Asking for a raise. Reassigning responsibilities. Giving critical feedback to an underperforming employee. Saying “no” to a request. All difficult conversations. What are the hard conversations you need to have,  but don’t,  or don’t do well enough?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a book that rarely is more than an arm’s reach away. My copy is tattered, highlighted and post-it tabbed with years of use. The tools and techniques this book offers are ones I have found invaluable.

(In fact, we wrote a newsletter on the subject several years ago.)

In response to client interest, we have developed a one-day workshop that will aid you in having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success. The course deconstructs difficult conversations into manageable portions and provides practical and actionable tools to take back into the workplace or the homeplace.

We’ll start the day with examining the three conversations that are part of a difficult conversation: the “What Happened” conversation, the “Feelings” conversation, and the “What does this say about my identity” conversation. Then we’ll move forward to mapping the contribution system (wherever we are, we all contributed both good and bad), separating intention from results (“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.”), and how to shift the conversation from being about who is right, to a learning conversation about how to go forward from here.

An inaugural public workshop is being offered on Friday, November 12. Cost is $850 and includes all materials, course instruction, and lunch. Enrollment is limited.

Dedicated on-site workshops are also available and can be customized in length and topics to address the specific needs of your organization. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

And there’s another new workshop on the horizon…

Myers-Briggs Step II® Workshop Now Being Offered

Working in almost any organization today, chances are you have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. You know that you are a INFP (Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception) or an ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment) or one of the 14 other combinations of psychological type. The Wunderlin Company uses the MBTI® to help individuals, teams and entire organizations improve the way they communicate, learn and work. The basic MBTI® is designed help identify your natural patterns for accessing information, making decisions and relating to people.

But did you know that there is a second part (MBTI – Step 2) that helps people better understanding their unique expression of a particular personality type? The MBTI Step 2 takes each of the 8 scales from Step 1 and breaks them down into 5 sub-scales known as facets. This gives us not 4 ways in which we differ but 40!

The Wunderlin Company is pleased to announce a half-day workshop that focuses on providing a much more thorough analysis of the Step 2 data and its applications in terms of personal development, teams, organizations, conflict, coaching, emotional intelligence and communication.

This new workshop is being offered for the first time on Monday, August 23 from 8:00 – noon and again on Monday, October 18 and Monday, December 13. The cost of the workshop is $249 and includes the Step II diagnostic test, and course instruction.

For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

Fall Lineup Announced for Wunderlin Company Workshops
In addition to the two new workshops, we offer a whole series of workshops that mirror the services offered by The Wunderlin Company. Click on the one that will most help you polish your skills and get all the details.

Facilitating for Results
This introductory workshop provides leaders and managers with three days of experiential practice in both the skills of facilitators—asking effective questions, observing groups and making interventions—and the tools of facilitators—brainstorming, multivoting, gap analysis and others. The final day simulates a WorkOut style problem solving process.

Advanced Models for Facilitation
For the facilitator with some level of experience, our Advanced Models workshop enhances capability by working through Roger Schwartz’ Skilled Facilitator models, and introduces more sophisticated group processes such as Appreciative inquiry and Open Spaces and working on more complex team interventions. Advanced Models also customizes to the specific needs and requests of workshop participants with plenty of time for problem solving, Q&A and practice sharing with our very experienced and skilled faculty.

Coaching as a Leadership Skill

Often at the end of a coaching process, our clients will see the value in cascading the approaches of the one-on-one coaching process to a broader population of leaders. Coaching as Leadership Skill provides over two days the practice required to significantly improve manager’s effectiveness in communicating with and developing their associates.

Customized Leadership Development
We have also customized this workshop for several clients to specifically support their leadership development needs.

Effective Meetings
We all spend so much time in meetings… and almost universally find the majority of meetings to be a poor use of time. This half day workshop provides nine practical and immediately applicable practices for improving meeting effectiveness.

Discover Your Strengths and Put Them to Work
Building on Marcus Buckingham’s book Now Discover Your Strengths, this team building workshop enables teams to look at their collective and individual strengths and reorient both their work allocation and leadership development.

We offer these workshops both in-house and by subscription. For more information, please email us at: kw@wunderlin.com or give us a call at 502.895.3689.

If you subscribe to the “what’s new” approach to organizational change, Work-Out might seem like yesterday’s news.  But, recent experiences reinforced Work-Out’s continued relevance. In some ways, arrival of tough times for all organizations has made Work-Out – and concepts like it – more contemporary than ever.

The Wunderlin Company’s approach to cultural change is rooted in our collective experiences with GE’s Work-Out process. Work-Out places the work to be done (or the problem to be solved) in the middle of an organization and surrounds it with the people who know it best. This unlocks new resources for problem solving.

From the beginning, Work-Out was a source of major transformation at GE.  In the mid 80’s GE was still a stodgy, monolithic enterprise, weighed down by bureaucracy and bureaucrats.  The earliest Work-Out wins were in the moments that we observed the combination of problem-solving teams asking, “Why do we do things this way?  What if we could try…” and leadership teams saying, “I’m listening….and I’ll support you to make that change.”  It’s a transformational combination!  And, more than 20 years later, it’s exactly the same in organizations who are just beginning Work-Out.

While the process is directed from the top of the organization, it is implemented with broad participation from employees throughout the organization. Work-Out develops broad coalitions across the organization. Employees start to care deeply about success because they are connected to the organization and can make change happen. The Work-Out process also provides a vehicle for organizations to optimize speed, cost and quality – without compromising any of these measures, and results in new levels of success.

Proof it works

Last year, we helped a financial services organization introduce Work-Out and facilitated a number of their early problem-solving sessions.  A highlight for Laura occurred when true “breakthrough thinking” occurred, resulting in a 90% cycle time reduction.  By making a few simple changes to their standard business contracts, the contract negotiation process was shortened and the legal department was no longer consumed by iterative “red lining” of agreements.  It was proof that Work-Out really works – even in a legal department!

Early on in Karen’s consulting career, The Wunderlin Company was engaged to instill the Work-Out process throughout Louisville city government. From the city garages, to garbage pickup to purchasing processes, we worked with government employees to tackle difficult problems and the results were nothing short of remarkable – in terms of time and money saved, citizen services improved, and overall morale boosted. In fact, the program was so successful that the Louisville government was awarded a Ford Foundation Innovations in Government Award to teach other cities how to implement the process.

Carol worked recently with a utility distribution business that was able to save $1.8 million by buying pre-fabricated parts and expects to save nearly $20 million by rolling out the program system wide – all thanks to the Work-Out process. That same company was also able to make similar improvements to its collections, prepayments and safety programs.

Another example of success was a Safety Work-Out that was instrumental in turning around a difficult ongoing trend for the company, achieving a 25% reduction in preventable motor vehicle accidents and OSHA recordables within one year. The company also revamped the entire Accident Prevention Manual in just five days with 35 union and 15 management employees.

Why it works

Work-Out gets the whole system in the room. How many times have you or an associate been frustrated by a work process that you know can work better… but how to make “those people over there” – whether it’s production or people in the field or finance – cooperate?  An essential tenet of Work-Out is to get the whole system in the room.

Work-Out significantly shortens decision times. A typical task force meets for two hours every week or so for a couple months, presents to leadership, and then waits days, weeks or months to hear the final decisions.  With Work-Out, teams work with a facilitator for 2-4 days, and then leadership joins the group.  The teams make their recommendations for improvement and leadership makes the decision on the spot. In 20 plus years of leading Work-Outs, we have yet to see a Work-Out session that received less than 80 percent “Yes’s” to the recommendations – and that isn’t because senior leaders become easy marks in public forums; it is because if you ask the people who do the work how to do it better, they know and they come up with highly workable solutions.

