Absentee leaders and Zombie Managers: Hidden, Harmful and in need of Help

Flicking through The Psychologist Magazine the other day, I unexpectedly came across the phrase ‘absentee leader.’ [i] Although it was new to me, it immediately resonated, and I was intrigued to find out more. As I did, I realised the phenomena could just as well apply to some managers.

What is the absentee leader?

A 2015[ii] survey of 1,000 working adults that showed that eight of the top nine complaints about leaders concerned behaviours that were absent; that is, employees were most concerned about what their bosses weren’t doing. The complaints weren’t about actively bad leadership behaviour, rather they were about unmet expectations of what leaders should be doing.

Absentee Leadership[iii] has been defined as leadership that fails to lift off; where individuals occupy leadership positions (and enjoy their attending privileges) but neglect to fulfil many of leadership’s core responsibilities. It’s when people occupy leadership roles but fail to be present in them, are psychologically absent (if not also physically absent!). In this way they avoid meaningful engagement with their team.

What are the effects of absentee leaders?

Working for an absentee leader is associated with role ambiguity, health complaints, intra-team bullying and has negative effects on job satisfaction. Unsurprisingly it saps motivation and team and organisational loyalty. It creates employee stress and a talent drain that, in time, affects the organization’s bottom line. That’s to say, zombie management and absentee leadership is bad for people in their orbit and for the whole organization.

Why isn’t it dealt with by the organization?

The research answer to this question this speaks volumes. It appears that organisational capacity is so taken up dealing with other manifestations of leadership malfeasance such as sexual harassment and abuse, bullying, theft, excessive drinking, illicit drugtaking and other maladaptive coping behaviours, that a passive issue like absentee leadership doesn’t even register as a problem.

Absentee leaders and zombie managers despite being much more common and more toxic to both group and individual functioning than the misbehaving leaders described above, are often invisible to those in power. Unlike the highly visible, attention-grabbing stress responses exhibited by some leaders, coping by psychologically disappearing is sustainable over a long period before coming to light. And indeed, such leaders and managers have been described as ‘silent organisation killers.’ [iv]

Why does it happen?

Research suggests some possible reasons[v].

• People promoted from ‘being a good worker’ to management or leadership struggle with the different nature of leadership challenges

• Excessive work stress

• Too many responsibilities

• Role overload

• Too many direct reports

• No support in their role

In other words, being psychologically absent can be viewed as a highly adaptive way of escaping or avoiding a difficult environment which someone has neither the skill nor the resources to cope with.

What can be done?

Bring the issue into the light

The issue has to be brought into the light. The clues should be there: churn, sickness, performance, team difficulties and other data. Alternatively, a staff survey might indicate any problem areas. It’s important to note that such operators might be very good at appearing ‘on it’ in the presence of those senior to them, this is partly how they remain undisturbed. It’s the staff who will be able to identify the zombies at large in the organisation.

Consider the context

There is the big picture to consider. How well does the organization prepare and look after its leaders? Is improvement needed in systems and processes that support leadership? If the organization has produced a toxic working culture, everyone will be trying to cope in their own particular way. Sometimes what is needed is a change in organisational culture.

Team Dynamics

Leadership is a relational activity. Creating psychological safety, building connectivity and encouraging honest contracting around staff expectations of their leader might act to reconnect, energise and motivate a disaffected leader, and team. It helps to bear in mind that most people want to do a good job and that, with skilled help, relationships can be repaired and reset. However, there will be those wholly unsuited for the role, promoted beyond their comfort or competency, or just in the wrong situation. They need help to return to a place they can once again be productive.

Help the individual

Sometimes, its just that someone hasn’t made the transition to being a leader or manager. They don’t understand the expectations of them. They don’t know how to lead a team, manage conflict, delegate or how to develop staff. In this case leadership development or personal coaching can help.

For a great toolkit to support leadership development see our Leadership Development Essentials Bundle

[i] In this article by Dr Laura McHale (2023). McHale, L., 2023, Corporate gaslighting, absentee leaders and the emotions of work. The Psychologist. December. pp 34-37

[ii] This is in Gregory, S., 2018, The most common type of incompetent leader. Harvard Business Review

[iii] This definition comes from this article Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard business press.

[iv] (Gregory, 2018) again

[v] McHale, L ,2022 Where’s the boss? Korn Ferry. Thought Leadership Paper.

See also

Hogan, R., Kaiser, R.B., Sherman, R.A. & Harms, P.D. (2021). Twenty years on the dark side: six lessons about bad leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal, 73, 199-213.

A very good short article by C. Brad entitled: The Phantom Menace: Absentee leadership and its silent destruction on Linkedin. 21.11.2023

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Co-Creating Planning Teams For Dialogic OD’, published by BMI Publishing, ‘Positive Psychology in Business’, published by Pavillion, ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management', published by Kogan Page.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

More blog posts categorised as ‘Leadership’ 

Could it be the active recruitment of incompetent men that stops women getting to the top?

The central cause, argues Tomas Chasmorro-Premuzic, of the low numbers of women recruited into leadership, ranging from 36% in bottom tier management to only 6% at CEO level, isn’t that they aren’t competitive, assertive, bold, talented or in some other ill-defined way, enough like men; but rather that a persistent systematic mistake is made during the recruitment process. A mistake that leads to many of the opportunities, up to 74% according to one survey quoted, being filled with incompetent men.

Hence the question isn’t: how can we get more women into management, but rather, how do we stop so many incompetent men filling the available positions?

No one sets out to hire incompetent leaders, so how can this happen? The answer lies in the difference between what is attractive at the selection process and what is effective in a leader.

Why do men get selected more often?

When looking for leadership potential, many instinctively look for behaviour that suggests a forceful and dominant character. This attentional focus on forcefulness and dominance reinforces the preferential selection of men for leadership in two ways. Firstly, this behaviour, along with the traits that support it, are found more often in men than in women. And secondly, when they are displayed by women they can be frowned upon. Such women can be dismissed as being too forceful or domineering to be considered as good leadership material. Yet, in a classic Catch-22 situation, if they don’t display this type of behaviour they are also not perceived as being suitably leader-like. Hence it is frequently forceful and dominant presenting men who get selected into leadership positions.

Research shows, however, that those who are most likely to appear forceful and dominant, are also those who are more likely to self-centred, entitled and narcissistic. All of which are related to the personality traits of narcissism and psychopathy, and none of which are good predictors of effective leadership behaviour.

In this way, it becomes apparent that there is a fundamental, and negatively impactful, difference between the personality traits and behaviours it takes to be chosen as a leader, and those it takes to be effective as a leader. The essential problem is that the traits that are taken as signs of leadership talent in men, are the very same that will eventually predict their downfall as leaders. In other words when considering male candidates, clear character flaws are mistaken for attractive leadership qualities. How does this happen?

The mistaken appointment of narcissists and psychopaths

Chamorro-Premuzic explains how this mistake is made. One important aspect is that confidence is taken as a proxy for competence. However, there is no relationship between confidence and competence. Most of us skew a little to over-confidence, it’s normal and healthy. But excessive overconfidence becomes dangerous and, statistically speaking, men are significantly more likely than women to display excessive overconfidence in their abilities. And while confidence is commonly regarded as the most important quality for a leader, research suggests that in fact it is less important than expertise, intelligence, hard-work, connections and even luck!

This over-confidence that we can find so attractive has its roots in two particular personality traits, narcissism and psychopathology. Narcissism and psychopathology are both more common in leaders than in the general population. For example, psychopathy is present in 4-20% of people in senior management roles, compared to 1% in the general population. Narcissism also runs at about 1% in the general population yet is estimated to be 5% amongst CEOs. By accident, this is what we end up recruiting for. Why, how does it happen?

Narcissists are master are masters of impression management, great at conveying confidence (and remember we use confidence as a proxy for competence). At the same time the advertised rewards of leadership, lucrative compensation, fancy titles and the other signs of success, could have been purpose designed to attract them in their droves. Meanwhile courage and risk-taking often coexist with psychopathology, enabling psychopaths to demonstrate striking audacity and resilience under stress, for example. They also often display a high verbal ability, meaning they can be eloquent and persuasive and tend to come across as charming and charismatic. What’s not to like, then, at the interview stage?

