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Monthly Archives: March 2017

Don’t Clobber the Dibber Dobber

17 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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CEO, dibber dobber, dobb, graded assertiveness, Julian Assange, no blame culture, open disclosure, snitch, Swiss cheese

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In this age of revived nationalism, more and more people are turning to their traits or defining aspects of their culture as a way of bonding and injecting passion into nationhood. Perhaps that is because they have seen this sense of identity progressively eroded over the years through globalisation. I know from my British friends that some of this sentiment bubbled to the surface in Brexit. So what defines us as Australians? Well it is sometimes hard to disaggregate the typically Australian aspects of our culture, given it is essentially a melting pot (our First Australians aside) of our colonial and European past. That said, I’m sure on surveys or Family Feud the most commonly identified aspects that define us as Australians would be things like, mateship, outdoorsy, giving everyone a fair go, neighbourly, laid back, sports mad, non-whinging and my personal favourite we don’t ‘dibber dobb’.

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For my non-Australian readers to ‘dobb’ is to go and tell tales on someone, also known as to rat them out, snitch, squealer, tattletale, weasel, sneak, fink, canary …you get the picture. I have worked in seven countries and with the exception of the Middle East, where they have no particular qualms with this aspect of daily life, all other places I have worked have had the same underlying principle. No-one likes a tattletale it seems. In Australia though, perhaps harking back to our convict past, we are particularly hot in our disdain for the ‘dibber dobber’, the name we attribute not so affectionately to those who turn ‘weasel’. You only have to look around at whistle blowers to realise they never seem to come out of the foray unscathed. Morally intact I am sure, but financially and emotionally they are bruised and a number must be tinged with some regret about what they did. Labelled a ‘dibber dobber’, it is well-nigh impossible to shake that moniker. While admired by many even Julian Assange (the biggest dibber dobber of them all and ironically an Aussie to boot) is loathed by perhaps even more because he exposes stuff.

What happens in the workplace in terms of culture often reflects the meta culture of the country as a whole. With Corporations increasingly acting as States it is no surprise that cultural issues not directly aligned to a business focus e.g. marriage equality, are permeating both culture and policy. I’m sure most workplaces have a whistle blower policy. We do. There is also legislation to back this up, in Queensland known as the Whistleblower Protection Act 1994. Even the title suggests that the dibber dobber will not get an easy ride as the Act tries to forge some protection for them. And they sure need it because our workplaces, as microcosms of society, have a deeply held ethos that you don’t ‘dobb your mates in’. Here the ‘dobbing’ is linked to the other strong cultural trait of ‘mateship’ and as our work colleagues are known as our ‘workmates’ you can begin to see how difficult it is for someone to actually call something out.

A friend of mine gave me a very good example the other day. He runs a business where he came across a situation he wasn’t happy with. On trying to get to the bottom of it, which was a clear breach of their own standard operating procedures, was told by one worker that he had spotted the issue but that he didn’t want to raise the matter given it would be seen as ‘dobbing in’ his workmates and his boss. The potential cost of the mistake was over $50,000 not much short of that individual’s wage. When confronted with this figure he apparently just shrugged and said he couldn’t because he didn’t want to be seen as someone who tattletales on his colleagues. On hearing this it made we wonder how much lost productivity, re-working, and, more alarmingly, injury hangs off the back of a misplaced loyalty that is inculcated in our workplace culture?

As a CEO I, and I am sure the majority of my CEO colleagues, want to know when things aren’t right. We can’t be everywhere and sometimes the view from the top obscures what’s happening on the ground. One of our few defences in this case is having a culture of open disclosure that allows for things to get reported up before they become a real issue. For those who know their safety theory, as a CEO you want to know an unravelling situation well before most of the holes in the Swiss cheese have lined up. We have an open disclosure culture at work but on reflection I could not say hand-on- heart that my own team members would abandon workmate loyalty for near-miss reporting.

