Professional Development Coordinator
ON
Canada
Speaker A My comments are of an entirely different nature, and they come kind of takes off from Catherine's comments this morning thing. And I just want to give you my own it's really my own personal journey on the topic of the presentation, and I'm not exactly sure how it agrees or disagrees with what previous, but it's a context for them. Yeah. Pardon? I am, I am. Thank you. So when I first started learning this stuff from Elliot, he talked about values. You've got to value the work in the role and kind of ends right there. There's nothing more interesting to say. And in part, he's looking at the prevalent use of personality tests for recruitment. And it's very interesting because I've had a number of clients who use personality tests, and I go to the test maker and I say, can I see your validation studies? And I've not done a systematic study of it, but it's like two thirds of them are with insurance agents who are in business for themselves. They are not subordinates, they're not employees. And it's like, all right, if you're going to leave someone unmanaged and you want them to automatically do what you want to do, well, they better value everything. You want, everything that has to happen in that work, because no one is holding the insurance agent to account. The correlations are like 0.4.5. You've looked at this stuff. When they do validity studies of personality anyway, probably other people would know. Yeah, typical validity studies would say. And part of Elliot's point was, you don't have to be an extrovert to be a good salesperson. There are many ways of coming to value the work and the role. Jerry Harvey kind of extended this in the elephant in the parlor or who the hell is Elliot Jacks? He talked about anaclesis is a Greek for lean on, and we lean for our sense of having control within the world, the ability to get our needs met. We lean on concepts and we lean on relationships. And he was talking mostly about the conceptual thing. He's saying, the reason why no one has heard of Elliot Jacks is because all of the concepts that the other writers lean on to make sense of the workplace, he pulls the rug out from under them and it's just too painful and threatening to go here. On a personal level, I think in the workplace, it's more the relationship aspect. It's that as well. But it's also a manager is sitting, being trained by a consultant, by a trainer, in how you hold people to account. And they're saying to themselves, yeah, right, I'm going to bring Fred into the office and say, in my judgment, because it's a judgment based system, in my judgment, you're not doing a good enough job, and if you don't pull your socks up, I'm going to have to deselect you. And the manager says to themselves, if I do that, I'm going to be sitting alone in the office Christmas party, no one is going to want to deal with me. I will be seen as unacceptable. And that's really the key issue. The key anacletic issue I think in accountability is the key relationship aspect is will I be considered acceptable? And that's all there is to say about that. Now, what I've been learning over the last couple years, listening to Spiral Dynamics, Warren and others, and some things of actually the chap that Glenn mentioned who designs the personality tests is there's quite a texture to values. There's more we can say about values and there's more that we can say about the culture within an organization and certain types of organizations where accountability will be more or less considered acceptable and those behaviors more or less acceptable. That is something that I think we have to learn and are learning from other disciplines. Very clearly. This stuff applies to when you're inside an organization, it applies to your work outside the organization. And I remember when I was first getting into this stuff and was working with social know, what is it, analytical Driver and the other two. And Catherine said to me, well look, if you're a salesperson, yeah, it helps to be able to read what are the motivators and the people that you're selling to. It helps to be able to read the drivers for them and their decision making. Alf has used this beautifully in IBM. He's using Spire Dynamics to read what it solution will or will not be acceptable in the culture of the client. The question is its relevance inside the organization. And I think this is what Catherine was coming to. And for me the key point in this is accountability. And I notice in this conference, I didn't notice it two years ago. It didn't stand out to me. But very clear. We all know about levels theory, right? And Don Beck for example, when he spoke on Sunday, had very good or Monday, has a very good understanding of levels theory, didn't get it that he understood accountability. And working with Barry and Sheila and Jenny on Friday and Saturday and looking at their model of how you do training starts bringing me back to the point of view that Catherine was putting forward. When I was talking to people over the last year about Spiral Dynamics and that sort of thing, I started having a doubt about the reality of some of the stuff we read about in Requisite, because I realized the clients I've worked with, I've been able to get good structure in good staffing, in train the managers. And afterwards there is still no accountability. There was training, but there was no accountability. Not the managerial accountability. That all right. You're saying there was not no, sorry, but managers were not being held accountable for their subordinates outputs to the degree that you would have ideally want or they were not doing it. They were holding subordinates employees were held accountable if they were for their outputs. Managers, I'm not sure what managers were held accountable. It's sort of like you can only be so abusive before you're held to account. And a great deal of fuzziness, certainly. Qqtr you don't see that kind of precision. And I was beginning to wonder if requisite organization, as I learned it and read in the book, is it a myth? And I started asking people, and a lot of colleagues were saying, oh yes, it's very successful. And I probe, oh yes, the CEO really holds the senior team to account, right? Is that cascaded down? Are all managers held accountable for subordinates output and working behavior? Well, no, not really. And then I start finding some people are more keep calling around to colleagues and some are more successful than others. And working again with Barry and Sheila and Jenny where it starts with a CEO who is not asking for an accountability culture, but for accountability who's not asking for a sales culture but for sales and sees accountability as the means of driving that. And a key differentiator between training I've done and the training I did with Barry and Sheila and Jenny was the presence of the manager in the know, introducing and saying, well, our consultants are now going to teach you about how to assign a task and here's what I want you to pay attention to in it. Because over the next year I'm going to be increasingly holding you accountable for your skill and your practice in doing that, which I've never had in