Tony Morales Interview
- Process for forming a consulting team:
- Forming the consulting team happens on a case by case basis, as it depends upon the industry, function, and available people
- Team is formed of principals, executives and residents at Inter-Growth, staff members, researchers, and experts
- Experts are one of:
- Functional experts (e.g. have deep experience in executive search, or deep experience in culture transformation)
- Industrial experts (e.g. deeply familiar with transportation and logistics)
- Generating ideas on how to tackle the issue:
- Need to understand first. Research team does the following:
- Extensive analysis of the organisation from the outside perspective
- Looks to understand the industry
- Looks to understand competitors
- Looks to see what’s going on in terms of industry trends (cyclical or not)
- How are their competitors operating?
- What changes are happening?
- Are there any emergent trends in the industry?
- Need to understand first. Research team does the following:
- Client process and structure:
- Seek to understand first from an outside basis (see above)
- How can we learn about lived experience, the culture, the design, beyond what you can see written in a document?
- Interviews and assessments
- Cultural interviews:
- Team members visited 100 client sites in a 90 day period to interview people, collect their notes, and put them together
- These are ethnographic, and so it takes on an anthropological skill set
- Don’t seek to guide or bias, just looking for the “grand tour”. Asking questions like:
- What’s your job like?
- What’s this organisation like?
- This can give a piecemeal picture of what’s happening across the organisation
- Assessment:
- Inter-Growth uses a tool called “total for index”
- This is an algorithmic assessment, that measures things like:
- leadership
- culture
- experience
- capabilities
- Model comes up with actionable data which allows insights about what’s happening across the organisation
- Deciding who to interview:
- There’s not enough time to interview the 20,000 employees
- Think about more than employees: what are consumers, partners, competitors all thinking?
- Instead, draw a diverse sampling across the organisation
- Looking to get information from different perspectives
- geographically
- seniority level
- Broad bases, then focusing up on the executive team
- Diagnosing team dynamics issues:
- A lot of the problems that emerge will be cited time and time again in the interviews
- Start off by looking for areas of shared concern from the interviews
- Core findings will be common, but there may also be smaller one-off or isolated issues that could be addressed
- Diagnosing organisation design issues:
- Organisational design should be fit to achieve the target culture
- There’s a culture that exists, and a culture that’s desired. Inter-Growth helps their clients move between these two states
- Secondary to culture issues, business fundamental issues are also manifest in the organisation design:
- cost saving
- revenue generation
- Other diagnosis tools:
- Top team problems are always sensitive and delicate
- Making sure that there is alignment with strategy and each other on the team level is important
- Inter-Growth seeks to understand where there are areas of misalignment, and leading the executive team towards better alignment
- Transport company had an executive team with different histories, and hence different ideas about what works and what doesn’t.
- Other considerations:
- Our client is a business who are looking to maximise shareholder returns
- Culture and organisational design need to be aligned towards what will help the business most through:
- driving revenue
- cutting costs
- maximising output
- quality
Environmental Misalignments
- VW pollution masking scandal
- Consumers have become less accepting of environmental scandals
- The external environment – something outside the team changes, but the team does not notice or adapt.
- Causes of misalignments:
- focus on shared information
- ignoring alternatives
- recency bias
- over-valuing outcomes
- Focus on self-interest
- motivated blindness
- For all these reasons, teams fail to adapt.
Individual Misalignments
- One of the main causes in Microsoft’s decline in the 2000’s.
- Stack ranking assessment – reduced trust and damaged Microsoft’s ability to innovate
- Team goals should align with individual goals (WIIFM)
- Individual goals can change. Some examples:
- Junior colleague develops new skills, gains new career aspirations
- Things change at work (conflicts develop over time)
- Things change at home (e.g. start a family)
- Psychological safety: an environment where team members can take risks.
- Examples of risks:
- admitting mistakes
- addressing conflict
- offering competing ideas
- These are risks because no-one wants to feel left out of a group.
- Examples of risks:
Systems Thinking Frame
- When attending a meeting, we must represent our own frame. However, it is also important that we adopt and listen, and take on other frames. Systems thinking is all about that.
- Analytical thinking: separate something into parts, understand the parts, and then see how the parts fit together
- Systems thinking (as opposed to our analytical framing) asks us to do something else. Take the part we are trying to explain, and see how that works in a larger system.
- Metaphor for Systems Thinking: Concentric Circles
- Example of car:
- You can pull a car apart and understand all the individual pieces.
- However, you won’t understand why it is the size it is, or why the size has changed since the 50’s.
- Instead of viewing the car as a transportation machine, think of it as something to move families.
- You only understand that when you think about the car’s role in society.
- Example of education:
- School classes, 1 teacher, 20-30 children.
- Why that configuration?
- Need systems thinking to answer:
- What is this preparing them to do?
- What is being taught?
- What role does that play?
- When we want to get the purpose, we need the systems thinking piece
- Getting rid of a problem does not necessarily led to what you want
- Is thinking about the system as a whole too much information?
- It’s a different set of questions that we’re asking
- If you’re really trying to understand purpose and possibility, that’s a different space
- Discovery space: not about getting rid of problems, but formulating problems in such as way that we can see possibilities that were not clear before
- By thinking of a goal and working backwards, we may avoid the constraints that block us going forward
- Analysis and synthesis
- Example:
- People leaving a group
- Was told this was because of monetary compensation
- In the larger system, compensation is only part of the rewards system
- What are the various monetary and non-monetary rewards?
- Considering the system rather than individualising issues or problems
- Win/Lose frame
- If I give you something, I have to take something away from someone else
- Reframing: changing win/lose to win/win solutions
Diagnosing Problems in Groups and Teams
- We tend to think we bring together a group of people, and they will be high performing
- It doesn’t always work! How can we identify the problems?
- Example: steering committee on an organisational development initiative
- Interesting patterns:
- Every time the team met in person, lots of laughter and jokes. The were agreeable on almost anything that was discussed during the meeting
- However, after the meeting, lots of emails sent raising numerous issues, which were not discussed during the in-person meetings
- The next time they met, none of the issues were raised
- Interesting patterns:
- The culture of politeness
- We’re interfacing with each other, face to face, we’re going to be polite
- “Real” issues are secondary to being polite
- Being polite gets in the way of learning in organisations
- The pattern of repeating
- Even when contentious issues are raised, other people in the meeting disengage and lose focus. They’re not wanting to signal agreement or disagreement.
- The speaker worries that they don’t get acknowledgement, so they repeat the same thing, a bit louder and more exuberant.
- “I’ll do it again, and they’ll get it this time”
- Not breaking the the frame, not stepping back or taking some sort of time-out.
- Conflict is often avoided
- People don’t feel the need to confront each other
- They’re not comfortable dealing with conflicts
- Undiscussable issues are not discussed during meetings
- Conflicts are discussed outside of formal meetings, over a lunch or a beer
- How to interrupt the negative cycle
- Pause, and raise the question of “What’s going on here?”
- Make the pause part Ground rules.
- Allow the team to re-frame and refocus
- It needs to be a deliberate activity
- The leader needs to help establish that this an effective and acceptable practice in the team
- Examples:
- work teams in factories can stop the whole production line
- retrospectives
- Try to identify what the issue is
- Where is the team is getting stuck?
- Collect a little data.
- Ask everyone on the team:
- What’s working well?
- What isn’t working well?
- Do an anonymous survey if people are uncomfortable talking in the open about what the issues are.
- Don’t just make assumptions. Really try to figure out what people are seeing
- Ask everyone on the team:
- Pause, and raise the question of “What’s going on here?”
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