Charming Devils And The Mischief They Make

It is increasingly apparent that sometimes people with severe personality disorders (narcissistic, psychopathic, paranoid and schizoid) slip through the organizational selection net. The problem is they don’t appear in our midst with ‘trouble’ tattooed on their foreheads, instead they are often rather charming devils who do very well until they fall (and bring everyone else down with them).

How to reduce the chances of appointing a chancer, a megalomaniac, an egoist, a drama queen, or an obsessive, to your team

Beware that their failings come disguised as virtuous traits, as they bring almost an excess of a good thing. So the dimensions can look like this…

•    Work focused – workaholic – obsessive/compulsive

•    Team player – dependency on others – can’t make individual decisions

•    Action focused – decisive – rushed, rash and impulsive – dictatorial

•    Analytical – paralysed – unable to act

•    Integrity – strong values – rigidity/cult leader

•    Innovative – enthusiastic/ committed – unrealistic

Spotting trouble in your midst:

Someone who has the following characteristics…

Is all things to all people

About whom people hold deeply divided opinions (seen as saving angel by some and dangerous devil by others)

Who wields disproportionate power to their status

Can skillfully play individuals, telling them what they want to hear

Has an uncanny ability to make bad things, things that don’t work, and people in their way, disappear (Teflon man / woman)

Lies and cheats with impunity in the service of some greater goal, and

Demonstrates loyalty only to self

…just might be displaying strong psychopathic tendencies. As they advance up the organization and external control and non-deferential feedback lessens, the bigger the mess they can create.

How can you lessen the likelihood of this happening to your organization?

1. Be brave enough to let go of the problem people early
2. Select for optimal not maximal qualities
3. Do proper biographical tracking history on your top appointments
4. Beware of trading off weaknesses for some great strength
5. Use 360 degree feedback, and listen to what those of no current ‘use’ to the person have to say. The once seduced and now discarded may have a less enamoured view of the charmer
6. Give leaders a stable deputy and make sure they have adequate power to influence, control, veto leadership action i.e. make sure they don’t gain absolute power!
7. Offer support to help self-management such as coaches, mentors, therapists

Sarah Lewis and colleagues at Appreciating Change are accredited to use the Hogan suite of personality psychometrics including The Dark Side instrument. Such psychometrics can help identify those at risk of going seriously off the rails!

(Furnham 2007, The Icarus Syndrome, People and organizations @ work spring edition, Trickey, Talent, treachery and self destruction paper at ABP conference 2007)

Other Resources

Recommended read: Snakes in Suits, Bob Hare

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 Leadership and Performance Management 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

Many Hands Make Light Work: Crowd-Sourcing Organizational Change Using Appreciative Inquiry

Barack Obama famously crowd-sourced the finance for his election campaign, a powerful example of the ability of new technology to create a great aggregate result out of lots of small voluntary actions. But this process is not as new as it seems: Sir James Murray used a similar approach to creating the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1897.

So while crowd-sourcing is a new and sexy concept, it really refers to the age-old process of recruiting groups to complete tasks that it would be difficult if not impossible for one person to complete alone.

Wikipedia, itself probably the most ubiquitous example of a crowd-sourced product, defines it thus: ‘Crowd-sourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowd-sourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.’ But it also says ‘Crowd-sourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model.’ 

Volunteerism: In house crowd-sourcing

It seems to me that the crucial distinction is the voluntary nature of the participation rather than necessarily the paid/unpaid divide. In other words can crowd-sourcing be said to occur when people are not compelled to do the tasks by a job contract, but volunteer to be part of an organizational project. It is this volunteer element that makes me think Appreciative Inquiry can be seen as a form of in-house crowd-sourcing.

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organizational development that originated when David Cooperrider noticed how organizational growth and development can stem from understanding and building on past successes as well as on understanding and solving problems. As he and others experimented with focusing on learning from success and growing more of what you want in an organization, rather than concentrating solely on eliminating what you don’t want, they evolved a methodology based on clear principles of organizational life. One of these is the principle of positivity, which basically suggests that change takes energy, and that positive energy (feeling good) is a more sustainable source of energy for change than negative energy (feeling bad). When the field of positive psychology emerged at the end of the 1990s it fitted perfectly with Appreciative Inquiry’s emphasis on achieving excellence through focusing on what works.

I was fortunately enough to stumble upon Appreciative Inquiry as an approach to organizational change and development in the 1990s and have been incorporating it into my work ever since. And the more I work with Appreciative Inquiry, the clearer it becomes to me that the volunteer aspect of the model is crucial to its success. In this way I see a connection between crowd-sourcing and Appreciative Inquiry. The power of Appreciative Inquiry is based on the power of the volunteer model in the following ways.

• Voluntary attendance

Ideally people are invited to attend the Appreciative Inquiry event. The event topic, the nature of the event, and the invitation have to be sufficiently compelling that people prioritise being there of their own volition. When people make an active choice to invest their time in the event, they are keen to get a good return on that. When they are compelled to be there by management diktat, it can be a recipe for frustration, and even sabotage of the process.

• Voluntary participation

The voluntarism principle needs to extend to participation in any and every particular activity or discussion that is planned for the day. We never know what may be going on in people’s lives to make some topic of discussion unbearable. They may need, during the day, to prioritise their own need for some quiet time, or to make a timely phone call. It is my experience that when people are treated as adults constantly juggling competing priorities, trying to make good moment-to-moment decisions in complex contexts, they manage it very well, and with minimum disruption to the process.

• Voluntary contribution

One form of crowd-sourcing is the wisdom of the crowd. Again I quote from Wikipedia: ‘Wisdom of the crowd is another type of crowd-sourcing that collects large amounts of information and aggregates it to gain a complete and accurate picture of a topic, based on the idea that a group of people is often more intelligent than an individual.’ Calling on collective intelligence is a key feature of large group processes. However people are free to chose whether and what to contribute; so the event needs to create an atmosphere where people feel safe and trusting and so desire to share information and dreams and to build connection and intimacy. And of course the general principle doesn’t hold in every case, sometimes expert knowledge is more valuable and accurate than ‘the general view’.

• Voluntary further action

With most Appreciative Inquiry based events, at some point there is a shift from the process in the day to actions in the future. Often this involves forming project or work groups to progress activity. And the groups need members. Again group membership needs to be voluntary. The desire to contribute to changing things for the future needs to stem from the motivation and community built during the day. Forcing everyone to sign up to a post-event group activity, regardless of their energy, time or passion for the topic or project, just creates drag, and sometimes derails the whole process.

There are some of the ways in which I think Appreciative Inquiry can be seen as a form of in-house crowd-sourcing around the challenges of organizational change or adaptation. The ideal outcome of an Appreciative Inquiry event is that everyone is so affected by the event process, discussions, and aspirations that they are motivated to make small changes in their own behaviour on a day to day basis that will aggregate to a bigger shift, and even transformation within the organization as a whole. In addition they may volunteer to be part of specific groups working on specific projects. By definition these personal shifts in behaviour and the group project activity are above and beyond their job description: it is voluntary, discretionary behaviour. In this way, the voluntary basis of the Appreciative Inquiry approach qualifies it to be seen as a form of crowd-sourcing even though it is activity undertaken by paid members of an organization.

If you are interested in, or a convert to, the power of crowd-sourcing to get big things to happen with a small amount of effort from many people, then Appreciative Inquiry might be a way of bringing it into your organization.

Other Resources

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

See more about Appreciative Inquiry 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

Ten Top Tips For Courageous Conversations At Work

What Not to Do

Many people at some point in their working lives have to have a difficult conversation with someone. It might be about a performance issues or something more personal. It can be with a peer, a subordinate or indeed a boss. Very often people are highly anxious, understandably so, about having this conversation. They then either avoid it for so long that when they do tackle it it comes as a complete shock to the other party, or they rush at it like a bull in a china shop just to get it over with. Here are some tips to help produce a good result.

Being Courageous

1.Be clear what you are trying to achieve

You need to be clear in your own mind why you are putting yourself through the trauma of having this conversation and what you hope to achieve. Is it an apology, an agreement about something, a change in behaviour in the future, some sort of restorative action or maybe a resubmission of a piece of work? Be clear what the successful outcome is and be listening for it.

2.Be clear what you are listening for

Being highly anxious can make us deaf. We become so focused on saying everything we have planned to say that we fail to hear the other person quietly saying ‘you’re right’ or ‘I know’ or even ‘you might have a point.’ ‘You bet I have!’ we say and then return to our carefully prepared speech. You need to stay alert to the first signs that you have made your point and be prepared to switch modes to ‘Ok what next’ even if you haven’t said everything you intended. Otherwise you run the risk of producing a new source of conflict as your conversational partner feels unfairly berated when they’ve made a concession. This can sabotage the chances of recovery.

