Organisational Thinking Styles in Recruitment and Practice – Sometimes a Contradiction

The culture of an organisation can be a major factor in the sort of people that are attracted to belong to it. This is true whatever the organisation – whether an employer, a club or an educational establishment. I was thinking about this recently after reminiscing about an incident that occurred at the senior school I attended. I attended a school which set out as its values the expectation and encouragement of high educational and personal achievements for every student. The school’s prospectus and other materials made it clear that it aimed to produce future leaders, business owners and other forward and independent thinkers. The governors and staff clearly wanted to attract pupils with ability, initiative, and creativity and who had the same aspirations and the potential to achieve them.

However, the school also had very strict policies on uniform, hair styles, jewellery and suchlike. Pupils who wore the wrong style of skirt, shirt or coat or who had an “extreme” hair style or wore jewellery to school would be reprimanded. The argument given by the school was that pupils needed to give a good impression of the school as a whole, and show both loyalty to and pride of being a part of it. They also expected the pupils (and their parents) to take their word for it that this would make a difference to the pupils’ success in life.

These policies resulted in frequent bouts of rebellion, sometimes supported by the parents. One such incident escalated to the point where coats were confiscated en masse, and many parents writing in to say that they had no intention of forcing their teenager to wear the dowdy prescribed coats. I can’t remember the formal outcome, but I do recall that many pupils continued to wear non-uniform coats generally with the compromise of getting a coat in the school colour.

Such group rebellions were generally small ones, and the overall academic achievement of the pupils remained high.

Thinking about this now in terms of thinking styles, I can see that such clashes were highly predictable. The school was deliberately attracting pupils from families which valued independent thinking and creativity, and so they and their children were likely to have a high level of Internally Referenced thinking and a high Internal Locus of Control. However, the school’s uniform rules were based on an expectation of high level of conformity, a concern about how others perceived the school as a whole, and a belief that they (the school) knew best about how the way a pupil dressed for school would impact on their eventual success. That required a high level of Externally Referencedthinking and an External Locus of Control. This mis-match made some clashes inevitable.

I see similar disjoints in many organisations. Some advertise for strongly independent innovators, creative thinkers and yet have a culture of conformity, especially around dress and appearance. This can result in the employees feeling constrained and restless – and is likely to impact upon performance and retention.

Interestingly, many years after I’d left the school I heard of a pupil whom had been sent by a class teacher to the (new) head teacher because of an “extreme” hairstyle. The head sent her back to the class and told the teacher that, if they wanted pupils who would go on to become leaders, they should encourage independent and creative thinking, not suppress it. What a change from when I was there!

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has seen this, or other contradictions in the thinking styles recruited and the ones best suited to the actual organisational culture. It’s certainly something to look out for when called in to discuss management issues with clients.

As always, please let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Improving Business Partnerships

Working with small businesses, I often come across partnerships in which the two partners are experiencing some conflict about their business. Recently, I worked with such a partnership using MindSonar to shine a light on the thinking patterns behind the differences. This understanding led to them being able to review the way worked so that each played to their strengths and were able to cover each other’s blind spots.

The partners (whom I shall call Peter and  Carol – not their real names) wanted the following question answering through their MindSonar session:

“How can we best use our different approaches to develop a more efficient business model”.

They described recent disagreements which were mainly down to two things:

  1. Division of the administrative side of the business, particularly record keeping and the organisation of accounting records.
  2. The future direction and growth strategy for the business.

Each partner completed a MindSonar profile in this context.

Interpretation

IWe explored their profiles, noting both the main differences in their thinking patterns as well as the areas in which they shared the same blind spots. Two particular examples of this were:

  1. A large difference between the partners’ approach to change. Carol had a preference for change (spilt between Developmentand Change), whereas Peter had a very strong preference for Maintenance.
  2. They had similar (very strong) scores for the Optionsmeta programme. This was strengthened by neither scoring highly for the BLUE Graves drive.  However, in his criteria Peter had added a caveat about options of “where appropriate”

The partners recognised their profiles as accurate and could identify a number of things which were contributing to their conflict.  In particular, they could see that their different approaches to change created disagreements around the future direction and growth strategy of the business.