Work-Out is much better than training. Frequently leaders talk to us about how to get employees to change their behavior.  What we have seen is the “double benefit” of Work-Out experiences – in addition to identifying and implementing recommendations to improve business results, associates learn new ways to do their work.  A participant in a Work-Out about fleet maintenance told us a year after his Work-Out experience “If I came in tomorrow and we went back to the old way of working, I would quit.”  Now that’s sustained organizational change!

People support what they help create. In Work-Out, participants own their approved solutions. Instead of “selling” their good ideas to the rest of the organization, the organization gets involved in selecting the best approaches to improvement, making implementation go more smoothly and faster.

The Work-Out process is elegant in its simplicity – yet deceptively powerful on so many levels

• You can get traction quickly working on important problems or opportunities.
• You can increase associate involvement and ownership in generating solutions. The people closest to the work are called upon to create and own the solutions; thereby creating support and buy in.
• You can breakdown real (or imaginary) organization boundaries – between manufacturing and engineering, sales and marketing, field and headquarters –because you start to look at the process end-to-end and with a customer-focused perspective. Participants gain valuable perspectives on their jobs and learn about other processes within the company. Leaders can demonstrate a way of leading that engages people in a more transparent and interactive way and gives associates, those closest to the work, the power of being involved in decision-making.

Here’s how it works.

1. Leadership identifies a critical organization issue or problem.

2. A small group of people from several functional areas comes together for uninterrupted work time with the pressure of a deadline as a catalyst and the assistance of skilled facilitators to support their work.

3. The group works to develop and present recommendations it can implement.

4. Leadership hears their recommendations and gives a “Yes,” “No,” (and here is why) or “Further Study” and then empowers teams to implement approved recommendations.

5. The teams implement accepted recommendations.

6. The teams come back together at a predetermined time (usually 90-120 days later) to report their progress.

At its core, Work-Out is a means for driving cultural change. In the short term, you can increase efficiency, improve work processes, eliminate nonessential work, involve your people in the process and increase communication. Long term, it empowers your people, sustains productivity improvements, and, perhaps most importantly, creates true partnerships.

What has to happen?

Senior leadership has to support the Work-Out. Participants’ most common fear: “Senior management will never really let us do this.”

Planning is critical. A small group of folks has to spend a couple weeks crafting the question to be answered, recruiting the right people to participate and gathering relevant background information.

Skilled facilitators are needed. Teams need a facilitator who knows Work-Out, and is highly skilled in bringing cross-functional teams to a high-performance state. The facilitator ensures the Work-Out teams’ efforts are focused and efficient, completing specific Action Plans to be accomplished within 90 days. The group must feel free to disagree, discuss, explore and problem solve in a short, intense period.

Try Work-Out

If you want to quickly see results, try Work-Out. If you want to improve dialogue, remove barriers between functions and bust bureaucracy, try Work-Out. If your work group has been wrestling with an issue for some time or is struggling to improve its performance, try WorkOut.

In 2010 being able to move quickly to take advantage of emerging opportunities and to streamline processes differentiates recovery from continued struggles.  When considering your department or organization’s recovery strategy, consider working in Work-Out—it really works!

– Warren Buffet, 2008 Letter to Shareholders

Sounds awfully gloomy, doesn’t it? Reminds me of the ballad which begs hard times to “come no more” and made fresh by Bob Dylan as he strums and laments: “Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.” (Click here for video of Dylan’s rendition). As I talk with business owners and organization leaders I almost expect them to break out into the chorus: “Hard times, hard times come again no more.” What is one to do?

Last week I took two actions to help me survive these tough economic times. Both felt like positive steps forward. First, I made a conscious decision to limit the amount of news I listen to. Avoiding reality, you say? Shying away from the truth, you wonder? I prefer to think I am preserving the sense of balance that shrill pronouncements of defeat and ruin drown out. Yes, I still listen selectively to NPR, watch the national news and read the New York Times (albeit, I pick up the Style section before tackling the World in Review). But I’ve quit listening to the “talking heads” predicting gloom and doom at every turn. I don’t need that. Thank you.

The second thing I did was read two publications that helped me frame my thoughts about the economy: Warren Buffet’s 2008 Letter to Shareholders (22 single spaced pages) and renown business writer Ram Charan’s Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty (138 pages). I highly recommend both publications, but since I realize that many of my colleagues and clients are too busy to read even these useful publications, this post highlights two quotes from Buffet’s letter and a summary of Charan’s points with some added examples.  For leaders in the not-for-profit and public sector, I have also attempted to “translate” Charan’s guidance into your frame of reference.

Charan begins his book by noting, “Whether you lead a small group of people or a whole business unit or company, these next few weeks, months, and years will test you.”

In responding to that test, he advises that you transfer your attention to cash.  “Your focus must shift from the income statement to the balance sheet.  Protecting cash flow is the more important challenge.”  You know the three sources of cash in your organization—earned funds (or donated funds in the not-for-profit world); working capital invested in inventories and accounts receivable, and proceeds from the sale of assets.  Make maximizing the cash flow from these three streams your relentless focus.

Another important change is shifting your focus from growth to gaining cash efficient market share. What Charan is referring to is that growth your organization can attain without excessive outlays of your precious store of cash. And, shrinking to providing only those products and services that provide cash will be a mandate. “Eliminate the rest,” he implores – that means shrinking will present opportunities to simplify your processes and reduce the layers of management.  In the end you will have fewer customers, fewer products, fewer facilities, fewer people, fewer suppliers –and a stronger [organization].”

In this new environment leaders need to dive into the details of operating their organizations in unprecedented ways.  Charan calls this “hands on, heads in”.  In adopting this leadership stance, we will all adopt a more intense approach to managing our companies.  We will communicate more with sales or development people, field people, our customers, and our employees who will need an ongoing balance of information from you about both the challenges of the current reality, and your optimism that your organization will come out in 2010 or 2011 healthy and strong.  The cycle for measurement and rewards will compress. Charan advises, “You have to increase your frequency of control, setting targets on a quarterly, monthly or even weekly basis.  Aggressive actions and decisions build optimism and confidence—your own and others’.”

The Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times
Charan argues that the new economic reality changes the attributes leaders must have for success.  Think about your work, your decisions and your leadership since September.  Which of the following are your strengths?  Which do you need to intentionally add to your repertoire?

Honesty and credibility. Do the folks in your organization absolutely trust you to tell them the truth, even when it is a difficult truth?

The ability to inspire. How skilled are you in finding the compelling strands in your organization’s or department’s future and knitting them into a story behind which your folks can align?

Real-time connection with reality. To what extent are you getting real-time information from your customers, clients or donors?  Basing decisions from even January’s information could be very misleading

Realism tempered with optimism. How balanced are you in your communication and decision-making?  Have you unwittingly become the prophet of an apocalyptic future?  Or are you clinging too hard to the belief that this will all go away in 90 days?  How skilled are you at finding that balance?

Managing with intensity. What is your personal energy level these days?  To what extent are you modeling “Hands on, Heads In?”

Boldness in building for the future. What investments are you making with limited resources to ensure your organization’s or department’s strength when the recovery does kick in? Again from Buffet’s most recent Letter to Shareholders:

“Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 211⁄2% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of challenges. Without fail, however, we’ve overcome them. In the face of those obstacles – and many others – the real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”

The balance of Charan’s Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty is organized around the actions, skills and decisions required for the major functions in most organizations, many of which build on the concepts already outlined.

