What is Your Year-End Function?

Last week I've got an e-mail: 

Dear colleagues, This is to announce  a casting to participate in a fascinating corporate New Year show "Musicals'  for our Winter party. If you like to sing, to dance or you have a genius for acting do not miss a unique opportunity to become a hero of a wonderful New Year party. The professional stage director, choreographer and vocal teacher will select the participants of the show. Once the participants selected we will start rehearsals and studio recordings. 

How could I pass this opportunity? Surely, I went to the casting and now I am looking forward to start rehearsals. Whether it will be Les Mis, Cats, or Notre Dame, I'm in for whatever.

Just like Web 2.0 is taking over the workplace, the office events also seem to become more participatory. Instead of inviting guest stars who do not really care why they are there as long as they get their fees, isn't it a great idea to make stars out of your own employees? It's cheaper, more engaging and more fun - do you know what your fellow workers are talented in? 

This goes further. I am genuinely pleased that many companies have realized (and we might have to thank the recent crisis for it) that they do not need external consultants in most cases and that they have enough capability and brains inside the organizations, which are merely underutilized. Companies are switching from the "kindergarten mode" (stuff should be done for employees) to the "scout camp" mode (employees are capable to do stuff by themselves, enjoy the fruits of their labor and have fun along the way).

As an illustration, you can see appearance of internal consulting units, brainstorming and employee idea gauging in any project, and increased staff participation. Way to go! Even if it starts small... like a year-end function. 

Why IBM Works: Diversity 3.0

I could not but admire the IBM Corporation, listening to the presentations on their diversity programs. I am a tad suspicious when big managers talk about diversity initiatives at their organizations, as the intent is normally drastically different from the implementation, but this time I was 100% convinced: I had heard the speeches, I had seen the videos and the materials and I had talked to the employees: at IBM diversity is not a program but a culture.

If Diversity 1.0 is mere compliance with the legislation and 2.0 is a more advanced version of integrating D&I (Diversity & Inclusion) practices into the business processes, Diversity 3.0 is shaping the agenda and proactively converting differences into the critical competitive advantage of the everchanging world of today.

Few managers understand the business case for diversity yet. The general feeling is that it's a nice-to-have but when push comes to shove they retreat to the safe haven of similarity and homogeneity. Yet, diversity only becomes a competitive advantage once everyone in the organization understand that:

• the marketplace is becoming increasingly global: to reach into the new markets and grow your business you need to understand the cultural nuances of those market segments you are trying to conquer. Making your workforce diverse facilitates this process tremendously: basically, you are bringing the market intelligence into your company! Taking it even further, foster supplier diversity programs and go for diverse clients and customers.
• great places to work attract great talent: the power of the workforce is in their differences and not similarities. Feeling welcome makes people work harder, be loyal and recreate this environment of acceptance and suport. How sustainable can dog-eats-dog or I'm-better-than-you-coz-you're-strange environments be?
• diversity breeds innovation: we all know that innovation comes from combination. Put as many differences together (Lynda Gratton calls them heuristics), create conducive environment for creative juices to flow and there is not much left for you to do - change will emerge by itself reinventing the organization and making it stronger and more adaptable to the changing market needs.

Change starts with listening. Listen to what your organization or community is asking for. The trick is to listen not to the loudest voices, but to everyone. I get a feeling that at IBM every word is heard. Uthopic, of course, but that's what I heard from the employees themselves. They are not afraid to talk about their personal experiences in the workplace and they are proud of their differences and extremely acceptable of the differences of others. It flows in the company and it flows from the top. I urge you to watch this video about Policy Letter #4 and think where your organization is on the Diversity 3.0 journey:

Great Transformation Stories

Last Friday I went to the 4th GLBT Leader Forum in Rome, an event placing diversity, uniqueness and self-realization at the head of the table and calling its participants and supporters to be inspired in order to transform the society we are living in. And as one of the panelists said, "Take a deep breath, which is of course where inspiration starts".

As I was listening to the speakers, I was doodling in my notepad and I came up with three great examples of successful transformations, and looking at those, I realized that in order to change and to change your environment, be it your family, your organization, your friends, your society or your country, you need three things: patience, hard work and courage.

Everything starts with patience. Change can happen fast but mental frames take long to set in, so prepare to wait. Just like butterflies: caterpillars turn into chrysales, then into larvas and finally beautiful butterflies appear, but some time needs to pass before we can see the rainbow beauty of the butterfly's wings.

