Psychological safety and a Pandemic

Make it difficult for teams to be able to share the virus but easy for them to share what is on their mind and how they are feeling!  Psychological Safety is an essential ingredient for organisations and teams trying to adapt and thrive a world of uncertainty and change during and following a pandemic

A thought paper by Chris Eastham, 18 March 2020

 Introduction 

In the middle of February 2020, in the midst of the CoronaVirus Pandemic Air New Zealand announced that it will be reducing its capacity on its long haul network by 85 percent.   At the same time Amazon announced that it we being overwhelmed with with demand within its parcel delivery business.  Within two days at 8:15am on 18^th March 2020  during a newstalk ZB news bullitin they announced that ‘creative thinking may be needed to keep sports and music events going’, then the headlines also confirmed that Keith Urban had cancelled his planned live concert and instead performed an online gig which was streamed live from his storage warehouse.

With the 2020 pandemic creating unprecedented new problems, challenges and change teams and cross functional groups need to work together more than ever before to survive, adapt and thrive.  In these conditions, psychologically safety (PS) within teams is vital to enable agility, adaptability and innovative, while supporting safety, engagement and mental heath.

If team members identify exposure or symptoms and need to self isolate, then they need to trust they can openly report them without fear of discrimination.  If multiple team members are off at one time it may significantly test team capacity and organisational resilience.   The wide range of unpredictable scenarios and problems involving supply chains or customers or other unexpected risks and incidents that teams will face and need to solve together.  This will require high levels of adaptability, agility and creative problem solving as well as open conversations about potential risks, hazards and incidents alongside great team work, commitment and engagement.

PS is the fundamental capability that drives high trust teams.   This paper presents an argument supported by research that in complex situations such as the ongoing response to the 2020 pandemic PS is a vital pre-requisite capability to enable teams to address all these factors and maintain high performance and critical risk management.

PS is not a silver bullet for managing all of the workplace challenges and opportunities and it must combine with other essential ingredients to enable effective learning, risk management and performance, and if an approach is not effectively nurtured and supported it could have negative effects.   But the research is clear that if effectively implemented, that it can be vital for teams achieving high performance working in complex situations or periods of high and unpredictable change.  Within the current context of the COVID19 Corona-virus pandemic I believe all New Zealand organisations and leaders need to understand what it is and how it can become ’the way we did things around here to get through it’. 

 

What is Team Psychological Safety?

PS is fundamentally about reducing interpersonal risk, which necessarily accompanies uncertainty and change (Schein & Bennis 1965).  When applied to work teams it is where  team-members have a shared belief that the team social environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking and it enables teams to operate with high trust.  (Edmonson 1999)   Studies show that Team PS allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off (HBR 2017). 

In high trust teams team members believe that they are able to and be open about any mistakes they might make without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career (Kahn 1990, p. 708).   This quality is not essential for all work situations but it is important when situations are unpredictable and there is a need for creativity or collaboration to do the work effectively or to adapt to changing operational environments.     

A leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust.  General Stanley McChrystal

Over years working in a range of team performance situations across different industries including high performance sport; clinical health; meat processing; major hazard operations and road transport across four different countries I have experienced many first hand examples of PS in work teams laying the foundation the achievement across all these different industries. 

PS is sometimes promoted as a capability for a specific outcome like innovation, adaptability or reliability, or for a specific function like Agile project management, Human Centered Design, mental health or safety.  As an example, if you visited the website for the Canadian workplace mental health standard you could be forgiven for thinking that PS was a workplace mental health capability.  If you were to attend a training course for agile project management  you might learn about creative confidence think that PS is only relevant to innovation and product development. 

In the following section I’ll provide brief history of research that looks up and out, rather than in and down we can see the diverse relationships and corresponding patterns that can exist in such a system. Senge 1990  This is important to the current situation as with the scale of the pandemic issue is important for organisations to realise that PS is a general workplace capability so relevant for all organisations trying to adapt to unprecedented change and uncertainty.

 

A short history of psychological safety (PS)

PS is a concept first developed in the 1960s and built on since then.  The body of research that shows the value of PS across the performance and risk landscape as a general foundation capability for workplace excellence in complex situations.

