I have had more than one situation recently in client organisations where a person "Angelica"  has had a problem with person "Boris" or something they have done. Angelica then emails or talks to Boris’s boss "Charlie," (and sometimes a range of other people) explaining the situation and seeking resolution.

It seems that this "dynamic of three people" frequently occurs in organisations, at all levels of seniority.

It is interesting to consider the effects of this in relationship terms. Angelica may have reached the point where she is so frustrated that this is the only option she can see to resolve an important organisational issue. "I am just being honest" or "I am saying what I honestly think" are common aspects of Angelica’s perspective in this situation.

Angelica’s boss Charlie has an opportunity to put a problem right. Angelica has contacted him, complaining about Boris or his actions. Charlie gets the chance to take some action with Boris to resolve the situation.

What action should Charlie the manager take?

One option for Charlie is to go to Boris, inform him of his transgression and work with Boris to remedy the situation. This is a very tempting option for many managers, as it enables them to be directly involved in solving an issue that perhaps could not otherwise be resolved. The manager is then very clear of his or her own contribution to resolving an issue that otherwise might not have a resolution.

I feel for all three participants in this situation. Consider Boris, who all too often is unaware that Angelica even has a problem with him. Seemingly out of the blue, Charlie is discussing an issue with Boris that Boris did not have any opportunity to attempt to resolve.

Another option for Charlie is to respond to Angelica by asking her to talk to Boris and see if they can resolve the issue prior to Charlie getting involved.

Then, at least Charlie only gets involved when Boris is aware that there is an issue and that Angelica and Boris have not been able to resolve the issue together.

And for Angelica, she would have reinforcement of the lesson that the first step in resolving an issue is with the person concerned, and then to go to the manager if resolution is not possible.

From a relationship perspective, I am interested in two aspects – the actions of Charlie the manager and the relationship between Angelica and Boris.

To me, Charlie the manager has to consider the relationship between Angelica and Boris and ensure they have made attempts to resolve the situation before becoming involved. Anything other response will make working with Angelica and Boris difficult in future, regardless of who is "at fault" in this situation.

Angelica’s very act of going to her manager Charlie will sour the relationship with Boris. So Angelica must be on very sure ground prior to approaching Charlie. Although by the time she has raised the issue with Charlie Angelica is so annoyed by what Boris has done that she is not thinking about the longer term relationship with Boris.

Now, Boris may (or may not) have been to blame for the original incident, but from the information provided by Angelica, Charlie wouldn’t be able to tell for certain, and this is commonly the case for managers like Charlie who are approached by staff members like Angelica – Charlie just doesn’t know how much of what he is told that he can reliably take action on.

So, if you are Angelica, try to resolve the issue with Boris before escalating to Charlie.

If you are Boris approaoched by Angelica, be grateful that Angelica has approached you before going to your boss, and work hard to resolve the issue. If you are Boris approached by Charlie, ask Charlie if he can give you some time to tlak to Angelica to attempt to resolve the issue (this happened to me once with a good result although Charlie was initially quite surprised at my request but quickly saw the logic of it).

If you are Charlie approached by Angelica, then encourage Angelica to discuss and resolve the issue with Charlie. If this is not possible from Angelica’s point of view  (i.e she thinks the situation is too far gone to raise it with Boris hersefl directly), offer to faciltate a discussion between tbe two.

Do not say that you’ll take it on and resolve it for her. If you do, you are not demonstrating that you are taking all the points of view seriously. That way lie monsters…

And that’s as prescriptive as I get!

• 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.

This depth of the psyche was not just words though, it was a call to action. In the story, Werther takes his own life. In the 21st century this would be seen as a futile act, but in the book at the time of publication this was seen instead as heroic. Because the way they saw it during the Romantic period, his heart was the source of all his strength, bliss and misery. Without being able to have the object of his love, taking his own life was an act of self-actualisation, long before Maslow ever thought of the term and put self-actualisation at the top of his hierarchy of needs.

Apparently Goethe’s work was so popular and influential that a wave of suicides followed its publication.
The Romantic period, then, is the source of our ideas today about humans having a deep interior. Artists and philosophers in those days were exploring the make up of this psychological depth. For example, William Blake elevated the imagination over mere experience because imagination enabled people to escape from mundane life and in Blake’s drug-induced poetry, imagination became a spiritual sensation, as it did also in Keats.

