Yo Christmas fiends!

Here’s the third and final section that makes up this chapter on Leadership.

Please do share your feedback – instructions below.

Will.

————–

How do I go on this journey?

We can boil all of these elements down into seven practices which can help any leader learn and adapt.

1.    The Open 360 degree survey
2.    Experimentation
3.    Sharing personal failures
4.    Practicing being emotionally congruent
5.    Publishing a personal rewards log
6.    Using flow tools to share and listen to your team/organisation
7.    Building a progressive support network

Let’s rattle through the practicalities of each practice:

1. The Open 360 degree survey

This one is awesomely simple and awesomely effective. Take your role description, and put it into an online survey platform like Survey Monkey (or your internal equivalent). Set it up your survey to have a Quantitative element and a Qualititive element.

In the quantitative section, configure the survey so that questionees can grade your performance on each area of your role by giving a score (I use 1-5). Results in this section will give you a clear personal benchmark on how the respondents evaluate your performance.

In the qualitative section, ask wide open questions designed to give your valuable insights into your performance, your strengths and vitally, your weaknesses.

I use questions like:

1. What do I do that enables positive performance in the team?
2. What do I do that impairs or reduces performance in the company?
3. What should get more of my time and attention?
4. What 3 things – if sorted – will substantially improve the company’s performance?
5. How can I serve the company better in the next 6 months?
6. This is just in case there’s something extra you want to say or share. You don’t need to, it’s just for those compelled to say more. I know I’m confusing you now. Sorry.

Before sending this out, you need to talk (ideally face to face) with the people who will be responding. Tell them why you are doing it (clue: to learn!), tell them that you have set it up anonymously because it is about you learning, not about you addressing individual concerns or carrying out a veiled witch hunt, but if anyone feels compelled to they can say in the survey who they are. And promise that you will share the high-level results and key takeaways with them – give them a prize and satisfy their curiousity too!

Then send it out, and let the learning begin! You will learn so much about yourself. You may recognise many things, but you may also be shocked or unsettled by others. The important thing, as my colleague Lasy always says, is ‘to not swallow the feedback whole’. No one person is ‘right’ – these are all just many-faceted collages or perceptions of you at work. But overall, the aggregate will tell you some valuable things.

I recommend doing this once or twice a year. I’m doing mine right now after an 18 month gap due to a shift in annual review cycles at our company, and I am alive with and challenged by the brilliant, gritty, intelligent, on-the-button responses coming back. It’s like I’m awake again. Do it. Start today.

2. Experimentation

Particularly in the area of Styles – which we looked at above – you will need to experiment. You may find through your 360 survey that there are styles you have which create great performance in those around you, and others that you have which bring the team down – this is normal.

The goal of experimentation is to expand your range. Try some of the below for size and see how they feel to you and how your people react:

•    Relentlessly detail oriented
•    Laid back, bigger picture, dreamy and visionary
•    Energetic and bouncy ball of sunshine
•    Quiet and pensive professor
•    Shouty desk-slamming hardballer
•    All-conquering warrior-heroine
•    Cheerleading supporter-in-chief and championer of others – ‘you can do it!’

Again, where possible it may help to be open about this – to let your people know that you are learning and developing and part of that is about experimenting with styles that are different to your usual two or three default modes.

By the way, what are your default modes? And which styles would you like to add to the range?

3. Sharing personal failures

Simultaneously the easiest and the hardest practice to do. It really is this simple: tell your organisation about it when you screw up. You can start small if that helps – might help the people around you to adjust too! Using the Church of Fail practice outlined in the People chapter will also provide a powerful and shared platform to do this in.

You can also use some of the platforms that we look at in the Technology chapter to regularly ping out failures (and successes!) without too much pomp and ceremony. In doing so, you normalise failure. This is not seppuku (or it shouldn’t be) – it is about demonstrating that failure is normal, that it is a huge learning opportunity, and that if the organisation and individuals in it are not failing, then they cannot be doing their jobs because they are not learning and not taking risks. Keep that in mind: you’re doing the right thing and it will help the organisation.

4. Practicing being emotionally congruent

Another challenging practice that is easy to say and very difficult to do sometimes. The benefits of being more congruent more of the time are that you will create a more empathic culture, which will lead to less stress for all (including you) because people will not be bottling up their emotions, a more robust and resilient workforce thanks to healthier inter-relationships, and greater performance and productivity due to the flow of more-honest feedback around the team(s).

There’s lots more to this topic that we do not have time for and that is way out of my expertise, but an appropriately straightforward entry point to doing this that we have found very useful in our company is to preface statements with “I feel….”. It’s like a hack for the mind, and gets you straight into accessing some of the feelings related to the topic of discussions rather than the emotion coming out accidentally through the other 99% of your communication (i.e. your body language).

So you say:

“I feel disappointed”
“I feel amazed”
“I feel delighted”
“I feel incredibly annoyed”

5. Publishing a personal rewards log

The British journalist and activist George Monbiot recently began publishing his own Registry of Interests completely voluntarily. As he says himself, ‘I have opened this registry because I believe that journalists should live by the standards they demand of others, among which are accountability and transparency. One of the most important questions in public life, which is asked less often than it should be, is “who pays?”’.

Is there a way you can do the same? It may be impossible. It may in fact, for you, be a sackable offence! So it’s probably worth checking your contract, but if you are an entrepreneur or the CEO, you can make this happen.

6. Using ‘flow tools’ to share and listen to your team/organisation

In the Technology chapter we look at platforms including those we call ‘flow tools’. These are the same kind of tools that CEOs Cristobal Conde and John Chambers referred to earlier in this chapter – things like Yammer and blogging – which are less formal and much quicker than other traditional communication channels available to a leader or manager.

This is not technology for technology’s sake. You don’t have time for that. Using these tools is a powerful way to demonstrate to your team or organisation the need to and value in moving in realtime. The benefit is that by participating you not only make it OK for others and show the way, but also yourself gain access to a realtime pulse of what is happening inside the organisation.

7. Building a progressive support network

Finally, you cannot do this alone. You need a support network, and one made up of people that get all of this. As a leader, no matter at what level in an organisation, there are times when you inevitably feel isolated or need the support of those outside your team. If the only kind of support you have is the slash and burn or command-and-control management 20th century style, then it will be hard to see these challenging personal changes through.

Find people to support you. Put yourself in places where they may come out of the woodwork. Share these ideas so that others might come on the journey and so become part of your network too. Get involved with organisations like WorldBlu, The Employee Ownership Association (UK), National Center for Employee Ownership (USA), and others.

It will be much easier with the right kind of support.

Summary

In this chapter we have looked at the role of leadership in the 21st century business, and broken that role into two lists of seven: seven components of leadership in a social business and seven practices to help develop your 21st century leadership muscles.

This journey towards better leadership is absolutely a journey. It requires change – and change is incredibly demanding. It demands you to get out of your comfort zones, to experiment and necessarily fail, to do things that the people around you find counter-intuitive or even downright odd. And during this journey and especially at times of stress it will be normal to default to old ways.

But the prize is magical, poetic, so brilliant. To become a better leader. To be the change you want to see in the world. To help others see different and better ways of behaving in business.

If you can lead in this world, you will be providing a powerful service to more than just your organisation – you will genuinely be helping make the world we live in better. Because it is only through significant change, led by leaders at all levels, that we will solve the problems that need solving in the world.

Join us. Come on the journey, and bring your people, your organisation. Let’s burn yesterday and make a better future for all!

—-

Whaddayareckon? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: We move on from Leadership and start the chapter on Openness…

Thank you for your support.

With mince pies and mulled wine at the ready, Will

Hello leaders of the revolution,

Sorry this section is so big – but I wanted you to get it all in one hit.

Lemme know what you think, all of the feedback and edits continue to be HUGELY helpful,

Will

——

So what does progressive Leadership look like?

Here are 7 components of Leadership in a social business.

1.    Self
2.    Style
3.    Trust & Ethics
4.    Transparency
5.    Rewards
6.    Communication / Realtime
7.    Support

1. Leading yourself

Just as this book puts People before Leadership, we must also put leading yourself before leading others.

There is a reason why we have the appallingly bleak but recognisable models of management style such as the mushroom management (‘keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em crap’), the seagull (‘arrive in a flap, squawk around for a while, crap over everybody and then fly out’) and so on. It’s because we have all seen and experienced them! They do exist.

Will those approaches to leadership help organisations thrive in the 21st century? I really don’t believe so. So what allows this to happen in the first place? Two things: a lack of organisational awareness and a lack of personal awareness.

As transparency rises in society at large and inside businesses in particular, more and more feedback will exist openly about manager and leader performance. As the agenda to make boardrooms more transparent and accountable to shareholders and wider stakeholders, again the same forces will drive an openness and awareness previously unseen. The organisation will learn more quickly and more transparently what works and who performs, which naturally then must influence the individual leaders and managers. Transparency has a momentum of its own – and will permeate all of our organisations.

As a result, in the evolved organisation it will be very hard to lead others unless you are constantly learning and improving in how you manager yourself. (In fact, that is the case today – it’s just a lot of people get away with crap leadership because the world allows them to).

So knowing how to lead yourself means knowing the answers to the following questions:

•    What is my purpose in this work?
•    What motivates and demotivates me?
•    What are my values, and which ones am I honouring and which am I not honouring in this work?
•    What do I believe my strengths and weaknesses are, and how am I consciously working with them?
•    What do the people around me believe my strengths and weaknesses are?
•    How do I bounce back from challenges and re-energise when I’m low?
•    What are my blind spots, what don’t I know about myself?
•    What do I tend to resist or ignore?

