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.

[4]

Lessons from the Pre-CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual (declassified, in case you wonder). This is how it goes:

General Interference with Organizations and Production:

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision – raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Well, let be this Daily Thought end here. No more to say.

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

Contact us today ^[9] to find out about our interventions, workshops and speaking opportunities ^[15] and how the team at The Chalfont Project can support your business.

‘A Better Way’ Series ^[16]

This series explores the future of organization life. We will explain how the 3 Pillars of The Chalfont Project’s Organizational Architecture – smart organizational design, large scale behavioural and cultural change and collective leadership – work together to create a “Better Way” for organizations to flourish in the post-COVID world.

Feed Forward Webinar Series ^[17]

In this series, Dr Leandro Herrero and his team of Organization Architects debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[18], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change ™,  ^[19]a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is regularly invited to speak at global conferences and Corporate events – to invite Dr Herrero to your event you can find out more here: Speaking Bureau ^[15] or contact us directly at: The Chalfont Project. ^[9]

I owe this phrase to John Kerry ^[20] whom I had the privilege of seeing on his London tour promoting his book Every Day is Extra.

He was making a point.  Our dislike for others, the ones who do not think like us, wear like us, pray like is, look like us ,is something that we learn. We are not born haters. Our tribal membership comes later. It is learnt, not in the DNA. Unlearning is hard but not impossible.

We could start by suspending judgement. Perhaps putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes. See the world differently.

I am not Pollyanna. All this is not straight forward. I am very intolerant for some things and very tolerant for others. I often surprise myself a posteriori. Why did I get so irritated with that incredible piece of mediocrity, and was so casual about that person who did not deliver? It’s all in my mind, my mental frames.

The world is more polarised than ever. Them and us. Me and the rest. Intolerance is growing. I find solace and comfort in places or institutions that could not simply survive without tolerance and care. The Health Service is one of those places. We criticise the systems, the delays, the bureaucracies, and rightly so. But these places are factories of kindness and compassion. Christian churches are another. Beleaguered sometimes, unfashionable frequently, their soup in the food banks of the streets of rich cities, still go daily with a smile and no questions.

I have a theory, a semi-Pollyanna one, perhaps. Many of our business organizations, where we spend most of our time, could be incubators of those values of  tolerance and respect. Many of these organizations have ‘respect’ in their value system. Respect breeds listening; listening brings new ideas; new ideas bring business success. Do you want me to calculate an ROI for this? I can do it in 5 mins.

And what would be the ROI of kindness for society?

Good and bad habits are formed at work. Work is the school of values for the rest of the day. Good or bad. Work is a gym for behaviours. If you want diversity, start with diversity of ideas, then you’ll get to other diversities. If you want equality, start with universal respect to others in the organization, then you will get to other equalities.

All this, many years after you hated the broccoli . Maybe that was the beginning. But it does not have to be the end.

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Don’t miss Leandro’s latest book The Flipping Point. ^[21] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[21] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

(Amazon) 5.0 out of 5 stars – Think differently

Reviewed on September 28, 2020

Are you ready to revisit all the stereotypes you have heard on management?
Do you need a fresh perspective on this topic?
Do you want to improve your critical thinking?
If the answer is “yes” to one of these questions, this thought-provoking and witty book is for you.
A must read!

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[18], 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 and an international speaker, he is available for virtual speaking engagements and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[9].

Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM from 1993 until 2002, recalls in his autobiography, the company’s use of a competence model for leadership and change. He acknowledged that they had too many of these competences, but that, by and large, they contributed to three things: created a common language, provided a sense of consistency and formed the basis for performance management. As you can see, he did not say that it created good leaders.

And I think there is a profound learning here. Most competence-based frameworks for, say change, leadership or talent management are more useful as a language for the tribe than as tools to facilitate change, shape leaders or ‘manage’ talent.

At that time in IBM, which Gerstner was referring too, the leadership competence system in the company had eleven of these, which eventually they ‘summarised’ into three. Most of the competence systems I know today run into several dozens, a broad supermarket of ‘pieces’ that one has to ‘have’ in order to be categorised into a particular box, which usually is related to a particular salary or compensation.