It was first explored by pioneering organizational scholars in the 1960s whom (Shein & Bennis 1965) argued that psychological safety was essential for making people feel secure and capable of changing their behavior in response to shifting organizational challenges.  An influential 1990 paper rejuvenated research on psychological safety (Kahn 1990).  It presented qualitative studies of summer camp counselors and members of an architecture firm.  The research showed that psychological safety enables personal engagement at work.   From there, psychological safety experienced a renaissance which identified links between PS and a wide range of team and organisational capabilities and which has continued to present times.

Amy Edmondson is another pioneering academic and a contemporary champions for PS and the power of high trust teams.  She is a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Businesss School and has published a large body of work on PS.  In 2014 she co-published a paper title ‘The History, Renaissance, and Future of Psychological Safety’  and comprehensively summarized the far-reaching extent of its influence in work settings.  (Edmondson¹ and Lei² 2014). 

Edmondson and Lei’s paper highlights how PS is highly similar to the idea of social climate of trust and a powerful enabler for team and organisational learning.  It reviews six decades of research that investigates PS at an individual and a team level.  It confirms the evidence for the impact of PS on engagement at work, involvement in creative work, knowledge sharing when people have low confidence in the knowledge they are sharing, speaking up and offering ideas to improve business processes or improve organisational function.  The paper further discusses research into fundamental risk reporting practices and how high trust and PS is important for enabling people to express concern about risks, incidents, or behaviors that may harm their organizations as well as learning from incidents.

What else is out there?

A scan around other workplace capability programmes also shows that PS has been identified as a relevant capability for complex risks in the world of health and safety.  For example.  Christianson explains how psychological safety is present and required in high reliabilty organisations, explaining that “People need to be encouraged to reveal mistakes so that everyone can learn from them. Near misses are our free lessons. Learning organizations pay attention to them and take time to learn from them.  (Christianson 20) 

The National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace states that organizations should establish and sustain processes to assess and address leaders for psychologically safe leadership competencies and a free Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment has been developed for Canadian organisations https://www.psychologicallysafeleader.com.

Cyber security is one of the most significant growing risks for workplaces worldwide.  Cyber security is complex and so is sometimes reliant on individual workers not clicking on malicious emails or quickly reporting if they have.  Open and honest reporting of mistakes like this requires an environment of psychological safety.  Psychological Safety is also promoted for the benefit of cyber security professionals as a ‘resilient workforce’ having to manage complex situations

As another function specific example, Agile is a project management approach for complex technology projects that is also now popular for all types of projects being run in highly complex situations.  Its designed to suit projects with changing requirements and contexts.  Agile relies heavily on high trust project team environments and a commitment to team learning.  The Agile Manifesto which is the founding document for the discipline promotes the need for collaboration and responding to change over following a plan and PS is a capability that is widely promoted and sited in Agile resources, training courses and articles. 

While we may not need to specifically run ‘big A’ Agile projects within out teams, we will all need to be agile to  adapt to all the changes that occur from month to month following the 2020 Pandemic.

 

Why the renaissance - a brave new 21^st century world. 

As I have described, PS is most useful for complex goals or risks  or work situations. The world around us is moving faster and faster. In order to survive and grow, organizations must, therefore, learn to adapt faster and faster, or be weeded out in the economic evolutionary process. (Shein 1992).  Increases in speed of communication and volume of travel and logistical interactions on a worldwide scale along with other social changes have dramatically changed the way we interact and led to workplace and industrial systems being significantly more complex.

PS is an important team level capability but it is not a silver performance or risk management bullet that is ‘the solution’ for all work situations.  There are many organisational operations or critical risks that require technical management and engineering solutions rather than highly connected teams.  In addition it must combine with other essential ingredients to enable effective team learning, or risk management and ultimately performance, but it is still a fundamental capability for working in complex situations or periods of high and unpredictable change which is extremely relevant for all New Zealand organisations throughout 2020 and into 2021.

 Things that organistions can do to foster psychological safety.