3.Be clear what gives you the right to initiate this conversation

It really helps us reduce our anxiety if we can understand how the conversational intent aligns with our values. For instance you may have to tell someone that they didn’t get the promotion they were after, and give some hard feedback as to why. The clearer you are that giving this feedback is, for example, helpful behaviour(and it is important to you to help and develop others) then the easier say what needs to be said about the current shortfall in their experience, manner, etc. if they are to succeed in the future. Fobbing them off softly is easier but less helpful to them in the long run.

4.Give thought to how you set up the meeting

There are pros and cons to giving advance notice of wanting to have a difficult conversation with someone. The downside is there may well be a drop in productivity as they become distracted wondering what it about. There is also the danger that their anxiety will drive them to push you to ‘just say it now, let’s get it over and done with’. On the other hand, springing it on them unexpectedly can lead them to feel ambushed or tricked in some way. It’s a judgement call and depends on the situation and circumstances.

5.Look for the positive in the situation

Sometimes bad outcomes are the result of good intentions. Was the behaviour caused by a strength in overdrive? For instance maybe ‘too pushy’ can be reframed as a strength of will, zest or tenacity being used with greater force than was appropriate, or where negotiation strengths were needed. Was there an honourable intention behind the behaviour? Many mistakes start out as good ideas or intentions. Be alert to any good consequences that occurred in the situation you want to address as well as the problematic outcome. All of these give you a way to approach the behaviour that make it more likely the other person can owe it, still feel good about themselves, and be open to making changes.

6.Listen first

It is often a good idea, once you have outlined the area, topic, incident that you want to discuss to give the person a chance to give their view on the situation. Many a manager taking this approach has found the other person only too aware that there is a problem, or an issue, or something didn’t go right and that they have been making themselves miserable over it. Of course you’ll also have people who take the opportunity to ‘get their defence in first’ but at least you have the lie of the land before you say your piece, and indeed you may not need to say much at all.

7.Offer reassurance

There is an art to building and maintaining the relationship bridge while trying to convey information or a perspective that the other person might find hard to hear. Think about an opener such as ‘I feel this conversation may be difficult, but I am confident it will be to the benefit of both of us.’  Or ‘my sincere hope is that we come out of this conversation with a shared understanding of what happened and how we can make things better.’

8. Be honest about the effect on you

The more able you are to be honest about your motivation for having the conversation, the more likely you are to be acting and talking with integrity. Authenticity and integrity tend to produce better responses in others. So say something like ‘to be honest I felt really embarrassed when... and I like to feel proud of my team when... that’s why I want to...’ This isn’t about trying to ‘guilt trip’ anyone; its about being honest about your investment in this as well as the favour you are hoping to do them.

9. Use descriptive not evaluative language

Try to stick to an account that articulates what you saw and the consequences in a way that is factual and could be verified by any other observers. Steer away from evaluators like ‘aggressive’ and say instead something like, ‘you were speaking in a louder than a normal speaking voice, leaning in very close to B. Your face was going red and your forehand bulged. I also noticed B leant backwards and raised her hands. She didn’t speak for the rest of the meeting. Later B came to me and said she felt intimidated by you in that meeting.’ Here you can add your concern, ‘My concern is that if B feels like that we will lose her input to the discussion. I know you are very passionate about this topic. I need both your inputs. Let’s see if we can find a way where you both feel able to make your points.’

10. Look forward to solutions, not backwards to blame

The aim of the discussion, if possible, is to create a common agreement about the situation now without getting too lost in counter-arguments about blame in the past. It doesn’t have to be complete consensus, just enough to allow the conversation to move productively the next stage of finding ways forward that are acceptable to you both.

Other Resources

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

See more 'How To' 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 Reasons Why Now Is The Time For Appreciative Inquiry

If you've heard about Appreciative Inquiry and know, or have an inkling, of what it can do and the difference it can make but can't face trying to change mindsets in your organisation or with your clients, here are some talking points to use to marshall your arguments!

1. Change is changing

Traditional, top-down, designed then implemented change takes too long and is too hard to push through an organization. The plan is out of date almost as soon as it’s made. People resist. Change needs to be fast, flexible and proactive and focused on maximising tomorrow’s possibilities rather than rehashing yesterday’s mistakes. Change needs to take everyone with it. Appreciative Inquiry is a change methodology for our changing times.

2. Feeling good is good for business

Positive psychology research shows that positive workplaces, where people feel hopeful, encouraged and appreciated, reap many benefits. People are likely to be more creative, more generative, share information better, grow and learn better, be more energized, be bolder and braver about innovating, be able to deal with more complex information, and respond better to change. Appreciative inquiry builds positive energy. Appreciative inquiry helps people feel good in the hardest of circumstances

3. The future exists only in our imagination

Imagination is more powerful than forecasting in an unpredictable world. The past does not predict the future: it suggests possible trajectories. Using our imagination we can create other, more attractive, more creative, more inspiring trajectories, to inspiring and attractive futures. Collective imagining has the power to create dreams that pull people to work together to achieve them. We can use our analytic powers to analyse data, we can use our creative powers to imagine pictures of the future that pull us towards it. Appreciative Inquiry uses the power of imagination

4. The best organizations positively flourish

Interestingly research shows that being good and doing well go together. The organisations that focus on creating positive cultures, and leading with values, where people thrive, where the organisation flourishes, where there is a bias towards the positive, where there is a sense of abundance, often also do very well commercially. Timberland, Merek Corporation, Cascade, Synovus Financial Corporation, Fedex Freight, Southwest Airlines and the Marine Corp are all a testament to the possibility of doing the right thing and doing well. Appreciative inquiry is a values based change approach that focuses on doing right and doing well.

5. Social capital is a source of sustainability

Relational reserves are what see organizations through difficult times as much as financial reserves. Relational reserves is the goodwill your people feel towards you, the trust they have in what you say, the willingness they demonstrate to forgive leadership errors, or accept bad luck, and work with you to put things right. It is built over time through building social capital.  Appreciative Inquiry builds social capital

6. Speed is of the essence

The world is constantly changing, organizations need to be nimble and flexible, able to recast themselves to meet new challenges; and quickly. Cascading change takes too long. Change needs to happen simultaneously from top to bottom. Appreciative inquiry works with the whole system simultaneously, so the need for change is experienced, absorbed, understood from top to bottom. And ideas for change are designed and tested for impact by, and on, those they affect before the money is spent.

7. Resistance costs too much

Planned change frequently induces resistance. Resistance slows down change and diverts managerial energy and attention. It also frequently illuminates unforeseen problems and obstacles to the change that cost money to put right at this late stage in the change process. Resistance to change costs both negatively (wasting time and energy) and positively (helping the organization make necessary corrections). Appreciative inquiry works positively with all reactions to change to co-create a sustainable, valued, endorsed and appreciated approach to change. Resistance is no longer part of the change conversation.

8. Change is not a commodity to be bought

Organizations put a lot of energy into getting ‘buy-in’ to their plans for the future. This activity comes after the plans have been made when other people have to be persuaded of the rightness of the plans. Appreciative inquiry involves those affected by change from the start. Helping to co-design it, bringing their expertise to bear at an early stage, being heard, being valued, having a role in shaping their destiny, co-creating a future that holds attraction for them, means that people have built it themselves and don’t need to be sold it. Appreciative Inquiry achieves this.

9. We need to use our intelligence

The world is more interconnected that ever before. Everything affects everything else. We need all the intelligence we can get to keep up and get ahead. Treating most of the organization as ‘hired hands’ and only the top echelons as the brains of the business wastes a huge amount of organizational intelligence. Appreciative Inquiry brings all brains, and experience, and skill, and knowledge, in the system to bear on the challenges of keeping up, getting ahead, doing right, doing well and flourishing.

10. Strengths are a source of competitive advantage

Organizations spend too much time trying to fill gaps in people’s profiles, adapt people’s personalities, and helping them become better at things they aren’t good at. And not enough time on building on strengths and abilities. Positive psychology research demonstrates that the more time spent working to their strengths, the more productive, fulfilled and energized people are likely to be. Building on the strengths of individuals, and building on the strengths of the organization creates a strength-based organization. Such an organization has a competitive advantage. Appreciative inquiry is a strengths-based approach.

Other Resources

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

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on Appreciative Inquiry.

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 bringing Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to your workplace.

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

Five Tips For Getting Started With Positive Psychology At Work

Positive psychology is the new domain of psychology that burst upon the world when Martin Seligman coined the phrase at his inaugural speech as the President of the American Psychological Association in 1998.

He issued a rallying call for research into human success. He wanted us to know more about what helps us excel, in health, in sport, in achievement. His work, and that of others who responded to the call, has been picked up by institutions as varied as the American Military and the education system. We know more now than we ever did about how to help people live happy and successful lives. The ideas have spread to Governments, with our own deciding to take regular measures of national wellbeing as well as national wealth.

Positive psychology can be applied in the workplace. Its successful application will help you develop an engaged, productive, healthy workforce, and to create a great place to work. Here are some direct and practical ideas of how to apply the best of the results of the research into positive psychology to your workplace.

