Setting Conditions and Preparing the Delivery of a "Natural" System

Speaker A It's important before we talk about setting the conditions to understand what we're setting the conditions for. And there are two things that work together that are the foci of those conditions and the two things are this the first one are the legitimate business needs of the organization and if it's to make profits or be successful in some way, those are the legitimate business needs. And the second one are the legitimate psychological needs of people at work. Those two things are what we need to build the conditions for and perhaps you can talk about the conditions that.

Speaker B Support that the conditions in the framework process. The framework we use a framework based approach so we've taken the key principles and we've developed a framework so that it's easy to understand the principles. And one of the things that we found is valuable is an approach that's very visual. So we use icons that represent this framework and we've taken some key principles that are the things that managers do every day, the hundred things that a manager does with their team every day, every week, every month. And we enable them to see how they can use these key principles to diagnose workplace problems and issues in a way that has a shared language, common and shared language with their teams so that they can quickly diagnose and come up with some recommended actions with a team of people in a short time frame.

Speaker A Diversity of organizations is more to do with an understanding of the business. So that if we move from utilities to specialty chemicals to education and indeed air traffic control, steelworks and so on, there needs to be an understanding of the nature of the work of the business before we can start to look at that work through this framework. So if, for example, I'm working for a bank or a financial services business I need to understand that it's a services business and it's not producing physical things widgets of one sort or the other. And that's important. That's a difference that's not about being African or Australian. As to cultural differences, apart from not being multilingual, which is a shame for us. Our experience is that this work transcends culture, transcends national culture and there's no question in our experience of that at all. I delivered a workshop in Mexico City and my Spanish will get me a beer. That's about it. And we delivered that in two languages. I depended very much on the participants understanding more English than I understand Spanish. But it was really very interesting and warming that their understanding of the information I was worried about. They may not understand, or am I going into a patrician culture, but in fact, there was a language barrier to be overcome, which they overcame was the anxiety. Rather than them thinking that I was going to teach them that I was offending them about teaching them about management. Having two languages and exploring it in two languages seemed to make it a richer and quicker experience, which was quite funny. And I think the same was true in Malaysia. We were speaking in English to people who probably have three languages at least, and they're talking to each other in two of those that are not English.

Speaker B At times they respond very well to the thought that people come to work to do the best job they can and that as managers, they're accountable to create conditions to enable them to do their best work. And we find that in any culture, they become excited about that.

Speaker A I think also the other thing that occurs to me about the naturalness of this is that I think in those workshops, what we often see is a removing of a veil of some description, which is about a veil. It's removing the veil of lies and deceit that we can often get in organizations or at least half truths. And the things that caused immediately caused distrust. There are lots of things that cause distrust, but that what we say is what we mean. And that I can provide feedback to my manager rather than genuflecting in front of our manager. And when these things are surfaced, there's a liberating of people almost in front of your eyes, certainly in the workshops. And that, of course, is to be maintained. And the ways we have of doing that, we don't want to let people regress. But there is a kind of a felt truth that there's a natural way we're going to work together and there's a natural way that we talk to each other when we're doing that.

Speaker B And it's about also enabling managers to set very clear expectations in the few days that they have their team and then to work with them on workplace based issues. So they've got real problems that they're talking about. And it's in that process that managers find that they can exercise their leadership using these principles. So they come across as very human people to their teams. They say, this is a journey that we're working on together. And in the early stages, the first day they struggle with their teams to make sense of this and by the end of the second day, they're leading their teams confidently. And the teams feel far more that their manager is far more human. And the manager has experienced a full engagement with their own teams, which they can then take out into the workplace because they're working on current issues that they then carry forward or what we call work out back in the workplace. So it's a two way street. Managers lead their teams, but the team members now also understand those expectations and have expectations of their managers to continue this work.

Speaker A They understand their managers got a hard job. From here on, I think it's.