Leadership is not rocket science

How do you make work meaningful?

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In a recent post I spoke of some scenario planning I was recently involved with where I proposed a scenario coming out of this economic turmoil we're in that I call the meaningful work economy.  Having potentially lost a lot of wealth, homes, jobs and maybe more, many boomers aren't willing to just workaholic themselves for more 'stuff' and titles and just plain more work.  And the younger generations have it right from the get-go.  They're not going to work beyond what they have to unless it makes a difference - unless it's meaningful for themselves and for others.

First of all, this can be challenging, especially for boomers, who have (as a generation) focused on doing what it took to get ahead and accumulate more all their lives.  Given a choice, this generation chose to be practical rather than following their passion.  so they're going to have a challenge just breaking that conditioning.

And even if they can break away from being 'practical', how do you make work meaningful?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The meaningful work economy (ravitangri.typepad.com)
• Think anew, Act anew: Scenario Planning (cognitive-edge.com)

The value of uphill challenges

I was working with a group of leaders from co-operatives yesterday, when I met a man who had cycled the Pyrenees in 100 hours.  I made a joke about 95 of those hours being uphill and 5 being downhill, and he agreed with me.  Then it occurred to me that this is a lot like life and work.

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We often complain about our challenges and the uphill challenges we may face, but in the end it is these times that provide us with the greatest value.  His sense of accomplishment was from making it through the entire journey, not from those fast downhill rides.

Think back to your greatest accomplishments.  Are they that way because they were easy, or because you came through the challenges?  As Thomas Paine wrote:

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.  It is dearness only that gives everything its value."

How might this perspective reframe your reality today?

The meaningful work economy

There is one emerging scenario in today's uncertain and volatile world that I believe is very likely to emerge, at least in part, and impact industries and work far and wide.

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As a member of the National Board of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS), I recently participated in a scenario planning exercise with Randy Park to lead into strategic planning for our association.  We identified many factors changing in the years to come, and, naturally, the economy came up as a significant concern, along with different generations, changing demographics and other issues.

Based on some of the critical issues identified, we started to identify possible future scenarios.  Let me state here that the purpose of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to identify a range of possible future scenarios so you can better plan for the future.  However, that said, one scenario emerged that I believe will take shape in some form in the next few years.

During our discussion with the CAPS board on the economy, we started identifying possible extreme scenarios of the economy staying sluggish, and business going more local, and the 'opposite' of the economy taking off again. As we debated these options, it occurred to me that there was a third pole that was, to me, far more likely to emerge - the Meaningful Work Economy.

Boomers have saved their entire lives for retirement, only to have it all disappear overnight, it seems.  There seems to be an awakening (finally) that money and material gains aren't all there is.  Add to this the fact that the younger generation (Gen Y/Nexus) won't be workaholics just for the sake of work like the Boomers are (and even Gen X to a large extent).  They want meaningful work, and if it is meaningful, they will work long hours.

Customers, too, want to make a difference and to work with organizations that make a difference.

If there is any opportunity in all that we've been going through the past several months, I think it's an awakening to the fact that materialism just isn't enough any more.  We need to have purpose.  We need to have meaning in what we do.  We need to make a difference.

And that will be (is?) a pretty cool awakening.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

The Value-Added Curve and Today's Wake-Up Call

Last week I was blogging about the difference in results organizationally when you have a common, shared sense of purpose and when you don't.  Simply put, the difference can be stark.  Most businesses and government departments don't make the time to focus on purpose - they're focusing on results, and in so doing, they sabotage the potential results they could be making.  I also posted about how, perhaps, our addiction to crisis in the industrialized world may, in fact, be a hunger for the common shared purpose we're missing in our workplaces.

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Michael Basch, one of the founding partners of FedEx, and the designer of most of the systems that drove its legendary service levels in its early days has a simple and powerful framework that starts to explain what's happening here:  The Value Added Curve.  Today's economic climate may be a wake-up call that it's time to move up this curve.

An organization can meet the needs of its employees and customers at many levels.  Most organizations meet the basic physical needs of these constituents - providing employees with regular pay for their work, and customers with the basic product or service that they purchase.  The value they receive back for doing this is minimal.

