Reflections on Management

There’s an old saying that the higher you climb the flagpole (or the corporate ladder) the more your butt shows. It’s a none-too-polite way of saying that being a senior leader or top executive means that you are magnet for criticism. I previously talked about counternarratives against organizations, but I argue this is a multi-level construct, thus there are also counternarratives against leaders which feed into an opponent's or competitor's strategies for attacking organizations.

We all want to be ‘change agents,’ don’t we? The competitive pressures that many of us feel can cause us to want to make a mark, make a difference, be bold. In contrast, we are warned about the changes going around us – in societies and industries, and technologies- and that not getting on board means we are complacent, falling behind the times, losing our competitive advantage. But there’s a good side to continuity, is there not? Are not reliability and predictability important qualities in organizations?

From work to education, much of what we do is measured in individual achievement and assessment of individual outcomes. Job performance, grade-point averages, final examinations, so many things are individually based. For some time now, collaboration has become much more important and group-based work the norm. But we really haven’t figured out how to assess group effort apart from the sum of individual efforts. In my experience, group assessments run up against some very strong barriers. Can we overcome them? Perhaps one experience from my educational background provides a baby step forward.

Many of us have worked around (occasionally for) leaders who fall from grace, either due to personal misconduct, embarrassing the organization, or something else above and beyond mere poor performance. The leader becomes a pariah. Sometimes that fallen leader did things that made a lasting positive difference in the organization, and the accomplishments may be worth retaining and retelling. Unfortunately because of the leader's sullied reputation, the accomplishments may be discounted, ignored, or even repudiated. Is the appropriate? Are there times when we should separate the person from their deeds?

How often have you been in organizations that placed high value on conceptions of unity? That everyone needed to 'row together' like a crew team or exercise 'unity of effort' like a military organization? And then, how often does it seem like the organization is utterly incapable of putting unity into action -- that there are persistent or recurring problems that appear causing the organization to fracture and remain fractured in some way? In this episode, I use theoretical works on paradox and dialectic change to provide suggestions for leaders.

This podcasts's 4th season begins with a closer look at the idea that organizations should celebrate success when undergoing change. While there is utility in sharing good news stories, should change agents go along with the celebration or curb their enthusiasm? After all, there's the possibility of the organization also punishing failure. Is the best reaction no reaction at all?

In a previous episode, I talked about counternarratives, which are narratives that refute or alternatively explain dominant narratives. In an organizational sense, counternarratives represent offensive tactics, ways to refute another actor’s narrative, or in turn, the narratives used by opponents to attack or discredit the organization. The obvious implication is that organizations defend themselves in some way from these counternarratives. But notions of defense is not well represented in the literature, so there’s some room for asking what does ‘defense’ means in a communication sense? How do organizations ‘defend’ themselves strategically?

Communicating on the defense is not being defensive! It is fending off the opposing messages without resorting to a constant game of ‘whack-a-mole,’ reacting to each event individually. This is not a strategy, and the result is frustrating and expensive (e.g., money, time, energy). A strategy recognizes that many of these messages are stemming from a common counternarrative, and thus the strategy amounts to deciding the organization’s main response — to refute it directly, to essentially blow it off or treat as irrelevant, or to acknowledge it and change the organization (on the organization’s terms as much as possible). From this defensive story, it is easy to generate defensive messages as you need them. The challenges are ensuring that you have characterized the counternarrative right in the first place — not always easy.

Did a change effort succeed or fail? Most change efforts never achieve their original goals, but is that really “failure”? Opponents of the effort certainly like to think so, and claims of failure are really easy to make, even in instances where the change demonstrably succeeded. Empty claims of success don’t always help, either, and they rarely quiet the critics. So, if determining true success or failure is important, and it certainly seems to be, then how do we measure it? Or is ‘measuring’ even the right idea?

Earlier in this podcast, I discussed some concepts from my experience in artificial intelligence, and one that is particularly applicable here is abductive reasoning. This is a way of asking if something is the best explanation why something else occurred. Best explanation may mean A caused B, or it may mean that A possibly caused B but there is a possibility it did not.

Over time in my work in organizational change, I developed a test based on abductive reasoning to help cut through the rhetoric of success and failure in change and ask whether or not there it is plausible that the change effort contributed to outcomes seen. In other words, is A the best explanation for B? I call this the plausibility test, and has three components:

Does the change effort explain the effects perceived?
Does the absence of the campaign means that the effects would likely not have been perceived?
No other actor or factor in the environment better explains the effects?

So how can one use this? Listen and find out!

The commitment of members to their organization and organizational commitment to its members is an important on-going discussion that I have covered both in this program and in the main Talking About Organizations Podcast. In this episode, I want to further discussion about the member’s side of things – because traditionally the construct is about the member as a single individual, when in practice we may be talking about something more – like the member’s family. This has become a significant economic issue, as family considerations (from health care to parental leave) has an impact.

But this is about far more than just money. It would seem too easy to rely on existing constructs whereby an organization’s commitment to its members is based solely on incentives — that is, provide enough benefits to families and the members are more likely to stay. Of course, this assumes that members are committed (a la Meyer and Allen, 1991) through cost-benefit analyses. Also, in high-risk organizations where the members face routine danger, bringing about stress to the families, psychosocial safety plays a role in a member’s willingness to stay. So, what is the conversation that should take place between the organization and its members regarding the care and benefits of the member’s families?

Warning! Overusing smartphones can be detrimental to your health! We might hear warnings like this, and perhaps even believe them to be true. Perhaps the claims are supported with solid scientific evidence on things like overdependence and addictive behaviors, sleep deprivation, information overload, and severe stress and anxiety. And yet, we pay them no heed, and continue to overuse personal technologies in unhealthy ways. Why? I think part of the reason is because we aren’t necessarily equipped to ask the right questions, and we simply allow ourselves to succumb to the attractive idea that smartphone technologies will simplify our lives, despite the mounting evidence that suggests the contrary.

As I explain in this episode, we have seen this before — those who remember flip-phone technologies and their descendants can probably recall how the promises of convenience would eventually be tempered with unforeseen costs and inconveniences. Moreover, the increasing complexity on how we use and adapt the technologies (witness the incredible diffusion of collaboration apps, for example), and it should no surprise that these devices can become incredibly burdensome — we fell like can’t stop using them even if we wanted to. Can this cycle be broken? Can we step back, stop, and think about what we may be doing to ourselves in the name of convenience?