Effective organisations

I was stimulated to think about how organisations become more or less effective after a coaching session I delivered to a client who was part of a senior management team.  I ended up with the following model:

The model is all about alignment between the organisation’s Purpose, People, Processes and the environment the organisation works within.  Where these factors are aligned, the organisation is effective.  Where they are not, it is ineffective.  The arrows between the polarities of alignment and dysfunction are to show that each area is a linear scale; most organisations will have some areas which are in strong alignment, and others where there is weak alignment or dissonance.

Different elements of Purpose, Processes and People may or may not be aligned.  For example, the Purpose of the organisation may align with the environment and with the organisation’s Processes, but if the People aspect of the organisation is out of alignment then areas B, C, and D will show dysfunction.  Translating this into practical terms, an organisation may exist in a highly structured environment and will have adjusted its Purpose and Processes accordingly, but the People within in it may be used to discretion and freedom of action, leading to indifference, disablement and ultimately ineffectiveness.

The challenge for leaders is to keep alignment between Purpose, Processes and People and the environment.

Positive Feedback and targets

Positive feedback in economics explains why some products take off and become the standard, while others don’t.  One example often cited is VHS, which edged it over Betamax (a product with a technical edge) by virtue of having a slight lead in the market.  Because more people had VHS, more VHS cassettes were produced with more choice, making that the choice for those purchasing a system, so more VHS was bought, and so forth.

Another example is a new service being provided by a national charity.  Many local authority commissioners have quickly bought into this service, although it is not yet out of the pilot stage.  I wonder if this is the case of  “everyone else has one, so it must be good”?

Apply this to behaviour at work as well.  If someone gets positive feedback, they believe something worked and will do more of it.  On the other hand, negative feedback, fault finding etc. only tells them what not to do and can lead to risk aversion.

Trouble starts here, as positive feedback can lead to poor decisions – technically we should have ended up with a Betamax standard.  And who remembers when bell-bottomed trousers were the rage (and everyone had them)?

To encourage positive behaviour at work, people set targets.  This would be fine if we knew what would be effective, but the specialised nature of modern work means that the impact of our actions on the whole enterprise is unclear.  Targets are best guesses, which then lock people into behaviour patterns that may be damaging, or parochial and narrow in outlook.  Missed targets can turn potential positive feedback to negative or blaming.

Positive feedback appears to drive a lot of behaviour.  Targets drive a lot of behaviour at work.  How can we know it is effective behaviour until long after the fact, if ever?

Transformational Leadership – 3

I would like to Continue my earlier thoughts about transformational leadership and particularly my wariness towards the “charismatic” element that Bernard M Bass identified as necessary (“Transactional to Transformational Leadership”, in Organizational Dynamics).

One way in which a leader can transform others is by example.  This is popularly called being a “role model”.  It works because one way we learn is by copying others.   Understanding of the behaviour copied is not required, simply copy someone who is good at what they do (in line with Bandura‘s theory of modelling).  The idea is that understanding will develop later as you experience how the behaviour copied works, and get further help from the expert (sometimes called cognitive apprenticeship).  Learning physical activities where description of the activity in words is impossible requires this sort of learning, but it applies to other tacit knowledge.  The way a child learns from its parents is the most common example.

For a leader this puts a premium on what you actually do, rather than what you espouse.  You will modify the behaviour of those around you by acting differently yourself, not by changing what the mission statement says.  It also means that if you have senior team members whose behaviour is unhelpful, they have to either make a personal change or go, as their behaviour reflects upon you and how serious you are about enacting a set of values.

One up side to this is that if you want a happy and effective organisation, make yourself happy and effective first – permission to enjoy!

Transformational Leadership 2

I previously wrote about transformational leadership on 6th February this year.  However, two things I read recently made me reflect again on leadership style.

