My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, when not chanting to each other in church seven times a day.

Yet, that silence needs the space in order to be heard. A while ago, they designed a garden, a sort of a maze, so that they could walk in a direction without bumping into each other. One of them, a friend for many years, goes from time to time to live completely on his own, for a week, in one of the nearby cottages, as if in a detox regime. When I asked him moons ago about ‘that need’ he looked at me puzzled: ‘wasn’t it obvious?’ When he is away, he walks down the valley every day for the communal Mass and back. When coming in, the other monks avoid him (during that week) to respect the space he has created for himself.

“There is something special about creating space”

There is something special about creating space. For me, leadership is mainly architecture: create the conditions, find the spaces, protect them, make them liveable. Architects also have maps, and compasses. The leader needs to provide maps (frameworks, such as the non negotiable behaviours) and navigation tools (a value system). But, above all, it’s about space.

Providing spaces for people to breath, to growth, to deliver something, to get better, to think critically, to interact, to collaborate, to travel together. This is all about space. Space is the psychological sister of place. Space may be only, or mainly, mental. As such, it is a precious asset. No wonder the word space has been often associated to the word sacred. As in sacred spaces. To provide space, to create and protect spaces for others, is something a good leader does. It’s a great deal of his servant-ship.

But we, sometimes, are not very good at this. We take over other people’s spaces by insisting on discussing, wanting to ‘go deeper’, being intolerant with leaving things open, dictating our own terms and providing unreasonable borders to their spaces.

At a threshold point of two people living together in one place, they may come to inhabit one single space. It requires a lot of maturity to live in one single space with others. Occupying one single place, is the easier part, space is not. Indeed, that single space may end up being too much to ask. It may be better to have separate spaces to respect, often overlap. Psychotherapists have known for many years that a temporary split, or making tangential connections for a while, may be the solution to some problems. Unbundle the spaces that have become blurred, that is.

Spaces could be rich and beautiful, or could also be toxic. In a relationship of spaces, if one is toxic, the whole may become contaminated. Also, the more personal, protected space one has, the more one can give. This is ‘the border diet’ of my old TEDx talk ^[1] – still relevant today!

Space is a good way to start a Leadership Development conversation. Much better than vision, charisma, determination or role modelling. The leader as architect is a much richer model. Architects of our own spaces, and providers and keepers of spaces for others.

