The Sense Makers

The Economist, July 29, 2010, had a leader highlighting the rising power of Chinese workers in demanding greater reward for skilled work.  The article suggested that this was good for the world and good for China.  After digesting the article, I “sort of” agreed but could not put my finger right on the reason.

Well, a reason arrived last week when a potential client of mine canceled a meeting.  I asked what the real issue was.  He had received a message from his Chinese supplier that the orders placed could not be delivered as there were “difficulties” with the workers.

A few questions turned the light on the difficulties:

• Skilled workers are now very difficult to attract and retain.  Once you train a person, their value to the local market rises sharply and they are poached by suppliers, new entrants, competitors and substitue manufacturers;
• To retain the skills, benefits are rising.  Wages have risen from $190 a month to over $400; housing for the worker and family is required along with multiple other finge benefits.

My initial reaction was ’so what’.  This is just what made Silcon Valley such a rich cradle of new ideas – creative ideas that tumbled out as skills moved between organisations and good ideas were made better with the addition of thinking from all sorts of organisations clustered in a small arena.  Not wonderful for organisations but good for us, the consumer.  We benefited from:

• Greater choices
• Lower prices
• Tweaked imaginations that fed back into our own thinking and products.

But, I think the Chinese pressure will bring higher prices as dextrous fingers don’t bring the multiplier effect of knowledge and applied knowledge, in particular.

Our supply chains will get more expensive and supplies erratic; we will stock more, increasing inventory and finance charges; with increased inventory comes greater write-offs where product lines become obsolete before the market has time to absorb the inventory items.

Hang onto your hats – the economic roller coaster will get bumpier before settling down.

In a recent Bnet article at http://blogs.bnet.com/management/?p=1664&tag=nl.e713 Margaret Heffernan argues that CEO’s need a “third opinion”. CEO’s have advice from their teams (first opinion) and their advisors (second opinion), each of whom look at the question from their specific perspective.  The CEO then has a job to reconcile the multiple opinions which, in this turbulent world, puts even greater pressure on leaders to make sense of events around them.

Heffernan suggests that CEO’s benefit from a ‘peer review’ of fellow CEO’s who bring their thought processes to bear on the opportunity.  What is really important is the unemotional dissection of the opportunity by the peer group.  They neither own the opportunity nor the outcome.

However, to contuinue as a peer group member, trust is a critical factor.  Even though the peer group does not own the outcome, to earn trust means bringing the full weight of thought, skills and experience to bear on the issue raised by the group member.  Individual sugestions may be well off the mark but this is irrelevant if the suggestion is made with intent to contribute with integrity by bringing your full measure of wits, skill and energy  to the conversation.

Groups like TEC -The Executive Committee (Vistage in the USA) and YPO – Young Presidents Organisation are built on this trust.  TEC is facilitated by experienced business people and is more formal in its approach to executive learning and business issue processing.  YPO provides a more unstructured environment and open network at your option.

Whichever your choice, make a choice and benefit from your peers: build trust by open commmunication, direct feedback and constructive ideas.  Remember that you will be expected to turn your mind to issues you feel are not relevant to you and your organisation.  Two important outcomes are likely:

1. You realise that issues are creeping up on you, waiting to ambush your plans at really awkward moments or
2. You find you can use approaches in one industry which, when modified and transplanted into yours, gains you a short-term competitive advantage.

Take the decision; join a formal multi-industry groups like TEC and YPO and participate fully.

I was struck by the definition of Employee Branding, below. This created a thought process on whether we are getting just too cute for our own good.

Start with the question – “why would anyone want to work here and why would they stay?”.

Think of yourself and answer those two questions by thinking along the lines of: how am I engaged; can I use my creativity; can I make mistakes; will people guide me on behaviour; do they listen, really listen; can I think laterally and provocatively; do people respect me for what results I can bring or is the focus on form and compliance?

Take these questions and apply a cognitive lens – a lens that recognises organisations to be created by people to concentrate skills and quantities to ‘do things the customer realises he or she need and in sufficient volume’.

