The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of people, culture integration, collective leadership build up, and any situation in which Peter, Paul and Mary need to start working together from somewhere zero, or below.

And this is perhaps after a restructuring, or M&A, or transitory team, new team, the mother of all task forces included. Also, anytime when you can’t afford low building of trust, slow development, slow diagnosis, slow ‘it will take months before we are a team’, etc., that is, never.

The line is: This is what I am very bad at, what about you?

And it’s plural, what we are very bad at; what this company is very bad at; what about you, yours?

The Old School Toolkit has a saying: we will take the best of A and the best of B in this new merged company. But this is a bad start. The best of A plus the best of B may still be crap. Also, the safe discussion of ‘the best’ tends to hide the bad and the terrible for months.

Take the ‘this is what I am very bad at, what about you?’ line upfront. As you can see, it is more than a line. It is an approach, an attitude, a whole jumpstart in a box.

The artist Alex Grey ^[1], somebody I confess I had not heard of until a recent article quoting him – for which I am grateful; unfortunately I can’t remember anything else from that article – said: ‘True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s’.

I think that this is a very good start to create ‘love’ in a reorg, an M&A, a whole restructuring. It should be a line and a quote for management. How about start loving fast?

In a new situation (and old ones) when Peter and Paul and Mary ‘now must work together’, the three of them bring their brains, their hearts, and with them, their skills and competencies. But they also bring their inadequacies, contradictions and flaws. At the top of leadership qualities, acknowledging our own contradictions must have a strong place. We all have them. Acknowledging them is a strength.

And I don’t have to tell you what that approach will do for trust: you’ll be see it rocketing soon.

The inevitable superhero (even if sincere) ‘this is what I/we am/are very good at’ is a starter built upon competition. My ‘very good’ is bigger than ‘your very good’, sort of thing. The ‘this is what I/we am/are very bad at, what about you? Points straight to humanity, collaboration, cut the crap, let’s do it.

Sure, you won’t see this in the Powerpoints of the Big Consulting Group Integration Plan. They never contain the how.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[3] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[4], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[5].

 

If you work in a corporation with headquarters and affiliates, scattered in many places, or with international sites, you will be used to the ritual of ‘visitors’ coming from those headquarters on a regular basis. Indeed, you, yourself may be, or have been, one of those visitors.  Those visits may happen in the context of a business review, or the annual business plan, or simply as a more or less regularly scheduled visit.

Some clients, speaking from the receiving end, don’t call this ‘visiting’ but ‘descending’ from headquarters. Some pointed to me, half joking, (but only half) that they were considering setting up a proper Visitor Centre given the amount of disruption, hassle and complexity associated with dealing with these ‘visitors’. Some of course love to have visitors. It tends to end with a good evening meal, who knows, good wine, and possibly extras. Others hate it because it forces many people to focus on ‘the visit’ as opposed to ‘the business’. Preparing presentations for Gene and Tony is often an ephemeral and pointless piece of work, but …‘it’s important to keep them happy’.

You need to see these visits and the whole paraphernalia around them as a ritual. And rituals stick because they are rituals. They serve a purpose, usually not the one that is declared and apparent.

Think about what is behind the visit ritual: the whole spectrum, from genuine interest to help, for example, to waste of time and corporate tourism. And all things in between. But, above all, think about four or five non-declared reasons for those visits. See what is behind them. Try to imagine what other purposes they may serve. Do Gene and Tony need comfort (that things are going well)? Do they come to exercise a bit of power?  Do they think you need more help that you think you need? What purpose does the visit serve for them?

You will find more than four or five reasons. You need to list them and consider them on their own merits. Then, use the ritual and participate in it with deeper understanding. My advice is, in any case, don’t fight it. When rituals go, other rituals take over. Perhaps you can, gently or not, use the time to explore the value of those ‘presentations’. Perhaps you could put yourself in the shoes of Gene and Tony and imagine how ‘the visit’ allows them to exercise control. Then, ask yourself, why do they need to ‘control’. Just because they are ‘managers’? What would you do differently if you were Gene or Tony?

(At some point, maybe, a budget cut comes in – another ritual in its own right – and Gene and Tony are not coming anymore. See what is going to substitute this ritual. Something will. Of course the obvious is the conference or video call. Observe and learn how the new ‘visit’ has changed meaning. Or not? The point is to reflect, ask yourself, see what is behind or underneath all the time. Never take these visits at face value. You’ll miss a lot of meaning).

Vocation is often defined as ‘a strong feeling’ to do something, a job, a career, an occupation, to dedicate one’s life to an idea, a trade, a craft.  Typically it is applied to professions such as nurses or doctors, or a religious life. It is agreed, in general, that following your own vocation is fantastic, and not being able to do so, a human failure, perhaps even a personal tragedy.

‘Vocation’ has Latin and then French roots. It means ‘a calling’, a ’summons’. It has a tremendous religious connotation but today we are applying the concept widely.