Losada and Heaphy in 2004 demonstrated that feeling good is good for us. In their research the teams that offered each other at least three times more praise than criticism were the most successful. Since then Fredrickson has made a study of what good emotions do for us, and Shawn Achor has brought all the research together in his great book ‘the happiness advantage’ also available on youtube as a Tedx talk. The result is conclusive: happiness leads to success. So, how can you help your people feel good?

Feelin' Good

1. Start meetings with a round of success stories.

Before you get into the meat of the meeting, usually a litany of problems and challenges, start by giving people the opportunity to share the best of their week.

2. Build the sharing of great stories about the achievements and success of the organization into your induction programme.

Get the owners of the stories to share their best moments of working for your company. Even better, equip your new recruits with appreciative questions about when people have been most proud to be part of the organization, or their greatest achievement at work, and send them off to interview people. This will leaven the dough of getting to grips with the staff handbook and inspire your new recruits.

3. Educate your managers about this research.

Too many managers are quick to offer critical feedback and slow to offer praise, hoarding it as a scarce resource. Explain that they need to keep the ratio of positive to negative comments and experiences above 3:1 and preferable 6:1 if they want to get the best from people.

4. Give them the tools to do this. 

Particularly, introduce the concept of diamond feedback and train people in its use. Diamond feedback is when you both report the behaviour you saw that you thought was good, and give the praise. E.g. ‘ I listened to how you handled that customer call. The way you admitted our errors and thanked her for letting us know was really good. I could hear that you saved a customer we might have lost. That’s worth a lot of money to us. Well done, that was great work.’

5. Help people use their natural strengths

Another finding coming through from the positive psychology research is that helping people understand what their natural strengths are and how to use them aids performance. Using strengths is energising and engaging for people. This means they find work that calls on their particular and unique strengths profile motivating. The more you can help people find ways to use their strengths at work, the more likely it is that they will become self-motivated in their work. But first they need to know them.

How You Can Do This

There are a number of strengths identifying tools around, particular the StrengthScope psychometric, which also has a great set of support cards. However in a low tech way we can just ask people ‘When are you at your most energised at work?’’ What feels really easy and enjoyable for you that others sometimes struggle with?’ and most interesting of all ‘what can you almost not, not do?’

Once you know your own strengths, find ways to use them more at work and, equally important, ways to do less of the work that drains you of energy. Find someone to delegate it to for whom it plays to their strengths. We’re not all detail people, but some of us love combing through data with a fine tooth-comb. Reconfigure how you achieve the objective so it plays to your strengths. Pair up with someone whose strengths complement yours. Allocate tasks in your team by strengths rather than by role and delegate by volunteer rather than imposition when possible.

Make sure other people know your strengths, so that they can call on you for opportunities that play to your strengths.

Positivity and strengths are probably two of the headline findings from the positive psychology research that are easily applicable to the workplace setting. However there are also other emerging findings that are of interest. For example, did you know that how you respond to someone’s good news is as important for relationship building as how you respond to their bad news? Apparently so. To encourage positive relationships at work, help people to be actively positive in their response to other people’s good news. This means not just saying ‘that’s great’, but actively inquiring into how they did it, how they feel and how they hope to build on it.

And finally, you may have noticed how some people are just people that other people like to have around. They give people around them a general good feeling. People are attracted to them. The research confirms the existence of such people at the centre of networks of positive energy. They have the knack of giving people little boosts of good feeling in their conversations or interactions with them, and they leave feeling better than when they arrived. These people are gold dust in terms of organisational motivation and performance. Notice who they are, place them strategically in projects and initiatives to which you want to attract other people, for example.

Futher Reading

This article has barely scratched the surface of the interesting research and ideas emanating from this field. The book ‘Positive Psychology At Work’ explains these and other ideas in more detail. For these with an aversion to books, we also have a set of development cards that offer bite-sized explanations of twenty core positive psychology concepts, with questions to help understand them and suggestions of how to integrate the concept at work.

Other Resources

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

See more 'How To' guides 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 , Engagement and Culture change.

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

Five ways to foster innovation using Appreciative Inquiry

First Off, What's Appreciative Inquiry?

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to organisational change and development. Based on five key principles of practice, Appreciative Inquiry helps teams or organizations generate both positive energy and innovative ideas for change.

Appreciative Inquiry is a participative process, and the ideas that emerge from the process have the weight of the group behind them. This active co-creative process means that resistance to change and the need to achieve buy-in are much reduced if not completely eliminated. The action ideas that are generated and agreed are implemented by the very same people who created them.

Here are five ways Appreciative Inquiry can be used with teams or organisations to generate innovative ideas and action

1. Learn about what stimulates innovation in your context

Discovery interviews are an appreciative process that highlights the best of the past. By exploring past pinnacle experiences of innovation, creativity and inspiring change you can discover the group’s existing resources, skills and knowledge about when, and how, creative and innovative things happen.

Using discovery interviews you can learn about situations, contexts or questions that have been associated with particularly fruitful experiences in the past and actively work to re-create them in the present. In addition people’s current creativity is stimulated by the discussions that follow the questions, and they are likely to feel their creative juices starting to flow.

2. Use stories to jump start imagination

Discovery interviews tend to generate a lot of interesting, and often previously untold, stories about the topic under discussion. Sharing these stories acts as a spring-board to creativity. You can also bring in stories from other contexts that you find inspiring and think might add as a prompt to new thinking.

One way to use stories gathered during a round of discovery interviews is to share the story and then spend time brainstorming what ideas it has stimulated about the particular current context you are working in. Just leave them, or record them, as possibilities and move on to the next story.

3. Ask generative questions

Questions can produce new conversation and insights or they can stimulate old patterns of conversation. Questions that produce new thoughts, connections and ideas, in other words that are likely to generate innovative insights and ideas for action, tend to have certain characteristics.

• Element of novelty and surprise - They have an element of novelty and surprise; they are questions that people haven’t considered before and may well be surprised to be asked. Many positively framed questions are of this nature. However imagination based questions, or questions that ask people to combine two seemingly opposed ideas can also have this effect of producing new thought.
• Relationship building - They act to build relationships as people discover new things about each other: positive, inspiring and attractive things. They start to develop good feelings about each other and to develop mutual positive connection. Connections to others are key for change efforts. People need to feel needed, supported and valued to want to engage with the many challenges of working with others to achieve things.
• They are meaningful - Good discovery questions connect to things that are deeply meaningful to the participants. These are questions about important things – my work, my values, my experience. By asking about what matters to people and giving express permission to answer with reference to feelings, they act to ensure that people are psychologically engaged with the question, answer and process, not just rationally engaged.
• They cause a shift in understanding of ‘reality’ - Good generative questions act to reframe reality for individuals and the group. They do this by focussing on aspects of the context that are overlooked or ignored. In the simplest terms this means asking about positive things when ‘the reality’ is perceived to be wholly negative. The answers reveal many more positive things going on than people believed was the case, so their reality shifts.

Designing questions that have all these characteristics takes thought.

4. Dream together

An important part of the Appreciative Inquiry process is ‘dreaming’. This process involves using our imagination to leap out of the present, over the many current obvious problems and barriers to change, to a time in the future where we have achieved our aspirations to be better.

A good dreaming process acts to fire up the imagination and stimulates people to create attractive and hopeful images of the future. Usually a number of different groups create their own dreams and then the sharing of the dreams is another source of inspiration for individuals and the group as a whole.

In the same way that good science fiction creates impossible ideas that inspire later scientists to create what they saw on star-trek as a child, so good dreaming sessions expand the group’s sense of the possible. The creative horizon expands.

5. Improvise destiny

And finally Appreciative Inquiry is attuned to the improvisational nature of creative efforts. At the end of an AI workshop the group as a whole should have a shared sense of where they want to be heading, and the kind of futures they want to be creating With this shared sense acting as the ‘roadmap’ people need to be given permission to get on with making it happen, to be enabled to take voluntary and visible action. While the leader’s role becomes that of creating coherence and connection.

Other Resources

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

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on Appreciative Inquiry and 'How To' guides.

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 Engagement and Culture change.

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

Ten Top Tips For Creating Positive And Flourishing Organisations

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

Having recently extensively studied the literature, Appreciating Change can exclusively reveal the ten things that you can do that can make your organisation an even more inspiring and positive workplace.

  1. Play to everyone’s strengths

People playing to their strengths are effective, successful, engaged and energised. Their productivity is at its best. Those dutifully struggling with weaknesses are slow, ineffective and demoralised. Their productivity is poor.

  2. Recruit for attitude

People have ‘a good attitude’ when they are using their natural talents, the thing they love to do. Find out people’s natural talents and inclinations because these are the basis of strengths. Recruit for a fit with the core task of the job and to build it into a real strength.

 3. Encourage positive deviation

Encourage performance that exceeds the standard expected in a positive direction. Build an abundant organisation, one that can take pride in excellence. Achieving this takes positive leadership: encouraging, recognising, appreciative, and forgiving. Affirm what is good in the organisation to help it grow and develop.