If customers are your dominant business driver and their tastes change, surely you want processes to morph into procurement and delivery mechanisms that meet that need?

You want hearts to be in the business, creativity celebrated, strengths celebrated, aspirations developed across the cross-section of the organisation, innovative approaches brought to operations, communication and inter-personal behaviour.  In short, you want people to listen, really listen; up, down and across the organisation and you want people to ask questions as a result of listening so that a common understanding emerges and spreads throughout the organisation.

Make your culture one of five I’s

• Inquire into your strengths and celebrate these
• Imagine the opportunities open to you
• Innovate to open the way to use the opportunities practically
• Inspire the teams to deliver against the opportunities
• Implement a continuous improvement cycle

We all want to be seen, heard and understood – align your behaviour to this belief and you will have an excellent place to work.  Call it what you will – employee brand is a bit of mouthful in comparision to common sense dealing with people as people – perhaps Team Charter fits.

Quote:

“While a lot of attention is paid to ‘employment branding,’ it is rarely understood as the heart of the Talent Management process. An employment brand is a clear and repeatable set of attributes for the company culture. The employment brand includes mission, work environment, values, and expectations. All of on boarding, succession management, performance management and even competency management and development must center on the employment brand.

When the company is clear about what it expects, what it intends, where it is going and why it is here, all of the other aspects of motivation fall into place. Mission, the centerpiece of the Employment Brand, turbo charges all of the other systems.

The study specifies ‘clear mission.’ That’s one part operations, one part vision and one part communications. A clear mission, expressed as the employment brand is a productivity boost and a competitive differentiator.

John Sumser is a member of the Salary.com Board of Directors as well as the founder and president of Two Color Hat, Inc. Contributions to Salary.com HR Voice and this Website reflect the opinions of the authors and are not an official opinion of Salary.com, Inc., or any of its subsidiary or affiliated entities.”

Researching the background for a keynote on the difficulties executives have in onboarding either from the outside (new to the organization) or by promotion from the inside, I was struck by the low levels of trust that employees have of their CEO; in other words, their leader.

Across 18 countries 29% of employees trust their CEO and, here is the shocker – 17% in the USA!

Let’s look at the impact of this finding:  71% of employees DON’T trust their leader.  This rises to 83% in the US.  If the level of trust is really at this level, none of the messages given out by the organization leaders is believed.  Every communiqué is listened to, the cynical filters applied with the result that, however important the message, it’s content is discarded as suspect.

As coaches and facilitators working with teams to build trust, we now begin to understand why we work so hard with teams and come back from time to time to help rebuild content-rich and direct communication between team members.  The collective cynicism and expectation that each person applies to his or her everyday listening is transferred to the team members.   This is a slow process until a team member behaves badly and is not ‘called’ by the other team members.  From this point on, trust tumbles down the short, steep and slippery slope: the result – a well-performing team crumbles into a dysfunctional group operating in a toxic environment.

Back to the executive onboarding process.  Would you, as a rational person, bet against odds of 70% plus chance of failure?  And we do!  Every day people are promoted and hired into executive roles.

Here is the second shoe.  40% of excecutive hires fail in the first 18 months of their tenure.

We have one good reason, trust, but there are more.  Let’s not look at the reasons as excuses but get to both the process and cost.  The next article deals with the process of onboarding and a subsequent article roams around the costs associated with failure.

Not being psychologists, we shortchange the individuals becasue we don’t deal with their hurt and the impact sush a “failure” has on their self confidence.  But let’s air some of the causes and create a serious discussion around what can be done to reduce the 40% non-success rate.

As I network to position myself as an executive coach, the feedback has been along the lines of “what exactly is coaching” and “that’s not what I want.  I want you to engage me, challenge me, be a consultant to me BUT DON’T tell me what to do”.

And so, I began the soul-searching to work out what I really am and how I can constructively engage executives and their teams in improving their personal performances in tangible ways.

I now know that I am happiest “helping people help themselves” but the ‘how‘ part has eluded me for some months.  Even with the diagram published by the Harvard Business Review, I still struggled in the trade-off between consulting (a 30+ year veteran) and coaching.

