Worker Owned Cooperatives

Why has New York City decided to dedicate $1.2 million in next year's budget to grow worker owned cooperatives? Because they are a small but mighty force. They lift people out of poverty, raise industry standards and produce new crops of entrepreneurs perhaps more effectively than any other funded approach. The city's inspiration in part comes from the largest US cooperative, Cooperative Home Care Associates where about half of the over 2,000 employees have opted into the shared ownership and profit structure there. Wages are double minimum wage and benefits and work hours support a sustainable life for individuals and families. The quality of the lives of employees isn't  compromised by the growing trend to force people in any business to be on call to maximize efficiency profits for the company.

We cannot say enough about the vital benefits of the model for local communities where people believe that entrepreneurship will be the sea that lifts all boats. For the 200,000 US small businesses that employ half the nation and lack succession plans, the worker owned cooperative model promises a bright future for the economic and quality of life well-being of indivuals, families, couples and communities.

A Sane Plea To Plutocrats

In his current TED talk, entrepreneur Nick Hanauer warns fellow American Plutocrats whose wealth runs the country that their failure to act on the wealth disparity crisis will, not could, mean their ultimate demise. His premise is simple. Your plutocratic power relies on your wealth that grows on the backs of an economy driven by consumption. Only people with the money to consume can be consumers. 

His proposal is simple. Raise the minimum wage to $15 so spending power can boost the economy and everyone wins. He cites the Seattle case where this dynamic is already working.

It's a sane plea. What's unclear is how many Plutocrats don't live in the fear of losing economic and political power enough to accept the invitation. What's equally unclear is what motivates the large scale inaction on the part of the large scale underpaid and working poor whose end of the economic gap rewards a Plutocratic reign.

Hanauer dismisses the argument that the growing 1% would be fatally wounded by a self-inflicted increase in the minimum wage. It's a talk worth watching. 

 

6 Easy Ways To Well-Being @ Work

Here are six simple, affordable, accessible and effective ways to optimize well-being at work.

  1. Use chairs, walls and stairs for stretching.
  2. Improvise meals from pot lucked ingredients.
  3. Practice mindful breathing as breaks, substitutes for impatient waiting and energy shifting.
  4. Use essential oils for awakening and soothing emotions.
  5. Stay moist with a variety of healthy beverages.
  6. Share humor in real time and across media.

With the latest mantra that time management is energy management, learning and incorporating these practices keeps us grounded and balanced, resilient and creative.

The 360 Opportunity

Many organizations are still honoring the corporate tradition of 360 degree assessments. Usually used for leaders, they give people anonymous feedback from others who know their work. They can be used as opportunities for people to consider new ways to elicit and use direct feedback from others, with the emphasis on direct. People become more trustworthy when they ask for and demonstrate use of direct feedback. People become more trustworthy when they give feedback directly and usefully. This culture of mutual trust is strengthened by the fact that feedback is more useful in real time. Delayed feedback erodes trust. Indirect feedback does the same.

Building a culture of mutual trust makes it more possible for feedback to be mutually exchanged in real time rather than postponing it for the next scheduled 360, if there is one. People can only improve in their ability to give and get feedback when they have and use frequent opportunities to do so.

The Tensions Frame

In the latest iteration of workplace self-organization, holocracy, we make the frame of tensions figural in the way we update each other on work in progress. It's an elegant frame: What tensions are at play here?

Renaming issues as tensions emphasizes the polarities inherent in issues we address. These are the tensions of speed and quality, speed and inclusion, perfect and iterative, self-promotion and service, following and leading, innovating and sustaining, systems and improvisations, transparency and protectiveness, honesty and respect, focus on strengths and gaps, internal and external, control and adaptability.

The tensions frame legitimizes and validates what would otherwise be cause for innocence and blame. Its a brilliant perspective that makes issues more intelligently actionable.

Contributing To Startups

When communities grow, it's often not from the pockets of large corporations, institutions and government programs. They tend to grow at the rate startup people emerge and get supported. These are the people who, for countless reasons, startup new businesses, events, social programs and social connections. The ones who grow do so because they are somehow supported by others in the community. One of the most interesting ways we can realize our significance occurs by supporting people in our world whose have a gift for starting things. These are people who start new businesses, ventures, programs, collaborations and social innovations.

