The prevailing conditions in the economic environment are placing contradictory demands on those who work in some of our most financially successful commercial organisations.
Living with the paradox of ‘take no risks and be more creative’ is causing a shift in the relationship between employer and employee. Special report from Khurshed Dehnugara, Managing Director, and Claire Breeze, co-founder of Relume Limited and co-authors of The Challenger Spirit – Organisations that Disturb the Status Quo. The consequences of this relentless recession are that organisations frozen in the headlights of an unforgiving economy and a deteriorating competitive position in the world. Can we find a way of working together that allows us to compete and grow? Recent research into Challenger Organisations, those that are successfully disturbing the status quo – may have something to offer in understanding how employers and those they employ can continue to foster a deep spirit of life, creativity and vivacity despite the challenges in the current environment. Led by recent world shaking events in the financial sector and oil and gas sector there is an increased sensitivity to any kind of exposure that would make an organisation vulnerable. At one level this is highly understandable as a response to the magnitude of consequences we have all been experiencing. At another it introduces an implicit message to employees in the organisations we have been researching and advising, take no risks.
This message is reinforced by many of the symbols and artifacts inside our worried organisations. Strategic pillars, themes and sub themes, simplicity programmes, internal reporting, hundreds of pages of analysis, thousands of key performance indicators. It is not hard to hide behind all that data. The message is well heard and heeded by many of those spoken to in the research. Struggling to maintain their effectiveness at a time when they also feel highly vulnerable to job insecurity, many of them default to high levels of presenteeism.
In the worst cases, the emphasis on control and risk avoidance gives the employee-employer relationship a deep sense of menace. The language and rhetoric of these organisations unconsciously exchanged in informal discourse is very revealing. People don’t just talk about being fired, they talk about being ‘shot in the head’ and ‘taken out’. Living with this kind of unexpressed anxiety can be brutalizing and pervasive. The deep need to survive fragments relationships and down-grades the psychological dynamic. It results in employees who are experiencing stress, are hyper-regulated and more concerned about underperforming than actually performing!
Be more creative
In itself this message of ‘take no risk’ would be manageable if it wasn’t matched by an equally loud message asking for more creativity. The recessionary period we are in doesn’t seem to follow a predictable path but in general our commercial organisations that have weathered the storm have done so by significant management of their cost base, building a strong balance sheet. Their attention now turns to growth rather than recovery, and innovation as the driver of that growth. The contradiction, take no risk and be more creative, is the backdrop against which the employer/employee relationship is shifting. Living inside this contradiction can be stressful and is especially so in a difficult employment market. Research data released by the CIPD this month suggested that stress has become the most common cause of long-term sickness absence in public and private sector organisations, for both manual and non-manual employees, overtaking acute medical conditions and muskoskeletal disorders. Our organisations are not going to be able to innovate if their employees are frozen, hiding or exhausted.
Establishment, rebel or challenger?
Against this backdrop there are large numbers of employees who sedate themselves and seek to find ways of disappearing safely into the Establishment practices and ways of being. There are a smaller number who Rebel, actively or passively and take a stance ‘outside’ of the organisational discourse. Looking to sabotage or destroy an organisational system that they are completely disconnected from and fearful of. There are a smaller number still who stay connected to the Establishment but find a way of adopting a Challenger stance. They find ways of working effectively on the border between the status quo and the novel.
Two Challenger patterns of behavior
The research findings from Challenger Organisations and Leaders suggest some helpful patterns of behaviour to pay attention to. There are seven of them in total, two are focused on here.
Witness the establishment
We use the term Establishment to denote the current habitual ways of working that are no longer effective. In the most successful Challengers we found a hunger and enthusiasm to find, surface and face into the 4’A’s – Avoidance, Agreement, Arrogance and Antagonism. Much of the work that needs to be done in transforming the employer – employee relationship requires a psychological and emotional opening up. As Rupert McNeill HR Director for Aviva UK, explains, deep collaboration does not mean there will be no conflict. In the Challenger context there is real attention paid to the quality of the dialogue in the business.
Anxiety in the Establishment manifests itself in a variety of ways, from avoidance of difficulty all the way through to excessive risk aversion through arrogance, and sometimes stopping along the way to indulge in blame or disassociation! However it shows up – it makes getting to the essence, staying in dialogue about complex or challenging realities, difficult. The management of anxiety, how it arises and goes on to manifest itself is linked to the inability of some organisations to really adopt a Challenger mindset. Once a Challenger has invested time and dialogue in Witnessing the Establishment, they compel the organisation to allow new Hope and Ambition to rise to the surface.
The psychological contract in Challenger Organisations is one of Hope and Ambition that employees experience as a deep connection to cause and possibility. When this is at its best there is an energetic liveliness in the fabric of the business that lends itself to experimentation, playing full out, and facilitating people to find their best contribution. The Establishment consensus would have us believe that visions have to be sculpted out of the dense rock of senior leader opinions and refined until they are elegantly encapsulated. After which they are returned to the organisation as a whole to be accepted. They involve a few people crafting something on behalf of the many. Unfortunately the more structured, efficient and heriarchical the process the less Challenger Spirit it ends with!
The Challengers in the research had a less controlled and more inclusive approach. They told us that they wanted their people to feel and experience their own significance in the workplace. In testing situations they still found talented employees, motivated to engage with companies that can offer them a sense that what they do matters.
The role of the HR Director in this very important journey is crucial. Bringing a compassionate focus to what shifts relationships in business is right at the heart of the Challenger approach to transforming engagement and performance. The hard part is doing this in a catalytic, messy, real time way – we use the phrase ‘leadership practice not leadership perfect’ to point to what we mean. These HR Directors are of course concerned with metrics and measurements of engagement and performance, they are without doubt business focused; but they are also undertaking something else on behalf of the business, which is crucial to Challenger success. They are unrelenting in their belief that collaboration at the human level is fostered and transformed in the moment by moment conversations and encounters that are below the radar of organisational initiatives. They are campaigning everyday for relationships in the workplace that make a difference to customers, employees and to business performance. They stand for opening up the organisation and its people to a possibility that the Challenger Spirit can be uncovered in many more of us. And that it will be beneficial to business and to the wellbeing of employees regardless of their roles.
“Challenger organisations take the possibility of honest conversations very seriously. They seek to create cultures and methods that keep the most important strands of employee discourse surfaced and attended to, rather than letting it slide underground. These methods do not have to be expensive or complex. Thankfully the answer to what deep collaboration looks like begins with a commitment to Witnessing the Establishment. To witness your own organisational establishment requires a joint participation between all segments of the company to take a good hard look at what is actually happening, rather than accepting either a more polarised perspective or a polished up version that glosses over the difficulties.
When you create methods for significant groups of employees and customers to really talk with their leadership in an open and sensitive way, you are engaging in something much deeper than feedback. It is more than just ‘the cold water of a friends criticism’, it is a transformational action that alters the engagement of people and their sense of responsibility to each other. So prepare to be surprised.
Notes: CIPD/Simplyhealth Absence Management Survey October 2011.
