Are you precarious?

A theme of a number of presentations at the Control or Care of the Self conference in Hamburg in July 2008 was precarious working arrangements, and the impact these are having on society. I had to ask what the term precarious working arrangements was referring to, because I had not heard it before.

I assumed it was referring to people who gained income through working at the margins of society, at the edges of legality, such as burglars or sex workers.

But no! The concept of precarious working arrangements means the shift to contract working and self employment. This seems to be happening on a large scale in Europe and academics are now writing about it extensively.

I was struck by the thought that at this academic conference of 60 people, all of them were employed by universities or tertiary institutions. I was the one person there who was self-employed, I was a part of the group that was being described as "precarious."

There is no doubt that in addition to your technical skills you do need to have the additional ability to generate work if you are self employed. And yet I have never felt less precarious in my working life.

It was ironic that I was seen as in a precarious group as I had been talking to several people who were on fixed term employment contracts with their universities, and I could sense their concern about what their next job would be.

I had to wonder which was the precarious group – the self employed or the academics.

Informalisation of our relations with each other is accompanied by expectations of increased self control. And watch out if you make a mistake of self control.

I had the privilege of hearing Cas Wouters speak at the Hamburg conference Control or Care of the Self in July 2008. He pointed out that the informalisation of social controls (e.g. in the form of mufti days or casual Fridays) is accompanied by an increase in self-control.

In organisations, people are also expected to informalise their relations with each other, but at the same time (and this is not so obvious) they are also expected to have more self-control, more self-regulation.

For example, as Jason Hughes pointed out in his presentation at the same conference, casual Fridays ostensibly give employees the freedom to wear any clothes they like, within the constraints of decency. It seems like a move from corporate uniform to corporate mufti. And yet are people really free to wear anything they like? Thinking of how people comment on each other’s clothes, it is obvious that there is plenty of judgment going on about what people are wearing.

It is a move to informalisation of what people wear to work on a Friday, and it is accompanied by a need for increased self-restraint. The company does not prescribe what you wear on a Friday, you decide yourself. But you need to exercise self control. And beware if you get it wrong!

At the Control or Care of the Self conference in Hamburg in July, Jason Hughes (right) caught my attention with his paper critiquing emotional intelligence. The others in the photo are Stefanie Ernst (our host in Hamburg) and Sam Binkley (Boston).

You have no doubt come across Daniel Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence. Hughes pointed out that the promise of emotional intelligence is to open the door to talk about emotion at work. On the other hand it makes the emotions into something that can be labeled and measured.

The concept of emotional intelligence promises the management of emotions at work. It repackages human emotions as a corporate concern. The ability to measure people’s emotions appeals to the perceived requirement for managers to inspire the hearts and minds of their people to perform exceptionally well for their employer. This leads to a kind of quest to colonise employee emotions in the service of their goals for the organisation.

The concept of emotional intelligence configures emotions as abilities that are properties of the person that can be developed intentionally by the individual. There is no notion of the social development of the self in emotional intelligence as there is in the work of G H Mead, Norbert Elias and Ralph Stacey.

Although I notice that Goleman now talks about social intelligence, his view of social intelligence seems to be a bolt on to emotional intelligence  and the two terms are used interchangeably.

Emotional intelligence allows you to experience emotions, as long as the expression of them is ‘appropriate.’ For example, you can become angry, as long as it is in the right degree and expressed appropriately. Not only is there an expressive element to EI (express your anger) but it is also subtly suppressive (express it only in appropriate ways), and the suppressive component is hidden – or at least not obvious.

Emotional intelligence has a further worrying fish hook that Hughes identified. In the past, if you made a mistake at work, you would be seen as a bad worker. Now, if you make a mistake in the expression of your emotions you will be seen as a bad person. This amounts to little more than a personal judgment that is lent an aura of scientific rigour by the measurement scales of emotional intelligence.

For a person with emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses desirable emotions. For a person lacking emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses undesirable emotions. Who decides what is desirable or undesirable?

