Sitting in Starbucks recently, I paused for a moment to reflect on some essays I was reading by Charles Handy and as I scanned the room it was remarkable to see how every single person was engaged in some form of activity. People were reading, staring at their 'phones, chatting - but not one person was just sitting and reflecting. I put my book down. I reflected. It was hard work.
Have we lost the will to reflect? In former times (forgive me if I'm romanticizing the past now) I imagine people (at least those who weren't slaving in the mills or poor houses) had time to do more than chat, instead there was a culture that valued active engagement in discussions about ideas and having some time alone without distractions to just… think. Now, we have any number of distractions and a culture that demands we look busy on a fulltime basis (ever feel uncomfortable in an elevator or at a party with nothing to make you look occupied? Those ubiquitous TV monitors serve a function you know).
Also, brain work consumes a lot of energy - something like 20% of our daily calories. Aside from the fact that it is good that we work those neurons to stop our dearly beloved and very necessary hippocampus from shrinking on us, it is tiring work - so maybe we like to avoid raw thinking time pretty much as we do physical workouts.
Yet reflection is the time we take to learn from what we or others have done, make sense of the world and figure out how to do things better in the future. I observe many senior executives moving swiftly from meeting to meeting, reading and commenting on documents scanned at speed and existing on 4-5 hours sleep a night. Their lives are consumed by events, and the time for reflection and learning is lost to them. Whilst they are in control to the extent that they decide what events will fill up their schedule, they are clearly not choosing to cram in reflection time and may well seem to an outside observer (of a reflective bent, naturally) that they are, to all intents and purposes, completely out of control. Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch drew attention to this problem in a 2002 HBR article in which they said that only 10% of managers spent their time in a purposeful, reflective manner - you could allow them to be out on this number by any reasonable factor you like and it would still make you read it twice to check your eyes weren't tricking you.
Similarly, I see so many training courses skinnied down to the basics because of a fear of productivity loss back at the workplace. Training itself becomes a series of highly structured activities strung together over a shortened program, with little or no reflection time involved. No surprise that the retention rate and application of workplace learning is, all too often, pitifully low.
How about we decide to make reflection a major part of our working lives? Imagine if each employee had to write down what they had learned in the past year in preparing for their performance evaluation? What if CEOs started to spend 15 minutes at the end of each day asking themselves 'What did I learn today and what could I have done better?', and then encouraged their subordinates to do the same? I would guess that we would improve performance, increase adaptability, get more control over how we spent our time and even start to enjoy our jobs more. Not a bad combination of corporate and self interest. Think about it.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Revisiting the Shamrock Organization
The New York Times on Sunday reported that many top dogs in financial services are deserting the big banks and moving into smaller entities such as hedge funds and other investment vehicles where there may be less restrictions on pay (particularly for those currently in institutions taking government money) and the regulatory environment may be less tight. We hardly needed more proof that there is little loyalty to financial institutions beyond the size of the pay packet, so no need to ponder that further here. The NYT goes on to speculate that this may be a good thing, because it means that risk will be spread across many more institutions compared to the high concentration that characterized the run up to the current crisis.
I also wonder if this is not a further acceleration of a more general shift towards smaller firms becoming the innovators, the most attractive employers and mainstays of the wider economy in future. We see big pharma forming partnerships with biotech companies, a proliferation of small technology start ups, Porsche and other car companies (successful and unsuccessful ones) highly dependent on a network of smaller suppliers. The media world is full of small scale on-line businesses, freelance production companies, and small music labels.
Charles Handy, back in 1989, talked about the Shamrock organization as one of three evolving models for structuring companies, with a much bigger proportion of the workforce either freelancing or working with smaller firms who, in turn, perform short term contracts for other companies.
With the loyalty link between employer and employee even further frayed by the mass layoffs of the current environment, we have a situation in which the desire for individuals to reduce their own risk profile through lessened dependence on a single employer, is simultaneously coupled with the economic need for companies to be much more able to adapt to changing circumstances. So, we would do well to go back and study the prescient Handy once again. If individuals put more effort into figuring out how to develop more flexible, 'portfolio' careers, and companies into evolving leaner, increasingly contractor based structures, we could reduce risk on both sides and maybe start to produce an employment model that is better suited to our times whilst also enabling individuals to feel more in control of their own lives.
