Leaders who want feedback, but don’t listen #leadership #fail

I was involved in a discussion recently about whether there is such a thing as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ feedback (for the record, I believe there is just feedback, the positivity or negativity rests in how it is communicated and received). When I work with leaders, feedback is a common theme. They want to hear my opinion on how I experience them, and value ‘straight talking’. What is less clear is how and why they struggle in developing relationships with colleagues/staff to support them to get feedback on an ongoing basis.

Robert S. Kaplan‘s recent article in McKinsey Quarterly, Top executives need feedback – here’s how they can get it, attempts to get under the skin of the issue.  Kaplan argues:

Many executives find that as they become more senior, they receive less coaching and become more confused about their performance and developmental needs. They may also become increasingly isolated from constructive criticism – subordinates do not want to offend the boss and may believe that constructive suggestions are unwelcome and unwise. …[They] may not have focused sufficiently on developing mutually trusting subordinate relationships that would make getting feedback and advice a lot easier.

He suggests the following strategies: cultivate junior coaches, practice self-disclosure, develop questioning and active listening skills and delegate a key issue to a team of key staff and give them genuine autonomy to come up with the answers. I suspect three assumptions underpin Kaplan’s thinking:

“How resilient are you?” #resilience

Resilience is an idea that seems to be gaining ground in the context of leadership development and OD. It came up recently in an interview I had for a consulting role in an organisation that has been/is going through substantial change, both internally and externally driven.

The meeting was with the management consultancy I would be working through as an associate. The client system was described as “challenging”, “emotional”, with people prone to shouting/outbursts, and the area I would be working in run by a director whose was challenging, often bullying (I was able to verify this later independently). I was also told, in the interview, that a consultant who had worked there earlier on this project was “burnt out” and still recovering; my desire to pay the mortgage was being given a run for its money by the “life’s too short” gene. And then I was asked:

How resilient are you?…

#Governance: Dancing in the Boardroom…

Governance has been on my mind quite a bit, what with the well-documented machinations of large media organisations, my own experience as a trustee and director, and a fascinating conversation I had with a friend who works in corporate sustainability. He talked about the tensions between profit and purpose  many organisations he encounters are grappling with. And then I read a piece in McKinsey Quarterly entitled Boards: When best practice isn’t enough, which asks:

Why is it that despite all the corporate-governance reforms undertaken over the past two decades, many boards failed the test of the financial crisis so badly?

Good question, one that exercises many of us to this day, and which may equally be re-framed and asked of, for example, trustee boards of organisations currently faced with gearing themselves up to fill the gaps created by a curtailing of Public Sector service provision. Simon Wong’s article offers three ‘Simple Rules’ to assess whether a Board is fit for purpose:

A gaping hole in “Balanced Scorecards”, human experience and social signals

The idea that our conscious, individual thinking is the key determining factor of our behaviour may come to be seen as foolish a vanity as our earlier idea that we were the centre of the universe. – Alex (Sandy) Pentland

Last week the Institute of Customer Services held a conference on Customer Satisfaction. I led a session how to create sustainable patterns of customer satisfaction, using behavioural economics (specifically the work of Dan Ariely) and systems-thinking as my primary lenses through which to look at this.

One of the other speakers shared how his organisation has moved away from a balanced scorecard approach to performance improvement – e.g. Financial, Business Processes, Learning indicators – to adding a fourth: ‘Human Experience’. He commented on “how we seem to know this ‘stuff’ is important” but often struggle to make the human element in organisations really work, especially when it comes to aligning it with the hard metrics.

Silo busting requires effective conversations #relational

Leading organisational thinker John Kotter recently wrote an article entitled Breaking Down Silos. It offers a precis of the risks to organisations with more than 15 staff of silos forming. For silos:

• Destroy trust
• Cut off communication
• Foster complacency

A fair assessment and Kotter’s advice is sound. He in essence recommends increasing the quality and frequency of interactions between people, and the creation of a “guiding coalition”, which once formed should:

Process without purpose is pointless #NHS

I had an opportunity to observe the NHS at first hand recently, as my father spent an extended period in a hospital before he passed away. Being someone who is curious about organisations and people within them, I had plenty of time to soak up what was going on around me. The overriding impression was of staff with immense humanity and professionalism, and the (minor) lapses that occurred were understandable given the conditions and inherent uncertainty when dealing with serious illness. So I have no major grumbles.

