Across, not up
“You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Andre Gide
Across, not up
I’m working with several executive teams at the moment, getting them to work effectively as ‘executives’ (not managers), and as a ‘team’ (not as individuals, and not as a committee). When one of them goes on leave, the normal practice is to get one of their managers to ‘act up’. This is done on rotation, or sometimes, on merit. I suggested to a couple of my clients that they stop doing this.
Instead, what they should do, if they want to become true executives, and work as a team, is ‘act across’. In other words, when the Executive Director, Corporate goes on leave, the ED Operations should take her place. Then, someone ‘acts up’ to fill the ED Ops role. This achieves two things: (i) Executives get to know each other’s roles and pain points and achieve true organisational breadth, not continued specialisation; and (ii) The ‘acting across’ ED gets to see one of their direct reports as a peer. This never happens in the ‘acting up’ model, as they’re always away when their direct reports are in their seat.
Question: “What would you create if you ‘acted across’, not just ‘acted up’ in your organisation?
Staff anxieties
Another client right now is undertaking a major reorganisation. She’s replacing her entire ‘next level’ owing to a combination of (i) her promotion from that level to CEO; (ii) the planned, voluntary departure of three executives all in the same quarter; and (iii) a reconceptualisation of the organisation’s strategy demanding different capabilities for the next 5 years.
She and I were talking this week about what her 250+ staff want to see from the restructure. I said, “They only want three things. Let’s build a structure — and a process — that delivers all three”.
They are:
Leadership: Staff want to see that such a disruption is necessary, not optional. The CEO and Board need to be strongly aligned on a handful of key messages about the changing shape of their world, and the necessity for change, framed positively.
Fairness: This organisation currently has 7 layers, and 13 different job classifications (they have directors, leads, coordinators, managers, officers, with deputies and assistants proliferating). People want a streamlined system that shows them that “People like me are treated the way I am”. We’re now discussing a 5 level organisation with, you guessed it, just 5 banded classifications.
Opportunity: People want to see that if they stay, there’s a chance to progress internally. Previously, pathways were opaque, blocked by long-stayers, or leap-frogging occurred where individuals were catapulted into ‘invented’ senior roles. This reorganisation gives the new CEO a chance to illustrate planned upward mobility is possible and, indeed, desirable.
Question: “When you’re rolling out major change, are you clear what those affected by the change most want to see?”
Clever labelling
I’ve worked with several organisations in the past year on a concept called social prescribing. In case you don’t know it, it’s a form of referral to non-medical services by healthcare providers: think social groups, sports clubs, volunteer agencies. It’s a response to the fact that over 20% of all doctors’ visits are not for medical complaints, they’re for social issues: loneliness, anxiety, malaise.
This movement has gained traction in Australia, after years of success in the UK and Canada, with significant social and economic results, including lowered rates of hospitalisation, and less use of medicines. While the key role isn’t the doctor (it’s the ‘link worker’ who knows, intimately, what a patient needs, and what’s available in their local community), the system won’t work unless doctors (and their representative organisations, like RACGP and the AMA) are convinced of its efficacy, its ability to sit alongside their existing practice, and its ease of implementation.
So, one element of true genius in this approach is in its naming: social prescribing. Prescribing is what doctors do. So, social prescribing is just a variation on that. It can be taught, practised and compensated in ways similar to prescribing of medicines. Now, there’s more in this than just naming something cleverly, but it’s an essential start.
Question: “What labels or names can you give a new initiative to ensure uptake from those invested in ‘old ways’?”