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:

• ‘Coaching’ is an appropriate frame for this type of conversation with ‘subordinates’ (as an aside, the use of the word ‘subordinates’ is unfortunate, given the military echoes and inherent notion of something or someone being ‘of less importance’. There is an immediate discounting of the junior member of staff and their opinion.)
• Any advice or feedback given will actually be listened to, and whilst Kaplan acknowledges the difficulty some execs have in this area, I believe he underestimates the problem. Recent research by See, Morrision, Rothman & Soll has shown that “powerful people are less likely to take advice from others, in large part because they have high confidence in their own judgment and don’t feel the need to incorporate outside views. By not factoring in others’ advice, however, people in power risk making flawed decisions.” Bankers spring to mind…
• Leaders have the skills/knowledge to set the appropriate conditions in their work relationships that will result in a high level of mutual trust, honesty and an ability to actively listen.

So what to do with the leader who wants feedback in order to develop them self and/or improve their organisation?…. You could follow Kaplan’s advice, although unless you address the power issue and really establish the extent to which a leader is willing to take advice, it would be pointless. Just because someone says they want feedback does not mean they are listening. As See (et al) note in their recent research, some leaders frame taking advice as a sign of weakness, so a purely rational approach is not going to work. Human beings – and believe it not leaders – are human. Whilst some may appear otherwise on occasion – they are rational, emotional and relational.

Leaders who do not understand that they are in relationship deny reality and ignore the fundamental dynamics of human interaction. Conventional approaches to leadership development and coaching can fall short in terms of developing leaders and setting the conditions for honest dialogue, so why not try something different?…

Taking a relational approach to leader feedback: Strategic & Intimate Interactions

Sonia M. Nevis, Stephanie Blackman and Ed Nevis, who have a background in Gestalt psychology, describe a powerful framework for analyzing and improving relationships in The Need For Balance (PDF). They break interactions down into two types:

Intimate Interactions -  “bring us closer to each other through caring about what each person is thinking or feeling.  The intent is to enhance connectedness as a desirable goal in its own right.  This behaviour is used as a way of being together in a mutually powerful way.”

Strategic Interactions – “the ways in which individuals exchange influence when the goal is to accomplish a specific task. Here, the intent is to use hierarchical power and to be less concerned with equality.  Achieving the goal is of primary importance and, though connectedness is still desired, mutuality gives way to getting something done.  Hierarchy is maintained by a willingness to lead and a willingness to follow.”

All relationships are based on a series of interactions that can broadly be defined as either strategic or intimate, and the balance between the two determines the degree of mutuality and connectedness in a relationship. That in turn has a direct bearing on effectiveness and performance. An excess of one or the other and the relationship will be unbalanced. For example, too much intimacy makes high levels of productivity harder; too much of the strategic leads to a cold and distant working environment, and followers will feel less inclined to follow, or be honest in their feedback.

My approach would be to suggest my client begin by assessing the nature of the relationship he/she has with a person, whether the conditions exist for true and/or useful feedback to be honestly shared, and if not look at what needs to change. Is this the only way? Of course not, and it is closer to the reality of human dynamics and social interaction, whether in an organisational setting or otherwise.

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?…

In the context of the meeting, entirely valid, and all this got me thinking. In relation to the interview, I was struck by the extent to which responsibility for handling and holding the dysfunction from within the client system was being placed upon an external consultant with no contracting around e.g. ‘simple rules’ for what is/ is not acceptable behaviour. If there was an underlying assumption that a consultant should be thick skinned enough to handle any behaviour, I do not subscribe to that. Aside from my own capacity for working with challenging behaviour, there is a fundamental question around colluding with dysfunction in a client system, something I choose not to do. It neither serves the client, or me.

And I wonder also how often the shadow side of resilience is what gets evoked rather than the real thing. Courtesy of the facilitatingchange.org blog, this quote from Dr Ami Carter is illustrative:

…resilience is not itself a ‘good’ quality — after all, corruption is a very resilient institution. Likewise, the resilience of particular regimes (Stalin’s, for example) does not correlate with the characteristics required for development to move forward.