One was an article, “Transactional to Transformational Leadership” by Bernard M. Bass.  Bass contrasted “transactional”  leaders, who relied on contingent reward (do the job or don’t get paid at its most crude) and management by exception, with “transformational” leaders.  Bass believed that transformational leaders achieved great results through charisma, showing individualised consideration to staff, and stimulating those staff intellectually.  I have no beef with the latter two as good things for a leader to do, but I do mistrust charisma (which Bass believed could be learnt).

The second thing I read was an article about Mike Wake wasting millions and his dubious involvement with and promotion of women employees in his organisation Novas.  I had the pleasure of working for Novas many years ago, and for myself and others who knew the organisation, the main surprise is that the allegations mentioned in the article took so long to come out.   Mike was not a charismatic leader in the conventional understanding of the term, and Bass recognises that quiet but visionary people with a lot of determination are charismatic.  Mike did intellectually stimulate and show individual consideration to employees, but as this included promoting women he had relationships with, it was a parody of the ethical transformational leader.  Over a period of less than twenty years Mike Wake led his organisation from nothing to a large organisation and now, possibly, back to nothing again.

The picture at the head of this article displays the very picture of the leader that worries me.  The leader is at the centre, communication is to spokes of the wheel, and the followers are not connected.  Maybe this works well if the leader is a great and selfless one (met lots of those) but even then it neglects emergent potential from employees.

Bass himself recognised the potential problems of transformational leadership that is selfish or antisocial (“The Two Faces of Charismatic Leadership”, Leaders Magazine).

If there is a remedy to this, it lies in more distributed leadership.  The UK government has invested much money in leadership training and development, and its big money for consultancy firms.  The case of Mike Wake suggests that unless this concentrates on leaders giving away power and pushing responsibility downwards, then the Novas scenario is all too likely.  My own view is that if we replace “charisma” with the redistribution of leadership throughout an organisation, then we may get better ethics and longer term success.

Why we have trouble with TUPE

I have been reading “The Structure and Dynamics of Organisations and Groups”, written by Eric Berne back in 1961.

Old as this is, it still contains some interesting ideas.  One of these is that groups come together for specific work or activities, which is carried out most efficiently during stable periods.  However, a group reacts first to any internal or external disruption to its structure in order to preserve itself.  This means that in times of threat much of the work that a group might undertake is displaced by activity centred around self preservation.

This reminds me of “forming, storming, norming, performing“, noting that performing comes last for a group.  It also fits with Heron’s model of change:

In Heron’s model, as things change they only get back to productivity after a period of emotion followed by experimentation, that requires the right type of interventions to handle well.

Observing TUPE transfers within supported housing, normally caused by changes in Supporting People contracts, has illustrated this in action for me.  The amount of effort spent on change management, or on groups resisting change, is extraordinary in some ways.  In other ways it is very normal, as changes in a group lead all members to lose much of the social capital that they have developed in that group.

However, if we also take the view that in a constantly changing world a useful metaphor for organisations is that of an organism, then we may think all that effort and lost work is worth it.  In this metaphor, the definition of death is something that is no longer changing.

Giving compliments to manage behaviour

One way of giving positive reinforcement in behaviour modification is in providing compliments, approval, encouragement, and affirmation; a ratio of five compliments for every one complaint is generally seen as being effective in altering behavior in a desired manner^[18]

Behaviour modification is concerned with changing how people react and behave using positive and negative reinforcement.  It has its supporters and critics.

I’ve highlighted the quote above (from Wikipedia) as its something I’ve discussed with participants in training.  It fits with the idea of unconditional positive regard for a person you are supporting (although you might take exception to their behaviour).  The 5:1 principle is something that many of us find very difficult to achieve in practice.

If we apply this to leadership and management, we would get a very different environment to that which is found in many organisations.   My personal experience has been that belief in people, positive feedback and trust get people to give their best.  Mistrust, blame and negativity generally don’t.

