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.

Then he goes on to make the most interesting observation, as far as these bullying accusations go. When this daily political process breaks down, when we get to the point where there is no longer a potential for negotiating how we might go on together, then we can experience this as violence.

The key aspects of bullying seem to be that it is repetition of behaviours over time, intending to control others, with a focused target, and ends up pitting people in the workplace against each other. It seems to me that these key factors are also involved when there is long standing conflict between groups of people that has never been resolved. I would expect in any long term conflict situation that there would be repeated behaviours, intentions to control others, focus on particular individuals and general taking of sides.

In the workplace you often did not and cannot choose those you are working with. Some workmates are people you develop a rapport with, and others are not. You have to work out or negotiate ways of going on together with people in both groups – this is the political process mentioned above.

When conflict reaches a no-return point and there seems to be no way of negotiating a way forward together, this can be experienced as violence. And when you reach this point of no possibility of negotiating how to go on working with the other person time after time, then this repeated experience of violence is very similar to the experience of being bullied.

So, from the perspective of those involved in the long standing conflict, they feel they are being bullied, and hence these claims arise, sometimes from both parties, of workplace bullying.

So, accusations of workplace bullying are, at the very least, a sign that a working relationship(s) has broken down to such a degree that one or both parties cannot see any possibility of carrying on together.

Admonishments to attempt to rise above the politics of daily life, or to "manage" it, are missing the target. We are all in situations where we are working with others, some of whom we have chosen to work with and others we did not choose. Some of these we find a rapport with, and others not. Daily politics are what allow conflict to be negotiated and for people in both groups to carry on together.

As Chris says, “Daily politics allows organisational life to flourish.” Without daily politics there is no avenue for conflict to be negotiated and this can be experienced as violence, as bullying.

If you are in a situation where there is long-standing conflict and accompanying accusations of bullying, then you have to attempt to address the situation with the aim of finding a way for the parties to go on together, i.e. through political processes of negotiation and so on. Ignoring or attempting to rise above the political aspects will get you nowhere.  

Photography by Ruby Cumming

Bas Reus is exploring what it means to say that humans are self-organising, over at http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/#comment-51. His post outlines the development of his thinking in attempting to define self-orgnisation.

Arising from the study of complexity, the important thing about self-organisation is that the ordering of society (or people in organisations) occurs through local interaction in the absence of an overall blueprint or plan. As any top manager will tell you, you can’t just make a plan, tell others and then confidently expect that the plan will be followed. Instead, all sorts of unexpected things happen – people interpret things differently, they react to things in surprising ways and there are unintended consequences. This is what is meant by saying there is no overall blueprint or plan.

Many people, including me, when they first learn of this idea of self-organisation, immediately think of questions like "How can we empower employees to be self-organising?" or "How can we manage our people so that the emergence can take place?"

In attempting to answer these questions during my doctoral thesis, thanks to my supervisor Ralph Stacey’s empathetic guidance, I came to realise that it doesn’t make much sense to talk in this way because humans already always are self organising, even when they work in organisations with top down management approaches. If they are working in an organisation with restrictive management approaches, then they are still self-organising, with a given mix of constraints, power relations and so on that is determined in part by the management approach. This is because top down or highly directive management approaches give a certain combination of constraints and power relations.

A more useful question might be something like "How can we change the constraints and power relating so that different patterns will emerge from the self-organisation?"

The challenge with thinking about self-organisation for people in organisations is to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that self-organisation means random – or that just anything can happen. Obviously, in an organisation, people cannot just do what they like. And it doesn’t make much sense to me for a manager to allow people just to do anything to respond to the environment – the chances of achieving management goals would be very low.

So self-organisation means something much more subtle than "anything goes." The challenge for managers that is presented by the concept of self-organisation is not "How can I empower my people to be self organising?" They are already self organising (in spite of management directives). The challenge is "How can I influence the constraints and power relationships so that different (hopefully more desirable) patterns of social interaction emerge." If different patterns of social interaction emerge, then along will come innovation and different results – the actions of the manager will play a big part in whether those results are more desirable or less desirable – so we cannot just say "anything goes."

The big insights of self-organisation are 1) the recognition that managers have a lot less control than the dominant managerial literature would have you believe, and 2) that managers themselves are also part of this self-organising dynamic of local interaction.

This means that as a manager you can only influence your organisation from within your own local interaction with others. So you must pay attention to your own interaction, observe what results and adjust as you go along.

Have you seen this blog post by Tiffany Monhollon called "How to Talk About Change at Work" that recently caught my eye?

For the last five months the author has had what is described as a seismic shift every 30 days. That amounts to five of these seismic shifts in five months. So, lots of change, by any standards.

Tiffany goes on to give a very personalised account of what she has learnt through these frequent and rapid changes in her organisation, and some survival tips that I think are very practical, and revealing of political processes. Essentially Tiffany’s tips amount to "how to be a good management recipient of change."

First of all she suggests figuring out what the change means, and recommends talking to a group of trusted others as a way of working out what it’s all about.

She then suggests finding something positive in the change. If you can’t see the positive immediately, she suggests expecting that there will be something positive that you can’t see yet, so open up the possibility that there will be something positive and keep looking for it. Don’t go to the next step until you can see something positive in the change.

