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A true story. A health care worker is truly struggling to do her work and caring for a son who has had a crash accident. She has no other means but finding time here and there for a first stage of intense rehabilitation that entails travelling to a distant centre. It just does not work.
Before her manager becomes aware, he has a visit from some of her colleagues who hand him a list of names. All are names of people who want to donate one day of their annual leave, their official holiday, to their colleague in serious need. In total, the number of days that could be accumulated was around a third of a full year. This is the number of people who had signed the list and offered one day of their holidays.
An HR logistical nightmare, but it happened.
I don’t know about you, but when I see human generosity in action, I reconcile myself with the human condition. And sometimes I need that reconciliation big time.
This collective action did not reach the front page of a newspaper. In fact, many like me only became aware of it through the context of one of our Viral Change[1]™ programmes where we were looking for real stories of kindness and generosity. The story is true, because it was told by the manager who received that list, a Viral Change[1]™
Champion himself.
It never occurred to me that this could happen. I wonder how many other stories of solidarity may happen in our work places. Many may be invisible. At times it seems that we have reduced all to money. Putting money in an envelope, noble as it is, is actually easy. Giving your name to offer a day of your holiday is less. Those having the idea of collecting and organising are real heroes.
Once again, the best possible currency we have: our time. The most precious and scarce one.
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The answer to individual negativity is group positiveness. Fighting individual negativity at individual level is a risky fight. If you are the manager of the chronically negative person, you may use threat (OK, up to you), may engage in a rational discussion about the negative impact of being negative (good luck), you may want to put up with it, you may pray, you may say, OK, but it’s Jim, everybody knows Jim.
You may also consider this path:
Question. Is Jim influential? You’ll need to define this for yourself. If the answer is remotely close to a yes (so he is an environmental health hazard), follow step 2.
Is there anybody who can influence Jim? If you are lucky and find more than one person, use them all. A group effect is needed. Individual confrontation, gentle or otherwise, is unlikely to work. Super negative people are not solitary hermits. They love audiences. So give Jim one. One of the people who can’t put up with negativity. The closer you can get to gathering a bunch of peers, the better.
If all fails, the management technique to use is called transplant. Transport Jim to a completely new set up where people have no time for negativity, and one in which it may take ages to build a new audience from scratch.
Human beings transported to an entirely new environment respond by deploying strategies and behavioural routines, which its own existence is sometimes unknown to them. The new environment destabilises old defenses. This could go really wrong in weak people, like an old person suddenly transplanted from home to a hospital or a care assisted home. In my medical times, I have seen sudden deaths (I repeat, death) immediately after a transfer of old people, otherwise with no particular immediate health risk, from their cramped, not very clean, ‘unsuitable home’, to a five star 24/7 care assisted, residential accommodation.
It could be very good, like a student gap year in a new country. Or an immigrant settled in a new country after an initial struggle. Or change of schools, or moving abroad, or change of career. Success is not guaranteed but it’s worth trying. In my old days as a clinical psychiatrist, some of my greatest successes, in some cases, particularly eating disorders, were transplant driven. Short of a miracle.
For more insights and thought-provoking discussion WATCH our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organization architects.
This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain 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.
In this series, Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of Organization Architects debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.
Join Leandro Herrero, as he 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[5] – Organization Architects, Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change ™, [1]a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and Corporate events – to invite Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau[6] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project.[7]
Empowerment: the muddle. The wrong conversation, until you start unpacking the concept and dismantling the house of buzzwords
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The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours:
I expect you to do something but you don’t think you are empowered to do it.
I empower you to do something (I have decided it is good to empower you) but you don’t want to be empowered (too much responsibility?)
I am told that delegation is good, so I delegate, but call it empowerment. But I am just passing the monkey on to you.
I empower you, you think I am abdicating.
I don’t have permission to do, or I think I don’t have, I feel I am not empowered, but you never thought you needed to give me permission.
You are empowered! Here you are! Take it. What? (Is he ok?)
Empowering you means you need to behave as if you were the owner of the business (does it mean I can have your bonus?)
We are all empowered, for goodness sake, just take accountability for things!
I am empowering you to be empowered, but not too much, because I will lose control.
I am told to let it go, so I am empowering you, but you don’t believe me for a second, because you know me. So I may have to do something more than just saying it.
You are empowered. Please report to me weekly on the hitting of milestones, number of KPIs and times you took a break.
I can’t empower everybody, it would be a disaster.
The above list of 12 contains these keywords, all conveniently used when and as needed contributing to the intrinsic muddle of the territory of empowerment: empowerment, wanted to be, thinking you are, delegation, abdications, monkey traffic, permission, ownership, accountability, control, let it go.
