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.

Working in a ‘non-place place’ can’t deliver inspirations and aspirations. Ideas need infections, not Clinical Isolation Units.

Marc Auge ^[1] is a French Anthropologist that coined the term ‘non-places’, to describe spaces of little or no significance, of ‘transitory nature’ such as hotel rooms, or supermarkets, or airports. (Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity 2007, 2009). These ‘non-place places’ deserve an analysis of their own.

I sometimes feel that some organizations work on non-place mode. The environment is sterile and the all-glass offices have simply replaced the all-panel offices for another material whilst keeping the border close (but gaining in luminosity). In a non-place-company-place there is little room for associabilty, or the associabilty is forced into spaces where the only thing missing is a sign hanging from the ceiling: ‘you must be sociable here’. Examples are the solitary corner with a small table football, the awkward table tennis table surrounded by sofas, the open plan seating area with a whispering TV screen. Be here and do that: play, rest, eat (or eat, play, love).

Some company offices are closer to pre-operating rooms in hospitals than a work place. As an external observer, I often feel the pain or migrating from a ‘you work here’ to a ‘you play here’ area passing by a ‘you get your coffee here’ corner.

Some modern facilities with pristine space and tons of glass are modern prisons of ideas, non-places of undistinguished clinical interaction, that far from inviting human interfaces, discourages natural communications: silence is heard, faces are hidden behind transparent screens, meetings are orderly conducted behind the borders of fish bowls. Only the toilets provide some space for liberation, even if segregated.

Don’t trade off an old, messy, inconvenient and cramped place for a pristine, delux, glass cathedral non place.

In a non-place office even the receptionist’s ephemeral smile reminds you that you enter into a carefully designed world, a sort of Japanese garden of ideas, where humanity has been hijacked until the 5pm rush to the car park.

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or business model that introduces a much more affordable product or service (that is also much simpler to use) into a market.

‘It enables more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service. The change caused by such an innovation is so big that it eventually replaces, or disrupts, the established approach to providing that product or service’

Clayton Christensen ^[2], author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, created disruptive Innovation as a concept.

All very well, but before looking for the big product disruptors with the potential to disrupt and create entire markets, disruption, like charity, needs to start ‘at home’.

Before creating the equivalent of cloud computing, and the new wearables, and driverless vehicles, here is the challenge: what are the small disruptions that you can implement tomorrow in your thinking, in your teams, in your environment?

Here is a guide on what to look for, my definition of Disruptive ideas:

Disruptive [management] ideas are those that have the capacity to create significant impact on the organisation by challenging standard management practices. They share the following characteristics:

1. They are simple.
2. There is a total disproportion between their simplicity and their potential to impact on and transform the life of organisations.
3. They can be implemented now.
4. You can implement them at little or no cost.
5. They are most likely to be contrarian.
6. They are also most likely to be counterintuitive.
7. They pose a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed.
8. They can spread virally within the organisation very easily.

You only need a few disruptive ideas to create big transformation without the need for a Big Change Management Programme. The impact of a combination of a few is just like dynamite.

This is what I said in the book: Disruptive ideas ^[3] ‘provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need to execute a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them, in its own right, has the potential to create significant change. The compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.’

So here we are, disruptive ideas transcend innovation or technology and go back to the fundamental roots of day-to-day management in any kind of organisation, challenging conventional wisdom.

I wrote the book with some suggestions, but there is a much better way. What about this disruptive idea? Ask your team for disruptive ideas, brainstorm, get crazy, retreat, have more. See what impact they may have. Try hard to kill them. See the resistance, if any.

So if somebody says, for example, no meetings for a whole week, does this meet the criteria? If so, what would be the benefits? Why would this be crazy? What may the organization look like?

If you get into the habit, you won’t stop. I don’t believe in ‘disruption’ for the sake of it, but I know that not doing exercise will get you into trouble. The exercise is the relentless questioning: what if we did?

And this is very healthy. Disruptively healthy.