Vocation is not the same as a profession. It’s not the same as a job. Vocations may ‘include’ a job (exercised to fulfill that vocation). But jobs don’t have to include a vocation. It is possible, indeed frequent, that people have a job that does not match their vocation or, even, it may be in contradiction. Like the son who has a vocation for the arts but is persuaded by his father to take over a family business which has nothing do with them. The son may not lose his vocation but he will probably live a very frustrated life if he cannot fulfill it.

I think that, in business, we don’t talk enough about vocations. It’s easier to ask somebody about his job, or jobs he or she likes to do, than asking ‘what’s your vocation?’ I’ve event met many people embarrassed to ask this,  as if we, in business, don’t get into these nuances. A job is a job, a career a career and a title in the rank, a title in the rank. We don’t ask a successful CEO; ‘what’s your vocation?’ Well, not often.

But if we could (re) introduce the ‘vocation’ idea in our narratives, we would gain enormously. For example, I don’t know of any Employee Engagement system (assessment, survey) that asks plain and simple: ‘what’s your vocation?’ and ‘can you fulfill it in this job?’ (We may have many surprises!) We ask about job satisfaction, even happiness, but not vocation.

A working place where vocations can flourish, will be a place ahead of the game in any Employee Engagement framework. It may not be possible, of course, to cater for all vocations of our employees. But that does not mean that we ignore this extraordinary motivational force.

Our Employee Engagement frameworks are too mechanical. They speak the language of machinery, such as ‘going the extra mile’ or ‘discretionary efforts’. Both concepts, as well-intentioned as they may be, are horribly mechanistic; more energy, more efforts, more output. The ‘happy-place/happy-employee = better output’ is a sad view of human nature.

When you see vocations in actions, you invariably see something as well: happiness. I personally have never seen happier people than those who are in full blown exercising of their vocations. And I know some.

Just trying to rescue the concept a little bit more,  may help us to understand better the whole motivational enigma. The one that is today dominated by a very poor input-output model.

I know of a brilliant medical doctor who, in front of a worried patient, perhaps with some imaginary worries, perhaps real ones, says: ‘Tell me what you need to hear so that you stop worrying’. Before you think that this is just a blind and dishonest way to please, see how she continues: ‘Not that I may be able to satisfy you, but I need to know what I could tell you that would help you to calm’. And later on, she is likely to end: ‘let me worry about A and B, you worry about X and Y’. X and Y being the things the patient may have full control over. Worried is now distributed!

Compare it with the ‘I’ll tell you the truth”. She is not telling a non-truth, she is just trying to figure out what is in your mind, what would trigger some comfort. She may not be able to give it to you, but, unless she knows, that is, unless she asks, there would be no good effect. ‘What do you need to hear?’, what a fantastic question that is.

By framing the conversation this way, she is very soon three quarters of the way to generate high trust.

This doctor’s approach is the opposite of ‘assuming’. Assuming is a dreadful word that places all power on your own mind ability to … assume, to know, to guess, to imagine. Assuming may be the only thing left once you have zero or little information, but not a clever strategy if you could get that information.

This doctor did not assume what would be the worrying items of the patient. The illness itself? Perhaps the illness is mild but the patient is worried about being out of work? Or carrying a hereditary burden. Or perhaps he may have a completely irrational fear of dying, but this remained unsaid.

Doctors that assume what patients worry about, instead of asking, would be fairly arrogant. Managers that assume what employees want as a reward, are equally arrogant. You may grant money when people want recognition. You may grant a holiday in an exotic place when people may want to be at home. You may grant discount coupons when people don’t want to buy anything. You may award 500 of something when people may expect 5000.

You may think that people stay with you because of your great management, but they do because they live nearby. Or because the fundamental values of the company, but they do because they need to pay the mortgage and would work for different values altogether.

Can we please stop the epidemic of assuming and start asking questions?

Such as:

What could I tell you that would produce X, not that I can guarantee, but I want to know (that brilliant doctor frame)
Why are you still here in the company?
What would be a sign of recognition from us?

You know those kind of incredibly complicated and sophisticated questions.

‘What do you need to hear so that you stop worrying?’ is not just a smart frame but an act of kindness.

I want to import the principle from that brilliant doctor to our tired and worrying organizations.

‘A year from now, you are all here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we screwed up! Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there’. ‘A year from now, you are all here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we succeeded! . Write the script for that year, what happened to take you there’.

Very often I run these exercises (‘Success and Failure Scenarios’ )with parallel sub-teams of Boards, top leadership teams or management teams. Literally I ask them to write those scripts down, or at least find all the pieces and assemble them as a script would have been constructed- novel, film, short story… People are incredibly good at writing these scripts (the failure scenario is invariably faster …) and can relate to them much better than an account of goals and targets as written in the Strategic Plan. The storytellers inside all of us seem to enjoy the questions and the production of answers.

For a long time ago, in my work with clients, I have switched from ‘Mission & Visions’ to ‘Space in the world’ and ‘Compelling narrative’. It’s not a simple change of terms. The questions are different. The emphasis is ‘What do you want to be remembered for’ and ‘What’s the story, your story, perhaps you unique story?’ I also insist in writing down the headlines my clients would like to see in the newspapers in year one, or two, or whatever the time frame. A couple of lines, that’s all. I have seen more executives surprise each other in this exercise than in many other times of interaction. These visual narratives are very powerful. They bring the authentic part of us to the surface.

