In my mission to foster a work revolution, I operate on a pretty simple premise:
If humans insist on being part of work tribes (which we always will), we need to make our tribes better.*
Because right now, most of our organizations suck.
I mean this literally — they suck the life out of us and the resources from the planet.
To stop this destructive pattern, we need to understand that there are two sides to a “business tribe:” a me side and a we side. Right now in our companies, we focus almost all of our organizational change efforts on the “me” component. This includes coaching, training, workshops, learning events, etc. These types of programs are all designed to help an individual get better, more enlightened, etc.
I’m a huge fan of personal development (clearly; it’s a big part of what I get paid to do). But it can’t stop there. And right now it does.
Here’s the problem: all the personal development in the world can’t fix a problem that lives in the system. It’s like treating cancer with a band-aid.
We have to get to the “we” side.
This is the “group” component. It’s about company culture and organizational structure. It is the “tribe” side of work. These are the rules that govern how we act when we work together, and each organization is a little different (which is good). Unfortunately, most of our companies have similar bad habits around how we organize (which is bad).
If we insist on working together, how can we organize our groups in ways that work with the new world, instead of against it?
I’ll be making the full case for this idea in my upcoming book, but a huge part of our challenge stems from the fact that most of our org charts are built around people performing a specific function or task. This is a problem, because in reality our work is much more complex and intelligent and nuanced and creative than just performing a list of duties.
Can everything you do for your company be summed up in a “job description?”
If it can be put in list form, do you want it to be!? How boring is that?
(I think you’re better and smarter and more interesting than a robot who performs a list of droning tasks, personally.)
The entire world is being rewired into communities centered around passion, which, not coincidentally, also lines up perfectly with how people create value for their organization. The great opportunity for business lies in learning to leverage the passions of the tribes that surround us.
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*For clarification, when I say “tribe” in this context I mean any kind of organization — for-profit to non-profit, small to large, startup to established, and anywhere in between.
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Normally I speak to “adults,” but last week there were a bunch of “youth” in my audience.
I spoke with a Kiwanis club on Wednesday, and though there were certainly “adults” present, the local Key Club showed up as well, and stuck around for the whole session (which I’m told is rare). That day we had a crowd that ranged in age from 14 to 94… literally. Then, on Friday, I did two sessions for the Circle of Change Leadership Conference, designed for student leaders who are in college.
What grand enlightenment did I glean from these strange new experiences, you ask?
I learned that I am a curmudgeonly old man.
OK, that’s not exactly true. But by the end of my last talk on Friday night on The Future Of Work, I looked into the sea of eager faces, full of hope and desire and promise… and I found myself telling them the truth.
I told them the world doesn’t care about them getting to work in their strengths.
I told them most business cultures are too screwed up to absorb their great new ideas.
I told them many managers they will have will focus on the wrong things.
To be fair, I also told them that I still believe we can change the world. “But,” I said, “If we’re going to get ‘there,’ we need to get through what’s ‘here’ first.”
That’s the funny thing about changing the world — we can’t really change anything until we know how it is now.
And how it is now ain’t so great.
So at the end of my talks to these promising young leaders, I realized that if we’re going to treat ourselves to this heaping helping of reality, the most important advice I could give was:
PROTECT YOUR HOPE.
Find a way to guard it.
Find a way to keep your optimism.
Find a way to keep the fire behind your eyes.
It won’t be easy, but if you’re going to make it through the harsh reality and arrive on the far shore with enough resilience to still want to change things, it will be essential.
When I woke up this morning, I realized this isn’t just good advice for students.
I think it’s good for us all.
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Once upon a time, there were three bricklayers.
When asked, “What are you doing?” the first bricklayer replied:
“I’m laying bricks.”
The second bricklayer was asked the same question. He answered:
“I’m putting up a wall.”
The third bricklayer, when asked the question “What are you doing?” responded, with pride in his voice:
“I’m building a cathedral.”
If you search for this story online you’ll find different variations, most including some sort of explanation about how it speaks to a person’s attitude and ability to see the big picture. While these things are true, and insightful, this story makes me wonder about something else.
Why is it that some companies seem to have an overwhelming amount of cathedral-builders?
Then on the other hand, why do other businesses seem to only contain hordes of bricklayers?
There is no question that a person’s individual perspective (attitude, big picture, etc.) is crucial. But the importance of the culture that individual is IN is often highly underestimated — even though a cultural explanation actually explains this conundrum much better.
If there is a group/culture/tribe component to our work — if there is something about the collective “we” that makes us better or worse as individuals — then this story isn’t just about a person’s mindset. (Also, as leaders we have very little direct control over how other people think, right?) BUT… if there’s something about the environment a person is in which can create more (or less) meaning in their work, then leaders are on the hook for something different. A work environment — unlike a person’s mentality — is something a leader has a HUGE amount of control over.
So then the next question is:
“As a leader, how do I create more cathedral-builders in my company… by building a better work environment?”
Once we start asking that question, we’re headed in the right direction.
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Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
