Cracking Great Leaders Program
  • Home
    • About Human Energy
    • Attention all consultants
  • The Book
    • The Book
    • Reviews of the Book
    • Contents of the Book
    • Get the 1st & 8th chapters for free
    • Where to Buy the Book
  • The Programs
    • IP for sale
    • Who the Programs are for >
      • New consultants
      • CEOs wanting to change culture
      • HR & OD Specialists
      • Double check your suitability
    • The benefits
    • 23 Modules (workshops) >
      • Summary 23 Modules
      • 23 Modules >
        • How to Liberate Human Energy at Work
        • The Power of the Subconscious Mind
        • Understanding Ourselves and Others Thinking Preferences (HBDI) >
          • Could You Be Missing Out On Three-quarters of Your Business Opportunities?
        • Making the Most of Your Genius Factor
        • Building Your Personal Brand
        • Cooperation, Collaboration and Connectedness
        • Colour Your Customers and Staff
        • The Power of Questions
        • Managing Your Manager
        • Confidence, Influence & Personal Power
        • Trust & How to be a trusted advisor
        • My Personal Power Program
        • Strategic Thinking
        • Strategic Execution
        • Organisational Architecture
        • Systems Thinking in Business
        • Increasing Innovation and Ideas
        • Customer Service Tools
        • Improving processes & Eliminating unnecessary work
        • Networks
        • Review & Dragon's Den
      • Pamphlet for 23 Modules
      • To buy the Modules
    • The 8 Programs >
      • Strategy Program >
        • Who it is for
        • To buy the Program
      • Cracking Great Leaders Program >
        • A typical program
        • Who it is for
        • Case study: The Correspondence School
        • Program Pamphlet
        • To buy the Program
      • Customer Intimate Program >
        • Who it is for
        • Program Pamphlet
        • Case Study - interview with Canary Industries
        • To buy the Program
      • Thought Leader Program >
        • Who it is for
        • Program Pamphlet
        • Case Study HTS-110
        • To buy the Program
  • Free Stuff
    • Introduction >
      • Why we give it free
      • The Business World Is Changing >
        • Doing Business in a Changing World
    • Free consulting advice >
      • Getting started >
        • Are You in a Corporate Cage?
        • Your Personal Power Program
        • Taking the plunge to go consulting
        • It took me 25 years but it doesn't have to!
        • Save Yourself the Cringe-factor
        • How Consultants can remain positive
        • Answer Your Calling >
          • Do you want to make money or be happy?
          • The difference between a ‘job’ and a ‘calling’:
      • Finding customers >
        • How to be top of mind!
        • 7 ways to identify your best customers
        • How to get an appointment next time you want to catch up with your client
        • Stand in your customers' shoes
        • Why Consultants Can’t “Sell” and Clients Won’t “Buy”
        • Stop Closing
        • How to develop strong relationships
        • How to get more sales more quickly!
        • Going consulting? It’s all about relationships.
        • Should consultant treat clients the same or differently? >
          • The secret great consultants know
        • What are you selling?
      • Building trust >
        • The worst advice I got
        • Why Trust Matters
        • Why Trust is important
        • Why You Must Build Trust
      • Free diagnostics process >
        • Why diagnostics is important
        • Become the expert they ask for, listen to and pay higher fees to
      • Developing Products/IP >
        • Cracking Great Leaders Program
      • Measuring a project >
        • Assessing a project
      • Success is Beyond the Conscious Mind >
        • Body Language
        • Talking without words
    • Free workshop advice >
      • 10 secrets to running successful workshops
      • Setting up folders for workshops
      • A great icebreaker
      • Rules of the workshop
      • Setting expectations for the Program
      • Ancient wisdom on facilitation
    • Free leadership advice >
      • Is Your Biggest Asset Under-utilised? >
        • Your belief in scarcity could sabotage your success
        • How to empower your frontline to be as committed as you are
      • Develop your leadership skills >
        • How to be a more powerful manager
        • Leadership boils down to 3 things. Forget all the rest of the guff!New Page
        • To Be Successful You Need To Know Your Core Of Greatness. Do you?
        • What is your Genius Factor?
