Brave New Work

by Aaron Dignan

  Questions About You

  What are some honest, unfiltered things about you?

  What drives you nuts?

  What are your quirks?

  How can people earn an extra gold star with you?

  What qualities do you particularly value in people who work with you?

  What are some things that people might misunderstand about you that you should clarify?

  Questions About How You Relate to Others

  How do you coach people to do their best work and develop their talents?

  What’s the best way to communicate with you?

  What’s the best way to convince you to do something?

  How do you like to give feedback?

  How do you like to get feedback?

  Gratitude. One of the simplest ways to improve relationships within your community or team is to show appreciation for one another. Research shows that making time and space for gratitude improves well-being, reduces impatience, and boosts brain function. Here’s an easy way to get started: At the beginning or end of your next meeting, ask everyone to stop what they’re doing and think for a moment about something or someone they’re grateful for and wish to recognize within the team. Then go around one by one and share. No fanfare, just an honest acknowledgment that says, “Hey, I love the energy you bring” or “You were there for me when I needed support” or “You’re the best designer in the building and we’re lucky to have you.” A little touchy feely? Sure. But you won’t believe the effect it has on morale. We forget to do this. We avoid it because it’s uncomfortable. Don’t let us. Make it happen.

  Membership in Change

  One of the most important steps The Ready takes in coaching teams through transformation is to define the boundary around who is actively working in new ways. This is critical because we are changing the requirements and agreements of that space in real time. That’s why, as you’ll see in the pages ahead, we focus on inviting (rather than forcing) people into a new way of working. We’re telling them, if you step into this space, you’re committing to try new things. That’s what it means to be ready. Our membership is a coalition of the willing, of the zealous, of those eager to reclaim their way of working.

  Questions on Membership

  The following questions can be applied to the organization as a whole or the teams within it. Use them to provoke a conversation about what is present and what is possible.

  What kinds of membership exist in and around your organization?

  How is membership gained? How is it relinquished? How is it revoked?

  What do all members expect of one another?

  How are prospective members discovered and recruited?

  How are new members brought into the community?

  What is the nature of the relationships within and across teams?

  How do members move between teams and other boundaries?

  How are departing members carried out of the community?

  What does it mean to be People Positive about membership? Recognize that everyone needs to feel a sense of belonging, both within the organization and within their team(s). Don’t build a walled garden that no one can escape. Ensure your boundaries are porous enough for the membership to continually renew itself. Celebrate generative difference and make space for people to bring their whole selves to work.

  What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about membership? Accept that a vibrant membership of commitment and participation is a prerequisite for self-organization. Don’t limit yourself to the structures and policies of the past. It’s unlikely that an adaptive and resilient system is going to look like a traditional employer filled with twenty-year veterans. Think about the movements that inspire you. Model your membership after them.

  MASTERY

  How we grow and mature; the journey of self-discovery and development; our approach to nurturing talent, skills, and competence.

  At Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, they have an unusual habit of recording their conversations. Every day, almost every meeting that takes place within the company is recorded. This is not some corporate urban legend. I know, because I’ve experienced it firsthand. A few years ago, I was invited up to Westport to meet with one of the company’s executives. When I entered his office, he asked me point blank, “Do you mind if we record this?” Having heard about the Bridgewater culture long before I arrived, I was prepared for this. “Let’s do it!” I said. He pressed a button on his desk—the room was wired—and we jumped into the discussion. Every once in a while, he would mark a moment in the conversation that he wanted to return to later. I’ll admit, it was a little distracting at first, but I quickly forgot we were on the record. And while I thought I might be uncomfortable, I mostly left the meeting curious.

  The fact that Bridgewater operates under surveillance wasn’t what intrigued me. What intrigued me was why they did it—the principle of the thing. And the principle that drives Bridgewater is “radical transparency.” Founder Ray Dalio and his team believe that if you want a culture that makes great decisions, you need a culture that is growing and learning all the time. So they record their conversations. They challenge one another. They “go back to the tape” the way a sports team might, to study what happened, how they came off, or exactly what was said. The Bridgewater culture is not for everybody (some might even call it cultlike), but the company’s leaders credit its status as the most successful firm in the industry to their commitment to radical feedback. As I left their headquarters, I was handed a small spiral-bound booklet that contained a sort of blueprint for life and work. At the heart of it was this idea of feedback and learning. It was the rough draft of what would soon be Dalio’s massive best seller, Principles.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us are caught up in a completely different pursuit. “In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for,” say Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, the authors of An Everyone Culture, “covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, [and] hiding their limitations.” One of the consequences of weaponized Taylorism is that work has become a place to perform, not a place to learn. Confidence and equanimity get promoted. Humility, vulnerability, and struggle get labeled weak. So we put on a show for one another (and ourselves). Our egos become inflated and fragile. And learning becomes a secret shame. What utter nonsense.

