Tips from the Undercover Boss: What does "they" tell you?

If you're up for a bit of Reality TV (the kind that won't rot your brain or leave you feeling unclean and in need of a bathe), I'd suggest the series Undercover Boss. In the next few posts, I'll explain why. For today, let's look at the sinister use of "they" in organizations. 

I've lately become a fan of the American TV series, Undercover Boss*. Yes, it's "reality" TV but its redeeming quality is that it highlights the major and continuing disconnect in organizations between the folks who make strategy and the people who actually make it all happen every day.

Can you see your CEO mopping toilets?

In each episode, a TV crew follows the CEO of a major company while he poses as an entry-level worker to see what life's really like on the front lines of his own organization.

Leaving behind not only the C-suite but also their (usually large) homes, families and pampered lifestyles, the human side of each CEO is revealed. Each struggles to deal in his own way with his new transient reality of temporary, insecure jobs and moving around from one motel to another.

The situations are predictably hilarious, as these high-powered execs push mops, clean out horse (and human!) shit, try to keep up with the inhuman pace of modern assembly lines and, in more than a few cases are actually told: you're fired!

A whole new take on "bottom line"

What makes it good TV are of course the human interest stories that emerge as the Undercover Bosses learn first-hand what effect their decisions (often driven by cost-cutting and "efficiency") have on the daily lives of their staff.

The bosses also hear staff using phrases like "Head Office" and "Corporate" and "it's policy" as they do things that clearly don't work and often actually make their job a lot harder.

These employees (even if unwittingly) have the chance to "speak truth to power" and let the Big Boss know, in no uncertain terms, that there is a very real "Us versus Them" divide in the organization.

And in case you think that doesn't matter, read on...    


What "they" tells you, and why you should listen

In "They" have a lot to answer for Richard Branson writes:

A company's employees are its greatest asset, particularly in service-based operations where your people are your product. When a company fails to grasp this simple business tenet, the result is invariably an oppositional "us and them" divide between management and front-line staff.

Managers and business leaders should watch for this tendency. A company where the staff consistently overuses the word "they" is a company with problems.

If employees aren't associating themselves with their company by using "we," it is a sign that people up and down the chain of command aren't communicating – and if that turns out to be the case, you'll usually find secondary problems throughout the company, affecting everything from development to customer service.

Repairing an "us and them" environment is a cultural challenge that usually calls for greater employee involvement and improved internal communications from the executive suite to the shop floor. In my experience, middle management is a good place to look for the source of the problem. Feedback from up and down the chain often hits a wall in the person of a midlevel manager who has fallen victim to the "knowledge is power" syndrome.

Identifying such blockages and unclogging corporate arteries will bring huge payoffs.

Watch for my next post, which will include tips and practical ideas for handling these stubborn and unhelpful middle-management communication blockages!

Where you can find Undercover Boss

In Australia, full episodes are available to replay on Ten's website: scroll down in the right-hand window until you find Undercover Boss, then select from recent episodes.

Outside Australia, you can try YouTube or your local network's website. (In fact, if you're a reader and you find a link to episodes of the show, please be sure to share the URL in the comments below - thanks!)

* - big hat-tip to Andrew & Sascha Rixon in Melbourne for letting me know about the series

"Soft" skills & behaviour change: important lessons for leaders

A conversation this week reminded me that developing effective people managers takes more than soft skills, it requires consistent behaviours in the workplace. To that theme, below is an excerpt from my recent paper on employee engagement, "It's not Business. It's Personal: People Engagement that works."

Over dinner last night I had a conversation with a couple of senior leaders from a European multinational. Among various topics, what got us most animated was the question of how to develop great people managers while also keep the technical experts that are the backbone of the business. There was agreement on the need to strike a good balance between coaching and mentoring. The overall theme: soft skills are important, but not enough - organizations need to create lasting and positive behaviour change if strategy is going to get executed on a daily basis.

Skills-building & Behaviour development

Many respondents to the [McLeod employee engagement] review stressed the need for better training for managers in so-called soft or people skills […] Many felt that current skills training concentrated too heavily on qualifications and too little on how people skills were implemented within the workforce.

It’s worth making a distinction at this point: skills differ from behaviour. Skill is the ability to do something well and describes the knowledge gained when you learn a tool, process or concept on a course. Behaviour is the way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others; it’s about applying your skills in real business contexts, on an ongoing basis.