        • Operate beyond the conscious mind
        • Work with Human Nature, Not Against it
      • The Business of Love >
        • ​Unbounded Human Energy
        • Manage Body, Head, Heart & Soul
        • Manage energy fields
        • Focus on the Whole Person
        • Are Leaders Mentors or Tormentors?
        • Rescuing hug
      • Do your people pull together?
      • ​Leadership Development is on the Wrong Track
      • A Glass Ball or a Mirror? >
        • The Power of Vulnerability
    • Free Strategy Advice >
      • How To Complete Your Strategy in Two Days Rather than Two Months
      • Why 76% of Strategies fail. How to do it successfully
      • Is your strategy being hijacked by numbers?
      • How to implement strategy and get it right in a fraction of the time
    • Free Organisational Development Advice >
      • Old Ways of Managing Don’t Work for Online Workers
      • Todays management challenge is to evolve the management model
      • A 30,000 year view of where business is going.
      • Will business be the Breaker of the world or the Maker of the world?
      • Creating Unbounded Human Energy
      • Emergence changes the way we think about scale
      • Sweet-spot - organisation without top-down control
      • Culture for new age
    • Free HR Advice >
      • 3 simple steps for H.R. success at Top Table
      • Getting Top Management Attention
      • 2 Secrets To Make Leadership Development More Successful
    • Free videos
    • Free blog
  • Bruce Holland
    • Bruce Holland
    • Bruce's confession
    • Bruce's LinkedIn page
  • Contact

Energising Silos

Large, mature organisations have too many people in silos that stop them becoming more flexible. 
This post addresses how to get people out of silos and increase flexibility. These strategies are required after the business system and senior managers have been addressed.
1. Tag and disturb the organisationThe first step to move the organisation is to disturb it. You can never direct a living system. A machine can be directed and controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. It will only be disturbed by something if it recognises that thing, and the only way it will recognise the thing is if it is tagged, named, pointed out or measured. This is why, what we focus on is what we get. This is why managers need to spend more time on strategy and must never stop pointing out what's important, again and again and again.
2. Look for what is already workingIn my experience, one of the most important things the organisation needs to recognise and tag, is stuff that is already working well.
In nearly every organisation, even in the worst performers, there's lots of stuff that's working well and some stuff that's a problem. Many managers start by looking for what's wrong and go after it. As a result the organisation becomes hurt even more and builds an even bigger protective barrier around itself, making the organisation even less flexible.
A far better way is to find the positives. In the process people will see that they already have much of value and grow in confidence as a result.
It's not just my experience, the study of systems shows that it's impossible to engineer the outcome you want. What's required instead is trust that the solution exists somewhere in the system. The trick is to look for and boost 'positive deviations' (things that are already working unexpectedly well). You can do this by providing information, lots of communication, managing conversations and providing highly respected role models so that people start to notice the success and want to be part of it.
3. Turn Serfs into Farmers and Farmers into HuntersIn "Survival is not Enough" by Seth Godlin, he suggests that most organisations have armies of Serfs (people who only do what they are told). By definition people who only do what they are told reduce flexibility. In my experience, Serfs are a smaller issue in New Zealand, however, I'm sure you'll agree that they are still a problem.
One of the main ways to increase flexibility is to turn a significant proportion of Serfs into Farmers (people who work within the bounds of a winning strategy), and Farmers into Hunters (people who work a winning strategy but expand it in ways that had not occurred to management).
Research shows that today about 90% of the market value of organisations come from four asset types, Knowledge Assets, Cultural Assets, Relationship Assets and Time Assets. Only the remaining 10% is tied up in Fixed Assets. These four asset types are directly related to people. Increase the value of your people and you increase the value of your organisation.
The following strategies will disturb the organisation and be powerful tags.
4. Identify those most likely to achieve
In my experience, a large number of people are almost invisible to senior managers. These people often come from the baby boom generation. They started off enthusiastically but over the years have become disillusioned. They probably tried to move up the tree but found few opportunities as organisations shed layers of hierarchy and there were too many people competing for too few leadership positions.
Now, if managers see them at all, they say, "They won't think for themselves.", "They are just waiting for retirement." And they are quite right, these people are burnt out and bored. They have stopped trying.
Organisations usually have well-developed processes for identifying talent for senior positions. This needs to be extended to find people who may never make it to the corner office but who could well become Farmers or Hunters.
