Yes … You Can … Change Your Organisation Culture!

Apr 19, 2016 by lsmit@wemanity.com in  Blog

Some management consultants claim that you can’t change an organisation’s culture.
This is nonsense.

Numerous other management and change consultants claim they can change an organisation’s culture.
This too is nonsense.

You can change your organisation’s culture … from the inside.
Indeed, a leader’s responsibility includes Shaping their Organisation’s Culture.
I am going to share two successful stories of leaders driving change in their companies. On both occasions, I was engaged as an external consultant with the brief to co-design and facilitate the process and selected interventions.

 

Engineering Inc.

From a loss-making conflict-ridden environment where indifference and lack of trust reigned, to a profitable integrated company with engaged employees. The company is now a unit in a global corporation and a Centre of Competence for its product line.

The Situation: A new CEO had recently been appointed to a company which had changed owners 3 times and been making losses for 8 years. The environment was poisonous: chaotic production processes, cynical, continuous conflict with customers due to delivery and quality issues, abuse of the system by middle managers who themselves were not trusted by the production engineers and technicians. Closure was a possibility with 300 jobs at risk.

Changes and Process: Three new engineers were brought in to fill critical positions: Chief Engineer, Senior Project Manager, Site Manager. We conducted individual interviews with all managers, held focus groups at all levels, engaged the works council. Product demand fortunately was not an issue. Customer relations unfortunately were a serious problem. The CEO appealed for support. He laid out a clear strategy with a message of the environment and changes needed to continue operating. Changing the focus from inward (protectionist silos) to outward (the whole business with customer needs as focus) we used strength-based approaches to realign around real business Questions, whereby employees were invited to contribute. The production and logistics process was changed completely; skills deficits were alleviated; product design now involved production; the management team began to work as an integrated unit; employees wanted to contribute to improvements. Three middle managers who resisted the changes were forced to leave. Additional jobs were created in production as demand rose. Within two years, the site was making a profit.

Key Change Success Factors: The need: without change, the company was in serious danger of closing. Leadership: A driven leader who everybody trusted – he was visible, approachable and walked the talk. His messages were clear and he listened. Involvement: People learned not only that their contributions were desired, they experienced that the invitations they received were genuine.

 

Finance Inc.

From a small sleepy company in which employees had a lackadaisical approach to their work and customers, to a dynamic market leader whose customers praised service quality.

The Situation: A small specialist data processing company was acquired by a global corporation. A new CEO was installed together with two experts from the parent company. The environment was friendly and relaxed. There was little engagement, people worked with an eye on the clock, problems were referred to management, error rates were high, clients were irritated.

Changes and Process: The new CEO laid out clear guidelines, expectations and his vision of potential opportunities. All employees were invited to play an active role in working groups that defined and implemented new more efficient practices and new customer interface processes. Customer orientation was prioritised. The two new specialists were appointed to lead functional units, otherwise, the only hierarchy was towards the CEO. Processes were defined, personal and team responsibility was expected, engagement levels improved significantly, the environment was noticeably more dynamic, problems were solved at the level at which they occurred, customer satisfaction indices increased dramatically. Within two years, the number of employees increased three-fold as new clients came on board.

Key Change Success Factors: Leadership, Trust and Recognition: Clear consistent Leadership; clear guidelines; employees felt valued and freer. Involvement: employees were able to see the impact of their contributions.

 

Culture is the continuously evolving dynamic interaction of the mindsets and gutsets of all the actors in the system. It is the Soul of the Organisation that drives the behaviours we observe.

In many if not the majority of organisations, observed behaviours reflect not the values of the people within the organisation, but those hidden values of the organisation as a system, frequently driven by inappropriate leadership. By inviting and encouraging the people to engage with the system, leaders can lead a change from a negative to generative culture. Indeed, this is their responsibility.

And in the fast changing world of the early 21st century, shaping an adaptable organisational culture is becoming a survival essential.

