List
Print This Post Print This Post

In my dealings with organizations of many sizes and shapes, cultures and geographies, I always find very fine individuals of healthy intellect, with good hearts, committed to the firm, with a wealth of experience, sharp views of the environment and sound professionals in their fields of expertise.

Why is it that those individualities, when aggregated in a ‘structure’ such as a Division, functional group, business unit, Committee on Something, seem to shrink and, suddenly, those little or not so little innovation engines (excuse my language) seem to be swallowed up in a sea of platitudes, terrible critical thinking and idea recycling, politically correct statements of intention, and trips in the road to nowhere? How come?

The logical expectation, I would have thought, is that the aggregation is bigger than the parts, that the collective wisdom is the fruit of those contributions, that velocity is injected and good stuff happens, thanks to all those healthy intellects, good hearts, commitments, wealth of experiences, and sharp views of the environment, now having a common home.

But, why is it that the home sometimes feels like a corset two sizes smaller, a straitjacket coming from nowhere, a babble of unintelligible jargon, a contest to make the point, a game to score in some undefined ranking, and, in general, a bad sum, a 3 + 4 = 2, a terrible intellectual deal, a circular system of recycled ideas, a sort of gigantic hamster wheel for managers?

Drucker’s famous definition of the company as ‘ordinary people doing extraordinary things together’, feels to me sometimes like extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and not much together.

Bad sum.

Something in the system that is created for collective action seems to have too many breaks, too many gates, too many translators, too many safeguards, too much political correctness, too much fear, too much checking upwards, sideways and down, like constant security checks in airports with many terminals, too much just in case, too much ‘in my opinion’, too much ‘the problem is’, a low heat cooking that never quite boils, a sailing boat stuck in the dock, a juxtaposition of opinions that run vocally in parallel, never quite meeting, a Ferrari that runs in low gear, if it runs at all, because most of the time it feels like admiring the Ferrari.

And it sucks.

If the collective is worse than the sum of the individuals, we would be better off having a General with an army of secret advisers managed by a clever algorithm. What is the point of having not only teams, no, high performance teams, and committees, and boards, that run collectively at a lower voltage than when the components are left loose?

This is a grim picture, reality is not like that, some would say, but I disagree. The role of the leader surely is not to cook a meal of platitudes but to come up with something new and transforming. Most of the ‘this was a good meeting’ meetings are long psychotherapy sessions. There is not enough restlessness and agony. Yes, the suffering meaning of agony is only 17th Century. Before, it was Greek for contest.

Where is the contest, sometimes I ask myself. I see a lot of content, and a lot of content (pleased) people with a lower common denominator achievement (intellectually, operationally) than the one you could have predicted from knowing them individually.

Sometimes the collective feels like a bad deal, a bad sum. And those kind of days send me to a retreat, greatly facilitated by a double malt.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation….

Learn how to successfully mobilize your people!

 

Do you want to learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture? Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us.  Join us on 16th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET for our free webinar on The Myths of Company Culture.

Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tell us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us. Over the Covid-19 peak across the world we have seen the best and the worst of company cultures. Sometimes it felt like a pressure cooker. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

Register Now!

 

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

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Contact us to find out more about engaging Dr Leandro Herrero for speaking opportunities with your company.

Keep up with the Daily Thoughts

Twitter Email

Would you like to comment?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

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

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]