Once you have identified something positive in the change then you can go ahead and find ways to advocate for the change by speaking positively about the change in terms of benefits for the organisation (and if possible, benefits for others). If you can talk positively about the change in this way, your change leader will be very grateful. This might be hard to do, so the author provides some creative ideas for how to do it, concluding that nevertheless it is a worthwhile exercise.

I quote here from Tiffany: "What your leaders need from you during times of change is your ideas, your energy, your solutions. And your advocacy." It strikes me how often the "change leaders" in the "consultation process" do not allow for ideas, energy and solutions because they reduce the feedback process to something written, avoiding opportunities for people to have the kind of discussions that result in new ideas, energy and solutions. They provide a written proposal and ask for written feedback, which is considered (or not) behind a closed door and then the final decisions are announced.

Change leaders in my experience, do want the ideas, energy and solutions of their people. But they are often anxious about whether they will be able to deal with the responses. A lack of experience or expertise in this area leads to over-engineering of the feedback process, resulting in severe restrictions to the scope and benefit of the ideas, energy and solutions of the people.

To summarise, so far you have talked to trusted others to work out what the change means, found something positive about the change, talked about the change with others in a positive way and now can choose your own change.

This means choosing either to stay the same and get swept away by the current of change, or choosing to remain in your organisation and, by implication, allowing the change to shape you. In other words, you have to choose how you will let the organisation’s change shape you. In doing this you can make it your own change, and your own opportunity.

I guess if you can’t follow the above steps then you have to leave and will not survive the change.

This approach speaks to how you have to be to have the greatest chance of surviving change – on the face of it, it seems to be good advice – how to be a good change recipient in a middle management position. If you are in the position of managing other staff then you have to represent the change to those staff in ways that support the organisation even while at the same time wondering if you will have a job yourself. So these steps really reflect that organisational reality in times of change.

Basically, Tiffany is pointing out that to be a good recipient of change you have to be in favour of the change, regardless of any qualms you may have. You cannot afford to express those qualms in open company – rather you have to work through your concerns behind closed doors with trusted others, so that you can emerge and find some way of supporting the change without compromising your ethics.

Underlying this approach is the recognition that those senior people initiating the change have more power than the recipients of change. The most imortant conversations in relation to the change occur behind closed doors with trusted others – these are the conversations in which managers work out what they think the change means and how they will respond – by resigning, by "going through the motions," by "passive resistance," by compliance or by being enthusiastic.

As a person who is often on the project team implementing change, I recognise that these conversations occur outside of the project team’s purview and yet are all important. That is why I think it is important to make the opportunity to have these conversations in the legitimate space rather than driving them into the shadows. For example, providing opportunities for people to talk in small groups with each other and with the senior people about the change and what it entails. 

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)?

It is both practical and interesting to think about power if you are trying to change your organisation. Instead of seeing power as being like an amulet, that one person holds over another, Norbert Elias had a very different way of thinking about power.

Elias saw power as an inevitable characteristic of all human relating. He saw power as a function related to the need that one person has for another. If I need you more than you need me, then at that time, the balance of power will be tilted towards you and away from me.

In this way of thinking, power exists only in relationship between people. Power is not a thing in itself that can exist outside of human relationships. Rather it is relational in nature.

To illustrate, Elias gives extreme examples where the power seems to be weighted completely in favour of one party, such as a baby and its parents, and a master/slave relationship.

Elias points out that a baby has power over its parents, just as much as the parents have power over the baby. At least, the baby has power over the parents for as long as the parents attach value to the baby. The parents may abandon the baby if it cries too much. Through the socialisation process the baby eventually learns what the limits of its power are, through interaction with its parents.

In the case of the master and the slave, another seemingly lopsided power relationship, Elias acknowledges that the master has power over the slave, but that the slave also has power over the master in proportion to his or her function for master and the master’s dependence on the slave.

How is this talk of babies and slaves relevant for organisations?

Consider the example of a manager / subordinate relationship in terms of the argument above. It is readily evident that the manager has power over the subordinate. What is less evident is that the subordinate also has power by dint of the subordinate’s functionality for the manager. In any change initiative, the staff have the ability to exert power by going along with the change or not going along with it. The manager and those reporting to the manager are interdependent – they rely on each other. They are not isolates bumping up against each other. Power is in an ever-changing balance between the two, depending on the relative need each feels for the other at the time.

Thinking of power in this relational way that Elias proposed shifts the attention away from the manager as an individual possessed of powerful characteristics by dint of position power and influencing power, to thinking of specific relationships between specific managers and specific subordinates.

It is then possible to see that the power balance is always shifting – it is not a static thing. With this way of thinking it becomes possible to identify shifting power balances between manager and direct report. And it also becomes possible to identify shifting power balances across an organisation.

And this is a very valuable perspective to have when leading organisational change.

Power is a topic that is not much talked about in organisations, at least not overtly in my experience. And yet it is a fundamental component of our organisational relationships as human beings within an explicit hierarchical structure. Hierarchies of management mean that some people have more power than others. I am referring to power as the ability to make certain things happen that would not otherwise happen.

Why is it that such a pervasive feature of organisational life is so little written about in the organisational literature, or discussed in every day organisational life? Especially considering that power is such an important part of the CEO or senior manager’s ability to get things done.

Norbert Elias suggests in his 1984 book What is Sociology, that one reason power is not a fit subject for discussion is because of the numerous examples of abuse of power and the harm done by powerful people to others.