Despite my swearing off (or maybe weaning off) of gloomy news programs, I did catch a recent NPR report (click here to listen) on the Arizona Diamondbacks which illustrated the success organizations can achieve in implementing Charan’s approaches (although as far as I know, Charan and the Diamondbacks are not in contact!) The Diamondbacks have lowered their cash breakeven by implementing a player acquisition strategy that keeps them significantly under the salary cap.  They forgo marquis players with back-loaded ten-year contracts in the hundreds of millions in favor of talented but lesser known players. They are adjusting their products and services to suit the times—you can now bring your own food to the baseball park, or for $25 you can sit on the suite level and enjoy their All You Can Eat Buffet.   Their General Manager, Derrick Hall notes their philosophy is “One Fan at a Time”.  By maintaining this highly personalized approach to customer satisfaction, their season ticket sales remain strong.  Hall noted that they are working with their season ticket holders to define packages for next season that fit their reduced circumstances—such as partial or split season tickets—and keep them coming to the ball park.

I hope this post has inspired at least one or two new approaches or tweaks to your leadership that will make you more effective, and more confident, and your organization more successful during these most difficult days. I’d love to hear from you about what is working for you and what you are doing to survive. Please post your comments as a REPLY in the box below.

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A New Look Is Coming Your Way

We are currently revamping The Wunderlin Company website and blog to make the format and content more engaging for our readers. We will let you know when it is up and running and available for your perusal. In the meantime, you can still visit us at www.wunderlin.com. or contact Karen at kw@wunderlin.com.

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count.
It’s the life in your years.
~Abraham Lincoln

2008 is proving to be a year of tremendous challenge for many of us. The financial markets continue to decline, oil prices have ascended to unimaginable prices – and then descended at a “bends-inducing” rate, there is continued uncertainty about the health of the global economy, contamination in the food supply… You name it, it seems like many areas of our lives are in turmoil.

In our year-end issue, we recognize these stresses and challenge ourselves to “seize the day!” That’s right: carpe diem, make the most of current opportunities. There is much we cannot control—so let’s focus on what we can control.

We are firm believers that people who make things happen – who seize the day – act as if time is at a valuable premium. (Well, isn’t it?) When we say “seize the day,” we mean seize this moment, develop a powerful sense of urgency around your projects and plans. Your sense of urgency is what makes dreams come alive and work for you.

Seizing the day is one way of being (at least slightly) in control of your life – even while parts of it seem to be spinning out of control.  Winston Churchill said, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

While you may not be able to control the world, you can control how you respond to it. So wake up! Get going! Life is short and time is fleeting…Over the next six weeks, we’ll give you our top suggestions for how you can seize the day. We begin with this one:

Push yourself to breakthrough thinking
Successful inventors, entrepreneurs and writers say they are often asked where their big ideas came from.

So goes the lead line in a story by Mickey Meece in the New York Times about the 2008 IdeaFestival which happens to take place in my hometown, Louisville, KY. Meece’s NYT article points out that breakthrough thinkers “will acknowledge that serendipity often plays a role. But equally as important, they say, is having an open mind — especially in tumultuous times like these. Big and small ideas are out there, they say, if you are looking for them.”

Now heading into its 10th year, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading and highly diverse thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation, imagination, and cutting-edge ideas.  The multi-day festival is presented as a non-linear program designed to stretch people’s horizons and promote breakthrough thinking… utilizing multiple venues to showcase, discuss and “connect” important ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc.
I attended the IdeaFestival this year and came away with a number of business relevant ideas. Under normal circumstances I would not be in a conference for gamers or neuro-biologists, but the opportunity for my brain to bounce literally from one thought-provoking and unfamiliar topic to another provoked new ways of thinking for me.

A surgeon, a global leader in his specialty, attended this year and was so energized by the experience he is proposing that he and all his colleagues attend next year to assess for themselves whether they are really thinking innovatively and pushing themselves to the highest levels of new thinking.

Here’s advice from one of the IF presenters, Jane McGonigal, a top game designer and future forecaster: “You have to systematically expose yourself to things outside your domain because the breakthrough ideas will come from areas where you are not constrained by doing the daily job.”

Innovators at the 2008 IdeaFestival offered 10 suggestions on how to come up with new ideas. Click here to see their list.

Positive Image; Positive Energy; Positive Action

This new approach to organizational change, called Appreciative Inquiry, emphasizes and builds on a company’s strengths and potential. It asks the question: “What is working around here?” Organizations around the world find that the answers create tremendous positive energy.

Here’s how a typical Appreciative Inquiry session might look, as described by leading practitioners and authors Jane Magruder Watkins and Bernard J. Mohr in a Harvard Business School article by Tom Krattenmaker, entitled, “Change through Appreciative Inquiry.”

1. Make the focus of inquiry positive. Seek out what is good and right about your organization. A company interested in improving client relations could ask: “When have customers been most pleased with our service, and what can we learn and apply from those moments of success?
2. Elicit positive stories. Use interviews to evoke stories that illuminate an organization’s distinctive strengths. When the organization is functioning at its best, what characteristics are present? Unlike data or lists, positive stories stir imagination and generate excitement about the company and what it is capable of accomplishing in the future.
3. Discover common themes. Through the shared stories, find what elements are common to the moments of greatest success and fulfillment. Look for the ones that are most promising and inspiring as components of a desired future. According to Watkins, “The themes become the basis for collectively imagining what the organization would be like if the exceptional moments uncovered in the interviews become the norm in the organization.”
4. Create shared images for the future. This stage in the process asks employees to create a future in which the high points identified in the stories are the everyday reality. The team then designs the structure – the policies, business processes, resources, etc. – for achieving the desired future.
5. Find innovative ways to create that future. Finally, the employees identify specific ways to bring the preferred future to life.
   

Want to Learn More?

You can read more about Appreciative Inquiry. Here are some books we recommend: The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry, by Sue Annis Hammond. Appreciative Inquiry, Collaborating for Change, by David Cooperrider & Diana Whitney, Berrett-Koehler. Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination, by Bernard J. Mohr and Jane Magruder Watkins. The Power of Appreciative Inquiry, by Diana Whitney & Amanda Trosten-Bloom. Lessons from the Field, Applying Appreciative Inquiry, edited by Sue Annis Hammond, & Cathy Royal, Ph.d. Encyclopedia of Positive Questions Volume One: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Bring out the Best in Your Organization, Diana Whitney, David Cooperrider, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, and Brian S. Kaplin.

What I have come to know is that storytelling, done appropriately, is the key to catalyzing change. It doesn’t replace analytical thinking; it supplements it by enabling one to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. The right story can communicate complicated change ideas while generating momentum toward rapid implementation. The right story can help an organization reinvent itself by getting into the minds of individuals and affecting how they think, wonder, agonize, and dream about themselves and their organization. It can help them see things in a different light and change behavior. Simply put, a powerful story can transform individuals and organizations. It can drive commitment and action.

This issue is devoted to the art and craft of storytelling in the business environment. Settle in and journey along with us as we explore this powerful tool for managing change.

Craft the Right Kind of Story to Accomplish Your Business Goal

Different kinds of stories achieve different results. Crafted and told properly, a story can spark action, communicate who you are, transmit values, foster collaboration, tame the grapevine, share knowledge, or lead people into the future.

Choosing the right narrative form allows you to accomplish your business goal. Business author Stephen Denning explains how to pick your story carefully to match it to your business situation. Denning advocates that the ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill.