Why is it so easy to be critical rather than positive?  Part of it is practice, but a big part is about how we feel about ourselves.  This morning I was not feeling great, and on the way to work caught myself having a jealous moment or two, thinking negatively about some of my colleagues.  A “not OK” moment as transactional analysis might term it.  As soon as my mood picked up that vanished.

Staying with transactional analysis, being in an “I’m OK, you’re OK” position would enable the positive compliment giving type of leadership that effective behaviour modification would require.  We come back to ourselves, and changing ourselves so that we might more positively manage others.

So tonight I’m going to bed, thinking, “I’m OK”….

Leadership and action logic

David Rooke and William Torbert wrote an article about the “Seven Transformations” of leadership.  Lots of people seem to like their ideas (e.g. another blog I read on this). It was originally published in the Harvard Business Review back in 2005.

Their basic premise was that the effectiveness of a leader depends on their “action logic” – how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.  They identified 7 stages in leadership development, each more effective than the next.

Their research and model is impressive.  However, I am always suspicious of models that show any sort of linear progression, and neatly divide things into stages.  I’m also suspicious of something based on top executives at big international Western businesses.  For someone like me working in the not for profit sector, it has to really ring true for me to feel it is relevant.

In the article the three middle categories, to which the majority of managers belong, were the most recognisable for me.  I could see how I went through the transformations myself.  I’ve given them below:

Expert	Rules by logic and expertise. Seeks rational efficiency.	Good as an individual contributor.
Achiever	Meets strategic goals. Effectively achieves   goals through teams; juggles managerial duties and   market demands.	Well suited to managerial roles; action and goal oriented.
Individualist	Interweaves competing personal and company action logics. Creates unique structures to resolve gaps   between strategy and performance.	Effective in venture and consulting roles.

I remember when I started to study an MBA that my learning was characterised by the idea that there was a right way to do things, the “expert” action logic. Its something I see often in organisations, who want solutions to problems, and want them fast.

The “achiever” makes me think of an organisation I worked for (and many I know) where the focus was on multiple targets, achieving goals, taking lots of action – and seldom ever reflecting.

As for being an individualist – I remember the step a couple of years back to asking the question, “why these targets?”.  “What is the assumption behind this?”  “Can we think differently?”.

The reason for my suspicion of the model is that, like most  linear models, a lot of it actually happens all at once and not in stages.  The action we take depends on how we are thinking at a particular moment.  One day I might reflect, think a lot, take into account lots of factors and people’s different realities.  Another time I might look for a solution without reflecting, or be pressured enough to go for a target whether I think its worthwhile or not.

To Rooke and Torbert’s credit, they recognise this, speaking about the “dominant” action logic for a leader and do not treat it as clear cut.  I suspect the simplicity of the model will help many people make sense of leadership development, but be a trap for “experts”.

Leaders and followers

In previous posts about transformational leadership and Singapore, I began to wonder about the leader and the led.  In Singapore I perceived a leadership focused on the material and secular, whom people were willing to follow because it delivered success.  This appeared to produce a sameness that I found stifling.

Should leadership also be about the spiritual in government and secular organisations?  In the UK church and state have been kept largely separate, but I’d like to apply the question to leading organisations.  Singapore also kept these things separate, and a wonderful diversity of religion existed – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Chinese.  Yet outside this strict rules and materialistic sameness were backed by a culture of conformity.

Lee Kuan Yew’s (former Prime Minister) leadership might be termed transformational – he inspired people with a vision of a materially better future and led them to it.  However, this also created conformity and sameness that carries a risk for the future, one where the reliance of the people on good leaders is a weakness.

An alternative for a leader, be they a business or political leader (and are the 2 different?) is to lead not through inspiration, but by creating the conditions for people to question.  The Internet (self organising and changing like a living entity) is an argument that you don’t even need the leader, and that leadership distributed amongst participants is equally strong in the right circumstances.