Resilience is simply a property of systems, based on particular features of those systems. …We cannot assume inherent goodness in either the case of resilience or the related term “adaptive capacity” which refers to coping, nor should we assume that resilience is some sort of panacea for vulnerability.

Invoking resilience without being prepared to inquire into the conditions creating the need runs a risk of missing out on relational subtlety. Equally, not cultivating ‘bounce-back-ability’ leaves you open to a potentially bumpy ride. So the next time you find yourself discussing resilience, get curious about what assumptions are at play and the intentions of those in the room.

And in the end, the life’s too short gene won out, and I wasn’t offered the contract.

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:

1. Do our directors think and act like owners?
2. Does our CEO have a collaborative mind-set?
3. Does our board guard its authority and independence?

It was lovely to read someone from a big consulting firm making the case for organisations paying attention to human dynamicS, and to pay attention to the collaborative (i.e. relational) skills of CEOs. Yet woven into the fabric of his model are two assumptions that need challenging.

Ownership
The idea that directors should foster a ‘owner mentality’ is interesting. A few years ago, when I acted as Company Secretary for one of my clients and sat on their Board, I was offered the chance to invest in the business. After much wrestling, I declined, and the primary reason was that I noticed that becoming an ‘owner’ would fundamentally cloud my judgement and prevent me from acting as a ‘critical friend’, which for me is the primary purpose of Directors and Trustees. If you ‘own’ part of something, and are invested in its success or failure, whose needs are you attending to? Equally, it cuts against the evidence: as Daniel Pink, amongst others, has pointed out, carrot and stick motivation just doesn’t work and is ultimately counter-productive.

How boards some behave beneath the surface?...

Challenge vs Conflict

Good boards are pretty uncomfortable places and that’s where [sic] they should be.

What does ‘uncomfortable’ mean? There is a difference between robust dialogue as part of a culture of learning, and macho posturing. Years ago, a teacher I knew said that shouting at children was pointless if the goal was ultimately to encourage learning. All it did was scare them rigid and kick-start the fight or flight mechanism and flood their brains with adrenalin. Hello knee-jerk reactions, good-bye critical thinking.

So to bring it all back to dancing, I suggest good governance is more likely to emerge from, say, Capoeira than the culture of the corporate mosh pit, and the Simple Rules for good governance need a bit more work. As an alternative, and an article I have referred to before,  Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld‘s What makes great boards great? from the Harvard Business Review (2002), is hard to beat. Unless you prefer moshing.

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.

‘Human experience’ resonated with the audience. What emerged during the day was a sense that there are currently more questions than answers around ‘managing’ human experience and improving organisations. Maybe that should be no surprise given that science is only now beginning to understand how human social interaction works, particularly at an unconscious level. For example, as Malcolm Gladwell and others have noted, we know people can see patterns incredibly quickly (thin slicing). What has not been fully explained to date is the mechanisms by which we do this, although there have been some advances.

The MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory is one such place, and it’s run by Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, author of Honest Signals: How they shape our world? Pentland is a computational scientist and directs the MIT HD Lab, and the book gives a fascinating insight into their work.

To date, how people communicate has largely been broken down into a relationship between:

• Content (meaning)
• Verbal communication (voice, intonation, pitch, inflection etc)
• Non-verbal communication (stance, gesture, emoting)

Pentland suggests there is a ‘back channel’ of social circuitry that operates when people come together, which is largely unconscious, partly automatic and measurable through technology developed at MIT – the ‘sociometer’. Pentland outlines in this talk how understanding social signals can make organisations more efficient and profitable here, and it gives you a taste og what is in the book.

So What?

One of the MIT experiments shows that this is not just optional fluffiness:

• 40% of a creative teams’ productivity was directly explained by the amount of communication they had with others.
• Employees with the most extensive digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues.
• Those with the most cohesive face-to-face networks were 30% more productive.

