Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Leadership

What turns good managers into bad ones? Often, it’s their fear of uncertainty.

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It’s quite simple, really.

We spend years in school, then more years in higher education, and even more climbing the career ladder. Throughout, there’s one constant rule: You need to be right. You need to know.

If you’re not right or don’t know, you’ve failed – whether it’s the test, the next grade, or the promotion. 

This approach works fine in predictable domains, where things are complicated but knowing is possible, even desirable.

But what about unpredictable domains, the world of uncertainty?

The unaware manager facing unpredictable situations will likely feel threatened. 

And when we feel threatened? 

We fight, flee, or freeze.

Not the most transformative or skilful leadership approach, I’d say.

And we all observe the’ day-to-day symptoms: stress, lack of empathy, micro-managing,  aggression, disconnection, and absence of presence. 

The list is depressingly long.

They don’t need another leadership course.

They need to get comfortable with uncertainty and learn to navigate it skillfully.

Because the world once just very complicated, it is increasingly becoming more and more complex. And thus unpredictable, 

Learning how to cope with uncertainty is more about personal development than learning new skills.

#Leadership #humanresources #complexity

PS Any situation involving other humans has a serious element of uncertainty – just a reminder.

Great Team Leaders understand the difference between respond and react

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Summary of React or Respond


For the full version watch the video or listen to the audio as you prefer


In every situation there is a space, and in that space you have a choice. The choice to react or respond.

Victor Frankel wrote:

Respond or React will position you above or below the line

Above the line and below the line is also the difference between responding (above the line) or reacting, which immediately puts you below the line. When we are hijacked by our emotional system, we automatically fall into the trap of the drama triangle. And we choose a role for ourselves. When we choose a role for ourselves, we at the same time try and push the people around us or the circumstances of whatever into one of the two other roles to get the drama triangle going. And as we mentioned last time, this only serves the purpose of creating a lot of emotional friction, hot air, whatever you like. But it never leads to any constructive solutions. As long as we are caught in the drama triangle, we have no possibility to, create anything meaningful or useful. We just go round and round in circles like cats chasing our own tails.

List to your own language

Try and listen for your own language and notice how your own language will determine whether you are starting a new drama triangle or whether you already are responding and trying to pull the whole conversation into a completely new sphere above the line where we’re outcome-focused, constructive and trying to find solutions. And if you can manage that, and if you get good at that, then you’re going to see how people love to work with you.

Catch up on previous posts

Previous blog posts in this series on Team Leadership Skills and working above and below the line:

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

Feeling right you are probably wrong

Great team leaders do not get sucked into the drama

Mike Hohnen, MBA is a coach, trainer, author and public speaker who supports leaders, managers and their teams in implementing the principles of the Service Profit Chain.

Why are so many top management teams borderline dysfunctional?

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“When we create something that is separate from something else, we create limits to our ability to see the interrelationships”
– Gregory Bateson.

For all practical purposes, organisations need organising in a way that makes it clear who does what. Departments, division or whatever.  But what we don’t always realise is that doing so comes at a price. Each entity is technically a holon; an entity on its own and part of something else and with that comes to ‘drives’, a power drive to realise itself and a ‘love’ drive toward unity with the bigger whole – What author Adam Kahane describes as a polarity of power and love in his book of the same name.

A polarity that is not well managed tends to tip to one side and become dysfunctional and ultimately self-destructive.

And therein lies the problem of the dysfunctional management teams. It is built into the system, no one pays attention to the need for a balancing of the polarities. On the contrary, in most organisations, there is a built-in bias to feed the power polarity. Heads of department, division etc. are held responsible as opposed to encouraging taking responsibility.

Success as the head of a holon often produces career benefits, personal bonuses but rarely is there a bonus for valuing the common good over own interests. The focus from the CEO is nearly always on optimising each section in the hope that by doing so we will have the best total sum. They may talk about unity and one-team and all that but the way they design meeting agendas, reporting remuneration and bonus systems contradicts the nice intentions.

Only very rarely do I see a CEO (or management team for that matter) where there is a focus on balancing this polarity, which means that there is a more balanced focus on driving unity, wholeness, and interdependencies while toning down the hard boundaries.

