-Covid world – Register[41] now:
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
‘‘Collective Leadership’[42] is that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the collective leadership is far greater than the sum of the power of the individual leaders, and when the team exercises leadership as a single unit, not as a collection of individuals.’
At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership.
So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.
Live Webinar with Q&A – TODAY at 1730 BST/1830 CET
Lose control, to gain more control: The paradox and the symptoms
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The more ‘command-and-control’ you practice, the less control you actually have and the more you’ll need to command. In today’s organizational life, there is little room for the ‘and’ between the words ‘command’ and ‘control’. If anything, it is ‘command and ‘be a slave to it’. Lose control and you will actually gain more control.
If ‘nuclei of control’ are scattered all over the organization and the company functions well, that is a clear sign that there is no need for a central ‘command and control’. It is also an indication of distributed independence, of trust in people’s capabilities that is spread across the organization. Although the days when the uniforms of Woolworths’ staff had no pockets (to make sure they didn’t steal) are long gone, the days where individual employees and teams don’t have much room to decide for themselves (as they may make the wrong decisions) have not.
Command and control management is intellectually dismissed by many who are convinced of its inefficiency and waste. But rational understanding is not necessarily the same as emotional integration. There are many different ways in which you can exercise command and control… and you might be doing it even if you say you don’t subscribe to it. The following are just a few examples that I frequently see in my consulting work:
Excessive ‘reporting back’ on points included in a project.
Too many reviews and rehearsals of presentations.
Pre-approval of certain types of communication outside official reporting lines.
Decision-making powers accumulated at the top of the organization chart.
Devolved responsibility, but with little budgetary room for execution.
Decision points centralised around formal meetings.
As I said, the paradox of control is that the more you let go of it, the more control you will have as there will be several ‘points of control’ scattered across the organization. If you think this is something you can’t afford, then that already tells you a lot about the kind of organization you have.
TOMORROW – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm[40] and I will discuss collective leadership in the post-Covid world – Register[41] now:
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
‘‘Collective Leadership’[42] is that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the collective leadership is far greater than the sum of the power of the individual leaders, and when the team exercises leadership as a single unit, not as a collection of individuals.’
At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership.
So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.
Live Webinar with Q&A – TOMORROW at 1730 BST/1830 CET
Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests
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THIS THURSDAY – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm[40] and I will discuss collective leadership – Register[41] now:
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
‘Collective Leadership’ is that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the collective leadership is far greater than the sum of the power of the individual leaders, and when the team exercises leadership as a single unit, not as a collection of individuals.
Live Webinar with Q&A – 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET
I call Collective Leadership that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the collective leadership is far greater than the sum of the power of the individual leaders, and when the team exercises leadership as a single unit, not as a collection of individuals. It is not the same as a ‘high performance team’, where the focus is on excellent coordination, collaboration and delivery. I see the ‘high performance team’ as a state of operational excellence, whilst I see ‘Collective Leadership’ as a state of unified, single drive.
Better than a definition is to understand two Acid Tests of this ‘management status’.
Number one – ‘The Empty Chair Test’. A member of the leadership team disappears for a period of time (prolonged illness, they are called to a special project to acquire Company X, he is tasked with a sensitive corporate project that requires his full dedication, he is parachuted to Geography Y to sort out a serious crisis, he suddenly leaves, etc.). That chair is empty. I am talking about either a functional chair (CFO, Head of HR, VP of IT, Head of R&D, etc.), or a Regional or P&L/Commercial chair (Head of Europe, MD of France, VP of EMEA, etc.). It does not matter. The answer to that the empty chair situation is (1) that somebody else from the Leadership Team jumps in and says ‘I’ll take care of your/that area/function’, and (2) that this is not dictated by the CEO, it just happens.
For the latter, imagine your day-to-day family life (or somebody else’s): ‘The car needs petrol, I am late for work. OK, You take the other car, I’ll take the kids to school and I’ll get petrol’. Explain to me, how many strategic decision committees were needed and how many discussions on ‘my role-your role’ took place before this action. Why is it that, we, in organizations, are unable to replicate normal life? A mystery.
Acid test number two – ‘The Wrong Members Town Hall’. The Head of HR is visiting an affiliate at the scheduled time of a local Town Hall meeting when all employees are gathered to hear some corporate news. People would welcome (from the VIP Visitor) an update on (1) New Product Launches and (2) overall Company Performance or Quarterly Results. But, there is no ‘Commercial’ person from HQ! However, the Head of HR (member of the Leadership Team) is able to walk people through both, as if. She has no commercial P&L responsibility but as member of the Leadership Teams she is able to deliver that speech, no problem. And people are a bit stunned, perplexed, amused, surprised. Great!
