Month: November 2010

Last week I took a road trip by Greyhound bus. Since I'd also taken various other transport trips in the last month (2 different airlines to get me to Shanghai, Amtrak to New York, subways in DC, and Shanghai, buses in DC) the Greyhound experience was just another travel experience to enjoy or endure.

This Greyhound one started off with booking my ticket on-line. That was straightforward enough. Fortunately the day before I read the small print in the acknowledgement email and saw that seats were allocated on a 'first come' basis and if the bus got filled before you got on then you had to wait for the next one. I was traveling on the busiest travel day of the US travel year.

I got the bus to the Greyhound depot arriving 2 hours ahead of departure time. There were a lot of people there, and a very long line a) because the two machines for pre-booked tickets were not operational, b) because there were only two staff members dealing with non NY tickets (out of 8 available desks), and one dealing with solely NY tickets (short line). I stood in the long line as I wasn't going to NY and I couldn't get my pre-booked ticket from the machine.

Then I saw that there was a subsidiary notice above the NY ticket seller's head that said 'on-line pick up'. I decided to change line, knowing at that point I was dependent on the good will of the agent who might have refused to give me an on-line bought ticket that wasn't for NY. Fortunately she didn't she just wanted my confirmation number which I'd written down to hand to her. That wasn't what she wanted. She wanted me to read it out to her. OK.

Since I was now speaking with an agent I asked to change my ticket to an earlier return. That was not what this agent was going to do. Oh well.

Gate 8, 10:00 departure – well over 55 people in the line for the 55 person bus but by some fluke I was about 54 in the line. Getting on, I had the choice of sitting beside an extra large person or a truly enormous person in either case my seat space was diminished.

Operator Johnson (the driver) began her instructions. 'I want all cell phone on vibrate. I do not want to hear a cell phone ring. If I hear a cell phone ring there will be an accident. If I hear you speaking to a person on your phone in a voice louder than quiet there will be an accident. I cannot be distracted from driving. Do I make myself clear?'

What I enjoyed a lot was the refrain from the 54 passengers 'We hear you Operator Johnson' with loud laughter all around. (I didn't know I had to respond!)

Next instruction. 'Anyone with a soda can or plastic bottle must not let it drop to the floor. It will roll around. It will get under my accelerator pedal. There will be an accident. I cannot have drinks containers on the floor. Do I make myself clear?' Refrain 'We hear you Operator Johnson'. (55 passengers).

Next announcement with the bus now having left the depot. 'Since this bus is full it will be an express. No one can get off before Charlottesville. There will be no stops. I repeat this bus is an express. Do I make myself clear?' Refrain 'We hear you Operator Johnson'. I don't know if there were any people who wanted to get off at one of the normally scheduled stops before Charlottesville but if there were they weren't prepared to speak up. Operator Johnson was fierce and funny!

We got to Charlottesville and were instructed that this bus was terminating there. "The next bus is at 1:30. Do not wander out. If you wander out the bus will leave without you. There is no other bus today. Repeat the next bus is 1:30. Do I make myself clear?" Refrain: "We hear you Operator Johnson". The next bus finally arrived at 3:00 p.m. with no apology or explanation. People started to ask each other – maybe this is how rumors get started people supplying missing information? Finally, I did locate an agent to ask who said the bus would arrive 'soon'.

Settled on the next bus – the operator did not announce himself nor make any other announcements. I did wonder about the different customer experiences. Seat belts, for example, these are not even fitted to Greyhound buses let alone required to be worn (as in the UK). Operator consistency in announcing – is this needed? UK coaches like Greyhounds have a safety announcement, and then a certain amount of driver discretion on other commentary.

Does the non-working automated ticket pick up system indicate a lack of maintenance – does this extend to the buses? What does lack of schedule information mean? It could be chaos behind the scenes, inadequate tracking systems, lack of forecast of demand … What does inadequate staffing on the busiest travel day of the year mean? Possibly staff staying off suddenly sick to cook turkey, or inadequate rostering arrangements, or lack of forecasting of demand, or inflexible terms and conditions preventing additional staff being called on. What do surly , or unavailable, counter agents mean for the company?

However, it was certainly fun to have Operator Johnson in charge. Can one person change the impression of a company? One felt confident in someone so determined not to allow any distractions that might result in an accident. But what is the accident rate? Checking the Greyhound accident statistics was interesting. In the 24 months prior to 11/24/2010 they'd had 143 crashes and their safety rating was 'satisfactory'. (They record 2,735 drivers). Detailed accident data was not available for reasons given on the SafeStat online website

So here's a short case study I might present in my next organization design training program. A start point for assessing an organization – by observation, experience, data search, and seeking answers to a lot of open questions.