What happens when they become leaders

However, both narcissists and psychopaths, while brilliant at getting the role, often perform poorly thereafter. For examples psychopaths, once in the role, tend to operate passively, failing to fulfil basic management tasks such as evaluating performance, giving accurate feedback or rewarding employees. They don’t hold teams accountable for their performance and are likely to prove unable to motivate others. They are loathe to accept blame and responsibility for the consequences of their actions. As overconfident leaders they can be immune to negative feedback.

Narcissists, meanwhile, are significantly prone to counterproductive behaviour such as bullying, fraud, white-collar crime and harassment, including sexual harassment. And while they are good at dreaming big, they are less good at delivering on that dream. What to do instead then?

Going forward

Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that, given this picture, the last thing we should be doing, if we want to improve the quality of our leaders, is to help women contenders become ‘more like the men’!

 Secondly, Emotional Quotient (EQ), or emotional intelligence is acknowledged as the best single measure of people skills, which are key to getting the best out of other people, the distilled task of leadership. And people with a higher EQ are generally more effective in leadership roles. This is the proxy we should be using to predict leadership success, not levels of confidence.

Thirdly, the three important leadership competencies that are enabled by higher EQ are found at higher rates in women. These are transformational leadership, personal effectiveness and self-awareness.

So, in essence, we need to

• Stop using confidence as a proxy for competence

• Stop being dazzled by attractive qualities at the point of selection, and select instead for the personality traits and other factors that predict success once in the role

• Avoid prompting narcissists and psychopaths to positions of leadership

• Stop looking at leadership potential through a gendered lens

• Start to appreciate some of the qualities that are more typically, but obviously not exclusively, found in woman that correlate with successful leadership, and look for them in our selection processes.

Those interested to explore this topic further are referred to Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2019) Harvard Review Business Press. All statistics quoted and other assertions made are referenced in this text.

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Co-Creating Planning Teams For Dialogic OD’, published by BMI Publishing, ‘Positive Psychology in Business’, published by Pavillion, ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management', published by Kogan Page.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

More blog posts categorised as ‘Thought Provoking’ 

How a dose of humility helps leaders succeed

In our narcissistic world the idea that being humble can help us succeed sounds counter-intuitive. Isn’t being successful based on making sure our achievements get noticed?

Well yes, but humility, it turns out, brings some useful things to the party. Let’s start with a definition. A humble leader neither over-estimates nor under-estimates his or her ability to relate to other team members, holding instead a ‘just right’ view of themselves. This fits with lots of research supporting the importance of self-knowledge to successful leadership: we need to know, acknowledge and take responsibility for our towering strengths and our yawing weaknesses.

Creates space for others to develop

Humility shows itself in a focus on others rather than self, through interpersonal modesty, through teachability, and through a willingness to express appreciation of others. This relates humility to other research showing the power of appreciation to help others grow. And supports the idea that a good leader knows how and when to get themselves (or their ego!) ‘out of the way’ to allow others to thrive and grow.

Increases team resources

We assess someone’s degree of humility when we see how they handle conflict, negotiate ideas, deal with power differentials, use wealth, receive honour and engage with cultural differences. I think we can all imagine the kind of person we would rather be around when these situations arise. Demonstrating a degree of humility in these situations makes it easier for the other person, helping them to be at their best in a challenging situation. In this way a leader who is able to show humility increases the resources in their system by allowing others to find their voice and develop confidence, indeed to shine.

Supports good team relationships

Humility, it has been established, is an important relational nutrient that helps people work better together by helping to repair bonds when relationships have become strained. Eating humble pie is an important part of maintaining good relationships with other people and is strongly related with eliciting forgiveness and building trust and commitment. 

Enhances team performance

When a leader leads through example, but exhibiting appropriate humility, it encourages the whole team to relate to each other in a different, more humble way. They become more willing to evaluate themselves accurately, appreciate the strengths of other team members, and to learn from each other. All this in turn encourages enhanced team performance.

Complements leadership drive

Now here is the really interesting bit, research found that exceptional leaders who guide their companies into periods of productive growth and also successfully set them up to continue thriving after their departure, exhibit both drive and humility. What does humility add to drive to produce these exceptional results?

Enhances resilience

One theory is that humility helps to buffer some of the effects of competitiveness and drive, an excess of which is thought to contribute to the high rates of divorce, depression and burnout amongst successful leaders. Bringing humility into the mix allows for a balance of both competition and cooperation which enhances resilience. The humbleness acts to soften interpersonal relationships in such a way that the leader can engage in a highly competitive way without incurring the usual wear and tear on relationships. They are more supported and less isolated.

So, what does this mean for you?

As a leader

·      If you already have the strengths of humility recognize it as an asset, not an obstacle, to successful, resilience leadership

·      If you don’t yet have this as a strength, it may well be one to nurture

·      Learn to use it in appropriate situations

o   To strength the team

o   To repair any damage to relationships

o   To improve team performance

o   To help others be their best

o   To create virtuous circles of cooperation, ‘we’ not ‘I’ thinking that boosts team cohesiveness

As a consultant or coach

·      Recognize this as a potential leadership strength

·      Help your client become skilled in identifying situations that call for humility

·      Assist them in learning how to exercise humility skilfully

Our strengths packs the Langley Group VIA Cards and Positran Strengths cards both include further information on this strength, how to work with it and how to develop it further, as does Ryan Niemiec’s book Character Strength Interventions.

Much of the material in this article was drawn from Davis, Hook DeBlaere and Placeres (2017) in Oades, Steger, Delle Fave and Passmore: The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of The Psychology of Positivity and Strengths-Based Aproaches to Work. 

 Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Co-Creating Planning Teams For Dialogic OD’, ‘Positive Psychology in Business’ ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

More blog posts categorised as ‘Leadership’

Energy state transformation is the key to Appreciative Inquiry effectiveness

I have recently come across a great paper about human energy, it is referenced at the end of this piece. It set me thinking about what it was saying in relation to Appreciative Inquiry. These are my thoughts.

What is 'energy' in an organisaitonal setting?

Energy can be a transforming resource. When people become ‘energised’ they are transformed before our eyes. We talk about how people become ‘fired up’ or are ‘on fire’. We see increased animation, people seem more dynamic; quiet wallflowers are suddenly able to hold a room’s attention because they are talking about something that really matters to them. The generation of this energy transforms potential futures as while un-energised people are disinclined to ‘spend’ any energy or to exert any energy to get something done, energised people are a force for movement.

We know from earlier theorists that we can conceptualise energy as non-activated, that is, latent, or, as activated, that is, ‘in motion’. We understand human energy to be made up of different elements e.g. to have affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions.  Human energy can be characterised as being positive or negative in intent or direction.

Organisational energy, while clearly related to individual energy, can also be thought of separately as a resource of a collective unit. Four different collective or organisational energy states have been identified: productive energy, comfortable energy, resigned inertia, and corrosive energy. These names have great face validity with me: armed with this language I can see I am in the business, frequently, of transforming resigned inertia or corrosive organisational energy into productive organisational energy that is going to work to move things forward.

These four states can be seen as lying across two dimensions: intensity and quality. Intensity as a dimension ranges from high (activated energy) to low (non-activated energy). While quality ranges from positive to negative reflecting how the energy is constructive or destructive of the organizations goals.

Productive (high positive) organisational energy can be characterized as a collective temporary emergent state. Temporary of course means not permanent, collective means involving everyone. The idea of an ‘emergent’ phenomena comes from the theory of complex adaptive systems and suggests that the phenomena of productive (high positive) organisational energy ‘emerges’ from the behaviour of individual actors in the system. The behaviour of these individual actors that help to create collective high positive organisational energy include individual interactions in settings of mutual dependence; the creation of shared interpretations of shared events; and by the generation of shared emotional or cognitive states.

A language for Appreciuative Inquiry interventions

It was at this point of my reading that I sat up and took notice. This is exactly the area in which Appreciative Inquiry and other dialogic, co-creative change methodologies create their magic. It is precisely by actively working with the interactions in situations of mutual dependency (a whole system), by creating shared interpretations of shared experiences (the process we take people through to create ‘account’ of past, present and future) and by the deliberate generation and expansion of positive emotions (Appreciative Inquiry particularly) that we are able to have an effect on the energy of a group or an organization and so the potential for action and change. I find this articulation of the phenomena of organisational energy and how it relates to the processes of Appreciative Inquiry very exciting.

