Leadership Development programs - the vicious cycle of solving the wrong problem...

 Why does the business world put so much effort and attention into the Leadership Development programs? Seriously. Have you ever wondered what problem these try to solve?

 

Let's do a round of all stakeholers involved to understand their perspectives and expected value. Clearly the intention of Sponsors is to develop leaders to be better leaders, to perform better, to be more effective and to build a stronger organization. For Participants, it's nobilitating to belong to the leadership cohort, they feel special and rewarded. For Trainers and Coaches, training leaders is nobilitating as well, it brings a lot of self-esteem, so they feel special and rewarded, not to mention remuneration aspect. Indeed I met whole flocks of consultants who dreamt about getting access to the leadership development level programs. This is the level where one can feel impactful. In this vicious cycle everyone feels happy, so it lasts.

My challenge is: Leaders know what to do, they do not need special trainings. We, human, are good and justice and ethical by nature, by design, we are equipped to make right decisions. The real question is why leaders cannot apply all the goodness and the knowledge in their organizations? Why do leadership efforts not blossom, and do not stick in spite of best intentions?

Here is my perspective: leaders cannot apply their natural goodness and wisdom, because the goal and the rules of the game of companies are different, leaders' goodness does not apply in this game, and is neither compatible nor usable in the context of the current purpose of companies. 

My call today is: Trust your leaders, do not try to change them, instead change the environment you need them to operate within - change the companies instead. Transform companies into good citizens of the world by redefining their social meaning and purpose.

Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash

The Testament of a Furniture Dealer

The Testament of a Futniture Dealer, by IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. 

A skeleton of thinking behind perceived IKEA behaviors. 

A masterpiece. 

An appetizer quote to build your appetite: 

“No method is more effective than a good example.” 

 

The Source: here.

A brief recap of Stephen Denning's Leadership Storytelling TEDx talk

As Stephen Denning says: 

The most important role of leadership is to tell stories. Why? Because nothing else works.

Characteristics of a good story:

1. Share a True Story - not a Titanic story that hides important negative details
2. Be Positive in Tone - share a story with a happy ending, not to trigger the reptile brain of your listeners
3. Be Minimalist in form - let the listener imagine, envisage and discover how to implement details, because it's when s/he internalizes the idea as her own idea. And that’s what you want, that’s when you are off to the races. If it’s my idea only, says Denning, nothing much happens. Once it becomes their idea it is when they become champions).
4. Contrast pre and post change worlds - the story need to contrast the situation before the idea was implemented with the situation after the idea was implemented.

With big complex ideas you can easily get lost in the story and miss the point of the story.

For the full story one definitely wants to read the Stephen Denning's book: The Secret Language of Leadership.

Professor Stefano Zamagni in Leaders For Humanity

A truly human perspective on how the world could do better.

I have learnt so much on human thought of economical systems and their relation to societies from this webinar...  A must watch for every builder of the future of work! Thank you Otti Vogt! 

The front-runners: We are not slaves of GDP - TED Talk of Michael Green

Another building block to raising awareness of sustainability and civilizational debt we have been creating - Michael Green's TED Talk back from 2015, just after the United Nations announced their Global Goals by 2030. 

I encourage you to watch the whole talk, let me just quote the breakthrough observation:

Social Progress Index representing the UN Global Goals by 2030 cumulatively can grow unrelated to growth of GDP per capita.

There are countries that prove it is possible to get lot's of social progress even if your GDP is not so great. 

(...)

Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability and as a result it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP.

(...)

And that's really important because it tells us two things:

First of all it tells us that we alreay in the world have solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. It also tells us that we are not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter. If we prioritize the wellbeing of people than we can achieve a lot more progress that our GDP might expect.

The Joseph Pelrine's Team Health Index

Finally! It turns out that I am a part of a bigger group of people who think that Psychological Safety itself is not a sufficient factor in a team's health. Yes, psychological safety is a necessary condition for teams to be healthy yet, there is more to it.

 

According to Joseph Pelrine to assess the team's health it actually takes three factors into consideration. Here is the full equation: 

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety + 

                          Empathy + 

                                      Thought Diversity 

or actually this should be a multiplication equation to highlight that the combination of these three factors is what impacts the final result:

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety x 

                          Empathy x 

                                      Thought Diversity

Only now I feel comfortable that we have set up the stage properly. This triad of factors as a whole is what really matters when we talk about team health. I think this equation should be called somehow and framed together as "Pelrine's Team Health Index" ;) .

Countless number of times I met teams who were "just" safe. Safe ot the extent that there was no development possible. They missed empathy and rejected any thought provoking challenges from external stakeholders and/or clients. Many times all other voices were treated as endangering the status-quo. And those teams were let to proceed with their limited worldview and produce solutions. And those solutions reflected the worldview of those teams as a natural consequence. Only when solutions turned to be suboptimal with hard evidence, the status-quo could be challenged and a space for a wider discussion was opening.
To some extent it is called a learning loop, yet there is a thin line between the necessity to learn by failing versus getting things done effectively by upfront collaboration through empathizing and being open.