Psychological safety is not something that can be implemented through a bolt-on off-the-shelf training programme.  For organisations to receive the full performance and risk management benefits from their teams being psychologically safe they need make a whole of organisation commitment.  Edgar Shein, who first proposed the idea, identifies four essential elements for a system framework that fosters a psychologically safe environment (Shein 1992)

1)    Provide opportunities for training, coaching and practice

2)    Establish norms that legitimize the making of errors

3)    Establish norms that recognise innovative thinking and experimentation

4)    Reward efforts in the right direction

Its not hard to hunt around on the net to find guidelines for cultivating PS.  Here are a range of ideas that can be incorporated into a system framework that have been adapted from Forbes & HBR:

·       Create Rules Of Engagement

o   Create and define the principles for engagement to clarify what the expected behaviors are provide ways for people to provide feedback to be able to honor the principles

·       Establish peer practice networks for managers and teams

o   implement a peer mentoring program in order to support a positive workplace culture

·       Have leaders model A Learning Mindset 

o   give leaders simple coaching frameworks (e.g. the GROW model) so they can quickly problem solve through a learning mindset, with coaching questions to problem-solve and learn after a mistake is made.

·       Find that right balance for your organisation

o   Encourage Managers find an appropriate balance of encouraging open communication related to the task at hand and providing constructive feedback to limit irrelevant questions, comments, or discussions.  The balance will be different depending on the organisation or team.

·       Bring Employees Together 

o   Create structured team experiences that allow employees to take risks, trust each other, make mistakes and realize it's OK.

·       Promote and support employees to develop mental resilience and personal responsibility in work situations

o   Start by having leaders share personal stories where they have had to learn, adapt and grow this skill.

·       Train some people in psychological first aid and encourage empathy and compassion

o   Start by creating an environment where it is obvious that showing compassion for others is appreciated. When you truly care for others, it is easier for them to feel safe, more creative and more engaged.

·       Take Action And Confront The Behavior 

o   There are subtle ways to undermine co-workers that can be threatening and cause distress. Addressing the behavior and trying to understand the root cause can often lead to solving the issue.

·       Measure effectiveness

o   See the example below (The Psychologically Safe Leader assessment)

Ideas for fostering leadership

A leaders job is to set the stage then model and promote good practice so that managers and team members can create psychological safety within their teams.

·       The Psychologically Safe Leader assessment (PSLA) is a free resource developed in Canada by Dr. Joti Samra, R. Psych. and her MyWorkplaceHealth.com team : https://www.psychologicallysafeleader.com/

Leadership development skills to practice from HBR

·      Adopting a leadership style that promotes psychological safety is particularly use for many 2st century work situations where there are too many variables or there is to much change to be able to fully understand the situation through analysis.  So teams need to foster cooperative relationships and work together to solve complex problems and learn for their successes as well as from mistakes.  Consider the following leadership skills and refer to HBR article for more information:

o   Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary.

o   Speak human to human.

o   Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves.

o   Replace blame with curiosity.

o   Ask for feedback on delivery. 

Conclusion

When the stakes get high and workplace situations become complex and unpredictable people need to increasingly collaborate and work together.  What ever industry, in these types of situations Psychologically Safety provides teams the foundation to be more agile and innovative, safer, healthier.

Appendix

1.     High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It, Laura Delizonna August 24, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it

2.     Schein, Edgar H.; Bennis, Warren G. (1965). Personal and organizational change through group methods: the laboratory approach. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471758501.

3.    Edmondson, Amy (1 June 1999). "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" (PDF). Administrative Science Quarterly. 44 (2): 350–383

4.     Kahn, William A. (1990-12-01). "Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work". Academy of Management Journal. 33 (4): 692–724.

5.     Systems Thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than separate things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of general principles, spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences, engineering and management. (Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York :Doubleday/Currency, 1990. Print.)

6.     Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct.  Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.  Amy C. Edmondson¹ and Zhike Lei²  Vol. 1:23-43 (Volume publication date March 2014) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305

7.     Build a Healthy Safety Culture Using High Reliability Organizing; David Christenson, U.S. Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center Conference Paper 2007

8.     How Can Organisations Learn Faster?  The Problem of Entering The Green Room: Edgar H. Shein, MIT Sloan School of Management 1992,

Is your contract strategy suitable for your circumstances?

Question:  Does your contract strategy suit the risks you are trying to manage in your supply chain or with your supplier / partner?

