Last week I attended another great webinar. It was hosted by Angie Alexander, of Corporate Catalyst Consulting, and she was interviewing Jeff Griffiths of WorkForce Strategies International. Regular readers will remember that I wrote about Griffiths last fall: in this post where I described his webinar "People Before Process," and then in follow-on posts (here and here) where I picked up a later question that he and I discussed afterwards and worked my way through it.
This webinar was called "Getting Sh*t Done! – Optimizing Performance through Human Centric Sage Leadership."* Ms. Alexander's starting point is the recognition that our internal attitude towards our work has a huge impact on our outcomes. Maybe that doesn't sound controversial when I state it so broadly, since the general message dates at least to the time of Epictetus. But Alexander then developed the point in some detail by identifying ten "saboteurs" (ideas or attitudes that get in the way of our working well) and five "sage powers" that combat the saboteurs and allow us to work with calm, clarity, and happiness. These five sage powers are:
- empathy, an unconditional love of yourself and others
- exploration, based on a love of learning
- innovation, a creative willingness to think of all the possibilities
- navigation, a search for purpose and meaning that asks "What's really important?"
- activation, moving forward without all the distractions
For my part, I spent the whole webinar thinking about the Quality business. I saw at least two places where the crossover is very strong.
One of these is in the area of problem-solving. You remember back in January I discussed the principle that "There is no such thing as human error." At the time I called this a "motivational slogan," and I emphasized how it is a useful approach if you want the cooperation (which you need) of people who were on the scene when an accident occurred. But this approach is just empathy in action, a willingness to see the events through the eyes of another person as a first step towards error-proofing the operation for the future. And after all, if your problem-solving exercise comes up with a solution that would work for you (if only you were the one on the scene) but that won't work for the people who actually do the job – in other words, if your solution lacks empathy for the people who have to implement it – then you really haven't solved anything and you can count on the problem to recur.
The other is in the area of auditing. One of the most dangerous temptations for an auditor is the desire to start telling your auditees how to do everything differently. In your mind it's simple: you know the management system standards, you've seen how those standards are implemented by hundreds of other companies, and these folks are simply doing it all wrong! And from the other side, pretty much every organization that goes through regular external audits has met one or more auditors who give into this temptation. I've talked before about how the line between auditing and consulting gets particularly fuzzy during internal audits; but during external audits it is important to keep it clear. And even in internal audits, you can't abuse your authority as an auditor just because the manager of this department stubbornly insists on doing things in a way that looks crazy to you.
For this reason, I have found it very useful when conducting audits to slow down, keep quiet, and listen. I'll ask how this or that part of the system works, and then just let the auditees talk. At first glance I might think they are doing it all wrong; I tell myself, "If I had designed their system, I would have done it differently." But it's their system, not mine. So if I wait and listen, after a while I can start to see the system through their eyes. I can start to see how the strange bits all hang together as a system. And I can see that my first objections were often based on my own failure to understand. At this point I may have some thoughts about how certain aspects can be improved – "Is there a risk because you aren't keeping minutes from this or that regular meeting?" – but I'm no longer going to ask them to redesign the whole thing from the beginning.
At its best, then, auditing deploys – or should deploy – all five of Alexander's "sage powers": empathy, to understand the client's system on its own terms; exploration and innovation, to look past the auditor's own preconceptions and see what the client is trying to do; navigation, to understand which topics really can put the client's system at risk; and activation, to proceed from there and find the nonconforming gaps (if any) which it will really add value for the client to fix. Of course if you find other nonconformities along the way you have to report them. But you provide the best service if you focus where it hurts.
It's not always easy, and at the end your list of findings may be shorter than it would have been doing it in a more directive way. But it's more helpful to work this way, which is the whole point. Besides, we're not paid by the finding. 😀
__________
* Yes, the second word in the title really did have an asterisk instead of the vowel.
No comments:
Post a Comment