Category: Uncategorized

Do you Lead People or Fiddle with Structures?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

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The problem with hierarchy is that it validates the illusion that restructures are valuable management work. Let’s lead people to create potential and better ways of work instead.

Restructures are a Joke

An old joke about management hints at the role of restructures in management life, an opportunity to avoid leadership. In the joke, a CEO is left three numbered envelopes by a predecessor. Each envelope is only to be opened only when the CEO’s job is threatened by a crisis.

At the first crisis the CEO opens the first envelope and it says ‘Blame your predecessor’ and it works. At the second crisis, the second envelope says “Announce a restructure’ and it works.  At the third crisis, the CEO eagerly tears open the envelope to see it says “Fill out three envelopes…”

Time for New Options

Leadership is how we realise human potential in real people. Leadership is not the management of the ideal hierarchical structure of fungible full-time-employee equivalents (FTE). The latter is avoiding the real work of leadership of people.

No human potential has ever been realised in an organisation by a restructure. Restructures may create short term value by reducing the cost of people in an organisation, but without leadership no value is created. Without a change in processes or the patterns of interaction that create culture, the structure change amounts to little. The old culture will take over the new structure. Either cost drifts back because the work processes have not changed or worse the reduced workforce has impacts internally on people and externally on customers. 

Sadly leadership often disappears in restructures. Mostly restructures involve an evident loss of human potential. Because many managers view their people as a fungible resource, the costs of human and social capital lost in restructures can be missed. The loss of tacit knowledge and capability is often evident immediately after a restructure as people struggle to make processes work and newly clarified roles fail to cover the inevitable areas of whitespace. The loss of social capital can be seen as new jobs in new structures force people to build new relationships of trust and collaboration internally and externally. Engagement and trust both need to recover. 

A focus on structures of fungible people lets managers avoid the hard work of leadership. Poor managers use restructures to force people to “remove resources”. They hope that with less people, the remaining staff will find creative ways to improve, often without any support from leadership. Poor managers also use restructures to address the lack of skills and underperformance of their people that they have been avoiding. In both cases would we not create more performance, more potential and less anxiety if we took on the leadership work to engage people directly?

Don’t Restructure. Become Responsive.

The pace of change requires organisations to be more agile with their processes and organisation than a traditional restructuring process allows. One of the reasons traditional organisations now feel like they are in a process of continual restructure is the need to keep up with external change. No organisation can afford to stand still to sort out its structure while more agile competitors continue to move forward.

Leaders need to create organisations, teams and processes where change in work is responsive to the demands of customers and the external market. Large scale shifts in hierarchies are irrelevant when the organisation learns to continuously adapt to the needs of work, supported by leaders focused on creating the right culture and realising more performance through helping people to realise more human potential.

A continuous process of small adaptations in agile teams across the organisation is far safer and far more productive than large restructuring efforts. This process will best leverage the networks in the organisation and employees understanding and engagement. Each of those adaptations brings the organisation closer to better performance for its customers and gives the people a say in how to make their work better and how they can contribute more.

The cost of this change in approach is that the work and power of leadership must change. Adopting a responsive culture requires leaders to step away from their power to periodically fiddle with organisational charts. A responsive culture requires leaders to step up to engage, enable and empower their people to change they way the organisation works every day. The new work of leadership is to create the responsive culture and an organisation that supports individuals to make their work better for customers, employees and the community. 

When More Talk is More Action

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‘Less Talk More Action’ is a common refrain in management. The best next step may involve more talk and more action.

A bias to action in management is a good way to overcome the inertia of bureaucracy. It helps foster change by requiring that we find ways to move forward. Like all good things a preference for action can be overdone. The traditional engineering mindset of management can come to view talk as a wasteful distraction. In management conversations in all kinds of organisation it is not uncommon to hear,

“This talk is too complicated and going on too long. Let’s do this”

In complicated and complex scenarios that involve systemic issues like culture, the best next step at times may involve more talk and more action. Realising the potential of people as a leader can often mean having to step back from one’s own action orientation to discuss the way forward with others, to gather inputs and to allow others to shape the path through collaboration. We need to recognise in leading the network complexity of the new ways of work that action alone may not be the wisest path.

The Time for Action

The Cynefin framework offers us a useful model to see where we need to demonstrate a bias for action over talk.  If the situation falls in the Simple domain, where cause and effect is clear, then action is straightforward once the position is known. We should have a strong bias for More Action and Less Talk. 

If the situation is truly in a Chaotic domain, where cause and effect are unrelated, then action offers the best chance to move somewhere else. talk may add some value after we act to help understand the environment is chaotic.  However it is action first that will get us out.

Much of our work in organisations is spent in the Complicated or Complex domains of the Cynefin model where launching straight into Action may not be all that is required.

