How to Recover Up to $17 Billion in Productivity and Help 50% of Workers

Okay, the headline applies to the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area in Southern Ontario, Canada, but I’ll bet the per capita numbers are probably about the same in your local area. A new report from CivicAction, “an independent and nimble developer of broad civic leadership creating collaborative solutions to unresolved regional challenges,” reports that nearly 50% of workers in the GTHA have experience mental health issues, and that the projected productivity loss over the next decade could amount to $17 billion.

Among the main causes reported in the report are: Income inequality, Job insecurity, Racial discrimination, Family care demands, and Housing conditions and affordability. Big, systemic issues, to be sure, and issues that need systemic approaches that recognize the inherent complexity of the contextualizing circumstances. Not surprisingly, the report highlights a medicalized, mental health support approach. It talks about physician-related stigma, access to Employee and Family Assistance Programs, and psychological/psychiatric counselling. In other words, irrespective of the root causes, a person who is feeling the effects of whatever the overwhelming stressers in their life might be, should be considered only as an individual, one who should be supported to overcome what is considered only their problem..

What’s wrong with this picture? Systemic, causal issues do not lend themselves effectively to individual solutions.

The biggest contributor, by the way, to workplace emotional distress (almost listed as an afterthought in the infographic and media reportage) is workplace culture. That’s right: 60% of the workers surveyed report “that emotional / interpersonal issues are the top source of workplace stress; the top … issue identified is the culture of the workplace” (emphasis mine).

This is potentially good news. Never mind, “potentially”—this is VERY good news. What it means is that a substantial solution to the seeming epidemic of mental health issues that workers experience every day in almost every workplace does not require solving job insecurity, eliminating racial discrimination, addressing family care demands, and remediating housing conditions and affordability. Those would be wonderful, to be sure. But, addressing the number one cause of workplace distress can be accomplished in the workplaces themselves, and for very little money.

In fact, many of the changes that would effect a remarkable transformation of workplace culture can be accomplished for almost NO MONEY AT ALL, aside from a little education, a little coaching, and a bunch of practice. By transitioning to a culture based on Appreciative Management Practices, the distress that half the workforce experiences can be greatly reduced. The savings in Employee Support Programs, not to mention eliminating the lost productivity, and gaining the ancillary benefits of improved motivation, higher work quality, and enabling considerable innovation more than justifies the minimal investment of almost no money at all.

For a taste of what could be possible, it just so happens that I’m teaching a seminar in June on behalf of the HRPA, open to everyone (with a class size limited to 20) called “The Human Side of Contemporary Leadership” that covers exactly this. Here are a couple of comments from people who have attended the same program (offered by a different organization):

• “Mark is an illuminating speaker, provocative presenter and incisive coach. His ability to make sense of organizational behaviour from an individual point of view to a larger dynamic corporate entity is remarkable. His thoughts on the workplace and people within it are relevant, timely, humanistic and creative. He allows one to reimagine a workplace environment where workers thrive and ultimately drive success at a time when 20th century business models no longer make sense.”
• “Mark taught a one-day session in our 2016 Leadership Program. His approach to the material was well-balanced between theory and practice providing insightful approaches on how to cultivate the best in people. Mark is a complete professional in his approach to teaching but manages to be very accessible by incorporating his own flair and personality into the session, resulting in a very engaging learning environment.”

Interested in helping to recover up to $17B in productivity and helping 50% of workers? Sign up and register here.

Appreciative Performance Reflection: A powerful alternative for annual review season

In a recent post I critique the traditional, so-called SMART-goal-oriented, performance review, an annual ritual that most people anticipate as eagerly as they do tax season, or a visit to the dentist (not that I have anything against dentists!). Advocates of this latter-day corporate version of the auto-da-fé would insist on the necessity of setting specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented, and time-bound goals to ensure that individuals are aligned with the overall objectives of teams, departments, divisions, and the organization as a whole, that they are objectively held to account for their responsibility towards the organization’s intended achievement, and that there is a fair and manageable mechanism to assess the relative contributions of individual team members. “Besides,” more than one command-and-control freak has assured me, “people want to know how they stack up against their peers.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and hardly a left-wing advocate of fads like holocracy, puts it very simply:

Managers don't like giving appraisals, and employees don't like getting them. Perhaps they're not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don't work. … Performance appraisals often don't accurately assess performance. … Performance reviews mostly reflect how well employees can ingratiate themselves with the boss. … Reviews occur too infrequently to provide meaningful feedback. … Those receiving the reviews invariably believe they are above average—and defensively resist being told that they aren't. … Performance appraisals [are] unlikely to improve performance. … Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers' attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. … By focusing on the presumed deficiencies or strengths of people, individual performance reviews divert attention from the important task of eliminating the systemic causes, such as inferior technology [not to mention problematic HR-driven systems or personally-dysfunctional managers], behind poor performance.

So what’s a possible alternative?

I recommend periodic Appreciative Performance Reflection conversations. This process derives from the Appreciative Inquiry methodology developed by David Cooperrider, from which the Discover, Dream, Design, Destiny structure is taken. It is a way of enabling a positive-focused review of one’s accomplishments in the larger context of long-term aspirations and ambitions. More than that, Appreciative Performance Reflection enables one to contextualize those accomplishments in the service of organizational and colleagues’ objectives. Using a reference group comprised of those with whom the individual mostly interacts as well as their manager, rather than simply reviewing accomplishments with one’s direct supervisor alone enables better collaboration and activity coordination among individuals, especially those working in diverse functional areas. Additionally, this process encourages more innovation and greater initiative than traditional goal setting exercises. Traditional goal-setting often provides an incentive for uninspired objectives—people quickly learn that greater rewards accrue from setting non-challenging goals.

The Appreciative Performance Reflection is ideally held with a reference group of three people chosen by each individual, which often includes the individual’s direct supervisor or manager. The reference group helps facilitate, and actively participates in, what is essentially a coaching conversation around the individual aligning their aspirations and bringing their strengths to the organization’s collective success. The participation of the reference group helps to create mutual accountability and collective responsibility. It enables organic, emergent alignment of everyone's efforts towards common successes. Ideally, the reference group process obviates the traditional necessity of a hierarchical command chain to align people’s activities so that the organization accomplishes its goals. The thinking behind this acknowledges that autonomous individuals are capable of self-organization towards common goals in a context of common understanding, a key finding of my research.

The setup and framing is roughly as follows (noting that the animating questions have been condensed for the post):

Appreciative Performance Reflection

Given your current understanding of the aspirations, high-level objectives, and business needs of our organization over the coming medium term (i.e., up to a year), please reflect on the most recent six to twelve months past, the coming six to twelve months, and one to three years ahead as you answer the Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny questions, below.

Discover

• Since the last reflection and formal check-in, what have been your greatest personal successes? What is it about these accomplishments that is important to you, that helped them be memorable and significant? Who contributed to your success in these accomplishments, and how?
• Reflecting on your own personal growth, development, and transformation since our last reflection and formal check-in, how have you have changed, and how did those changes occur?
• What is one thing about you at this point in your experience here that you want to herald to the wider organization?

Dream

• What would you like to do more of, do differently, or do even better than you’re doing now in order for you to be even more successful and satisfied?
• Imagine that you are in your ideal role here, doing precisely what you love, and feeling very proud and satisfied. What does that role look like? What have you done to achieve that role?

