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The Process of Ongoing Success

Guest post by: Charlie Badenhop

Article Overview: Managers can become more successful by transforming the workplace into a community which evolves over time rather than depending on old inflexible patterns of organization which have ceased to be effective.To lead such a community, the manager or management team must be able to learn new techniques and develop an intuitive and comprehensive appproach which includes appreciating the complex emotions workers bring to the workplace.

The Process of Ongoing Success

We would like to present you with a radical idea - most, if not all, of your previous training and experience in people and process management has prepared you to be effective from the perspective of the past, and ineffective in regard to the future. The greater your past successes, the more likely it is that you will experience difficulties in the future. Most managers have been well educated in regard to logic, analytical reasoning, and problem solving. These skills have been nurtured in the home, stimulated in every phase of education, and further developed and rewarded in the workplace. All of this learning takes place at the expense of developing the perspective and skills necessary for managing people and demonstrating effective leadership. Truly effective leaders cultivate an intuitive comprehension of non-rational, paradoxical people and situations, and understand and respect the emotional and spiritual longing that people bring with them into the workplace.

Well schooled in "living in our heads", we often find during challenging times that the body as a whole consistently refuses to implement actions dictated by the logical mind, just as employees often balk at directives set forth by management. While the logical self says "I should and I will" the body says, "I can't and I won't!" As individuals we resist all change that does not "feel" right to us. The same is true of any workforce.

Our work together needs to be about the conscious creation of high performing, self-monitoring, special purpose communities. Special purpose indicates that all communities exist to achieve an end, whether explicitly stated or not. A community exists only in the actions that it takes to achieve that end. Organizations rarely explicitly state their reason for being, except in a nebulous manner. The term community recognizes that leaders, managers, employees, and customers seek a sense of belonging and require as a condition of personal commitment, a supportive emotional environment. The term business community describes an environment in which the complex set of organizational and individual behaviors that result in learning are grounded in actions that signal dignity and respect both to the customer and to the employee.

A business rarely plans at the start the kind of community it becomes as time goes by. Rather, a business community evolves over time in interaction with, and often as the result of, a broader system. A pattern of effective actions evolves during lengthy periods of organizational success. We then deliberately build these effective actions, and the behaviors thought to produce them, into the community. Beliefs, rituals, stories, and values communicate them. Methods, procedures, organizational structures, and the criteria within appraisal and compensation systems require and reward their use. Over time, the conscious rationale for these underlying structures fade, and the behaviors produced become unconscious and habitual organizing aspects of the system. Community behavior becomes part of the background and history of the organization. Behaviors become embedded in the bodies, the biology, of staff. In the process, these behaviors become disassociated from the effectiveness they are meant to bring forth.

Typically, most organizations only assess the overall health of the community they have evolved when a breakdown occurs which dramatically reduces the organizations ability to continue to achieve its special purpose. Few organizations have appropriate robust models of community to model the workplace after. Because of this, there is usually little patience with the difficulty and discomfort of the renewal that every organization must go through periodically. Most companies seek a quick fix of off-the-shelf, event-based training instead of examining the various threads woven into the fabric of the community. Companies hope to "fix" their current difficulties by hiring experts in team building, communication, or management and leadership development. However, the actions that flow from these newly developed competencies rarely transfer from the training room to the workplace. This is neither the fault of the trainer or of the employees. Rather, it is testimony to the power an organization's underlying structure has on influencing group and individual behavior. This underlying structure seemingly evolves and mutates on its own, without explicit directives from management.

The overall results an organization achieves are produced by repetitive patterns of behavior carried out by the individuals within the organization. These patterns of behavior are strongly influenced by the underlying structure of values and beliefs the organization has unwittingly propagated over time. Given the "chicken or the egg" nature of organizational development, we find it is most effective to start the process of organizational review and renewal by examining and bringing greater awareness to the beliefs and behaviors of individuals, while concurrently modifying the organizational structure to reinforce the shifts each individual needs to make.

In the face of this massive, inflexible system we call the workplace, we need to explore what actions we can take to assist the process of transformational change.

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Article Tags: flexibility, management style, success, work community



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