Medium and big organizations tend to use a competence system that segments people by grades and by degree of competence. A typical segmentation is, for example, one of non-managers, managers, senior managers, top leaders etc., and a set of achievement levels such as collaborators, contributor, exceeding, outstanding. Another cut is by ‘job families’. There are also core competencies, technical competences, job family competences and leader competences. Other authors distinguish between meaning competences, relation competences, learning competences,  and change competences. There are also behaviour competences, management competences and organizational competences.

The official use of this jungle is: selection of people, performance management, of course, career development, succession planning, etc.

There is an interesting line in one Wikipedia entry about ‘Competency Libraries’: ‘Organizations that don’t have the time or resources to develop competencies can purchase comprehensive competency libraries online. These universal competencies are applicable to all organizations across all functions. Organizations can then take these competencies and begin building a competency model’. Did you hear? ‘These universal competencies are applicable to all organizations across all functions’.

I am describing a jungle, a system of baskets and matrixes that often seem as if designed by a quantum physicist. In my consulting career, I am yet to meet a leader who seriously believes these  supermarket shelf approaches work. I have also met many HR mangers who, smiling and whispering, tell me that this is imposed by headquarters, and they have little room for anything other than implementing. Nice.

Sure we need a system of classification. However the use of that classification for the purposes of bonuses, for example, has taken over all the original noble aims. The complex system allows us to allocate money more than training packages or career path. Many systems and uses are deceiving. The music is about career development; the lyrics are about a percentage increase.

I don’t know where this fascination for the matrix of 50 boxes or so comes from. We are collectively fooling ourselves with some sort of smell of ‘scientific management’. We need a diet. The competency system needs to lose a few kilos, pronto. We need one, but slim and agile. Secondly, we need to be honest. Is it there to promote/demote/and allocate the ‘2 points above the inflation’, or to support performance and professional development?

Ah! I know. Both. The famous both, or all of the above.

Lets clean up these systems and make then fit for purpose. If I had a pound for every HR manager who says to me in private that he does not believe in the little monster, and another pound for every manager who, also in private (of course!) tells me that he has been asked to allocate money ‘in those boxes’ according to a pre-cooked Bell curve (‘you must have 5% outstanding, 10% below expectations’, etc.), I could plan for a holiday in the Bahamas any time soon.

‘Prioritize’ is a word that I particularly dislike because it is overused and  misused in a terrible way. I have seen many people making sophisticated priority lists, grounded in a sound and elaborate process to then kill the rigour at the last minute by choosing the actions that seem more amenable or, shall we say, that we can control. Clean and simple, but not terribly rigorous.

The logic of focusing on the things that one can control is inescapable. But there is no logic in sweeping the things that one cannot control, and that may be the real core of the problem, under the carpet. Just because I, as leader, can control my organization chart, play musical chairs, and move people around, does not mean that reorganizing is an automatic priority.

‘Prioritize’ as a term, has two meanings: (1) arrange or do something in order of priority and (2) declare something to be more important than another. People follow more or less both, but, as a client put it recently, we seem to always prioritize in a way that everything becomes No 1! Besides the funny comment, there is enormous truth here. For something to become No 1, something else will have to become 2 or 3. We sometimes seem to have a few number 1’s competing with each other.

In Decision Analysis, there is a principle called ‘preference independence’. It means that if you have A, B, and C as options, you can’t chose one such as ‘B with a little bit of C’. If you really like ‘B with a little bit of C’, this is your D option!  In our cruder, day-to-day prioritization, when we don’t use a decision analysis tool other than our brains, we need to learn the ‘preference independence’ principle as well. We need to be better at refining the options before rushing to priorities.

And we need to apply some principles of critical thinking as well, so that, particularly in a group situation, we don’t end up with the classical basket of ‘things that we can’t control’ without actually challenging ourselves on the truth of that category.  Are these really things that we definitely cannot control? You will be surprised how the discipline of the questioning can eventually decrease the size of that basket.

