The What Goes Around Blog

Before and After. Big and Small

I’m going to take a quick look at the love/hate aspect of work from my time in big corporate land and in micro business world too. Neither are perfect, both have their wonderful highs and frustrating lows, so here goes:

Big

I hated the way there were targets for everything. The trouble with targets is that people game them all the time. Set people a target, hook it up to the reward system and sit back and watch everyone screw the business and the customer and each other. So I loved trying to find pockets of enlightenment where we could experiment with doing the right thing because we believed it mattered, not because we were driven to it. The handy, overlooked thing about big business is that you can often play around and get things done differently. Everyone is watching the targets, so go play in the spaces in between. It helps if you don’t make a fuss about it, just go ahead and lay a few small bets around service improvement and watch some of them grow. Proceed until apprehended. I hated the games people played, and I love to play games.

I hated the way performance reviews were a) historic b) forced c) tied to reward and d) even existed. Good managers communicate with their people often enough that this old fashioned lack of trust has surely run its course, and yet it goes on. Big business learns very slowly sometimes. What I loved about performance reviews was trying to make them as flowing and continuous as possible, because that meant it was all about the conversation. Getting to know people, to understand what they are good at and then to get out of the way long enough to allow them to be good at it is an on-going process. I love that dialogue.

Small

I hate the way everything takes so long. I feel like I’m always waiting for decisions to get made. When I started my own business this used to rile me badly. I wasted ages wondering why people weren’t getting back to me, particularly when the discussion was started by them. And then I got to realising – for the time we are together, our discussion, the idea, the proposal, whatever – it has some immediacy. Then I depart and the often badly organised whirl of work just picks people up again and deposits them who knows where (how often do you hear a colleague exclaim – ‘I don’t know what day it is!’ I don’t know where I’m supposed to be next’). I manage this better now by having more things on the go, and looking for other reasons to be in touch – not about the proposal or the idea, but about work and life in a wider context. I believe these interactions add value to a relationship and that in time, they will come back around. I love the faith I have that this approach will work, and it simultaneously scares the crap out of me too.

Big or small it matters not. Game less, target less, worry less. Talk more, believe more, love more.

A version of this post originally appeared over at CostofWork run by Chris Fields.

Art for Work’s Sake

I ran an Art for Work’s Sake workshop earlier this week. There were ten of us round the table at Workhubs, and after breakfast, we talked a little about art, why it is so helpful as an aid to better work, and why most of us have come to believe that we are not artists. I’ve spoken and written about some of this as part of We Are Better Together and we looked again at the Breakpoint and Beyond research about how rapidly awful we get at divergent thinking, plus this great piece about sketching and how helpful it is.

Conversation summary

Brene Brown – 85% of the 13,000 people interviewed for her research on shame and vulnerability ‘can recall a time in school that was so shaming it forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners. 50% of those recollections related to art and creativity.’

Breakpoint and Beyond. Up to 98% of very young children excel at divergent thinking, and we get progressively worse at it as we move through the education system and into work. By the time we are 25, only around 2% of people show the same ability to excel at this vital way of thinking.

When note taking and doodling, different colours are helpful for different ideas and themes – easy to pick stuff out afterwards.

Getting doodles and sketches down on paper frees up brain space and extends memory.

Sketching improves your ability to restructure ideas.

When you draw how you/your team are feeling – you will likely get different signals and results than if you just talk and write about it.

Sketching Exercise

We wanted to try our hand at sketching and with time at a premium, here’s what we did.

Method

Choose some paper. I had brought four different types, photocopy paper, two grades of cartridge paper and water colour paper. Take a pencil, a rather lovely, brand new Staedtler B Grade in this instance (pencil nerd alert), and spend about a minute sketching something. Then review your sketch with your partner, spending a couple of minutes talking about each one. Remembering what we discussed earlier, we agreed to avoid asking judgmental questions, and instead – just explore our work together. After the conversation time, either redraw the sketch or refine it, for about a minute and a half. Discuss.

Here is a gallery of some of the work we produced.

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The coffee cup was drawn by Louise who previously told me, ‘I can’t draw’. After the session Louise tweeted, ‘It seems I can draw, despite 20+ years thinking I couldn’t’, before adding, ‘It only took 60 seconds to realise I can!’ Louise preferred cup 1 which took less time to draw than cup 2.

