Mike Chitty

Helping realise development since 1986

management

Leadership – helping people find what they want…

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Managers and leaders know that most people are looking (consciously or not) for a number of things. These include:

  • autonomy – the freedom to decide what they should do, when they should do it
  • some control over their own future
  • a chance to plan, act and succeed
  • to improve things – to make them better
  • to take some responsibility – to enjoy it – to seek it
  • to be active rather than passive – to have an orientation towards action – rather than reaction to the instructions and orders of others
  • to be a person rather than a human resource – a cog in a machine
  • to be creative and autonomous
  • to be acknowledged, recognised and valued by others.

Managers and leaders can establish relationships with people that help them to look for, and find, these things. People develop, talent flourishes, relationships improve and performance can excel. This group of people usually respond very well to the introduction of effective management and leadership as they it offers a vehicle for accelerating progress.

However some people are not looking for any of this.

They do not want freedom, or responsibility. They want instructions, structure and clarity. They want other people to do the thinking and the creativity. They want to be the foot soldiers – doing an honest days work for an honest days pay. They do not see life as a vehicle either for their own self development or creative expression. They are not looking for self-actualisation but security and control. This group can be very resistant to leadership, seeing it as an intrusion. They are likely to resist development, and accept change grudgingly, if at all.

There are several things to consider here:

  • the first type of response is deemed ‘healthy’ – for society , the organisation and the individual. In these circumstances it is likely that people will thrive. The relationship is synergistic – what is good for the individual is likely to be good for the organisation and vice versa.
  • the second type of response is not ‘healthy’. It is a defence mechanism. It leads to staleness, frustration and at best mediocrity. It is characterised by a loss of synergy – the perception being that what is good for the organisation or society will not be good for the individual and vice versa.
  • the type of response that we find depends, in large part, on management and leadership style. For decades leadership has encouraged people to respond passively to direction to follow the ones who ‘knows the way and shows the way’. Some of it may be driven by personality or by experiences from the past or from outside the work context – but in most cases the response we get tells us much about our own management.

Go to the people

Live with them

Learn from them

Love them

Start with what they know

Build with what they have

But with the best leaders

When the work is done

The task accomplished

The people will say

“We have done this ourselves.”

Lao Tsu (700 BC)

Want to develop your own leadership and management skills?

Find out How to Be an Outstanding Manager…

Reflections from the Safe Space #1

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Last night I had my first ‘safe space’ conversation with a small group of managers and leaders to reflect on their responses to the current crisis, to share lessons learned and to think about the possibility of change. In a series of short posts I’d like to share a few of the insights we explored in the hope that you might find them helpful.

If you would like to join us in a future ‘safe space’ you can book your place here.

Insight 1: Learn from your heroes

Heroes are out in force.

It seems nearly everyone is making heroic efforts and enormous sacrifices, to ‘support patients’, ‘support the frontline’ and ‘keep the business going’. But heroism is a difficult thing to sustain. We can’t keep on sacrificing, without a burden of debt building up to what has been sacrificed.

Inside every hero is a human being, fragile, beautiful, sensitive, exhausted.

So when you notice individuals and teams being ‘heroes’, before you jump on twitter to offer them your thanks, take a good look at what they are actually doing, the behaviours that earn the label ‘heroic’ and ask:

  • Why do they have to do these super-human things?
  • What are the demands on them?
    • Working long hours?
    • Exposing themselves to risks because of a lack of PPE?
    • Quickly re-wiring the operation in the fly?
    • Deploying and learning new tech for working remotely
    • Making enormous efforts to get to work
    • Sacrificing time with their own loved ones to keep things going

Once you are clear on what the demands are that create these heroes, do everything you can mitigate them. Just like the rest of us, heroes tend to break sooner or later. And this is a marathon – not a sprint.

Reflect on what it is about your planning that creates the space that can only be filled by heroism. It will almost certainly point to a weakness and some important learning. Unless of course you always planned on sustained heroism and sacrifice to see you through. In which case you might want to check your ethics.

Also reflect on whether you have taken lean and efficiency too far. We used to run our hospitals at something like 85% occupancy, and valued the notion of ‘redundant staff’ (staff who were on shift but not directly on the front line – who could be drawn upon if there was a surge in demand or some other shock to the system. These days occupancy is up at 98% and often higher. The conversation is about enough staffing to be safe with business as usual rather than enough staff to cope with a surge. Organisations that run on skeleton staffing struggle to run marathons.

So recognise your heroes. Study them. Learn from them.

And improve your planning and resourcing so that we can move towards ‘no more heroes’ – just human beings sustaining the kind of compassionate and creative work that humans do best – especially when the next crisis hits.

If you would like to join one of these safe spaces for reflection and learning please do get in touch. I run them regularly online using virtual conferencing and they offer you the chance to step back, draw breathe and learn.

What does it cost?

I am committed to a Pay If You Can – Free is Fine model hoping that we can find a way to support those that can’t pay as well as those that can. So don’t let money stop you getting the reflective space you need. Just sign up now and I will be in touch.

We have a couple of slots set aside each week for the foreseaable future.

You can book your place here.

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