Tag: solidarity

Buzzing with expectation?

Published November 4, 2008 by Jo Jordan

5 contemporary concepts for understanding why some groups buzz with expectation

Self-styled vagabond, Sam Brannon, asked a good question last weekend on Linkedin. Are we in a state of learned helplessness?

I’m an inveterate shaper so I am always asking “is what we do important and are we doing the important things?” Because I ask these questions, it is possible I sense learned helplessness more than do others. But, I am also much more interested in the the opposite of learned helplessness.

I love the crowd singing their local hero to victory.
I love the buzz of getting a group project done on time.
I love the feeling of belonging to an institution worth belonging to.

Indeed my love of that community buzz is key to my professional interest in work psychology and university teaching. Sam’s post led me to list 5 contemporary concepts from psychology and management that, I think, are key to creating the spiral of group buzz and efficacy.

1 Collective efficacy

If we believe in each other, we add 5-10% on our effective results. Collective efficacy is a simple yet powerful idea. When the teachers in a school believe in each other, the school outperforms other schools who have equal resources!

Rule one: The CEO needs to believe genuinely in his or her direct reports. That process kicks off their belief in each other and in their direct reports, etc. etc.

P.S Faking doesn’t work. The pre-requisite of leadership is genuine, heart-felt belief in one’s followers.

2 Solidarity

Rejection is enormously destructive. Roy Baumeister, who blogs at Psychology Today, has shown that being rejected by a computer (not even a person) is sufficient to stop us looking in a mirror. Someone who feels rejected is not going to be feeling efficacious!

Rule two: Don’t just walk around! Walk around with a mission to create a sense of belonging.

P. S. Be hyper-alert to the small minute and accidental ways in which we exclude people. They are devastating to moral and self-confidence.

3 Personal Leadership

Social media (like LinkeIn) has awakened our sense of being at the centre of our own network. Everyone is a leader. The personal leader ‘school’ supports the development of individual leadership (see poet David Whyte). I am also interested in organizations that recognise that everyone is a leader.

Rule three: Tell our own ‘stories’ to show how the organization fits in to our personal destinies, and write an organizational story that depends upon our differences and uniqueness.

P.S. A story that depends on us mimicking the boss defines us as irrelevant (a hole below the waterline for the organization!)

4 Positive psychology/positive organizational scholarship.

The work of Martin Seligman and David Cooperrider has shown the power of gratitude and appreciation. Positive whatever-whatever sounds like touchy-feely stuff but it is pretty hard core. Basically, it is an approach where we focus on what works and works well and we discard the rest.

There are good reasons why haven’t focused on what works well as a matter of course. Simply, if we define leadership as one person knowing what is best, and telling the rest of us what to do, then we are always focusing on a gap – on something negative.

Rule four: Scrap all the “gap” technology on which management and HRM was built. Pinpoint what works and do more of it! Then keep the conversation there.

P.S. Its scary to abandon the idea that we know best. But when we get the hang of it, we find out all the good stuff that is happening that we didn’t know about.

5 Globalization

Globablization has changed economics and shifted where and how we can make a profit. We have to work harder now to create value that produces a penny of profit. Working with this constraint produces fantastic results as we see in V.J. Prahalad’s value at the bottom of the pyramid.

The principle used by large companies to rethink their process is this: abandon the idea of trying to sell more and more at a better and better price. Rather, ask what is needed at what price, and work backwards to what we can supply. The ability to ask questions about the world outside the organizations is a key aspect of successful business teams.

Rule 5: Forget about being a leader! Ask how to develop a community who are interested in what we do.

P.S. We do need to honour the community’s needs and trust it to honour ours (complete the circle). When we don’t have this loyalty to each other, a buzz is not possible. We simply don’t have the conditions for a high performing organization. This is not the day!

[CSPPG : cheerful squirrels prepare parties toGether]

Everyday use of these concepts

I use all these ideas in running everyday projects, like university courses. I know students do better when they believe in each other. My job, as I see it, is replacing their initial dependence on me, with, a strong belief in each other, a belief in their project of studying together in this year & in this place, and a deep pride in how they came to be here and how they will move on together.

That is the buzz of expectation that the whole world feels tonight with the US galvanized to get out and vote (or is just to get a free cup of coffee from Starbucks?). That is the buzz we get when our favourite team makes the finals. That is the buzz we get when you couldn’t stop us going to work even if you tried!

Have a winning week!