No wonder we can go for days and weeks ‘discussing empowerment’ without reaching anywhere serious. The conceptual discussion is messy and difficult. The only way to unbundle this is to descend to the behavioural side: what do you want to see in the environment (that people do, don’t do) that you can say ‘this is a culture of empowerment’?
The culture is, will be, will feel, completely different if your (collective) view of empowerment is for example delegation, or passing the monkey, or simply accountability taken.
The real, true, unique, powerful, core ingredient underneath this discussion has one word: control. That is, how much you have, need to have, should have, and their mirrors, how much you can lose, want to lose.
If you frame a discussion about empowerment you need to start by acknowledging the conceptual muddle and then peeling the onion until you get to the core. Then, there, at that core, it will be control, will feel control, will smell control. That is the issue. And if it is, your discussion now has a different label. Address control, forget the rest (unless the discussion takes place over a few glasses of wine, in which case, conceptual muddle thrives in such a fertile territory).
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects, and the pioneer of Viral Change™[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable, large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations.
An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project[7] or email: [email protected].[8]
Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.
As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.
This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers, will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. Contrary to how this may sound, when the entire management team participates, this is an incredibly fast process. But it is also an in-depth one when using our tools which, amongst other things, shortcut weeks of discussions and pseudo-brainstorming. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked. You may or may not need us beyond that point in order to help you with the journey itself.
The cult of issues. The culture in which airtime is dominated by problems and where navel-gazing is king
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Some cultures a very introspective. In a healthy way. Some are pathologically introspective and spend a lot of time dissecting the dynamics of anything that moves. The latter tends to drift towards issues, problems, things that we need to solve. There is a fine line between ignoring the issues and talking only about issues or indeed creating them when they do not exist.
For some people, issues are something that brings the smell of blood, the infection of gossip, the excitement of war. In those companies, workshops become warkshops.
In those cultures, many people feed a little monster that soon grows fat and becomes a big monster. In some cultures, some people are masters in creating problems that do not exist.
In those, toxicity is high, everything else does not get good attention. Everything is navel-gazing under the noble aim of introspection and ‘learning’.
Entire communal experiments in the 1960’s went out of the window, not because they were bad in themselves, or because of political or ideological tensions, but simply because people used collective introspection and psychodynamic analyses as oxygen. And those are easily suffocating.
Avoid too much of that. The company is not a large therapy group of people on the payroll.
Dr Leandro Herrero, frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide, and his team of Senior Organization Architects can deliver both dynamic and provocative sessions, and are guaranteed to motivate, inspire and inform your audience.
What we offer:
Keynotes
Workshops
Behavioural and Social Change Masterclasses
Social Movement Masterclasses
Engagements based on Dr Herrero’s books
View our speaker brochure to find out more[11] With high-level expertise, thought-provoking content and an engaging presence the team at The Chalfont Project will inspire audiences, encouraging them to challenge the status quo and adopt new ways of thinking. The result is an audience motivated to take action and equipped to make a lasting difference to their organizations. Over the years, Dr Herrero and his team of experts have created bespoke keynotes, workshops and masterclasses for both large industry conferences and C-Suite level corporate events, covering a wide-ranging and hugely varied number of topics.
A tsunami of navel-gazing, force 11, is impacting business, society and politics. And individual identity.
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I don’t like to sound gloomy, but, is the current self-centrism an epidemic of colossal proportions? Or, another way to put it, is navel-gazing the tsunami coming to all our shores?
Individually, we are in a massive selfie/toxic epidemic. Millions of homo sapiens take pictures of themselves as if running out of time before any Second Coming of the Lord, or at least The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse drop by.
Companies look 90% at themselves and 10% at the market. And when they use the 10%, 90% of that 10%, it is looking at competitors, not the real buyers, not society.
Big Countries. Well, that one wants to be Great Again, meaning close the borders, look inside, close the windows, look at us.
Big Global Brands have such a high regard for themselves that they keep telling us about their attributes, and their greatness, and their passions – which they have dissected into millions of PowerPoints and multi million pound consultants – so that the rest of us mortals recognise a greatness that we don’t care much about, and pay for that greatness that is not that great.
The Me Inc. is very strong and, dangerously, we believe that we are communal and resource-sharing loving people. Wow!
Across the world, self-centred-born organizations have become so sophisticated at navel-gazing that you wonder if they have inherited some sort of optical macular degeneration, aka blindness, in the process. Conservatives are hyper-conservatives because they want to conserve what they see in their navel-gazing exercises. Left-leaning organizations have lost the equilibrium, due to so much navel-gazing, they are falling instead of just leaning, and becoming irredeemably self-centred. Nationalist movements thrive because telling people to look after oneself and forget the rest, sells very well. Add in the salt and pepper of ‘the others are screwing you up’, and, bingo, we all want independence in a Massive Interdependent World.
