Beyond Management Workplace_4

80 BeyondManagement on. (Remember that job descriptions originated in factories.) How could they do what they do but do more of it and still do it well? Acquiring prac-tices is actually an ongoing, life-long phenomenon. As you interact with bosses, clients, and colleagues, you learn what everyone expects in terms of “good work” and how to do it. This process never ends and practices aren’t just about skills. They have to do with roles (yours and others’), responsibilities, and relationships. People’s identities are wrapped up in their practices.2 Although it was obvious to the field reps that they were expected—somehow—to change their practices, when you don’t know what is involved or what to do it is natural to wait and see while you try to fathom this out individually and collectively; which is just what they did. In phone calls and emails back and forth, they tried to figure out what they should, could, and would do differently. At the same time they speculated about how this strategy would affect them and their clients and expressed anxiety about their futures. This wasn’t what their managers expected or wanted to hear. They wanted action. Theworkofnegotiatingmeaning People start to organize by talking about why they’re there, what each is up to, what needs to be done, and so on. In other words, organizing starts with making meaning, so that’s where I’ll start; but remember that making meaning isn’t just a phase in the work of organizing. Social philosophers tell us that making meaning of what someone said, what the weather will do later in the day, or why the neighbor’s dog is barking, is a human quality, perhaps uniquely human. “Sensemaking,” as Karl Weick calls it, is something all of us do, all the time. As long as people are conscious of their surroundings (including other people), themselves, their feelings, and their actions, they are making meaning of what is happening to them, around them, and to others.3 You might say the work of organizing is negotiating meaning. But, equally, it is all the other threads too. Meaning making, creating work, building networks, and aligning are completely interwoven. Whether they ran into each other unexpectedly at the bus station and are doing it face-to-face, or are sitting at computers, having a scheduled meeting in cyberspace—when they organize, people hold up their own perspectives and interpretations of what is happening, or what was said, for scrutiny and discussion by everyone involved. You say what you think or believe, or what you heard, or you offer a suggestion and expect a response. This is how we make meaning together, negotiating amongst Theworkoforganizing 81 ourselves about the nature or significance of what is going on and what we ought to do about it. What is this about? What am I supposed to do? How should we respond? These are just some of many questions field reps would have been asking themselves as they chewed over the emails which contained their new job descriptions. Very soon they were asking each other. When the field reps started to organize, emailing and phoning their colleagues, it was because they genuinely didn’t know what to do. They weren’t trying to sabotage the reorg and weren’t “resisting change.”4 What problem or problems were they dealing with and what kinds of responses were possible and desirable? Who were they responding to: their bosses; colleagues in other departments; clients; or those at the top? And, what did they want? What was behind the new job description? What were the immediate consequences likely to be and what would happen in the near future? To figure this out they had to do the work of making meaning of what others were doing. What were their managers (and others) thinking? What did they expect? What were the implications? What approach would be effective and acceptable? Until they had some answers, they couldn’t take any action. I’ve named this thread negotiating meaning because people have lots of ideas and, quite possibly, different perspectives and varied agendas.5 They engage and talk and their ideas encounter others’ ideas. They pit their beliefs against others’ beliefs and learn that others’ values either match or run counter to theirs. Initially, nothing is fixed or settled. Working out what todoandhowtodoitrequiresagooddealof giveandtake,toresolve differences and find a way forward. As it is important that participants are able to engage one another productively in these situations, their social spaces are crucial. If it is the kind of environment that shuts down discus-sion, or if people don’t listen to each other, progress will be slow and it will be difficult for them to align. Theworkofcreatingthework Like the field reps working through the problems of what is going on and what to do, press officers, executive coaches, ambassadors, software developers, lobbyists, trainers, property developers, fashion designers, and journalists—in fact, all knowledge workers—are architects of their own work. Do you remember Jeff’s “little cloud”? Conversations are the clouds of the collective work of organizing. Ideas seed other ideas, which eventu-ally lead to action. “Creative,” meaning “originative; productive; resulting 82 BeyondManagement from originality of thought, expression, etc.; imaginative,” is exactly the right word for this work.6 What is more creative than ideas building on ideas?7 Organizing in response to management’s strategic reorg, the field reps are doing much more than framing their immediate actions. Their deci-sions and actions are almost certainly going to have a ripple effect. They’ll bring other people and groups into their conversations, extending their net-work as they organize and, together, they will generate new conversations. Eventually, these will reshape their work and that of other employees, pos-sibly well into the future, and in ways no one imagined or intended. This is why I think of knowledge-work—organizing—as open-ended or as filling an open future. People come together to deal with a problem because they have a com-mon interest in solving it, or because they’ve been asked by others to participate, or just out of curiosity. They expect to accomplish something.8 But, early on, in their initial conversations, they may know little about what they’re going to do, what they’ll accomplish, or even why they are there; and they don’t have a plan or place to begin. Instead, they extempo-rize when they start to organize. They put out ideas and offer suggestions about why they are there and what they can do. Then, the sense of what they’ll do—their work—emerges, bit by bit, conversation by conversation. Usually, as this