Stephen Billing’s Blog

I am totally over "best practice." It is a term used by consultancies (including myself in past lives) and those trying to sell ideas internally, intended to get emotional support for the ideas being promoted.

If you have a think about best practice, it is an off shoot of benchmarking. The idea of benchmarking is that one can investigate the best organisations in other industries, and adopt their practices into your own organisation.

There are two assumptions behind this that I have come to see as unrealistic. The first is that practice is universal and can be adopted in a general way in other organisations. The second is that doing what others do will automatically improve your performance.

For me, the classic example of best practice being adopted is when quality circles were adopted in US companies. American vehicle manufacturers looked at what Japanese manufacturers were doing and one of those things was quality circles. When these were adopted the results were entirely mixed. You cannot import a practice from one organisation to another "holus bolus." You can take ideas from one industry and consider how they might apply in your own industry. You have to take into account the specific organisation and its norms and values.

Even if so-called best practice could be imported into your organisation, there is still the assumption that doing what others do will make your performance better. To me this is a nonsense. At the best, it would make you as good as anybody else. But it does not account for breakthrough performance.

Instead, pay attention to what is going on in your organisation at the moment. Instead of asking "what should we be doing," ask "what is going on right now." When you understand what is happening at the moment this will lead to ideas about what to do about it. Too often we are thinking about what should be, not ‘what is.’

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…

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.

I have just had the opportunity of peer reviewing a journal article for a learned academic journal. The idea of the peer review is that by passing the test of running the proposed article past some anonymous reviewers, the journal can expect to be able to publish articles that meet minimum criteria for being worth of academic publication.

It’s a kind of rite of passage for acceptance into the club of published authors – the authors get kudos for publishing in peer-reviewed journals. I am currently preparing an article for publication myself.

The article I just reviewed was unformed, unfinished and did not articulate ideas that seemed very useful. It purported to be explaining complexity theory but seemed to be unclear about basic concepts of emergence and was very mechanistic in its constructs which were all in the service of managing and controlling the emergence of desired behaviours.  And yet, by definition, emergence cannot be controlled or predicted.

Why should you care? Well, we can read published material that sounds quite plausible. Because it’s been written on the printed page or on a website seems to give it more weight somehow. I expected that because it had been submitted for review by a learned journal the article would have something useful or interesting to say. Somehow I could not find the usefulness or meaning in the article. Very disappointing. 

I am reminded that just because it has been written down does not make it true. Even if an editor agreed to publish it.

So question what you read, including this!

An employee who is leaving can be interviewed to find out what made him or her leave. The goal is to identify the real causes for them leaving and there is some assumption that the causes may not already have been identified prior to the exit interview. An exit interview certainly has the potential to reveal useful information about why staff are leaving and what attracts them about the new positions or situations they are going to.

The only problem is that the employee has already made the decision to leave. If you wanted to keep them, it’s too late by the time you do an exit interview.

What is the solution?

Instead of trying to find out why people are leaving, find out why others are staying. Engage with them about their experience as employees before they get to the departure lounge. How do you do that?

Make a practice of talking to high performers and other valued employees who are not thinking of leaving, and ask them how their job is going and investigate why they are staying. What is it that they like about working at your organisation?

I have done recruitment projects where I have had the recruiting manager say to me that no one good will want to work there because the salary is too low and the organisation’s profile is negative. My response was to ask him why he stayed there if that was the case, and to talk to others to find out why they were there, even though the salary was perceived as being low and the organisational profile was not positive. There are many other reasons why people stay in jobs, including a feeling that people can help the customers, as was the case in this particular organisation.

In this particular situation we were able to find excellent candidates against expectations, in spite of the salary levels and the perceived unfavourable employment brand.

Asking people why they are staying will give you useful insight that will enable you to retain more of those high performers and other valuable employees.

And you will confirm that there is a lot more to why people work than just money.

Have you tried this before? If so, what was your experience?