We need a counter-epidemic. It reads like this. People, can you open the windows? Actually you’ll be amazed what you can see. You are not that important, we all are. Calm down. Your horse is getting a bit tired. Bosses, employees, politicians, journalists (that excludes the UK Daily Mail), Decent Men, we are here In Transit. Stop looking in. We are in this together. The answers are outside us, most of the time.
I know that my Unsexy Manifesto won’t go too far but, come on, let’s be serious. There is a thing called society, despite Mrs Thatcher’s denial. Most of the things that look like ‘I’ or ‘me’ don’t have a life within the ‘us’.
ps. I propose a Narcissus Tax. For every selfie, 10% of your phone battery is gone. (Mr Crook? Mr Croooook? Tim? Are you there?).
You can now watch our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects. To find out about our workshops visit The Chalfont Project website[6] or Contact Us[7] today.
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[12] Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.
Walking e-bays bearing second hand thoughts
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We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking notes is not enough. You need to say something. And because this is universal, it sometimes feels as if saying is more important than what you say. Meaning evaporates soon on behalf of content.
You may have been in meetings and conferences where everybody seems compelled to intervene. May worse moment is the ‘do you have any questions moment.’ I wish they didn’t. The short showering of triviality finds you naked with no raincoat.
Many team meetings are composed by walking e-bays selling second-hand thoughts. Nothing is terribly profound or cooked. However, if a figure of status or authority is in the room, the nodding increases and the probability of more second-hand thoughts increases as well. ‘You’ve made a fascinating point Jane.’ Actually, not. BTW, ‘fascinating’ is only reserved for you Jane; otherwise ‘very interesting’ would have done it.
Mind you, this is interesting. When the Brits say ‘this is very interesting’ , chances are it is the least interesting thing. Particularly when the sentence is left hanging as if anticipating a part 2 that never comes. Never take credit for something that a Brit has qualified as ‘very interesting.’
The trouble with group meetings, team meetings and any gathering of humans around mints and biscuits, is that the natives take the campfire very seriously. Uncooked ideas are great if you allocate time for them. Uncooked ideas at the time of serving the meal is only palatable to the few lovers of raw fish.
The best Time Management course is, of course. in Ecclesiastes 31:8: To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
And it carries on.
Even second-hand uncooked thoughts have a time. But it is not all the time.
I am switching off over the weekend, giving my thoughts a chance to avoid becoming e-bay goods.
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change™[1], a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers sustainable large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management.
An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and corporate events. To invite Leandro to speak at your conference or business event contact: The Chalfont Project[7] or email: [email protected].[8]
See here[6] for all workshops and masterclasses developed and delivered by Leandro and his team. Or to discuss any of The Chalfont Project products and services call: +44 01895 549 144.
Thesaurus – based value and behaviours systems are meaningless, exhausted and cheap
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Let’s start somewhere else. What is the logic behind Listmania?
Very often there isn’t one. But starting a note/blog/communication with ‘the 10 things that’, or similar, apparently is very good for the rankings. I have to confess I have followed this many times. Not by force of headline management. I do make lists, and I do publish them. So if you see rubbish, please shout.
But the non-logic logic I am talking about is the one that is simply fabricated around the same concept or idea, and sold as a clever list, which actually only an idiot can buy; a condition that ostensibly is unrelated to headline effectiveness management.
It goes likes this:
The 5 characteristics of successful managers are:
They are punctual
They arrive on time
They are never late
They are very conscious of time
They attend meetings from the very beginning
How’s that for a successful full page ‘on management’ on a prestigious blog, of a prestigious business school of some sort? I’ve seen it.
Thesaurus-like list (mania) is a silly version of other things that pretend to be more serious. For example, a value system.
Imagine this:
Value = integrity
Behaviours = honesty, openness and candour
Value = openness
Behaviours = sincerity, integrity and honesty
Etc.
There is absolutely nothing in the above sentences about anything remotely operational, behavioural or otherwise. It is pure Thesaurus-management.
If you want openness, you’d better define what exactly it is that you want to see, and not to see, in real life, concrete, unequivocal, so I can understand what you want. And this is the first step to agree (if we have to) on how to go about creating a culture of openness. I know, harder than right-clicking on ‘synonymous’.
Memo: Permission never required, so don’t ask
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I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order (an internal formal community of brothers) had been waiting for centuries for Rome to lift the ‘in excommunicationem’ status (ex-communication) or maximum penalty for gross deviation from the dogma, of one of its medieval brothers, a top German theologian at the time, once a high teacher and scholar in La Sorbonne in Paris. He had been, and is still today, highly regarded and influential across a broad spectrum of spiritual practices, beyond the Catholic church, but had over centuries the big weight of his unorthodox thinking and preaching on his shoulders. His battles with the official defenders of the orthodoxy only ended by his natural death, fortunately before the planned final ideological tribunal in Avignon.