Developing people managers to better engage with people requires more than one-off skills-building workshops. It’s about helping them develop consistent, positive, productive behaviours. The addition of more and more technical “soft skills” doesn’t get you there. Rather it’s a matter of helping managers to develop the behaviours that are adaptive to the situation, so they know when and how to deploy their skills to best effect.

The challenge is that many managers who got promoted because of their technical expertise still relish and covet the role of technical expert. You can send them to one training course after another. But do those skills get applied in their work, or is it just another course binder that joins the others on the shelf, unused and swiftly forgotten?

It takes time to help people managers turn the corner and learn step back from doing the work in order to manage others to get the work done takes time. Developing adaptive people management behaviour also requires mentoring and coaching. So how’s your organization’s bench strength of mentors and coaches?

Dead fish in the room

[M]iddle managers who become convinced of the need for change can themselves run up against barriers […] the most formidable blocks to success were the behaviours and attitudes of the most senior managers. The […] top managers believed that their status in the organization was evidence enough that they ‘had what it took’ to be regarded as a leader, and regarded their development as therefore unnecessary. Nonetheless, they believed that the managers below them needed it. However, when the managers returned to the workplace with a clearer idea of what leadership should look like, they became much more aware of the poor quality of leadership role-modelled by their senior managers, and their frustrations increased. This was deepened by another major problem, which was that when the managers attempted to implement their learning, their suggestions for improvement were rejected or ignored by their somewhat defensive and/or reactionary bosses. The result was disenchantment, greater cynicism and lower morale among the manager group, who eventually stopped making any suggestions or trying new ways of leading.

Getting senior management sponsorship of people engagement and development programs is always listed as a must-have success factor. When you look at the dismal example provided by the “top managers” described above it’s clear why. (The old saying “a fish rots from the head down” comes to mind…) These chaps are certainly NOT mentors or role-models and you can imagine the frustration of the people managers test-driving their new leadership skills in those organizations!

While this situation is extreme in its dysfunction, it’s still true that mentoring of people managers by more senior managers can be complicated by reporting relationships. After all, it’s hard to admit to your boss that you sometimes feel like you don’t know what you’re doing!

Mentoring should be complemented by coaching, whether by internal people, an external coaching professional, or both in combination. An external coach offers an objective sounding board and helps people think through their challenges without being hampered by reporting lines and competing organizational priorities. 

Most of all, coaching enables “double-loop learning” (learn a skill, then go try it out, then talk to the coach about how it went, adjust course, go try it again) which helps your people turn otherwise mechanical skills into enduring, lived behaviours. And that, in turn, means you’re getting the full ROI out of those skills-building courses, along with practical business results.

Keep reading in the weeks to come for further excerpts on people managers, skills building and behaviour change from It's not Business. It's Personal: People Engagement that works.

And for more ideas on how to develop great people managers with the behaviour needed for success in your organization, remember you can get posts from the tmc blog sent to you automatically. Just go to the top-right side of this page and either click on the Get blog updates by RSS feed button or enter your email address under Get blog updates sent to your email.

Technology as a loudspeaker - what are you broadcasting?

Technology is a terrific enabler and accelerator of organizational processes, but it's not a cure-all. Read on to explore the nexus where technology overlaps human behaviour and interaction; learn why it's important to know what message your technology is broadcasting - both to your employees and to your clients!


In April I was invited to a seminar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the uses of technology in higher education and corporate training.

Among other tech companies and educational institutions, Microsoft was on hand to showcase Surface, its "social way of computing," as envisioned for university campuses and business meetings of the future.

In this idealized future, businesspeople easily find and exchange information with world-wide colleagues and their road-warrior lives are made easier with access to timely information on hand-held devices that speeds them along to fruitful and interactive meetings.

It was pretty slick stuff: technology enabling a whole new way of doing business and, as you'd expect given the theme of the conference, there was a lot of enthusiasm and buzz in the room.

As human behaviour specialist, I was left wondering how these admittedly snazzy tech-tools would help you to deal more effectively with colleague who's just off a red-eye flight filled with screaming kids and has spilled coffee on herself in the taxi ride from the airport.

Or how those gizmos would help to effectively manage interpersonal conflict that might arise in one of these tech-enabled meetings...quite possibly with the frazzled and overtired colleague just described!

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

The more (and faster) technology changes, the more human behaviour remains stubbournly the same - complex, unpredictable and non-linear.

Now don't get me wrong: I love my gadgets as much as the next guy and technology is a great aid to our working lives. It's in the nexus where technology overlaps human behaviour and interaction, however, where we can clearly see that technology's role as an enabler and accelerator of what's already happening in the organization (you can even say it's also an amplifier) is not as straightforward as some tech-enthusiasts may believe.