Another method I use is to ask people to answer (all in writing, again) a question posed by their children (or other children if they don’t have of their own): ‘Dad/Mum/Sir, what do you exactly do?’ The exercise always starts with some light jokes until it gets really serious. Try to articulate ‘maximize shareholder value’ to your 5 year old.

It’s scripts, narratives, stories; not targets, numbers and earnings per share. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with targets, numbers and earnings per share, but the signposts are not the places themselves. If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, there will be lots of good people traveling with you.

Our traditional management education has almost 100% focused on the formal organization, the structural fabric of teams, divisions, groups, committees and reporting lines. The informal organization, often also called the ‘invisible organization’, has always been a ghost: you know it’s there but can’t see, can’t manage, can’t measure, so I don’t do anything about it. Not many years ago many leaders considered the informality side as a waste, a detractor from the core and formal, that is, doing your job. It seems yesterday when a friend of mine, a very successful business owner, spent a lot of time writing (hand writing for his secretary to type) memos to staff about how not use email for personal reasons, or the internet for that matter. Forget that online shopping and Ticketmaster deal. Not in his company.

Today, the role of the informal origination is more recognised. But still it is important to remind ourselves of what the informal social networks inside the organization, the web of connections, the largely (but not totally) invisible side does, and why it is inexcusable for leaders today to ignore it, or even treat it as an anecdote.

1. Connectedness (= network) Obviously! The issue here is fluidity. Informal social networks inside the organization could become non fluid if you attempt to formalise them, ‘convert them into a team’ or corporatize-them. They then become clubs (women in leadership, expats) which have their own utility, but they are not strictly speaking an informal network. The real connectedness dwells in the informal organization, well above the ‘forced connectedness’ of teams and task forces.
2. Information traffic and communication. The travel, the social life of information, uses two highways: the top down hierarchical system of communication (the pipes) and the informal network (chatter, rumours and all versions of Chinese whispering). You can’t exercise a role, or example, as Internal Communications without mastering the social life of the rumour. So you need to know how the invisible organization works.
3. Clustering. In the internal social network, people who know/does/did X, also know/do/did Y. There is an entire social cartography that can be considered. The informal organization loves clustering. Find an element, chances are you’ll fine the others. It’s ‘people like me do this’.
4. Listening. Receiving feedback. The informal organization/internal social networks are very good at listening and closing the loop with people. If you see the organization as a listening organism, then you need to focus on the informal organization, not the structural and formal of teams and committees. What the formal organization hears is then listened to in the informal one.
5. 24/7 Q&A. The informal organization is a 24/7 Q&A system you can tap into. The 24/7 Q&A knows no boundaries. The fluidity and use of the informal organization and its clusters of (informal) social networks allows for the bypass of a formal ‘expert system’. It is literally a ‘can anybody tell me about X?’, assuming that everybody is a possible ‘expert. You don’t need to catalogue them anymore.
6. Idea generation/crowdsourcing. Taping into intellectual capital, idea generation and fast idea qualification requires the entire network. Internal crowdsourcing is only possible if the fluidity of the social networks is respected.
7. Ties. The social network is the generator of ties, strong or weak. The more weak ties, the greater the potential for innovation. Strong ties are more predictable (you already guess what your team members John and Peter and Mary are going to say) and less good for innovation. The informal network hosts the weak ties, which are often the  most powerful ones.
8. Social capital. The network is a constant creator of relationships, a self-configuring one. It is therefore the strongest social capital builder; social capital defined as the sum of qualitative and quantitative relationships.
9. Host of conversations. The true conversations take place outside the straitjacket of the team meeting
10. Stories. The informal organization is a big campfire for stories to be told. Their nodes in the informal organization (you and me) are raconteurs. The employees in the formal structures are more on the information traffic side.

Leaders should be curators of the informal organization, masters of the invisible world and keepers of the fluidity, avoiding any attempt, from anybody, to corporatize or formalise it. It is the art of un-managing to reach full potential.

We all have our share of ‘difficult people’. Conventional management of change has taught us that there is always going to be a group of ‘no-hope’ people and another group of ‘maybe-but’ very-sceptical-people. We all know what we mean by it. My warning is against premature labelling and self-fulfilling prophecies.

A converted sceptic is worth 100 disciplined followers, because (a) an imitation of his ‘conversion’ may draw a small world of its own into the change and (b) the ‘conversion’ itself is social proof and legitimization. “If Peter is involved, maybe this is for real at last’

A frequent ‘internal segmentation’ often reads like this:

Good guys: going for it, get them all on board.
Resistant guys: they will never change, be prepared to let them go.
Sceptical guys: mainly a pain, either they will ‘get it’ and change, or else’.

My advise:suspend judgement, be willing to be surprised and, above all, don’t write off the assets that quickly.

