Category Archives: The Leadership Project

Happy at work? Part 2

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The story so far:

Two receptions. A university starts a conversation about creating a happy, positive workplace and is ridiculed by staff and observers alike. A business magazine publishes an article suggesting employers thank employees for their work and an online leadership forum reacts with dismay and fury. Both audiences assume the employer is being false and manipulative, and is asking them to be false and manipulative too. What is going on here?

Here are some speculations.

I hear a couple of unexamined assumptions in the audiences’ reactions. The first assumption is that work is work and it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. The old Protestant/Calvinist streak is alive and well in our thinking here. We might have had “The Sixties”, to the faux despair of conservative or Tory politicians, but no matter how much love was free and how many bongs were smoked, they are a pimple on the bottom of an elephant in comparison to the depth and breadth of the Calvinist mindset and its commitment to joylessness.

The second assumption is that it’s not possible to enjoy work. Possibility can certainly occur like this. Damn infuriating! Talk to someone luxuriating in some beautiful, faithful misery of their own, suggest it could be different, and then see what happens. All I can say is you’d better watch your eyes. As for some poor schmuck who comes along and suggests it is possible, and, moreover, as in the case of the university, “we’d like you to do it”, well, the fury will be untrammelled.

This second assumption is starting to approach another factor, a deeper one, which may be what’s really running the show. It concerns the fear of blame, and the confusion about blame and responsibility.

We are enraged with the idea work may not have to be hard, disagreeable and coercive because it raises the spectre that our suffering may not be inevitable and this is a problem.

If our suffering is inevitable, then we can feel ourselves free from the fear of blame. Because it’s always blame, the premonition of blame, that’s lurking in our consciousness. Our Western culture is weaned and steeped in blame. We are all scarred with it almost from birth, and we will do anything to avoid it.

If, however, our suffering is not inevitable, well then that’s when things start to get tricky. If we were to admit the possibility that our suffering at work, our suffering in any sphere of life, were not inevitable, then a question would arise: who is responsible (or in the terms we’d hear it, who is to blame) for our suffering?

And then we may start to see, out of the corner of our eye, that we are there. We may start to see we bear responsibility for our lives and our experience in this moment, including our happiness and our suffering. Around the same time the stoppers in our ears, placed there by our own hand, might fall out and the call to give up blame and resentment and do something different might reach us at last.

***

In summary, my theory is that we ridicule the idea it might be possible to be happy and satisfied at work because we prefer the prospect of our suffering to the prospect of taking responsibility. The former is familiar after all; we know how to play that game. The boss is the boss, and we are the bossed, and if each of us just plays our respective roles, the world will go on turning. We may be miserable, but we’ve survived this far, and we’ll continue to survive.

For many people, however, there comes a day when the bankruptness of this stance is no longer tolerable. On that day, an opportunity presents itself. The opportunity to be a leader. When that day comes for you, what will you choose? To be a whinger, or a leader?

***

Image: Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Vincent van Gogh

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Happy at work?

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Two reports. The first in a national newspaper, the second in an online forum on leadership.

First report. The newspaper reported a major university had just published a document, prepared on their behalf by a big consulting organisation, which urged university staff to adopt “positive” behaviour in the workplace. Staff were furious, the article said.

Everything about the newspaper article was sneering, from its title – “So happy together” – to sentences such as this:

So far all RMIT’s 12-page, dot-point cajolement to be happy at work has succeeded in doing is raising the ire of its academics …

The commenters duly chimed in too.

Most were furious, scornful. They viewed the university’s discussion of “positive” behaviour in the workplace as coercive and requiring staff to pretend or suppress their real feelings.

Few, if any commenters could conceive that being happy or satisfied in the workplace could be a real experience. The concept “happiness at work” occurred to them only as “pretending at work”, and they viewed the university’s raising of the possibility of positive attitudes as demeaning and insulting.

***

Second report. A participant in an online forum on leadership cites a report in Forbes magazine about the benefits of employers saying thank you to their employees. An innocuous enough proposition you might think. Not at all. Commenters were scathing. One commenter was incensed enough to write her own blog post on the mistake of saying thank you.

Like the university staff and the readers in the first example, readers in this second example assumed without hesitation that having an employer say “thank you” could only be a ploy and a hateful one at that.

The blogger went so far as to say actions such as this – saying thank you – were responsible for an absence of employee engagement. “It’s no wonder,” she said,

we have such an issue with employee engagement, where 72% of American workers alone are disengaged.

