Stephen Billing’s Blog

This article appeared in the October 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter, ChangingOrganisations.

The other day I was in a group that was discussing leadership, including the similarities between business and sports. No doubt you’ve seen similar comparisons before – business and sports both have winners and losers, a game plan, scouting out the competition, reading the game and changing tactics accordingly, playing within rules, a coach and many other similarities.

The basic assumption is that business is like rugby, chess or my own favourite game, tennis, in which one player or team is playing another player or team.

But in such a game of two players, if one player is much stronger than the other, then that player can pretty much determine the outcome of the game, and will be able to compel to some extent the moves of the other player.

Nevertheless the stronger player still has to take the moves of the weaker player into account even though they have overall dominance of the game. You could say that both players have some power over each other. In this sense, power is not an absolute but a ratio between the two players, a ratio that favours the stronger player. If the players were more equally matched, then the power ratio would be more even and neither player would be able to dominate the course of the game, nor compel the other player to make certain moves.

But business is not like a game of two players like rugby, chess or tennis. It is not even as though one person is simultaneously playing a number of others individually like in simultaneous chess. Nor is one person playing a number of people who are united against him or her. In both of these cases, a player who is much stronger than the others could dominate the course of the game and moves of the others.

Business is not like these games.

It’s Not One on One

Business is more like a game for many many players, playing against each other, not one on one like tennis or chess. Individual players then have to wait longer and longer to make their moves. As the number of players increases it becomes more and more difficult for one player to have a mental picture of the overall flow of play, the direction and development of the game. The ability of one player to control the game or compel the moves of others becomes diluted, even for a relatively strong player. From the point of view of an individual player, the network of other players and the moves they make will eventually seem to take on a life of its own as they wait for their turn and try to work out what is happening.

This is what it is like to be a participant in a change initiative, particularly in a large organisation, especially as a member of the group of “targets” of change. From the perspective of an individual involved, the moves (or actions) available to that person have to take into account the moves (or actions) of others, and in this way the people involved have to be responsive to the actions they see happening, and the overall patterns of behaviour, power, politics, and ideology that they discern. Individuals involved, even powerful ones, cannot completely dominate the course of the project and the actions of others.

The Number of Players is Always Increasing

Returning to the game of many players, imagine that the numbers of players keeps increasing. As individuals find themselves less and less able to obtain favourable outcomes, different groupings of players will form and reform as players seek to gain an advantage. Strong players will group together and attempt to attract other players to their groupings. From the interplay of the various groupings, you could end up with a two tier game – a game in which players are still interdependent but no longer play directly with each other. Rather, the function of playing directly is taken up by a tier of leaders, delegates, representatives, governments, focus groups, steering groups or other specially designated functionaries. This first tier of representatives / leaders plays directly with each other, on behalf of the mass of people in the second tier, who now do not play directly with each other. There can be no first tier without the second tier. So the representatives / leaders in the first tier are bound up with the second mass group in one way or another. The first tier cannot exist without the second tier.

Let’s assume the first tier is very powerful indeed. In fact, like a senior management team or a change project team, only they can play at the decision making levels – they have a monopoly on access to the game. Every player in that tier can play, pretty much like in a single tier game, being able to see the pattern of the game, decide strategy, make moves directly and follow the influence of his or her moves on the later moves of others. Even though the game is complex through the interdependence of tier one with the mass of people in tier two, the game appears more or less transparent to those players in the top tier.

This transparency is only an illusion however. The two tier game is much more complex than a simple two player game like rugby, chess or tennis, where one strong player is able to dominate the moves of the other player and the course of the game. Because of their interdependence with those in the less powerful tier, no individual in the two tier game, no matter how powerful, has anything like the power of the player in the two person game to guide the game in the direction of his or her desires and wishes.

Sports Analogies Trap You into One on One Thinking

Sports analogies, though, make it appear that those involved in powerful positions in business are like players in the simple one on one games like tennis. These sports analogies ignore the interdependence of each group with the other, the presence of many other groups as well who might not be playing directly, and the complex relationships that are therefore involved.

This is why it is more effective for you as a leader, and also for those involved in change projects, to think of your organisation as a constantly shifting set of ever-changing groupings, rather than being a sport in which the objective is to beat the other team. If you think you are in a simple one on one contest, then you will focus on goals, strategy and tactics. If you think you are part of interdependent groupings with shifting power balances, you will be paying more attention to what is going on around you, to the shifting ratios of power and to the quality of your responses within the framework of your overall intention.

Which is far more effective. So, stop yourself when you find yourself using a sports comparison to describe situations in your organisation. It will be hiding the interdependence of groupings the people you are talking to are part of. Are you aware of what these interdependencies are in your organisation?

Note: These thoughts were inspired by the remarkable ideas of Norbert Elias in “What is Sociology,” 1978, New York: Columbia University Press.

