informal coalitions

'Corridor conversations'

In the middle of a chat about all things organizational, a client once told me that the Company’s CEO had said to him and other senior colleagues, “We’ve got to stop the corridor conversations.”  Leaving aside the naivety of the CEO’s comment, in the pre-COVID days when the possibility of in-person exchanges was ever-present, his remark also betrayed a basic lack of understanding of how organization works. In particular, it failed to recognise the fundamental role that informal conversations such as these play in determining the overall nature and quality of people’s individual and collective perspectives, practices and performance.  Ironically, of course, informal conversations would have been just as much a part of the CEO’s own practice as they were of everyone else's.

The U ’n I at the heart of communication

We can probably all agree that communication is a fundamental aspect of organizational practice and performance. At the same time, it is important not to view this simply as an act of message-passing from those who are formally in charge, and supposedly “in the know”, to other participants. 

 

However well-crafted, information-rich, and skilfully presented such messages might be, these communicate nothing. Instead, they serve as an invitation for those on the receiving end to communicate amongst themselves. And this is something that they do informally, in small-group and one-to-one interactions; seeking to make sense of what they’ve heard and deciding how, if at all, they’re going to respond. Communication takes place only in real-world; U ‘n I interactions - with all of the informality, messiness and ‘hidden agendas’, etc. that these entail. And this applies equally well, of course, to those in formal management roles as it does to everyone else.

The challenge of taking complexity seriously

I recently came across a blogpost entitled, Simple Thinking in a Complex World is a Recipe for Disaster. It was written by Prof. David Green of Monash University in Australia. 

 

In it, he cautions against the tendency to oversimplify the complexities of everyday life, and gives some practical advice on how to take complexity seriously. In particular, he maintains that we should,

"... avoid following simple slogans uncritically. Avoid dismissing uncomfortable facts out of hand."

So far, so good. 

10 examples of language that denies the real-world complexity of organization and management practice

According to conventional wisdom, managers can somehow stand outside the ongoing flow of human interaction and choose the optimum way to manage the situations in which they find themselves. Then, provided that others implement their decisions as planned and comply with the prescribed ways of working, it is assumed that the sought-after outcomes will be achieved.

Most managers would concede privately that this bears little resemblance to their everyday lived reality. However, the presumed ability to predict, organize, and control outcomes persists. Nor is it limited to management writing, leadership development programmes, and consultancy offerings. It also frames the ways in which managers’ actions are scrutinized and commented upon by politicians, journalists, and members of the general public. Most significantly, perhaps, this scientifically rational view of organization and management practice remains central to the way in which managers’ performance is typically judged by the in-house scorekeepers and commentators on whom their current standing, ongoing remuneration, and future prospects depend.

When managers account formally for their practice, therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised if they adopt the clichéd language and “We did this and got that” explanations that reflect this managerially ‘correct’ and politically acceptable view of their practice.

“Talking the walk” as an act of everyday leadership practice

In a recent HBR blog post, entitled The Best Leaders “Talk the Walk”, Fast Company co-founder and author Bill Taylor argues,

“… the more time I spend with game-changing innovators and high-performing companies, the more I appreciate the need for leaders to “talk the walk” — that is, to be able to explain, in language that is unique to their field and compelling to their colleagues and customers, why what they do matters and how they expect to win. The only sustainable form of business leadership is thought leadership. And leaders that think differently about their business invariably talk about it differently as well.”

Taylor rightly acknowledges the importance of language to people’s understanding, motivation, and performance - whether for better or worse!  I wonder, though, if the way that he describes the notion of “talking the walk”, and the example that he uses to explain it, does it full justice. In particular, I think that he fails to highlight how, practised properly, this signals a fundamental shift in the nature of leadership communication. A shift, that is, that privileges joint sense-making and relationship building ahead of the excessive emphasis on 'getting the message across' that continues to dominate current practice.

