Change Symbols

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a potential client company about running some seminars for them on culture change. One of the things they asked me to think about was - what would be an appropriate symbol for their change program?

And this did get me to thinking ...

Why? Simply because dry logic only gets you so far with your prime change audience - the people. Logic and reason and facts and data are all important, of course, but not so inspiring or exciting.

So what would be an appropriate change symbol?

Lots of recent research internationally, and also in Australia, points to the importance of having a dedicated, and even a named change program. The Woolworth's Supermarket chain in Australia have 'Project Refresh' for example. (http://www.woolworthslimited.com.au/aboutus/ourhistory/index.asp)

We also often see new logos appear as part of a rebranding strategy - a frequent component of a change program. Think of any of the major Australian banks ... National Australia Bank is now "NAB", etc.

So, we might have a named change program. We might even have spent lots of dollars on a new logo. But how effective will they be in grabbing the attention of the various stakeholders during the change?

So what would work better? What would really grab someone's attention, inspire them, excite them?

My view is that this where the arts really come to the fore. Without doubt the detailed analysis, planning, decision-making, etc all needs to be done, but to capture our attention and excite us, there's nothing like a striking image, or a funky or uplifting tune. I'm not a big Rolling Stones fan, but how good was the Microsoft launch of Windows 95 with 'Start me Up'? And they made US$8million as well! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPFKnBYOSI)

But you don't have millions of dollars sitting around to spend on a change symbol right? What might work for you?

You've done a lot of the analysis and planning right? Somewhere, somebody has been able to outline the vision - what it's going to look like, feel like, be like if the change program is successful. If someone in your team can put that into words, can the team also think of a picture, an image, a scene from a movie or a song that sums up the journey or the destination? If they can, your team has uncovered a powerful tool that has the potential to excite and inspire your stakeholders. That image or that song will grab the stakeholders in the gut, as surely as the analysis will grab their heads.

So that gets us back to the photos at the start of the blog and below. They are images that I love. It's the Duomo (cathedral) of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy. (Thanks to http://www.freefoto.com)

Sure, there are lots of old churches that are beautiful across the world. But what is special to me about this Duomo is that it symbolises change so well.

While I was in Italy in September last year, I learnt a little about the restoration of their numerous monuments. Interestingly to me, there is constant debate about the validity of restoration work. Are the changes that are necessitated by the passing of time what the artists originally intended, etc?

This is why Florence's Duomo is so interesting. Because it was constructed over a long period of time, various artists, builders, supporters and labourers were involved with a constantly morphing vision of what the completed Duomo should be. Does that sound familiar to your organisation?

Construction was begun by the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. Numerous local artists continued to work on it during the following century and a half. But, the massive octagonal cupola that truly dominates both the church and the city was the proud achievement of Filippo Brunelleschi, master architect and sculptor and it wasn't started until 1420.

The cathedral of Florence itself had been begun in the Gothic style. But in 1366 the City of Florence, following the advice of certain painters and sculptors, decided that the Gothic should no longer be used and that all new work should follow Roman forms, including the now famous dome built at the east end of the nave.

A modern façade of the cathedral, executed by Emilio de Fabris in 1867-87 in the style of the Gothic Revival, has taken the place of one which was destroyed at the end of the 16th century.

When you see the Duomo today, you can see its Gothic nature, the towering Roman style dome, and the most recent neo Gothic facade.

What a wonderful symbol of change. Evolution not revolution. The engagement of many many workers in its construction and upkeep over centuries. And most importantly, the inspiration of countless visitors over time.

Your organisation could do worse than picking the Duomo as its change symbol.

Bad Bosses

Here's a headline ... there's a lot of bad bosses, managers and leaders in businesses and organisations worldwide.

Well, it's probably not such a headline. It doesn't surprise many of us really, does it?

Does it matter? Bad bosses can still get good results can't they?

It depends ...

Certainly it depends on what and how you measure good results. A bad boss may indeed be able to get some good business results - but not over time, and certainly not in the same organisation.

But the bottom line question is probably, will having good bosses in the business or organisation get better results?

Now, defining what a boss, a manager and a leader needs to do in a short blog is another challenge of brevity. But let's condense the role of a boss into two perhaps overly simplistic generalisations. For this blog's sake, let's assume that the role of a boss involves:

* managing tasks (the "technical" management skills: setting objectives, planning, implementing, controlling); and,
* managing people (the "relationship" management skills).

And let's make another assumption, that the business schools, universities and vocational training providers can do a reasonable job in training bosses in the first of these two roles - technical management.

So my question becomes, if a boss is good at managing people, does that mean that business results will improve?