Yes … You Can … Change Your Organisation’s Culture!

By: Eric Lynn from CultureQs

Yes … You Can … Change Your Organisation Culture!

Rejecting roles

Mar 29, 2016

Rejecting roles: That’s marketing’s job. You need to talk to IT.

Having roles is considered essential by most organisations. We’ve read dozens of business blogs, HR advice articles and even management training courses that insist clearly defined roles lead to better results, greater productivity and higher motivation. Without clear definition of roles, they warn that tasks get missed, no-one takes responsibility, the office is chaotic and individual motivation drops.

We disagree.

The writers of this advice have grasped the outcomes they want – people taking pride in their work, everyone focusing on delivering value, individuals coordinating and collaborating – but they’ve applied the wrong solution.

They’ve confused roles with responsibilities.

That may not sound like a big deal, but we think it is. Rigid role definition has some major downsides. We believe it hurts companies and individuals, costing them in creativity and happiness.

Most organisations intend their role definitions to be a way of signalling particular specialisations, expertise and responsibilities… but instead, the definitions swiftly harden into barriers, marking out territory which is defended against ‘interference’ from others. Have you ever been told to back off by the marketing manager for commenting on the new advert? Been refused access to the code base by the developers, ‘in case you break something’? Been told to leave presentations to ‘the sales guys’ or forecasts ‘the finance guys’? At the extreme, you may have your opinion rejected with a straight-forward ‘well it’s not your job to worry about x, it’s mine!’.

Individuals may also use their role definition as a way of avoiding unpleasant or boring tasks. This ‘that’s not in my job description’ approach ends up making the company less efficient as well as eroding team motivation. I remember organising a last-minute marketing stunt when I worked at Unilever. I was booking a double-decker bus to turn up and I wanted to check it would actually fit into the office forecourt. The marketing assistant nipped down to Reception to check. An hour later, she returned. The security guard had refused to measure the gateway and if it was beneath the dignity of a security guard, then she reckoned it was beneath the dignity of a marketing assistant as well. So I borrowed the security man’s tape-measure and checked the gateway (you could – quite literally – have fitted a bus through there). Anything wrong with doing my own measuring? Absolutely not. Anything wrong with wasting an hour of time arguing about whose job it was? Plenty.

Roles are comfortable – but bad for us

It’s very human to defend our own work and our own opinion. When we can dress this up with the authority of experience, expertise and organisational separation – all the better. Except it isn’t. Rigid role definition acts as a barrier and can stifle innovation. It can also make things slower and less efficient.

If a customer rings up with a problem, they want a solution, not to be told that only part of their problem can be dealt with by this department, and they must be passed on to billing or whoever to deal with the rest of it.

It’s not great for individuals either. Sticking to just one thing may mean our knowledge gets deeper, but also narrower.  We can get bored or worse, so convinced of our own expertise that we can’t take on other points of view.

Being Radical: Sticking to the start up way

In many start ups, a lack of defined roles is the default position. There is not enough money to hire specialists – instead developers must learn to present to investors, marketing managers must be able to create and manage their own customer data, and everyone must have a grip on the financial assumptions as well as a grasp of the their product (this often means some grasp of the technology).

When entrepreneurs look back on the early stage of their companies, they often comment on wistfully on the diversity of work and of how close to the customer it meant they were.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, recalled being the ‘mailroom grunt’ in the company’s early days, driving books to shipping and courier companies in his 1987 Blazer. But this doesn’t scale, right? Jeff Bezos is not still doing deliveries. Actually, he is. He spends a week every year in the warehouse. It’s not a PR gimmick, because he refuses to set up interviews when doing it. It’s an opportunity to stay connected to his responsibility – leading Amazon – and not the role of CEO. That includes really understanding conditions for employees – something for which Amazon has received a lot of criticism – and staying close to core services like order fulfilment.

