If I’ve been asked that question once, I’ve been asked it a hundred times in the last few years. In an age of the “sound bite” trying to talk about the complexity of human relationships that make up business life doesn’t quite lend itself to co-operation.
All of my work comes to me structured as a “problem” that needs to be “sorted out”. That “problem” may be a plan that needs to be written, a consultation process that needs to be designed and rolled out; a “difficult” person or team in an organisation that needs to be “fixed”. While the framework around which my invitation is phrased can often look quite generic – the underlying issues are always about people and relationships. What I “do” is design processes for engaging people in dialogue. What happens as a result of that is that we create plans that are owned, consultation processes that are genuinely dialogical/meaningful and solve human resource issues.
My toolkit consists of questions – rather a lot of them at times. I work from the perspective that there are no “taken for granteds” and my starting point is generally trying to explore the assumptions and hypotheses around which the particular problem or issue is constructed. One approach I use is Appreciative Inquiry.
I like working with problems. I see them as solutions. By that I mean that a particular kind of behaviour – whether it is bullying, excessive praise, stubbornness, stuckness etc… - is the only way at this moment in time that an individual or a team can give voice to an issue. As such, I approach problems from a benign, curious position. I don’t begin my work by assuming that this problem is a bad thing (which can be challenging for my clients sometimes!). In fact, it may be a very useful thing. It may contain rather a lot of information about how the whole system is communicating. That way, I avoid falling into the trap of blaming and I hope that I can approach each member of a team or organisation from an appreciative position. It gives me, and the organisation, a richer understanding of how this issue is relevant to the broader organisational system.
As well as working appreciatively and asking questions about what is going on overtly, I’m curious about what’s not said – the unconscious processes that contribute to organisational life - and more interestingly – the emotional climate in organisations. Because like it or not – we don’t leave our emotional selves at the front door and enter into a rational entity that is “organisation” even though there is a dominant discourse that organisations are “rational” entities. Organisations are emotion generating environments and asking people to be rational only is a fairly irrational request when you think about it.
Approaching consulting to organisations from this perspective means I offer insights that address the overt “problem” while also addressing the “covert” issues that may be informing it at a deep and unspoken level.
What happens when you have 80 people in a confined space over 8 days?
Emotions start running high, that’s what. And in some cases – very high and I include myself in that description. It’s interesting to find myself in an institutional setting experiencing much of what my clients experience when they invite me to work with them to “solve” the problem.
Many organisations fear emotion. There is an assumption that to be emotional = out of control and to be out of control = inevitable chaos. Often the point at which someone starts exhibiting emotional behaviour in an organisation the three Cs will be called for – the Coach, the Consultant of the Counsellor. Taking the “problem” out of the system is seen as a way of containing and controlling the situation.
Here in Paris there’s nowhere to go. The hotel is about 25KM from the centre of Paris, there’s little outside the hotel in terms of distraction, (in fact the location has all the charm of an industrial estate on the edge of nowhere) there are limited circulation spaces and many people are sharing rooms. From an outside perspective it looks like a recipe for disaster. But we’re being challenged to look at, experience and understand emotion as a systemic manifestation. Why is it that people get “set up” in organisations to be the carriers of emotion? In my own experience, many of the trouble makers in organisational life are expressing what the rest of the system is too afraid to say. Here in Paris there is a lot of emotion – frustration, anger, intimacy, sadness etc and we are exploring how the relationships in our temporary institution create carriers of emotional messages. Both how we accept the invitation to act on behalf of the group and how we assign that invitation and responsibility to others.
Increasingly I’m becoming more interested in keeping the learning about this kind of systemic interaction within the organisations with whom I work. If I can help the organisation understand why particular kinds of behaviour speak on behalf of the organisation then the intervention can be appreciative as distinct accusative. That’s not to suggest that people don’t have choice about how they behave in organisations either – not everything can be blamed “on the system”. Systems can generate emotion but individuals make the choice about how to express it. Coaching and consulting can work hand in hand to bridge the gap between the individual and the organisation and when I’ve been privileged to have access at both levels the results in terms of organisational learning are impressive. It takes bravery to contain rather than control emotion and then use the wisdom to advance the learning of the entire organisation.
Taken in a pizza store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Every problem is a solution to a set of circumstances – so you could say that the problem is both the problem and the solution.
One of the things I try to do with clients is help them “appreciate” the problem they are having. No, that’s not some new age methodology that doesn’t deal with the issues. It’s more a case of asking them – is there any way in which this problem has truth to it? Most particularly if it’s a problem person we’re talking about. I try to encourage my clients to look at the “job” this person is doing for the organisation first before we talk about what to do about it.
Here are some examples of the work problem people have done in organisations I have been invited to consult to.
- A technical director in an engineering company made the working life of the sales department “hell” (their words) by refusing to co-operate with them. He withheld his staff, demanded more appropriate briefing, took the sales requests back to his department and sat on them for days holding up the closing of business. When we actually looked at what was going on here, this technical director was seen to be protecting his division and team from an increasing set of demands by all departments that were impossible for his technical team to meet. The technical director was, in fact, offering leadership to his team by protecting them from being overwhelmed by demand. By helping the sales team appreciate the problem they were able to articulate the real problem which was an unrealistic set of sales targets that had been imposed by senior management on both the sales and technical teams and not negotiated with them.
- The manager of a cultural organisation was increasingly vilified by her board of directors as being “useless” and having “terrible” communication skills. The board never knew what was going on and more to the point this manager wouldn’t take their calls when they phoned. On closer examination it emerged that the way of communicating in this company was informal. The 10 directors on the board would frequently phone the manager at all hours of the day and night sometimes requesting the same information. The manager was in 10 different relationships and each director was comparing notes with the other. It was a fact that she was “useless” and had “terrible” communication skills when you looked at it from this perspective – who wouldn’t be? The organisation had transitioned being a voluntary organisation to a company limited by guarantee with a board of directors. While they had hired a professional manager, the board themselves were still operating like a voluntary group – which meant that the company business was done informally and out of traditional business hours. The director was trying to run the business during the business day and the directors hadn’t settled in to their new roles. By helping them look at the “problem” as the “solution” they were able to openly negotiate a way of working that resolved the tension and achieve what they really wanted.
More often than not, problem people are articulating something in organisational life that others refuse to do. When you’re on your own you sometimes have to shout louder to make yourself heard – the louder you shout, the more problematic you are and the more isolated you become. “Problem” people can emerge for lots of reasons and the person who carries this role may have a personal back story that makes them the perfect candidate for the job. A person’s back story may also be where the intervention is required so knowing when to refer someone on for more personal work is a key part of any consulting in this area. The working environment and context for the issue is of course an essential part of the story as well.
Building a good working alliance with a client is essential if we are going to have that kind of conversation. Organisations have an unconscious life. Because it’s unconscious it’s unseen and difficult and very often threatening to look at and my clients have to trust in my skill that I have some idea of what I’m talking about. But if you can have an appreciative relationship with the problem, then that’s a really great place to start the conversation.
I eventually got around to reading the Art of Possibility on my recent trip to the US. Here's an extract from the Amazon blurb.
Ben Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, was faced with the same problem every year for 25 years: Teaching students who were in such a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance, they were reluctant to take creative risks. One night, he sat down with his partner Roz Stone Zander, a therapist, to try to find a solution. They decided the best approach would be to give everyone an A, at the beginning of the course. The A was not intended as a way to measure someone's performance against standards, but as an instrument to open them up to new possibilities.
This didn’t mean students could slack off for the rest of the semester. Students were required to write a letter that began with “Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because…” and they had to describe in as much detail as possible, how they came to achieve this “extraordinary grade.”
In writing their letters, Zander said students must “place themselves in the future, looking back, and report on all the insights they acquired and the milestones they attained during the year, as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as ‘I hope,’ ‘I intend,’ or ‘I will’ must not appear.”
Zander asserts “the A is an invention that creates possibilities for both mentor and student, manager and employee, or for any human interaction.” The A allows teams to accomplish what is possible, and reduces “the disparity in power between them can become a distraction and an inhibitor, drawing energy away from productivity and development.”
Zander doesn’t say what happens to the A when his students don’t pull their weight. His point here is to help people we work with to remove the barriers that block achievement--and to embrace the mindset of giving an A, by letting go of rigid mindsets that keep people pegged.
Zander applied this kind of thinking to his conducting and it transformed him from being a dictator, to an orchestrator of collaboration. This approach opened the door for musicians to speak more freely with him about their concerns -- about the way a piece of music ought to be played, for example, and he discovered that "the player who looks the least engaged may be the most committed member of the group." This new openness in communication had a huge effect on the morale of the orchestra, improving the performance of both conductor and players.
It's a nice variation on Appreciative Inquiry and one of the most useful things I took away from the book is Zander's invitation to stop thinking in good/bad splits and ask the question 'Did I make a contribution?' I've asked myself that question on numerous occasions over the past month or so - it's such a forgiving position to take - the answer is invariably 'yes'. It's also useful to ask if I experience others as making a contribution and the answer to that question is generally 'yes' also. The invitation is really about focussing on 'good enough' rather than on 'the best' - a little bit of the reality principle mixed with a soupçon of humility - I like it.