Well, over the weekend I've got hooked on organizational cultures of gratitude. I've now discovered an article by Charles Kerns at the Graziadio School of Business and Management. His article Counting your blessings will benefit yourself and your organization. has a good number of references to explore (including some from Robert Emmons whom I mentioned in my previous blog on this topic), and a second article by Kerns, Putting Performance and Happiness Together in the Workplace bears a strong likeness to the Harrison article I mentioned in my previous blog on Cultures of Gratitude. I'm not implying plagiarism here. It's just that Kerns suggests that 'Happy High Performers' exhibit the following characteristics:

These individuals:

1. Have a clear direction.
2. Find that direction motivating.
3. Focus on what is important and what they can influence.
4. Are linked to the resources necessary to execute key actions.
5. Talk and act in ways that promote performance and happiness.
6. Are significantly engaged in their work.
7. Find meaning and purpose in their work.
8. Have more positive experiences than negative experiences at work.
9. Are grateful about the past and do not carry grudges.
10. Are optimistic looking into the future.
11. Achieve agreed upon results.
12. Are happy about their workplace.

And Harrison suggests that high performing organizations share qualities such as these:

• The work situation engages the total person.
• The values that people experience in the work transcend personal advantage. The situation evokes altruism, which is satisfying to everyone involved. People feel they are working for something bigger than themselves.
• People give their all, working long hours without complaint.
• People supervise themselves, seeking out what needs to be done without direction from above.
• There is high morale, teamwork, and a sense of camaraderie. The group frequently feels itself to be elite or special.
• There is a sense of urgency; people live "on the edge," putting out high energy for long periods of time.
• There is a clearly understood mission that is articulated and supported at the highest level of the organization.

These lists seem to have a lot in common. What do they share with cultures of gratitude (were such a thing to exist)? I haven't got to the point of describing a culture of gratitude but a report called 'I didn't do it alone: society's contribution to individual wealth and success' has several lovely examples of people thanking the social systems that enabled them to generate wealth. For example,

At a 1996 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, [Warren] Buffett noted that the American system
"provides me with enormous rewards for what I bring to this society." In a television interview, Buffett stated: "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling 30 years later. I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well – disproportionately well."

And another example: Amy Domini the founder and president of the Domini Social Equity Fund points to a number of other public services that allowed her business to grow:

Getting my message out over the public airwaves has allowed me to be far more successful than if I had been born in another time and place. The mail runs on time, allowing me to communicate with existing and potential shareholders, and the rise of the publicly financed Internet has lowered the costs of these communications still further. I can fly safely – and most often conveniently – throughout the country, sharing my ideas and gaining new clients, again thanks to a publicly supported air travel system.

Acknowledging that one is supported, and examining ones role in interacting with the support seem to be central to a gratitude of culture, and these are both implied in the two lists of characteristics of high performance organizations shown.

Although there's a certain amount on 'happiness' in organizations. There's very little that I've found so far on the topic of gratitude as an organizational capability. One short piece I came across: The Effect of Gratitude on Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Customer Satisfaction, by Dora Schmit of Louisiana State University has a research propoal abstract that reads as follows:

This research proposes that management's expression of gratitude can influence employee state gratitude; in turn, this increases the likelihood of an employee engaging in Organizational Citizenship Behaviors directed at the customer … [these behaviors] directly increase customer satisfaction. … while also having indirect benefits for the organization and the employee.

But it's not clear whether the research did take place and I did not find any follow up work from her on the topic. (I've emailed and am waiting for a reply).

UPDATE: December 1 2010. Dora Schmit tells me that: "Yes, I published a copy of the abstract in the Society for Marketing Advances Conference Proceedings (2009). I presented my work there as well. I am actually still working on this project, and in fact, I am actually pursuing a dissertation on gratitude & marketing."

Any other research work that anyone knows of on creating organizational cultures of gratitude would be appreciated.

I haven't yet come across a CEO who says he/she wants to instill in their organization 'a culture of gratitude'. I've heard them ask for cultures of innovation, teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and customer service among others but not gratitude.

