Remaking the Workplace

A CEO I know was engaging with some of his senior people a few days ago. They were sitting around telling war stories and pumping each other up. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems his ego got the better of him: “I’ll tell you what this business is about: It’s about the [frigging] money!”

Interesting. Revealing. And very, very dangerous.

Maybe it wasn’t ego. Maybe he just doesn’t know better. Either way, it’s hugely damaging behaviour.

Because in one unconsidered moment (these things always leach through the system) he guaranteed that almost all of his colleagues in the company (I prefer colleagues to employees) would now (if not earlier) not be able to link their own reason to come to work each day to the company’s purpose.

That creates a huge systemic disconnect between organizational purpose and individual purpose and meaning (which is the key driver of creating magic at touchpoints with customers, without which, nothing). Amazingly, most colleagues continue to do amazingly good work in creating value for customers. But that is in spite of the business’ leaders, not because of. Most people really do the best they can in their work, out of a sense of pride. But with this aforementioned disconnect in place, pride of purpose will end with their own work. They have no real reason to care about the larger success of the business as a whole. Imagine having your colleagues come to work and leave a key piece of themselves (their hearts?) at home?

Shareholders might get really excited to hear of the CEO’s single-minded focus on creating wealth for them. But most colleagues aren’t also shareholders.

Let me see if I can find us  another way to think about this … Okay, how about this: A man announces to his family at the dinner table one evening that he’s rethought the family and what they’re about and “ … it’s all about the frigging sex …” His wife and kids are stunned into silence. They thought the family was about the special connection they had, about their larger purpose to have safety and opportunities to grow and be all they could be, about joy and meaning and a shared purpose. Just about sex? What is he thinking? The wife pushes back. Surely not? He forges ahead: “Don’t give me all this stuff about purpose and meaning. That’s just soft stuff …”

Of course physical intimacy is important in a marriage. But it can never, sustainably, be the reason the family exists, and it can never be any kind of driver of success for this complex of people (a family …) who are bound together by ties that speak to all that is human in us. Sex is a marvelous byproduct, an important part of the mix, but never the raison d’être.

In just the same way, a business whose largest purpose is to make money is [Henry Ford said it first …] a narrow, venal thing. 

One of the best parts of browsing the business news is the juicy little tidbits of wisdom that are revealed in things as innocuous as (for example) interviews about business performance.  Kevin Hedderwick, CEO of Famous Brands, commenting on the value of franchising over ownership (www.fin24.com) gifted us with the following insight: “Franchisors cannot be as efficient as franchisees because an owner runs a business far better than a manager.”

This little statement might not (at first take) seem relevant to the work life of all those who don’t own their own businesses, but in fact the little pearl of wisdom that sits behind it reveals everything we need to know about the difference between mediocre/good performance and outstanding I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes performance. Simply put, people who feel that they have skin in the game out-perform by a country mile those who don’t. And the skin in the game doesn’t have to be determined by monetary rewards.

My belief is that, if a team of people have truly inculcated the values and deeply-believed principles of an organization (and this will depend largely on how they are treated, how they are trusted and how their efforts are recognized), pride, satisfaction, commitment and honor will trump money almost every time. And if this sounds a little too cute, try reading Jon R. Katzenbach’s Firing Up the Front Line from the Harvard Business Review of May 1999 (a substantial excerpt available at http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/1999/05/firing-up-the-front-line/ar/1) and you will see this idea reinforced by the description of a study of a variety of businesses by no less than McKinsey.

If my experience of the human spirit means anything at all, somewhere today, some ordinary little team of people, dumped with a challenge or a horrible situation, have taken it upon themselves to work together to turn the bad situation (whatever it is!) around and triumph over circumstance. This is the great thing about the human animal. Their genius and courage is sitting there waiting to be revealed / discovered / liberated / unleashed. How much nicer if all managers and leaders made this possible in a very deliberate way. But then all managers and leaders would have to know what is possible and (in their defense) sometimes, stuck in the trenches and bogged down under flak (from inside and outside), the vast unexplored horizon of the possible seems like a million miles away.

(This post written by Mike Burgoyne)

I’ve always liked Pete Adamo. He’s my neighbour. Now I have to admire him, too.

He runs a small boatbuilding business here in Hout Bay. I always worry about small business owners like Pete when the economy goes south. Turns out I didn’t need to worry about him. In a year when ALL the economic indicators are down, Pete’s sales YTD are up a whopping 500%. (I thought I had observed busier-than-usual activity around his boatyard.) 

