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 This is simply because we have been using outdated toolkits and methods.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.

Learn more about Viral Change™ [1]

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.

[2]

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. Start your journey here. [3]

If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

Command and control management has fewer friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting for a piece of the estate, not quite sure what to take. It’s time to replace the organizational model, but not with just another one.

The history of management is the history of managing time, effort, and outcomes. It’s a history of control that started with very good intentions. In the beginning, it was a case of making work more ‘scientific’ which was a premise to make it efficient, predictable and replicable.

Cultural shifts, technological tectonic plate movements and dissolution of a standard classification of skills in favour of mixed, unpredictable and constant new ones, have made command and control not a bad or terrible thing but simply something not as effective as before. Even traditional full blown command and control structures such as armies have to embed some non-control and non-command mechanisms, such as the VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) military concepts of the 90’s.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, the love for
self-management has increased.

 

Self-management it not the absence of management but another form of it, certainly the opposite of command and control, yet not always understood as ‘a form of management’.

As with any pendulum swing in history, the fancy guys are now the extreme self-management organizations, represented by the iconic Halocracy, embraced by the likes of Zappos ^[4], where the shift and implementation was far from plain sailing. It would be simply naïve to think that this can be implemented anywhere and with no liabilities.

We know that command and control is, at the very least, in an intensive care unit, and it may not make it at all. But we are less clear as to its real replacement. Empowerment, devolution, self-management, all go in the opposite direction. The problem is how much of this is fit for purpose in any particular organization.

The clue is probably close to what I call ‘cohabitation’ of different models inside the firm, the coexistence of different ‘collaborative spaces’, from tight to loose management (and control), instead of a single overriding model.

Another clue has to do with experimentation,
the trying and prototyping of models.

 

There are areas, pockets, units that could experiment with models of management without compromising the entire ‘unity’ of the firm. As with ‘cohabitation’, this requires a bit of courage and a lot of trust.

Leadership today must come with the request for experimentation. There is poor trial and error, and poor prototyping of organizational models in the modern company . We are obsessed with uniformity and with ‘the model’. The best model may be the one that has many models under one model, excuse the semantic trick.

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WEBINAR: A Better Way to…design your organizational structures to create a remarkable organization for the future

In these challenging times, we know that the 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?

Watch on demand now ^[5]

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Previous Issues of BackInAWeekorso:

August
Unprecedented times? Sure. Let’s move on please ^[6]
Empowerment, Engagement and Ownership Culture must meet at same point. Obvious, simple and incredibly forgotten ^[7]
Employee Engagement Frameworks and the Productivity Magnet ^[8]
Is Employee Engagement whatever is Measured by Employee Surveys? ^[9]

July
Management: By Invitation Unbundle Reporting Lines and Management Teams ^[10]
Safe to Talk, Need to Talk, Must Talk. Team Meetings and Airtime ^[11]
A Critical Thinking Health Check ^[12]
We need teaming up, not more teams ^[13]
If the business is the mission, culture is the strategy ^[14]

In case you missed my first edition ^[15], sent out last week, Daily Thoughts has evolved. Now a new format, rather than daily, I will share with you a weekly focus on key culture change and behavioural science themes. This week I continue with my focus on leadership.

Future issues will cover:

• Behavioural Change – ‘there is no change, unless there is behavioural change’.
• Company Culture – dispelling the myths
• Organizational Design – looking at the future of work

 

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The Corporate Love Affair with a Thermometer: Employee Engagement Surveys

Here’s a brief snippet of my latest thinking on Employee Engagement and how leadership fits into the conversation. Use the link below to read the full article. 

Company culture has suffered a similar set of problems when a reductionistic approach is used: culture equals employee engagement and employee engagement equals the score in the employee survey (because we have thermometers). Here is a bit of a circular definition which is real (I am not making it up): definition of Engagement is whatever you have decided Engagement is and you have decided to measure via an Employee Engagement Survey. In summary, Employee Engagement is whatever the Survey says. And it says it with a number, which is very handy, but it’s time to abandon this.

It’s surprising how, in many areas of the company business, we are used to using a set of parameters to define what is going on – and it’s pointless to focus on employee survey results only, out of context and in isolation from a wide set of ‘cultural parameters.’ The problem is not that any sensible leader would agree with this, but that the same sensible leaders may spend a lot of time ‘on the scores’ just after agreeing that it does not make a lot of sense. Leaders must reflect on their role in culture change, and understand that when it comes to ‘explaining culture,’ the single indicator and the single ‘employee engagement’ does not make sense anymore.

Read the full article ^[16]

 

________________________________________________

Leading Culture Change ^[17] – A conversation between Gert De Winter, CEO of Baloise Group, and Dr Leandro Herrero, CEO of The Chalfont Project.

