Category: Future of Work

Don’t wait for formal processes to manage accountability. Foster the little acts of courage that deliver accountability in real-time when required.

One of the reasons that traditional organisations struggle with the transition to digital ways of working is that they lack a consistent flow of accountability conversations. Accountability conversations are little acts of courage. Traditional organisations build elaborate structures and processes to ensure that accountability conversations occur. That’s why there is so much emphasis on reporting lines, performance management processes, peer review, measurement, business reviews, reporting and service level agreements. These activities are all proxies to force people in the organisation to have accountability conversations. Often these proxies become ends unto themselves with a bureaucratic efficiency that frustrates their purpose. We have seen meetings that were ostensibility to discuss accountability devolve into a series of formal set-pieces to ensure everyone avoids the difficult accountability conversations.

Forcing people to have an uncomfortable and risky conversation, usually results in compliance not commitment. People may duck the moments of little acts of courage, but still comply with the formal processes ensure that empty or confusing conversations are had. The consequence of a remote, formal, delayed and intermediated process of accountability is that these conversations are often unwanted by all involved. The resulting conversations are full of euphemism, deflection and opinion, feedback delivered by those who weren’t involved and the need to investigate further new issues raised. All this ensures that they are largely ineffective. Worse still the delayed and formal process has the outcome of taking small acts of feedback and blowing them up into major dramas and relationship breakers. Forcing people to have a conversation that involves little acts of courage just guarantees a conversation. It doesn’t guarantee courage, learning, or value.

Digital organisations focus on bringing forward the courageous conversation and getting into the conflict quickly. Every accountability conversation, especially those based on a difference of opinion, is a learning moment. The agile pace and real competitive demands of digital organisations mean that learning is valued, outcomes are the highest priority and conflicts must be surfaced early. These digital organisations have focused to varying degrees on different approaches to foster the psychological safety and directness required for the small courageous acts of accountability. Agile, Scrum, Lean, Holocracy, OKRs and other approaches are all paths to solve the absence of acts of accountability in traditional organisations.

We must remember that no process is an effective substitute for a purposeful, timely, respectful and brave conversation. Leaders in digital organisations must be on the alert for signals of misalignment and lack of timely conversations of accountability. Encouraging these conversations and fostering a culture of little acts of courage must be the first work of leadership in digital organisations. When digital organisations can deliver a consistent flow of these little conversations about accountability, issues of alignment, customer focus and performance disappear quickly and learning is accelerated.

Fixing the accountability issue for all organisations does not require a new process. It requires a relentless focus on fostering the kinds of conversations that resolve issues, improve performance, and allow people to learn and grow. The fix begins and ends with little acts of courage.

Recently in Change Agents Worldwide we were discussing the challenges of change leadership. What struck me in that conversation was that there is a real challenge of courage for leaders. Change leadership is difficult, not always a positive experience and fraught with failure. Leading change takes people to have the courage to push for change.

The challenge of leadership courage in change is not the big risky acts that demand bravery. Big risky acts are those people are expected to pursue in leadership roles. There are rewards for taking the big risks even when you fail.

Little Everyday Acts

Earlier this year I read my Change Agents Worldwide colleague Lois Kelly’s book, Naked Hearted. The book is about removing the filters and getting to the real issues. Besides being beautifully written, Lois shares a series of personal essays in which she examines many of the ways we can duck the chance to be open and show courage in being ourselves. Lois has taken this theme further and is now running a series of Courage Camps to enable others to examine how to be bolder.

The book was a reminder to me that the hardest form of courage is the little everyday acts of courage.  These opportunities for leaders to take these small risks come so hard and so fast that it can be easier to take the easy option and avoid them. There is rarely praise and accolades for these everyday actions. At times, there can be enormous social pressure to “accept the status quo”, “fit in and get along”, not to raise “the elephant in the room” or to “go with the flow”. We have lots of phrases to describe surrendering our little acts of courage.

We can at times feel that even a single missed moment of action on these little acts creates insurmountable barriers to future action.  These little acts offer little reward for action to overcome doubts. With doubts and barriers leading to inaction, over time expectations can arise that certain issues won’t be addressed. The expectations are how toxic cultures are built over time.