Similarly, Peter, the Senior VP of Commercial Operations in Europe, Africa and Middle East, finds himself unexpectedly in front of an annual event for HR people. The audience is composed of the company-wide HR community. (Mary, the Head of HR has missed the plane for the Conference, but Peter, the commercial head of EMEA is in town). Peter is able to describe the entire HR strategic plan, no problem. And people are a bit stunned, perplexed, amused, surprised. Great!
I am sure you get the message. I have an equal number of clients saying that ‘this is unrealistic’ or that ‘this is great, something to aspire to’.
In Collective Leadership mode, Functions, Regions, Support, P&L, non P&L, get blurred. Nobody expects people to be an expert in a functional, non-commercial area that is not theirs, but Collective Leadership means that it would be perfectly reasonable to deliver a non-expert, pretty accurate picture of any area, no matter what part of the business, if you are a member of the Leadership Team.
Imagine these two Acid Tests in your organization. Would it pass? Reflect on your own journey to Collective Leadership. Whether you are at the top, or less top, or less-less top, the principles apply.
If you are in the ‘this is unrealistic’ camp, my question to you is ‘Why?’
Continue the conversation….we’d be delighted to have you join us! Register now[41]!
One disruptive culture shift, five outcomes. At least. The 30/30 to 3/3 ‘unreasonable shift’.
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Imagine this goal. Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same decision in 3 days. Let’s imagine it! It’s only when one starts to visualise this kind of shift that all sorts of possibilities come up.
I do this with my clients to provoke a reaction: impossible, chaos, that would be good, but how? nice idea, crap, and the whole variety of things. I call this ‘introducing disruptive targets’. Some may feel unreasonable. Some may be indeed unreasonable. Some will turn up possible, necessary and incredibly powerful. Some changes would never take place unless it all started… unreasonably.
Anyway, why did you need 30 people to make a decision involving a 30 day process, in the first place? Well, there may be many reasons. Here are some
We need all these people to ‘represent’ all constituencies
Many of these people are not empowered to make a decision, so they will need to go back to their bosses
The issue is complex, it needs lots of people and lots of time
The majority of these 30 people are in the process to ‘defend’ some sort of interest, or they are there ‘just in case’ the decision may affect them, or the groups they represent.
The issue is not complex. So many people involved is historical. This is how it has always been done, and, although the decision is ‘ready’ today, the next project team meeting is in 30 days, so, we will ‘take it to the team’.
And combinations
What a Disruptive Target may introduce? Well, for starters, it will challenge the ‘It’s Not Possible Brigade’. Reasonable or unreasonable as it may be, it will force a review of processes and systems. It may discover that the only reason why things are done in a particular way is number (5), that is, it has always been done in that particular way. Perhaps.
Imagine again. ‘Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same decision in 3 days’.
I’ve done it. It is possible. Just a few bruises.
Five Outcomes of the disruption:
Acceleration. Suddenly decision making is fast. This is copied by other people, other places. Not change in SOPs. Just viral
Effectiveness. People work smarter, people get rid of barriers. If you want fancy labels, here are some: agility, entrepreneurial, nimble process.
Costs down. Do I have to explain?
Trust, delegation, empowerment, all up in ‘scores’. You have to start trusting these 3 people and stop ‘attending just in case’ or being in ambassadorial mode, representing somebody else.
Culture change. Big time. All of the above.
With the 30/30 to 3/3, you have just avoided a multi-thousand pound consulting bill to ‘create a culture of empowerment and delegation. (Tip: if you want ‘a culture of empowerment and delegation’, empower people and delegate).
The path to fast cultural change, organizational effectiveness and smarter working, sometimes starts with unreasonable thinking.
Unreasonable thinking as a stretch and unreasonable thinking as a blind, fundamentalist, nonsense are not the same.
Sadly it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them in real life. I know.
THIS WEEK – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series – Register[41] now:
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
Create a “Better Way” for your organization to flourish in the post-COVID world
Live Webinar with Q&A – 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET
At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.
Management upside down: global is local, leadership goes grassroots, top is at the bottom and traditional management needs a retirement party
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It is perhaps the Age of Inversion. The weights have gone the other way. Globalisation, big G, or small g, or just corporate speak, has not gone away, but the value of local is higher. Back is the local expert, the local grocery and the local travel agent. Maybe, even, the local bookshop, dare I say, that has more than books.
Top leadership is weaker than we care to believe. But this is such a sinful admission that nobody dares to say it. Top leadership is progressively less powerful; grassroots-anything has great traction. The bottom has power: in the street, in political campaigning, in the health care system, in the peer-to-peer associations. The business organization is next. Employee activism is not employees giving positive messages about their companies. This is a prostitution of the word activism. And it is sad when I see it used as a mere employee with a megaphone. Employee activism is employees taking charge and being more and more self-managed, not necessarily in the fundamentalist, extreme way. If you don’t have a percentage of your workforce self-managed, even a little, you are not listening.