In this video ^[17], I talk to Gert De Winter about the challenges and solutions of Viral Change™ in action. We reflect on the role of leaders in culture change and on how Viral Change™ contributes to culture change in Baloise Group.

________________________________________________

For more on Leadership…..

Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road
A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves.

 

Find out more and purchase here. ^[18]

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

 

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What are the collective leadership capabilities?

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.

_______________________________________

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].

 

 

Corporate grade, reporting lines and membership of leadership teams in organizations often go together. But unbundling these components is a healthy exercise and a powerful rule in the maths of change.

If you report to Joe – CEO, divisional director or country manager – chances are you share this with another eight or ten people who constitute Joe’s management team, executive committee or leadership team. This is what the organization chart says. Most management teams are formed by what the organization chart dictates; by an ‘accidental’ reporting line. Everybody reporting to Joe is de facto a member of his management team.

In medium-sized or large corporations, structures are very often cross- or multi-functional. Imagine a Business Unit composed of a large Sales function, a smaller Marketing function and then a series of support functions such as HR, Finance, Legal, IT and perhaps a very small Strategy Team. The leadership team of that Unit is bound to be composed of the Director of Sales, the Director of Marketing, the Finance Controller, Legal counsel, the Head of IT and the Head of the Strategy Team. I suggest that this happened by default, by the dictation of the organization chart and that nobody ever questioned it.

But a legitimate question may be, “does everybody need to be part of that leadership team?” Many people in business organizations would of course say ‘no’. But the way we sometimes solve the issue is by promotion/demotion. For example, we may say only directors are really part of the management team. This is managing by grade, not by brain and it’s not what I am suggesting.

Grade in the corporate structure (VP, Director, Manager, Head) should not be a criterion of membership of a particular leadership team. Membership should be by invitation only. And only those who are in a capacity to add value to the role – whether they are in charge of a large part of the cake or not – should be invited.

It may be that, on reflection, the leadership team of the above Business Unit example should be composed of the Director of Marketing, the Director of Sales, the Head of HR and two Country Managers who do not report directly to the top leader of the Business Unit, but who are called upon to serve on that leadership team.

There may be alternative arrangements, but the principle is one of ‘by invitation only’. A principle that forces you to stop taking for granted the fact that membership will happen automatically or that grade or rank are a form of entitlement. It may be counterintuitive at first, but it is very effective. Much of the counterintuitive aspect comes from the fact that we tend to have pre-conceived ideas about how the organization should work. Sometimes these ideas carry flawed assumptions:

1. We must be inclusive. Yes, I agree but it is inclusiveness by invitation. If people feel the need to have all the direct reports together from time to time or, indeed, on a regular basis, they could have some sort of ‘Staff Committee’ (of all direct reports) if there were reasons for them to meet. But Staff Committee is not the same as a leadership team.
2. We must be fair. That assumes that all reporting lines to Joe are equal. In the above example it may have been considered unfair to the Financial Controller not to include him in the leadership team. There is nothing unfair about a selection made on transparent grounds. Inclusiveness and so-called fairness, sometimes result in gross unfairness to the group, because the artificial composition makes the team ineffective or highly unbalanced.
3. We must be democratic. Democracy is a form of government, not a type of organization (unless you work for a company that ballots everybody to elect a CEO!).

When you question management team compositions for the first time and, de facto, try to unbundle corporate grades, leadership and reporting lines, you will encounter some negative reactions and a few puzzled faces. But once this has been accepted as a legitimate questioning of the status quo, a breeze of healthy fresh air will start to flow through your organization!

Something that you may want to try as a model to follow is the Board of Directors. Though there are some differences between countries, a Board of Directors in public companies is usually composed of a few executives and some non-executive directors, who are either representing some shareholder sector or participating as members on their own capacity, background, experience or particular expertise. We have accepted this kind of designed composition as normal when it comes to the Board, but this is far from common for executive and leadership committees. But there is no reason why you could not mirror this, unless you want to stick to the default position because, “we have never done it like that.”

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[21] Now available in paperback.

New book extract – for a preview of the book: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[22]

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[23]
Amazon.com ^[24]
Waterstones ^[25]
Barnes & Noble ^[26]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[27]

 

One of us or one of them. Liberal or conservative. Top down or bottom up. Progressive or retrograde. Robust or fragile. Pro something or anti something.

The world is an orange and it is cut in two halves. You must be on either side. But only one.

It’s an easy thing for the tired mind. There are only two shelves and you must file in either. But you must choose one.

This is not just a simple anecdote. It has tremendous consequences. What if the opposite of progressive could be also non-regressive? The opposite of fragile, anti-fragile (Nassin Taleb ^[28] dixit), and any other option beyond A or B?

Bipolar thinking is dangerous and, always, a sign of poor critical thinking. It’s a Descartes infection that needs to be repelled.

