Copyright: Chris Grieve. All Rights Reserved.

Hedgehog by Tomi Tapio - CC-BY-SA-2.0

When we get together in relationships and groups, we humans can behave very much like hedgehogs in winter. Schopenhauer created a parable about the dilemma hedgehogs face when trying to stay warm in their burrows in the coldest months: they need to huddle together for body warmth, but their spines are prickly, uncomfortable and even damaging, so they need to move apart. Eventually, after moving in for warmth and out for safety, the hedgehogs discover they need to maintain a comfortable distance from each other to gain the benefits of togetherness without the painful downsides.

In his latest book “The Hedgehog Effect“, Manfred Kets de Vries suggests that we too need to grapple with the hedgehog dilemma – how close must we be to others to survive in the world? As ‘human hedgehogs’, Kets de Vries suggests, we are drawn together by relational or societal needs, but at the same time we’re repelled by others’ prickly and disagreeable qualities. Our need for intimacy coincides with our desire to avoid hurt or painful entanglement – creating the human condition for a certain amount of distance.

Not only does this play out in our more intimate relationships, but also team settings in organisations. At work we confront the hedgehog dilemma everyday, in most of our daily interactions. How close should team members get in order to achieve team objectives?  How aligned are we as team members? Are our interconnections too loose or too stifling to enable us to perform to our potential? What boundaries do we need?  We need to accept a certain degree of closeness in order to work effectively with others.

So, what’s your hedgehog factor? On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represents ‘I like to be very close to people’ and 10 represents ‘I prefer to be very distant from people’, where would you place yourself?

What is your hedgehog factor?

Consider how your ranking on this scale affects your relationships with other people. Where might you put other team members on this scale? Reflect on how such hedgehog factors influence whether your team can generate synergy which leads to high performance and effective outcomes, or whether together you’re steeped in conflict, leading to low performance and little productivity.

By becoming aware of behaviour patterns of people in groups and teams we can begin to understand the dynamics that play out as we try to accomplish our goals, as well as begin to get to grips with the real complexity of human relationships when it comes to teamwork.

Photo credit: Tomi Tapio

Ironically, the so-called soft skills are not so highly valued by many leaders in organisations. A search for the term on Wikipedia says these are the personal attributes we possess – communication skills, social skills, personal traits and habits – which may not be necessary for employment! They are essential for employment, especially if you aspire to be a worthy leader of people trying to achieve anything. The problem may be semantics – hard skills may be so named because they can be seen and measured; soft skills because they are more opaque, less tangibly measured. An unfortunate result of such labelling is that ‘soft’ doesn’t mix well with hard-nosed business principles and tough-minded leadership paradigms that many heads of business or departments believe are necessary to get a job done. Many people do not want to be seen as ‘soft’ – he’s a bit of softie – it might be appreciated in a relationship, but does it garner respect in the boardroom?

The people skills, as I suggest we relabel them, are actually the hard skills – meaning the most difficult to master and the easiest from which to run away. I wonder how many of us avoid doing the hard stuff when it comes to the people side of business by calling it the soft stuff?

It’s hard to give both challenging and supportive feedback to someone who doesn’t measure up to the task. If we’re tough we might ‘tear them a new one’, or deal out derogatory remarks like Lord Sugar on the UK’s Apprentice. Or maybe we postpone feedback, storing up vague statements for the one conversation a year that HR demands – the annual appraisal. Or maybe we avoid it altogether by moving them to another department or firing them. It’s hard to understand one human being’s psychological make-up and work with the full range of their emotional experience at work. It’s easier to place injunctions about not having emotions at work – unless of course they involve bravado and high-fiving achievements, or metaphors about harnessing the rage to win. It can be hard to figure out how to unlock someone’s potential and to help them flourish and grow.

It’s hard to ask teams to reflect on their own processes of getting work done – to delve into the real politics and the shadowy underbelly of group life. It’s hard to explore who is in, who holds power, who is out, who rubs you up the wrong way, who is lazy, who never shuts up, who never says anything, who agrees and then goes out and does the exact opposite or stubbornly refuses to do anything different. Or when team members seem to get on fabulously and the team is achieving its goals, it’s hard to get beneath the surface to check you’re not heading into disastrous ‘group-think’ territory. So, mostly we avoid doing those things that might help us achieve greater heights or tackling those things that hinder us from achieving near our potential. We focus on the tangible and measurable and declare we’re doing the best we can! It’s hard to work on group dynamics that involve all those individual emotional, psychological beings.

It’s hard to change an organisation’s culture when it depends on the buy-in of its people and changes to social norms, group dynamics and individual behaviours. Surely if we leaders post a new set of values on the walls and hand out a few pamphlets about ‘our values round here’, then people will fall into line and start behaving in ways that align to them. It’s hard to create a real set of lived values in which people really do believe and with which behave congruently. It’s hard to work on organisational or system dynamics that involve all those complex webs of relationships and those individuals’ needs and desires, not to mention the people outside the organisation (the customers, shareholders, clients, stakeholders, opinion-shapers, pundits).

If you can master the people skills, then you’re on your way to being a worthy and inspiring leader – people want to feel that you value them as people, that you value their contribution, that you trust them to honour the best interests of the organisation. People want to feel a genuine sense of purpose and meaning in their work. People want to believe their leaders are genuinely interested in their growth and development. Master this people stuff and you will reap the rewards of higher performance, loyalty and discretionary effort from the people in your organisation. This ultimately will transform into hard numbers that you’ll be able to analyse and compute for the betterment of your organisation.