A traditional ‘Risk Transfer’ arrangement for project or service delivery contracts is still the primary approach for many industries in New Zealand.  But there have been huge changes to the way organisations work together over the last 20 or 30 years due to changes in technology and other operating environment factors. So risks are increasingly unpredictable and it cannot be said that risk transfer is always the right approach. A contract owner must choose a contracting model that is appropriate to the particular circumstances of the project or delivery of service (work as done) and I believe there will be an increasing need for partnership contract approaches in the future. 

Partnership contracting is not a new concept. 

• The construction industries of Australia and New Zealand have been operating 'Alliance' partnerships for large infrastructure projects since the late 1990's. From this origin, further alliances models have been extended to manage large scale utilities services and for the delivery of health services. 

• In an entirely different industry and at a different scale, a partnership form of contract is promoted within the SAFe Agile model for Agile technology project delivery (https://www.scaledagileframework.com/agile-contracts/). 

Even though partnership contracting is not new a risk transfer form of contract is still the most common form of agreement. As technology continues to evolve and becomes and the way organisations work together more inter-connected, and I believe there is considerable growth potential in partnership contracts and corresponding working relationships.

Lets explore further.

All services or projects involve inherent risks (eg. political or economic change, climate, technology, ground conditions, engineering uncertainties, errors, industrial disputes, land issues, environmental issues and many more).  When entering arrangements to undertake high risk services or projects with other organisations a risk owner must select the most appropriate contract strategy for managing the sorts of risks that are present to effectively consult, communicate and coordinate.

The traditional approach to contracting where risk is transferred over to a supplier, is still the most common method for many supply chain contracts.  This method has been proven over many years to be particularly effective when the scope is clear and the circumstances and risks are reasonably predictable.

However, more and more projects and services have to be delivered in an environment of increasing uncertainty.  This increase is driven by rapid technological change, corresponding social change, shifting business or political imperatives and diverse stakeholder interests.  The traditional simple risk-transfer contracting models have increasingly been shown to have limitations in dealing with these circumstances.

Work as imagined:

• All project or service risks can be effectively transferred out to contract suppliers just like they always have
• Organisations can effectively consult, coordinate and cooperate even with traditional risk transfer contracts that stipulate a separation of responsibilities and focus on individual needs.

Work as done:

• Project and service risks all different and are spread across a spectrum from predictable and stable to unpredictable and changing.
• Sometimes  supplier contracts can get in the way of effect consult, coordinate and cooperating.  Particularly when risk management requires a high degree of collaboration
• There is an increasing need for supply chain agreements that involve risk owners retaining and partnering on risk rather than simply transferring risk.

The following matrix is presented by Jim Ross in a 1998 paper on alliancing in the Australian construction industry.  It shows a strategic relationship for the suitability of a risk transfer approach vs a risk embrace approach depending on the circumstances.

Examples of: 

1. Full risk transfer: Traditional supplier contract 
2. Hybrid: supply chain collaboration forums, transparent workflow, cost + agreements etc etc.
3. Full risk embrace: Relationship contracts, e.g. - Joint Venture Construction project alliance, Health Service Alliance

There is no particular model along this spectrum is the “right” one for all situations. The model shows how a contract owner must choose a contracting model that is appropriate to the particular circumstances of the situation.

Episode #11

Kathy McKenzie - Director, Coach, International Trainer, Leader.

Kathy is recognised as a leader in the field of coaching, both as a practising coach and as an educator. She has diverse national and international experience and an exceptional ability to fully engage people with powerful and applicable messages. Studies and practical experience over 25 years has given her a depth of understanding of how to develop human potential.

Kathy is Founding Director at Fire Up Coaching a leading Australian Registered Training Organisation.

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The Power of Partnership - Alliancing in Australian Healthcare Part III

In third and final article in a three part series, I am talking to Anthony Osborne and Sandra Quinlan, from Seeds of Possibility, about Alliancing and its potential for application in health industry projects and health organisations (Click on these links to view Article I & Article II).

Through their backgrounds in the Energy, Construction and Utilities sectors, Sandra and Anthony both have many years experience in Alliancing, a model of project management that grew, in Australia, out of the construction industry.

 

Alliancing in practice – current and future opportunities 

What are the commercial requirements of Alliancing projects?

Anthony: Alliancing in its current form is a big process. Lets say you have three organisations that get together to bid to build a hospital.  Those three bidders have to form their own alliance.  In an example alliance I was involved in there was involving three major Melbourne based multinational construction groups who agreed to bid for a $450m project. 