Just very recently, a ‘more friendly’ new Vatican administration, and after a polite reminder by the new Head of the Order, replied finally that there was no case for the ‘excommunication’ to be lifted because, in fact, the brother preacher at La Sorbonne had never been excommunicated in the first place. The news apparently took centuries to reach them.
Now imagine that, in the real world, present day, you were waiting for permission to act. OK, not as historically glorious as the German medieval brother. Let’s say more prosaic waiting, from the boss or boss’ bosses. Imagine, that you get the news that the permission is not coming because you never needed it; you had it already.
Would that not be sort of embarrassing?
OK, don’t wait for natural death as the brother in Avignon. Get up and move. Catch up with the time lost.
Here is a list of permissions that you should check whether you actually never needed them. Please do so before brain degeneration (or pension) kicks in:
To push the boundaries and abandon default positions
To open Pandora boxes, to uncover mysteries and deal with cans of worms
To get fellow travellers not in your teams, not in your formal structures, working with you
To get ready for the unpredictable and prepare yourself with constant learning
To make it happen, and fix it later
To tell others, to tell others to work across boundaries
To do great things that are not in your job description
To engage other bosses not in your direct hierarchical line
To initiate change and create traction
To talk, engage, team up, with absolutely anybody, anywhere in the organization regardless rank and geographies. Use of the phone included.
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In my world, ‘corporate’ is synonymous with big structure, big processes and big systems. Of course, it is not its strict meaning, which is purely legal in the sense of ‘authorised to act as an entity’.
But in the day to day meaning, we have indeed corporatized the corporation, excuse my language. We have overlaid the structure with too rigid, global and uniform processes and systems. We have increased complexity and bureaucracy.
In my world, a ‘corporate programme’ often means something imposed upon, top down, something that is almost untouchable. A performance management system may have some flexibility, but, when it is ‘corporate’, sorry, there is nothing we can change. ‘Corporate’ becomes sacred.
The corporatization may be so strong that often, for some people to gain credibility on initiatives, they have to present them as ’non corporate’. People want to avoid the ‘here we go again, another corporate programme, will last for a few months and then will die’. Corporate is very often negative language.
In our Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform[13], people mobilization is bottom up, or multi-centric. We boost, nurture and grow the informal organization, the spontaneous collaboration, peer-to-peer work, the grassroots movement, singular or plural. All these need to be supported and orchestrated because they don’t come naturally. But it has to be done in a way that does not become absorbed and incorporated by the formal organization. That is, corporatized.
A typical example is one of the Champions (also called influencers, or pioneers) who, in our programmes, have been selected by their peers as the source of influence and cross-collaboration. These communities become very active and useful very soon. The temptation is to ‘corporatize’ them by formalizing them too much. For example, by creating formal teams from what is in essence a bottom up, pre-selected network. Avoiding the temptation of corporatization of these communities is a critical success factor.
Leaders need to reflect on how much ‘the corporate structure’ helps or hinders. A progressive dose of de-formalization is always possible without descending into chaos. Leaders need continuous recalibration, because, left to its own devises, ‘corporate’ will always take over one way or another.
Corporate can be a great structure and platform, or an incredibly expensive straightjacket. The latter, not a very good idea. But most of the time this is a self-inflicted problem that can be tackled successfully.
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[12] Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.
Listening is more than being silent. Learn to spot the listener and call out the ones who pretend.
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There is a difference between listening and just waiting to speak. You can spot people doing either. Some people don’t listen at all, just are silent until they decide to speak. Other people may interrupt – how annoying! – but actually they may listen more than the silent and polite.
‘Interrupting’ has a cultural connotation. The conventional wisdom is that this is rude. And it is, in Anglo-Saxon context for sure. In other cultures, it is more normal and nobody sees it as disrespectful. Conversations overlap and people start talking when the other has not even finished the sentence. And in those countries, last time I checked, the sky was not falling.
After many years in organizational consulting, I can spot who is listening and who is not. The management team at the back of the meeting room, secluded from the rest of delegates, looking at their laptops/blackberries/iPhone and nodding and smiling, are not listening. Actually, this ‘show of support’ by being in the room ‘despite their busy schedules’, is a waste of time and an insult to the imagination. Their engagement has the strength of a cream cake.
Other politically incorrect ‘interrupters’, as much as they are a pain, may be listening big time and engaged fully.
Don’t judge listening by the amount of silence or the amount of interruptions. Suspend judgment. Get behind what you see and hear, what people do.
The test of listening is not what is not said but the meaningful conversation, or lack of, that follows in the room.
Next week is our first webinar from the Better Way Webinar Series
Design your organizational structures to create a Remarkable Organization for the future
The new Promised Land of the so-called ‘future of work’
We know that the new organization has to be very adaptable and flexible, beyond what it has been in the past, but what are the organizational principles that can lead to that? Is there a singular best model? Or, more importantly, can several possibly competing models coexist in one single organization? And, if so, what kind of management and leadership are to be reinvented?