Rejection of bipolarity does not mean wild post-modern relativism, where anything is possible and nothing stands as ‘the truth’. Regardless the philosophical or even religious connotations (true/false vs. ‘it depends’), bipolar thinking is simply bad thinking. Full stop.

Anything presented to us as a bipolar choice should smell bad. It’s a cheap shortcut. We can do better. Our minds can do better.

Agree or disagree?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Critical Thinking ^[29] Accelerator from The Chalfont Project:

 

At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a short intervention on Critical Thinking ^[29]:

• Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes?
• Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking methods and questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about strategy acid tests and many mind fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

 

This high impact, short intervention will:

• – challenge ways of thinking
• – provide immediate and trackable actions
• – drive change
• – develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[30] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

 

The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog is thrown into a boiling water pan. The frog jumps out one millisecond later. Close to first degree burns, but alive. And learns the lesson.

The second way is to put the frog in a pan with cold water, turn on the heat, slowly, and wait. The frog, the tale says, likes the warm bath at first, the cosiness of that lake around him, the delight of the warm feeling. So delighted the frog is that does not notice that the water gets warmer and warmer. And warmer. And hot and boiling. The rest is a funeral.

At some point in the heating up, the frog would have tried to resist and adapt. Maybe. After a tipping point, the original adaptation becomes a liability.

Welcome to the Slow Cooking School of Management. We sometimes don’t realise that adaptation and robustness and resilience may provide some sort of blindness. By the time we realise, it may be too late. The (management) pan may be full of warm cosy water. We don’t notice the heat. We are cooked. Some people are cooked in their 30s, some in their 40s, some later. All of them may have been very adaptive and resilient.

Most slow cooking is self-inflicted. We need organizational thermometers that tell us the changes in temperature. Waiting for the 100 degrees Celsius to turn up does not seem like a great strategy.

In the land of prone-to-warm-water frogs, crisis is welcome. Stress to the system ^[31]must be welcome. Reboot mechanisms ^[32] as well. Nassim Taleb ^[28] (I keep quoting) would say that opposite to fragile is not robust or resilient. Actually he could not find a word, so he created ‘antifragile’: ‘things that gain from disorder’, as the subtitle of his book says. In his typical Taleb way he also says: ‘The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much’. That is the problem with robustness, including a ‘robust culture’; it turns us blind, complacent and insensitive.

Switching from frogs to cultures, for me, one of then most useful organizational thermometers are the Broken Windows ^[33] that I have written about. These are the relatively innocent failures in compliance, the not too strident signs of weak accountability, not life or death promises that are not kept, the windows a bit broken that nobody fixes. These not so tragic, not so visible, not so disturbing signs of organizational graffiti and broken windows, flood the organization, one day at a time, without anybody bothering so much because, as we say, in the great scheme of things, these are not a big thing.

But these are degrees rising in the thermometer. Actually, they are telling us that the patient has a temperature. I know, I know, not sweating and shivering yet, so a little analgesic and chicken soup may be just ok. Watch the funeral.

Apocalyptic? Tell that to the warmer frog.

We must have our own non negotiable. Still today I get pushed back on this language when we talk about ‘non negotiable behaviours’ in cultural programmes powered by Viral Change ^[34] . Well, I’ll keep the language. It’s a sort of a thermometer. I will not compromise with fevers.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Interventions from The Chalfont Project

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[29]

Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

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. 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.

Contact us ^[30] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

 

If one thing has become clear after all these decades of management soul-searching for more or less universal truths, this is one of them: cultures make or break. Culture is probably your most important asset. Entire companies thrive commercially on the back of a culture, or fail miserably because of it.

Culture is never ‘done’, like a project finished and milestones achieved. Culture is in construction every day. Also, it’s not the simple  sum of components, processes, systems and behaviours; written and unwritten rules, leadership and fellowship. Even the type of furniture and the size of the windows is a component of the culture.  The size of your inbox is also culture, the number of meetings per week and per capita is also culture. Leaders eating in the cafeteria, or not, is also culture. Certainly the  voice at the other end of the telephone in the call centre is culture.

Culture is the smile of the receptionist, the way a nurse introduces herself in a hospital, the hotel room service, the speed of a reaction to a complaint.

All working practices are culture. All ways of doing, all airtime, the concept of a priority, and the differences, or matches, between the values on the wall and behaviours on the ground.

For years I have tried to navigate company culture; when I was on somebody else’s payroll and when I was outside the walls, looking inside. I’ve seen places where happiness is contagious and places that would have deserved Dante’s sign and the entrance of Hell: Abandon Hope. I have seen suffocating cultures dressed as human. I have seen very human cultures without trumpeting their values.

Having been in my old past through a great deal of corporate toxicity, I have become cynical of the ones that talk too much about them. But this is a conversation for another day.