Another trick used at Amazon is to have individual employees who have no role at all. Bezos has ‘shadows’, people who simply follow him around. It means there’s always someone free to chase a wild idea or set up an experiment – and it recognises that a responsibility like ‘envision Amazon’s future’ requires several people, not just a single role.

So what should we do?

1. Responsibilities not roles

Some radical companies go for a very broad responsibility ‘provide value to the company’ and say that how this is fulfilled is up to the individual. Others go for more precise responsibilities: ‘help the customer’ or ‘make sure we comply with financial regulations’.

The point is that how you fulfil these needs can require doing tasks which, in other companies, would be seen as belonging to differing roles.

2. Trust people

A lack of roles makes people more responsible, not less. Tasks rarely get missed because everyone knows they have total responsibility for the work – no tester will come pick up the programmer’s bugs; no finance controller will correct over-optimistic projections.

3. Trust people some more

A lack of roles doesn’t mean that everyone will try to do everything. People naturally gravitate towards what they’re interested in and what they’re good at. If someone is convinced she’s a brilliant illustrator and everyone else insists the stick men cartoons are rubbish, she will soon stop.

4. Value dissent not consensus

No roles doesn’t mean you have to design by committee. Heated arguments are common, and that’s fine.  Even if people don’t agree at the end of the debate, the important thing tends to be to air the problem. Opinions can be rejected; a decision can still be made, risks can still be taken…

By: Helen Walton from Gamevy

Remote Work: Stories of People and Teams Doing Great Things

Apr 29, 2016

Get ready to pack up your laptop and hit the road!

Today, I specialise in facilitating remote work. And it was an experience ten years ago that turned a light bulb on for me — in a way I would have never expected.

I was living in California at the time and belonged to a social community interested in the future, technology, and staying healthy. Every Sunday, we’d meet up for a hike together. One member of the group was particularly interesting to me because he was working on a startup idea I’d never encountered before: he wanted to eradicate death.

To the outside world, it appeared that he was building an online project management tool. That was a very “normal” startup idea, even for ten years ago. But what most people didn’t know was that he was building the tool so that longevity scientists from all over the world could collaborate and solve the “problem” of aging.

He had found that the best people needed for this unusual collaboration were not living in the same place. So his vision was to build a tool that they could use to work together remotely.

It was a true “aha experience” for me. Once we remove the issue of being geographically dispersed, we can gather the best, most enthusiastic people together virtually to work on the most challenging problems imaginable.

I was hooked by the concept and started interviewing people and companies working remotely to see what they were doing. Down the rabbit hole I went!

In the past, we had to go to a specific geographic place in order to access the information we needed for our work. Now, that information is likely accessible from anywhere. And this gives us the opportunity to play with new ways of working and new business models.

I’m increasingly seeing a move from a model of work-life balance, which assumes that work and life shouldn’t overlap or blend, to work-life fusion, where the lines between work and life blur.

Work and Life: No Longer at Odds

Jeffry Hesse is an agile coach working with a distributed development team of approximately 40 people at a company called Sonatype. He loves his work. He also loves mountain climbing, photography, and spending time with his grandmother.

Because he can work from anywhere, Jeffry combines his passions by working while traveling. He started by trying an experiment with his remote team. He spent one month traveling in Argentina — and didn’t tell his colleagues he would be on the road.

He wanted to test how productive he could be while traveling, and if anyone on the team would notice.

Admittedly, it was hard. Finding a decent internet connection in Argentina was one of the most challenging aspects. He tried coworking spaces and staying with friends — and his technical know-how came in very handy while experimenting with various VOIP phones. But while it was hard work, and sometimes shaky, he managed to get his work done without the distributed team noticing that he was on the road.

While being a digital nomad may seem like a radically unconventional way of working compared to the traditional 9 to 5 job, it gives us a glimpse into what’s becoming possible…and increasingly common.

What Does It Mean Today to Be “Present”?