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I am in the process of preparing a series of posts that question whether or not personality profiles are valuable or useful. This feels like a biggie – to be raising doubts about "scientifically proven" psychological instruments. I don’t mean that I’m questioning whether or not they are implemented well or not. Obviously sometimes they are not implemented well, and sometimes they can be implemented according to the book. Either way, they are implemented according to the view of the world held by the person or people implementing them.

When I questioned in earlier posts the idea that establishing a set of corporate values was useful, there were a number of comments suggesting that they agreed with me that they weren’t valuable, because they were implemented poorly. In a similar way, I have had some feedback that personality profiles can be implemented poorly and in these cases they are less useful.

How ideas (or abstractions) such as values or personality profiles are implemented is one question, and there is no doubt in my mind that they can be implemented poorly (this often means "not in accordance with the way I think they should be implemented").

In the following posts I will be questioning whether or not it is actually valid to consider a personality profile at all. In a similar way I also have at least 16 posts questioning whether the concept of values is useful or not – you can find them here, and a number of posts questioning whether a shared vision is necessary (here). Many people thought I was just questioning whether or not values or vision were implemented well. 

Not so. I was wondering aloud whether it made sense to have shared vision and values.

In a similar way, I am wondering whether personality profiles make sense. Stay tuned!

Do you recognise any of these six fallacies in your own change initiative?

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their amazing book "Changing Organizational Culture" identify on pages 162 -163 six fallacies that are common in organisational change work. How many of these are driving your change projects?

• Domination of managerialism in the form of the belief that management is the central and superior actor, and that management’s intentions will drive outcomes.
   
• Overemphasis on planning and design, and ensuing neglect of energy, resources, attention and sensitivity to the process of implementation. I love the word "attention" because I have observed that often managers have their attention so focused on the future, or the plan, that they are oblivious to what is going on in front of their noses.
   
• Assuming the organisation works in a unitary way (i.e. has "one culture") leading to neglecting to work with the diversities of meanings.
   
• Translating complex phenomena like leadership and culture into seemingly simple representations which hide their complex and multifaceted qualities, giving a false impression of what can easily be dealt with.
   
• Believing in the quick fix, where rather limited instructions, resources and time are supposed to bring about great improvements.
   
• Underestimating the need for expressiveness and capturing the hearts and minds of people – through an over-reliance on planning and instrumentalism.
   

You may know that I have a chapter in the new book that is due out soon, "Client-Consultant Collaboration" edited by Anthony F Buono and Flemming Poulfelt.

My chapter is called "Inside the Client – Consultant Relationship: Consulting as Complex Processes of Relating." It is expected to be out by the end of August.

Here is the flyer for the book (in PDF format), it even includes a special deal for purchases. I like the vibrant colours on the cover.

Very exciting.

In which Chris Rodgers expresses my perspective on organizational politics better than I could myself, and I conclude that politics is inevitable in all human and organizational relating.

In my previous post on organizational politics I pointed out that politics is seen as bad. Then Chris Rodgers commented on that post, making the same point most brilliantly I thought, referring to Beverley Stone’s “Confronting Company Politics,” that “The term ‘company politics refers to all the game-playing, snide, ‘them and us’ aggressive, sabotaging, negative, blaming, ‘win-lose’, withholding, non-cooperative behaviour that goes on in hundreds of interactions everyday in your organisation.” Yes, I thought, what a succinct quote that sums up how politics is seen.

Further shooting home this point, Chris mentions Samuel Culbert’s observation in “Mindset Management” that “It’s almost as if people treat organizational politics as a low-grade virus infection, hoping that if they ignore it and think positively it will go away.”

It is as if there is some requirement that for responsible members of the organization, "playing politics" should be beneath them. Comparing organizational politics to an inconvenient virus is particularly apt in this respect.

Chris then goes on to point out that that savvy political behaviour makes a big contribution to successful organizational change and that acting politically in a skillful way always includes the requirement to provide, post-event, a rational description of what happened, a description of what happened in which the political elements disappear. (more…)

A journal entry reminds me of the messiness of change.

In our accounts of change projects, we often look back and think of the plan, and how we achieved it despite distractions, resistance and problems that arose. But, like being on a building construction site, working on change projects can be messy.

I think in our remembering afterwards, we forget how messy, reactive, anxiety-raising and unplanned a lot of what happens actually is when you are in the thick of it.  Certainly most of what you can read in the literature on change emphasises the planned side of it rather than the messiness.

I was reviewing a journal entry I made in the middle of a large and difficult change project which has since been completed.

"Last night we decided that A would write the accountabilities, I would write the Executive Team paper and B would proof read and wordsmith our drafts.

Today the plan has changed – there’s a meeting at 4.30pm with the General Manager and Deputy Secretary at which they will decide on the naming of the positions and other related questions.