You can start anywhere you want but, not just my own heuristic (full of bias) but all those decades of soul searching, leads me to one point of departure and one point of destination. The alpha and omega of culture is behaviours. Behaviours create cultures. I don’t have to study reams of corporate documentation; tell me what behaviours you have and I will tell you what culture you are in. Tell me what you do, not what you think, not what you proclaim.

Culture is simply strategy in action. Magnificent or sloppy, ambitious or middle of the road, thriving or broken.

Culture is strategy.

 

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If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, don’t start with hybrid vs. non-hybrid, flexible vs. non-flexible, work from home vs. work from anywhere.

It’s the wrong start!

The real conversation is about the culture you want or need. Company culture is the petri dish where everything grows. The culture has workplaces. Focus on culture. This is the real driver. This is the true conversation.

 

Start your conversation with us today. We can support you and your organization on your culture journey.  Contact us: email at [email protected]  ^[35] or visit. ^[36]

 

 

 

The cost of authenticity, of being yourself, is zero. In theory, the cost of pretending you are somebody else is higher. And the cost of doing, always higher.

Being you does not cost you much and always pays off. At least in the long term. And I am not sure it’s worth the effort of pretending differently in the short term.

People often spend a lot of time and effort pretending they are somebody else, so that they can fool others. It is a choice, of course, but I would not recommend it.  It ends in tears many times.

If you are hired by what the employer thinks you could be, would be, should be, or will be, you’ll get a bad deal.

If you are part of a leadership team of some sort because somebody (perhaps the top leader) has an idea of your persona and expects you to be that one, it will cost you if it means pretending

If you spend your life outside you, in semi-permanent exile, playing somebody else’s character, you will come back home – if you ever do – exhausted.

There is quite a lot in the self-help literature that recommends you mimic some heroes, or role models. It has contaminated business wisdom as well.  So for example, how could I ‘imitate’ Richard Branson, or the late Steve Jobs. Believe me, bad idea. Don’t. By all means read about them, admire them if you wish, and imagine their persona, but you are wasting your time imagining and pretending that you could be their cloned brother.

Heroes are more useful when distant. When the energy is not wasted in pretending that you could be a clone. This, by the way, is so obvious that should not deserve mentioning. But I think that often , unconsciously, we want to pretend that we are ‘another’, a different one. Very high cost.

When I look back, I want to see the one who was me, not the one in exile, in nomadic quest for acceptance, or coming out of a political correctness course.

I wish the accountants could tell us more about the  zero cost of being, it’s fantastic ROI and the silliness and cost of pretending to be a different character. As the old saying reminds us, we are so busy doing that we don’t have time for being. Another cost of busy-ness.

As philosophy goes, this is as deep as I can go today.

I recommend the highest ROI that comes from being the one you are supposed to be, as opposed to the one others want you to be, or an ideal being that is only real when in exile from your inner self.

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For more thoughts on Leadership, you can purchase my latest book…..

 

Camino Leadership Notes on the Road

This is a collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts, which started years ago as a way of talking to himself. 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.

 

Watch the Camino ^[27] webinar, where I discuss this book and my thoughts on Leadership.

 

Visit BOOKS ^[18]  to get your copy from Amazon now!

or

You can now read extracts from Chapter 1 ^[21].

 

This piece of conventional wisdom is almost never true. That ‘they were ready’ is very often a posterity rationalization.

Most revolutions don’t start when people are ready. In fact they start when people see others doing something and they feel they have to be … errr… ready. Readiness is very often a state that people feel when one has already started to move.

Don’t wait until the leadership team is ready. The leadership team may never be ready, or only ready when they see others below are moving.

Don’t wait until your team is ready. Start moving, they will get ready.

Don’t wait until you feel ready. If you want to be ready, move.

There is no state of readiness in your mind. There is fear or excitement of being stuck that we translate in to the binary ready/non ready.

‘I would do X, but they are not ready’ may just hide our incompetence to get people moving. Get them moving, they will be ready, and you will see how much power you had in that supposed readiness.

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What do YOU want to change in your organization’s culture? More accountability, innovation, respect?

Whatever it is, you need the tools to mobilize people at scale. The Chalfont Project Academy can provide those tools. Our new online learning platform, enables us to share with you, our resources and insights based on our work as Organization Architects.

Find out more ^[37].

 

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:

1. 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.
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.
3. 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.

Those steps 1,2,3 of social engineering work.

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For more insights and thought-provoking discussion WATCH our free on demand webinars led by Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of organization architects. 

 

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[38]

This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smart organizational 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.

 

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[39]

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.

 

Camino Book Launch Webinar  ^[27]

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 ^[40] – Organization Architects, Anett Helling and Jayne Lewis, ACC.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[40], 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 ^[41] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[30]

And still I get lots of people who raise eyebrows, people who look at me with a conspiracy-like smile (‘you don’t really mean that, but it sounds big’), and people who would filter it all, going straight into their junk folder in the brain.

