I Don't Agree. Michael Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ you believe to be strong components of the kind of culture you’re looking to achieve. In my case, this includes variations on key themes such as collaboration, team player, teamwork, solidarity or inclusive. Or anyone picking words that riff around fairness, justice, equality, conscientiousness or socially conscious. Integrity is another – be careful of that one, though, almost everyone aspires to it. Certainly those in public service, finance, real estate, politics, security, education, manufacturing, medicine, law and a huge chunk of all global corporations. In fact, the Maitland report found that 35 of the FTSE 100 claimed integrity as a value – so much for differentiation!

      Steve Marinker, a partner in Maitland, described the difficulty of articulating authentic and distinctive values, with firms worrying that they might sound trite and unconvincing the more common they are. Which is why, if you have asked someone to out their values and are reviewing their framework, the next step is to maximise the possibility that the candidate is actually authentic and a genuine fit for your culture.

      It’s possible to get a firmer handle on this by cross referencing a person’s claims against complementary attributes. If someone really has a sense of justice, then they should claim other values that ultimately reflect this. A challenger, campaigner or a brave person, for instance, might be someone who will speak up against unfairness when they encounter it.

      Note that conflict is still inherent in these qualities. In all this talk of collaboration and inclusiveness, I don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that we are not talking about eliminating conflict altogether. We will always have a world view to disagree with, it’s just that we need to learn to manage conflict more effectively to reduce its insidious effects – a values-outing exercise helps with this.

      I recently asked Lily Watson, a hopeful young applicant in the last stage of the interview process, if there were any values she ascribed to. Like many others, initially, she had no firm answer. But after giving it some thought she referred to a discussion she had with a group of friends about what it was that drew them all together. The answer was kindness. She brought it vividly to life by explaining how they, as a collective of young and broke millennials trying to make their way in London, pooled resources. They shared food, sofas to sleep on, clothes for interviews – some of them even met doing voluntary work. I was struck by the power of kindness as a binding force.

      When does that quality ever get spoken of in business?

      It certainly doesn’t exist as a value in the FTSE 100. Though the quality is actually common in life, it’s uncommon in a values framework. It was a real head-turner for me. (Lily got the job.)

Undoubtedly, more kindness in business would make the world a better place. It might mean less plastic in our seas. Perhaps the number of zero-hour contracts would be reduced to zero and our young people would not need to pool resources to find work. Possibly, had kindness been enshrined at Volkswagen, the well-documented culture of fear that led to their 2015 emissions scandal3 may not have existed.

      In the wake of the scandal, Volkswagen conducted a huge consultation with their workforce, asking for help in reshaping their values framework. Of the six values that emerged at the end of 2017, two stood out when viewed against their past behaviour; ‘courage’ and ‘genuine’. The former is certainly key to overcoming a culture of fear; the latter seems to lament the organisation’s failure to be what it should have been – and aspire to something better in the future. This smacks of Rogerian self-actualisation, which is, of course, the end goal of the values-outing exercise.

      How values outing could change the world

      I happen to believe that flawed organisational culture is the primary source of all conflict everywhere in the world. Pick any subject!

      Wars arise from disputes between opposing leadership, government or ideological organisations. Global warming arises from the conflicting challenge faced by big business organisations, obliged both to return a profit to shareholders and preserve the environment for the benefit of the organisations’ customers. The latter has too frequently lost out to the former.

      Famine not only arises from bad geography, bad weather and bad luck, but from the conflicting interests of big business, governments, charities and NGOs, world banks, international trade and economic bodies, investor groups, patent owners, unions of producers, unions of farmers, etc. Organisations all.

      However, it’s my hope that we can collectively reduce the debilitating effects of conflict in the world by positively improving the culture in each of our individual spheres of influence – a micro approach to a macro problem.

      Whether you manage a small team or a global organisation, whether you are part of a group or running one, whatever endeavour you are involved in, personally or professionally, by outing, understanding and living by a personal values framework, we can reach a place of greater harmony and collaboration.

      A bit like those little birds Darwin discovered in the Galapagos: be more finch.

      3 Volkswagen went out of its way to invent tech that told the world its cars were clean, while they were really emitting pollutants at 40 times the legal limit.

      Step three: Drop the C-bomb

      Collaboration: why are we obsessed and are we any good at it?

      One of the irritating things about collaboration is that it’s difficult to achieve. Uniting everyone around a single vision is no mean feat – the average collaboration risks collapsing in on itself under the collective weight of the egos in any given team. Especially if you’ve overindulged on the ego-stacking front (a term I use to describe a personal temptation to overload a team with too many big personalities in the belief that they’re the most likely to get things done).

      A lot of conflict can get stirred up that way.

      The other irritant is the sheer frequency with which this C-word gets used. It’s sprayed around so liberally inside organisational life that, if you’re like me, the mention of it sets your teeth on edge. I worked for one CEO who would have sprinkled collaboration on his chips if such a thing were possible. He dropped the word so often, he must have thought that by this simple act of repetition it would just happen.

      The Maitland report, discussed in the previous chapter, listed 28 FTSE 100 companies claiming collaboration – or its first cousin, teamwork – as one of their corporate values. Back in 2012, IBM’s global C-suite study of 1,709 CEOs found that 75% saw collaboration as the key to future success and recruited with this in mind. When you learn that a large chunk of the Forbes 1000 also claim collaboration in their values framework, it becomes apparent: we’re obsessed. Whenever the person at the top of an organisation is speaking or writing, the chances are that, in a game of buzzword bingo, collaboration will keep the fingers on the buzzers very busy.

      BUT. Are we any good at it?

      I believe this ongoing preoccupation is actually because successful collaboration in business is elusive. We’re not very good at it at all. While we can all see collaboration’s huge potential to change our fortunes, it streaks by overhead, comet-like, to remind us that we don’t really understand how to do it.

      The same is true in politics. With the loudest voices gathered at the extremes, the rest are drowned out. Even views that are just a few degrees to the left or right of the noisemakers are shouted down, encouraging people to retreat to a safe place where everyone holds an identical view: the infamous bubbles of social media. Yet, many people wish that those in politics СКАЧАТЬ