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Compassion

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

People can grow. Practice compassion. Help better their practice.

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In my office I keep a statue of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. I found the statue in Hong Kong over 20 years ago and loved the serenity & beauty of Guanyin. I also loved the reminder of the value of focusing on compassion for others. Guanyin is connected with the Lotus Sutra which established in the Buddhist scriptures that everyone can improve with the right practice.

[The Lotus Sutra] teaches us that the inner determination of an individual can transform everything; it gives ultimate expression to the infinite potential and dignity inherent in each human life. – Daisaku Ikeda 

The Compassionate Leader

Compassion is greater than empathy for the challenges of others. Compassion is when that emotion leads people to go out of their way to act to help others. Compassion is not a mindset. It is a practice.

Compassion requires a specific focus on each individual. Compassion is about helping each individual to relieve their situation. The ultimate belief of a compassionate approach is that everyone can improve, like the Lotus Sutra.

Traditional organisations with an industrial mindset encourage dispassionate leaders. With a fixed mindset of employee potential and mechanistic view of employee productivity, compassion is discouraged. Leaders need to play to the averages of teams, cut their losses on poor performers and move on. Leaders who show compassion will be seen as overly focused on soft skills or more bluntly as weak leaders.

When the future of work is becoming more human, we can no longer afford the waste in this dispassionate approach. We cannot predict the emergent practices which will define effectiveness in a new connected digital knowledge economy. Innovation, disruption and new value creation rely on leveraging diversity, new ways of working and learning. If so, how can we afford to write people off until we have tried to realise their potential contributions.

Compassion takes Practice

Much of the traditional concern in management around soft skills relates to concerns that these skills are just talk. However compassion demands more than the thoughts and talk of empathy. Compassion demands action.

Leaders can act in measurable ways to help their teams to learn, to improve and to practice new skills. The work of leaders in the future of work is to realise human potential. This will take the hard work of new practice.

Compassion begins with a focus on the individual and an acceptance of their real circumstances. Leaders need to understand an employee’s goals and build their plans around those goals and a frank dialogue about where the employee is today. Compassion does not require you to soften the blow of reality. It requires you to help change it.

Compassionate leaders must work to improve practice. Coaching will play a key role in encouraging employees to seek out, experiment with and learn from new practice. A coaching approach to performance aligned to the employee’s goals and the goals of the organisation can achieve dramatic improvement in individual performance.

Compassionate leaders do not protect their teams from change. They make them better able to benefit from change. These leaders teach new skills and perspectives, show the potential gains in new practices and find alternative ways to contribute for those who are adversely affected by change. Compassionate leaders see change as a way to better realise potential.

The future of work demands compassionate leaders. How is your leadership working to realise the potential of others?

Compassion is a necessity, not a luxury – His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama

Adaptive practice.

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

There is no perfect method.

Searching for a perfect method is not work and is a waste.  

The best way to judge a method is to use it. 

Method should be a path to better personal practice.

Use what helps you work better.  

All methods fail at some point.  

Stop using a method when it no longer works.  

The method no longer works when: 

  • you are spending time on the method that could be spent working
  • you continue to need a consultant, a manual or a system to help you to use the method
  • you do not understand, you feel less capable or you do not know what to do next. 
  • the method does not improve your work.
  • the method stops or delays your work.  

If the method doesn’t work, change it or choose another that works. 

Build your own method through adaptation. 

Relatedness

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

In an atomistic, individualistic and competitive business culture we can miss subtleties in many concepts. We focus on the individual and forget the system in which the individual operates.

The idea promoted by Dan Pink that purpose, autonomy and mastery is the key to motivation is a very popular concept where an important subtlety is often lost. People love this concept because it sounds like our ideal heroic business agent – mastering the universe, empowered and enabled by destiny.

This characterisation misses an important point: Purpose, autonomy and mastery shape relationships and our relatedness to others.

Purpose: Purpose is our desired impact on others. We have relationships in the heart of our personal purpose.

Autonomy: Autonomy is not absolute. Autonomy is relative. Our autonomy is a measure of our relationships to others. Autonomy comes from the trust and authority that others grant us based on our behaviours.

Mastery: Mastery is enhanced by collective practice. The measure is not absolute it is an ever shifting relative standard. Read Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman or Togetherness. Read any of Harold Jarche. Mastery is best achieved in apprenticeships, communities, mentoring and the guidance other human relationships.

We live in a world that requires more than freely independent masters of the universe. We need people who manage purpose, autonomy and mastery through and for others. Relatedness is the concept that reminds us that all work is human.