But I am not a politician, a Policy Guru from The X institution or a professional philanthropist. I don’t command armies, or run a Footsie, or am invited to Davos. Or will make it to Mar-A-Lago, or will be given an OBE by Her Majesty, or will be called to mediate between warriors, or run a global NGO.

And if you are reading this, chances are you fall into the same category. So how come?

When I was older I used to buy the story of the one thing at a time, the small change leads to big change and the first change yourself logic.

I was told to be patient, which is the equivalent of explaining the merits of sprinting to a tortoise.  I was told not to put the cart before the horses, but the advise always seemed to come so late that carts and horses had already left. I was told that those ambitions were only for the superheroes, the writers of Hollywood scripts or the visio-luminaires a la Steve Jobs, and, by the way, that category was very small.

But now, I don’t see the point of aiming low and achieving, versus aiming high and possibly failing (Michelangelo dixit).

When you look around and see the truth and the lie being treated as equally moral; when you read the low employee engagement figures across countries and industries; when you see trust at its lowest (pick a concept, pick a country, pick a profession), what is there left, that deserves ‘small change’?

‘We don’t do small change’, I put in some of our company slides (more eyebrows raising). My company does not aim at incrementalism, yet that may be a very legitimate goal. We have painfully walked away from clients who did not understand that we did not want to sell our time, but share our expertise; that we were very asymmetrical with them in terms of P&L, but expected to be very symmetrical in collaboration.

And I know that we are not  alone in this thinking. Far from it. That there are many, like you, who don’t want to do small change anymore;  who seriously question the little tweak here and there, whether in HR policies or organizational development, or L&D.

We live in times of scale. Large scale behavioural and cultural change (Viral Change™ ^[1] ) for example. Not small scale management team alignment, with zero implications for the rest of the organization.

‘Changing the world’, for you and for me, may start with changing the rules of the game in the organization, the way people collaborate (for example from teams to peer to peer networks), the building of collective leadership. Maybe it is ‘a world at a time’ after all. Wait a minute? Did I?

When listening to the news, or looking at the twitter feed, I just have this urge to use the Michelangelo test all the time: ‘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’.

Will we? Who else is there?

Michelle Obama’s line in the US elections, ‘when they go low, we go high’, was for me a Michelangelo-like moment, I confess. When we see all going lower and lower, whether in the politics of selfishness or the disrespect for truthfulness, or an increasing Homo Homini Lupus ^[42] fabric of society, that ‘man-is-wolf-to-man’ ^[42] world, I am  left only with an option: higher and higher.

Change the world, I suppose.

You?

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There is no change unless there is behavioural change!

Viral Change ™: model, method and way of life, all in one

Viral Change™ ^[3] 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™ ^[3] 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 ^[30] today to find out more about Viral Change™.

The Chalfont Project ^[40]. We are your organization architects.

 

 

 

The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours:

1. I expect you to do something but you don’t think you are empowered to do it.
2. 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?)
3. I am told that delegation is good, so I delegate, but call it empowerment. But I am just passing the monkey on to you.
4. I empower you, you think I am abdicating.
5. 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.
6. You are empowered! Here you are! Take it. What? (Is he ok?)
7. Empowering you means you need to behave as if you were the owner of the business (does it mean I can have your bonus?)
8. We are all empowered, for goodness sake, just take accountability for things!
9. I am empowering you to be empowered, but not too much, because I will lose control.
10. 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.
11. You are empowered. Please report to me weekly on the hitting of milestones, number of KPIs and times you took a break.
12. 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).

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[40], 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 ^[30] or email: [email protected]. ^[43]

For more information visit: The Chalfont Project Speaking Bureau ^[41]

_

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We can help your business Reboot!  

 

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.

 

Reboot! The Game Plan ^[29]

Timing: 1 – 3 days depending on format

Audience: minimum 20 – maximum 40

Price: POA

For more information, and to discuss how Reboot! The Game Plan ^[29] can support you and your business, please Contact Us ^[30] or email: [email protected] ^[44]

‘For every problem, the Victorians have a building’. ^[45] For every idea that we need to carry forward, we invent an initiative, a platform, a vehicle. Nothing wrong with this. But, many times the initiative let’s us off the hook.

Let’s say that, after lots of discussions on innovation, the team members need to commit themselves to exploring new ways of doing things, versus carrying on doing them as they have always been done. This is so far a personal commitment: to think, to explore, to read, to evaluate, to imagine, to do something. But ‘the initiative’ kicks in: let’s have an Innovation Week, when an Innovation Committee will judge the most innovative ideas, open to all. And if it’s successful, we will repeat it two or three times a year. I am off the hook. The initiative will do the thinking, we’ll see what others say and do. My personal commitment, good as it may have been, surely cannot compete with the power of the initiative (brand it Global Initiative and it will sound more powerful, and, the more powerful, the more off the hook the individual and the individual commitment). It is a paradoxical effect that many people will hate to recognise. My God, we are so good at initiatives!

