Stephen Billing’s Blog

In which I conclude that efficiency of communication may well work against effectiveness of communication in organisational change situations.

There is an old saw that says that efficiency (or management) is doing things right, with effectiveness (or leadership) being doing the right things. I am sure you have come across this before.

I’m not enamoured of this simplistic bromide, having wondered before on this blog whether is in fact such a thing as leadership. (Search on "leadership," or click on the "leadership" tags or categories to find the threads).

I started to ponder on what this might mean in relation to communication.

If we took the idea of efficient communication, what would it mean? Email is quite efficient – it’s just a matter of typing it and sending it. Twitter and text messages are even more efficient. In this sense, being efficient equates with being "less effort." And then it occurred to me, that this refers to less effort for the sender of the message.

I have a friend though, who regards a phone call as more efficient than a series of texts or emails, say when trying to schedule a meeting. So after a couple of texts or emails about suitable times, he’ll call, saying it’s easier that way. Perhaps he’s also thinking about the effectiveness of the communication – in a phone call he can get it resolved and get a commitment to a time, coming up with alternatives quickly based on the reaction of the other person.

What about effective communication? What would that be? I guess from the perspective of the sender receiver model of communication, you would say that effective communication would be that in which the receiver gets the same message as the receiver intended. So, effective communication has much more consideration of the receiver than the idea of efficient communication, which seems to be more related to the sender’s convenience.

Thinking about this idea of effective communication, I think it is not so much a matter of the accurate transmission of a message, as it is about understanding the response you have received.

In this way of thinking about it, effective communication would be achieved when the parties were satisfied that they had agreed on the meaning of the gesture and response involved.

In any one interaction, it might take several attempts to reach this point of both parties being satisfied that agreement on the meaning had been reached. Many of our interactions actually never reach this point – for example, I might go away from a fight with my partner convinced that he doesn’t understand me.

I think effective communication requires genuine attempts to understand each other, and so repeating yourself, paraphrasing and summarising are all used in the process of coming to understand the meaning of what you are negotiating. When people are coming to grips with proposals for organisational change, effective communication requires methods like paraphrasing, that employ redundancy or duplication, rather than efficient communicating of a message in the shortest time or least amount of effort possible.

Efficiency of communication and effectiveness of communication are certainly not the same thing in organisational change. Further, quests for efficiency in communication may well work against the effectiveness of your communication about change.

In which I consider that even though it is much debated what leadership actually consists of or whether it actually exists at all, the language of leadership has certainly given rise to to many ways to describe deficits of personal characteristics in those who manage and lead organisations. 

I am currently reading The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen. In it, he discusses the impacts of burgeoning technology on our identity – i.e. how we experience who we are. He says that through technology we are now bombarded by many disparate voices of humanity – both harmonious and alien.

He demonstrates how the scientisation of human behaviour has led to an explosion of terms to describe mental health deficits in the 20th century. Terms such as low self esteem, repressed, authoritarian, obsessive-compulsive, bulimic, sadomasochistic and post-traumatic stress disorder have only come into being relatively recently, and they all refer to problems, shortcomings or incapacities – mental deficits. (more…)

This article appeared in the November 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter, ChangingOrganisations. Why is it that it is so hard for your people to articulate to you what is actually going on?

In my consulting work I often find that clients who tell me of a problem or issue they want to resolve, often have great difficulty explaining what is going on and what it is that they see as the problem. They know that there is a problem and they know roughly what it is – they definitely know who is involved. It’s just so darned hard to articulate the multitude of factors and the complexity of the problem(s)

The challenge seems to be in explaining the situation to someone who is not intimately involved. At one point I used to think that this meant that the person must be not very competent if they couldn’t describe what’s happening. But then a colleague graciously pointed out that I have the same difficulty in explaining my own practice. I had to admit that there are so many nuances that are difficult to explain, and I started to appreciate that explaining our practice is difficult for everyone. You end up repeating yourself, skirting around the issue and providing a picture that is not very coherent. It becomes like an onion where you are trying to unravel the layers and it makes you cry while you’re doing it, if you’re not careful. (more…)

It’s a convoluted path from objective questionnaire instruments that only make sense in the subjective reality of respondents. Why not just enquire directly into the subjective reality of managers and staff in organisations, and bypass the "objective" instruments?

I am delighted that Tom Gibbons has joined the discussion and debate on this blog about the place of instruments in organisations (here) as well as other topics such as self organisation. Tom is Managing Director at TMS Americas, which is the organisation that represents the well-known Margerison and McCann Team Management Profile and associated instruments, so Tom is an expert on profiling. TMS is also well represented in NZ by TMS Ltd and I certainly like the profile well enough to have become accredited in administering it.