Mary, the one who is systematically sceptical, may well be so for a reason. And she may see vital change as a real opportunity for real change and see a role for herself in a model of distributed leadership, when she may have a role as influencer in a Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform, for example

Alice, a wonderfully loyal employee, always ready for change, may have been taken for granted. But Alice, recently promoted to section manager, may not fancy the idea of Change Champions going around apparently bypassing her hierarchy. She may become a wonderfully unhappy and unsupportive employee.

Do not sideline anyone! Let’s first see who the final characters are in the tipping points plots! Suspend judgement.

It’s worth remembering a fundamental principle of social influence. John, a very vocal sceptical, negative person, socially toxic, well known and omnipresent pain, is so, literally because he can. Translation: John has an audience, maybe the group, the division, the entire company. John gets away with this behaviours because he usually gets zero challenge. From nodding whilst he talks to not challenging him, John and his behaviour, are reinforced all the time. Probably this is day one of a social psychology course.

Transplant John to a group of positive, no-time-for-moaning-people who will challenge him (for example, make him part of a group of positive influencers; ok, John may be shocked by the invitation; even better) and the reinforcing world is reduced to a bunch of 29 ‘this-is-not-how-I-see-it-my-friend’ people. I can guarantee one of the following

John is suddenly converted
John leaves
John is diagnosed as Acute Masochism.

Suspend judgment, the world may change tomorrow.

Organizational life can go on, driven by management, without asking people about their motivations. These are assumed in a rather generic way: everybody likes money, bonus are always good, target sales need to be incentivised monetarily. Even outside the extrinsic motivations repertoire, we still know better: making a difference, being autonomous, grow as professional, a good work-life balance.

The reality is that, whilst there is plenty of survey data in support or against those incentives, we apply those ‘findings’ in an universal way. Nobody has asked Peter, or John, or Mary what is specific for them. They will get what everybody will.

A while ago a senior HR person said to me ‘imagine if we had to ask one by one what they want!’. I did not understand what ‘we’ meant. Certainly I did not mean HR, which would be bound to address the problem via another blank  survey. I was talking abut managers and leaders who should be able to know, must know.

The issue is in fact broader. The level of (staff) segmentation in organizations is minimal: rank, demographics and performance. That’s it. We treat the organization as a uniform entity. Communications are standardized for example. It is assumed that the messaging would be equally pertinent for new employees or long serving, technology functions or commercial, part timers ore full timers, men or women, people involved in rich social life or not, digital hermits or gregarious souls. Who cares?

In the socio-political arena, for example, we would not survive five minutes with those assumptions. Messaging, engagement, conversations and call to action are segmented and tailored. You don’t talk to a 60 year old about job creation, or certainly at the same level as to a 25 year old. Single parents and pensioners need different messages. They click with different things. This is not rocket sciences, yet, in the organization, we ignore it completely. We forget to ask, so we send them all the same goods.

I don’t know where this comes from but it’s in posts and posters all over. It’s perhaps one of these interpret-as-you-wish-quotes, universal quotations in search of a purpose or simply, a well articulated, clever idea

I’ve seen it applied to sports, of course, and also to many other things. But the truth is that it has serious implications for you and me in this fuzzy world of management, leadership, organizations and their dynamics.

We tend to focus a lot on the input side of things: motivation, effort, even happiness. We still unconsciously or consciously think of us as a machine that needs fuel to work. It sounds reasonable. So reasonable that we spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about the amount of food, the quality of the food and the food suppliers. Motivational speeches, team buildings, all are food providers. And then, well, stuff will happen, we seem to think. But motivation without a platform to action, a system, a process or some rules of the game could actually be counterproductive and end up in demotivation.

I have written many times, and in the process irritated many people, that having rebels, mavericks, volunteers, passionate people and similar tribes in the room does not guarantee change. On the contrary, you may have change in 20 different directions, or just glorious noise. And the riskier type of noise is the one that the corporation adopts as a sign of progress (‘look how progressive we are, we even have those John and Peter rebels, pushing the envelope, challenging us; not many other organizations would have that; how cool is that?’) but also an alibi for not serious change.

So yes, in the corporate Everest we indeed find lots of corpses that once were motivated people, mavericks, rebels and incredibly passionate change agents.

Change agent minus a platform equals autistic change.

In Viral Change™ ^[6] we take care of the platform, big time. We don’t put the champions/activists together until the platform is ready, until there is a serious, well orchestrated backstage system of support. And not just for the next week or so.

Incidentally, back to inputs and outputs, the human capital industry (HR, OD, traditional management) has been historically so in love with inputs that it finds hard to get rid of this model. It still sees employee engagement as an input, but it’s an output; or still sees motivation as an input, a fuel, but it is also an output. Great motivation comes from success. Perhaps if we focus on success, we will get motivation and employee engagement.

First published in 2016.

Employee satisfaction/engagement surveys are a one way traffic systems. They are about what the company gives you, or does not. I suggest this is intrinsically wrong since there is no such a thing as one way traffic in a relationship. It is not only a missing opportunity to look at the other side of the traffic, but also a fundamentally flawed system to apply context to the validity of the answers.

I am picking on the very well known 12 questions of the Gallup questionnaire, a well established system with a multimillion answers database, not because these questions are wrong, far from it, but to show what an alternative 24 questions (in italics)  may look like.

Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Have you expressed your own expectations to your employer?

Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
Have you asked for the support or technology that will enhance or improve your work?

At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
Do you create or seek the opportunities to make the best of your skills?

In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
In the last week, have you praised colleagues for their work, or acknowledged the praise that you have received?

Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Do you care about your colleagues as people, or shown that you do care to them?

Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
Is there someone whom you help develop as a professional, even with small advise or support?

At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Do you express, or try to express your opinions and speak up?

Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Do you work with the mission and the values of the company in mind?

Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you do quality work that show your commitment to it, in a way that others can emulate?

Do you have a best friend at work?
Have you alienated colleagues or lost friends at work recently?

In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last six months, have you brought up a conversation about the collective progress of the group or team?

In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?
In the last year, have you taken any of the always present opportunities to learn and grow?

Employee satisfaction surveys do not usually include any question about personal responsibility. After all, one can say, it is about the employee’s engagement or satisfaction. But in this way, they reinforce a one  way traffic relationship. It is the language of exams, not of collaboration. The results, and the scores up and down, wrongly fix the attention on what is right or wrong (mostly wrong) in the organization-employer, as if the employee was a passive rating machine, a beneficiary of goods at best, a sufferer and a victim at worse. And the defendant always pays for the survey.

Imagine a score that shows: At work, do your opinions seem to count? = 10%. Terrible. But this is the chicken.

Now imagine: Do you express, or try to express your opinions and speak up?= 10%. Terrible. But this is the egg.

Chicken-only conversation, or egg-only conversation, can’t simply be interpreted. The results are meaningless.

Those surveys have only one direction. Half of the story is always missing.

I does not make any sense.

 

 

 

Somebody asked a group of senior IT people about to buy a whole new software infrastructure based on the ‘agile’ approach, what would be the most important thing they wanted the software to do. The answer was: getting home for dinner on time.

Many years ago I was involved in setting up a new collaborative structure for a pharmaceutical R&D client. It was a combination of structural, behavioural and (enabling) technologies approach. Our IT partners did a lot of analysis on the needs of the Research Division.  This division was populated by PhDs and MDs, ‘la crème de la crème’ of the industry. Our IT partners, who needed to provide the ‘collaborative software’ part of the solution, asked similar question: what is your number one priority?

The expected menu of answers included a brand new ‘combinatory chemistry’ software support and a real-time collaborative tool between researchers at different R&D sites scattered around the world. The number one request of the highly skilled, highly paid, highly published and highly scientifically avant-garde executives was: could you speed up these laptops, please, they are so damned slow!

There is an obvious pattern here. The most basic needs are often overlooked in favour of more sophisticated, game-changing aims. But the reality is that there is nothing ‘basic’ about getting home on time or expecting the computer to fire in less than the time it takes to read War and Peace.

The two examples have however one very good thing in common: people asked! Well, don’t take that for granted, since we often act as if we (managers, consultants) knew very well the motivations of people, or what would be ‘unquestionable’. The word says it all: we don’t need to question.

Entire compensation schemes, for example, are created without asking people what would motivate them. Since money is ‘the easiest’ and supposedly most universal one, we create a structure about this. Which it may be the right thing to do, but it is often done without a single question to people.

My followers know that my favourite employee engagement survey has one single question: why are you still here? Frankly, we take this as a bit of a joke, but it is far from it.

If we keep asking questions… we have a better change to understand the real world around us. And, getting home for dinner on time, would be a bonus.

 

 

 

 

 

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company)
I work for X (company), I am in IT

These are not the same. It tells me where the sense of belonging is, where home is, where loyalty may be, or divided. Both are neither good nor bad. They express what they express. They are different.

Change IT for R&D, Commercial, Regulatory etc. if you wish.

But some tribes are particularly good at preserving their belonging. Medical doctors is one. ‘Being a medical doctor’ becomes part of some sort of special form of being that sticks. Lots of pages in social psychology manuals explain why, including one that made me think for many years, when I was briefly teaching Medical Psychosociology in the University: the so called ‘access to your body’. The plumber, the engineer, the roof fixer, the driver or your manager do not have (usually) access to your body. They may have access to your time, your money or your emotions but usually not your body. That is an anthropological privilege when looked through those lenses.

In my many years doing time in the pharmaceutical industry, I was always struck by the medics, some reporting to me, who would always put ‘the medic’ bit before the company paying the salary. ‘I am a doctor, I work for X (company) as Medical Director’ was always, always, far more prominent than “I work for X (company) as a Medical Director, comma, I am a medical doctor’

Here, the order of factors does change the product.

Similarly, for a company composed of parts or business units or acquired businesses.

I am in Y (part of a company Z, or we are just being acquired by Z)
I work for Y, now part of Z
I work for Z, they just bought us, Y

Here, as well, the order of factors does change the product.

Months, even years after an acquisition, some groups or individuals have not made the transition yet. They still belong to the previous entity.

Also, the more de-centralised, devolved, an organization is, the more it is acting as a host, as an umbrella. As such, the overall brand may or may not be stronger than the individual de-centralised branded units. We see this all the time. People are often more loyal to a product-brand, or a service-brand, or, indeed a geography-brand, than ‘the firm’.