In my experience, managers consistently and grossly underestimate the power they have to implement things. That is why the standard prioritization process, as generally used, is poorer than it should be. The easy ‘lets pick up one or two’ has become a default outcome of many priority exercises. Often those ‘one or two’ were already (and suspiciously) the front runners before the priority setting process. ‘Let’s prioritize’ and ‘Let’s choose the usual suspects’ are two different things.

Affinity, like-minded groupings and ‘we know each other very well’ works if what you want is to get things done, bypass crappy recycling of things and have a cohesive effort. And a beer.

Affinity is as old as mankind. Our own positions in a social network (the organization is a social network) is in part determined by our affinity to other nods (sorry to call you nod). There is a term for that in Network Theory. It’s called preferential attachment. That is why some well connected people become more connected, not less. It’s also called  the Mathew effect, for the Gospel lines in  Mathew 13:2 ‘ those who have more will have even more, those who have less will have even less’. (Excuses to my unauthorized translation)

That is all very well. But the more cohesive, like-minded and ‘being a good team’, the more predictability in the system. Launch any questions to your mates (or direct reports whom you know very well) and chances are you already know the answer, or part of the answer, or at least the flavour of the answer. Predictability is high. (Some questions, like how much money did we spend lat month, or when we will have that report, requires predictability!)

Do you need innovation of some sort ( define as broad or as narrow)? The last thing you need is high predictability of the answers. So you need to reach out, team up, call it as you wish, with people you don’t know well. These are Granovetter’s ‘weak ties’ ^[4], a concept as old as 1973 in his paper ‘The strength of the weak ties’

People push back to me saying that the team members themselves will be linked to other people, other connections, who will bring the external view, ‘the innovation’. It’s a comforting view. Not sure it always happens. So, the logic says, as long as we all are connected with other people and other people, we will be OK.  Traditional HR/OD says Bravo! Network sciences say, good luck.

My question to my clients often sounds like this: ‘where are the aliens?’  Which always creates a tiny bit of fun. If I don’t have aliens (people I hardly know but are willing to bring a  fresh view, including the possibility of lunching questions such as ‘are you on something? this does not make any sense’) I always suspect some dose of ‘confirmation bias’ (we hear, and bring in, what we want to hear), a bit of ‘groupthink’ salt and pepper, a bit of ‘appeal to authority’ (come on, tell the boss he is 10 years delayed on his thinking. Mmm, pass, he must know, or at least wants to feel he looks like knowing). The teamocracies that we have created for so many years, have done a lot about operational excellence. Done. We need networkracies that bring the unpredictable. The relatively old concept of Social Capital (quantity and quality of our relationships) cannot be fed within a teamocracy.

The quality and solidity of a business plan is factor of the number of experts involved multiplied by the number of aliens who have seen it.

For me, one of the key traits of a good leader his/her ability to seek unpredictable answers. The predictable ones are already taken.

This is of course not something every mortal is privileged to do: to make ‘work’ an exciting, fulfilling and meaningful part of life. I acknowledge that, actually, those of us who aim for this, or who are in a position to choose this path, live in a comfortable bubble compared with  millions of fellow human beings.

Perhaps even a more compelling reason to use the privilege that we have been given. Perhaps a reason why good mangers not only manage a company well but also have the keys for a ‘good lived life’ of fellow co-workers.

I fear this sounds platitude-like but I think we take for granted that those of us who discuss employee engagement and work-life balance, and pontificate on pros and cons,  are in such a tiny minority in the world that run the risk of living in a colossal navel-gazing.

Those of us in the bubble – that includes you fellow bubble reader – have perhaps a moral obligation to make the most of those powers to shape our working environments on behalf of those who are completely stuck and unable to move a finger.

Bringing morality to the HR/OD/Organizational party is not popular, but who says we should be?

Steve Jobs’ super-quoted phrases from his Stanford Commencement Address of 2015, the famous ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’ and ‘’You’ve got to find what you love,’ are still bubble speak but I can’t think of a better calls to action.