In this paper energy is described as a resource that allows actors to generate new cognitive frameworks to organise their understanding of a situation. In other words, as we have different experiences together, so we see things differently together, and therefore we can act differently, together. As the paper explains, once a group starts to experience a shared enthusiasm, shared cognitive activation (brain or thought activity) and shared sense of working for joint goals, so the situation begins to feel more one of mutuality and less one of antagonisms. As the sense of mutuality (we’re all in this together) grows, so people are more likely to get involved helping to create meaning, direction setting, deciding, motivating others and in general taking on such leadership tasks in some area or other. The leadership capacity of the system expands. Leadership capacity and leadership enactment becomes less a property of a job title and more a property of the social system.  It is this shift in the leadership capacity and pattern in the group, as well as the emergent productive energy that allows change to happen. Again this describes exactly what, as a practitioner, I see as the Appreciative Inquiry process unfolds.

And so I suggest that as we look to help organizations adapt and grow in changing conditions we need to attend to the phenomena of organisational energy. Thanks to researchers and theorists we have a language in which to describe what we see in organisations and to help us understand what underlies the effectiveness of these ‘positive energy, whole system, dialogic’ change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry. By giving us words and a framework they help people articulate something they instinctively know i.e. difference between the energy of resigned inertia and productive energy. They make it possible to explain what Appreciative Inquiry does and how: namely that it transforms the energy of resigned inertia or corrosive energy into productive energy by working with the collective phenomena from which the temporary phenomena of productive energy emerges. By so doing it creates a shift in energy state and an increase in leadership capacity allowing for effective organisational action.

I am highly, if not wholly, indebted in this article to the paper ‘Experiencing Human Energy as a Catalyst for Developing Leadership Capacity’ by Bernard Vogel published in Developing Leaders for Positive Organising: a 21st Century Repertoire for Leading in Extraordinary Times, of the which I have here only scratched the surface.

Sarah Lewis

Take a coaching approach - 7 top tips for developing talent in your team

A key challenge for leaders and managers is developing the capacity of their staff or team. Taking a coaching approach allows you to focus on drawing out motivation rather than trying to push it in!  It allows you to create energy and motivation and it is usually experienced as an empowering process by your coachee. It helps people develop their initiative and sense of ownership of their work and tasks, and, in general, converts potential into capacity.

Here are seven tips to help make your coaching conversations highly productive.

The TIPS

1) Be clear what you are coaching for

It’s important to be clear why you taking a coaching approach rather than just giving information, orders or instruction. Generally it is worth taking a coaching approach when we want to invest in skill development.

Examples might be:

• To improve problem-solving skills
• To improve emotional intelligence when interacting with customers
• To increase confidence in own abilities and so ability to be pro-active and use initiative
• To increase team collaboration and mutual support
• To develop expert excel skills

It is also important to know when not to invest in a coaching approach.

For example while for one person developing expert excel skills might be key for their job, for another their engagement with excel may be a very rare occurrence. In which case other ways of solving the problem might be more effective and appropriate.

2) Select appropriate opportunities

Coaching is only one of a number of management interaction styles and is not right for all occasions. In emergency situations for instance, you are better off just telling people what they need to do.

Some indicators of a possibly good opportunity for coaching are when:

• Whatever the person is struggling with, or asking for help with, is going to be a recurring challenge
• There is no panic. Heightened emotional states, such as panic, can lead to unhelpful learning. For instance they ‘learn’ that you are an obstructive unhelpful so-and-so rather than that you helped them develop a new skill or think for themselves.
• There is time to assure yourself that they are good to go after the conversation and that you are happy with their next steps. This needn’t take long, but there needs to be time to conclude the conversation.
• Someone is asking for help
• Someone comes to you with a problem, and its clear they have a solution in mind
• You are trying to help someone and they are resisting all your suggestions

3) Use Turning Questions to get into a coaching conversation

If people come to you expecting you to give them the answer, then you need to turn the conversation into a coaching conversation. These questions will help:

• ‘That sounds interesting/challenging/important, what do you think might be the way forward? What ideas do you already have?'
• 'If that is what you are worried about, what do you want to see happen instead?'
• 'If I wasn’t here, what would you do about this?'
• 'I can see you are looking for help with this, what is the most helpful question I ask you to help you with your thinking in the 30 seconds we have here?'

After asking any of those, or a similar question, put an expectant expression on your face and stop speaking! Create a big space full of expectation and hope for them to answer into. Hold your nerve.

These questions work to turn the question away from your resourcefulness towards theirs. It also helps move them from passive recipient waiting for an answer, to active agents in finding a way forward.

4) Help them draw on their existing resources

Questions you can usefully ask to achieve this include such questions as:

• ‘When have you tackled something similar? Not necessarily here but in other places you’ve worked or in other situations? How did that work out? How could what you learnt from that be relevant here?’
• ‘Who else knows something about this and might be interested to work with you on finding a way forward?’
• ‘What ideas do you have?’
• ‘Where else might there be some information on this that might stimulate ideas? Websites, in-house training, forums, professional associations?’

5) Help them explore and develop possibilities. Reality check.

This is where you finally get to feed your knowledge, problem-solving skills, and expertise into the conversation, but in a different way. You use it to help shape up the idea into the best it can be, making sure they retain ownership of it. For example:

• ‘Explain to me more about how that’s a good idea? How do you see it working?’
• ‘Have you considered/ taken into account/ thought about...?’
• ‘So what will you do if....?”
• ‘Hm, I’m just wondering how that might go down with... what do you think?’
• ‘Great, what do you see the risks as being? How will you deal with them?’

This is also where you set any boundaries on action. This might range from ‘It’s a great/interesting/novel/exciting/challenging/provocative idea and I truly am sorry to have to say I can’t support it as it will be too expensive/take more time than we have/be seen as too risky.’ Then move swiftly too ‘However, I think the bit about ... could work, lets explore that more.’ Or ‘what else have you got?’

6) Road test for readiness

This is a crucially important part of the process where you are testing to see how committed, ready and energised they are to make this happen. Questions you can ask at this point include:

• ‘What’s your first step?’
• ‘Who else do you need to talk to?’
• 'How will I know you are making progress?'
• 'On a scale of 1-10 how ready are you to get going on this?'
• 'What else needs to happen to increase your readiness?'
• 'How can I support you to make this happen?'

Offer encouragement and support, express belief, and agree a ‘progress check’ process.

7) It’s not for every situation and it doesn’t work every time

Coaching is not suitable for every occasion. Sometimes people do need to be told. For example when:

• They don’t know enough to even start to engage with the challenge
• They are missing a vital piece of information, and need to be informed of it
• Its an emergency, you have the answer and speed is of the essence
• Its not worth the time or energy e.g. it is doesn’t fit the criteria of point 1

Also sometimes particular people or even groups of people get stuck in patterns of belief that makes it hard for them to engage in coaching, for instance

• They believe its your job to think, not theirs
• They’re still smarting from some previous managerial behaviour (this can go on for years)
• They have zero confidence in themselves and their ability and are highly dependent on others
• They are severely depressed, anxious or otherwise cognitively incapacitated
• They are fully preoccupied with other challenges, maybe outside of work, and have no capacity to engage with being creative.

In this case you need to address these challenges before you can hope to get very far with coaching.

In conclusion

So be aware that coaching isn’t for everyone and every situation. Beyond that though, on the whole, once people genuinely believe that you want them to contribute and you will support them in their adventures of learning, they relish it; and they will grow in ability, confidence, initiative and general switched-on-ness before your very eyes!

Other Resources

More on this, and details of how to practice Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal can all be found in Sarah’s latest book Positive Psychology and Change

For more on Leadership Skills visit our knowledge warehouse

For case studies on Leadership at work visit our case studies collection

Or, click through to learn about or to order our positive psychology based positive organisational development card pack and other support resources

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

Making your own mission

Anyone who has ever tried to assemble flat pack furniture will know that vague or unclear instructions can be of as little use as no instructions. Yet how many times do we receive requests from higher management to ‘Increase employee engagement’, ‘heighten brand awareness’, ‘Improve office culture’ or ‘Streamline work processes’. Indeed we may be guilty of issuing such directives. Orders such as these that do not have specific measurable outcomes, or direction as to how management wants them to be fulfilled, they are mere vague desires disguised in management jargon.