Knowing these answers is an iterative and constant learning process. The answers may change over time, or become more (or less) clear. Knowing to keep reflecting on them, and practicing and evolving methods of operating from these answers is the key to self-leadership.

2. Style

Just as we are all different, so are our styles and approaches to engaging with people and therefore ‘leading’. There is no correct style for this kind of evolved business we look at throughout this book.

However, there are a few stylistic themes or tensions to be aware of. The first is the tension between being the all-solving hero and the convenor or curator of the group.

Heroic leadership

In the popular definition of leadership, the leader rides in on his white stallion, glistening in the midday sun, holding a spear aloft, squinting slightly with a look of hard resolve, his mouth (and this leader definitely is a ‘him’) is very human, his ears wise, his arms strong, his hands etc etc. You get the idea. Now that he has arrived, the problem will be solved. Be it through wisdom, strength, bravery or decisiveness, this leader will fix it and in record time! ‘Stand back, minions!!! I AM SOLVING THE PROBLEM!’.

Personally, I find this style very attractive, and am drawn to it regularly. One of my biggest flaws is that I want to be the hero, the all-fixing leader. If you have the same idea about how you should be as a leader, then you will find that the issue is that it crowds out the possibility for others to participate, for the group to function as a whole, and for others to step up and take responsibility. To unlock a team’s full potential through their participation and democratic practices, this style may not be best. To engage an organisation of smart, progressive people that have seen through the fallacies of old school leadership, this style may not be best.

Convening, curating, gardening

Perhaps a better style to adopt more of the time is that not of the hero, but of a convener or curator of the group – be that a whole organisation or a small team. The shift here is from being the individual fixer that the most complex issues get escalated to, to being the person that helps the group observe what is happening, creates the space for them to share in that information, helps them reach decisions and create accountability.

This is a more removed personal style of leadership than the heroic mode – this is leadership as facilitation, or if you prefer the metaphor, gardening. Adding something here, pruning a little there, encouraging this bit to come forward, digging deeper, patiently nurturing changes and growth.

Given that we are now managing groups of people whose behaviour and attitudes may be becoming more like volunteers, that we are managing people distributed physically (whether they are working from home or working across multiple geographies), and in an environment where the best talent have given up on the idea of a job for life and can pick or choose from the best jobs, our style may need to increasingly be one of influencing over directing. Or curating/gardening over heroic leadership.

The challenge for you and any of us is that when we are told ‘you’re in charge’ then assuming a directive style is easy. Or at least it is a known style – it’s what we’ve been trained in since school. I say jump, you say how high! Teacher, boss, captain, coach, General – all of these have had different styles, but the commonly held view is that leadership is about telling people what to do and making sure they do it. As emotionally intelligent types, we probably don’t couch it like that – but our inclinations, particularly under stress, will be directive. It is the established paradigm, so no need to explain that. What can be much harder is to resist that model and the indoctrination there, and to overcome your urges to just tell everyone what to do. The challenge, then, is to influence and persuade, to garden and curate, rather than just directing.

Managing volunteers and creating ‘followership’

As we have touched on, the people in our organisations will increasingly demand this adapted, evolved style of management. Gen Y in particular seek the dialogue, participation and feedback from their manager, and meaning in the work. Managing Gen Y is often characterised as managing volunteers: finding ways to excite, cajole and generate tangible results from a group of people who have lots to give but will not respond well to just being told what to do.

As John Chambers, the long-standing CEO of Cisco put it in an interview with TK: “I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, no way. And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more.”

Interestingly, at Gore they talk about Leadership being ‘defined by followership’. That is, that the group nominates its leaders – they “vote with their feet” as CEO Terri Kelly puts it. You cannot be a leader at Gore without having people that are willing to follow you. What a powerful evolution from the norm.

So the question for you is how do you create followership in your work? What is it that you do that makes the people around you want to follow you? And what is that you do that makes people not want to follow you? Finally, if your people weren’t paid and were volunteers, how would you engage with them to create the best results possible?

Changing styles

But leadership is situational. There surely will be occasions where this more directive ‘heroic’ stance is the right one to take. And others where being the curator or gardener will generate the best results for and from the group. That is the judgement we all have to make continuously – which style and approach is right for this context.

3. Trust & Ethics

Underpinning much of the 21st century approach to leadership are Trust and Ethics.

The trust dimension is trusting in the people and the practices of the organisation to deliver the desired results. Trust is particularly important in order to accept some of the contemporary practices we talk about in this book: giving power to more of the people in the organisation; allowing new spokespeople to emerge; entrusting big decisions to groups rather than making decisions in ones and twos.

Without trust, there can be no empowerment of others – instead, a lack of trust creates a centre of gravity that leads to micromanagement across the whole organisation, which in turn creates slowness, bottlenecks, stifles creativity and so on.

So there must be trust flowing from the leaders in the organisation. There should be a default ‘I trust you’ position rather than a default ‘I don’t trust you’, though in many organisations it feels the other way around.

The final point to make on trust is that the most powerful thing a contemporary leader may do is to publicly fail inside (and outside) the organisation. By failing and communicating that failure, leaders make it OK to fail AND immediately create a different context for trust to exist in. It sets a new precedent and provides at least the promise that others in the organisation can fail too. This is powerful fuel for the creation of trust, because what it does is not only says but actually demonstrates that it is OK to be vulnerable in this organisation. Leaders fail first. In fact, that’s a nice slogan: Leaders fail first.

The ethics dimension is about behaving with integrity – and particularly about doing only what you would be happy the whole world knowing about if that email or decision was shared with the whole world. I’m sure there are great books on this whole topic – do we really need to describe ethics? You might think so, looking at some business people’s behaviour. But really, it is just about doing the right thing, all of the time. (Simple!).

4. Transparency  

Leading in a more transparent world demands different things from us. We can break these into two sub-categories: Informational Transparency and Emotional Transparency.

Leaders have always dealt with a higher degree of transparency than everyone else in an organisation, to the extent that they have always been highly visible, are subject to higher expectations than normal and are typically surrounded by and at the centre of a variety of competing influences and stakeholders. Clearly, this varies hugely from being a manager in a medium-sized organisation to being the CEO of a Fortune 500 multi-national or a leading politician.

This transparency has manifested itself in a variety of ways: from gossipy tabloid stories about personal lives to the fact that executives in publicly listed companies have their remuneration published openly to the whole world.

However, as we continue to discuss in this book, this transparency around information – not only rewards, but also performance, feedback and increasingly other more subtle data (think MPs expenses, or carbon footprints, or travel patterns) – is going to increase.

So as a leader, you must prepare for and cope with more and more information about you and your various impacts being open and available to others.

The emotional transparency of the coming age of leadership is perhaps the more demanding shift.

If the organisations that we lead in are becoming more conscious, more authentic and more open to dialogue and listening then we leaders must necessarily do so too. It will not be possible for the people in an organisation to take their risks and become more vulnerable and open at work if the leaders do not lead the way.

Emotional transparency requires leaders to be congruent: to actually act in accordance with their feelings no matter how unexpected that is. Can you image you or other leaders in your organisation saying any of the following to a group of your people:

•    “I’m scared about this and I don’t know what the answer is”
•    “I’m feeling sad”
•    “I need help, I’m lost right now”
•    “I feel like going home and hiding”
•    “When I look at this, I’m ashamed to be part of this organisation”
•    “I feel guilty because I haven’t done my job well in this area”

Yes, these are deliberately provocative. But what would it be like if people were more emotionally transparent at work more of the time, starting with the leaders? What is your biggest fear here, when you read through that list of proposed ‘acceptable things for a leader to say’? Are there benefits to this approach? What are the downsides and risks? And how emotionally transparent or ‘congruent’ are you?

5. Rewards

The rewards of leaders in organisations, particularly CEOs and the board, have been at the forefront of media and activist attention for a long time. Hopefully that pressure and attention will continue – it feels like their are some ugly wrinkles developed in the latter part of the 20th century that still need ironing out. Think about golden parachutes for failing CEOs, the lack of a relationship between value-creating performance and rewards more generally, the lack of transparency and rigour in setting of top management rewards including weak or non-existent remuneration committees, and so on. This, however, feels like it is in hand – the world knows about it and expectations and behaviours are gradually changing.

However there are two additional concerns that fit into the scope of this book: the ratio of top earners rewards to the rest of the workforce’s; and a shift towards recognising the value of non-financial rewards.

In a social business, the ingredients of a more empowered organisation and greater transparency result in a clearer focus on the inter-relationship between peoples rewards in the organisation. And in recent times, as the Occupy movement has reminded all of us, the rich have been growing richer and the poor poorer. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has actually grown. An awareness of this has led many progressive businesses to put in place formal ratios or to continually observe the ratio between the earnings of the lowest paid person in the organisation and the highest paid person in the organisation.

At the incredibly admired John Lewis Partnership in the UK, TK

TK Other research on ratios.

Secondly, to the topic of non-financial rewards. Right now it feels like most leaders only do it for the money, but there is rapidly growing body of interest around social enterprise, social business (in the Mohammad Yunus TK definition) and entrepreneurs and leaders doing what they do for a much higher purpose than the accumulation of wealth.

