The ‘More Monster’ Culture

More Sales! More Calls! More Profit! More Growth! More Savings! More Effort! More Commitment! More, More, More!

I just spent 2 days with a team of Account Managers who reminded me about how challenging it can be to survive in a sales environment. These managers are all intelligent, talented and highly committed to being the best they can be, but their performance is seriously hindered by the culture of their organisation.

They explained with utter sincerity that their usual work day can begin with Blackberry calls, texts and emails at 6 am, and that it is not unusual to be taking calls at 10.30 at night. Their days seem to be filled with activities they consider non-essential sales function, and their leaders apparently bombard them with conflicting messages, lots of negative feedback and very little recognition.

Some of these managers were so stressed they talked of “burn out” and “overwhelm” and their language was richly scattered with metaphors and analogies of “black holes, the abyss, burdens, weight, spreading cancers, dropping balls and carrying huge lumps of lead”. They described “impossible targets” and “meaningless goals”, “confusion, chaos and embarrassment with their customers.” Some were looking for an escape route. Others felt trapped and many said their home lives and health were being seriously impacted.

Their bosses are not intentionally having this negative effect. They are responding to their own concerns and fears about future uncertainties and current realities in the business. Unless they can achieve more with less cost their competitors will surely win the business they are working so hard to achieve and keep.

This is a dilemma facing many businesses in this economic climate, and the perceived urgency to achieve more drives this high pressure way of doing business.

This is not the only choice.

These managers work for an organisation that has chosen to explore change another way. They decided to engage their key people in a process they hope will shift their culture dramatically. The most influential sales and operations managers have been invited to explore their contribution to creating a new direction and a new culture, one they can all be proud of, and one which will enable the business to grow through creative choice, rather than the ‘do more’ strategy they seem to have slipped into.

The process involves individuals exploring their own beliefs, thinking and behaviours to see how they contribute to the highly pressured quality of work life they experience. This is counter-intuitive to the usual reviewing which encourages us to point the finger of blame at everyone else in the company, to the mythical ‘they’ who are never in the same room as the finger pointers.

We have designed a number of structured experiences to help these key people to uncover the direction they want the business to go in, so they can express it, and live it, rather than wait for their leaders to give them consistent direction.

This is a brave and brilliant approach. Some, of course, may realise they have no real vision of their own and this revelation could trigger their departure. But the vast majority will discover that the reason they are still there putting up with this highly stressful life, is because they genuinely care about, and have faith in, their organisation’s future.

Within the space of 2 days, these managers turned their persistent complaining about their managers, other parts of their business and their systems into a sincere and passionate commitment to change.

By the second morning one manager had arranged a meeting with her manager to agree some meaningful targets, another had fixed a meeting with his ops manger to agree some new standards, yet another had interrupted her usual pattern of rescuing a colleague and clearly asked him to step up to his responsibility. I could go on but essentially these managers have taken ownership of their organisation and have plans to transform everyone they can. They are prepared for set backs and have been equipped with some resilience tools. It’s early days but my guess is that this organisation will reach a rewarding tipping point soon!

I wish them well, life is far too short for such stressful working conditions. How about your organisation? Are you contributing to, or putting up with, stressful conditions? Let us know if you want some help creating the mind-set and skill-set for your people to thrive.

With love Lorraine x

 

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Love and Work – The myth of separate worlds

“One can live MAGNIFICENTLY in this world if one knows how
to work and how to love.” Tolstoy

Not so long ago the linking of ‘love’ and ‘work’ would have
been considered flaky and soft but now books on love and work, love and leadership, and many others, are filling Amazon’s shelves and a quick check on Google this morning revealed 969 million returns for ‘love and work’. Not all of these entries would be considered strictly commercial but my point is that we are talking A LOT about love as if it is the new, new thing in business and leadership.

For many years the love and work connection was dominated by
the HR departments desire to control and deter romance and sexual behaviour at work. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200703/love-work
Quite a useful strategy for keeping people focused, avoiding embarrassment and the whole spectrum of abuse of power that seems to be both real and perceived. But I suspect even the most stringent policy driven organisation has the odd romance and fling going on. It seems that human beings and love are inseparable.

Romance is not the only form love takes at work.  There’s much more to our work- love story. Think about your most inspiring or inspired leadership or work related experiences. Were they the result of some super sophisticated strategy, procedure or process or a gob-smacking vision that blew your socks off? I doubt it. Mine are all completely distinguishable by the difficult to define quality of LOVE.

