In a recent post, I discussed  organizations that have a top-down, HR administered corporate religion and accoutrements which serve as a pseudo-sophisticated ideological veneer. This religious dogma inhibits, not enables, successive coping with a hostile environment. Three short case studies will illustrate.

Myname specializes in electronic signatures and ensuring the safety of financial transactions. Myname has just purchased Signit, which greatly enhances the user friendless of e-signatures in the mobile domain. The integration between the two companies is a failure. Myname, the dominant company, has a culture exhibited by 5 core values which are rammed downed peoples’ throat. The CEO decided to “re-examine the core values” in light of the integration difficulties. A major change was made. Instead of being a “People Company”, the value was changed to “We are All Family.” The integration failed.

Nowait is a mobile telephone company with a very strong top down cultural religion of “Responsiveness to our customers and our staff”. An overly zealous and under skilled HR department supervises the inculcation of this culture, almost by enema. Responsiveness is measured, over measured and measured again. The staff have learnt to beat the system, and the clients are leaving. The Head of HR and the Head of Training, OD and Telephony were recently replaced when an organizational survey had a response level of 12%. The CEO has just hired an HR goon from the military who “knows how to take a bunch of bums from the street and turn them into soldiers in six weeks.” The new HR’s managers key deliverable is to “get responsiveness back on the radar screen”.

Olam is a company with a religion of globalism. The world “global” is attached to everything done in the company. The dining halls serve “ethnic foods” in the company twice a week. Olam suffers lack of delegation to country managers, who feel they have no power over the corporate technical presales team. As a result, sales is falling because the initial pitch made by corporate is not tailored enough to local demands. The CEO has recently asked the HR manager to commission a webinar to “drive home the global message”. The CEO has never really defined “global” because “culture is HR’s domain”. And the HR manager, who ran a call center, also has a marketing background, and she wants the word “global” to capture employee “mindshare”.

These cases illustrate what can happen when the artefacts and accouterments of corporate culture are top-down/phoney as well as what happens when they are executed by HR managers who serve as mindless clergy.

Very often, circumstances change and managers need to be flexible and reverse decisions and actions. For example, cancellation of an order or loss of a client can change priorities big time.

In this post, I will present tips I have found useful in dealing with flip-flopping and inconsistent managers.

I am not referring  to the type described in the opening sentence of this post.

Nor am I referring to a manager to is trying to encompass dichotomies, like quality and release date.

Following are the characteristics of the type of manager I am referring to:

1. Makes ambiguous statements which can be understood in many ways
2. Contradicts himself, and denies it.
3. Decides but does not act
4. Acts in contradiction of a decision

Following are behavioural examples of the above:

1. Makes ambiguous statements which can be understood: “We need to be Diverse-at the switchboard”
2. Contradicts himself, and denies it. “I gave you leeway, but you should have asked before you promised this feature”.
3. Decides but does not act “I will speak to Joe” and it never happens, yet.
4. Acts in contradiction of a decision “I ok’ed business class travel just this one time”.

Here are a few tips I have found useful.

1)  Type down statements/assumptions made by the client and project them on a screen during a consultation. E.g., Jacques needs to be retained in 2014 because he is a key employee”. The client gets these statement typed out at the end of the session.

2)  Every decision has a written summary. (This is pretty obvious, but very important)

3)  When the client has made up his mind, ask: “Have you calculated all the risks? What can change? Are you ready to decide? Is this tentative?

4)  Bring  someone else to important meetings so that there is a witness to what was said.

5)  Try to use group interventions more than one on one interventions because a group will police a flip flopper well.

Note: The Chinese have an expression: like playing piano to the cow. 对牛弹琴 This is said in referring  to someone who just does not get what you are telling them. So, my final suggestion is not to confront the person that he is inconsistent time after time, because it is like “playing piano to the cow.”

There are managers who know everything, and they are undoubtedly very hard to deal with.

Managers who know everything may hire you because “they do not have time”, or need more data, or in order  to carry out change under the artillery coverage of an OD project.

The first task is to try and understand the reason for your service being commissioned.

I will share 3 things I have found somewhat useful in dealing with managers who know everything.

1) Try and focus on the future. No one really knows all that much about the future. Even the omnipotent know-it-all may show some humility when the discussion is future focused.

2) On certain limited issues, stand your ground and label differences as “disagreements”. You will get push back, which is the time to then focus on the issue: “do I need to agree with you on everything”, here and now.

3) Where possible,  don’t get involved trying to prevent a fire; wait till  things get really bad. Even managers who know it all are more flexible when massive dysfunction heads their way.

Brief Introduction:

In this  post I want to characterize a type of client who should, by the look of things, be user friendly to OD, but is not! Quite the opposite-this type of client is often among the hardest to work with.  I am referring to clients which have what I shall call  pseudo-sophisticated ideological veneer.