The next component for transformation is hard work, and who would be a better role model for that other than Cinderella? Scrubbing floors and separating beans from lentils all days long, suffering jabs and insults from the ugly stepsisters and her stepmother and harboring her love for her deceased parents and wishes for the beautiful prince... As the stepmother in Ever After put it, "Child, you were made for hard labor".

Finally, no transformation will happen without courage. Through pain and suffering the ugly duckling is doomed to success. It takes guts not to give up. It takes all your strength to wake up every morning, dress up and face the world that is not welcoming you in - the world that hates you. When there is nowehere to seek help from, all that is left is you. That's courage.

Transformation always starts inside; the rest is facilitation. The Fairy Godmother was there to finish off what Cinderella has already created within herself - her inner beauty. Remember: if you want to transform, all you need to change is your thoughts...

Workplace is changing. Are you?

This video does not give any answers but raises tons of questions, boiling down to one single conclusion: the speed of change is becoming so fast that it is impossible to keep up with the most recent developments, unless organizations become lean, agile and open to constant state of flex. This puts an enormous effort on HR, particularly in areas of change management and learning. Demographic and technological trends cannot be ignored any more, but very little is done to leverage their potential or minimize their disruptive influence. Long story short - watch the video:

Organizational Constellations

The topic of organizational constellations sounds stellar and somewhat removed from the mundane problems we are surrounded by every day of our lives. Yet, you will be surprised how practical and applicable this change management tool can be in your professional or personal setting. IE HR Club organized a workshop last week to introduce the students and alumni to the relatively new organizational development technique - Organizational Constellations. More than 25 people attended, which, as I understood, was already a bit too much for this type of an intervention, but it was an excellent setup for academic purposes.

First of all, fundamentals:

• a constellation is a system (small wonder, the father of the methodology being German...)
• the roots go back to the tribal ways of solving problems, it is intuitive and relationship-based.
• organizations are governed by the laws of a family system, the laws of give-and-take.
• the concept of belonging (pertenencia) is pivotal - who belongs to a particular constellation? The major difference between an organization and a family is that unlike kinship, belonging to other social structures is voluntary.
• "what happens in Togo, stays in Togo". Confidentiality is essential to make sure there is enough trust between the participants to start the energy flowing.

After a short theoretical introduction, we moved to the most interesting: mapping out our own constellations, using specific symbols for males, females and events. The key characteristic of the picture is in which direction the constellation members are looking. The term in Spanish is radiografía,  not sure what the appropriate equivalent in English would be, but I think I will not be far away from the truth if we call it a radiogram. One of the participants was asked to draw the picture on the board and then... he was asked to substitute the drawn figures on the board with live people in the class, making sure that they are arranged in exactly the same formation as the sketch.

The next step was to ask the "models" how they felt in those positions and after that allow them to change places, so that they feel more comfortable. That provided the grounds for constructive dialogue around the actual problems within the team, even though none of the "models" was familiar with the situation. That proved that the concept really worked and the participants were truly amazed by the energy created by this seemingly simple exercise.

This can serve as the initial phase in group coaching. There are many modifications of the approach - new elements can be added into the system (e.g. a client or a task). What is critical to understand is that everyone has his or her perspective on what is happening in the organization and no one person has the whole picture. Organizational Constellations therefore is another tool to build a shared vision in a company - a task so many fail to achieve.

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For those who are interested, here are the short bios of the speakers (sorry, in Spanish):
MONICA LARRABEITI es actualmente Coach Personal, Ejecutivo, de Relaciones y Equipos. Tiene consulta propia además de colaborar con varias empresas, entre ellas “Empresas con AlmaÒ”, en proyectos de coaching tanto individual como de equipos, trabajando en sectores tan diversos como telecomunicaciones, consultoras, sector inmobiliario, farmacéutico y petroquímico. Ha hecho coaching tanto a miembros de comités de dirección como mandos intermedios para temas de gestión de equipos, conciliación laboral, evaluación de desempeño, cambios de trabajo como ascensos o despidos etc. En 2004 conoció las Constelaciones Familiares de la mano de Svagito Liebermaster y desde entonces ha continuado ampliado su conocimiento de esta herramienta y empleándola con éxito en su trabajo. Monica es Licenciada en Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales por la Universidad de Deusto y anteriormente trabajo durante 16 años en Procter & Gamble