Yet organizations, thinking of them here as entities with personas, have a lot to feeling grateful for: that they have customers or clients willing to buy their products and service, that they have suppliers able to supply them with stuff to operate, that they have shareholders willing to invest money in them, (or in the case of non-profits volunteers willing to invest time in them), that they have employees willing to work for them, that they have regulations to help their competitive position (witness SAP just having to pay Oracle $1.3 billion this week in a copyright infringement lawsuit). I'm sure you can think of other aspects in where organizations could feel gratitude. Would having a 'culture of gratitude' make a difference to performance – preferably in the direction of high performance? Maybe, but probably only if gratitude was seen as a positive organizational attribute and not a credibility buster.

Years ago (1987) I remember Roger Harrison wrote a pamphlet called Organization Culture and Quality of Service: a strategy for releasing love in the workplace. I went to look for it online as I was writing this piece. I did not find the pamphlet there (though I have since found it in physical form on my bookshelf) but I did find an essay (2008) Accessing the Power of Love in the Workplace written by Harrison in which he says:

For most of my working life, love has not been an idea in good currency in organizations-to say the least. When, in the eighties, I first wrote about the importance of understanding love in the workplace and tapping into its power, I did so against the counsel of trusted colleagues who had my best interests at heart and were concerned that I maintain my credibility.

It's an interesting essay to read because 'love' in the workplace is like 'gratitude' in that neither is expressed as and organizational cultural attribute that could add value by being cultivated – though you sometimes see them voiced or evident at an individual level in organizations.

What set me down this path of thinking today (Thanksgiving Day) on gratitude was the article I'd just sent someone on Naikan called Reflecting on You, by Harris Salat. Naikan is a Japanese therapy that has gratitude (as well as guilt) at its core. Investigating this a bit further I found an interview with Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and author of two books on gratitude.

In the interview he says "It [gratitude] really becomes an attitude that we can choose that makes life better for ourselves and for other people." The Naikan approach mentioned in the Salat article suggests that by regularly asking yourself three questions: What have I received from (insert name)? What have I given (insert name)? What troubles or difficulties have I caused (insert name)? You will, over time, in Emmons words "acknowledge where things come from and the people to whom one is indebted. And this regular practice of working with the questions brings remarkable personal benefits in terms of happiness, and health benefits to people who practice it. "

Both the article and the interview intrigued me as I was already familiar with organizational techniques that focus not on trying to overcome barriers, obstacle, and hurdles to issues, but rather looking for what's going well in organizational life and aiming to extend or replicate it – Appreciative Inquiry, and 'Positive Deviance' are two approaches to this but neither is looking specifically at gratitude. My thought is that organizational cultures of gratitude could be beneficial to all stakeholders.

So are there any organizations interested in cultivating 'cultures of gratitude' and if not, would it be beneficial if they were? Any answers to this question would be much appreciated?

One of the nice things of organizational development consulting is the range of work that comes my way. This week it's been a new piece for me – community gardening. This started with the move to hoteling and hot desking when we issued an edict that personal potted plants would not be feasible in a situation where people did not have their 'own' desk. (The organization does not have a contract with a company to bring in and maintain plants).

Given that people are moving to a new building with all sorts of accolades for green-ness and sustainability there was, rightly, significant 'pushback' on the plant issue. We got a delightful email from one of the environmental experts that the organization employs giving all the benefits of plants in terms of mitigating the effects of chemical toxins and fume given off by new carpets, furnishings, and so on.

The net result has been a suggestion that we instigate a community plant scheme. The details need to be hammered out but there's a certain amount of information to draw on – mostly related to outdoor community gardens.

The New York Times ran an article on thistopic in May this year. Titled 'The rise of company gardens' it comments on the increasing number of companies (Pepsico included) whose employees are gardening in office time and space. The article reports:

As companies have less to spend on raises, health benefits and passes to the water park, a fashionable new perk is emerging: all the carrots and zucchini employees can grow.

Carved from rolling green office park turf or tucked into containers on rooftops and converted smoking areas, these corporate plots of dirt spring from growing attention to sustainability and a rising interest in gardening. But they also reflect an economy that calls for creative ways to build workers' morale and health.

Molly Mann's blog commenting on the NY Times article makes the point that:

Corporate gardens yield myriad benefits for employees and employers alike. Though it may not be feasible in all corporate settings, installing a patch of green amid a sea of cubicles is a great way to improve worker health and morale without digging too deeply into the company budget.

Our plan is to have indoor plants that are maintained by employees with guidance on the types of plants that would work in the amount of light that's available, where to site them, how to think about using them for internal 'landscaping', and similar.

Getting somewhat carried away we began to imagine herb gardens in planters in the kitchen areas – in fact the US Green Building Council does have this – with the notion that employees could enhance their lunch with office grown herbs.