What strikes me is that quality of care is at risk because of a classic case of mis-aligned process and desired outcome(s). This is something that people within the NHS see, but do not necessarily have the power to change. The Pyjamas in Bananas blog gives an insight from within the system, and it mirrors, I suspect, something of my experience.

The irreducible minimum of organisations is relationship

Last night I had the privilege of seeing Sir Ken Robinson give a talk in London as part of the Learning Without Frontiers series of events (the talk is not on-line yet, so cannot link to it). Like many of the talks Sir Ken gives, this was an impassioned, intelligent, witty and well-argued call for policy makers and educationalists to reassess how they make the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ subjects. To whit, that such a distinction is flawed, that there are only different subjects and we can take both an academic and/or creative approach to any of them.

One of the analogies he used, and has done previously, is that of Peter Brooke’s idea of the “irreducible minimum of theatre” (a handy transcript of which can be found here).

The only thing you cannot remove from theater is an actor in a space and somebody watching. That’s the heart of it. And if either of those parts is missing, there is no theater.You need a performer and an audience. Theater is that relationship.

“Hope is not an action plan” #TedXBrighton #HSD

At the recent TedXBrighton event, where the theme for the day was Reasons to be Cheerful: An Optimistic look forward, Sally Kettle gave an inspiring talk on how to achieve your goals . A couple of things she said struck a chord, one of which came back to me today as I sat with a colleague talking over the workshop we will be delivering soon as part of the Business Action on Homelessness programme for the Business Community Partnership in Brighton.

Hope is not an action plan

When working with clients – whether at an organisational, group or individual level – conversation often comes round to the gap between aspiration and achievement, goal setting vs goal attainment, planning vs delivering. And in the context of organisations – whether commercial or public sector, charity or social enterprise, the language of ‘hope’ is not particularly valued as it rarely moves things forward. Hope is indeed not an action plan and don’t organisations just love plans…

 

Answering “that’s not how we do things around here…” #HSD #relational

I am lucky, and have never been told “that’s not how we do things around here”. It might be a function of having been an independent practitioner for some years,  or because I’ve not been in organisations where this is an issue…. but I doubt it.

Seth Godin’s recent post on the subject is pithy, and I agree with the central point that this type of statement is likely to kill innovation (amongst many other things). What he does not do is offer any suggestion as to how this pattern of behaviour has come into being, or what you can do to change it. So here are two possible approaches to the latter, one pitched at the organisational level, and the other for the imaginary colleague, new hire, student or freelancer that Godin invokes.

What it tells you may not be what it tells you…
The thing about a statement like “that’s not the way we do around here”, is that it invites the listener to come to one of a number of possible conclusions e.g.:

• “Why did no-one tell me?”
• “”I am being told off.”
• “I am not part of the in-crowd.”
• “If I challenge this, it will cause conflict.”
• This is an organisation that does not like change/innovation/creativity etc.”
• “Ooops have I put my foot in it?”
• “I appear to be working with Luddites/idiots/Muppets (delete as applicable).”

Add to that the emotional response this is likely to evoke, and that is a potentially heady mix. The conditions are ripe for both parties to entrench and/or move away from each other. What if you did the opposite?

Porcine connectivity & the reality of how we see things differently

As social beings, connections matter. Sometimes, just how (inter-)connected the world around us is reveals itself. Not only that, the world I see may be literally different to the one you do. So it is not just about slowing down and raising your awareness of ‘what is’, it is also about recognizing the maps of the world we create are literally that: visual maps that differ from the moment we take data in through our eyes. This all comes to life for me having watched some of Christien Meindertsma‘s work this morning. Meindertsma work explores the life of products and raw materials. For example, PIG 05049 (2007) documented the “astounding array of products that different parts of an anonymous pig called 05049 could support” revealing “lines that link raw materials with producers, products and consumers that have become so invisible in an increasingly globalized world.”