Design

• Which one or two aspects of the ideal role inspire you to take positive action over the next while? What initial steps can you take?

Destiny

• What resources and individuals do you want to call upon to support your aspirations? What type of support do you want from your supervisor? What resources to which you don’t have ready access would support your success over the medium term? Which from among your particular strengths will you call upon to support your progress and success towards achieving your aspirations?

Using such a framework to guide a strengths-oriented, appreciative reflection enables the desired alignment of individual’s activities among collaborative groups with whom each person interacts the most in a way that encourages people to bring their best towards achieving their – and the organization’s – aspirations.

Take the job (statistic) and shove it!

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report is out for the period ending September 2014. There is an interesting tidbit that jumped out when one compares the number of voluntary separations – those who quit outright – to the overall job openings. The latter number remained stable month to month (in fact, it went down slightly). The number of people who quit jobs, however, went up: “The number of quits increased from 2.5 million in August to 2.8 million in September. This was the highest level of quits since April 2008.” It seems that, statistically, at least, many of those who quit found jobs, as the number of hires increased by a corresponding amount. But that’s a statistical trick: the hires rate would obviously include people who were hired after months of searching and long – some would say overly long and onerous – recruitment processes.

The US BLS claims that “the quits rate can serve as a measure of workers’ willingness or ability to leave jobs,” possibly suggesting a healthy availability of jobs in which to land when jumping out of current employment. However, given the relative stability of openings, this glib conclusion should be critically questioned.

There is an old adage which states, “people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.” Given the meanness that has crept into corporate cultures of late, the (un)natural selection of dark triad managers for promotion to leadership positions, and the behavioural trickle-down effect in which aggressive bad-boy behaviour at the top of the status hierarchy is emulated by those lower down as a de facto road to career success, I’m not surprised at the fact that workers are jumping ship in ever greater numbers. I personally know of several people who left one of Canada’s so-called Best Places to Work because the environment was so unbearably toxic. In another case with which I am familiar, a dark-triad manager was given a free rei(g)n of terror until fired, apparently for financial malfeasance. Only after did the manager’s abusive behaviours become known. (And the employee engagement survey was of no use in ferreting out the problems because the environment was unsafe rendering the results unreliable.)

People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. Is the increased turnover rate in your organization – perhaps concentrated in one or two particular areas – the proverbial canary in the managerial coal mine?

Leaders with Hot Pants

I am struck this morning with the coincidence of three items in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. There is the report on Keurig’s response to the pending lawsuit alleging anti-competitive practices brought by Coffee Club. [Disclosure: In 2011, I did a culture change engagement for a fee at Green Mountain Coffee Roaster’s Toronto plant. GMCR is the parent company of Keurig.] There is the item on Canada’s Competition Bureau looking into alleged restrictive trade practices at Loblaw. And finally, there is the piece on Telus joining BCE in its challenge to Rogers’s exclusive provision of NHL hockey content to its own subscribers contrary to “the CRTC’s vertical integration rules, which require companies that both create and distribute media content to offer it to their rivals to distribute as well.”

In each of these cases, senior leaders from the respective organizations respond with a trite, deflective response that sidesteps the issue at hand. Moreover, the response attempts to justify the behaviour being called into question. For example, Stéphane Glorieux, president of Keurig Green Mountain Coffee Inc.’s Canadian and U.K. divisions,

likened Keurig’s stated incompatibility with rival coffee to apps made to run on Apple Inc.’s phones and tablets. “When you play with an app, you have to go through a platform called Apple. So it’s a little bit of the same principle. That’s how we view ourselves so that we can control our quality,” he said.

What nonsense! The issue here is that Keurig includes an interconnect mechanism that prevents non-Keurig K-cup coffee pods from being used in the new series of Keurig machines. So, it’s not quite the same as Apple managing the App Store for new applications to control quality. Rather, it’s like a car manufacturer insisting that only its brand of gasoline can be used to fuel its vehicles and including a technological lock to prevent you using any other product. Or, to bring things back to the kitchen, it’s akin to a toaster manufacturer insisting that you buy only its proprietary bread to use in its toasters, so that the manufacturer can control the quality of the toast. (Note to M. Glorieux: Have a look at Chamberlain v. Skylink in the U.S. Federal Court)

In Loblaw’s case, the Competition Bureau is seeking access to supplier contracts from a dozen major grocery suppliers “searching for information about potential “reprisals or repercussions” from Loblaw” including requirements that suppliers financially compensate Loblaw if a Loblaw competitor offers the supplier’s products on special and Loblaw chooses to price match, among other similar allegations. Loblaw’s response? “Loblaw spokesman Kevin Groh said … Loblaw doesn’t believe its “practices are inconsistent with a competitive market.””

Finally, over at Rogers, the now-owner of NHL Hockey broadcast rights streams hockey content to anyone’s Internet-connected devices, irrespective of supplier. However, it makes its proprietary GamePlus app available exclusively to Rogers’s customers, allegedly creating a vertical integration that requires die-hard hockey fans to subscribe to Roger’s service for a full online experience, including a much touted “ref cam.” As Telus joins BCE in launching the complaint to the CRTC, Rogers’s rather telling, if not childish, response is to refer to BCE as a “crybaby” and minimizing the impact on customers of this decision: “we don’t believe we transgressed any rules and we will continue to focus on delivering innovation for consumers and not fighting little petty fights such as this.””

The commonality of these three news items for me is how they demonstrate the response of imperious leaders who defiantly place themselves above what a reasonable and objective observer would deem as fair play, and minimize or ridicule those who would call them on what the common person would consider aggressive and anti-competitive behaviours. Unless these individuals have a greater degree of psychopathy than usually found in minimally dark triad leaders, they cannot, in their heart-of-hearts, truly believe the responses they spout publicly—responses that are clearly disconnected from market realities. To say that their proverbial pants are on fire might be going to far. But warm to the touch?...

Members of organizations look to their organizational leaders for tacit guidance on what is acceptable and expected behaviour, especially with respect to getting ahead in the organization. Irrespective of the espoused values that may be laminated or bronzed and hanging in the lobby, it is the in-use practices to which people pay attention. No one should be surprised when members of Keurig, Loblaw, and Rogers – who see their leaders skirt ethical behaviours and the truth in order to promote the ends of their companies – do the same. What those quoted in the Globe articles are providing is not leadership, or at least the type of leadership that is consistent with the complex demands of the 21st century.

The Dark Side of Leadership

I'm in the process of developing a new Certificate in Innovation Leadership that Adler will offer in 2014 in conjunction with HRPA. It comes from several talks I've done over the past several months on Enabling an Environment of Innovation. While doing some research on enabling factors, I came across an interesting study published last year in the Academy of Management Journal entitled The Dark Side of Leadership: A three-level investigation of the cascading effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity.

The primary results of this extensive study by Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hui Liao (University of Maryland), and Raymond Loi (University of Macao) are not that surprising. They found that abusive behaviours by top leaders tend to cascade downwards to be emulated by lower-level managers and group leaders. They also found that abusive behaviours significantly and negatively affect employees' creativity and hence, innovation throughout the organization. This result is corroborated by extensive literature indicating that intrinsic motivation is critical to promoting innovation; nothing kills intrinsic motivation among people more effectively than abuse.

What was particularly interesting to me was how motive attribution affected the results. The authors tested two attribution reasons: promotion, that is, whether abusive behaviour was perceived by subordinates as the way to get ahead in the organization; and injury, that is, whether abusive behaviour was experienced simply as malicious intent to cause harm.

