You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'leadership' category.
Image via Wikipedia
So what does fractal mean in plain language?
In the social professions that are my milieu - psychology, HR, workplaces - fractal means “walking the talk”. It means using the working procedures you would like to see in an organization to bring those working practices about.
It means delivering democracy through democratic means.
It means having the same pattern of organization throughout the organization.
I attended the Bucks08 Social Media Camp
at Bucks New University in High Wycombe on Saturday 17 May 2008. It was organized by Chris Hambly and kindly hosted by Bucks.
It was an unconference. It is free, and registration is simple on an open wiki. Any one who wants to present, signs up in the room and time slot of their choice. It is gently organized with people changing rooms on the hour as they wish.
Around 60 people converged from as far afield as Brighton, Leicester, Nottingham and Sweden (yes, it was international with people from at least 7 countries there). Personally, I went to sessions on
- online recruiting
- wiki and facebook support for the careers section at University of London
- community management in a newspaper group
- a 2.0 application ‘Sketchbook’ for assisting arts students develop their portfolio from Julia Gaimster
- a double session on metrics
- running fashion shows in 2nd life from Julia Gaimster and Andy Savery
- my own on personal journeys into 2.0.
How was this fractal?
Social media capitalizes on self-organization. We provide a framework where people can “read and write”. Social media is a framework in which the audience has a voice.
An unconference is minimally structured and, far from being disorganized, captures the energy of people with a purpose. So it is fractal in the subject matter is participation and the method of organizing is participative.
And then it becomes fractal again, because participants leave and blog about the conference on their own initiative and using their own resources. Before I had got home, a High Wycombe website designer, Paul Imre, had written up the session on metrics. Dan Thornton wrote up his take on social metrics with a parallel on reflecting on your marriage. Michael Clarke provided a running blog on the same session with comments on the whole day.
And it becomes fractal again, in that Dan & Paul summarized the discussion with the metaphors of marriages and “investing in a dam” to build and release potential. Dan’s metaphor was about managing social media. Paul was talking about deciding how much to invest in social media. In so doing, they effectively advanced the discussion and took it to another level. Within the afternoon, several people had replied, continuing the engagement, which I suspect will continue in other forums too.
Bucks New University must be very proud. They would have been happy, I am sure, with a smoothly organized event. This was so much more: it illustrated the power of social media, it supported a community of practice, it engaged new people, it generated new material.
To use Paul’s metaphor, investment that increases potential and to use Dan’s, when we enjoy ourselves, we come back for more!
PS The next media camp is at SAE in London on 5 July 2008.
When do we have cross-generational conversations? And how do they go?
Steve Roesler blogged a few days ago about prevailing concerns about developing generational differences. Steve was asked “what do we have in common?”
This led me to ponder when we have cross-generational conversations? And whether they are conversations at all?
- When was the last time you spoke in depth about something of mutual concern with someone in another generation?
- Was the younger person able to access the older person’s experience and compare how things were done at different times?
- Was the older person able to listen to the younger person’s experience and acquire insight into their existence?
And what, if anything, did we do to promote and support the conversation?
Is there anyone out there writing on cross-generational conversations?
Image via WikipediaI am looking for my mouse
Clay Shirky at Web2.0 Expo tells the story of a 4 year old who gets bored looking at a DVD and crawls around the back of the screen: “I am looking for my mouse”. This is the story of child brought into a technological age where we expect to participate in whatever we do. “Looking for the mouse” is the mark of a generation who expects to take initiative.
Who moved my cheese?
Just ten years’ ago, we were delighted by another story, an allegory, Who moved my cheese? This story is about a generation who does not expect to take initiative. Indeed, it resists taking the initiative. It wants to ‘put the clock back’.
We spend a lot of time crying, “we want the cheese to come back.” Or, words to that effect. We celebrate the past rather than the emerging future.
The positive message of this allegory is that once we can move beyond fear, we are free to move on, and find fresher, more interesting, more enjoyable cheese.
My advice is “follow that mouse!”
I live a double life as I have said before. In my one life, I work with Zimbabweans who are frozen in terror about the changes going on in their country. Their fears are real, and justified. So too, is their desire to go back to a time when cheese was there for the taking. Their liberation will ultimately come when they stop protesting the unfairness of it all and start to explore their future.
In my other life, I work with HR professionals who are also frozen in terror. In the case of HR, there is a little cheese left, but not much. The world has moved on to work patterns where there are new demands and new generation who says “I am looking for the mouse”?
For Zimbabweans and HR professionals, I am looking for my mouse has a sadder meaning The mice have already detected the dwindling cheese supply and have left.