PILAR PARDO CEMBRANO, coach y consultora, se define como el Alma Mater de “Empresas Con AlmaÒ”. Su continua inquietud sobre el desarrollo de las organizaciones con el objetivo de mejorar su eficiencia, mejorando también la integración de la vida personal y laboral le lleva a fundar “Empresas Con AlmaÒ” con el propósito de proporcionar un servicio integral a aquellas empresas que entiendan que las personas son parte fundamental de su éxito y quieran hacer de ello su ventaja competitiva. Para ello utiliza además de su experiencia profesional, estudió Ingeniería Industrial y trabajo en Procter & Gamble durante mas de 13 años en áreas tan diversas como Marketing, Logística, Ingeniería y Producción en varios países, sus estudios sobre Liderazgo, Constelaciones tanto Familiares como Organizacionales, PNL y Consultoría Sistémica entre otros. 

Nice Standards: Cities as Organizations

I am a social migrant.

I see things from the outside because I don't really belong anywhere. That's why it is easier for me to pick up inconsistencies, things of interest and be much more critical of how life is set up in different places.

Culture is a weird thing. I have been thinking about it a lot. Culture is like Bin Laden: it is there but nobody has ever seen it.

Nice is a city in France on the Cote d'Azur, and it's an homograph with the English word "nice". I felt particularly creative about writing today. Reflecting back on my holidays a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly realized that cities are just like organizations: they have their own corporate citizens, their rules, regulations, and norms (explicit and implicit). Cities go through the same cycles: decline, revival, blooming, and then decline again. How exciting is that? The French Riviera has been a glamorous holiday destination for thousands of French and foreigners for many years. Nearby Cannes and St Tropez can vie with Hollywood for the first place in which city has seen more millionaires per square meter.

What do we see today?

• any language is spoken but French. How disappointing! Russian, English, Italian, but not French! I go to France to be sneered at, to experience that famous shrug Peter Mayle was writing about, and what do I get instead --- the standard smily irritating American service. 
• there are four categories of businesses most popular in town: lawyers, doctors (particularly geriatric services), real estate agents, and funeral services. Just the right marketing mix for a holiday destination.
• people play the accordion on the beach and sing. Maybe I don't understand something, but my idea of high culture is somewhat different. 5% of intellectual elite is our last hope, I guess.

How do you tell a good restaurant from a bad one? The first thing that I always look at is the quality of napkins. When a restaurant opens, they are nice, think and expensive. As time goes by, they become thinner and resemble toilet paper more and more. To me it is an indication that I need to look for a new place to socialize. Same with cities and organizations. Signs of decay, or as Lynda Gratton coins it, "permanent frost" must shun you away like plague. Why do you think Goldman Sachs pays so much attention to recruitment? Because people constitute the culture. Culture is the ultimate driver of any organization.

At the very beginning of this blog post, I mentioned that you can't really see the culture. You are in it, like a pickle in the marinade, and if you are not careful enough, you may just as well get marinated. How do you abstract yourself from what is happening around? How can you keep your immunity to changes happening around you, when they happen for the worse? 

We don't know who discovered the sea, but we are sure that it was not a fish.

Culture is Destiny: Bonn

Very much honorable Sigmund Freud once said that anatomy is destiny. If we paraphrase that, culture is destiny as well. You can travel a lot, learn various languages and consider yourself a citizen of the world, but deep down in your brain and other places (you even suspect exist in your body) you still belong to your primary culture. That culture, at the end of the day, shapes your mental models, has a major input on your behavioral patterns and significantly impacts your values system.

Earlier this week I went to Bonn in Germany for an assessment center with DHL for my internship in winter. I have got the job and I am going to write about my assessment experiences a bit later, so in this particular post I wish to talk about Bonn and the German culture in general.

When you are walking around the "village" of Bonn, it is difficult to believe that it used to be the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in the good old days. The flow of life is so uninterrupted and "sticky" that the entire city (particularly after arriving from Madrid) feels like a shrine. It is metered, measured, mowed and manicured: even the rubbish bins are trying to deny any relationship to trash whatsoever. Cyclists get indignant with you if you are walking on the bike route. Pedestrians stand waiting for the green light even if the street is empty and dead as a cemetery. Overall, I think that we can make a comparison between the German culture and food: plain, unimaginative, hearty and satiating. In short, nothing fancy but true and solid. Do you think that an idea like an "open bookcase" work in the countries in the south of Europe, for instance? People bring and exchange books in public "bookcases" located around the city. Those are not locked, there is nobody supervising, and surprisingly enough - they are full of books: people really bring and exchange, not only take and forget.