The initiative (event, committee, new team, new review process, a monthly review, task force, a new project, bringing in new consultants) may be the right thing to do, but may also be a distraction and a form of simple deferral of action in which the collective takes over the individual.

The reasons why so many internal initiatives fail are two fold: (1) There are simply too many of them competing for air time; (2) They defer decisions, postpone reality, pretend that they are useful, but then everybody gets exhausted with a ritual that has forgotten its original meaning.

Before creating a new initiative, and, I repeat, they may be necessary and a good thing, we need to think what the initiative may do for the individual commitment and the personal behaviour. Will the initiative switch off the individual thinking? Or perhaps on?

Devolving the individual accountability to a collective task may be something that happens in a subtle manner. The key is a bit of critical thinking and the non-automatic falling in love with ‘the new thing that will solve the problem’.

PS. There should be a sort of Cluttering Tax in the organization, anyway. For any new initiative, get rid of two.

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ACCELERATORS from The Chalfont Project

 

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.

 

At The Chalfont Project ^[40], we have crafted a series of short interventions called Accelerators ^[29]:

 

• Reboot! The Game Plan –  ^[29] Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?

There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.

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. 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.

 

• Critical Thinking ^[29] – Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes? Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?

In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking Methods and Questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.

You will learn about Strategy Acid tests and many Mind Fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.

 

These high impact, short interventions for senior teams, will:

• challenge ways of thinking
• provide immediate and trackable actions
• drive change
• develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.

 

Contact us ^[30] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.

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 ^[46]), ‘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.

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For more thoughts, insights and discussions on leadership:

• Watch my recent webinar on leadership as a praxis ^[27]

• Read my latest leadership book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road ^[21].  For more information about the book and for sample extracts visit: Camino ^[21]

 

Visit The Chalfont Project ^[40] or Viral Change™ ^[1] 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  ^[30] or call on: 01895 549158.

1. I trust you because I can say ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and you don’t think I am an idiot
2. I can be vulnerable and won’t be penalised
3. I can be emotional and you won’t think I am weak
4. I made a mistake and you said you did as well
5. I opened my heart and I did not regret it
6. I told you something in confidence and you kept it like this
7. I shared my doubts and I did not go down the rankings
8. I showed you my tiredness and you didn’t think I wasn’t able
9. I am not as strong as you think but you could see my strengths when I didn’t
10. You said that you’ll help me and you did
11. You said I could call you and you meant it
12. I felt overwhelmed and you did not broadcast it
13. When I screwed up, you could have avoided me, but you gave me your public hand
14. You knew how much I depended on that piece of work and you delivered it to me earlier
15. I got mad and you didn’t
16. You always keep your promises
17. You represent me and I can sleep
18. You protected me and did not send the bill
19. You always tell me the truth even when I don’t want to hear it
20. You never grow at the expense of my shrinking

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For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road ^[18], available from all major online bookstores ^[47].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[22],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 ^[48]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. 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.

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’.

Pope Francis, spiritual leader to 1.2 billion people, likes ‘to call a cat a cat’. He has gained a world cat-naming reputation received with an equal mixture of excitement and joy, including non-religious people and bewilderment and even panic, the latter mainly by his own administrative structure in Rome, or Curia. He likes to make off the cuff remarks, whilst all his predecessors waited 100 years before deciding that it was time to pontificate on something (and this word comes from Pontiff, as used to refer to Popes, which in Latin means ‘maker of bridges’). I believe that the most difficult job on earth must be the one of Head of Communications for the Vatican. Francis is Authentically Disruptive ^[49].

I am bringing this here because, one Christmas time, Francis, in a well prepared speech, launched his ‘15 diseases of the Curia’, in front of all of the most senior people in the Catholic Church. Leaving aside religious belief and context for these words, these 15 illnesses that he identified, tells us a lot about the universality of the pathology in any big organization of any kind.  Here they are in his own words and a little comment by me.

1) Feeling immortal, immune or indispensable. “A Curia that doesn’t criticize itself, that doesn’t update itself, that doesn’t seek to improve itself is a sick body.” OK, so this is self-criticism, critical thinking and a bit of humility. Corporates? Yes please. We know about this. Groupthink? Yes, we can.

2) Working too hard. “Rest for those who have done their work is necessary, good and should be taken seriously.” OK. Work life balance Vatican version, equally applies to the average business organization.

3) Becoming spiritually and mentally hardened. “It’s dangerous to lose that human sensibility that lets you cry with those who are crying, and celebrate those who are joyful.” Here we have a version of social and emotional intelligence. Leadership 2021 needs this at the top of the agenda.