It’s a pretty pass we’ve come to, isn’t it?

Investigating how staff can have a positive experience at work, or recommending people thank others, is viewed as damaging or threatening, while cynicism is allowed free rein. Neither group stopped for a moment to consider how their cynicism might be affecting the workplace. The issue is all over there, with the employers.

What is going on here? What is using these readers when some simple propositions are raised?

To be continued …

***

Image: The Sower, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

Blog readjustment

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It’s been bothering me that writing a book seems to demand I hold back the best ideas and insights gained by talking to people being leaders in the world until some as-yet-mythical publication date. If my book is published by a publisher, it may be years before it is published. If I publish it myself, it may be years before it reaches the audience I want it to reach.

In the meantime, as Goethe said, life is sweeping by, and all the while, remarkable people are living remarkable lives, transforming themselves and the most unpromising of circumstances into pure gold, while another group starves for want of joy and power and meaning in the world, the kind of joy and power and meaning available to them too if only they could know it was possible.

It’s seemed to me for some time that another type of book publication is needed. Something that allows instalments to be published and content to be written on the fly, as in the time of Dickens. Or something like the literary or political pamphlets that were previously a staple of publishing.

For these reasons, I’m choosing to take a different approach to this blog. From now on, I’ll be sharing more of the content I have previously been reserving for the book. I’ll also be using, with their permission, the real names of leaders and their organisations I’m writing about.

This might mean some content in the book will have been first published on this blog. I don’t foresee this will be a bar to book publication because the paradigm of book publishing is being entirely re-written, and it’s becoming routine for content to exist in a blog form and then a book form. I don’t foresee it will be a problem for potential book readers because the material will be integrated in a different way and there will be plenty of new material.

I’m also creating it that the book material will occur as entirely fresh and compelling, regardless of whether it’s been previously referred to in some other form.

As for the potential hazard of people borrowing ideas or stories, I choose to follow Seth Godin’s line on this. He is great in many ways, and his renunciation of the stance of proprietorialism is one of them. It’s never much interested me if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. For one, it’s a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and secondly, they’re welcome to it, for as George Gershwin reportedly said when he lost a song he was working on,

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m originating this stuff. I’m just a conduit for writing that wants to be written. I’m shepherding into words material that already exists, even if it hasn’t yet been said.

***

Image: Farmer sitting at the fireside and reading; by the glorious, inimitable Vincent van Gogh, courtesy of biblioklept

Agreeing to create beauty

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An orchestra is … the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself. Agree on what? To create beauty…

With those words, Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist and classical pianist from Venezuela, had me.

In 1975 Abreu started a small children’s orchestra to share his secret about the profound effects of music-making, and today he is the founder of a program in Venezuela called Sistema involving over 300,000 children. Pilot programs based on Sistema are now being run around the world in the US, Scotland, England, Canada, New Zealand and, since 2008, Australia.

Yesterday, I attended one of the rehearsals of the Crashendo orchestra, the Sistema program established for the children of Laverton primary school in Melbourne. Laverton is a suburb regarded as being socially disadvantaged, with a high immigrant population. In the orchestra I found tiny wee girls from China with ribbons tied to their violins, sweet delicate boys from other parts, and bigger Australian-born children, one boy jumping over garbage bins in a single bound, two girls with small teddy bears in bags labelled “With love to Mum” perched on their music stands.

Their music tutors for the day, the astoundingly patient Laura and Eric, by whatever miracle, brought together this chirping, squawking flock of birds to play a hornpipe dedicated to “Cap’n” somebody-or-other and a tune called Barrier Reef featuring some of the children playing pizzicato.

Along the way they were many fits and starts: some of the children had forgotten their music or hadn’t written in their fingerings as they’d been asked; teddy bears fell on floors and had to be retrieved; the cellos went on a mini-strike because the violins were holding them back, and one boy cried over a disagreement he’d had with another child and declared himself “too stressed to play”.  But there were points at which the smoke cleared for a moment and in that moment something else was emerging.

One such moment came when Laura asked the double bass to play alone. After he finished, she asked him,

Did you notice something? Did you notice that everyone stopped talking while you played and that it was absolutely quiet?

The boy, who’d been very distracted, was still. At another point, she explained to the violins how the cellos were playing an octave lower and to have them be heard it was the job of the violins to “fit themselves into the cellos”. When they played the next passage it was markedly different.

