Friday 28 February 2014

Experiments in organisation and the implications for management


There have been a number of articles and blogs published recently discussing the implications for management and management structures in the internet age. Here are a couple of links that I've been following:

Do we still need managers from the HR Zone blog that talks about the potential implications for management of the announcement by Zappos, the US online retailer, to abolish its reporting hierarchy and job titles. In its place is a self-organising model called Holacracy. The rationale is that this will help the company to become more adaptive to change and improve employee engagement, as individuals take on more responsibility for their own work.

Haier and higher from The Economist describes the attempts to transform the world’s biggest appliance-maker into a nimble internet-age firm. The firm has organised itself into 2000 self-managed teams that include responsibilities for P&L and rewarding performance.

It's too early to say whether either of these approaches will work or how they will adapt. Of greater importance is what they are pointing towards in terms of the practice of management and, perhaps, a much more fundamental disruption of how we think about this notion.
 
Whilst modern management as both a theorectical study and as a practice is a 20th century phenomenom, in truth management practices have been present long before these things became codified in the way they are now, e.g the building of the pyramids, the exploitation of slaves, the deployment of armies have all required the organisation of labour to achieve a desired outcome.


So what might this mean for the future role of managers?

In my blog Do manager's matter - using data to make the case I highlighted the analysis done by Google as to what employees wanted from their managers. Somewhat surprisingly, to my mind at least, was how conventional the results were: a good coach, empowering, results orientated and so on.
 
My hunch is that what constitutes good management practice, whether viewed from traditional management theory or a manager's perspective or from an employee's simply reverts to the status quo. It also reinforces a number of taken-for-granteds about management: that good management is about applying a set of generalised attributes and a fallacious separation between the work of managers and employees. However plausible, the attributes are too neat; they do not describe the interactional work that's taking place minute by minute between, say, the manager and their employees. If we were to look at the work of management or leadership what we would discover would not be generalisable or concrete but ephemeral and in a constant state of flux.  
 
The moves by Zappos and Haier to experiment with how they organise work is interesting on a number of levels.
 
  • First, they are bold attempts to break away from traditional approaches of organisation. The internet age is changing the ways in which we connect with each other so why not experiment with radical approaches to organisation too?
  • Second, they appear to be placing much greater emphasis on co-operation to get things done and less on the artificial distinctions between people at different levels in a hierarchy. 
  • Third, they are pointing towards something that Henry Mintzberg has been writing about for some years and that is the need for less leadership and more community-ship. Here is his quote from a piece in the FT in 2006:

 

Isn’t it time to think of our organisations as communities of cooperation, and in so doing put leadership in its place: not gone, but alongside other important social processes.

What should be gone is this magic bullet of the individual as the solution to the world’s problems. We are the solution to the world’s problems, you and me, all of us, working in concert. This obsession with leadership is the cause of many of the world’s problems.

And with this, let us get rid of the cult of leadership, striking at least one blow at our increasing obsession with individuality. Not to create a new cult around distributed leadership, but to recognize that the very use of the word leadership tilts thinking toward the individual and away from the community. We don’t only need better leadership, we also need less leadership.

  Mintzberg, H. (2006) 'Community-ship is the answer'. Business Education Supplement, Financial Times 23rd October 2006: 8



Conclusion


Whether what's happening at Zappos or Haier will work is not the point. Of more importance is what emerges from these experiments. As I have written about on many occasions before, what should be of interest to practitioners, management developers, coaches and so on is the study and understanding of the intricate workings of meaning making between people. These experiments, if studied, may help brush away the legacies of hierarchy and to look instead at how people are working together.

 


 

  


Sunday 16 February 2014

Learning and Skills Exhibition 2014



I went to the Learning and Skills Exhibition at Olympia this year.  It is a popular event that's co-located with the Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference and both days were very busy.

The exhibition is free to enter and there were a large number of seminars running in parallel across 10 open theatre areas.  These were being run by commerical training providers and although this meant that they included a certain amount of 'selling', by and large, I found the content well presented and a good way of taking the pulse about what's going on in the L&D market.  It was also a great networking event.  I bumped into a lot of people both on the stands and as attendees and had some interesting chats with old and new contacts.

The things that I saw which interested me were...

Social learning using user-generated video

Fuse Universal and Phones4U gave a lively presentation about the use of user-generated video to help develop sales effectiveness.  The video link that I've added does a good job in making the case for this type of social learning.  What I can't find online is the video that was shown at the conference,  produced by one of Phones4U's frontline sales people.   It was creative, full of energy and contained lots of context-specific content with sales tips and tricks.   

Online Coaching Development


The University of Cambridge's Institute of Contunuing Education (ICE) presented their online approach to coach development.  The title of the presentation was 'Can you really learn coaching skills online?'

Given that this was a presentation about their online learning programme, then the answer was 'yes' of course.  What really interested me was the analysis from research done with students about their levels of discomfort with self-disclosure in discussions.  The continuum was from: working 1:1 with another person face-to-face (most comfortable) through working in trios, groups of up to 5, groups of 6 or more to online (least comfortable); the results were just over 70% for 1:1 to about 20% for online working.

What impressed me was that the presenter acknowledged the virtue of workshop-based coach development but also pointed towards an alternative approach using online methods.  The course uses Skype to create a 'bubble' for paired coach/coachee practice with the facilitator also present providing verbal feedback, through the Skype channel, to the trainee coach.    The rest of the learning group/set could listen to the conversation through headphones and were invisible to the coaching pair.  They were able to add their written feedback about the coaching practice. 

The point in all of this is that if you want to develop coaching skills and you can get along to a traditional workshop then this approach has a lot going for it.  But not everybody can work this way and the online model demonstrated a compellling alternative that replicated the 1:1 'safe space' for self-disclosure using Skype and also encouraged good deep learning processes from those observing through the written feedback process; an additional benefit being to the trainee coach of a permanent and reviewable record of the feedback for continuing reflection and learning.  

Ignite


Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that has been held in around 100 cities worldwide, organised by volunteers, at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format.  The tagline is '...enlighten us, but make it quick'.  Each speaker is allocated five minutes of presentation time and is accompanied by 20 presentation slides. During the presentations, each slide is displayed for 15 seconds and then automatically advanced.  To see examples follow these links Ignite Cardiff  Ignite Showreel

At the session I saw there were 6 speakers and the topics covered were: The best training event ever - NHS Couch to 5k programme, Skills@School, Life as a Digital Apprentice, Avoiding the Mariah Carey Syndrome, Being Your Best Self and The Baloney Detection Kit - Bertram Forer's Personality Test.

Reflections about format? Positives: lots of content in a short space of time, redundancy for the listener is minimised, encourages presenters to practice because the slides' advance is uncontrollable. Negatives - creates tension for the speaker  - I noticed that several of the presenters rushed and on many occasions were waiting for the next slide to advance; creates tension for the listener - I found myself paying a lot of attention to anticipating the next slide than necessarily concentrating on the speaker.

Overall, I thought that this was an interesting idea that has value as a learning process both for the presenter and the listener. 

   
     
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