Anxiety is built into organizations.

The anxiety stems from peoples dependence on one another.

• If I build something but you do not sell it, I may get blamed.
• If I cook a feast but the person who designs the menu makes it appear unattractive, then fingers may be pointed at me.
• If I teach a course but the room is too hot, people may walk out on me.
• If I answer the clients’ queries but the IT system is too slow, then the level of service provided gets knocked.

This inherent anxiety happens both within organizations and well as between organizations. Lawyers are used to lessen the anxiety between organizations. Sometime SLA’s (service level agreements) are used, with very partial success, to mitigate anxiety between people and functions within one organization.

Nothing whatsoever can eliminate this anxiety.  It is a built in feature. The only way to mitigate the anxiety is to talk about it, acknowledge overlapping responsibilities, maintain realistic goals, reward cooperation and hire-for-both-attitude and competence.

In the framework of the supervision I constantly hammer my young flock to avoid jumping to wow-wowism and sloganeering to paper over the basic anxiety  all organizational members carry on their backs or in their gut.

It’s there, and we need to learn to live with it. It cannot be otherwise, nor should it be. Depending on others is no mean feat.

Blame shifting, buck passing and turd-on-the-table avoidance are rampant in many organizations.

There are very good reasons why this happens: lack of long term mutual commitment between employee and work place, the gig worker/external vendors upon whom blame is easily shifted, goals which are overly aggressive and “a victim must be found”, the shocking lack of solidarity between what was once “the working class”, and the use of digital communication which make shirking of ownership so easy.

Many organizations play lip service to enhance the level of ownership. These organizations PREACH ownership, put the word ownership in job descriptions and mission statements and T shirts. However, this is what Israelis call “hasbara”, or (mindless) propaganda.

Other organizations want to enhance ownership but do not know how. This is my advice:

1. If the goals that are set are too aggressive, forget about enhancing ownership. If you set up your employees to fail, they will not tolerate it. They will not agreed to be screwed. They will avoid being hanged at all costs.
2. If risk assessment is shared, then ownership can be enhanced. This sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. The sharing of risks provides the context in which people can assume ownership yet feel safe. Force clarity of language. “Challenging”, “obstacles”, “threats”, “probable.”…these are words which hide more than they reveal.
3. Use shared KPIs so that team members help one another to succeed. Do NOT rely on goodwill or teamwork. No one should be able to look good if they don’t help their peers succeed.

Flat organizations have a very cruel dynamic which I will highlight in this post.

A flat organization is way of organizing which has no hierarchy or very few layers of hierarchy. Supposedly, these organizations are superior  places to work, giving more room for creativity, abstaining from forcing decisions and  less infighting and bureaucracy.

I have worked for 8 flat organizations. Two are listed on Wall Street and are technology powerhouses. Three are industrial/agricultural collectives in Israel, and three were start ups.

Here are a few shared dynamics between all 8 organizations.

1. There was a huge gap between what the way that they operated, and the way they claimed that they operated.
2. There was a power elite in all these organizations, whether or not the people held office or not.
3. There was massive social pressure to conform.
4. The culture of these organizations was viewed as a ritual, ie, one must behave according to the rules in the spirit of a blind leap of faith.
5. There was a lot of apparent buy-in to decisions.
6. A language developed to hint at disagreement without actually saying it. Eg, the goal is really tough, yet if we all hunker down, it may be possible.
7. There was a lot of cynicism about organizational life.
8. Decision making was a nightmare.

Organizations need hierarchies to coordinate, make decisions, allocate resources and manage the inevitable kindergarten that exists in all organizations. And often, there is a dirty diaper to change. Lack of hierarchy causes extreme dysfunction and massive anxiety, so a de facto hierarchy is re-construed under the “non-hierarchy”.

The challenge of good organizing is about making more effective hierarchies, not via taking away the very scaffolding which provides sanity against extreme anxiety, albeit many many negative side effects.

Meet three of my clients from the past: a Quebecois, an American and an Israeli. Jacques, Marshall and Zeev are three outstanding executives whose organizations have constantly  over-performed for the last decade. Each manager has a critical flaw in his style.

Jacques sells all the time. When he should be consulting with his management team, he sells them his ideas. When he should be telling them what to do, he sells to sell them his ideas.

Zeev lacks emotional intelligence. Severely! Despite outstanding cognitive capabilities and strategic depth, he fails to factor people into his decisions.

Marshall commits his organization to impossible goals out of an almost fanatical religious belief in aggressive over-commitment. His teams constantly over achieve yet few executives (none) can stay with Marshall for more than one year due to mental and physical exhaustion.

Over my long career, I have worked with outstanding managers like these three on their critical (and near fatal) flaws. In this post, I want to share what I have learnt in the hope that can help someone.

• Many of these flaws are like chronic pain. They are here to stay. There are good times and bad times, but the flaw is best recognized as permanent. By doing so, appropriate expectations can be set.
• Taking the bull by its horns (“stop selling to me Jacques”) is rarely effective. Damage control strategies appear to be more effective. (What happens if your people don’t buy in, Jacques?)
• Working around the flaw has proven itself in many cases. (Zeev should empower his HR partner to provide input and guidance for to augment his poor instincts).
• Paradoxical interventions are very effective. For those who are not acquainted here is a link. Paradoxical intervention should not be practised without appropriate training. (Marshall, why not have your staff work on New Year’s eve? Just give them the appropriate carrot).

And the consultant must remember that he or she is not a brain surgeon. Dealing with critical flaws is a slow uphill crawl. It’s not about your own competence; don’t push to be overly effective otherwise you will lose your clients’ trust.

A recent visit to the Museum of Sex in Amsterdam enlightened me about various strange sexual fetishes. I grew up in the sixties in an era when, let’s put it this way…I assumed that there was very little I did not know. I was wrong.

So I got to thinking, is there such thing as a fetish in organizational behaviour? If we describe fetish as obsessive interest, the answer is a resounding yes. So in this post, I want to provide three examples of rampant organizational fetishes that I have seen, and I believe that my readers can see, all around them

1. The fetish of defining away complexity. Given the complexity of reality, overlapping responsibility is often necessary, creating the need for people to communicate and decide together in the areas of disagreement where overlap occurs. Instead of focusing on addressing this need, organizations prefer to focus on over-definition of roles, responsibilities and process clarity. Thus, our first fetish.
2. The fetish of overdosing on gender diversity. Oh yes, I may be in trouble for this. However, there are roles where professional competency trumps gender as a selection criteria. When a hospital wants to recruit 6 brain surgeons, three of them of each gender, this makes no sense at all. As a patient at least heaven forbid, I would prefer their recruiting six top surgeons, in the unlucky scenario that I would need their services.
3. The fetish of engagement. Most management (except perhaps on social media) is about getting as much as possible for as little as possible over an optimized period of time. In a bad market place, employers exploit employees, and in a fast growing market with skill shortages, employees squeeze and extort their employers. It’s a market dynamic for the most part and since 2008, it is a blood bath for employees. Engagement is a sedative aiming at dulling the true nature of the relationship. The goal of engagement is more for less, regardless how the pig is perfumed. Most people know this, but the fetish is rampant.