By Ian Chisholm

Small, large, quirky, established, entrepreneurial, institutional — these are some of the adjectives used to describe organizations that are as varied as the people who work inside them. Yet often this wide array of adjectives is unable to communicate what it actually feels like to work where we do. That’s when we reach to the top of the language shelf for a metaphor.

The subtleties that everyday language fails to convey are often better expressed in a metaphor: management describes their current project as a trainwreck; a protégé labels her Mentor as a Jedi; a disenchanted team defines their office environment as a nest of vipers; a journalist writes how the marriage between two countries is being tested; a team refers to the next phase of their business as Everest; a school faculty terms themselves a family.

In the realm of symbol, where one thing represents another, the spare language of poetry has the ability to capture the multiple layers of meaning inherent in a situation in just a few words. A metaphor allows the listener to instantly grasp a deeper, richer meaning and to experience the feeling behind a concept. Someone using a metaphor in conversation is expressing a desire to have the listener fully understand all the aspects and unique complexities of an evolving situation. We should pay attention.

While there are boundless options for metaphorically capturing the essence of our workplaces, as leaders we would be wise to choose our metaphors carefully for, once chosen, a metaphor has the power to shape our work and to shape us.

Back to Basics: The Metaphor of Family

Family is an enticing metaphor that has surfaced more and more across sectors in the last few years. Highly accessible and easy for anyone to relate to, since we all come from one form of family or another, the family metaphor is common in business today. But for thousands of years, family was not a metaphor at all. Family was the work unit of society: the family farm, the ma and pa shop, Vendor & Son and Acme Bros. These familiar shingles have hung throughout our history, clearly signalling that families of related people routinely worked together.

Today we’ve moved on from the actual to the metaphorical family in the workplace. We have cast unrelated people into roles where they work closely together, as “family.”

Why has family re-emerged as a symbol to engage people in the workplace?

We suspect that, with up to four generations working together and attempting to find function in their differences, organizations are trying on this most familiar of organizational metaphors. We suspect that the popularity of the family metaphor stems from organizational leaders reaching out to engage Millennials — the generation that has made it clear that they value balance, strong social connections, active feedback loops, and an emotional connection to their work and manager.

Undoubtedly, choosing the family metaphor to describe our work together is an attempt to connect with the themes around families that we hold dear. People care about each other in families. People protect each other in families. People share in families, grow and develop in families. People in families are deeply — even unreasonably — invested in each other’s success. At their core (under varying levels of crust and quirkiness), families are often tender and tenacious. We choose family as a metaphor because we believe we want to create and work in an organizational system that is loving and resilient.

Sound like a great idea? Just be careful.

Families, as fundamental to our existence as they are, have their shadow side: they can be painful, awkward and irrational. As adults, there are few of us who do not wrestle sooner or later with family-of-origin issues, the barrage of hang-ups, fears and mental models, authority figures, and/or learned helplessness that contribute to the stew of dynamics shaping who we believe we are.

People also frequently hide things in families. We sidestep uncomfortable topics so that all can save face. Often there is a strange sense of avoided accountability: “Oh, that. That’s just Uncle Fred being Uncle Fred.” Or, “It’s just always been that way.” Families can come with all sorts of unfair obligations, unchallenged truths, and compromised autonomies. Bad habits, mimicked patterns and suboptimal survival mechanisms are often acquired in families. We might be prepared to lie, cheat or steal for our family. Our souls take some bruising in families; it’s an inescapable dynamic of being human.

And then, one day, in order to fully leverage our own personal sovereignty, we leave our family (in a real or metaphorical sense) to begin our own lives. So why would we want to model our organizations after an entity that people have to leave to fully become themselves? Do we really want to work for “the family”?

Side note: There’s a reason that organized crime uses the family metaphor to get things done.

The tough thing about families is that someone has to be parental and occupy the throne of power. But in business, the metaphor of leader as parent has several serious limitations when it comes to describing the kind of stewardship organizations need today. Placed on a pedestal of biblical proportions, parents are not questioned, they are revered. What mummy or daddy says, goes.

