WISDOM FROM FRIENDS: STAY PRESENT

Our final bit of advice in honor of the New Year and Decade is the present of presence, via our friend and Larry Dressler, our fellow Berrett-Koehler author who authored Standing in the Fire. He posted a blog about “holiday presence” that we found meaningful and useful as a guide to remembering the power of being present to the moment.

 

Staying present is essential to having authentic conversations. It helps us be both participants and observers as we engage others. The participant/observer skill will help you manage your own emotional reactions so they don’t get in the way of what you’re trying to accomplish, so that you can better observe the emotional reactions of others. If we can describe what we’re seeing in others — without judgment or defensiveness— we can help get those emotions expressed, which will allow the focus to remain on the content of the conversation.

 

Larry suggests keeping a talisman with five knots in your pocket, with each knot representing a question that will help you stay present. Adapting this technique to keep our intentions for authentic conversations at the forefront is easily done:

 

§         Who am I here for? (What is it I want to create in this moment, with this person?)

§         Why am I here? (How will this conversation serve the good of the whole business or enterprise in which we are engaged?)

§         What can I release from my grasp (e.g., an expectation, distractions, judgment, desire to “win”) that will put me into a stronger partnership with my reason for being here?

§         What would my wisest friend or teacher whisper in my ear at this moment? (Who are your role models for being authentic?)

§         Where in my body can I imagine compassion hiding, taking safe refuge, and reminding me of its ongoing presence? (How can I demonstrate goodwill, even if things are getting tense, or difficult?)

 

Reflecting on those questions before a conversation, or in the moments when the going gets a little difficult will give you the gift of “presence.” And don’t forget to breathe.

WISDOM FROM FRIENDS: BABY STEPS

This is the second of three offerings of wisdom in honor of a New Year and Decade.

 

This insight sprang from our family’s holiday tradition in our family of giving books we think our loved ones will find meaningful and useful. Our daughter gave us a book by Robert Maurer called One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. It is a short, easy-to-read guide with practical advice on how to begin life’s longest journeys — with the proverbial single step.

 

Maurer is a psychologist and consultant who believes that the Kaizen philosophy of small, continuous improvement help our brains shortcut fear and the “fight or flight” reactions inspired by big change.

 

One of the suggestions we found particularly useful was the idea of “visualizing” your way to positive change. For example, we often hear from people who tell us they want to engage in authentic conversations at work, but are stymied by the traditional organizational cultures that reward manipulation and compliance as a means of getting along and getting ahead. Speaking the truth, especially to those who we see as having “power” over us, feels too risky. Consequently, even though people can see the business benefits of telling the truth with goodwill, owning their own contribution to a problem and raising difficult issues, the fear of doing it keeps them stuck.

 

One of the ways to make the change feel less daunting is to spend only a minute or two each day imagining an authentic conversation with a colleague, peer or supervisor. These mental mini-rehearsals are safe, and kick start the brain into a new habit. In one minute, you can imagine what you might say or do differently in specific situations, and reflect on how outcomes might be different if you do.

 

The next step might be equally small, yet powerfully effective. Think about one small action you could do each day, or even a few times a week, that would inch you along in your desire for authentic conversations. For example, you might vow that at least once a day, you will tell the truth as you know it, with compassion and goodwill, in a situation where you might once have kept silent instead.

 

Maurer says these tiny, incremental steps trick the brain into thinking, “This is such a small change, it’s no big deal. Nothing to be afraid of here.”

 

And it is in these small changes that big transformation slowly unfolds.

SEMCO: A case study in distributing organizational power, Part Three

(Continued from Part 2)

 

Synopsis: Ricardo Semler, inherited his father’s company in 1982. He was 24 years old. After his singular focus on work created a serious health crisis, he decided something had to change. Over several years, he dismantled the hierarchy of his traditional organization to create an adult culture of empowered workers.  Today Semco employees decide when it makes the most sense for them to work and where. They choose their own leaders, define their own schedules, and set their own salaries.




The purpose of work at Semco, Ricardo insists, “is to make workers, whether the working stiff or a senior executive, feel good about life.”

 

Sounds crazy? Here are a few facts about Semco so you can judge for yourself:

• The company that employed 100 employees in 1982 as of 2007 has 3,000 workers


• Semco now represents diverse ventures including manufacturing, mixing equipment, making cooling towers, technology, managing Latin American properties, and environmental consulting.