There is a whole industry of consultancies selling these boxes and categorisations, which usually look conspicuously similar to those of the multinational next door. They all successfully pass the universal test: they are impossible to disagree with. Teamwork, collaboration, ‘drives change’, empowerment, proactivity, ‘provides clear instructions’, results focused, openness and customer-centrism, are ‘fundamental to your leadership structure’. (I have just saved you a few thousand dollars or any other currency for consulting fees).

So there you are. The trick now is the dosage. Lower ranks have less of them; as you go up the ladder, you have more of them. By which mechanism one goes from ‘manages change’ to ‘leads change’ and then ‘anticipates change’, is never clear to anybody. The linguistic injection of steroids seems to be enough to expect the differences between levels. And if you land in a higher rank box by accident or imposed reorganization, you seem to inherit the competencies of the new box. The corporate Father Christmas has just given you abilities you did not even know you had.

One of my tired, recurrent jokes in this area is that these systems seem to have been created by a quantum physicist, but this usually gives Quantum Physics a bad name.

But, the language, oh, the language. That is marvellous. Conversations about people and talent management rituals by HR could not take place without the language and its dialects. And that is a serious asset, as Gerstner acknowledged.

Don’t expect the perfect leader to be the sum of a perfect high dose combination of competences. But expect perfect conversations about career progression and bonuses.

Despite appearances, this is not a rant against competence systems. It is a rant against outdated and past-looking competence systems. I can assure you that if you have one of those systems in place, and are performing well, the chances are your company is fully prepared for the past.

The trick, that many of those ‘human capital consultancies’ do not seem to provide is how to look at strategic, future looking capabilities. That is much harder because one has to project oneself into the unknown and acknowledge that a copy and paste of the competences that seem to have served so far, equally yourself and your neighbours by the way,  are going to be in the best case a pass, a baseline, and at worst, completely unsuitable for you.

However, since language is providing you with a powerful glue, it’s going to be difficult to abandon those quantum physics boxes.

But, frankly, I can’t see any other option. It will take a brave leadership team to look at those boxes and say: seriously?

Memo to all functions and Business Partners (HR, OD, L&D, Internal/Corporate Communications, Strategy Units, Finance, Health and Safety, Branding/PR, and any other supporting tribe; apologies if we missed somebody): You are fired. But you can get back. Maybe.

If you are back, none of you should have the same configuration, purpose, jobs descriptions and Partner Business Plans as the previous year. You need to reapply for your space in the organization.  However, new functionalities are now required, and they may fall into more than one of the old functions, so don’t take it for granted that you can just get your chairs back. Lines are open. Empty Corporate Spaces are waiting.

The following functions are needed. We declare them vacant. Please apply to as many as you want. Applications need to be supported by evidence that (1) you have the skills, (2) the mental frame and (3) the appetite, to take over one or more of these. You may have heard this before: Previous performance is not indicative of future performance.

1. Storytelling and Narrative. Both top down and bottom up. Not one off, a continuous shaping. We are dumping ‘the employee of the month’ in favour of ‘the story of the month’ and a crowd sourced company narrative.
2. De-cluttering. We need to clean up, simplify, get rid of unnecessary processes and systems.
3. Keepers of the culture and the behavioural DNA. Yes, sure, the CEO does that, the Leadership Team does that, we’ve read that book too. But somebody needs to take particular ownership to make it happen across the board.
4. From Change Management to Ability to Change. Our new focus is change-ability; the creation of an organizational fabric where ‘any change’ can take place (and if possible without calling it ‘change’).
5. Curators of the fluidity of the informal organization, regular health checks. Fluidity of the informal networks, the conversations, the social chattering. We have ignored this for 20 years. We have overbooked expertise in the formal organization. We are switching the focus to the informal one.
6. Greeter/Onboarding/mentoring. For new people coming onboard, it now needs to take one third of the time to become fully functional. This needs to happen peer-to-peer. Open as to exactly how.
7. Critical thinking. Desperately need to inject this across the board. Open-minded as to how as well. But we need to see this progressively embedded in the organization.
8. Connectivity, collaboration. Facilitation of the cross-border enterprise (‘Enterprise Without Borders’) However, we are planning a Big Team Sabbatical, so this is not about ‘more teams’ and team building.
9. Health check ups, Reboot! mechanisms, Time Outs. A built-in system that self-checks and plans reinventions .
10. Space in the world, brand, internal and external seemingly connected. All behavioural, by the way. Not about logos.

