A very small story that taught me a lot about power, influence and giving a shit

I’m sharing my story for four reasons:

i) to help me reflect and learn

ii) to share my lessons to help you

iii) to connect and learn alongside people who are interested in their own development

iv) to be honest and open about my experiences, good and bad (to lead by example)

I’m in a celebratory mood today because I achieved a small but significant success with my team. It is small because it was just running an exercise in our team retrospective (where we reflect on our performance and see how we can improve). It is significant because it is another step towards achieving what I believe to be very important. And this was only the latest step in a journey that started several months ago.

I want to reflect on this for a few insights that I have had (or had reinforced) along the way:

• the importance of having a vision that you believe so strongly that you will fight for it; it matters personally to you and will give you the energy you need
• it gives me hope that anyone can achieve a change within a large organisation or even society (i.e. you don’t need to be the CEO, prime minister)
• change needs early adopters/evangelists to keep going (no-one can do this alone but they can be the catalyst for change)
• making big changes is hard — it needs ingenuity, fellow believers, persistence and resilience

Why do I give a shit? (what’s my vision?)

My vision is based on a belief.

I believe that…

People and their behaviour is important and, in fact, without this, the impact of organisational transformation will only achieve a tiny amount of its potential. Also, any gains made will fade over time as the resistance to any change that was achieved increases.

I’m not going to justify this position in this post. That’s for another post. This post is about explaining the insights I have had, NOT to convince you that this or that belief is correct.

However the knowledge I have acquired through experience and observation tells me this is true.

This matters personally to me because I realised (remembered) that the reason I became a contractor is that I felt being an employee in a company meant you had to be deceitful (at least some of the time). I felt there was a level of dishonesty required to be able to navigate the company and be successful. My experience told me that success was defined by pay and pay was defined by your position in the hierarchy and this didn’t appeal. I also knew that I would find this uncomfortable.

I didn’t think this through in such an analytical way at the time. I just saw two paths ahead of me, one labelled contractor, one labelled employee. At the time, the path labelled contractor would provide some freedom (not much as it turns out) but also it would not require engagement in company ‘politics’. Oh and contractors are paid better than employees too.

In my recent experiences, I have discovered organisations that operate in entirely different ways. Organisations that don’t have hierarchies; organisations that have small teams of people who are self-reliant and autonomous and responsible for deciding on their purpose and how to achieve it (without any managers); people who are able to play to their strengths and don’t have to squeeze into a one-size-fits-nobody box; people who can find the right place where they can excel.

I’ve also discovered that organisations are recognizing the need to do things in a radically differently way to be effective and successful. And sitting on your laurels is not an option as the customer will (eventually) punish you through moving elsewhere. Or the competition will bite chunks out of your organisation as it takes away the profitable, juicy parts of your business.

So there is an existential threat for older, slow-moving or traditional organisations. And there is an opportunity for a more equable approach to organising how people work together. This allows people to bring their best selves to work and, therefore, create a more successful organisation.

Now there seems to be an alternative to the slippery, deceitful world of traditional corporate culture which I thought was the only option.

Now THIS is something that inspires me!

It’s not like me saying,

‘Customer journey mapping helps us understand the customer’s perspective’

OR ‘A business analyst is critical for success on any business initiative’.

I might believe these statements to be true (the second one, not so much :-)) but they don’t fire me up in the same way as taking the dishonesty out of corporate culture does.

I was speaking to my friend Rachel Bamber once to help me get motivated about a new business idea. She helped me cut through the noise by asking:

Would you do this if you weren’t getting paid?

I replied

No way!

Now that was my wake up call and my test — what would I do if I didn’t need the money?

So my vision now is to

help create a world where people wake up feeling inspired, feel welcomed at work and return home feeling fulfilled.

(with apologies to Simon Sinek who articulated this better than my previous efforts)

And this new vision does pass the ‘what would you do if you weren’t getting paid?’ test.

Now for the small story

As a small part of achieving that vision I am helping a large corporate transform their organisation and their ways of working. I have learnt a great deal whilst helping them go on this journey.