An article in the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 April 2007 (page 68) provides part of the answer. The title of the article? 'Staff flee bad bosses, not companies'. (http://www.afr.com/home/)

The article opens by stating:

The historically low unemployment rate that is making it difficult for all sectors to find quality candidates, especially among the small pool of accounting and finance professionals, should encourage organisations to focus on their internal culture'.

In an Australian context, not only is the labour market tight - particularly for young professionals, knowledge workers and specific trade qualified workers - demographics point to the fact that the labour market is only going to become even tighter. The implications should be obvious. Attracting talented workers will be challenging enough, retaining them in a work culture of bad bosses will be impossible.

The executive general manager of Chandler Macleod's Recruitment Solutions (http://www.chandlermacleod.com.au) discussed a recent survey in the Australian Financial Review article that found that a whopping 82% of workers resigned from their jobs because of bad bosses!

How do we get good bosses from bad bosses?

My perspective is that many organisations spend a lot of time either providing in-house training on the technical management and job requirements - or focusing on these skills at the recruitment stage. But, very little time is spent on developing or selecting for the relationship management skills.

To me it's clear. Leadership, team and emotional intelligence skills are critical if an organisation is going to develop its bosses. If the business chooses not to, then its increasingly valuable team members will almost certainly choose to work somewhere else.

What's your organisation choosing to do?

Learned Helplessness

I was watching my beloved football team (Richmond in the Australian Football League if you haven't seen an earlier blog on "Leaderful" Teams) last Friday night.

Well ... they remain beloved, but they are less than successful just at the moment ... but that's not so relevant.

While I was having my football supporter's heart broken again, I was really struck by the reactions of some of the opposition team (Collingwood) supporters sitting around me.

Remarkably enough, up to half time Richmond were leading comfortably. The reaction from the other team's supporters I found fascinating. Why? Largely because so many of them were young children or teenagers.

As their team slipped further behind in the game, their support turned rapidly into condemnation for ... yes, you might have guessed - the umpires.

Most sports fans hate getting beaten, but there can be a number of reasons why your team does get defeated. Here's just some:

* Your team's simply not good enough.
* The opposition are playing better than your team.
* The playing conditions (heat, rain, snow or whatever) don't suit your team.

Of course bad umpiring and refereeing do impact game day results. But, and it's a huge BUT ... it's pretty unlikely bad umpiring is the sole reason a team is being outplayed. Particularly in AFL where there are three field umpires, two goal umpires, two boundary umpires and a match referee. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe in collusion to that extent!

So what?

What does yelling frustrations at the umpires at a sporting contest have to do with your business or organisation?

It seems to me that blaming the umpire has become far too convenient an excuse to avoid looking at the real reasons for underperformance. And this is a real danger for any organisation. If we can't honestly appraise our own performance and that of our business team, then we have a real problem.

And unfortunately, it seems that this is far more common than it ought to be.

Let's put it into the context of "learned helplessness". Wikipedia provides a useful definition of learned helplessness being:

... a psychological condition in which a human or animal has learned to believe that it is helpless. It thinks that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result it will stay passive when the situation is unpleasant or harmful and damaging.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)

Some of those Collingwood fans were seemingly approaching their team's (sadly for me - temporary) poor on-field performance from the perspective that they, and by inference, their team, were helpless to the fate of the umpires. There was no point doing anything.

Learned helplessness in organisations and businesses is even more dangerous. if this type of behaviour continues to be reinforced and is not actively addressed, it can become a dangerous part of the organisational culture.

Here's some common ways that learned helplessness can manifest itself in an organisation:

* Teams sit back and wait for the leaders or the executives to take action.
* Businesses blame regulators, governments, business cycles (or whatever) . They ignore the causes without taking action, instead whining about the symptoms.
* You hear workers saying things like "it's always been like this ... it's impossible to change ... our company is hopeless ... it will never change."

So what can we do about learned helplessness in organisations?

It's as simple and as challenging as having to unlearn that helplessness and relearn the ability to ask the tough questions and be optimistic.

Perhaps most importantly, it's getting the key leaders at all levels in an organisation to realise and communicate the truth of "We are the They". When some form of responsibility and accountability is reinstated, then the helplessness can be banished by focused action.

Luckily for the Collingwood supporters last Friday night, this is what their team and the coaching staff did. The players didn't blame the umpires. They worked out what needed to be done, took action, and unfortunately for the Richmond supporters, they succeeded!

"Leaderful" Teams

This weekend is the start of the Australian Football League (AFL) competition. In a couple of hours I am heading off to see my team the Richmond Tigers play (http://www.richmondfc.com.au/).

The start of the season is always a wonderful time. At that stage it seems that your team is potentially capable of anything. Every supporter of every team is convinced that this is “their year”. No one has won, and no one has lost. Ah ... the possibilities.