The second level of the value-added curve is information.  For employees, this means letting the organizations understand how they fit into the organization and what the organizational goals are.  By understanding how they fit in the puzzle, they can make more effective decisions for the organization, and there is greater value both ways.  For customers, this means providing information on the product or service that allows them to have more assurance of their purchase.  This could be a listing of ingredients, or something like the parcel tracking system that couriers like FedEx offer.

Most organizations do these two things to some extent and they stop there, and that is why they have limite results.  As shown in the Value-Added Curve, below, there is a 'glass ceiling' above these points that most organizations never progress beyond.

By providing the physical and informational product, the value you provide to your stakeholders - and in return the value they provide to you - is limited.  To truly take off up the exponential value-added curve, you need to progress to meet the emotional and spiritual needs of your employees and customers.

What does this mean?  Simply put, when we make decisions and commitments, we make them emotionally, and then we find the logic/rationale to justify that emotional decision, including our commitment to an organization or product/service.  You only reach that emotional engagement when you go beyond the glass ceiling on the curve.  it is at this point that you truly understand the difference between 'managing things and leading people'.

To meet the emotional needs of your employees you need to engage them in your vision and goals, not just tell them about them.  They need to understand how they can benefit from the organization realizing its goals, and they need to know that they are supported and cared for.

When it comes to meeting the emotional needs of your customers, they need to know that, when there are problems, that you will do whatever it takes to look after them.  When ka-ka happens, do they have to resort to dealing with an online complaint system or dialing through an automated mine field, or will there be a person who will have the courage to face them and do whatever it takes to solve their problem?

Another of Mike's frameworks that I love is 'Proact Creatively, React Outrageously'.  That's the essence of this place on the value added curve.

So what does it mean to take it to the top and meet the spiritual needs of your customers and employees?  No, this doesn't necessarily mean religious.  It means spiritual - being part of something greater than them.  This is where purpose comes in.  What is the purpose of your business? 

In an earlier post I spoke of how the Canadian Armed Forces became operational within 3 weeks (an 'impossible' task) when Iraq invaded Kuwait in the 1990s.  They broke every rule in the book and every union-management issue disappeared off the table because they were al part of a higher cause.  That's the power of purpose - the spritual element of the Value-Added Curve.   What your people will put in at this level is off the charts - the challenge is: how can you live here without being in crisis as most organizations do?

For customers, their loyalty also goes off the charts if you have a clear purpose that they can buy in to.  What is the greater good that you are doing that they can also join in with by buying your products or services?

I'll go out on a limb here and say that the organizations that are having the greatest difficulty in today's economic times are those that never crossed the glass ceiling to fully involve and engage their employees and customers, and perhaps this crisis is a wake-up call to tell us that it's time to step up and go beyond the glass ceiling for all of us.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

Why things fall apart when there's no shared purpose

Yesterday I blogged about how the military is incredibly effective at innovating and breaking every rule in the book when they're at war, when they have a clear purpose and mission. They just don't know how to do it when they're at peace, when their is no clear purpose or mission.

Image by BrianR via Flickr

I've learned that crises play the same role in most organizations as wars and peacekeeping missions do for the military - and that may be why most organizations spend so much of their time stressed out in crisis.  When there's no crisis, they're not really sure what to do.

I learned this (again, at a deeper level) while I was working with a leadership team of an organization in the midwest last week.  We spoke of how people came together, listened to each other and made things work when things hit the fan.  The problem was that, before things hit the fan all of that wasn't happening.  Each person/department was going off in their own direction, focused on what was important to them, and those things were often not in alignment with each other. They had no common shared purpose (that they fully bought in to) that framed all their individual tasks and gave meaning to them.

When a crisis hit, they came together with a shared purpose and worked together wonderefully.  When the crisis passed, they went back to their own silos and priorities.

This organization is not unusual - in fact, it's pretty typical.  Our conversations just helped me realize once again the incredible need for a shared purpose that everyone buys in to and lives (ie: not one that stops being relevant once someone stops reading the fancy plaque on the wall).

Is that why so much of North America lives in one crisis after another? 

That's my 2 cents. What do you think?

With purpose you can do anything. Without it...

In the early 1990s I spent about 5 years doing a lot of work with the Canadian Armed Forces (teaching them how to question the rules - great fun!), and during my time there I learned a powerful lesson about the power of purpose.