We extend and expand our significance through donating time, talent and treasure to them. We can volunteer time, share talents and invest in causes we care about. The options for supporting them range across a taxonomy of possibilities. We can join their effort, donate money or time, connect them to other resources and story about their successes.

Growing Development Networks

Every community needs to grow a development network. This is a network of individuals, businesses and organizations dedicated to supporting new business entrepreneurs and investors in their search for locations, testing of markets and launching new enterprises and spaces for new enterprises.  It's not a novel concept. Many transformed communities have always had these. They often operate under the radar and begin with just two or a few people. They do what institutional planners and policy makers only dream.

Smarter Together

When it's our intention to be smarter together, we interact in specific ways that sustain the space of trust that makes possible being smarter together. The idea of being smarter together is the idea that what we create together is smarter than anything any one of us could create. No one of us is smarter than all of us.

This is a normative shift for some groups used to tolerating where someone dominates or people compete for the prize of being right. In the domination dynamic, people tolerate a two class system where people with superior hierarchical positions are assumed to know more and know better than everyone together. On the informal side of equation, some people dominate simply because they're used to getting their way by being rigid and aggressive.

Groups are either smarter together or not. The vicious cycle is the less a group is smarter together, the more apt someone tries to dominate, which makes the group less likely to be smarter together and on it goes in a downward spiral.

Groups are smarter have two characteristics. People build on each other's contributions. And people welcome and value each other's feelings. All of this builds the kind of trust that fosters any group's ability to be smarter together.

Building Our Strengths Vocabulary

We know that people do well at work when they engage their strengths in unique, complementary and redundant ways. After long working with leaders and teams, I would argue that people only engage most consistently engage strengths they can name. So part of this work is expanding people's strengths vocabularies. We give them access to the myriad of strengths focused assessment tools. We have them create personally meaningful labels and phrases to name their strengths.

What we find is that the more personally meaningful these strengths names are, the more poignantly they support their engagement. Academic and consultant speek vocabularies are often too inaccessible or anemic to provide a significant emotional hook to the resonance of people's strengths.

Of course getting people to tell stories featuring their personal strengths culls out langauge that matters and works.

The Millennials Leadership Conundrum

The Global Leadership Forecast looked at the workforce issues affecting 13,124 leaders from around the world, representing 48 countries and 32 major industries.

Millennials present a unique catch-22: Their presence in leadership positions related to the company's growth rate. Companies with a 30% proportion of young people in higher roles saw "aggressive growth," according to the study. When it's more like 20%, they saw "little to low growth" rates. At the same time, they were the least engaged of all the age groups studied, and the most likely to leave within a year.

One narrative would be that organizations most committed to millienial leaders have high growth cultures and strategies that leads to the accelerated growth rates. It is problem worth solving that these young leaders would be highly disengaged and disloyal leaders.

Rethinking Listening In Collaboration

I would argue that if we want more productive collaborations, we need to rethink what it means to listen in conversations. In the old model, listening is what happens inside the mind of the communication receiver. When we "trained" people in better listening, we focused on the cognitive processing involved. In the inner game of listening, accurate listening is the ability to distinguish fact from assumption, knowing when to take things personally, identifying the feelings of others, interpreting non-verbal ambiguities and incongruities and assessing for sincerity.

The inadequacy of this definition is that no one in a conversation is directly affected by what happens inside other people's heads. We are affected by how they express their listening in valuing and devaluing our ideas.

In this context, the critical conversational dimension of listening is the quality of our listening responses: how we respond to what other people say.

You know exactly how I'm listening to you simply by noticing how I respond to what you say. My listening shows up in my responses that make you feel ignored, defensive or valued.

In collaboration conversations, three kinds of listening show up.

Deflective listening: we talk and people, without acknowledging what we said, simply say nothing in response, go onto their own ideas, they shift to listening to others or in get deflect in any variety of screen delivered distractions.

Invalidating listening: we talk and people get busy trying to prove our ideas are flawed, missing facts or lack relevance, legitimacy or usefulness in the conversation.