In the final ten minutes they all sat and played together under Eric’s guidance, and there was a moment, I swear, when the six young girls on the violins next to me had me do a double-take. Hello, I thought. Where had this clarity come from?

***

As the Director of Sistema Australia, Christopher Nicholls, says:

There’s so much more to children than people give them credit for. They have an enormous capacity to be brilliant.

Chris has kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book about people being leaders in the world. What I know of him already is that he’s committed to having children live extraordinary lives, to having them experience joy and beauty and the grace of human harmony.

Sistema and the Crashendo program exists by virtue of Chris’s commitment and the generosity of people contributing their time and funds. It is one of the principles of Sistema as Abreu created it that no child has to pay to participate. Everything is provided by Sistema, including the instruments.

It really takes something to have this happen, to wrest something new from the ordinary inertia of life, and create it ongoingly. At present, Crashendo needs $60,000 for the rest of 2012. You can make a donation by clicking here.

For more information about Sistema and the Crashendo program, including a short video of Crashendo’s first concert, click here.

To read a recent New York Times article about Sistema, click here.

***

Image: Some of the children I met from the Crashendo orchestra in Laverton, Melbourne

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Fear? Oceanic.

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We never know the truth by being told it.
We have to experience it in some way.
That is the abiding grace of history.
It is the theatre in which we experience truth.
~ Greg Dening, Performances, 1996

I want to tell you about my week. Not much happened outwardly. Inwardly, I had a revelation. I started to get present to the fact I’m not present to the world.

By world I mean my experience of the world. As I started to glimpse this huge and fundamental fact I also started to get what was the stuff of my experience of the world. And I’m stunned to report it is fear.

Fear of other people, fear of not being liked, fear of losing love, fear of disapproval, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of not doing what I want to do, fear of getting old, fear of the weather, fear of going to the shop and not getting a parking spot, fear of not having anything to wear, fear of having a bad hair day, fear of this and much much more. Fear of everything, fear on principle.

My fear is oceanic, and somehow I’ve completely missed it till this week.

There were a few things that came together to make it possible. I want to tell you about one because it may give you something too.

***

I was talking to a friend and she asked if the word “coward” fitted for some way I’d been being in a situation we were discussing. I easily turned this down. “No”, I said, “I’ve always known myself to be courageous.” Courage was the one thing I knew I could always count myself for. I may doubt myself in various ways, but never on this score.

Afterwards, I got curious about the discrepancy. How could it be, I wondered, that that word had presented itself to her and yet I had utter confidence in its antithesis?

The next day I happened to pick up a book on leadership I hadn’t yet read and the book fell open at a page entitled “fearlessness”. The author* made a distinction between courage and a quality she translated, from a Buddhist concept, as fearlessness.

Courage, she said, was the ability to act in the moment, to do what was required, with little or no thought. To save the drowning child, run into the burning house, speak up in the face of danger. Fearlessness, on the other hand, is the ability to go through fear to the other side. Not to dispel fear or overcome fear, but to experience fear on a sustained basis and break through it into a space beyond it. The Buddhists, and also I think the Hindus, call it abhaya.

When I researched it further, I found this sentence from a Tibetan monk:

Cowardice is not being present to fear.

Which was not at all how I thought of cowardice, if indeed I’d ever thought of it.

Here was a way in which both possibilities – courage and cowardice – could co-exist. One could know oneself as being courageous, and yet suffer an absence of fearlessness.

Around the same time I had a deep, bodily reaction to something that with my new attentiveness I now recognised as fear and sadness, and I saw I never usually let myself feel it. It’s unpleasant and shocking, and usually it’s ruthlessly suppressed by some aspect of my being, covered over, in my case, with boredom, restlessness or irritation.

This covering over, something I’ve not even been aware of, has made me oblivious to my fear. It has made me a coward.

***

As crazy as it sounds, I’m exhilarated and intrigued to know myself as a coward. It’s an entirely new thought and it offers ways of being I didn’t know were available.

Over and over, I learn that in order to see something new, one first has to give up what one knows.

***

* Margaret Wheatley

The deliciousness of talking about writing

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I had the delicious experience of meeting an author whose book I edited. Our conversations had been by email and he wanted to meet the person who “knows me so well now”.

He also wanted to ask questions about some of the editing decisions I’d made and I was happy to oblige. Having to teach another person about my thought processes would give me the chance to discover them myself.