My advice is “follow that mouse”!
Ben & Ros Zander on leadership
“The job of a leader isn’t to make decisions. It’s to make “distinctions.” “The discipline of making distinctions,” she says, “is based on two questions: What assumptions am I making that I don’t know I’m making, and what can I create that will give me something new? Making distinctions is about performing small, inventive acts — acts that are totally different from normal strategizing or scheming. Leaders of the future will create categories that give people information on how to do their jobs and on how to live their lives.”
For the full article: here.
Step-by-step
- What surprises me? What has brought me to bone-shuddering halt? What would I like to know more about?
- Who else is interested in this surprise but is saying nothing?
- Who would be so happy if I asked them what they felt?
Here we are.
If you have never read The Spectator magazine, you should give yourself a treat. It is extraordinarily well written and often has news long before the mainstream British newspapers.
It is also very Conservative. Though timely, erudite and often very funny, it serves more to tell you what you don’t believe, than what you do. It is bit like exploring the inside of a hat, to work out what the outside looks like, and you do it, because the inside is more fun than the outside. Perverse?
Today, in an article intended, I presume, to support the Conservative leader, David Cameron, they wrote about poverty in the UK and two topical issues: the use of metrics, which Brits love to hate; and problem of immigrants who work for less than locals - an odd complaint for a Conservative party I would have thought, but nonetheless! Both these issues point to two themes that are current in contemporary Management Theory.
METRICS
The article suggests what is wrong with so many metrics. A metric is a signpost. It tells you which way to go. It is not the destination.
There is only one destination that is acceptable in management and politics - that is the agreement and happiness of our constituents that we have arrived in the right place.
If we arrive in a place and they decide they don’t like it, we can’t make the argument that we followed the metrics. It just doesn’t wash!
Pick some metrics that guide your leadership. Don’t make them the substitute of leadership !
So to the issue of poverty and politics in the UK. Don’t ask Gordon Brown the numbers about poverty. Ask him, are you happy about poverty? He blusters and says yes. Ask him, are you interested in my views on poverty - are you going to ask why I asked? He asks! You tell him. Give him the problem you wanted solved and come back next week and tell him how well it has been solved!
Where do metrics fit in? When it is your job to supervise ‘leaders’ like teachers, nurses and police officers, ask them what metrics or signals will help them achieve satisfaction with their leadership. Don’t impose the metric though. When you do, you do not improve leadership, you do the opposite. You relieve them of the responsibility of their actions beyond that metric!
Just hold the conversation about what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it! That’s all.
OVERPAID BRITS & OTHERS
The second story was about a Scottish joiner whose job is now done by a Pole at 6 pounds an hour. Apparently the joiner’s wife stood up and asked Cameron what he was going to do about it! Exactly what I recommend. He took the job as leader, give him the problem. His answer - ban Poles!
Bizarre.
Couldn’t he have said: Here is my aide. Call him/her and make an appointment - we will work this out.
To the aide, he says: find me the smartest MBA student on our books. Ask him/her to give me a briefing in a week. I want to know about all and every industry that uses joining as a skill. Could s/he also social-network other students to brainstorm any and every industry who can possibly use joining to advantage? And give me a list of the top ten business people in the UK who might use joiners.
And then meet the joiner, find out what he really wants, with the MBA student on hand, and work out who should be meeting with each other to use this skill, and joining is a skill, that is obviously not being used.
Get the right people together and ask them to produce a business plan for how the joiner is going to use his skill to make lots of money (and lots of taxes).
And ask them to report back to him in a week.
Who is betting the answer would include “more Poles please” and a air ticket for the Scottish joiner to nip over to Poland to do the recruiting with his wife in tow to explain the Scottish school system (she is a school teacher by all accounts).
People don’t ask politicians questions (or managers for that matter) as a prompt to blame someone else. They want a solution.
They want positive ideas based on our skills, passions, interests, wants, hopes and dreams. This is leadership.
BUSINESS MODELS OF THE FUTURE
Managers are struggling with contemporary ideas about human capital.
In addition to money being capital, in addition to land being capital, we are capital.
Our hopes and dreams, our sense of entitlement (!): this is our capital.
Businesses of the 21st century will be built around who we are and what we want to be. That is the challenge of management and leadership.
Building our lives around us. Positively. Cheerfully. Collectively.
Cheers to The Spectator.
This is the best of times and the worst of times. Below is a preliminary case study of positive psychology during times of extreme stress and despair.
The beginning . . once upon a time there was an election in a landlocked country nestled just above South Africa, to the west of Mozambique, and cuddled to the north by Zambia and Botswana to the east.