4. Create a workplace that feels good

Positive emotions are really good for the workplace. They aid creativity, working together, problem-solving, communication and information-sharing, just for starters. Make your workplace somewhere people enjoy being because it makes them feel good.

 5. Build social capital

Invest in the relationships between people. It is through these relationships that information and resource flow to where they are needed. It is these relationships that allow organisations to be responsive to change and to bounce back quickly from trauma.

6. Be an authentic leader

Authentic leaders know their own strengths and how to use them well. They help others develop theirs. They have a strong moral compass and they treat people right. They learn from success as well as mistakes. They admit mistakes, and encourage others to do so too.

7. Create the conditions for change

Directive planned change is ineffective: the evidence is overwhelming. Effective change leaders create the conditions for change to emerge. They work with the emerging process of change. They engage the whole organisation in discovering how to go forward.

8. Create reward-rich environments

People work for many rewards: success, approval, flow experiences, recognition, feelings of satisfaction, thanks, completion, or being with others, for example. The more rewards available to people in their work environment, they more motivated and engaged they will be at work.

9. Make sense together

In this fast-paced, complex world, it is more effective to involve others in a continuous process of making sense than trying to make definitive decisions that will hold for years. Build periods of mindfulness and reflection into your schedule, to help people notice the early signs of a changing world.

10. Be appreciative

Develop an appreciative, eye, ear and tongue. This will help you recognise and grow the organisational strengths and resources. Our appreciative faculties are usually very weak compared to our critical ones; they need positive attention to thrive.

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, 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

How To Keep Your Employees Engaged

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

In 2005 David Bolchover took it upon himself to find out what actively disengaged employees do when at work (and also when not). Scouring the research, he found that:

•   1 in 3 people have taken illegal drugs at work: ecstasy, cannabis, and cocaine
•   1 in 5 people have had sex at work
•   70% of porn site hits happen during working hours
•   The actively disengaged have twice as much time off sick (and many of them are to be found at Alton Towers, apparently)
•   1in 5 people describe themselves as constantly surfing the net, while a majority of people estimate they spend the equivalent of a day a week on non-work websites at work
•   7% send more than 20 personal emails a day
•   1/3 of young professionals confess to being hung over twice a week at work; and
•   A quarter of people have fallen asleep at work

Active disengagement at work costs the UK economy about £38bn a year.

So what makes for active engagement at work?

Using strengths and talents

People encouraged to use their strengths at work are about 2 & 1/2 times as likely to be engaged as those who are encouraged to focus on their weaknesses. They are particularly more likely to be engaged if they get to use their strengths every day. Help people identify their strengths either with good psychometrics like strengthscope, or through Appreciative Inquiry discovery interviews and Feedback Strengths Cards such as those sold on this website.

Experiencing flow

When people are in flow they are engaged. Flow is by definition an engaging experience. Flow experiences occur at work but aren’t always recognised as such. Help people understand their flow experiences. To discover them, inquire into when they ‘lose’ themselves in their work, or ask them when they feel ‘in the zone’

The helpful use of goals and rewards

Much goal setting at work is poorly done. At its best goal setting provides opportunities for people to experience plentiful, positive and meaningful rewards (positive reinforcement). Working for social or self-satisfaction rewards can be highly motivating and engaging. The sustainable reward pattern is one that is self-reinforcing e.g. the more or better I do, the better I feel. The flourishing factor of accomplishment is an expression of this self-reinforcing rewarding activity.

Help people find meaning in work

When people are engaged in work that they experience as meaningful, they are more engaged. People can be helped to create positive meaning at work, particularly when groups are given the opportunity to collectively to discover why their work is meaningful to them, to the organisation, and to the world.

Create positive emotional experience moments

The research into positive emotions continues to demonstrate the powerful positive effects of a high ratio of feeling good moments to feeling bad moments. Create environments where positive moments: a shared laugh, sharing good news, pauses for wonderment at the achievements of others, happens often.

Encourage job crafting

Helping people to shape their roles and tasks in a way that maximizes their sense of meaningfulness, their ability to use their strengths, their self-reinforcement and the pleasure they can take in their work will boost their engagement and their performance.

This blog article has an accompanying article on organisational flourishing, and an accompanying case study on activating  employee engagement

More on using positive psychology to boost engagement at work 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 Engagement 

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

Positive Deviance: Learning from, and creating, exceptional performance

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

What is positive deviance and why is it a good thing?

Positive Deviance is an exciting methodology emerging from an understanding of organisations as complex adaptive systems. It helps organisations learn from those who manage to achieve better than normal outcomes from within the same resource constraints as their colleagues.

It is one of Kim Cameron’s distinguishing features for flourishing organizations: they both learn from and create positive deviance. Flourishing organizations are interested in exceptionally good performance and they learn from it. Some of the earliest examples of how learning from positive deviance can make a real difference comes from community work.

For example... 

For instance an early example of positive deviance was in a poor Vietnamese community. In this community there were many starving children yet some families were doing better than others in feeding their children. A positive deviance investigation by the villagers themselves revealed that the more successful families were taking shrimps and crabs from the rice fields i.e. had realised an additional source of protein. Some others were spreading their rice ration out over 24 hours, which is better for young children. These were things that theoretically everyone could do but not everyone did. These are positive deviance strategies. Of course there were also other factors such a having a rich relative who sent supplies. However these strategies are not available to others and so are known as true but useless (TBU) strategies. A key factor for the success of the intervention (i.e. achieving behaviour change) was they got the villagers themselves to do the investigation.

Positive Deviance investigations are being used very successfully to reduce super-bug infection rates in some hospitals. 

It is a very effective way of ‘growing’ a better culture. By recognising that small variations in performance always exist and by focussing on and amplifying the variations in a positive direction the whole organization can be encouraged to move in the direction of the best.

Appreciative inquiry as a methodology works on the same principle of identifying  positive deviance, learning from it, and increasing its presence in the organization.

When might investigating positive deviance be the way forward in an organisation?

With thanks to Lisa Kimball from Plexus

When…

• There is some existing deviance e.g. some people are doing better than others in a similar situation (performance variation across team or division)
• It’s a really intractable problem
• It involves behaviour change
• Everyone knows what to do, they are just not doing it
• The situation is bathed in data. It really helps if the groups can keep track of the changes they are making and their impact
• There is top leadership support. This means top leadership support the process through releasing resource, being responsive to early efforts and initiatives, and tracking, recording and amplifying results.

How to do positive deviance

1. Ask about success
2. Compare best to near best to tease out small differences that make a difference
3. Encourage peer to peer inquiry (and analysis) into success
4. Identify strategies for success (discounting TBU factors)
5. Support with behaviour change strategies
6. Support with top leadership resources: interest, budget, encouragement, action

This blog article has an accompanying article on positive culture, 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

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

Ten Tips for Effective Strategic Development

This blog article has two accompanying case studies: Making Strategy Real and Open Space For Strategic Development

What is Strategy?

Organisations often think of strategy as a plan for achieving a specific future. This plan is created by a small group of people who then inform others of the vision of the future and how it will be achieved.

A Compass, Not An Alien Artefact

This process can result in the production of a strategic document that appears opaque if not irrelevant to the rest of the organization. I have sat with many a group attempting to ‘decode’ the strategic document just handed down from on high into something that is meaningful, useful or compelling in their local context. Generally the connection, the relevance, is more created than uncovered.

Strategy is the lodestar of organization: it creates direction and holds things together. Without a sense of the over-arching purpose, direction and values of the organisation it is difficult for people to prioritise amongst the many competing demands on their time and energy. A good strategy acts like an internal compass for all employees, enabling them to prioritise their activities against a common understanding of ‘the most important things’, even when working in isolation.

It is possible to create strategy in a way that understands it not as a plan handed down by omniscience others, but as a co-created organizational story of future direction and intent. Here are some tips for working with strategy in this way.

How To Build Your Compass

1. Invert the usual process

The usual pattern for strategic development is that a small group of people design ‘the strategy’ which they then attempt to get the rest of the organization, the large group, to adopt. It is quite possible, as our case study ‘Making Strategy Real’ shows, to invert this process by involving a large group of stakeholders in initial strategic conversations, which a small group then write up as the strategic document. This approach allows data analysis, theme identification, creation of new initiatives, commitment to outcomes, common vision, motivation and energy for change to be created simultaneously rather than in staged sequences. Given this, change is likely to happen much more quickly.

2. Create positive energy for change

Large group co-creative approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry or SOAR create energy for the change right from the start. However, if the organization is doing strategy more traditionally all is not lost. We know that inducing positive mood states and helping people identify their strengths helps people engage with change, even if it is imposed rather than self-generated. So create opportunities for groups to identify what they are doing that points in the new direction, the successes they are achieving, the changes they are making, and the resilience they are demonstrating as well as the endless opportunities for identifying shortfalls, delays etc. Spend time helping people identify their strengths and working out how to apply them every day.