Parents are never subjected to performance reviews, or given honest feedback or encouraged to admit that they need to learn more about their craft. We position them as unquestionable authorities who will tell us what is proper and to be valued, and what is not. Parents are not allowed to show weakness or to admit fear. Instead, we believe in the Santa Clauses they swear to be real and believe that we are safe because our parents are in control.

While the metaphor of family is neither exclusively good nor bad, we need to realize that, as Chief Poetic Officers of our organizations, when we brand ourselves with a metaphor, we create possibilities and also impose limitations where our good intentions may be matched with unintended consequences. As leaders, we must be alert to both potential outcomes.

Going Tribal: The Metaphor of Intentional Community

At Roy Group, we prefer the metaphor of tribe for organizations. At its best, it is a colourful metaphor, one with character, ritual and mystery.

In an ideal tribe, autonomy is not traded in for accountability. Individuals have responsibilities to the collective, and within those responsibilities are able to leverage themselves into the work to create a virtuous cycle that assists the self with personal growth and knowledge. This is a far cry from participating in an ongoing vicious cycle that subjugates the self to unconscious familial patterns.

As Seth Godin points out in his brilliant little book Tribes, modern-day tribes have been appearing for several years now, largely due to social media’s capacity to introduce and unite people who share a passion. We like the metaphor of tribe better than the metaphor of family because it embodies some of the strongest, best elements of the family while allowing more personal autonomy. It also invites adult-to-adult, rather than parent-to-child, relationships to flourish.

Defined by a blend of three key characteristics, the paradigm of a modern-day tribe proffers an exciting new metaphor to which our teams and organizations may aspire.

1. Tribes are fundamentally about something bigger than themselves.

Some noble promise has been made. Tribes have a purpose they pursue with focus. They are protecting something, questing for something, yearning for something. They stand for something that unites the whole.

2. Tribes value the archetype of the elder or tribal leader within the community.

An elder embodies the spirit of the community’s purpose at what feels like a cellular level. Tribal leaders have no need to explain their values or philosophy: they wear their intentions on their sleeve. They are teachers, advisors, and confidantes to the next generation. They invest in the next generation. Tribal leaders are trusted and become more potent with each organizational challenge. They invite tribal members to present their finest selves and make their finest contribution, continually fostering in others the ability to take up their own personal leadership challenges.

3. Tribes use tools, rituals and ceremonies to deal with arising concerns.

Even though the content may be new, tribes have a predictable system of practices at hand for responding to issues. They know what kinds of gatherings or discussions are needed to plan for the future, respond to a crisis or address a wrongdoing. Tribes convene whatever conversation is necessary in order to realign them with their noble promise. Moreover, there is a functional transparency of how business is conducted for all tribal members to see, which holds them accountable to each other. There is less nonsense in tribes: the costs of not staying true are too high.

Are we prepared to honestly examine our shadows, old and new?

Crafting this article enabled our Roy Group team to take our own advice: we weighed the shadow side of a modern-day tribe against its strengths before completely signing on.

We foresaw how:

Thus, even when we embrace the modern-day tribe as a metaphor, we must keep our radar keen for signals of corruption, arrogance and insularity within our organizations.

What would it look like if your team grew into the vision of the high-quality team that has been wavering on the horizon?

As a leader in your own organization, you can connect with the upcoming generation to discover your own organizational metaphor by engaging them in a conversation. What adjectives describe how it feels to work together now? How would they like it to feel? What metaphor would invite your team to perform more masterfully, to learn more voraciously, and to engage more completely? What metaphor “represents the world that you inhabit now and the next, larger world that awaits you” at the same time?

Find an imaginative way to convene that conversation.

And choose wisely.

 

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Ian Chisholm is a founding partner of Roy Group.

