Articles

A Most Dangerous Position To Be In, When All The Sexy People Stuff Had Been Said But Nothing Has Changed

Some organisations give good rhetoric.  They talk about inclusiveness and claim to follow the latest thinking about engagement.  They launched a Vision and Mission some time ago and have a laminated set of values issued to all.  They’ve run a 360 and the CEO has held a series of ‘doughnut and coffee’ sessions.  The Directors have done a ‘back to the floor’ to discover the ‘real’ story and the company made a matched contribution to Children in Need.

Yet when to talk to ‘the workers’ about  how things feel in the organisation or ask them about morale, or look at how enthusiastically people have signed up for the Christmas party, peoples’ views bear little relation to all the enlightened management practice that has supposedly been going on.  Cynicism, suspicion and a general weariness flavour the comments as if the organisation has done nothing at all.  And that’s the point, if people receive all this communication about cultural change, about how things will be different and about a new way of doing things, and then nothing much happens, what are they supposed to think?  Launching all the things in the first paragraph doesn’t make them happen. 

Questions that should be asked beforehand.  Why does management believe all this stuff is required?  Has it articulated the problem to be solved, or the opportunity to be exploited?  Has it defined measures of success for each intervention?  Has it created some accountability in the process of implementation and follow thorough?

And that brings us to an uncomfortable principle.  An organisations’ delivery of enlightened people practices cannot exceed the quality of its management’s ability to do so.  Put more simply, management has to change and improve before the wider organisation can make the same journey.  That ability to be consciously aware of its own shortcomings and to transcend is a critical early stage requirement in any people related change process.

Claudine McClean
T: 01789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com