|
about CMC
organisation development
people development
change processes
who we are
what we stand for
our clients
news & articles
contact us
Subscribe to receive our occasional newsletter:
|
The first UK consultancy
to be awarded the
Ethics Mark
|
|
|
|
Archive for the ‘Culture Change’ Category
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Another piece of research, published by Good practice Ltd (www.goodpractice.com) explores how managers learn and stresses the strong link between learning and performance. It reveals that most learning is informal on-the-job learning, very much about how to get better at doing the job.
This supports what we have always stressed, that the best medium of learning is the work to be done. Indeed the meta-levels of such learning are about re-focusing the work to be done to better meet it’s purpose and then evolving the purpose itself – raising the game!
We see this phenomenon in competitive sports (witness the winter Olympics) where people learn to perform and then learn to be among the leaders before, just possibly breaking new ground and learning to take things to a new level. Everyone has a quest to be as good as they can be and therefore has an appetite for learning.
Not all learning is of the same kind. We need first to learn how to do a job and then how we need to learn to change in ourselves, in order to do it better. Finally we enable the whole process to become more fit for the world. In hierarchical control and command organisations, these three levels of learning are often divided. Those low in the hierarchy are expected to just do as directed. Middle level people have the job of getting people to get better results. Only the top folk occasionally think about the name of the game. This division fails to tap into the creative potential of the vast majority of people. How much better that senior people devolve all three learnings throughout the organisation. The work of leadership is to lead learning.
So how does this happen? If leaders are not leading learning, what are they doing? How can people be encouraged to have an appetite for learning and meta-learning?
Tags: high performance, leadership, leadership research, learning, levels of learning, meta-learning
Posted in Authentic Leadership, Culture Change | No Comments »
Monday, February 15th, 2010
A recent survey by ACE, Scala and Salans of 550 senior HR professionals across 17 countries, suggests that the recession has given organisations the motivation to strengthen their existing leadership. This means that, as the economy recovers, those organisations are going be well placed to succeed.
Scala Group’s founder, Janice Caplan, comments on leadership’s: “critical role in creating shared vision, values and understanding for the organisation. … providing strategic leadership through their … direct reports… will emphasise the issues of communication, coaching and training.”
After the unrestrained greed and gluttony of the boom years, when leadership hardly seemed to matter, recession has given us a wake-up call. Old ideas of leadership no longer fit the bill. Organisations are made of people, along with their structures, systems and processes. Without effective leadership we have no means of engaging people in working together for their common good.
Leadership is not reserved to top management (where too often it is disconnected from action) but is present in every human interaction in the organisation. Leadership promotes the flow of information and knowledge to where it is most effective, by setting higher energies over lower ones. This evolutionary idea of leadership runs counter to the mechanistic model of organisation, that imagines that people need to be manipulated to make them work. Invoke authentic leadership and you will not be able to stop people giving of their best. If you are not already working on devolving authentic leadership at every level from the boardroom to the shop floor then now is the time to act.
If this all sounds strange to you, and even if it does not, then we should talk.
Posted in Authentic Leadership, Creativity and Innovation, Culture Change | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
The start of a new decade may not command the razzmatazz of a new millennium (only a decade ago) but it is worth noting nevertheless. What have we in store?
We read that the Chartered Management Institute’s Future Forecast survey suggests that business leaders recognise the importance of looking inwards and that putting staff back at the heart of their organisations will enhance their chances of a speedy post-recession recovery. We also hear the Work Foundation has proven a link between outstanding company performance and people-centred leadership.
Here is confirmation of what we have long believed. There is little doubt that organisations are shaking off the vestiges of the scientific management paradigm and seeking something more sustainable and wholesome. That means involving and engaging people rather than treating them as assets to be managed. It means we need a new kind of leadership – leadership throughout an organisation not just figurehead leadership. It means changing how people see and value their diversity and how we bring them together in creative relationship. It means helping people to appreciate the value of their unique contributions and to discover ways to serve the greater good. It means breaking free from past dysfunctional systems (e.g. bonus culture) and inventing something better.
People are at the heart of organisations and organisations serve people, so organisations need to organise themselves around their value-adding stream. The start of a new decade and emergence from recession give us all wonderful opportunities to re-think, re-conceptualise and re-invent your organisations nearer to your heart’s desire and nearer to what works.
Here at CMC we are developing the threefold nature of our business to better serve you, our customers.
We can offer you our deep experience in facilitation, designing and running bespoke processes to help you develop the leadership, the teams and the strategies to engage people and keep you abreast of change.
Our High Trenhouse ‘innovation centre’ provides the ideal venue and ambience to develop your strategic teamwork.
LogoVisual technology provides facilitation, training and the processes and tools to help you embrace the new decade’s shifting priorities.
Call us and we will be glad to meet with you to explore what matters to you, what concerns you currently and how our processes can help ensure you keep ahead of the game.
Posted in Authentic Leadership, Culture Change, Teamwork | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Change is in the nature of organisational life, especially as we cope with recession and its aftermath, If we are to ensure our organisations are more fit for the future, the leadership of change is a critical success factor. There are many aspects that affect leadership and even the nature of leadership itself is shifting, as the way we organise continues to evolve.
Beinhocker, in ‘The Origin of Wealth’, points out that, for two hundred years, the world’s economy has been wrongly understood as being a balanced equilibrium system – largely because nobody had any way of thinking about complex adaptive systems. Events such as we have just experienced are the result of mental models that no longer match the reality.
An increasingly common perspective is that a 21st century organisation (the way we organise) is also more complex than the hierarchical, control and command paradigm of the industrial era. As evolutionary changes take place we can expect that many change programmes will become increasingly complex, but there is an often quoted statistic that up to 70% of them fail to deliver their intended outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this is fine and to be expected. It is more daunting when your own future may depend on getting a positive outcome. So, if organisations are complex adaptive systems, how does one lead change?
As an aspect of his doctoral research, our colleague, Howard Adams, is offering feedback to change teams who participate. He is exploring how team effectiveness is affected by team leadership behaviours and how personal values affect the types of leadership behaviours used by the team. These are clearly important factors and anything that shines light on the issues would no doubt be useful. Get in touch if you want to know more.
Tags: change, complex adaptive system, leadership, research, team leadership
Posted in Authentic Leadership, Culture Change | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” Marcel Proust
Many of us are familiar with using exploratory techniques to tap the creativity and diversity of groups. Ideally such groups are representative of the whole system being addressed. That means crossing boundaries and silos and including some wild cards.
The techniques – group interaction, graphics, mapping and modelling, serious play, creative interaction, enquiry, dialogue, narrative, scenarios, experiment, design and so on, are orchestrated to enable everyone to contribute and to learn, so that the outcome addresses the issues as fully as is possible at the time. It requires that people bring mutual respect, enquiry, attention and a willingness to learn. It is holistic – but it is not what we would call systems thinking although systems thinking may have much to contribute.
In my experience, this sort of process, as well as very practical outcomes, can produce the ‘new eyes’ – the shift of perception, attitude and intent that changes you as well as your world.
John Varney 24th September 2009
Tags: creativity, diversity, holistic, new eyes, systems thinking
Posted in Culture Change | No Comments »
|