  Think back on the time in your career when you grew the fastest. What were the conditions that drove that rapid development? Let me guess. You were faced with a challenge. Perhaps you received some harsh feedback. Or you accepted an impossible project. In any case, you were in over your head. And you were no longer able to pretend that you were perfect. That freed you to ask for help, to try and fail, and to push yourself beyond your normal limits. And lo and behold, eventually you figured it out and leveled up. Not only did you know more about the challenge, but you knew more about yourself. We grow through resistance and discomfort. We grow when we are stretched, when the challenge before us exceeds our skills and we have no choice but to close the gap. But we can’t appreciate those opportunities if we’re too busy avoiding them.

  Peter Senge suggested the concept of Personal Mastery in his landmark book The Fifth Discipline. He defined it as “a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.” This is strikingly similar to the ethos at Bridgewater, which was profiled as a “deliberately developmental organization” in Kegan and Lahey’s book. One of Dalio’s core principles is to “embrace reality and deal with it.” In a company-wide email he asked his team, “Do you worry more about how good you are or about how fast you are learning?” What he’s getting at is that we have to get under the surface—and behind the masks we wear—in order to confront the truth a
nd start to grow.

  Practicing radical transparency is inherently uncomfortable. We will be exposed as imperfect. We’ll have to face feelings and emotions that we normally avoid. We may hear things that threaten our egos or our sense of safety. Critical feedback from a trusted friend. Or an admission from leadership that funds are running low and the company may not make payroll. We may have to confront our privilege (or lack of privilege) and work through those complex dynamics out in the open with our colleagues. This is not easy stuff. This work requires that we show up at our best.

  Here we see the connection between mastery and maturity. Talent and skills don’t matter if we don’t have the maturity—the courage and humility—to welcome the conditions for continuous growth. And our ability to do this has a lot to do with what psychologists call the four dimensions of core self-evaluation: locus of control, neuroticism, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. Our self-appraisal across these factors plays a predictive role in areas such as job satisfaction and job performance. Locus of control, though, is of particular interest as we explore mastery. The concept was developed by psychologist Julian B. Rotter to describe the degree to which people think they can control the outcomes of events in their lives. People with an internal locus of control believe that they have a high degree of influence over what happens to them. People with an external locus of control believe the opposite, that fate and other people shape their lives. Think of it as a personal referendum on determinism. Carol Dweck later expanded this concept into the world of learning in her book Mindset, which introduced the now-famous fixed and growth mindsets. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe their abilities don’t change and their potential is predetermined. But those with a growth mindset believe that their effort and attitude determine their abilities. They see failure as an opportunity to grow.

  Of course, what matters here isn’t which perspective is right but which one produces the most beneficial outcomes. And in that context internal locus of control and growth mindset win, hands down. When you believe that your choices and attitude matter, you show up in your own life. You strive to make things better. You reach for your dreams. You never give up. This leads to more practice, more failure, more learning. Everything about the future of work calls us to connect with our deeper sense of self—our empathy, our vulnerability, our bravery, our humility, and our humanity. Ironically, it’s the organizations that create the space to be imperfect that end up with the most stunning teams.

  Thought Starters

  Maturity Model Madness. One pattern in the learning and development space is to create maturity models for roles, skills, and methods that allow us to rate and rank ourselves and our colleagues. This is evocative of the belt ranking system—ranging from white to black—that emerged in martial arts in the early twentieth century (an auspicious time frame for putting things in boxes). Prior to that, rank was effectively just a private delineation between masters and apprentices. Why do we seek maturity? Because maturity is a state of self-sufficiency, competence, and judgment. That’s wonderful. But maturity models stem from our misguided desire to cram all that complexity into a complicated framework. An ever-evolving spectrum of knowledge and skill becomes a fixed number of levels, each with its own qualifications. These models promote conformity to dogma and reductive criteria that can quickly become the focus instead of actual competence. In order to attain this rank you must know these things. A black belt in karate who has never been in a real fight meets a cage fighter with no formal training. Who is more likely to win? Who is mature? Luckily, it’s easy to abandon the exhausting administration of these models for deliberate practice and knowledge transfer between masters and apprentices. It’s harder work, but we can stop chasing colored sashes and start getting good at what we do.