Here is where I am today:

• I have a wealth of experience in facilitating, problem identification and scenario development, supporting executives in grappling with tough decisions and helping executives work with their teams and helping the teams work with their executive.  This sounds peculiar, I know, but how many times have teams rolled their eyes at a meeting, said nothing in the meeting but been vocal around the water cooler, in hallways and with anyone who is prepared to listen to their dissatisfaction with the decision.

• I have been uncomfortable ‘coming up with answers’ as I really don’t know the nuances of the organizational context.  In contrast, I am very good at defining problems, engaging people in and around the problem in a process of ‘unpicking’ the problem knot while not being sidetracked by symptoms and facilitating scenario development with those who are steeped in the organizational context.

• As an executive consultant with a coaching focus, I can rove through the difficulties you face by asking powerful questions, play various roles you need, use life stories to illustrate behaviors and outcomes and help you help yourself by getting to the best solution in your context.  I am not responsible for ‘telling’ you what to do: you carry that responsibility and are accountable as a capable leader.

• You don’t get a voluminous report that justifies the position I have taken and represented in the recommendations.  You get a dynamic interaction which results in an action plan to change your future or a part of your future, we give other feedback on the process and look to improve the level of trust and imagination (with trust, more lateral solutions fall into our reach and we can plan for the increased risk as a natural consequence of more ‘edgey’ scenarios.  And, you also get the kudus of success and know you have a backstop where the plan did not work as expected.  You get a thinking partner walking a mile with you in your shoes.
  

We focus on the future, we are relentless in looking for better individual performance and we do this by you discovering your own path.

• This outcome is successful coaching.

• Now, really successful coaching sees you learning how to coach and applying the principle to your teams and helping them increase their performances, work more cohesively as a team and feed back your bad behaviors to you in a supportive way.

• Each person is seen, heard and understood.
  

Isn’t this what each of us craves – the recognition of our strengths and contribution?

Executive coaching is all about improving performance – your personal performance, that of your teams and your combined contribution to the organizational brand.

We look at brand as the broad ‘holder’ for quality of product or service, customer interactions, response to market demands represented by agility and flexibility, internal processes and solid teamwork between all levels in the organization.

Exceptional results are likely to follow once the variables are well established and ‘owned’ by the individuals making up the teams and leaders.

So, where does executive coaching pay?

Lets start with you, the leader.  If you are able to talk through thorny issues with a person having significant business background and know that your discussion is kept in complete confidence, you have an opportunity to weigh potential options rationally.  As a coach, I will challenge your assumptions and ask those deceptively simple questions that make you stretch your thinking.  In effect, we are walking backwards up the results chain by identifying the results gap, analyzing the actions, understanding your behavior and, finally, working out how to change your context of operation.  If you look at this as a scenario, we test the impact of a different context on different thinking which drives behavior and actions.  Then we test the possible result to see how close we come to closing the gap.

The payoff is in the clarity of seeing possibilities through a different lens.  The lens is mirror the coach holds up to you, the space you gain to think differently, the assumptions you hold and are challenged by the coach and, finally, the scenarios you are to built and test for fit in theory.

Now, we put an action plan, timeline and checkpoints in place and get to trying the chosen scenario out in practice.  The key to learning and improving is reviewing the scenario results and analyzing how and why both the strong and weak points have happened, doing more of the good and tweaking the weak results by changing the approach, publishing the learning and instilling the lessons into ‘the way we do business round here’.

Internalizing learning is the fundamental building block of iterative change: celebrating these learning wins at all levels of the organization sets an example and involves all the organization members in the business.  We want to use the full range of brainpower available to the business to its maximum.

And so, performance improves, people are engaged and participate, celebrate wins, learn from losses and raise the bar on quality.  In turn, brand grows along both breadth and depth.  Your customers increase trust in the organization and form a solid base for earnings – what the Wall Street analysts call “quality of earnings”.

