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When playing poker, or more importantly in my life with my three kids, when playing Uno, it’s important to hold your cards close to your chest.
We see the same in organisations – managers holding their cards close. I call it playing Manager Poker.
It’s no good.
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You’re in a work conversation, and you’re just not getting through. And it matters. It needs to get through.
So you regroup and go again. Because you’re not someone who gives up easily. And you get the same result, they either
And the numerous other approaches, none of which give you any movement forward. You’re frustrated. Maybe doubting yourself.
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Engagement, ownership, accountability…whatever you want to call it, we all want to see (and feel) more of it.
Like all things, half of the game is internal, and there’s a magic number that can help get us there.
Let’s start with our standard managerial hierarchy…
…even the way it looks give us a certain sort of vibe.
Here’s a more modern way to draw it:
Looks a bit kumbaya with being in a circle and all, but taking out the cynicism, it looks a bit more like everyone’s involved.
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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.
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.
Read more…‘We need to get KPIs sorted’ is a common refrain, which carries with it the assumption that it is the lack of these things that is constraining performance.
Unfortunately or fortunately…there’s deeper stuff going on that we need to be aware of if we want this sort of thing to work. And if we’re not aware of it, sorting the KPIs will actually make things worse!
You’d know from your own experience that when the next initiative is introduced, including KPIs, the sensible response is to smile politely until it blows over, then get back to work. This is a deep issue of ownership, and to understand it, we need to go deeper into working relationships. And for this, we’ll use the work of Peter Block.
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…
How would you react to this decree from the government:
These are the five ways we expect every citizen to behave. All people observed not behaving in this way will be sanctioned, at first via discussions, then via bad ratings on the official record, and ultimately removal from the community. The five behaviours can be found on government issue posters, coffee cups and lanyards which are freely available at your local post office. You will be rated once per year on your adherence to these behaviours.
Does this sound like a community you want to be a part of? Does it sound like a community where people are trusted to be adults and serve the best interests of each other?
You get the point. And it’s full on. It’s essentially an act of HR and Management sedition to suggest that all of this behaviour stuff might be bulldust.
But it is.
In the words of a better person than me: “Far out”
Well, actually, there’s a situation where behaviours are not bulldust. If a group of people get together to discuss and agree behaviours for themselves, then fine. What’s bulldust is the decreeing part. The mandating. The ‘we know what behaviours are best for you‘ part. This is the bit that treats grown adults like they are in child care….which is eventually going to create child care behaviour, which is dependence and rebellion all at once. Read more…
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…