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about what people do, not about what they are thinking of doing, or just thinking. People, however, naturally focus more on processes and systems because this is what is usually at the forefront of the corporate citizen’s mind, in their day to day life. That relegates behaviours into the ‘consequence’ basket, what happens after, a bit of an afterthought.  But the problem is that behaviours create cultures, not the other way around. They are the input, not the output, not the day after, but Patient Zero. It’s where it all starts (what are the behaviours we need for A?), not the endpoints (declare X, Y, Z and you’ll get these behaviours). If you think of most of the themes currently on the table of the organization these days, they all are behavioural, and yet, the attention is somewhere else. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a good example. It focuses a lot on ‘the function’, which not surprisingly automatically requires a ‘Head Of’.  Then, on what needs to be changed structurally (e.g. more representation of minority groups). And finally, on the associated communication and training. There is usually not a lot of behavioural granularities here. But if there is not habitual diversity of thinking and of ideas in the behavioural DNA of the company (which would mean that we value diversity per se, at a very granular level, foundational, not as an application), other applied ‘diversities’ (gender for example) could just become a quota to reach, a target, and, in the process,  possibly killing all the beauty of the never exploited primary diversity. Some DEI warriors don’t like this thinking and tend to dismiss it as ‘general diversity’, not the real diversity which for them is mostly a question of quotas. There is no question that creating the conditions for diversity (providing seats at the table, seeking different experiences, transcultural, for example) is fundamental. But this cannot simply become management by ratios for the purpose of ticking some boxes. For example, you can obtain a great deal of sustained diversity by having, say, 30% of your people this afternoon asking the questions: Is there a different way to solve this? Who else needs to know about this? Who needs to be involved? Or by always bringing 3 options to a decision, at least one of them unconventional. And this is not the whole list. We do this in our Viral Change™ [2]  programmes with great success. It may sound simplistic, but it is very powerful at scale, across an organization. When this kind of primary diversity is widespread and entrenched as a habit, any other ‘particular diversity’ will already be finding a good home. Unfortunately, this is not the standard way. It’s easier to look at ratios and quotas and showcase them. The re-presentations (as psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist [3] would put it) have taken over the presence. He often jokes about the question ‘how does one become a Buddhist?’ Easy – some people say – sit on the floor, cross your legs, wear orange, and close your eyes. My analogy is, have a Function, call it Diversity and showcase some people from minority groups in the leadership team. By the way, there is little logic in grouping D, E and I into a construct called DEI. Even from a financial performance perspective, it makes little sense, as the superb professor of Finance at the London Business School, Alex Edmans [4], has demonstrated. Mirror arguments can easily be made in areas such as ESG (another construct), Health and Wellbeing, Psychological Safety or even the whole ‘Future of Work discussion’, where the hybrid/non hybrid/remote/office ‘debate’ has taken over the airtime. The latter being the wrong end of the stick: workplaces are in cultures; cultures are not in a workplace – we have mistaken the content for the container. Debating the number of days in the office is like debating the number of commas in a Shakespeare play. So, what about training? For example, DEI training. Again, this is another ‘easy default’ that tricks us into adopting a relatively easy way to implement a ‘solution’. Training has more than a legitimate place in corporate development, serving well awareness and skilling. Unfortunately, it has limited power in cultures. These are largely un-trainable and shaped by the day-to-day (behavioural) interactions of people mostly following unwritten rules and social copying what is around them. Sending bankers to a business school for a course on ethics, to become more ethical- a real example in the UK after the ‘banking problems’ – is either a commendable good intention of extraordinary naivety, or a bad joke. The fact that people may ‘get’ the intellectual and rational side of something, does not mean that they will change behaviours. Rationally, people agree that smoking is bad, driving when under the influence of alcohol is bad, and ditto for not wearing a seat belt. If awareness and safety training were enough, most of these and other problems would have been eradicated ages ago. When compliance leaves the room, the real culture shows up. Similarly, the success of so called Bias Training, is largely underwhelming, not because it’s wrong in itself but because people wrongly expect behavioural change from a bunch of lectures or presentations only. The emphasis is on the only. We attribute powers to training that it does not have in the behavioural arena. Behavioural change at scale (and you would have thought that DEI advocates would want that, not just the awareness and enlightenment of a small part of the company) can only be achieved by a bottom-up ‘social movement’ that equally touches the Board and the front line.  That needs to be orchestrated carefully. Training is then a good comrade in arms. The combination of a top-down communication push-system and a bottom-up behavioural pull one is fantastic. I have described this in Homo Imitans [5] as the World I and World II working together and it’s at the core of our Viral Change™ methodology The tragedy of DEI is that it may progressively die of terminal corporatization. A recent, ‘epidemic-like’ round of dismissals, of (relatively recently appointed) Chief Diversity Officers has been described in the US. People often report that ‘it was mission impossible’, a monumental task that was naively addressed by creating a corporate function. All that is corporatized, eventually melts in the air, or in the pages of an Annual Report. My intention is far from discouraging the tackling of the reality of diversity, equity and inclusion (or any other set of cultural drivers, which I am happy to group in trios if you wish – what about Performance, Engagement, Belonging?), but I am making a plea to take them seriously by being very critical about the ’labelled solutions’.  Those solutions for me are behavioural in their roots and therefore require a behavioural-cultural approach. Corporate is very good at wrongly providing structural solutions (a new Function) to behavioural problems and is applying the same medicine to the recently acquired DEI. No surprises here. Using the lenses I use, I can tell you that DEI can be rescued from its hijack to truly realize the value of diversity of thinking, of ideas, of inputs, of participation, and equal treatment and involvement of people. The Viral Change™ mobilizing platform [6] provides the scaffolding to address the culture goals in an incredibly powerful way. It’s behavioural DEI, powered by Viral Change™. Just a conversation away if you wish. Reach out to [email protected] [7].