Now, when we are all up for integration and vereinigte Europe, what role does culture play in the process? When Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks (for example) need to work together, what mental models are going to clash? My take on this would be - all of those. In Italy there is a political party called Lega Nord, advocating for splitting the country into two - North and South as they feel that people in the Northern Italy work harder, thus they should enjoy more privileges. How do you think Germans feel about it? :)

Culture defines the way you see this world. Combined with the ideas of Sapir and Whorf, we have a powerful destructive (or constructive) mix, which can facilitate or destroy an intercultural dialogue. We cannot be competent in a culture other than our own, but we can be aware of it. That is the ultimate flaw of all the intercultural training programs. Shifting the focus from building the skills to cope in a certain culture to the skill to adapt quickly to whatever culture or cultural elements should be the key.

Cigarette butts in organizations

I was lying on the beach near St Tropez a couple of days ago and suddenly I noticed something that sent me thinking about stuff you don't really want to think about when you are on holidays. Cigarette butts. They were all over the beach - but that was not the only thing that drew my attention. "After all," I mused, "this is France... what do I expect of the French - wrap those in little plastic baggies and carry away with them? I am not insane... yet..." What really amused me was how people were behaving when they found some of those butts next to their beach blankets.

There were three typical behavioral patterns towards the cigarette butts:

• cover them up with sand
• shove them off towards their neighbors
• ignore those and enjoy the sun

How often have you observed similar behavior in organizations when it comes to solving problems that nobody has any desire to face (leave alone to solve). People either try to pretend that such issues do not exist,  cover them up and hope that no one will find out or pass the buck and make it someone else's headache. It's all recurring. If you do not care for making things around you better (more beautiful, cleaner, nicer, simpler, etc), it does not matter whether we are talking about picking up trash after yourself or streamlining business processes. It always boils down to sense of responsibility and ownership.

And here we are facing a dilemma. How do we instill the feeling of ownership into our subordinates, peers and managers? If there is little accountability, you can palpably feel it in the organization. Where people do not care about development of their staff, those chores are being ignored, pushed away or done in a manner that deters others from approaching the subject ever again. It's cigarette butts all over again.

Do you have any suggestions on how to approach the cigarette butts issue?

Self-Directed Teams and OD Challenges

Today in the Organizational Behavior class we were discussing the case of MediSys, which was dealing with a project team working on a product development and launch. Conflict emerged on the grounds of lack of legitimacy and operating in silos. Reflecting back, it occurred to me that I have seen something similar too many times in many different organizations.


What basically happens - people are put together in a project "team" to achieve a "common" objective. Who have I put the quotes? We can go into lengthy discussions on what we call a team and whether any group of people working together can be referred to a s a team. Secondly, achieving a shared understanding of goals is not an easy task as it might appear on the surface. There are instances when group members would claim that they have a common objective, while in reality each one of them would be pursuing individual goals or the goals of that particular department the person has been deployed from to form part of the project group. Silo mentality is deeply  ingrained in human psychology on the simple account of subconscious self-identification and the selective function of our brain (i.e. it´s mine/ours, therefore best/correct/right/better/etc; we refuse to see the position of others).


I wish to give an example of how this problem was tackled in one of the leading banks in South Africa (I am not disclosing the name because of the obvious reasons). There used to be three functions working on the same task (providing loans to customers): risk analysts, sales/customer managers and admin services. They were reporting into different departments with little horizontal integration. Sales were the driving force to get the product sold to the customer. Risk people liked to take their time in doing background checks and running all sorts of models, which the Sales did not like and sometimes concluded deals before Risk´s go-ahead. Admin was least motivated among the three and it would take them all the available time to get done with all the papers. The structure did not work and the bank was losing customers, hence money.


The Organizational Development department recognized the issue and came up with the idea of self-managing groups (sometimes called self-directed teams). From then on, teams consisting of three people were created with their compensation linked to the overall success of the team. Results were incredible. Once people were motivated to deliver faster, cooperate and go an extra mile, they suddenly saw the value-add in everything they were doing. Reporting lines were adjusted accordingly with very little managerial effort, since the teams were managing themselves in most situations.


Thus, instead of the programmatic approach many people like so much (program management strategy, strict controls, corporate policemen, etc) it is better to assume the emergent change philosophy and rely on the organization as a living being to find its own ways to manage itself. It is riskier but in the long run can be much more rewarding. Most difficult thing, as usual, --- to let go.