Useful listening: we talk and people explicitly affirm the benefit and validity of our ideas, add value to our ideas or ask questions that move our thinking foreard with considerations of other possibilities and implications.

The most impactful part of listening in conversations is how we respond to what others say and ask. How we respond is the only access people have to the quality of our listening: whether we are listening to deflect, invalidate or help make their contributions as useful as possible.

If we want our collaborations to be as productive as possible, we need to practice listening responses that facilitate everyone feeling heard. When people feel heard, they are more willing to hear. Only in a culture of rich listening is authetic collaboration possible.

The Art & Power Of Relaxed Arguing

Those of us whose work involves designing collaboration structures know that the design of conversations significantly influences the attitude people have when they interact within them. Design is particularly critical when it comes to the inevitability of arguing that occurs in collaborations, especially as we bring together different personalities with uneven knowledge fields around complex issues that resist a strategy of more of the same.

Two kinds of arguing happen in collaborations: relaxed arguing and tense arguing.

In relaxed arguing, people free to voice whatever they want: ideas, questions, feelings, concerns, commitments and suggestions. Everyone also feels welcome and valued for voicing differences.

In tense arguing, as some people feel free to voice what's on their mind, others do not. 

The ones who don't lack a sense of trust that their contributions will be welcome and valued. In cultures of position and power inequalities, the power have-nots prefer to voice little or nothing because they don't trust the power-haves to welcome and value their honest contributions and differences. Protection is a higher priority than engagement.

The vocalists in tense arguing don't necessarily feel trust either. They are extroverts who can't help themselves or introverts willing to push their agendas as far as they can beyond expected resistances.

The declaration of consensus in tense arguing is an inauthentic consensus which always hurts quality of outputs, ownership and implementation. It's always interesting how many more excuses than results occur after collaborations of inauthentic consensus.

The costs of tense arguing outweigh any potential benefits. We lose important contributions, weakening the possibilities of authentic consensus and rich deliverables. Trust further weakens as the ideas of those who dominate have disproportionate influence over the ideas of those who disappear. This results in a smaller production of new, different and evolving ideas. The culture of tense arguing carries over into diminishing other attempts at collaboration.

The prime difference between tense and relaxed arguing is the attitude of listening more than the amplitude of voicing.

In tense arguing, it is acceptable for someone to show absolutely no response to another's contribution. It's acceptable for someone to say or ask anything in a way that unequivocally shuts down another's offering before it is considered for its validity and value. It's acceptable for someone to filibuster the conversation until they get their way. It's acceptable for a majority to expect minority compliance and label it "group consensus."

In relaxed arguing, several different attitudes are practiced.

  1. People kindly inquire into contributions they feel are not fleshed out enough
  2. They appreciatively validate the benefit of anything new that emerges at the table
  3. They respectfully voice concerns and differences of view with an attitude that these need to be explored, and might not be deal breakers for what's on the table
  4. Everyone trusts they will be heard and their contributions will be welcomed and valued

Everyone contributes more and as a result, the group becomes far smarter together than when stuck in loops of tense arguing. They favor the trust and insight building langauge of What about ... What if ... and What else ...?

Everyone also trusts in the importance of thinking through anything for its implications and researching rather than debating actionable questions or concerns that can be further researched.

Relaxed arguing grows trust. Trust is one of the most critical drivers of learning, creativity and authentic consensus. We have a huge opportunity and responsibility to help groups learn and practice the art and power of relaxed arguing.

The Brainwriting Advantage

Kellogg School management faculty have begun promoting brainwriting for idea generation in replacement of brainstorming. In brainwriting, people write their ideas before voicing them.

In her studies, (Leigh) Thompson found that brainwriting groups generated 20% more ideas and 42% more original ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming groups, she writes in her book Creative Conspiracy. "I was shocked to find there's not a single published study in which a face-to-face brainstorming group outperforms a brainwriting group," she said. In Nordgren's research he has found that the process leads to more diverse and candid ideas.

While in brainstorming, only a small minority of groups do 60-70% of the talking and first ideas disproportionately influence and constrict a group's generativity.

I've been using the approach for years with the Agile Canvas and it is magic. My variation is allowing people to either take or write first. It significantly equals the playing field, no one dominates or disappears and quality of ideas increases.