I don’t doubt that if Daniel Goleman were to read this, he would take exception to what I have said here. You might be a supporter of emotional intelligence. Whatever your stance might be, I would be interested to hear what you think.

These ten myths about strategy, leadership and control are drawn from the complex responsive processes theory of Ralph Stacey and his colleagues. The myths are assumptions that are taken for granted in the predominant ways of thinking about organisations.

Drawing on complexity theory, the reality is that leaders and managers have a lot less control over what happens in their organisations than is commonly assumed in most managerial discourse. But organisational results and outcomes are not random. So do not despair. Leaders and managers do have an impact on their organisations. However, their impact is often not for the reasons they think!

Strategy

Myth 1

Results occur through strategic planning and execution of the plan

Reality 1

Results in organisations occur through the interplay of the numerous intentions of those in the organisation and are therefore unpredictable

Myth 2

Actions are either strategic or operational / tactical depending on whether they have a broad or contained focus

Reality 2

There will always be unintended, unpredictable consequences as a result of the interplay of local interactions therefore only hindsight can tell if an action was strategic or tactical

Leadership

Myth 3

A leader is a masterful individual with a vision for the organisation

Reality 3

Leadership emerges from interaction as a social process of mutual recognition

Myth 4

The organisation is a whole that can be designed and managed by a coalition of the most powerful

Reality 4

The organisation consists of many interactions amongst combinations of individuals, over time. From these myriad interactions emerge patterns of stability and novelty as propositional and narrative themes. The most powerful people (i.e. the leaders) can interact with many others, but they cannot control the responses they receive, and so they cannot design and manage the whole organisation

Myth 5

To provide good leadership, look at the big picture

Reality 5

To provide good leadership, take your experience seriously – look at the detail of what is going on and what we actually do to achieve results. No one else is! They are too busy being future oriented, thinking of solutions and what we ‘ought’ to do to notice what is really going on around us

Myth 6

Power is something an individual holds over another person

Reality 6

Power is an intrinsic part of all human relating and changes according to the relative need one individual has for the other. Power balances can shift. Power enables you to do what you would not be able to do otherwise, but you cannot just do anything if you want to maintain relationships with others. Power paradoxically enables and constrains us in our relationships with others

Myth 7

Patterns across the organisation are identified and managed by senior managers or organisational experts. Leaders set the vision and direction for the overall patterns of the organisation.

Reality 7

Patterns emerge from local interactions in the absence of any blue print or master plan – they are not managed or controlled by anyone, no matter how powerful. Leaders engage in local interaction and they cannot predict the outcomes of their actions for the organisation. If it were so, no leader would ever fail!

Myth 8

Personality is an attribute an individual has and with sufficiently sophisticated instruments, it can be measured

Reality 8

Identity and personality are formed in interaction with others. They are not intrinsic to the individual – they are not properties held inside the individual and so they cannot be measured

Control

Myth 9

Breaking elements of the organisation into parts, setting targets and measuring results will enable leaders to have more control of the organisation

Reality 9

Leaders are paradoxically in control (of their own actions, speeches and so on), but not in control of how people will respond. Leaders act with intention and so do employees. No one person is in control of the outcome, which is the result of the interplay of all the various intentions of those involved.

Myth 10

Increasingly stronger targets, rules, laws or procedures give increased levels of managerial control in organisations

Reality 10

The strongest controls come from the constraints we put on each other

More about complexity in organisations is available on this website or refer to:

Stacey R. 2007 Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, fifth edition, UK: Prentice Hall

Stacey R., Griffin D., and Shaw P. 2000 Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking, UK: Routledge

How can you tell if a person in your team is an expert? And how should your leadership style change if you have an expert in your team? 