If promotion was the attributed reason for abusive behaviour, the cascading effect of higher-level abusive behaviours was enhanced. In other words, if underlings perceived that abuse was the way to get ahead because those higher up behaved that way, they were more likely to adopt similarly abusive behaviours, as compared to those who perceived that their superiors were simply mean bastards. On the other hand, attributed promotion had a somewhat mitigating effect on the creativity-killing aspects of abusive behaviours. In other words, if people perceived that the abuse was the result of organizationally sanctioned success behaviour, employee creativity was destroyed less than perceived meanness.

The bottom line is, if you're seeking innovation in your organization, you must have no tolerance for abusive behaviours. Period. However, if you are an abusive person, ensure that your victims believe that you're only doing it to get ahead.

[And yes, for the irony challenged among my readers, that last statement was indeed satirical.]

Now, one might say that organizations should never tolerate abusive behaviours. Sadly, I have first-hand knowledge of several organizations that are officially named among Canada's so-called Best Places to Work (don't get me started), in which the organization culture has been described as toxic, and employees regularly leave without a job to go to, choosing unemployment over continuing abuse. Among these companies' espoused values? Innovation. Go figure.

Tactility and the Inverse Performance Review

’Tis the season for Oscar announcements, breaking New Year’s resolutions, and perhaps among the most dreaded of annual rituals, the Performance Review. I wrote recently about Appreciative Performance Remediation, and here at Adler we too are setting up for our own Appreciative Performance Reflections done in the context of a 3-person reference group (rather than being reviewed by their direct supervisor or manager alone, or in the context of the now-cliché 360 appraisal).

When an organization is guided by vision, a method of evaluation and assessment that involves oversight and supervision (which literally means the same as “over” “sight”) makes some semblance of sense. Vision is a one-way sense that demands distance and separation of the viewer from what is being viewed. Objectivity is the intent, and that unfortunately necessitates that which is being viewed – that is, the employee – to become an instrumental object in the organization’s “eyes.”All of that is consistent with the instrumental consideration of employees in an Industrial-Age-informed workplace.

On the other hand, an organization that chooses tactility as its guiding sensory metaphor – navigating according to the question, whom are we going to touch and how are we going to touch them today? – has a different realization. Tactility is a two-way sense: you cannot touch without being touched. In a workplace informed and inspired by tactility, there is an opportunity to introduce a reciprocity aspect to the annual performance reflection. If the organization is going to ask its members, “how well did you accomplish what we’ve asked of you; how well were you able to bring your best to contribute to the organization’s success?” then the individual has the right to ask of the organization’s leadership, “how well did you do what was expected of you to support my success?”

Recall what 21st century leadership is about: “enabling a conducive environment where people engage to create a shared experience in which an alternative future becomes possible. In an organization informed by tactility, it is not only legitimate and appropriate, but necessary for the individual to assess the leadership, asking, “how well did you enable that engaging shared experience? How much more likely is that alternative future this year as compared to last year? How effectively were resources deployed to create an environment most conducive to enabling me to bring my best towards our collective success?”

Fair game, I say: If organizations are bent on annually reviewing the performance of its members, the members have an equal right and obligation to act appropriately in undertaking an inverse performance review.

Appreciative Performance Remediation

I happened to see an interesting post on my Facebook timeline that originated from a posting on Dharma Comics:

I was recently told of an African tribe that does the most beautiful thing. When someone does something hurtful and wrong, they take the person to the center of town, and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him. For two days they’ll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being comes into the world as Good, each of us desiring safety, love, peace, happiness. But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees misdeeds as a cry for help.

They band together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true Nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth: “I Am Good.”

This tribal practice offers some important ideas for organizations facing the challenge of “performance remediation” and its many euphemistic incarnations with respect to dealing with problematic employees. It is essentially the basis of Appreciative Management practices.

Traditional performance reviews involve “checking the boxes” against achievement and development goals that are more-or-less arbitrarily set in an annual exercise (that is mostly dreaded by managers and employees alike). Such practices are based in a control and regimentation mentality that assumes that all achievements can be quantified (that is, they are measurable), that they can be translated into specific, observable “action,” and that they conform to deadlines (“timely”). Given the complexity that defines most that happens throughout contemporary organizations, such goal-setting exercises that to not recognize the fact of emergence are not really very “smart.”

Even worse is that the reward and punishment mechanisms that surround and support such performance management regimes more-often-than-not lead to abusive and non-productive behaviours that tend to diverge from the organization’s tactility – whom it intends to touch and how it intends to touch them – in favour of achievement of goals that are abstractions of what seemed like good ideas at the time. It is particularly authoritarian mechanisms of discipline and control that become problematic.

In contrast, Appreciative Management practices are inherently strengths-based and founded in continual reinforcement and support of “catching them doing it right”—especially important when part of doing “it” right involves organizational members autonomously determining what are the right things to be done.

Particularly, when traditional organizations are moved to discipline (or the very many euphemisms thereof), Appreciative Management approaches are far more effective in sustainable correction of problematic behaviours. When the “tribe” reinforces an individual’s strengths, and the good that they are and can bring to organizational environments, we see remarkable turnarounds in both direct behaviour and sustainable engagement and commitment.

Employee (Dis)engagement

Back when I was doing my research that led to the development of Valence Theory, I came across a curious phenomenon among two of my participants, both senior leaders – CEOs, in fact – of their respective companies. In many instances, they said nearly the same things but their intention and meaning were almost exactly polar opposites of each other. For example, both spoke about consultation and collaboration with employees, yet one’s intention was to impose his beliefs, worldview, and sense-making on employees who held dissenting opinions. The other leader consulted and collaborated – especially with those who held opposing views – to discover what she was missing in her own understanding of business situations. One leader was confident in what he knew to be “true.” The other, actively sought out to fill the gaps in what she didn’t know that she didn’t know. In McLuhan language, same figures with different grounds (contexts) yields different meaning; meaning being the interplay of figure against ground.

I’m reminded of this idea that we can construct very different meanings from a given observation depending on the ground or context against which the observation is interpreted. Take employee satisfaction surveys, for example. Every leader wants to believe that her or his employees are engaged, satisfied, willing to go the proverbial extra mile or kilometre, and would happily stay even if offered a somewhat better job elsewhere. Leaders want to score high when employees consider whether their company is a Great Place to Work. They survey employees regularly, solicit feedback from workers at every level, and herald high scores through self-congratulatory email blasts thanking staff for their great teamwork, support, dedication, and loyalty in the face of adversity and constant change. What could be wrong with that?