TK Khan quote

Having looked at motivations in the People chapter, we have already reminded ourselves that motivation at work is much broader and richer than the pay packet alone. What would it be like if we as leaders and the other leaders around us were all nourished by and talked about job satisfaction and the rewards we really enjoyed in a more open and nuanced way?

6. Communication / Realtime

In this networked world, both the demands on and opportunities for leaders around communication are increased. We are living in a world where the time between something of importance happening and the world knowing about it are increasingly the same – the buffer between the two are less and less.

There is less time to prepare the right message. There is less belief and trust in leaders generally, and so in the message itself there is an increased demand for authenticity and honesty. There is an always-on-ness to the world’s media, to the workforce with their BlackBerries and internal collaboration platforms (see Technology) so communication cannot be a one-off or occasional piece of work, but more a constant flow.

Consider how Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard described it in an interview with the New York Times: “I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer [which this book looks at in the Technology chapter], which is about all it takes. A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The combination of these platforms, this growing culture and these expectations is a huge opportunity for all leaders as an outbound communication channel. But as much of the value for leaders can be in the inbound or dialogue aspect too.

There is a growing application of the concept of ‘people as sensors’. In a networked world, there are exponentially more opportunities to harness relevant, timely information, and for people and attention to gravitate towards which senor has the best available information at any given moment. As Brian Humphrey who was then working with the Los Angeles Fire Dept put it in a tweet: “Every soldier is a sensor. Every citizen is a contributor. Every resident is a reporter of #crisisdata”.

By using the communication landscape to their advantage, contemporary leaders can harness this huge opportunity to plug in to their organisational sensors, and both flow out and flow in realtime information to and from the rest of the business.

7. Support

The last aspect to leadership in a progressive 21st century business is putting in place the appropriate support for yourself and other leaders going on this journey.

The world is pretty much geared up to support the 20th century leader. The expectation is you’re a hero and an all-conquering expert, that you’re doing it for the money alone, that you do not and will not talk about your feelings (and may not even have them), that you will issue command-and-control dictats from your ivory tower, that you only want to hear good news, that you resist and dislike technology and – probably also – that you’re a man or behave like a man and are old and white.

If you are not these, life can be hard. The conventional support networks and the wisdom and advice available through conventional resources may not help you. You may find yourself feeling isolated and stupid – asking yourself ‘why am I doing this differently to everyone else – maybe I should stop trying to do things the long, hard, stupid way and just fall in line with everyone else’.

So to give yourself the best chances of success you must find or create a support network of people that do get this new world, that do belong to the community of changers striving for something different, who have walked the same alternative paths. For me personally, the single best thing I did on this front was go to WorldBlu Live 2011 in San Francisco and met over the course of 3 days a whole community of people motivated by the same things and with many of the same values. It was like coming home! It gave me faith that I wasn’t (that) stupid and certainly didn’t need to feel like it was only my organisation on that path.

Fortunately the world is changing. Our numbers grow! And there are radical shifts in the articles published by the blue-blooded business press (like Harvard Business Review), in the newly-celebrated CEO stars (like Vineet Nayar of HCL) and in the professional support available from accountants, lawyers and associations (like WorldBlu or The Employee Ownership Association).

By addressing and working on these 7 dimensions of leadership in the 21st century you will strengthen yourself over time. As you work at it, you will evolve in exciting ways. You will provide a subtle, powerful role model for those around you. You will become the future you want to see in the world.

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: ‘How do I go on this journey?’, with seven handy (but not easy!) practical next steps.

Thank you for your support.

Bon voyage, Will

Hello Shockers,

Quite excited about this next chapter, as leadership is much talked about and is certainly a vital part of the mix if we are to make big shifts in how businesses behave.

Please do keep the seriously useful feedback flowing and also spread the word.

Thanks – Will

—–

CHAPTER FOUR: LEADERSHIP

It is quite deliberate that the order of this book puts People before Leadership. In fact, it reflects both a switch from the contemporary sequence of leadership first, people second and a return to Julius Caeser’s long-standing maxim that ‘every soldier has a right to competent command’.

As General Patton put it: “There has been a great deal of talk about loyalty from bottom to top. Loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important and also much less prevalent. It is this loyalty from the top to the bottom which binds juniors to their seniors with the strength of steel.”

But what defines a ‘competent command’ in today’s environment? And are we at risk of reverting to military models and top down thinking here? Having understood the challenges and opportunities around People, maybe it is clear that this contemporary organisation demands a substantially different type of leadership. This is an approach that will be hugely welcomed by the world, though it will take us all time to adjust and wean ourselves off some of the myths and folklore around leadership.

And is the contemporary leader actually new or is this just a rehashing of principles which have existed for millenia, simply dressed in the emperor’s new clothes? A little ‘realtime’ here, a little ‘networks’ there, but effectively the same as it ever was? I believe it probably is. This probably is a return to the fundamentals of human leadership, but perhaps a necessary recalibration and a shift in emphasis from where we got to in the late 20th century.

The challenge of leadership in the 21st century

The leader in a social business is walking a path that many of her peers before her will not have done. She may not be able to get advice as easily, or support from her stakeholders and investors as immediately.

One important note of caution: there is a great deal of folklore around leadership. Many, many books are published every year on leadership, building on an accepted canon of well-established management wisdom. I do not wish to add to that, and particularly not to the idea that leadership is beyond the many, the preserve of a few ‘special’ destined to become leaders.

So do not be intimidated by what follows.

You already lead, so you must already be a leader – at different times, and in different domains of your work and your life. Nobody does all of this well all of the time. Instead, these are ideas and possibilities about how you can continue to develop as a leader; and one who can help lead in a different world, changing their organisation, their team and themselves. That is all!

Leadership must change

If the behaviour of people in organisations is substantially shifting, then clearly so must leadership shift too. Why should we invest in this shift? Clearly there are the benefits of an unleashed and engaged workforce that were outlined in the previous chapter.

On top of this is a higher order of benefit. Can you imagine a world where leadership had transcended and evolved from the good and bad bits we found in the 20th century? Can you imagine the problems that will be solved in the world through the work of a new generation of leaders, working with purpose and vigour? Can you imagine what it will be like to be part of organisations alive with this kind of leadership? That is the prize, that is the why!

If we can gather and energise a whole generation of progressive leaders, what will the benefits be?

•    More organisations working towards Purposes of Significance, leading to a better world for all (seriously!)
•    Healthier, happier and more meaningful work lives for millions, if not billions
•    Fairer rewards for all participants in business, leading to a more resilient business community and a healthier society
•    Higher standards and demands for leaders in all walks of lives, and a new set of role models to help inspire and lead the way
•    Greater self-leadership in all

———–

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: The 7 components of Leadership in a social business – nice and practical (hopefully!).

Thank you for your support through the wind and the rain. Off home for roast lamb now…nice one Mrs.

Tallyho, Will

Dear CultureShocker,

Kapow! Here’s the final part of Chapter 3 on People.

The aim of this chapter is to provide practical next steps for you and me, the prospective company-changers.

How well does it do that? Lemme know.

Go!

—-

So how can you evolve how your organisation interacts with its people?

Here are the four powerful practices suggested:

1. Creating strong values & principles
2. Celebrating personality
3. Enabling people development
4. Establishing freedom and trust

1. Creating strong values & principles

Having spent time studying companies that absolutely nail the People bit, it is clear that one characteristic that they all share is the clarity and belief around their values.

At the WorldBlu Live conference speaker after speaker from visionary companies outlined their crystal clear values, and what really comes through from organisations like Zappos and Gore are the values that are woven throughout the hold organisation: from ‘Create Fun and a little Weirdness’ at Zappos to ‘The ability to make one’s own commitments and keep them’ at Gore.

So what are the values that you want to imbue your team with? Or, better, what are the values that you together are willing to stand by, to hold one another account against and to really strive for in your work?

2. Celebrating personality

In the 20th century, being professional and being yourself were seen as different things. Being professional was not only about delivering against promised made and to a high quality, about being trustworthy. It was about being neutral (like the colour of old school beige desktop PCs!) and in doing so acting within some powerful puritan norms – a little polite laughter, no rough language (at least not at first) and definitely no weirdness. As for emotions, a professional didn’t show ‘em.

In the 21st century, when the alternatives to the job are a freelance careers, where the alternative to working in an office is working from home or in a co-working space, and in a century where people are realising that there’s more to life than work alone, these notions of professionalism are shifting. Hurrah for a return to personality!

What is clear about these progressive businesses that celebrate people is that they welcome and value personality, authenticity, emotion and humour.

This poses new challenges for us all. At our company we know it usually takes a new team member 6 months to really become themselves at work. And it poses challenges to you as a leader, whichever level you lead from. You must lead. You must be authentic, you must celebrate your own real self at work, and make it OK for others to do the same. Easy to say, difficult to do: particularly on bad days.

Sow can you start doing this tomorrow? How can you be more ‘you’ and encourage others to do the same? At scale, how will you institutionalise that? What practices will help it happen?

3. Enabling people development

In this chapter there is an underlying constant which is about enabling people to improve themselves. It is not enforced, and it is not only the slightly twee ‘personal development’ that you can find on your bookshop’s shelves under the title of PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT, but it is an ethos of allowing and enabling the organisation’s people to develop themselves both in their professional and especially in their personal aspects.

4. Establishing freedom & trust!

Perhaps the biggest ideas that 21st century organisations embrace are those of Freedom and Trust. BOOM. Big words, and kinda the diametrical opposite to the established cultures of most businesses. But isn’t that what we demand and expect today?