The previous day was also spent preparing material for another meeting with the General Manager. So the project is spending its time preparing these other papers for immediate consumption rather than concentrating on the goal of having the full Executive Team paper ready."

While we ended up meeting the deadline for getting the Executive Team paper done, at the time we were dealing with various stakeholders with differing degrees of anxiety about the project. Handling these anxieties by providing reassurances, early draft versions, additional materials and so on was a large part of the day to day work.

The rhetoric about change does not much acknowledge this messy reality. This reality is that we are feeling our way forward, responding to others as they respond to us. We cannot step outside this messy human relating in the present, the experience of which is shaped by our history of the past and our expectations for the future. I think that our approaches to change in organisations need to recognise this, but many do not.

I am convinced that the value of a facilitator is in fostering free flowing conversations among participants, related to the job in hand. During this process they generate meaning for the work they are involved with, for example coming up with new ideas, enhancing a relationship between 2 units, proposing a collaboration between 2 groups or understanding a situation from the other person’s perspective. There are many more possible outcomes – these are just a few examples.

And yet how many times have you seen facilitators who:

1. Create structured activities that are engaging but do not foster real conversation about real things going on in the work place (e.g. cutting articles out of newspapers, getting people to vote on arbitrary rating scales).
    
2. Are more intent on getting through their predetermined programme than meeting the needs of the participants (and the sponsor).
    
3. Build in restrictions on the conversation (e.g. speaking only one sentence at a time) that interfere with the natural ebb and flow and repetitions of normal conversation.
    
4. Get participants to talk to the flipchart or to the facilitator, but never to each other?
    
5. Regard participants talking to each other as a waste of time, something to be discouraged. Why is it that the most lively conversations seem to happen at breaks?
    
6. Close conversations down rather than opening them up.
    
7. Divert attention from what is important to participants, for example through skits or artificial presentations.
    
8. Generate ideas in brainstorming sessions but never discuss the merits of the ideas?
    
9. Ask questions that they already know the answers to in order to reach the predetermined outcome – this amounts to a subtle manipulation.
    
10. Use devices that touch on, but avoid, dealing with real concerns, for example getting people to write their concerns on yellow stickies and posting them anonymously on a flipchart (never to be seen again), or posting anonymous ratings of how we are getting along at the moment or how we are doing as a team. If the items raised by these techniques are not discussed in the group then they amount to disguised manipulative techniques to get the group to think that something has been done just by undertaking the exercise.
     
11. Getting through a set number of Powerpoint slides in the time available (e.g. "These ones are not relevant to you so I’ll just go through them quickly").
     
12. Facilitate sessions that generate long lists of ideas or issues that never see the light of day again.
     
13. Have a pre-set agenda that gets in the way of what is meaningful to the participants (e.g. even though we know the answers now, we won’t answer your questions about the space you will have because according to our plan we will address that in stage 2, which takes place next month.)

These are examples that I have seen over the last four years or so. The embarrassing thing is that in the past I have been guilty of some of them myself! 

Concentrate on the basics of good leadership and management, not on your engagement scores.

Previous posts have argued that

• High employee engagement does not cause high productivity
• Engagement is becoming a cult and wise leaders will not pay too much attention to it
• Leaders should concentrate on business results and employee engagement is not a business result, it is an input

Given that I’ve been so critical of measuring employee engagement, what do I advocate instead of engagement scores and action planning to increase your engagement scores?

If your organisation is hooked on engagement scores, then middle managers probably have no choice but to comply and go through the motions of completing the questionnaires. And there is no doubt that there is a lot of political advantage in scoring well in the surveys.

If you are the leader of your organisation, think very carefully about your implementation of engagement surveys. As you know, what you measure is what people focus on. Do you want your people to concentrate on inputs or results? Engagement surveys will make your line managers and  support groups (e.g. HR, admin, finance, legal, communications) focus on inputs because that’s what you are measuring. Engagement surveys will concentrate your line managers on inputs and you risk diverting their attention from the things that matter – your business results.

Unfortunately the magic bullet is not magic and it is not a bullet.

Let the good old basics prevail. It is simple, but it is not easy. Implementation is all. Concentrate on the results you are trying to achieve, keep talking to your people about their performance along with what you are trying to achieve, and your progress together towards your objectives. Concrete progress towards business success stimulates and excites people to keep going in that direction. As they achieve business results, engagement scores will take care of themselves. This is the converse of what the engagement brigade would tell you.

The emperor really has no clothes. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the cult of engagement. Instead, stay focused on your results,  keep in contact with your people as they progress, help them to overcome obstacles where necessary and provide recognition of achievements.

By the way, this is heresy in the prevailing ways of thinking in the public sector in New Zealand.

Comments welcome.