This is the final post in a series of five covering Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s stages of adult development that I came across in Patricia Benner’s book From Novice to Expert. The five stages are:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert

Expert

The expert performer no longer relies on an analytic principle or maxim to connect his or her understanding of the situation to an appropriate action. Experts have developed an intuitive grasp of each situation and are able to zero in accurately on the heart of the problem without wasteful consideration of alternative diagnoses and solutions.

Experts see what needs to be done and how to achieve the goal. They are able to make more subtle and refined discriminations than proficient performers. They are able to distinguish among many situations that would be seen as similar by the proficient performer.

Implications for Leaders: Don’t ask your expert performers to tell you or others the rules by which they work. They will tell you rules they hardly remember, because they do not follow rules any more. Instead, ask them to describe specific situations in which they had to exercise judgement. Ask them to describe what they did and why they chose that option and not a different one. Your proficient, competent and beginning performers will all benefit.

More in the next and final post of this series…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Drefus and Dreyfus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

After competence there is one more stage before a person achieves expert status. This is the stage of proficiency. How should your leadership style change to address this movement from competence to proficiency? 

This is the fourth post in a series of five covering Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s stages of adult development that I first came across in Patricia Benner’s book From Novice to Expert. The five stages are:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert

Proficient

A proficient performer sees the performance in terms of the whole, rather than the individual aspects of performance, and is guided by maxims. Proficient performers have a perspective based on experience and they see the meaning of the situation in terms of longer term goals.

They have learnt from experience what typical events to expect in a given situation and how plans need to be modified in response to these events. Being able to recognise whole situations, they can now see when the expected normal picture does not materialise. Decision making becomes less laboured because they can distinguish which aspects of the situation are important and which are less important. Proficient performers can therefore consider fewer options (the important ones) and home in accurately on the important aspects of the problem.

Maxims are useful to the proficient performer, as they reflect nuances of the situation, but these maxims would be unintelligible to the competent or novice performer because they can mean one thing in a certain situation and another in a different situation. Moving from competent to proficient performance means that intuitive behaviour must take the place of reasoned responses.

Compared to competent performers, proficient performers are much better and faster at diagnosing a situation. Then they must decide what action to take. For example, a competent relationship manager may know that a better relationship needs to be established with a key buyer in an at-risk account, but must calculate how to go about improving that relationship.

Implication for Leaders: For proficient performers, provide plenty of opportunities for them to reflect (with you as non-judgmental sounding board) on the positive and negative outcomes of their actions to reinforce the associations between situational discriminations and the associated responses. Help them to identify successful and unsuccessful responses. This reflection will accelerate the process of developing practised intuition to replace reasoned responses.

More in future posts…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Drefus and Drefus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

How can you tell when an advanced beginner is on the way to developing competence? How should your leadership style change to deal with this? This is the third post in a series of five covering Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s stages of adult development that I came across in Patricia Benner’s book From Novice to Expert. The stage after advanced beginner is competent. The five stages are:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert

Competent

Competence is where the performer begins to see his or her actions in terms of long-range goals or plans of which he or she is consciously aware. The plan dictates which attributes and aspects of the current and expected future situation are to be considered and which can be ignored. So, for a competent manager, a plan establishes a perspective and the plan is based on conscious, abstract, analytic contemplation of the problem. Competent performers become more and more involved in their work, compared to the detached rule-following behaviour of the beginner.

For example, I worked on a project with a person for whom every problem, issue or question that arose seemed equally important. This led to him spending time on things that were not important, and he worried a lot about things that were not significant in the scheme of things. When others asked questions, he was concerned if he did not know the answer, and this diverted him from the objectives we had agreed. As the mentor, I had to keep reminding him of the plan and asking him how the current problem fitted in with the plan, providing guidance on this frequently.

A competent performer lacks the fluency, speed and flexibility of a proficient one, but does gain a sense of mastery from the ability to plan the work, relating the various components to one another in a way that helps to achieve efficiency and organisation.

Implication for leaders: Help competent people to devise a plan or choose a perspective so that they can distinguish and decide for themselves what is more important and what can be ignored.