Characteristics:

On this type of client’s website/hallway/elevator, there will be a mission statement, core values, and/or other accoutrements which lead us to believe the client is domain savvy. The values, mission or whatever are more likely than not almost religious tenets, serviced by HR and Training, who “teach” this religion, more often than not during initiation and management training, which tends to be “ideological”.

There may be a history of many OD consultants, who have come and gone. These consultants have been called in to provide expert knowledge, not in the domain of the HR/Training “ Corporate Curia” which peddle the ideology.

The issues encountered with such clients are:

1) The slogans, values, mission and other statements are top down religious beliefs which are “administered” by HR-Training-Glorias; thus the veneer.

2) The critical gap between the religion and reality is generally out-of-bounds for discussion

.3) This type of client often does not know that he does not know.The religion has provided him with a false sense of certainty. External OD consultants will be scrutinized  by gatekeepers to ensure they do not bring in pragmatic and counter-culture ideas.

4) This type of client will treat you as a vendor of OD products, telling you exactly what he needs. Often you work to SOW, rendering the OD effort useless.(statement of work)

In a recent post, I suggested a few ways of managing pessimist people and managing in pessimistic cultures.

As mentioned in that post, there is a plethora of tools which exist to promote optimism, wow wowism, and getting people “on board” and highly engaged. Often these tools are used wisely; often however,the creation of optimism is a manipulation to get people to sign up for busting their ass against all odds at a huge personal sacrifice.

However, many employees have learnt to beat the system of “overdosing on wow wowism”. A short case will suffice.

Tony manages a software team composed of Russians, Israelis and Americans. Tony has given his software team a “somewhat demanding commitment which I am sure you guys can make, if we do our best. I believe if anyone can do it-it’s you”. (This means work on weekends for the next 6 months and monthly trips to Lagos. (That ain’t fun).)

Tony has convened a meeting to get “input” on obstacles to meeting the “aggressive” schedule. His team in the past has been cynical and pessimistic.

Russian Igor, Israeli Sivan and American John had lunch before the meeting with Tony and built a strategy to deal with the expected pressure. Two years ago, they had faced the same  scenario. At the time, when they raised a whole list of obstacles, Tony made them work 18 hours a day for nine months. in today’s meeting, the plan to go with the flow.

The meeting with Tony just ended. Tony was surprised as how well it went. Igor said he will do his best and sees “nothing substantial” to cause delays. Sivan simply said: “can do, boss; looks good”. John said he has a plan to make it work. All three said told Tony he can “sleep well”.

This strategy will appease Tony, and delay the bad news for a few months. In a few months, the three will surprise Tony with huge delays; Tony will need to surprise the customer.

In the first few months, the three do not even plan to work hard at all, so that Tony will need to “slap” a huge delay on the customer.

The customer will then demand more realistic deadlines and proper negotiation will occur internally.

There are pessimist people and there are pessimistic cultures as an article on France in the Economist points out.

Management techniques wrongly suggest that pessimism is something to be “turned around”; pessimistic attitudes are “”a “challenge” for managers, who are well equipped with a whole set of tools to create and foster optimism: vision, mission, wow-wowing, pep talking, motivational techniques, AI, and what have you.

Pessimistic culture are pessimist for a reason. The first thing we need to do is accept the pessimism.

No one (well almost no one) comes to Japan and tries to re engineer the national psyche to create individualists. No one goes to Asia and tells people to “put face aside” and be more “open”. Similarly, attempts to re-engineer the pessimist genetic code are doomed to fail.

Pessimist people have a very strong defence mechanism that has formed that attitude. People do not give up defence mechanisms easily, especially when the alternative is exactly what they are protecting themselves from, that is a rosy boy-scout yes we can attitude that sounds greats in a Tweet or coaching session with a gung-ho coach, but makes no sense.

I will propose 5 key points which may assist managing in pessimistic cultures and when dealing with pessimistic people.

1) Accept the pessimism;  do not try and change it.

2) Give low key messages, rich in facts,  analysis and critique and go easy/avoid hope, belief and wow wowism.

3) Identify the pessimistic statement that irritate you, and ignore them as much as you can.

4) Humour may work well to make a point if the pessimism is excessive.

5) Examine why pessimism rubs you the wrong way. When you really come to terms with this key question, managing pessimistic people and managing in pessimistic cultures will be far more intuitive.

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Sandbagging is a method of managing the expectations of peers and managers by giving estimates well below the “doable”. When better results are achieved, the individual shines.

