Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here – 4 mins, with captions.
I was on my oldest child’s school excursion to Old Tailem Town recently (which, by the way, is pretty freaky, which is why the kids love it…)
As I watched the teachers do their (awesome) thing with us bunch of volunteer helpers, the thought occurred to me that what we have here is a great example of how the Team Leader role works.
Read more…Prefer to watch on video than read? Click here – 3 mins with captions.
Traditional hierarchy looks like this – a pyramid (and BTW it’s a very appropriate organising principle for many, many situations, so don’t feel guilty if you’re running one or in one).
The hierarchy shows us which roles have the job of being accountable for other roles…but it also can be used to show us what Elliott Jaques discovered as different levels of work. I’ve drawn them in here…
Read more…Prefer to watch on video than read? Click here – 5 mins with captions.
The Team Leader role. Called lots of things – sometimes ‘Team Leader’, older-school names are ‘Supervisor’ and ‘Leading Hand’, modern names are ‘Coordinator’.
Then we have the Manager role. Sometimes called that, often now called ‘Team Leader’ because management has apparently become evil, and in the US this role can be called ‘Supervisor’.
And before you get started on ‘hierarchy is bad’, remember that most of us work in hierarchies, and it remains the optimal structure in many situations.
If it’s run well. Which is what this is about.
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here – 5 mins, with captions.
Unhappy people, putting out fires and feeling like we’re not getting anywhere. We often look for so-called ‘bigger’ solutions – to talk about purpose, strategy, systems. And sometimes that’s spot on.
But more often than not, there’s a more powerful, yet very unfashionable component of every organisation at every level that needs to be working for anything to…well…work!
And that’s Coordination. I’ll explain…
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here – video is 6 mins, with captions.
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.
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:
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:
Read more…Today’s article goes through one of the most common causes of organisational pain. A sore back is guaranteed to make people grumpy, and compression is a great way to give your organisation some proper spinal issues.
Now, a big proviso. Organisational hierarchies are very out of fashion right now. Here’s three things though:
OK, let’s get on with it.
Read more…
(If you’d prefer to watch and listen than read, click here)
PART ONE – CLARITY
The problem
If you’re in any sort of managerial role, it’s almost a given that you’re spending your time in the detail and not spending enough time doing the job you’re really paid for. And that you’d rather be doing. That job you’re paid for is about longer timespans – looking into the future, maybe strategic stuff, maybe it’s improving things. For you to be able to do your work and not be involved in doing the work of your people, three things need to be in place….
Clarity, Capacity, and Capability.
The Three Cs. Or, be fancy, 3C.
If your people don’t have enough Clarity of what they need to do, if they haven’t got the Capacity to get it done, and if they don’t have the Capability to do it, who’s going to end up doing it? You are! And don’t feel bad – this happens because you’re a decent person.
This first article is going into Clarity.
Read more…
Something different this time around – a talk! I spoke recently at the Leadership, Culture and Governance Symposium put on by Aged & Community Services Australia in Adelaide.
The topic – Designing for Quality Leadership The point? Leadership depends as much on your organisational design as it does the people in the jobs, so….stop fidgeting and start building something!
Click here to watch. Goes for about 40 minutes, and sorry about the hissing at the start – that blissfully goes away at 4:15.
It’s the stuff we teach in detail in our workshops and our online learning so you can design departments and enterprises where people can do great work.
And…if you’d like to see what was on the screen, or want the super-quick version, click here to see the slides. I’ve written short explanations on many of them so they make sense even without the presentation itself.
Feel free to download and distribute the slides to those who might be interested if you think it might help create a conversation that makes your place better.
Thanks to Derek Dittrich from ACSA and Tim Levett for the video production.
As always, if there is anything I can help with, just let me know.
Cheers!
There’s an element that gets overlooked when you set up your organisation with the right number of levels (yes, there is a right number, but that’s a different post), and when you make sure that the people in the roles will be able to add value at the level that the role requires. You get a natural feeling of release or ‘that feels better’ as some of the key conditions that create micromanagement or disconnection are now dealt with.
Couple in some training about what the unique value-add of each level is, and we’re well on the way toward an enterprise that can seriously get things done, both today’s work, and tomorrow’s. If you’d like some research on this, and no less than 50 years’ worth is good enough for you, check out the work of Elliott Jaques. We use it because it works.
But there’s a darker side.
In the process of defining ‘levels’, the human need for dominance rears it’s head. I’m talking about the idea that “I’m at a higher ‘level’, therefore I know better than you”. Don’t get me wrong, most times this isn’t evil, and comes through as genuine caring for ‘your’ people. But the very act of assuming you know what’s best for someone else….how comfortable are you with being on the receiving end of that?
Yet, we need people who can think in longer timespans so we’re OK in the future. And we need people who can make things work right now so we’re OK right now. We need all of these things for a successful business. Hierarchy is actually natural.
So what do we do?
What we do is move to the mindset described by Peter Block as Partnering not Parenting. Read more…