Now I know why.

Pete and his team produce works of art. He uses the word beauty often, and craftsmanship keeps popping up too. He has created a little team that LOVES what they do. And it shows up in their products. As it happens, even though the economy shrank a few percentage points last year, there are still people who want to buy works of art they can take out on the water.

Go to www.sentinelboats.co.za if you have a hankering for things nautical. For the rest of us, Prospering from Adversity’s first step is to assemble a team (to deliver value to customers) that, because of how we lead them, have fallen in love with this journey we are taking them on. Then customer experiences become things of beauty and delight.  And prospering in tough times becomes possible. Even, maybe, plain sailing.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt alerted those listening to his address at the graduation ceremony at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday to something very central: First, be human.

He urged the graduands to experiment with stepping away from the virtual world and making what he referred to as human connections. (Go to http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-05-18-google-ceo_N.htm for the article and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKFQx30f6M for the video).

That makes me think of how many management committee meetings I have attended in various organizations which bore little resemblance to anything human. How did we get to here?

The kind of organizations that actually experience the energy and full participation of its workforce (as opposed to those who show up each day because they have a job, do a fair amount in earning their place in the organization, but where the business never really benefits from all their energy and creativity) are the kinds of workplaces where:

People actually listen to each other. Deeply. With real intent. (This is not easy …)

• Respect is not just a word in the company’s mission statement, but is deeply engrained in the DNA of the organization, because the management team practices it, demonstrably and relentlessly, every day.
• The notion that the people stuff is somehow soft is just never even contemplated.

Every time I speak to a group at a conference or in some other setting, and ask “How many of you wish your workplace was constructed differently and allowed you to find full expression for your talents, and to find increased meaning in what you do each day,” and have, always, basically had every hand go up, I long for business leaders to put the notion of creating workplaces of meaning, workplaces that respect that we are people first, at the top of the agenda in every business conversation.

My beautiful one-year-old Doberman did something really unfortunate ten days ago. In an effort to get outside to go and bark at horses passing the front gate, she jumped up against the window next to my front door. She had jumped against the front door before and I had thought nothing of it. This time she jumped against the window and the pane shattered. She then did what dogs will do: She jumped through the gaping hole and made just enough contact with the sharp edge of the glass on her way out to sever tendons (and a critical nerve) in her lower right leg.

After many visits to the vet, she’s almost completely healed now. Except for the severed nerve. The vet is hopeful that the brain will find other ways to send signals to the foot, but for now the lower leg is tragically floppy. She has adapted amazingly and only struggles when she needs to exert the kind of reverse pressure on the lower leg that is not now possible. So why am I telling you this?

Because there is a direct connection between the way a mammal’s mind and body work, and the way we could (should?) design workplaces (and then lead and manage in that context.)

Up till last week, one of my great delights was to enjoy my dog’s exuberant athleticism. What a magnificent thing is a Doberman! In movement, like poetry. In her enjoyment of her ability to run and jump, like pure intelligence. Dog fully functioning! But alas, no more.

The link to workplaces is not hard to make. Instead of thinking of our businesses as organizations (I have seen so many org charts that I get quite giddy at the thought that someone might ever show me another), how about thinking of them as organisms?

Our business plans turn ideas into money by means of people. Real, live, breathing people. Often, in large organizations, spirit and creativity are suppressed and then people who once had dreams feel squashed. People everywhere still have aspirations. They have good days and bad ones, they experience the entire gamut of human emotions (sometimes all in one day), they ache to be noticed and appreciated and found acceptable, they have struggles of every kind in their home lives, and sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night and rethink all their inadequacies. And yet these are also people who can be amazingly focused, extremely creative, doggedly determined, strikingly loyal, and wonderfully energetic. These last attributes are the ones you rely on to have your strategy executed.

At the nexus point between these two distinct sets of attributes that are foundational to the human condition, is the workplace we have created.

There is nothing soft and fuzzy about this! Nothing!

This metaphor is central to optimizing your business. In just the same way that Sariah’s lower front leg now flops uselessly, unable to receive instructions from the nerve centre in the brain, depending on how we construct and then lead and manage our businesses, there can be huge disconnects in our organizations - and there often are.