You all know the Zimbabwe elections took place a little while ago - 24 days to be precise. I have been following them closely.
The first weekend after the poll, there was feverish excitement as votes were counted and results were announced (and signed off in triplicate) at local level, polling tent-by-polling tent.
And then silence - no official announcements. Excitement curdled to despair. Moods yo-yo’ed as events unfolded, and as pictures of stomach-turning brutality are smuggled out of the country by brave activists, people have become palpably depressed.
And then breaking news. . . it all changed.
Somebody blew the whistle on a container ship, the An Yue Jiang, who wanted to offload munitions for Zimbabwe at Durban, in South Africa. The dockers’ union, SATAWU, refused to offload. The Anglican church and activist lawyers sought a High Court order to prevent the weapons crossing South Africa. A German bank joined in, hoping to seize the arms as part payment for Zimbabwe’s debts.
Before the court orders could be served, the An Yue Jiang weighed anchor and left in a hurry. The saga intensified as she reported herself to Lloyds as a casualty, and people all around the world spent the weekend trying to track the vessel and petitioning governments and worker unions to prevent her refueling and unloading her deadly cargo.
Heads of state and political parties have begun to offer support and the citizen action continues, determined not to allow arms of any sort reach Zimbabwe while they might be used against her own people.
Positive psychology
People are understandably upset, nervous, anxious, outraged, sickened, indignant, angry. . . negative emotion abounds. Emotion is highly contagious and I have watched myself abandon the gym, eat too much, remained glued to the internet even when little was likely to happen. I have become mildly depressed and I am well fed, I am warm and dry, I am safe. I can walk out my door into the English spring.
Action restores mood
The citizen campaign to stop the An Yue Jiang unloading her cargo is utterly spontaneous. People find the site hosting the bulletin board and join in. When I last looked, there are more suggestions, addresses and initiatives that any one person can support.
I haven’t been able to do a formal count. I don’t know what the churn of people is. I also haven’t counted the number of active and depressed posts. There are still the angry people, but they tend to be newcomers.
Sending one email to your MP might not sound like much but this is the spirit of the age. Five minutes here and five minutes there, and it adds up. A petition to Thabo Mbeki when he arrived at the UN Security Council last Wednesday had 150 000 signatures. Opinion is turning.
More importantly the mood is turning. But emotion is contagious. Moods can turn down as well as up. I was listening to SWRadio Africa this evening. A young lady had called in to discuss her views. Amongst other matters, she discussed the perpetrators of the unspeakable brutalities in Zimbabwe. She believed that people were enticed into taking these actions for small amounts of money or food, or other promises, and they went along it because they were desperate - they had no choice.
This is the essence of positive psychology: the perception of choice.
When we feel we have no choice, we take the feeling as fact, and are unable to perceive the small alternatives that are open to us. Conversely, as we cheer up, we find choices, small as they are. And as we act, we remain cheerful, improve our objective situation, see more choices, small as they are, and act again, in a positive spiral of hope.
We move in the direction of the questions we ask
The spiral is reversed awfully quickly, as I have learned sitting safely and snugly out of harm’s way. Our discourse is important. An important principle in appreciative management, a close sibling of positive psychology, is that we move in the direction of the questions we ask. When things are very bad, it is important to ask positive questions. If we don’t then we stare the predator in the face, and are as the saying goes, ’scared witless’. And for Zimbabweans who like to ‘make a plan’, that is a magnified horror.
I think it is time to spread the viral citizen campaign to reach more people and more Zimbabweans. Let’s convert despair into hope, one click at a time. Can you help?
If you are able to help, we are open to all ideas. As I write:
- There is an urgent need for IT help to build and sustain an offshore website on which to post petition letters and addresses.
- There is an urgent need for people to petition governments, unions and businesses who trade with the Zimbabwean government.
- I believe there is a move to try to provide more secure communication lines into and out of Zimbabwe.
Image via Wikipedia
The eminent social scientist Karl Weick once said that social problems are often defined in ways that prevent us doing anything about them.
I have been watching the Zimbabwean elections closely. As facts emerge, I have been listing them on a “secondary” blog.
The situation in Zimbabwe is as dire any conflict in history. Can we move here? Can we move there? It seems the ultimate Catch 22. Whatever we do may create more damage.
I believe however that much of our hopelessness comes from our own representation of what is happening. Could we not, instead, look at difficult objective conditions that require resolution?
Today, people are starting close in, as the poet David Whyte would say.
