Author Archives: shevat allon

What does Organizational Sloganeering indicate?

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Sloganeering is the repeated use of empty words geared at influencing behaviours and/or attitudes.

Politicians use slogans all the time. Those of you who live in democracies know that slogans are often empty promises. Those of us who live in other types of regimes know how to decipher slogans and guess what the regime really means.

Organizations use slogans almost as much as politicians.

Most of us are less skilled at understanding slogans in an organization that we are in understanding political slogans.

 I want to provide possible directions of what sloganeering can indicate.

1-There is a gap between actual and desired behaviours that management does not how to bridge, so they are using slogans. Let’s call this sloganeering due to ignorance.

2-There is only a message that management wants to purvey; there  is no willingness  to commit resources to make it happen, so slogans are being used to obfuscate.Let’s call this sloganeering as malicious lipservice.

3-Instead of solving problems pragmatically, there is a corporate religion which is being promulgated, in the hope that more religion will cure the organization. Let’s call this organizational religious  fanaticism.

4-Slogans are used as imperialistic tools to conquer someone else’s territory. The massive  use of “big data” and “internet of things” are illustrations of this. Let’s call this sloganeering as weaponry.

Case Studies

  • The slogan: Worship your customer.

This company was not willing to invest in the necessary IT to serve its customers, so they invested in sloganeering internally and externally.

  • Let teamwork make it happen

This company hired managers who built empires and after several failed attempts to create more synergy, slogans are being administered, which makes “more sense” that replacing managers.

  • Quality is everybody’s job

This company makes very aggressive commitments to the market which are unachievable. So initial product releases are crap. Yet the CEO truly believes that everyone should own quality. BTW, the measurement system supports speedy releases.

In all the supervision work I do with consultants, I place a major focus on how to diagnose and use the company’s slogans to understand and deal with organizational pathologies.

One final word of caution. Has a company hired you to train its employees about how to implement its slogans? Don’t do it since the chances of being relevant are very very very (3 verys) low. But you sure can get burned!

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The Management of Blame by Senior Managers

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In the natural course of doing business, things go wrong.

For some of the things that go wrong, people assume responsibility; for other things that go wrong, blame is assigned. The management of blame is part and parcel of organizational life. Blame is part of the game at all levels of the organization.

At the very top of every organizational/business pyramid, there are people with huge egos, and the management of blame is a tool that protects the valuation of the ego and the reputation of the very senior players.

As a matter of fact, managing blame is a critical skill often ignored by the starry eyed consultants who tweet and write about leadership. Many claim that blaming is characteristic of poisonous leadership, or a dysfunctional culture. I disagree.

My experience of 35 years in 4 continents suggest to me that almost all senior leaders have (and use) a vast array of political skills, one of which is the allocation of blame to others when things go wrong. Without blaming skills, you do not reach the top. 

Organization development consultants need to pay more attention to the allocation of blame as a generic built in characteristic of leadership at the top, because senior management teams “manage” the allocation of blame all the time, looking for a place to “park the blame”, and have someone else pay the fine.

I want to point out 12 frequent types of blaming used by people in senior positions.

  1. Pushing  unrealistic commitments
  2. Demonizing a certain figure
  3. Blaming one’s predecessor
  4. Picking on one member of the team without dismissing him/her
  5. Blaming the entire senior team
  6. Blaming the regulators (over-under regulation)
  7. Constant shifting of blame, like a swan casting water off it back
  8. Lack of employee “engagement”
  9. Making ambiguous demands and then, ex post facto, expressing dissatisfaction about the results
  10. Maliciously and intentional under-resourcing
  11. Over simplification  of complex tasks
  12. Appointment of incompetent people to do complex job

I have never encountered any senior manager or senior team where some blaming dynamic is not in place. Furthermore, the blaming dynamic often reflects the pathology of the organization.

The starry eyed idealistic consultant, armed with leadership models fresh from academia, avoids discussing the blame factor, and focuses solely enhancing accountability, ownership and mutual dependencies. By ignoring the realpolitik of senior leadership , the consultant will become irrelevant.

A professional practitioner understands what part of the blaming dynamic is changeable and works to mitigate the dynamic, whilst accepting that the treatment of the blame pathology can only go so far.