I once worked in a team that was so highly motivated we worked for weeks at times without breaks or extra incentive. I couldn’t explain it then but looking back our boss inspired us through his absolute faith in our talents and learning ability (which was bordering on crazy at times), but like a proud parent he never doubted any of us for a second and held on to a vision for us even if we couldn’t see it for ourselves. He held our hands through challenging times, he provided support for every risk we took, he worked
restlessly to encourage and promote our personal as well as our work goals, and
he shared and celebrated our successes.

Our boss loved ‘IT’ (our business). He loved our company. He loved his team. He loved the contribution we were making to the business. And that LOVE was the fuel for our exceptional motivation and performance.

Leadership is not about models, theories and process. Leadership is not even about having the best vision, strategy, goals, people, technology or systems. If it were, Apple should never have been so outrageously successful and countless other organisations who invest millions in their technology, systems, processes and people would be much more successful than they have been.

It makes a huge difference to LOVE WHAT YOU DO. Where would Apple be if Steve Jobs didn’t LOVE sexy technology? Where would Microsoft have got to without Bill Gates’ LOVE of clever software? But that’s not the whole LOVE STORY either.

Effective leaders are able to inspire others to have the FAITH TO FOLLOW, even into the scary unknown. They also have the credibility to compel their people to dig deeply and draw on all their talents, qualities and resources to find solutions to impossible problems, to go the extra mile and find whatever it takes to achieve the goals.

Despite uncertainty about the future, true leaders create the conditions for their people to explore, experiment, test, fail, learn and succeed. They foster self belief and belief in the possible. They create a united sense of security and LOVE.

I realised long ago that when I peel away the hard nosed labels on the work I do (executive coaching, capability development, skills training, facilitating change, culture change programmes, team building, etc), what lies beneath is simply this: humans learning to love themselves, to love their work, to love their colleagues and to love the meaning they make of it all.

Powerful leadership is about having the conscious commitment to learn how to love. So, how do we love? Well that’s for another post! Take a few moments now though to look through this short self inventory survey and ponder your own LOVING capabilities at work.

Loving Capability Self Inventory:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

 

So, are your LOVE AT WORK capabilities or LOVING LEADERSHIP
skills in need of some TLC?  Contact us to arrange a personal coaching session, an in-house talk or seminar, or to find out about our next public programme.

With love, Lorraine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Focusing Passions

Spring bulbs shooting up all around me deepen my yearning for change, new growth, fresh insights, revitalised possibilities and tender steps into unknown territory.  I’m in a conscious state of significant transformation right now.

(Thank you Al for this photo!  www.almelville.com)

My love of consultancy work is driven by my passion for meeting new people and helping them to explore their changes, growth and development. I LOVE seeing people as they truly are in all their complex and simple quests for increasing their success at work and fulfilment in life. I relish exploring the deeper structures of motivations, thinking and feeling that create the behaviours that result in the work, relationships and lives we have.

I feel deeply honoured to share the journey with so many of you who are stepping into your potential and beginning to navigate new territories and I feel humbled and inspired by the courage and faith I am entrusted to witness and the (sometimes hidden) visions that I hold in my heart, often through time.

As a consultant, facilitator, and coach I am privileged to be a change agent and despite the breadth and depth of my experience, I am just as vulnerable as anyone else to all the fears and anxieties aroused by change regardless of whether it’s initiated or imposed. And as a change agent, like many of you, I am also at risk of neglecting my own conscious transformations at times. 

Luckily my lifelong friend and co-coach Paul King is never too far away when I need some coaching or a sounding board. He has recently helped me shift some mental fog and clear the way for the next stage of my development.

My next steps are not completely clear yet but some of my emerging change is about balance and focus. I want to shift the balance of my work now to create more time for creative design and writing, and I want to focus my consultancy and coaching work on developing fresh thinking and tools for a new approach to leadership.

So I can develop both of these passions, I am transferring my consultancy and coaching practice to Future Plan Consulting where my good friends Pat and Nick Naylor have been collaborating with me for a while now. You can reach me through Future Plan at lorraine@futureplan.co.uk  if you would like to contact me regarding consulting, coaching, facilitating and training.

You will still be able to contact me at lorraine@passionatwork.co.uk for e-programmes and e-tools for leadership, team and personal development resources. You will see some changes to the web site soon.

I’d love to be in touch with you through both Passion@work and Future Plan where I will be posting about a new way of leading very soon. However if you would like to unsubscribe please just hit reply and put ‘Unsubscribe’ in the subject line – I will miss you but I understand.  If you would like to continue to receive emails from us at Future Plan and from me at Passion@work you need do nothing at all.

I am both excited and scared by these next steps of my evolution and I hope you are conscious of your own journey into the freshness of your new territory.

What are you shifting, opening, embracing, balancing or focusing on in your next development steps?

Passionately, Lorraine

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