These individual organisations had to get agree and align about roles, responsibilities and money.  They had to agree who is going to lead and there are a whole lot of legal requirements even at this stage, just to put the tender together.  Then there is the clients bidding process with a number of different groups who have formed alliances.  This effort is multiplied as each bidding group has gone through a similar alliancing and tendering process.  Then there is this second work-shopping stage, which leads to the successful bidder being chosen. 

Once they are selected, the successful bidding alliance has to be aligned with the client.  This doesn’t happen automatically, it involves further discussions and workshops about roles and responsibilities to align everybody completely before you start.  For large-scale projects it’s an expensive process.  It generally costs over a million dollars. 

Sandra – I have coached alliancing teams on how to work together, to help them understand and learn how to behave in a different way to their normal processes that they go through, where they just stand up and do a presentation. 

One bid we did, we had to identify how we would recruit the best people out of the organisations that were there, and how we would do it to gain them to come and work on the alliance.  We had 30mins to come back with our response.  So we did a theatre production of The Hobbit!  We had Gandalf, who gave the vision, and Bilbo Baggins who was the messenger who talked to the people. 

Rather than just wanting a presentation, the client wants to see how well the teams work together and whether they can think outside of the box.

Commercial Arrangements

For large complex projects, there are legal agreements that are put in place and solicitors are involved to ensure due considerations are documented thoroughly.

There are agreed ways of working.  The partners agree formally on how they will work together.  They also agree on what the risk factors are and how the risks, the gains and the losses will be shared. 

It’s documented in the contract upfront how much money each party is going to make.  Also if there is a profit, above what the group expects, how that will be divided up.  What we’re talking about here is total commercial transparency and this is what people find the hardest. 

Sandra - I remember sitting in with two colleagues involved with Alliancing projects in Australia and in the New Zealand health industry.  What they did really well was to create a really great environment for people to say I feel really uncomfortable about telling you and about my costing details are and what my profit is. 

You might be in an alliance with other competitors, for example if you were in the construction industry you might find John Holland and Theiss – two direct and powerful competitors - working together.  These direct competitors still have to commit to showing these details.  It asks questions of peoples ethics.  You really start looking at all of the qualities that people bring to an alliance.  This element of the selection process therefore becomes very different to what you would normally have in a commercial project.

This a major change from common commercial practice in other partnerships or tender agreements.  But what it does is that it stops people from being greedy.

An example is a project that was conducted to build the Royal Children’s Hospital in which the owners did form an alliance for the project.  They would have contracted a group to facilitate the project. 

The selection process is very different from procurement or even partnering.   Bidding groups would put forward their representative teams.  Once all he bidding teams were confirmed, to start the Hospital would have first bought in solicitors and explained the process for selection to the teams.  All the different bidding teams were then taken away for a two-day program.   There are representatives from within the hospital also involved as a panel. 

The Alliancing facilitator will work with actual live scenarios.  They will then give the teams live example scenarios, to work through and demonstrate their solution.  Anthony – I was in a number of bids for alliances and I remember workshops where ‘out of the blue’ the panel would say, we’re now stuck in this scenario what would you do?  What they are actually looking for is to understand how does each team actually relate to each other.  Do they work as individuals or do they work collectively and collaboratively?  If they are coming into an alliance they need to be fully committed to the collective.  

It’s not about the skills of the teams because it’s generally assumed that if groups have got to that stage then they have the technical skills.  They are also looking to particularly see how they handle conflict.  How they resolve differences.  Interpersonal skills.  Creativity.  These are the abilities that are really important to the alliance, so that is what they are being measured against.

They would have the project manager identified and they would be watching him really carefully to see, for example, whether he takes the lead all the time or whether he shares it with his people.  Does he defer to his people and include them or does he do all the talking?  They keep them overnight because it’s different when you go to dinner.  You can put on a performance pretty well for a number of hours, but if over night you go out to dinner with everybody and then are back into it the next day, it’s harder to fake it.

How could Alliancing be applied creatively within the Health sector?