But from a leadership perspective, what I have found increasingly interesting over the past couple of years, is that clubs and coaches are no longer appointing just one captain and a vice-captain. Instead, they talk about the “leadership group” or “co-captains”.

Of course, leadership groups have always existed in all sporting teams, in businesses and in organisations. What’s interesting to me now is that this being formally acknowledged. I wonder why?

A well-known Australian - Ric Charlesworth (http://www.riccharlesworth.com/) (Australian representative hockey player, former Federal politician and coach of the Australian women’s hockey team that won the Gold Medal at the Sydney Olympics) wrote about creating “leaderful teams” in his book The Coach: Managing for Success. What did he mean by this?

Charlesworth’s theory, that he implemented in the undeniably successful women’s hockey team, is that there are a number of downsides of appointing a single team captain - just one leader. Not only does it put a lot of pressure on that one individual, but perhaps more importantly, it often means that the rest of the team tend to sit back and wait for the leader to tell them/show them what to do.

His alternative is to create a team atmosphere where everyone is a team leader - the so-called “leaderful team”. But Charlesworth doesn’t mean some anarcho-syndicalist commune! Instead, he argues that at different points in a game or in the life of a team, different team members with different strengths will assume the role of leader.

And that’s the evolution that we are seeing in AFL teams at the moment. There’s no longer one leader, there are many.

How does your work or sporting team do it? Does this approach make sense to you?

Optimism, laughter and leadership

I’m always intrigued by the answers I get when I ask people how many terrific leaders or managers they have had in their working lives. Invariably the answer is very low. Often none, and never more than two or three. But why is that?

Simply put, it’s bloody hard to be a terrific leader. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up the challenge of becoming one.

In fact, one of the very real ways that terrific leaders distinguish themselves from the masses is their sense of optimism, and their ability to infect others with those same feelings.
John Seely Brown, the Chief Scientist at Xerox, describes this ability eloquently:

The art of making an impact through people is the ability to pull people together, to attract colleagues to the work, to create the critical mass ...To communicate is not just a matter of pushing information at another person, it’s creating an experience, to engage their gut - and that’s an emotional skill. (www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB.html)

An emotional skill? I have just been rereading Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s 2002 work Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with Emotional Intelligence (www.amazon.com/Primal-Leadership-Realizing-Emotional-Intelligence/dp/157851486X - 144k - 23 Mar 2007 -) and I was struck by their opening chapter as they argue that one of the most important roles of any leader is a “primal” role. That is, driving a team’s collective emotions in a positive direction and avoiding any “toxic” emotions.

Sounds a bit wishy washy doesn’t it? Certainly leaders have more sway over a team’s emotions than others. They tend to talk more, they have greater formal authority, and they are also often the team member who gets to frame the discussion.

I was really struck by a study that Goleman et al quoted that was run by Yale University School of Management in 1998. Not only did this study find that cheerfulness spreads more easily than depression (that’s got to be good news!), but upbeat moods increase cooperation, fairness and therefore business performance.

However, to me the most interesting thing of all was that these scientists also found that laughter was a terrific team performance barometer. Laughing together signals trust, comfort, empathy and a common view of the world.

About six weeks ago I caught up with about ten of my ex military mates for a very informal dinner and a few cold beers on a hot Melbourne evening. At work the next day I was struck by how sore my jaw muscles were. With my tetanus shots up to date I realised it was simply from spending so much of the previous evening laughing with my friends - a group that enjoys a strong sense of trust and a common view of the world.

So what? We probably all enjoy the company of our friends and a few laughs. How does optimism and laughter impact on the performance of a team, organisation or firm?

Psychologists regularly talk about “mirroring”. That is, how moods or emotions spread in a group of people through verbal and non-verbal signals in a relatively short period of time (less than 15 minutes). Ask yourself, who would you rather be working with, that touchy, cranky and domineering boss, or that optimistic and enthusiastic one? And that’s the first example of how optimism can positively impact your team performance. Optimistic people attract followers. Negative leaders repel them.

A second way in which optimism and laughter help is simply that by generating upbeat moods in teams, people view themselves, others and events more optimistically. This has been shown to enhance creativity and decision making skills.

Don’t believe me? Then take a look at a 2000 study in Administrative Science Quarterly (www.johnson.cornell.edu/publications/asq/) that looked at 62 Chief Executives and their leadership groups, comparing their energy, enthusiasm, determination, and emotional conflicts with their business results over time. The conclusion? The more positive the senior leadership team was, the more cooperatively they worked together and the better the business results.

So, think positively, enjoy a laugh and give off that vibe. Your team will thank you.