Every time I hear people saying that they care so much, above all, about their work-life balance I feel a bit sad. Mainly, because they need to distinguish between life (good) and work (less good). OK, or at least there is an antagonism, otherwise why to bother to stress it? I know, I know, they mean well, they don’t want to be sucked into permanent ‘work’, OK, I get it. But those who really master the famous work-life balance, are those who do it and don’t talk about it.

For those of us in the bubble I’d like to send an unpopular request: stop talking about work-life balance and find if you can (perhaps you have already but don’t know) that ‘thing that you love’ that allows you to ‘stay foolish and stay hungry’. Then live both fully. Each of us have different ways to connect and disconnect ‘with work’, to protect spaces of reflection, to engage or disengage with others (and that includes family, friends and colleagues) but I do not believe you can put a rigid timetable to it.

I have yet to meet a serious artist who paints her beautiful drawings from 13:30 to 16:45 (work) and then switches to ‘life’. At least not in my bubble.

I can feel a very long conversation with managers. And all of those conversations start with the word ‘but’.

 

Can we work on the collective and reward the individualistic? Well, sure you can, it happens every day. But it’s a bit crazy. The organization, the corporation, the company, is collectivist in nature. It is not a collection of units doing individual things. It’s a collective for a reason. It’s supposed to do things that the individuals on their own can’t.

The contribution to goals and outcomes has two faces. On one hand, there is the individual: things I am supposed to do, and only me. On the other hand, precisely because the individual cannot reach goals on their own and needs others, the collective collaborative, joining forces, is a primary engine. So far so good.

But we hire individualistic agents and we tell them to ‘work as a team’. OK. What’s that? The individualistic cum laude says. When they manage to learn to ‘work as a team’, we reward them for their individual contributions, so we are reinforcing the original idea. Confusing the troops, we are.

At the other end of the spectrum, everybody gets the same reward on a collective achievement regardless the individual contribution. Read, universal bonus.

Behaviourists would have a problem with either end of the spectrum. The universal reward may address a sense of belonging (‘we are all here together ’) but this is more romantic than real in behavioural terms. In those behavioural terms, the strongest reward is the one in which the individual can see a direct connection between his individual contribution and an outcome. That outcome may be collective. The greater the distance between what I can do, personally, and reward, the weaker the reinforcement effect.

A mix is of course OK. Some general pool reward and a strong personal one connecting me and the outcome, may be a good combination. But be careful what you are aiming for, you may get it. Be careful what you are rewarding, sure you’ll get it. Reward everything, get nothing.

Next time you want a compensation scheme, you need a careful behavioural sciences approach. Let’s say that you need something to be done in strict collaborative terms. You need to reward the collaboration at least equal to the output. You may of course reward both, but, if so, collaboration needs to be stronger. So that it’s not about achieving X, but about achieving it by collaborating with A,B,C. Not rocket science, but we very often forget the ‘by collaborating’ when pretending that we are rewarding collaboration. There is a name for this: very high dose of decaffeinated espresso.

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 sort 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 in all counts. It got rid of all backlog of assessment of molecules. It attracted bright people wanted to join in. In fact, its permanent headcount was low, but we had a long queue of good brains wanted to join as secondments from other parts of the company. The NPI was ‘the place to be’. It was fast moving, high risk, work intense, stimulating, high output, thought provoking environment. And did delivered 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.

Listening to everybody’s opinions is an unquestionably healthy feature of open organizations, inclusive cultures and good leadership. But it requires a forgotten etiquette. People need to make sense (!) and listening is not a guarantee, nor a necessity for reacting to all, let alone accommodating to all.

Some discussions in teams look and feel like a permanent focus group, but without a clear ending or outcome. Some free-flowing conversations are important, needed, part of the health of the social network that the organization is. Whilst we need lots of these, the problem often starts when we are not sure what it is that we are seeking.