To Scale or not to scale? This is the Shakespearean culture question.
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Behavioural/cultural shaping in organizations does not scale up by the leaders simply having the right mindset and motivation. A mechanism (mobilizing platform) must be in place. Many reasonably good leaders think (they have been told by providers of leadership development and HR departments) that having a good (massive?) spread of leadership workshops (programme) and coaching to key people, things will naturally scale up. This is false maths.
I sustain that leadership in large organization is (must be) always leadership of social change following the socio-behavioural rules of social movements and not the traditional leadership programme cascades. Another thing is team alignment or collective leadership at, for example, leadership team(s) levels and/or the individual coaching. These things are great but not scalable.
No practitioner in culture change can ignore ‘scale’ since culture by definition is something that has scaled, good or bad. Even if commercially we see a lot these things coming together , ‘culture’ and ‘leadership’, they are very different things. Good leaders are not automatically good leaders and shapers of cultures, although they are on a good path, compared with the alternative.
So, knowing how things scale or not, is vital to the practise of ‘culture change’. Our well known distinction between World I (the world of communication) and World II (the world of behaviours) serves to at least be clear on what to expect or not.
It may be that you, as leader, have reached a good level of insight, self-introspection and learning. It may be that you are well equipped with good emotional and social intelligence. Great! Still you have a big question to ask: can you scale that goodness? Will that A, B, and C initiative scale up, or will they be something nice and good and rewarding in the relatively safe and relatively small world around me?
Don’t have a good scale answer? Don’t stop what you are doing, but ask, where is the multiplication, not the addition? Where’s a pull effect, not another push? How can we engage the other 1000 people?
Here is the logic for a Mobilizing Platform[13], not a change method, but a way to provide a scale up effect/social movement.
WEBINAR THIS THURSDAY: Company culture: a new look for the Board, ExCom and Investors
I have crafted a special webinar for Board and/or Executive Team members of organizations, and their institutional investors. Visit Executive Webinar[14] for full details and to reserve your place on Thursday 13th May, 1730 BST/1830 CET.
“I get your strategy. Now tell me how your culture is going to deliver it. Also, how that culture shapes the “Social” in your ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) agenda”.
Visit Executive Webinar[14] for full details and to reserve your place.
This webinar will cover:
How cultures are created and how they are not
The limited role of massive communications roll outs
The even poorer role of training
The contrarian view of the traditional role of leadership
The problem with expecting ‘big scale’ culture change from ‘small scale’ or not scalable interventions
Why culture is not an HR topic
‘Where in the organization’ does culture sit?
How to ensure success in culture change so that it can be ‘explained’ to investors and shareholders
Shaping cultures that create true competitive advantage and the differentiation
I, along with my team of Organization Architects from The Chalfont Project[5], will explain how to orchestrate culture change successfully.
Leave your sandals at the door
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This is the request we make at the beginning of a Viral Change™[1] programme. Forget your function and your hierarchical position. You are participating in the social movement representing yourself. The leadership of the organization has asked you to participate and you are a champion/activist, holding a key role because of who you are as a person, not your role description. And, if highly connected and influential champions have been found via anonymous peer nomination (as we do) then your power is significant, whether you are a manager, a supervisor or a porter.
There are not many instances in organizational life where people are called to help towards a mission, which is not dependent on their position in the organization chart. It’s novel, to say the least.
The role description that people have and their hierarchical position in the system, dictate pretty much what they do. But those glasses (those sandals) de facto limit them. A community organizer, sports school coach or organizer of an amateur theatre group in the evenings, has unique skills and qualities that maybe completely lost at 09:00 am every day as soon as they wear the Health and Safety supervisor’s hat, for example.
We need to engage more and more people for who they are, and that entails a serious desire to find out! It’s extremely healthy to ask, what would Peter look like (do or say) if he left his HR sandals at the door? It would be magic to try.
Join my team and I for these forthcoming webinars:
THERE IS A BETTER WAY WITH THE CHALFONT PROJECT
Join my team of organization architects and I, as we explore the future of organizational life. We will explain 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[2]‘ for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.
Webinar 1: “A Better Way to…Design your organizational structures to create a Remarkable Organization for the future.”
27th May, 1730 BST/1830 CET
Defeatism and cynicism are two toxic sisters that need to be challenged. Every minute of silence is a terrible complicity in the erosion of hope.
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A slow growth cancer in organizations.
People unnecessarily and gratuitously condemning the company to an impossible future: we will never change, we will always be like this, our leadership is terrible, we have no hope in hell of A, B, C, everything is really bad, etc.