One reason that explains some of the sandbagging in the engineering world is universal: management makes hallucinatory aggressive commitments to demanding customers;  engineers respond with gloom to protect themselves from working 6 months with no weekends as well as a means of procuring engineering resources from overly zealous management.

There are additional cultural factors impacting how and why people sandbag. I shall illustrate 4 examples and provide the recommended choice of managerial action for each case.

1) An Israeli engineer will sandbag because everything is a negotiation, all the time. The planning process itself is seen as a negotiation in which middle ground is reached. The recommended choice of managerial action is to negotiate, long and hard, and then sign the Israeli off on his commitment.

2) An Indian engineer will sandbag via negotiation, but  differently than his Israeli counterpart. The Indian will initially agree to what he has been tasked with, yet as the project progresses, he will surface obstacles and barriers to meeting the deadline. Like the Israeli, the Indian negotiates but in instalments. The recommended choice of managerial action is to work closely with the engineer, not allowing too much time to pass before he “updates you” the commitment he made is passé.

3) A Thai engineer will sandbag is a unique fashion. If he knows you very well, you will get an accurate answer. However, if you are remote and not close to the Thai, he will tell you something that he thinks you want to hear. Then, via gossip or via telling other people, he will sandbag to save his own face in the case of delays. It may come to you from a 3rd party in the form of :“Boss, Khun Sumchai told me that his commitments are very optimistic”. The recommended choice of managerial action is to try to build up a personal and trusting relationship with the Thai to get real (not klenjai –outwardly pleasing) answers.

3) An American engineer will sandbag expediently (in order not to damage his career)  by questioning the planning assumptions again and again, or wearing out the manager by overdoing on ritualistic planning. This will be followed by an apparent, half baked commitment basked in nice language like “we’ll do our best”. The recommended choice of managerial action is to ask “what is realistic”, without delving into planning overdose.

Samuel Beckett’s play “en attendant Godot” (Waiting for Godot) is about people waiting for someone who never shows up. The play illustrates that while meaning may exist in the world, we human beings are not too good in discovering it. It is not strange that Beckett’s genre is the Theatre of the Absurd.

OD consultants are waiting for the market to improve. The goal of this short post is to show absurd this is, and propose an alternative.

In one of my previous posts this week, I focused on the growing irrelevance of OD as currently practised. This irrelevance has caused a drop in demand for Organisational Development. Add to this, the universities keep churning out OD consultants at an alarming rate. Perhaps (in Israel where I live) we may soon have more OD consultant than lawyers, or even more OD consultants than Middle East “experts”.

With the lessening of demand and the growth of supply, there is not only a problem on the horizon, it’s here.

The OD consultants who are waiting for the clouds to pass over and waiting for the economy to improve need to wake up and smell the coffee. Godot never comes. The cheese has moved. OD is moving forward, not going back.

What is to be done instead of Waiting for Godot?

OD consultants get work if they are relevant.

Here are 4 questions  you need to ask yourself (and have superb answers) to be remain relevant , which will ensure a backlog of work.

Invest

1) What relevant value do I need to provide to enable effective functioning in a global organizational configuration? What are the situations of global organizing which clients can come to me to solve?

Divest

2) From which beliefs do I need to divest, i.e. present beliefs  which limit my relevance and make me sound absurd?

Focus

3) Since OD services do not have universal appeal, upon whom should I be focusing on to provide the value I create?

Reputation and Position

4) How do I build my position as a content expert (not only facilitator) in the domain in which I work?

“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day;

The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,

And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.’

From Casey at the Bat –Ernest Thayer         Hebrew translation

Let’s look at the context in which OD is practiced nowadays and what this all means.

1) There is a severe economic crisis which has been going on for a long time. While some phoney “economic indicators” may look better than they did in 2008, the truth is that organizations are war zones in which people struggle not to join the ranks of the unemployed. Few people expect to have job satisfaction; “ satisfaction” is having a job. Since market conditions favour the employer and not the employee, people are no longer all that important. People have become spare parts.

The cornerstone of OD was to align the individual with the organization and focus on creating an environment which is good for the individual and for the organization. Thus, the relevance of OD’s value proposition appears bizarre at the present moment.

2) Professions should have professional standards. These professional standards serve as a balance and complement the commercial criteria by which professions are evaluated. So, a chartered accountant who has a thriving business but violates accounting practices will find himself in deep water.

OD is a poorly defined profession with no borders. There are no agreed upon professional standards. Thus, commercial standards are totally dominating how OD is practiced. OD has become a commodity, sold by an OD vendor, and the OD practitioner must satisfy the client. If the client does not know what he needs, this is irrelevant because you “follow the money” and deliver what has been ordered.

A cornerstone of OD was to “speak truth to power”. If one needs to “titillate” and please the “customer”, the ability of OD to delivery on one of its major principles is castrated.