Today, we are going to do something positive. Today we are going to say thank you. Today we are going to say we are with you. Today we are going to send emails to the President of Zambia who is the current chairman of SADC. Today, we are going to take 3 minutes to write a short, brief, courteous email saying,
Dear President Mwanawasa,
I write to thank you and the leaders of SADC sincerely for convening the extraordinary meeting concerning Zimbabwe and to extend my support and goodwill for a resolution that is satisfactory to all the people of Zimbabwe and her neighbours.
Sincerely,
I am patching in a long excerpt of a post from Sokwanele that gives the email addresses of SADC. Zimbabwe for a positive future.
TAKE ACTION
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has called an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to discuss the Zimbabwean presidential poll delay. This is the first move by Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours to intervene since the elections on 29th March 2008. President Mwanawasa is the current Chairman of the 14-nation South African Development Community. This is what he said yesterday:
I wish to take this opportunity to commend the people of Zimbabwe for the calm and peaceful manner in which the elections were conducted.
Similarly, I appeal to them to maintain the same spirit of calmness which they exhibited during the elections as they await the results of the presidential elections.
However, given developments immediately following the elections, I have decided, as Chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to call an extraordinary summit on Saturday 12th April, 2008 to discuss ways and means of assisting the people of Zimbabwe with the current impasse as well as adopt a co-ordinated approach to the situation in that country.
Both President Morgan Tsvangirai and opposition leader Robert Mugabe will be attending the emergency meeting.
Support our democratically elected leader and take action.
What YOU can do
You can voice your feelings and SHOUT OUT for FREEDOM. Communicate with key SADC people attending the meeting.
Tell them that Zimbabweans have the right to live in a democratic, free and peaceful country. Tell them your personal experiences and why you want change. Make them understand what it is like to be in Zimbabwe today. Tell them we voted for change, we got change, and we want change now. Speak the TRUTH.
HOW you can do it
Email, fax or phone using the details provided below. Keep your messages real and honest but also short and to the point. Remember: thousands of us will be doing this so they will have a lot to read. Let’s make sure they can read and hear it all!
Be polite at all times. People don’t pay attention to angry messages (look at us: Mugabe has been angry with the people for many years now and we just ignored him and voted him out anyway). Anger does not work.
1. Call or fax or email the Zambian State House with a message for President Levy Mwanawasa:
- Tel: +260 1 266147 or 262094
- Fax: +260 1 266092
- Send an email to Mr John Musukuma, Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations: johnmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
- Use the contact form on the Zambian State House website here to send an email:
http://www.statehouse.gov.zm/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3 - Bonus email: we’re not sure if this is a direct contact for President Mwanawasa, but just in case it is, copy all the emails you send to: differmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
2. Call or fax a message to President Thabo Mbeki - President of South Africa
- Tel: +27 (0)12 300 5200 and +27 (0)21 464 2100
- Fax: +27 (0)12 323 8246 and +27 (0)21 462 2838
- Send an email to Mr Mukoni Ratshitanga Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Spokesperson: mukoni@po.gov.za
3. Call or email Lieutenant Colonel Tanki Mothae - Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs at SADC
- Tel: +267 361 1001 or +267 397 2848
- E-mail: tmothae@sadc.int
4. Copy all your emails to this general SADC email address:
- Email: registry@sadc.int
5. If you want to attach images to your emails, you can download copies of the photographs at the top of this mailing from the Sokwanele flickr account here:
6. Forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to take action too.
7. Be positive, stay strong, and never forget that we have won.
Alex Deschamps-Sonsino linked yesterday suggesting a degree of jadedness in the design industry.
Rick Poyno wrote this about design conferences. As most of us discover this after going to one or two professional conferences, I thought it might be worth pasting it in here to reassure ‘newbies’ that they aren’t the only ones who have noticed.
Typical professional conference
“Only rarely at this kind of event will you encounter strong analysis and original new ideas. “Programmers of design conferences often appear to be unaware of the limits of their worldview, uninterested in new thinking and practice, and insufficiently confident to address controversial issues,” says Nico Macdonald, one of the most active conference-goers on the British design scene. “Design conferences tend to be aimed at ‘jobbing’ designers, who the programmers think want ‘dog and pony’ show-and-tells, maximising presentation with minimal explanation and little”
So what do we want from our conferences?
“Too many design conferences don’t aim much higher than entertainment, escapism and the vaguest kind of hero-worshipping ‘inspiration’ – as in, “I wish I could be a famous designer like you.” What they should provide is unique occasions to concentrate design thinking and propel it to a higher level. discussion.”
Still, the most rewarding conferences are those that succeed in promoting interaction and debate
For that purpose, small and focused is likely to work best.
The historical influences shaping Gen Y
There is an excellent article on Gen Y from The Office NewB on Brazen Careerist today. And who says Gen Y can’t write! It sums up the influences on Gen Y and shows the potential of their generation.