4) Planning too much. “Preparing things well is necessary, but don’t fall into the temptation of trying to close or direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is bigger and more generous than any human plan.” OK, we, in corporations, have sometimes over-analytic processes and systems that become ritualistic and suck most of the energy, shaping and in-wards culture. Airtime is limited. 80% inwards looking, only leaves 20% outwards. Some parallels? Yes Sir,

5) Working without coordination, like an orchestra that produces noise. “When the foot tells the hand, ‘I don’t need you’ or the hand tells the head ‘I’m in charge.’ This is the ‘big company syndrome’ that I had referred to in my ‘You must understand, we are a big company’ true story.

6) Having “spiritual Alzheimer’s”. “We see it in the people who have forgotten their encounter with the Lord … in those who depend completely on their here and now, on their passions, whims and manias, in those who build walls around themselves and become enslaved to the idols that they have built with their own hands.” These words have a precise religious context but it applies equally to other types of ‘Alzheimers’ in which management practices become insensitive to the nature of a ‘human being’.

7) Being rivals or boastful. “When one’s appearance, the colour of one’s vestments or honorific titles become the primary objective of life.” OK, this is corporate and leadership egos. You and I see this all the time.

8) Suffering from “existential schizophrenia”. “It’s the sickness of those who live a double life, fruit of hypocrisy that is typical of mediocre and progressive spiritual emptiness that academic degrees cannot fill. It’s a sickness that often affects those who, abandoning pastoral service, limit themselves to bureaucratic work, losing contact with reality and concrete people.”  I don’t know how to put it better in corporate speak.

9) Committing the “terrorism of gossip”. “It’s the sickness of cowardly people who, not having the courage to speak directly, talk behind people’s backs.” One of my 30 Disruptive Ideas ^[18] from the book of the same title, and our Accelerator at The Chalfont Project ^[50] read ‘Go to source, decrease the noise’. In any organization there are Noise Amplifiers and Noise Cancelling people. That he has chosen to use a dramatic term such as ‘terrorism’ to refer to gossip, says something about his brave stance.

10) Glorifying one’s bosses. “It’s the sickness of those who court their superiors, hoping for their benevolence. They are victims of careerism and opportunism, they honour people who aren’t God.” Mmm, should I bother to comment?

11) Being indifferent to others. “When, out of jealousy or cunning, one finds joy in seeing another fall rather than helping him up and encouraging him.” This is a serious sign of organizational toxicity, sometimes one of my Broken Windows  ^[33]signs.

12) Having a “funereal face”. “In reality, theatrical severity and sterile pessimism are often symptoms of fear and insecurity. The apostle must be polite, serene, enthusiastic and happy and transmit joy wherever he goes.” This is a favourite theme of his: in his view, religious practice does not need to be like going to a permanent funeral. Some organizational cultures are a bit like that, a type described by the great and late C.K.Prahalad ^[51] as the ‘Calcutta in summer’ situation, that I have referred to in ‘The Abandon Hope’ organization ^[52].

13) Wanting more. “When the apostle tries to fill an existential emptiness in his heart by accumulating material goods, not because he needs them but because he’ll feel more secure.” Much has been written about the corporate culture of greed. When is enough enough?

14) Forming closed circles that seek to be stronger than the whole. “This sickness always starts with good intentions but as time goes by, it enslaves its members by becoming a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body and causes so much bad scandals especially to our younger brothers.” In my consulting experience with organizations I have very often found the desire by leaders to create ‘One company’, where ‘the whole’ is priority, and where sense of belonging goes beyond your function, or area, or division, or country. Needless to say we all, you and I, tackle this with different degrees of success.

15) Seeking worldly profit and showing off. “It’s the sickness of those who insatiably try to multiply their powers and to do so are capable of calumny, defamation and discrediting others, even in newspapers and magazines, naturally to show themselves as being more capable than others.” Comments unnecessary!

Although it all makes sense, it should not be ‘unexpected’ by somebody in my profession, it did surprise me to have this diagnosis in front of my eyes. It seems that putting people together, growing to a certain size and spreading titles, jobs and role descriptions, ends up in some sort of common pathway.

I would really welcome to see any CEO of a sizable company to stand in front of his top 200 and ‘call a cat a cat’ in the same way.

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People in organizations spend a lot of time representing somebody else or something else. It feels sometimes that the company does not have employees but ambassadors.

Project team members represent their functions in the team. Project leaders represent the team in Portfolio Management. Functional heads (Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Strategy, Communications, HR…) represent their functions in a Management Team. Business support functions (Finance, IT…) represent their tribes in the whole company.

