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Issue 6 May 2006
I am pleased to say that several new subscribers to Perform have responded to our plea for feedback. One new subscriber wrote that she found it difficult to determine what our offer is to our clients. In one way we are pleased that Perform is not being seen as a sales brochure but on the other hand perhaps we should say a little about our services! We want Perform to provide useful information that you can use to improve your organisations. Our catch phrase “We want to help” is a core value statement for Motivation Matters. To answer the question “what do you do for your clients”, we help you get the best from your people. We do that by helping you develop a management system that makes your people want to work, enjoy their work and motivates them. Thank you to those who made suggestions for our Great Leader articles. We appreciate your ideas and will use them over the coming months. If you need help with getting the best from people, and it is certainly not always straight forward, then please use the Help page on our website or contact us directly. We want to help. This month’s Great Leader is not a famous person from the Western world. He is a man whose leadership skills and qualities have to be set in the context of his time and in the history of his country.
He is a leader who lived in the time of my grandparents. I am sure my grandfather, if he was around, would disagree with my choice.
This man led his countrymen through a turbulent time in their history. He shared their passion for their country. He led from the front during battles. When the fighting was over he helped modernise the country’s institutions at a fundamental level. He enabled the new republic to emerge into the 20th century.
You can read the full article about Kemal Mustafa, Atatürk on our website by clicking here.
A recent report by the Chartered Institute of Management (The Quality of Working Life: Managers’ health and well-being) investigates the effect of organisation functioning on well-being, absence levels and perceived personal performance.
The report finds that over half of the managers reported feelings of constant tiredness and insomnia. The report highlights change initiatives as a cause of stress in 89% of manager’s workplaces.
There is a big difference in the well-being of senior managers compared to their subordinates. The senior managers, who instigate the change processes, report much better health than the others.
Sadly there is also a big discrepancy in the assessment of the change initiative success. Senior managers being much more positive than their junior colleagues.
The managers’ own productivity and absence seems to be linked. Those with low perceived productivity having over 9 days absence a year compared to their more content colleague’s 2.5 days.
The causes of change initiative stress are the usual ones: not feeling involved in performance target setting; un-enjoyable dull and repetitive work and so on.
The report did not investigate the non-managerial staff’s response to change. However it is hard to believe that their productivity, absence and stress levels will be better affected than their supervisory or managerial colleagues.
This is not a pretty picture!
The senior managers instigate changes that they believe work well. Meanwhile their people are stressed, de-motivated and less productive.
The message is clear and the report clearly states it: “Organisations need to ensure that their managers are effectively trained in the planning and implementation of change.”
We can help you ready your organisation for change. See our website for details of these services.
Festinger plays an important part in the design of the communication process which supports our management system. His theory of Cognitive Dissonance, that holding dissimilar ideas in your head is uncomfortable and unstable, is a key part of the motivation management toolkit.
The theory is an important concept which both causes difficulty when creating that willingness to act in someone, which is in changing their motivation, yet acts as a reinforcing agent when the willingness is created.
It is so important to avoid the trap personally. To fall into “I know what I know and nobody can tell me any different” is, in my view, the biggest waste of opportunity. This follows on from last month’s Current thinking where we compared the .com visitors to our website to their .co.uk cousins. The .com visitors explored eight times more content. We tentatively posited that this eagerness to explore, to learn might explain the greater productivity growth of the US economy compared with the UK.
We are always looking for examples of Festinger’s dissonance. It is astonishing to see the emotional power of the switch that happens to restore mental balance, to remove the cognitive dissonance. As an example, ask a reformed smoker what they think about second-hand cigarette smoke!
Sometimes the original idea is too strong for the dissonant input to overthrow it. Then the new input is ignored, discarded and seen as wrong. People will not believe their eyes!
We gave a short talk to a Chamber of Commerce recently and, as usual, conducted a number of straw polls with the audience. Incidentally the audience was around 120 strong. We asked the hirers and firers in the audience what they thought was the most important satisfier for their recruits. Overwhelmingly, money was the top choice.
Then we asked the rest of the audience what their biggest satisfiers were in their work. A series of straw polls gave the usual litany of achievement, recognition, the work itself and so on. That is not a surprise of course.
What I found astonishing was the pure disbelief on a handful of the hirers’ and firers’ faces at the result. They could not accept what the audience, well over half voting for achievement, was saying.
The discomfort of that cognitive dissonance showed on their faces. They were in pain. Cherished beliefs reinforced over years were being undermined. Perhaps one or two of the discomforted were able to see the new information and may even have achieved a change of mind. For the others, I am sad to have caused them pain to no avail.
Festinger lives on.
If only we could re-route that nerve signal that shrieks “dissonant input”! If we could re-route that nerve to a tooth then we might recognise when we are getting new information by the toothache. Perhaps evolution will find a way!
Consider this. Everything you have ever experienced is still playing loudly in your head.
What do you have to do to hear or see something new over all that background noise?
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© Motivation Matters 2006
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