Phil drew the bottle, and after drawing bottle 1, he noticed the way the glass distorted shapes behind it, and modified his idea in bottle 2.

Paul drew Euston Station arch – from a photograph on the wall. Paul talked about how he could remember the station behind the arch but not the arch itself. He wanted a record of the arch so he could speak with other people about it later. Nick then told us that parts of the arch have been rediscovered, and later that day, Paul sent me this picture of what a rebuilt arch might took like. I’ve played with this exercise a few times and this is the first time I’ve seen someone do what Paul did. I really liked his creative interpretation of the exercise.

Bernie drew the salt cellar – and then added depth with shade.

Nick did something similar to Bernie with the patterned glass.

Ed captured the sphere shape in the basketball beautifully. What you see here is version 2 – version 1 got rubbed out because it wasn’t round enough. I really like the way I feel like I can reach out and grab the ball.

Aftermath

Louise’s post workshop tweets gave me a real lift, and then on Wednesday I received a lovely note from Paul about the workshop. Later on Wednesday evening I spotted Phil had tweeted this:

I like Phil’s idea – a sketch of what work looks like, and the groups and ideas you connect with. Sketching your way to better work, sketching your way to stronger connections. I’m grateful to everyone who came along to the session and participated so enthusiastically. And in the time we had together, I’m really pleased with what we covered and the different ways people embraced and interpreted the challenge, and have continued to do so. And if you missed out this time – keep a watchful eye out for further chances to take part.

Three CEOs walked onto a stage…

Sounds like the beginning of a crap joke huh? Sorry, it isn’t – but I hope you’ll read on anyway.

I missed the Crossrail session at the CIPD conference last week, which is a shame as by all accounts it sounded and looked good. During the conference, CEO for Crossrail, Andrew Wolstenholme was quoted on Twitter remarking about how few CEOs were speaking at the conference, and certainly his presence was an attraction for people.

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That night over dinner, the lack of CEOs at the conference was bemoaned, and someone suggested something along the lines of ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we could get your CEO to speak, and yours, and yours…’, hence the title of this post.

I suggested that rather than obsess about CEOs it might be interesting to hear from someone who in an hierarchical sense is closer to the edge. Having had a few drinks, I offered up the role of bog cleaner as an alternative (role, bog cleaner….oh never mind). My suggestion did not meet with approval. ‘Why?’ ‘Why would you want to do that?’ ‘Why would that work?’ What I had to offer in return was something along the lines of, ‘Well everyone’s got their story to tell’. I mumbled on a bit about people close to and at the front line experiencing a different reality and having an equally valid tale to tell. I did not make the point very convincingly and I think it’s fair to say that at the table, I lost the argument.

Putting the red wine to one side – as evidenced by Andrew Wolstenholme, there is real power in having a CEO take to the stage, and rather than have her or him accompanied by more of the same rank, instead why not add layers and depth to the tale through a mixture of disciplines and voices. The approach wouldn’t work for a lot of organisations, many are too coercive, and simply too afraid of ~~the truth~~ difference for this to be any more than a showcase of the unreal (and we’ve all seen enough of those kind of talks, right?).

I can vividly recall my biggest internal disagreements in big business were with the upper and very top echelons of management, simply because I relayed observations and facts to them that they weren’t used to hearing. This situation is not unique, war stories abound of how the big bosses typically get told what people around them think they want to hear, and it remains rare for a CEO to invest the time to go and discover what’s going on at the front line for themselves. For the right organisation however – one which is happy to share failures and successes in the spirit of learning – I think this could be a bold and powerful move.

Of course I may be wrong about this, I often am, so why not ask the audience? One of the ways the CIPD, and indeed other organisations could deepen engagement with its membership at conference could be to ask the members to choose a few of the conference sessions in advance. Maybe have an open invite for submissions and vote your preferences onto the stage?

Or should we now just shift our focus from case study addiction (and yes – I know – there are some great case studies out there, and they’re in the minority), to CEO addiction instead? What do I know? After all, I thought it was a good idea to involve the bog cleaner ~~front line~~.

Update. Since publishing I’ve spotted this piece about diversity over at XpertHR. One of the threads is about speaker diversity which has some relevance to this post so I thought I’d join the dots.