How you can rescue DEI from its hijackers – some recommendations: Don’t address DEI in isolation, as a distinct entity of some sort Blend it with broader culture change and evolution. Otherwise, the organization becomes a playground of competition between acronyms and their meaning. Many people who quote ESG have no clue what the letters mean. The more you label, the less you get it. Go down to the granular side (behavioural) as much as you can What is diversity? How do you recognise it in terms of what people do, not a label in the management structure. Translate into behaviours. (Hints: Opening the door to somebody is a behaviour; being courteous is not. Diversity as a mindset means nothing since it would mean different things to people). Don’t rely on training only Intellectual understanding, even emotional reaction to it, do not always trigger new behaviours. Above all, don’t use the victimhood card It never helps real victims. The DEI world is saturated by it. If you care about diversity, have the courage to say that it starts with ideas, opinions, points of views, cultures, experiences And, even more courageous, to say that it is intrinsically good as a value. ‘Employee engagement’ has killed the intrinsic value of work. It has been presented as a utility to deliver performance. What if ‘engagement’ (with your own work, with others, with a collective effort in the organization) were good in itself, regardless of how much performance ‘you get’? Diversity of the human condition, and in our business organizations, based on the intrinsic value of the dignity of work, is too important to leave it in the hands of any label The ultimate goal of a DEI corporate function should be to become irrelevant as fast as possible. If you are broadly in agreement with the principles of this article, and if you care about the behavioural and foundational aspects underneath diversity, but feel that the conversation has been hijacked, forward this article around your network.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn [8]

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have a purpose, bring others along, plan properly, organise resources and implement the changes. Great organizations give people autonomy, their leaders communicate well and, above all, exhibit great alignment with their business goals’.

The above 3 statements belong to what I call ‘Impossible to disagree with school of management’ and represent a great deal of content seen in posts, books, reports and, even worse, ‘the latest research’. This lazy thinking brings zero value to the party. It is however, easy to produce and highly magnetic. It generates lots of ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ which grows quickly in the LinkedIn petri dish.

Infuriatingly, people who jump into declaring agreement, don’t just say ‘I could not agree more with you Peter’ (exasperating in itself) but tend to repeat the proposition. That is ‘I could not agree more with you Peter. Indeed, good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example’.

I am highly suspicious of anything that seems to produce tranquilizer effects in the mind, that does not generate the slightest restlessness. In a recent post, whose authorship will remain private, I found an article that happily declares 20 reasons why change fails. You could easily add ‘bad weather’, ‘climate change’ and ‘long Covid’ and the article would stand, obviously highly enriched.

The ‘Impossible to disagree with’ school of management might as well also be called ‘The School of Not Thinking’.

The famous ‘Not even wrong’ category, attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe a very poor argument that does not even reach ‘wrong’, should have a sister category in our Platitude Management Industry called ‘Not even challengeable’. My view is that entire libraries of management books, HBR articles and ‘latest research’ could dwell happily there.

Please disagree. Even, just a bit.

Learn more about our interventions here. [9]

If you want to hear more about how we can bring some Critical Thinking and new approaches to your organization, please contact my team at [email protected].

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us to do? Way number 2: I need you to approve A. We also have options B and C but would not recommend them. Way number 3: Just to let you know that we are doing A. We explored B and C, but they did not rank as high as A. These 3 ways describe 3 different concepts of empowerment, 3 different styles of leadership, also, 3 different organizations. The 3 are legitimate, but they are very different. Please don’t kid yourself; they are not simple variations. Many people still ask for permission for things that the leadership does not expect to have to approve. But they may do so because it’s now on their plate, in front of them. Many boards complain that decisions are ‘pushed up’ too much but do very little to change the situation. On the other hand, many leadership structures expect to be presented with options for the latter to make a final decision. Knowing whether ‘you are’ 1, 2 or 3, and, more importantly, whether you’d like to be 1 or 2 or 3, and which one of them your senior leadership team expects, is fundamental. These questions are, more often than not, simply not posed or articulated. In these cases, decision-making runs in automatic pilot mode, creating default positions that are never appropriately validated that, sooner or later, will drive people, top or middle or bottom, for different reasons, simply mad.

Learn more about leadership and its applications here [10]. [10] Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’?