Make the decision where the information is

Our role as coaches is to bring our client, the executive, to a point of greater awareness of the systems, multiple sources of information and interrelated factors that need to be considered through various perspectives, maps or frames such as:

- organizational structure
– the human resources
– power differentials and politics
– symbols and culture

In his book Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargrove mentions that he follows five compass points to bring a client to insight and breakthroughs:

- In partnership with the client
– By standing in the future the client wants to create
– By prompting the client to start by reinventing themselves first
– By being a thinking partner with the client
– By expanding a clients ability to take successful action

It’s Hargrove’s “thinking partner” concept that helps to interrupt old frames of reference and bring new insight.

He offers some stock questions to help the coach to challenge the client’s thinking:
– “What leads you to that conclusion?”
– “Could you walk me down your ladder of inference?”
– “What is your reasoning process?”
– “Do you have any data to substantiate that opinion?”

Mary Beth O’Neill, also a coach, says “A systems perspective resists identifying a single element or person in a system as the root cause of the problem.”

She builds on Salvador Minuchin’s triangulation theory of family systems by introducing the impact of triangulation in which the coach can get sucked into the drama and lose all objectivity and personal power.

These triangles can cascade into multiple interlocking triangles and the coach’s role is to help the client see the “interactional fields” and “dances” within a system so the client can get a perspective and navigate a way forward with less stress.

The premise of Bolman and Deal in their book, Reframing organizations, artistry, choice and leadership, that a “primary cause of managerial failure is faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas” is a reminder of my responsibility as a coach:
– to help frame and reframe organizational and personal experience within the organization
– to help shift points of view and interrupt old and archaic frames,
– so that executive leaders see and act on new possibilities

And that aligns with Hargrove’s 5th compass point:

“Expanding a clients ability to take successful action”

Dene Rossouw

Organizational unconscious

During 1998-99 I worked in the public relations division of the largest life assurance company in the southern hemisphere. In terms of growth, the organization had outgrown its motherland, South Africa, and was on the point of demutualizing and listing on various stock exchanges, including the London stock exchange. One of my functions as was to produce the “glossies,” the annual reports of this 154 year old life assurance company.

Working to deadlines, I remember burning the midnight oil, working with 50 content experts, the graphic design people, the chief accountant, actuaries, in-house copywriters, and chasing directors and board members with the photographer in hand.

And then after many proofs, when the “glossy” finally came off the press. The annual reports got shipped out on schedule to high net-worth investors, trade-union stakeholder groups, members who requested a copy and to every branch in the country.

After all this activity, I remember feeling disappointed. After all that effort, no-one was queuing up to read the copy, hot off the press. Although the organization was experiencing incredible growing pains as it became an international player, none of the true culture, spirit and symbols of the organization was reflected in the pages. Not able to put my finger on it at the time, I now know that the annual report reflected one aspect of the narrative, “what’s happening” but not “what’s really going on here?”

Once the annual report is out, leaders, employees seldom read the numbers. As a customer, the most anyone might read is to casually flip through the pages, while waiting for an appointment with a representative of the company.

But leaders also seldom read the organization’s actual balance sheet. Apart from income and expenditure, assets and liabilities, it’s the off-balance sheet numbers that show the actual human cost of staying in business. Those numbers are rarely seen. Consider this fictitious scenario:

Although Mike Pender, the sales manager at Learnys Inc., regularly exceeds the sales projections, we re-calculated the balance sheet, by including the off-balance sheet realities of Learnys. This new balance sheet showed the actual cost of sales to Learnys, and the numbers turned out to be less rosy. Why? The off-balance sheet numbers revealed that two extremely skilled members of the IT production team resigned because, in their view, Mike had a short fuse, lacked integrity and was in need of some vital social skills. We included the many hours that were consumed last year at meetings trying to keep the peace instead of addressing the actual issues between Mike and the production team. We included the loss of productivity of the production team because of Mike’s unreasonable demands and tantrums. We also projected the cost to replace the intellectual capital loss if five more member of the production team decide to resign because no one has the know-how and courage to confront Mike. And if left unchecked, like bad cholestrol, we calculated the cost to Learnys Inc. if it’s veins get further clogged with the toxic waste of interpersonal fallout between sales and production.

