informal coalitions

Discipline in organizations – On ‘hot stove rules’, performance conversations and an opportunity to learn.

The October 2008 edition of Management Today bemoans the fact that the management of discipline and poor performance in the workplace is not what it was. Under the headline "Death of the Bollocking", a mixture of managerial timidity, increasing bureaucracy, fear of litigation and general societal malaise (death of a competitive ethic etc) are cited as reasons for this.

Its main argument is that people need to know when their performance isn’t coming up to scratch and that, as stated in its sign-off paragraph, "… if you want a workplace where you don’t have to tick people off in the future, you may need to start bollocking them now."

I agree with much of what’s said, especially in relation to the contextual factors mentioned in the article. At the same time, I think it’s important for managers to see discipline in a broader sense than simply ‘telling people off’.

Employee engagement - With what?

Stephen Billing's post Leadership and Management Matter, Not Engagement Scores is the fourth in a series that he's 'penned' on what he sees as the ''cult of engagement''. In it, he summarises his main points as follows:

• high employee engagement does not cause high productivity
• engagement is becoming a cult and wise leaders will not pay much attention to it
• leaders should concentrate on business results and employee engagement is not a business result, it is an input.

The goal of raising employee engagement has become one of the 'taken-for-granteds' of organizational management - fuelled in large part by the ready availability of a multitude of questionnaires and surveys that purport to be able to measure it. But, as Billing argues, does this really make sense?

Is Kotter on song with his latest offering on organizational change: A Sense of Urgency?

John Kotter has just released what you might say is the first 'single' from his highly successful eight-track 'album', Leading Change and its 'unplugged' version, The Heart of Change.

In a previous post, I have challenged what I see as the mismatch between the complex social realities of everyday organizational life and the theme that runs through these two 'concept' albums. That is, Kotter's claim that successful organizational change can be brought about in a neatly-packaged, one-step-at-a-time, predictable way.

So how does this extended rendition of Track 1 from the album, A Sense of Urgency, stack up?