And indeed, all may be well in the state of the company. Equally – thinking back to the example of the two leaders saying the same thing from completely opposite intentions – all may not be as well as the survey results might suggest on the surface. Here are some telltale signs that great results in an employee satisfaction survey might be masquerading some serious, systemic problems:

1. Response rate is low or delayed: Most such surveys require a minimum response rate from workers to be considered valid. Those sponsoring the survey monitor responses and strongly encourage managers to get their employees to respond, especially as the deadline draws closer. Generally speaking, people are more reluctant to share bad news and eager to provide good. A delayed response – a “hockey stick” shaped response graph – might indicate underlying dissatisfaction.
2. Small granularity of samples: If response units are fewer than ten people, it’s often easy for a manager to figure out who are the naysayers (or non-responders); framed another way, those who are not “good team players.” In an environment in which employment safety with respect to reprisal, career limitation, or risk of firing is a concern – especially when there is a culture of “no bad news” (see below) – employees will give neutral to mildly positive responses rather than share their true feelings. It’s a tough job market out there!
3. Functional favouritism: Especially in companies that favour one function over another – engineers and developers in a tech company, sales people, researchers in knowledge-based organizations – satisfaction results may be skewed by overwhelmingly high scores among those who enjoy privilege who also tend to dominate in numbers as well. When average-to-mediocre results are clustered in particular functional areas, there is useful information that management is missing.
4. No bad news, a.k.a. Emperor’s new clothes: Employees quickly learn whether honest opinions – especially those that express disagreement with the senior leaders – are welcome or not. They learn whether dissenters experience reprisals via lack of promotion or salary raises, limited access to funding or opportunities, or whether they become members of madogiwazoku “the window ledge tribe” of people who are stripped of responsibility and forced to spend their days in triviality until they resign (assuming they can find alternative employment). In such environments, employees know that there is no percentage in telling the emperor s/he has no clothes. It’s much easier, not to mention safer, to tell him/her what she wants to hear.

Sadly these conditions and others create conditions in which leaders are unable to hear and observe what is really going on right under their noses: compliance rather than commitment, apathy instead of innovation, putting another one over on the boss as opposed to providing inspired guidance.

The bottom line: High employee satisfaction and engagement survey results are meaningless if they are not understood in the context of the real environment in which they are taken.

Video Trailer: Adler's Certificate in Leadership & Organization, Development & Coaching

What an exciting program we have planned beginning January, 2013. Our new Postgraduate Certificate in Leadership and Organization, Development and Coaching is officially announced and registration is open. Have a look at the video trailer and imagine yourself enrolled in this dynamic program. Better yet, imagine yourself as a 21st century leader, with expertise in Organization Development Fundamentals, Critical Perspectives, Complexity Theory and Applications, High-performing Teams, and Professional Practice (coaching/business strategy/consulting). “Your future will never be the same!”

Advice for the Leader-lorn: When to Skip the “Skip Level”

“Advice for the Leader-lorn” is an irregular series in which Dr. Mark answers your leadership questions. If you have a thorny leadership situation that you’d like Dr. Mark to address, send your question to Dr. Mark.

Today’s question comes from A.Y. who writes: “I’ve recently come into a company in a Senior VP position. It didn’t take me very long to observe that morale among the managers and staff isn’t up to what it might be. In fact, people seem to be pretty demoralized. In my last company, we used “skip-level interviews” with staff to hear what was really going on two or three levels down in the hierarchy. I’d like to do the same here, but the moment I mentioned the idea, people turned pale, fumbled for their Blackberries, and excused themselves to head to a meeting (and people here absolutely hate meetings!). I get the feeling that jumping in to this program may not be the best idea right now, but I’d still like to know what’s really going on. How should I proceed?

Your powers of observation serve you well, A.Y. You’ve saved yourself a lot of time filled with awkward moments, and your staff painful facial muscles as they feign smiles and pleasantries. Skip-level interviews can be an effective means of hearing “the truth,” unfiltered by layers of management well-trained in obfuscating corporate-speak. But as actor Jack Nicholson famously reminded us, “the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” And many employees can’t handle delivering the truth, especially when the implications of the uneven power relations are not perfectly clear as being safe.

Your previous company seemed to have made good use of skip-level interviews, the opportunity for more senior leaders to reach down into their organization and spend some quality, one-on-one time with employees farther down the reporting hierarchy. It’s likely that the organization culture was one of openness and safety. No one there had ever experienced reprisals from their direct manager (or manager’s manager) for reporting anything other than a rosy picture of complete competence. The culture was probably a strong learning culture in which reflective learning accompanied every decision—without witch-hunts, post-mortems, or the type of inquisitions meant to ensure that “this (whatever may have gone sideways) will never happen again.” In a culture of Appreciative Management with Positive Leadership, all levels of the organization expect to hear frank exposition of what’s really going on from everyone, irrespective of their level of responsibility or seniority, and positively reinforce that openness and honest. I would go so far as to say that in such a culture, skip-level interviews are likely unnecessary, since everyone typically knows what’s “really happening” anyway, through regular check-ins in an environment of individual autonomy and agency, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability.

The reactions you’ve received at your new company suggest that it may be too soon for a person with legitimated authority – you – to embark on a program that requires a high degree of trust and safety to be effective. Everyone knows that it’s not safe to talk to strangers, and in the context of that organization’s culture, you are still a stranger. My invitation to you is to begin slowly in your quest for knowledge. There are likely those who are organizationally close to you whom you can ask first for frank opinions about what needs to change to improve the work environment—your admin assistant (if you have a person in that role) or other person in a relatively lower-level position. Follow through on your promises to them and you begin to build trust. Next, hold a mini-town hall meeting among those people’s organizational peers and listen deeply to their experiences of the organization. Find an opportunity to give them autonomy and agency in enacting the changes that will make their roles more effective and more satisfying.

After that, spread out to those of higher hierarchical rank who are connected to the ones who are beginning to trust you, again listening deeply, granting autonomy where possible, taking the opportunity for action whenever you can. By all means, recognize and reward those who speak the truth – especially difficult truths – and invite a strong “culture of inquiry” to emerge. Rinse and repeat until you notice that people are regaining the colour in the faces and putting away their Blackberries when you approach. Only then will you have gained sufficient trust and established the requisite safety for skip-level interviews to succeed.

Except by then, you won’t need them to know what’s really going on.

An Opportunity to Engage With Me as Coach

Have you ever considered engaging the guidance of a professional coach?

Let me reframe the question: Are you feeling a connection with any of the following intentions as they might pertain to either personal or professional aspects of your life:

• What do I want to achieve? 
• What do I really want in my life right now? 
• How can I bring myself to face this tough decision and move onward? 
• How can I be an even more effective leader in my organization? 
• How can I better integrate my professional and personal lives to be able to live more authentically as “me?”
• How can I change the way I work (or what I do as an occupation) to be more in tune with my life’s purpose?
• What is my life’s purpose? 
• How can I feel more complete in what I do as a professional? As a parent? As a person? 

Or, to frame all of this more succinctly:

How can I achieve more awareness and more fulfillment throughout all aspects of my life via a guided process of learning, reflection, and focused conversation? 

I have the opportunity of a couple of openings in my coaching practice for new clients. We can engage our coaching conversations in person, over the phone, or through technology like Skype. After an initial foundational and discovery session (usually about two hours), subsequent coaching sessions typically run, on average, about 45 minutes to an hour. You should expect that our coaching arrangement would run for at least six sessions post-discovery, either weekly, twice-a-month, or monthly, depending on your schedule and needs.

For those who have worked with me in other contexts – as consultant, academic mentor, or facilitator – the coaching relationship is a different kind of engagement. Coaching is based on the fundamental affirmation that the client is creative, resourceful, and whole, and is closely connected to Appreciative Practices (in a consulting context) and Positive Psychology (in a therapeutic context). Most of all, coaching is centred in developing one's individual potential, enabling more productive and meaningful relationships throughout all aspects of one's life.

I invite you to connect with me – be it now or in the future – whenever you find yourself drawn to enabling and creating change that will lead you to your hoped-for aspirations and desired results.