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Like many bureaucracies, the Forces suffered from many inefficiencies - fighting over policy, union-management issues, etc.  Then the first Gulf War happened, and they had to become operational within 3 weeks, something that was impossible - but they did it, and they did it by breaking every rule in the book.

A week before the Gulf War hit, this would have been impossible.  But the Forces are about mission, mission, mission.  There was a clear purpose, one that almost every Canadian could believe in, and this mission drove them.  Regulations were irrelevant.  Long hours for unionized workers was not an issue.  People working outside their job descriptions was not an issue.  The mission was something they all believed in, and it over-rode all of that.  They all had a clear, shared sense of purpose.

Once the operation was over, they reverted back to the way it had always been and all the inefficiencies came back.

The Forces know how to work in wartime, when they have a common, shared purpose - they can and will break every rule in the book to accomplish the mission. When the war is over, and there's no clear, shared purpose, they get lost in their silos and policies and that takes over.

Are other organizations that different?  What do you think?

Why systems to control expenses can waste expenses

Recently I did some work for a government client where they had to book travel for me, as opposed to me booking my own travel and billing them back.  Little did I know I was to receive a big lesson in how feedback can impact organizational performance - for the worse.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The first thing that I had to do was contact a person to get some file numbers for the travel.  She entered my information and produced my specific numbers that I had to use.  Then I called the travel agent to book the travel.  The agent had to confirm the file numbers I was given, and then looked for flights.  I selected what seemed to be a good flight, and then the agent had to check if there were cheaper flights.  She found some and booked me on them even though the times were not as good as the original flight.  Then she had to re-check if there were cheaper flights that had miraculously appeared in the five minutes since she'd checked.  Then, for reasons I couldn't understand, she had to recheck two or three more times if there were cheaper flights before she could process and book me.  Then, they were not able to e-mail me a confirmation and itinerary - they had to fax it to me.  And when they came, I got 14 faxes.

There were other hoops to jump through, but the bottom line is that it took half an hour to do what I could have done in 5 minutes online.  Yes, the first flight I picked was not the cheapest because I didn't want to waste time sitting in an airport all day.  I honour my clients' wishes and book the lowest fares for them within such parameters.  Yes, it may have been $50 more.  But let's look at the additional costs:

• The time for the public servant who generated my file numbers
• The time for the travel agent to search and research for cheaper flights (they don't give that service to the government for free)
• My wasted time on the phone (yes, I'm not in the government, but public servants have to go through the same process, wasting their time
• My wasted time in airports (again, public servants wasted paid time in most cases)
• My wasted time figuring out 14 needless faxes plus material costs of the paper
• Time for the original clerk to figure out and file the paperwork from the 14 faxes

Now, I don't know the details of these costs, but I'm pretty sure they add up to waaaaaaay more than the extra $50 I would have spent doing it myself.

So why is this type of situation typical for any bureaucratic system, not just government systems?

In the systems approach that I use in diagnosing organizational problems, one of the key elements is feedback.  One thing that governments, in particular, are sensitive about is criticism on excess expenses.  If people spend too much on travel or food or entertainment and the media gets ahold of it, there's ka-ka everywhere.  And that's why government bought this travel service and requires them to go through all those checks - over and over again.

And I've used the same travel agency for another (private sector) client, and we were finished within 5-10 minutes for a much more complex travel agenda.  The checking and rechecking is not the basic service - it's something government pays extra for.

In trying to avoid negative publicity, they are paying far, far more than would be abused to protect themselves - this is a cover-your-butt policy.  However, these expenses are hidden.  It's really hard for the media or anyone to find these costs because they're hidden in corporate expenses.  There is no line showing how much it costs to check an re-check every single booking that's made or all the work the clerks do to process this. 

Ironically, there are probably very few people who actually abused the situation and booked expensive travel.  However, like most bureaucratic policies, you are punishing the majority for the sins of the few and spending far more money than the original wastage.

So what feedback counts in  your organization?  What feedback systems shape the behaviour you want - and the behaviour you don't want?

The need to control

One of the patterns of the 20th century way of doing things that still lingers in places is the need to control and the need to know everything.  In the old world, knowledge and experience meant power.  Now, when half of all you know is obsolete within 18-24 months, it has far less impact.  Flexibility, sharing information and letting go of power actually give you more power.