Anyway that is somewhat in the future. The first step is to float the idea and see how many people are interested. Then work out the design of the scheme including methods of operating it – pilot, payment, committee, etc, etc? No doubt we'll have to run the gamut of barriers (health and safety, financial, compliance, etc) but its worth taking a shot at getting it up and running.

Last week I did a learning teleconf call with the Plexus Institute, It is "a not-for-profit organization that was formed in 2001 by a small group of people from diverse backgrounds who shared a vision of discovering the most beneficial uses for the insights from complexity science". Because as the site states "Clearly, we need a new way of looking at work and organizations of all types." And complexity science applications offer that new way.

The teleconf calls led by the Institute are described as follows:

PlexusCalls are designed to let you listen in to unrehearsed, spontaneous conversations among leading complexity scholars and practitioners from the comfort of your home or workplace. … The format is simple. The calls last an hour and are held on many Fridays on a conference line.

So the theme of my conference call was my new book Corporate Culture: Getting it Right and the topic was "Does Corporate Culture Exist." You can listen to the discussion by clicking on this link.

What was interesting for me was the questions. I didn't know in advance what they would be, so thinking on my feet around "What's the difference between a corporate persona and corporate culture?" or "why is it that people have to wield two swords?" was a good challenge. Not least because I realized that Sharon Benjamin, the interviewer had read my book closely and picked up on many of the pieces that I found most interesting to research and write about. The two swords question relates to an exercise in the book around cultural fluency adapted from Adapted from: Moran, R. , Harris, P. Moran, S. (2007) Managing Cultural Differences, Seventh Edition: Global Leadership Strategies for the 21st Century . Elsevier. It goes like this:

Miyamoto Musashi a seventeenth century Japanese Samurai, learned to handle two swords at one time. To be skillful, effective and successful in one's own culture by being assertive, quick, and to the point is one mode of behaviour. To be skillful, effective and successful in another culture by being unassertive, patient, and indirect is another mode entirely – like being able to handle two swords at one time. This exercise helps with such a situation.

Step 1: Ask individuals to read the list of adjectives, that could describe a manager, below and circle the ones that apply to them.

Assertive, energetic, decisive, ambitious, confident, quick, aggressive, competitive, impatient, impulsive, quick-tempered, intelligent, excitable, informal, versatile, persuasive, imaginative, witty, original, colourful, calm, easy-going, good-natured, tactful, forceful, unemotional, good listener, inhibited, shy, absent-minded, cautious, methodical, timid, lazy, procrastinator, enjoy responsibility, resourceful, individualist, broad interests, limited interests, good team worker, enjoy working alone, sociable, co-operative, quiet, easily distracted, serious, idealistic, sceptical, abrasive, cynical, conscientious, flexible, mature, dependable, honest, sincere, reliable, adaptable, curious.

Using these qualities skillfully is like handling one sword.

Step 2: Now ask individuals to think of a business trip to another country, or a meeting with a different department, and ask them to circle the qualities that they think the other people will be looking for in them.

Step 3: Discuss what individuals will have to do/learn to be able to wield the second sword successfully as they meet with people with different cultural expectations and norms.

When I've done the exercise with people it does open the discussion on the way culture and language are exhibited and interpreted. I'm not sure that this starts to answer the question 'does corporate culture exist' but it does illustrate the complexities involved in thinking of ways to 'change the culture' as so many leaders aspire to do.

Last week we were running a one day introduction to team based teleworking. It was a pilot program with two teams of staff plus their managers. It was a fun day – opening with an icebreaker using the go ask anyone cards which usually start people off laughing as they discover, for example, what their co-workers answer to a question like "what did you want to be when you grew up?" or "if you could trade places with someone for a week, whom would you choose and why?"

The day was in two parts. The morning of the workshop were focused exclusively on the team, the work it needs to produce and how they think/feel they need to work together when operating remotely.

The afternoon concentrated on the tools and software that most appropriately met the group's needs in terms of their work and the community they want to build, and getting their computers up and running for working on them away from the office.

To summarize the day looked like:

1. What type of work do we do, and how does play out day to day?
2. If we were working remotely from each other how would we retain a sense of community, stay in touch with each other, and demonstrate that we are being productive?
3. How do we tackle perceived barriers to teleworking including career development, performance management, integrating new joiners into a virtual team, and handling decision making and conflicts, etc
4. Given how we work and how we want to stay in touch what kind of technology and software makes the most sense? (We have 'tasters' of commonly used ones to demo in this slot)
5. Setting up and testing people's computers to work off-site via VPN or Citrix.