We need to focus on how we best use relationships to reinforce our own motivations, to motivate others and to do our best work.

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Thanks to Matt Guyan for drawing my attention to the idea of Self determination theory and its use of relatedness.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Replaced By Algorithms

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Automation has widespread implications for the future of work. However we get to make choices on how we work. The best way to start is to ensure you practice the skills to work beyond simple routines.

The Office 365 network had a YamJam today on the future of work led by Bob Crozier and Naomi Moneypenny. The discussion was a rich and vibrant conversation about aspects of the future of work. The concluding conversation was about the prospects of the automation of management.

Your Future Robot Overlords

Many managers design their lives for the maximum predictability. The execute simple repeatable routines.  Over the years those routines are refined to maximise efficiency of management outcomes.

Gone to the robots.

I once knew a senior manager who insisted all financial information be presented in one common format. Why? The manager knew how to interpret that format, even though the numbers could never be reconciled to financial systems. Teams of analysts were required to produce the results in the required format and then explain the inevitable discrepancies and queries.

Gone to robots with the analysts too!

I’ve known managers who manage people according to formulas. For example a performance review might sound like an automated script that could be delivered to you by a robot iPad on wheels:

So what is it that makes you think that your performance has been above average? What is it about those outcomes that enables them to be rated above average? I still don’t understand. Perhaps if you were better able to identify how you have contributed above expectations we could record the rating. Let’s agree an average rating for now.

Gone to the robots!

We could go on listing examples of managers executing routines, but selecting similar items and building lists from large sample sizes is a task best left to automation.

Be a Human Manager

The best chance of avoiding the fate of robot replacement is to ensure that you are learning to adapt and change your management practices to make them more effective.  Move out of the simple and routine realms that will be relatively easy to automate.

We can focus on management that improves the effectiveness of people and realises human potential. This is the attraction of the ResponsiveOrg. We can encourage managers and workers to move from the routine to seek step changes in effectiveness. We can harness the potential of the technology to aid managers to handle creativity, complexity and chaotic situations.

We can also recognise that automation is still a developing process. There may yet be needs for humans to help with the processes like trust, relationships, fairness, empathy and engagement that have not yet been easily replicated. One only needs to see Uber’s issues with the fairness of surge pricing to see that algorithms are still learning in this space. On relationships, it seems Uber’s passion for robot cars doesn’t take account of the lack of loyalty in robot car return management algorithms.  

We can’t predict how far automation will reach. We may yet find ourselves as managers of the very human issues that our robots will encounter in purpose, free will and coordination of autonomous agents. We can be sure it will go further than we expect.  However, we have the choice to determine how we work and the practices we learn now to help us to adapt to a changing future. We can choose human effectiveness over eliminating human workers in the name of efficiency. We might yet be surprised by the extent to which the future of work is human.

The alternative is a little bleak.

The Engagement Organisation

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Want to create engagement? Make engagement in a common purpose the only thing holding your company together. Let people choose to stay. People who choose to engage are always more committed. Importantly, opening that choice will keep you accountable to creating a great team and place to work.

Make People Choose

In traditional organisations, hiring is a marketing function. The difference is well summarised by an old joke that highlights the difference between the treatment of candidates and staff.  The objective is to make the job look good so that candidates will join the organisation and submit to its constraints.

Zappos is famous for its offer to pay new hires to leave. The expressed logic is that anyone who will take a small amount of money to leave is not that committed. Psychology tells us the commitment to stay is potentially more valuable to Zappos than losing a few uncommitted people. All the staff that stay chose their jobs over money and psychology tells us that we make decisions to be consistent with our earlier decisions.

Discuss purpose openly in your recruiting. Highlight the difficulties, challenges and work involved. Discuss these things more than status, money or the likelihood of success. People who choose purpose over money or status will be more engaged. Would you rather have someone who joined for the mission or the money?

How do start-ups ever have high engagement when the work is hard, the pay is poor and success unlikely? They make the choice to work in these conditions explicit. People are engaged because they sign up for hardship to be part of the extraordinary. People participate for experiences and learning not available elsewhere.

The approach is not new. This advertisement is a mock-up and the story of Shackleton’s ad may be apocryphal. However, throughout history people have been choosing to commit to purposeful work over money and comfort.

Remove Barriers

Remove the barriers to your talented people leaving the organisation.  They will value you more when they can’t see restraints.