Holding managers strictly responsible for their units ( holon’s) performance they will automatically react by insisting on very clear boundaries. This is my department, that is your department. How else can I take responsibility for what is not under my control? But that thinking completely overlooks the reality that all the departments are interrelated and that my success or failure is closely linked to your success failure. In fact, success is not entirely under their control at all.

The only way out of the rigid boundaries is to foster a culture where individual managers take responsibility, which is a totally different story, and where the management team holds themselves collectively responsible for the overall performance.

“Categorising your peers as either stupid or evil is a failure of empathy.”
– Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership by Peter Hawkins

The key driver of unity is obviously relationships. The better the personal relationship we have on the top management team, the easier it becomes to balance the polarity and think outside own personal interests and gains. But relationships, as we all know, don’ t emerge out of thin air, they require a serious effort, and maybe more than anything else they require an attitude from all concerned that: I will do whatever it takes to makes these relationships work.

Collaboration is a habit of mind, solidified by routine and predicated on openness, generosity, rigour and patience. It requires precise and fearless communication, without status, awe or intimidation. It’s hard because it allows no passengers.
– Heffernan (2013) “A bigger Prize”

If you are an eager student of leadership you will probably also have noticed that the polarity of power and Love is also the polarity of Management and Leadership.

Dysfunctional management teams are a bigger problem than you might think.

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It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the weekly management meeting. As they filter through the door, they look as if they are attending a funeral. They take their usual seats, open up their laptops and locate the agenda, not that they need to, they know it by heart, it’s always the same 5 items and the CEO starts out with item 1 and every one goes through the usual motions. The 5 people on the management team have been together for the past 3 years. They know the routine by heart. In fact, they know it so well they can almost predict how each of them will answer the questions from the CEO.

If you ask them individually, they all dread these meetings, they just want them to be over and done with. The CEO especially is frustrated. This is his team and they are so far from what we would consider a team as you can be. They are just a group that convenes to share some information that could probably have been just as easily shared on an intranet.

So some people would argue to change the meeting format, make it livelier, sit in bean bag chairs and use lots of post-its etc. But that is not the core problem. When the meetings play out like this, it is just a symptom of something much more serious going on. The core problem here is relationships, the top management team at best don’t have healthy relationships with each other. In the worst cases I have seen, I would even characterize them as toxic and dysfunctional.

Furthermore, the problem here is not so much that they have boring meetings that they all dread, that is their problem you could say. No, the real problem is that if they have rotten relationships with each other, it filters down throughout the organisations and contributes to the dreaded silo thinking. Invariably, employees take sides with their team leader and the relationships across departments suffer accordingly.

Not the best scenario when we are trying to create end-to-end seamless and breath-taking customer experiences.

Company culture starts with the culture in our management team; that sets the tone. That culture is primarily defined by the relationships in that group. If you really want to create a strong culture, you will need to invest time and effort in improving the relationships on your management team. Until you do, not much will change.

What is your experience of top management cultures and how they influence the rest of the system? Leave your comments below or contact me, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Great cultures are created with principles not rules

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Source: Netflix -https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

‘Another, customer complaint!’ thought the manager. ‘And what a stupid one at that. Some of our people just don’t get it. We will have to create a new rule for this kind of situation.’ And so he does. Up goes the memo on the information board, where it joins quite a few other new rule memos.

But rules only work when we can clearly define the situation and set clear boundaries. However, what we are looking for in our customer experience is personalisation. We want employees who are flexible in their approach and who can think on their feet. And with as few boundaries as possible… If there is one thing a customer hates, it is hard boundaries. ‘Sorry, sir that is not my section. Please ask your waiter.’

When we analyse why we create rules, it is not because we have a problem with the top performers. The top performers use their own good judgment to solve situations, which are typically also the situations that lead to praise and four-star reviews on social media. It’s the bottom 30% of the crew who need rules.

The more rules we create, the less room there is for good judgment.

The solution to the customer complaint is not to create another rule. It’s performance management, but not in the form of making a note for the yearly appraisal meeting, but here and now feedback and coaching. And, ultimately, if we have team members who don’t get it, they should not be on the team.

We can never create enough good rules to cover every situation. And even if we could, that would still not be the solution. Because top performers hate rules. What drives their engagement is autonomy, being able to use their own good judgement from situation to situation. And if you take that away, they will find somewhere else to work, a business where good judgement and personal initiative are appreciated.