It has to be clear when we are seeking opinions, when we are seeking expertise (which is more than an opinion and assumes evidence based views) and when we are seeking ’input’, which usually implies we will do something with it. The latter is often a source of either disappointment when that input is not incorporated, or a source of messy and ‘uncritical crowdsourcing’ when people try to accommodate all opinions.

Many problems around the inclusive culture come from mixing up the desired outcomes, even in formal meetings. If seeking opinion, say so. If seeking input, say that it may or may not be incorporated in a final outcome. Somebody will have to make a judgement. If seeking expertise, say which one. Experts are not usually experts on everything, and they themselves mix opinions with evidence. If in free-flowing conversation, say so.

Many organizations complain that people’s opinions don’t matter or at least do not seem to be taken seriously. At worse, nobody asks. That’s a bad deal for a culture. In my experience, the worse cases I see are the opposite, when some sort of over-inclusiveness virus has been injected and nothing seems possible unless and until countless opinions have been sought.

Managers and leaders often forget that they are paid (amongst other things I suppose) to make judgements and that they are not simply facilitators of ‘opinion traffic’ ending in 30 post-its, classified in 4 clusters and prioritized with the top 5. A computer/piece of software does that much better.

So, next time, what are we talking about? what are we supposed to do with this? And a few other zero cost checkpoints.

Incidentally, the worse case of naïve ‘input seeking’ is the one when people feel compelled to go to senior management ‘for input’, perhaps out of courtesy, or out of lack of confidence, or secretly (or not) seeking some sort of blessing. Like any mortal, senior management will give you input. But be careful what you are looking for, you might get it. Tell me how you are going to explain later that, thanks for their input, but actually will not be incorporated after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Public sector health in many parts of the world has been financially squeezed. Committed health workers have continued to deliver care despite those constrains. It does not mean they are happy, or that they always do the right thing with patients. Financial squeeze or not, the public sees three things: what politicians say, what they personally, or their families, have experienced, and the fiascos. A fiasco, a mismanagement, a mistake, a blunder, a failure of care of some sort, will probably make the front page of newspapers, regional or national. What these newspapers do not report is the thousands of acts of kindness and widespread good will usually present. Some of those are true heroic behaviours by a nurse or a health care assistant. Often something hardly in their job descriptions. We don’t see them, hear them. Unless, scenario number 2, you have yourself been a recent user, somebody who has experienced those most of the time invisible human acts. Even then, the small negative and disappointing moment may take more memory space than the rest.

Even more biased towards what is negative is the Safety sector. The whole Health and Safety line of work is based by definition on avoiding incidents and accidents. That is the language, the processes, the training, the discipline. The parameters you see are the visible number of problems, less or more, or progressively less if things go well. Nothing wrong with this. But for each unsafe event there are perhaps thousands of safe ones. The system is not geared towards seeing them and learning from them, but how to avoid the negative. The negative takes the airtime, the positive is taken for granted.

This airtime taken over by the negative is inevitable. But, speaking with my hat on as organization architect, there is a whole line of rich work, cultural shaping, designing of better organizations, that is based upon uncovering the invisible and unpacking the goodness. In behavioural terms, you need to know what happens underneath those acts of kindness or those safe day-to-day practices. This is a much better source of insight and a much more fruitful strategy to scale up the positive behaviours.

Uncovering the invisible: social anthropology, cultural shaping, designing the new organization of the future. This is the first step of that Camino.

‘I am convinced that a well thought out “small wins approach” is the premier path to effective strategy implementation, and therefore to long-term organizational capability building’, Tom Peters, Guru of Gurus said in 1998.

And it kept me wondering whether this perfectly legitimate advice would still be valid 21 years later. Tom Peters was then referring to a new book by Bob Schaffer entitled ‘The Breakthrough Strategy: Using Short-term Success to Build the High Performance Organization’. The book and approach is based upon ‘“locating and starting at once with the gains that can be achieved quickly and then using these first successes as stepping stones to increasingly ambitious gains.”