3. Recognise that strategy is what people do

Strategic becomes a ‘lived’ process as people make different decisions, moment-by-moment, to those they made in the past. While big ‘strategic’ events are important for various reasons, it’s micro-moment differences and decisions that add up to change. Every conversation, every decision, every action is either pointing towards the desired future direction or away from it. However habitual behaviour, aligned to past strategy, is strong. Therefore attention has to be paid at the granular level to the language used and the way things are talked about, as well as to what is being done, to create new patterns.

4. Use ‘word and deed’ to create new organizational fields

Drawing on quantum physics, Wheatley identified that effective leaders implement new strategy by their words and deeds. They choose words and deeds that fill the conversational, meaning or  social space with clear and consistent ideas about the new strategy, for example how the customers are to be served. This kind of behaviour creates a new system ‘field’, one strong in congruence, influencing behaviour in only one direction. In effect they create a field of influence that make certain behaviours more likely.

5. Help people understand what ‘strategically aligned behaviour’ looks like

People often have difficulty translating the words on the page of a strategic document into ‘what it means for us’. One way to help people create a stronger vision and sense of what the new strategy looks like is to seek out early examples of behaviour that is ‘pointing in the right direction’ and to pro-actively amplify and broadcast these stories. These are stories that exemplify ‘yes, this is what we want, this is what we mean’. It’s hard for people to imagine things they have never experienced. Sharing stories that act as models of what is required helps people to ‘get it’.

6. Recognise strategy as an emergent process

Strategy becomes a lived reality in an organization through an emergent process. People have to feel their way into ‘doing’ the new strategy. Sometimes organizations act as if strategy can be dictated and people can start working in this new and different way with never a false step being made. This expectation hampers progress as people are afraid they will make a mistake, whilst also quickly creating the sense of things going wrong. Recognising the enactment of strategy as a discovery process, with false starts, blind alleys and a general iterative ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process, helps greatly in creating and sustaining momentum for change.

7. Retell the story of strategy around the organization

The strategic ‘story’ needs to be shared in many different ways in many different contexts with many different groups. We work out what we mean by what we say through this process of telling and retelling. The creation of strategy is not a uni-directional communication process, it is a collaborative co-creating dialogue process. Organisational understanding of what the words on the paper mean in practice emerges through shared dialogue.

8. Create a strategy that is both familiar and different

We can conceptualise strategy as a fiction. It is a fictional account of a possible future. Ideally it is a co-authored story (see point 1) but often it is a story created by some people that they need others to believe. To grasp and hold our interest stories need to be both credible and unfamiliar. Appreciative inquiry is perfect for this. The articulation of the best of past in which we recognize ourselves offers the ‘credible’ part of the story, while the following three stages, dream, design and destiny, offer the generative part of the story. During these phases, the organization creates a picture of itself that is built on the familiar yet is importantly different, new.

9. Make the strategy tangible

The way this is usually done is to produce a report. The printed word is more tangible, carries more weight, than just words. When we hold the document in our hands we can see that we have done something, much more so than when we emerge from a dialogue event with ‘just’ different ideas in our heads. The challenge is to go beyond just a document. How else can the organization make the new strategy tangible? Pictures, logos, diagrams are all part of this process. Encouraging people and groups to physically model (with Lego or plasticine for example) the past and the future, and then talking about the difference, can help with this.

10. Strategy is a verbal activity

Finally, as a summary of most of the above, it is important to recognise that strategy is a verbal activity. How we talk is different to how we write. The written strategy document is unlikely to be a direct source for effective verbal explanations. Different groups and different people need different approaches if they are to ‘get it’. Ideally the talking comes before the writing, so people can see their words in the document. But it is quite possible to reverse the process, helping groups create a verbal account of the handed down written word. Which I believe brings me back to where I started.

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

How Working With Strengths Can Improve Performance

Our strengths are those abilities we have that are hardwired into our ways of doing things. They are a combination of genetics we inherited and the environment in which we were raised. By the time we are adults some neural pathways are much more practiced than others. We have habitual ways of being and behaving that we find effortless: indeed almost irresistible. These, in essence, are our strengths. We might use them for good or evil, with or without much skill, but they are our go-to, default way of being in the world. While they can and frequently do get us into trouble when applied badly or inappropriately, they are also our greatest asset. And yet....

'This isn't development, it's damage control'

Many of us have been diligently working for years to get better at the things that we are bad at. Time after time the same things come up in the performance appraisal, 360 degree feedback or the personality profile, time after time we resolve ‘to work on our weaknesses’ In this we are in good company.

•   87% of people believe that finding your weaknesses and fixing them is the best way to achieve outstanding performance. (Buckingham, 2007).

However as Buckingham says ‘this isn’t development, it’s damage control’. As someone with poor attention to detail, I live in fear of sending out incorrect invoices. My diligent attention to them, checking and double-checking is damage limitation indeed! And it takes me a disproportionate amount of time.

However, recent research suggests that we are wrong because:

• Excellence is not the opposite of failure
• Strengths are not the opposite of weaknesses
• We will learn little about excellence by studying failure
• We will learn little about our strengths by concentrating on our weaknesses
• By studying our mistakes we will learn more about how we make mistakes
• By studying our weaknesses we will learn more about ourselves at our worst
• If we want to learn about success, we must study our successes
• If we want to learn about our strengths we need to study ourselves at our best

Know your weaknesses

This isn’t to say that we don’t need to attend to our weaknesses, clearly we do. However we can be cleverer about how we do that. In an ideal scenario we fit the tasks to the strengths profile. My ideal bookkeeper (for my invoicing for instance) would be someone for whom attending to detail isn’t an anxiety-ridden, fraught activity where a mistake lurks undetected in every line, but is a delight, an engaging dance with perfection. While I emerge from the task with a sense of ‘fingers crossed’ they would emerge with a sense of ‘job well done’. (For those of you who are worrying about my ability to stay in business, I do now have an assistant who helps with the double-checking!). This of course is another way of dealing with weaknesses: getting help.

Invest your time where you get the best returns

With the time and emotional energy we save by not ‘working on our weaknesses’ we can concentrate on understanding and maximizing our strengths. The research demonstrates very clearly that excellence in individual and team performance is related to the awareness of, and exercise of, our strengths, on a daily basis.

• People who get the chance to play to their strengths every day are 50% more likely to work in teams with a low turnover, 38% more likely to work in productive teams and 44% more likely to work in teams with higher customer satisfaction scores. (Buckingham and Clifton, 2002)
• In high performing teams, people say they call on their strengths more than 75% of the time.

However,

• Only 17% of people use their strengths at work everyday. (Buckingham, 2007)

The jury is out – working on your strengths can help achieve great performance

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 Engagement.

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

Sources

Buckingham, M. 2007 Go put your strengths to work, Simon and Schuster

Buckingham and Clifton,, 2002, Now discover your strengths. Free Press Business

Five Ways to Get Your Team Working More Effectively

Teams are the building blocks of organizations. Teams are groups of people who work together to achieve things, but not all groups are teams. Teams are characterized by interdependencies, in other words team members have to work together to get things done. While this interdependency creates the potential for the whole to be more productive and creative than the sum of the parts, it can just as easily be a recipe for frustration and conflict. How can you help your team get the most out of working together?

Create a positive working culture

Very few people like to be in an atmosphere that is critical, hostile, unfriendly or cold. Yet many teams manage to create precisely this culture because they overly focus on achieving the task and fail to account for basic human nature. Research over the last 10 years has convincing backed up what many of us intuitively knew, a good working atmosphere makes a huge difference to a team’s productivity. What the research found is that the key to the difference between high performing and low performing teams is the ratio of positive to negative comments in team meetings. Interestingly this doesn’t need to be in balance, it needs to be weighted in favour of positive comments, at least by a ratio of 3:1.

A number of things seem to happen once this magic ratio is reached and even more so if the ratio moves closer to 6:1. There is more positive affect ‘good feeling’ generated by the group when they are together. When people feel good they are more able to think well, be creative, and to work with others. In addition people become more willing to contribute ideas, and to work with goodwill through the moments of uncertainty, disconnection or confusion in the conversation until something new emerges. The benefits continue beyond the immediate team meetings, as team members’ actions in their own domains are more in sync with their colleagues, and so the departmental interface issues are lessened.

Help people play to their strengths

Many people have put much effort into attempting to address their weaknesses over many years to little avail. I know this because I meet them at their 360 feedback sessions somewhere mid-career where they say ‘yes, that always comes up as a weakness, I do try...’. This is usually a depressing conversation for both parties.

Recent thinking is that attending more to our strengths will reap greater benefit in terms of performance improvement. This is because when we are using our strengths work feels effortless, we are energised and confident, we are engaged and probably experience moments of flow. Feeling like this we are more able to be generous and patient with others, so the benefits flow onward. Strengths are an expression of highly developed mental pathways and neutral connections that take minimal effort to enact. Help your team members discover their true strengths and then find ways as a team to utilize everyone’s strengths to achieve the team task. Think of your team as an economy of strengths, and work out how to create extra value by trading your strengths.