In Dan Pink’s fantastic TED talk he talks about the three aspects of motivating people as being Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We’ve looked at how the three businesses in this chapter each extend significant trust and freedom to their people, and reap the rewards.

I guess the question for you is what can you do with freedom and trust in your organisation? Because they feel like the backdrop for and the shortcuts to this whole chapter. It’s what it all boils down to. Are you going to actually let them – the people – deliver great things?  And who – in your organisation – might not, and why not?

Acknowledging challenges

Before finishing this chapter, it would be remiss not to look some of the challenges around people in the contemporary organisation. There are three that we look at here:

Competition

Competition between peers does not necessarily lessen in a more enlightened business culture. In fact, my current belief is that it may heighten.

By opening things up, with greater transparency, less official hierarchy and a culture and practices which create much more feedback inside the organisation, it is possible that a quite ferocious meritocracy is created. ‘Great’, you may cheer! That may be so, but I believe I am working in such a place and dealing with some of the consequences of an environment where there is both an incredibly strong team ethic AND very high competition between peers. That is not easy. And for the team members themselves it can feel very stressful (and very motivating) to be part of an organisation where there is a relentless drive towards performance, with few places to hide.

Hearing Gore CEO Terri Kelly talking about how every Gore Associate (herself included) is ranked by their peers I cannot help thinking that one of the consequences of some of these ‘better’ people practices may be a tilt towards at times unhealthy competition which will need monitoring and counter-balancing.

This is worth looking out for, particularly when team members may be going through a life event or a phase in their life or career that does not naturally thrive in this environment.

Drowning in freedom and honesty

A related issue can be that in an organisation where there is greater fluidity, less definition around roles, less directive people management and a greater emphasis on feedback is that team members can end up becoming overwhelmed.

When there is little structure to hang on to, many opportunities to engage with and a high performing team to fit into, a new employee may end up drowning and become overwhelmed by the lack of structure and huge possibilities that exist.

Similarly, a new team member at NixonMcInnes described the environment as ‘like having the honesty volume turned up’. That can be tough to deal with at first if a person has become accustomed to a less honest, less authentic approach to communication and management information in a different organisation.

Some people want a 20th century job

Finally, perhaps some people will want a 20th century job. Maybe they do want to just do what they came in to do, to do the same thing for years, to know little about how they or the organisation is doing, and maybe that is OK. These kind of people – and they may even be you – do not want to sit around in a circle talking about their feelings, they do not want some kind of airy-fairy coaching from a ‘sponsor’ – they want a boss, and they want to be told what to do.

Recognising this fact is crucial. When the fit is not right, try to spot it early on – the signs will usually be there. In an environment where the individual cannot thrive, they cannot be really happy and they will sap your efforts. Be clear, and be sure to follow through swiftly – not everybody is ready for your enlightened ways! It’s better for them and for you if you recognise and act on that.

Summary

People are the lifeblood of any business. In this chapter, we have spent some time thinking about what it is that contemporary organisations do with their people to create real advantages. And there are many more practices available than those we have been able to cover in this book.

Fundamentally, what it boils down to is beliefs. If you believe that people are the first, the last, and the everything, then you can write your own chapter for your organisation, your business, your team.

People say that we are in a talent war, and that in business the best team wins. If that is true, then taking these next steps is the difference between whooping ass and being left behind. I know where I’d rather be.

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How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next chapter is on Leadership – often written about, often talked about, yet still so much to do… 🙂

Thank you for your support. Have a nice day. Do come again.

Here’s the section in the People chapter where I’m showing the reader some of the companies out there doing progressive, brilliant or odd things to help their people give their best at work.

It’s a section that excites me, so I really want it to be excellent – please give me feedback wherever you feel necessary.

Also, I’ve been reluctant to talk about NixonMcInnes – this book isn’t about promoting us as we are a tiny consultancy and as flawed as we are brilliant. But in the end it felt like the People practices we have just fitted into Culture Shock and obviously how we do things is material I know so well, so I whacked NM in. Let me know if you think that’s a bad thing or risks credibility somehow please.

Thank you.

—

So which businesses really celebrate and engage their people?

Zappos

Zappos should be a boring business, shouldn’t it? To massively oversimplify, Zappos is a website, a warehouse full of shoes, and a bunch of people answering telephone calls and enquiries. Dull. Like that beige colour that old school PCs were (or still are?). Yet Zappos may be the most colourful business making waves at the moment – thanks to its unique culture Zappos is all the colours of the rainbow, it’s a graffitti-spraypainted dancing unicorn with a beating heart and crazy eyes.

Zappos is essentially a business built around the principle that if you create the environment, hire the right people and so develop the right culture, you will thrive. And Zappos is delivering against that belief with a thriving business: widely recognised to the be the largest online shoe retailer in the US, it was bought by Amazon in 2009 for about $1.2bn, and is believed to turn over in excess of $1bn per annum.

For the whole story, you must read CEO Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness. But looking at just a few of Zappos practices should help inspire us all.

Family

Zappos staff use the word family lots. Not just when they speak or write, but publicly on their website and in company materials and their annual Culture Book. The great thing is if you say you’re a family, then you have to live up to it. This is not ‘employee relations’ – the whole thing is powerfully reframed in a way that leads to an entirely different approach at Zappos.

Create Fun and a little Weirdness

Zappos has 10 Zappos Family Core Values. Core value number 3 is ‘Create Fun And A Little Weirdness’. I just love that! And this value clearly permeates everything that Zappos do: from their All-Hands meetings, to their office decor, through to their hiring processes. What could be further from the conventional brainwashing about how people should behave at work? We don’t want you to be ‘professional’, we want you to be WEIRD.

Reply-All hat

One of my favourite Zappos people initiatives in their Reply-All hat. You know that moment when, in a medium or large-sized organisation, you or someone you know unwittingly replies to ALL? Ouchy! At Zappos to celebrate that moment they have a Reply-All hat. Not just any hat, this is a gaudy, ridiculous plumed showgirl hat, and if you are unlucky enough to have Replied-All, you wear the hat and have to parade around the Zappos offices while being shouted and whistled at. You also are at risk of having photos taken, or even a video made! It is as brilliant and mad and awful as it sounds, and I for one wish our team was big enough to warrant one!

Zappos tours and Happiness Delivered

The Zappos culture is so potent that they are increasingly sought out to spread their ideas. They offer free, daily tours (and will even pick you up in a minibus from your Vegas hotel), and their inspiring CEO Tony Hseih has written a book called Happiness Delivered. They also now have a part of the business called Zappos Insights to provide training and consultancy services to other businesses.

Can you see how engaging the Zappos culture is to people like you and me? And also how straightforward it is – completely unlike traditional business, but completely human and immediately recognisable as fun AND smart ways to go about things? A great company.

W. L. Gore & Associates

W. L. Gore & Associates is quite a mysterious business. The makers of many innovative textiles including Gore Tex, the well known breathable waterproof fabric, the company has an extremely interesting approach to people and structure.

What must be said is that for Gore, these practices are not new. Though the ranting and railing in this book is against the staid, stupid mainstream management practices of the 20th century, Gore is a 20th century success – Bill Gore founded the business with his wife Vieve in the 1958! However, if we are able to spread them, then it will not matter how old they are for in most organisations these concepts, practices and the overall culture they create will be utterly new and very different.

Team size and lattice structure

One of the few things that is reasonably well known in the business community about Gore, which remains to this day a privately-held enterprise, is its unconventional practices around organisational structure which fifty years ago must have seemed genuinely bonkers, but today – though still unconventional – can seem much smarter.

Gore’s structure is made up of two particularly interesting components: their team size and their lattice structure.

Team-wise, the business operates very small plants – typically a maximum of 250 people in each. So for every 250 people the organisation has to provide a different building and replicate the same core structure that a single plant requires. We can safely assume that there are inefficiencies here in staff, in building costs, in equipment. Everything is replicated rather than lumped into the same ever-growing mega-plant! But in the words of their current CEO Terri Kelly, an engineer by training and only the fourth in Gore’s history, “we divide so we can multiply”. How does that work? The Gore organisation believes that it can unlock much greater innovation and engagement from its people by keeping smallness. In the mythology of Gore it is said that this was driven by the founder Bill Gore walking around a plant one day in 1965 and realising he didn’t recognise everybody any more. From then on he put in place a principle that no more than 200 people would work in the same building. The company’s growth record, enduring innovation and constant presence on ‘Best company to work for’ lists suggests they might have a point.

Even more radical is Gore’s lattice structure which shares more in common with networked organisations like Al-Qaeda, Anonymous and the Occupy movement than the traditional org chart.

In Gore, there are ‘few’ org charts and ‘no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication’. So how does work get done? How do people organise themselves? Put simply, how do they manage a multi-billion dollar global business without such structure?! As they say on their own website:

“Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.” As CEO Terri Kelly put it in an enjoyable talk at MIT (link provided in the Further Reading section for your viewing delight at another time – or even NOW!)  “Associates vote with their feet”.

Utterly brilliant.

What does the 20th century manager say to this? ‘Pah! Must be like herding cats’ and reaches for her latte with a patronising disdain. Yet when so many organisations complain about their silos and their lack of collaboration, surely a little more fluidity might help? Isn’t this how the future looks? People, us, gravitating around the initiatives and projects we feel passionately need to happen?