1. Getting along in an equal world.
2. Taking personal responsibility for the economic viability & sustainability of our work and lifestyle.
3. Re-centering our lives on our families and community life.
4. Fully exploring new technologies.
5. Extending self-determination to our relationships in the workplace.
I recently had an assignment in which I worked intensively with a large Gen Y client-base for three years. As a Gen X’er, I had a steep learning curve, and it is one that I glad I made.
I’ve found Gen Y refreshing. It is true that they want information to be personally meaningful. But who doesn’t? Gen Y simply live at a time when technology has allowed democracy to step forward. They are showing us the way.
Are Gen Y prepared for leadership?
I’ve also recently had some bad experiences with Gen Y as leaders and I asked around the blogosphere for their thoughts. This is important. Many Gen Yers are already in positions of responsibility and I have particularly disliked they way they are unable to relate to people with experience. I don’t mean kow-tow; I mean to relate; to acknowledge the existence of others; to enquire and to learn from others. These failures challenged my understanding that Gen Y are good at working in teams.
In drafting my comment to The Office NewB’s post, I may have found the answer and I would be interested in your opinion.
Gen Y are good at dealing with distributed decision making, not teams per se. In distributed decision making, the final conclusion is found by repeated iterations. Consensus is marked by a majority vote in some cases and supported in others by the absence of another compelling argument.
Distributed decision making does not require a leader to encourage involvement. The distributed system has been set up by a games designer, or puppet master, whom players acknowledge, implicitly but do not communicate with directly. Leadership in these systems moves around depending on who is contributing the most interesting solution. The games designers and puppet masters also respond to the players as the game unfolds.
In a conventional workplace, leadership does not move around. It is vested predominantly in one person and that person has an obligation to find the information relevant to the problem. The system assumes the leader has the cognitive and behavioral framework to detect and to collate all the information.
It is not and never has been a feature of command and control to ignore subordinates. That would be so silly.
If the system is malfunctioning and the ‘boss’ is not sufficiently capable to recognize and organize all the relevant information, or if the people put in those positions don’t expect to play that role, or if they problems we are addressing are too complex for any one person to function in that way, then we may need to overhaul either our processes or our structures.
I wonder if anyone else has a view one this?
I have never been totally happy, no pun intended, with positive psychology’s approach to objectively bad situations. I am totally persuaded by our ability to make the best of good situation. I am persuaded by our contribution to sort-of-bad situations. I am persuaded that in a terminal situation, we may as well be happy. I can also point you towards little experiments that cost you nothing but your time and that you can try on your own.
But there are three situations where I am not persuaded positive psychology can help us much, though in truth, nothing much helps in these situations.
First, when you are in a bad situation alone, and I mean socially alone. I haven’t looked closely at being physically alone.
Second, when other people will harm you, unless you harm them first.
Third, when you have experienced sustained social abuse and your fight/flight mechanism is on a hair trigger.
I watched a Scottish movie over the weekend, 16 Years of Alcohol, that illustrated a combination of these three situations. The protagonist grew up with an alcoholic father and joined a gang. While he was generally terrorizing the neighborhood, he met a girl and was motivated to change his life. The story is about his intelligent and thoughtful attempts and ultimately his death on the streets.
We can compare this story to Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched last weekend, and the well known movie about hope, Shawshank Redemption. In Shawshank, we have a protagonist who out-thinks and outwits people and is able to leave the situation by tunneling out of the jail. In Goodbye Mr Chips, the protagonist has a mentor who is slightly above the situation and he is able to grow himself and ultimately change the environment around him. Put this starkly, I think you already see the shape of my point.
In 16 Years of Alcohol, the agent of change, a young woman, was a resource but not sufficient to change the situation for the protagonist. And importantly, he did not exit the situation. I’m afraid he should have left town!
The protagonist asks himself at one point: where is hope in a hopeless place? There was an excellent line though where the young lady suggests to the protagonist that the past does not come looking for him - that he went looking for the past. And he talks about stopping the past leaking into your heart. These are good points - with slightly more resources and slightly less stress, he might have made it.
This is a realistic account of dealing with extreme hardship. If you are interested in using positive psychology to move on from bad places, you should have a look. Though a tragedy and not a feel good movie, you are left with an abiding memory of struggle and courage. It is a respectful account of people brought up in the hardest places in our society.
Oh! I do like this expression. How do we solve large problems or answer large questions? Break the question into as many small questions as we can.
And if we are group or a family, do the same thing. Brainstorm the question and ask everyone to contribute, “two or three (neither more or less) specific things” about how they will be affected by the big question.