As part of understanding what is required to change people’s behaviour (and I won’t go into all the theory here), there are two insights I want to highlight:

• people’s behaviour is a product of the ‘system’ they are in (so you need to understand and change the system to change people’s behaviour)
• effective teams must have psychological safety to really unlock high performance

Psychological safety is discussed at length here but, in brief, it exists where people feel able to speak up:

• Without risk of ridicule — others welcome someone asking the so-called ‘stupid’ questions to increase their understanding
• Without fear of damaging my relationship with my peers — or my boss and their boss — for example, questionning your manager’s or their manager’s strategy/opinion
• Without fear of being perceived as negative — when there is broad consensus and positive energy in the room, it is difficult to be the one to ‘prick the balloon’

This supports a creative environment and is part of helping people feel fulfilled, inspired and, therefore, making a more significant contribution.

So I was convinced and wanted to make this a focus for the organisation but how would I do this?

I needed to explore different avenues for achieving this.

I tried talking about this in public forums at work to help and work with other who were motivated to ‘try this out’. There was some interest in discussing this but no active experimentation.

I found enthusiasts within my team who felt as strongly as I that this was important.

Through luck and conversations, we found another couple of individuals who were committed to the idea and were actively experimenting within their teams.

Within our own team there was interest but not enough to make it into our backlog of work.

So, we wondered how to raise the profile and start our own experiments…

Rather than continuing to talk about psychological safety, Kav and I decided to introduce an exercise into our retrospective which was about exploring our performance as a team. We produced a mashup (I love that I can use that word!) based on some of the ideas from psychological safety (see below) and the Spotify squad health check model.

Some questions that are used to test for the existence of psychological safety

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

(A retrospective is a regular working meeting where the team explores how well it is performing and identifies how to make small improvements.)

Our hypothesis was that the team would find the exercise useful because of the conversations it generates.

We ran the exercise this week and we did have a useful conversation. The real evidence of success was that the team said they would like to capture the ‘data’ and run the exercise in the future to see if anything had changed.

I am cautious of my own confirmation bias having committed to this idea very strongly. I need to keep remembering that this is my belief but that does not make it a fact.

So I will continue to test hypotheses to try to keep myself honest. One of the tests is that the team are having very honest conversations about tricky subjects and actively dealing with them. There are no ‘elephants in the room’.

I will grow that small community of experimenters who can learn from each other’s experiments and also challenge each other (this presents an even greater risk of confirmation bias with group think starting to take effect). We need to use data and evidence to keep us on the straight and narrow.

And I will challenge us to look for opportunities to increase the impact.

What did I learn?

A quick reminder of what I have learnt from this experience

• the importance of having a vision that you believe so strongly that you will fight for it; it matters personally to you and will give you the energy you need
  you may already have your vision or it may take years of reflection and exploration (as it has in my case). Either way, it needs to be grounded in your experience and be very personal. Once you’ve found it, it is a powerful engine to drive you forward.
• it gives me hope that anyone can achieve a change within a large organisation or even society (i.e. you don’t need to be the CEO, prime minister)
  I am very optimistic. I am naturally quite cautious but I have seen how change can happen and I can envisage a more positive future. I work with inspiring, visionary people and I can see how we can all be more effective with a dose of belief, a few fellow believers and a way of learning and moving forward. And I can see how anyone can discover their own vision to inspire them to take action.
• change needs early adopters/evangelists to keep going (no-one can do this alone but they can be the catalyst for change)
  I have found my early adopters and believers and this small community helps provide the energy to continue. It also provides a place for inspiration and the potential for much greater impact.
• making big changes is hard — it needs ingenuity, fellow believers, persistence and resilience
  This is still true but I can be persistent when pursuing a vision that matters so personally. I cannot conceive of not pursuing my vision. And fellow believers and a way to experiment and learn are all I need to give me the energy to continue down that path.

What are your thoughts? Does this resonate with you? Is there anything you would add from your experience?