Issue 1: some arrows point in the wrong direction. The VP of R&D, member of the Leadership Team, thinks that they represents R&D in the (company) Leadership Team. That’s why they switch off (e.g looks at their Blackberry) when there is no R&D topic in conversations. But the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction. The VP of R&D, in fact, should represent the company (and its Leadership Team) in the R&D function (division, staff). If they wanted to be an Ambassador, they had chosen to represent the wrong people. Note, this is not a semantic trick. Representing my tribe in the company is not the same as representing the company in my tribe.

Issue 2: Any company has tribes (subcultures). Being buried in the tribe has its advantages. However, the ultimate goal of engagement is that the employee represents himself or herself. You have been hired as Maria Smith, and as soon as you get the label of ‘Safety Supervisor’, you will cease to be Maria Smith so that you can look like a proper Safety Supervisor. Again, not another semantic trick. ‘Being oneself’ (authenticity) is not the same as ‘representing oneself’(my own human capital).

In my Viral Change ™ ^[53]programmes, as soon as the champions/activists have been identified (following strict criteria) and are called to help, they cease to represent anything (geographies, functions, cultures, affiliates) other than themselves. Occasionally and symbolically, we give them a business card with their names, no titles. Very frequently we hear: ‘About time that the company is asking me to help on something because of who I am and how I am, not my job description. Believe me, a bunch of Activists representing themselves and united by a common good, is dynamite. A bunch of Ambassadors representing somebody (a function, geography, their bosses) has collective zero power. There is a choice.

Of course we all represent others, one way or another. But if your job is representing, not doing, acting, thinking, engaging, using your own human capital, then you are in the Internal Diplomatic Service, but without the perks.

The journey from a company of ambassadors to a company of agents and activists is a great journey. But you may have to close some internal Embassies.

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‘A Better Way’ Series ^[38]

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 – smart organizational 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.

 

• On demand webinar from this series now available – Organizational Design ^[38]

 

Register ^[38] now for our next live webinar of this series, taking place next week:

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.

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET

REGISTER HERE ^[38]

Let me share a piece of our own research that has just come up from the oven.

In a 1200 people, pan European company, in the financial sector, we have compared the power of the five person Leadership Team, in terms of messaging and engagement, reaching other people, with the power of the top five Viral Change™ Champions, defined as top influencers and hyperconnected in the organization.  The analysis has been done blind and anonymously. All staff were asked a series of seven questions to try to identify the colleagues whom they would trust and reach out to, in order to obtain some real information, or the ones who usually reach out to them for the same communication purposes.

We analysed three steps (or ‘degrees of separation’) that can be understood like the immediate layers of connections. One layer or step equals your immediate network, second step the connections of that immediate network, third step, the connections of those connections.

The results are revealing. By step one, the Leadership Team had a reach of 21 people whilst the Viral Change™ Champions  had 104. Step 2 (connections of the immediate connections) Leadership Team 100, approximately, and Champions 3 times more, around 300 people. Step 3, 250 for the Leadership team and 450 for the Champions. By step 3, the five person Leadership Team was able to reach (tap into) 27% of the workforce, whilst the five top Viral Change™ Champions reached 49%, almost half of the workforce.

The power of this data, gathered through the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is its inclusiveness (all people in the workforce participated) and its anonymity.

The results reinforce the well established principle in Viral Change™ ^[53]  that hierarchical power is limited when compared with the one of highly connected and influent people (Champions or Activists, in the Viral Change™ methodology). Of course these Viral Change™ influencers need to be found, identified and eventually asked for help to shape a cultural transformation of some sort.

Finding the real influencers inside the organization is vital to orchestrate a bottom-up, peer-to-peer transformation (‘change’, ‘culture’, new norms, etc). It does not get better than this. Many organizations naively think that this pool of influencers match existing pools such as ‘Talent Management’, for example. This is not the case. Inside the organization, the importance of particular individuals, not in the hierarchical system, is clear. Internal, influence of the few, is well and alive.

Backstage Leadership™ is the art, performed by the formal leadership, of giving the stage to those real, distributed leaders who have approximately twice as much power as the Leadership Team when it comes to influence, messaging and communications inside the firm. Similarly these influencers shape behaviours and culture.

Our data is consistent with Edelman’s Trust Barometer that places the category ‘people like me’ (peers) twice as high as the CEO/hierarchical power.

Burn those organizational charts! Other than being a sort of Google map for who reports to whom, they don’t say anything about the real organization. Social Network Analysis ^[54] does. Then, Viral Change™ takes over to shape a culture.

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Continue the conversation…..

 

Join me and my team for our final webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series as we look at collective leadership:

 

Build and enhance your collective leadership capabilities

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.

Join us on 17th June at 1730 BST/1830 CET to find out more.

REGISTER HERE ^[38]

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Do you want to know your REAL informal organizational networks?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections has been well understood. Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

To understand your informal social networks in your organization we can work with you using our product 3CXcan – see here to find out more. ^[55]