To determine which kind of story to tell, ask yourself:

• What do I want my listeners to FEEL after they hear my story?
• What do I want them to REMEMBER from my story?
• What do I want them to BELIEVE as a result of hearing my story?

Are You a Good Listener to Other People’s Stories?

Being a good listener to other people’s stories has a big payoff.

First of all, people who are good storytellers learned how to tell stories by listening to others and picking up storytelling skills from them. It may have been a parent telling you a bedtime story, or it may have been a teacher who made the subject come alive through storytelling, or perhaps it was a manager who achieved remarkable results through the stories she told. But from each you can learn what storytelling techniques really work and then you can weave them into your storytelling efforts.

Secondly, by being a good story listener, you can learn a great deal about the people and environment around you. Business guru Tom Peters has long advocated “management by wandering around” as an effective leadership tool. It works because you hear stories as you wander. By listening to the stories of your employees and customers you can uncover problems and solutions that you may never have otherwise known existed. And only by knowing about them, can you respond.

In her book Corporate Legends & Lore, Peg Neuhauser reminds us that “storytelling is a two-way street that requires telling and listening to forge strong relationships with lasting results.”

Questions to Consider for Getting Stories Started in Your Organization

Whether you are the supervisor of a work team or the CEO of a large company, storytelling can be one of your most effective management tools. Even if you are not an experienced storyteller, your job is to continually talk about and emphasize the key values and goals of your organization. If you are relentless in this effort, you will find that members of your organization will take this “material” and fashion their own stories to exemplify these key values. In her book, Corporate Legends & Lore, Peg C. Neuhauser poses six questions to consider for getting stories started within your organization:

• What are the two or three key ideas or themes about this business that the people who work in this organization associate with me?
• When and where can you repeatedly bring up these themes so that everyone knows they are on your mind all the time?
• What stories are they already telling that have these themes?
• How much time do you spend listening to other people in your organization, at all levels, tell their stories?
• When and where could you repeat stories you have heard that represent the themes you want to encourage? Or, how could you get other people to repeat these stories?

Using Storytelling to Determine: What does Your Organization’s Future Look Like?

Here’s a way that we use storytelling techniques when working with organizations to envision their future.

Working with a group, we tell them: “It is January 2010 and you have just learned that your organization will be featured in Fortune magazine’s June edition. In addition to a cover photo, the magazine will include a full feature on your organization. The reason your organization was selected is its outstanding success over the last five years.” We then ask them:

• What/who is on the cover of the magazine? Draw it on a flip chart.
• What is the title of the article?
• Please write an outline of the article. Be sure to include quotes from your customers, professional staff and employees, industry experts, and competitors. Describe the factors that have contributed to your outstanding success. Note the barriers that had to be overcome.

When each individual is done with this exercise, we have them exchange stories with other members of the group and then identify what the stories had in common and what was unique among them. Later they share their collective story with the whole group and then work to develop a common vision from the stories.

A Gatherer of Stories

by Judy Futch, associate of The Wunderlin Company
I’m a gardener. I have a variety of baskets and crates and two wheelbarrows to carry produce, weeds, tools, rocks, and plants. If I go into my garden and find too many ripe tomatoes that I can’t hand carry, I improvise and use the tail from my workshirt as a carrying sling.

Stories are like my carrying devices – they hold the richness of people’s experiences, their beliefs, values, hopes, and dreams and also dark-side fears and blocks. Stories operate on two levels – the level of the story text and the level of the subconscious – where the images conjured up in the telling simmer and mix. Our thinking mind is engaged answering the questions who did it or how did that happen? and our imagination and intuitive intelligence is awakened and engaged making connections, enlarging our ideas, stretching our boundaries, and stepping outside our current realms of possibilities.

Everyone is a storyteller – a weaver of their experience. If we operate from the assumptions that people in organizations are rich with insights and understandings to share about their positive perspective of the organization, and that by asking questions the organization begins to shift in the direction of the inquiry, then it makes sense to ask our organizational “partners”:

• What are the best times that you have had at our organization – a time that you felt most alive, involved, or excited about your contribution?
• What do you value deeply about yourself, your work, and our organization?
• What do you think is at the core of this organization – what would make this organization more vital than it currently is?
• What in our organization gives you confidence for the future?
• If a genie emerged from a bottle and gave you three wishes for this organization, what would they be?

The stories that emerge from the simple asking of these questions can be “mined” by listening appreciatively for the words, phrases, ideas, and emotions and truly hearing the responses. This approach begins the appreciative inquiry process which seeks to understand the forces within an organization that encourage vitality. EPA, Roadway Express, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, University of Kentucky Hospital, and ANZ Bank (Australia’s largest bank) all have embarked on appreciative inquiry processes to align their organizations and to accelerate whole system changes.

We have included a number of resources you may want to explore on our website. Visit www.wunderlin.com to check our favorites on this subject. Or step out into your hallway and ask a colleague for a story about a time when they felt “most excited about their involvement at your workplace.” Be that gatherer of stories! “Stories are like my carrying devices – they hold the richness of people’s experiences, their beliefs, values, hopes, and dreams and also dark-side fears and blocks.”

“Let’s Count Motion Instead of Doors”

In one of the first Workouts at GE Appliances we had a team of employees working on a number of refrigeration factory productivity issues. One of those issues was the factory’s inability to consistently manufacture the same number of refrigerator cases as doors. Numerous analyses and continuous improvement projects had been initiated in this highly automated plant to address the issue; none successfully. At the report out on the last day, a manufacturing engineer stood up to begin presenting an idea. Soon, a member of the team, a union member who actually worked on the line, stood up and said, “Here, let me tell them what’s really going on.” He went on to recount how he worked downstream from the paint booth. Because of his quality circle training, he knew that a door with a drip, crack, or imperfection should not go to the customer. So he would pull those doors to be reworked. Trouble was, right past him was an electronic eye that counted motion, not doors—so the system didn’t know that hook was empty! This fellow’s idea was, “Let’s start counting doors instead of motion.”

This story so graphically demonstrated many of the issues we were struggling with to transform the organization—it got told and retold.

Managing by Storying Around

The story above comes from Karen’s experience at GE. In his book, Managing by Storying Around: An New Method of Leadership , author David Armstrong offers a collection of 75 stories from his experience running a family business. Each of Armstrong’s stories has a moral. They work for him because he “invests a bit of his soul in each of these small sagas.” It makes for good reading-and makes a good case for the power of storytelling within your organization!

Emotional intelligence refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions in ourselves and in our relationships. Simply put, emotional intelligence is the intelligent use of emotions. It encompasses maturity, emotional health, and “grownupness.” You intentionally make your emotions work for you by using them to help guide your behavior and thinking in ways that enhance your results.

For leaders, emotional intelligence accounts for almost 90 percent of what sets “stars” apart from the mediocre. And organizations that build emotional intelligence in groups are the ones that are vital and dynamic today – and will remain so in the future.

Unlike IQ, EI can be developed and dramatically increased at any age. But boosting your EI takes extensive practice, feedback, and personal enthusiasm for making the change. Are you up to the challenge?

[audio:http://www.wunderlin.com/audio/changingtimes8.mp3]

Using a Mix of Leadership Styles Yields Positive Results

Emotionally smart leaders know that being flexible with their leadership styles pays big dividends. They know that instead of choosing the style that best suits their temperament, they adopt the style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation.

The most successful leaders have strengths in the following emotional intelligence competencies:

• self-awareness
• self-management
• empathy
• and social skill.