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are supposed to give, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. As an input, all the airtime will be allocated to how much to give, when, and in which circumstances. Sure, you need to think about that, but the real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? What kind of state of mind and behaviours? And why? What benefits? If there are any. The why is obviously important. Why is empowerment good? Because it is? What would happen to an organization with high levels of employee empowerment? Can you visualize it? If it is not clear, stop thinking about what to give away to empower. In this path to uncover the benefits, the argument is going to take you to the territory of ‘autonomy’, whether you call it this or not. Autonomy means a degree of control that has been gained (so yes, you now need to imagine what you will need to give away, to let go). Autonomy means self-determination, self-help, ability to conduct independently. If you had that, people in the organization will probably also gain a lot of self-esteem and confidence. Trust levels will go up. Autonomy means increased efficiency and efficacy. Usually, it also means faster reactions: markets, environment, crisis. The ‘business case’ is strong. There are five ingredients that need to be cooked to achieve this. Explicit ‘permission’ from leaders. There is something, perhaps in people’s upbringing, that makes us very dependent on ‘permissions’. Don’t underestimate the need to stress and repeat this to people. Don’t take for granted that this has been heard. Trust. Call it how you like, but you need a good dose of this for autonomy and empowerment to be real. Are you prepared? Resources. If people don’t have them, there is no point trumpeting empowerment. You can’t empower people to do the impossible. Skills and competencies. Equally, you can’t empower people to do something if they don’t know how to. A safety net of some sort. Within the compliance parameters that you may have, people need to be able to fail and not only survive but spread the learning. A working definition of empowerment from the leader’s perspective may sound like this: To give control to people who don’t have it so that you can free yourself for things only you, as the leader, can do, and, in doing so, you are creating an efficient system with high levels of trust and self-esteem. All this provided that people have the skills and resources. But the trick is to start by visualizing the kind of organization you want to see, not the theoretical view of empowerment or the things you would give away (decision rights, for example). Then you need to work backwards to see what needs to happen. If you can’t visualize the benefits in the first instance, or not yet, don’t go that route. Stop talking about it.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [11]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero or below. The line is: This is what I am very bad at; what about you? And it’s plural, what are we very bad at; what is this company 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”. However, this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be  [12]insufficient [12]. 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 once 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, Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, hearts, and skills and competencies with them. 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. I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll see it rocketing soon. The inevitable super-hero (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.

[11]

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [11]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the WMD of change and transformation in organizations. By WMD, I mean Weapons of Mass Diffusion. Traditional management was established to work top-down and through formal structures, such as teams and committees. More and more, the neat and innovative work is taking place outside the formal, hierarchical structures in the informal networks of the organization. Forming and nurturing relationships outside the formal structures is a new key competence for managers and leaders, and for that matter, all employees. It’s not new, but the emphasis and the weight is. But, in the last years, we have come a long way from seeing this intuitively and as an anecdote, to making it part of the leadership of the organization. It’s, of course, at the core of what is called ‘distributed leadership’. And it’s an engine far more powerful than the hierarchical one when it comes to shaping cultures, diffusing unwritten rules, copying and spreading behaviours, creating new norms, and sharing and establishing new ideas. In the formal organization, you would not survive if you did not know the teams you have, their composition, their leaders, their goals etc. If you don’t have an equivalent for the informal organization (influencers, hyper-connected people, activists, mavericks, positive deviants, advocates, ‘who influences whom’ outside hierarchies– these are not the same, by the way), then you are missing at least three-quarters of the game. There are ways of identifying these informal, peer-to-peer networks and integrating them into the life of the organization. However, the formal organization likes swallowing anything. It’s a macro-phagocyte that will tend to corporatize anything that moves. And this is a life sentence for the peer-to-peer networks which detest the teamocracy of the formal system. If you feel that you are a bit behind in all these or that it is all very well conceptually, but not sure what to do about it, well, the world is in front of you. I am pretty sure that if you start with simple homework, you’ll dig and dig deeper. From first gear to fifth or sixth, it is all doable. Start by reading about SNA (Social Network Analysis) and then explore possibilities. We at Viral Change™ do work with a particular peer-to-peer network of highly connected people. There are other peer-to-peer networks that are formed more in the traditional way of ‘communities of practices’. Have a go. You are, of course, welcome to explore here in Viral Change™  [13]and my Homo Imitans [14] book. Or have a conversation with us, contact us now. [15]

[16]

Learn more about our Leadership and Culture interventions here [17]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of: 1. Inner civil wars Internal fighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually, we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’ in us. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by-design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against senior people. 2. Employee disengagement The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness, and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage. Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing and feeling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets. For more on Employee Engagement see my article here [18]. 3. Dysfunctional leadership For any functional and aligned Leadership Team I’ve met through my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams, but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’. These 3 areas – the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership – are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family. If any of this sounds familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment. PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is about opportunity costs; it’s about how more successful could they be.

[16]

Talking about behaviours and culture, this is a good opportunity to look at how you can reshape your culture, and we have a simple vehicle to achieve this. Start your journey here. [19]

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

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change that refuse to go, you are left with a few strong and powerful drivers. I’ve got 40 of them. And I am seriously resisting the urge to ‘get them down’ to the most vociferous few. “Campaign it” is one of them. Let me explain it in this short video:

[20]

Why “Campaign it”? In the social change arena, you don’t survive if you don’t “campaign it” – that is if you don’t campaign the changes you want to see. Yet, in organizations, we are not very good at campaigning. We often focus on top-down messages or run campaigns every few months.. that’s not enough. People in the social change arena know that they need to campaign constantly. Leaders and organizations need to learn from this. For successful organizational change, you need to campaign it!