In terms of system dynamics, an exchange and mutual benefit between a team and its stakeholders / clients, one could say that a team needs to give back for Safety with Empathy and be grateful to external voices for enriching their Thought Diversity.

Thank you Joseph Pelrine for bringing the full picture together in your post!

Personal relation with "Your work is shit" leadership style

 I have a confession to make - I am a big fan of "Your work is shit" approach by Steven Jobs. It is so unpopular these days that I already feel guilty, passe and removed from your social media. Still here I am, making the confession to show my vulnerability in a hope to be understood better.

To understand where I am coming from you need to know that I am very demanding from myself. I have always been. As a result I am also very demanding from people I work with and live with. I reflected on this many times, asked myself questions how it influences my relations with others, how it influences my ability to co-create, etc. I explained to myself that I have the Achiever profile - I am fuelled by achieving. But I felt this explanation is not the whole story - that's only how it looks at the surface. Achievement is actually just a side effect of the real driver - the urge to become wholly embedded in solving a piece of puzzle. When I am solving a puzzle nothing else exists, aka the flow. This is how I engage in work. Till it's done. Then I can go out and socialise, eat pizza and drink beer. Until the next wave of urge to Solve comes. So more than an Achiever I am an Obsessive Solver, a Craftsman. Coming back to "Your work is shit" - this helps me produce better solutions - by challenging what I have done and my current approach. This helps me cross the boundaries and limitations and breakthrough to wider landscape of options. 

There is on more thing wrt "Your work is shit" - this frame is, in my honest opinion, very close to my favourite quote "The ABC of Business Decay" by Warren Buffet - Arrogance, Bureaucracy and Complacency. Especially the Complacency resonates between these two famous quotes. If I am complacent with my work it means for me that Complacency has reached me. And, as always, there are others working harder than myself while I am contemplating Complacency. 

I recommend starting every decision making, every option generating workshop by posing the "Your work is shit" frame - to open up discussion about how we can do it better. It is similar to another brainstorming technique by the Heath brothers - the Vanishing Options test. It goes like this: Imagine your favourite option is not an option given the situation. What are other options? It is also related to BHAG goal setting. BHAGs are goals that are not achievable by the current means and the current levels of thinking.

How all the above influence my desired identity of a Transformation Leader? Some will say, such confession crosses me out as a transformation leader. Honestly? I think there is a great match between being the Solver and being a Transformation Leader. A Transformation is a huge effort and it is supposed to take companies across a big river full of crocodiles to another bank. Such effort usually needs a BHAG goal to even risk it. And a realisation coming from the first attempts to solve it - that the BHAG is not achievable by the current habits, thinking and ways of working.

So here I am: suspected of being Achiever while actually being a Solver. Suspected to be a Toxic Leader while I feel a Radical Candor leader: I always care personally and yes I always challenge directly. 

Credits: Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

Remodelling of employee-employer relationship

This article describes my understanding of the current state and the desired direction of evolution of the employee-employer relation (EER). I was triggered to share my view by the McKinsey’s Organization insights presented in the “Great Attrition or Great Attraction? The choice is yours.” article published here.

I fully agree with the bottom line presented, "Employees crave investment in the human aspects of work (whereas employers were more likely to focus on transactional ones like compensation).".  This is our current reality on the global scale, there is no doubt about it.

Still I feel I need to share my view both on the presented means of attraction as well as on the wider topic of the employee-employer relation itself. I believe the attrition issue needs to be solved on a deeper, more systemic level. On the level of the nature of the employee-employer relation itself.

The research confirms the gap between the employees' expectations and what employers offer. The opportunity for remote work on the big scale is a relatively new phenomenon and clearly a significant contributor to "The Great Attrition". Employees have gained a new dimension, a new degree of freedom that they can shape for their convenience. 

However the overall landscape has not changed, it has existed for decades. The landscape is defined by, as the report says, the transactional nature of the employee-employer relation. As a consequence of the transactional nature of this relation we observe deep and common disconnectedness of employees from their employers and employers' goals.

It is the very nature of the relationship that we need to challenge in order to eliminate the gap. Imagine the world of work if we can find a more balanced relation, a relation that matches the needs of the both parties closer. Imagine the world of work if we can align the goals of both employees and employers!

Any other means, including those suggested in the article, are not sufficient to solve the original issue. Their impact is limited, and these may only serve as temporary fixes to something that needs a proper remodelling or even a replacement.

