Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

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Having previously written about my views of the differences between the cultures at the Tarong and Stanwell power stations in the 1990’s, the former manager of the Stanwell station and inaugural CEO of Stanwell Corp (Ted Scott) sent me a copy of this book in order that I could gain a fuller view of his philosophy.

1)  Binary Review

I am very grateful that he chose to do so.

The Book	What we thought
“The Myth of Nine to Five”by Ted Scott and Phil Harker	.Great content (lots to consider)

Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way.  If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books.  Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you…

Unlike the Richard Branson book, which I read in a couple of hours during the same holiday, this one is a small book that takes longer - as there is plenty of food for thought.

The tagline for the book = “a little book with a big message” does (in my view) reflect the contents.

2)  The Main Message

Work is more than just 9-to-5 (as the title suggests).

This does not mean you are being asked to slave away 24×7 for the “greater good” of the company – rather it is a statement that it’s not natural for people to segregate their lives so cleanly and coldly.  The extension of this is that what you do at work is integrated into what you do as a person (and, increasingly these days – with the decline of other institutions – plays an increased role in defining how some people view themselves as a person).

Hence, the main message is that your career had better be aligned with who you are, and where you want to be – or you are just setting yourself (and your employer) up for disappointment.

What should be obvious (I hope) from this is that the authors dislike the view of people in the workplace as “human resources”, as if they were just another consumable item in the inventory.

As Ted has noted to me, this is more than just a disagreement with the principles of Taylorism/Fordism – it is also a step beyond the principles of Deming (a simplification would be that Deming viewed people as the “custodians/implementers” of business processes – hence a somewhat impersonal view).

3)  The Details

I have written and re-written this review many times to try to capture the essence of the book in only a few words, and the following is the best I have been able to do.  However even this does a disservice to the book, and I urge you to have a read for yourself.

The book deals sequentially with three main dimensions of the view of the integratedness of a person’s work-life into their being, and the person’s work-life into the existence of the organisation – as follows:

Dimension 1 = Work and the Individual

A person’s ability to operate as a fully productive member of a team (in a commercial organisation, or elsewhere) is determined by a number of factors, including the following 3:
1)  A person’s own maturity;
2)  The clarity of the Vision/Mission of the organisation; and
3)  The degree of alignment between the visions of the organisation, and the individual.

A few words on each, paraphrasing my understanding of what was said in the book:

(A)  About Personal Maturity

In the “7 Habits” this was covered in the concept that individuals need to progress through three stages:
Dependence to
Independence (oh, those rebellious teen years) to
Interdependence.

In this book, much more of the science behind this transition is discussed, including how someone’s view of the world (and how they relate in the world) is defined by the maturity level.  The point is made that personal maturity is somewhat independent of age and certainly independent of intellectual ability.

Hence, the main message is that, in a workforce, you encounter people who are at all stages of the continuum.  Hopefully (if you are lucky) the managers are operating at a higher level of maturity than the rest of the employees – if this is not the case, then chaos will ensue.

In the words of the authors (p7):

Dysfunctional organisations … result from dysfunctional individuals.  They in turn are dysfunctional because they have world views, internal paradigms, that produce inaccurate representations of the world particularly with respect to human behaviour.

The corollary of this is that, to help the organisation improve, one must also seek to advance the level of maturity of all individuals in the organisation.

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(B)  About Clarity of Mission/Vision/Values

Up until relatively recently, I had been operating under the impression that the Mission/Vision/Values of the company had been generally understood by employees.

However, it turns out that this has been not so much the case – for instance, whereas for me software has been a means to an end of my objective of making the market understandable (in a business model of interest), it turns out that some employees have seen the software as our primary reason for existence.

Stephen alluded to some of this lack of clarity in his post following an AIM information session.

Establishing this blog (which has only been up and running since about May 2009 – yes, despite the back-dated blog posts, for those finicky people out there!) is one new approach we’re taking to refine and clarify these over-arching principles.

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(C) Alignment with Vision/Mission

This is achieved through the organisation’s culture.  In the words of the authors (p28):

Culture is embodied in the answer to the question, ‘how do we do things around here’

I would even go a step further in noting that it is more than just how we do things, it is also why we do things.

Explicitly outlining more of my personal philosophy is a start down the process of establishing a common understanding of where we have come from (and why) but the logical progression is that the organisation starts to develop its own philosophy, that borrows from that of individuals, but is independent at the same time.