When The Action includes Talk – Sense Making

Each domain of the model requires decision makers to make sense of what is going on in the environment. That sense making process may need discussion with other participants, particularly in the complicated and complex domains where patterns of cause and effect are unclear. For example discovery and analysis are both tasks that need not be purely data-driven exercises. People may need to debate the situation and the work collaboratively to determine the relationships in place. Action have a collaborative element too, requiring discussion as the action progresses to implementation.

Making collective sense of an environment where cause and effect is not straightforward is essential to winning people’s engagement in action and especially action that creates change. The more complex the environment  the more important this engagement will be. Without an ability to make sense of the environment and the strategy to be put into place, people will be at best disengaged and at worst actively oppose the approach.

When Action and Talk Go Together – Working Out Loud

In a Complex domain, the recommended course of action is to probe. A probe is an action done with an intent to learn. In other words, it is an experiment.

To maximises the value of the learning and the effectiveness of the experiment, we often need to communicate that experimental intent. A strategy of probing, sensing and responding can appear confusing to others without a declared intent. Leaders who are trying to take their team on a series of experiments need to be clear on the nature and learning goals of the experiments.

Leverage others to design the experiment and keep you true to your goal of learning. Too many experiments get converted into actions by the management mindset of showing progress at any cost. Think of all the pilots that slid into full-scale launch because nobody wanted to declare them a failure. Working out loud can also help with accountability and also leverage the contributions and learnings of others to develop the collective sense of a complex domain.

Why Talk Matters – Realising Potential in the Future of Work

As Harold Jarche explains in his description of the Cynefin model for the future of work, a key role for leadership in the changing workplace is to help employees use capacity that is released.  That capacity can be used to transition employees from the domains most susceptible to automation, the simple and complicated, to working in those where human contributions are most valuable.

“Less talk, more action” is what we expect of machines. As we see our world of work move into networks and more complex domains, leaders must remember the value and human potential in communication. 

Perhaps we should choose to lead with “More Action and More Talk”.

Everything Meaningful Happens in a Network

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Leaders need to realise human potential in networks.

In our pursuit of efficiency in an industrial management mindset, we can become very linear in our thinking. Inputs create outputs. People have a job to make things happen. People are therefore production inputs with variable quality and productivity. These inputs can be automated away to reduce waste, deliver better consistency and improve efficiency.

This linear thinking runs the risk of unintended consequences and a massive loss of human potential.  Human potential properly engaged with leadership offers exponential opportunities.

More importantly, nothing significant in our organisations happens in a linear process.  Everything meaningful that we do in our organisations happens in a network.

Performance Incentives: An example of the significance of networks

The most straight forward example of linear thinking in organisations is performance incentives.  Organisation after organisation has invested huge effort and dollars in design of performance incentives as a linear process. More incentive should generate more of the desired outputs and more engaged people.

Oddly the outcomes of linear performance incentives are often mixed. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t always work as intended. Intrinsic motivations often matter more to people and those intrinsic motivations are more often concepts that related to our human place in networks, like status, impact on others or sense of belonging in a group.

Some times your linear incentive program is even counterproductive. If you want to find the flaws in any incentive program give it to a group of employees who can share their insights and intelligence. They will quickly identify and exploit any flaws as a collective and enforce group norms on individuals who don’t follow along.

Incentive programs are a key issue disrupting group working behaviours like collaboration destroying value & output. People don’t deliver their performance as an atomised input.  They act and share as part of larger groups.

Our Brains are Networks

As we better understand our human brains, we start to see that their function is less the outcome of linear processes and more the result of networks of neural processes. We don’t evaluate decisions simply on purely financial criteria. In addition to financial benefits, humans consider issues like status, certainty, autonomy, relationships and fairness.

These concepts which come from the network in our brain also reflect our need to function and place ourselves in networks in society.  Mechanistic management processes leave these network functions in our brains out to their detriment.  They are leaving out the meaning that makes for human potential. 

Our Organisations are Networks

Thinking of our organisations as atomised individuals acting in linear processes simplifies our management challenges.  However, our leadership challenge remains to engage the network to realise its human potential.

No matter what the process the official process is in your organisation, you know that networks are the way to influence decisions and get stuff done.  Hierarchies are just a part of the network in the organisation and people are more likely to use the human network than the process hierarchy.

Why else would meetings about meetings even happen? They are never required by the process; they meet the needs of the human network, needs such as increasing certainty, reducing threats to status or increasing relationships with others. If you want to get rid of these wasteful occurrences in corporate life, the answer is not tighter compliance with the process. The answer is better engaging the human meaning in the network in the organisation. Working out loud in a social network is a great alternative to meetings about meetings. People can build their comfort by learning about and engaging a leader working out loud informally before the decision point.