Create commonality amongst team members

Teams are often made up of people with different skillsets and areas of expertise that tend to see the world, and the priorities for action within it, differently. This can lead to a great awareness of difference, and the differences can come to be seen as insurmountable. Yet at the same time there will be areas of commonality amongst team members, often in the areas of core values and central purpose.

A very productive way to access these commonalities is through the sharing of stories. When people are asked to share personal stories of their moments of pride at work, or moments of achievement or success, or the part of their job that means the most to them, they are expressing their values and sense of purpose in an engaging, passionate and easy to hear form. The listener will undoubtedly find that the story resonates with them, creating an emotional connection at the same time as they begin to see the person in a different light. In the best scenarios as people share their highlight stories a sense emerges in the room of ‘wow, these are great people I’m working with here, I’d better raise my game!’

Move from the habitual to the generative

Groups can get stuck in repeating dynamic patterns. When this happens listening declines as everyone believes they know what everyone else is saying – they’ve heard it all before. And so does the possibility of anything new happening. To break the patterns we need to move from rehearsed speech (which means exactly what it says, speech that has been thought or said so often it just tumbles out) to generative speech (which is the delightful sensation of hearing ourselves say something new).

To help the team make the shift you need to ask questions, or introduce activities that mean people need to think before they speak, that brings information into the common domain that hasn’t been heard before. Positively or appreciatively framed questions as suggested above are particularly good for this. So too are imagination based questions, or example ‘If we woke up tomorrow and we had solved this dilemma, how would we know, what would be different?’ ‘If we weren’t spending our time locked in this conversation, what might we be talking about?’ Or ‘as if’ questions ‘If we discuss this as if the customer was in the room with us, what will we be saying?’ Sometimes just getting people to all switch from their habitual seating pattern breaks old and creates new dynamics.

Create Future Aspirations

When teams suffer a crisis of motivation or morale it is often associated with a lack of hope. A lack of hope that things can get better, a lack of hope in the power and influence of the group or the leader, a lack of hope or belief in the possibility of achieving anything.

Hope and optimism are both great motivators and also key in team resilience. In hopeless situations we need to engender hopefulness. Appreciative Inquiry as an approach is particularly good at doing this as it first of all discovers the best of the current situation, unearths the hidden resources and strengths of the group, and then goes on to imagine future scenarios based on these very discoveries about what is possible. As people project themselves into optimistic futures clearly connected to the present, they begin to experience some hopefulness. This in turn engenders some motivation to start working towards those more aspirational scenarios of how things can be.

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 can help Top Teams and how we can help your organisation with Engagement.

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

How Does Positive Organisational Behaviour Turn Into Positive Organisational Performance

Positive organisational scholarship researcher Kim Cameron reports that flourishing organisations, that is organisations that are success as well as being described as great places to work, exhibit three key cultural characteristics.

A strong interest in learning from positive deviance

All organisations have an interest in learning from negative deviance, that is, when things go wrong. Rather less have an interest in learning from positive deviance, when things go right. But they are missing a trick. We now know that very often the root causes of success are not just the polar opposite of the root causes of failure. Taking an active interest in learning from exceptionally good performance allows organisations to increase their ability to succeed.

The modelling and promotion of virtuous actions

There is still a strong organizational story that suggests that a successful organizational culture is hard, macho and dog-eat-dog with little time for sentiment. By contrast Cameron’s research has found that organisations that promote virtuous actions, by which he means things such as kindness, patience, humility, generosity and forgiveness reap the benefits in organizational performance. A moment’s thought suggests this makes sense as such an environment means people are likely to take more learning risks than in a blame orientated culture with a minimal toleration of mistakes or errors. Of course the learning process still has to be managed, but the recognition that people are human and that in any human system error is inevitable helps liberate learning behaviour and reduce blame avoidance and buck-passing.

A strong bias towards affirming the best in people and situations

Cameron found that his exceptional organisations had a real bias towards noticing and affirming the best in people. We might say they had developed skill with their appreciative capabilities as well as their critical ones. Being affirmed in your essential goodness as well as your particular strengths helps boost confidence and morale. It also affects motivation. People grow towards the best reflections of themselves. Reflecting back the best of people helps them attain their potential.

This collection of behaviour actively promotes two organizational processes that lead to improved performance

Upward virtuous circles of positive emotion and behaviour

When we see others displaying exceptional virtue, we are inspired to emulate them. People behave better in the company of the better behaved. The kind of culture described above contributes to a self-reinforcing virtuous circle of people feeling good, therefore being more inclined to do good things, therefore more likely to be observed by others behaving well, who in turn are more likely to be inspired to behave at their best, with colleagues, customers and suppliers. All these little bits of behaviour add up to a performance culture.

Social Capital

These three key organizational behaviours also contribute to the development of good social capital. Social capital describes the levels of trust and connection between departments or divisions in an organization. High levels of social capital promote good information flow and low-level decision-making and problem-solving, all of which contributes effectively to local and global performance.

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 can help with Engagement.

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

‘I wouldn’t have started from here’ - The Challenge Of Bringing Emergent Change Insights To Planned Change Projects

Planned Change - The good and the bad

When organizations decide they need to make changes in the way they work, their culture or their IT system they often default to a planned change approach. Typically LEAN specialists and programme managers if not already present are hired and the process of organising a top-down driven change process begins.

This approach has its strengths. It often reveals scope for improved efficiency, but more tellingly, it presents change as a problem of data and logic and makes change look manageable, sequential and what I can only describe as ‘tidy’. Unfortunately it also leads straight to the ‘how to get buy-in’ and ‘how to overcome the resistance to change’ conversations.

Planned change approaches inadvertently encourage people to give up trying to contribute to the change conversation or to influence how it happens. They can become passive, demotivated and demoralised, waiting to be told what to do. It is when the downsides of this approach become apparent that people find their way to me, presenting their challenge as a problem of dis-engagement, poor morale, people needing support during change.

Bringing in Emergent Change

We know that emergent, dialogic, psychological, and co-creative approaches to change such as Appreciative Inquiry, World Café, and Open Space act to motivate, engage and energise people and connect to their desire to influence their own future, to be part of the change process. The challenge is how to bring them to the party when the planned change process is already in full swing: when one’s first thought upon engagement is, ‘well I wouldn’t have started from here’ – but here we are.

How To

There is an art to bringing value from our perspective under these circumstances. We need to work at the interstices, in the gaps that emerge in the planned change process. In working with this challenge, there are some principles for engaging that I have found useful.

1. Work with who you can, where you can

You may not be able to get ‘the whole system in the room’, that doesn’t mean you can’t work in these ways with the bits of the system you can gain access to. Use all opportunities to help people start to understand change as an emergent phenomena that they can influence, even as planned change is unfolding all around them. Bring your appreciative questioning style and your positive focus on strengths and good affect to all opportunities. Work wherever you can, with whoever you gain access to the move the focus to: what we can do, what we can influence.

     2. Adapt processes to fit the opportunities

I have used Appreciative Inquiry approaches working with parts of the system over a series of events, pulling it all together through another series of events (multi-events for one process); with one group in small chunks of time over time (one event split over time); and have developed one-day ‘roadworthy’ Appreciative Inquiry processes when unable to negotiate the longer time I would have desired. I have found Appreciative Inquiry to be an incredibly robust process that acts to re-energise, re-motivate, re-engage the disillusioned, disengaged and demotivated time after time.

    3. Encourage awareness of possibilities of local influence and control

Help people and groups focus on what they can influence. Usually the idea that top management ‘has got it all planned out’ is a myth. Top management don’t have brain space to attend to every last detail. If people want good decision making in their own area they need to seize the initiative and start presenting ways forward. Help groups focus on what is important to them in the change and on how they can influence the wider system. Once again Appreciative Inquiry is great for this. It is these conversations that start to rekindle hope, optimism, motivation to engage.