We tend to think of society – and organisations – as being places where we harness intuition and rationality to ensure that risk and reward are balanced. The error in that thinking has been that we start with, and arguably remain rooted in, an individualistic paradigm, and ignore or discount the social. Even where we do come up with constructs to help us e.g. ‘social capital’, they have been difficult to quantify.

In short the way we think decision-making happens in organisations is not just inaccurate, it is flawed, and we need to look beyond conventional models of organisation and learning to get to the reality of human experience, and how to really improve performance.

The challenge for organisations and those who work in and with them, is that we are going to have to re-define what we mean by “effective communication” and what tools we use to develop greater relational resilience, adaptability and group decision-making skills. That means more sensitising people to relationship dynamics, and inquiry into social process and the relational field.

• 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:

…hold an inaugural in-person meeting that allows members to connect to each other with both hearts and minds as a way to build trust among them. Set regular meetings, such as quarterly in-person gatherings and bi-weekly conference calls, to maintain momentum. Encourage group members to communicate outside of organized meetings and, more importantly, filter messages about the group’s activities to others in their respective divisions or offices.

I get a little uncomfortable here, partly because of the echoes of George W. Bush and his Coalition of the Willing, and also due to the linguistic absence of two key facets of human systems: relationships and the social. Conventional thinking sees organisations as largely linear and mechanistic, and whilst Kotter acknowledges the value of informal communication (that which takes place outside “organised meetings”), for me there is something missing. There is an assumption that by bringing people together in new groups they will be able to form healthy relationships and communicate effectively. My question is this: if there was a breakdown in, or absence of, the ability to initiate and maintain effective conversations before silos formed, how does any organisation expect people to suddenly start behaving in a way they have not previously?…

Organisations are social and relational systems, and creating a pattern of interaction and communication that makes for sustainable dialogue rather than silo-ing and the growth of ‘them and us-ness’ requires more than re-framing meetings and roles/responsibilities. Effective communication equals effective conversation.

[NB: I will be following up this post with a piece on the principles of effective conversations soon.]

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.

To give a specific example from the hospital I was in: each bed had a green ring binder next to it. This contained all relevant paperwork (care plans, records, detail of treatment/drugs prescribed etc). This file is NOT for a patient or their family to read (as I discovered having started to flick through dad’s), you have to request permission – the file “is for our use only, so we know what is happening”, one nurse told me. Great…

The problem is, that file was a mess. No order, pages filed randomly, not necessarily the right way up; I watched as one nurse leafed through it , and I don’t think she found what she was looking for. If the process is designed to ensure quality of patient care, it is failing. Patient care, I suspect, happens in spite of that folder not because of it. One example may do to illustrate my point. In the 6 weeks or so my father was in hospital, my mother had to repeatedly remind staff that he was blind in one eye. That is an example of a simple piece of data that needed to be communicated at all handovers and easily seen in any ‘care plan’. The obvious rider is that the data here is anecdotal and based on a sample size of one. None the less, from what I observed of the beds around me, the pattern extended beyond one patient.

The Bigger Picture

So, what is the purpose of a process? What inputs/outputs/outcomes relate to it? And the absolute clincher: what question is the process designed to help people working in that organisation answer? The implications of these not being aligned could mean life or death in a hospital. In other organisations, it can often be at the root of performance and efficiency issues. And if ‘management’ are intent on answering a different question to those working for them, it may not be life or death but the sustainability of the organisation is compromised.

What are you doing to make sure your organisation is answering the same question(s)?….

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.

Sir Ken uses this to ask: what is the “irreducible minimum” of the relationship between teacher and learner? The answer is that it is what happens in the hearts and minds of individual learners. I agree, and in the context of an education system, where teacher and learner come together, the irreducible minimum resides in a relationship between two people. Which got me thinking: what is the irreducible minimum of an organisation?