Negative Outcomes

Unfortunately, it is not often appropriate or good for one’s career to highlight these concerns to those who issued these vague objectives. but leaving them unaddressed leads to negative outcomes such as:

·      Lack of focus and motivation in individuals

·      Deterioration in office culture

·      Low morale

·      Uncoordinated or unproductive actions

·      Teams working for mutually exclusive goals

·      Loss of confidence in leadership

·      Loss of ambitious staff

These effects of unclear goal setting in an office environment can result in lost revenue and employee dissatisfaction.

Case Study

To help us understand the potential consequences of poor mission setting, and to see what a leader who finds himself in this situation can do, let’s examine the actions of Colonel Richard Westley, O.B.E., M.C., who  found himself in exactly this situation in 1995 during the genocidal war in Bosnia.

Just like the now infamous town of Srebrenica, Gorazde is small Muslim Bosniak town in the mainly Christian Serb south of Bosnia. In 1995 British Army sent a small group of troops under United Nations authority to Gorazde. Their orders were twofold:

·      Serve as the eyes and ears of future N.A.T.O./U.N. action

·      To protect the civilian populations of the designated safe areas against armed attacks and other hostile acts, through the presence of its troops and, if necessary, through the application of air power, in accordance with agreed procedure

There were no planned future actions by N.A.T.O. or the U.N. at that point and so no direction as to what information to prioritise gathering. And through the vague terminology ‘serve as the eyes and ears’, no direction as to what kind of intelligence gathering to focus on. It also did not specify what ‘other hostile acts’ included, what the ‘agreed procedure’ was or most importantly give any indication as to how the mere ‘presence’ of several hundred lightly armed peacekeepers will deter several thousand heavily armed and highly motivated Serbs. Especially considering that the ‘application of air power’ turned out to be non-existent.

Defining the Mission

However, he and his immediate superior knew the risks of not having a clear mission and decided on a simple solution; to make their own. This lead Colonel Westley and his immediate superior to devise their own, more specific objectives:

·      To prevent any Serbian encroachments into any part of the U.N. outlined Safe zone of Gorazde, with force if necessary

·      To prevent any Bosniak forays out of the U.N. safe zone of Gorazde

·      To establish a strong psychological presence to both sides by operating on both sides on the exclusion line (i.e. patrolling outside the safe zone and establishing freedom of action, showing they won’t be bullied)

·      To prevent civilian casualties as much as possible

·      To neutrally liaise between the two sides when possible

·      To update U.N. command to any developments in and around the safe zone such as troop build ups, violations of the safe zone or humanitarian emergencies

What this meant in practice was the decision to change from peace keepers to peace enforcers. By redefining their mission in this clearer and more aggressive way, adopting a  stance to actively hold the ring between the two forces come what may, and to protect civilians at any cost, it removed any doubt in the ranks as to why they were being deployed far from home somewhere they had never heard of.  It also allowed the British to establish a stronger defensive position and gave them a stronger negotiating position.

This contrasts with other UN peacekeepers in the area who:

·      Were constrained by U.N. agreed procedure in the threat of force and use of force to counter Serbian violations

·      Suffered a progressive loss of morale caused by an inability to influence events

·      Gave full initiative to the Serbian forces in the region and emboldened them

·      Undermined U.N. military credibility in the region

·      Became overly dependant on negotiation

Opposing Outcomes

Around two months after the British deployment the Serbs attempted to capture Gorazde and then Srebrenica. At Gorazde, they encountered immediate and effective resistance on the ridges around the town at the extreme edge of the exclusion zone from prepared and motivated British troops.  This gave the Bosniak soldiers of Gorazde time to move up to these ridges out of their own exclusion zone, relieve the British peacekeepers and protect the town themselves. It is important to note that Colonel Westley was aware that firstly the small U.N. force would never stop the Serbs on their own and secondly that whoever controlled the ridges around Gorazde, but between the two exclusion zones of both Serbs and Bosniaks, controlled Gorazde.  So, he called on Bosniak forces as soon as fighting began to prevent a massacre, against U.N. procedure.

However, in the proceeding months at Srebrenica, another European force had allowed the Serbs to take 30 of their soldiers hostage to use as human shields against air power, allowed them to seize several observation points around the town without resistance, and, allowed high ranking Serbian officers into the town which spread discord and did not fully enforce the exclusion zone around the town. This meant that when the Serbs chose to seize the town and murder all the males, the peacekeeping force were in no position to resist and had lost the will to do so. As unfortunate or tragic as these actions look in retrospect at each stage the UN soldiers were attempting to follow their vague orders while not overstepping them, and were being constrained by U.N. procedure. Remember they were only to protect the safe area’s ‘through the PRESENCE of its troops’, not explicitly through their actions. 

Redefining over Interpreting the Mission

Colonel Westley pursued a smaller but more defined mission while giving himself more freedom of action and was thus able to focus on and prepare for the worst eventualities. Whereas as the other force dissipated their effort on several contradictory aims meaning they achieved none of them and lost focus on the main goal of preventing ethnic cleansing. Proving that interpreting an instruction is not the same as redefining it. Interpreting a mission in your own way is a refinement of a flawed instruction and will inherit many of those original flaws, redefining a mission is a paradigm shift resulting in a completely new mental framework in which to address the problem.  

This is an extreme example but a common outcome of unclear goal setting and a heroic but simple example of how to avoid that fate. Individuals, teams, departments and companies all work better towards a clear, defined and measurable goal. So, when you receive that next aspirational contradictory pie in the sky instruction from upper management, or indeed if you are in danger of issuing it, don’t ignore it but redefine it.

Redefine in a way that’s

·      Concise,

·      Easy to understand,

·      Measurable and

·      Achievable,

So, doing a few things right is a lot better than doing many things wrong.     

Other Resources

The book itself - Positive Psychology And Change, published by Wiley.

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology for Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

See more, Leadership, Leadership Skills and Though Provoking articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

Entrepreneurs And Owners - Five questions that will add value to your bottom line

Save smart - make savings and improvements without the hidden costs

In the quest for ever great efficiencies, productivity and general cost saving, a few key questions can open up new avenues to improve performance and profitability.

1. How can we learn from our best performers?

An over-attachment to a view of organizations as a set of roles and role behaviours, with expected minimum standards of performance can blind us to the exceptional performance of the our best staff. Focused on trying to prevent our worst performers from costing us money, we don’t always focus on really examining how our best performers make or save us money. Research into these examples of positive deviance has demonstrated that there are distinctions between the best and the rest; and that these distinctions can frequently be small and replicable by others.

For example Atul Gawande, a general surgeon, was interested to learn more about how the increase in life expectation for people with cystic fibrous had been achieved. The first hospital he visited had a good track record and an array of processes and procedures for treating and supporting those with CF. He was impressed. Then he visited the top performing hospital where the life expectation of people with CF under its care is almost double the average.  What he found was while they too provided excellent care in all areas, they had one further by identifing one key feature, lung capacity, that made the key difference. It was the single-minded care and effort that went into supporting people to maintain or improve their lung capacity that seemed to be the distinguishing feature. This is not someone he could have learnt by studying the worst performing hospitals. Someone in your organization demonstrating double the sales figures, or twice the academic success rate? Be curious. Study and learn.

2. How much is this saving costing us?

When people or organizations focus in on areas where savings might lie, and start to implement processes to realise those savings, they don’t always account for the hidden costs of administering the process or achieving compliance. For example insisting that all requests for housing repairs are submitted to be assessed and approved by a manager might seem a good cost control idea. However as some Housing Associations have realised, the hidden costs of bureaucracy and close scrutiny can be greater than the cost of many minor repairs. If the bureaucratic delay means that the situation then escalates into a formal complaint or dispute then costs rise more and senior manager time starts to be eaten into. Some housing organizations have started to give front line staff direct access to budget to authorise payment for repairs. Not only has the overall repair budget not risen, but the benefits of engaged and committed staff who feel they can really make a timely difference and be helpful, and more satisfied clients, have been a real bonus to organisational culture and reputation.

In the same vein I recently read that the administration of the competitive tendering process in the NHS, that is the bureaucratic, managerial and legal costs, are conservatively estimated at £10 billion every year (and that’s not counting the time spent by those hopeful of securing a contract submitting exhaustive tender applications for relatively small contracts.) So we know how much the ‘saving’ is costing the NHS, do we know how much it is saving in real terms?