Making progress by paying attention to the everyday realities of leadership practice ahead of idealized prescriptions

In a new LinkedIn Group associated with the Centre for Progressive Leadership, members were recently invited to answer the following question:

"What are your top five 'must haves' if we are to see progress in the field of leadership?"

In response to this, and echoing my recent paper for the Centre entitled Taking Organisational Complexity Seriously, it seems to me that meaningful progress depends on the willingness and ability of managers to:

• understand and engage more insightfully with the complex social reality of organizational life;
• avoid the lure of simplistic, “if you do this, you’ll get that” prescriptions; and, in the words of Ralph Stacey,
• accept that "Managing and leading are exercises in the courage to go on participating creatively despite not knowing." 

At present, there is a wide gap between the established ways in which people understand and talk about organizational leadership, and the current reality of what leaders actually do in practice. Rather than prescribing some idealized future state based on prescriptive 'must haves', therefore, I thought I would respond to the question by offering five ‘already haves’. That is, five ways (amongst others) in which people's experienced reality of organizational life and leaders' actual behaviours already run counter to the ways in which these are supposed to operate according to conventional management 'wisdom' and common discourse.

These five 'already haves' are reproduced below.

There's no such thing as on-line conversation

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Ozcan Kabakcioglu shared his observation that many on-line discussion forums generate very few conversational exchanges. More often than not, contributors tend to share their own or others' thoughts in the form of previously published blog posts, magazine articles, published papers, and the like.

In reflecting on his well-observed comment, I suggested that we are perhaps wrong to refer to these on-line exchanges as "conversations" at all. And, given, the centrality of real-world conversation to my informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics, I thought that it was worth restating my reasoning here.

Getting 'real' with "veridical perception"!

As I was sorting through some of my books earlier today, I came across David Ewing's Practice of Planning. Published in 1968, this was one of the texts to which I referred in a thesis on organizational planning way back in 1980 (see here for the first in a series of posts based on its findings).

My reason for commenting on it today is that it fell open at a section headed "Veridical Perception". Given that much of my current practice is based on encouraging managers to engage directly with the everyday conversational life of their organizations, I was interested to read Ewing's introduction to the concept:

Making the most of "the leader as host"

Mark McKergow who is perhaps best known for his work on the Solutions Focus approach to organizational change and coaching, has just launched a new website to explore and promote the metaphor of "Leader as Host". This is an interesting concept. It offers an alternative way of looking at leadership in organizations. And, in doing so, it might provoke some new insights into its process and practice.

In an accompanying working paper, McKergow sets out six aspects of “hosting” that he maintains apply equally well to the practice of leadership in organizations. Hosts (and hence leaders), he argues:

• Create great spaces (physical and psychological) – and are active in them.
• Use the ‘soft power’ of invitation (rather than the ‘hard power’ of coercion).
• Have ‘Response-ability’ (Balancing defining the event AND responding to what happens).
• Use Co-participation (Balancing providing for everyone AND joining in alongside everyone else).
• Ensure judicious Gate-opening (Balancing defending boundaries AND making new connections).
• Spend time front stage, on the balcony (taking an overview) and back stage (developing their capabilities).

McKergow positions the notion of Leader as Host in relation to what he describes as the established polar opposites of Leader as Hero and Leader as Servant (after Robert Greenleaf). He argues,

“This new metaphor could be viewed as a Hegelian synthesis – it not only includes both of the others, but offers a new perspective with many creative possibilities.”

Leadership communication - the conversations are the work

In a recent couple of posts (here and here), Johnnie Moore explains why he so dislikes panel sessions at meetings and conferences. And why these – like other formats that marginalize ‘audience’ participation - fall so far short of common-or-garden conversation as an effective and engaging mode of communication.

“They [the audience] probably deep down want conversation, but the whole format deprives them of it. Starved of relationship, of course they struggle to relate successfully to others in the room.

I'll go a bit further with this. The panellists themselves probably want a conversation too, but are onstage and self-conscious, so they give a performance of a conversation instead of having
a real one.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Moore on this. And with the general thrust of his argument.