Stephen Billing’s Blog

Correlation between engagement and productivity does not mean that engagement CAUSES productivity.

Many organisations are doing culture surveys to measure how employees feel about the organisation. In the public sector it is becoming increasingly common to measure employee "engagement."

This is done on the basis of the claim that engaged employees are more productive employees. This claim is based on research that shows a correlation between employee engagement and productivity.

Leaders of organisations should beware getting too hooked up in the engagement fad for three reasons. The first reason is covered here, the others are the topics of my next posts.

The first reason is that correlation does not mean cause. The correlation between employee engagement and productivity means that responses to a certain questionnaire showed that in the populations that were subject to the research, if employee productivity was high, engagement tended to be high as well. But this does not mean that employee engagement CAUSES high productivity.

I have seen workplaces where the staff love the boss but do not produce much that benefits the organisation. I.e. high engagement, low productivity.

I have also seen business groups that have had high productivity and high engagement but have been pursuing ends that have been in competition or conflict with other parts of the business – this is quite common when a new business unit is established and develops its own strong identity separate from the parent organisation. For example, a new telephone sales channel is established and it ends up competing with the established face to face salespeople for leads and sales.

In case that alone is not enough reason to be cautious about employee engagement, more reasons are coming up in the next two posts. 

Misunderstandings allow both you and the other person to gain new insight into a situation.

Misunderstandings become apparent when the other person responds in an unexpected way. The unexpected response offers the opportunity to explore the misunderstanding and reach a new way of thinking about the situation. Many times in life we avoid exploring such a misunderstanding, perhaps for fear of escalating the threat of conflict that is inherent in these situations.

In organisational change situations, misunderstanding is often interpreted as resistance. And rather than attempting to explore the world from the point of view of the ‘resistor,’ such exploration is avoided either through trying to persuade with powerful reasoning and authority, or by moving on to another subject to distract attention from these difficulties – for example, moving back ‘on message’ by speaking positively about the vision for the change.

The golden opportunity when misunderstanding occurs is to explore the misunderstanding with the intention of making sense of the other person’s point of view. This joint sense making process can result in both parties having an expanded view of the situation. And this expanded view makes your implementation of change go more smoothly.

This golden opportunity is lost when leaders avoid exploring misunderstanding. The unresolved issues then cause problems for the change project later on. It is somewhat counterintuitive. By exploring the areas that are of concern to the targets of change, you let people know that you are listening and acting on the information they provide.

Instead of changing the subject or ignoring a misunderstanding, paraphrase what you understand them to mean and check whether you have got it right. Reflect on what you have said and what they have said and summarise both points of view. 

I have found that the more I am able to do this, the more I am able to negotiate situations to successful resolution. But it is not just about the techniques. It is about the intention.

By exploring misunderstanding with a view to making sure you have understood what the other person said, and clarifying your own intentions, perhaps several times and in different words, you are taking advantage of the golden opportunity to resolve issues before they become showstoppers.

I am co-authoring a paper for publication in a learned journal with my colleague, Margaret Miller, who is many time zones away in Virginia, USA. We have a weekly phone call at which we discuss the paper and what is going on in our lives.

Margaret has eagle eyes for detail and noticed that in the fine print it says that we have to get permission from every single author whom we have directly quoted in the article. That’s what it sounds like, anyway. What a world! Some of the authors we have quoted are ‘no longer with us,’ so this will be difficult!

I would have thought that the authors would be pleased to get citations because one of the ways the success of one’s publications is measured is by the number of citations received. This approach is very different from the blog world which makes it easy for people to link to each other and cite each other’s work.

For this journal, it sounds like a very time consuming process to quote the work of others, and I am certainly not inclined to spend months waiting for responses. So we are just going to paraphrase the quotes instead, which we are apparently allowed to do.

No doubt there is a good reason for this requirement. I wonder what it is.

Q: How many psychodramatists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: You be the lightbulb.

    I’ll be the psychodramatist.

   Now… talk to the chair.

I heard this the other day and feel duty bound to share it. If you’ve been associated with psychodrama, you’ll appreciate it, otherwise no doubt you’ll be in the dark – don’t worry about it…

Shared values are a complete fallacy and the pursuit of them will not help your organisation one bit.

The idea of writing values on a poster assumes that if everyone in the organisation shares the same values, the organisation will be a better place to work.

These shared values are articulated on posters as a way of bringing about the future that is desired by the powerful people in the organisation.

I guess it is assumed that people will be able to get on well if they share the same values and it will create a more harmonious place to work. It is also expected that if everyone shares the same values then the organisation will perform better.

The aspirations of these values are idealisations of a future in which the tension of conflict is avoided, diversity is embraced and openness and trust are pervasive.

Here are three reasons why you should rip up your values posters and stop trying to achieve shared values in your organisation.

Reason 1

In complexity science, novelty and new patterns arise from the interaction of diverse agents. Using this as an analogy for organisations suggests that innovation and novelty arise from the interaction of diverse people. If everyone has the same values, then this will squash innovation and new ideas in your organisation.

Instead, go for people with different values and watch the new ideas arise. At the same time watch out for how people negotiate the conflict that comes with it (reason 2 below).

Reason 2

Human relating is inherently conflictual, and these shared values totally miss this important point about being human. It is how we negotiate this conflict that determines whether we are a tightly-knit, high performing organisation, whether we blow apart in a spectacular bankruptcy or whether we potter along in the same old, same old way.