If you want to hear more about the full set of rules, my team and I have a great opportunity coming up very soon. Let us know if you would like to know more here [15] or via [email protected].

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage.

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:
1. Inner civil wars

Internal infighting is a potential feature of any complex organization, business or not. We see the caricature of this, and its high cost, in political parties or social movements. Usually we see the features of the inner civil war in newspaper headlines or on our television screens. Often it triggers in us a feeling of ‘how stupid can these people be? they are killing it’. And sometimes they do. In business organizations the mechanics of inner civil war are the same. The ones that worry me most are those that do not have 100% visibility: the hidden turf wars, the passive-aggressive reactions between corporate functions, the by design unhelpful collaboration, the cynical comments expressed in the corridor, restrooms, by perhaps senior people, against  senior people.
2. Employee disengagement

The industry of Employee Engagement (and there is one) tries to measure a mixture of satisfaction, happiness and willingness to run the extra mile. Year after year the rankings, for whatever they are worth, are terrible. We know more about the diagnosis than the treatment. I have written about the difference between being engaged with the company or within the company. The within (doing lots of stuff to make people ‘happy’) is a distraction. However, you define engagement, running the system with high degrees of a ‘lack of it’, is pure self-sabotage.

Leaders need to spend time on this, but it’s not about ‘improving a ranking’ but about gaining a deep understating of the motivation and ‘the chattering in the corridors’. It’s seeing, feeling and smelling. Some leaders can, others meet budgets.

For more on Employee Engagement see August’s Issues of BackInAWeekorso ^[21].
3. Dysfunctional leadership

For any functional or aligned, serious Leadership Team I meet in my consulting work, there will be four or five dysfunctional ones. Most of them look like juxtapositions of people reporting to somebody, but not a single entity ‘collective leadership’ type. It’s a journey, though. You don’t achieve high levels of sophisticated leadership in a week. But you have to work on it. I don’t have a big problem encountering dysfunctional leadership teams but I do worry when six months later they have not moved a bit. Or it seems they have via multiple changes and ‘musical chairs’.

These 3 areas, the inner wars, the hidden or not-that-hidden disengagement, and dysfunctional top leadership, are particularly toxic. The sad part is that they tend to come together like brothers and sisters in a dysfunctional family.

If any of these sound familiar, to stop and think would be a great investment.

PS. Don’t try to correlate success. Some successful organizations are dysfunctional. Some functional ones are not successful. The issue for the perhaps successful ones working with high self-sabotaging levels is how more successful could they be.

 

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Organizational Design
Your house is more than the sum of the number of bricks. Your organizational life is more than the sum of management activities and solutions.
Contact my team at The Chalfont Project ^[15] about creating smart organizational design and strategy or to find out more visit: Smart Organizational Design. ^[22]

 

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Leadership Accelerators
We prefer the term ‘practising leadership’ to ‘developing’ to emphasise the real-life essence of leadership. Busy-ness has taken over and leadership is now a series of ‘how to’. Yet, there is hardly anything more precious in business than individual and collective leadership capabilities.
Find out more about our leadership interventions and workshops  ^[23]

 

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Previous Issues of BackInAWeekorso:

September
The best organizational model is to have more than one under the same roof ^[24]

August
Unprecedented Times? Sure, let’s move on please ^[25]
Empowerment, Engagement and Ownership Culture must meet at same point. Obvious, simple and incredibly forgotten ^[26]
Employee Engagement Frameworks and the Productivity Magnet ^[27]
Is Employee Engagement whatever is Measured by Employee Surveys? ^[28]

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.

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For more thoughts on collective leadership, watch my recent webinar ^[29] where I am joined by leadership and change experts from The Chalfont Project,  Marieke van Essen ^[30] and Mark Storm ^[30].

 

 

‘Daily Thoughts’ is paused, to assess its value and its next  ‘presentation of  life’. Bear with us. In the meantime, we will post some short vignettes from Leandro Herrero’s book The Flipping Point. ^[31] Contact us if you need anything or if you wish to share any insights about how Daily Thoughts is of value to you. Thanks for being here. Don’t go away! The Chalfont Project team [email protected] ^[32].