One of the things I discovered is that the energy of a piece of writing comes from what’s not said; from the folds in a text, the pockets of unarticulated thought or emotion. The trick in writing is to be present to these folds and their potentialities, without pursuing them. To be at ease with their unsaidness; to have lost one’s fear of the unsaid. That’s when a text becomes pliable, robust, just quiescent enough.

***

In my own book writing, I recently drew up a list of rules: my rules of the game for writing the book. One rule is to give up intensifiers. Another is to make it as simple as possible “but not simpler”, as Einstein said.

As a leader I interviewed put it,

Once you get it really simple, then you’re able to communicate it at different levels.

***

Image: Joan Miro, Landscape, 1927

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Context is decisive

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Rosamund Stone Zander* tells an anecdote about going on a skiing trip to improve her skiing. On the very first run her plans went awry.

I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.

She was having a miserable time and was about to abandon her project and come back another time “when real skiing was to be had” when it suddenly occurred to her she was operating under an assumption:

that real skiing is skiing on snow.

She saw immediately that if she were going to be “a New England skier”, she had better include ice in her definition of skiing.

Thereafter, she says, she “redrew the box” in her mind so now she had it that “skiing is skiing on snow and ice.” The next run, and all the runs after, were very different. Her physical self now “coordinated easily” with her new way of thinking and she “welcomed the ice.”

***

The box in her mind, and the one in ours, is our context. It’s essentially what we delineate as ours or “it”. Everything outside the box is not-ours or not-it. Dealing with the not-it of our lives is exhausting, futile and disempowering and yet we spend a lot of our lives doing precisely that. We regularly fail to get that we are the ones who drew the box and we can re-draw it at any time.

I used the distinction of context on a recent consulting engagement. Never the most patient person, I was getting frustrated at the glacial pace of the project. Tasks that would normally take hours were taking days, and whole weeks were going by with very little progress. No matter how I tried to hurry along my various colleagues and the client, nothing worked. And yet every time there was a hiatus I would stop earning income because it was a time and materials job.

At first I considered ending the engagement and walking away. Technically, I had fulfilled the terms of the contract because the contract end date had already past. In my heart, however, this wouldn’t have been honouring my word. I may have signed a contract formulated around time, but the unwritten clause, to which I’d also signed up, was that the job be finished.

As soon as I got that walking away was not an option, I saw what hadn’t been working and it had everything to do with my context.

The context I had had was that completing the project meant completing the project as quickly and smoothly as possible. In this context, the glitches, delays and misunderstandings were not “mine”, not “it”.

Yet say if I re-drew the box to include the glitches and delays and misunderstandings? Say if I invented a context that said completing the project meant completing the project in the face of glitches and delays and misunderstandings?

As soon as I got this new context, the frustration fell away. And, wouldn’t you know it, the project re-started almost immediately.

The glitches, delays and misunderstandings didn’t necessarily go away; what went away was my resistance to them.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility; this book just keeps on giving.

Image: Alpine skiing by Leroy Neiman

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On doctors and other divas

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It came up in the comments that doctors might have an implied dispensation from communicating with empathy to their patients. I think many people, not least many doctors, would hold this view.

It’s based on a number of unexamined assumptions.

1. Skill or service or efficiency is not concerned with empathy or relating.

2. Not only is skill or service or efficiency not concerned with empathy or relating, they are in contradistinction; more of one guarantees less of the other.

3. Empathy or relating is a “nice-to-have”; it’s the icing on top but makes no appreciable (read, measurable) difference in the execution of a skill or service, nor in the world generally.

There’s also a fourth underlying assumption which Seth Godin notes (how great is this guy? Posts seven days a week, produces potent little gems most):

4. Trapped in the “scarcity model” of thinking, we assume if someone is truly gifted they don’t have the “time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding our needs”. In short, a “diva” is great because she is a jerk.

All these types of assumptions are markers of the “scarcity model” of thinking, the conception of the world in which everything is finite. They are also markers of a conception of the world in which a fatuously mechanistic cause-and-effect operates.

It’s all nonsense, all a fundamental delusion about the world and the way it works, and people like Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell are illustrating it.

***

Professor Gittell is Professor of Management at Brandeis University in the US, and on a recent trip to Australia she shared her findings about the determinants of performance in the airline industry and hospital sector.

Professor Gittell looked at the organisations in each sector that performed well and those that performed less well, and distinguished three parameters as being vital to the performance differential:

  • shared goals
  • shared knowledge
  • mutual respect among workers.

So what? we might ask. We could all intuitively predict the presence of these factors, or factors like these, may lead to increased performance in an organisation.