Reason 3

The idealisations on the values posters ignore the messy uncertainty of taking the next step together. In any project or organisational situation, people are negotiating with each other what to do next. The future is always unknown and people are working out what to do next in ways that enable them to go on together. They cannot just do anything, because of the risk of destroying relationships and then not being able to carry on together. The idealisations on the posters distract attention from the messiness of not knowing what the outcome of what you do will be, in an unknown future.

Sources

Joas – The Genesis of Values

Stacey and Griffin – Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations

Shaw – Changing Conversations in Organizations

Values are constantly being negotiated in specific situations. They do not exist on their own, outside of human action.

An earlier post said that writing values on a poster assumes that these values have some meaning in their own right, independent of context or situation.

While values have enduring qualities, they must continually be negotiated afresh in specific situations. A value only has meaning when it is applied in a specific situation. And then it has meaning again when it is applied in another situation.

Further, values are often in conflict with each other.

For example, nurses in hospitals are continually negotiating the value of seeing a patient within a specific time frame, and other values such as seeing those with the most urgent need first.

Writing values on posters makes no sense to me. It would be more useful to discuss situations in which these conflicting values arise. For example, in a mental health facility, does keeping the house clean take priority over taking a lonely or depressed resident for an outing?

Joas – The Genesis of Values

Stacey and Griffin – Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations

Communicating your intention is more important than worrying about vision.

Sue Tupling over at Changeworksblog focuses on communication and organisational change.

She has recently posted an article I wrote for her blog. In it, I argue that leaders should be less concerned about communicating their vision and more concerned about communicating their intention. Read the article here.

It makes no sense to derive a set of values in a rational way.

In my previous post I said that writing values on a poster assumes that the values of a group of people can be prescribed rationally by working them out.

It makes no sense to come up with a set of rationally conceived values. By definition, values are not rational.

Values come from a deep sense of what it is right to do. They have an attractive, uplifting, unrestrictive sense of the ideal. There is something compelling about the values that we hold, and yet it is entirely voluntary that we commit to these values. Value commitments arise from key intense experiences that we have and give life meaning and purpose. You cannot decree a purpose in life.

Values are the highest expression of our free will, and are intensely personal.

It is a nonsense to rationally decree a set of values and expect employees to hold to them. Other than that I don’t feel strongly about it.

Sources

Joas – The Genesis of Values

Stacey and Griffin – Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations  

Most organisations have spent time and money identifying their values and putting them on posters. This is a waste of time because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding about what values are.

Most of my client organisations have statements of their values written on posters, shown in prominent positions around the office. Many have created other artefacts for displaying these values, such as stands for the desk, cards, notepads. Clearly these organisations have invested considerable money and time of their human resources and corporate communications departments in coming up with these statements.

Obviously the return on this investment is hard to measure in terms of dollars and cents, and so must be articulated in non-specific terms of "company commitment" and the like.

I think there is absolutely no return on this investment because working out the values and communicating them to people is a misguided activity in the first place.

First, it assumes that the values of a group of people can be prescribed rationally by working them out. Second, it assumes that the values exist in their own right, independent of context. It is as though these value statements have some intrinsic meaning of their own. Third, it assumes that if people follow these values the organisation will be improved.

Do you think these assumptions are valid? Can a set of values be thought out rationally and then prescribed for others? Do these values as written down have meaning of their own independently of context? Will everyone having the same values make a better organisation? 

I will be posting daily on this topic for the next three days…

No person is an island, we are all linked together and dependent on each other. As a leader you cannot control how others will respond to you.

Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who fled Germany in the 1930s and made his home in England. His work starts from consideration of us as interdependent human beings. This is different from our commonsense view of ourselves as humans surrounded by social groupings.

The diagram to the left is taken from Elias’s 1978 book What is Sociology, and shows how we see human beings as autonomous individuals surrounded by social structures, bumping up against others in social interaction. And it seems to make common sense that our experience is that we are at the centre of our world, with other groupings like family, organisation and country surrounding us. It has the individual at the centre of it, surrounded by other, progressively larger and more encompassing groupings. But although this view is extremely commonplace to the degree that it is taken for granted, this is actually only one potential way of looking at the world.

And when you think about it, it is actually quite an egocentric view of the world with the individual at the centre. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this way of seeing the world as ‘individualism’, and is the basis of much of the personal development / self help / authenticity movements of the 80s, 90s and today.

Elias argued that societies, and organisations, are made up of interdependent beings, including you and me. Because we are interdependent, we rely on each other and are in relationship with each other. Therefore, in order to understand organisations we should seek to understand the nature of the relationships we have with each other.

We make up webs of interdependence, what Elias called figurations, of many kinds. The figurations are characterized by power balances, and this applies to all figurations, such as families, schools, organisations, towns or countries.

The significance of understanding humans in relationship to each other, rather than as each of us being the centre of an autonomous world, is the foundation on which I follow Ralph Stacey in arguing that organisations are emergent patterns of continuously iterated interaction which arise from myriad relationships amongst those in the organisation.

This way of thinking has important implications for how you view leadership because it changes what you actually think an organisation is. Changing your view of what an organisation is means that you also change how you think you should lead it.

If organisations are patterns of interaction, then as a leader you cannot control those patterns – you can only control what you say and do, but you cannot control how people respond to what you say and do.

Follow and participate in this blog to explore further the radical implications and the extraordinary potential for leadership success that is offered by taking this view of organisations comprising interdependent individuals.