     4. Keep bringing key ideas to the fore

These are some of the ideas that need encouragement and reinforcement as planned change swings into gear, and that you can bring to any conversation or situation you are able to negotiate entry to:

• Volunteerism - people are being pushed around enough already, try to make any specific events you are able to run optional (and very attractive!).
• Co-creation – always ask ‘who else can we usefully involve in this?’ Encourage leaders to take questions to their teams in a co-creative (e.g. not just consultative) way. I find the notion of ‘drawing on the collective intelligence’ often helps with negotiating more involvement by lower level staff.
• Positivity – focus on creating positive affect, it really helps create resilience during a difficult time. Encourage others to recognize the continuing importance of positive mood boosts. Many ‘rewarding’ experiences disappear during change as people go ‘heads down’ and pleasurable interactions can lessen.
• Strengths – people are more energised, engaged, motivated etc. when they can use their strengths to achieve their objectives. Help groups focus on identifying these and working out how to draw on them: individual strengths, group strengths, organisational strengths.
• Hope and optimism - In my experience these can be early casualties of planned change. Using appreciative techniques helps people focus on the best of the past and their hopes for the future. Hope is also part of the ‘building resilience’ challenge.
• Pro-activity – encourage people to take responsibility for how they are engaging with the change and the effect they are having on others around them. It’s the antidote to the ‘being done to’ feeling that can be so strong during planned change
• Leaders’ face – be mindful always of leaders’ face. They are (usually) doing their best to do the best for the organization, and they are doing it the only way they know how. As we help people make sense of what is going on, we need to help them recognize this.
• Story and Choice – Unhelpful stories often emerge during change about the motivation for change in general and to explain leaders’ behaviour in particular. These are often stories of blame, inadequacy, deficit and deceit, nefarious motives and so on. We can remind people that there are many truths about a situation, and situations are often paradoxical. We can remind them that they have a choice about the story they choose to tell, both to themselves and to others and that the telling of stories has impact for action.
• Amplifying success – in change people get so focused on what isn’t working they lose sight of the fact that they are still achieving things. Bringing these to the fore helps with morale, pride etc.

See Case Studies of how introducing emergent change into planned change can work in practice

Case Study - Making The Virtual World Visible

Case Study - Cultural 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 the tools we use to foster Emergent Change.

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

Using Your Positive Organisational Development Cards: 10 Ideas To Get You Started

So you've got some of our Positive Organisational Development Cards - now what? We have produced a list of 10 ideas for ways in which you could use the cards to add value to your work with different audiences.

In General

You can use these cards in a number of ways to stimulate discussion; create commonality and motivation; and to identify agreed action. Some general ideas are:

• Use the cards as they stand, the questions and the action points
• Use a rating scale ‘To what extent is this present in our team/organization/group at the moment on a scale of 1-10? What would we like to be? How can we move towards this?’etc.
• As a prioritizing tool. ‘Which five of these are most key to our future success/our development/our strategy?’
• As playing cards. Each person has some. Someone starts by laying down a card they think is important (to the topic under discussion) explaining why they think so, the person who thinks they can build on this with one of the cards in their hand lays it down with ‘yes and...’. This is a cooperative card game, with no winners or losers.

With Senior Executives

1) Leadership

Use the Authentic Leadership card as a stimulus to the initial discussion.

Ask them to identify what other cards they see as being relevant to being an effective, positive leader (e.g. affirmation and positive deviance, mindfulness, engagement, virtuous practices, positive energy networks and strengths). Use the questions to stimulate discussion and the further notes to create possibilities for initiatives or personal development

2) Organisational Culture

Take the five culture cards (pink). For each card consider and discuss the questions and then make a rating for each concept (where are we now?) on a scale of 1-10. Then ask – Where do we want to be? Look at the action points and pick a few as a basis for planning how to start moving in the right direction

Leaders and Managers in General

3) Using micro-moments as a leader

Select the cards that leaders can have an impact on in every engagement they have (e.g. positive deviance, virtuous practices, authentic leadership, high quality connections, positive emotions, flourishing, mindfulness). Use the questions to stimulate discuss to raise awareness of the importance of these concepts to creating a positive organisational atmosphere. Then use pointers for action to help create action resolutions.

4) Performance Appraisal

The yellow cards (with the possible exception of the Appreciative Inquiry card) form a good basis for a performance appraisal conversation. Also include the blue cards engagement and flow and maybe the flourishing card. The key question is ‘When you do you experience this at work? What are you doing, who is around?’ and so on to help them learn about when they are at their best.

Alternatively, you can spread the cards out and ask them to pick a few cards that exemplify what they would like more of in their work. Or what they find most exciting at work e.g. using strengths, being affirmed, having great conversations and so on.

5) Career Counselling

Pick a few appropriate cards like affirmation, strengths, positive deviance, authentic leadership, engagement, generativity, and ask them which of these features might be important to them in a job or their next career move? How can they find out whether a job or organization offers these? Alternatively get them to pick the five that seem most important to them to allowing them to give their best at work.

Groups – Development

6) Culture / Organisational Development

Take the pink culture cards and add any others you like, such as positive deviance, affirmation and flourishing, asking ‘What is important to us in our culture? Where is this already present?’ and so on, use the questions on the back of the card as well. Get the group to make a current rating of where the organization is, then use the suggestions on the cards to stimulate discussion of actions to increase positivity of the culture. These cards help individuals identify what they can do to move things forward.

Take the green cards and repeat the process. These give ideas as to how to create cultural change at the collective level.

7) Identifying our strengths as leaders and managers

Start with the strengths card, identifying what strengths are and working with the questions and suggestions on the back. You can then delve further into the individual and collective strengths using a strengths card pack (such as the Strengthscope cards or the Positive Insights strengths cards), or work with rest of the positive psychology concept cards to identify organisational positive psychology strengths. E.g. as an organization we are good at... ‘affirmation’ and the evidence is....

From here the discussion can move to how to build on the strengths we have and, how to discover hidden organisational strengths.

8) Divisional Groups or Teams – our local culture

Use the cards to help the group address the question of what kind of atmosphere do we want to create in our local part of the organization? How can we do this?

9) During Redundancy and Other Difficult Times

Take green cards and positive emotions and high quality connections as a basis for a discussion on, ‘How can we consciously work to boost all of these in our organisation even as we have to do this difficult thing?

Take yellow cards and ask ‘How can we build these into our process for doing what it is we have to do?’

10) Increasing Motivation and Morale

Take positive deviance, positive energy networks, positive emotions, flourishing, strengths, engagement and appreciative inquiry cards as a basis for discussion asking, ‘How can we increase these in our organization?’ Use green cards to help identify collective processes to engage and motivate.

These are just 10 ideas to help you get started, I hope you find them useful, please do write and let us know how you do use the cards, and any ideas you have for improvements to them.

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

Introducing The Positive Organisational Development Cards

The Positive Organisational Development Cards each cover a key concept from the field of positive psychology. 

The concepts reflect key findings from positive psychology research of things that make a positive difference to organisational life. Each card lists the benefits of the concept, provides three questions to stimulate discussion, and is followed by three pointers for development. Each is introduced briefly below, arranged in four groups, to help you follow them and get an idea of any you aren't familiar with as well as to help explain them to your audiences.

Presence Concepts (or Strengths) - Blue

Employee Engagement is positively related to: wellbeing and attendance, employee retention, effort and performance, quality, sales performance, income and turnover, profit, customer satisfaction, shareholder return, business growth, and success. According to research, only 19% of employees are highly engaged at work. For an engaged employee, job performance matters.

High Quality Connections are conversations that are generative in nature, affirming and life enhancing. They boost motivation, trust, innovation and information flow. They are particularly important for people who are excluded from more purposeful 'bonding or socialising activities’ e.g. causal workers, temps, interns - boosting stickiness and motivation to perform

Positive Energy Networks are mutually energizing, motivating and affirming, with a particular positive and affirming person as the node point. They are generative, they add value. Being part of such a network is highly motivating, encouraging individual commitment, performance and resilience.

Flow is the psychological state experienced when challenge and skill are sufficiently matched in an area of interest to produce complete task absorption. When 'in flow' people are working at their best, using all their abilities to achieve the task. Flow states are highly motivating.

We are displaying Mindfulness when we are paying attention in the moment to our internal state or the external world. Mindfulness and attentiveness require being present in the moment. They enhance the quality of interpersonal interactions and the thoughtfulness of decision making. In the mindless state induced by efficient routines, we can miss important signs of change.                  

Collective Concepts (or Strengths) - Green

Social Capital is the hidden capital of group relationships. Social capital releases the potential of investment capital. Social capital affects trust and information flow, and speed of adaptation. It is a basic requirement for a flexible, flourishing organization. High social capital promotes organisational resilience.

Collective Intelligence draws on the accumulated resourcefulness of the whole organization. Within organisations there is a huge, intelligence held by the whole workforce, not just a select few. In today's competitive world relying on a few key people for knowledge, innovation and decision-making is ineffective.

The degree of Connectivity amongst a group is a measure of their alignment. High connectivity promotes self-organization amongst a group, which reduces management cost. Well-connected organisations exhibit lower level, faster, better problem solving and decision-making. High performing teams demonstrate high connectivity.

Four key states characterise people's Psychological Capital: hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and resilience. Together these affect performance and satisfaction. Because these are states rather than traits they can be learnt, as can the ability to self-create them. These states are related particularly to motivation and performance at work.

Resilience refers to the ability to bounce-back from adversity. Resilience contributes to post-traumatic growth. Resilient people find sources of positive emotion even in difficult or upsetting situations. Resilient people and organisations are able to return to a functioning, productive state quicker following trauma or adversity.