I also wonder if this is not a further acceleration of a more general shift towards smaller firms becoming the innovators, the most attractive employers and mainstays of the wider economy in future. We see big pharma forming partnerships with biotech companies, a proliferation of small technology start ups, Porsche and other car companies (successful and unsuccessful ones) highly dependent on a network of smaller suppliers. The media world is full of small scale on-line businesses, freelance production companies, and small music labels.
Charles Handy, back in 1989, talked about the Shamrock organization as one of three evolving models for structuring companies, with a much bigger proportion of the workforce either freelancing or working with smaller firms who, in turn, perform short term contracts for other companies.
With the loyalty link between employer and employee even further frayed by the mass layoffs of the current environment, we have a situation in which the desire for individuals to reduce their own risk profile through lessened dependence on a single employer, is simultaneously coupled with the economic need for companies to be much more able to adapt to changing circumstances. So, we would do well to go back and study the prescient Handy once again. If individuals put more effort into figuring out how to develop more flexible, 'portfolio' careers, and companies into evolving leaner, increasingly contractor based structures, we could reduce risk on both sides and maybe start to produce an employment model that is better suited to our times whilst also enabling individuals to feel more in control of their own lives.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Value Added Leadership
In professional services firms, by and large, the partners are expected to be actively productive in the sense that they get involved in content rich activities such as analysis of client issues, development of recommendations, writing articles for publication. In corporate environments, most especially in the larger ones, there often seems to be a different mindset along the lines of 'don't keep a dog and bark yourself' .
Many executives, as they rise through the ranks, seem to do decreasing amounts of productive work. Instead they indulge in the pleasures of doling out work and deciding between choices provided by others. The main mechanism for this form of work is meetings which, for those seeking to make an impression, are always back to back and run from dawn to dusk, conveniently leaving little time to do any real thinking or doing on their own part. John Kotter in his book What Leaders Really Do said that the average general manager only spends about 25% of working time alone (and this is mainly at home or travelling, hardly conducive to quality work), so the opportunity to not do much more than direct and choose is substantial. I think of this as a pyramid principle, where each additional layer adds weight and pressure to the layer below, without doing more than enhance the appearance of the total structure.
Even in these leaner times, where companies are squeezing quarts into pint pots with grim persistence, this pyramid principle does not seem to be diminishing (am I in danger of over mixing my metaphors here?). Although great leaders may be a rare thing, managers who can pass work around and make decisions on the back of others' efforts are two a penny. The leader who can both manage and do is a rarer thing altogether, but in this age of flexible structures and leaner workforces, isn't it time that we expected leaders to do more productive work themselves and be better at devolving responsibilities so that less time is required for 'oversight'? You never know, it might also have some spin off benefits in this world of shortened executive tenure and changing job market expectations in helping keep skills current and relevant to whatever is just around the corner.
Many executives, as they rise through the ranks, seem to do decreasing amounts of productive work. Instead they indulge in the pleasures of doling out work and deciding between choices provided by others. The main mechanism for this form of work is meetings which, for those seeking to make an impression, are always back to back and run from dawn to dusk, conveniently leaving little time to do any real thinking or doing on their own part. John Kotter in his book What Leaders Really Do said that the average general manager only spends about 25% of working time alone (and this is mainly at home or travelling, hardly conducive to quality work), so the opportunity to not do much more than direct and choose is substantial. I think of this as a pyramid principle, where each additional layer adds weight and pressure to the layer below, without doing more than enhance the appearance of the total structure.
Even in these leaner times, where companies are squeezing quarts into pint pots with grim persistence, this pyramid principle does not seem to be diminishing (am I in danger of over mixing my metaphors here?). Although great leaders may be a rare thing, managers who can pass work around and make decisions on the back of others' efforts are two a penny. The leader who can both manage and do is a rarer thing altogether, but in this age of flexible structures and leaner workforces, isn't it time that we expected leaders to do more productive work themselves and be better at devolving responsibilities so that less time is required for 'oversight'? You never know, it might also have some spin off benefits in this world of shortened executive tenure and changing job market expectations in helping keep skills current and relevant to whatever is just around the corner.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
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