My work with organisations often involves getting groups together so they can see their work situation, make decisions on what needs to change and put these into action. Which means at some point in the preparation, we are going to be asking “right, so who do we need to have in the room”?
That’s where I lean one of the brilliant concepts of Dr. Ichak Adizes, called CAPI.
There’s a thing that you can do to become a better leader that it is so simple, it’s difficult for many to believe it can make so much difference.
That thing is the weekly one-on-one.
The best descriptions of the importance of this and some guidelines come from Manager Tools, founded by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne 15 years ago. Originally a podcast, it’s now a consultancy, training company and there’s a book. They call the one-on-one the ‘O3’, and they have it as one of their cornerstones of good leadership.
The world of work is chaotic and filled with anxiety. We can track most of that back to one source – to the one thing that is rarely done well in most organisations – the Resource Bargain.
The term the ‘Resource Bargain’ comes from Stafford Beer (1926-2002), legend in systems thinking and the creator of the Viable System Model (VSM), one of the best ways to diagnose and change organisations (or any system) so they work better.
Like I did in my article and video on Radical Competence, this week I again break down a scene from a movie starring Tom Hanks. This time it’s Saving Private Ryan, with our mate Tom playing Captain John Miller. To get the full effect, it’s really best to watch the video, the article doesn’t really do it justice.
What you’ll see is an example of handling what we might call justified dissent – Captain John Miller and his soldiers have stormed the beach at Normandy in World War II, and he is given their next mission – select a small group of your people and find a Private Ryan. The mission exists as Private Ryan’s three brothers had all been killed in action, and the US had passed the ‘sole-survivor’ policy which required that in situations such as these, the surviving sibling be brought home. As you might expect, this is not exactly the mission the soldiers signed up for, and not all are happy.
“I need lift the capability in my team so I can do more future-focussed work”. It’s in the Top 3 things I’m going to hear whenever I have a chat to a manager at any level, and it’s a good idea.
What’s rarely covered is how to actually do it. That’s what we’re going to sort now.
Coming to Grips
Ever thought of yourself as a production line? It’s easy to do in manufacturing, might look like this:
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein questioned whether there is such a thing as private language. Can something that can only be understood by one person be considered to be real?
Beach Balls
Well…good news…we don’t need to figure that out. Instead, we can use the brilliant metaphor of the beach ball from Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations.
It goes like this – if I hold up this ball – what colour is it? Blue and white.
If you’d like to watch me go through this on video, just click here. 6 mins with captions.
Senior Management is not just more management. It’s a new kettle of fish. I’ll go through:
The change in the nature of the work
What the job actually is
Action To Take
Senior Management
First – what are we talking about here? The key thing is manager of managers. Or, managers of multiple teams, who each have their own leadership. These roles can be called various things, some of the ones from my clients are:
Posted by Adam Thompson on the 28th September 2020
If you’d like to watch this as a video instead of reading, just click here.
Politics in the workplace. Not generally considered a good thing. But it’s as real as the wind is reality if you’re in a sailing boat. We need an angle if we’re going to get things done so we can earn our keep.
We can get that angle from the work of Peter Block and his model which I call his ‘Positive Politics’ model. Not only will it help you make sense of the political relationships going on in your workplace, it gives us some strategies to make things better.
You can find this model in his brilliant book The Empowered Manager. It’s one of the classics, now in a second edition.
Politics
First, some origins. The word ‘politics’ comes from the Greek word ‘politikos’ which includes the words for ‘citizen’ and ‘city’. Change ‘city’ to ‘organisation’ and you can see that any time you try to start, stop or keep something going in an organisation…it’s a political act.