Getting Beyond Generation Prejudices

When people somehow manage to not get to know people from other generations at work, they find it easy and important to generalize about generational differences.  In any case, no matter how much evidence we amass to argue these differences, respecting others always requires knowing people as they are, whatever generation. This means legitimizing the reality that people have more dimensions than any stereotypes suggest.

De-Ruling Organizations

Talking to leading practitioners in human resources this week, there is an emerging trend to de-rule organizations. De-ruling involves eliminating even sacred cows like time off policies and work hour rules. The benefit is bi-dimensional.  On one hand we reduce the financial costs of policing and mediating compliance and conflicts. On the other, we reduce the social costs of high and good performers feeling mistrusted to act like the responsible adults they are.

The prime motivation behind this movement is the simple observation that if people can't be entrusted to behave like adults, you might not want to also entrust them with your brand.

Authentic Collaboration

Fast Company this week posted a piece on conflict at work.

A 2010 study by Provo, Utah-based leadership training firm VitalSmarts found that 95% of employees have trouble voicing differences of opinion, which results in a loss of roughly $1,500 per eight-hour workday in lost productivity, doing unnecessary work, and engaging in active avoidance of co-workers for every crucial conversation they avoid.

In authentic collaboration, agreements are based on the leveraging of differences that make us smarter and faster together. 

I think there are two dynamics that prevent authentic collaboration. There are people who have been shunted, demeaned or bullied when voicing differences in their organizational cultures. They keep differences to themselves, feeling wise in the security position chosen. Then there are the people who become controlling out of their intolerance for differences. These are both learned behaviors, exacerbated by a weak culture of trust.

To make authentic collaboration possible, we have to invite people to actively name differences and discover the inherent value of embracing contrasting opposites. Collaboration is authentic when different and even opposing perspectives are valued and leveraged for agreements that become richer and more sustainable than those from inauthentic collaborations where people maintain a weak trust culture through dominating and disappearing. Trust is strongly connected to our shared ability and willingness to embrace polarities.

Creating a culture of authentic collaboration requires it.

Listening Through Demographic Differences

When we're not present in our listening we listen through the filter of our bias about demographic differences. We make assumptions or are at least suspicious that what people are saying is biased by their gender, generation or geography. When we're present, we don't get distracted by our assumptions or suspicions. We inquire and work with the unique person before us. We are skillful and create more trustworthiness as a result.

Training Teachers & Leaders For Engagement

The evidence continues to indicate that when students in education and employees in organizations are disengaged, which is more often the case, it's in part because their teachers and leaders aren't prepared to make engagement occur. I would propose that in order to give them more training, which takes them away from their roles, it's a matter of practical necessity to make learning and work more self-directed, which usually works well anyway. This frees up the necessary time for effective training and ongoing development. Until engagement scores in both contexts get into the 90s, is would suggest training happens around a quarter of their time as teachers and leaders. It's that vital and it isn't going to happen by less than strongly engaging teachers and leaders.

The Value Of Work Alumni

Wise organizations keep track of their alumni: those who have moved onto other jobs and retired. They keep track of them through reunions and social media like LinkedIn. When they have unplanned vacancies and need for project and temporary help, they reach out to this network of people who already know the organization and often have the kinds of good will and social connections to do better than burdening existing people or bringing other unfamiliar people. It's smart and not that complicated.

When Pay For Hours Worked Is Irrelevant

Pay for hours worked was an invention of the early industrial era of piecework. Time studies could determine any pieceworker's exact hourly output because inputs, rules, conditions and precise product requirements could be predicted and controlled. No amount of output per hour different from what was mandated was possible. The history of work from the industrial to information era is the history of work becoming increasingly and radically different in character. As controllable work gets automated, the work left is work that has little to do with piecework. In this world, the time anything takes depends on any number of uncontrollable and unpredictable variables. How much time people spend at work does not guarantee any measure of output or value, especially when the work involves any form of creativity, adaptation or people interaction.

What becomes relevant is agreed upon pay for agreed upon constellation of outcomes assessed by agreed upon success criteria. So much for the relevance of managers wasting attention on whether their people are 10 minutes "early" or "late."