Many times these are simply unchallenged. Often met with a nod, even if one does not believe it. They are also sheltered under the ‘respecting opinions’, flawed diversity cause. And it’s toxic.
One of our most successful types of behaviour in our Viral Change™ programme is the challenging of those verbalisations in canteens and corridors.
Critics may say that we are then promoting the opposite, a world in which we are supposed to say that everything is good, where there is no criticism but a permanent Pollyanna principle of unreserved optimism, that we say should reign. But this is far from reality.
Take public health care, say a hospital set up. Resources have been constrained, staff reduced or not growing, and long waiting lists. Staff are frustrated and in a bad mood. And they are entitled to be. To say everything is good, or even dismiss these problems on behalf of all other good things happening is not the approach. But this is not a ‘toxic attitude’ as we call it. The toxic attitude is: and we will never change, we will never solve it, we will always be a monster, we have no solution. That is toxic defeatism and cynicism, not legitimate ventilation of frustration. Yes, of course, there is a fine line. But this is crossed very often. The result is the spread of hopelessness that creates a climate when not even the good things get airtime anymore.
In our Viral Change™ programmes, the situation’s similar. We hear people saying that, for example, we pay lip services to health and safety, but nobody really cares. If this is not the case, as in most places I know, every minute of silence, is an unsafe minute of propagation of a defeatist culture.
Calling out these two sisters, defeatism and cynicism, is the best favour you can do to yourself and your fellow travellers. It’s enough to have real, funded frustrations, to then have to put up with prophetic gloom and doom.
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. 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.
Have your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.
Stop press: The C-suite people and top leadership, major problem revealed
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For CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, and other Cs, and Divisional Ds’, survey after survey try to identify their focus, their concerns, their attention, their worries, the 10 things they see as critical success factors. There is a whole industry of C-suite level surveys that run interviews and then package the answers under glorious headings such as ‘Global Trends’. In those surveys (also called ‘research’) leadership goes up and down, so does talent management, vision, culture and the rest of the management supermarket. These surveys are an interesting read.
Here is my Alternative Survey (sorry, Research). The major issue is fear, which is no more and no less than a legitimate human emotion, but one of imperialistic power. These are the top 20 fears that I see from my work with clients as an organizational consultant. Not exclusively of C and D suites by the way, also people below, but with focus on top leadership teams.
The unknown. Strategic Linear Planning does not do the trick anymore
Fear of pronouncing the word ‘unknown’ as if it was a sin to accept that the unknown does exist and it’s not their fault
The untried. We want innovation, but you go first. (Can we have examples of where this has been done? Although, when you give us the examples we will tell you that they come from the wrong industry and the wrong size of company)
The unconventional. We’d better bring McKinsey, the Board will like that. Predictable, safe and expensive
Fear of challenging, but not fear of saying that we should not be afraid of challenging
Fear of failure, although we say that mistakes are OK
Fear of not knowing what could go wrong, because if we knew we may not have the skills, or guts, to address it
Fear of disappointing others. The definition of others depends on your GPS position in the organization chart
Fear of losing control. That’s it
Fear of not being recognised
Fear of being disrupted (also referred as Uber-ized)
Fear of being redundant, which is not exactly the same as becoming redundant
Fear of becoming irrelevant: C-people, D-people, the products, the company, the vision
Fear of losing the plot, expressed in more circumvented ways
Fear of being second
Fear of being late (in the thinking, in the action)
Fear of being embarrassed by decisions not leading to total, unequivocal success
Fear of spending too much money, although they know that the concept of ‘much’ is both relative and strategic
Fear of being seen too brave, in a culture where being seen as brave is good. (I suppose, this is fear of the borders)
Fear of being seen as having fear
What differentiates leaders is the order, or the combinations, or the relative weight of these 20 fears.
When addressing challenges and when helping these executives, in whatever capacity you may act (boss, colleague, consultant, coach, service provider, friend), the trick and the wise move, is to get into fear-hunting mode. The key question is: what fear(s) are behind the said and the unsaid?
This is always, always, the most productive way to understand what is going on.
Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’.
Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars. The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?
What attendees said:
‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’
‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements[15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project[7].
Corporate language needs a transfusion of humanity. It can be done.
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Corporate speak is of course tribal. So, to belong, you have to speak the tribal idiom.
Through my work, I have run behavioural recruiting interviews for clients. My interviews are a complement to the standard recruiting interviews based upon skills, capabilities and experience. I am looking for predictive value, predictable behaviours that could be compatible with a set of values that I had also helped to craft. In behavioural terms, the best prediction of behaviours comes from previous behaviours. So, this is something I do.