By Bob Chartier

It’s the reward-and-recognition season again. Chances are high that mugs will go once more to individuals and teams who lead the charge during one crisis or another. Listen for it: fires, floods, and disasters (literal or figurative) are often the focus for our award ceremonies.

In your work life, if you have ever had the opportunity to take part in any sort of crisis response, you will know that people say, “It was our finest moment.” There is just something about blatant adversity that brings out the best in us.

I would also bet that, a short three months after the crisis, the same folks would say their workplace was back to the same old, same old. Oh, sure, people are still working hard, doing a good job and getting the work done, but with nowhere near the spirit, energy, and personal accountability that arose during the crisis.

So, the question becomes, How do we invite the same engagement that appears during a crisis into the everyday?

Lately, I have been working with an interesting leader who has been wrestling with this question. Ryan Jestin heads up the roads department for the City of Calgary and was front and centre with Mayor Naheed Nenshi during the devastating floods in 2013. In any crisis situation, transportation becomes a key factor, and Ryan’s team of over 1,000 frontline public servants responded to that flood with an ingenuity and focus never before seen, even by them. Engagement was through the roof. People felt that what they did was important.

In returning to business as usual, Ryan and his team expected that this “high” might wane a bit. What they did not expect was a complete return to the engagement levels they had before the crisis.

Ryan is ex-military and has an ability to lean into the punch of a tough conversation. He opened up the discussion, engaging in an after-action review, and decided to challenge his leadership team with the question, “Where did our extraordinary teamwork go?”

Using a collection of engagement methods I had shared with him, Ryan convened the conversation with his entire team. Here are some of our key findings that the conversation unearthed:

People capable of high performance can be engaged less than 50% for all sorts of reasons. Multiply that across your entire team and you have a seriously compromised capacity to deliver something excellent. This dynamic is presented very clearly in a one-year study conducted by Gallup around employee engagement that found 28% of employees were engaged, 54% were not engaged, and 17% were actively not engaged.

In other words, well over half of the workforce is either underperforming, or actively undermining productivity.

What we came to understand through our conversations with Ryan’s team was that if an organization was typically around 40% engaged during regular times, in a crisis situation the engagement scores would spike into the high 90s. Not magic — just people being fully engaged, counted on (a nice way to see accountability) and aware that what they were noticing and contributing was important.

How do we maintain the levels of engagement that we see in crisis situations in our everyday work affairs? Crisis is by its very nature unsustainable; it is temporary. Real engagement has to be fully sustainable, built into the everyday, and is best done through the everyday practice of those leaders who know how important it is. Engagement work must be more purposeful than serendipitous, more strategic than tactical, and more cultural than policy.

It’s a long game, not a fast hit. And if you are not getting stronger and stronger, you are going to lose ground.

Sustainable engagement is about having rituals that people can count on that allow them to have the conversations that they need to have every day — exactly the way we do in a crisis situation. Good intelligence, no-nonsense feedback and status reports, coordination of resources, a suspension of silos, and maybe most of all (around the edges): personal check-ins with people about how they are really doing. Regardless of the content that we need to tackle, we know that the processes exist for us to make sense of it together in real time and act accordingly.

The slow and steady leader wins the long game, using tools and practices every day, developing their own people to convene these conversations in a cost-effective way, and quietly but firmly building systemic engagement where the lasting difference is made — in the everyday.

 

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Bob Chartier is Roy Group’s learning lead on engagement.

For upcoming sessions of Tools of Engagement, see Open Courses.

By Richard Eaton

The dog handler was apparently vaporized in the explosion along with his dog, Ben.

Over the radio in the operations room, I heard the patrol commander almost laconically report, “The dog’s gone,” and was able to make it outside in time to see a cloud of smoke towering into the South Armagh sky, followed by the unmistakable “thud” of the fatal IED going off in the far distance.

* * * * * * *

For the past 18 years I have been helping people in all kinds of organizations work together to improve their business processes. Frequently, I find they struggle mightily with the complex reality of their daily business lives to the extent that they become bogged down in the detail. Many well intentioned consultants (including yours truly) try to help out by providing flowchart software and other tools in an earnest effort to make it easier, but we can frequently create more problems than we solve.