3. What behaviour do we want and what behaviour are we rewarding?

Over time perverse incentives creep into organisational life. As people make changes, launch initiatives or develop projects misalignments can occur between the desired behaviour and the behaviour rewarded by the contingences of the system. An example I have come across a few times concerns sales people. Rewarding sales people on their individual sales is a time honoured effective motivational system for many sales staff. However, it is not uncommon for an organisation to realise at some point that they are missing out on opportunities for cross-selling, either across products or between areas. They introduce a load of cross-product training and encourage people to try to sell other products, or introduce their colleagues to their clients. To spend time doing this, if the reward system hasn’t changed, is perverse since it lessens the time available for selling more of the thing you do get rewarded for. So there is a perverse incentive in the system not to spend time cross-selling.

4. How can we help people spend more time doing things they enjoy and less time doing things they don’t?

It is not always apparent to people the high cost of trying to get people to do things for which they have no aptitude, and less liking. Firstly when people have little aptitude for a part of their role the return on investment of trying to train them in it can be invisible. In other words hours of management time might be devoted to improving skills in this area to little avail. Secondly, even the most conscientious of people will be drawn towards putting off those parts of their job they dread, while the less driven find endless ways not to be in a position to do the hated deed. Somehow we get focused on the short-term objective, getting this person to this, and lose sight of the bigger picture which is just that a particular outcome needs to be achieved; not necessarily in this way, not necessarily by this person. In other words, sometimes we would be better off to step back and ask ‘Who would be better suited to this task?’ or ‘How else can we achieve this objective?’

On the other hand we know that people using their natural strengths, all other things being equal, are usually highly motivated, engaged and productive. Doing what we feel good doing is motivating, struggling with things about which we feel a hopeless inadequacy and dread (note this is different to being at the beginning of an eagerly anticipated learning curve) is demotivating. Demotivated people are a cost to your business.

5. How can we make our workplace a great place to be?

To some extent sickness absence is a discretionary behaviour. Clearly at one extreme we are too ill to rise from the bed, while at the other we are bursting with health and vitality. But between these extremes is the grey zone: tired, hung-over, bit down, cold coming on, bit head-achy, it could be flu etc. Two factors affect whether that person decides to go into work or take a day off. The push or pull factors of the alternatives e.g. the pull of a sunny day or the push of all my mates are away and I’ve no money to spend; and, the push and pull factors of work. Push factors might include being fed up with the work they’ve got at the moment, problems with colleagues or feelings about their managers while pull factors include loving the work, enjoying the company, feeling appreciated on a daily basis, believing your presence makes a real difference and feelings of mutuality and loyalty. Obviously you don’t want anyone coming in when they shouldn’t and spreading infectious diseases, but beyond that a great place to work is likely to have a positive effect on attendance rates.

Other Resources

Much more about the features of co-creative change, guidance on how to do it, and practical information about on the key methodologies mentioned here can be found in Sarah’s new book Positive Psychology and Change

See more articles on Leadership in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Leadership Gratitude Exercise

I used this recently with a group of managers as part of a workshop on positive and appreciative leadership. It is an effective way into the virtuous practices aspect of flourishing organizations and into the topic of authentic leadership. It could just as well be used as an exercise in individual executive coaching or development.

Objective

The brief moment of reflection on blessings that the exercise invites helped these leaders remember that they are connected to, and dependent on, many others. Some left resolved to make their (previously somewhat hidden?) sense of gratitude and appreciation more obvious. This exercise could be built on with individuals with the suggestion of the keeping of a gratitude journal. (The clue is in the title, it’s a journal in which you write down things you are grateful for everyday. This exercise is proven to lift mood in a short space of time).

The Exercise

Form people into groups of 4-6 people and invite them to introduce themselves. Then invite them each to share three things they feel grateful for

1) To their colleagues (individual or collective)

2) To their organization as a whole, or the leadership of their organization

3) And finally offer them a free choice (anything or anyone of their choice to whom or for which they feel grateful or gratitude)

Suggest they might like to start their sentences:

 ‘I want to express thanks..’

or

‘I’m very grateful that/for…’

And encourage them to enlarge on what difference the thing they are grateful for, or person they are grateful to, has made to their lives.

Once everyone has been around and shared their stories encourage the group to reflect on the experience of the exercise and, as ever, their learning from it.

Feedback from the recent workshop included the observation that it was easy to overlook the things that one is grateful for amongst the hurly-burly, frustrations and challenges of organizational life and that to reflect on reasons to be grateful was both a pleasant and a humbling experience.

In addition people commented on the value of taking time to experience gratitude, noticing that this led, in some cases, to a resolve to say something to someone. In a coaching session one could build on this to suggest that they write the person a gratitude letter, and then arrange a time to read it to them. This again is proven to be an excellent mood boosting exercise.

When to use

It worked well as an opener to a session exploring what leadership is and means. It could also be used:

• As an exploration of virtuous practices in flourishing organizations
• In workshops focused on authentic, ethical and moral leadership
• As part of individual or executive coaching

Other Resources

More on using Positive Psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles about positive psychology and leadership in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Why We Should Cultivate Gratitude In Our Leaders – Particularly In Difficult Times

One might have thought that the expression of gratitude was for the benefit of the recipient, to feel acknowledged and affirmed in their generous act: possibly so. However the experience of gratitude also brings great benefit to the donor, and some of those benefits can be seen to act as an inoculation against the dangerous seductions of privilege, power and position.

 Gratitude is an acknowledgement that we have received something of benefit from others. The grateful person reacts to the goodness of others in a benevolent and receptive fashion. Classically it was considered to be the greatest of the virtues. However, like all virtues, it needs to be cultivated. Resentment at the good fortune of others and a sense of personal entitlement seem to come more easily to us. So why bother to cultivate a sense of gratitude? What are the benefits? And why might it be especially beneficial to leaders to experience gratitude?

1. Gratitude enhances resilience and coping abilities

Counting one’s blessings in time of stress is a well-known coping mechanism. Such behaviour works by helping to facilitate a switch of attention from the negative and depressing in any situation to the positive and encouraging. It helps people switch into a more positive mental state, which in turn makes it more likely they will be able to adopt a pro-active adaptive coping mode following some set-back.

Specifically feeling gratitude makes it more likely that someone will be able to seek social support from others and that they will be able to positively reframe the situation (finding the silver linings). Gratitude has been found to be a key component of promoting post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress. And it plays a key part in determining transplant surgery post-operative quality of life. Experiencing gratitude was a key component affecting resilience and post-trauma coping for American students in the aftermath of the shock and horror of 9/11. All in all the evidence is fairly strong that the experience of gratitude promotes adaptive coping and personal growth following setbacks or trauma.

Leadership can be a stressful process: a degree of resilience is a requisite for the job these days. Cultivating a sense of gratitude for the good things going on and the benefits others bring will promote greater resilience, better coping, better mental and physical health and personal growth and renewal.

2. Gratitude builds and strengthens relationships

Feeling grateful encourages people to consider ways to reciprocate the goodness or kindness they have received. Such reciprocal behaviour builds social bonds, creating a mutually reinforcing positive cycle of expression and acknowledgement of interdependency. It enhances trust. In addition grateful people are attractive to others; being found to be extraverted, agreeable, empathic, emotionally stable, forgiving, trusting and generous. Gratitude is associated with empathy, forgiveness and a willingness to help others. These things inspire loyalty and commitment amongst other things. Gratitude is a vital interpersonal emotion, the absence of which undermines social harmony.

Leaders can’t do it on their own whatever the myth of hero leadership might suggest. Healthy relationships are key to organizational success. Leaders get things done through other people. Leaders need enthusiastic, committed, loyal and responsive team members and followers. Being grateful, recognising other’s benevolence, and reciprocating in kind help to build these essential social bonds and enhance organizational social capital.

3. Gratitude helps develop flourishing organizations

Cameron discovered that an emphasis on, and prevalence of, virtuous behaviour is a defining feature of flourishing organizations and positive leadership. Gratitude acts to motivate virtuous behaviour, that is, action taken to benefit others. Gratitude acts as a benefit detector making it more likely that opportunities to express appreciation and gratefulness will be spotted. Expressing gratitude reinforces pro-social behaviour while feeling grateful motivates pro-social behaviour. In this way gratitude is a motivating and energising emotion, not just a passive pleasant feeling. The benefits of gratitude can be far reaching. Acts of gratitude can stimulate virtuous circles of generous and grateful behaviour as the recipient of benefit is inclined to pass it on i.e. to do someone else a favour.