3 Comments

Confidence in bad times

Published October 29, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image by Darwin Bell via Flickr

For the last two weekends, I ran a little poll here on your plans for beating the recession. The full poll and results are at the end of the post.

Of the two score or so people who answered, this was the modal response.

I have only scenario planned the future INFORMALLY. I am planning to 2010. My business is YET to be affected by the recession. I expect to grow 25% over a 2007 baseline. I will find a RECESSION-BEATING strategy.

So are we confident or fool-hardy?

Let me add these three observations.

People who answer online polls are “geeks” or “geek-like”. Maybe all of poll results are true. We haven’t been badly affected and we understand what is going on sufficiently to improve our businesses.

A prudent economist friend of mine offers the following: the stock market has dropped 50% since its peak of October 2007 (possibly more by today). The average growth rate per year is 6%. Assuming a good recovery, stock prices will recover their value in 50/6=8 years time (2016). This simple arithmetic may be useful for people managing their portfolios or planning their retirement. Notice that people in my survey (typically) assume 4x the average growth rate. During coaching, some nudging towards practical plans might be necessary.

Before I left Zimbabwwe, and while it was already obvius that things were going wrong, my students ran a series of studies measuring and explaining “hopelessness” [not hope sadly but interesting nonetheless]. They measured “hopelessness” in various groups and NEVER EVER found clinical levels of hoplessness.

Explaining hope and resilience

Moreover, any one person’s sense of hopelessness could be explained by the level of social support they perceived from relevant others. Here are some interesting results.

Wives of unemployed men looked to their churches for support.

Teenagers about to leave school after writing their O levels [school certificate/high school] felt more hopeful if they were supported by their families.

And feeling supported by their family was strongly linked to the number of family members having work or income

Working men in factories depended heavily on the social support of their supervisors. The mood of employees who were well educated and qualified was very much less affected by their managers

What did we take from these studies (and my little poll)?

People are naturally resilient. They believe the best.

Social support is critical.

In hard times, it is very important for the management system to provide support. This is likely to have a chain effect. The CEO needs to show belief in his or her direct reports and they need to show belief in their direct reports.

Social support outside the firm is also critical and managers can help themselves by supporting external support systems.

Enourage people to remain within churches and sports clubs, help them stay in touch with their families and make it easy for them to do so. Have we arranged for Hindu employers to have time off for Diwali? Do we celebrate Eid? Do we help people take time off for important events?

Collective efficacy, solidarity and business results

It is pretty likely that

collective efficacy (expressed belief in the importance and competence of our colleagues) and

solidarity (our willingness to support each other through thick-and-thin)

add a critical 5-10% onto our collective performance.

I wonder if there are any practitioners out there who are focussing on these ‘soft’ concepts and linking them to the ‘hard’ results of revenue in hard times?

Here is my original poll. Thanks so much for contributing. Despite my experience during other crises, I was still pleasantly surprised that we are so confident.

[polldaddy poll=1005163]

[polldaddy poll=1005175]

[polldaddy poll=1005188]

[polldaddy poll=1005210]

[polldaddy poll=1005254]

Reader poll: How long will the stock market be down?

One Comment

And after EQ comes PQ . . .

Published June 29, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image via Wikipedia

IQ, EQ and now PQ

PQ is going to be the next big thing in work psychology and management. What competencies do we need for participating, leading and influencing in today’s interconnected world?

Here is a list from Jane McGonigal, the games designer who talks of the engines of happiness. I’ve found links to her work here, here and here.

1 Mobbability

“- the ability to do real-time work in very large groups

– a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously”

Restated: My immediate thought is the ability to mobilize people for anything – a party, a demonstration, etc. This is a little more though. It probably begins with the ability to appreciate the dynamics of a music festival, or the crowd at a big sporting event. A Mexican Wave is one of the simplest forms

My questions: I get the feeling that I am missing something!

2 Ping quotient

“- measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement
– your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network”

Restated: How quickly do you respond to requests for your attention and participation? Do you plan your communication systems so that you are able to respond? Do you anticipate the types of inquiries you will receive and do you update your communication systems to reflect the inquiries you receive? Do you initiate contacts and broaden your network? How do people find you and how do you find them?

My questions: Where is listening?

3 Collaboration radar

“the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task”

Restated: When you start a task, do you think about who can and will help you? Do you take an interest in what work other people like to do? Have you some kind of model in your head about how to collaborate with other people and what helps collaboration to be satisfactory or unsatisfactory?