Things have changed a lot in 21 years; the environment is a quantum leap different. The principles behind Schaffer’s work were very solid then (and he went on to fund a non-profit arm of his company to help the developing world; he was very determined to creating long-term impact). How much of the ‘small stuff leading to big stuff’ is valid today?

Not many people would disagree with the rationale: small steps, ‘baby steps, ‘one step at a time’, don’t put ‘the cart before the horse’, ‘a thousand steps’, ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’, etc. Incrementalism is in our mind. Is it because this is how our brain works, and how sensible things need to happen, or because we don’t know how to make big steps, adult steps, many things at a time?

I am not against the incrementalism rationale per se, which is logical and rational. But we need to ask ourselves how far we can go with it.

Can we do a step at time if your major competitors does 10 steps at a time? Can you afford small wins if you need to prove a big output in five years? Does the step-by-step theory apply to a company growing fast, at pretty much any cost? When is small-win-leads-to-big-win strategy legitimate and when is it a suicidal note?

At the very least, I ask my clients to play contrarian and imagine that they have no time for baby steps and small wins. What would they do? What if they all needed to accelerate by 50, 60, 100%?

For all the merits of incrementalism, and there are many, our present times are against that rationale. Perhaps it’s not all or nothing. Some things need the increment, others the big leap. Question is, do we always know which ones are which?

 

The project team has been complaining for a long time of their lack of empowerment. They have a lot of responsibility but little power to make decisions. The budget is not with them. It is spread across functions and business centres.

The complains are heard.

The system changes and the Project Leader now has budget responsibilities. They have the money! Hurray! They have to power!

Oh no! We don’t want that. This is too much for us. We don’t have financial training, and we are already overloaded; imagine if we have to manage the numbers on top of it.

I have seen this many times, or similar, in corporate life.

Many times the issue is not that the empowered people don’t want empowerment; they just meant, errr, to be empowered, but, did not mean that kind of empowerment.

So, be careful what you are asking for, you may get it.

Also you might get what you never asked, as well, if you are not careful…

The other side of the coin is often one of artificial redistribution of ‘empowerment’ and accountability, without asking the supposed to-be-empowered people whether they will take. Or indeed, whether they will have the skills, capabilities and mindset.

Many reorganizations and reshuffles, particularly the ones that come on 400 page PowerPoint by Big Consulting Groups, do change the rules on spot on behalf of some kind of artificial effectiveness dictated by dogma and by a big consulting budget.

Suddenly, sales managers become Key Account Managers with no change of anything other than the business cards. And it shows. Country managers become Regional Sales directors (it is cheaper). And the downgrade hurts, and they leave. Local HR directors become pan-regional-pan-continental HR heads, but they don’t have a passport. Just as well, because they don’t have a budget to travel.

Empowerment is a funny thing that goes up and down, often without the players noticing , asking for, or meaning it.

But empowerment is not passing the monkey, or passing the button.

Truth is, empowerment is never unidirectional. It is always, always, at least, a tango. It takes two to it.

 

The prestigious publication ‘The Economist’ has published an article ^[5] under the title ‘Team spirit. Businesses are embracing the idea of working in teams. Managing them is hard’. The article is doing the rounds of social media.

The article has no doubt been sponsored by the Association of People Returning from their Sabbatical in Mars . It’s a very useful article if you don’t know what the word ‘team’ means and if for some reasons you’ve missed the idea that most organizations have teams of some sort.

Aside from the wrong date of publishing, 19^th March, instead of April 1^st (Fools Day) the article is full of platitudes not worth even discussing. I have no idea what the purpose of this article was, but, hey, I may have missed something fundamentally profound.

There is a broader issue though, the one that The Economist could have tackled if the author had been on Earth. Actually the problem with teams is that we have too many of them. The team as a ’structure’ had become the default position in organizational terms, and, as such, taken over all air time in the collaboration arena. High performance teams have been described for many years, and the whole solution to the historically limited ‘divisional organization’ had been the matrix, which, by definition, required the inter-disciplinary project teams. Business have teams, sport has teams, the military has teams. So it must be good.