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In my work I use social technologies that are based on systems thinking, chaos theory and even quantum physics to host meaningful conversations.  Instead of having 20 or 50 people carry on one conversation in a room, as was often considered appropriate in the past (translation: 2-5 people speak, 10 people drift in and out of conversation, the rest are blackberry-ing below the table), we allow people to self-organize and cluster into smaller, more intimate conversations using processes such as world cafe, open space and circle. 

In these environments, they have phenomenal conversations that engage everyone (it's hard to hide or blackberry in a group of 4 people), great insights and come up with breakthroughs and alignment as a group that they never could have with traditional methods from the old world (ie: more dictatorial or autocratic or bureaucratic solutions).

Despite the results, which are astounding, I still hear people saying they wish they could have shared what they gained in a cafe conversation with everyone else, not realizing that they now carry that knowledge and they have the responsibility to carry it forward.  It's not up to the person who they gained the wisdom from alone any more. 

Or, the other reaction I sometimes encounter is the discomfort with the uncertainty and the lack of precision of these processes.  Because they are self-organizing, you can't say exactly when each element will start.  And because the process is an emergent process, you can't predict exactly what will come up, and some people are uncomfortable with not having that level of control (as much as that control was mostly perception - they never really had it).  In one breath, these participants will say they got phenomenal insights, acknowledge the great strides that came out of the meeting (things that could never have been achieved in the old, controlling way), and then with the next breath say they didn't think the process was good because they were confused or didn't know what was coming.

This is part of the letting go that we are transitioning through - letting go of the need to control everything to ensure that we actually accomplish things.  The paradox is that the more you try to control, the less you and your organization can actually do.  The reality is that organizations that controlled tightly from the top may have been profitable in the old world, but they also threw away half their profits, half their profit growth, half their sales growth and more.  There's hard data that shows that.

In today's complex, uncertain world, I question whether those organizations can continue to remain profitable at all.  The rules have changed and leaders have to change as well, or they will be crushed by the competition that does. 

This is simply a time of transition.  Yes, there are still some who react in the way described above.  But there are more and more every day who are stepping out to discover the new rules of the game.  And that's what makes this so much fun to do!

That's my 2 cents. What do you think?

How to deepen your ability to host meaningful conversations

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The Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations is a practice that grew out of systems thinking.  It is the DNA of the learning organization, that enables organizations and systems of organizations to connect, self-organize, and learn from each other in ways that support everyone.

It’s not about setting policies or controlling people or controlling what emerges.

It’s a proven approach for these uncertain times, as it comes from understanding how chaotic and complex systems work. 

Yes, you will learn methodologies, but the methodologies alone are not enough.  Many people use the same techniques with limited success.

What makes the Art of Hosting so incredibly effective is the philosophy or approach that underlies the methods and techniques.  It’s the understanding of how systems work, of how important it is to create a safe space for these conversations, of how to balance just enough left-brain structure with right-brain intuition to flow with what comes up.

And most importantly, it’s understanding how important it is to host yourself before you can host others.

Simply put, you have to be able to create a safe space for yourself to step forward authentically before you can do that for others.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

The secret to discovering the new rules of the game

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The ‘old’ rules were based on mechanistic thinking – seeing people and organizations as machines.

And they’re not.  We’re not.

People and organizations are living systems.  It’s not the org charts that define organizations – it’s the relationships.  The relationships between the people in the organization and between the people in the organization and other organizations are the living systems of your organization. 

The more constrained these relationships are by policies and controls (the ‘old’ rules), the more limited they become, and the more ineffective the organization becomes.

The stronger and richer the relationships and the interactions and the sharing of information, the more vibrant and dynamic the organization.  The more people can connect authentically and honestly, the more

And the currency of these living systems, of these relationships?  Conversation.

To nurture the living systems that our organizations are, to discover this new game, its rules and what ‘winning’ means, you, as a leader must be able to engage the players and nurture meaningful conversations.  And this is true whatever level and position you are at in the organization.

To engage others, you have to create a safe environment that allows them to let down their barriers, their masks and have the real conversations they need to have to find the way through these challenging times.

And to do that, to create that safe space, you have to model what you want.  You have to show up authentically to show them that it’s safe for them to do the same.  If you can’t do that, they never will.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?