The reality management never sees

A recent diary entry from an employee in a research study was titled, “The Reality Management Never Sees.” While managers may have an unspoken agenda in the workplace, what they can’t see is how employees process life at work. In order to learn what happens inside of employees’ minds, for three years, researchers studied 238 professionals – persons who use their knowledge collaboratively to solve problems. The question for reflection in this post is, “What is the reality managers can’t see and how does understanding that reality change how they manage?”

The research shows that every person is affected by emotions created by reactions to events at work and by how they perceive and make sense of these events. This interplay of emotions and perceptions drive employees’ process of choosing what tasks to perform, how to do a task, and where to do it or in other words: their  motivation to perform. While this may not be surprising to a manager who has reflected on the question of how employees experience the workplace, the argument among managers is how performance is influenced by employees’ subjective experience.

The debate between managers is whether employees perform better when they’re self-directed, happier, and love what they’re doing or when supervisors pressure them to meet objectives and design competition among peer groups. The evidence showed three elements impacting performance:

• Positive emotions such as happiness, pride, warmth, and love directly affect people’s ability to solve problems creatively and successfully. And not only are they more likely to be 50% more productive on a day with positive emotions, the surprise finding was that the succeeding day was more productive as well. The reverse was true with fear, anger, frustration, confusion, and sadness decreasing employees’ ability to make progress not only on a given day, but on succeeding days with productivity falling between 65% and 80%.
• Individual perceptions of organizations and leaders as collaborative and cooperative, willing to consider new ideas, providing a meaningful vision, and willing to reward excellent work led to higher performance. Perceptions of political game playing and lack of trust and confidence in leadership led to an unwillingness to take risks and share ideas.
• Motivation to perform at their best comes when persons are interested in the work they are doing, finding enjoyment and challenge in the work itself. Motivation dips when external pressures rise and rewards are based not on doing meaningful work, but on meeting external expectations.

High performance was described as increases in productivity, a commitment to the work at hand, and respect for and contribution to the work of team members. The inner reality of employees clearly impacts effectiveness, productivity, and team participation. So what can managers do that will have the biggest impact on employees’ inner experience – emotions, perceptions, and motivation?

Surprising to me was what did not make the list of good management behavior: daily thanking an employee, working side-by-side with an employee as a peer, injecting lighthearted jokes, or buying a pizza for lunch. While these do have an impact, the most important and fundamental management activities were:

• Enabling progress by setting clear goals, communicating where the work is headed and why it matters and makes a difference; giving assistance when needed; providing resources and time to get the job done, and managing success and failure as learning opportunities. A few opposite examples include frequent changing of goals and objectives, placing obstacles in the way of progress, focusing on trivial issues, evaluating without explanation or learning, offering inadequate resources to reach the goal, forcing unnecessary time pressure, and engaging in political infighting.
• Treating employees as human beings, with dignity and respect.

As employees are connected to their work 24/7 ripple effects from organizations spread through employees’ lives. This knowledge emphasizes the importance of understanding the inner life of employees, It is good for our organizations and reaffirms life and our value as human beings.

Read more about Inner Work Life at http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/pdf/winter2008.pdf

Walking in the woods and Organization Development

What does walking in the woods have to do with Organization Development? Stress is necessary for life and work.  To-do lists keep us organized, Blackberries and iPhones keep us in communicaiton, and performance goals keep us focused on the big picture. It’s when we become distressed that our work and organizaiton performance decreases as our bodies react as though there were a tiger just behind the wall. Whether we are overwhelmed gradually or suddenly by the circumstances around us, each person needs to find ways of regaining equilibrium – recharging their batteries.

We’ve all heard the experts talk about how to manage stress and distress successfully: exercise, eat a healthy diet, spend 10 minutes in meditation or prayer, get enough sleep, and spend time with people you care about and who care about you. Yet, too often I find myself making excuses, putting off the necessary action. I hear others doing the same.

Outdoors it is the fall season. The light comes late and fades early. Brilliant red leaves cover the ground under dormant trees. Green wheat covers the ground like a fuzzy blanket, waiting for the gift of snow and spring warmth. Fall – Spring. Light – Dark. Life – Death. Stress – Distress. As Parker Palmer says, “We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives.”

The challenge for each of us is to take action, to find a way to live the paradox that is stress and distress. Take a walk; each lunch with a friend; read a good book; enjoy a movie; spend some time sitting quietly and connecting with the world around you; sleep well. When we intentionally act to care for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, our organizations and communities can thrive as we engage productively with the energy and innovation that come from well-being.

Action precedes transformation – for individuals and organizations. It is not enough to know what to do; we must do it. “You must be the change you with to see in the world.”