During that process, I find a few candidates have a robotic repertoire ready to use no matter what the question is. I get bombarded by ‘stakeholder relationships’, ‘exceeding expectations’, ‘empowerment’, ‘alignment’ and ‘shareholder values’. Although nothing is intrinsically wrong with them and almost unavoidable at some point in our tribal-corporate conversations, the difference is the percentage of airtime taken. That level of off-the-shelf, acquired vocabulary puts me off. I need oxygen at the end. A transfusion of normality.
Corporate life has it own language and God knows each company its own dialects. I am not interested in fighting them. On the contrary, if anything else, from a selfish perspective as an organizational architect, I need to hear, see and smell all that, to make a sense of the Tribe(s). But I have to say, I sometimes wish we could inject some normal prose and a bit of poetry!
‘A poem, my corporate kingdom for a poem!’. I am not Richard III but I prefer it to horses.
Ok, here we go. What about:
Landscapes of ideas
Tapestry of behaviours
Beauty of a plan
Adventure into new markets
Hospitality for the imagination
Sheltering the creative minds
OK. I get the message. I’ll get real.
Your language will shape you. ‘The limits of your language are the limits of your world’, Wittgenstein[17] dixit. No wonder we are so limited in our corporate narratives.
Watch Leandro’s latestWebinar Series.[3]Leandro 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.
A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘[16], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.
This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements[15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project[7].
An enlightened top leadership is sometimes a fantastic alibi for a non-enlightened management to do whatever they want
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Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news and who produces bold, enlightened and progressive quotes for all admirers to see. That organization is lucky to have one of these. The logic says that all those enlightened statements about trust, empowerment, humanity and purpose, will be percolated down the system and will inform and shape behaviours in the milfeulle of management layers below.
I take a view, observed many times, that this is wishful thinking. In fact, quite the opposite, I have seen more than once how management below devolves all greatness to the top, happily, whilst ignoring it and playing games in very opposite directions. Having the very good and clever and enlightened people at the top is a relief for them. They don’t have to pretend that they are as well, so they can exercise their ‘practical power’ with more freedom. That enlightened department is covered in the system and the corporate showcase guaranteed.
The distance between the top and the next layer down may not be great in organizational chart terms, yet the top may not have a clue that there is a behavioural fabric mismatch just a few centimetres down in the organization chart.
I used to think years ago, when I was older, that a front page top notch leader stressing human values provided a safe shelter against inhuman values for his/her organization below. I am not so sure today. In fact, my alarm bell system goes mad when I see too much charismatic, purpose driven, top leadership talk. I simply smell lots of alibis below. And I often find them. After all, there is usually little room for many Good Cops.
Yet, I very much welcome the headline grabbing by powerful business people who stress human values and purpose, and a quest for a decent world. The alternative would be sad. I don’t want them to stop that. But let’s not fool ourselves about how much of that truly represents their organizations. In many cases it represents them.
I guess it all goes back, again, to the grossly overrated Role Model Power attributed to the leadership of organizations, a relic of traditional thinking, well-linked to the Big Man Theory of history. Years of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, never attributing the CEO with more than 30% of the trust stock in the organization, have not convinced people that the ‘looking up’ is just a small part of the story. What happens in organizations has a far more powerful ‘looking sideways’ traction: manager to manager, employee to employee. Lots of ritualistic dis-empowering management practices can sit very nicely under the umbrella of a high empowerment narrative at the top and nobody would care much. The top floor music and the music coming from the floor below, and below, are parallel universes.
Traditional management and MBA thinking has told us that if this is the case, the dysfunctionality of the system will force it to break down. My view is the opposite. The system survives nicely under those contradictions. In fact it needs them.
A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘[16], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.
This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements[15] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project[7].
Tribes in the organization: seeing the world in segments, one character at a time . The Big 40 (2 of 3)
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Exercise: take a piece of paper and put names next to each category. Use your organization or an organization you know well. This is personal, so don’t worry about the Data Protection. This is your Leadership Protection Act in operation. If you don’t know names, or you have very, very few, you are in trouble. It means you are looking at the organization from several hundred feet high from where a forest is a forest and you can’t see anything other than lots of trees. The list below is seriously biased towards the negative. I know.
Mavericks
Rebels
Deviants (positive). Do things differently, have another playbook and succeed
GPAs (General Pain in the Back Side; acronym non PC)
Contrarians, because they can
Seems to see things through glasses nobody else has
Sceptical for all seasons
Glass always half empty people
Hyper-connected. Good or bad, they spread behaviours, role model at a scale, set mountains on fire and multiply anything they get their hands on
Hyper-trusted. Multiple reasons, it does not matter which ones
Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations, particularly in the areas of change and transformation. We must abandon change as something imposed in favour of people becoming true agents. Organizations that have mastered this have been in ‘the new normal’ for a while!
What attendees said:
‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’
‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’
This best kept, secret jumpstart, will save you months of pain in people, team reorg and alignment
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The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of people, culture integration, collective leadership build up, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero, or below.