 

 

Leaders have two hats. Hat one is the hierarchical one, the one that is usually the reason to be hired or promoted. It comes with a position in the top down structure. Hat two is the one I have described as Backstage Leadership. Hat two uses the power of Hat one to create the conditions for peer-to-peer and informal networks to work, without dictating what to do, without interfering. Hat two recognises that leadership is distributed across the organisation and beyond the boxes of the organisation chart, the one populated by Hat ones.

 

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Many long, complex and expensive reorganization projects by Big Consulting Groups make companies fully prepared for the past.

 

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Find out more about the range of books written by Leandro Herrero: Books ^[5]

Organizational transformation equals organizational life. Sometimes we add an adjective to signpost a direction. For example, digital transformation. Very often I am not sure what the adjective adds.

My average, large company, client has at least seven big initiatives running in parallel. There is Six Sigma here, leadership programme there, employee engagement cascade workshops, simplicity, diversity and inclusion, quality improvement, innovation programme, talent management programme, you carry on please.

Each of them have their own sponsor, likely their own budget, their own tribes, their own need to deliver, their own defence mechanisms, their own identity and their own self-inflicted blindness to their neighbouring initiatives.

Ah, by the way, they all compete for the most precious currency in the organization’s life: airtime.

That the staff are often confused should not surprise us. Being clear would be surprising.

Programmes that are constructed as A,B,C, steps 1 to 8, number of workshops, number of activities, will be favoured. So all those trains will depart from the same station at different speeds and avoiding collision, what else?

There will be transformations, however, that don’t fit into a 1,2,3, a,b,c engineering style. They are more like a journey, where you need good equipment, a sense of direction and a shepherd if you are trying a Himalayan one. (You don’t need a shepherd to go to the grocery store on the corner).

Those real, true transformational programmes are harder because they need a leader (a) who can trust others,  (b) who is prepared to accept the unplanned and emergent, and who (c) does not have to have all the answers pre-cooked.

There are those leaders around, but not many. But these are the ones who can exploit the full, real richness of the journey.

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Read about GSK Vaccines’ culture change journey, powered by Viral Change ^[33] (article written by: Hilton Barbour).

Or watch our Change Journey video ^[34] and hear how Viral Change is successfully driving change across many organizations.

 

This is one of the many pearls of wisdom from Confucius ^[35].  Your revenge may kill the adversary but a bit of you will be dying as well.

Let’s get a less dramatic interpretation. When we inflict pain on fellow human beings, some of us will require some painkillers at some time as well.

Leaders are required to lead with a good dose of emotional and social intelligence, not precisely new concepts, but perhaps never fully captured. Leaders lead, and in doing so, they are impacting on the lives of others. I am stating the obvious. Many leaders seem oblivious to the consequences of their leadership. Some with a macho style may sound like this: ‘I need to make the tough decisions so, I am sorry, it’s not me, it’s the tough decision, and anything else will be weak leadership, and seen as weakness’.

But nobody says the leader should not make ‘the tough decisions’. This is perfectly compatible with being very sensitive to the consequences, particularly the negative ones for the life of the followers.

In my consulting work for many years I have seen, and still see today, the whole spectrum of sensitiveness. I have seen, and see, leaders laying off people and doing so in an extraordinary sensitive and human way. I’ve seen, and see, the opposite. I’ve seen gratuitous power exercised. I have seen leaders with the social skills of a dead fish. I’ve seen great leaders with a sense and knowledge of their environments that not even a dozen Employee Engagement surveys could provide.

So, here is another leadership question: how deep is my grave? How is the digging going?

If you are not a good, sensitive, emotional and social intelligent leader, carry on, but be careful when moving around with that hole in the ground that seems to get bigger every day.

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[36] Now available in paperback.

New book extract – for a preview of the book: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[37]

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[38]
Amazon.com ^[39]
Waterstones ^[40]
Barnes & Noble ^[41]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[42]

 

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. ^[36] Now available in paperback.

New book extract – for a preview of the book: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[37]

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[38]
Amazon.com ^[39]
Waterstones ^[40]
Barnes & Noble ^[41]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[42]

 

I have not counted the number of TV shows, either side of the Atlantic, that are based on individual competition, but there must be big numbers. Competing will get you out of a jungle, or will win you a music contract, a best baker award, a bride, a groom, cash, a job, or just a title of Winner of this Year’s Whatever.

A fraction of these contests will entail collaboration as a means to winning. Even when collaboration is part of the show, such as in The Apprentice, contestants at the end are entitled to blame each other as a means to saving their own skin. (The Apprentice is, in my view, the worst public projection of what business is really about).