training. Spiral Dynamics talks about I don't think the word is used there, but it's like a crucible. It takes a culture only changes when there's something. It's bumping into something in the environment that's forcing a change. And the people in the audience in the kind of training where the manager is holding them to account, I'm sitting there as a manager being trained by this trainer and saying, oh shit, you mean I'm actually going to have to tell someone. Here's what I think I'm actually going to have to say I'm going to have to deselect you if this doesn't happen. That feels really uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as getting fired myself. And I'm hearing from my manager that this is now part of my job and she's serious about it. And that crucible that Spiral talks about and not in most terms have to say what the power of that training is. And so my manager holding me to account for a certain type of behavior makes me value that behavior may not come easy to me, may not come natural to me, but keeping my job sure is natural to me. And I intellectually get it. And uncomfortable as it is, I know I'm going to have to behave in a different way as a manager. That changes my behavior, changing that behavior. Now I start seeing son of a gun. I gave Fred a really hard talking to, and I'm nervous throughout the whole thing. And at the end of it, Fred says, Boy, you're right. And three other people said, Herb, why did it take you? I'm not sitting alone at the office party. People are coming to me and saying, you finally did it. Thank you very much. So my beliefs change, and now I start more naturally, valuing this new behavior. Right. And as Susan taught me 30 years ago, the elements of culture you're right. Are values, beliefs, and behavioral norms, and this is the way you go about doing it. So I'm wondering how to put it. Definitely there is more to say about values and culture than just they exist. How much of a driver are they in the sense know? Glenn has done a lot of work noticing, hey, there are requisite interventions you can bring in or not bring in, depending on the spiral level of the company. Terrific. But now if we're really talking about doing this work all the way to the root of it, when you have a CEO who gets accountability, I'm not sure how much of this stuff matters. And I'm just reporting this as here's where I am in my journey. Jenny, I'd be curious if you have, because you've worked with this and you've worked with this kind of it's over there. Yeah, and I'm just I've been using.
Speaker B Requisite organization for 18 months and found it incredibly useful. I actually think that one of the barriers to managers picking up requisite organization is that when it's taught to them, they all go, yeah, oh, we already do that is requisite to a certain extent, because if it wasn't, it'd be so dysfunctional, it wouldn't actually exist.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker B So my experience of being taught requisite organization is, oh, yeah, we already do that. And then you go, oh, well, perhaps we don't do it quite as well as that, et cetera. And then you start to actually get better at implementing the requisite organization, and you see great things. But getting back to your point, if you go over the page, Herb, I think that you cannot then I asked our agent, how the hell did you bring requisite organization into business? Because I was so intrigued as to how she'd done that, given that you have this mindset. We already do that. And she actually referred me to your paper, Herb Culture. I didn't actually know what an epipenometer was. I really enjoyed the paper, and it made so much sense to me. We'd already done all these programs of changing people's culture or changing the organizations that we already when really what you're saying is we're not looking for a sales culture, we just want to hold you account for selling, and this is what I expect you to do. And when you do that, I really enjoy sales culture. So everyone's been trying to change the bit at the bottom rather than changing the bit at the top. And at the end of the day, no organization can tell me what to think. I'll think what a bloody well want to think, thanks very much. And if the organization's beliefs and values are so incongruous for selling and this is why, I won't be there anyhow because I can't work in this place. So that is bottom rather than the whole spiral dynamics thing. I mean, I enjoyed reading the book, I enjoyed reading the workshop. I enjoy going oh gosh, that's what the organization I have conflict with my father in law because he's very stuck in blue here in green and that's why we have conflict. And my brother in law, I think sort of pretty egotistic the whole spiral because he's in orange and that's a useful diagnostic tool. But I think it would be really tragic to use spiral dynamics or an organization or culture as an excuse to not do something. And I don't buy at all that there are some egotistic elements that fit with some cultures and not fit with other cultures. I don't buy that at all. It'd be really tragic means that you have to explain it in different ways for different organizations. So for me, I've got a fair amount of green in my culture. So I've always been really a little squeamish about doing charts because it looks really hierarchical and it looks like I'm better than you. Yet understanding level theory and understanding how critical an organizational chart is because what it's doing is telling everyone a fair amount of green organization this is your job, this is my job provides everyone with so much clarity because it looked my squeamishness about who's better than who. And I can still sorry.
Speaker A And that's in a context in which you are being held accountable for those people's outputs. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B But it just means that when I explain levels theory or whatever, I just need to do it in a context that matches that in my organization. So if I'm in a very blue organization, I can go here's the hierarchy, this is what it looks like. Bang bang. Everyone goes well that's cool because we're into hierarchies and no problem. But if I'm trying to explain hierarchies in a green culture, I need to be much more cognizant of where people are coming from and spend more time explaining why an organization's structure is important because hey, in a very blue organized, no one knows what they're doing and you're likely to not actually deliver anything. So there's been a bit of discussion about alignment being very difficult in much more cotton because people don't have honest conversations and it's very difficult to actually ask for a commitment from someone else. My view is that you just have to not actually present that piece of work in a different way. So if you're working in a blue culture, you just have to put a lot of structure around your alignment session and you need to say that this is the right thing to do because that's what that culture is looking for. If you're working in an orange culture, you somehow got a link alignment to success. You will be successful in this organization, that piece of work, if you do it this way.