These are the initial 10 offerings. For the record, we are well aware that all leaders and managers need to ‘do this’. That is not the point. We are looking, however, at leading functions within the organization, drivers of these needs, groups that are willing to take ownership and drive them.

Joint bids accepted. Rebranding and reinvention of ‘business partnerships’ welcome.

More functionalities are crafted as we speak, and successful re-appointed functions will participate in a second bid.

Lines are open.

PS. Do not infer that because you occupied an obvious space before, you will occupy the same now. Your function is not needed. Functionalities are. Do not assume you will revert to previous ‘tasks’. Hiring by HR is not inevitable. Communicating by Communications, ditto. Culture is not necessarily HR. Change may or may not be OD, etc.  None of the old or the new functionalities belongs to any particular function by law.

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Let’s Join Forces!

My team at The Chalfont Project  ^[18] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by me.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• informal and formal organizational networks
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[9]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by me. Contact us now ^[9] .

A book by ex-Microsoft researcher and now MIT prof Kentaro Toyama ^[22] (Geek Heresy, 20015) is not precisely novel on the topic of blindly accepting technology as the solution for all evils, but it is a refreshing account of what has been a personal journey.

Sent by Microsoft to India to solve social problems via technology, he ended up showing the shortcomings of the technology and the need to focus on the human side.

‘The only conclusion I could come to is that technology is secondary – ultimately the people and the institutions matter most’.

Which is the kind of statement that triggers from us a big ‘of course’, although we carry on as before ignoring its consequences and with zero behavioural change.

Amongst other things he points to the lack of critical thinking on this banking on technology and the urgent need to review our digital world.

In day-to-day management, more and more time is devoted to a digital system of communication and collaboration. Years ago we would have referred mainly to email, spending most of the time on Information Traffic Management, and management itself being a glorified form of Information Traffic Warden role. In places where email is now progressively taken over by digital chatting of some sort, perhaps via Enterprise Social Networks and other forms of collaborative systems, the new digital is now a form of, very useful, more appealing benign dictatorship.

Management remains an analogue affair. It’s human interaction, person-to-person, no screen to screen. If we lose analogue human social-ability in favour of the digitalization of our humanity, we will lose part of us and, in the process, the chance to involve the whole of our emotional and intellectual beings in that kind of activity that we call ‘work’.

Creativity manuals often suggest having two desks: the analogue, with no computers and the digital, with the screen in front of us. The trick is more than a clever suggestion. It actually transforms the way you work and interact. Most workstations, or offices, today look like places to hang a screen, often situated in front of us, not just ‘on the side’. The invitation to collaborate comes to us digitally. The shortcut and default is to email back, as opposed to, say, pick up the phone, let alone move your back side and visit the originator of the email down the corridor.

So, yes, have two desks. And force meetings with no devices in the room. I’m afraid that having them ‘in the room’ remains a problem: people will check, will use, will have it in silence and will continue to reply to emails.

Declare management interaction (discussion, debate, exploring of possibilities) a brain-to-brain affair with no digital intermediaries. The issue is not one of blaming the technology. The problem is our addiction to the instant messaging and the instant world.

Decouple digital and analogue. Each world is different. Protect both, protect their dedicated times, don’t mix them up. It works.

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Continue the conversation….

High touch and high tech in the digitalization era

Join Leandro Herrero and his team for their free webinar with Q&A on 13th August, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.  Register Now! ^[17]

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative?

The ‘Covid-19 era’ seems to have discovered ‘digital’! Suddenly the world has been ‘zooming’ in the way that Sherry Turkle pointed out many years ago in her book ‘Life on screen’. Before this extraordinary disruption we had all become hyper-connected. But, did we become hyper-collaborative? This webinar will bring insights into the not very well solved tandem ‘high touch- high tech’ and how we can shape a future where the human condition wins.