We are creating a world of ‘contestants’, always competing on some form of battleground: the TV studio, radio, the school system, the company. It may be soft or hard Darwin, but it is Darwinian. Many people will argue that this is not bad, that this is life after all, and that ignoring ‘competition’, for example in the school, is not doing kids any favours. So, it’s a vicious circle in which we prepare kids to win (more than to know, to grow, to live, to love or to contribute, or to just be), which in turn prepares (some of) them to join a company to… compete, which, I suppose, makes the company… competitive.

No wonder a survey of 2000 adolescents in the UK run by The Guardian a few years ago, showed that the number one concern of this pool was ‘fear of failure’ (followed by bullying, pressure to be thin and depression).

Slight problem here. The world is interdependent. Nothing that we do today can be done out of independence, no matter where you sit: the company, society, geopolitics, business.  The key competence of the Century is actually, collaboration, not competition. The laws of collaboration and competition are different. We have a societal bias for one (competition) and we desperately need tons of the other (collaboration). I have used the term ‘Competing on Collaboration’ many times in my consulting life. It’s not a clever attempt at playing with words. We need to master this. It is the top fundamental organizational and personal competence of today.

Yes, there are, attempts to inject collaboration in schools and organizations via training or gamification, but they are timid and powerless compared with the enormous pull of competition.

As leaders we need to reinforce, reward and recognise collaboration and stop reinforcing, rewarding and recognising the heroic individual  contributions and achievements. It’s hard when faced with the super hero, the hyper-achiever, with a stockpile of stock options and bonuses, to say: ‘Congratulations but you don’t get the bonus. You did a great, fantastic, incredibly successful job …on your own.’

We are hitting ‘culture’, again. That means choices, for example, how people achieve what they achieve.

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[36] Now available in paperback.

For a preview – take a look at: Camino – Extract Chapter 1 part 2 ^[43]

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[38]
Amazon.com ^[39]
Waterstones ^[40]
Barnes & Noble ^[41]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[42]

 

An old patient was concerned about her hair. A nurse came in at 7 am to put colour in her hair. ‘Nurses are saints’, she said. All nurses? That’s unfair. (A real example from one of our Viral Change programmes).

We have a reasonable level of trust between us. We help each other. But I have just let you down. Just once. Trust goes out of the window. This is unfair. How can trust be so vulnerable. (Because it is).

The doctor was hesitant, perhaps confused, maybe she had a bad day, but she missed a vital sign. Doctors don’t really know what is going on. There is a big problem in this hospital. You can see how everybody is so stressed. That is unfair.

Twelve nurses in the hospital ward were kind, attentive and considerate. One was terrible, uncaring, dismissive, awful. The nursing staff in this ward have an attitude problems. (All? But have just said…) That is unfair.

Again and again human behaviours and human emotions are not linear. We love unconditionally with very little objectivity. We hate deeply for perhaps a small feature.

These are non linear maths. We are stuck with them. This maths maybe needed to (be seen as running) run a brilliant organization out of a small set of positive behaviours or a dysfunctional organization out of a few bad apples. With these stats,’a few bad apples’ has no meaning. ‘Few’ is all you need to create havoc. In traditional, linear (organizational) maths, a few bad apples is just ‘a small proportion’ not to worry too much about. In our day to day non linear world, those few bad apples need to be identified and addressed. There may be more than one way, but leaving it to the comfort of ‘it is a small number’ is a bad idea.

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[36] Now available in paperback.

 

Camino is a collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts, started years ago as a way of talking to myself. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

For a preview – take a look at: Camino – Extract Chapter 1 part 2 ^[43]

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[38]
Amazon.com ^[39]
Waterstones ^[40]
Barnes & Noble ^[41]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[42]

Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one:

(1)   To create a New Product Incubator Unit (NPI) in charge of fast assessment/fast fail of very early stage development of medicines, including those offered for in-licencing by outsiders. The client was slow in this crucial filtering phase of the value chain, and applied to this well-known bottleneck in medicines development the same laws and management criteria used in the rest of the company. We created an Incubator from what it was a Slow Incinerator.

(2)   To give the NPI complete autonomy with different governance from the mainstream company, for example, allowing different reporting system and different levels of risk management (read: high). In many companies, uniformity and homogeneity of process, systems and reporting, sold as quintessence of, otherwise flawed, good management efficiency, is the only way to go. To carve out spaces (we call it ‘cohabitation of spaces’ in our Organizational Design method) with different laws and rules of the game, seems sometimes to management like a non-affordable nightmare. But the only reasons for the non-affordability, though, are simply of the managerial convenience type. It is indeed more difficult and painful to manage an organization which de facto works as a host of different designs, units, and rules of the game, a diversity of spaces, not a one mansion with all the windows and toilets looking the same.