Bang on time - this will be useful this weekend!
Eeee . . ., why do I have empty seats? Where are my students!!!
Much of my life, I’ve taught in Universities. As we all know well, our ability to lecture varies enormously. Some people pack the rooms, and students from other courses are sneaking in the back. Some people empty the rooms, and are never quite sure how they do it!
Most of us are somewhere in between. Delighted when we delight the students and a little curmudgeonly when students are missing because we would just love to know how the stars pack them in.
Oh . . . that’s where my students are!
I was privileged to work alongside someone with theater training, who taught marketing, and who had worked in broadcasting. This was great! She could hold a room AND explain how she did it.
She asked questions about her performance differently. Instead of seeing everything as function of what she did or didn’t do (and also entering a negative emotional spiral when an hour wasn’t too sparkling), she thought about what the class was doing.
She thought about people entering, and taking their seats. What were they feeling and what were they doing? How they changed as she entered? How they reacted when she flicked the microphone switch to green: go. How they listened to her first sentence. How what they felt changed? etc.
She understands classes well enough to choreograph their reactions. Whatever she did was aimed at producing a wonderful collective experience.
Now I have found someone else who can explain charisma!
I am a member of Xing, which is the European equivalent of LinkedIn. It’s worth looking at because it runs on slightly different lines.
Erica Nelson posted this brilliant article in Xing’s group for Global Business Women group. It is about how to write an attractive blog.
It’s also sage advice for thinking about presentations, lectures, meetings, and for that matter, going to a party! Erica also writes here.
Thanks Erica!
I wrote up these FIVE steps for one of my other blogs around a discussion of what is important to startups and how to choose people to work with.
I think it is important to know why you are hiring someone. It helps to be clear why they are critical to your operation. It is very hard though, when you don’t really understand what they do or how they do it. Most of us would feel like that about somebody in the organization, say the accountant? We might also, without thinking about it, feel like that towards the intern!
I like my 5 steps and I thought I would share them here. I am using them now to talk to myself about tasks I don’t like. They seem to work.
1. Explain!
2. Show me!
3. What’s next?
4. When will we finish?
5. What is my role here?
Sociologists sometimes write of a masculine culture. Hofstede writes of masculine and feminine cultures.
The ‘prep’ scene in Goodbye Mr Chips illustrates this point. A pupil slams down a books while Mr Chips’ back is turned. This pupil has already challenged Mr Chips successfully on two occasions: mimicking his walk behind his back and disrupting his class spectacularly.
At first, Mr Chips does not know who is making the noise. He cunningly uses the glass of a large picture as a mirror and calls on the boy without giving away how he knows who is the culprit. Then luck would have it that the boy’s name is “collie” and he is able to humiliate the boy by suggesting that is the name of a dog. And so it goes on.
This is a masculine culture. It is based on pecking order, domination and humiliation.
We aren’t being rude about guys. Why should you put up with it either? The story line in Goodbye Mr Chips is that guys were challenging this way of life in 1910, one hundred years ago.
The alternative
If you want the alternative, look at the scene where Mrs Chips challenges the headmaster. The challenge is based on reason, persuasion, and persistence. Not domination and subjugation. The headmaster deftly avoids the challenge. He rejects an unfamiliar idea, which would be alright in its own terms. He rejects it, though, to restore his domination. Later, in the dance scene, being a wise man, he concedes the validity of the new idea (and validates it by including it in the hierarchy!)
Does life has to be a series of battles? Can we not trade visions? Can we not have Eureka moments when we learn something unexpected? Can we not do the equivalent of come up to a crest of a hill and be amazed by the vista in from of us?
If the 21st century will be about anything, it will be about a currency of visions rather than the currency of force.
A long back story
I took out Goodbye Mr Chips from my local library thinking it would be nice to relax for a couple of hours with this gentle, slightly sentimental, very inspirational movie. For non-Brits, this is a classic pygmalion, teacher story with romance thrown in. Think To Sir With Love, History Boys and Freedom Writers. I think when Yanks write pygmalion stories they are typically about basketball coaches. Britain has teacher stories.
Goodbye Mr Chips is a double-pygmalion story. Mr Chipping is an awkward “Latin master” in a “public school”. If you are non-Brit, read exclusive private school (or prep school in Americanese - a prep school here preps you to go to public school which takes you to the army academy or university).
Mr Chipping has two mentors. A charming relaxed fellow teacher and his wife. They are the catalysts in allowing Mr Chipping, or Chips as he comes to be called, to incorporate the softer side of his nature in his teaching style, reform the rugged-masculine-bullying culture of the school, and to encourage boy-after-boy, and their sons after them, to blend the feminine sides of their nature with the masculine demands of their school and obligations to country.