Traditional organisations are full of all sorts of explicit to subtle restraints on employees. Non-competes, non-solicitation clauses, no-part time work, requirements other projects or other positions must be approved are just some of the explicit restrictions. The subtler forms are the design of bonus schemes, long term incentives, career paths, etc that reward those who respect the invisible handcuffs. Then there is the policy guidelines: discouragement of networking; media, speaking and communication policies; and guidelines on interactions with competitors or the community – requirements that employees remain isolated, invisible, anonymous and silent. I have even known organisations that celebrate their employees taking car leases or large mortgages because they believe that they will need to stay around for financial reasons.

Encourage people to network. Connect them with each other, your customers, your competitors and anyone who might be of help in the success of your business. Make sure they know everyone that they should know (It will help later in your succession planning). Your business will benefit as they know more. If networking alone will see them leave, then they will leave anyway in a modern networked economy.

Encourage people to share. Help your team to build reputations as leaders in your industry. They will thank you for the profile and the recognition of your contributions. They will bring back clients, amazing connections and insights from their engagements. If sharing their insights leads your team members to leave, then it is a signal that you are missing an opportunity to better use their talents.

Foster the career development of people. Make them the most attractive and best connected talent in the market. As another joke goes:

“If it is dangerous to invest in our people because they might leave, what is the danger if we don’t invest in them and they stay”
Make them the heroes and heroines of your organisation. Like Zappos, you will lose a few but your will gain far more from those who remain and understand the value you place on their development and their success. Many more will be attracted to work for you.

Let people go and you will encourage them to return. The ultimate recognition of people’s autonomy is the recognition that they are always free to leave.

Purely Engaged.

I am participating in an experiment of a pure engagement organisation at the moment with the Change Agents Worldwide network. As a network of independent agents, Change Agents Worldwide has no requirements of its members other than they commit to its purpose and they participate occasionally in the community.

Members come and go without restraint, based on their needs and their choices. There is no ability to require people to work or to do any particular thing. Everyone is independent and their choices are respected. People participate in activities because they chose to do so. The challenge for Change Agents Worldwide is to make activities attractive enough that people stay around and the work valuable enough that people collaborate to deliver it.

There is no exclusivity. When we are trying to learn more about the practices that foster the future of work, exclusivity would be counter-productive. All members do the same work under their own names or for the organisations where they work. Members participate and even lead other networks, communities and conversations on similar topics.

Still the members are the only way Change Agents Worldwide does anything. Any client consulting or other opportunities in Change Agents Worldwide are referred to members to realise together.

Because of the freedom, what the members of Change Agents Worldwide do best is that they gather in conversations, swarms and pods to work and learn together. The heart of a pure engagement organisation is collaboration for a purpose. When people choose to work together, they choose to be engaged.

Respect Choices

Most importantly, always respect the choices and the commitment of those who work with you. The sad part of all the subtle restraints in the traditional organisation is that it leads to a mindset that “we can do what we want, they can’t go anywhere”.  When you don’t respect and support the commitment of others you will surrender their support. It is little surprise that engagement is so low in organisations with all those restraints and a mechanistic view of employees.

By letting people go when their needs are not being met, you will be more accountable to create a great organisation, great team and great individual contributors. You will be forced to treat each person as an individual, to respect their goals and to focus on realising their potential. The future of work is human.

Stop the Machine. Engagement is Human

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Employee engagement is a human psychological process. Stop treating it like an industrial machine.

Introduce a target into a modern management workplace and you will introduce a standard set of mechanical efficiency models to achieve that target. Employee engagement is a classic example.

Engagement is human

When we stop and reflect, it is obvious that employee engagement is a human process. Our engagement with our work is the psychological outcome of complex series of elements, including purpose, the work we do, its rewards both monetary and psychological, our relationships with others and much more. Everyone’s engagement outcomes are driven by their unique psychological and social needs. Our engagement is influenced by opportunities offered to us to experience states that people desire across all the domains of their lives like autonomy, purpose and mastery. Engagement is an integral outcome of our connection to others in the workplace and in the surrounding community.

Stop the Engagement Machine

Except that is not how the industrial engagement machine works. Search the internet for ‘engagement drivers’ and you will find lots of great advice on how to treat people as machines for generating engagement as an end in itself. The focus on drivers leads to a focus on top-down engagement plans. These plans measure and relentlessly focus on transactionally moving the drivers. The failure of these plans to shift engagement begins with the disconnect from the daily leadership interactions in the organisation.  

Further, the plans fail to take a systemic view of what influences engagement.  Clarifying the connection of my work to strategy (a substitute for purpose in many engagement models) will only worsen my engagement if the rest of the system frustrates my efforts to achieve these now more important strategic outcomes. When my leader then dismisses those strategic outcomes to foster their own agenda, all improvement in engagement is lost.