The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that the human will was at the centre of the deep interior that controlled the actions of individual human beings. Edgar Allan Poe was writing stories positing that a dark core of inner evil inhabited our deep interior. Edvard Munch’s faces were contorted with anguish from an eternal wellspring deep inside (e.g. "The Scream"). He and other artists were creating paintings which were expressions of inner emotion, rather than as illustrations of the real world.

The Romantic view was also the source of the idea of the soul which in Romantic times was not seen as a fictional aspect of the self, but as an aspect of nature given by God.

This Romantic view lives on today in our ideas of people being true to that deep inner core, and the concept of being authentic – acting in harmony with that inner essence. We especially expect this of leaders – leaders with character are seen as being true to themselves and passionate about their organisation or team. Qualities of this inner self, such as integrity and trust, courage, ethics and values, compassion, and fairness are now articulated as competencies, generic attributes that can be developed intentionally.
We also attempt to get to know that deep inner core of leaders through the use of personality questionnaires to identify the kind of inner essence that our leaders have, and to develop these in the service of their organisation.

I do hope though, that our leaders are not now expected to die for their passion for their organisation like young Werther! This may be due to the influence of the modern thinking stage which came after Romanticism, and is discussed in the next post.

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.

He is pointing out that we now have countless ways of locating faults within ourselves and others that were unavailable even to our grandparents. He says that as psychiatrists and psychologists have worked out ways to explain undesirable behaviour, they have generated a technical vocabulary of deficit.

This language has become increasingly disseminated to the broader public as they become aware of these issues. People have increasingly come to see self and others in these deficit terms. He uses this process as an illustration of how the language of the self is malleable – that is to say, it changes gradually over time, and thus how we see ourselves changes over time.

Implications for Leaders

I am struck by how the same process is operating in terms of leadership. One of the side effects of the proliferation of tools such as competencies, 360 degree feedback, climate surveys, engagement surveys, personality questionnaires, emotional intelligence is the corresponding increase in the number of deficit terms we now have for leaders. For example I have on many occasions recently heard people described as "low in emotional intelligence." Our performance management systems provide lists of competencies and behavioural indicators in categories of differing levels of deficit, and even overuse.

Just as in the mental health example given by Gergen, the proliferation of deficit terms for leaders has been the result of the "scientising" of leadership. This scientising process involves attempts to break leadership down into its constituent parts and make these attributes more amenable to control. For example, the development of particular personal attributes such as listening skills, in the service of the organisation.

So, the language of leadership is malleable, it has changed gradually over time. Even the concept of leadership is relatively new – having emerged in the twentieth century.  It is still not conclusively determined what leadership actually consists of (or indeed whether there is even such a thing as leadership).

But one thing we can be sure of is that the leadership tools have nevertheless introduced plenty of language terms to point out deficits in the personal characteristics of those who lead in organisations. 

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."

During the conversations that take place during these meetings, participants make choices about what to bring into the public domain and what to leave unspoken. Thus, organisational participants are always negotiating a balance between what to reveal and what to conceal in their organisational conversations. Such matters as the status of your love life, your living conditions or issues in your family are obvious matters for judicious revealing and concealing.

But so are matters such as what you really think of the CEO’s presentation on customer service,  whether you think this change initiative will blow over and be superceded by something else, or whether you are thinking of looking for a new job.

What you think of your colleague’s idea for your current project is no less the subject for judicious revealing and concealing. After all, your relationships are subject to power relationships that both enable you and constrain you at the same time. So frustrating!

All conversations are subject to power relations that enable and constrain at the same time. Hence, your people are always determining what it is safe to reveal and what to conceal – perhaps not consciously. You are subject to the same dynamics. By which I mean that you as a senior manager are also negotiating what to reveal and what to conceal in each of your myriad interactions during the course of a day.

I contend that choices not to bring issues into the public domain tend to foster consistency and support the status quo (i.e. "no change"), while choices to bring issues up for discussion, which can be risky, perhaps even career-destroying, create the opportunity for new patterns of interaction to arise.