In my experience, this includes the vast majority. The need for achievement and to provide service are basic drives in people and it takes quite a bit to knock it out of them.
5. Fast feedbackFast feedback about what's effective in the workplace can help move a workplace full of unquestioning Serfs to probing farmers. It must be fast. For example when I was Group Strategic Manager at the Bank of New Zealand we wanted to turn the Tellers into Sellers. The first step was to get them talking to customers. A box of 100 dollar coins was put in front of each teller with a sign that read, "If the teller does not smile, take a dollar." At the end of the week the Social Club got any money that was left in the boxes. You'd hardly believe what happened.
A service organisation, I was working with, that wanted to increase customer service put an electronic wall display in the middle of the office that started counting off the number of elapsed seconds before the telephone was answered. This simple feedback tool produced amazing results.
6. Expand leadership development
In many organisations, leadership development opportunities are restricted to senior managers and new hand-picked recruits. Middle managers and below are largely neglected. I find it ironic that CEOs complain about the lack of leaders coming through their succession pipeline, when the have large numbers of people who given a chance could become Farmers or even Hunters.
I hear arguments like, "My people are seasoned" or "They are no hopers" or "They should know, they're been here for years." When you ask the people themselves, you find corporate restructuring and flattening organisations have eroded the old career paths, and they can't accumulate the needed set of leadership skills on the job.
Can you imagine a Cardiac Surgeon saying, "I had a class on heart surgery once back in medical school."?
For more on Leadership Development...
7. Peer-to-peer development
Peer-to-peer development was listed by the Harvard Business Review (Feb. 2006) as one of the "20 breakthrough ideas for the year".
In the Peer-to-peer groups that I have set up, people throughout the organisation are invited to come together in groups of about eight people with a commitment to helping each other grow. Usually they meet every other week for 2 or 3 hours.
Peer-to-peer groups are a great way to build networks, collaboration and increase flexibility, especially if they are made up of people from different parts of the organisation.
Peer-to-peer development groups have another advantage beyond increasing flexibility, they help to solve many of the issues that hold an organisation back when it is going through a change process.
Each meeting, one or two participants are asked to bring a problem to the meeting. The other members give close attention to the problem-holder but will not solve the problem even if the answer is obvious. Rather, they ask open questions and dig deep to enable the problem-holder to get a deeper understanding of his/her problem.
By far the most obvious difference in peer-to-peer learning, is its insistence on questioning and gaining consensus about what the problem is. This forces the group to spend time on understanding the problem and its context and conditions.
Most individuals and groups rush to search for the answers. This is natural because most people are uncomfortable with spending too much time in ambiguity. The original problem is rarely the one that is most crucial. Groups that accept the initial problem often end up solving the surface problem. The peer-to-peer group's first and primary task is to understand the problem. As some wag said: "It's better to first put your finger on the problem before sticking your nose in it."
For more on Peer-to-peer learning...
8. Participation in project teamsGetting a significant proportion of people participating in project teams is a wonderful way to increase flexibility and collaboration, especially if they are made up of people from different parts of the organisation.
Also, whenever an organisation undertakes a significant change process, there are dozens of areas to be looked into and project teams are an ideal way of mobilising the knowledge and experience of people who actually know the system.
For more on Project Teams...
9. Provide fresh assignments or even career changes
Serfs often feel frustrated and uncared for. For reasons that seem to be outside their control, they have been sidelined and now everyone sees them as rusting. Serfs often dream of-and in some cases end up pursuing-something fundamentally new outside the organisation. Yet jumping the corporate ship is risky, so an employer that can offer an attractive internal career change has a chance to retain valuable talent.
A fresh assignment, often in a different geographical location or part of the organisation, lets them take advantage of their existing skills, experience, and contacts while letting them develop new ones. The best assignments are often lateral moves that mix roughly equal parts of old and new responsibilities
Sometimes an organisation can provide employees with a career change. They may develop a new speciality, assume an altogether different job, or sometimes return from a management track to a specialist role.
I hope you can see how this improves flexibility. Firstly, influential people who were previously actively against the organisation become reenergised; secondly, they are able to use their extensive knowledge and relationship assets for the organisation; but even more important is the symbolism to other people, that the organisation cares for its people and they will not be left to rust.
Bruce Holland