For the full formal alliancing process that we have described, with tenders and legal agreements and two-day workshops to be utilized, you would need to be building a hospital or running another big health related project, for example as it has been used by New Zealand District Health Boards.  But I do think that with a smaller team and smaller projects you can use the concept and get that process up and running with an outside facilitator. 

One interesting option that hasn’t been explored before is in the hospital environment. Hospitals would benefit from learning to aligning nurses, doctors and administration staff.  The alliance would be within the organization.   What I have observed is that they are different entities altogether.  I hear Doctors complain about nurses, nurses complain about Doctors, and they all complain about the administration staff.  It’s almost like saying 'this is the organisation, how do we create an alliance within the organization with our own people?' 

Anthony: My experience is that usually in very senior roles you have functional managers and they tend to run their function separate to everybody else, and as a result they conflict with other departments, they don’t actually work together in unison.  If you just went in to a large organisation like that and said that ‘we’re going to bring principles of alliancing to this whole place and for a particular project we’re going to work towards one vision as one entity towards this outcome.  So you align all the divisions in the organisation for the outcome rather than individual outcomes for each group.

One thing that we’ve noticed, having been through major multi-million dollar alliancing projects, is that the breakdowns happen at the transition points.  So you come from one system into the next, and it’s the transitions where it all screws up.  For example, if you look at the information collection points.  If a medical record is collected well then it’s easy for it to go to the next system.  But if the initial collection is not good and clean and easily transferrable then the handover to the next department is no good and then they don’t fix it so when it goes all the way along the line inefficiencies develop.   Clinicians have to repeatedly gather the same information or they have different ways of collecting information. 

It would be much more efficient to work together right at the beginning by saying lets collect as much information as we can for all our needs at one point.  This gives stakeholders the ability to also consider new ways of getting information that they may not have considered before.  You see, they may have always been collecting it one way but simply need the opportunity to question if it needs to be done this way, or if it could be done differently. 

It’s always the same.  It’s the handover spots which is where the clunkiness happens and usually each just complains about the other, but in an alliance model they two groups have the opportunity to say ‘hey, we’re not communicating well here, lets sit down and align how we can make this work.

What are the steps involved in the alliancing process?

In summary

1. You first need the facilitator to pull the management team together and agree on the project that the group wants to do. 
2. A project group is then bought together 
3. The facilitator works with the group to get the roadblock issues on the table and to agree on principles they are going to work by during the project.  
4. They would then facilitate the rest of the project process.  First by facilitating the initial planning required by the management team. 

So we start the alliancing process, by working towards and gaining an agreement of how we are going to behave as a group and identifying a number of key principles by which the alliance operates. 

Then, because people have the opportunity to speak in a safe and trusting environment they get to unload their junk, which is a huge step forward.   In these situations, you don’t generally have to deal with every individual issue that comes up.  There are usually three or four issues that are the major ones and when you deal with them, the rest cease to be problems.

Sandra - An important part is to start of by going through all the issues that people bring to the partnership so that everything is on the table.  As a facilitator I would use four questions what are the issues here? What does it cause to the organization here? How do you fix it? If you do fix it, what does it give you and the organization?

This is done in a workshop scenario.  As this point we also generally bring in a manager to talk about the organizations expectation and vision.  From there though we run the program as a neutral facilitator.  Often what comes up are issues of confidentiality and trust.  I need to be able to re-assure a person what is said in the room is in confidence and what leaves the room is by agreement.  At the end of the day the group agrees, what is going out.  Because often people who come to join alliancing groups simply need to be able to talk about problems that are going on. 

There can be things that are considered ‘unspeakable’ within the organisation and until you get them out of the way you can’t get anybody to agree on anything.  What I have found as a facilitator is that issues that arise might have been going on for a long time, even 10 years or more, that is still playing itself out.  No matter which new manager comes along, and what they say, people are still seeing and hearing what they want based on these old longstanding issues. 

So a first step is always to get the departmental issues out in the open and simply work through them, so that the group is able to move forward.   You have to do this otherwise; you will not be able to get anybody to agree on anything. 

Once the principles have been established of how the group will work together, the primary aim of the workshops is uncovering what the issues are and coming up with solutions.  These solutions then go to management.  Ill also work with management as well because management want peoples input but when they get it they don’t always listen. 