The little acts of courage include:

• presenting ourselves openly, honestly and without gloss
• separating yourself from a group
• pointing out a difficult, hard or inconvenient truth
• sharing hidden or suppressed stories
• listening when the conversation makes you uncomfortable
• sitting in uncertainty
• exposing our vulnerability
• deferring to the contribution of others
• following another’s lead
• managing tension towards a productive outcome
• making a change from a successful formula
• challenging the prevailing culture

Each of these acts of courage takes no more than a moment. We barely notice whether they are there or are missing. These are the moments that can often shock us into inaction and we think of things later that we should have said. Often we have to reflect deeply to understand what happened in the rush of our days and how we could act differently.

While these acts are small, they are missed if not addressed in the moment. High-performing teams and vibrant cultures create an environment of psychological safety such that these little acts of courage become the expectation. Cumulatively, a cascade of these small acts of courage creates an enormous difference as they role model better culture, enable hard change and enable others to act.

Failing the Test

I have found myself testing my own little acts of courage a great deal over the last year.  I  have a strategy of not engaging in political debates because, in our highly partisan climate, open debate rarely creates change or creates productive learning environments. The upswell of discussion in the last year around the world on topics like privilege, sexual harassment, sexism, racism, immigration, gender, sexuality, and nationalism, and more has tested my resolve to sit out. I have made some efforts to discuss the general non-political implications of these issues for communities and society like our need to foster civil society.

However, my caution and doubts have been sorely tested.  The toxic political environment and lack of civil society around these critical human issues have also seeped beyond political contexts and social media. People have felt emboldened to express intolerance, to foster division or to dismiss the contributions of the marginalised. In the last year, I have had more conversations in both business and personal contexts where people have expressed ugly views in the interests of ‘not being politically correct’.

I wish I could say that I had lived up to my own expectations of calling out all these behaviours and displaying the necessary little acts of courage. I was brought up to value politeness and good relations. Staying silent in the face of difficult conversations is too easy. However, it is ducking the hard work that we need to do to create the kind of relationships, organisations and societies.

I have kept silent at times too because as a well-educated middle-class grey-haired white male who has held senior management positions I am a representative of the group that has much to learn by listening to other voices. I know I have been the beneficiary of extraordinary privilege in my career. When opportunities keep opening up for you, you know that is more than talent, hard work or luck. Too many hardworking people of talent don’t get the luck they deserve. Privilege also acts an insurance policy. That privilege means that mistakes and shortcomings that might have had ended or held back others have not had that effect on me. I can be an ally to others and I can be braver in helping others to take action on these moments, both little and big.

I have kept silent at times too because I have made my own mistakes and not been called on them. Part of privilege is this protection. I’d love to be able to say the only issues were those where I silently acquiesced in decisions or actions of others, but my fingerprints are on too many moments to list. My privileged situation actually protected me from my own failings when others didn’t have the courage to tell me where I let them down. I had one team in my career where I thought I did a great job of management. The team seemed to have a great culture & great performance.  In support of those goals, I engaged directly with the team consistently, including regular skip level meetings and working on development plans for the whole team. Only years later did I discover through a third party that one of my team felt bullied by their manager, one of my direct reports. My high expectations, support for the team and praise of their progress was taken as my unwillingness to hear bad news and my alignment to my direct reports. Despite regular interactions, a flat structure and regular open communication, nobody felt it was OK to point out an issue. One little act of courage could have changed that situation by opening a different conversation. I sailed on oblivious convinced in my leadership while others suffered in silence. It makes me wonder how many other stories that I may never know. I can be an ally to others and search harder for the stories that need to be told.

Putting Little Acts of Courage into Action

The value of being an ally was emphasized yesterday. Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Golden Globes accepting her Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement award.  The response to the speech was dramatic with an upswell of enthusiasm for her leadership and calls for her to run for President.

Much of this call misses the message of Oprah’s acceptance speech. It is full of little acts of courage and explicitly a call for action for others to follow her lead.  She asks all of us to:

• listen to the hidden stories
• help others to tell their stories
• take action to improve our workplaces and society by exercising little acts of courage to push for change in the culture

Realising Oprah’s vision of a new dawn won’t take a new heroic leader bring about big change. We don’t need to follow.  We need to act on the little everyday acts of change.

Adapting to circumstances matters more than following a plan. Don’t stress if your resolutions or plans need to change when your priorities change.

Cleaning up my office for the new year, I found the plans for the year that I wrote carefully in January 2017. I had delivered on much of the plan, but a great deal of the great ideas went undelivered. Largely, I had pursued the parts of the plans that were about how I positioned myself and Change Agents Worldwide, how I developed a few new areas of work and how I made new relationships. The products I intended to build and some of the events I planned to create did not materialise.