In other words, as a leader, your choices about what is acceptable for discussion – what you proactively raise as a legitimate subject for discussion, has a direct impact on the potential for change to occur in your organisation.

Your mundane day to day conversations with others have a big impact on the change potential of your organisation. If you’re thinking about the change you want in your organisation (and who isn’t?), ask yourself, "What topics am I legitimating," and "What topics are undiscussable?" Your intuition may tell you the answer.

Check out your intuition with someone you trust.Or else get someone from outside to help.

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.

The respondents therefore have to couch their replies in the general, staying away from the detail and specifics of situations. This is because the researchers’ unfamiliarity with these situations is clear from the uninformed nature of the questions being asked by the researcher.

In other words, the respondents can’t really give detailed specific answers because the researchers come from a completely different world, or they wouldn’t have to ask the questions they are asking.

Managers, who are seen as outsiders also risk receiving general answers from their staff if they are not familiar enough with their work.

This is one of the reasons that I find myself constantly urging managers and project teams I am part of to spend more time with their people noticing what is going on and seeking to understand the world of those they working with.

Project teams, contractors and consultants are particularly prone to attempting to involve managers and workers in what they are doing.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, they could instead become involved in what the managers and staff are doing. There is a subtle but very important difference.

In the first, the project teams are trying to get people from the business involved in the project. In the second, they are getting involved with the business and generating a much more nuanced understanding of the business, and therefore how the direction of the project and how their project should be conducted in order to best meet business needs.

A common objection is that it will take too long for the project to get its needs met if project team members spent time in the business getting to understand it, rather than just sitting in the project "war room" with a representative of the business.

I am reminded of the old quality management adage that even if there is not enough time to do it right the first time, then there is always enough time to redo the errors. In other words, time taken at the front end to understand the business significantly reduces the amount of time taken to implement. And as we know, it is in implementation that change projects lag behind schedule and ultimately fail.

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.

The language of speaking about "I" tends to mean that you forget about the interdependent nature of "I" and it seems that maybe there is an "I" that is separate. For example, we come to take for granted that the "I" is resident inside the individual person, quite secluded from other people.

Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.

Here’s another way of saying it. Everyone that I think of in the third person as "she", e.g. my friend Robyn, thinks of herself in the first person as "I", and she in turn thinks of me in the third person as "he" or sometimes as "you." So Robyn’s perspective of our relationship is different just in the quality alone that her "I" is different from my "I." It’s all a matter of perspective.

I have found it useful to bear this in mind in any corporate or business situation, especially when you are involved in change.

There are always at least two perspectives in every relationship, the perspectives of each party to the relationship, and both of them are valid.

So, as a leader of change, it is helpful if you remember that. Remembering that there are two perspectives will lead you to first seek out the different perspectives, and secondly to find a way to hold both perspectives at the same time, even if they are contradictory.

The most common response to being faced with contradictory perspectives is to become anxious. And then to try and resolve the two points of view so that the "right" perspective, or the "facts" can be found. The problem with this is that one perspective then is labelled "right" and one labelled "wrong." Usually the "right" perspective is the one that is closest to that of the most powerful people.

It is very helpful to have the capacity to hold contradictory points of view without becoming anxious. Apart from keeping a relatively calm atmosphere for others, it also helps you to facilitate the parties to see the other’s point of view and this allows the possibility for each point of view to be transformed, into something new. And this is at the very heart of leading change in organisations – the ability to assist others to transform their point of view.

This post is based on the ideas of Norbert Elias, in What is Sociology, 1978.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

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:

• The rules are quite different. Both sport and business are played to the laws of the land, but sports have extra specific rules that govern every aspect of play, and limit the options as to what can be done in certain circumstances. These rules are far more limiting than in business. Also, the rules of sport are written down. There is no equivalent in business to the written rules of a sport. For example, in rugby, when the ball goes out, everyone agrees that people will line up and the ball will be thrown by a particular person. In business, it is highly unlikely that the other team would line up and wait for you to throw the ball in.
   
• Sport is played on a prescribed field or court with clear boundaries about what is in and out. This is not the case in business, where sometimes it is hard to see exactly what field you are in, and what game the competitors or other players are engaged in. Hence the need in strategy and marketing to define your markets, and the premium given in business to those who can invent new variations or see their market differently from others.
   