Update (17 Jan 2012): If you're still wondering, "What can a coach do for you?" Harvard Business Review answers that very question!

Honest Leadership: The End of "Vision"

Over on the Linked 2 Leadership blog, I have a new post, Honest Leadership: The end of "vision." In it, I open with the controversial idea that,  

Vision is terribly over-rated as a valuable attribute of leadership... More than being over-rated, I would suggest that vision is counter-productive to providing appropriate leadership in a world that has become unfathomably complex and rife with intractable problems. Now, before you fill the comment stream with rebuttals along the lines of this: “If you don’t have a vision, you won’t know where your organization is headed…” let me suggest that knowing where your organization is heading may be of less value to society and the world-at-large than realizing the direct and indirect effects your organization is creating along the way.

Regular readers will undoubtedly recognize that in this post, I'm building the case for tactility as the dominant sensory metaphor for organizational leadership, answering the question that I suggest is paramount in today's UCaPP world: whom do we want to touch, and how do we want to touch them, today? Head over to L2L, have a read, and please let me know your thoughts.

Creating “Smarter” Organizations

Several items have collided in my field of awareness and that always merits a post (especially since I’ve been remiss on blogging in the run-up to, and during, my teaching trip to Sweden). I took advantage of the travel time to re-read Westley, Patton, and Zimmerman’s great book, Getting to Maybe—How the world is changed. This is a book about complexity, social innovation, and non-deterministic approaches to intractable problems. It’s about both personal transformation, and transforming our collective understanding of how to effect change when one clearly cannot be in control. Arguably, as one of my friends never neglects to point out to me, you may be in charge, but you can never be in control. Mostly true, of course—especially when dealing with complex human systems. However, there are many aspects that we can control: one of which is our intention; another, the intensity we bring to transformational undertakings; yet another is the passion with which we strive towards our intention.


In the somewhat unconventional way I tend to connect ideas and observations, the triplet of intention, intensity, and passion came to front-of-mind when friend Holly MacDonald asked on Twitter this morning, “what are three things that an organization could do to demonstrate it was serious about learning?” My response (expanded from Tweetish) was: For organizations truly serious about learning? More reflection on the effects of actions; less blaming and witch-hunting postmortems in the name of so-called accountability; and more adaptive behaviours to navigate complex environments rather than deterministic planning and expectations of perfect execution.


I cannot count the number of organizations I’ve come across that consider themselves committed to organizational learning simply because they invest in employee training. (I know there will be some readers who will roll their eyes at that, and others who will think, what’s wrong with that?) Organizational learning, like adult education, requires active reflection on lived experiences. It requires a commitment to be accountable for what can be done to achieve success from where one is located right now, rather than defending past decisions or action. It requires navigation among the complexity of the unforeseeable – including the potential to change destinations – rather than “staying” some arbitrary course, if only to demonstrate that a prior decision was the “right” one. To accomplish effective organizational learning – that is, learning where the acquired knowledge sustains and informs future decisions – requires that members bring an intention to bring about desired effects in their (and the organization’s) interactions with others. To persevere in the face of unexpected twists, turns, and setbacks that often characterize complex situations requires one to bring presence, intensity, and even passion to the situation. Most certainly, being able to nimbly adapt when confronted with navigating complex situations necessitates possessing a comfort with ambiguity, uncertainty, and not necessarily knowing where one might end up.

It is this last aspect that often stymies even the best of organizational learning intentions. Because leaders are expected to be in control (not merely in charge), to be able to plan and to execute the plan (or be executed for failure), it is almost invariably deemed unacceptable for organizational learning initiatives to have a mindset of “we don’t know what we’re going to learn, but we’ll know it when we learn it.” But true organizational learning is all about discovery, making inroads on what we don’t know that we don’t know. As such, it’s impossible to plan for and quantify, to set “measurable and actionable organizational learning targets” (paraphrased from a BAH organization’s annual management objectives review form). Rather, leaders who espouse organizational learning as a core value would be advised to enable environments that encourage their organizations to be ready to learn: embracing uncertainties, being prepared for transformation, and directing intention towards relationship effects, that is, the organization’s tactility. Sustaining such an environment, especially in the face of more traditional action, “accountability,” and achieving measurable objectives requires… you guessed it: those same three attributes!

Now, if only more organizational environments were created in such a way so as not to deliberately stifle intention, diminish intensity, and destroy passion, imagine how smart would those organizations become from all the learning they could accomplish!

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 3

Among the “harvested” ideas that came forward from our third, and final, Conversation Café of this phase of developing our new Master’s degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Executive Coaching was this: our program should have a “future-driving” orientation, in other words, it should create and enable change. Our eventual graduates will be asked to facilitate other individuals’ and organizations’ transformations, enabling them to move to a new place – literally, basho – rather than being satisfied with attaining new specific goals or objectives. But it occurs to me that the specific expression of this idea – future-driving – is not quite correct. Traditional leadership training is all about driving the future, creating the future, living in the future. Consistent with being in a UCaPP world, I think our greater concern, and indeed, our most pressing challenge, is how to drive, create, and live in the present.

In other words, our focus (as the Café participants also noted) might more effectively be directed towards the question of how to encourage leaders to appreciate, understand, and become comfortable with the “complexity of supporting the change that is happening right now.” How do we create the necessary learning to accommodate emergent change as a way of being, without feeling the need to control or “manage” the change in ways that might stifle the appropriate and necessary evolution of the organization? One key characteristic of UCaPP organizations is that their leaders have learned to become comfortable with complexity (ambiguity, uncertainty, and emergence rather than control). They embody this new-found comfort in ways that, in turn, create new forms of engagement and flexible modes of operating that are consistent with the newly emergent properties of their organizational systems. Thus, our program must create learning experiences that enable participants to become comfortable with ambiguity and complexity in an environment not devoid of structure, but not frozen by it, either. One participant suggested the neologistic metaphor of “cloudworks” in contrast to the highly structured, deterministic “clockworks,” connoting a looser structure of flow and emergent, but clearly discernible, form. This metaphor serves to identify the issue of how to create “complexity education”—learning environments appropriate for participants to embody and assimilate principles of complexity as a guiding model for understanding human dynamics.


When we speak of embracing values of social transformation and social innovation, we necessarily involve processes that substantially encompass more than driving towards pre-conceived goals. This concept represents a substantial shift in the notion of leadership for contemporary circumstances: leadership becomes embedded process rather than embodied role. One aspect of contemporary, UCaPP leadership exists as an “ongoing series of conversations around questions that matter.” So, too, must a program that will help to develop contemporary leaders and organizations. Conversations around questions that matter enable cultures of inquiry – invaluable when it comes to navigating a trajectory of intended effects amidst complex environmental interactions – that necessitate fostering a sense of curiosity throughout an organization. This means that organizational members exist in a space of curiosity that opens the mind to be able to imagine what is possible. In doing so, organizations eliminate the fear of failure—sometimes overwhelming, stress-inducing concerns of potentially not being able to achieve a specific end, goal, or objective. This does not mean that “failure” itself is not eliminated (and as reflected in our program, that all students will unconditionally “pass” irrespective of performance or lack thereof). Instead, it reconstitutes the notion of “failure” in a context of complexity, transformation, and innovation, alternative futures that become possible, and navigating for intended effects.