I worked with a large group of senior individual contributors, professionals all, a few weeks ago. We were talking about why things go wrong on the projects they are working on in their organization (with a view to minimizing the foul-ups). Here’s what they listed as the symptoms in their organization that made things go wrong (and put them under more pressure than they ever wanted to be under …)

• Poor decision-making around people, especially in assigning management roles to people who are not sufficiently skilled at the people piece to get it right.
• Inadequate communication up and down the organization, often as a result of the previous point, which leaves people deep in the organization with the feeling that they are just pawns in a chess-game they can’t understand and thus really feel part of.
• The making of bad decisions, which impacts on people on the front lines, and which are bad decisions because they are often made from the perspective of the executive floor at head office, and thus are insufficiently informed by reality on the front lines of the organisation.

 What it takes to make the shift from organization (how sterile!) to organism (living, breathing, vital) is a shift in perspective of the leaders of the organism, who are able to do quite a lot to shape things.

 Tom Peters said a while ago (and i quotyed it in a few days ago) that an organization should be: … an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others — e.g. Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Partners.

 The central act of business leadership at the end of the first decade of this century is that of remaking workplaces in human terms.

I know that there are many who think that Tom Peters has lost his way / lost his relevance. I really think the reverse is true. What he (insistently!) teaches is how things ought to be. And he does it lyrically too:

At its best (alas, hardly the norm), an organization, any organization can be/should be:

… an emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted service of others—e.g., Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Temporary partners.

My question, as I said, repeated now a hundred times:What else—literally—could the point be of any collective human endeavor, grand or mundane? No, I can’t imagine this as the norm on any given day, but I can imagine this as a very real, very pragmatic aspiration. I’ve discovered that, upon serious reflection, most people agree that this is indeed a pragmatic aspiration—an aspiration worthy of measuring oneself and one’s mates against.

This is the point of organization.
This is the point of organizing per se.
Period.

What Tom does (really) well is suggest a way of thinking for business leaders (wait: make that broader - how about everyone?) to create workplaces (and hence economic engines) that are powered by the very best that workplace colleagues have to give. The link to business results is not difficult to make.

What worries me is how few organisations I have ever encountered qualify as … emotional, vital, innovative, joyful. But why ever not? Those are all adjectives that describe what it means to be fully human. Why would we recognise these attributes as critical to men and women being fully functioning, and then accept (resignation?) that the places where we work are antithetical to that?

There is clearly work to be done. This is not about training. It’s not about workshops and roadshows - although there might be some of that. It’s really about (first) leaders and managers going through a process that alerts them to what is possible, provides them with tools to drive this transformation, and then supports them on this journey.

Well worth doing!

Tom’s blog can be found at www.tompeters.com. At the head of the page you can subscribe to his daily (and always relevant) snippet of an email to provoke your thinking.

I raised my kids on the basis that every child is born a genius - and then we (parents, teachers, the workplace, church, society at large, pretty much everybody …) spend the first twenty years of their lives de-geniusing them. Okay, I’m being a bit hard (there are lotsa great parents, teachers and (ahem) even workplaces, community and church organisations. But the rate at which we underperform as a species (living below our privileges, so to speak) suggests to me that the de-geniusing bit is more real than we’d like to think.

But help is on the way. As a species, we’re rethinking so many things about how people collaborate. (It is beyond argument that we need major work done on the absolute basics of the workplace.) But we’ve started. We’re beginning to rethink what it means to have talent and what it means to be a genius.

Two interesting (very interesting) participants in this debate (well, it’s not yet really a debate - this whole thing is too new, and the nay-sayers haven’t marshalled their troops yet) are Elizabeth Gilbert (she of Eat, Pray, Love  fame, that insanely successful and popular offering) who spoke at TED recently. Watch her entertaining, heartwarming and challenging talk at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html.

A second cool thinker on this topic is Daniel Coyle whose “The Talent Code” argues that genius is more common (and more developable) than we think. Read David Brooks on this topic at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?_r=1 [If you don't yet have a New York Times registration - and hence, cookie - it's worth taking the few moments to register ...] and Coyle talks about a concept called deep practice, a form of drill (your mother was right after all) that enables more rapid growth than we normally expect and that forms one part of his genius model. Go to http://thetalentcode.com/video/ to hear Coyle make his point. This is worth watching all the way through to see Coyle mimic Tiger Woods, in order to argue more convincingly.  Enjoy!

Is it just me or is there something really fundamental that needs fixing?

Almost everyone I talk to (okay, a small experience set …) who works for one of the large (and supposedly) respected corporates talks about the dysfunctional nature of their workplaces. Millions of people go to work every day in toxic workplaces, riven (yes, riven) by poor leadership, carefless management and daily political infighting. And then we pretend that nothing is wrong.

Excuse me …