The issue is not whether the decentralised business units retain high levels of loyalty and belonging for employees (what is wrong with that?) but whether the parent brand makes the whole thing even more attractive. The more decentralised, the greater the need for an overall glue, a neat common home to be. The onus to be a good magnet is on the host/umbrella/mother/father. Not on the children.

 

 

Protests all over the world linked to a reason. Let’s take the Women’s march in January 21st In Washington. I don’t need to tell you why, unless you’ve been in a Sabbatical. Hugely popular, equally criticized.

Well, if there were no protests, the obvious alternative would be silence, equals acceptance, equals complicity. The marches, any march, create attention, use airtime, ventilate emotions and make a collective point. All in themselves a very good reason to march.

Do you want to change the world, that world, your world? You need to do something else, other  than marching. It is called action, mainly collective action. It is activism. The world activist has an ‘act’ inside  for a reason. Activism is not marching, although marching may be part of activism. Maybe.

Many people in politics, lobbying, organizations, social causes, want to have a voice. Presumably because they feel they don’t have one. When they get their slot, their hearing, their petition, their audience with the minister or the top civil servant, they feel, naturally, that they have achieved something. They feel good. The picture is taken, the news is in front page, they can prove that attention is been given.

I sometimes feel that one of the worse things that can happen to people who want to have a voice is that they are given one.

I know many people who will dislike me for saying this. What I mean is that given a voice is not only not-that-difficult but also could be an alibi for not changing anything. The protester is happy because he has been heard. The one given a voice is praised by his magnanimous sensitivity. Both are happy, nothing happens.

This is a much worse scenario than un-achieved voice, un-given air time, which would prompt the individual to continue his activism and figure out ways to change ‘that world’. The apparent end of the struggle often masks the real problem under the illusion of achievement.

It is not that different, if perhaps less dramatic, in organizations where employee voice is given in Town Halls and workshops post-employee-engagement. All of that well and good, I support them, provided that they are a vehicle for further action.

The more satisfied the audience in a corporate Town Hall meeting, the more I fear all will stop there and business as usual will take over the next day.

Give me some dose of unsolved frustration in the air; this is where I keep hope for change. When restlessness is gone, complacency gets in the room. My non-restless clients are not my best clients.

True thought leadership is not about conveying new ideas, showing directions for innovation and offloading the latest trends. There is a term for that: journalism.

Management gurus, whether from a Harvard pulpit or a Consulting Firm, who pontificate about trends or show their latest ‘research’ after interviewing 50 CEOs, and provide tons of valuable data (legitimized by their brand) but do not make people think, think differently, or advance in their possibilities, are glorified journalists. And we have lots of them.

A lot of what comes to us from such prestigious business pulpits is of inferior quality to what can be found in the pages of the FT or The New York Times.

‘It made me think’ is the most rewarding testimonial you can get, whether you are running a 50 people, a 500 or a 5,000 people organization. Or you consult for them.

Mind you, you don’t need thought leadership for your intellectual living all the time. You watch the news, read the Twitter feed and subscribe to those trend reports. We need all of them. But let’s call thought leadership exactly what it is, what it says on the can.

Although I understand the temptation, it always amazes me to see those resumes/CVs on professional pages, digital or otherwise, that start with ‘a thought leader, passionate for X,Y,Z’. And I often wonder where the title comes from. Self-attribution of thought leadership is a risky affair.

Personally, I have two other additional attributes to thought leadership, which I don’t expect other people to agree with.

My real, personal and possibly un-transferable trio of thought leadership is (1) It makes me think; (2) It provides me with some hope; (3) It pushes me to be bolder.

Now, that is for me the Thought Leadership Premium Package.

‘People like me’ is a category on its own right in the Edelman Trust Barometer. Multiple sets of data point to this category being the highest source of trust inside the organization.

Translation: my mates, my colleagues, my peers, people who share with me similar worries about life, kids or football. Also, ‘one of us’. Call it as you want. It may or may not include the so-called friends in facebook.

I am talking about this transversal, horizontal tribe, or tribes, I belong to, which have more credibility than official authorities. I play with this in my 2011 book ‘Homo Imitans’ where I said it was ‘youth to youth, granny to granny’.

This horizontality of trust clashes with the verticality of our leadership.

• You can send 5 social workers to help a dysfunctional family, or enlist an ex-dysfunctional family to fix the problem. Ex-dysfunctional 5, social workers nil.

• You can preach and send messages from middle to old age priests, rabbis or imams to disengaged, disenfranchised youth, or you can engage people of the same age, positive youth, youth to youth. Young activists 5, clerics nil.

• You can bombard people in the organization, top down from the hierarchical system with calls to something ( safety, accountability, execution) or you can craft and nurture peer-to-peer networks. Peer to peer networks 5, top down nil.

The world is horizontal. We think vertical.