Here is what I mean by that. The transactional nature of the employee-employer relation creates a gap. Clearly the gap originates from the difference in goals of the two parties. On one hand employees care for and expect adding the human aspects of work into the equation, on the other hand employers offer a transaction. A transaction that can be decorated by additional elements, which may obscure the underlying nature, but still is a transaction. The transactional nature will not change if we sprinkle the relation with additional elements. 

Employees invest their most precious irreversible resource - their personal time and, so no surprise, they expect this sacrifice to be valued and appreciated by the accepting party of employers. Yet, employers are not in the frame of appreciating this kind of gift, employers are not equipped, not in the position to satisfy this expectation of employees. Employers are rather positioned in the frame of exploiting this gift to generate profit for the investors, the magical Return of Invested Capital (ROIC), the holy grail of nowadays business. Such a framing of employers defines companies' attitude to the relation and, as a result, defines the nature of the relation with employees. As long as employers are trapped in the frame of ROIC the relation will remain transactional and the gap will exist.

The level of the roots of the nature of the relationship is the appropriate level on which we can tackle the gap. If we want to eliminate the gap, and I believe this is what we all want in the long term, we need to talk about remodelling or even replacing the transactional nature of the relationship. We need to help employers relieve themselves from the frame of the ROIC, the root cause of the transactional nature of the relationship. Only then employers will be in a position to come up with an approach fitting the needs of employees. 

We may not yet know how to do this in practice, but this is clearly the direction to pursue. After all, employees are us, we are societies and it is societies that define the employee-employer relation. It may be hard to imagine, because the currently existing relation has been with us for really long and we got used to treating it as an unchangeable element of the landscape. 

I believe we are well equipped for such a change. We have proven for ages that we are capable of reacting to challenges of life and we can update our value systems and worldviews to adapt.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Simple truths, episode N: Process is dead

Process is dead. When it comes to process everything has been said. Starting from theory of constraints, through Value Mapping, kanban, complexity theories, lead time & cycle time optimisations, dependency management, to the magic of incremental approach based on short iterations, incremental approach to delivery and product creation, goal and result oriented approaches, scaling, continuous improvement and operational excellence. 

In case of IT projects this knowledge shortened the software delivery live cycle from 3 years in 1980s to 1sec 2010s. 

Nowadays there exist multiple ready to use process governance frameworks that present enormous value and quality: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Nexus, Less, to name a few. They really do a great job.

What is more: everything can be done when it comes to process. Nobody has reached the process optimization end though. Not because it is impossible to optimize further - the options here are endless. Nobody has reached the process optimization end because on the way down this route companies discover issues on their way to their effectiveness that with time destroy the energy of the process improvement effort. Due to the attribution error, the issues are attributed to the process / framework itself and the framework gets blamed and accused that "it does not work for us". 

Yet the true reasons of not reaching expected effectiveness improvements lay somewhere else. The expected effectiveness boost is not reached because process is only one of a few elements of an effective company. It is usually the one that is explored as first. And it is usually the last one... Most companies begins and ends within the process optimization aspect. And if they try again, they try in the wrong way - they try to apply another process governance framework...

Given the above vicious cycle it comes as no surprise that the process area is the area of the biggest buzz and the best money for consultants, majority of which never needed to look and explore beyond the process frameworks. These guys will not make your organization effective in the long term. They are capable of setting up a delivery machine, but that is it. Where is human in this machine? This question remains unasked and unanswered.

Few companies and few leaders think wider. I guess you do if you are reading this. 

Process is the easiest piece of the organizational effectiveness puzzle for us humans. It is logical and tangible - natural food for our neocortex brain.

What needs to follow in parallel to implementing an effective process are the areas of 

• organizational culture - how we get things done here, 
• organizational design and architecture - how an organization supports flow of value, and
• leadership style - what mindset and behaviours leaders promote. 

These areas add ocean-deep and ocean-wide potential into the big picture. One can cross the barriers of the machine metaphor as the work in these areas is with people and for people. 

All four dimensions are complementary and all are equally important. They are also closely related - one cannot grow and reach higher levels of maturity without others growing in parallel. It was Michael Spayd who I learnt from the special name for this phenomenon - the idea of all four dimensions tetra-arising.

p.s. Thanks Maciej Rusinek for triggering me to articulate my thoughts!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Entrepreneurs that restore the common sense - Ricardo Semler

"The main thing I was looking for in the companies is How do you set up for wisdom?"

"We have come from the age of revolution, industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we are not any closer to the age of wisdom".

With this classic from 2014 I am clearing my mind for a productive weekend. Absolute MUST HAVE for CEOs, HR and corporate middle classes. How much time you spent this week asking yourself how to set up your company for wisdom? Do you really need to follow the herd? Do you really have to accumulate first to give back later?

Clearly Ricardo Semler is our guru! His message restores the common sense and gives courage to free ourselves from the dominating perspective and status quo of the corporate world, and to hear and experiment with the natural intuitions.