It worked very well on the whole – though we are making some amendments to parts of it. For example, because the two teams had been teleworking for a month or so they had some practical aspects they need to agree – like protocols for filing and accessing shared documents to make retrieval easy. We didn't have some of those practical things covered in the original design.

On that same day, November 18, the US Congress passed the Telework Enhancement Act OF 2010. The announcement I first saw read:

Today, the House of Representatives passed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. The Senate passed the final version of the legislation by unanimous consent on September 29 and the House passed it with a bipartisan vote of 254-152 on November 18. The legislation now proceeds to President Obama's desk for signature into law.

I then looked at a fuller story on Federal News Radio. Under the new law US Government agencies must:

• Establish a telework policy and determine employee eligibility within 180 days of the bill becoming law.
• Set up interactive training programs for teleworkers and telework managers.
• Include telework in business continuity plans.
• Appoint a telework managing officer who is a senior official with direct access to the agency head.
• Submit yearly progress reports to the Office of Personnel Management.

This was good news because the organization that I'm working with has been developing its teleworking policy and strategy over the last few months and is somewhat ahead of the game in meeting legislative requirements on this.

There's lots of material out there to help managers of telework schemes. One I've found useful is A Handbook for Managing Teleworkers, by Sandra Gurvis and Don Philpott, and the accompanying Toolkit -because they focus heavily on team telework rather than individual telework.

The handbook outlines a five step process for introducing and managing teleworking and teleworkers, (with the focus on the work team as the unit for management).

Step One gives you the tools you need to decide whether your organization needs teleworking. It looks at the jobs suitable for teleworking, the benefits and the technology needed to make it happen.

Step Two focuses on putting together a teleworking team. This includes successful strategies for telework programs, creating guidelines for managers and employees, writing telework agreements and selecting the right people. There are also important sections on safety, security and the legal rights of teleworkers.

Step Three is all about organization – getting together a winning game plan. In addition, there is information about training and setting up a continuity-of-operations plan to maintain essential functions in the event of a major disaster.

Step Four covers implementation – how you make it all happen. In addition, there is guidance on insurances, taxes and health care options and how they impact teleworkers.

Step Five discusses maintenance – now that you have set up your teleworking program what do you have to do to ensure it runs smoothly.

Next week we run the amended program with a second pilot group so I'm guessing we'll be making more adjustments after that.

Yet again I turn to my 'rules of thumb for change agents' first printed, as far as I know, in Organization Development Practitioner in November 1975. The author was Herbert A Shepard who was according to the introduction on the Herbert Shepard Foundation website.

A pioneering thinker in the Organization Development movement, an engaging teacher and mentor of exceptional depth, scope and humility with a gift for recognizing and nurturing the potential of others. His unselfishness, utter sincerity, compassion and unwavering commitment touched lives, forged lasting friendships and helped shape the careers of a generation of leaders and social scientists. He held faculty posts at several universities including M.I.T., where he received his doctorate in Industrial Economics. He founded and directed the first doctoral program in Organization Development at Case Western; developed a residency in administrative psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, and was also President of The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

I'm interested in his work for two reasons: immediately because with a colleague yesterday we ran a workshop that, about an hour before the start time we changed the design of fairly radically. Why? Because the internal noise we were getting about the session reached a crescendo about midday (the session was scheduled for 2 hours in the late afternoon). I went to discuss the situation with two of the people who'd expressed their concern. In different ways, and for different reasons, they were very anxious about the session – the number of people involved in session design (not many) and the number invited (lots), the lack of communication and information on session content including who 'owned the meeting, the perceived value of the session judged on the value people attributed to previous similar sessions (not highly valued), etc.

So listening to these views and in partnership with one of the two people we redesigned the second half of the session. This meant that 5 minutes before kick off I was still amending slides and handouts. Was it worthwhile? Should I have stuck to the original design as, after the event, my colleague said I should? That's when I brought out the rules of thumb that had guided my decision. This time the one I had in mind was 'Start where the system is' Shepard explains this as follows:

Starting where the system is can be called the Empathy Rule. To communicate effectively, to obtain a basis for building sound strategy, you need to understand how clients see themselves and their situation, and you need to understand the culture of the system. Establishing the required rapport does not mean that the change agent who wants to work in a traditional industrial setting should refrain from growing a
beard. It does mean that, if he has a beard, the beard is likely to determine where the client is when they first meet, and the client's curiosity needs to be dealt with. Similarly, the rule does not mean that a female change agent in a male organization should try to act like one of the boys, or that a young change agent should try to act like a senior executive. One thing it does mean is that sometimes where the client is,
is wondering where the change agent is. Rarely is the client in anyone place at anyone time. That is, he/she may be ready to pursue any of several paths. The task is to walk together on the most promising path. Even unwitting or accidental violations of the empathy rule can destroy the situation…

To my thinking going with the originally conceived design would have violated the Empathy Rule. There may be all sorts of sound(ish) reasons for doing so like 'taking the client out of their comfort zones' or 'challenging their beliefs' to force change, but is this a good thing to do? Perhaps I'd also been influenced by Peter Block's questions in the introduction to the second edition of his book Flawless Consulting in which he asks:

Is it even legitimate to call ourselves 'change agents'? It is common for consultants to talk about how to 'intervene' in order to achieve change in an organization. It may feel fine for us to intervene in another's world, but which of us wants to be intervened upon? If we are change agents who are we trying to change? We can claim we are trying to change systems, but systems are still people in various formations. The mind-set that we can change another is risky business. And what about the common phrase "change management"? Can change be managed, and if it can, is it not someone else that we have in mind?

He ends the introduction commenting that

the core of consulting is about social contracting and managing in a self-managing world. It will take only minor shifts in language for line managers to apply most of the methods in the book to their own challenges of supervision.

Changing the workshop design in line with what I was listening to seemed to be to be less of a violation of the empathy rule than ploughing on regardless. The outcome of the session for me was lessons learned, and points taken for future use. Ultimately the session itself had a good outcome which will bear fruit at the follow up session next month.

The second reason I am interested in Herbert Shepard is because he was one of the founding fathers of organization development and on this count will be part of the research I am doing for a chapter of a book on organization development to be published next year.

During the training courses in Shanghai last week I was asked what a typical day in my working life was like. Given that I was classifying myself as an organization development consultant I thought I would see if I could describe one of my days taking Monday November 15 as a 'typical day'. It was typical in that I was not traveling anywhere and I had the normal number of scheduled meetings.

I began the day with a self-reflection exercise as I'm enrolled on a month of self reflection with the To Do Institute. It's interesting in that it has the same underlying premise expressed by Peter Block in his book Flawless Consulting. In this he says 'An authentic consultant, is not any oxymoron, but a compelling competitive advantage, if unfortunately a rare one.' Block talks about authenticity in terms of 'simply being honest with ourselves and being direct and honest with others.' The self-reflection program is partly about developing that authenticity.

I then went to the new office to see how the people who had moved over the weekend were doing, and chatted to them about any traumas of the move (none to speak of) and the excellent service provided by the IT department in getting everyone up and running the moment they reached their desks. Kudos to the IT team.

Once at the new building I participated in two meetings one after the other, both about the move. The meetings had very different feels, one informal with just three of us, and one much more formal with several people in the room and several more dialing in from other locations. I left at lunchtime to go and work from home but during the afternoon I dialed in to two other meetings, one on teleworking and one on communication.

These different meetings caused me to think about whether some meeting forums were better than others. (In one of the meetings we also discussed Telepresence). Is it 'better', i.e. more productive to have face to face or dial in meetings. What is the value of the face to face-ness? This is a substantive question as we are ramping up teleworking (mobile working). I'm wondering if there are any criteria that can be applied to help people decide this. In what circumstances does 'presence' in a physical sense add value to a meeting? A quick interrogation of Capella University's extensive on-line library, that I have access to as an adjunct faculty member, showed me that there's a significant amount of research on the comparison of team effectiveness in virtual with face to face stuations.

Two articles that I skimmed through on the topic were The Impact Of Team Empowerment On Virtual Team Performance: The Moderating Role Of Face-To-Face Interaction. By: Kirkman, Bradley L.; Rosen, Benson; Tesluk, Paul E.; Gibson, Cristina B.. Academy of Management Journal, April 2004, and Individual Swift Trust and Knowledge-Based Trust in Face-to-Face and Virtual Team Members. by Robert Jr., Lionel P.; Dennis, Alan R.; Hung, Yu-Ting Caisy. Journal of Management Information Systems, Fall2009, Vol. 26 Issue 2.

My challenge is to convert the various academic findings into practical and relevant recommendations for managers who are wrestling with building a sense of community accountability and productivity among their work teams who are increasingly working off the office site.