Leadership is all about cultivating and creating productive working environments. Virtuous circles of self re-enforcing beneficial behaviour that smooth organizational life and facilitate the effective transfer of skills and resources through acts of helping, the exercise of patience and forgiveness, and the expression of gratitude help to increase organizational capability without increasing hard cost.

4. Gratitude increases goal attainment

Interestingly gratitude appears to enhance goal achievement. Often the assumption is that a state of gratitude might induce passivity and complacency. However the limited research evidence available suggests that gratitude enhances effortful goal striving. One would imagine this is a product of the well-researched benefits of positive emotions in general: greater creativity, sociality, tenacity and so on.

Leadership is, amongst other things, about goal attainment. It seems that cultivating an attitude of gratitude in the process of goal striving, rather than giving into emotions of frustration and blame, aids goal achievement.

5. Gratitude increases personal wellbeing

Gratitude acts as a vaccination against envy. Envy is a negative emotional state characterized by resentment, a sense of inferiority, longing and frustration. It creates unhappiness and mental distress. Gratitude directs attention away from material goods more towards social goods. Grateful people appreciate positive qualities in others and are able to feel happy over their good fortune. They are also less likely to compare themselves unfavourably with people of a higher status. By encouraging a focus on the positive and beneficial in the present moment, gratitude also seems to protect against the damaging effects of regret.

Grateful people are concerned with the wellbeing of others, both in particular and in general. This focus helps them fulfil the basic needs for personal growth i.e. relationships and community.  They are less likely to define success in material terms. Materialism is damaging to subjective wellbeing and it is correlated with many things unhelpful to leadership such as less relatedness, less autonomy, and less competence.

 Leaders often compete in a world where advancement and success are measured by the trappings of material possession: salary, office space, houses and cars. Given our straitened times and the shift in many sectors from a sense of abundance to one of scarcity – less promotion, less bonus payments, less corporate benefits – cultivating increased gratitude may help inoculate against the corrosive emotions of entitlement, resentment and envy.

Gratitude is the mindful awareness of benefits in one’s life. It seems that counting one’s blessings on a regular basis really does help with overcoming the vicissitudes of life and with maintaining optimal personal functioning. For those in leadership positions the benefits can expand to increase organizational functioning. Feeling gratitude doesn’t come easily to many of us, but the evidence is mounting that the benefits it brings are worth the effort it takes to cultivate a grateful outlook on things.

Further reading

Emmons R and Mishra A (2011) ‘Why gratitude enhances wellbeing: what we know, what we need to know’, in Sheldon K, Kashdan T, Steger M (eds) Designing positive Psychology.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about Positive Emotions in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

How ‘Change Management’ Can Be A Hindrance To Achieving Organizational Change

We are constantly told that, in today’s world, change is a permanent feature of organizational life. Given this is it surprising the extent to which organizations struggle with the concept of change in organizations. Myths abound. Working with organizations I constantly hear the refrain ‘people don’t like change’ and ‘change is hard’. Neither of these statements are necessarily true, as we see below. What is true is that the way we understand organizations, understand change, and go about achieving change can make the job much harder than it need be.

Part of the problem is that our ideas in this area are outdated. We think and act as if the organization is a perfectly designed and aligned machine that we can plan to reconfigure, and then just systemically and mechanically set about reconfiguring. The organization is not a machine; it is a living system of people with its own internal logic and ways of behaving. We need to work with the dynamic, inventive, thoughtful nature of our organizations, not against it. In the same vein, our views of leadership can be a hindrance to achieving fast, responsive and adaptive change. We act sometimes as if we expect our leaders to be all seeing, all knowing, all powerful. They’re not. However they are increasingly expected to introduce changes in work practices, routines and structures as part of their leadership role. Unknowingly they have often picked up some unhelpful ‘rules of thumb’ about implementing change at work. Here we expose the fallacious thinking behind five of them.

You can’t implement the change until you have thought through every step and have every possible question answered.

Not True. In many situations it is sufficient to have a sense of the end goal, or key question, along with some shared guiding principles about how the change will unfold. For example ‘We need to produce our goods more efficiently’, or, ‘How can we cut our process times?’ With these in place leaders can call on the collective intelligence of the organization as it embarks on learning by doing: taking the first steps, reviewing progress, learning from experience and involving those who know the detail in their areas.

This ‘all-seeing’ belief leads to exhaustive energy going into detailed forecasting and analysis of every possible impact and consequence of possibilities often leading to paralysis by analysis. It slows things down, allows rumours to fill the information vacuum, and creates feelings of disempowerment. Worse of all it disregards the huge knowledge base that is the organization; wasting organizational assets.

You can control the communication within the organization about change

Impossible! People are sense-making creatures who constantly work to make sense of what is happening around them. This means it is not possible to control communication in this way. By withholding information we convey something, usually distrust or secrecy. But more than this, in this day and age with so many communication channels instantly available to people, there is no chance of being aware of everything that is being said about the change. Instead leaders need to focus on making sure they get to hear what sense is being made of what is going on so that they can contribute a different or corrective perspective.

This ‘control’ belief leads to embargoes on information sharing, ‘until we have decided everything’ (see above) and much investment in finding ‘the right words’ to convey the story of the change. Meanwhile people are free to make their own sense of what is happening uninhibited by any corrective input from management. And when the carefully chosen words are finally broadcast, leadership is often dismayed to discover that they don’t work to create a shared sense of the meaning of the change.

To communicate about change is to engage people with the change

Not necessarily. People start to engage with the change when they start working out what it means for them, what it ‘looks like’, where the benefits or advantages might be, how they can navigate it, what resources are there to help them. They find out through exploration and discovery. They become more engaged when they are asked questions. “How can we implement this here?’ ‘What is the best way of achieving that?’ ‘What needs to be different for us to be able to…?’ People have to use their imaginations and creativity to start visualizing what their bit of the world will be like when ‘the change’ has happened. Everyone needs the opportunity to create rich pictures of what the words and ideas in the change mean in their context. The answer to the question ‘What might it mean for us?’ is jointly constructed and evolves as new information emerges.

The belief that communication alone equals engagement leads to an over-emphasis on communicating about ‘the change’. Staff hear managers talking endlessly about how important this change is, how big it is, how transformational it will be, yet no one seems to know what the change actually means for people. To be part of this scenario is to suffer a confused sense of ‘but what are we talking about?’ This in itself is usually symptomatic of the fact that at this point there is only a fuzzy picture of what this much-heralded change will mean for people: much better to get people involved in finding out.

That planning makes things happen

Sadly no! How much simpler life would be if it did. Creating plans can be an extremely helpful activity as long as we realize that what they do is create accounts and stories of how the future can be. Until people translate the plans into activity on the ground, the plans are just plans. For example I might develop a really detailed plan about emigrating to Australia, including shipping and packing and visas and job prospects and everything you can think of, but until I do something that impacts on my possibilities in the world, for instance by applying for a visa, then planning is all I have done. Plans are an expression of intention. Things start to happen when intention is enacted.

This belief in ‘plan as action’ fuels a plethora of projects and roadmaps and spreadsheets of interconnection, key milestones, tasks, measures and so on. People can invest time and energy in this fondly believing that they are ‘doing change’. A much more energizing alternative is to bring people together to start exploring ‘the change’ and generating ideas for action, and then to write documents that create a coherent account of the actions people are taking.

That change is always disliked and resisted

No. If this were true none of us would emerge from babyhood. Our life is a story of change and growth, of expansion and adaptation, of discovery and adjustment. Do you wish you had never learnt to ride a bike? That was a change. Had never had a haircut? That was a change. What is true is that change takes energy, and people don’t necessarily always have the energy or inclination to engage with change. It is not change itself that is the issue, it is the effect imposed change can have on things that are important to us: autonomy, choice, power, desire, satisfaction, self-management, sense of competency, group status, sense of identity and so on. If we attend carefully to enhancing these within the change process then there is a much greater chance that it will be experienced as life-enhancing growth like so many other changes in our lives.

This much repeated and highly prevalent belief leads to a defensive and fearful approach to organizational change, inducing much girding of loins by managers before going out to face the wrath of those affected by the change.