The implications for leadership are enormous. ‘Looking sideways’ has a stronger traction than ‘looking up’. I always, always, always get push pack on this, saying I ignore the very hierarchical social systems of the world, where people look up for approval. All those patriarchal and caste-based systems, all those behavioural tapestries in which nothing is supposed to move unless approved by the authorities, elders, seniors and the rest. And that may be true. People look up in those systems. But how they respond, is much influenced by their looking sideways, how other peers react, what ‘people like them’ do. If compliance is the norm, they will comply. If rebellion is, chances are they will rebel as well. Don’t underestimate the ‘looking sideways’ power.

This my PhD in psychology in one line. People behave the way they do for three reasons: (1) because they are told to; (2) because they want to, or (3) because other people like them do.

The entire traditional management system has been crafted around (1): telling people. The entire motivational/employee engagement system has been crafted around trying to make people behave on (2) mode: make people want. In the process, people have forgotten (3): others do.

And this is the best kept leadership secret/gem in front of us.

One of the most conventionally accepted theories of change, perhaps better called ‘tactics of change’, says that it is important to show ‘quick win-wins’, that are visible achievements very soon in the process so as to create credibility and to project an impression of progress. It’s written in all  ‘change management textbooks’ … of the last century.

This mental model is so entrenched in the conventional wisdom, that it makes it hard to say to people that they have to wait. Entire cultural transformation efforts feel the pressure of the ‘win-win’  mantra, translated into internal human resources, and/or external consultants fiddling with the system to show that ‘something is happening’ very soon.

Which, frankly, is not a difficult task.

What is frequently not said is that the quick win-win, instant achievements, fast triumphs for a showcase, are small. Some people may be satisfied with this, particularly if, for example, as sponsors, they are anxious to show that the investment is paying off. But the unintended consequence of the rush for a pseudo-ROI legitimization is that other people may see those quick win-win’s as examples of goals not worth achieving.

Is that it? Some people may say. Are these examples of what we were trying to achieve? Is this the big cultural change? Are you serious? What is the fuss?

Organizers of activist-lead social movemenst know this phenomenon well, often learnt the hard way. In societal movements (social change, political change, political platforms) people often have much higher goals and expectations than inside the business organization, for example. A quick win-win in the form of a little tweak in a policy, for example, may turn off more volunteers than the movement wants to attract. If this is an example of ‘the revolution’ – some people may say – I am out of here; it’s not worth the effort.

As usual, the universal principle of ‘be careful what you are asking for, you may get it’, rules here. You may get many quick win-win’s but at the expense of many other lose-lose.

In Viral Change™, we prefer the early emerging stories as a sign of progress and direction than the traditional win-win. In our system, not all stories are good stories. The good ones are those that link (new) behaviours and a situation in a very strict way. They may look small as well, but, as a story, they are received as an indicator, a sign of movement, not something to be ticked as a key performance indicator. It is ‘the journey has started, and its visible’, versus ‘problem solved’ and it was fast…

It’s not simple semantics. The quick win-win is often, but not necessarily always, an artificial achievement that calms anxiety and satisfies egos but is not automatically an indicator of real progress.

Resisting the push for quick win-win may be hard. Clients who are absolutely adamant, stubborn, who don’t understand the push back, are never our best clients.

Wonderful orchestra conductor, music educator and leadership speaker, Ben Zander ^[7], used to explain how he gives his music students an ‘A’ and the beginning of the year, and then ask them at the end to explain and justify how they got an A. In fact he asks them to write a letter dated one year later and starting: ‘Dear Mr Zander, I got an A because…’

A wonderful model that needs no explanation. The antithesis of what we usually do with people, from schools to organizations.

In his cheeky way, he goes beyond the explaining and says about his students: ‘You don’t know how good an orchestra of ‘As’ sounds’.

An orchestra of A sounds fantastic. So does.

A team working as if they have full empowerment.
A leadership team that behaves as if it has archived its vision.
A change management team that behaves as if they have succeeded already.

Give them an A. Then plan work and process. But the A needs to be justified.

Starting with giving ‘them’ nothing means I don’t trust you. Yet.

Starting with preconceived ideas is a recipe for achieving them, seeing them realized. Good or bad.

So, why not to start with the A?

Good on paper but scary in practice? I agree.

But I am told by Ben (and more than once) that an orchestra of As cannot be matched. So, I may be missing something.

When in the not too distant future, cultural digital archaeologists will dig into the remains of the legacy of sexual predators and large scale sexual abusers such as the UK entertainer and charity champion, Sir Jimmy Saville (1926-2011), Order of the British Empire, Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, they will find something at the engine of it all, and it’s not sex.

When we do the same with the human disaster around abuse at the hands of religious ministers (Catholic Church, Anglican Church, many other churches) , we will also find something as a common currency, and it’s not sex.

When the same digging takes place in all cases of sexual harassment, abuse, rape and combinations in universities ( as just now highlighted in the media), any campuses, undergraduate colleges and, for ever known boarding schools, we will equally find the same currency, again and again. And it’s not sex.

When the likes of Donald Trump have been scrutinized in a more forensic way, and people have really come to terms with his expressed on tape views on women being a target for anything; to be more precise ‘you can do anything to women; grab them by ( sorry, censured in Daily Thoughts), and I don’t even wait, when you’re a star’, we will find the same absence of sex as the main motivator.