In a comment on my previous post on reification (what’s that?) Tom explained how he uses the profile as a vehicle for starting conversations that would not otherwise be possible. I think this is an admirable use for a profile, because I think that it is important in organisational change to foster new conversations. After all, people gain insights from filling in a questionnaire and then receiving feedback from someone on how they stack up in terms of the criteria of the instrument.

My comments in this post are not related only to the Team Management Profile, but to all psychological profiles, and I have experience of many. It is commonly understood that the participants in the instrument do not know what the criteria are at the time they fill in the instrument, and this is seen as an enhancement to the objectivity of the instrument. Many instruments are designed to obscure the criteria through, amongst other things, the format of the questions and through asking the same question in a number of different ways, for example through forced choice between two criteria. So, participants are told that they can’t fool the computer programme. For some instruments, the delivery of the feedback via computer programme is also seen as making the feedback more objective. (more…)

In which I ponder on why I haven’t used instruments and profiles in my consulting work in leadership development or helping organisations to bring about change (the post is after the light hearted questionnaire below).

A recent post on this blog was on how we often treat concepts or ideas as physical things and attribute the properties of physical things to them, such as thinking we can manipulate and manage culture as though it were a physical thing (here). In the comments on that post, a discussion has begun in a spontaneous way about the place of instruments (assessments or questionnaires) in dealing with complex processes of interaction in organisations.

Like many consultants, I am accredited to administer and facilitate workshops based on the Team Management Profile offered by TMS.

I have to confess though that I haven’t used the profile in my consulting work, even though I like it enough to have become accredited to run it. I have plenty of experience of other profiles as well (e.g. Myers-Briggs, Lominger competency profiles, Gallup Strengths Finder, Gallup Engagement Survey, 15FQ+, LSI, HBDI, AVI, Belbin, EQ, 360 degree and others) and I haven’t used them much either. And yet all of them have something to offer, certain compelling points of difference in the way they are presented, in what they claim to measure and in what insights they offer.

I’ve been pondering on why it is that I am not now drawn to profiles. In fact I seem not to be finding them helpful to my clients, even though I have been able to help clients to make sense of different profiles they have bought or undertaken. At times I have helped them to make decisions about how (or whether) to roll these instruments out across their organisation.

When I started out as a consultant in independent practice, I thought that it was important that if a client needed a profile, I should be accredited to provide one, otherwise I might miss out on work. I am aware of other consultants who have the same idea. Somehow, in the five years since I have been in operation, I myself have never found a client who needed a profile, and I’ve been busy with client work. During that period, other consultants have done dozens and hundreds of administrations of such instruments – in fact it’s a staple part of business for a number of consultants.

After a couple of years I realised that this was at least partly because I didn’t see my client’s issues as things that could be resolved by reference to profiles.

I am conscious that sometimes clients want someone to implement "xyz profile" and that there are consultants who do this. Often clients have a particular solution in mind when they talk to a consultant. If they don’t, they certainly have a business problem when they ask a consultant for help.

I have come to realise that how the consultant frames up the solution has a big influence on the solution they offer. If a consultant has a profile, then they will very quickly see in client situations, applications for that profile. I suppose this a variation of "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will appear like it’s a nail." And you will have no option but to try banging it with your hammer. Shame if it’s not a nail but a rather painful blister.

But I think it’s more subtle than that, in spite of the joke questionnaire at the top of this post, courtesy of flickr.com. Perhaps it is partly a factor of "I have a solution, now let’s find someone I can flog it to." But I suspect that most consultants do not think this is what they are doing.

I think it’s more that becoming experienced in the profile does give you a certain way of looking at the world, a certain vocabulary, a certain theory about what is going on.  A certain habitus as Pierre Bordieu and my colleague Chris Mowles would say. If that’s your theory and vocabulary, then you will see organisational situations in terms of that theory and vocabulary. And no doubt you will also be able to convince clients to try out your solutions.

In my work with my clients I have become more interested in exploring "How are we looking at the world?" Our conversations are rooted in the present world of experience. When abstractions come up I bring the conversation back to what is currently happening. Perhaps that is why I am not feeling the need for instruments at the moment.

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

Once more on engagement surveys

Employee engagement surveys are attempts to measure how strongly connected with the orgsniation its staff are.

I was talking to a client in HR who pointed out that for a group like HR, the emphasis on engagement scores meant that HR was concentrating on measuring its engagement with itself.

For example, the leadership-type questions ask the respondent about his or her relationship with colleagues and manager, and the direction and tools provided.

There ain’t nothing about the customer in there.