If leaders look at the company through its cultural and symbolic frames, and zoom in on the off-balance sheet realities, it might spur different actions and better results.

I can’t help but think of the incredible loss of intellectual capital, energy and human potential that wasn’t reflected in some way in the annual report, because the frames of reference were more about structure, and traditional powers and politics, while ignoring the significant contributions through the lens of culture, spirit, symbolism.

The result was an incomplete picture, overlooking, misinterpreting or reframing important signals and thus presenting a partial perspective of what’s really going on. [Bolman & Deal, pg 4]

And even as the annual report is shipped out, most everyone knows it’s a partial story because at the same time, other numbers and narratives are being circulated around the water cooler. They reflect the off-balance sheet numbers that show the actual human cost and potential of the organization.

It’s the employees, often overlooked, who hold informational and informal power. They are the ones who hold the keys to the real kingdom – real transformational change.

Dene Rossouw

In a paper presented at the 18th Annual World Congress of Organization Development in Dublin in 1998, Gervase Bushe spoke about five theories of change embedded in AI (Appreciative Inquiry).

In his “appreciation” of appreciative inquiry, he calls and cautions practitioners to not fall into the trap of thinking that any process that focuses on the positive is in fact AI and that it’s use will always have a positive effect.

He mentions that organizational systems of “deeply held and unexpressed resentments will not tolerate an appreciative inquiry until there has been some expression and forgiving of those resentments” (Bushe, 1998, p.2).

This resonates with me because he makes a point of saying that negative images that are repressed from discussion or are undiscussible, will result in “nasty side effects” (Bushe, 1998, p.2).

One of the five theories of change that Bushe mentions in his paper is the organizational inner dialogue.

Simply put, the theory suggest there are layers of awareness in the organization including the official voice heard in meetings and announcements – the conscious, rational corporate mind. And the unofficial inner dialogues that happen around the water cooler, confidential conversations, interpretations and judgments that occur below the radar of any official forum – the unofficial inner dialogue of the organization.

According to Bushe, this inner dialogue of the organization are the officially undiscussable conversations which can be a stabilizing force in the organization [or unsettling – my perception]. This is where “peoples’ real thoughts and feelings about what is discussed in official forums are revealed and communicated.” (Bushe, 1998, p.4.)

Why unsettling? My sense is that if these conversations are not balanced or overwritten with more positive conversations, morale eventually gets so low that a company can flounder, lack direction and result in lower investor and customer confidence.

According to Bushe; The AI change theory is: “if you change the stories, you change the inner dialogue.” (Bushe, 1998, p.4.)

Based on my experience I would agree that in terms of change management, nothing a leader does in the official medium will effect change if the organization’s inner dialogue is resistant to it.

What is required, according to Bushe, is “richly woven stories written in the first person.” (Bushe, 1998, p.5.)

My understanding of the role of the coach is to help leaders to tell new stories and to create an environment for people to hear each other’s stories. Using Bushe’s tracking and fanning concept, “tracking is a state of mind, where one is constantly looking for what one wants more of,” while “fanning is any action that amplifies, encourages, and helps you get more of whatever you are looking for” (Bushe, 1998, p.6.).

AI comes into its own when the telling and retelling of stories lays down new organizational neural pathways and ones intrapersonal and organizational inner dialogue is refreshed and updated with more accurate information, helping the organization to move on.

As sense makers and coaches, we need to Bushe’s caution to pay attention to and encourage appropriate outlets for negative and positive personal and organizational inner dialogue. And by tapping into the power of imagination and innovation and crafting unconditional powerful questions, provide opportunities for new and old stories to be articulated.

Dene Rossouw

Gervase R. Bushe Ph.D.Published in Cooperrider, D. Sorenson, P., Whitney, D. & Yeager, T. (eds.) (2001) Appreciative Inquiry: An Emerging Direction for Organization Development (pp.117-127).