Evolutionary Provocateur

All You Need is Love..

Dan Bobinski over at www.Management-issues.com just wrote an article entitled, How to kill morale and start an exodus. It is a classic story of what happens when managers forget that love is the most important generator of performance; when data drives action and disconnection to what has heart and meaning prevents clear vision. There are a lot of managers in that boat right now. Managers who  truly believe that it is all about control and all about the numbers.

We focus on the manager but what about the culture that values the numbers over performance. Where numbers do not accurately reflect the real dynamic and way that work gets done. Too often assumptions are made where curiousity would be a stronger ally in seeing the underlying forces.

Tim Sanders, with Yahoo has made the point that it is love, not greed that is the Killer App. Tim learned that the three elemental particles of Love are: knowledge, networks and compassion. That was in 2002. The words are even more true now.

Yet old habits die hard. It is easy to blame the people. The real culprit lies in the embedded habits of the organization which rewards data over intuition insight and wisdom.

Time for a rebirth don't you think?

Personal Spirit-The Fuel Every Workplace Needs

My colleague Bob Wiele created the assessment tool One Smart World a while back. Its value to personal and organizational achievement can easily be missed unless someone understands the power of the human spirit as a determinant for success: personal, professional and organizational. Bob has put an explanation of how personal spirit is measured on his blog. It is really a reprint of an article done by the Journal of Psychology and it describes with simplicity the component parts. Head to Bob's Blog to read that in detail.

Personal spirit as initiative, sense of control, and outlook becomes the collective expression of one's ability to receive change, to adapt, flex and alter course of action quickly and at the root become the fulcrum through which intergenerational differences surface as a common playing field. Senior workers turfed early from the workforce will have been depleted on one or more of these three levels. Youth come into the workforce and if they are not able to exercise their initiative they will exercise their sense of control over their lives and leave. In contrast, boomers and traditionalists have been trained to self-sacrifice which naturally depletes their sense of control, initiative and outlook - the lens the world is viewed through.

All this takes place on a personal level. But what about the workplace? Epigenetics tells us that the environment informs cellular response making the immediate connection between the quality of the working environment and support for employees to contribute.

Without exploring and becoming aware of where you are at and where the workplace is at, it would appear that turf wars, silos, depression, addiction and stress related illness will serve as a wedge between what employees can contribute and what the workplace is willing to receive. Closing performance gaps may simply be a case of raising organizational and self-awareness to higher levels.

How much receptivity is there in your workplace to truly contribute talent you know you have not yet tapped into?

The Role of the Manager in Goal Driven Social Networks

Research done within Hewlett Packard by Dennis Sandow under the Knowledge and Innovation Network branch of SoL reveal that the social networks required to achieve goals extend far beyond the company rim to include those who bring passion and purpose to the task. Nick Zeniuk calls it follow the joy.

At the same time this raises the whole question of what the manager's role is. This is a question that Nick found himself facing with the Lincoln Navigator project. He realized that he was in a space of confusion over what he was supposed to do as the wildly creative team around him took off to create. Rather than step in, Nick chose to stop and reflect. This point of awareness is critical as it creates the space for conscious choice to be made rather then leaping first and looking at the results later...if that happens. Fortunately he was in a position to do so. it does not always happen that way. When Fujio Cho, President of Toyota was asked about the difference in culture between plant start up in the U.S. and Japan he replied that the biggest challenge in improving quality was to stop the line. Stopping the line had previously been a sign of doing a bad job.

It is interesting to note what we associate with action. Sometimes the best action is none at all. That opens the space for emergent knowledge by creating receptive space. Much of this rolls back to underlying beliefs and habits around how things work. The patterns tell you everything. It might work to do an organizational habit check every once and a while just to see how hard it is to let go of habits that no longer serve.  One tribe would regularly trade habits just to make sure they were overly attached to them. Not a bad idea.

Organizational Bad Habits

Scepticism once served a useful purpose in science at least. As Tim Flannery pointed out in The Weathermakers, 'While sceptism is the lifeblood of science, it can have drawbacks when society is called on to combat real dangers." We are at that point now in the evolution of humanity. The effect of scepticism is to cast doubt which in turn creates uncertainty which typically ensures that a creative or innovative idea ends up with very little stretch to it. There are no shortage of challenges we face in the world; all of them require radically innovative solutions and a totally different mindset from the one that has been operational to this point in time.

Scepticism is only one of the many habits organizations can adopt as vocal patterns. Another deadly habit is that of judgment. Most people do not even notice when they are seeking to blame or isolate responsibility on single individuals. Judgment creates performance gaps when none might exist. The propensity to focus on what is wrong with the individual ignores the impact of the larger system completely. When judgment becomes ingrained as a habit, the old shamanic saying 'Energy flows where attention goes' applies. A stifled, repressed workforce existing in a fear of judgment creates a relatively unsafe working environment. It is tough to perform in a climate of fear.

In my experience, organizations can also become addicted to acting, frequently without a clear sense of purpose, outcome or direction. The signals are a massive to-do list, a sense of stagnation, and a lot of busy people wondering why they are so busy.

For shifts to be made, organizations, just like people, must acknowledge where the energy is flowing and choose to guide toward a better balance on the whole. There is a story of a tribe which exchanged habits on a regular basis as a way to not get too attached. Presumably they were all good ones yet practicality aside, the idea of staying attentive to what patterns guide day to day actions can mean the difference between staying stagnant or staying on top. 

What does Belief Have to do with Performance?

Everything and nothing. It depends on how you use belief to achieve performance but WAY more importantly, if beliefs that have been unknowingly adopted by a company inhibit or limit employee performance, then wouldn't you like to get out of your own way?

The oft quoted Henry Ford: "Whether you think you can or can't; you are right" has not stopped companies from unknowingly working off of a built in set of limitations operating subliminally as a belief system.

So what is a belief? What does it sound like? Belief has many faces. Sometimes we think of belief as mental models. An easy example of that is: self managed teams don't work. For many self-managed teams do work, but the conditions, circumstances, and outlook initiated a totally different process and outcome.

If the organization/company believes that it is a victim of market conditions, then new legislation impacting its viability is a surprise; in fact pretty much anything that impacts failure is a surprise and success then becomes more of a happy accident.

Raising the subliminal to the visible is an important tool in the sustainable business kit. Habits often reflect beliefs. 'What are we doing over and over again that is not giving us the results we seek?' Ask this and other deep questions you will soon start noticing patterns that reveal direction operating below the conscious radar. This is the place where action leads to results of a higher order.

Beliefs, limiting or empowering, are also held within each individual who work for your company/organization. Every element of their contribution is embued with their perception of what is or is not possible or achievable. You can only implement what you can see and believe is possible.

Making a personal list of what you believe is achievable is a good way to expose what guides action. It is the results that truly show how belief gets put into reality. Track back from the results and you will gain insight into what took you there and whether that belief still serves.