happens, a network grows along with their conversations. “I’ll talk to my colleagues,” someone says. Another feels their supervisor ought to be involved; and someone else has a contact who she thinks has worked on this sort of problem before. Now they’re part of an evolving network, which, soon, takes on a life of its own. They may have initiated the process but, with ever-expanding connections, there are people in the network they don’t know, doing things they aren’t aware of.9 Isn’t it an exaggeration to say knowledge workers “fill an open future”? After all, everyone has parameters and guidelines to work to and, as we work with and around others who have work to do, we have to fit in with them and can’t go off in any direction we please. A combination of rules, plans, proposals, regulations, contracts, precedents, procedures, directives, and our own rules of thumb, derived from our experiences of what worked and what didn’t work, give us direction and limit the scope of our actions. This is highly desirable because, when people are working together, organizing, they want to know where they stand. Another factor that places limits on what people can do is that knowledge-work is highly social and if they don’t keep to their commitments and promises, fulfill their obligations, and meet their responsibilities little gets done. Theworkoforganizing 83 Having guidelines and commitments isn’t the same as having a script to follow. Just as job descriptions don’t tell people what to do, neither do plans, schedules of activities, and the lists of requirements that software developers draw up at the start of a project. Each of these is a tool, which, by itself, is a hollow shell. Plans and directives as well as responsibilities and commitments have to be interpreted. People have to make meaning of them and this is where creativity begins. To get to action, we need talk as well as tools (I explained in Chapter 5 that practices always consist of both). Think about the field reps. It is in conversation, together, that they begin to work out what the new job descriptions mean to them and how they’re going to deal with them. Without conversations, plans and directives are words and ideas. Discus-sions, negotiations, and deliberations, with clients, bosses, suppliers, or colleagues in other departments, transform them from “empty rhetoric” and “abstract ideas” to something practical: instruments of action. It is in their conversations that people find their reasons for taking action. That is where they become aware of why and how specific problems or issues matter to them and of their level of interest in getting involved to deal with them. So, conversations produce the motives for doing the work, or at least helptoshapethemand,whiletheyworkoutwhattheywanttoaccomplish, what to do to accomplish it, and who is going to do it, they assign respon-sibilities and generate commitments. Without these it is difficult to move forward.10 Hairballsandorbiting Having spent his entire working life at Hallmark, the greeting cards com-pany, where he started as a very young artist and school dropout, Gordon MacKenzie understands creativity and writes about it as few others do: from the perspective of knowledge workers and their struggle to become and stay creatively engaged at work. You’d imagine that, in a company where creativity is a must, management would pull out all the stops to foster it. Not so, says MacKenzie. Hallmark was (and possibly still is) the antithesis of a creative place to work. He blames the corporate culture, which he calls, memorably, a “giant Hairball.”11 Hallmark is certainly not an isolated hairball. “Corporate culture” is a nicely alliterative term for standard management practices. You’ll find hairballs wherever organizations put conformity, consistency, and compliance (as well as competition) ahead of originality, imagination, 84 BeyondManagement resourcefulness, and cooperation; which means there are hairballs as far as the eye can see. Those “Cs” of corporate culture trump the “Cs” of cre-ativity and cooperation. This is an objectionable combination for people whose work is creative, so the term “hairball” fits, although MacKenzie admits he wasn’t comfortable with it at first. As he explains it, every hairball is a powerful center of gravitation, able to suck up anything and everyone in its path. When employees get pulled in, as, inevitably, they do, it is the end of creativity and cooperation. It is risky for them not to comply and it is hard to be creative under a regime of rules, regulations, and rigid routines. MacKenzie’s position is corroborated by every business that wants to spur innovation or is in a hurry to get products to market and sets up a “skunk works” or spins off a smaller, largely independent, operation to handle the task.12 What makes these more successful than their much larger counterparts is that they are unencumbered by “bureaucratic red tape.” For red tape you can read “lots of conventional management tools.” As creativity thrives outside the box of rules, regulations, and require-ments, thechallengeis toget outsideand staythereand it isn’t just creative folks, like artists, who need to do so. “Thinking outside the box” has become the manager’s mantra, for good reason. The human urge to cre-ate is so important to the work most people do, particularly the work of organizing, where they share ideas in order to frame and shape future action together. The desire to create—to accomplish something new or different—is also important as a motive, spurring people to move beyond ideas and words and into action.13 So, while there is every reason to respect and encourage creativity, hairballs, which favor compliance and conformity, don’t. Here is the paradox of management today in a nut-shell. Managers complain that employees do not think outside the box, but it is the management system (i.e. practices) that keeps them firmly inside. MacKenzie’swayofdescribingwhatitmeanstoescapeahairballisjust as unique. He calls it “Orbiting”; a word that is perfect for understand-ing what is involved. To avoid the straightjacket of practices that were designed with compliance rather than creativity in mind, in the interests of doing good work it is the task of knowledge workers—actually, their obligation—to organize themselves to get into and stay in orbit above their hairballs. In orbit they can see and do things others can’t, but are still teth-ered to them by invisible bonds—the force of gravity. They have work to do, which means responsibilities, commitments, obligations, and so on, which means they aren’t free to go off on their own to do whatever they want to do. ... - tailieumienphi.vn