More in future posts…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Drefus and Dreyfus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

When does a novice stop being a novice? How should your leadership style change as the novice develops his or her skills? This is a second post in a series of five covering Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s stages of adult development I discovered in Patricia Benner’s book From Novice to Expert. The stage after novice is advanced beginner. The five stages are:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert 

Advanced Beginner

An advanced beginner can demonstrate marginally acceptable performance because they have enough experience to note, or have pointed out to them by a mentor, the recurring situational components that are global characteristics (called aspects) that can be identified only through prior experience. They need to see examples so they can identify these characteristics. Instructors can provide guidelines for recognising these aspects which can be made explicit. The guidelines will give cues, but no one cue is definitive in all situations.

A manager who can explain steps in delegation but who doesn’t pick good situations to delegate tasks is demonstrating the advanced beginner stage.

Implication for leaders: Show lots of examples for advanced beginners so they can learn to recognise new aspects of situations.

More in future posts…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

You know you have to adjust your leadership style to suit your team members. Tick. But how do you decide where your team members are at? Have you come across Patricia Benner’s very interesting way of thinking of the development level of people as they move From Novice to Expert?

Rather than using simplistic two by two matrices of task / relationship needs like situational leadership does, Benner applies to nursing practice the work of Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus who studied groups of people who rely heavily on the synthesis of expert practice such as chess players and airline pilots. It is interesting to consider how to lead and help people develop depending on their stage of skill acquisition.

The Dreyfus brothers identified five stages of skill acquisition for adults moving from novice to expert practitioner in actual applied situations. This is a situational not a traits or talent model of skill acquisition. It distinguishes between the level of skilled performance that can be achieved through principles and theory learned in a classroom, and the context-dependent judgments and skills of the expert that can only be acquired through experience of real situations. Think about a key member of your team, someone you are finding challenging at the moment. Are they:

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert 

1.  Novice

Starting out, a novice is a beginner with no context who needs rules to follow. The rules by definition are context-free. This rule-based behaviour is limited and inflexible. But with no experience to draw on, novices require rules to guide them. However following these rules legislates against expert performance because the rules cannot tell the novice what relevant task to perform in a given situation. The rule can only say how to perform a task once it has been decided that the task should be performed.

Students are not the only novices. Any manager entering an unfamiliar situation they don’t have experience of may be limited to a novice level of performance in that situation.

Implication for leaders: Stay close to the novice performer and provide rules to follow so that they can learn how to do various tasks.

More in future posts…

This series of posts draws heavily on Benner’s book

From Novice to Expert

and Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s article

From Socrates to Expert Systems

The implications for leadership are my own. What are your thoughts?

Benner P. 1984. From Novice to Expert, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

It seems to me there is a problem with the typical HR approach to change.  HR is concerned with compliance with employment law and minimising risk. And like lawyers, HR can be more concerned about what arguments they can get away with in court rather than what it is actually right to do.

In my experience, HR addresses the formal lines of communication, but rarely considers what is going on in the corridor conversations, or gatherings in the staff room or around the water cooler.

And yet these informal conversation channels are where organisational change occurs.

At times HR advice can make managers quite wary about even talking to their people except in very guarded ways, and I think managers must be vigilant against giving HR advice supremacy over any other business or management considerations in situations of organisational change. HR advice is specialist advice that comes from the world of the HR practitioner – a world of compliance to certain legislation, and that is its value.

However, like all advice-givers, HR are not accountable for the successful implementation of the change. Therefore as a manager, while listening and understanding the HR advice you receive, you must also weigh it up in your specific situation along with all the other considerations, such as cost, operational issues, relationships, previous commitments made – upwards and downwards – and your own experience.

I am not advocating ignoring HR advice. I am advocating considering HR advice as one input into decision making in times of change. And because HR is only one input, I am not in favour of assigning responsibility for leadership of organisational change to HR unless the HR practitioners can demonstrate that they have a wider understanding of change than just the HR aspects.

What do you think?