W. Edwards Deming, the “father” of Continuous Improvement, once famously noted, “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” So, for me anyway, a good process is like a good story with a happy ending. My dog handler story at the start of this piece had a very unhappy ending, unfortunately, largely because the chapters weren’t told in the proper order.

As you can imagine, with most things in the army there is a process for doing just about anything, including employing a trained search dog and handler for detecting improvised explosive devices or IEDs. When told properly (i.e., when the process is followed), the story can be retold by anyone on the team and it usually has a happy ending. It goes something like this:

Chapter 1: When a patrol member spots something unusual in a hedge or a field or a street, the escorting patrol forms a defensive perimeter, covering the dog handler and the dog as they go to work.

Chapter 2: From a safe position, the dog handler then “casts” the dog — directs it using voice commands and gestures — to move up to sniff out any possible explosives in or near the suspicious object. (As an aside, this is both a fascinating and a humbling process to see in action.)

Chapter 3: If there’s no problem, the handler recalls the dog and the patrol carries on. However, if the dog “indicates” or “points” at the object or surrounding area, as these dogs are well trained to do, the handler recalls the dog to safety and the patrol commander then seals off the area so no one can approach the suspicious object.

Chapter 4: A large-scale clearance operation, using engineers and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) units is then launched to neutralize or remove the danger, and we “all live happily ever after.”

Really, it’s that simple.

Of course, a variety of other things can be unfolding at the same time as the four main chapters in the story. But it is these four simple steps contained within the context of a story about IED clearing, told in the same order every time, that are the important things to remember. During my time in Northern Ireland, I led soldiers in counterinsurgency operations like this on an almost daily basis with no problems at all.

So what went wrong with this particular story?

The dog handler apparently told the story of Chapter 3 wrong. For whatever reason — no one will ever really know why, of course — Ben indicated, and the handler didn’t believe him. Unaccountably, the handler then walked up to where Ben was standing rigidly at point to check things out and BOOM. No more Ben. No more handler.

Luckily, most of the frustrating process stories we wrestle with on a daily basis deal with consequences that are somewhat less dire than in the example I’ve shared here. Nevertheless, if you find yourself mired in the detail, take a step back and work with your team to tell a story about the process you are trying to fix. If one of the chapters seems out of place, work together to retell the story until it makes sense, and more often than not I think you’ll find that you will, like me, live happily ever after!

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Richard Eaton is a principal of Berlin Eaton.

By Tim Gallwey

The Inner Game is about high performance, learning from experience and enjoying all of one’s life. After 40 years of observation, these three attributes are what happen spontaneously when a person is working or playing from their natural self. You can observe all three in young children who are just being themselves, showing the many qualities we admire and love.

A good example is three-year-old Michael Patton of Dublin, Ireland who made the news a few years back in a home video that captured him giggling and nonchalantly hitting a string of chip shots through a hole in the roof of his playhouse.

Yet, somewhere in the process of trying to control them to be the kind of children we think they should be in order to fit in with society, we parents and teachers make it more and more difficult for growing children to access the original qualities and attributes they were born with.

At a Roy Group gathering recently, I asked participants to make a list of the inherent attributes they observe in young children. Here is what made the list:

• spontaneity
• curiosity
• an appetite for learning
• joy
• giving and receiving love
• trust
• openness
• autonomy
• creativity
• fearlessness
• innate confidence
• no judgment
• contentment (once basic needs are met)
• freedom
• knowing exactly what they want/need
• energy
• no worry

After listing these attributes and reflecting upon them, it was impossible for the participants not to develop an admiration for our human existence and to realize that they were once the same way: spontaneous, curious, joyful — free.

And then a rather confronting question came up: “So, what happened?”