Coaching

A quick note reinforcing the earlier point about coaching: Gore is small on Management with a capital M, and BIG on coaching. As we’ll look at later, Leadership in Gore is defined by ‘followership’ – if you don’t have an organisation mapped out beneath you, what do you have as a manager or leader? Influence. And every Associate (not employee, as they are keen to point out) at Gore has a Sponsor – that is, someone responsible for their success and usually someone outside of their day-to-day project work. This creates a big coaching culture.

‘Culture eats Bureaucracy for lunch‘

In her MIT talk current CEO Terri Kelly spoke throughout about the tension between the Gore culture and bureaucracy, and how their goal as the environment has become more complex is to keep driving out bureaucracy. Kelly also made the point that “with the right people, a few clear objectives and guidelines you don’t need a lot of rules”.

There is the famous quote from management theorist Peter Drucker that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. I propose a second: ‘culture eats bureaucracy for lunch!’.

NixonMcInnes

NixonMcInnes is the company that I am part of and helped found with my co-founder Tom Nixon. Like any organisation, we have very many flaws and we do lots of things very badly. I do not include us to present us as the finished article in any way – we are a small, focused consultancy just trying to find our own way in the world. However, if there is an area I do feel we are relatively good at, and that is the People bit, so with this caveat made, it felt relevant to share two of our less usual people practices.

Church of Fail

At a company away weekend in a farmhouse we’d hired in the Welsh hills, we split into groups to work on the company culture by developing initiatives that would not only benefit our company but also our clients’.

One group designed a little process to work on the idea of celebrating failure in NixonMcInnes. They developed the seed of their idea based on a stagecraft exercise that Matt Matheson in our team had experienced in his improv work to teach novice improvisers to accept applause and become better accustomed with feeling uncomfortable.

Out of this was born Church of Fail: a bizarre but powerful cultural ritual in our little company. Once a month, the boardroom at NixonMcInnes is converted into a non-denominational (!) church – with the chairs laid out in rows, all facing to the front where a sign of paper marks the ‘comfort zone’. On the wall behind the congregated audience is a poster with three instructions on it:

1.    How did you fail?
2.    What did you do about it?
3.    What did you learn?

One by one volunteers – and the whole thing is a little whacky so it definitely has to be voluntary – members of the group walk to the front, stand in the comfort zone and, looking at their peers, describe a time that they failed in the last period. Having described their failure, the congregation begin to cheer and clap loudly. It is both incredibly uncomfortable to be stood there at that moment and enormously amusing seeing your colleagues whooping and clapping uproariously at the best (i.e. Worst) failure you could remember. As much as the confessor wants the moment to end, so the applause continues way beyond the point of comfort. And then, when the group sense enough has been done, it tails off, and so their turn is done and it is on to the next volunteer.

What we hope this does is change our own perceptions of failure over time. It is hugely cathartic to socialize your biggest fail of the previous month in front of your peers, and I imagine it is good for our people to see all of us – regardless of our supposed importance or length of service – stand up and discuss our failures.

Communication Workshops

Another practice that we ran for about eighteen months was a rolling programme of Communication Workshops. Conceived and delivered by our excellent Finance Director Lasy Lawless who is also a trained therapist and our wise Chairman (now Non-exec) Pete Burden who has been working with and prototyping progressive business practices his whole career, these sessions were fairly simple in structure.

The group, again made up of volunteers, sat around in a circle in a private meeting space (for us, the boardroom). There would usually be 10 or so people, and Lasy or Pete as the facilitator would introduce  the basic ground rules and the ‘Three Core Conditions’ that we wished to practice:

•    Respect – for the other person as a human being, regardless of their behaviour
•    Empathy – experiencing the world as another experiences it (putting oneself in the other’s shoes)
•    Congruence – being appropriately open and transparent about one’s own thoughts and feelings.

With these principles in mind we would practice this ‘conscious communication’, talking as a group about awkward incidents and issues that had come up and how they had made us feel. If it sounds a bit like group therapy, it probably was but I really cannot say as I’ve never done therapy! (Not yet, anyway).

Over time, the groups fizzled out – I think this was for two reasons: that we all found them a bit weird in a work context and that overlap never felt entirely comfortable; and that they had to some extent served their purpose – everyone in the team has got better at communicating honestly and authentically. For some people, that is just little changes in how they speak and how they listen, and for others it has helped make big improvements in their communication with people at work, particularly under stress. For my part, I learnt lots and am glad we did it. I just need to remember to apply it!

Measuring happiness

Clearly one of the challenges for big business is to measure its contribution in more than financial terms alone. However, even for more progressive businesses there is a prickly challenge – especially when there is greater transparency around the company’s finances – which is that the more open the financial data, the more powerful and influential that data can become.

Imagine a company where every Monday morning every single team member is told exactly how much profit/loss the company stands to make that month and that year, how much cash is in the bank and therefore exactly what shape the company’s finances are in and what that means to each individual. For better or worse, that is what happens at NixonMcInnes every Monday.

It can be a horrible way to start a week. In our own efforts to balance the financial aspects of the business with other equally vital considerations we measure happiness every day.

Quite simply we have three buckets – one full of tennis balls, and then two buckets which start every new day empty: a happy bucket and an unhappy bucket. These are by the door to our office, and on the way out at the end of each day you pick up a ball and toss it in the bucket that best reflects your day. Simple.

On the door is a sheet, and we fill out the number of happy and unhappy balls every day as the week progresses. Anyone can count them up, it’s a pretty straightforward system. And then our office manager adds them to a spreadsheet. We now have happiness data going back to June 2010.

We believe this matters. We believe that in creating a currency around our mood, we put a marker down – it shows that it matters, it gives us a point of reference for discussions in teams and as individuals. It also provides a powerful self-awareness check: ‘why am I putting another ball in the unhappy bucket? What’s going on? What do I need to do or who do I need to talk to?’.

And for me as a manager it’s like a spring in the stride or a kick in the gut the minute I walk in the next morning. As I write this on a Sunday morning I see that on Friday we had 30% of balls in the unhappy bucket – that is not normal for a Friday, and I’m now conscious of it. I have realtime feedback about my team’s wellbeing, their mood – and I cannot hide from it. It is ambiently transmitted, for better or worse. It forces me and all of us to act (or to consciously choose not to).

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next extract breaks down 5 or so practices that you – the reader – can implement in your organisation; finishing with a really practical ‘how to’.

Thank you!

Here’s the second extract from Chapter 3. Thank you so much for the useful comments and emails people 🙂

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How to unlock the potential in your people

To help you unlock more of these benefits in your team and organisation, we’re going to look at a set of five People levers that you can positively pull to jolt your organisation into the vanguard:

1.    Motivation
2.    Happiness
3.    Rewards
4.    Environment
5.    Management

1. Motivation

It might help if we take a step back and think about what really motivates people. It can be hard to connect with why on earth team members or customers might be motivated to go beyond their work being ‘just a job’ when people-centricity is not normal in the culture of your organisation.

From that cynical mindset, it can sound or feel a bit like this: ‘Why on earth would our employee want to do that – surely they just want to come in to work, go home and have an easy life, right?’. For some people that may be true, but wouldn’t you say that most people want to enjoy their work and achieve things that they can be proud of?

We have trouble in the business community remembering that there are broader motivations than money alone. Real trouble.

So perhaps it is useful to think about the possible motivations for a unpaid volunteer – someone who does what they do just because they do. Let’s imagine a fervent Wikipedian who has helped write several thousand entries in Wikipedia, has contributed hundreds of hours of her time unpaid, has worked almost entirely without management in the conventional sense, to unpick why people contribute to initiatives.

What would we say are her motivators? Perhaps she is motivated:

•    To help other people?
•    To share what she knows and cares about?
•    To express a passion?
•    To be part of something bigger?
•    To gain kudos and respect from others?
•    Because she simply enjoys it!?

Whichever of those it is, you know intuitively that in yourself these motivators are much more powerful than money alone. Consequently, tens of millions of hours of volunteer time has gone into the production of Wikipedia, a marvellous testament to what we can achieve when we work together, while many of us sat on the sofa watching TV.

And in writing this list it occurred to me that it was very likely that someone clever has studied this. A quick Google and I found The 16 basic desires theory – ta da!

Motivation: The 16 basic desires theory

Having studied some 6,000 people a certain Professor Steven Reiss proposed a theory that found 16 basic desires that guide nearly all human behavior:

•        Acceptance, the need for approval
•        Curiosity, the need to learn
•        Eating, the need for food
•        Family, the need to raise children
•        Honor, the need to be loyal to the traditional values of one’s clan/ethnic group
•        Idealism, the need for social justice
•        Independence, the need for individuality
•        Order, the need for organized, stable, predictable environments
•        Physical activity, the need for exercise
•        Power, the need for influence of will
•        Romance, the need for sex
•        Saving, the need to collect
•        Social contact, the need for friends (peer relationships)
•        Status, the need for social standing/importance
•        Tranquility, the need to be safe
•        Vengeance, the need to strike back/to win

With this in mind, what we need to ask ourselves in business is which basic desires am I calling upon in our people – which powerful underlying motivations can be harnessed to achieve of Purpose of Significance so that we can put a dent in the world?

Perhaps it also worth us pondering on this: which motivators have been poorly tapped in our organisation and more broadly in business in the past century? Which can we realistically address and call on?

2. Happiness

Perhaps the most radical change in how businesses manage people that is coming down the line is that borne out of the growing Happiness movement. Top tip: if you want to get a smile out of a 20th century business man, tell him that happiness is more important than profitability.