They also both recognised their high OptionsThinking Style and acknowledge that they were good at identifying and constructing procedures, but not at following them. They agreed that this explained the tension around administrative work. However, Peter could identify areas outside business in which he did use a Proceduremeta programme.

After exploring those and other differences in their profiles, the partners identified a number of  actions that they would take immediately. Two key ones were:

  1. Peter would be responsible for identifying the areas of the business that were currently successful and determine procedures to build on this and which could be applied to any new areas (using his MaintenanceThinking Style and “stepping into” the Proceduremeta programme that he used in other areas). Peter was open to options about some areas of the business, but not his own speciality which he felt was right where it needed to be.  Therefore, Carol would have responsibility for identifying possible options for general business development, including new areas in her area of specialty that she could take forward (Using her OptionsandChangeThinking Styles).
  2. For administration and other procedural activities, they agreed that they would consider out-sourcing these, recognising that neither of them particularly wanted to spend the time in the business doing these. Again Peter would “step into” the Proceduremeta programme in the meantime.

Following the session, the clients said they were impressed with the accuracy of the profiles and the usefulness of the exercise in which they identified their own and each other’s strengths and blind-spots.  They felt that they now had a great understanding of how they could work to make the most of each one’s strengths.  They expressed an interest in further coaching to develop other areas identified.

Of course, this is a brief summary, and the partners discovered many other things during the session which they felt would enable them to work better as a partnership, leading to greater personal and business success.

If you work with partnerships or very small teams, you should definitely consider using MindSonar to really optimise your working relationships and team efficiency.  You can find a MindSonar Professional near you in the Registry on this site.

MindSonar Benchmarks for Project Teams – I wish I’d known about Them!

In my previous role I was responsible for managing a major programme involving multiple project teams. Part of the programme management involved regular risk management and “lessons learned” meetings. During these meetings, representatives from each of the project teams would discuss any issues that had arisen since the last meeting, and what steps had been taken – or needed to be taken – in order to rectify the issue and prevent it happening again.

The aim of the meetings was to ensure that the systems and processes we had in place were adequate to minimise the risk of problems arising and to enable a rapid corrective response when needed. However, at times these meetings could become quite tense because there was a fine line to tread between good risk management and problem resolution on one side and the development of a blame culture on the other. This was clearer to some members than others. Some members would always want to attribute all problems to individuals, rather than to consider the more common situation of them arising from system weaknesses. Tthe result was that friction would arise between those individuals with a “name and shame” approach and other members of the programme board. This created risks to the programme itself as it could result in people being reluctant to raise issues when they spotted them in fear of being blamed.

As the manager of this programme I had to manage the situation and try to cultivate a systems approach in the individuals concerned, most of whom I had no direct line management of.

How helpful it would have been to have had MindSonar back then. I believe it would have been possible to construct a Benchmark Profile to help identify the members of each project team who would be best suited to be the risk management/lessons learnt representative. This Benchmark Profile could have been constructed in consultation with other project and programme managers to provide a narrated estimation (with consultation).

My first thoughts about this are that this benchmark profile might include the following:

Graves Drives: Ideals; Learning;

Thinking Styles:

High: Away From (for risk management); Past (for lessons learnt);Structure (for systems approach)

Low: People (to avoid blame approach)

There are likely to be others and different views which is why I would prefer a benchmark profile resulting from a narrated estimation with consultation.

It would be great to hear from other MindSonar Professionals about their thoughts on this – and about whether anyone has yet used the MindSonar tool in this context.

It would also be good to hear from project and programme managers who have found themselves in similar situations – they could find MindSonar particularly useful when allocating project roles to their team members.

What are your thoughts?  Use the comments box below to share your experiences and views on this.

Procrastination – not just about Reactive versus Proactive

Procrastination – it affects virtually all of us at some time and I find that it’s a particularly common problem for those who seek a coach. In fact, it’s often the reason why someone finally decides to hire a coach – to help get them moving on ambitions and plans that they’ve had for years.

At the surface, procrastination seems to be predominantly about the person being overly reactive rather than proactive and so not stepping into the actions needed to take them forward.

However, the more I’ve looked at the clients’ b