To my way of thinking, the measures are important to the degree that they influence what people talk about together. This is because the patterns of what people talk about together actually constitute the organisation, so initiatives like engagement surveys can have a significant influence on the organisation itself. From this stand point, engagement surveys, which purport to measure an aspect of the organisation, actually construct the organisation through the influence they have on the patterns of conversation occurring in the organisation.

Employee engagement surveys influence managers to talk about the scores and how they can improve them. That sounds fair enough. But is this at the expense of your engagement with internal and external customers? As a manager you need to be focusing on both.

Good managers and teams will be talking with their teams and customers anyway. The engagement survey is an abstraction that purports to provide objectivity, although it amounts to nothing more than some anonymous ratings and comments. It diverts managers and staff to talk about the scores and the items on the instrument (it seems that NZers don’t really go for "I have a best friend at work"), instead of talking about what is going on in the ordinary everyday experience of the members of the team, with each other and their customers.

If your organisation has an engagement survey, then maybe you have to go along with it as part of being a manager. But don’t let it divert you from helping your people to make sense of what is going on for internal and external customers as well.

Dealing with resistance depends on how you deal with difference

People who resist change are negative, troublemakers, or just don’t understand the benefits. Right? Not necessarily.

Perhaps they have legitimate concerns about the change as it is framed and planned. If so, these concerns, even legitimate ones, when expressed would sound to senior managers like resistance, wouldn’t they? Cooney and Sewell see dealing with this resistance as a question of who we deal with difference.

Cooney and Sewell’s stimulating research article is called Shaping the Other: Maintaining Expert Managerial Status in a Complex Change Management Programme, and is published in December 2008 in the academic journal Group and Organization Management.

Cooney and Sewell identify three means of dealing with difference:

• Confrontation – overt domination through the exercise of power – in other words, crush all opposition.
• Appropriation - a more subtle form of confrontation in which you take ownership of their position. For example, managers might appropriate the technical knowledge of the workers by eliciting it and representing it in a standardised and formalised manner, and then use it in service of their own ends.
• Dialogue – engagement with the other in a process that recognises each other’s difference and does not seek to dominate or appropriate them.

Note: the above are based on the work of the German philosopher Hegel, as discussed in the work of Collins.

While at first blush the dialogue option seems to be the most desirable, I think it is unlikely to be attained. Why not? Because of the power relations that are part and parcel of all human relating.

However, these alternatives gave me an insight into the work of the leader in making change happen, and my own role as a consultant in facilitating change.

I think that it is quite possible and indeed likely, that the issues of staff and managers are based on genuine concern for the organisation. I don’t assume that people are damaged.

In sessions I run with managers and staff, I am seeking to recognise difference, and not to dominate the discussion, in line with the dialogue option above. I do all sorts of things to minimise the power differential between me and the participants in order to meet this objective. And I am seeking to create dialogue. However, everyone knows that there is a power relationship going on, no matter how unacknowledged it might be. People are often surprised that I am actually listening to them, and that their views are reflected in the written documents that are produced in the course of the change project.

But nevertheless, the organisations I work with are not democracies (whether they be private sector, government agencies, NGOs or Crown entities), and the power differentials are real. By the way, do not read this as meaning that I think the power is all on the side of management. In one restructuring project I worked on successfully, a previous attempt to do similar things resulted in pickets and the resignation of the CEO. Naturally enough, the new CEO, General Manager and I took this very seriously as it graphically illustrated that the power was not unilaterally on the side of the CEO.

How are the power differentials in your organisation getting in the way of you dealing with difference (and resistance)?

Chris Rodgers on his blog Informal Coalitions  has picked up on my criticism of the employee engagement industry.

Interestingly he has criticised ”disembodied" culture change programmes and I am struck by his insight that employee engagement is similarly disembodied from the "everyday experience of organizational practice and performance." When he talks about the disembodiment of culture change, he is meaning the way that it is common to treat culture as a thing that is separate from everyday interaction, a thing that is a separate building block of performance that can be managed independently of daily conversation.

The measurement of employee engagement by means of surveys leads to engagement being thought of as a thing independent of human interaction, that can be objectively measured and managed.

To my way of thinking, employee engagement refers only to human interaction and is not something outside of people in organisations interacting with each other. By definition it cannot be outside human interaction. And because we are human beings, we cannot stand outside of human interaction. Managers cannot stand outside of their interactions with their employees and measure them objectively.

So the notion of measuring employee engagement is of doubtful value, particularly if it results in people taking their eye off their results and their interactions with others.

Chris Rodgers suggests that instead, "the ‘real’ engagement task for leaders is twofold:

• Helping individuals to make sense of everyday events and emerging challenges in the context of their local interactions; and, in the light of this, to take action in ways that contribute to the achievement of local organizational objectives.
• Doing so in ways that also resonate with individuals’ own aspirations and personal agendas."