But how will new employees know what good judgement looks like in our context?

This is where principles come in. Principles are the fabric of a great service culture. Principles frame what we believe around here. Principles are the foundation for our decision. Nordstrom, the US retail giant, has a very simple approach:

“Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

Southwest Airlines tell its employees: “You may do anything you are not uncomfortable doing in order to solve a passenger’s problem.”

Obviously, some people have better judgment than others. But that means that performance management is not about enforcing the rules but about helping people make better decision – and ultimately weeding out those who just don’t get it.

Get rid of the rule book and start thinking more about what  should be the guiding principles.

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

If you would like to change your culture, start a new conversation

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Often teams say to me: “We need to change the culture around here.” And they often have a point, because toxic cultures are very powerful and can often destroy all sort of great initiatives – and as we have seen in a previous post, culture is a huge part of engagement. But it also easily becomes a fluffy excuse for not doing anything. It’s another drama triangle where the big villain is the culture and we are just the victims of this culture. “Well you know, that is just the culture around here. There’s not much we can do about it.”

But how does culture emerge? What creates the culture?

If you use the four quadrants we introduce in this blog post, then culture is influenced by:

– The attitude and behaviour of each individual

– The system or physical setting that we operate in.

If you are having a meeting with someone, the physical set-up has an influence on how the meeting unfolds. We could have the boss behind a desk looking down on the other party, or we could move to a sofa or we could even go for a brisk walk around the park. Each of these physical systems would obviously create a different feeling in that meeting. And if we run most of our meetings in a certain way … that creates a culture.

(I am known for insisting on having round tables or just circles of chairs for my workshops, and some people think I am being a bit silly in insisting ad nauseum about this. But I know from my 15 years’ experience that the setting creates a different feeling. It sets the tone. And when I am with a new group for the first time, this is the first step in creating a culture. A culture of conversations.)

Another aspect of culture is that, at the end of the day, our culture is the sum of the attitudes and behaviours that are present in our group over time. So first of all, each person needs to ask themself a crucial question: “In what ways am I contributing to this culture that I possibly don’t like?”

Secondly, how does each person behave? What they do and how they do it contributes to the culture. The more dominant or influential someone is in a group, the more their behaviour influences the common culture. This means that top management is key to the culture. After a few years, the culture becomes a mirror or reflection of the values and behaviour of the top person or the top management team.

So what can you do as a management team to influence the culture?

First, be very aware of your behaviour, including what you focus on, what you notice and comment on etc. All these things are cues that the organisation picks up and uses to try to decode what the culture is.

Secondly, change your conversations. More than anything, our culture becomes what we talk about. Take a look at your meeting agendas (and meeting formats) and think carefully about the conversations that you participate in during the day. What are we talking about?

But maybe more importantly, what do we never or very rarely talk about?

I spoke to a manager the other day who had just joined a large service organisation. He told me that when he was recruited, he was told all about the very customer-centric values the company has and how “we always put the customer at the centre of what we do”. “But,” he said, “I have been here for 6 months now and I have not had one single conversation about the customer experience. Every meeting is about financial KPIs. That is all we talk about.”

So, what do we need to introduce into our conversations if we would like to shift the culture? Where and when are we going to make the time and space for that conversation? Those are the crucial questions.

<<<<  >>>>

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

The employee experience needs to adapt to the employee life cycle

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The classical way to define the employee life cycle is: attract, recruit, onboard, develop, retain and transition. But that is the HR perspective, not the employee’s perspective. And as good service designers, we know that we need to consider the perspective of the ‘customer’ or user if we are going to be successful with our journey/experience design.

The life cycle will vary from industry to industry and of course from employee to employee. So good experience design would require that we do more research on this, in order to understand what it looks like in our case.

But here is what it might look like from an employee’s perspective.

Is this for me?
Attracted to a job proposition and wondering if it is for me.

Will I make it?
Entering into the application, selection, interview, and final negotiation process.

I made it!
The excitement of being chosen and starting the new job. Flooded with new impressions and ‘firsts’.The lunch canteen is amazing. Loving the attention I get as a newbie. (Or so one hopes.)