I thought I was borrowing the musical version with Peter O’Toole from the library. When I got home, I discovered I a new version with Martin Clunes, the star of the TV show, Doc Martin. He makes a marvellous Mr Chips with the mixture of clumsiness and kindness that we also see in Doc Martin. (He doesn’t sing btw, and nor do we hear the boys singing which we did in the earlier version).
The story seems slightly different too - but so be it. After this long back story, this is the quote I wanted to give you.
“I found that when I stopped judging myself harshly, the world became kinder to me. Remember I told you once, go out, and look around the world. Do that now. Only this time, let the world look at you. And the difference, I assure you, the world will like what it sees.”
Positive psychology is more than positive thinking
This is the concept which takes positive psychology far beyond positive thinking. It has echoes of the pygmalion effect, popularized in the musical My Fair Lady in which a flower girl becomes a lady. It includes the Galatea effect, ably researched by Dov Eden, who also researches the pygmalion effect in work settings. Basically, the Pygmalion effect is the effect of other people’s expectations on us. So a teacher creates clever pupils by expecting more of them. A teacher creates dull pupils by expecting failure and subtly communicating doubts and restricting the resources and time we need to learn. The Galatea effect works the other way around. It is the effect of our own self-perception. It is not that seeing is believing. But that, believing is seeing.
Is this new?
George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion 100 years ago. 150 years ago Goethe wrote:
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
- Goethe
The idea that we shape the future is so new to us in the west. The idea that the universe comes to us sounds a little new age.
Of course, we cannot do anything. We don’t want to do anything.
But there are some things, we want to do. And if we can imagine those things, if we believe in them deeply without effort, if they make sense, if they seem right in themselves, if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,
if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,then the universe conspires to help us.
Skeptical?
This is tautological, of course. It will work because it is right and it is right because it works.
Ask only whether what you want is right, and why you would want anything that doesn’t work!
Yesterday, I was down in London to attend the CIPD meeting on talent management. This is a hot issue.
“The war for talent”
With my recent experience teaching management to 900 predominantly Gen Y students in New Zealand, I wondered what they would make of that expression.
Would you like two employers to go to war to win you? Sounds good.
Are you a prize to be won? Mmmm . . .
There may be a war to be the best employer though, because Gen Y not only clutches a mobile, it is mobile.
Gen Y are often described as a feckless generation. They aren’t in my experience. Their mobile phones, metaphors of the age, deliver personal, relevant and timely information. They are more focused, more connected, more socially responsible and more time oriented than any generation that have gone before.
Are we going to keep up with them? Who will win the war for a Gen-Y-ready organization?
This reminds me of that famous saying. Whoops, there go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
Someone asked the question from the floor. Is talent management always about slots that we want to fill? Or, are the ambitions and interests of our people, and how they develop when they work with each other, our real competitive edge?
Is Gen Y going to rewrite the employment contract? Will work become a place where we are agentic? Where there is room for initiative? Where we become purposeful and imaginative because our work brings out what is purposeful and imaginative?
Will people or talent become less of a commodity, and more of an essential alliance between stakeholders?
is well explained in this Times on line article.
. . . with great and interesting posts every day.
Today Alex wrote on the recession, which is worrying lots of people. I’m a Zimbo so I am going, ahh! this ain’t so hard. Forgive me. This is what I have to say.
1. I have never worked with a lazy person, ever.
I have worked with people who were thoroughly disengaged and very unhappy. I have worked with people who I thought were misdirected (yes I thought, they didn’t).
People like working. The great trick is integrating people. And I will be the first to say that can be hard. I always take the view that we hired someone because they are good. If we are falling out, the responsibility is mutual and we should help the person (typically with the least power) move on to a better place - where they are highly valued, better paid, etc. And if we are so far down the line of conflict we can’t see the good anymore, we should back off and let someone else manage the relationship. I want to kiss goodbye (with relief as right now we are on a path to hating each other) and recover our friendship in due course. We both mismanaged our relationship. It is time for us to recover and make good.
2. I don’t want to work in a place where some pigs are more equal than others . . .
I’m a conventional HR-based psychologist. I do selection - you know those awful tests and reports telling you who you are. I can run up a comp-and-benefit scheme explaining who gets more money and why. I predict labor demand within organizations and match supply (to make sure we don’t suffer too much when you leave). I run the hello and goodbye programs. And I bollock anyone who gets into a disciplinary scenario because of the paper work they make for us all.
But I don’t want to work in a place where one person is more important than anyone else.