So, what is the alternative? Once we give up the idea of the leader or leadership team as all knowing, of change as a linear and logical process of compliance, and of people as passive recipients of information, we can start to work in a much more organization friendly way with change. Many new approaches that focus on achieving collaborative transformation are emerging such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space and World Café. These approaches recognize organizational change as a collective effort, as a social process that can be inspiring and dynamic with leaps of understanding as well as being messy and confusing at times. They work with the best of the human condition – the importance to us of our relationships, our imagination, our ability to care and to feel and to create meaning in life. In this way they release managers and leaders from the impossible responsibility of foreseeing all possibilities and instead liberate the organization to find productive ways forward in an ever-changing organization landscape, together.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to create change can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about change in the Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Classic New Broom Mistakes

The pressure on new leaders or senior appointments to make an impact, and quickly, is tremendous. The organization has spent time and money attracting, selecting and securing the chosen candidate, now they want to see the value they have bought. It’s a brave person who can hold fire while they take time to look and learn; take time to find out what works here, and how it does; to find out who the people are who really ensure the work gets done; to find out who is brave enough to deliver bad news. This knowledge is often hidden, while, to new eyes, what doesn’t work, who doesn’t look or behave like management behaviour, and who too often isn’t at the end of their phone or at their desk, is all too obvious. In their attempts both to improve things and make a mark quickly, New Brooms frequently commit one or all of these mistakes:

1.They Believe in Year Zero. New Brooms often act as if everything that happened before their arrival is irrelevant. They have no interest in why things are the way they are, they know only that they are wrong. The wholesale change that follows as they (re)create the organization in the image of their last organization, or a textbook organization, tramples over history, accidentally throwing out precious babies with the bath water.

2.They Create Tomorrow’s Problems. ‘Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.’ said Senge.  And it follows that today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems. New Brooms, in their enthusiasm to create new solutions, often inadvertently create the foundations for the next set of problems, for the next new person to solve. The experience on the ground can be of repeated extreme pendulum swings.

3.They Create Ground Zero. This approach often accompanies the Year Zero mentality: since nothing created before I arrived is of value, nothing will be lost in its destruction. Creating ground zero usually starts with the drawing up of a new organizational chart followed by frenzied activity restructuring, firing and rehiring, redrawing all paper work (job descriptions etc.), and retraining to create the brave new world. All too often the map changes but the terrain remains the same

4.They Have The Answer. At last our leader is in a position of power where they can put this great new idea they have come across into practice: LEAN, Team-based working, BPR. The list of management fads from which to choose is endless. The trouble is that there is no one right way to organize. Organizations are full of irresolvable tensions, they are dynamic entities that flux and flow, seeking to resolve the irresolvable. In this way they can keep everything in play. Once there is only one answer, only one way, the benefits of equi-finality and fluidity are lost.

5.They Love Tidiness. This approach is often related to having the answer. To the newcomer the evolved solutions are messy. The organizational chart is not neat, things aren’t arranged logically, the rationales for the way things are done are idiosyncratic, it doesn’t seem equable, everything is an acceptable exception. Like Trinny and Susanna they tear through the mess, creating order, boxing things up, cloning and standardizing. Everyone must start at 8.30, no exceptions. Bang goes the best customer service girl we ever had, who can’t get in until 8.45. Tough!

6.They Cut Through The Gordian Knot. Our new broom doesn’t have the time or the inclination to engage with office politics, so pretends they don’t exist. As they set about finding out what’s what, they dismiss any notion of being manipulated by the players. It’s easier to take everything at face value and then apply their own superior 20/20 vision to get to the truth. Often the people who lose out are those who really don’t know how to play politics and who strive to deliver a truth, as everyone else angles to demonstrate their irreplaceable value

7.They Believe Context Is Irrelevant. Leaders who believe they are impervious to office politics often also believe that context is irrelevant. They have a plan for change. There will be winners and losers. It’s very cold out in the employment market at present. The leader is in a very powerful position, determining people’s futures. Without a lively awareness of this context, it is very easy to mistake people’s quest to retain job security with the expression of a heartfelt endorsement of the new leader’s genius and a real desire for change. From here it is all too easy to get rid of dissenting voices.

8.They Fire the Opposition. The new leader is insecure: they need to prove their worth. They don’t want to hear that their plan has flaws, that there are benefits to the current, irregular, way of doing things. Expression of such thoughts is heard as disloyalty, easier to label such dissenters as resistant to change.

9.They Devalue Social Capital. The new leader is seduced by the organizational chart and all the paperwork that dictates who must report to whom, how the job must be done. Focused on this they fail to notice the intricate and delicate relating patterns, communication, information flow, informal problem-solving, that facilitate effective working. Seeing such informal networks as essentially irrelevant to achieving the task, they (re)arrange people without regard to these informal relationships and communication. The social capital of the organization is reduced, its efficacy damaged.

10. They Disregard Sense-making As A Powerful Change Process. Too often a new broom is overly focused on the behaviour change they require, and they work hard to ‘make’ people do things differently. Failing to appreciate that our behaviour is related to how we make sense of the world, they invest little time in working to change people’s mental maps, their experience of reality. They work to drive new behaviour into people rather than to release it.

Want to do it differently?

Appreciating Change can help you discover the strengths of the existing organization, can help you see and appreciate the less tangible assets such as the social capital, before you tear into making wholesale changes.

We can help you work with existing complexity, realizing the value of the evolved equi-finality, flexibility, diversity and difference before you become overwhelmed and seek to simplify by standardizing, and reducing complexity.

We can help you ‘be active’ in your engagement with the organization in ways that build on the best of what exists, that help people actively and willingly engage with new realities, and that grow positive change, before you lose patience and decide to impose a brave new world order.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'Thought Provoking' articles and more about Leadership in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Cultivating A Positive Culture

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive deviance, and an accompanying case study on culture change

What is a positive culture?

Cameron’s research has revealed three key distinguishing features that define a positive organisational culture. Essentially these are: an interest in learning from success to exceed standard performance; the cultivation of graceful behaviours such as helpfulness, patience, humility, forgiveness; and a bias towards spotting and affirming the good in people and situations.

The nature of culture

Organizational culture is fascinating. It is complex and paradoxical, slippery and intangible and yet highly impactful on organisational behaviour. It acts as a constraint on the possible for organizations. This becomes particularly pertinent when an organization decides it needs to change itself in someway. Organisational culture has a big impact on attempts at change while being highly resistant to change itself.

Changing cultures

Culture is as culture does. It is hard for organisations to step outside their existing culture, to act ‘as if’ they weren’t in their existing world. Attempts to ‘bring in’ or in any other way impose a new culture by diktat or plan or rhetoric is pretty much doomed to failure. New cultures need to be cultivated; they need to be grown from within the organization, which means exploring the variance that already exists within the organization to find that which already exists and is emblematic of the desired new culture. In addition we can create variance.

Growing cultures

When considering this, it is helpful to think of the organization as a complex adaptive system, that is, a living human system. From this perspective the organization is both created by, and constrains, the small daily habitual patterns of interaction and communication of everyone in the organization. These patterns are at the root of consistency (replication) and change (variation). Change these and you change the organization.

The patterns of behaviour are both products, and reinforcers, of our patterns of mind, that is, our habitual way of understanding the world. As we understand the world so we act. Change your mental models or underlying beliefs about the world and you change the action potential. Powerful experiences that can’t be accommodated by our existing world-views are the things that change our mental models. Such experiences can be located in either action mode or thought mode.

Exposing someone to different experiences can work to shift their views, for example sending the production manager out with a salesman to experience customer behaviour and need first hand. In a similar way creating events where people experience each other differently can shift their beliefs about each other as they discover aspects of and qualities in the person to which they had not previously been exposed.

Alternatively the powerful experience can be an internal one, for instance when we are asked a powerful question that causes us to have thoughts, make connections, see things that we haven’t up to now. The experience of being asked a really powerful question is akin to having the world shake on its axis as so many neurons unexpectedly fire off at once in response to the pinpoint accurate stimulus of a good question. Thought and action are interactive and iterative. To affect one is to affect the other. We often talk about the need for behaviour change in organisational change. Then we think in terms of training courses and job descriptions. Both of these are possibly useful. The smallest point of leverage though is to affect people’s understanding of the situation they are in by getting them to think differently by asking them different questions.