Leaving that aside I started prepare a one day workshop on the topic of teleworking. Getting the balance of behaviors, skills, and technologies for confident teleworkers was the order of the day. The program is being developed for intact work teams, not for individual teleworking though that forms a part of the section on organizing yourself for teleworking.

A couple of 1:1 phone calls had similar themes – in that in both we were reviewing presentations to check that their messages and approach would, as far as we can judge, work with the stakeholder group. Getting presentations right is a real art. At the training program last week I gave out a piece on how to construct an effective 10 minute presentation that seemed to go down well with the audience. The slight disconnect is that the narrative on how to do a good presentation is wordy and densely packed – the opposite of what the writer says a good presentation should be, nevertheless it has useful pointers.

Additional phone calls were a) to discuss the logistics for the telework training b) to ask someone to send some info regarding a meeting I didn't get to last week c) to check on a policy. In all cases I made the decision to call rather than email or IM – why? It was the quickest and easiest method in the time and resource (not by my computer at that moment) – assuming the person I needed to speak to answered and they all did!

Beyond the meetings and phone calls I answered in the order of 50 emails on a range of topics including an office community garden, conference room booking protocols, meeting scheduling, coasters for the conference rooms, and leadership development programs.

So another typical day passes. One of the fascinating facts in the ToDo self reflection course is that the average lifespan is 30,000 days. One of the questions to reflect on is how do you want to spend the number of days left to you. I'm pondering this as I reflect on my typical day.

On the programs I was running in Shanghai last week I was asked by several participants at different points and in different contexts to explain the differences between coaching, counseling, mentoring, and consulting.

On the flight back to the US I was thinking about this and wondering what the best way to answer was. In the course of this musing I wondered if there was a cultural distinction. Did the US/UK language have four different variations of what is essentially the same thing – advising people about a course of action, either by helping the individual come to his own approach or by telling him/her what to do. And does Mandarin only have one word for these multiple advising approaches?

This took me into the world of ethnoliguistics and I read an interesting piece on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis on the University of Minnesota's Cultural Anthropology website. No, I had never heard of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis either, but I had read Smilla's Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg in which I think I first read about the way Greenlanders have many names for the different types of snow. (Initially I looked at another book with snow that I'd read, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, but realized that probably didn't have the ethnolinguistic snippet. They're both books I enjoyed though).

Just as a by the way on this mini-research project I did come across another website that told me that "Everybody has heard that the Eskimos have over forty different words for snow; quite a few people also know that this is an urban legend. What you probably did not know, however, is that Finnish does have over 40 words for snow — at least if we stretch the definition a bit to include all forms of frozen precipitation." Then neatly listed are the forty words. Since I don't know Finnish I don't know if the writer is accurate but I won't go into that except to say that it reminded me of an article I read (also on the plane from Shanghai to DC) in Atlantic on whether to believe what you read. The article was called Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, by David Freedman.

Finished the musing, I tackled the distinctions using a home-grown variation of Andrew Campbell's tests. (Nine tests of organization design, in Goold, Michael and Andrew Campbell " Do You Have a Well-Designed Organisation?", Harvard Business Review, pp 117-124, March 2002, and four tests of decision making instincts )

So my tests ran:

Is it a formal form of advising i.e. with set dates, objectives/goals, timescale, and payment involved?

Is it a formal form of advising for teams/groups or is it solely 1:1?

Is it a formal form of advising related to a specific performance issue or problem or generalized 'improvement'?

Is it an informal advising with no specific dates, goals/objectives but an 'as needed' discussion?

As I was running through these I thought I could try a flow chart but didn't have enough paper on the flight to experiment and start again if the flow got blocked somewhere along the line.

In any event it seemed that it could work without a flow chart as follows:

Coaching: 1:1 or team, formal with or without payment, to generally improve performance but may be specific on certain goals or outcomes to be achieved. Examples include – coaching a football team to improve overall performance but maybe with specific attention being paid to passing, coaching a senior executive to improve scenario planning and strategic thinking but may be focused on resolving a strategic issue or problem – current or potential. (But what's the difference between coaching and training?). Coaches are often certified: see the International Coaching Federation for more on this

Counselling: Most frequently 1:1 with an emotional or therapeutic element. Generally best left to skilled practioners. May well be formal with payment and goals, but may also be generally developmental. See the American Psychological Association or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Consulting: Advising in an expert or collaborative (process) consultant role on an organizational issue or opportunity that will bring organization improvement. Focused more on whole organization performance (or part of it), than on individuals, teams or groups. Consultants may be certified by one of the members of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes as a Certified Management Consultant.

