Do you suffer from the same problems social researchers do – being an outsider in your own business?
Much of what we "know" about leadership is based on research conducted according to social research methodology. The movement towards qualitative research has often been the basis of leadership research, which often involves participants responding to the questions of social researchers. The social researchers are by definition, outsiders. (more…)
"Best practice" ignores the most important factor – the people who are working with the practice or model.
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Many managers have fallen for the attractive prospect of "best practice." And many consultants claim to be able to bring best practice to your organisation. What is usually meant by this term is that they bring models or processes they’ve used or developed in the past, which they can implement with new clients.
There is certainly value in the experience consultants have had in other organisations – it can bring a new perspective to what is going on in your organisation.
The idea of best practice goes further than this – it implies that the same outcomes are possible in your organisation using the standardised best practice or models adopted in other successful companies. (more…)
Holding contradictory points of view without getting anxious – could this be a core competency for leaders of change?
When you think about it, it is fairly obvious that there can be no "I" without we, you (singular), he, she, you (plural) and they. "I" can only be thought of as "I and relationships with others." "I" cannot be thought of as a stand alone individual in isolation from others. You could think of "I" as meaning "interdependent I."
You can distinguish between interdependent I and others, but you cannot separate them – interdependent I only exists in relationship to other people. (more…)
Sports are like business only in certain superficial ways. The differences are far greater than the similarities, and bear strong warning for any leader of change.
The other day I participated in a group discussing leadership. It was apparent that to many people, that lessons from sport were highly applicable to leadership and business, and further, that it was taken for granted that there are strong similarities between business and sports.
I think that the use of "lessons" from sport highlights certain apparent similarities, such as having winners and losers, a game plan, tactics, coach and so on.
At the same, the highlighting of these similarities disguises some very crucial differences between sport and business: (more…)
The competencies required for leadership (if there is such a thing as competencies and leadership) are not to be found in the standard competency frameworks. If you are using a competency framework, it is likely to be wrong, therefore don’t give it much priority.
The idea of competencies is that you will be able to identify necessary skills and define the steps required to acquire those skills. So, an important step in developing leaders is then to be smart enough to analyse the work of a manager or leader, or make use of the work of those who are smart enough to research and precook a set of skills for you. These skills are separated from the context in which the skills are used. Hence, strategic agility is said to be something that people can acquire by using strategic buzzwords, doing five year projections even though five year plans don’t happen as projected, or regularly reading strategy gurus and Harvard Business Review. These remedies are among those recommended in Lominger’s book FYI For Your Improvement, Fourth Edition, pp 344 – 348. (more…)
Questioning the usefulness of personality profiles and instruments is likely to be provocative
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The previous discussion on the blog about personality and other profiles has generated some interest from readers. Many of my colleagues (i.e. other consultants) and clients, along with me, have used personality instruments. So we are certainly in the mainstream there.
I have recently been wondering about their use and questioning for myself how valid it is to use them, given the arguments in my blog about the importance of context when considering abstractions such as culture, leadership and values. (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…)
What is reification and why on earth should I care?
You may or may not have come across this term before, and if not, then welcome to the arcane aspects of complexity science and organisation theory.
However, as a leader it is important to understand the tendency we have to treat organisations and other abstract concepts like culture or organisations as though they were actual physical things that respond to natural laws. Why? Because it affects how you approach making changes to your culture or wider organisation.
Organisations and other social objects respond to processes of human interaction, but they do not respond to universal laws the way that physical objects such as balls (speed, direction) or pot plants (colour, mass). Even though pot plants are living, and organisations are dynamic and so seem to have some qualities of living things, organisations are not living systems like pot plants. (By the way, do you like the pot plants shown in our front entrance? I am quite proud of them.) (more…)
Four dimensions of change that are considered in the mainstream literature on change.
According to Alvesson and Sveningsson’s excellent new book Changing Organizational Culture, key dimensions of change that are common in the literature include:
Change is often characterised in terms of two extremes as revolutionary or evolutionary. Revolutionary change refers to changes that affect several aspects of the organisation simultaneously, such as culture, resources, performance management systems, strategy, technology, market positioning. Evolutionary change refers to operational change that affects part of the organisation within existing strategy and resources.
The following scales are also used to characterise organisational change:
Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that these labels and distinctions often mean roughly the same. (more…)
I was at a client function the other night and one of the managers approached me saying that he was a trustee of another organisation and they’d like to talk to me about how I could help them. This kind of serendipity makes the world go round, in all aspects of life, not just business.
I serendipitously came across an article (subscription only) in the latest edition of Organization Studies by Professor Nicholas Dew of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA, in which discusses the role of serendipity in entrepreneurship. (more…)