If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch my video by clicking here.
When you’re feeling the overwhelm, the pressure, and you need a way to make projects run better in your organisation…who do you turn to?
Matthew MConaughey of course!
Hang with me here – check out the below, McConaughey from an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, with my emphasis:
Read more…This time I go through a scene from the TV show Andor…so it’s better to watch me do this on video. To do that, click here.
And if you can’t…I’ll go through it now.
Have you seen the show Andor? I’ll bet you didn’t know there’s a lesson in there about organisational structure!
The show is part of the Star Wars pantheon, but it’s different. Deeper, and goes right into the effects of colonisation, imperialism and how that can turn individuals.
And…we get to see what’s called the Imperial Security Bureau in action, which we can picture as an Executive Team of an organisation. Here they are:
The scene I go through is a meeting of the ‘Supervisors’, who are the equivalent to Executives, with the boss being Major Partagaz who we might say is the CEO.
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here, 5 minutes with captions.
Getting your culture moving in the direction you need doesn’t have to be a mystery. There are tangible actions you can take right now that will make a difference.
I’ve named them the 4 S’s, and if you know the work of Frances Frei and Anne Morriss in Unleashed, and the body of work known as Systems Leadership developed by Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke and Karl Stewart…you’ll already be familiar with some of these ideas.
First – my definition – culture is the shared understanding about the way you need act to fit in around here. Don’t get too caught up in it…this works fine.
Read more…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…(If you don’t see the video embedded above, go to it here)
Today’s article is Work Models You Need to Know, Episode 2. The model is Zone to Win and it’s by Geoffrey Moore.
Why do you need to know this? It’s a way to organise your entire enterprise, your division or your team to both deliver for your customers today, while ensuring that the strategic innovations needed for success and viability in the future are discovered and brought into the mainstream.
It’s how to do strategy right.
The full title of Moore’s book is Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption. This title is spot on.
The starting point is the classic consultant’s four-box model, where we divide the world into:
Read more…You need to focus on today. You need to focus on tomorrow. You need engagement from your people to get both done.
Nothing here you don’t already know. So….
Need a method? Just schedule these meetings. Things will be better.
Weekly: Optimisation meeting.
Get together to look at graphs that show performance according to customer experience, cost and sustainability. Resolve issues and monitor the effects of changes you have been making.
The question here: how do we make this show run as it was intended? Read more…
A TEAM OF OWNERS
Ask any group of people to draw their ‘org chart’, and they’re going to draw something like this:
There is nothing wrong with this – it’s a useful diagram that shows managerial relationships – who is accountable for which teams. This has value simply because if a given team is doing great, or not so great, it’s convenient to know who to talk to. And we can have meetings of five teams by coordinating five calendars instead of forty.
Here’s the thing though – this visual representation becomes the dominant mental model for how we think about work. Notice how it implies four separate people, only connected through one other who sits ‘over’ them. It’s not a big leap from here to see how relationships of dominance and dependence can emerge, with the friendly version being the ‘caretaking’ manager, the not-so-nice version being the autocratic manager. Either way felt ownership of the work is gathered in just the one person. Not nice if you’re that person.
(Click here for a pdf version of this post)
So here’s a change. Draw your team like this….
…as a Circle, that gathers around the work of the team – it’s mission. But notice a key feature – we still have a managerial leadership role. And we define that role very deliberately – as the role that takes accountability for the team delivering it’s mission. So it has the authority to convene meetings, to name the conversation that needs to be had, and, when required, to make decisions if the team can’t naturally find a consensus that makes sense. Read more…
“We need more accountability around here” Chloe said.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“You know, people caring, people hitting their marks, doing what they said they would. You know, being accountable” she replied with a slight tone of ‘what is wrong with you’.
“Like you do?” I asked
“Do you think I don’t” was the quick reply.
“No, not that at all, sorry” I immediately answered. “I meant that question literally, you mean you’d like people to care about the place like you do as the CEO?”
“Well…..yeah. That would be great!”
“So why don’t they?” I asked.
Chloe laughed – “I thought that’s what you were here to fix”.
I didn’t laugh at all. I looked straight into her eyes.
“No. This is what you have caused. So it’s what you are here to fix”.
The pause was somewhat awkward.
“OK….I get it.” she said. “So what can I do?”
“The word I use for what you’re looking for is ‘ownership'”. I said. “You want people around here to act like it’s their place. Like it’s their money. Like owners”.
“Yep, that pretty much it”. Read more…
A recent study compared a couple of different ways of organising a production environment.
Both groups had 40 employees. The first group had seven types of roles and was divided into 14 subgroups, with coordination, integration and continuity of the work being the responsibility of management.
The second group coordinated itself. They had the same roles as the first group, but they decided themselves who would rotate to what tasks and which shifts they would work.
Here’s the findings:
What’s the study?
Well…I have to come clean. By ‘recent’, I was more on a geological timescale. The study was conducted in the 1950s.
Two hundred kilometres southwest, teenager John Lennon hadn’t even formed the Quarrymen, let alone the Beatles.
The production wasn’t software development. It was coal mining. In Durham, UK. The work was getting the coal from long walls. Fun stuff.
You can read about it in Gerrit Broekstra’s book Building High-Performance, High Trust Organizations.
You see, the results on this stuff are in – when people have some sort of control/autonomy/authority over their own work….things are better. We don’t need further studies on this, and if you just ponder anything in your own work life where you’ve felt totally into it…I’m sure these conditions were there.
So, here’s some thoughts on what we’re seeing here, and in similar studies and examples of self-managing enterprises: Read more…
Question
I’ve heard that principles of Requisite Organisation mean that people can’t talk to people in other teams without checking with the manager first. This seems to be against all modern ways of working together as an organisation, so just wanted to check in with you as I know you are an expert in this model.
Answer
I’m very glad you checked. First principles, ‘Requisite’ means ‘what is required’ and in our model, which we call Requisite Enterprise as it uses these principles among others, it’s about designing and leading work so it’s fulfilling for customers, employees, beneficiaries and the planet.
This means that a way of working that causes frustration and disintegration of relationships is never going to be requisite in our model. Saying ‘you can’t talk to them without checking with me first‘ is therefore obviously not part of what we teach in our workshops and online.
The Managerial Relationship
But…we can acknowledge where this comes from. We use the Elliott Jaques idea of making managers accountable for their teams serving their customers (internal or external), and so give managers the authority to ultimately decide the way ‘work works’ and who does what in their area if that’s required. This is called authority to ‘assign’ work. And we describe the relationship between Managers and the team members using the Jaques term ‘Task Assigning Role Relationships’ or ‘TARRs’. (BTW…we insist that before decisions managers also get the input of all those effected as an absolute minimum)
It is, however, a mistake to therefore think that this authority to ‘assign work’ means ‘a person may only do work directly assigned by their manager’, or even further ‘only the manager may talk to this person about work’. Read more…