Because we have an industrial mindset we can become more focused on the measures than the actual process. Consider the averaging that is built into most engagement surveys. Does it allow for the fact that individual outcomes matter and that a few highly engaged employees can deliver an enormous impact for the organisation? Averages also foster initiatives tackling the averages, over individual conversations.  

Industrialising a psychological process weakens the focus on engagement. I have seen senior managers sit around discussing their engagement scores as if the black box of engagement is a mystery. These leaders expressed aloud the wish that it was a more transparent machine. However, their scores were transparent if they looked away from the report. Their scores were an outcome, not of their engagement improvement plans, but of their daily leadership actions and the culture that they fostered in their teams.

Changing engagement outcomes to improve the responsiveness of a business and to better leverage the talent of its people, requires a focus on those people. We need to leave the engagement machine behind and begin work on the human side of the challenge: an individual employees experience of the purposes, interactions, the connection and the experience of work in the organisation. That will lead us to the changes in the system that will sustain growing engagement.

Confusion is the absence of Design

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Yesterday I had to deal with an unnecessarily confusing customer experience.  All I wanted to do was pay for my parking.  It was a great reminder that in the absence of design you generate confusion.

Here are some observations on what happens when you forget to design:

  • The insides of this parking machine would fit in a shoebox, but it’s a big machine.  That means that it is actually very hard to keep all the machine in sight at one time. When the interface is confusing, having to scan the whole thing repeatedly to find your next step is hard work.
  • The screen draws your attention but it is not where the action happens. In fact the screen, tells you little of interest and mostly distracts from where the action happens.
  • Every function has a light or a sign which adds to the confusion. The signs look like later additions to improve the usability but the signage is neither consistent nor supports the process the machine requires users to follow.  The range of different coloured lights is distracting.
  • The blue P lit up is prominent, but purely decorative. 
  • The red laser light top left is for museum membership card discounts, a second process step for a small proportion of users, but it is by far the brightest light.
  • The slot for inserting a ticket to pay, the first process step, is a solid yellow light at bottom left. This is the last place anyone looks, especially when the screen shows the slot and you assume that the image shown must be near the screen.
  • The screen is below normal eye height. As there is no shade on the screen, the lights above make it unreadable unless you crouch.  This matters if you want to know what you need to pay or want a receipt and need to push a button below the screen to confirm your request.
  • The paypass reader doesn’t work though it appears to all intents that it does with a shining light. After several failed attempts, I realised that I needed to insert my card.

The odd functional arrangement and the lights create a sense that four separate divisions of Skidata all said ‘we want a bright flashing light and a sign. We want to be prominent’. Politics and engineering determined where the various bits went on the machine rather than any designed order of a customer experience.

For a simple process this is an unnecessarily confusing customer experience. That says to me Skidata and those who installed the machine weren’t designing a customer experience, they just installed a parking payment machine.

Practice and Persistence

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Developing mastery of new future of work practices is essential to individuals being able to leverage the networked economy and also organisations ability to adapt to become Responsive Organisations. However, new practices don’t develop overnight they take persistent repetition and gradual mastery.

Your way to Carnegie Hall

There is an old joke that an out-of-town violinist is walking through New York and stops a passerby to ask for directions to Carnegie Hall, the site of many famous concerts and recitals. The answer from a wiser old New Yorker is “Practice. Practice. Practice”

We have a current example of this insight in the hacker quest to demonstrate you can become an expert in a year through consistent practice.  For example, this man’s effort to reach the top table tennis players in the UK.

The key points here are that:

  • the practice is voluntary
  • the practice persists
  • the practice develops in mastery with a determined intent on improvement 
  • the challenge of the practice raises over time

Allow Time. Design for Flow.

In our rush to implement new practices in organisations, we can miss these characteristics of growing mastery. We choose target state behaviours. We impose them transactionally through short change management programs. We are often disappointed by the results.  Not surprisingly they rarely develop into consistent practice, let alone mastery. Alien behaviours can take time to make sense, to practice with confidence and to learn new capabilities required.

The ideal programs to the introduction of new behaviours leverage the concept of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Individuals need to be presented with purposeful activities where the challenge raises over time as their practice grows in capability.  Keeping the developing practice in the zone of flow provides personal rewards to sustain the development of mastery.

The development of individual practice in this way may not fit within our traditional management timeframes.  This is not a 90 day challenge. Developing new mindsets and behaviours will occur on a human timescale.