So, let’s not call it the soft stuff any more – it’s bloody hard to do all that people stuff and its time we acknowledged that soft skills are the new hard skills!

I once knew someone who bought a second-hand book from stand outside a bookshop – it’s title was “Stop Procrastinating Now!”. She laughed as she told me she had taken it home and still hadn’t read it!

I have been procrastinating. I have been writing prolifically for various clients on matters fisheries and marine conservation, but completely lacking inspiration about what might be blog-worthy from people and organisational development perspectives. Not that anyone noticed especially – except there’s a link to here from my company website and it’s fairly bad form to have nothing new posted. But, inspiration aside, I’ve had been self-censoring too long – worried too much about whether my ideas are right enough, polished enough or, worst of all, original enough. Putting pressure on oneself to come up with repeated unique and original thoughts is daft in so many ways. As social beings our thoughts and feelings are so intertwined with others, influenced by our interactions and by what we hear and see, whether through in-person encounters or more remotely through news media, social media, reading or entertainment. Just getting on with it is an important action. I can express my take on the world and acknowledge inspiration from wherever it comes. In that way I can generate a version of the world that is my intellectual property.

So, with renewed vigour and sense of purpose, this week I am inspired by Alan Weiss to stop procrastinating and just get things done — thus, I am relaunching this blog as a forum to express ideas that help people and organisations transform potential into tangible results.

I have just served as a guest editor on a special edition of the electronic journal e-Organisations & People published by the Association for Management Education and Development, or AMED. The Winter Edition, out now, explores a great range of topics related to coaching as organisational development. It contains practical case studies and think pieces that pose and attempt to answer the question.

Check it out at: http://www.amed.org.uk/page/welcome-to-eop-winter-2010

Though the hours were long, I came away feeling I had received more than I put in. I left energised with a real sense of empowerment and hope for the future. These people will spend the next 12 months working together on campaigns that seek to make a real impact in the communities where they live. If the energy and sense of purpose that was on display this weekend is anything to go by, I have no doubt that they will achieve great and significant things. Thank you for letting me be a part of it.

UpRisers 2010

So what is strategic thinking?

Some might define it as rational, logical thought, or the ability to analyse and synthesise data and information in order to determine the optimum choice for future action. This implies that a person’s rational-cognitive abilities make up strategic thinking.

Others might take an opposing point of view and describe strategic thinking as the ability to imagine, create or innovate. Being able to recognise that ‘gut-feeling’ you get when you hit on a significant or important strategy to move your organisation forward. This suggests that a person’s intuitive-affective (emotional) mental abilities are the most important facet of strategic thinking.

I think it is both. To be a great strategic thinker, you need to be able to access the rational-cognitive functions of your brain, as well as those all important intuitive-affective functions. Adopting both perspectives means applying logical analysis, as well as creative, imaginative tools, help to generate strategies that work in business terms, but are not merely extensions of today’s strategies and plans. These could result in dramatic successes for your organisations such as profit, vision or mission accomplishment or other outcomes you are pursuing.

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

For example, my presence as a facilitator can come from embodying a certain stillness and that more can happen for people and groups in the silences I leave, rather than in the ‘facilitating’ talk I engage in. I experienced a more profound connection with my group of co-participants by both acknowledging my separateness and letting go of my need to add value with clever interventions. I listened more deeply, noticed more about people’s body language, their voices and seemed to hold the space (or field) for the group in a way that worked for them.

These lessons were surprising, yet not surprising at the same time. They are things I have heard before, but somehow this time they landed – I was ready for the lessons and willing to take the risk to experiment with new ways of being with people as a facilitator. These lessons, therefore, were also immensely valuable. I returned to work on Monday with my sense of presence and stillness intact. This seemed to open a more profound space for my coaching clients, resulting in deeper reflections and insights from them about the topics they were working through.

Less really can mean more.

Some people assumed ‘strategy’ meant strategic planning and talked about budgets and resource allocations, and those endless meetings where people jostle for position or defend their patch.

Some people assumed strategy meant strategic direction and talked about maps and getting to where their company intended to go

Yet others assumed it meant strategy making and talked about discussing the very nature of their business and visions for the future, or its position in the marketplace.

Any and all of these perspectives might be valid. They fall into the broad field of strategic management which encompasses a continuous cycle of strategy formulation, strategic planning, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation or review.

I have been reading Henry Mintzberg’s work on strategy (and there is a lot of it). He and some colleagues developed five definitions for strategy:

1. Plan – something you design and is forward looking.

2. Pattern – something that emerges and you understand it as you look back over past actions.

3. Position – something that you determine about your company in relation to the outside world, e.g., the competition.

4. Perspective – something that you understand about your company in relation to its internal world, e.g., its values or culture.

5. Ploy – something designed to outmaneuver or outfox your competition.

None, they concluded, is the absolute ‘right’ one. A single definition could describe your approach to strategy or a combination of them might do the trick.

Whichever way you look at it, you need to be ‘strategically intelligent’ about it, reflect on your assumptions and those of the people around you, and decide what you are actually talking about.