But this is no laughing matter. As referenced earlier in this book, whole nation states are suggesting that measures of happiness will succeed measures of financial productivity. We have outgrown the idea that money alone is the metric and the reason.

This rebalancing to take into account happiness and broader wellbeing is happening across society, and will eventually – and perhaps sooner than we expect – reach the shores of business. As it is we remain in a fairly sad and turgid state of affairs when it comes to happiness at work, with the annual (or in the more dynamic organisation, not once but twice a year! Let me hear you say ‘real time’). The HR community tot up the answers behind closed doors and then send back results to senior management, line managers, and sometimes, to the team’s themselves.

As Nic Marks puts it in his readable and very well-referenced ebook The Happiness Manifesto “The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.”.

This absolutely applies in a contemporary business. Later in this chapter will look at how other companies pull this lever and how you can too.

3. Rewards

All of the academic research says that money is a hygiene factor. It is terribly demotivating to not be earning ‘enough’, but when the vast majority of people reach an acceptable base level, increases in earnings are exponentially less effective in increasing personal satisfaction.

With this in mind, a powerful people lever we have in 21st century business is to reimagine the whole area of rewards – including but going beyond financial rewards and traditional ‘benefits’ alone.

Here the possibilities are endless, but to remind you of some of them, some organisations include non-financial rewards like:

•    Flexible working hours
•    Sabbaticals
•    Innovation time (Google’s famous TK%)
•    Duvet days
•    Free books (the Zappos library)

4. Environment

Something that smaller businesses and creative services businesses have tended to do much better than large and non-creative services businesses is recognise the impact and value of a positive work environment.

Positive role models feel alive, are comfortable, have a look of being lived in, and clearly value and prioritise the people working in them. People in these offices feel comfortable at work. It doesn’t have to be colourful beanbags, but you can generally tell when you walk around a place whether it is people-friendly or not, can’t you?

But, these working environments aside, the trend has been heading in the opposite direction.

CNN covered some research from the International Facility Management Association which indicates that the amount of physical space we give our people is drastically shrinking: “In 1994, the average office worker had 90 square feet of office space, down to 75 square feet in 2010”.

Inevitable in today’s climate? Perhaps, but does environment matter to business success? Absolutely. There is lots of research showing that everything from the colour of the walls to the number of likely interruptions massively affect morale, stress, engagement and as a result, the bottom line. Take for example research cited in a Wall Street Journal blog that was carried out by Joan Meyers-Levy from the University of Minnesota: Meyers-Levy looked at the relationship between ceiling height and thinking style and found that “when people are in a high-ceilinged room, they’re significantly better at seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated subjects”.

5. Management

The role of line management in actually delivering a contemporary approach to people management is crucial. It is in the nitty gritty of recruitment, day-to-day management and coaching and in performance reviews that many of the available benefits of a new approach to people management are either gained or lost.

The case studies we look at shortly provide many practical examples and bring the whole ethos of progressive management to life, but at this stage we can break out the three specific

•    Recruitment > Management
•    Coaching > Management
•    Feedback > Reviews

    •    Recruitment > Management

In the best run progressive businesses, more emphasis is put on the recruitment of team members than on their subsequent management. There is a belief in these businesses that if – in the words of Jim Collins in Good to Great – if you get ‘the right people on the bus’ everything else will sort itself out. So there is a big emphasis on multiple people being involved in hiring, in hiring being as much about values as about skills and experiences and in taking the whole processes of hiring patiently and thoroughly. Great recruitment lessens the burden of ongoing management.

    •    Coaching > Management

Secondly, once people are on board the approach of these pioneering organisations tends to be on coaching rather than formal management. That is to say, a style of working together which empowers, an approach which helps the individual to find their place, their role, their hidden talents, much more than telling them or placing restrictions or highly defined envelopes to work within. In a coaching culture, the logic in play is something like ‘most people want to be great at what they do, we spent good time finding them, now let’s work on unlocking their full potential’.

    •    Feedback > Reviews

Thirdly, the approach is to prioritise ongoing and very honest feedback over occassional and scheduled formal reviews. That is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but that these cultures tend to prefer the feedback to be continuous, to be in the context of every day work, and to be unusually honest and real. Remember some of HCL’s practices? And at Namasté Solar one of their main culture beliefs is in the importance of ‘FOH’ – Frank Open Honest communication.

Combined, these three elements make for a powerful new formula in people management.

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The next section will look at ‘Who does this well’, which I think you’re going to like.

Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

Thank you!

Hello and thank you for so many valuable contributions – everything from comments on the blog to links tweeted. Very grateful!

I have some work to finish off one small sub-set of the last remaining Democracy extract, so I’m hopping here to Chapter 3 which on People – a critical area…

This extract is the Intro, and will be followed by quite a lot of detail and practical steps in the following extracts.

Please keep the support, sharing and feedback coming 🙂

———–

CHAPTER THREE: PEOPLE

In theory people should be the great beneficiaries of business. After all, we’re people – we work in businesses, we own businesses, we created businesses and, for the most part, accept and depend on businesses.

So shouldn’t then people love business, and thrive in and because of business?

Instead business seems to be the enemy of people. It, this horrible machine we created, spits people out embittered, exhausted, demoralised on a daily basis and over years and careers.

We have all allowed for people and humanity and authenticity and real lives to be different to professionalism and work and business. We have allowed these two halves of the same sphere to be kept apart rather than held together.

Given this backdrop, we all know innately and absolutely that business must radically change how it treats people. We have all seen people around us be dreadfully mistreated by businesses and business people. We have all seen documentaries or read articles about the exploitation that happens to poorer people around the world at the hands of business to satisfy our own consumer needs and wants.

This. Must. Stop. It really doesn’t need to be this way.

Being bad to the people is being bad to the bottom line

Aside from the moral imperative to treat people better in business there are profound and proven business benefits going untapped. It is well understood by the Human Resources community that engagement translates into profit. It is well understood by managers that a great, motivated team member is worth five poor, switched-off team members. Yet we seem to do everything we can in conventional business to destroy engagement and to run roughshod over the simple opportunities to create

What a terrible shame! And yet what a huge opportunity. For people are the lifeblood of any business, and in the 21st century we are already seeing the pioneering social businesses celebrating and unlocking the abilities of their people and the people around them in ways that create powerful value.

What does the progressive business movement do differently?

The revolutionaries in this progressive 21st century business movement understand this opportunity instinctively and have subverted the ridiculous and staid logic of the last century to create powerful new ways of unleashing and empowering their workforces to create huge value.

Fundamentally, what the smartest organisations do is design themselves to create an environment where people can thrive and achieve more and feel stronger than they ever believed they could about their working lives.

These organisations place the highest premium on people. Not at a lip-service level, but at a deeply ingrained cultural level.

The newly created value that flows from this approach can be measured financially: better engagement of people translates into profits, sales, lower cost of returns, greater customer lifetime value and so on. But 21st century social business also create value for their people way beyond money alone. As the economist Simon Kuznets who originally developed the measurement of Gross National Product said back in 1934: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” We can extend that and suggest that ‘the welfare of an organisation can scarcely be inferred from financial measures alone’. More of that later.

What’s the prize?

By making challenging but hugely rewarding changes, the following benefits are available to the 21st century social business:

•    Better, faster results through higher workforce engagement
•    Competitive advantage by nurturing innovation and creativity
•    Sustaining competitive advantage by attracting and retaining the very best talent in the hyper-competitive global marketplace
•    A lighter soul and greater wellbeing for all (from the bottom to the top of an organisation) from the knowledge that the business is doing the right thing by its people

—

Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

PEACE!

Right, let’s move this thing along shall we?

Here’s the second and middle extract from Chapter 2, all about employing Democractic type stuff at work.

The tricky thing is I haven’t got permission of these companies covered yet (though everything I’ve written is in the public domain), so I’m hoping I don’t get in trouble but want to keep the flow of content coming your way so here goes…

(Oh, and where it says ‘TK’ is where I need to do more research – please ignore!).

———

Who can we be inspired by?

To make more sense of these ideas, let’s take a look at some organisations that are already reaping the rewards.

Namaste Solar

Namasté Solar is a rapidly growing solar power business based in Boulder, Colorado. Providing solar energy technologies to both business and residential customers, the business is thriving, ranked #975 in the 2010 Inc Magazine Inc5000, has grown 306% in three years and turns over in the order of $TKm per annum and has TK employees.

That’s about as conventional as Namasté get. For starters, Namasté started as a pure out-and-out co-operative. In a co-operative the business is owned and operated by the same group of people, with no external shareholders, and co-operatives often equally share the equity, and sometimes the salaries and other financial rewards in the company, although that varies from co-op to co-op. Indeed, over time Namasté itself has responded to its own evolution and the changes in the world around it, and continues to adapt how it operates to this present day. These structures do not need to be rigid and inflexible.

Hearing Blake Jones from Namasté Solar talk about their business, their structure and in particular how they manage decision making is refreshingly clear. The Namasté approach has five levels at which decisions are made:

1.    Individual level – ‘On the individual level, the company is a “meritocracy” whereby individuals can assume responsibilities based on proven competencies and feel empowered to make decisions.’
2.    Peer review level – ‘Peer review refers to a process whereby an individual co-owner consults with multiple other co-owners to resolve the issue.’
3.    Committee level – ‘When more in-depth discussion and collaboration is required, the issue is addressed by one of the company’s many “committees” which consist of volunteers, and “teams” which consist of members grouped together based upon job role.’’
4.    Company level – ‘A company-wide vote is required when a new or particularly important issue is introduced. The issue is then addressed by the entire company via a democratic voting process.’
5.    Board level – ‘In the rare event that a resolution is not made at the first four levels of decision-making, the board of directors, which consists of five elected co-owners (any co-owner may nominate themselves for Board elections), is empowered to intervene and provide resolution.’

