Just do something
An important and often-overlooked responsibility of an organisation’s management is to run an “improvement service”.
That is: it is part of their to identify the ways that the organisation is getting in people’s way, and to implement solutions to address them.
Think of the organisation as being a product whose users are the front-line, non-management staff1. “The organisation as a product” is not always a useful framing, because I think it can put too much priority on “employee experience”. As I’ve previously written, I think it’s better to focus on creating the conditions to do great work, rather than on being a great workplace. But if this perspective is neglected entirely - that is, if you never think about your team as the users of your organisation - you end up with a mess.
I find that most people’s experience in most workplaces is that the organisation is mostly in their way. That they want to do a great job, but the organisation puts big and small barriers in place to them doing this.
Those barriers might range from making it hard to make small useful purchases (like stationery, or tea bags), or insisting on cybersecurity policies with a poor return on investment (like an enforced password on company devise that cannot have two consecutive letters of the alphabet next to each other2). It might also mean not providing the physical or digital equipment needed to do your job properly or safely. Or creating onerous internal reporting requirements. Or having policies that prevent you from solving customer problems on your own initiative. You get the picture…
This accumulation of restrictions is a thief of joy. Not only is it frustrating, it gets in the way of what makes work fun: the ability to do good work that you’re proud of.
The result is a pervasive state of learned helplessness.
The effect starts with poorly functioning systems, but it soon spreads out into the culture - where other people in the organisation being in a state of low agency pushes YOU more into that state. And so the feedback loop continues. Then senior leaders wonder “why won’t people take initiative?” or “why is motivation so low?”. Could it be because no-one at a senior level seems interested in solving problems that matter to people?3
You can counter all this by just doing something.
It actually almost doesn’t matter what you do.
I had a client where one thing I helped the CEO do was to get the fire system serviced so that one non-critical part could be replaced so a warning light on the alarm panel that had been blinking for months finally went out. This was not by any means a big strategic piece of work. But it was a very visible one for the wider team.
When you make a change that people can see and can benefit from every day, the deeper benefit is that it increases their sense of agency. They find themselves thinking:
“Oh, this is an environment where things can get better. This is a place where problems are things that can get solved. It is worth taking initiative to improve things.”
This is the state that people need to be in for a high-performance culture to flourish. It is the opposite of most people’s preconception of corporate culture.
And it starts with doing something!
In organisational development this is called the ‘gemba’, a Japanese word meaning something like ‘the place where the thing happens’. In detective fiction it is denotes “the scene of the crime”.
XKCD’s famous example of a strong password - “Correct Horse Battery Staple” - would fail this test.
I’m not saying that senior leaders in this situation aren’t caring, or aren’t doing their best. They might be busy doing sales or fundraising, or working on strategy, or high-value stakeholder relationships. Lots of legitimate things that absolutely need doing for the organisation to survive. This is about what does this look like to more junior members of staff, and how it affects their experience of the organisation.