Our first Conversation Café provided the inspiration for a motto: “Transform the individual. Transform the organization. Transform the world.” This Café suggests “4 Ps” that might characterize the type of applicants and students we would want to encourage: those with Passion, Potential, Path/Plan, and Perception. Consistent with the ideas expressed in the previous paragraph, the “plan” would be a different sort of (complexity-oriented) plan than might be typical of a more conventional graduate program. In particular, we would strive to attract people who see the ethos of this program as a personal life goal integral to their passion. We would invite people for whom this program is personally meaningful in the context of “making a difference in the world”; for them, it would not merely be the “next employable thing.”


In traditional education and training, there is often a large gap between what is academically taught, and what is actually experienced (and adaptively applicable) in practice. “Real life” must intersect with “real play” in the learning environment to create transformative experiences that draw on the creativity of the participants. This observation from among our Conversation Café participants is yet another expression of the praxis principle in adult learning that will be embraced and embodied in the context, process, and content of this degree program. Participants introduced the concept of “Living Labs” that extends the common construct of a practicum in useful ways. Living Labs might sustain between courses, and perhaps involve a larger segment of a given cohort, instead of being an individual placement. Living Labs could be a possible way to create a vehicle that enables a more authentic intersection between “life” and “play.” Such extended, collaborative engagements could provide specific but larger opportunities that would enable students to apply, practice, and transfer learning to real world environments, in keeping with some of the transformative aspirations of our program. On an individual level, students would be invited, encouraged, and actively supported to engage in iterative reflective practices as a means of advancing and assimilating their own experiential learning. As an aside, how many contemporary university courses ask their students to write “reflection papers,” or keep some sort of journal, throughout the course, without providing specific guidance on what mindful reflection is really about? Among the “fundamentals” that underlie the overall learning, I would intend to remedy this common oversight in the service of enabling students to become truly mindful, reflective practitioners.


Many of the ideas shared by the Conversation Café participants reflect what are often understood to be good principles of Adult Education. Good adult learning derives from: embedded, embodied, and explicit knowledge, active incorporation of participant (that is, both instructor and learner) experiences; inquiry from within (in other words, reflective practices); hands-on, experiential learning in and from live situations; combined with feedback and feedforward that continually inform and evolve the program content and process. Thus, we create environments of co-learning. Everyone in the environment is both a learner and a co-creator of knowledge. Knowledge, wisdom, and insights exist throughout the room, not just at the front. As a consequence of these principles – co-learning and co-creation of knowledge – we would consider our program to be successful if our graduates can inspire leaders to create environments of co-learning within their organizations. One way of encouraging this is for students to create an organization within their cohort to put their learning into practice via Living Labs, as I described above. Taken together with principles of co-learning, this idea speaks to the true embodiment of learning, reflective practice, seeking transformation, and praxis. It also speaks to an intention towards social transformation within the organizations that our program will touch and hence, expresses the program’s tactility.


For our students, the profound experience of transformation in the context of the program will be embodied in the visceral experience of being simultaneously awe-struck and awe-inspired. But this raises an important question with respect to evaluation and assessment: In a practical sense, how do we jointly accomplish this transformational experience with integrity, that is, being true to both our and the participants’ aspirations, without abdicating our pedagogical ethos and responsibilities? A large part of the individual assessment will necessarily be subjective, collaboratively completed between participants and instructors, and qualitatively expressed via narratives that describe, for example, the circumstances of the student’s most compelling change process. This idea echoes an idea from our first Conversation Café in which students would be assessed not according to whether they achieved specific, pre-conceived goals, but rather according to the degree to which their goals transformed and emerged consistent with their learning experiences throughout the program. Included in such an assessment would be an understanding of how effectively learning is transferred to workplaces, both during the students’ direct participation in the program and thereafter, as a direct application of what has been learned during the course of the degree. In doing so, our students begin to introduce the process of praxis into workplaces in ways that begin to transform those environments towards becoming a true, reflective, learning organization. This, in turn, means that the design principle of praxis must be made explicit to our participants, incorporated as key element of reflective practice, and embodied as a way of being among our students and graduates.


Finally, our participants strongly expressed the notion that we must be in the business of developing the whole person “in relation” through a series of reflective considerations: Who am I; what do I value; what skills do I possess; what behaviours do I enact; what sort of environment do I enable? To support these critical self-reflections over the time of the program, it will be incumbent on us to provide specific guidance for our participants to manage “energy,” more than just time and resources. Mindfulness practices will likely play a large role here. There must be an explicit acknowledgement of the polarity between “tension” and “serenity” wherein the participants must live that balance during their participation in the program. Such active acknowledgement will enable our program to be sustainable, balancing the considerations of performance with renewal.

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 2

Transformation and language—two key themes that came out of our second Conversation Café seeking ideas and inspirations for the development of our proposed Master’s Degree in Leadership and Organization Development, and Executive Coaching. Not unexpectedly, much of the language that I have been using to describe important, healing-oriented processes among organizations has already been co-opted by the managerialist discourse (according to some of our participants). In particular, the increasingly worn cliché of “change” seems to be giving way to “transformation” as a catch-all, synonymous euphemism for instrumental, mostly unwelcome, counter-inclusive processes. One participant even noted that in her practice, she has come across an organization that glibly uses the phrase “organization transformation” to refer to the heavy-handed, BAH layoffs practice formerly referred to as downsizing (or even worse – from the perspective of management clichés – “rightsizing”).

In what some might call a time-honoured practice, more-conventional consultancies often appropriate language that has been deliberately chosen to suggest new ground, context, and meaning. In doing so, those who cynically adhere to managerialist learning from as far back as the famous Hawthorne experiments of the late 1920s and early ’30s, have come to realize that workers can often be manipulated into compliance (possibly resulting in temporary increases in productivity) by introducing change that appears to be positive, including nominative changes in language. Thus, it is vitally important that as a school and faculty that will create its reputation on true transformative practices, we must first fully understand and appreciate what we mean by terms such as “transformation.”

Among the conversations, one simple yet profound aspect came through very clearly: Self is emergent not through deterministic, goal-oriented training, but from the assimilation of reflective learning of one’s experiences in the context of history, culture, and prior knowledge. Transformation in this sense occurs when the individual explicitly realizes, and can articulate, a fundamentally new context for their life in which prior (and future) experiences can be understood with new meaning. In turn, “emergent self” becomes an agent of similar transformation in other individuals, and among environments in which that individual participates. What this means for the development of our program is that specific skills for personal transformation must be encouraged and nurtured among all our members, including both students and faculty, in a suitably safe environment. These skills encompass an ability for self-awareness and mindful reflection; self-cultivation together with collective co-cultivation; realizing the resultant basho that is thereby created; creating a non-conventional self-plan that focuses on trajectory and navigating for effects, rather than necessarily attaining a specific objective or preconceived goal.

In a similar vein, commonly understood (which means that everyone understands them, but few people would unpack them the same way) terms such as “Leadership,” “Organization,” and “Executive” must be clearly and appropriately contextualized in our program in a way that will clearly delineate and differentiate what Adler’s future master’s degree offers that is distinct from any other institution. Likewise, words like “Development,” and “Coaching.”

