This is a book about how managers can lead and facilitate joint action in their organizations to make things that matter better for all stakeholders. They are being tasked with guiding their units towards value-adding outcomes. If they want to do this challenging work well and as a result create high performance-high fulfilment organizations, they must turn leading and facilitating joint action into a personal craft.
Unfortunately, contemporary organizations have a serious problem: Many, perhaps even most of them, are not places of high performance-high fulfilment. Instead, they seem to be places of high effort, high strain & mediocre performance. In my view, organizations do not improve and become places of high performance-high fulfilment because of eight thinking errors managers make that cause them to act in sub-optimal or wrong ways despite having the right intentions.
To help managers better understand and correct these thinking errors I explore each of them in detail and subsequently offer fundamental reframes of how we can understand organizations, culture, and leadership in ways that are much closer to what is going on at a particular moment and the human phenomena we are dealing with. That means, instead of viewing organizations as linear machines that can be worked on like a car, I suggest that an organisation is really a process of continuous interactions of people in their local situation in the present moment that everyone participates in.
This interaction view of organizations requires a significant refocusing of managers’ attention. Instead of mainly paying attention to the more mechanical aspects such as structures, processes, targets, and measurements, they additionally need to be attentive to and competent in six psychological and sociological activities essential for leading and facilitating joint action to make things better for all:
› The quality of presence – Being aware of oneself, others and what is happening at any moment
› The quality of thinking – Using a deliberate and disciplined mental process of reasoning with the highest possible quality to develop well-grounded insights and understanding
› The quality of improvisation – Being focused on acting with clear outcome intentions while at the same time being intuitive and spontaneous in the moment
› The quality of conversation – Ensuring the appropriate people participate in the significant conversations within the organization to think and converse together in ways that facilitate mutual understanding, learning and good decision making
› The quality of difference – Facilitating the introduction and utilization of diverse perspectives to evolve habitual patterns of feeling, thinking, talking and acting to better address issues that matter to all
› The quality of experimentation – Practicing and facilitating experimentation with new, diverse perspectives, ways of thinking, behaving and doing things
I close the book by suggesting five leading live practices that I think are essential to develop.