Everyone is important otherwise why did we hire them? Floors are not cleaned as a luxury. Clean floors are essential to the smooth running of our business, etc. etc.
I hate the idea that we look after the top 10% of people. Why do I select people, then, I hear you say? Because we have the technology to identify the matches that will never work - the extreme cases. Let’s make ourselves useful, folks. I am also happy when my deli refuses to sell me something because what I intend to do with their food is just plain horrible. There is nothing wrong with someone who knows, leaning over to someone who doesn’t, and saying, if you want to achieve X, do it like Y.
What a wonderful expression of goodwill. I am saved disappointment and I feel great that someone cared enough to tell me.
3. Can organizations be egalitarian? Don’t we need leaders?
I discovered Barbara Sliter’s blog Creatorship - courtesy of Galba Bright. Thank you so much.
I have stopped believing in leadership. I believe we thrust up people to represent us. It is a dynamic process, as we are seeing the States right now. The answer is not given, and the person who most respects the dynamic will win, by definition.
On a daily basis, in my conventional role as a work psychologist, leadership is shared. I deliver data, collected professionally and organized to inform action in the circumstances we are in. Our understanding of the situation evolves during discussions, as mine does. And “leadership” shifts with the part of the situation we are considering. The “leader”, be it the senior line manager present, or any one else, leads by representing our collective and considered view to us and to others.
Sometimes the senior line person is so much more experienced than the rest of us, they add an overview we all recognize immediately as bringing us together. Mostly, they are sufficiently experienced, in our line of work and in leadership roles (they probably started practicing at pre-school!) and recognize when we are reaching agreement which they sum up effectively so that we can move forward with full confidence in each other.
Often, they find the group view is very much at odds with their own, but they represent our view effectively anyway. They value their people. We are on the team for a reason. Together we will make good decisions. We won’t always be right. And sometimes we will be right, but won’t win.
But we will put our best foot forward! They know that.
Barbara puts this so much better than I do. People who haven’t had the privilege of working in professional, collegial settings are ready. Ready to co-create meaning at work.
What I can do, is add the stories and the robust HR technologies for the pay systems, etc. I’ve seen places where the “least senior” person chairs the meeting. It works. And why not? They will be the least opinionated after all!
4. Recessions offer opportunity too.
Go back to Zimbabwe I hear you say. Maybe I will. I haven’t heard that for a while - at least 6 months. I must be keeping good company.
What counts in life is finding opportunity in what looks like a negative space. A 3% downturn is not trouble, believe me! But it is disconcerting. The firms that sit down, and openly talk about what is opening up for them, will thrive.
To refer to the American elections again, I deliberately engaged with Obama-skeptics to find out their objections. They don’t want universal health insurance, presumably because it may cost them a little. My scampering mind screams OPPORTUNITY! Where is Melissa Clark-Reynolds? I don’t know if you are Kiwi, Alex, but Richard will know whom I mean.
Whomever asks the best questions under frustration wins! I’ve also just found Galba Bright’s blog. He has posted today a great heuristic for managing meetings and particularly tricky meetings. I am going to look at that more closely today.
Thanks, Alex. I liked your post. It is closer to the egalitarian world I like (provided I am in charge of course!). I like working with knowledge workers. And BTW, Gen Y really get this. I had a conversation late last night with a colleague’s son who had been deputed by his father to help me with a website. At one point the young man said to me: tell me a little more about your skill set so I know what you will be contributing. Yep, indeed. They hold their own!
Don’t blog in a vacuum - comment on other people’s blogs
Any “coldie” as I have heard people from the 1.0 or cold-war era called, will hesitate to take part in online discussions, and is amazed that “post-coldies” do, and quite happily. Do! Do take part!
I have just discovered Barbara Sliter’s site Creatorship and I discovered it in inimitable 2.0 style. I went to the Chief Happiness Officer blog. Alex was doing something with snow (pardon me I’m from Africa); Steve Roesler was guesting; Galba Bright joined the discussion of one of Steve’s posts; he had a look at one of my blog’s and said you will enjoy . . . You are right. Thank you. I do.
Thanks Galba, Steve, Alex and not least, Barbara. If you are interested in leadership, personal development and real-world applications of complexity theory, you should have Creatorship on your feed reader.
The promise of the 21st century
I know a lot of people my age who are rather gloomy about the way the world is going. Change is certainly in the air. Whether we see it as good or bad, depends on the meaning we perceive and more so, on our intuitions about how we will be connected in the new order of things.
That is why I love Barbara Sliter’s site. She has the gift of pointing to a horizon that welcomes everyone, young and old, experienced and inexperienced, from your country and mine.
One excerpt:
Recent Comments