Would it have been good to deliver those new products and events? Yes. Was it an accident or an oversight that they weren’t delivered? No, they actually sat on my to do list right through to the end of the year. They didn’t get done because the time I planned to allocate to them was taken up by new challenges and new work that was far more important to my purpose and long term plans. The work that I did do on my plan for 2017 created better opportunities than I expected and I changed my priorities. Managing priorities is by far the most valuable way to manage your work.

The opportunities that arose for me in 2017 that were unplanned were all meaningful steps forward like contributing to a Social Business book, helping launch Jen Frahm’s Conversations of Change, building a new consulting and speaking focus on the future of HR, working on a number of agile projects, becoming a Yammer Adoption Specialist, becoming a Workplace by Facebook partner, speaking at Microsoft Ignite again, joining Lantern Pay as Head of Markets and becoming a non-executive director at Bank First. In the latter case it achieved a personal goal I had set for years hence. Everyone of those outcomes came about because I kept engaging my networks and followed the opportunities that the network delivered. I kept my eyes open for new opportunities that were higher priorities than those I had planned.

So as I start the process of planning 2018, I know that my plan will change. What matters most is using the planning process to be clear on my understanding of:

• my purpose;
• my priorities;
• how my networks can help; and
• how to advance my goals.

The actions I set will be the first draft. What happens in 2018 will depend on how I use those four to adapt my plans. Where I end up depends on my continuous process of adaptation, the opportunities and challenges that arise and the actions of others.

The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon’s saying: “I have never had a plan of operations.”
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

A new year is a time to reflect on what we want for the year ahead. It is a time to reflect on what needs to change and what kind of world we need to create. One desire rises strongly for me – a world where we have relationships and communities with the least collateral damage.

Collateral damage is a term borrowed from military contexts for deaths, injuries, or other harm inflicted on someone other than the target. For me, it is a useful way to consider how dysfunctional relationships can have wide and unintended negative impacts.

Collateral Damage of Commission 

Reckless, thoughtless, or dangerous behaviour by individuals in our society or our relationships can cause long term collateral damage on those inadvertently impacted or merely around the activity. When we act with simple self-interest or without concern for the broader consequences of our actions we see often devastating impacts of actions that can last a long time into the future.

A wide variety of our social challenges offer us an opportunity to reflect on the unintended harm and victims of actions of others and ourselves: climate change, domestic violence, the social ramifications of rising inequality, and so on. 2017 was a year in which we saw many consequences surface of actions taken without regard for consequences on others. Worse still in business and political domains we continued to see leaders act without regard for collateral damage.  We can all benefit by taking greater consideration of those indirectly impacted by our actions and looking for paths that minimise the collateral damage.

Collateral Damage of Omission

A wider category of collateral damage occurs when we simply fail to take action on matters that could prevent issues for others.  I see so many situations in work contexts, in relationships and society where the consequences of minor omissions lead on to damage to others.

A simple example is the undiscussable issues that exist in many organisations and relationships. Topics like racism, sexism, privilege, discrimination, and many more uncomfortable issues easily fall into the undiscussable category. These issue are real but people will rarely raise them or seek to address them. Undiscussable issues are often those that cause discomfort, embarrassment, loss of status, or confront a given in the current culture or relationship.  As a result of a topic becoming undiscussable, collateral damage can occur widely, particularly if silence perpetuates or endorses the current negative impacts. Some times there will be lots of action to address the symptoms that arise in this damage but because the principal cause remains undiscussable the issue persists and in many cases spreads.

The global upswell in focus on sexual harassment becoming public is an example of a previously undiscussable issue coming out. The stories that have come forth are harrowing examples of the damage that can be imposed on others when people know of issues but neither take action to fix them and feel constrained by power, consequences, or other social circumstances to discuss them publicly. Every person who didn’t contribute to making this discussion more open.

More Compassions & Less Collateral Damage

Unintended consequences are by definition challenging to prevent. However, we can reduce the collateral damage of our actions by addressing the root causes of harm. Thinking more broadly about consequences, including wider groups of people in our consideration and fixing the problems. Importantly, we can also take action to exclude from our relationships and even societies those who continue to act without regard for the collateral damage on others.

Creating better relationships, better communities, and a world with more compassion demands we all work harder to reduce the collateral damage of our actions and our omissions.

Organisations spend a lot of time talking about values. They spend less time exploring their use in practice. The most dangerous for corporate values is rarely an attack on the heart of a value. Corporate values collapse not because of direct attack but by creeping conflict at the edges that create a culture of corruption.

Values – Easy to Say. Harder to Do.