One final comment. In Asia, senior management tends to vocally blame subordinates far less than in Europe and North America, due to the obligation of the leader to appear to be compassionate. Blaming does occur, but it is much more subtle.

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An OD consultant should not approach chaos like a Change Manager

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When Jean invited me to work with this management team, he had prepared a few slides to brief me on what he sees as the major issues. I have worked with Jean twice in the past, so Jean was fair enough to tell me “this is how I see things, Allon; I am not telling you how to do your work”.

Jean’s slides boiled down to three issues:

  1. Role ambiguity between Engineering and Customer Service results in lack of accountability during customer deployment
  2. Lack of priorities per department and lack of shared priorities result in constant chaos
  3. Planning not accurate results in “resource allocation as a constant ongoing negotiation” between line and staff

Jean had tried to solve these issues with his (cost effective) internal change management team, consisting of industrial managers and change managers. “Every time I think of you Allon, I think of my root canal surgeon, so you can imagine I have tried everything before having you come all this way to make my life miserable.”

I spoke with Jean’s team members, 8 in number, consisting of 2 Germans, one Israeli, and five North Americans, including one French Canadian besides Jean himself. My view of things was that Jean is running a highly innovative company in a fast moving market, and all of the 3 issues Jean had pointed out are “par for the course.”  To be more specific,

1-The product is so innovative and deployment is so early that it is indeed impossible to define what is owned by Engineering and Customer Service

2-Everything is indeed urgent; there are no firm priorities because the market is moving so quickly

3-No plan, however extensive, can be useful in a market where expected quarterly revenue runs between 4 and 90 million dollars.

The problems that I noticed are:

  1. The two Germans (Finance and Planning) and Israeli (Engineering and Deployment) had totally different coping mechanisms with the chaos, the German preferring drowning in details in attempt to conquer the chaos and the Israeli preferring making an ideology out of chaos.
  2. Each senior manager managed to juggle well within their own group, but as a senior juggling team, they were useless because they were blaming one another instead of assuming joint ownership of the juggling task.
  3. Planning and control, Finance and HR were trying to fit old economy and rigid models/mechanisms onto the organization which did not match reality.

Jean promised to fix the third issue. He also told me to coach the German and Israeli, separately and as a team. I worked with them on global competencies.

Jean asked me, how we fix 2? Joking, I told him that his purchasing department had asked me for a detailed roadmap for fixing 2 as well. And thus the work began. We focused on mutual accommodation, organizational juggling skills, teamwork and delphi prediction techniques.

All in all, I made three trips from Tel Aviv to Geneva and Zurich, and the entire project took ten days. Not one single day was devoted to either role clarity or reaching agreement on one firm list of shared priorities.

In our final meeting, all members of the team said that the learning experience and change had been phenomenal, and they invited me out to my favourite steak house, and we ate and drank, and drank.

The greatest compliment came from the German who told me, “you did not change anything, but every”z”ing changed.

Follow me @AllonShevat and follow Gloria at @GRamsbottom

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Emotional detachment and the calling of OD

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One definition of a calling is simply a vocation, trade and or profession. Another dimension of a calling is a strong impulse, inner yearning and/or beckoning to practise a certain profession.

Certainly there is a lot to be said for viewing ones’ profession as a calling: enjoyment, fulfillment and self-expression, and not simply a “bag”. (old slang for a way to earn a few bucks).

Organization Development is a compatible calling for many sorts of people driven by values and the desire to make a difference: practised well, OD is meaningful, powerful, interdisciplinary and very hard to get right. Although it is sisyphic, it has a huge impact on the quality of relationships and outputs in the workplace.

Beyond the positives that can attract folks to practice OD as a calling, I want to point out one of the less discussed, obscure and counter-intuitive motivations to the OD trade: it is a profession which can provide a people-interaction platform for those of us with emotional detachment. 

  • It is the very “numbing” so characteristic of emotional detachment that allows the practitioner to distance himself/herself from a situation and thus provide value-added meaning and perspective. This numbing provides value in diagnosis, intervention and monitors energy levels. 
  • The emotional detachment allows the practioner to develop a practice with a wide range of clients, all of which are contract-based and limited in time. The contract and the time limitation allow the emotionally detached consultant to give more, with less personal anxiety.

