informal coalitions

Paying for performance at the Olympics?

I was dismayed to read in yesterday’s Sunday Times that the British Olympic Association (BOA) is drawing up plans to pay bonuses to athletes who win medals at the 2012 Olympic Games in London (Team GB to be rewarded with gold for gold).

This is not to say that our athletes don’t deserve recognition for their sporting achievements and a generous reward for their efforts. Far from it. But advocating a crude form of performance-related pay as part of the strategy for securing more medals seems to me to miss the point on several levels:

High-expectations leadership – moving from vicious to virtuous circles

Some years ago, when I was a manager in a large industrial plant, we took the decision to scrap a whole raft of ‘performance measures’ and related practices that had been introduced some years earlier under the guise of productivity improvement and management control. Despite widely-held concerns that poor work practices would increase if controls were relaxed, we pushed on with the decision.

The reasoning was simple. If we were ever to unlock the vast wealth of untapped talent in the business, we needed to change the expectations that managers - throughout the organization - had of their staff.

The time machine of organizational decision making

In Technology, Management and Society*, Peter Drucker describes decision making as

“… essentially a time machine which synchronizes into one present a great number of divergent time-spans.” 

“Our approach today,” he goes on, “still tends towards the making of plans for something we will decide to do in the future. This may be a very entertaining exercise, but it is a futile one.”

Incredibly, Drucker first made this statement to a management conference in 1957!  And yet, 50 years on, the notion that present and future decision making are separated in time still dominates management thinking; the former focusing on current operations and the latter on the visions, strategies and plans intended to realise the desired future.

So how do Drucker’s insights on the time dimension of decision making and the need to focus on the present play into current thinking about the dynamics of organizations?

The limits of rationality and the illusion of management control in organizational change

Stories abound of change efforts that have petered out, failed to deliver the expected benefits or disappointed those who were once their most enthusiastic supporters. All too often, the initial enthusiasm, intense activity and (frequently) large-scale investment are followed by disillusionment, cynicism and a feeling of wasted effort.

Can we escape from this pattern into something more useful or is it inevitable that events will take this course?

Stacey on Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics

I have been a fan of Ralph Stacey’s work since I first purchased one of his early books (Dynamic Strategic Management for the 1990s) almost 20 years ago. In particular, I have been attracted by his willingness – eagerness even – to challenge conventional thinking and practice in relation to the leadership and dynamics of organizations. The latest edition of his textbook on the subject, Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, continues this tradition.

The “keep it simple” mantra and the complex dynamics of organizations

"Keep it Simple!" How often have you heard this phrase used to signal the need for a change in the way that business is carried out or that organizations function?

Recently, it appeared on the cover of the Chartered Management Institute's journal, Management Today. This featured two articles about, as the MT put it, "managing complexity". The first, How to Survive Complexity, charted a round-table discussion on the subject between a number of senior executives and advisory specialists. The second, Simplicity: Not as Easy as it Looks by journalist John Morrish, suggested that although "simplicity has become the modern mantra of business ... it's easier said than done."

The call for greater simplicity in organizational design, management and operation is a natural, commonsense reaction to the overly complicated nature of many modern-day organizations. However, it is misleading and unhelpful to talk of this in terms of "managing complexity".

The secrets to successful strategy execution - sort of, perhaps!

I was delighted to read the words of Harvard Business Review’s editor, Thomas A. Stewart, in his editorial introduction to the June 2008 edition.  In his piece headed “Tools for Change,” he briefly previews the journal’s lead article, “The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution”.

In re-stating the authors’ claim that clarifying decision rights and designing information flows are the most important aspects of execution, he points out that “… those [areas] are the least subject to corner-office diktats. They involve dirty hands and messy conversations [my emphasis].” 

Reading this, I eagerly thumbed through the pages of the journal to see what the authors had to say about the messy conversations at the heart of strategy development and delivery …

Leadership communication in organizational change

In Lessons in Communicating Change, on her Body Talk blog, Dr Carol Kinsey Goman, challenges conventional wisdom on leadership communication in organizational change.

In particular, she stresses the critical importance of informal communication - the "complex web of social interactions and informal networks" as she puts it – which accounts for upwards of 70% of all organizational communication. Her post goes on to underline the powerful role that she sees non-verbal signals playing in the communication process.

The 'wiggly' world of organizational dynamics

Over 30 years ago, in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, philosopher Alan Watts illustrated the world as a “wiggly” line.  On top of this he drew a net, which “… ‘cut’ the big wiggle into little wiggles.”  In this way, he argued, man has sought to impose order on chaos.   But the net, he cautions, is only an image and

“… the real world slips like water through our imaginary nets.  However much we divide, count, sort, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided.”

And so it is with the dynamics of organizations.

Managing the informal organization

This post continues my informal coalitions commentary on the report by Katzenbach Partners about the importance for managers to pay attention to the informal organization. 

In two earlier posts, I have questioned whether or not the report represents a fundamental challenge to management orthodoxy (#1); and the extent to which managers can control the impact that the informal organization has on organizational outcomes (#2). 

Here, I want to build on Post #2 by looking further at the ability of managers to manage the informal organization. In simple terms, can the informal organization be managed at all?