Announcing a new set of corporate values is a remarkably common corporate action, particularly in a transformation or after a crisis. Senior executives, boards and regulators feel more secure when there is a clear standard of the values endorsed by the organisation. However, we always have the stark reminder of Enron’s fine values statement to be reminded that the practice of values matters more than the words.

Values are easy to say but hard to do, because the first thing that happens once they are announced is that they become inconvenient. If values don’t drive choices and action, they aren’t values. As John Stewart famously said:

If you don’t stick to your values when they’re inconvenient, they’re hobbies, not values.

Values are also hard because often organisations find that the values feel like they are in conflict in common scenarios. What do we do if ‘collaboration’ and ‘accountability’ feel like they are in conflict in a scenario?  Because values are often imposed and much rarely discussed, employees can find these situations difficult to resolve, even when they are aware of the values and seeking to follow them. One of the benefits of having a strong organisation culture of storytelling is to help embed one word values into practical guides for decision making in situations like this. In a story, collaboration and accountability have specific meanings in context and usually can be resolved based on the past practices of the organisation & its cultural expectations.

Fraying at the Edges

Resolving these conflicts and other edge cases is important in organisational culture. Values don’t like compromise. The point of declaring some values as pre-eminent should not be to then trade them away when matters become difficult.

The worst corruption of values in organisations is never a direct attack on a corporate value. If the value is real and embedded, The culture of the organisation will usually push back on a direct attack. The sneaky corruption is the gradual erosion of inconvenient values at the edges. Every single time an employee excuses a minor variation from values or a policy or process is created without consideration of the values then no matter how convenient that choice, it is a threat to the future effectiveness of the values. Employees take their lead on values not from posters but from practice. All of those frayed edges are a signal of what matters and what doesn’t.

Senior executives are usually the worst at fraying the edges of values. They have power and status. They have fewer voices to question their decisions. They are busy and important and not prone to stop and ponder inconveniences. Their actions are highly public. When that senior executive stops and says ‘Just this once I will order a limousine in breach of the expense policy, because I really need to get to that flight’, they send a signal that integrity can be traded away for convenience.

To prevent fraying, organisations need a rich ongoing conversation about values that is full of stories, debates and practical examples. The values need to be embedded in employee practice and encompass all of the employees, even the most senior. Most importantly of all, conflicts of values or fraying at the edges should be areas of great concern and common topics of discussion. Treat fraying at the edges as as much a cause of concern as corruption, because that is where corruption starts.

‘There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.’ commonly attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

2017 has been a year where we have seen the power of the follower. Change in society takes the weight of those who follow the lead of a change agent.

The quote above is likely apocryphal and widely used as a mockery of a form of ‘leadership’ that is all to common in modern politics. Politicians poll the populace and then follow their opinions. Their ‘leadership’ lags public opinion and is at the whim of media cycles and perceptions. In many cases this means politicians follows the swings of opinion. More rarely it means that politicians focus their efforts on supporting late movements of social change whose work is well advanced in society.

Modern politics with a focus on the news cycle and the next election seems to be losing the ability to set a vision and influence action towards in. While this form of following is driven by fear and a lack of influence, 2017 saw many braver examples.

Around the world individual change agents started huge movements of social change by speaking up. The moment of courage came when others rushed to support them and share their own stories or passion for change. The impact of the discussions of domestic violence, sexual assault, racism, mental illness, sexuality and gender around the world has been driving by wave after wave of brave sharing and has forced many to consider their role in a system that can have cruel consequences to those it doesn’t currently support.

Derek Siver’s story of the first follower of the lone dancing guy has been so widely shared the message can be lost. Choosing to be the first follower of the mad, embarrassing or difficult change agent is also an act of bravery. Following takes courage too. Every act of following is an individual act of leadership to influence others.

The value of a community around a change agent is to make it easier to follow and to encourage more of these acts of bravery. Change Agents and their early followers take huge risks in their advocacy. Many suffer greatly as they sacrifice more to lead change in society.

In 2017, Lois Kelly, a colleague on Change Agents Worldwide, ran a Courage camp to help people to explore their courage to make change in their lives and their communities. Having read Lois’ book Naked Hearted this year and knowing her work with Rebels at Work I can see her qualification to facilitate others. We all need to invest in giving others the courage to support change.

Following is less dangerous in a community than a network because we are connected with others in shared purposes, values and relationships. When we build rich communities and a strong civil society we create the conditions for more bravery and following. We create the conditions for society to demand more of its leaders and better support those who follow. We must value the courage of the followers too.