Yes, there is sex in all of this, but, focusing on sex would be a fantastic smokescreen.

It is almost impossible to say this without upsetting anybody remotely close to the suffers, who saw sex, suffered sex and are still traumatized by sex.

But it’s not sex. It’s power. It’s all about power, the cultural digital archaeologists will tell us. Power over others, power over intimacy, power to access a body and a soul and get away with it in the name of power. Power that was exercised and self-reinforced because it worked. Power that could not be disputed or challenged. Power that made the sufferers guilty of not accepting it.

Power is power. The power of the uniform, the cassock, the pinstripe suit, the semi naked holy man, live coach, cultural celebrity, divine representation, prestige professor, life guru, or formal authority. Exercising power, because one can, is the real primal motivator of this rather flawed evolutionary product called Homo Sapiens.  Who also does sex.

In psychoanalytic terms, it’s not Freud (sex) but Adler (power) who understood humanity. But we never paid attention to Adler as much as we did to Freud. The Freud anthropological concept of man, was more exhilarating, more headline grabbing, I suppose.  Maybe the diggers will have to tell us why.

The same power mechanisms rule in any association of individuals, any organizational dynamics, any relationship between management and staff, any corporate rituals between those with hierarchical power and those with any other power, or no power at all.

Some would think that the comparison of the rotten part of the managerial world with those horrors of abuse is too risky and disproportionate. And that would be another fantastic mixture of alibi and smokescreen. It’s the some power, but I am not making any assumptions about the severity of the human impact, benign, malignant or terminal.

Power is at the core of any human relationship. I don’t think we need any cultural digital archaeologist to tell us. But anybody involved in any form of collective action, and managers, leaders, HR/OD tribes and others are, who want to make sense of what is going on, must leave the cultural-accepted sex glasses, or any other, on the table,  and wear the power glasses. Believe me,  these will serve to see reality with 20/20 vision. If you start with power analysis, you will have a head start. Then add in any other layer such as trust, empowerment, or any theory of leadership. Fine. But don’t lose the power glasses.

Perhaps it’s so simple, so obvious, so palpable, so present, that the big risk is the use of another so: so what? It’s human nature, people say.

But we are not condemned to this kind of humanity. We don’t have to. There is power for good as well, a topic for another day.

There is a whole industry about ‘emotional intelligence’. I want a bigger industry about power intelligence. Then, we will be talking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve written many times: passion is overrated. Of course I am pushing the envelop with this. Passion is the fuel. How can anybody question it? But there is a myth around it. Many people in organizations think that injecting passion is the answer to almost everything. It’s not. Success is hard work. Passion is either an input, in which case, an incredibly welcome input to hard work, or an output, what happens after success kicks in. The latter is not well understood, even rejected when understood. But, yes, many people become passionate after repeated success, not before.

Hard work! No substitute for this. As leaders, let’s not kid ourselves and others. Virtuosos are because of many hours of practice, and because they compete with other virtuosos, who have … many hours of practices. Business virtuosos are the same. And those hours are a mix of success and failure, of continuous recalibration.

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, put it this way at a Commencement speech at the University of California at Berkeley: “When the challenges come, I hope you remember that anchored deep within you is the ability to learn and grow. You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are, and you just might become the very best version of yourself.”

Translation: go to the Gym of Hard Work to build resilience. Otherwise, you are kidding yourself.

I have zero masochist genes in me, but I do know that unless it feels ( a bit) difficult it’s not good enough. Forgive me the pinch of personalization. Some followers of my large Daily Thoughts community think that this daily commitment must be easy for me, precisely because it shows daily. Well, actually, it’s hard work. It’s my daily gym. And each piece must pass a subtle, yet personal, non transferable, acid test: is this worth saying? Will this make us think? I am using the collective, not very royal ‘we’ to include all of us in the business of creating remarkable organizations.

Oh, I forgot, I am really, really passionate about it. And I hope it shows.

Tried and tested in political marketing/mobilization/campaigning, many times, that ‘intention to vote’ increases the probability of other people voting by several points. Much more than a plead to vote, or other direct call to action, eg… will you vote, please?

In organizations we have a tendency to dismiss ‘intentions’ as something weak. And they are, if they were to stay like that. But numerous Behavioural Economic ‘experiments’ show that the declaration of intentions, visible and with good social copying possibilities in front (e.g. the neighbourhood in political campaigning) is very strong in pulling behaviours.

The practical translation in organizational terms is the leader switching from ‘we need to do X, X is good for you/us’ to ‘ I am going to do X (what about you?)

Indicating clearly upfront what one plans to do (and doing it) may pull more behavioural weight than more traditional managerial ‘guidelines’ of what you/we need to do.

So, I am shortening the meetings to 30 minutes; I am answering the questionnaire that we were sent; I am taking one of the 5 things that were left in limbo, are far stronger than we should have shorter meetings; we need to answer the questionnaire that we were sent; somebody needs to address (or the most frequent ‘so, who is going to do X?’) the things that were left in limbo.

Easy! Change gears.

As usual, behavioural insights come from somewhere other than a business school.