Am I good enough for this?
The first feelings of being overwhelmed. Am I good enough for this? Imposter syndrome. Do I belong here? Is this really for me? Feeling very much outside my comfort zone. Should I bail out and limit the damage?

Challenging but do-able
Feeling more secure in the saddle. Challenged and on the edge of my comfort zone, but in an exciting way. Giving the job everything that I have, and enjoying it.

Cruising – no sweat
The daily routine sets in, and most of what I do is well within my comfort zone. (Canteen is not nearly as nice as when I started.) Engagement may start to regress, through lack of challenges.

Is this it?
The first doubts start creeping in. I am always well within my (now shrinking*) comfort zone. This is no longer meaningful for me

From here there are two options: change your job or stagnate completely.

Experiences are all about managing customers’ emotions, as we have seen in previous blog posts on the subject of Service Design Thinking. The same principle applies to employee experience design. We need to understand the emotions that the employee is going through at each stage of the cycle.

When we review the above life cycle it becomes clear that the overall principle we need to look at is where people are in terms of comfort zones. Growth and development are keys to engagement and enthusiasm. But learning and growth happen just outside our comfort zone. We have the misconception that if we do the same thing for a long time we will get better and better at it. Not true. Research shows that, if anything, we stagnate or regress*. (Could you pass a driving test today? Probably not. See what I mean?) In order to get better we need to challenge ourselves and make a deliberate effort to improve. On the other hand, if we get too far outside our comfort zone we trigger fear, and then all learning and development stops as we move into “fight or flight” mode.

Engagement is essentially the product of the accumulated emotional experience. It is what we in a service profit chain terminology would call content. It is different from context (environment, salary and work conditions), which forms the basis of satisfaction but does not produce engagement. We can all have tricky and less than satisfying days, just as we can have fabulous days. But over time the key to engagement is: is this meaningful for me overall? Do I regularly find that I am at the edge my comfort zone, in a constructive and challenging way?

So the key to engagement and retention is to create an environment where the employee can safely switch back and forth between “challenging but do-able” and “cruising, no sweat” modes.

When looking at the employee life cycle in this way, it also becomes clear that as a manager you have a huge responsibility to know where your employee is in the cycle, and to do what you can to support that person in the best possible way. And that may even include helping an employee to move on to a new and more challenging position, if you have no more challenges to offer.

 

Why culture is not enough to save your employee experience

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The four quadrants of the employee experience

Last week I argued that culture is an often overlooked and important part of the employee experience – and it is.

However, having a great culture is only part of the story – as we all well know, we can’t suboptimise ourselves to greatness.

A great employee experience is not about how high a fuzzy-feel-good factor you can score. It’s about sense making and meaning. Is this meaningful to me or not?

When things are meaningful, we thrive; when things become meaningless, we suffer.

When you look at it this way, it becomes clear it is not enough to make part of the employee experience pleasant. It is not about the free fruit or great lunch service. That is also important, but it’s also just another part – the same way that our culture is only a part of the whole experience.

So, if we recapitulate.

We are striving for high levels of engagement. Engagement emerges from an individual feeling of motivation, enthusiasm – call it what you like – but it is something that starts on the inside of an individual and it is influenced by the three other parts: culture, physical environment (system) and the job that we get to do (and how we are allowed to do it).

This is the very simple explanation why it is so incredibly difficult to achieve consistently high levels of engagement. If you are not hitting all the elements more or less perfectly, there is no engagement.

We can have exciting challenging jobs, but in a horrible culture that is not meaningful for very long. We can work in the loveliest of cultures, but where ‘nothing seems to really work around here’. That is also not meaningful. And, finally, we can build these beautiful work environments with lovely cultures, but everything is so controlled, right down to how I am supposed to do every little detail, and that is not meaningful either.

And, to top it off, we must, of course, mention the fourth variable – the individual. None of this works the same for everyone. Each individual has their preferences and their ideas of what is meaningful to them.

So, if you have a day where you feel frustrated that you have tried everything to create a great workplace, don’t despair! Getting it right is really hard, but if you manage to do so, the pay-off is amazing.

How is that for a meaningful challenge?

If you are interested in exploring what it takes to develop engagement you are welcome to download my free e-book here

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