Do you have a hidden agenda?

How many times have you heard that you or your organisation has a hidden agenda? If you are in any form of leadership position I would be surprised if you’d not heard this before. If you are not at the top of your companies tree I am sure you've heard conversations about what 'management' are doing behind the scenes.

It can be really frustrating as a leader when you hear this if you think you don't. Many managers just ignore it when they hear it and dismiss it as the ‘normal scepticism that employees have for management’.

When I hear it I treat it as a clue to the culture of the organisation.

So before you ignore that ‘scepticism’ let me ask you whether it is possible that you actually do have a hidden agenda…….unintentionally?

Many organisations have active yet unofficial ‘information networks’. These networks aren't communication networks, they are more akin to the skin mounted monitors used in hospitals. They don't tell the doctor what the patient thinks but whether the patient’s heart rate has risen or when their breathing changes for example. They let the doctor know how the patient is feeling.
The information networks in your company are extremely sensitive to changes in management activity, just like the hospital monitors. When regular meeting patterns exist and there are no unusual comings and goings they tell the people in your organisation that 'everything is the same'.
But when extra or unusual meetings begin happen, consultants start to arrive, or senior team 'awaydays' take place, they are noted by the networks and the signal that 'something different is happening' goes out.
Especially if you have not said what they are happening for.

Riding on the back of those signals is that most human of conditions; speculation.
In the void of an unintentional hidden agenda people will naturally fill the gap based on past experience e.g. what happened last time the management team disappeared for days and had many closed door meeting (was that a structure change by any chance?).

From your perspective as a manager you are doing management work. You are 'planning' or 'reviewing' or even 'thinking about things', 'haven't decided anything yet' or 'have nothing to declare at this stage'.
What that means to the information network is that activity has increased without a similar increase in communication. If you haven’t said what is going on then what you are doing is, in the truest meaning of the word, ‘hidden’

Be aware that a 'hidden agenda' is often a sign that your people are filling a communication void with speculation. It can therefore be a clue to the health of your routine information channels; it may mean that they are blocked, or too loose with information, not delivering consistently or uninformative, used sporadically when you do have an agenda or a one way transfer of information. You may find that it is a combination of these in different streams of the business.

But don’t ignore the clue or the next time you stand up and say something in all honesty you will still be accused of having a hidden agenda.

Can Twitter teach you leadership?

I recently got in to a conversation about the Twitter phenomenon and in particular about follower numbers. My colleague wondered about why some people have many followers yet don’t seem to say anything that he thought was useful. It got me thinking about situations that you often see in the workplace where individuals within the organisation can influence the thinking of others without having any positional power or authority. These people can often be a thorn in the leaderships side and I have heard many managers complain about them or try to marginalise their influence in some way. Of course it never works and often backfires.

I saw a classic example of this once in a small chemical producer in Holland. I had been asked to look in to their I.R issues as they had a lot of strikes which caused massive disruptions to production. I spent some time with the managers of the site and every one of them told me stories about an individual who they branded as a 'trouble-maker'. When I dug in to their stories it seemed that this individual unearthed and made public things that the managers didn’t want him to. He spoke up about things at town hall meetings (which got stopped as a result). He followed up on things that went wrong, asked questions about safety and decisions that had been taken on ‘little things’ (like spending money on production instead of working conditions). If any of the operators asked this guy anything he would always get back to them and everything he told them turned out to be true.

As I listened I liked the sound of this guy. After a day or so of stories I told a meeting of all of the middle managers that they should promote this guy. In fact they should promote him above a lot of them! Needless to say this didn’t go down well.

I told that that this ‘trouble-maker’ was showing leadership. What he said struck a chord with the people around him. A chord that wasn’t being struck by the managers. Managers who spent their time in meetings or in front of computers and didn’t walk about their plant to see what was going on, to listen to the troops, to feel the pulse of the organisation. He was also believable because what he said turned out to be true, in plain mans language with no spin. It might not have been sophisticated or complicated but it spoke to what the people needed in a way that they needed. Needless to say the managers didn't.

In twitter, people follow those who say something that resonates with them and they re-tweet (pass on) the things that resonate most. Its a living modern example of leadership and followership at work.

If your workplace had a table of who your people really followed or really listened to, would that table have your leadership team in it? Would you be in it?

Are you right or are you winning?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were convinced that you were right and that the person you were debating with was wrong? Or that someone else’s behaviour was ‘out of order’ and that it up was up to them to ‘apologise’ or ‘make the first move’?

Perhaps you’ve had that situation with someone who worked for you? Or perhaps you’ve been the one on the other side of the argument?

Its really easy to get stuck sometimes, and its happened to most of us at some time or other. Sometimes as a manger you will see the situation occurring between two peers or between of your staff. But what do you do about it if you are the boss or the peer?

This came up in a conversation with a client of mine recently. He was in a situation where he had been given some ‘feedback’ by his manager. Except it wasn’t really feedback. It was a long list of what the manager thought they should and shouldn’t be doing and why the manager thought it was so. In feedback terms this is a ‘slam dunk’ and when we teach feedback to managers we find that a large amount of what is called feedback is really a ‘slam dunk’ (you know the type of feedback; negative and not designed to help someone improve performance; just a way of letting someone know how wrong they were. And if at this point you are thinking, ‘that’s the feedback we do in our business’ then contact my coaching colleagues at www.altris.co.nz before it causes more problems than it already is!).

My client was rather unhappy about this and it had caused a number of sleepless nights and emotional outpourings with trusted friends. In fact it became obvious that my client was one step away from looking for a a new role, anywhere where his boss wasn’t. This, buy the way is the regular result of poor feedback skills. De-motivation!

