I love Caroline Wynn’s LinkedIn posts. They always have a bias for action and make absolute sense. But I want to unpick number 2 in her most recent post. Try to get under its skin… why do we have bad relationships, with limited trust, at work?
I completely agree by the way, reaching out rather than reaching in (or only reaching in) can mean you get a less biased and less judgemental view. But what I would love to understand is why ‘reaching in’, is likely to give you judgemental and biased views and has so much jeopardy. After all these will be the people who see you perform the most, they should know you better than anyone and know what your abilities really are.
I have no doubt this jeopardy when speaking to colleagues is true, I have experienced it, but why do we tolerate a culture that puts peers into competition and creates unhealthy or even toxic environments? Surely, we are all individually seeking to do the best for our organisations, whether it is making a profit financially for stakeholders or a profitable outcome for beneficiaries?
For too long I have seen leadership structures that do nothing to support and smooth the way work moves across an organisation. Bemoaning lost productivity whilst they unconsciously create conditions that get in the way, isolate teams or worse.
Often organisations look for magic bullets to sort out their productivity woes, missing the point that people are always at the heart of it and if you don’t make it easier for them to do the right thing, rather than the wrong thing, then you are putting your own spanners in the works. The sort of magic bullets I see are:
- restructures (falsely labelled org design),
- KPIs and measures that focus on outputs and short-term gains,
- Demands for agile working, when doing nothing to change culture,
- technology (layering rather than integrating).
- If you have a dysfunctional / competitive top table of execs, you are in trouble before you start. Does your top table know each other well, know what they do, spend time working together and respect each others expertise? If there is no critically loyalty, credible assertion and empathy (my recipe for culture) in the top table then everything else is exceptionally difficult.
- Do you have a clear strategy that isn’t just a statement but is strategy into implementation including how much you want to spend on that strategy? Most execs stop at “we are going for growth” and then do nothing to translate that into plans. Net result is a 1000 flowers blooming bottom up “being strategic” but actually being pet solutions and pet projects.
- Do you celebrate maintenance …. People, process and technology? (Not just the buildings). We all know we need to maintain physical stuff… the car, the house, or the lawn mower? So why do we screw down on maintenance budgets or just forget them altogether. If you don’t invest in maintaining your people, optimising (end to end) your processes and keep your tech up to date and fresh you will slowly end up spending more and more on unplanned spend as things go wrong.
- Do you value and invest in resilience in your people, your teams, your organisation? Are your people so exhausted they more closely resemble a herd of gazelles constantly being circled by lions? Resilience is that extract bit of gas in the tank. It might be a bit more time for learning, breathing, getting to know colleagues. It might be contingency in budgets. It might be time set aside for maintenance work to make sure when bad things happen, the things you need to rely on are not rusty.
Back briefly to AI… slightly off topic but beware of snake oil sales people. AI, as in automating local issues will make some productivity gains, but like many technologies that are being touted, it will paper over cracks. Those cracks remain. We keep layering tech on top of dysfunctional teams, overly complex processes, poorly maintained environments and exhausted people and teams. I give you the elephant in the room, with its AI carpet…. Ironically generated by AI….