Dissatisfied of (insert organisation)

Work in supported housing in the not for profit sector brings me in contact with a lot of dissatisfied people.  Mostly they don’t know why, and think things should be other than they are.  There’s a lot of emotion and stress involved.

While this might often be projection (projecting dissatisfaction with self/lifestyle/partner/income/whatever onto an organisation), there can be a more positive personal reason.

Discussing this with my critical friend by the banks of the Thames, we came onto the subjects of self development, creativity, learning and change.  Government regulation may lead to a culture in supported housing organisations that is, if I can use a technical term, “stodgy”.  Management becomes hierarchy, empowerment becomes targets and statistics.  Playing this game well leads to advancement, a self reinforcing situation.

Self development can upset this situation, especially if it stimulates creativity.

Creativity, often released by being inappropriate, striving to be different or just a little crazy, does not sit well with such a culture.  Perhaps this is a reason the sector uses external consultants to import new ideas.

Self development stimulates asking questions and the realisation that actually, the person in charge may not know what they are talking about.  Suddenly you notice that the emotions and bias that drive you, drive them too.  No longer can you be satisfied with this, you ask questions, you become the one who always comments on ideas (often adversely).  You have changed and you no longer fit.

I framed this as a positive thing.  If you are dissatisfied with your organisation, and the reason is that you have changed, its time to go and find something that will help you keep growing.

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”….

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

Anxiety as a trigger for learning

The evidence is mounting that real change does not begin until the organization experiences some real threat of pain that in some way dashes its expectations or hope to make it open to the possibility of learning. — Edgar Schein

I was reading an interview where Edgar Schein asserted his belief that all learning is coercive, and that organisations learn because they are forced to.  He maintains that anxiety is neccessary as a trigger for learning, and talks about two types of anxiety.  “Learning anxiety” inhibits learning or trying something new due to fear of failure, while “Survival anxiety” promotes learning when the survival or the individual or the organisation depends on change.

Pessimistic although this seems, it immediately rang a chord with me.  Thinking on my own experience, on several occassions recently I have suggested innovations or changes that might help an organisation learn.  Here I am thinking of systems that deliver management information that were dismissed, only to be requested a short time afterwards.  In the specific cases I am thinking of, change/learning was embraced due to external pressure from funders and from poor performance.

I’m with Schein on the idea that learning anxiety – fear of getting it wrong – prevents learning and therefore change in organisations.  Perhaps not just fear of getting it wrong, but the fear that we will expose our own inadequacies, especially to ourselves.  Learning and change is painful – my own has certainly been at times.  I see this everywhere – especially amongst executives who perhaps have more invested in “being right” first time.

What can we do about this?  We can “feel the fear and do it anyway“, we can acknowledge anxiety and allow for it in how we propose change, and we can raise “Survival anxiety” when proposing change.  The latter puts me in mind of the “disconfirmation” stage of Lewin’s change model, the need to discomfort people and show that the old paradigm is spent, before asking them to change.

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.

Avoiding tasks

As usual I was putting off something I didn’t want to do – and in order to do so I did a  search on avoidance, and procrastination.  Despite the irony of this, it did motivate me to go and do the task.

The job was fixing a screw in a shower.  It turned out to be a 5 minute job, as it had simply come loose.  However, I had cluttered my mind wondering if I’d need to re-drill the hole, use some putty or glue, and wondering if I would be adequate to the task.

Fear of failure certainly played a big role in procrastination in this case, and I think in many other cases as well.  Yet, failure is so important to learning, in business or elsewhere, that avoiding that is likely to kill a business or your own personal development.

 

The habit of “just do it” is part of good time management.  However, that also leads to fragmented work, addictive email checking (I can’t remember the reference, but somewhere I saw time lost by stopping work to check or answer emails frequently amounted to up to 8 hours per week in some cases) and otherwise putting off bigger or more difficult tasks by apparently practising time management.

So the motto might be “eat a frog before breakfast” – do the things you fear most first, to begin to release the mental clutter.

How we learn

This is my view of learning. It is a sense making model, with the implication that planned learning that ignores any of the elements shown is unlikely to be effective as applied learning. I’d love some comments on this.

Many models of adult learning (Kolb, Jarvis, etc.) use a staged process that fails to take account of the doubtful authenticity of experience caused by social and cognitive bias.

An individual’s reflective learning takes place in the space inside social context, reflection, experience and their own emotional and cognitive bias.  For the learning to be effective, both reflection and experience need to be present.  Experience without reflection is a series of actions from which nothing is learned.  Reflection without experience is untried theory.

Put more simply, you can memorise knowledge, but is only “learning” when it is of use in a social context.  Likewise you can reflect on experience, but unless you recognise your unique social and thinking biases, you are trapped by them.  The social context also represents the “situated” nature of learning.