A walk in the woods

Walking away from the computer and into the woods is one of my favorite ways of managing stress. A walk in the woods allows me to step away from the challenges on my desk, re-focus my thoughts, and intentionally encounter the present. Here are some photos from today’s walk:

Sand Creek Trail Hedge Apple

Barn Along the Trail

Approaching Storm

As a friend wrote recently in her blog, “when I step back from our routine activities and try to see things with fresh eyes, I am reminded how much there is of value and beauty in the everyday.” I need to be sure to take time to reset . . . move away from the speed, chaos, and busyness around me . . . to stop processing what-could-have-been and what-might-be . . . to take a walk in the woods.

Being the change I wish to see . . .

“You must be the change you want to see in the world,” is a familiar quote from Mahatma Gandhi in organization change circles. Recently I’ve talked with several people about how organizational change happens. The consensus is that change begins with the individual.

If we want more trust in our organization, each of us must be more trusting. If we want more support for collaboration and communication, each of us must be willing to suspend our own opinions and our wish to be “right” while seeking to find workable solutions for all. If we want less conflict and tension, each of us must be willing to be calm and at peace with ourselves while genuinely caring for others. When I am open to transformation and actively work to change myself, I can become part of a chain of connections that opens a door for transformation and change that can benefit everyone.

Being open to change in myself is a life-long process. This process includes self-awareness and self-reflection, being willing to take responsibility for my own development. It asks me to make conscious choices, even in the midst of chaos. It asks me to practice being present with empathy, kindness, and compassion wherever I find myself. It asks me to make conscious choices about what to do and what to stop doing.

May each of us make a choice to be the change we all long for and wish to see. May we come to understand that how we treat ourselves, each other, and the world creates our experience. May we live into the answers for our questions. May our organizations be changed, one individual at a time.

Just tell me what to do!

“I’m committed to this organization, but I don’t understand what they want anymore. I wish they would just tell me what to do!”

The manager overhearing this conversation on the other side of a cubicle shrugs with frustration and thinks, “I’ve told them. They just don’t get it!”

What is the mystery that underlies this exchange? Managers spend time communicating goals, listening to concerns, and seeking to move the organization toward a shared vision and mission. Employees try to meet expectations and be a part of the team. But there is an unspoken agenda in many workplaces that can undermine the best intentions of managers and employees.

Hours are committed to writing accurate job descriptions. Some employers even develop replicable hiring criteria. Research shows that employees are so stressed by annual performance reviews that productivity suffers for weeks before and after the review. Yet few consider what is the most wished for workplace attribute: that people take on personal responsibility for their work and the organization — that people act as if they are self-employed at work.

Here are some of the unwritten attributes that define the self-employed at work phenomenon:

• Be creative and inventive – see your work as owned by yourself, not by your employer or supervisor.
• Be self-initiating and self-evaluating – identify problems and issues and evaluate what is working and what isn’t, suggest and initiate potential solutions. Don’t wait for others to do it for you.
• Take responsibility - see yourself as an actor that participates in creating the internal and external work environment, you are as responsible for what happens in the organization as the next person, including your supervisor.
• Be professional - master and author your work role and career. Don’t be an apprentice forever, continually imitate others, or only mimic the company line.
• See the system as a whole – look beyond your own role and part to see the whole, your relationship to the whole, and how the parts work together.

While most of us were hired for a specific position and may not actually be self-employed, I would invite consideration of the idea that employers biggest, unwritten wish is that people take ownership of their job, that they become self-employed at work. Robert Kegan and his team continue to do research on this issue as well as on the idea of immunity to change. I recommend his book, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, which looks at the question of what is really being demanded of us not only in the workplace, but in life.

Rushing ahead for more of the same

I’ve been thinking about change and transformation. It seems to me that most things that are “new” are often just the same things we’ve always had, perhaps with an incremental change here or there. A new computer has a slightly faster chip or a screen that’s an inch larger on the diagonal. Even the questions we asked are often worded in such a way as to create the context or framework for the answer.

The current buzz word flying through the air is innovation. For me the challenge with innovation is not to design a process that creates an opportunity for brainstorming or mind mapping that leads to the slightly different. And I will concede that any process or method has built-in biases for outcomes.  The challenge is to create an environment or an experience that pushes us to go beyond our assumptions and self-imposed boundaries.

Perhaps the key is to live the questions, to hold the opposing demands together: experimenting with reproducibility, spontaneity with stability, and surprising serendipity with effective efficiency. This is easier said than done. The beginning is to move to the level of systems thinking where we not only seek to understand and be understood, but to integrate the pieces into a whole.

