I presented some of my PhD research outcomes on “Why Power, Authority, and Direction Need Systemic Alignment to Create Performance”. One insight relates to the importance of purpose within an organisation setting and how it can be used as a vehicle to bring people together. However, if there is misalignment, this can create divisions in places where you’re trying to achieve harmony.
All this talk of purpose got me thinking about my own personal drivers for success. Many years ago, a line manager of mine highlighted that ‘you wear your heart on your sleeve’ when he was commenting about how upset I was about something in the workplace. The comment helped me to reassess how I respond to workplace difficulties and I made a change, which benefited my career, leading to a number of significant promotions over a ten-year period. What I learnt was not how to shut off from my emotions, but how to manage the external impact of these until I was certain how best to respond. In doing so, my responses to important work situations were more measured, appropriate and impactful.
Emotions, Power and Resistance
Emotions are part of the human essence. The only person who knows if you are being true to your emotions is you. It is incredibly powerful if you are able to harness this positively in the workplace.
The topic of emotions connects with another subject that I referred to within my PhD findings, power. As a consultant in the Organisation Design space, I am in the business of defining how formal power is exercised. Power is probably the most important managerial mechanisms that we help construct—everything hinges off who has power and who agrees to submit to it.
Much of the current discourse within contemporary business suggests that it is optimal to distribute power across flatter organisation structures, creating the myth that we’re all more equal than we once were. However, whatever decision-making and power mechanism is put into place, there is a submission to a higher authority, or a choice not to. Essentially, all parties involved either agree or don’t and then create an agreement on how to proceed. Agreement is pivotal to the exercising of power. Without this it is rendered diffused. I say agreement, because power is bounded within a form of co-dependency.
Within organisations ‘Resistance’ can be as powerful as managerial power, if it is used to frustrate a change activity or action. The model below (a refinement of the Beckhard-Harris change model) highlights this phenomenon. It is something the other consultants and I at ON THE MARK work with as part of our Accelerated Change Readiness approach (ACR).
‘But the manager can sack a resistant employee, surely that makes them more powerful?’…well, yes and no, it’s a bit like chopping off a toe, because you stumbled in on the side, slightly overkill. You might manage without it, but there’s probably a better way to deal with the situation. Explicit or implicit threat to use such power is problematic at best. We all know this—it’s expensive, time consuming and is very high risk both practically, and also in terms of workforce psychology. There is a better way.
Value Co-Creation: From Dissatisfaction to an Inspired Vision to Taking the First Steps
In order for change to be successful in an organisational setting, it needs to be centred on the notion that you are reliant on others to make change happen. In doing so, there is acceptance that managerial power is not omnipotent. It is dependent on employees’ willingness to accept change.
What is there to gain by behaving in a dictatorial fashion in 2018? Other than inflating one’s own ego, the only other result is that people perform subversive tactics in order to appear as though they have complied, when in reality they haven’t. In the worst case, where disfunction is high, the tactics might not even be subversive. Simply put, people use their emotions, and therefore personal power, against the wishes of the manager in question.
The quickest way to create resistance to change is to try and impose it. The very reason to pursue value co-creation activities through engaging the whole organisation in the design process is to pay attention to the realities of power. In doing so, we help highlight issues and realisation from within the organisation that things could be better, which in turn creates legitimate dissatisfactionwith the status quo and motivation to do something different. In combination with collective purposeyou create enthusiasm leading to increased energy and a visionfor something new. This is gold dust in organisation change activities. Once people come together, they can achieve almost anything they put their minds to.
Between dissatisfaction and vision, you have created motivation to make the first stepstowards something new. No one was threatened, no one was made to feel like the history of working in the organisation had no meaning. What has been created is a recognition that now is time to make a change. And that change is wanted by a majority rather than an elite minority.
Why Our First Reaction to Change is Usually Resistance
In traditional change management activities, the employee is completely cut out of a process that allows them to be included and have a legitimate voice, which leads to resistance. We all see the world through our own working lives and perspectives, therefore even if we are dissatisfied we are unlikely to have the full picture as to the reasons why. By nature, any organisation of scale has to segment the work in one way or another. This segmentation leads to a narrowing of focus (for good reasons) on your own world. It makes things more manageable at both the organisational and individual levels.
When someone external tells you that there is a deficit that you must change, often the automatic reaction is a feeling of threat, even if the language used is objective. The individual is often so engrossed in identity made through work that the critique is heard as a personal attack. Extrapolate across teams, departments, sub-units of an organisation and you have resistance to what might well be a perfectly logical argument for change.
Humans are emotional. We use emotions for the good or ill of our organisations depending on the context. There is no power bestowed on managers to wave a magic wand and create enthusiasm for a change. Change is built on the basis of psychological pain (dissatisfaction) of the current situation achieved through collaborative efforts to understand the now, hope (vision) that something better is possible, and then finally action (first steps) to move towards something better leading to reduced propensity to resist the aforementioned change.
Is your whole organization aligned on purpose?