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Dimension 2 = Management and Leadership

The authors describe employee participation at work in terms of three temperature levels (which are – in my view – similar to the 3 maturity levels in 7-Habits):

Luke-Warm	My understanding is that the employers describe this similarly to the “dependency” phase in 7-Habits. As the authors note (p72): The essential defining characteristic of such an employee is that the work is engaged in primarily to avoid negative consequences (internal or external) and not because the employee finds the work personally satisfying or intrinsically worthwhile. … these employees may actually feel like they are ‘working harder than ever’ even though their productive output has reduced. In this stage, employees cannot be fully engaged with work, or fully productive.  For management, this is the paradigm in which the “carrot and stick” metaphor arises. It is clear to me that this is the stage where a number of our employees were at, around the time of our autopsy (indeed, it was explicitly noted to me that the measure by which some were judging their performance was whether I was happy or not).  Little wonder, then, that we missed our performance targets for 2008-09!
Cold	The authors note (p76): to get from lukewarm (passive compliance) to hot (self-determining), an intermediate, transitional, or learning phase is almost always required. In the cold condition the employee is in transition.  That transition may either by from lukewarm through cold to hot, or from lukewarm through cold to exit Furthermore: effective management is most clearly demonstrated through management’s ability to ‘manage’ the cold transition phase. Personally, I certainly find it very challenging! There’s plenty of useful content from the authors (and several references, which we will review in due course), but I thought I would add this one further one (p77): As an employee under the cold condition, I have a chance to develop the ‘right’ thinking processes that help me learn how to align my personal reality to the collective reality and to own that learning When I make a mistake or perform inadequately under the conditions of the cold period, however, I am able to learn from those mistakes (i.e. unlike whilst previously in the luke-warm condition). �
Hot	The authors note (p78): The most important characteristic of the hot condition is that employees have a real sense of ownership of their decision to bring into alignment the fulfilment of personal needs with the fulfilment of the collective needs of their team. With employees in this state, the role of management becomes very much the role of a coach and mentor, rather than a director of work. It’s very much where I would like us to be, all of the time!

(A)  Leadership –vs- Management

For many years I have generally been under the impression that leadership and management are different skills, that have different focus:
1)  Management being more task-focused, more “carrot and stick”,
2)  Leadership being more outcome-focused (or even principle focused) and hence more focused on motivation at a holistic level.

As a result, I have always personally been more attracted to the idea of being a leader than a manager.

My reading of this book is that this dichotomy is perhaps the unnecessary by-product of the immature paradigms through which companies are run even at these times.

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(B)  Making the Change

The authors note that, for an effective workplace to be established, the leadership are responsible for setting the tone by (p66):

1)  Being accessible (hence the old chestnut of “management by walking around”)

2)  Engaging with the humanity of the people encountered.

3)  Allow employees an input into issues of concern for the organisation.

Conversely – if leadership changes, and the above principles are abandoned (or even just lessened in importance) than the effectiveness of the organisation can quickly reduce.

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Dimension 3 = Teamwork

I am a big believer in, and supporter of, the concept of personal empowerment and self-managed teams.

I am this way for a number of reasons, including:
1)  Most importantly, I believe it is a much truer reflection of the nature of an individual’s humanity.
2)  It is the way in which I would like to be treated as a person.
3)  I also see that there are commercial advantages to us in acting in this manner.

However, attempts (to date) to embed such principles into our organisation have not been wildly successful – hence leading me to the more detailed review of references such as this book, and the implementation of various strategies to ensure such approaches can work more effectively for us.

As the authors note (p22):

empowerment works best where the personal adjustment of employees has progressed sufficiently for them to be proactive participants in the business of the enterprise rather than reactive defenders of the status quo.

Continuing on:

We have found that a good indicator of maturity is to be found in a situation in which an individual can afford to put a case and lose it without losing peace of mind in the process.

It’s important (in my view) to recognise that the authors did NOT use a term like “be ostracised”, or something else external to the individual, as the peace of mind might be disrupted by either an external stimulus (such as ostracism) or by an internal stimulus (such as poor self-esteem).

In other words, a high level of maturity is required by all – hence reinforcing the need (as noted above) for the organisation to play a hand in advancing the personal maturity of its employees.

More directly, this means that the organisation has an interest in not only advancing the technical abilities of the employee (such as we’re doing through our Guru Plans), but also the personal capacity as well (hence the myth of work being only 9-to-5).

A note of caution (p115):

Some anecdotal evidence suggests that a period of three to five years is required before teams function in a natural and effective fashion.

That’s not to say that we can’t make some “quick wins” (we already are), but it does mean we should not get discouraged by some hiccups along the way….

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4)  What it Means for Us

In a nutshell, it means that there will be personal development work ongoing into the future for existing and new employees, which coupled with the technical focus of our Guru Plans, will be aimed at improving our capability as an organisation to deliver on our potential (including delivery of more than just satisfaction to all employees).

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5)  Dealing with Paradox

it is a mark of maturity when a person can hold two conflicting viewpoints in consciousness at once…
(or, for the visualisers)
… if I have in mind only a two-dimensional space it will seem to me paradoxical that non-parallel lines don’t intersect

This is such an important point, in my view, that I have extracted it from here onto its own post on the blog.

Apologies to the blog-purists, but (as noted before) I view ICT as a means to an end.

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6)  An Slightly Uncomfortable Place To Work

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Tags: growing pains, human resources, motivation, personal development

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Book Review, Human Resources Management, Personal Development, The Managing Director's Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.