(3)   To put in charge somebody with a technology/engineering background, not medical or pharmaceutical. This bright gentleman, out of ignorance, started asking all sorts of uncomfortable questions about speed, decision making, risk levels, resources and deliverables. The client anticipated a big backlash from ‘the professionals’ but, in fact, we had next to nothing of it, ‘professionals’ largely welcoming the alien and his awkward questions that nobody else had asked before.

This all-in-one bold move worked extraordinarily well on all counts. It got rid of all backlog of assessment of molecules. It attracted bright people wanting to join in. In fact, its permanent headcount was low, but we had a long queue of good brains wanting to join as secondments from other parts of the company. The NPI was ‘the place to be’. It was a fast moving, high risk, work intense, stimulating, high output, thought provoking environment. And did deliver big time.

When later on the company was acquired by a Big-All-Things-Corporation, it took the new owners just a few days to dismantle this alien, avant-garde, magnetic structure. None of the new acquiring executives descending from heaven with a McKinsey cookbook understood this apparent madness, and the most successful experimentation in the long history of the company, going back to the 50s, died unceremoniously.

I made a big mistake at the beginning. I took for granted that success would always be protected, proven innovation would always win, and even Big Consulting Thinking would always acknowledge bold moves. I am slightly less stupid now.

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Featured in my latest book: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road. ^[36] Now available in paperback.

 

Camino is a collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts, started years ago as a way of talking to myself. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

 

Order your copy now

Amazon.co.uk ^[38]
Amazon.com ^[39]
Waterstones ^[40]
Barnes & Noble ^[41]
and more….

To find out more:
Watch the book launch on demand webinar ^[42]
Read extracts from Chapter 1 ^[44]

 

A publication I once received around the Mighty Davos meeting portrays the views of five expert academics on the topic of leadership for the future, probably all attending  that-type-of-business-conclave. Here are their five vignettes:

1.’The leaders who fare best at predicting the future are the ones who recognize that the future is unpredictable’.
2. ‘Heightened uncertainty puts a premium on good judgement’.
3. ‘Leaders must be able to build organizations that are agile and can routinely innovate’.
4. ‘One key skill that all responsible leaders need to have today is a deep understanding of the key global trends driving change’.
5. ‘The path to leadership is both an inner and outer journey’.

OK! Now, try to (a) disagree with any of these; (b) take the advice as an operational yardstick; (c) combinations…

Can we unpack it a bit please?

The leaders who fare best at predicting the future are the ones who recognize that the future is unpredictable. Please explain. So what do they predict? That the future is unpredictable, or a particularly unpredictable future?

Premium on good judgement? You bet. Bad judgement sounds like a bad idea, leaders or no leaders.

Building organizations that are agile and can routinely innovate? Yep. But, is there anything else? I heard that in the last decade.

One key skill that all responsible leaders need to have today is a deep understanding of the key global trends driving change. Sure. If you don’t, you should not be paid, let alone be a ‘responsible leader’. The irresponsible ones presumably don’t care.

The path to leadership is both an inner and outer journey. I could not agree more, but, what does it have to do with leadership, that it does not for all of us as plain vanilla human beings?

Is leadership so elusive? Or only in the hands of academics?

It is frustrating that people who are portrayed as ‘leaders and experts on leadership’, generate platitudes of such a magnitude which I would not tolerate from junior consultants applying for a job with us.

You could say that I have taken lines out of context. And I have. But I have also red the rest of that context and it does not add much to the position. It may well be that the journalist has edited them. That I could imagine. And I hope this is the case.

I promise you, I don’t want to make fun of the academics or anybody else for that matter. Not a good use of my time. Just want to find meaningful conversations on leadership style, and it has been a long, long time since I have had a good aha!

Maybe it’s just me who does not get it. I don’t get this Davos stuff.

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This Daily Thought is featured in my recent release: Camino – Leadership Notes on the Road ^[36].  Available to purchase on all major online book stores.

To find out more read this Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[45]

 

 

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 ^[42] webinar, where I discuss this book and my thoughts on Leadership.

 

Visit BOOKS ^[5]  to get your copy from Amazon now!

or

You can now read extracts from Chapter 1 ^[36].