Register now! ^[17]

At a conference I attended, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos ^[23], CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are leaving behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

Another ‘expert in Millennials’ would assure us that ‘they’ have three distinctive characteristics: (1) They love relationships; (2) They need and follow a cause; (3) They don’t want a job.

These may be true. As caricatures go, this may be a good one. But I’m always puzzled by how these are always portrayed as almost innate and genetic of an entire generation. Are Millennials born with a relationship gene, a purpose and good cause gene, and a no job gene? Or did they all get together in a Global Millennial Alignment Convention and decide on these three features?

The truth about ‘the Millennials characteristics’ maybe more about how the non-Millennials, previous generations have shaped their world, so that the world in front, handed to them, is the only one they know.

They love relationships. Sure, they are ‘there’, in front, at a click and a like. Hyper connectivity is a global phenomenon (but not hyper-collaboration and hyper-proximity) so, they take it because they live it. What nobody really says is that their relationships may be very different from other relationships. The question is what type of relationship, if any at all, is a differentiation between us.

They want and follow a cause. Maybe the previous generations have created more and more causes to follow, so, no shortage, the supply is high. Maybe previous generations are looking at a serious purpose for the organization, having avoided full domestication under ‘the maximisation of shareholder value’, which reached a climax of Robotic Goals and proportions, until legions of people started shouting my favourite slogan: ‘surely, there must be a better way’.

They don’t want a job. Perhaps they don’t want your kind of job, or mine. Perhaps they are redefining ‘job’.

I think that, very often, we have a set of stereotypes and mental frames that we apply easily as a way to comprehend the world. That makes us (feel) more  in control. It’s easy to apply a frame of wishes, desires and predictable behaviours to an entire generation. Some of these behaviours may tell us more about our own ones, and the world that we have prepared and cooked for that generation, than something ‘intrinsic to them’.

The question about Millennials is not whether, or why, they love relationships, a cause, and ‘no jobs’, but whether, or why, we have a world that is craving for better relationships, has organizations that may have forgotten a ‘high purpose’, and jobs not worth having.

Perhaps what Millenials want is the same as we non-Millennials want, but one of us is too shy to say. I think that they are having the meal that we have cooked for them.

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There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children? That’s probably the only question that matters.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. ^[21]

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. Management needs deprogramming. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Extracts taken from my book The Flipping Point. ^[21] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[21] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read recent reviews on LinkedIn ^[24] and Amazon ^[25].

360 degree feedback is the great deceiver

Another self-proclaimed ‘vital management practice’. It is a self-centred and inwards looking system that is supposed to provide food for people’s development. But it is also often an HR sacred cow from HR departments with a lack of imagination, sold on the idea of openness and transparency, but serving as a ritual to keep HR busy. It bypasses meaningful, truthful, day-to-day, ongoing dialogues and 24/7 mutual interchanges on behalf of a pseudo-scientific process. An alibi for managers, who don’t have the guts to have honest conversations. I doubt that any job description or contract includes mental nudity and exposure to friendly fire and ‘objective’ input from colleagues. In the best-case scenario, do it if your boss is also included in the parade. And do it quickly, there is a lot of real work to do. In reality, it is a collective Maoist system. I have only seen collateral damage, never a seriously good thing coming out of this process. Obsessive feedback cultures are cults, not healthy organizations.

360 feedback is the great deceiver. A ‘culture of feedback’ is always praised as superior. When feedback is institutionalised, the whole thing becomes mechanistic. Robotic processes deprived from real meaning. If ‘feedback’ is part of the daily, prosaic conversation, then you don’t need the 360 Maoist system. Or any benign form with narrow angles (180 degrees etc). Incidentally my preferred angle is 45 degrees, which is the one you need to look at yourself in a mirror.