But the actual feedback had happened a few weeks previously. So I asked why my client hadn’t raised this with his boss and given them some feedback about that conversation, explaining how it had left them feeling and how disempowering so much of it had been. The answer was ‘ why should I?’ and ‘its not up to me to make my boss better at their job!’

At this point I am sure that you have been here before, haven’t you? Whether you were angry at the boss, or hurt or worried about the way they had spoken to you I am sure we’ve all been somewhere like this before. So what do you do?

I know that some of you will have heard me use this maxim before, so it will be no surprise that I told him that one of my favourites is’ Am I right, or am I winning?’

We used this to talk through who was suffering most as a result of ‘the why should I?’ approach, and whether it was his role to help his boss be ‘better at his job’ or not. The answer is probably obvious to you, right?
Who was having the sleepless nights? Who was replaying the scene time and again in conversations with himself (we all do that, don’t we?) And with trusted colleagues? Who was using all that energy and building up the stress? Certainly not their boss!

In a perfect world, everyone would recognise when they have not been at their best, bosses included, and they would do the ‘right thing’. But waiting for that to happen and wasting energy, time, emotion on it is certainly not going to keep you ‘winning’. The answer is to become skilled at giving feedback to the person you need to. Proper non emotive feedback (not a slam dunk)

But lets track back to a question I posed earlier. What do you do if you are the boss and you see it happening between two peers or two of your team?

Lets start with what not to do.

1) Don’t make a judgement. Don’t tell one of them they are right and the other is wrong. You know where that will lead don’t you? No? Who has become the problem now?

2) Don’t ‘bang their heads together and tell them to sort it out or you will!’ either. You know what kind of damage that will cause to your reputation as a manager don’t you? Positional power as a problem solver between people? Good move? (anyone that thinks yes at this point should call me now!)

When I run conflict resolutions, one part of the process is to get people to look at the problem from the other persons point of view. You might want to try that. It takes every ounce of your coaching skills (and if it this point you are getting worried then you do need to go to www.altris.co.nz and talk about their coaching culture programme!), but as a boss or as a peer all you are doing is facilitating enough thinking between two people to get them to talk the problem through for themselves (perhaps with someone like me to make it work well between them if its not a good role for you).

You can of course sit them down (individually), tell them that you know something is not right between the two of them and ask if they want to talk about it. If you can get them to unload with you it might help (especially if you don’t try & solve the problem; see the reasons above!), and then when the moment is right you can ask, ‘what are you going to do about it’.

If you get all the reasons that its not up to them you might want to ask your version of ‘Are you right or are you winning?’.

Why is the important word

When you embark on a change programme you set out with the intention to succeed, don't you? As a leader you have thought the change through and know what you are going to do (change the structure, implement a new system or process etc.) and you've had to build a business case to justify the spend against the return and benefits for the company. You get the green light to go ahead and start to implement your plan and make the change happen. Then you find, as the new structure is in place or the system starts to run, that the benefits are not coming or months later you are asked to review the change against your forecasted benefits and you can see it's not happening. People aren't really doing their new role in the structure or using the system the way it was designed. They are doing something else. Have you been here before or seen this happen? You should have, as it happens in 90% of change programmes.

In troubleshooting such programmes I come across frustration and confusion in the minds of so many managers. Some just want to get rid of the people who aren't doing the job and others up the stakes and make non appliance of the new system a dismissible offence. Others start to tinker with the structure or the system to apply band-aids as it obviously cant be working. Leaders point to nicely drawn business structures and organisational charts and ask "Why isn't it working?".

The key is in that word "why".

Often when leaders go out with their change they explain "what" is going to happen and sometimes "when" it will happen. Many forget to fully explain "why".

A study of students in the USA found that some tended to favour "what" questions, others "how" questions and another group favoured "why" questions. In my experience of change, everyone is a "why" person. Without a clear understanding of "why" the change is happening people don't really buy it. Even if they appear to have no choice (you take the computer off their desk and give them a new one with the systems fully loaded) the project doesn't deliver to its full potential. If they don't fully acknowledge the "why" they will never fully engage in the "what". This is why I.T people often find that users have their own favourite pieces of software loaded up and use that rather then the expensive system the company implemented. This is why people continue to do the old job even though the structure clearly shows that the job is now different.

Change challenges our certainty. We go in to work every day certain that we know what will be there and what we are there to do. We get used to it and in many cases it becomes part of us and who we are. When someone comes along and challenges that certainty, many people will hold on to what they know until they are sure that they understand "why" they need to change. If you don't provide any "why" or a robust "why" some will not let go of their current certainty at all, willing your change to fail so that they can get back to what they know is right or at worst actively working to subvert your change to prove you wrong.

Those that do come along because you have their trust, may not grasp the change with both hands and embrace it and engage in it. They may not even realise this themselves.

It's as if the word "why" is a filter to their beliefs. If the "why" is fully understood then the "what" will be too and the "how" will follow as they engage in your project. The less clear the "why", the more cluttered their filter and the less likely that the what and the how will have a smooth path to delivery of your objectives.

If your organisation is on the path of change, walk round a random sample of people and ask them "why were we doing this?". Any organisation that is set to successfully achieve the change will have consistency of reply and will find people happy to explain it and their part in it. The greater the variety of the answers, the more faces expressing confusion and the lack of certainty or willingness to discuss the change the less likely it is that the change will deliver.

And if your first 5 people say "what change?" you have real problems!