Among aspects of our program’s tactility, we would strive for our participants – in-program students and especially graduates – to feel a calling to seed and effect transformations consistent with the values of the program. Such emergent dissemination among the various environments in which they participate would occur long after their direct participation in the program has finished. In this sense, the need being addressed by the program addresses the question: How will organizations redefine themselves and their processes given the complex manifestations of transformation that are now occurring throughout society? This suggests a direct, follow-on question: In what ways can our program demonstrate and offer unique guidance – via our students, faculty, and graduates – towards the answer(s) to that question of redefinition? And perhaps equally important for our sustainable success: How do we appropriately identify those individuals who want (and are prepared) to transform themselves in such a manner for this program to be appropriate for them? 

The short answer is that we would be seeking those people for whom earning this degree would be more than a simple, instrumental benefit, that is, more than a mere “academic exercise.” In traditional education and training, there is often a large gap between what is academically taught, and what is actually experienced (and becomes adaptively applicable) in practice. Pervading our entire curriculum – every course syllabus and practicum experience – “real life” must intersect with “real play” throughout the learning environments. In this way, we would strive to create transformative experiences that challenge the creativity, engagement, and commitment of all our participants. As those who participated in our Conversation Café expressed these ideas, I observe yet another expression of the principle of praxis in adult learning—experience recursively transforming into embodied knowledge that informs subsequent practice. Conversation Café participants identified the concept of “living labs” comprising intervention engagements with practicum clients that could sustain between courses as a possible way to create a vehicle that enables “life” and “play” to intersect in this context.

Reflections on Creating a Degree Program: Conversation Café 1

Having spent a good part of this week reflecting on the insight, suggestions, and collective wisdom shared at our first Conversation Café for the master’s degree we are developing in leadership and organization development, and executive coaching, here are some ideas and inspirations that stand out for me.

Most academic degree programs are focused on knowledge. If there is a critical or constructivist bent about them, they include a strong acknowledgement of ways of knowing. If the degree is professionally oriented, as opposed to more purely academically focused, it will additionally have a strong emphasis on practice, or ways of doing. What we heard strongly from our participants – consistent with my own thinking – is that this new program must also encourage individual transformation—realization of each participant’s human potential, holding an inherent optimism in the value of that potential, and being true to the notion that individual change is intimately connected and implicated in the larger project of social change. This adds one more “ways” dimension to knowing and doing, namely an equal emphasis on ways of being in the world, and particularly, ways of being in relation in the world.

We can consolidate these ideas as Savoir³: Savoir, Savoir Faire, and Savoir Être, or Knowing, Acting, and Being. These three, to be integrated by design into all aspects of the degree program, represent the dual ethos of praxis and transformation that informs not only our program and pedagogy, but the intended experiences that we intent to enable among our participants. Thus, what may well become the slogan of our eventual degree program is almost self-evident:

Transform the individual.
Transform the organization.
Transform the world.

How, then, will our students know if they are successful in the context of such guiding principles; indeed, how will we know if our program itself is successful? With conventional academic degrees, the answer is fairly obvious: students are graded for assignments and summative assessments according to some appropriate rubric, they accumulate a certain number of course credits that are required to complete degree requirements, and the school itself processes… rather, graduates a continual flow of completed candidates.

However, if the objective of both the program and (presumably) the students themselves is transformation, how can that be assessed in a more-or-less rigorous, but non-positivist, fashion? (There is another post begging to be written on how the notion of objectivity – externally constructed measures of truth that impose themselves as structure – renders a degree program inorganic; in other words, dead—but that's for another day.) Several Conversation Café participants coalesced around the idea of defining success in terms of the participants’ individually held understanding of “where and how do I want to grow?” and “what needs of mine am I trying to fill?” This is a useful starting point, as it suggests appropriately facilitated processes of reflection and check-in through our participants’ transition through the degree process. However, a large part of measuring transformation must be rooted in how the individual’s perceived needs evolve and emerge consistent with the individual’s changing worldview. Merely satisfying preconceived needs and attaining goals projected from one’s starting point suggest a deterministic process that is inconsistent with the type of transformative effects that are at the heart of the program’s ethos. In particular, the program can only consider itself successful if there are aspects that the learner will discover as s/he navigates the program experiences through which individual transformation begins to emerge. It is quite likely that the successful participants will change their intended and desired outcomes for growth, personal transformation, and perceived needs during the course of the program. Conversely, we might say that if one’s recognized and self-perceived needs haven’t changed by the end of the program, the person simply hasn’t been paying attention!

How, then, do we evaluate our students? As a capstone or thesis endeavour, they must be able to usefully demonstrate what they have contributed in their individual and collective transformative contexts to Savoir³—Knowledge, Action, and Reflection on Being. Success is manifest in the students necessarily engaging in complexity thinking, creating connections in social relation as a way of being, and having experienced transformation among the three elements that comprise Savoir³. Part of the summative evaluation challenge for the students will be for them to design and realize that demonstration—how’s that for transformation in pedagogy?

In many contemporary degree programs that address leadership and organization development, there is a strong thread – if not overarching theme – of change. Change management, resistance to change, organizing for change, ensuring organizational readiness for change, technologies of change—I hate to use the very tired cliché of “and the list goes on,” but I’ve surveyed quite a few graduate programs and the list indeed continues in this fashion!

In keeping true to the ethos that inspires and provides impetus for this program we – without question – need to foster a change in our own understanding and experience of change itself: from deterministic, planful, outcome/objective/goal-biased change to an appreciation and understanding of, and comfort with, emergent transformation, navigating intended effects among complex human environments. This concept strongly suggests – almost mandates –  considerable care in adopting a new(er) lexicon throughout our curriculum content and subject matter. Curriculum is only a framework for the program. To effect the type of transformation suggested by holding true to Savoir³, our intent in course designs will be to create powerful experiences that will enable our students to make sense of their own contexts and histories through both the source materials and collective experiences of instructors, other participants, and other engaged constituencies. Out of these powerful, sense-making experiences Savoir³ will emerge in ways that complete the course syllabi and overall curriculum.

If you are interested in contributing to this conversation, there are still a few places available for both our November 1 and November 7 Conversation Cafés in Toronto—please contact me for details and an invitation. And, if you are unable to attend, I would be grateful to hear your thoughts, either in the comments or directly by email.

From Cargo-cult Management to Transformative Organizational Learning

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of participating on a panel for the newly inaugurated, Ontario Learning Network, sponsored by Service Canada University for training and development for Canada's federal civil service. As an adult educator, I was invited to share some of my thinking on organizational learning; in particular, I chose to offer my thoughts on transformative organizational learning:

Transformative Organizational Learning addresses the capital-B, “Big Questions” that concern themselves with what might be possible if we could imagine a future with few, if any, constraints; and how can we begin to take small steps today advancing towards that brilliantly imagined future. ... In a transformative organizational environment, contemporary leadership is not about leading in the conventional sense of assuming control and mustering others in working collectively towards a predetermined objective, that is, in the conventional way most modern managers understand “leadership.” ... Rather, contemporary leadership is about enabling a conducive environment where you can bring people together and engage them to create a shared experience from which an alternative future becomes possible... 

The article drawn from my short presentation is here. Download, read, share, enjoy, and most of all, think!

Organizational Therapy and Positive Psychology

I was recently asked about positive psychology interventions in organizations, and the use of Appreciative Practices in organization development interventions. In part, here is the essence of my response:

In my role as an Organizational Therapist, I help organizations, their members, and especially their leaders to realize how problematic the traditional ways of organizing and managing have become, especially in today's context. A foundational part of this work is a new model of organization that I developed as part of my doctoral research ("Valence Theory") that serves to rebalance the priorities among organizational engagement among ALL of its members (that include those that are often called "stakeholders" - employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, as well as regulators, and other members of the same industry). A large part of this practice involves transformation of the organizational culture, and that draws heavily from the praxis of transformative learning (from adult education), as well as becoming a values-based, emergent, "organic" (in complexity terms) organization.