Whether you need the leader or not, I’d suggest that a leader’s job must always be spiritual as well as material.  How we think and feel is linked critically to how we act and so to the business of business.  This is normally expressed as motivation, but I believe it is more than that and that a truly transformational leader would inspire people to examine their own beliefs and ways of being.

I’d like to suggest that its important for all of us to move from followership to discovery, and that the key to this is how we go about learning.  I’ll end with a quote I find important:

Learning to become an effective self-directed learner is probably the greatest intellectual and psychological challenge that an individual can face in a lifetime……  Some people never attempt to acquire the competencies of serious learning to learn as they are addicted to the deferential prescriptive approach.

- Dealtry, R. (2004), “The savvy learner”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 16

Innovation – failure and success

I have led two similar innovative projects for not for profit organisations, one of which was implemented, and the other of which suffered prolonged delays.  While many innovation projects stumble and fail, working on two similar projects gave me a chance to compare factors that may have contributed to getting through the planning stage to implementation.

First, I asked myself if it was me?  The projects happened at roughly the same time and I don’t think my approach was significantly different.  In both cases participants were very enthusiastic and I paid insufficient attention to some of the powerful stakeholders involved.

Next, I considered how they differed in scope.  The one that suffered the most delay was more ambitious and involved greater potential innovation.  This made it harder to persuade the powerful stakeholders to approve implementation.

However, the most significant factor appeared to be the forces driving the need for change.  The delayed project had powerful business drivers, but they were not as acute as in the other case.  In addition, the CEO set a clear deadline for the one that went successfully through to implementation, forcing other stakeholders to make decisions.

I’ve drawn several tentative lessons from this:

1. Projects need a powerful champion who can ensure barriers to timely implementation can be overcome.
2. Pay attention to powerful and interested stakeholders, even if they are only going to be involved in a final review and sign off – the importance of persuasion and politics.
3. Outside forces help promote change.
4. Smaller step by step adaptations are easier to implement than more ambitious innovations.
5. A big change requires either a very pressing need and powerful champions, or involvement of as many interested stakeholders as possible.

These lessons apply to my work in the not for profit sector, where the involvement of all potential stakeholders is widely expected and risk can often be treated conservatively.  Note that I am only thinking about getting a project through into implementation here, not about the quality of the final result.

Point 5 links to reasons why it is so hard for organisations to change and innovate in a timely way, and why strategic drift may be so widespread.  Innovation changes culture, culture can represent a mindset that it is hard to step out of, so perhaps the biggest job for any significant innovation is to manage powerful stakeholders so that they are ready for change.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is the latest historical “movement” in classical leadership (which can be contrasted with “shared leadership“).

Transformational leaders seek to share their vision, gain commitment and motivation from their team, and inspire performance. It involves charisma, rests on morality and ethics and underlies modern executive coaching and top team development.  Its the current favourite for academics and gurus but as yet there seems to be little empirical proof available for claims about it.

One implication of transformational leadership is that the before trying to lead others, the leader needs to understand themselves.  You might argue that this has always been the case, and I’d agree, but with transformational leadership it seems even more central.

You could so easily end up back with the idea of the “big man”, the egotistical leader who leads not from any moral basis or vision, but simply from charisma and self belief, creating dependent followers.  To guard against this the self development of the leader becomes crucial, especially understanding how their own emotion and cognitive biases affect their decisions, and how they interact with people.

If you think of leadership as “relational influence” (Patton) rather than one penguin out in front of the rest going who knows where, then we get a better sense of what transformational leadership might be.  To my mind, influencing, developing and inspiring others to become their best is more about participation and shared leadership than classical models of leadership.

The problem with all this is that the “masters of the universe” are likely to think this is all very woolly, when they pause for breath between paintball contests.  I searched for images of “shared leadership” and came up with the image where we all hold hands.  Show me the money?

Shared leadership just isn’t heroic.  Transformational leadership can be, but there I think is a trap waiting for would be leaders.