Can you see how this pushes decision-making power into Namasté’s team of TK people?

Rather than a default of either individual managers or the exec team, the whole company is empowered and people encouraged to resolve issues at the early stage levels wherever possible.

What is also striking about the Namasté model is the breadth of available options in how to get a decision made, without it being overwhelming or cluttered. There is no default decision making location, nor a sense of a particular bottleneck slowing the organisation down.

What would it be like to work in an organisation where the decision making was so clearly expressed and so evenly distributed?

By the way, all of this does not mean to say that the board luxuriate in an easygoing world where no tough decisions ever get to them. Blake, who is voted in as the CEO for TK year terms, has had to deal with redundancies and TK.

Oh, and the board are also voted in. Seriously cool company.

Box copy:
Namasté in 2010: $TKm revenues in 2005, TK co-owners.

HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company that focuses on ‘transformational outsourcing’. Headquartered in TK, the company has over eighty thousand employees located in offices in 26 countries and works with a customer base across many industries including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. The business has a turnover in the order of $4bn a year. Not small beer!

Like many people, I hadn’t heard of HCL Technologies story until I came across the book ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ by CEO Vineet Nayar. It’s a great story about a how a big business goes through a transformation to continue to thrive at scale but through radical new management practices and an ethos that flips the traditional ‘customers first’ mindset to a position of ‘if we do the right thing by our people, our customers will thrive as a result’.

What the HCLT story has done is eliminate in one fell swoop the suggestion that participation cannot work at scale in business. It also provides a helpful and grounded perspective of what it is like to take a large existing business on such a journey. Case studies like this are few and far between and the early pioneers deserve kudos and support. (Another example worth looking up is the American healthcare company DaVita).

In ‘Employees First, Customers Second’, Nayar outlines 5 brilliant and practical practices that his substantial business put in place:

1.    360-degree Survey
2.    U&I Portal
3.    MyBlueprint
4.    Smart Service Desk
5.    Employee First Councils

In this book we will look at the first 3 of those 5, and I wholeheartedly recommend buying the book to read the whole HCLT story.

1. 360-degree Survey

In their 360-degree survey, HCLT went much further than the traditional approach in two ways: firstly, any one who felt that a given manager affected their performance could participate in their 360-degree review; secondly, any one participating in the survey could then see the results. You can imagine how this creates massively more transparency around reviews, and fundamentally shifts the responsibility to the managers rather than the employees. In fact, it’s a great example of the application of Linus’ Law by welcoming in outliers and diverse opinions to create the very best possible quality feedback and learning for management. What does this have to do with Democracy and Empowerment? Everything! This approach massively flattens out hierarchy and reintroduces merit, it shifts power to the grassroots and broadens it out to a wider base, and in doing so directly influences the power and decision-making in HCLT.

Is there a way you can start sharing the results of your own performance review with your team, and invite more people in to review your own performance?

2. U&I Portal

Nayar and his team at HCLT designed the U&I platform open up the CEO’s office (and power base) to allow anyone anywhere in the workforce to ask a question. The platform is available for all in HCLT to see, and the question, the questioner and the answer are all visible.

This profoundly shifts the ability of senior management to hide from difficult questions and promotes the ability of anyone in the organisation to ask one.

As Nayar writes, a group of employees told him “this is the biggest change we have seen at HCLT in years”. Powerful culture change by walking the talk and really, genuinely opening up the floor to the issues that people in the organisation care about.

Is there a way you can use simple, lightweight technology (in small teams, open Q&A or email will suffice!) to get the dirt out and get the ‘elephants in the room’ talked about?

3. MyBlueprint

Whereas the first two of these management practices are inherently about becoming more participative through enabling authentic communication and transparency, this third is more fundamental: it is about setting strategy together rather than hierarchically or in silos.

In their MyBlueprint endeavour, HCLT had three hundred managers responsible for business planning in their respective areas produce their individual ‘blueprints’ for the coming year and then share them, together with an audio walk-through, on a Facebook-like platform called MyBlueprint. These plans were then available for a further 8,000 managers to consume, review and feedback on.

The results speak for themselves: “Everyone felt able to contribute to the thinking and planning porocess. People understood the challenges better, owned the plan, and could align themselves with the strategy as I had never seen before”.

This is the power of deep, meaningful participation in the running of our organisations. To get better solutions, more belief, higher levels of engagement. HCL is an inspiring and instructional example of how very large businesses can do just that.

Box copy:
HCL Technologies in 2011: $3bn revenues, 82,000 employees.

Apple and Visionary Leaders – the anti-examples?

One of the great unresolved tensions for me in the democratic model is best summarised in the ‘what about Apple then?’ case. According to the mythology and the literature, Apple was run by Steve Jobs in a tightly controlled and extremely hierarchical way. Whole departments were locked down in secrecy, people worked on tiny segments of the visionary product in development – never seeing the whole of what they were contributing to until the very end, Jobs was himself apparently incredibly harsh in his dealings with people.

If all of this is true, then it really does sound like Apple is a powerful anti-example of the democratic mode of working, truly the antithesis of Linus’ Law: here, rather than many eyeballs, there were just a few of the ‘right’ eyeballs.

And, in that model, the company created some of the greatest product designs of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. It changed the face of the personal computing, music, mobile phone, and (possibly, they gossip at the time of writing) TV industries.

What can be said about this? I do not have the answers, at least not yet. Perhaps there is something about the resilience of a business so dependent on so few. It sounds churlish to say it after Jobs’ death, but  it is true that the company was not just dependent on him but on a few key people. Perhaps also there is then something about an organisation’s life span when it is so dependent on a visionary individual. Perhaps the democratic model can provide a platform for a longing period than the led-by-a-few model.

And beyond Apple and back into the community of democractically-run businesses, there is the common thread of visionary leadership. It seems to be both a paradox and just a fact of life that to involve the many needs to vision and energy of just one or two: Semler at Semco who we are about to meet, Blake at Namasté, Vineet at HCL, and still more – the visionary CEO Kent that turned around DaVita (briefly referenced but not looked at in this book). Or perhaps the world lionizes the few leaders progressive enough to see these opportunities and committed enough to see them through – perhaps that’s it. They are over-celebrated simply because they are so different.

I do not know the answers, but if we are to grow this movement and if you are to carry your own changes through then we must at least glimpse into the dark spots and challenge what we find.

Grandfather and Mother Earth

One of the things that happens when you start to take this alternative approach to business is that your peer group drops from squillions of everyday, conventional businesses to a much smaller, tighter set of organisations. And in that, it can be hard not to feel alone.

But as we have seen there are absolutely others on this journey. The two motherlodes for me, two of the leading lights that I use to help me stay on course I half-jokingly refer to here as the Grandfather, Ricardo Semler of Semco, and Mother Earth, Traci Fenton and her brilliant team at WorldBlu.

Ricardo Semler is the guy that first inspired so many of us in this movement with the possibilities of a different approach through his hilarious, mesmerising books Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend. Semler has walked the talk: he has grown the family business he inherited from his father from a traditional manufacturer of pumps TK into a thriving conglomerate where some of the most radical working practices are at play. People can set their own salaries, if a meeting is boring you can just leave, TK.

Traci Fenton founded WorldBlu with a mission of spreading the concept of democracy at work. This dedicated group of people work tirelessly towards their mission of seeing 1 billion people employed in democractic organisations. Gob-smackingly cool. Talk about a Purpose of Significance.

WorldBlu is without peers in the job that it does connecting up progressive leaders and entrepreneurs. Through its annual WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Companies, the organisation builds pride and profile for the community, but vitally that list is based on a comprehensive surveying tool which is extremely useful in benchmarking where your organisation is on the journey to becoming as democractic as it can be.

——

So the next and final extract is the ‘OK, so how do we do it?’ section.

What do you think of this section? Hit me with comments and feedback please: here, wmcinnes@gmail.com, on twitters @willmcinnes / #cltrshck.

THANKS 🙂

Hi contributizers,

Thank you for your help so far – here’s a list of people who’s changes have helped push the work forward (and will be thanked in the book!) http://willmcinnes.co.uk/book-culture-shock/contributors/

As always, please comment or send me your thoughts.

———

So what does Democracy at work look like?

To make this practical and helpful we need to break this down into four sections:

• Ethos and principles
• Decision making approaches
• Underlying motivations

Ethos and principles

Firstly, to really make this work you have to believe in some basic principles. And the fundamental principle is this: ‘I believe that we can getter results by involving more of the right people’.

If you cannot believe that, you will get stuck here. It really is that simple. You have to believe and to see that opening issues and decisions up to more of the right people will lead to a better end result. Like anything new, it is a leap of faith. And once you’ve leapt, you’ll get the rewards. But to take that first leap you must believe that it can be better.