There are many reasons that I love doing OD work. First and foremost, it is because it is interdisciplinary and very hard work to do well. However, I easily admit that OD has provided a loner with a playing field to interact with people. Had I not chosen OD as a calling, I may well have had gone into a field more akin to the nerds of today. In many ways, I have made my handicap into an advantage.

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OD needs to stop cross-dressing as Change Management in order to support the chaos of organizational life

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Organizational life is characterized by a high degree of chaos, a chaos which creates a complex painful reality at the system, personal and interpersonal level.

Organizations pretend to deny/avoid the chaos via ERPs, structural changes and well defined processes, but the chaos bites them in the ass all the more, manifesting itself in a plethora of post-modern pathologies, such as collapse of trust, massive disengagement, toxic leadership and subjugation of common sense to grotesque IT dictated business processes.

Despite the need that exists to better cope with the brutality inflicted by chaos, OD is no longer a major player in this domain. OD sold its soul as it went through a vast array of changes and  these changes have negatively impacted  OD’s ability to survive. A few of the changes-

  • Commercialization
  • Productization
  • Dumbing
  • Crawling into bed with change management

OD rendered itself irrelevant in the very area in which it has most value. OD became a side show.

Why did these changes not position OD to move into the chaos pain mitigation domain more effectively?  Well, chaos is chaos. Coping with the complexities of chaos cannot be done by dumbed practitioners, using scalable models which promise the predefined deliverables a la change management.

The alternative to the commercialized OD product crap is not easy. Selling and practising the less structured, semi chaotic art of OD is real tough. OD that deals with coping with chaos is hard to define to the client. There is lots of artistic and eclectic improvisation on the way, and the output of such an OD effort is unmeasurable; the changes OD makes eventually creep into the system and people, alleviating a lot of the side effects of excess chaos. However, there is no “deliverable” as an output, enter-able into an ERP purchase request.

By conforming to the clients’ pathology instead of confronting it, we sold our soul.OD knows how to deliver a change in the critical underlying dynamics which sabotage flexibility. There is no need to pretend to be something else.

So where do we go from here? I believe that before OD supports clients’ chaos, we need to loosen up and deal with our own anxiety driven over-structuring. 

In the meantime, OD practitioners who want to help their clients cope with chaos would be wise to avoid all OD models, avoid the flight to spiritualism and desist from cross dressing as change managers.

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From contact to contract-that’s a key time to diagnose

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All of us who have studied and taught organizational diagnosis know a plethora of diagnostic models. But diagnosis should begin before the work itself actually starts and this post is geared to pointing out what we should be looking at in the very initial stage between contact and contract.

Paying close attention to what we learn about the client in this period of time often provides the context and direction for the diagnosis and intervention.

Here are five things worth noting.

1-Misplaced/wrong expectations about the nature of OD

  • Clients may overly define the scope of work and expected measurable “deliverables”, forcing you commit to something you know nothing about.

2-The ideological/religious nature of the corporate creed

  • Clients who lecture you about the corporate culture and ask you ensure that your work will reinforce the Holy Grail.

3-Lack of respect

  • Clients who cancel initial meetings again and again, often at the last minute, yet demand total flexibility on your part.

4-Do they want to change, or do they want to “use and throw away”

  • Clients who milk you for long and detailed proposals, again and again , with a very aggressive time schedule and then make you hurry up and wait for an answer.

5-Accessibility to key information; stakeholder analysis

  • Clients who block access to senior management before HR puts a stamp of approval on your forehead.

I do a lot of supervision with consultants who seek guidance when projects go astray. One of my first areas of inquires is “tell me about the very beginning”. Alas, often it’s all there from day one. And acting right from day one saves a lot of heartache.

Recently, I was asked to do merger and integration work. In our initial meeting, the CEO asked me what “model” I use, and if I could finish it all “in 6 weeks”. That was all I needed to start work.

So remember, work starts with the first call, and if you act appropriately at this stage, the chance of success increases.

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On Managing Lower Back Pain and Organizational Response to Crisis

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 Five weeks ago, I was getting dressed to go to a weekly lecture at a History Club which I attend; as I tightened my belt, I strained my lower back. I was totally unable to move for 4 days, and now, five weeks later, I am on my feet and doing most things again, with the pain lessening slowly as time goes by.