‘Management’ is literally upside down and looking for new ways of doing things, more devolved, more bottom up, more self-managed, more autonomous. Old words such as empowerment, delegation and ‘ownership’ are so incredibly tired that they have lost their meaning. They need a break, perhaps a long break, perhaps retirement.
It is a new concept of the enterprise that we have in front of us, where ‘community organising’ and ‘people mobilization’ skills will be a premium and traditional MBA management may remain but as a commodity. We will send people to understand and participate in social movements, as a way to skill them for leadership positions in the company. We will not send them on a Leadership Course in a Business School. We will hire people who have built something (a football club, a petition, a youth centre, an association) as a premium and we will have the ones who ‘can do a job’ as a commodity.
I am not worried about the super-digitalisation-super-transformation taking away jobs for the robots. I am worried about humans thinking that the answers are more skilling of the last Century, or this one, a la Big Business School.
Business will have more leaders coming from charities, from the army, from ex-diplomats in war zones, from social movements, from people who know how to navigate life and bring others with them.
I am convinced. This is not disruptive innovation or innovative disruption or any other clever business speak. It is survival or prolonged agony trying to steer a ship that suddenly seems to have a life of its own. If done well, it’s success, an exponential one.
Behavioural Economics, Social Movements, Viral Change ™, Network Theory, Political and Social Campaigning, Large Scale Social Interventions, Design, Digital Activism, Voluntarism, all are in and fresh. Traditional economics, traditional management, linear Kotter-ian change, academic ‘research’, mechanistic employee (happiness) engagement and old Business School lenses are out. Tired, aged, desperate for a retirement.
We are all very grateful for your contributions. Enjoy the freedom. Well-deserved. We’ll call you if we need you. We are busy here figuring out how to look at the world upside down.
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
Create a “Better Way” for your organization to flourish in the post-COVID world
Live Webinar with Q&A – 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET
At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.
WATCH our 5, free webinars as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.
Leandro Herrero discusses leadership themes from his new book and reflects on leadership as a continuously evolving praxis. ‘Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest’. He is joined by senior consultants from The Chalfont Project – Organization Architects[44] Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.
Can anybody dispel the mystery for me, please? Who are ‘they’?
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These are commonly found uses of the expression ‘they’ within organizations.
They won’t approve this
They don’t get it
They don’t listen
I don’t know what they would think of this
They are bad at execution
They haven’t said anything yet
They really don’t know.
And numerous others. The use of ‘they’ is almost mythical.
I have heard ‘they won’t approve this’ in the context of leadership teams referring to the Board of Directors, even when two members of that leadership team were also members of the Board of Directors.
I have heard ‘they are very bad at execution’ used by management teams to refer to their troops, even when every single member of that collective ‘they’ reported into somebody in that management team. So, if ‘they’ report to you, then the problem is you, not ‘they’! So, you, actually, are bad at execution.
I have heard ‘they don’t really know’ in a Board of Directors meeting, referring to both, external investors and employees. I have also heard the mythical ‘they’ in the same Board of Directors meeting, with no obvious reference to anybody, leaving me with the question of whether the real ‘they’ that they were referring to was the Holy Trinity or any other supernatural entity. I left the meeting with no clarity.
If anybody knows of a ‘they’ category (and a Social Security code?) please let me know, so that I can incorporate it to my organizational work. I would not like to miss them. They will never forgive me.
Don’t miss our final webinar from our series ‘A Better Way’[41] – Thursday, 17th June
A series of webinars with Dr Herrero and his team of Organization Architects exploring the future of organizational life. Explaining how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smartorganizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a “Better Way” for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.
Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities
17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET
At The Chalfont Project, we prefer the use of the term ‘practicing leadership’ to ‘developing’ it to emphasise the real life essence of leadership. So much has been written that the world is full of recipes and techniques, examples and role models. The rich plethora of available answers obscures the need to have good questions. Reflection and introspection seem like logical ingredients for being a good leader, yet our business and organizational life treats them as luxuries that have no place in our ubiquitous ‘time famine’. Busy-ness has taken over business and leadership has been commoditised to a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in organizational life than the individual and collective leadership capabilities.
WATCH our 5, free webinars as Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects, debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.
Leandro Herrero discusses leadership themes from his new book and reflects on leadership as a continuously evolving praxis. ‘Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest’. He is joined by senior consultants from The Chalfont Project – Organization Architects[44] Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.
Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.
Organizational Design
Leadership Accelerators