Secondly, you must put your power into the process and then be willing to live with the consequences. Until you have sat with a decision that is close to being made, that is no longer in your hands, and that is tantalisingly close to being the very opposite outcome to that you had hoped for, you have not truly empowered and fuelled this approach to decision making. It must be real, and every individual must throw themselves into making it real. If there is any hint that you either may not fully back the decision that is made by the group or that you are only chucking soft, easy unimportant issues into group decision making processes then you will fail. It’s gotta be real! That’s where the huge potential lies – in the reality and the excitement and the shared power of carving real decisions together.

These two requirements are by far the hardest, because they are the highest order. Everything else is just detail. Easy, right?

Empowerment is a lighter touch

However, for those that feel scared off by suddenly handing over the keys to their unruly internal mob there are intermediary steps that can be taken on the journey.

In my own company’s experience we have graduated from making relatively unimportant decisions together like ‘shall we shut down the office between Christmas and the New Year’ through to much more impactful and meaningful decisions like ‘shall we reject this potential new client on ethical grounds’ and ‘what should the CEO’s rewards package be this year’.

There is no right or wrong way to go about this. No approved approach. As we go further, you will find ways to take the organisation you are involved with on their own journey.

Decision making approaches

There are a number of decision making approaches that are well evolved and described elsewhere including:

• Democractic
• Sociocratic / Consensus
• Empowered individuals or groups

We will look at how to begin implementing these in more detail after looking at some of the companies leading the way in this area.

Underlying motivations

When you’re operating in an environment where the idea of participation in decision making is the very last thing on anyone’s mind it can be hard to connect with why on earth other people in the organisation might be motivated to get involved in more decision making. From that cynical mindset, it can sound or feel a bit like this: ‘why on earth would our employee want to do that – surely they just want to come in to work, go home and have an easy life’. For some people that may be true, but wouldn’t you say that most people want to enjoy their work and achieve things that they can be proud of?

We have trouble in the business community remembering that there are broader motivations than money alone. Real trouble.

In People, this is something we look at in more detail and in particular the work of Professor Steven Reiss and his 16 basic desires theory. Looking at this list, I believe that at least seven of those basic desires can be powerful motivators to get involved in participative decision-making:
• Idealism, the need for social justice
• Independence, the need for individuality
• Order, the need for organized, stable, predictable environments
• Power, the need for influence of will
• Status, the need for social standing/importance
• Tranquility, the need to be safe
• Vengeance, the need to strike back/to win

‘This is my chance to try and make this unfair company policy so much fairer’. ‘This is our opportunity to exert some control over what goes on around here’. Wouldn’t it be good to tap into deep motivations like these in yourself and the people around you?

—-

This is just a short section before looking in depth in the next extract at some case study/company examples, but really keen to hear whether it works or not – can you let me know?

I am listening in the comments here, on twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck and wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Thank you.

Hello again!

So while many of you helped last week with improvements to Chapter 1 on Purpose, I was writing this second chapter on Democracy at work.

If this is your first time here, you can find more the Contents of Culture Shock here.

Again, over this week I plan to release 3 chunks that represent a good 80% of the chapter.

Again, I am very grateful for all and any feedback.

—

Introducing Democracy at Work

In this changed world we now operate in the military paradigm of top-down, command and control is simply too slow and too stupid for the 21st century. Even the military agree with that.

This world is markedly different and any organisation today has to deal with radically different forces to its predecessors from generations before.

We face massive competition from a new set of global competitors, market and organisational disruption from the relentless advance in technology, seismic shifts in the role of institutions in society and the changing attitudes of a changing workforce. Oh, and the unstoppable movement towards greater consciousness about what our actions are doing in the world around us – a search for higher meaning and more sustainable behaviours.

So how we distribute power and make decisions simply must evolve. Contemporary businesses that intuitively get this are creating genuinely innovative methods for decision making and also reviving ancient models that had become pooh-poohd in business circles.

At their very core, these organisations are flipping convention on its head and showing us all smarter, more profitable and way cooler ways to get decisions made at work.

The very idea of ‘democracy’ (did you just say DEMOCRACY?) at work is seen as subversive, ‘participation’ is seen as a nice to have, whilst collaboration is increasingly an empty buzzword, thanks to technology vendors banging on endlessly about how their system will enhance collaboration.

Why make decisions and distribute power differently?

So why do these new more social businesses establish these alternative and seemingly subversive approaches to decision making? This is hippy stuff, right? ‘So you all sit around in a big circle every time you want to make a decision?’ Cue roll of eyes. Love it!

The simple answer is: because it makes sense. Business-sense. Society-sense. People-sense.

And in five or ten years time, this is going to be mainstream. (It is already becoming so and rapidly). And by then, the window of opportunity and advantage for the courageous and the ‘irrational’ – that’s you, I hope – will have passed. Now is the time!

Here are some of the major factors driving our organisations to change how decision making happens:

1. Linus’ Law
2. Gen Y
3. Realtime
4. The Internet

1. Linus’ Law

Why? Because we’re living in a world where great chunks of the internet are run on Open Source software, powering the internet servers your information flows through every day. Software like Apache server, which runs 65% of internet servers, and the Mozilla Firefox browser, contributed to by small and large communities of software developers that have often never physically met. Linus Torvalds, the initiator of Linux – which Google’s Android operating system is based on and which the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world run on – has Linus’ Law named after him which says that ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’. A bug is a problem or glitch that a lone developer gets stuck on and cannot fix. By opening up that problem to broader base of participation as Torvalds did through developing the rock-solid technology Linux all bugs became shallow.

Vitally, Linux and Open Source software in general are seen by the developer community to be more secure, more robust, more reliable than the proprietary alternatives. Because the sunlight of transparency shines into their code, because of Linus’ Law.

Working together in a flat, loosely connected network, in a peer-to-peer fashion, built out the most significant advance in human society in the last thousand years (that’s the internet). What Linus’ Law tells us is how an inclusive approach to management and production can lead to much higher quality end-results.

So the question for us in organisations is are we getting enough of the right eyeballs on this problem, and if not, how can we through a different approach to the decisions we make about our work?

2. Gen Y

Why? Because your team, your organisation is filling up with Gen Y, who are becoming a significant part of the workforce. These guys just will not accept top-down. Having grown up in a different world, they have radically different expectations from work. “In the workplace, Gen Y tends to favor an inclusive style of management, dislike slowness, and desire immediate feedback about performance (Francis-Smith, 2004). And again: “Speed, customization, and interactivity – two-way nonpassive engagement – are likely to help keep Gen Y focused (Martin and Tulgan, 2004).” You will fail if you do not involve these guys. But get them on board, and you’ll fly!

There are two big benefits here. Firstly, by actively involving your teams in the making of decisions you will improve the quality of those decisions (Linus’ Law). Secondly, working with your people and in particular those from Gen Y you will be significantly enhancing their engagement with those better quality decisions, their willingness to follow through, their hearts and minds.

3. Realtime

Why? Because this massively connected and rapidly evolving world is moving at a pace that our organisations are struggling to keep up with. There’s a whole chapter on this later on in the book – see Flexibility & Realtime. But in brief, we simply cannot wait these days for messages to filter up and then back down when the events and information flowing around our markets move so quickly. A PR guy from a major European rail operator said at an event we were both contributing to: “when there was a crisis we used to have twenty minutes before the news broke during which time we could get a handle on the situation; today we have twenty seconds”. Gulp.

Funnily enough often the objection to participative and empowered forms of decision-making is that ‘we don’t have the time!’. Perhaps the real challenge is that we do not have the time to go through the conventional decision making processes, to reach bottlenecks, to wait for a pending decision to ping around the organisation whilst change and disruption happens in the real world? Perhaps it is a bit like the aphorism ‘I couldn’t afford to buy cheap’ – counter-intuitive, speaking to the pressures that are faced, but cutting through the crap?

4. The Internet

And once more, why? Because of the internet! In their prophetic, brilliant work the authors of The Cluetrain Work wrote back in 1999 that ‘Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy’. As they foresaw, in this world where the internet massively connects at all levels, regardless of title and office in the formal hierarchies, our influence and attention flows to the person that can actually fix the problem.

For example, in my first and only proper job, there was a lovely receptionist called Margaret. A long-standing loyal employee, Margaret had little formal power or influence. But once you got to know the business, you knew that there were a whole load of questions and issues to which only Margaret would know the answer.

Today the Margarets of this world are connected to many more people that seek answers: and so we see the rise of the engineer that voluntarily fixes customer problems out of hours on Twitter, the senior manager who listens and joins in with real customers to understand their real and unfiltered feedback anonymously in forums that she just cannot access through conventional means, and the growth of new teams and roles to provide customer service in the social web in response to sub-set of customers who know that they can get the fastest response to their issue by kicking up a fuss in the public social web. Hyperlinks have indeed subverted hierarchy. Today, the most accessible, highest quality and fastest answer wins. Your organisational structure either helps that, or gets in the way.

The prize of participative working

So contemporary organisations are employing smarter ways to decision-making for very powerful and tangible business benefits, including:
• To enlist the highest levels of engagement from their workforce, which is consistently proven to closely drive profitability
• And within that, to get the very best talent and results with the whole workforce, including from Gen Y, the new generation in the workforce who have very different expectations
• To increase collaboration, leading to greater innovation and less over-dependence on a few ‘knowledge hoarders’
• To be able to adapt internally more quickly in an unpredictable and highly adaptive environment
• To be able to effectively communicate at the new speed of business, which is closer and closer to real-time thanks to technology

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The next section will look at some of the building blocks of greater participation at work, and then some case studies of best practice and the final section will cover suggested steps on ‘how to make it happen in your organisation’.

Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

Thank you!