Researchers have identified six basic styles of leadership; each makes use of these EI competencies in different combinations. The leadership style that is chosen in any given situation dramatically affects the way that managers motivate direct reports, gather and use information, make decisions, manage change initiatives and handle crises.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled: Leadership That Gets Results, author Daniel Goleman presents the six leadership styles and suggests situations in which they are effective and those in which they are likely to backfire. Here’s a brief overview of how Goleman describes the styles:

1. The coercive style. This “Do what I say” approach can be very effective in a turn-around situations, a natural disaster, or when working with problem employees. But in most situations, coercive leadership inhibits the organization’s flexibility and dampens employees’ motivation. This style demands immediate compliance.

2. The authoritative style. An authoritative leader takes a “come with me” approach: she states the overall goal but gives people the freedom to choose their own means of achieving it. This style works especially well when a business is adrift. It is less effective when the leader is working with a team of experts who are more experienced than he is. This style mobilizes people toward a vision.

3. The affiliative style. The hallmark of the affiliative leader is a “people come first” attitude. This style is particularly useful for building team harmony or increasing morale. But its exclusive focus on praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected. Also affiliative leaders rarely offer advice, which often leaves employees in a quandary. This style tends to heal rifts in a team or motivate people during stressful circumstances.

4. The democratic style. By giving workers a voice in decisions, democratic leaders build organizational flexibility and responsibility and help generate fresh ideas. But sometimes the price is endless meetings and confused employees who feel leaderless. It is best used to build buy-in or consensus, or to get input from valuable employees.

5. The pacesetting style. A leader who sets high performance standards and exemplifies them himself has a very positive impact on employees who are self-motivated and highly competent. But other employees tend to feel overwhelmed by such a leader’s demands for excellence — and to resent his tendency to take over a situation.

6. The coaching style. This style focuses more on personal development than on immediate work-related tasks. It works to develop people for the future. It works well when employees are already aware of their weaknesses and want to improve, but not when they are resistant to changing their ways.

Goleman tells us, “The more styles a leader masters, the better.” Being able to switch among the styles as conditions dictate, “creates the best organizational climate and optimizes performance.” While most leaders have a predominate style, they need to work to expand their style repertories. They can do so by first understanding which emotional intelligence competencies underlie the leadership styles they are lacking, and then by working to increase develop those competencies through measurement, practice and feedback.

EI Leadership Dimensions Build Upon Each Other

Work Without Emotion is Like an Opera Without Music

In his book, Primal Leadership Daniel Goleman outlines the four leadership dimensions of emotional intelligence. He contends that the dimensions build upon one another. For example, self-awareness is crucial for self-management; self-management, in turn, is crucial for success in terms of social awareness and relationship management. As Goleman points out: “None of us is perfect on this scale; we inevitably have a profile of strengths and limits….the ingredients for outstanding performance require only that we have strengths in a given number of these competencies….and that our strengths be spread across all four of the areas of emotional intelligence.” While he tells us there are many paths to excellence, in general, leaders who exhibit sensitivity to the range of needs and individual differences in their organizations get the best performance results.

Our emotional intelligence determines our potential for learning the practical skills that are based on these competencies. Our emotional competence measures how much of that potential we have translated into on-the-job capabilities. As Goleman explains it: “Being good at serving customers is an emotional competence based on empathy. Likewise, trustworthiness is a competence based on self-regulation, or handing impulses and emotions well. Both customer service and trustworthiness are competencies that can make people outstanding in their work.” He goes on to explain that “Simply being high in emotional intelligence does not guarantee a person will have learned the emotional competencies that matter for work; it means only that they have excellent potential to learn them.”

The foundation of Goleman’s model is self-awareness. Self-aware people recognize their emotions and their effects on others. The second tier, self-management, demands knowing one’s inner resources, abilities, and limits. The third and fourth tier deal with “People Skills.” Each tier builds on the one below it.

Emotional Intelligence in Action

From Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman: “The aptitudes you need to succeed start with intellectual horsepower – but people need emotional competence, too, to get the full potential of their talents. The reason we don’t get people’s full potential is emotional incompetence.”

“If you are part of a management team, you need to consider whether your organization fosters these [EI] competencies or discourages them. To the degree your organizational climate nourishes these competencies, your organization will be more effective and productive. You will maximize your group’s intelligence, the synergistic interaction of every person’s best talents.”

From a Harvard Business Review article entitled: Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance, by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee:

“Emotional intelligence travels through an organization like electricity over telephone wires. Depressed, ruthless bosses create toxic organizations filled with negative underachievers. But if you’re an upbeat, inspirational leader, you cultivate positive employees who embrace and surmount even the toughest challenges . Managing for financial results, then, begins with the leader managing his inner life so that the right emotional and behavior chain reaction occurs.”

From The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace by Cary Cherniss and Daniel Goleman:

“The higher one’s position in an organization, the more important EI is; EI accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the success of organizational leaders.”

And, finally, from the Harvard Business Review article entitled Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff:

“Group emotional intelligence is about the small acts that make a big difference. It is not about a team member working all night to meet a deadline; it is about saying thank you for doing so. It is not about in-depth discussion of ideas; it is about asking a quiet member for his thoughts. It is not about harmony, lack of tension, and all members liking each other; it is about acknowledging when harmony is false, tension is unexpressed, and treating others with respect.”

Emotional Competencies: Guidelines for Learning

The good news is that emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, can be improved throughout life. Our emotional intelligence tends to increase as we learn to be more aware of our moods and the moods of others, to handle distressing emotions better, to listen and empathize – in short, as we become more mature.

Developing emotional intelligence differs from intellectual learning in fundamental ways. It requires developing new behaviors – and this takes practice over time. Intellectual learning can take place in a classroom; emotional intelligence learning takes place best in life and over an extended period of time. Nevertheless, teaching emotional competencies can be accomplished using the following guidelines, which are offered by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, a coalition of researchers and practitioners from business school, the federal government, consulting firms, and corporations.

• Assess the job. Training should focus on the competencies needed most for excellence in a given job or role.
• Assess the individual. The individual’s profile of strengths and limitations should be assessed to identify what needs improving.
• Deliver assessments with care. Feedback on a person’s strengths and weaknesses carries an emotional charge.
• Gauge readiness. People are at different levels of readiness.
• Motivate. People learn to the degree they are motivated – for example, by realizing that a competence is important to doing their job well – and making the competence a personal goal for change.
• Make change self-directed. When people direct their learning program, tailoring it to their needs, circumstances, and motivation, learning is more effective.
• Focus on clear, manageable goals. People need to understand the competence and the steps needed to improve it.
• Prevent relapse. Habits change slowly. Relapses and slips need not signal defeat.
• Give performance feedback. Ongoing feedback encourages and helps direct change.
• Encourage practice. Lasting change requires sustained practice both on and off the job.
• Arrange support. Like-minded people who are also trying to make similar changes can offer crucial ongoing support.
• Provide models. High status, highly effective people who embody the competence can be models who inspire change.
• Encourage. Change will be greater if the organization’s environment supports the change, values the competence, and offers a safe atmosphere for experimentation.
• Reinforce change. People need recognition – to feel their change efforts matter.
• Evaluate. Establish ways to evaluate the development effort to see if it has lasting effects.

These guidelines appear in Daniel Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence book and on The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations web site: www.eiconsortium.org.

Build the Emotional Intelligence of Teams and Boost Their Overall Performance

Just like individuals, the most effective teams are emotionally intelligent ones. And like individuals, emotional intelligence can be built within teams. A team’s EI isn’t simply the sum of its members’ EI; rather, it comes from norms that support awareness and regulation of emotions both within and outside the team. Teams with a high EI build the foundation for true collaboration and cooperation – enabling the members to feel that they work better together than individually and enabling them to boost their overall performance.