• The referee is another big difference. In sport the referee is expected to watch the play carefully and judge right and wrong in accordance with the rules and award penalties for infringements. In business, the nearest approximation to this would be a Judge in court, perhaps a regulatory body such as the Commerce Commission or a complaints tribunal, or perhaps an Ombudsman. But these “referees” are not expected to watch the play carefully and proactively blow the whistle. Instead, they get involved only by exception, if someone else draws attention to a transgression or potential transgression.
   
• In sports, the teams have the same numbers of players and play with standardised equipment. Sports such as Formula 1 racing are criticised because of the advantage those teams with better technology and resources have, and swimming has recently had controversy over the new swimwear which allows a significant advantage to those wearing it. In business on the other hand, it is quite common for the “players” to have differing numbers of players and resources. This is all considered to be part of the strategy of business, if you are small, working out how to compete with bigger firms with access to more resources. Being a niche player is perhaps similar to being allowed to play only on the left hand side of the field and to not venture into the right hand side. This would not be tolerated in any sport.
   

You need way more accurate analogies and comparisons that take into account distinctions such as these if you are to lead change successfully.

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.)

Reification means the process of taking an abstract concept, something that does not really exist as a physical object, and treating it as though it were an object or a physical thing. In the same way that personification means to treat an object as though it were a person (e.g. "I remembered Sunday’s mistake," as though Sunday were a person who could make a mistake. Or thinking of a storm as grumpy – as though it could have the kind of emotion a person has). I think of "reification" as meaning "thingification."

Naming an abstract concept is an important step in enabling humans to discuss and make sense of it. To a degree, it could be said that if we can’t name something, then it doesn’t exist for human beings.

There is a phenomenon (not often considered) that the process of naming something as "this" simultaneously names everything else as "that." So if I call something a circle, then I am also calling everything outside that circle "not circle." So by naming "circle" I have actually created two categories, ("circle" and "not circle") even though I am only focusing attention on one category – the one I have named. The other category becomes almost invisible in this process. I learnt of this concept from Farhad Dalal, who has drawn on Matte-Blanco in discussing the process of categorisation that occurs in the development of racism.

That is one aspect of naming something that is not often considered.

Naming the concept does not necessarily lead to reification though. So to use the word "culture" as an example, we could, having named the concept of "culture" then go on to treat culture as though it actually exists as a thing that can be managed, manipulated or changed by rational action, and that perhaps has properties such as direction and speed, in a similar way to how you could manipulate a ball and say that it has direction or speed. Of course, culture is not a physical thing that you can touch and discern its shape and direction.

Nevertheless, culture surveys (often nowadays called climate surveys or engagement surveys) do attempt to discern the shape and direction of a corporate culture.

At most culture is an abstract concept created by humans to help to explain certain social phenomena – i.e. the way certain patterns amongst a group, country or organisation seem to be continually perpetuated.

So to me, reification is something that we commonly do in everyday life and in many situations. This is useful to do as it helps us to understand certain things. It can also lead us to think of trying to manage and control such abstract concepts as culture, as though they were actual physical things, and this, to my mind is unlikely to be helpful and that is the danger of reification.

Reify = ‘thingify" – to treat an abstract concept as though it were a physical thing and had the physical properties of a thing. It is powerful to be aware of these tendencies that we have when talking about such abstract concepts as corporate culture. After all, how we approach them can have major effects on the lives of hundreds and even thousands of people who report to you as an organisational leader.

According to Alvesson and Sveningsson’s excellent new book Changing Organizational Culture, key dimensions of change that are common in the literature include:

1. The scale of change
2. The sources of change
3. The content of change
4. The politics of change

The Scale of Change

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:

• revolutionary vs evolutionary
• discontinuous vs continuous
• episodic vs continuing flow
• transformational vs transactional
• strategic vs operational
• total system vs local option

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that these labels and distinctions often mean roughly the same.

The Sources of Change

The sources of change can vary – hence a distinction between planned change and emergent change. In planned change, the intentions of top managers are central, and in emergent change, the source is those outside top management. Emergent change emphasises the messy nature of change. Planned change includes the grand change projects often involving HR staff and consultants, including re-engineering, TQM, new technology, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on.