The tools that allow us to work in new ways are developing at breakneck speed. One of the most exciting examples of this is telepresence. Telepresence is a combination of technologies that give you presence somewhere other than your actual location. Your smartphone and standard video conferencing tools — even Facetime — can all be considered forms of telepresence.

My favorite form of telepresence? Robots.

The Revolve Robotics Kubi, for example, allows someone to call in (via video conferencing) to any tablet device. The difference is that you can move the tablet from side-to-side and up and down and control where you are looking from your own laptop.

For instance, if you are a remote participant at a meeting where everyone else is sitting together in a room, you can turn yourself to see who is talking. Other telepresence robots allow you to beam in to what is basically a tablet on wheels, and drive yourself around using the arrow keys of your keyboard. Schools use these for kids who can’t attend classes in person. Museums use these to give remote tours. Even doctors use them when specialists are scarce.

These interactive sensory experiences bring us closer to replicating what it’s like to be together in the same room. And the technology gets better and less expensive every year, opening new options all the time. Holograms are just around the corner!

How Businesses Are Changing

Because of these new technologies, more and more people are like Jeffry, seeking to balance their work with the freedom to pursue their passions. What it means to actually “be at work” is changing rapidly — businesses are evolving as well. Here are three examples:

A Virtual Network With Global Impact

Happy Melly is a social entrepreneurship network of individuals and small businesses dedicated to happiness at work. Supporters include coaches, creatives, authors, speakers, managers, and entrepreneurs. Members of Happy Melly help amplify and globalise great business ideas through virtual and in-person workshops, blogs, guides, books, tools, and videos.

I joined the network to get business advice from people who shared my same purpose and values. With the help of “colleagues” from all over the world, I learned how to structure and scale my company, Collaboration Superpowers, so that myWork Together Anywhere workshop could be offered online and in person around the globe. I’m also now the remote team manager for Happy Melly.

Serendipity Turned Them Into a Team

The team at StarterSquad first started working together (remotely) when a client hired them for a software development project. They didn’t know each other before the project started, but over time, the team clicked.

At one point, the client unexpectedly ran out of money — but the team members weren’t ready to part ways. They decided to find other clients so they could stay working together. They now operate as a self-organised team of entrepreneurs, specialising in building minimum viable products for software startups. In addition, they offer seed funding for startups whose ideas they believe in.

Forget About Facetime

Another company, Teamed.io, prides themselves on having no central office, no meetings, and no phone, Skype, or video calls. The company is made up of a large group of freelance software developers that have never met or spoken to each other. They work entirely through chat on task management systems.

Specific people are brought together for projects depending on the skillset that’s needed. Projects are broken down into very small tasks. Programmers are paid as they complete tasks, and they are not paid if the tasks are not completed. When the project is over, the team is dissolved and everyone moves on to other projects.

Extreme? Perhaps. But it does show ways of working that were never before possible.

Leveraging the Remote Advantage

There are numerous benefits to being able to work from anywhere. Some resonate most for solopreneurs and digital nomads as a source of empowerment to work and travel. Others please HR departments and hiring managers who need to build virtual teams or want to offer flexible benefits to their employees. A few are aiming to raise visibility around worker happiness and the environmental benefits of not commuting.

The ability to tap into information and collaborate with colleagues from anywhere has opened up new possibilities for work-life freedom. People can work on the things they are most passionate about, and businesses can hire people who love what they do versus people who are just doing their jobs.

If you haven’t thought about what’s possible with remote collaboration options in a while, you might be surprised by what’s happening — and what’s possible for you as well! I encourage you to do some more exploring. We’ve come a long way, and it’s only getting better from here.

By: Lisette Sutherland from Collaboration Superpowers

Scrum Gathering Orlando Through The Eyes Of A Live Illustrator

May 17, 2016

Equipped with my graphic board, pens, sunglasses and shorts I set sail for the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. Having attended two awesome gatherings in the past, the bar was set high – however, I was far from disappointed.