Theatre, education and organisation – all three only having meaning through relationship, they are human systems. The irreducible minimum of an organisation is a relationship, be that between colleagues, a manager and team member, executives, or between an individual representative of that organisation and a client/customer. Everything ultimately emerges from exchanges at a relational level. Of the three human systems – theatre, education and organisation – it is the latter that seems to struggle with this reality in particular.

(See also my posts on Leadership success? It’s all about relationships and Management is a social act.)

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…

And yet where there is hope, despair often lurks. Mark Hughes, for example, is the only person I know of who is actively researching the nature of hope and despair in organisations. In the context of working with clients who have had experience of homelessness and are looking to get back into employment, where you sit on the ‘Hope-Despair Continuum will in no small part dictate how resourced you believe you are in terms devising a plan, let alone acting upon it. And arguably, so long as you are sitting on that line, you are not actually moving anywhere; the sole difference is one position feels ‘hopeful’ and the other ‘despairing’. The personal fallout may differ hugely, the inertia is the same.

So what is the learning here? Two things occur to me.  Neither hope nor despair in themselves may be enough to catalyze ‘positive’ change, and having an action plan is fine so long as you are equipped – emotionally and relationally, and in terms of relevant skills and resources available to you – to use it. Equally, hope and despair may not appear overtly in organisations, yet  often breaks through in other ways. Two examples to be going on with: notice the conversations around any redundancy programme, or whenever a ‘them & us’ dynamic becomes entrenched.

And the irony is, in just such patterns lies the potential for change, if you can identify the conditions that are creating them.

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?

I take the view that what is being offered is data. The question is, what is the data telling me, and how can I engage with it? The truth is that, much as Seth and you or I may not like it, the “way things are done around here” may work perfectly well for the organisation, or at least some people within it. For if everyone follows the same short list of simple rules, then the group behaves in a coherent way as a whole, even if that pattern is not the one you want!

Equally, it is arrogant and naive to assume that we know better, or indeed that offered the opportunity those apparently most attached to these ways of working would in fact not welcome a change. So what to do? One approach is to inquire with the people/person invlved as to what the ‘Simple Rules’ are that they are working to. Ever seen a flock of starlings, or shoal of fish? They follow simple rules:

Human systems do as well, and the trick is to make visible what these rules are, and then engage with the people involved to re-write if necessary. The Simple Rules tool, which comes from Human Systems Dynamics, is a good starting point for an organisational level intervention.

If the answer is “that’s not the way we do things around here”, what is your response?….
Here are a few possible ways of engaging with the statement in question, some more confronting than others. Mix and match as you see fit. The key is you inquire with genuine curiosity, and a willingness to engage and learn. If you believe you are right before you ask any question in return, then how different are you?

• “Great, how do you do things around here?”
• “How often do you review that?”
• “I am curious as to why you feel the need to tell me that….”
• “Brilliant, and who do I talk to if I can see a way of helping us do things even better?
• “How did you come up with that way of doing things?”
• “And how well is that working for you/the team/the department/the company/our clients?”
• “Who is responsible for deciding how things are done round here?”

What would you add to the list?….

Looking at my work with organisations and groups, it is rare that I come away not having become aware of a multitude of connections both within the container I am working in, and ones that link to what is going on outside. The challenge, aside from allowing them to come into awareness, is to discriminate between what is true and useful and what is not. And yet…

As I make meaning from what I see and hear, how certain can I be that what I am experience is similar to, say, what you are experiencing? Let’s just take the seeing bit of this process for a moment. In another experiment, Meindertsma and her colleagues demonstrated that, for example, people from different professions will absorb visual data by focusing on different elements of the same image.

So how do we establish a shared truth? I have rarely heard people in organisational settings (or any other for that matter) really make explicit the basis for why they believe something to be true, and so assessment replaces fact, and assumptions run riot. How can you tell which is which? When you voice assessments or assumptions, someone in the room will disagree (even if they remain silent). Facts land differently, you will know when they hit home.

Next time you are in disagreement and consensus seems a remote possibility, ask yourself whether you are missing some connections, whether what you see is really the same as everyone else, and whether you are in the territory of assessments or facts.