The trouble with ‘team’ as a structure is that, today, in 2016, misses the point. The noun, ‘team’, is no longer the issue, the verb, ‘teaming up’, is. The question is how to create fast, productive non-bureaucratic, responsive, self-recalibrating collaborative structures. ‘The pair’ ^[6] may be a very premising one, for example. Team or not, the issue is how to bring some minds and hearts together for a purpose, short or long term, and make it work.

I’ve written before that, today, net-work ^[7] is more important than team-work. The ability to ride the networks of connections, some of them tight, some weak or lose, is the 21^st Century equivalent of the previous competence of ‘team player’. I don’t want more team players. I want network riders that can team up, as needed, ad hoc, for short, for long, and not restricted to a ‘team charter’ designed as if the structure needs to run up to Apocalyptic times.

The focus today must be on collaborative formula, in a environment where hyper-connectivity has not made us more hyper-collaborative (connectivity is not collaboration). The ability to group and regroup, establish short or medium term collaborative arrangements, come together fast and disband fast, is more important than ‘the establishment of teams’.

Stop worrying about ‘teams’ and focus on hands on, sharp, creative, fast and fit for purpose collaboration. It may end up on something looking like that classical ‘team’, or not.

Let me go further. If you are serious, find another label. As soon as you call a collaborative structure ‘team’, you inherit a tremendous liability of ‘machinery expectations’, with no obvious guarantee of productive collaboration.

Again, with apologies, no more teams, please, we have a full house already.

Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon the most solid foundations of behavioural sciences, and yet incredibly forgotten. It is the connection between work (activity) and (personal) impact.

If work is an input to a black box in which a myriad of opaque algorithms may end up enhancing shareholder value, don’t be surprised with a shocking system of employee disengagement

The connection between what I do and the impact that I make, small or big, is fundamental. However we design many jobs that define and craft an input for which the consequence of the output is not clear. There is no clear reinforcement mechanism available and ready. The input is blind

Producing growth, becoming market leaders, winning prizes and improving industry rankings are not good enough. Granted, some people may have a longer horizon. The Chemist in a pharmaceutical lab may be working to an overall ‘improving health goal’, but, most likely, day to day motivation comes from the relatively close and even intimate visualization of an outcome in the Lab, not ten years later in the market place. I use the pharmaceutical example because it is an extreme case of people working in extraordinarily long development cycles. From initial discovery of a molecule to a medicine in the hospital may be a 10 to 15 year gap. Statistically, in a fast moving skill market, many of those chemists will never see ‘their product’ in the market, whether because of produce development attrition or because they have moved to another company.

There is a fault line in any CRM system, for example, that, banking on everybody inputting, does not give close feedback to the person who did the input: ‘thanks for your last week inputting of new customer insights; as a result of that, the sales force in X has now created a new segmentation of costumers and are considering to do Y’. Not rocket science, zero cost, not done.

In my long battle to plug in behavioural change management (Viral Change™ platform) into failing Customer Relationship Management systems, I have always seen very little of the above. In the old days of Viral Change™ we even created a behavioural term for that fault line: blind input. I make the efforts, input data, send stuff and, as District Sales Manager put to me moons ago, ‘I hope somebody will do something with this; for the time being my motivation is based on faith’.

Work design needs to include a way for people to see, feel, visualize, and mentally connect with an impact. If personal impact, even better. If personal impact in a way that nobody else could have done, much much better.

This applies to anything form producing reports, crunching numbers, making project team decisions, hiring, or packaging goods. The longer the distance between personal work and personal, visible impact, the greater the problem with engagement and ownership.

People use expressions such as ‘making a difference’ for a reason. Many frustrated good employees in large organisations migrate to small ones, not because the work was bad, but because they did not feel they were making any personal impact, and many inputs (ideas, actions, contributions, advise, decisions, steering, deliverables, pieces of management within their teams) were lost in the Bermuda Triangle of ‘the system’. A waste of human imagination.