3) OD was founded by White Western and European males, and the Western values of OD are  in line with those of the founders: participation, openness, authenticity, delegation, team work.

Organizations are now configured globally. In most of the world, there is more autocracy, more secretiveness, more discretion than is seen in the west; many of the values of OD are seen as parochial and irrelevant to the way people should operate, especially when they are threatened as people are in today’s economy.

4) As OD “stood its ground” and waited for the economy to “recover”, other professions cannibalized OD.

Change Management promises those in power that changes can be “managed” with a set of templates. HR’s disguising itself as a “business partner”, has cast aside/betrays the lobbying for the human resource and often serves as management’s 5th column to “deal” and contain the human resource. Unions and organized labour may/will fill in the vacuum. Certainly in the country where I live, re-unionization is rampant.

5) OD had a massive focus on communication. In organizations, people rarely talk too much any more; they text and email and use portals. A major domain in which OD brought huge value is shrinking.

6) Now that Corona has created unprecedented crisis and unrelenting change  in all organizations and systems, there is a new challenge to our relevance.

• Jobs are very scarce. Very scare. Like 4 leaf clovers. And that means that it becomes an employers’ world: sans work-life balance; sans perks; sans engagement; sans paid vacation; sans lunch coupons.
• Choppy choppy is back in season. 3 jobs will become one. Three departments will become two. Six engineers will become four. And until that happens, organizations will be war zones between people vying to be retained.
• The roles and functions focused on gender equality and diversity will be totally marginalized and wither away. It’s a world of many people drowning and very few life jackets.
• Dreams, vision and big ideas will be relegated to the back burner.

We need to be faster, more short term focused, less non-directive and far more creative, shaking off values which hold us back from being relevant in this economic catastrophe. This is a tall order for a profession so enamored by its past, and trapped in the values of another world which is dead and gone

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright;

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out

From Casey at the Bat –Ernest Thayer     Hebrew translation

Very profitable companies’ choice of consultants often reflect the distinct pathology from which they suffer.

Company A sells cutting edge products which enable improved digital marketing to the Financial Services industry sector.

A’s product releases are very buggy and need ongoing bug fixes, yet clients continue to buy A’s products because they provide competitive advantage.

A’s commitments to its client are exaggerated. For example they recently promised push advertising for incoming tourists within 3 months, although there is no way of providing anything whatsoever within this time frame.

Even within “A”, no one really knows what will be the content of the next release because their internal commitments between R&D and Sales lack credibility. As a matter of fact, company A suffers from constant friction between R&D and the Sales force, as well as from constant churn of project managers who loose credibility with the clients as deliveries slip both in quality and functionality.

A hires an OD consultant every so often, because the level of pain is as high as the level of profitability! A is very profitable.

Last week, all hell broke loose at a plan of record meeting, and it was decided that a consultant needs to be hired to “support growth”.

4 consultants have applied for job, each with a different set of values. One of the consultants has worked with A in the past. 

The consultants

• Consultant Bill believes that change is planned and managed. Bill’s approach is to work on process and structure to ensure predictability. Bill was not hired because he is “too much of an engineer”.

• Consultant Constance believes that the ethical and moral fibre of the company are building blocks for its long term sustainability. Constance focuses on end to end transparency, both internally between departments and externally with the clients. She plans to plot out with A’s  CEO  how the firm will “say what it means and means what it says”. When the CEO read her proposal, she did not even get an interview.

• Consultant Amir has worked with A for 9 years, under the previous CEO. Amir believes that OD is a midwife to change which happens. He is very eclectic and pragmatic in business matters and focused on “whatever works”; Amir believes that A operates in a competitive arena where its behaviour is largely logical and paid off. Amir works with the CEO on ensuring that A does not lose its competitive edge,without which A will quickly default into rapid decline. Amir does a lot of pain mitigation with the management and troops. Amir focuses on ensuring that everyone understood the hidden dynamic by which the entire system functioned. Amir worked a lot on understanding the thin line that exists between partial and deep chaos.

• Consultant Robert believes that OD work needs to be non-disruptive and create a wow effect. He used to be a Training Manager in a large company before he was downsized. Robert took a course at a community college and got a diploma in OD. Robert proposed a series of 3 wow lectures on Stress Management, Great Teamwork and Engagement, as well as some personal coaching on individual effectiveness.

Robert was chosen for the job. He worked with A for 9 months. When A’s profitability was severely hit, his contract was terminated immediately  and HR was tasked with commissioning cost effective training webinars on positive engagement.

The moral of this story is that very profitable (yet decaying) companies with some pain often choose low level consultants who will work with the wrong population on the tactical problems, and when the shit hits the fan, they get it wrong again. Smitten by arrogance.