This began the discussion about the emergence of Self 1 and its ability to decide, “I’m not good enough,” “I can’t do this,” “I’m always wrong,” “So-and-So is so much smarter than I am” or even “I’m the smartest, the best!” “Look what I can do!” etc.

My recognition of this phenomenon started while on sabbatical from a career in higher education, when I was instructing tennis. This was a time when my Self 1 was strongly crippling me. I began to notice that most of the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” I was imposing on my students, though technically correct, actually interfered with learning and performance. So instead of just looking at the students’ strokes and correcting every instance of “incorrectness,” I started asking a different kind of question: I wonder what’s going on in the minds of these tennis players when the ball comes toward them?

What I discovered changed the very foundation of how I taught. For the most part, the tennis students were trying to remember my instructions, trying hard to do what I said they should, and trying hard not to do whatever I had told them they shouldn’t. In the act of “trying hard” they tightened too many muscles and their shots looked stiff and mechanical. To complicate things further, when I would sometimes say, “Relax,” they would get really confused. By “teaching” tennis, I was making tennis harder to learn.

As I started paying more attention to the learning process and less attention to the teaching, I myself learned a lot. Not so much about teaching, but about what actually supports learning and what gets in the way. I learned that, when I asked my students to pay attention to what was happening in their experience, they learned naturally, as children do, more quickly, and, surprisingly, with the enjoyment of seeing themselves improve without being taught how. Instead of analyzing why a student wasn’t hitting the ball in the middle of the racquet, then giving three or four corrections based on that analysis, I simply asked the player after each shot to point out the place where the ball actually hit. I would often say, “Don’t try to hit the ball in the centre,” (just to calm Self 1 down) “but be as accurate as you can about where the ball hits.” About 95% of the time, it took fewer than seven swings before the student was pointing each time to the centre of the racquet.

“Are you trying to hit in the centre?” I would ask neutrally, and the reply was often something like, “No, I’m not doing it, my racquet is doing it.”

“Pretty smart racquet,” I would reply. “How does it feel? What do you notice? What are the results?”

“It feels great, more solid, sounds better, and the results are much better.”

“If you weren’t trying to do it, how do you really think it was happening?” I would ask.

“I have no idea,” was the usual reply.

My only guess at the time was that, when thinking about the shoulds and shouldn’ts and trying to hit the ball correctly, the player didn’t see the ball very well. Later, I realized that my instructions had been invoking the players’ stress system — releasing stress hormones —and, in simple terms, evoking the fight-flight-freeze-flock response. In such an environment, the player saw the approaching ball as a “threat” or “a probable mistake” flying through the air. They would often back up (flight), then tighten too many muscles to lash out at the ball (fight), while trying to conform (flock) to how everyone else did it.

Of course, the player’s physiological reactions attended to this perception of the ball, and the results were usually worse than desired. Thus the player would confirm his pre-thinking: “I don’t have a very good backhand. I’m not a very good tennis player. In fact, I guess I’m just not good at sports.” And, finally, after a few more disastrous shots, “I’m not a very good person.”

Self 1’s favorite trick is to get you to identify yourself with your performance. It wants you to think you are Self 1 or, as my Dad used to say, “I’m a self-made man.”

Of course he meant something different, but remembering Dad’s phrase made me shudder at the thought of my Self 1 trying to make me who I was, rather than discovering the self I had always been and would always be during the journey of my life: an independent being with consciousness, with choice, and with a treasure of unimaginable seeds of potential that I could enjoy as they grew and developed.

Who would have thought that the journey was designed to be a beautiful and graceful process of learning through experience as well as learning to understand and appreciate the value of the gift we have been given, simply by being a human being?

 

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W. Timothy Gallwey is the bestselling author of The Inner Game, a series of books which set forth a new methodology for the development of personal and professional excellence in a variety of fields. His long-term clients include Apple, AT&T, The Coca Cola Company, and Rolls Royce, where The Inner Game is applied to leadership, sales, change management and teamwork.

Tim was a special guest leader at Roy Group’s first ever Mastery Forum in Victoria in May of 2013.