Management can sometimes think they should have all the answers and they can sometimes think they are losing control.  This type of decision-making system can cause them to question what their job is now?  I work with them to help them understand that that they do play an important role of engaging with people, and that if they do that well they don’t have to make all the decisions.

I will be taking management through the same process so that they are also able to open up and speak candidly about the same situations about what they see as the issues.  Often they are exactly the same as what the people reporting to them are saying.  Sometimes their issue is that ‘I’m not understood upstairs and that I am working with all these rules and boundaries around me’.  They might know that what the operational workers are saying is right, but they’re limited because they’ve not got the support from above.

Within the workshop, you have to work through the layers to get to the top, because what is going on at the operational level is a reflection of what is going on at the top.   

In an alliance process, most of the work is with the leadership team so that they’re totally aligned and that they’re modeling the behavior that they want from everybody.  If they walk into a workshop and I say ‘I want you to speak openly and honestly’ they have to show that this is what they actually want and that people are not going to get punished for speaking up.  All of this stuff sounds great in a textbook but when you’re confronted it can be quite challenging to work with.

Also, how are they operating as a team?  Because they are the model of the whole workforce.  So I do one on one coaching with them and also sit in on management meetings and provide feedback on process.  Ill always ask initially whether they want feedback in the group or later in a one-on-one setting.  But later on it’ll be in the group environment.  Some can handle feedback initially others cant.

Then facilitating down through to the project teams who work through the problems and identify the solutions.  But you would treat this group as an alliance, not just as individual departments within that organisation so that the alliance principles could be utilized where the group is all working together for the good of all. 

The ongoing alliancing process involves having a number of regular facilitated workshops.  As a facilitator, I probably come in every 4-6 weeks depending on what is happening within the organisation. 

As the end of it, the individuals would have learnt about and taken on the principles and processes themselves.  It’s a facilitative way of leading.  They would start to work that way in their normal work. 

I did some work in a large construction group once and there were managers there who had been on a big alliance and they were sad that it was finishing and that they were going to be going back to doing procurements because alliance wasn’t happening and more.  I said to him ‘you are a facilitative leader!  You naturally lead this way and you don’t have to be in a formal alliance to keep doing this.  Once you have had the experience you can create it’.  I caught up with somebody last week that was on that project .  He is a very senior manager now with another multinational construction group and is very much a facilitative leader.   

Now back when he started on the alliancing project he was an environmental manager and he use to check everybody’s desk at the end of the day to see what they had been up to.  He was a total micro-manager!  He was really bright and a great guy, but everybody knew how micro-managed them and they were all complaining about it.  As a facilitator during the alliance, I had to really challenge him on what he was doing. 

When he spoke to me the other day, 6 years later - he’s just turned 40 - he highlighted how he understands the big picture and focuses the change in focus has not only freed up his workers to do their jobs, it has freed him up to focus on organizational wide issues.  He’s learnt these skills through the facilitation process from alliancing.  He said to me, I wouldn’t be doing this job if I hadn’t been through that alliance.

It’s a skill of taking people out of content, and bringing them up to context!  If you are caught up in the detail of the undergrowth you cant see above the trees to the rest of the forest.  Usually when we go to a worker about changing a system for example if we’re talking about the flow of paperwork in a hospital, they will talk to us about the detail and the individual steps.  But the overall context of how everything in this system impacts on the wider environment and vise versa is just as important, but there are not many people who can live and work in context. 

WHO ARE SEEDS OF POSSIBILITY 

Seeds of Possibility are a business performance consultancy.  They bring a wealth of experience in alliancing across different industries and Sandra has also worked closely with a Key consultant to a New Zealand District Health Board, who pioneered Alliancing within the New Zealand Health system.  What Seeds of Possibility do differently is that they work with clients to improve systems and engage people both at the same time.

  

As Anthony highlights ‘ I saw a recent Gallup poll that revealed over 70% of people in the workplace are not engaged with the work they do which astounded me.  ‘But it’s no use engaging with your people if your systems are no good, because if your systems are no good, the people disengage”.

When you get those elements right and include how you align everybody – the alliancing component - the organisation becomes powerful and strong and make a difference and get great results.  Their contact details are:

 

Anthony Osborne
Conscious Leader
anthonyosborne@seedsofpossibility.com.au
Mobile +61 413663360