Creating an environment that fosters space for innovation will require strategic planning and storytelling, mission statements and poetry, and schematic drawings and publicly visible art. My hope is to discover a road less traveled rather than rushing along the interstate of life, rushing ahead for more of the same.

Sailing with Dragons

I’ve been thinking about the tsunami of information that seems overwhelming and at the same time, necessary. The number of words written on WordPress can exceed 43 million per day, which doesn’t count traditional print media or any of the other popular social networking and blogging sites. There are organization strategies known as knowledge management systems that attempt to make sense of the tide of information. There are individual strategies for organizing e-mail and schedules.

And yet, we need to implement effective strategies to contain and manage the knowledge necessary for the linear processes in our work and life. And additionally, we need to have flexible strategies designed to help us, and the organizations we are a part of, make sense of the knowledge and information. When we have effective management processes and time to tell the stories that make sense of what is happening, our organizations will begin to thrive.

Having an effective process map and the narrative stories to give direction are not the only helpful things for organizations. It can also be helpful to go sailing with dragons. A few weeks ago I wrote about our maps and talked about the dragons that live beyond the edge of the known world. A willingness to live the full adventure, to accept the contradictions and paradoxes encountered, to not have all the answers, . . . these are keys to innovation and discovery.

The College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. 
    Jorge Luis Borges in Of Exactitude in Science

Fragments . . .

This past week I spent much of my writing time working on a new article for the Kansas EMS Chronicle column that I write. After writing on the blog for a couple of months, I found it challenging to put together a full-length article for a print publication. I kept asking myself, “How has blogging changed the way you write?”

Sitting on the porch this afternoon, I was readying say everything by Scott Rosenberg. Near the end of the book he suggests that blogs are fragments of ideas, conversations, and information. The on-line world is full of fragments, some linked together, some standing alone.

In reflecting on fragments, I thought of archaeologists who piece together pot shards and of researchers who discover fragments of ancient manuscripts. Every fragment is part of a whole and has a story to tell. Each blog post is only a fragment of what I’m thinking about regarding organizations and the development dynamic the fuels their growth. And, yes, it has changed the way I write.

So, why blog? The posts are fragments my reflections on the conversations that are going on in organizaitons formally and informally. They are fragments of the ideas in the world of people who care about how organizations can function at their best. In the end, the blog allows me to share my reflections on the pieces of thoughts and ideas that I hope will be a small, but useful contribution – a part of the resources for organization development.

Seasoned by Reflection

You’re the coach. It’s the NCAA basketball finals. Your team is down by 1 point with 4 seconds to go. Do you want your all-star rookie or your 4-year, seasoned veteran to take the last shot? My guess is that you’ll choose the seasoned player, even if her stats are not as impressive as the rookie’s. Experience in performing under pressure can give the seasoned player better odds.

Seasoned players and leaders have spent years reflecting on the situations they’ve encountered, considering what worked and what did not, observing what was required to meet the challenges. Reflection is an important part of personal development. The goal of reflection is understanding, synthesis, and integration of experience. It is not about judging the past as bad or good, criticizing yourself, or self-aggrandizement. It’s taking time to think about and recognize what happened, accepting the past as it is. Then it’s taking the next step to learn from what happened and identify your role, behavior, and response.

Think there isn’t time to reflect? I use the time spent driving to-and-from events or meetings. I often take a walk in the early evening. And, I set aside specific time to write and think each week. All of life’s experiences can teach us things if we are open to reflecting and learning.

People You Won’t Meet at the Water Cooler

The best leaders, the ones developing field leaders, won’t be the ones standing around at the water cooler. They are the ones working to get things done. But they don’t get things done by doing everything themselves. They start by looking around at the people they are responsible for leading and assessing their strengths and weaknesses.

A good leader knows that the people around them may possess strengths that the leader does not and is willing to allow people to be good at what they do. A good leader also assesses areas that need to be improved. Developing these areas will go a long way to creating new leaders. The challenge in developing leaders is to construct the environment and situations which will challenge people to develop and stretch their knowledge and abilities, even allowing them to fail — without significant consequences.

Once a challenge has been met, it is important to do two things: The first is to review what worked and what didn’t. Respectful dialogue and healthy debate can be part of a process that can improve not only the field leader, but the entire organization. The second is to go out and try again. In Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, the research is presented showing that people who are expert at their chosen task have practiced it for more than 10,000 hours. Trying again, assessing, improving, and trying again has been called by many different names over the years – from Total Quality Management to After Action Review; it is a proven method for exercising, growing, and building capacity.

The leaders who develop other leaders get things done. They don’t give up. They create challenging opportunities. They continuously act, learn, and improve. They put the well being of the organization and their people ahead of their own interests. They are committed to doing excellent work, work that makes a difference and is sustainable over time.