Mentoring: Usually informal (though many companies have mentoring programs). I have not come across any certifications specifically in mentoring, and there seems to be an idea that anyone can be a mentor if they have the 'right' attitudes. A book I read years ago Everyone Needs a Mentor by David Clutterbuck was excellent on the topic. Looking for it just now I see it was first published in 1991 and seems to have been superseded by Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring by David Clutterbuck and David Megginson. That's now on my wish list.

The fact that coaching and mentoring are now mentioned in the same book title illustrates the fact that there are overlaps among all four advising roles: they all require curiosity and an open mind, they all need practitioners skilled in open questions and non-directive approaches, they all require attentive listening skills, and a good sense of self. Beyond that they segment by focus – individual(s) or organization, formal or informal, therapeutic or developmental, specific goals or open ended. Categorizing the type of thing issue is may ultimately be less important than choosing the person with the right skills to work with the issue(s).

Flawless Consulting, by Peter Block, has been a long-time favorite of mine. Thursday and Friday this week I was using it as a 'course text' for the consulting skills program I was facilitating in Shanghai so I was paying particular attention to its content and relevance. A number of things caught my attention. (I was using the second edition but someone told me there is now a third edition which I just looked up and discover that it becomes available in March 2011).

First was the way he allocated discussion to the phases of consulting. He notes on page 6 that: "each consulting project, whether it lasts ten minutes or ten months goes through five phases". He then overviews the five – entry and contracting, discovery and dialogue, feedback and the decision to act, engagement and implementation, extension, recycle or terminate. All good so far.

What's fascinating is that he doesn't get to implementation until chapter 15, of 19 where he gaily says "when I wrote the first edition of this book I devoted exactly two pages to implementation", that's ok because he does cover some aspects of implementation and engagement. However, there's nothing at all on phase five extension, recycle or terminate, and this is a critical area of work that demands a particular set of consulting skills to do effectively and that is far too often neglected – but without doing a good job of this phase how else do we get any organizational learning? It'll be interesting to see if the third edition has anything on this.

Second it was interesting to see the book being interpreted through the eyes of a predominantly Chinese group new to consulting, with a background in HR (some with a lot of experience and some just starting their HR careers). One of the challenges was the focus on the relationship aspect of the book. Block says up front that "A major objective of the book is to encourage you to focus on and value the affective, or interpersonal aspect, of the relationship between the client and the consultant." This focus led to questions around how to manage power differentials in the client/consultant situation, how do develop assertiveness and influencing skills, what exactly to say in certain situations – like if someone challenges the validity of the data. It seemed to me that the set of cultural assumptions inherent in Block's book around organizational power and personal styles were quite a struggle for the participants I was working with to get to grips with.

Third the learners were looking for detailed 'how to', so they found the checklists Block dots through the text the most helpful thing about the book. In fact, for the purposes of the program just extracting the checklists and building one for the omitted fifth phase would, in retrospect, have been a sensible thing for me to do. Many of the examples in the narrative just didn't seem to have any resonance with the group members – a sentence like "If you are feeling expansive, you can even say to the client, "It looks like we agree on how to proceed. I am really happy about that, " seemed to be something of a concept and language disconnect. (What is expansive? Do you really want to reveal your feelings to a client?)

Fourth Block's orientation is that consulting assignments are messy, unpredictable, and somewhat chaotic. Thus they rely heavily for success on the consultant being self-aware, authentic, and able to deal with ambiguity in the workplace. Again discussion with participants seemed to suggest that order is what organizations are based on, and that ambiguity is ironed out as much as possible. So it seems that many of the consultant characteristicsBlock discusses would take great courage (one of the characteristics not listed in the interpersonal skills list on p9) to deploy in the workplaces the participants were familiar with. Nevertheless, the role playing we did and the discussion we had around stepping out of your comfort zone met with enthusiasm. We had great fun with an influencing skills exercise using playing cards where people act to the level on their card and others have to guess what number their card is. It's a game I learned years ago from Jo Ellen Grzyb of the Impact Factory when I attended one of her influencing skills courses.

So over the last two days working on consulting skills here in Shanghai I've learned a lot about my clients (i.e. the participants) expectations, and how I can adapt and improve the program to meet their needs more closely. It's going to take a more detailed thought process/evaluation to come up with something that I think is better but it'll be a good challenge to my own assumptions on what internal consulting is.