A colleague and good friend of mine John Scherer just released a video about the Global mindset, based on my last posting on this subject.
John’s Wiser@Work is well worth subscribing to, as of December 3rd.
The video is here https://vimeo.com/johnscherer/review/112689584/e2a3bcc5e9
These ten questions access the extent of your global mindset.
For every question that your answer is YES, my suggestion is that that you work on upgrading your basic assumptions and skills in order to develop relevant capabilities to be effective in the global organization.
Here is a video on this subject, by John Scherer.
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Many corporations preach trust as a critical success factor. The word trust appears in many organizational artifacts: the way clients are to be treated, mission statement, core values etc., ad nauseam. Yet when examined up close, the term trust seems to lack shared meaning.
An underlying dynamic which impacts perceptions of what constitutes trust are the basic assumptions about “how do get things done”.
Indeed, trust means too many different things to different people and is achieved by drastically divergent means.
I am publishing a book of exercises geared to create enhanced global mindfulness of key organizational terms. In this upcoming book, one of issues I shall address is trust in global organizations.
There are global companies that attempt to elicit “buy-in” for key decisions. There is no place for a priori eliciting of “buy-in” in very diverse global firms. It just does not work. The goal of this post is to explain why not and provide an alternative.
In many parts of the world, management is autocratic and autocracy is not a pejorative term. Autocratic management has the right and privilege to decide, and in return, autocratic management assumes responsibility and does not share blame. Autocratic management can be more compassionate than more democratic forms of leadership, because compassion comes with the territory of being an autocrat.
The autocratic manager has subordinates who feel relieved that they are asked to do, not decide. They willingly relinquish the power of decision to the autocrat, as well as the larger salary and reserved parking spot.
Autocratic management is often prompted up by religious beliefs, such as the 5 unequal relationships of Confucius. There also may be a political preference for autocracy due to a societal fear of the instability which stems from the divisiveness caused by overly democratic decision making process.
The global companies that try to get buy-in for key management decisions believe that there is a phenomenal upside. It is true; buy-in has a phenomenal upside, in some cultures. Yet, cementing a priori buy-in is limited to very few cultures and appears to be a bit of an idiosyncratic quirk, observed in such diverse places as Japan, starts ups of a certain nature, companies with a strong participative ideology slash religion of participation, and companies which have perhaps overdosed on OD as a religion!
Too much focus on buy-in may result in a growing lack of trust in management’s ability in cultures with an autocratic streak to them. Worse, too much reliance on buy-in may cause folks to feel that management is dithering and the company is “unsafe”.
Pragmatism is suggested as the best medicine. In autocratic cultures, it is best to dress up buy-in as risk mitigation, rather than challenging the decision itself.
I imagine that all of my readers have faced impossible situations, both personally and at work.
Since this is blog about OD, it is so easy to conjure up impossible situations, characterized by poor products, impossible deadlines, poisonous management, a dysfunctional culture or a Board with their heads up their ass.
I am not the kind of person who generally easily accepts boundary conditions or limitations. Quite the opposite as this entire blog indicates, I challenge assumptions and turn over the apple cart quite often. This explains the work I get, the work I do not get, my success stories and failures.
Work and life have taught me to go slower when dealing with hard (for me) situations. Age has been a contributing factor in helping me be realistic. Age has played strange tricks.. As I have aged, I have learnt that if I cannot run 7 days I week, I can run five days a week. And on days when I cannot run 5 kilometers, I can walk 9 kilometers. And after the flu, I may not be able to exercise within a week, but I will be able to do so in a 3 weeks, or a month.
But what about impossible situations? I think that I am making progress here as well, thanks to Shyka.
Shyka is a dog with a psychiatric depressive disorder. He takes massive amounts of anti depressants and the meds have stabilized him. Having torn up the living room of his past 4 owners due to anxiety attacks when left alone , Shyka lives in a well kept kennel. He has been without an owner for 2 years. Every Sunday, I take Shyka for a long walk in the framework of volunteer work that I do.
Entering the kennel is very very hard for me; the barking of the many abandoned dogs breaks my heart every time I pick up Shyka for his weekly walk. Shyka awaits me with the saddest of eyes .I know that he only gets walked 3 times a week. I know that the medicines that have placated him are also killing him. And I know that Shyka will never have another owner.
Shyka however has taught me that when everything seems impossible, do what is possible.
And when I walk him back to the kennel, I am at peace with myself. I have done what I can.
By the way. Shyka loves the bones I bring him, and slowly, he is showing me affection, not an easy feat for a dog who has been abandoned so many times.
You are my boy, Shyka.
Smelling the land
שייקה ידידי My friend Shyka
Dec 2 2014
Update Jan 2015
My daughter just smsed me that Shaika has been adopted and is living in Tel Aviv.
Some stories have really happy endings. Here is Shaiya resting, and putting on the Ritz.