The following qualify for early retirement

The following qualify for early retirement on compassionate grounds due to their poor health, in some cases terminal illness: Agile, neuro-anything (as in neuro-leadership and neuro-marketing), employee engagement surveys, annual performance management systems, 360 feedback, talking about VUCA, Change Management à la Kotter, gender targets (as a sign of how diverse we are), mindset-change programmes (I have worked as a clinical psychiatrist for 15 years of my life and I have never seen a mindset, no idea what they look like; but I’ve seen lots of behaviours, I know what to do with those) and purpose. Purpose is really, really exhausted and has asked for a career break, but I don’t know whether it will ever be back. It has been occupying the old Mission and Vision discredited spaces and has become so overworked that it has grown grey hair. It also has nasty arthritis.

The following qualify for early retirement on compassionate grounds due to their poor health, in some cases terminal illness. Are we still friends despite my list?

The snap shot of the company as pictured in an organizational chart, is probably one of the most fictitious works of management art.  Yet, it is a map of power and control that perhaps, in many cases, needs to be shown by the HR Cartography Department.

But the idea that the static display of boxes, reporting lines, solid or dotted, tells us anything about what is going on, is very naive. I don’t think many people would see it differently.

To understand what is really going on, you have to have a ‘live organizational chart’ and that could only be achieved with a live social network analysis.

For all technological advances we have at our disposal, we have a fairly prosaic, rather boring and uninformative ‘thing’ called an organization chart as a ‘representation’ of the company.  For example, it tells us nothing about three vital, fundamental components of organizational life:

Unwritten rules. The organizational chart may point to the written ones and only in so far as they are connected with the mechanism of power and reporting lines. For example, whom to escalate a problem. But not even when.

The natural influencers. The organizational chart is blind as to where in the organizational network a particular individual sits. There is no correlation between a hierarchical system and an influence system. Mrs Jones running the mail room may have three times more (cultural) influence and connections than Mrs Smith running the Strategic Unit.

The tribes. Every organization has tribes. Some are functional, and they may have their own organizational chart: IT, Operations, Finance etc. But many powerful tribes are not functional and they don’t have ‘their chart’: the youngest, the part-timers, the remote workers, the newly-acquired, the ‘women in leadership club’, the smokers or the runners/gym-lovers/wanting-to-die-healthy people. And if you don’t know about your tribes, or don’t know what to do with them, please note your Sabbatical has ended, come back.

The organizational chart is that lonely artefact that corporate archaeologists will find and frame, a relic from the divisional and Fordian organization, a Guide to Bosses for Dummies.

Although the reports of its death have been grossly exaggerated, the practice of  management as ‘organizational chart reordering and reshuffling’, is today in a rather poor state of affairs.

I despair when I see reorganization announcements solely based on new power distribution, or that say little about the possible excitement of the new structure in favour of that new chair showroom.

Some press releases are new furniture brochures, the new chairs and sofa collection. And a few beds.

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THE COMPANY IN A MRI ^[26]

Are you ready to do your organization health check? A must for the well-being of any organization. Join the conversation with us this Thursday July 2nd for our 2nd thought provoking Feed Forward webinar with Leandro Herrero ^[27], Marieke van Essen ^[28] and Carlos Escario ^[29] from The Chalfont Project ^[26]. 18.00 BST, 19.00CET. Register Now! ^[26]

Can we have a sense of the reality of communication, connectivity, and collaboration inside the company, a real sense, without simply using assumptions, or taking for granted what we see at face value?

Maybe get confirmation bias out of the window and have a good diagnosis of what is going on, whether we like the outcomes or not. It can be done. And it may save you millions in reorganizations or reshuffling that may not be needed. Or, yes, it validates your intentions.

Let’s put the company in an MRI and find out so that any course of action is informed. (Would you have an operation without X-rays and perhaps MRI?).

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[21].  Read a recent review ^[24].

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

These are 3 self-sabotage systems to be aware of:

1. Inner civil wars

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

2. Employee disengagement

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

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

3. Dysfunctional leadership

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

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

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

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

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New webinar series – Register Now! ^[17]

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[21].

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Flipping Point ^[21] – Deprogramming Management

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Read the latest review ^[24].

Available from major online bookstores ^[30].