• It experienced a 900 percent growth in 10 years.


• In Brazil, Semco increased its ranking from 56^th to 4^th in machinery operations.


• It ranks No. 1 in the service industries in which it is active.


• Turnover has been less than 2 percent over 25 years.


• Operating this way has generated a 27 percent growth rate for 25 years, without public investment and in spite of Brazil’s erratic economy.


• The $4 million company Ricardo inherited is now worth more than $220 million

 

Semco is an unparalleled example of how abandoning traditional management strategies and widely distributing organizational power can lead to phenomenal business results — and create meaning and purpose at work.

 

Says Ricardo: “People want to work when work is not the enemy of personal freedom and legitimate self-interest. Our [organizational] ‘architecture’ is really the sum of all the conventional business practices we avoid. The purpose of work is to make workers, whether the working stiff or a senior executive, feel good about life.”

 

Treating his employees like adults, helping them understand the marketplace they live in and trusting them to get results has been a remarkable success formula t Semco.

BOOK REVIEW: We Must Be the Change

Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment

This review is by Jeffrey McCollum

This book is challenging and provocative. It's not one you can breeze through because it has this unsettling knack for holding up a mirror and saying, "Hey look. There's something here I want you to see." The something it wants us to understand is how deeply our everyday conversations at work are riddled with a lack of authenticity and how that lack stifles engagement and personal accountability. As a result, business results are less than they could be.

At the heart of this problem is an enormous collusion–a pattern of parent-child conversations that have become undiscussible in daily life. These norms in turn create organizational culture. The Showkeirs' fundamental premise is if you want to change a culture you have to change the conversations–difficult and, in their view, dangerous work. To change those conversations we have to accept our complicity in them.

The book is broken into two broad sections. First the Showkeir's lay out their case for change. Then, the offer a set protocols for shifting those conversations.

The case for change starts with an identification of "relationships that don't work at work ". Specifically, they point out how the following conversations–holding others accountable, caretaking, coping with disappointment and colluding with cynicism–are so deeply engrained that we take them for granted. "In all cases, these types of conversations have a detrimental impact on the culture and the business", they argue.

The conversations rest on a set of "old" management assumptions that see people as objects, ignore individual freedom and will, use policies and procedures that ensure compliance and emphasize leaders and experts while ignoring those who work in the system.

Leaders who see their role as "holding people accountable (as opposed to them being accountable) and who seek to protect their organizations from the rough and tumble vicissitudes of the market place (as opposed to helping them understand those realities) are operating from an implicit parent child model. This model puts unreasonable expectations on the leader and creates dependency in those led. [Although the Showkeirs chose not to venture into a discussion of contemporary American politics, it was hard for me to avoid looking at their arguments in the light of how self interest seems to be trumping service on the public stage.]

The Showkeirs explore the power of cynics to sap organizational change efforts of vitality and momentum. They become, in effect, a black hole into which hopes for a better future disappear. Leaders who seek to protect people from disappointment by promising safe landings in all difficult circumstances create cynics.

The antidote to all of this is to promote an "adult to adult culture" in which each individual in the organization:
* Becomes the eyes and voice of the business
* Brings an independent point of view
* Is expected to raise difficult issues
* Extends a spirit of goodwill to the endeavor
* Creates business literacy in others
* Choose accountability for the success of the whole business
* Manages his own morale, motivation and commitment

These qualities propel an organization from manipulation to engagement. People in the organization are enabled, ennobled and empowered–by their own choice. Manipulative conversational practices like name dropping, hidden agendas, over promising, sarcasm and exaggerated optimism or pessimism are replaced by authentic ones. All of this requires that we remain vigilant to three levels that operate in any conversation: the content, others' emotional responses and our own emotional responses. To business that operate on the belief that "business is about logic and fact based decisions", these three realities are radical in their own right.

Having laid out their case, the last portion of the book is a "practical guides to conversations like:
* Facing a difficult issue
* Seeking an exception (a radical reversal of the common organizational practice that it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission)
* Proposing change
* Introducing a mandate
* Renegotiating an established relationship
* Initiating endings
* Dealing with individual performance

These types of conversations, done in a manipulative parent-child environment, tie people in knots. Done authentically, they create clear, clean communication which, in turn, drives business performance to higher and higher levels.