To build EI within a group, the members must be aware of and constructively regulate the emotions of the individual team members, the whole group, and other key groups with whom it interacts. They can do so by establishing EI norms – rules for behavior. For example, a group’s norm for regulating the emotions of individual team members might be: “to encourage all group members to share their perspectives before making key decisions.” A norm for the whole group might be: “Regularly assess the group’s strengths, weaknesses, and modes of interaction.” And one for other key groups might be: “Designate team members as liaisons to key outside constituencies.”

These norms serve to build emotional capacity and influence emotions in constructive ways. The norms outline the attitudes and behaviors that eventually become habits.

They serve to support behaviors for building trust, group identity, and a belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart. At the heart of these behaviors are emotions.

A group’s emotional intelligence is not about learning to suppress emotions; rather, it’s about bringing emotions deliberately to the surface and understanding how they affect the team’s work. It is also about building relationships that strengthen the team’s ability to face challenges.

Intrigued by EI? Want to Learn More?

The Wunderlin Company has been using this body of work on emotional intelligence for a number of years with our clients. It provides a springboard for helping our clients understand how their emotions impact their own success and those with whom they work – staff, suppliers, and clients.

We have a number of resources that we use extensively with our work on this subject. Take a look at the books on our “bookshelf” for further learning about this essential subject:

Boyatzis, Richard, Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee. 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Cherniss, Cary and Daniel Goleman. 2001. The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Goleman, Daniel. 1998. Working with Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books.

Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam Books.

Pearman, Roger R. 2002. Introduction to Type and Emotional Intelligence, Palo Alto: CPPI, Inc.

Weisinger, Hendrie, Ph.D. 1998. Emotional Intelligence at Work, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

We also recommend the following articles from The Harvard Business Review:

Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance (Product #8269).

Leadership That Gets Results (Product #4487).

Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups.

And check out this website:

The web site for The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (www.eiconsortium.org) is packed with research findings including model programs, business cases for EI, practice guidelines, and downloadable reports.

And finally, The Wunderlin Company is so committed to integrating knowledge of EI into our work that we cover it extensively in all our workshops. For more information visit: www.wunderlin.com/workshops.

Leaders today face a dilemma: we are accountable for results and for making good decisions, but our work is so complex that it is the folks who work for us who have the information we need to make those good decisions. Increasingly, the leaders who know how to draw out the best in individuals and in the organization as a whole, who focus on the positive images of the future and guiding those images toward real results, are those who succeed.

Leaders today need to be able to create meetings and work structures that close that gap between the information and the decision.They need to be able to focus on asking, instead of telling; on listening, instead of talking; and on building consensus, rather than dictating.

The Wunderlin Company has embraced this facilitation model for years and we are seeing more and more of our clients adopt it as a way to work. In this issue, we’ll provide you with a look at some tools and techniques that make this model so successful.

Brainstorming: A Tool for Getting More and Better Ideas

By Debbie Galloway

Good facilitators have a full set of tools they use to create buy-in, generate active participation and empower people to take charge. One such tool that allows people to explore new ideas and challenge traditional thinking is called “brainstorming,” and if used correctly, is guaranteed to generate a wide range of solutions for any given problem.

Brainstorming is fast and fun. It allows a group to put a full range of ideas on the table before decisions are made. It’s free-form approach not only wakes up the group by getting their creative juices flowing, but it often results in some very original solutions to problems.

The premise behind brainstorming is that it taps into the thinking resources of the entire group. The ideas generated from a brainstorming session are likely to be far more numerous and more creative than those generated by traditional problem-solving techniques.

In a brainstorming session everyone is encouraged to freewheel their ideas. The more ideas the better, even if they seem silly or frivolous at the time. The rules are few and simple:

• No debating and no judgment. No one is allowed to criticize another’s ideas, not even with a groan, giggle or grimace.
• Hitchhiking allowed: build upon the ideas of others.
• Be humorous and creative.
• Everyone participates.
• Think in new ways. The more ideas, the better. The wilder the ideas, the better.
• And finally, spelling and penmanship don’t count!

Even though the rules are few and simple, running a brainstorming session requires some very specific facilitation skills. Here’s a look at how to run a brainstorming session.

1. Introduce the technique and rationale.

2. Distribute the necessary materials for recording ideas. Our favorite way is to use markers and 5×7 cards. Instruct the participants to write one idea per card horizontally. Post the cards with tape or pins on a wall. (You can also use flipcharts, however you can only go as fast as the scribe can write and it makes it much less efficient during the sorting and prioritizing phase.)

3. Review brainstorming rules and write on a flipchart the question/issue on which the group is generating ideas.

4. Start the session. You will need to prompt, restate the question, urge participation. When people have run out of ideas, allow for a few minutes of thinking time and reflection. Sometimes the best ideas will surface on second thought.

5. Only after everyone has run out of ideas, should you discuss each idea in detail. Sort and combine them.

6. Agree on the final list of best ideas using criteria the group defines.

Remember, you must consciously follow the rules. Don’t allow any criticism of suggestions during brainstorming. Ensure that all the participants participate. And most of all, remember to have fun!

Well-Timed Questions Can Help Your Group Learn from One Another

by Kathy McSweeney

A leader skilled in facilitating can play a pivotal role in how productively a group meets. The facilitative leader’s responsibility is to create an environment in which the group’s best thinking can be shared, creative solutions developed, and constructive decisions agreed upon. The responsibility may feel daunting, but leaders have a number of powerful resources from which to draw.

Well-timed questions are a core resource to the leader as he or she guides group discussion. In facilitating discussion, the leader is less often the expert; instead he or she is usually attempting to learn from one another and to help the group learn from each other. The leader may have to switch gears from his or her usual style, especially if that style is “take charge.” Questions can enable that to happen.

Leaders have different types of questions available for guiding discussion. One of the most potent types is the OPEN-ENDED QUESTION, which is meant to stimulate discussion. An open-ended question can encourage participants not only to answer more fully but also to think more broadly or deeply about a subject. Open-ended questions are not answered with a single word or phrase. They often begin with words like “how”, “what”, and “why”:

• “How can we best spend the remaining meeting time?”
• “How will the proposed solution affect you?”
• “What happens if we take no action now?”
• “Why is the project temporarily bogged down?”

Open-ended questions discourage participants from prematurely taking definitive positions on issues that have not yet been thoroughly discussed.

Related to the open-ended question is the GREATER-RESPONSE QUESTION. The leader can use this kind of question to gain understanding and to add depth to participants’ involvement. Greater response questions typically begin with one of three words: “describe”, “tell”, or “explain”:

• “Can you describe how we typically handle telephone complaints?”
• “Could you tell us more about the public’s reaction to the policy?’
• “Would you explain to us why our new system still costs more to operate?”

A participant will often ask questions of the facilitator as a follow-up to a remark made by the facilitator or another participant. If the question relates to the content of the meeting, consider redirecting it to the whole group. For example, a participant might ask you:

• “Why is motivation so low at this point?”

As the facilitator, you might respond by redirecting the question:

• “What does the rest of the group think about why people have been losing energy for the process? That question needs to be answered by someone who’s in daily contact with the team. Joan or Robert, what are your thoughts?”

At times, the facilitator needs to bring closure or clarification to a topic being discussed. Before doing so, it’s important that all participants are together in understanding where the issue stands. At such times, FEEDBACK AND CLARIFICATION QUESTIONS are appropriate:

• “Eric, if I understand correctly, you are saying we should adopt Pat’s suggestion?”
• “Where are we at this point; will someone summarize our position?”
• “Who can paraphrase the group’s opinion?”

