Read Online The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless
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get a chance to come out
.
Managers and their experts often operate in a world apart from the people closest to the problems. They don’t understand one another or work well together. They have lost touch with the needs of clients and with the people they need to solve problems
.
Relationships between people and between functions are strained. Sometimes they don’t exist at all
.
Too many people are doing their jobs on autopilot. They are not enthused about coming to work; they don’t trust the idea of teamwork and are fed up with meetings
.
Inevitable? We think not. But these issues perpetually frustrate leaders, no matter where they are in the organizational hierarchy. Plus, many of the strategies they use to mitigate these “perpetual problems” do nothing to change the situation and sometimes make it even worse.
Around the globe, leaders employ an elaborate and expensive array of countermeasures to address these frustrations. Reward programs, cross-functional incentives, change-management experts, personal coaches, and external consultants are tapped to deliver results such as:
Build trust
Get people to speak up
Break down barriers between functions and levels
Motivate employees
Control bureaucracy
Reduce resistance to change
Minimize politics
Foster cooperation
Innovate more effectively
Make meetings useful and productive
Empower the frontline
Get people to contribute their full potential
These programs and investments rarely deliver the desired results. While they have merit in some situations, these approaches don’t have much influence on a main cause of the problems: how everyday work is performed. Too often, they make the problems worse and deepen cynicism in all directions.
Does any of this sound familiar in your situation?
The Bad News: Unintended Consequences and Side Effects
In spite of their good ideas or intentions, generations of leaders have been unable to turn their goals for more effective, productive organizations into reality. The bad news is that unmotivated employees, unproductive meetings, uncooperative work groups, and the rest of the problems leaders complain about are inescapable consequences of their leadership practices and of the way most organizations operate.
Here is why it happens.
Regardless of their own philosophy about leadership, people everywhere end up learning and using the same conventional top-down, command-and-control work practices—even leaders who consider themselves to be inclusive and participatory. Why? Because that is all they ever get exposed to. These conventional practices are routinely used in the vast majority of organizations, from first-level supervisor all the way to the top leadership levels. This grants top-down, command-and-control approaches unquestioned validity, and they are solidly embedded through all management layers and functions.
This explains why changes in leadership or organizational restructurings usually make no difference
,
Traditional ways of working together exist to get things done and produce results, the underlying assumption being that they are the ones that will use the minimum amount of resources. Top-down, command-and-control practices are not designed to build trust, motivate employees, prevent silos, or address any of the other aims that elude and frustrate leaders. Instead, unwittingly, these practices combine to create a system that is perfectly designed to generate low trust, feelings of powerlessness, exclusion, frustration, and fear. The only way conventional work practices vary from one organization to the other is the leader’s management style.
Leaders may be more or less inclusive, directive, or authoritarian, but they still end up using mostly the same practices. This explains why changes in leadership or organizational restructurings usually make no difference, because in most cases these routine practices remain the same: unaffected.
Over the years, the dysfunctions turn into norms; they are not seen as
.
Managers and their experts often operate in a world apart from the people closest to the problems. They don’t understand one another or work well together. They have lost touch with the needs of clients and with the people they need to solve problems
.
Relationships between people and between functions are strained. Sometimes they don’t exist at all
.
Too many people are doing their jobs on autopilot. They are not enthused about coming to work; they don’t trust the idea of teamwork and are fed up with meetings
.
Inevitable? We think not. But these issues perpetually frustrate leaders, no matter where they are in the organizational hierarchy. Plus, many of the strategies they use to mitigate these “perpetual problems” do nothing to change the situation and sometimes make it even worse.
Around the globe, leaders employ an elaborate and expensive array of countermeasures to address these frustrations. Reward programs, cross-functional incentives, change-management experts, personal coaches, and external consultants are tapped to deliver results such as:
Build trust
Get people to speak up
Break down barriers between functions and levels
Motivate employees
Control bureaucracy
Reduce resistance to change
Minimize politics
Foster cooperation
Innovate more effectively
Make meetings useful and productive
Empower the frontline
Get people to contribute their full potential
These programs and investments rarely deliver the desired results. While they have merit in some situations, these approaches don’t have much influence on a main cause of the problems: how everyday work is performed. Too often, they make the problems worse and deepen cynicism in all directions.
Does any of this sound familiar in your situation?
The Bad News: Unintended Consequences and Side Effects
In spite of their good ideas or intentions, generations of leaders have been unable to turn their goals for more effective, productive organizations into reality. The bad news is that unmotivated employees, unproductive meetings, uncooperative work groups, and the rest of the problems leaders complain about are inescapable consequences of their leadership practices and of the way most organizations operate.
Here is why it happens.
Regardless of their own philosophy about leadership, people everywhere end up learning and using the same conventional top-down, command-and-control work practices—even leaders who consider themselves to be inclusive and participatory. Why? Because that is all they ever get exposed to. These conventional practices are routinely used in the vast majority of organizations, from first-level supervisor all the way to the top leadership levels. This grants top-down, command-and-control approaches unquestioned validity, and they are solidly embedded through all management layers and functions.
This explains why changes in leadership or organizational restructurings usually make no difference
,
Traditional ways of working together exist to get things done and produce results, the underlying assumption being that they are the ones that will use the minimum amount of resources. Top-down, command-and-control practices are not designed to build trust, motivate employees, prevent silos, or address any of the other aims that elude and frustrate leaders. Instead, unwittingly, these practices combine to create a system that is perfectly designed to generate low trust, feelings of powerlessness, exclusion, frustration, and fear. The only way conventional work practices vary from one organization to the other is the leader’s management style.
Leaders may be more or less inclusive, directive, or authoritarian, but they still end up using mostly the same practices. This explains why changes in leadership or organizational restructurings usually make no difference, because in most cases these routine practices remain the same: unaffected.
Over the years, the dysfunctions turn into norms; they are not seen as
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