There are a number of reasons why team members might remain quiet when they should really speak up. The obvious first one is they do not want to ‘rat out’ their mates. Social interaction in the work environment is for many the significant contributor to workplace enjoyment so it will take quite some degree of concern to overcome this hurdle. Loss of face for self and others is another. No-one wants to be seen, or have their mates be seen as a doofus in the workplace. We spend the majority of our life at work and for many it defines us, so being confronted with a situation where your very competence might be called into question is a good reason to quietly let something slip under the carpet – management none the wiser. Equally, a strong motivator for keeping stumm is for fear of punishment. Using this line of reasoning is more complex as there is a judgment to be made between the consequence of being punished for owning up, versus the punishment if caught out. It’s an easy one really but quite often wrongly calibrated. Managers and supervisors, in my experience, are much more forgiving with self-reporting of mistakes or errors. Some companies have even introduced ‘no blame’ reporting which has, in turn, had its own unintended consequence with a lackadaisical approach to the job given there is little ultimate consequence. A sort of ‘if I mess I just fess’ culture. A ‘my bad’ and move on approach. This is not helpful either.

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To solve this is not an easy matter. First and foremost we need to give our team members the requisite skills to raise a concern. This is the communication tool known as graded assertiveness and I firmly believe it should be taught in schools starting at primary level. Having a vernacular to challenge and raise concerns that potentially addresses the loss of face issue and removes the personality component is essential, not just in business but in life. When dealing with an aggressive or forthright manager when you are less so is a challenge, but learning an escalating vernacular that can be deployed almost in an autonomic way is one means to get around this. Secondly, when someone does raise a matter it is essential that the person who does so is protected. Knowing in the Australian work setting how big a deal this is managers should not take the reporting of a concern so lightly. The temptation to react strongly and ‘nip the problem in the bud’ should on most occasions be avoided without first thinking how the reporter gets protected in the process. In Australia recently we had an example of an individual from India who used a friend’s passport to pass himself off as a Doctor. The truth came to light 11 years later and only after he had left Australia. You can’t tell me that in those 11 years of practice someone somewhere didn’t scratch their heads and ask the question. Perhaps him being a doctor and top of the tree in that work setting was a major factor in this?

It is essential in the workplace to encourage people to report things that don’t feel quite right. Intuition is often the best guide to things being not quite as they should be. So perhaps it’s time to come up with another word for someone who reports issues in the workplace in the interests of the business; one less pejorative. I’m thinking dobber dibber. Imagine the conversation. ‘ I’d rather be a dobber dibber than a dibber dobber’. Only then will we see just how childish this long-held cultural norm is.

Stop Working and Start Playing

17 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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When was the last time you were rewarded at work for playing around? Quite a while ago, or maybe even never? I attended a session the other night on setting goals using a value-based approach. It was hosted by NAWIC, which is the National Association of Women in Construction. This sprang to mind as I opened my laptop on the eve of International Women’s Day. I was the token ‘bloke’. Where some of the guys might have been a bit threatened is that the session started with some meditation and focused a lot on mindfulness. More enlightened managers embrace new ideas like mindfulness in the workplace for the many benefits it accrues not only for the individual but also for the workplace.

 

The simplest definition I can find for mindfulness is ‘the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something’. So it’s essentially about presence. Another way of putting it, as my father used to say, is ‘having your wits about you’. Those who know my work, know of my interest in the various quotients required to be a successful manager. IQ everyone knows about and even those with just a cursory understanding of management practice now know of EQ. I discussed DQ (Diplomacy Quotient) in a recent blog with particular reference to Donald Trump. I now want to talk about SQ (Situational Quotient). SQ is presence, or putting it another way, mindfulness breeds situational awareness. Being present makes you hyper-aware of your surroundings enabling you to spot when things are not right.

 

I travelled to Sydney recently and my bag got pulled aside by the security team for checking because, of all things, I had left a set of Allen keys in there. I placed them in there on the weekend to put them in the garage but forgot to take them out. A fine example of lack of presence. They were spotted by the woman operating the carry-on luggage bag scanner at the airport. A fine example of presence. In fact the job of looking at a security scanner all day is a classic example of where you really want someone to be working mindfully in their job. Their job is to sort out what doesn’t look right – so they are looking at patterns that don’t look quite right. This is a very complex task on the face of it, given our technology today requires a myriad of chargers and headphones and emergency battery storage devices, hard drives USB sticks etc. all of which get thrown in at the last minute into your carry on bag. How they achieve their degree of focus, in what is essentially a fairly low paid job, always amazes me.