  Learn by Doing. The other manifestation of our complicated approach to mastery is training. This is most commonly delivered by a “sage on the stage,” an expert who imparts wisdom to a classroom full of students, but is increasingly done via web-based training modules that are the equivalent of a fancy PowerPoint deck. This approach to learning and development is still surprisingly popular—organizations in the U.S. continue to fund training to the tune of $93.6 billion a year. The only problem is information delivery and regurgitation is not learning, or at least not the kind we need. Anyone who thinks that a multiple-choice exam about unconscious bias is going to eliminate racism is kidding themselves. Today we face an array of complex issues, from privacy and security to sustainability to the future of democracy itself. The most in-demand jobs today barely existed ten years ago. Remember how the only way to understand a complex system is to interact with it? Well, the knowledge, skills, and mastery that matter most are being minted on the front lines, in direct contact with reality. That means our approach to training and knowledge management needs to change pretty radically. Dave Snowden, the director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at Bangor University, has spent decades thinking about knowledge management and ten years ago shared seven principles that challenge everything about our current approach:

  Knowledge can only be volunteered; it cannot be conscripted.

  We only know what we know when we need to know it.

  In the context of real need, few people will withhold their knowledge.

  Everything is fragmented.

  Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.

  The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.

  We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.

  Each of those is worthy of its own chapter, but the takeaway is this: We need to accept that we cannot distill or transfer knowledge completely. We need to create work environments with high social density where members with different levels of knowledge and competence can work and learn together. We need to enable individuals to pursue roles and projects where their skills are stretched and flow is achieved. And when we do stop, we need to create safe and open spaces for experiential and self-organized learning, where memorization is replaced with dialogue and epiphany. Consider the case of Etsy, the online marketplace that hosts an internal Etsy School where the curriculum is taught by and attended by employees. Classes range from silk-screening to Python programming and help team members connect across disciplines in ways that help them grow in- and outside of work.

  Mastery in Action

  Role Mix. One of the greatest inhibitors to personal growth in the legacy workplace is the fact that we hold singular fixed roles. Being rooted in one function with a standardized set of accountabilities inhibits our ability to develop different skills in different contexts. It’s not uncommon to work the same job for multiple years before a new role presents itself. This limits the potential of both the individual and the organization by reducing our ability to optimize the distribution of skills and interests against opportunity. In the structure dimension we talked about moving from one to many roles by atomizing our job titles. Shifting to a “role mix” enables us to pick up and put down roles as we grow. And this leads to dramatically more interesting career paths. Instead of one grand promotion that changes everything, roles become a currency for learning and impact. People go where they will learn the fastest and contribute the most. To make this real for your team, start by asking everyone to articulate the role(s) they’re already playing—including the role name(s), purpose(s), and general accountabilities. Have everyone evaluate which roles they want to continue to play and which ones they’re ready to hand off. Next, give your team the responsibility to create, modify, and remove roles going forward. From here on out, every team member will be responsible for their own role mix, and every team for the roles within it. Of course, you’ll have to decide whether roles are filled by appointment, election, or two-way negotiation, but that can be done on a role-by-role basis. And if you’re starting to wonder how you’ll compensate members in a system such as
this, don’t worry: that domain is coming up next.

  Ritual Feedback. Traditional performance management is anything but People Positive, and it’s incoherent when it comes to developing mastery. Reviewing someone’s performance annually from a single perspective and ranking them with a number or grade . . . I mean, where do I begin? The time frame is woefully inadequate as a feedback loop. Anything said in that meeting should have been shared far sooner. What’s more, reviews are extremely time-consuming. According to one study, the average manager reported spending up to 210 hours preparing for and doing appraisals annually. And worst of all, these processes make employees spectators in their own development. It’s disempowering, and we’ve known better since McGregor argued for employee involvement in the 1950s. And of course there’s the issue of separating individual performance from team performance that is inherent in processes such as this. Should a member of a subpar team who has strong personal performance receive a good review? What does that even mean? Many organizations, such as Adobe, Gap, and IBM, have gotten hip to all this in recent years and abandoned the annual review process in favor of more frequent and inclusive processes. Real-time feedback from our leaders and colleagues is great, but there’s also value in stepping back for a broader perspective. Here’s an approach to balancing both that puts the person seeking feedback in control: