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Archive for the tag “Learning”

04 Sep 2008

Is Traditional Corporate Leadership Fundamentally Flawed?

Pyramid Restoration by Dyoptria

I was struck today with the thought that the traditional corporate structure has a fundamental flaw. This flaw relates to its ability to harness the power of its peoples’ ideas.

I may be wrong, but it seems that the traditional corporate structure is predicated on the workers doing the doing, the managers doing the managing and the CEO/ Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) (with Board consultation and expenditure on consultants) doing the thinking.

The flaw for me is that unless the CEO/ CSO spends time directly talking to the people doing the doing, they’ll only ever be hearing from the managers managing the same thing they’ve always managed (with the expected change/ transformation that all corporates go through)

Where are the structures for the CEO to actively ask the questions of the people who perform the company’s activities and (arguably) are the best people to advise on how things are done better?

Is bringing in a firm of consultants to ask your staff for the answers the best investment of shareholder funds? Will the consultants end up filtering the message to what they ‘corporately anticipate’ the Board want to hear? I do not (totally) mean to be unfair to consultants in this in terms of their value add and business model in strategic decision-making – thinking independently is always of benefit.

Further to this, I believe that the aggregation of the average messages or required actions is also a structural flaw. If you seek to hear the ‘noise’ of an issue and prioritise action/ change on that basis, you’re by definition missing the silent issues or improvement opportunities. It does not bear testing to assume that in a sophisticated organisation of client or process focused roles that any broader ‘noise’ can be heard past questioning the lowest levels of the organisation.

I run recurring six monthly reviews with every member of the company (granted only 75 now: scale will require solutions). We spend half an hour and I ask them whether, beyond things that they’re working on with their line manager, there are things that I could enable or effect change on that would increase their happiness/ role enjoyment/ enjoyment of the company. Even in a situation where they are completely happy, I push them on how I could make them even happier. I also take the whole team away every six months and similarly we work up (and on) the things that we should be stopping, starting or continuing. My senior managers are not involved in guiding these conversations. Just facilitating.

As you would expect from the tone of the rest of this post, the stuff that they come up with is brilliant. I end up with pages worth of actions. And why? Because each of them has time whilst doing their job to think about how they could improve the activities of the company that they are undertaking. Managers think about how they can get better managing. So in act the CEO and the front line team are the ones that should be having the regular 121 conversations.

…but how to practically do this?

Posted in Business, Change, Communication, Leadership, Learning, Management, Strategy and tagged CEO, Corporate Structures, Leadership, Learning, Listening, Management Consultancy, Strategy | Leave a comment

30 Aug 2008

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Why Persistent Focused Practice is What it Takes to Be Great

Catching up on some articles and I came across a great one I’d pulled out of Fortune October 30 2006. Called ‘What it Takes to be Great’ by Geoffrey Colvin, it reviewed research to try and answer the question of what it takes: is it talent or hard work.

Great conclusions:

1. Nobody is great without work: there’s no evidence of high level performance without experience or practice

2. The Ten Year Rule: most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before coming world class: this is across most fields – music and literature it’s closer to twenty

3. The best people devote the most hours to ‘deliberate practice’: activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance

4. Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends

5. Great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude (the example is given of Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team)

6. Deliberate practice starts with going at any task with a new goal

7. The mental approach is vital and feedback is crucial

8. You have to do deliberate practice regularly and not sporadically

The really fascinating bit is the conclusion ‘we still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice’ or as University of Michigan business school professor puts it after 30 years of working with managers “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why”

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Mindfulness and tagged Conscious and Unconscious, Greatness, Learning, Practice, Skills

22 Aug 2008

Learning Strategies: Can the Conscious Teach the Unconscious?

Black Label by Zsuzsanna Kilián

Accepting the principles that we have:

1. a conscious intellect which we feel that we control

2. an intelligent unconsciousness: as well as the running of things we know how to do (get dressed/ clean teeth/ drive car), increasingly it is seen as the place where our creativity/ intuition and problem-solving resides. This is believed to operate independently of conscious control (even though we may think we’re consciously controlling…)

I wonder whether with practice we can improve our ability to call on or apply our intelligent unconscious in whatever direction will be of use to us?

I think that simple approaches of consciously thinking about an issue or question without coming to a conclusion or answer, and then allowing thoughts to percolate or marinade over night is recognised as an effective strategy.

But what about training the conscious mind to use unconscious resources by habitually and routinely consciously and mentally debating unconscious issues?

Is it possible to grey the border between the black of conscious awareness and the white of unconscious resources (creativity/ problem-solving) by having unconscious characteristics and behaviour as your subject matter of focus?

So far I can’t find any writing on this matter, so is a good experiment to question those practioners/ passionate about the relationship between the conscious and other-than-conscious about their views on their own learning?

Emails away….