Our Network Relationships Create Value and Meaning

The networks that leaders must manage to create value go well beyond the organisation. The only real value in our organisation is created in external networks.  We only create meaning and value when we interact with customers, partners, suppliers and the community.  Everything else is internal accounting.

As organisations now increasingly can see, these relationships are no longer linear. A salesforce can no longer view as a sales funnel as a series of linear outward pushes to convert a customer. In a social & networked world, it is more evident than ever that the network of influences is what pulls a customer into a sale.  The customer’s every interaction with the organisation, its competitors and influencers is a part of that decision.  The value and the meaning created with customers comes from the network, not your linear sales process.

Community engagement is an even richer network conversation that depends deeply on human engagement, real conversation and the purpose and values that your organisation lives.  Whatever your process for a community sponsorship, it creates no value without the human network effects. 

Choose Human Potential. Look to the Network

Simplifying people to a fungible input measure like number of full time employees (FTE) and treating FTE as inputs in a linear process may be of value for the measurement and control of management. However, the challenge of leadership is to enable our organisations to realise human potential in a network. Whether with employees, customers or the community, the real value and meaning of an organisation happens in the network.

If Your Company was a Country, Would You Live There?

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Imagine a country like this:

  • Run by a small group of powerful individuals (let’s call them oligarchs)
  • Transitions of power only occur when those in power hand it hand down to chosen successors or as a result of bloody coups
  • Status in the society is intensely hierarchical. Changes in status are managed carefully after interviews and testing by those responsible for correct human behaviour
  • The rewards to oligarchs can far exceed those of others in the country
  • Resources are subject to allocation and expropriation. Individuals engage in barter and black market activities to work around resource constraints
  • There is a constant state of war with the country battling external threats and the daily activities and goals are often meaningless
  • Decision making can be arbitrary and decisions are often made without consultation or explanation
  • The oligarchy engages in continuous propaganda.  There is a black market in real information
  • Freedom of speech and action is tightly constrained by policies and process. 
  • Any form of rebellion against these stringent rules results in exile or a significant loss of status and livelihood.

Sadly, countries like this are all too common in human history. Most prompt a consistent flow of refugees fleeing an environment that stifles human potential and human relationships.

How many of these characteristics apply to your organisation?

If you company was the country above, would you choose to live there? Are some of these characteristics driving engagement in your organisation?

Today more talented individuals are choosing careers that avoid the kinds of experiences listed above. They are refugees who ‘voted with their feet’ to leave dysfunctional organisations. 

In a country, arbitrary decision making power used without consultation is seen as bad thing, risking unrest, poor policy outcomes and corruption. In business, it is called ‘strong management’. Many organisations are beginning to see the limits of these traditional models.  

Rethink Power, Purpose and Potential

The answer is not necessarily that we should make every organisation function like a country using a political system like democracy or an anarchy. We know from looking at our own countries that these systems have real issues too. For almost all organisations that transition is too great a leap to make in one step.  Few organisations that have led working in new ways are copied. However we can learn by reflecting on what refugees are seeking.

There are three transitions most people would seek in fleeing the country above, if they could. Anyone who becomes a refugee knows that the life ahead is hard and that they must put up with many new challenges.  People flee to escape oppression and experience better leadership, fulfil purpose and to realise their potential.

These are the key transitions that leaders of organisations can help create to avoid that exodus:

  • From Power to Participation: A move from arbitrary hierarchical power to a situation where people, customers and community are respected and there is an opportunity for all to lead and contribute transparently to the discussion and the work.
  • From Subsistence to Purpose: Giving people the opportunity to find intrinsic meaning and to work for a purpose, not just a pay check.
  • From Subjugation to Potential: Recognising that everyone has the ability to contribute more if given information, flexibility, a chance to learn and the opportunity to grow.

Those three transitions don’t even require leaders to surrender final say in decisions, their hierarchies and their processes today. However, these transitions build trust and enable new conversations about how the organisation will work and the consequences of its actions.  Those insights will form the basis of the next phase of transformation of the way the organisation works.

Leadership is the way to better realise human potential.  Leveraging the innovation inherent in human potential is the way to improve our leadership and our organisations.

Danger on the Door

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Too many of our organisations need ‘Danger’ written on the door. We need to remind Leaders that they must lead change to succeed in the a disruptive world outside. We also need leaders to work to make organisations a safer place for employees to realise their potential.

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The Warnings of Network Disruption are Around Us.

Walk through any city and you can see the evidence of disruption from the technologies of the network era. That evidence needs to be a warning to all of us of the dangers of not changing our organisations to stay relevant to employees, customers and community.

In Burnley, a suburb of Melbourne near the railway station you will find this derelict building with grass growing on the roof, its windows smashed and concrete crumbling away. The Danger sign on the door is a warning to us all.