Among the big questions are these:

• How do we help people to unlearn old behavioural dynamics (that are often about vested power, dysfunctional human interactions, command and control, etc.)? How can we learn instead to adopt those forms of mutual engagement that encourage individual and collective commitment to the higher purpose of the organization - those things the organization would like to promote, preserve, and protect? 
• How can we encourage and assist people within the organization to attain greater autonomy, accomplish stronger mastery, and connect with their individual higher purposes? 
• And, how can we attune organizations and their people to navigate among their daily (and longer-term) challenges being cognizant of the multiplicity of interconnecting and interacting effects, so as to enable those effects that serve their values, their purpose, and the greater good?

One among many interventions is to help people to adopt appreciative practices in their dealings with each other, and especially in the context of superior/subordinate relationships. (Note that the concepts of "superior" and "subordinate" ideally evaporate in an organization that successfully transforms towards becoming more consistent with today's societal conditions.) Appreciative practices themselves (derived in the organization development context from the research intervention of Appreciative Inquiry) are consistent with and supportive of positive psychology, incorporating interventions and practices that help people attain pleasurable, engaged, and meaningful lives. It's founder, Martin Seligman, does a great job of describing its tenets in this TED Talk. Nothing, of course, should be considered a panacea. Nonetheless, with the opportunity for substantial improvements in productivity, innovation, member engagement, commitment, social responsibility, and most important of all, happiness and satisfaction, positive psychology based, organizational therapy interventions are unquestionably and tremendously effective.

10 Lessons of Organizational Culture Transformation

If you're not familiar with my writing, a few notes of explanation. UCaPP is an acronym representing the phrase, "Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity," (or "ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate," depending on usage), the description I use to characterize contemporary societal conditions. BAH refers to "Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, and Hierarchical," a description of traditional management and organizations. UCaPP organizations are mostly described as "collaborative" in the literature, but they are much more than that. For more details, you are invited to visit the wiki site for Valence Theory of Organization - after reading this post, of course!

I’m finishing up a seven-month contract that helped to initiate an organizational culture transformation in a newly acquired Toronto subsidiary of a large American organization. The American organization’s culture is strongly towards the UCaPP end of the BAH-UCaPP organization typology spectrum. On the other hand, the Toronto organization was strongly BAH when I was first introduced to it, and demonstrated many attributes and behaviours that would qualify them for organizational healing—being able to strongly benefit from my practice as an organizational therapist.

Although the formal educational program was prescribed by the parent organization, the Toronto site had specific needs that went well beyond those addressed by the otherwise excellent and insightful formal materials. Nonetheless, the results have been nothing short of outstanding: by the beginning of the program’s sixth month, overall productivity – units out the door – increased by 70%, with customer complaints down to a small fraction of what they were in January. Employment growth in new production staff has been nothing short of explosive, and the line and middle management ranks – initially fearful of what such growth would mean relative to the old ways of doing supervision – are (mostly) feeling quite good about how well they’re coping.

I’ve compiled ten lessons learned from this remarkably successful organizational culture transformation that, not surprisingly, are consistent with the predictions of Valence Theory. See how many might be useful to you as you reflect on navigating your organization through the complexities of today’s environment of uncertainty:

1. Culture comes from values; values obviate vision as the organization’s source of impetus. When people work from a place that aligns fundamental values among all members, shared knowledge of where to head is a natural outcome. On the other hand, a vision imposed by an small, elite group at the top of the organization necessitates continual reinforcement (and enforcement) through ever-growing, extrinsic incentive plans.
2. Like learning a new language, culture change venue scripts seem artificial at first, become more comfortable with practice, and evolve into the organization’s lingua franca. The challenge is to ensure that those who are not directly involved in the “language lessons” that serve to inculcate the new culture are nonetheless given opportunities to participate in the new vocabulary of practices, behaviours, and attitudes.
3. Relying on training as the sole or primary mechanism to effect culture change is completely ineffective. On the other hand, continual peer reinforcement on-the-job, coupled with a concerted program of individual coaching and counselling for key members, with a limited amount of well-contextualized education, are essential to begin the process. Notice I said, “begin.” The process of transformation necessarily continues long after the formal program has been completed.
4. There will be an occasion – and usually no more than two – in which the new culture’s principles will have to be violated in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the new culture’s principles. This usually results in one or two people being asked to find other employment. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “it is perhaps ironic that coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership is occasionally needed to enforce the transformation away from coercive, legitimated, and hierarchical leadership.”
5. Embracing and committing to the new culture is always a matter of individual choice. What is not a choice is the tight coupling between embracing the culture and sustaining one’s membership (e.g., employment) in the organization.
6. The person who, in the past, has been identified by legitimated management (i.e., those who are most vested in the “way we do things around here”) as the trouble-maker, malcontent, or the one-most-likely-to-be-written-up-for-disciplinary-action, is likely your best ally in identifying necessary changes, and effecting culture change—as long as you can overcome his/her legitimate cynicism and long-reinforced distrust of management-imposed “change.”
7. In a UCaPP organization, compensation is at least partially – and ideally completely – decoupled from job performance. The more strongly extrinsic motivators influence an individual’s contribution to the organization, the more BAH the organization necessarily becomes, and the less committed is the individual to the organization’s values as its primary impetus.
8. In a UCaPP environment, no one is required to give “110%.” Instead, more productivity is paradoxically experienced as needing less expended effort. Conversely, in a BAH environment, 50% (or more) of the organization’s potential is wasted in counter-productive, energy-consuming behaviours and well-rehearsed defensive scripts.
9. Blindly adopting so-called best practices in a bid to become as successful as some arbitrary industry leader is a management cargo cult. Transformative education is founded on experiential learning, not plagiarism.
10. The vast majority of benefits of organizational culture transformation are necessarily qualitative, not quantitative. However, there are consequential, indirect benefits – some of them economic – that are measurable, although one cannot usually establish clear, deterministic, causal connections. This means that one cannot “prove” a priori, tangible benefits of organizational culture transformation, much to the chagrin of traditionally trained managers. Remember—when it comes to effecting sustainable, truly beneficial change throughout an organization and among its members, complexity is your friend.

Governing by Design

Seed Magazine has a thought-provoking article on the application of design principles to governance, as part of their "global reset" series. One paragraph in particular caught my eye concerning the "radical thinking, creative solutions, and collaborative action" required to address the complex and often intractable problems that face both the world at large, and organizations in transformation. I offer it as a challenge to UCaPP leaders to truly incorporate these practices, outlined in the Seed article, into their day-to-day business:

This design approach would be:

• transparent (complex problems require simple, clear, and honest solutions);
• inspiring (successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs, giving meaning to their lives, and raising their hopes and expectations);
• transformational (exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that may be radical and even disruptive);
• participatory (effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive, and developed with the people who will use them);
• contextual (no solution should be developed or delivered in isolation but should instead recognize the social, physical, and information systems it is part of);
• and sustainable (every solution needs to be robust, responsible, and designed with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society).

A useful guide for a leader's periodic self-reflection and check-in, to be sure!