This has been a  hard period because despite the fact that I am fit, getting back “up to speed” is so hard, although I have been exercising for decades. The learning process of managing this back pain is no less painful than the back ache itself!

The goal of this short post is to reflect about the process of my learning about managing back pain and organizational response to crisis. This post is meant as a metaphor.

Very quickly I learnt that lower back pain is a mass of symptoms with many (but no clear) cause. There is no real model of what treatment works and what does not. Sometimes walking helps, sometimes walking  hurts; sometimes rest helps, sometimes rest makes things worse. Sometimes it pays off to be mindful of the pain and sometimes it pays off to be distracted.

And symptoms do need to be treated, especially since the problem is nothing but a mass of symptoms. The term “just a symptom” makes no sense in treating back pain. A symptom is not a “just”. The problem has no root cause, but the symptoms are very real.

Treating back pain involves a certain degree of acceptance, a mindset of humility, many eclectic concepts and tools, some rigour and a flexible plan, which changes but does not overly waver. And patience is critical. . (I must admit that I am a very, very impatient person).

Now I look at the way that organizations respond to their pain: diagnosing root cause, changes of structure, engagement plans, new IT based processes, axing people and process clarity. Even when organizations respond with “agility”, they do so rigidly with agile theories and routines.

In organizations, those in charge KNOW what needs to be done. They project clear goals and vision. When things do not work, people/things are blamed because there is a need to prove the “fix it” plan is right.

The essence of my reflection is that while organizations are not individuals and this post is “just a metaphor”, I think that eclecticism, humility,  balancing the  polarity between plan & improvisation have a hell of a lot to bring to the table. And maybe positive changes in organizations come from a lot of little things being adjusted.

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Why internal OD departments are often unable to drive relevant changes? (The chicken shit brigade)

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Just last week, I was called to a meeting with a CEO who wanted to discuss the ramifications of “being forced to unionize”. The internal OD department in this very same organization was deploying 360 degree feedback at the level of junior supervisors, which was as relevant as chiropractic treatment for a corpse.

This CEO’s HR department employs 4 OD consultants, all of whom are irrelevant in dealing with the strategic organizational issues at hand. Instead of being relevant, they are dealing with chicken shit.  Why is this so characteristic of internal OD departments? In this post, I will try to make sense of this matter.

Large, bureaucratic government organizations, public utilities and veteran conglomerates develop internal OD department as they age ungracefully simplifying “organizing” into a set of processes and products which can be “administered” by what the Russian and Israelis armies both call a “politruk,” that is a political commissar, serving warm corporate lemonade, or providing soft skills to middle management.

These OD departments generally report into HR, which saves costs. Because of the growing anxiety of HR management about HR’s positioning, not rocking the boat becomes a dominant element of HR strategy. And nowhere is this conservative stance more apparent than in an internal OD department. Instead of positioning internal OD to be be strategic drivers of change, the emphasis is placed on delivering and administering regime goodies cooked up by the company kitchen. This breeds phenomenal cynicism and lack of trust.

Internal OD departments generally implement such routine tasks as the administration of surveys, and packaged training for middle management, commission outdoor training or perhaps force feed “engagement”, whatever the hell that means. As Levis Madore points out in comments section below, “castrated internal OD functions quickly become eunuchs who pose no danger to the executive levels as they proceed to (administer) cutbacks in the HR department which gradually (are)  transformed into process boxes with mere transactional tasks (to perform).”

The internal OD departments control access of junior external OD  consultants to the company. Very often when there is a budget to hire externals, they hire OD technicians who are controllable, inexpensive and slavishly  loyal. 

As a result, more experienced OD consultants are often commissioned directly by very senior managers, who ask these senior externals to “work in coordination” with the internals, or more often ignore them. Both scenarios are often ugly.

When does an organization need an external OD consultant? In my mind, the answer is counter-intuitive. A skilled internal OD consultant (not an OD product hack or what the Chinese call a barefoot doctor 赤脚医) is needed in the initial formative stage. That’s where organizations can get the bang for the buck, especially in organizational design.

