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Changing the Game

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I love it when I hear of a manager who does something simple and easy that shifts organisational culture immediately.

A recent example of this is the CEO of ING Direct in the USA.  He has recently moved his office to the floor of their telephone banking call centre.

He is now much closer to his staff and to his customers both physically and psychologically.

He is able to experience the company and its work with customers directly, as opposed to through a balanced scorecard or some other set of metrics. He is able to listen to the conversations and make a real difference in appreciating the good stuff and providing a touch on the tiller when it is needed. This first hand experience of how things are working ensures a tightness in execution that is bound to pay off.

My guess is that this one game-changing move will have more impact more quickly than most ‘strategic change efforts’.

  • What simple game-changing moves have you seen work?
  • What simple game-changing moves have you made?

Just imagine…

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You have been working like a dog.  Long hours, taking work home to try and bring a project in on time and in budget.

Family and friends have taken a back seat for the past three weeks as you work on this opportunity.

Your telephone rings.  It’s your boss – asking for a meeting in her office at your convenience to discuss progress on the project.

You step into her office and she asks you to close the door.

She thanks you for the hard work you are putting in.  She knows the hours you have done in the office and knows that you have taken work home.  She appreciates you going the ‘extra mile’ and thanks you again.

She then asks if she can give you some feedback.

‘When I see you working these long hours as you have been over the last three weeks, and I see you taking work home in the evenings and over week-ends I get worried.  I worry that you will burn-out.  I worry that your relationships outside of work will suffer.  I worry that you might resent work because of the way that it intrudes on your personal life. 

What can I do, as your manager, to help you get your work done in a 37 hour week? 

What might you be able to differently that would help?’

  • What do you do as a manager to recognise and reward those that regularly put in the extra hours?
  • Do you thank them?
  • Does that encourage them to work even longer?
  • Will that help you to retain talent in the long run?
  • What example do you set around working long hours?
  • There is a work life balance issue in your workplace. What is your role, as the manager, in helping to sort it out?

First, second and third sectors – the unrealised opportunities

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The Progressive Managers Network exists to radically improve the quality of management.

It is designed for managers from:

  • the business private sector – which is ‘privately’ owned and profit motivated;
  • the public sector – owned by the state;
  • the social economy, or third sector, including a wide range of community, voluntary and not-for-profit activities.

Historically each of these sectors has formed its own ‘ghettoes’ of professional practice, development and learning.  This has led to stereotypes taking hold and low levels of trust and respect between the sectors.  Crudely speaking the stereotypes are:

  1. Private sector = cigar chomping ‘Thatcherite’ entrepreneurs who would sell their own granny and destroy the planet if the ‘return on capital’ is adequate – values and ethics subordinated in pursuit of profit.  Actively seek opportunities for exploitation (workers, environment, customers – but preferably all three) – in order to generate cash.
  2. Public sector = cardigan wearing bureaucrats pushing papers across desks until  they can collect their pensions.  Dull and uninspiring  at work they often have exciting outlets for their passions outside of office hours – such as bell-ringing or volunteering.
  3. Third sector = unreconstructed class war heroes, sandal wearing entrepreneurs, communitarian do-gooders with myopic spheres of interest, bicycles and brown rice.

The Network allows managers from all three sectors to learn together allows for ideas to be transferred from sector to sector and provides the opportunity for collaborations and partnerships to develop.

This matters because because increasingly large parts of a modern developed economy are driven by partnerships between public, private and third sectors.  Organisations that succeed will be those who learn best how to use these partnership to get things done.

So step out of your ghetto, set aside the stereotypes and get involved.

Developing People and Gardening

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Michael McKinney over at Leading Blog has found some great stuff on developing people from Lord Sharman.

“To some degree, developing people in an organization is impossible. You can’t develop them; they develop themselves, and so your job is like that of a head gardener. You figure out what the various microclimates are around the place, and then you figure out the qualities of the plants that you need to go into those microclimates. Similarly, you select the people based on their strengths and place them in those jobs.”

Key point: If you have someone who is under-performing ask yourself “is this person in a microclimate, a context, in which it is possible for them to thrive?” If not – then move them. A cactus won’t thrive in a bog.

“I’ve seen notes of appraisal interviews, which say that two-thirds of the interview is spent talking about what the guy’s not good at. Now, that’s great—I can’t imagine anybody coming out of an interview like that feeling anything other than very depressed.”

The Gardener

“What you want to do is spend time talking about what the person is good at and how he’s going to develop that. Sure, see whether you can do something about the weaknesses, but to my way of thinking, appraisal interviews should be two-thirds about what the person is good at and how those great assets can be used within the organization.”

Key point: accentuate the positive – and get locked into a virtuous spiral rather than a death-roll of negativity and decline. Have you caught someone doing something well today?

“You’ll always have people that find it much easier to be critical than to be encouraging… If you start criticizing your colleagues about what they’re bad at all the time rather than encouraging them, that’s sure as hell going to get down through the organization very quickly.”

Key point: Learning to recognise, encourage and promote the positive is a surprisingly hard habit to acquire. In many organisations it is almost counter-cultural! I know this is something that I always have to keep working on personally.

Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.

People join these organisations because they:

  1. Want to make a positive difference in the world
  2. Develop their own potential and capacity in making this difference
  3. Want to provide food, warmth and shelter for themselves and their loved ones.

They want to belong in an organisation where they can grow, make a difference and earn a living.

They need respectful and nurturing management. The salary to them is important – but in the long run it is personal growth and making a difference that they really value. They need management that focuses on helping them to make their contribution.

Many of the organisations I have worked with have struggled in this area. People lose their sense of purpose and identity as they become consumed by delivering ‘the service’ or ‘the contract’. They become more technically proficient at what they do – but their optimism and belief slowly fades away and performance slowly degrades.

This process is driven by an orthodox approach to management that focuses on tasks and fails to engage with dreams and aspirations. The noble goals are transformed into routine. There is a famous story about the floor sweeper at NASA who proudly told visitors that he was working to help put men on the moon. Well, in many organisations this process of ennobling a job is completely reversed. People doing great work, contributing to great goals, become reduced to ‘marketing co-ordinators’, ‘database administrators’ or ‘account managers’. They get absorbed into management systems, balanced scorecards, customer service standards and the other paraphernalia of modern management and they lose sight of what they are all about.

Managing people with passion has to be done differently. It has to keep the sense of purpose ‘up front’.

It has to keep the passion burning.