At rest-בא מרגוע לעמל
Putting on the ritz-חתיך
One of the services that I provide is working with people who have superb technical skills to develop their leadership capabilities.
In my experience, people with superb technical skills respond much better to one on one coaching than to learning with a group of people since in a group, they have often learned to be heroes and/or excel by leaning on one limited set of skills with people prone to worship technical talent.
When I do intake before I start the work itself, I ask 15 questions in a 2 hour session. Here are 6 of the questions that I ask before we start to work to begin to understand who I am working with.
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Several times each month, I interview people who are candidates for roles which have a large degree to of global exposure to vastly different cultures. Clients ask me to provide an assessment of the candidate’s global literacy and a suggested coaching plan where relevant.
I generally ask 12 questions. I will share 4 of these questions with my readers. For these interested in what I consider “global literacy”, here is a link to another post.
1) Describe what you think are the biases of your own culture, and how do they impact the way you manage conflict, communication and teamwork.
2) Describe 2-3 behavioural patterns of other cultures which you find most challenging to deal with and explain.
3) Respect is a term that many cultures use, yet often it means different things to different people. Explain how you would show respect, differently, to various populations that you work with.
4) How do you go about establishing trust in a society with an insider-outsider dynamic?
I have witnessed hundreds of reorganizations which have resulted in either no change, or a change for the worse.
The goal of this post are to point out why reorganizations fail.
At face value, reorganizations are implemented to improve the organizational ability to adapt to changing circumstance.
Another unspoken but very real reason for a reorganization is that senior management needs to buy time, and what buys time better than a reorganization, which can often result in a year of grace from pressure from above.
Yet another reason for a reorganization is that it is “doing”, which serves as a message that the status quo is untenable. And management often believes that doing “something” now is better than taking time and figuring out what needs to be done.
Change management and industrial engineers have promulgated a myth that reorganizations are more manageable than they really are, so managers feel more certain that reorganizations can be well controlled, and thus use the reorganization medication frequently.
There are many reasons why reorganizations fail. Here are the top three which come to mind.
The type of OD work which is necessary to support reorganization is not serving as the CEO’s Vaseline with pre-packaged OD products, as it were, which purport to “manage the change” .
In a reorganization mode, OD needs to focus on ensuring that something else changes, not only the structure. Most time, reorganizations are merely turf grabs, as Terry Seamon notes below in his comments.
But only the best CEO’s want to expose themselves to this type of hardball OD in the first year of a reorganization.
Most CEO’s prefer to use the year of grace, freed from the prattle of an OD consultant whose input creates “noise” by focusing on abstracts like politics and trust.
The art of post merger acquisition is difficult regardless of cultural differences. When the culture of the Israel start-up is factored into the equation, the challenges of post merger integration become daunting.
This post will focus on 4 factors that will impact the ability to integrate an Israel based start up after its acquisition.
1) The Israel market has a crushing demand for top talent. So it really does not matter what type of stay bonuses are put in place after acquisition, there is a good chance that top talent will be lost. And because Israel start ups have so few processes and so much “oral law”, the chances are that not only talent will be lost, but also unrecoverable knowledge .
2) Israel is a very modern society and appears very western in its cultural accoutrements.. But Israel is not Western at all: relationships are more important than process, the “old buddy” network is impregnable similar to the Chinese old friend clique, and the communication style within the inner circle is very different than the communication with the outer one. Very few non Israelis get into the Israeli inner circle within the first 3-5 years acquisition.
3) Transparency is a rare commodity Like the Chinese, Israelis believe that transparency maybe foolish, especially when it gives HQ the possibility to screw you.
4) Israelis argue all the time about everything, both with one another and with their bosses. This is very time consuming when doing anything, large or small, because one cannot give “marching orders” to the Israel based manager and assume that things will happen. Corporate directives often encountered with the fiercest resistance due to lack of discipline and rugged individualism, the same rugged individualism and lack of discipline that enabled the innovation to begin with!
My next posts will address what is to be done when acquiring an Israeli company.
In my previous post, I pointed out some of the characteristics I have encountered in managers from the FSU with whom I work .
In this post, I will provide 3 tips on how to deal with the cynicism, which can be tough to take for western yes-we-can OD consultant/manager.
1) There is no need to counter every cynical remark that is made. Just listen to these comments as “this can be tough”. It’s often no more than that.
2) Use these cynical comments as a springboard to work out a rational set of risk mitigation tactics.
3) When a very, very cynical person comes your way (and they do exist), use a paradoxical intervention, such as “So there is nothing to do, we need to avoid wasting out time”. I have been surprised at how well this has worked.
I train managers and consultants to better manage folks from FSU. Lot of what you need to do can be counterintuitive, so it takes time.
If you succeed, you will generally have a hard working and dedicated resource on your team, albeit cynical.