When you are looking for a brief response, use a closed-ended question, which can encourage a “yes” or “no” or another one or two word response. For example:

• “Do we have his buy-in yet?”
• “How many new customers are included?”
• “What is the date of the meeting?”

Closed-ended questions can also bring a topic to conclusion and move to the next point:

• “Who could summarize what we’ve discussed?”
• “Have we reached agreement?”

When a participant has been offering wordy responses, you can help that person move toward brevity with a closed-ended question:

• “Can we count on your support for the project?”

When facilitators are under stress, we may overuse closed-ended questions to reassure ourselves that the group is listening and engaged. If you hear yourself asking a series of quick questions, ask yourself if the discussion is advancing. If not, pause and ask an open-ended question.

Closed-ended questions are designed to shorten response. If relied on too much, they may frustrate discussion; well-timed, they help move discussion along.

It is important for facilitative leaders to refrain from LEADING QUESTIONS. Leaders are more effective in leading group discussion when they are aware of their biases and opinions. A leader may feel strongly about a subject and think it is important to communicate that opinion to the group. In that case, it is more effective to state one’s opinion and follow with a question about the group’s opinion. For example, “Don’t you think . . . ?” or “Wouldn’t you rather . . . ?” are actually pseudo-questions. Instead, the leader can say something like: “I think we should take the risk in this case. What does the group think about that?”

Even with skillfully constructed, well-timed questions, leaders have not completed the requirements of productive questioning. Giving the group time to consider the question and formulate responses is essential. This means that the leader must be silent for brief spaces of time, which may feel uncomfortable when first facilitating discussions. Silent pauses, however, provide valuable time for the facilitator to think and to observe the body language of the group.

So, ask the right question and then listen and observe. There’s no telling what you and your group might learn!

Capitalizing on What is Working!

Applying Appreciative Inquiry in Daily Work Life

by Judy Futch and Doug Silsbee

What would happen in your workplace if the leaders of your organization or department asked questions that evoked new possibilities from the people being asked? What would happen if a critical mass of your organization systemically interviewed each other with questions like:

What were the peak times of organizational excellence — when people experienced the organization as most effective?

What were the unique factors that made our record earnings possible?

What things do you value most about yourself? The nature of your work? The organization?

What three wishes would you make to heighten commitment and enthusiasm in this organization?

A key factor is not only the inquiry but also the commitment to truly listen to the responses. Recently a friend’s 4-year-old son confronted him. John thought he was successfully juggling several tasks at once. His son, demanding his attention, said “Dad, did you hear my words?” “Yes, son, I heard your words.” “But Dad were you listening?”

Are we willing to listen to what gives life, health, and vitality to our organizations? The subtle shift would involve moving from focusing on what is not working to focusing on common values, empowering moments in our histories, shared aspirations for the future and the creation of preferred futures. This shift in focus is what Appreciative Inquiry is all about. It focuses attention on what is working within an organization.

The first step is to discover and value those factors that give life to the organization through an interviewing process. Second, you envision what might be — creating a positive image of a preferred future. Third, you engage in dialogue to move from individual appreciation to a collective appreciation, from individual commitment to a group commitment and to shared vision for the whole. Fourth, you construct the future through innovation and action. Because the ideas are grounded in realities (in the stories that were initially generated) there is the confidence to try to make things happen.

Organizational change begins with the first questions you ask. The questions asked set the stage for what is found, and what is found (data) becomes the material out of which the future is constructed. The outcome of this four- step process? An organization built on a commitment to valuing the individual and the whole, a future designed by innovation and openness to “breakthroughs” and a respect for past accomplishments and individual achievements. It all starts with asking questions to capitalize on what is working now!

On our Bookshelf

There are a number of excellent books on the subject of facilitation. Here’s a list of some our favorites:

Bens, Ingrid. Facilitating With Ease. Sarasota, Florida: Participative Dynamics, 1997.

Dyer, William G., Team Building: Current Issues and New Alternatives. Reading, Masssachusetts: Addison-Westley Publishing Company. 1995.

Hammond, Sue Annis. The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry. Plano, Texas: Kodiak Consulting.1996.

Hunter, Dale; Bailey, Anne; Taylor, Bill. The Art of Facilitation. Tucson, Arizona: Fisher Books. 1995.

Kaner, Sam. Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers. 1996.

Schwarz, Roger M. The Skilled Facilitator: Practical “Wisdom for Developing Effecitve Groups. San Francisco, California: Jossy-Bass Inc. 1994.

Thiagarajan, Sivasailam. Facilitator’s Toolkit. Bloomington, Indiana: Workshops by Thiagi, Inc. 1998.

The Workshop, a creative work space in Louisville, KY, is marketed with the tag line: “the power of play at work.” That tag line captures perfectly my belief that we need to “play” more to improve our performance. It is through “play” that we practice and perfect our skills.

The folks at The Wunderlin Company have long used experiential activities as effective tools for changing behaviors. Since 1995 we have increasingly turned to simulations because these experiences offer such rich learning opportunities for our clients.

In this issue of “Changing Times,” we’ll take a look at how simulation games change the way people do their work. Let us know if you find something in this issue that captures your imagination as a potential tool for improving the way you work. We’ll be glad to elaborate!

An Interview with Thiagi

Simulations: Learning from Behavior

Karen recently had the opportunity to work with Thiagi, game creator extraordinaire. They spent the day looking at Karen’s new simulation game and talking in general about simulations. Reproduced here are some of his observations about the value of simulations.

“The best way to learn something is ‘on the job,’ but that can be very dangerous and very costly,” cautions Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, Ph.D., a highly regarded simulation game creator, trainer, and educator. “The next best thing is simulations.”

And simulations are something that Thiagi knows a lot about. He is a much-published author on the subject and the creator of BARNGA, a globally recognized, cross-cultural communication game that has been translated into seven languages.

“Everyone learns through simulations — from the most primitive of societies to the most sophisticated corporations.” It is an intrinsic way of learning. He points out that as children play, they learn a lot through simulation — whether it’s playing house or playing dress up. Adults learn this way too. “Play,” he explains, “is one of the most powerful and least used strategies for improving human performance.”

According to Thiagi, using simulations is an ancient form of teaching. “The game of chess is one of the earliest simulation games that still exist today. And during World War I, a number of war games were developed to teach soldiers military tactics.” Thiagi has seen the use of simulations in the corporate world grow rapidly in the last two decades.

“People do not learn from the actual simulation, rather they learn from reflecting on how they behaved during it,” explains Thiagi. “Simulations don’t distort a person’s behavior, rather they hold it up as a mirror to it. And in some cases, it’s a magnified mirror.”

Providing the Perfect Opportunity to Practice

In a recent article in Fast Company magazine entitled “Game Over,” Peter Carbonara reports that simulations are “a tool sweeping business.” He notes that “people are making tougher decisions in less time with fewer resources. Even as competition gets more complex, the margin for error shrinks. Being great at business today requires something few people have — opportunities to practice. That’s the real value of simulations.”

He points out that “actors, athletes and musicians wouldn’t dream of performing without practicing. But where and when do businesspeople practice? Most of the time they attend the school of hard knocks — encountering new situations, making mistakes, learning from what goes wrong. But learning from real mistakes gets expensive — both for the company and the people who make them. Simulations create “virtual practice fields” that allow people and teams to test their assumptions and experiment with new ideas without having to suffer financial reversals or career setbacks.