 

What I have observed in those security areas, almost without exception everywhere in the world I have travelled, is a certain level of banter between the staff. They have no requirement to be customer focused. Their customer is the Government or airport operator so interactions and in-jokes etc. while rude elsewhere – in a retail setting for example – are not inappropriate. What I recall from my mindfulness training, so well delivered by The Potential Project, is the notion of beginner’s mind. Bringing the questioning or critical (as in critical thinking) mind to play in such situations enables the staff to sort chaff from wheat as it were. Beginner’s minds are best represented by the curiosity of children who have not had the life experience to build up patterns of normalized behavior and are therefore less likely to take things for granted. The adult brain is much more sophisticated, or so we think. We know from experience, don’t we, what feels right and what feels out of place. It is a basic function of the reticular activation system part of our brain. That is the part of our brain that when we are looking to buy a particular new car we start to see lots of them on the road. A child’s brain does not work in this way.

 

Our brain is tricky though in its search for pattern. While we think it’s rational it can be anything but. As the landscape of neuroscience understanding expands so does our understanding of the power and weakness of our brain. Neuroplasticity blows my mind but I am underwhelmed when I realize just how we let emotions and other unconscious bias affect what we believe to be rational decision-making.

 

Cordelia Fine writing in A Mind of Its Own points to experiments done at an elite US university where a lecturer was plotting points on a graph displayed on a screen. The screen then went blank and students were asked to locate exactly on the graph where the last plot point was. Almost without exception the students identified a point beyond the last plot point of the lecturer. Why? Well the brain seeks out patterns as a basic survival and psycho-motor instinct. You couldn’t drive a car or walk across the road without it. But it can mislead. Our accumulated experience makes this worse. Our perception of our ability to make sensible predictions and the degree of belief in our decisions is known as the illusion of control. Once again children do not build such a concrete control illusion exhibiting a much greater cognitive elasticity over the situations they encounter.

 

And that’s precisely where I need my team to be. I need that beginner’s mind to stay critical such that each and every situation is assessed and not taken for granted. It is essentially how we stay safe. The world of safety at work in Australia and other developed nations has become overwhelmed and bogged down in complex systems that very few (apart from the consultants and managers who advise on and manage the systems) can understand or effectively manage to deliver the required outcome – safety. But the conundrum is how we engender situational awareness at work when there are so many other distractions.

 

We live in a VUCA world and our brains, trying to process much more information than previously, need a way to stay present and situationally aware at the same time. It’s just not about safety though it’s about how we present our business to the world. Is our website up to date or do we still display one of our team members on there who left two weeks ago? Are all the lights working in the toilets? Have the security lights automatic timer been changed to reflect that the nights are drawing in? Is that trailing lead a trip hazard? Should that Coke can be placed in the recycling bin – the one I walked past today twice on the way to the toilet? Has anyone claimed that bag that has been left in the courtyard for the last couple of hours?

 

I think I may have an answer to that but it’s controversial and counter-intuitive. Play! Play is what children do to explore boundaries and rules are developed as they go along. The system of play is essentially without pre-set rules or probabilistic calibration which makes it so powerful. Eric Zimmerman a Professor at NYU’s Game Centre theorises that we have entered what he calls the ‘Ludic Century’. What he means by this is that given the times in which we live games and play are central in a way that, for example, information and the moving image were central to the 20th century. Perhaps through the embrace of play we can re-imagine the beginner’s mind and build the situational awareness that seems to be lacking due to the complexity of modern living and working. With the advent of the micro nap at work becoming more commonplace, maybe it’s time we stole another concept from day care – playtime! Maybe we should change our mindset as workplace leaders and rephrase ‘stop mucking around and get back to work, to stop working and get back to mucking around’. Our workplaces just might be safer for it!

 

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