From the offset, co-chairs Anu Smalley and Kate Megaw knocked it out of the park by entering the stage to the sound of ‘Starman’ by David Bowie, whilst wearing convincing spacesuits complete with helmets. This was their genius way of setting the Gathering’s theme ‘Infinity and Beyond: Transforming the World of Work’. With three tracks on offer, ranging from beginner (‘Mission Control’), intermediate (‘Orbiting the Earth’), to advanced levels (‘Agile Galaxy’), there were more than enough sessions to choose from for all 1100 attendees. Let’s not forget that this was the largest Scrum Gathering so far.

Although each session had a unique offering, there was an obvious key topic that resonated from all talks. During the CST/CEC retreat ‘Agile Leadership’ was introduced as a pressing subject, with one attendee keen to highlight the distinction between ‘Leaders’ and ‘Managers’. Brian Rabon reminded everyone that ‘Agile starts with Leadership’ during his opening keynote. A panellist on the PWC keynote pinpointed that any organisation would struggle without ‘Agile Leadership’, and Steve Denning went on to inform the audience during his ‘Agile Leadership’ talk that the key driver for ‘Agile Leadership’ is having a different mindset.

Leon Sabarsky identified during his ‘Extreme Scrum Hiring’ talk that an obvious flaw when interviewing individuals for team roles is to interview them on their own. His key takeaway was to move away from ‘One-on-One’ interviews by considering ‘Scrum Team group interviews’. This approach enables individuals to be assessed based on their engagement within the group, and demonstrate the qualities required for being an effective team player. It all comes down to good collaboration and communication, folks.

Leon noted that:

“the number one criterion that Scrum team members ought to be measured against is their Collaboration skill. It’s relatively easy to teach people a domain area, Agile methods and a specific technology. However, I can’t teach someone to collaborate well. They either have it or they don’t. If they don’t, they will reduce team effectiveness and cohesion over time.”

Another talk with an interesting twist was ‘Scrum Team CRM: Aviation Crew Resource Management Techniques for Scrum Teams’ by Thomas Friend. Using the narrative of flying aircraft, Thomas made strong comparisons between ‘Aviation’ and ‘Scrum’. Once again, the underlying message here was good communication.

During the Gathering another inspiring movement was unfolding. A group of passionate Agile Educators met face-to-face to carve out a manifesto for Agile that is authentic to Education. With a variety of case studies demonstrating how Agile values and principles have been adopted within an educational setting showing proven success, this group of innovative leaders were making a difference. They set out to define a vision and values for what resulted in the ‘Agile in Education Compass’, an inspiring model for how education can respond to the modern world with agility.

Once again, I had the opportunity to take to the pen and draw key insights from beginning to end. The canvasses enticed the crowds, and people soon took to Twitter to share the learning and store the visuals as a reminder of the Gathering.

Alongside this, on the final day, I couldn’t resist suggesting an Open Space topic around the use of ‘Graphic Templates’ which can assist coaches and facilitators in communicating with pictures. The session was a great success and those that attended were satisfied with their newly gained visual skills.

“Visuals speak volumes, this workshop encouraged me to draw and take these skills back to my team.” – Lynda Menge (workshop attendee)

Whether you wish to enhance your facilitation skills, make collaborative design thinking a key enabler within your team, or simply gain the confidence you need to draw live in front of an audience, join me for a one-day ‘Innovation through Visualisation’ workshop in London on the 1st of June or Atlanta on the 24th of July.

My final point on what drives so many people to attend the gatherings: passion and the desire to collaborate and share ideas. People attend these fantastic events for the discussions and seeds of information that are shared over breakfast, and last well into the evening over a cold beer, the networks that grow, and the desire to continue to collaborate way beyond the event.

I look forward to sharing some ideas with you at the next Scrum Gathering.

By: Stuart Young from Radtac

http://www2.radtac.co.uk/blog/scrum-gathering-orlando-through-the-eyes-of-a-live-illustrator/