My questions: Is this ability to engender collaboration? Or just detect it?

4 Influency

“- the ability to be persuasive in diverse social contexts and media spaces
– understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique”

Restated: Are you persuasive and are you persuasive to different audiences and in different settings? Are you interested in persuasion and how other people are persuasive? Are you able to communicate through different channels? Do you understand the nuances of using different channels? Have you an emerging theory of when to use various techniques and why? Do you have some idea of what motivates other people in various settings? Are you curious about their motivation? Are interested in how motivation changes when we take part in groups? Can you predict what will individuals will do next in a social settings and what an entire group or community will do? Can you anticipate what individuals, groups and communities are willing to do?

My questions: The arts are so important, aren’t they?

5 Multicapitalism

“fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial”

Restated: How much capital do you need for your business to succeed? What do you have now? What do you need to do to

Financial?

Intellectual?

Social? Whuffie?

My questions: What is natural capital? Is social capital tradable? Is the “securitization” of social capital the next political innovation?

6 Protovation

“- fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles
– ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure”

Restated: Do you “have a go” and look for feedback from other people? Do you pick small, cheap, easy ways to experiment with new things that don’t just lead to success but teach you something important when you fail? Do you learn the meaning of errors? Are they useful signals or just sources of distress? Do you celebrate the errors of others (and I don’t mean gloat!) so their experiences are seen as useful and valuable by everyone?

My questions: Has anyone linked protovation to self-efficacy (Bandura) and error-training (Michael Frese)?

7 Open authorship

“creating content for public consumption and modification”

Restated: Do you write, speak, make videos, etc. for other people? Do you expect them to take what you use and change it (mash it)? Do you judge your effectiveness by the extent to which your audience uses and changes your ideas?

My questions: Is this a major aspect of social media? That we expect our ideas to be an input rather than an output or expert opinion? Is expecting a reply rather than approval or disapproval the major behavioral shift of our time?

8 Signal/noise management

“filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data”

Restated: Have you set up your data streams so that you receive information from many, many sources? Have you set up your data streams so that you can detect repetition (without checking our original sources), speculation, rumor? Are you interested in how information is passed around the world on matters that interest you? Do you streams allow you the benefit of serendipty? Have you got people (lots and lots) to consult when you are stuck?

My questions: How much have these skills changed from the checking of provenance taught in universities? How much can we transfer skills from one domain to another?

What have I still got to learn?

9 Longbroading

“thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture”

Restated: Having a “helicopter view” and seeing a problem from different perspectives have long been valued business skills. This seems to go further – to understand a situation in terms of its dynamics

My questions: If I am correct, then we need to see situations in terms of their feedback loops? And is this an important skill that kids learn when they work out different ways of playing a game?

10 Emergensight

“the ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity”

Spot unexpected patterns as they pop up, and be ready to take advantage of them – even when systems scale in size and messiness.

Restated: Do you look of for the way a pattern unfolds? Do you look for changes in speed as well – from the lull before the storm to the tempest that will blow itself out? Do you look for small levers that have huge impacts?

My questions: Is this improvisation? Are we talking about good reaction times, or understanding complex dynamics?

Hat-tip to NLabNetworks and Andrea Saveri of the Institute of the Future who spoke at the recent NLabNetworks meeting at Leicester.

Make your team ~ break your team ~ it is in your gift (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)

2 Comments

“Go get your things. Dreams mean work”

Published February 24, 2008 by Jo Jordan

I discovered Paulo Coelho this year. I am amazed I spent this long on this earth without finding his books.

His stories have mystical settings. By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept is about a woman and her childhood sweetheart who meet up again in their twenties to make a hard decision: should they get together or should he follow his vocation into a Catholic seminary and a life as charismatic and healer?

All Coelho’s books (I think) have a happy ending, but not a silly ending. After many trials, the protagonists resolve to take the high road: living in solidarity with this world. These may be mystical stories, but they are neither fantasies nor escapist.

And the trials faced by the characters are never gratuitous. Each in itself offers a perspective on relating to the world and, I think, the tension between commitment and uncertainty.

They are a remarkably “open” read too. He has a light style that draws you into the story. And then releases you from time to time to ponder what he or one of his characters has just said.

Wikipedia describes the book as “a week in the life of someone ordinary to whom something extraordinary happens”. Read it at the end of a long week to ponder extraordinary people who live ordinary lives.

One Comment

Tag: solidarity

Buzzing with expectation?