Stephen Billing’s Blog

Those involved in funding health services such as mental health services do not have it so easy.

The previous post described the perspective of the world of the CEO of an NGO – what it is like to be funded by an entity that does not actually use the services you provide.

But, it’s not all beer and skittles for a contract/relationship manager in a funding organisation such as a District Health Board. Imagine you are the new contract/relationship manager in the procurement area of the DHB. You start your job and you are responsible for a range of NGOs providing services, some with as few as 2 full time equivalent staff and others with over 100 full time equivalents.

You review each contract and find that some don’t specify how many service users will be catered for. The descriptions of the services specified in the contracts don’t match what the providers tell you they provide. The NGOs explain the reasons for this, but how do you tell if they are valid or not?

Informally, you hear both positive and negative things about the service provider. (more…)

Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self points out how the modernist view of humans gave rise to the (questionable) personality questionnaire.

Continuing Gergen’s argument, the modernist view was that an ideal human would possess machine-like reliability and rationality – and would be genuine, principled and stable.

David Riesman’s book Lonely Crowd distinguished other-directed from inner-directed types of character. An inner-directed focus was a source of direction implanted by parents and family, that was aimed implacably at the achievement of goals.This sense of direction would keep the inner-directed person on a course towards those goals while negotiating the buffetings of the external environment. By contrast, an other-directed type would be without an internal guide, and would instead be guided by the immediate social surroundings. This type would tend to be superficial, a conformist with a high need for approval.

The inner-directed personality captured the central ideas of modernist humans. If people have machinelike essences, situated not too far from the surface (by contrast with the romantic self which was hidden deep and only hinted at in the real world) then these should be able to be measured. And if the essence of a person could be measured then this should lead to the ability to make predictions about people’s behaviour in the future.

Personality instruments are based on the assumption that people are basically consistent and stable through time, and that their essences will manifest like a fingerprint or DNA.

Gergen points out that the logic by which such tests demonstrate the internal traits of a person is both interesting and misleading. (more…)

The romantic notion of the self as a deep well of hidden passion and emotion has given way through the application of scientific thinking to an idea of humans as rational beings applying reason to make sense of their world. The n-step approaches to change are based on this view of humans.

The romantic stage began to wane toward the end of the 19th century. As expansionist markets and mass production started to emerge, the sciences, with their imperatives to objective evidence and rational utility gained favour. These concepts went against the romantic ideals of feeling, soul, will, and the driving forces of the deep interior which were so much a part of the romantic view.

Science: objective versus Romantic: deep inner core (subjective). The battle lines were drawn. (more…)

In Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self, he notes that the Western concept of the "self" has developed in three stages and I have been thinking that we can see these three stages in our current views of leadership. These stages he labels as:

• Romantic
• Modern
• Post-Modern

This post considers the Romantic stage and the residue it has left on our current thinking about leadership.

Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.

An early exemplar of the romantic period was Goethe’s "The Sufferings of Young Werther." This is the story of a young man, Werther, who is hopelessly in love with a young woman who is married to an older man. His love goes unrequited and Werther has months of agonising over the conflict between passion and morality.

This conflict summarises in a nutshell the elements of the concerns of the Romantic period – the conflict deep inside the person, between the passions of the spirit, and what it is right to do. (more…)

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…)

By Theodore Taptiklis

Guest contributor Theodore Taptiklis, author of Unmanaging, who has worked recently in New Zealand, UK, and Denmark argues in his very readable style, that we need to reconnect work and its evaluation back together.   

It seems that there is now an impulse to think again about how public sector quality is evaluated and reported, arising from a deep-seated concern about current approaches. This concern appears even though the practices presently favoured in most Western economies (around performance measurement, outcome evaluation, and key performance indicators) have themselves developed from an era of almost continuous public sector reform. And it is possible to understand the  character of these reforms largely as a product of recent history, undertaken alongside – and heavily influenced by – that most pervasive of late twentieth-century endeavours: the management project.

But it might also be helpful to consider the origins of the present concern from an even longer historical perspective. From earliest times, as soon as labour became specialised, and tasks were undertaken by one person who was paid by another, the question has arisen: What is good work? Manual labour or craft work seems to produce visible results, or things whose functional quality can be observed directly. But even here there are problems. How can we judge the thatcher’s work until there’s a rainstorm? Or until the wind blows from the east, which happens only once or twice in a year? Some aspects of ‘good work’ are not visible to the untrained eye, but are deeply embedded in the tiny details of working practice. (more…)

 What you are comfortable to discuss legitimates topics for your people. Those things you are uncomfortable with quickly go into the "undiscussable" pile.

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends." (more…)

Have I found a sports analogy I agree with?

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project. (more…)

"Best practice" ignores the most important factor – the people who are working with the practice or model.

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…)

In situations of long-standing conflict, accusations of bullying can be a sign that relationships have broken down to such an extent that one or both of the parties can see no possibility of carrying on working together.

I have noticed when I have been asked to help organisations where people are in deep seated conflict, that the situations are often characterised by each party accusing the other of bullying them. When I mention to a new or potential new client these accusations of bullying in other conflict situations, I am struck by how they say "that happens here as well."

Chris Mowles writes an interesting post in Violence in Organisations on his blog Reflexive Practice that shed light on this for me.

He says that organisational politics consists of the daily exercise of power, involving people negotiating, discussing, being polite or impolite to each other, revealing, concealing, pulling rank, delegating and so on. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, he describes this political process as the proper exercise of power in the public space; as something that leads to the greatest of human civilising achievements. (more…)