And this is perhaps after a restructuring, or M&A, or transitory team, new team, the mother of all task forces included. Also, anytime when you can’t afford low building of trust, slow development, slow diagnosis, slow ‘it will take months before we are a team’, etc., that is, never.
The line is: This is what I am very bad at, what about you?
And it’s plural, what we are very bad at; what this company is very bad at; what about you, yours?
The Old School Toolkit has a saying: we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company. But this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be crap. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.
Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.
The artist Alex Grey[19], somebody I confess I had not heard of until a recent article quoting him – for which I am grateful; unfortunately I can’t remember anything else from that article – said: ‘True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s’.
I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?
In a new situation (and old ones) when Peter and Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, their hearts, and with them, their skills and competencies. But they also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.
And I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll be see it rocketing soon.
The inevitable superhero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’, sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you? Points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.
Sure, you won’t see this in the Powerpoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.
Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project[5], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements[15] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books[20], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project[7].
4 types of generosity in the workplace. 2 with epidemic potential.
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Four types:
The generosity of the traffic light. Every fixed interval, it lets you get through. It even changes colour for you. This is the generosity of the organization that generously rewards people for what they do. No more. It’s a clear transaction, no fuss. As predictable as the green light.
The 1/365 policy generosity. One day you agree a generous policy for employees (extra holiday, extended leave, subsidised meals…). You expect 365 days of gratitude. You don’t have to think about generosity for 364 days.
The I am making myself available generosity. It may be a pain, an inconvenience at the very least, but you make yourself available to others, all the time. (My experience? People don’t abuse this).
The I give more than I am asked generosity. You don’t have to. You do it intuitively. There is something inside you that tells you that this is right, that keeping more for yourself is wrong. (But you may not be sure if it’s sensible, after all).
How generous is the organization you work for, or that you lead? Traffic light generosity? Giving more than asked? People make themselves available (and this is not in the job description)? One off generosity policy? Other?
How do you spread generosity? In behavioural terms, I can tell you: 3 is first, 4 is second, 1 is effective in fooling everybody, 2 looks good in the annual report but, once in place, people will take for granted and will ask for more.
There are choices. A generous workplace is not a question of employee-employer dynamics, it’s a ‘culture of’, or it isn’t . It’s a Viral ChangeTM epidemic of generosity type 3 and type 2 combined.
Studies in altruism has shown (I hate this kind of sentence) that altruism spreads via social copying (homo imitans). In a neighbourhood some people start doing ‘altruistic things’ and soon the neighbourhood does. No training, no Declaration of Altruism is Good for You.
Generosity in the organization follows the same (scale up, Viral ChangeTM) rules. Master a critical mass, going that way you can start a little revolution.
Extract taken from my book ‘The Flipping Point‘.[16] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘[16] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.
Behaviours create culture, not the other way around.
Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Change behaviours get culture. Behaviours are copied (homo imitans) and scaled up peer-to-peer. Culture is not trainable in classrooms. Everybody copies everybody but some people are more copy-able than others. It turns out that 5 – 10% have very high (non-hierarchical) influence. Find them, ask for help and give them support. Tell stories of success all the time. Make sure leaders do support the peer-to-peer work, but don’t interfere. This is the ‘what’ of Viral Change™ in a box. The ‘how’ is what I do for a living.
This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
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There are three major sources of trust generation. Everything else is commentary:
The ‘keep promises’. I can rely on you, You said you would, you did. You did not let me down. You walked the talk. Some people may call it reliable, consistent, and predictable. I call it trust, trustworthy. I trust you. You’ll trust me. We will keep our promises. (Keeping promises, or lack of it, still one of the greatest sources of disengagement in organizations and reasons for leaving).
The ‘I can be vulnerable’. I made myself vulnerable by disclosing too much, by telling you about my weaknesses, my fault lines, my unfinished thoughts, my doubts, my hesitations, my half decisions my half truths, my insecurity. You did not take advantage. You did understand. Or not. But you did not exploit it, or gained from that, or made a killing out of my inferiority. Thanks. I am not worse off, not humiliated, actually, I am a bit of a more confident grown up.
The ‘diamonds in an envelope’. New York Jewish communities trading in diamonds see the backwards and forwards of them in envelopes. That’s it. Not certified, not FEDEX, not signature. If you reach the envelope practice level, you’ve done very well on trust.
The three are connected, of course.
There is a fourth one. It’s blind and emotional and halo effect. I trust this guy, not sure why, speaks well, seems authentic, is a family guy, and religious, and speaks with authority, and is credible, and intelligent, and…
This is a package of trust, for better or for worse. But it works.
Trust is the greatest organizational oil. No trust? Slow or stuck machinery.
Keep promises, allow yourself to be vulnerable and send diamonds in envelops; that is the formula. Easy.