For example, if you've been in meetings that look a bit like this unfortunate group - where people aren't engaged, there's an atmosphere of negative interaction and conflict, and a people manager who fundamentally can't manage people - then it's probably clear to you that no amount of technology is going to improve the situation.

Putting touch-screen computers into this meeting will not magically transform it into a smoothly-functioning team. Quite the opposite, in fact: in dysfunctional organizational cultures, technology is more likely to give people more tools to extend unhelpful behaviours and disengagement to a much wider audience, even faster (email flame wars, anyone...? or text messages that read: "PLEASE get me outta here! :-( MeetingFAIL!!!").

Technology as enable/accelerator/amplifier (or, behavioural loudspeaker) 

If you remember the classic technology equation (Garbage In = Garbage Out) and then factor in technology's role as enabler/accelerator/amplifier, it's clear that technology most often functions as a loudspeaker to surface dodgy behaviours in an organization. Technology therefore cannot be the quick-fix panacea to address unhelpful behaviours, because they aren't technology problems - they're management problems, and they need management solutions.

This fact about technology helps explain why some leaders are so resistant to introducing social media tools - because amplifying the kind of talk that happens in a toxic corporate culture will most likely serve to  increase dissastisfaction (and staff turnover), to undermine the command-and-control structure typical of such organizations...or quite possibly a combination of both.

So I would argue that our awareness of the kinds of behaviour being enabled/accelerated/amplified with technology (social media or otherwise) needs to at least keep up with the pace of technological change. And in many organizations that's going to be a pretty steep learning curve.

When it comes to awareness of human behaviour dynamics and taking practical action to create Positive Change, we can't release a new patch or upgrade each year, it's an ongoing effort. Thankfully it's the same complexity and unpredictability of people that also makes us hugely creative and adaptable - and that's very good news indeed for those looking to create Positive Change.

Some questions remain - what do you think?

My next post will tell you more about what Positive CHANGE looks like and how it can help shape behaviour and interactions in your organization. The end result is certainly worth the effort: effective teams that can take adversity in stride and maintain a positive focus on contribution and results.

Other interesting questions remain: in what ways could technology actually expand and deepen our perspectives on human behaviour so we interact and engage with each other more effectively? Beyond being simply an enabler and accelerator, can technology serve to positively shape human behaviour and interactions...?

I look forward to discussing these questions and more at next week's instance of another technology-in-business conference: Melcrum's Social Media conference in North Sydney. See you there!

Thoughts and themes from an EE conf in Melbourne

Just wrapped up the Melbourne Employee Engagement conference and a couple of clear themes emerged:

• There's great value to be gained in giving your people access to the senior leaders in your organization - if that's not possible, remember that it's your people managers who will need to carry your engagement efforts.
  
• High salaries and a great safety record only get you so far in engaging your people. If they have to "park their brain at the gate" and get their intrinsic satisfaction (i.e. happiness and real engagement, a.k.a. "flow" experiences) from activities outside work, you've still got your work cut out for you as an organization.
  
• Acquisitions and mergers are a fast way to grow a company and gain needed technology and market share. M&A's attract lots of "bean counters" looking to realize efficiencies...equally important (and too-often forgotten) is the need for people-positive engagement practices. No company ever cut its way to greatness and in the final analysis it's people who make the competitive difference. Great to hear about practical ways to demonstrate the value of the intangible people dimension.
  
• A compelling presentation reminded us all of the power of stories to engage and motivate people. In the same vein, you'll find a tmc-related example of practical application of storytelling in an organizational setting (combined with the solution-focused technique The Affirm) here.
  
• One of my favourite quotes of the conference was from Michael Specht: It's not a social media problem, it's a management problem. If you don't trust your people, if they're already wasting time in other ways, and you give them social media tools - they're just going to go play. Highlights the role of technology as not only an enabler but an accelerator of what's already happening in the organization - hence also an amplifier. If you're disconnected from your people no amount of social media will reverse that trend.
  
• My equally favourite quote of the conference: Change programs [to improve people engagement] are not a sprint. They're a marathon. Enjoyed the insight offered that when leaders and manages fail to communicate using "formal channels," the result is not silence; instead the "informal" communication channels (i.e. the rumour mill) move in to fill the vacuum. For me the interesting question becomes: given that conversations in your organization are happening all the time - what can you do to get positive conversations working for you?

Those are my highlights from the Melbourne conference - tune in next week for an overview of both conferences.

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