However, very often start-ups in their formative stage commission external OD workdue to high cost, and end up “bringing the OD work inside”, after due castration by the HR manager, who may have been a senior admin or office clerk at the very beginning.

pt

The inspiring  politruk

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The perfect storm: The fearful HR clerk and the OD brush salesman (totally revised)

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In my previous very widely read post, I described the imperfect nature of the OD intervention. In that post, I explain that OD interventions cannot be perfect. Organizations themselves are very imperfect. Once the human race started organizing and we all  became dependant on one another, there is severe anxiety built into the very essence of organizing, and all forms of organizations. This anxiety is not soluble nor does OD  “deliver” solutions to this inherent anxiety.

The goal of this post is to link these imperfect OD interventions to what is happening to HR, which often commissions external OD interventions.

The positioning of HR organizations is in a state of drastic decline. HR domain has been cannibalized by IT technology, Legal Departments as well as by the declining perceived value of the resource that HR represents, i.e. people and their loyalty/satisfaction.

As a result of HR’s speedy and painful demise, the anxiety level of the remaining HR executives is sky high. Management and peers of HR constantly “question the value” of HR, as illustrated in the satiric HR Gloria blog. Like a third rate politician frightened by plummeting rating, HR becomes motivated by fear.

There is a still a group of HR managers, mainly (but not only) in their 40s +, who stand their ground and do an admirable job in this hostile environment. However there is also a younger set of HR managers , transactional technicians,  who accept that the HR consists of sycophancy to the regime  (obsequious flattery) and transactional efficiency. These HR technicians guard their position by “apparent effectiveness” and wow-wowing, i.e., organizational cheer leading.

At the meeting point between the imperfect world of OD interventions and the anxiety of transactional HR technicians, the perfect storm occurs.The OD practitioners can only commit to a process that questions the regime’s assumptions, and the HR technician deals with its own anxiety by wow wowing and cheer leading.

The result of the perfect storm is that the type of OD intervention which is chosen by HR is aligned with the fear level of HR and not the needs of the organization. The OD “vendor” must ensure that the intervention is fun, measure-able, and creates a wow buzz. Luckily for HR, there are many OD hacks who have morphed into doing this shit.

Just to provide a small example. Recently I received a call from the HR manager of a company which had recently been acquired. The call went like this, “Hi this is Dorit speaking. I am the HR manager of XXX, which has recently been purchased by YYY. Do you have an “engagement package” for technical staff. And how much does it cost?. I need this by 2 pm”.

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Why engagement and training programs fail to deal with a no can do attitude

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There are organizations and units where “no can do” is a frequent behaviour of employees and lower levels of management. No can do is undue pessimism, foot dragging and a passive attitude.

Upon encountering such behaviour, senior management gets all upset and may demand “engagement” programs from the ever so perky HR department, as well as pressure middle management to assume responsibility.

Consultants may diagnose no can do-ism as  lack of engagement and then prescribe engagement or managerial training or even coaching, reminding me of doctors looking at something they do not understand by labelling it a virus caused by stress and tell patients to live a less stressful life style.

Can’t do-ism, however, in many cases is a positive adaptive defence mechanism on the part of employees.Unless recognized as such, it cannot be properly addressed.

Here are examples where a no-can-do attitude actually pays off!

1-an organizational culture in which people are pushed to over commit, and then blamed for delays.  This is very prominent in software, sales and cut throat competitive domains.

2-a culture where constraints to aggressive timetables/goals are negotiated (in the sense of bargaining) ,not discussed. This can be prominent in software, in goal setting, and with certain societies which tend to negotiate instead of discuss.

3-a culture where there is a severe work life imbalance and employees perceive a need to “hide” (pad) from management, because where there is no such thing as priority management, and everything is urgent.

As such, no-can-do is a survival reflex of an abused employee to a dysfunctional organization.

In my experience, all engagement programs, talent management and training efforts that “throw skills” and wow wow (cheerleader) when dealing with no-can-do are doomed, because they see no-can-do attitude through the biased eyes of management.

In worst case scenarios, there is a ready made training/coaching product that is “applied”  to make a fast buck which also helps someone internally look good for rapid action to deal with this no can do  `virus`.

No can do is a severe and hard to diagnose dysfunction which cannot be picked up at a proper resolution via organizational surveys or cured via engagement programs. However when diagnosed qualitatively and without a management bias, there are many positive steps which can be taken to reverse the situation, none of which have anything to do with engagement.

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