“The most
common and continuous means of communicating to people their worth and
potential is: the organization”.
Stephen F Covey in his book The 8th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness.
Reflect on
this quote for a while and then tell me how your organization communicates the
worth and potential of the people working in it. Or maybe it does not!
Too many
organizations have a structure that instead communicates that all they want is
a body for the production. And then another quote from Covey: “When all you
want is a person´s body and you don´t really want their mind, heart or spirit
(all inhibitors to the free-flowing processes of the machine age), you have
reduced a person to a thing”.
Organizations
that believe people are things often build systems for the managing of things
instead of leading people. They install control systems and regulations that
make it difficult for people to do their job and take away the very space where
people can breathe. When we don´t have breathing time and space, we are like
the wood man who didn´t stop to sharpen his ax. We just go on swinging the dull
ax at different trees at the same time. We might get some of them down, but if
we just had taken time to stop and look at what we were doing, we might even
have invented a double ax instead of just sharpening the one we had.
The way to
have organizations communicate the worth and potential of its people, is to use
methods and approaches that are based on that very same value. When the way of leading meetings, working in
teams and making decisions are changed to participative, engaging and creative
methods, this communicates that the organization is changing its foundational
values. It is never enough tell people that things have changed. If the organization
still uses the same methods it did before, they won´t believe you.
There are
never such things as quick fixes but a quick way to start the organizational
change process is to change the way meetings are conducted. If the
old-fashioned board meeting style with a list of speakers and a chairman is
still used, then change it to a flexible and participative method, such as Open
Space Technology or Whole Person Process. Those methods not only show people
that they are valued but teach them another way of working together, that
builds the foundation of the new organizational style and culture. Use another
method for decision making, such as Five to Fold process where everyone shows
to what degree they have energy for working for a topic to move it forward. This
allows the group to create teams by self-organization built on passion and
engagement. The change in meeting and decision making methods is a change in
the organizational body language. It is just like being a parent, your children
will not do as you say but as you do and they will always be able to distinguish
the truth by watching and feeling, rather than by just listening.
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