Why is culture change so hard to achieve in organizations?

Essentially because it is about social dynamics not formal structures, processes and procedures; these are surface phenomena and as such easy to change. To affect the social dynamics of an organization we need to work at the deeper level of recurring patterns of interaction, relationship and communication. Whole system change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry do exactly this.

So, how do we cultivate culture change?

• Recognize it as a moral act, a judgement call on what is ‘good’ and involve others in making these judgements
• Focus on patterns of interaction as much if not more than on individuals
• Ask world-shift questions of people, groups, the organization
• Identify and build on the positive core of values, strengths, resources, abilities and positive organisational experiences
• Use a methodology like Appreciative Inquiry to grow it not order it

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive deviance, and an accompanying case study on culture change

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Leading Through Uncertainty: Seven principles for practice

Many leaders are currently facing the challenge of leading in conditions of great uncertainty in an unpredictable environment. Yet much leadership and change guidance is predicated on the assumption of a relatively stable or foreseeable future – for which plans can be made. Here are some principles to help leaders continue to offer leadership even when firm predictions are hard to come by and plans are difficult to make.

1. Keep Leading

When researching his book ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ Atul Gawande turned to the airline industry for case-studies on how to prepare emergency checklists. He discovered that these pioneers in the creation of a checklist for every scenario had quickly learnt that the first instruction on every list had to be ‘keep flying the plane’. Similarly, all may be in turmoil about you, but ‘keep offering leadership’ has to be at the top of your checklist.

2. People First

When thing are running smoothly people issues can seem to be looking after themselves and leaders often devote their energies to more of the task aspects of the role. Once uncertainty and unpredictability become a key part of the picture – are we being sold? Will there be redundancies? Is our line/factory/project being discontinued? – all this changes and working with your people must become the main focus of the leadership role. Essentially all managers have to become leaders, able to inspire loyalty, trust and courage. This may not come easy to those promoted on their technical skills. They need support to understand that spending time with people to help them remain motivated, optimistic and performing is now the key aspect of their job.

3. Engender Hope and Optimism

One of the first causalities when uncertainty looms large is hope. People can’t see the future clearly; they don’t understand how they can influence it. They feel hopeless in the face of bigger circumstances.  A collapse in motivation and morale can quickly follow. Creating a sense of hope and optimism is a key factor in restoring motivation and so levels of productivity. Appreciative Inquiry as a change methodology is particularly effective at this. The general principle is to help people, in the midst of all the gloom and despair, to focus on what is good, is still working, is worthwhile, and on what they can influence. Help them be proactive in dealing with, coping with, responding to or interacting with the situation. These things engender hopefulness.

4. Learn to Love Emergence and Discovery

Many change approaches rely on analysis and implementation through planning. This approach is too slow, too inaccurate and too prone to be rendered obsolete by a sudden shift in the wind in conditions of great uncertainty. Instead we have to become experts at sensing small shifts, capturing emerging trends, discovering ways forward by trying things out and seeing what happens. We have to engage pro-actively with an emerging future. Working this way can initially feel messy, inefficient, and worryingly uncontrollable. By the same token it is timely, fast, flexible, engaging and involving and can lead to surprising discoveries about the possible. Appreciative Inquiry and the other collaborative transformational approaches such as Open Space and World Café are good approaches for emergent situations.

5. Call on the Collective Intelligence of Your Unit

When things are changing fast and new information is constantly emerging it is impossible for one person, or even a small group of senior people, to keep on top of it all, never mind sorting it, sifting it and creating new possibilities for action. The collaborative transformational technologies allow the collective intelligence of the whole unit to work together in an effective way. Involving others adds value and effectiveness to the process. It greatly increases the likelihood of creative, collectively endorsed ways forward emerging. Involve your people in the challenge. Recognise them as intelligent adults and reap the rewards of a huge increase in brain-power on the task. Make finding ways forward and staying pro-active everyone’s challenge.

6. Have Many Review and Reflection Points

As situations constantly change so must our plans. Learning from fire-fighters Weick suggests a shift is necessary in highly uncertain situations from decision-making to sense-making. Leadership behaviour in these highly changeable situations is characterised by ambivalence, an ability to move quickly between seemingly contrasting states - such as taking risks and being cautious, using repetition and improvisation, or working with intuition and deliberation. In addition, proceeding by trial and error, they assess and reassess the appropriateness of their actions frequently, involving others as well to ‘calibrate’ their sense of the situation and the appropriate action against the insight of others. Constant adaptation of plans is adaptive in these situations.

7. Reveal Your Authenticity and Integrity

In unpredictable and uncertain situations it is easy to be blown off course by the temporary prevailing wind. Good people can find themselves doing bad things when they lose their bearings. Research by Avolio and colleagues identified four key features of authentic leadership, one of which is having a strong internal moral compass. Make sure you consult yours often. Another is what they term ‘relational transparency’, by which they mean allowing people to know you, the real and true you. This may mean sometimes letting people know that you too are only human and sometimes falter or feel vulnerable, as well as sometimes feeling strong and certain. This is not licence to collapse all over your team in a heap – get a coach for that – but rather, as Goffee and Jones put it ‘to be your (best) self, more, with skill.’ Over time it builds trust and increases group capability as others step up to the mark to help.

Offering leadership during times of uncertainty is no easy task. It requires a different understanding of leadership and different leadership behaviours. Finding ways forward in a rapidly changing environment that will enable the organization to continue to flourish is too big a demand on any one individual. There is too much information, too many variables. However Open Space, World Café and Appreciative Inquiry all offer ways to call on the collective intelligence of the unit while still adding value from the unique position of ‘leader’.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at the tools we use to foster Leadership.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Don't be a nodding donkey - how to listen appreciatively

Active Listening as a set of activities

The popular model of ‘active listening’ is often presented as a set of behavioural ‘mechanics’ that if employed judiciously with demonstrate to an audience that ‘listening’ is taking place. The recommended behaviours include: good eye contact; not interrupting, clarifying; summarising; and displaying other visible signs of attending. It is very easy for these behaviours to become de-contextualised; to become a list of ‘to do’ behaviours. At which point it can become the ‘nodding donkey’ school of listening. I certainly have experienced the disconcerting effect of talking to someone who is showing all the right behaviours but behind whose waterfall-mist eyes it is clear that disconnected thoughts are crowding and cascading. I am not being ‘heard’ although he or she may be hearing what I say.

How might the spirit of appreciative inquiry, the desire to ‘grow more of what we want’ help create more effective listening? And how this might help reposition ‘active listening’ as a systemic, dynamic, creative act.

Active Listening as an intention

We need to recognise that listening is always an act of intent: we are listening to some purpose or for some reason. There are many different possible purposes, for example:

•    To bear witness

•    To provide space for someone to think

•    To provide help

•    To provide encouragement

•    To help sort confusion

•    To share an experience

•    To find fault or spot flaws

•    To appreciate

•    To amplify and fan early successes

And so on. Each might require listening for different things. So at a meta-level we could ask ourselves, firstly, what might be our own personal default intent when we listen, and secondly what do we particularly need to be listening for in this conversation, what sort of listening is appropriate here? There is a shift from an emphasis on body language to an emphasis on integrity of intention.

What might help

These things might help in all situations

1    Feeling peaceful in ourselves, aligned in mind and body

2    Not worrying about ‘the next thing to say’ or ‘getting it right’

3    Allowing that whatever kind of listening shows up is the right kind

4    Recognising that intense listening can be full of activity – asking many questions, reformulating a lot, re-acting. It is not necessarily a passive activity.

5    Having the ability to say ‘I’m not able to offer you my full attention, or to listen well right now because…( I’m getting anxious about time, I’m distracted by…)’

6    Recognising that the concept ‘I must to 100% present’ is precisely that, a concept that may be unobtainable at any given time

 In general, in a spirit of appreciative listening we might find ourselves listening for:

What is working?

What are the resources available here?

What good is in this?

What is the broader picture, and how can we connect to that?

We might ask ourselves questions such as:

What arouses my curiosity in this?

What do I connect to?

What excites me in what is being said?

What can we grow from this?

Thanks to the other participants in the source conversation for this line of thought, Madeline Blair, Suzanne Quigley, Pauline Doyle, and Claire Lustig-Roche, which took place at a Blore AI Retreat event hosted by Anne Radford in the UK in 2011. 

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715