The Politics of Change

Strategy is the result of political processes where bargaining, negotiating, lobbying and power relations are used to further the interests of top managers. The political dimension of change is often downplayed, perhaps by being framed in rational and analytically accepted terms which are useful especially when change is challenged.

The Content of Change

The content refers to the specifics of the change, whether it’s restructuring, re-engineering, strategy, customer orientation, new production systems or whatever. Often many aspects of the content are related to each other, for example a culture change is often seen as affecting aspects such as management control systems, strategy and structure.

Conclusion

Alvesson and Sveningsson go on to point out that these categories are not so neat and tidy as they might first appear. Depending on your position in the organisation, the scale of change might look quite different. What appears as minor and incremental to a senior person might be seen as radical and revolutionary by someone else. Personal interests, background, education, hierarchical position and other factors all influence how you see and categorise the change.

There are plenty of examples where change that is seen as major by the top managers is disregarded by the troops. The converse is also common, where the troops see a change as far more significant than the managers; many cases of industrial unrest and strikes reflect this different perception.

These views of change are also affected by whether you see organisational change as discontinuous and episodic or as continuous. Major planned change initiatives are often implemented on the assumption that change occurs from time to time and the organisation reverts back to stability or equilibrium in between. Seen at a distance organisations can appear quite stable (episodic change), but looked at closely they can appear to be constantly changing as people leave, customers and suppliers change and new products are developed (continuous change).

Changing your organisation is often thought of as meaning changing organisational culture. The term "organizational cultures" first was used by Pettigrew in 1979 in an article titled "On Studying Organizational Cultures" in the scholarly journal Administrative Science Quarterly.

To me it is quite significant that he used the plural, denoting that there are many cultures within an organisation. It is a more recent thing to talk about an organisation as having one culture only (a "corporate culture"). I think it is more accurate to think of there being multiple cultures within an organisation, as there are many groups that people in your organisation belong to, and people are included and excluded from these groups as they are in all social groupings.

Pettigrew brought concepts from anthropology and sociology to his studies of organisations. He was interested in studying organisations over time through continuous processes ("longitudinal" or "processual" studies). In particular, he wanted to link the history and future of the organisation to the present (other discussions of this can be found here, here, and here).  Pettigrew studied the birth and evolution of a boarding school from 1934 to 1972, and he came to see this history as a series of what he called social dramas (I might call them narratives), anchored by the reigns of three particular headmasters and a structural change that altered the school’s population.

Pettigrew saw culture as the source of a family of concepts – symbols, language, ideology, belief, ritual and myth.

The concept of organisational culture is thus relatively recent (since 1979) and went through its faddish period where everything was seen as being about culture.

From the way the knowledge management and IT people talk, it seems that nowadays, the concept of organisational culture still retains some mystery about it and is seen as difficult to change. It is common in my experience for knowledge management and IT people to articulate elegant technical solutions and then to wrap up all the reasons why these lovely technical solutions don’t or might not work as the human element of "culture," quite outside their expertise to address.

It wasn’t long before Peters and Waterman in "In Search of Excellence" were claiming that shared values represented the core of corporate culture. The empirical work (i.e. quantitative research) of Hofstede et al in "Measuring Organizational Cultures" showed that, to the contrary, it was shared perceptions of daily practices that were the core of culture. This reinforces my constant catch cry to reflect on your practices and those of the others in your organisation if you want to change your organisation.

Hofstede et al identified six characteristics of the corporate culture construct:

• Culture is holistic – it involves a group and cannot be reduced to single individuals.
   
• Culture is historically determined – it emerges over time and is manifest in traditions and customs.
   
• Antropological terms such as "myth," "ritual," "symbols" are commonly used to describe culture.
   
• Culture is socially constructed, meaning that it arises from processes of interaction of different people – not from any universal characteristics of human beings (hence different groups can be said to have different cultures).
   
• Culture is soft – difficult to catch hold of and difficult to measure.
   
• Culture is inert and difficult to change. People tend to hold on to their values and traditions.

It didn’t take long before organisational culture was seen as something that could be managed and subjected to the wills of the domininat coalitions of the organisation. The articulation of the concept of organisational culture meant that it soon came to be seen as something that could be manipulated in service of the organisation’s objectives.