Her findings are startling in showing the degree to which these factors make a difference. In fact, in the hospital setting, she finds these factors – factors which pertain to what’s happening outside the operating theatre – to be the greatest determinant of the effectiveness of the hospital, the satisfaction of staff and the patient outcome.

She has now shared her model of organisational performance which she calls “Relational Coordination” with many hospital systems around the world. And all over she meets with the same startlement, the same evidence of our delusion about the way the world works. As one UK surgeon, a little less invested in his amour propre, said to her:

It’s really hard to get it’s not what we’re doing in the operating theatre that determines the outcomes.

***

For more information about Professor Gittell, go to her website or to the Relational Coordination site.

New ears

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There’s a question I’ve been letting myself be used by this week:

Starting from nothing, what can I create?

If I were able to get outside what I know, outside what the past is telling me about who I am and what’s possible, what could I create?

Inside the question, I remembered someone.

***

Several years ago, a colleague and I were hired by a government department to provide recommendations on the technology it should purchase to assist staff members with a disability. During the engagement I met a staff member whom I call Iris.

Iris was born with a severe hearing impairment. She wore hearing aids and used lip-reading, and spoke with what she called a “deaf accent”. After I interviewed her, Iris invited me to go with her to a private appointment with her audiologist because she thought it would be a good opportunity for me to ask him questions. I went, and it was. Later, she asked me if I wanted a copy of something she’d sent her audiologist and I said yes.

It was a story she’d written about her life in hearing aids.

When she was a little girl, she wore a hearing aid powered by two batteries so large and heavy for a child they were supported by a halter that went round her neck. Each battery hung down on her chest, she said, like premature breasts.

At that time, children like Iris qualified for a government scheme which provided new hearing aids every five years or so. Iris was raised by her grandparents who were classical music aficionados, and every five years, they would take Iris to get her new hearing aids and Iris’s world would be turned upside down. Each new hearing aid would cancel out a whole swathe of her experience, while opening up new areas. On one changeover, she explained, she lost her grandmother’s favourite, Schubert, but she gained Chopin whom previously she could never hear.

At each changeover of hearing aid, she started from nothing all over again.

***

There are very few people I’ve ever met as confident and self-assured as Iris. And she was a leader. Normally, people hiring consultants seem to assume the consultant has some kind of magic power to see or understand what’s going on without giving them any information. Not Iris. She took responsibility for ensuring, as far as possible, I got some insight into what it takes to be deaf. She created opportunities to communicate with me and increase my knowledge outside the formal interview process, and she shared her life with me.

She totally got how she could contribute to me for everyone’s benefit, and she did it.

Today, I’m wondering how Iris’s experience of starting from zero every five years contributed to who she is in the world: a human being living the possibility of power, resourcefulness and leadership in the face of severe disability. And what she learnt of invention and nothingness.

***

Image: Poster by Raymond Savignac, 1978, courtesy Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

Choose your reason for being sacked

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Curious story in The Age yesterday* about a case before the Fair Work Ombudsman involving a young woman who was sacked from her job as a personal assistant for a real estate agent because she was “too short” and “looked too young”.

She had been in the job two weeks when she was dismissed. She had recently assisted at an auction by recording bids, and in a phone conversation one of the directors of the company told her her height:

could be a disadvantage at an auction where there was one or more interested parties and she would not have the presence to effectively negotiate.

Another director emailed her to say:

Some of the directors at the auction on Saturday were worried by your overall young look. This will be an ongoing concern.

The Ombudsman fined the company for breaching the Fair Work Act under which it is “unlawful to discriminate against employees on the grounds of, among other things, age.” The company was also ordered to make clear to all their staff that federal workplace laws had been contravened.

What’s so curious, you ask?

What’s curious is that it came out in questioning that the reason given to the employee for her dismissal was not the real reason. The real reason, a director of the company admitted, was that the director who fired her

felt a little awkward admitting that he had very little on to justify an assistant and incorrectly used [her] age.

What’s curious is that neither the journalist writing the story, nor the Ombudsman, made any comment about the lie and the fact an employee was made to feel physically inadequate rather than have a director of the company feel awkward. Instead, the journalist and the Ombudsman concerned themselves only with the ostensible reason for the sacking. Why?

Well, for starters there are no fines for lying or being a jerk. Pity.

***

* Clay Lucas, “Sacked worker too short and too young”, The Age, April 2, 2012