Carbonara says that in order to work, simulations need to follow a few basic rules. “First, they have to feel real . Second, the exercise should focus on well-defined choices…. And third, the players should be able to see a direct connection between their decisions and the company’s performance in the market.” He points out that “one of the most powerful virtues of simulation is that it compresses the time between action and outcomes.” Carbonara concludes by offering “best practices on how to practice:”

• Never forget the point of practicing is to learn how to get better.
• Good practices force people out of their existing mind-sets and routines.
• Practice works best when it puts people on the spot — that is,
  when it requires them to take decisive action.

Mark Chussel, cofounder of Advanced Competitive Strategies, says in the article that “the ultimate result of good practice is to develop leadership qualities that are all-too-rare in business today: the courage and confidence to take risks.”

A Good Debriefing Session Makes a Great Difference

What happens if participants in a simulation have a great time — but learn nothing? Worse yet, what if some participants become confused, frustrated and upset?

One role of a good facilitator is to conduct a debriefing which connects simulation experiences to real world situations so that participants learn how to productively change their behavior.

In the debriefing session, the facilitator allows the participants to talk about how they feel, getting strong emotions off their chests. Then they help the group collect data about what actually happened during the simulation.

The facilitator helps them understand that the activity is a metaphor and draws from them real-world analogies. The participants can then apply their insights to new contexts.

That’s when the real learning takes place! Participants define how they will change their real-world behavior as a result of the insights gained from the simulation.

A well-orchestrated debrief makes the difference between a fun day playing games and a fun day where teams gain new insight into improving their effectiveness.

Virtual Gourmet: Building Sandwiches; Building Teams

In a simulation, participants experience a situation in a “neutral” form, which enables them to see and learn from what’s happening, and to experiment with effective responses. Virtual Gourmet, a simulation developed by Doug Silsbee, is a good example of this and one that The Wunderlin Company has used several times with great success.

A major global bank was rolling out a new program that involved “virtual teams.” Senior account managers and technical experts around the globe were newly organized in a highly flexible structure to coordinate sales strategy and technical solutions for major global clients. For each client, the “team” membership and responsibilities were different. A simulation was perfect for identifying the skills and behaviors required by this complex, decentralized and ambiguous environment.

The bank’s new initiative required the managers to:

• assemble a coherent picture of customer needs from highly fragmented information;
• identify specialist and technical resources within a complex system, and access needed information;
• coordinate efforts of team members across time and space; and
• maintain a clear focus on the desired results while overcoming organizational “noise” and chaos.

A good simulation has a structure, metaphorical to the real business situation, that includes an enticing challenge and a satisfying resolution. In the case of Virtual Gourmet the enticing challenge is creating gourmet sandwiches. The satisfying resolution is a meal for each participant if they effectively apply the required skills. Participants work in geographic “regions” (i.e., separate rooms), communicating via phone.

Participants play roles and have limited information about customers and team structure. Ingredients such as smoked turkey, gorgonzola cheese, and kaiser rolls are located throughout the simulation world, most often other than where they will actually be needed for sandwich construction. The challenge is to assemble an integrated picture of the desires of each team’s customers, identify the ingredients that are needed and available, arrange to have them delivered to where they are needed, build the actual sandwiches, and deliver them to the dining room. Successful resolution of the challenge provides a delicious sandwich for each participant (and consultant)!

After dining, the client group analyzes the simulation and engages in frank discussion of related business issues. Beginning with the voices of real sandwich “customers,” the group then talks about how they sought to identify and meet customer needs, and the consequences of the choices they made. The review winds up with a discussion of the strategies needed to be effective in actual business situations. The clients who have tried this simulation have found it fulfilling on a number of levels, feeding both the body and spirit!

Aha…Get it with K’nections

It’s 9:30 p.m. You have been locked in the team warroom since 8 a.m., but the team still hasn’t been able to agree on what your product’s storage capacity will be. Finance has been calling every hour looking for your decision because they can’t do their work until the bill of materials is complete. And your marketing members have been on the West Coast all week doing consumer research when they are needed here with the team. What will you tell your boss at the milestone review tomorrow?

Teams who practice the decision-making and team skills that they face everyday at work are far more likely to succeed in the real business world. That’s the theory behind K’nections, a new simulation created by Karen Wunderlin.

K’nections is a simulation that creates change by allowing participants to internalize the experience of effective teams.

A number of international corporations now use K’nections to launch new teams down a positive path and are doing so with remarkable results. Brown-Forman is one such company. “We used K’nections to infuse our B.L.A.S.T. teams with the knowledge and spirit of effective team decision making and found it to be a very powerful learning experience.” relates Phil Lichtenfels, vice president of leadership and development. He explains, “In one day these teams previewed the roller coaster they would be on for the next several months. The insights they gained and the changes they made to how they were doing their work contributed significantly to their ultimate success.”

Here’s How it Works

Teams of 4-8 individuals research, specify, design, build, demonstrate and market a meeting-efficiency product that is built of K’nex, a construction toy. The team must factor in such variables as cost, time to market, concurrent work, team effectiveness, and market success.

Participants have specific process and function roles on the team (i.e., timekeeper and financial). The teams work their way through five simulation periods completing specific tasks during each phase. During the final period, the entire simulation group convenes to present their marketing launch presentations and to demonstrate their products. The energy, fun, humor and enthusiasm of this time reward the groups for their hard work and enable them to benchmark their results.

Every decision the team makes has a price, cost, market-share or market-size implication, which is ultimately measured as the profit-ability of their product. During the debrief, participants reflect on their experiences and identify ways to apply that learning to their work. The day is filled with lots of “Aha!”s as the teams “get it with K’nections.”

We are in the business of helping clients define and implement the changes necessary to compete in today’s competitive environment. We’ve come to realize that how successful our clients are depends, in large part, on how good they are at executing the plans they conceive. Why are some companies so good at it? And why do others fail miserably? In this issue, we visit with executives who we believe are really good at “getting things done”. We asked them to share their thoughts on execution in broad terms and then to divulge their secrets for how they go about getting things done.

Leading with Your Heart and Soul

Authors Larry Bossidy (vice chair of GE and chairman of Honeywell International) and Ram Charan (legendary advisor to senior executives and boards of directors) contend that an organization can only execute well if the leader’s heart and soul are immersed in the company.

In their recent book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done Bossidy and Charan tell us that “leading is more than thinking big, or schmoozing with investors and lawmakers, although those are part of the job. The leader has to be engaged personally and deeply in the business.” They make the point that execution requires a comprehensive understanding of a business, its people, and its environment. “The leader is the only person in a position to achieve that understanding. And only the leader can make execution happen, through his or her personal involvement in the substance and even the details of execution.”

The authors argue that the leader must be in charge of getting things done by running three core processes – picking other leaders, setting the strategic direction, and conducting operations. They claim that “these actions are the substance of execution, and leaders cannot delegate them regardless of the size of the organization.” The leader has to run the three core processes and “has to run them with intensity and rigor.”

Here are their arguments for why the leader must run the processes:

• Only a leader can ask the tough questions that everyone needs to answer, then manage the process of debating the information and making the right trade-offs. (And only a leader who’s intimately engaged in the business can know enough to have the comprehensive view and ask the tough incisive questions.)
• Only the leader can set the tone for dialogue in the organization. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. The authors ask: “Is the dialogue stilted, politicized, fragmented, and butt-covering? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions.”

In their book, the authors detail the leader’s role in each of the three core processes (people, strategies and operations). To read more about their book or to order it, Click here.