Cultural Strengths - Pink

The Abundance Bridge includes excellence, exceptional performance, generosity, brilliant and benevolence. Flourishing organizations invest in building their abundance bridge as well as closing their deficit gap. While attending to the deficit gap prevents unacceptable performance, attention to the abundance bridge promotes exceptional performance.

Authentic Leadership is made up of four key attributes: openness, integrity, self-reflection and balanced judgement, that underlie surface style differences. Life experiences are more important than innate abilities in achieving formal leadership positions: leaders are made. Authenticity is a key defence against corrosive, demoralising organisational cynicism.

Positive Deviance is about learning from success and building towards excellence. It means paying organisational attention to building the abundance bridge as well as to lessening the deficit gap. Positive Deviance is one of the attributes identified as distinguishing flourishing organisations. Very few organisations really pay attention to learning from their successes.

Virtuous Practices are strengths such as patience, helpfulness, gratitude, appreciation, forgiveness, and humility that characterize the most successful and life enhancing places to work. Strong patterns of virtuous behaviour are a distinguishing feature of flourishing organizations. People are inspired by the virtuous behaviour of others, creating virtuous spirals of mutual benefit and increasing social capital.

Flourishing is a state of growth and abundance. Flourishing organisations exhibit positive deviance, affirmative bias and virtuous behaviour. Flourishing individuals experience positive emotions, engagement or flow, meaning, positive relationships and accomplishment. Flourishing organisations and individuals are likely to be more successful.                           

Appreciative Strengths - Yellow

To experience Affirmation is to be valued for who you are and what you bring. When we are affirmed we see ourselves reflected positively in the eyes of others. Affirmation aids personal growth. Affirmation is nourishment for the soul. Affirming the best in people, teams and organisations enhances performance.           

Appreciative Inquiry understands the organisation as a living system and develops it through growing more of the best. Appreciative Inquiry offers a positive psychology approach to organisational development. By working with the whole system, Appreciative Inquiry creates rapid, coordinated, energised change.                                

Generativity is a source of change: new, compelling ideas, generated by the group, garner commitment and energy. Generativity occurs when people come together: combining knowledge, inspiring each other and creating new possibilities and generating energy for action. High quality interactions promote generativity                                              

Positive Emotions include things like pride, joy, interest, serenity, awe, and excitement. When feeling good people are more likely to be creative, engage with others, manage complexity, be tenacious, and deal with ambiguity and novel information. The magic ratio of positive to negative experiences is 3:1 or above.

Strengths are the natural abilities developed over your life course. Using strengths feels effortless and highly engaging and energizing. Strengths underpin many aspects of performance at work. They are the source of motivation, development, high performance. Strengths are the most efficient source of excellence                 

More information on all of these concepts can be found in Lewis S (2011) Positive Psychology at Work. Wiley Blackwell, as well as many other positive psychology books.

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

How To Avoid Triggering Resistance To Change: 5 Benefits of Co-Creation

The problem: Silence is not 'buy-in'

Key change questions

Two of the questions most frequently heard when talking to leaders about their plans for change are:

•       How can we get buy-in?

•       How do we deal with the resistance to change?

They reflect assumptions about people and change so embedded as to be endemic.

Assumptions about people and change

These assumptions are that ‘people don’t like change’, and, that people can be ‘sold’ change.

It is true that, on the whole, people aren’t widely enthusiastic about change that is forced upon them without consultation that appears to make their life or working conditions worse. It is also true that people will buy the idea that if they point out the problems that the proposed change will cause, they will be labeled as a troublemaker or worse. Given this, they may stop saying anything. This compliance is often confused with ‘buy-in’.

An alternative approach

Co-creation change processes offer an alternative. By working closely, from the beginning, with those who will be affected by any proposed change, these questions become irrelevant. A number of additional benefits accrue.

Benefits of the Co-creation approach to change

1) Tapping into Collective Intelligence

Participative co-creation taps into the collective intelligence of the organisation at the point where it’s application can have the most effective impact at the least cost - at the very beginning. Involved early, before irreversible decisions are made, people can draw on their wealth of localised knowledge about what works and what doesn’t while the challenge is still being formulated and considered. They can also road-check solution ideas for feasibility before they have become invested with the weight of being the right and only answer.

Utilising the organisation’s collective intelligence leads to better solutions arrived at in a cost effective manner.

2) Creating Active Participation

When people are involved in the definition of the problem or challenge and the design of the solution, they start to make changes in their behaviour immediately. In addition, once formal plans are issued, or projects started, they already understand why and don’t need to be persuaded of, or sold on, the rightness of the action. Co-creation approaches to change lead to faster implementation.

Encouraging active participation in design leads to faster solution implementation.

3) Direct Involvement in Decision-making

When people have direct involvement in decision-making, they are much more likely to accept the outcome. As long as their views have been genuinely appreciated and considered they are likely to accept the evolving nature of the solution. People can track their particular contributions as the answer evolves. Such involvement inspires a sense of ownership of, and commitment to, the final design. Co-creation leads to a high level of commitment.

 Facilitating direct involvement in decisions creates a high level of commitment.

4) Building Social Capital

People who have worked together in a positive way on something that is important to them form stronger social bonds. Collectively the strength of these internal relationships is known as the social capital of the organisation. High social capital means a high level of trust across the organisation; good information-sharing and easy information flow. It also facilitates problem-solving at the level of the problem. Investment in social capital helps to ameliorate the well known problems of silo-mentality. Co-creation facilitates low level, quick and effective, peer-to-peer problem-solving, vital when new, unfamiliar systems are being implemented.

 Increasing social capital leads to coherent, co-ordinated action

5) Leverage Strengths

Co-creation processes that focus on identifying existing strengths and core values as part of the change process help people link the need for change with success and personal integrity. They also create positive emotion that is energy for the change. Aligning the future with the past along the lines of what is best about the current organisation makes it more likely that people will feel hopeful and optimistic about the change and the future. Co-creation based on existing strengths and clear values is likely to be implemented with hope and enthusiasm, leading to a smoother implementation process

 Leveraging strengths and values leads to hope and optimism

How can you implement change like this?

There now exists an abundance of co-creation change processes that help organisations avoid triggering resistance and all the costs and delays incurred with that. They require organisations to demonstrate a different style of leadership, one that is predicated on an understanding that an organisation is a social system, with leadership a privileged position within that system. The role of the leader then becomes to find ways to help the organisation continually evolve towards a better future. To do that the leader needs to call on and release the collective intelligence and capability of the whole organisation.

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 Our Approach to change.

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

'How do you create a sense of urgency in positive approaches to change?'

This was the question posed to me recently by an HR Director taking up a new post with a big change agenda. He was attracted to the idea of positive change, but working with an organization with a long and successful history, he was challenged about how to galvanise the workforce into engaging with the necessary changes. I thought it was a great question and it has stayed with me.

It has long been known that negative emotions such as fear, despair or anger can act as a spur to change. Leaders and change consultants have sometimes built on this knowledge by deliberately creating these emotions at work, by ‘creating the burning platform for change’.

Such tactics may well produce energy for change, however there are some drawbacks.

·      The energy may not be accompanied by much creativity: the aim is to avoid, not to create.

·      The energy may not be very sustainable: once the threat is seen to have receded the escape        behaviour ceases and old patterns reassert themselves.

·      It tends to produce more compliant behaviour than active commitment.

·      It can create a very unhealthy and unhappy working atmosphere.

So what is the alternative, how do positive approaches to change create urgency? I think we probably need to rephrase the question to how do they create energy and drive for change? How do they create motivation and momentum for change?

We are drawn towards an attractive future

Rowland and Higgs (2008) in their research into how change actually happens (as opposed to the story we have about how change happens) discovered four key things that made a difference to the success of change efforts. One of these was the ability of the leaders to create a magnetic pull towards an attractive future. This I think is at the heart of the answer to our question.

Positive and appreciative approaches to change major on creating hope, optimism, group cohesion, strong visions of attractive possible future states, desire and ambition. They strengthen relationships, build social capital, create interdependencies and identify shared goals or aspirations. They build trust, illuminate shared values, and have a positive effect on motivation and morale.

In short they create a ‘together we can’ understanding of their collective abilities to influence outcomes. This, combined with co-created aspirations for, and visions of, future states, forms the basis of the energy for change.

The tortoise and the hare

A desire for change created from these more positive emotional states may take a little longer to release, discover, create or build, but it is likely to be more sustainable as a force for change. Working with groups you can see when a particular idea about, or vision for, the future really starts to take hold. It won’t go away. It exerts a continuing fascination, an attraction. This creates its own urgency: a desire to engage others with this powerful aspiration. It acts as a powerful light in the hazy vision of the emerging future, allowing for constant re-orientation. It is a pull towards the future and as such tends to create a much more sustainable energy over time than the push energy created by an awareness of the need to avoid present danger. An awareness of present danger can make us jump fast and without thought. An aspiration to achieve a desirable future state can draw us ever onwards.

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 Our Approach to change.

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