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This little piece of history of the railway organisation is now redundant. Upgrades to more modern networked power and switching technology in the railway means that this building is no longer required as its functions are now managed better elsewhere in the network. With the building’s function disrupted, nobody needs to work here any more and the building is left to decay, except for the odd coat of paint when the graffiti gets out of control. 

The future of your organisation looks like this, if you don’t embrace the network era and lead the change required to keep your organisation relevant to customers and to your people. This building is one small warning that your organisation needs to be a Responsive Organisation.

Too Many Organisations have the Danger Sign on the Inside.

Many organisations are confident that their history, people, bricks, iron and concrete are good defences against a hostile environment. Leaders of these organisations do not face outwards to help lead the change required. Instead they turn inwards to shore up power and protect themselves.

Simon Sinek eloquently explains the dangers of this approach in his talk to 99U.  Leaders need to take up the challenge of realising human potential and making work a better place for people.

In organisations where leaders don’t work daily to realise human potential, the danger is not outside in the environment.  Danger reverberates around inside these organisations as big and little threats to safety, affecting employees and customers every day. These organisations need a Danger sign on the front door to warn employees of the risks of their work.

Start leading human potential.  Start leading the changes to your organisation for a network era. 

No organisation should have Danger written on the door.

You Can’t Buy Employee Engagement

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We sure have tried.

New workspaces. New technology. Changes to benefits, remuneration systems and more. Great systems to measure and track employee engagement. Generous community, pro bono and volunteer programs. Investments in training & other career support. Programs to improve compliance with HR processes, drive diversity & address key issues of engagement. Lots of expensive communication materials. No end of efforts to make employees feel better about work. 

Mostly, we still don’t have engagement. Some of the above helped, particularly to remove hygiene issues that get in the way. Usually, the impact of these initiatives is temporary. Employees respond only as long as misread the investments above as signalling real change. When the hoopla passes and the bills are paid, the culture of the organisation is still the same.

You can’t buy employee engagement. You lead it. It is not a program. It is work. Hard leadership work.

Engagement is not something your employees do. Engagement is something that they feel. It is a belief that arrives from and is reinforced daily by your culture, your decisions and your conversations. Just as you can’t buy a transformation, you cannot buy this change with a management decision to spend money or work harder.

Employee engagement comes when people feel that they will realise their purpose and potential better in their work. Helping people to experience that takes conversations, your visible actions and their daily progress in their work.

Before you sign off another employee engagement initiative, ask these three questions:

  • Do the organisations daily decisions value your employees’ purpose and potential? Before you reflexively answer yes, when was the last time you changed a management decision because of its impact on employee purpose or potential? How often is that even discussed as a genuine factor in decisions?
  • Do all individual leaders consistently have genuine 2-way conversations about purpose and potential with their teams, collectively and individually? Not speeches, IDP templates or emails. The hard personal conversations. All leaders. Every day.
  • What is the hard evidence that your leaders are advancing individual purpose and potential? Your employees don’t rely on feel good measures. They look for hard proof of your intent. So should you.

Leadership is the technology of human potential. How well you use leadership is what your employees are judging every day. Don’t wait for the next employee engagement survey to decide to do something about it.

Zeitgeist warning: the future of work is human

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Talk of the changing future of work and human potential is growing. There is discussion of the need to make the future of work more human in many different ways. The conversation runs from thought leaders to vendors to managers to employees.

Why now?

The cynics will attribute this to the last gasp of dreamers before a new networked information revolution of automation takes over. Hope you enjoyed your daydream: Welcome to Skynet and the singularity. The market pressures from global competitors, disruptive innovation and capital markets are as intense as ever. Management is doing a its job driving rising efficiency.  Technology will continue to advance its potential under human ingenuity.

We choose the path for humanity

So why be an optimist?

We get to choose. Remember there is no external power determining the course of history. Humans collectively get to choose and to make it happen. The evil external force we fear is us. The peers, management teams, the markets & the competitors are other people too.

In the last thousand years collectively we have chosen paths that lead to great knowledge, productivity, wealth and freedom. We have embraced major social changes that have changed our institutions, markets and our organisations because they made our lives more human.

There are decisions that deprive people of their potential that others can no longer make without consequences. No CEO will stand and argue for the profitability of slavery, discrimination, violence or tyranny in our workplaces. We have used leadership to realise this potential and make the changes required. With enormous cost, turmoil and effort we have created change.

If you want to make a bet on the future of work, bet on humanity. Leadership is the technology of human potential and we would waste our lives of we did not work to realise that greater potential. Networks now give us the power to use leadership to connect and engage people in change. Use your leadership and creativity to help make work more human.

I know where I will put my efforts. I am comforted to know many others are working for the same goal.

Note: If you are interested in working to change the future of work, then check out Change Agents Worldwide, The Responsive Organisation, read anyone of a dozen other manifestos or get in touch with me. I would love to help