informal coalitions

Enabling people to excel - remembering Sid's Heroes

In the mid-1990s, the BBC broadcast a series of six half-hour programmes entitled Sid’s Heroes.  This featured workers from a range of organizations (the “heroes”) who had been challenged to improve the effectiveness of a central aspect of their work, using techniques introduced in two-day workshops by management consultant Sid Joynson.  Sid suggested that a 30% increase in productivity was readily achievable in the chosen processes. And, based on the evidence of the shows, his confidence was well-founded. 

Sadly, on a couple of occasions, crass comments by managers in response to the workers’ findings undermined the work that had been done.  But Sid’s insistence that “the experts” in relation to the work processes were in the room with him, not in the management offices, was well demonstrated.  I recall trying to buy a copy of the series from the BBC – on VHS(!) – but it was never made available for purchase.

Individual, team and organization development – the missing ingredient?

Managers – quite rightly - invest substantial amounts of time, effort and money in individual and team development. Too often, though, they assume that improvements in these dimensions will deliver the desired level of organizational performance – especially if this is accompanied by a programme of organization development.

So why is this not the case? What else is going on? And why doesn’t classical OD fill-in the gap at the organization ‘level’?

The importance of gossip as a natural dynamic of organizational behaviour

In the October 2008 edition of Scientific American Mind, social psychologist Prof. Frank T. McAndrew argues that "… gossip is a more complicated and socially important phenomenon than we think". It is, he says, a by-product of the psychology that evolved in prehistoric times to enable our ancestors to survive and thrive in their communities.

Viewing organizations as networks of conversations inevitably brings gossip into focus. And gossip, like other aspects of ‘small talk’, is often dismissed as an irrelevant or, worse still, destructive component of the ‘conversational mix’.

However, McAndrew identifies a number of positive aspects of gossip.

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:

The roles of conversation and vision in team and organizational leadership

Nick Smith, in How to Set a Team on Fire, sets out some wide-ranging challenges to management orthodoxy in relation to various aspects of team and organizational performance, which are well worth reading. Two brief extracts give a flavour of this thoughts on the nature and roles of vision and conversation:

• On vision

"… I'd argue that shared visions are not all they're cracked up to be. If you think about it, the more diverse a team of people are, the less chance there is of arriving at a common vision. Diversity and a unified perspective are, to great extent, mutually exclusive. In anything but a small group, finding common purpose is nigh impossible unless you're going to select a team of me-too automatons."

Little Britain and the paradox of team working

If today's Mail on Sunday is to be believed, tensions have surfaced in the relationship between the two co-creators and presenters of award-winning BBC comedy Little Britain. Allegedly, Matt Lucas and David Walliams have disagreed on the future direction that the show should take and on how their partnership should develop. These disagreements have, the paper claims, extended to the question of who should be credited with the show's success.

Whether or not there is any truth in the specifics of this story is not the issue here. What this story highlights, though, is the paradoxical nature of all team-based relationships, which most conventional discussions of the subject ignore.