Freedoms and Boundaries - The Human Side of Transformation
I felt it necessary to dedicate one article in this series to the discussion of the inter-dynamics of groups, power, and agency as it relates to how companies function. If you have been reading, you’ll remember this series was spurred from a conversation about creative culture over coffee. In that conversation, Noah made the statement: “employees have no agency”.
What a powerful statement. Some statements have gravity, and this one was profoundly heavy to me. It goes to the the inner elbow joint of this entire conversation. How does one enable workers? How do companies establish agency for individuals and sub groups within their often vast number of resources?
The reality is many companies provide this level of empowerment to only a small percentage of their workforce. I think we can all agree this is painfully sub-optimized. How workers act upon their individual instincts and knowledge, is determined by their trust, and how powerful they feel within the system they participate in. Most feel they do not have agency to make change outside their defined box, the established norms, or without approval. Let’s take a look at a few of the inter-dynamics at play in modern companies that establish this component of the status quo, and conceptualize alternatives that better enable the worker.
AN ARMY OF [N]ONE
The following quote, as reported in the NY Times, is from an internal email by an Boeing employee talking about the build out of the recently tragic launch of the 737 Max:
“This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”
Wow. It’s challenging to have your epically expensive new product fail at its launch, and then have smoking gun statements plucked from the operations of your business. If we are honest, every company has those individual emails swirling in their corporate data just waiting to be plucked out to salaciously embellish the inner problems of a company in business magazines. Luckily, most companies will not suffer this level of embarrassment or failure, but most companies have the same inner problem. They have workers in their operations who know what is wrong, but do not feel they have agency to correct it. Whether you make the news or not, I think we all would prefer our workers to feel that they have capacity and endowment to make the company better where they see obvious fit.
This problem is a side effect of complexity. There is a great deal of inter-dependent processes, decisions, and people involved in corporate decision making; and there is too much going on to catch it all. Companies look to control chaos, and to find the signal in the noise. Prioritization and simplification through focus are strong positive strengths of good operating environments. Companies have to make trade off decisions to survive. However, these corporate operational functions limit the freedoms of their workforce both intentionally, and unintentionally. If enabling the creative worker is important, companies need to find balance, and evolve the model for worker freedoms and boundaries.
Workers feel a proverbial thumb upon them, employment can be so critical to their perspective that it creates trauma in their relationship with work. The team at SMS recently received a story from a worker who had worked at a local restaurant. She shared several unpleasant stories about the restaurant practices, and how she was treated. Here are her own words from the end of the story:
“Yet I stayed there, suffering from abuse, for my family who was in desperate need of help. Sadly, I made a mistake of staying there for that long. In the near future I hope to flourish into a sufficient environment as well as those around me.”
This is a tragic story, and it highlights the concept that workers in traditional business environments can feel that they have a lack of control or power. A work relationship can feel, by degree, like a function of survival. There is a power imbalance, workers are only strong, and empowered when the company’s culture enables that; and the company is only as strong as the full potential capacity of its workers when the culture enables it.
CORPORATE CIRCUIT BREAKERS
Picture Nikola Tesla sitting and reading the paper between his two arching coils to visualize that “power” is a field of energy, that is challenging to control. Power is hard for companies to distribute and balance inside their companies. Large corporate environments are full of intelligent, accomplished people managing complex environments full of potential reward and risk. Companies go through a structural, and then a practiced process of dividing up the work and responsibilities in order to operate within a environment of balanced control.
The corporate era started with the traditional “top down” hierarchical structure of executives, managers and employees. Managers manage, supervisors supervise. Over time we innovated and created more corporate organizational options. We added steering committees, and grassroots bottom-up organizations who look to level or “balance” the impact of the traditional model. One of the most popular innovations, is the matrixed organizations that create an environment where everyone has multiple managers and their teams are made up of direct, and indirect workers who are assigned to them, from other groups, via the “dotted line” in the org chart. Most modern companies have incorporated aspects of each of these to setup their organizational strategy.
Let’s consider how these organizational paradigms impact the worker. As an example, let’s consider the very popular matrix structure. Like the "human knot" game you did during that team-building outing, the effect of matrix management is to inject inter-dependence into its corporate leaders. No one can make a move or decision without gaining cooperation from other players. Large fast growing companies need tools to test out the skills of their management. Matrix management is a tool to see how well leaders can work with others and develop influence instead of using, or potentially misusing, unilateral power. What is interesting is that this same structure unfortunately emulates the composition of a 1970's soap opera. There is a potential for politics in matrix management. It can feel more like an episode of Dynasty, than a corporate office. As with all organization structure and division of power, there side-effects. Establishing freedoms and boundaries for power and execution within corporations is messy, and adheres to the Newtonian laws of motion. Things bump into other things, causing reactions.
Similarly the division of the company into functions like Finance, Accounting, Sales is to create specialty, but the organic effect is to also create a power balance to some degree. The reality of all organizational strategy, there is no perfect model, and that every model is challenged to balance its inherent strengths and weaknesses, as it evolves and helps generate culture.
DON’T MOVE, YOU’LL SINK FURTHER
Today’s modern company has sectioned off power and risk into a delicate balance of interactions that can be difficult to understand and navigate. This only further complicates a change effort. Organizational inter-dynamics can feel like quicksand, when there is nothing to push or pull against to gain leverage. The victim becomes trapped in a space devoid of solid structure and gravity. This can be the experience when trying to create change within a company. We discussed in the first article of the series that culture is an indirect by-product of operations. Changing culture is difficult enough without being neck deep in quicksand. So adding to the soft-skills we discussed, will help find new channels for alignment. When confronted with new ways of thinking, our brains rebuild out synaptic connections. Companies need to consider adding more pathways that create inclusion, alignment, and understanding to reduce some of the negatives that organically arise from their control functions. We discussed in article four about teaching leaders about “staging” or curating change. As we create new pathways, consider allowing much of this work to be built bottom-up. Let the workforce collaborate on these solutions to create “shared wisdom”, and it will have a multiplicative, and positive affect.
Culture change is iterative - it is easy to slip into the quicksand, because we were working against the natural strengths and the complexities of the corporation. To do this requires the company to consider how it has established its interdependent rules for freedom and boundaries. Culture change is focused on enabling the collective worker and harnessing the inherent power within. This is a righteous goal, but power is not stopped, it is redirected. It is important to respect it, and to realize lasting change is iterative and incremental. Considering a modern company, to change the culture it is a function of understanding, effecting small change, inclusion, implementation, and building upon the energy of success. Each step further emboldens the collective worker, the smaller chunks reduce risk and lessen the backlash from the net of matrixed power. Whether you are knitting, untying a human knot, or creating a better corporate culture, it is a game of nuance, and consideration. Consider how you enable the capacity of your workforce within your operations.
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